Stop Trying to Fix Yourself: The Path to Wholeness with Lorena Monda

Lorena Monda 

It’s not so much why is this happening? It’s what is happening and how is it happening? And so we’re looking at that. We’re looking at what’s happening in this moment. How is your experience being organized in this very moment? That’s what Hakomi does. And what are the elements of that experience in this very moment? And how are you sometimes organizing out things that might be good for you, that might be nourishing for you? And how did you learn how to do that? We weren’t born learning how to do that

Lorne Brown 

By listening to the Coherence Code Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition, either in yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast, where we explore how the mind and body work together so you can move from stress and inner conflict to clarity, calm, and alignment. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. And through my work, I’ve seen that healing happens when we remove what gets in the way and allow the body and the nervous system to do what they’re designed to do to heal. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.

Today’s conversation is about something many of us are quietly searching for. How do we actually end suffering and access a deeper sense of that inner peace? So many people are trying to fix themselves, improve themselves, optimize their mindset. But what if that very approach is part of the problem? My guest today is Lorena Monda, and she offers a different perspective. Her book, The Practice of Wholeness, which I’m holding up here for those that watch on video, explores how real transformation doesn’t come from fixing what’s broken, but from reconnecting with the parts of ourselves we’ve rejected or pushed away. This is a conversation about awareness, the body, unconscious patterns, and what it actually means to become whole. So our guest today is Lorena Monda. She’s a psychotherapist, a Hakomi teacher and author whose work focuses on the intersection, as I mentioned, of mindfulness, somatic awareness, and spiritual transformation.

She teaches that healing happens not through force or effort, but through presence, curiosity, and the integration of all parts of ourselves. Welcome to your episode on the Coherence Code podcast, Lorena.

Lorena Monda 

Thank you so much, Lorne. It’s exciting to be here.

Lorne Brown 

Well, I’m interested to hear what you have to say after going through your book. I want to start with that fixing themselves. So many people are trying to fix themselves, the whole personal development movement. Can you share why that approach doesn’t always work for people? And in your work, you often say that it’s really about coming back to yourself, and I’m curious what that means as well, but let’s start with trying to fix yourselves. What’s your approach or how do you think about that question?

Lorena Monda 

I think the reason this book exists was I was working years ago here in Santa Fe where we have so many healers. At the time, it was a mecca. People came here for healing, and I noticed that many people had been to many different kinds of healers, psychotherapists, all the things, all the people that are out there doing healing work, and they didn’t really make what I would say, land in a place where they felt okay. And I was curious about what people who did land in a place or make a core transformation where they really became what I would say coherent, love that this is the coherence podcast, what were they doing that everybody else wasn’t doing? So it was like a research question. And so I started taking notes. I started asking a lot of questions and I discovered it wasn’t about fixing.

It wasn’t about there’s something wrong and I have to fix it. It was more about how do I be a human being? How do I be a human being on this planet at this time and use the resources that are inside of me and outside of me, which includes all of our parts. So that’s where it started and I’m still on that track. It’s been 26 years or more, 30 years since I started this investigation and I’m still on that track that what happens if there’s nothing to fix?

Lorne Brown 

And so if someone feels broken, anxious or stuck, you’re suggesting there’s nothing to fix, but they’re saying, “I think I feel like there’s something to fix.” So how does somebody begin to shift from fixing to what you talk about integrating?

Lorena Monda 

Yeah, I think that’s a good question. People do feel broken, anxious and stuck. And I think part of it is the work is reframing that and becoming curious about it, becoming curious about. There’s a chapter in my book about stuckness, becoming curious about stuckness as a thing and what is my relationship to stuckness? When I’m stuck, what am I doing? When I’m stuck, how am I being? When I’m anxious, let’s break it down. Let’s unpack what is my anxiety? Anxiety is the number one psychological symptom in this country, so a lot of us are anxious. And then to start connecting to what is this, what is this state of anxiety and what helps it shift?

Lorne Brown 

Well, I want to talk about what helps it shift, but when you talk about getting curious, so first of all, so you’re sharing be curious versus judging because we usually start to judge ourselves. So it’s our practice to be getting curious, but do you find then part of it is in this curiosity, you also have to be willing to feel your uncomfortable feelings is –

Lorena Monda 

Yes, absolutely.

Lorne Brown 

You talk about you can’t think your way through this, right? Yes. So I’d love for you to talk, because there’s the concept, get curious and go inside. And the computer analogy I often use is it’s like we’re going to do a self-diagnostic, right? Sometimes your computer runs a self-diagnostic, does in the old days, disc defragmentation and quarantine stuff, but it does require a process. You’re not suggesting you’re going to be able to think yourself through this, are you?

Lorena Monda 

Yeah, great question. No, not at all. It’s really an unfolding. It is a process. It’s a process that starts with curiosity and willingness, as you say, to feel things that are not exactly comfortable. And what I notice is people, they apply their curiosity to the outside. They look for things. They look for the next book, they look for the next workshop, they look for the next thing. And usually that’s great. I’m not against it. I do it myself, but it doesn’t last as a process. It’s hard to stay engaged with something external only. There’s a relationship between the inside and the outside, and people err on the side of going outside themselves. And so the inside process is fascinating. I mean, that’s what I’ve been doing the last 40 years is hanging out with people in their unfolding process and making it together, collaborating on this way of being with ourselves that is not so scary after all.

Lorne Brown 

I remind our listeners, because this is something that is being talked about a lot that you’re sharing going inside and feel your feelings, but this book was written in 2000, so more than two decades ago. So that wasn’t such a common thing. It’s an inside job, you need to go inside.

Lorena Monda 

No, it’s an inside job.

Lorne Brown 

And you talk about there’s a lot of ideas of eliminating these parts of ourselves. We’re in battle with these different parts, and you talk about rather than eliminating them, you want to integrate them. And again, it’s more this, what’s it called? Internal family systems is really well known and popular now, but when you wrote this book, I don’t think it was talked about or it was very popular. So I’m bringing this up as it’s like a truth, this idea of inner child work or coming to those parts and integrating them. It seems like so many healers or people that are doing conscious work or helping people find that coherence inside of themselves, it’s that idea of going in and becoming whole again, integrating. And I get that sense from your book that that’s what you were describing.

Lorena Monda 

And what I would say is that integration wants to happen. It’s not something we have to actually do. It’s something we have to start the process. And it’s more than just feeling our feelings. It’s that our feelings are connected. I like to talk about feelings because to me, feelings are the bridge between the body and mind. Feelings arise in the body and they’re connected to something in the mind. Sometimes if I ask you to complete this sentence, I’m feeling sad because, that’s your mind that answers that question. It thinks of a reason, it has a meaning. And also there’s a whole realm of what we’ve been told or learned about feelings, like the common things, big boys don’t cry or all the things that we were taught. So feelings –

Lorne Brown 

Or medicate. If you feel sad, you need a medication because you’re feeling sad.

Lorena Monda 

Exactly. And yeah, those are modern things we’re taught. Things we’re taught in childhood, things we’re taught by our culture. It’s almost like this ball that we want to unravel. It’s this beautiful ball of wool that’s multicolored and we want to start unraveling and then we start somewhere. We could start with feelings. We could start with thoughts. That’s the delight about wholeness is that we’re all connected to ourselves. I say that we’re a simultaneous experience of body, mind, emotion, spirit. It’s happening in everyone simultaneously. We may not have access to all those aspects of ourselves. And it’s a little different in some ways, this work than IFS. I know a little about IFS in that we’re not just looking for personality-esque parts, that the aspects of humanness are interrelated and they’re connected and they’re whole. They work together. It’s not just my angry part. It’s the experience I’m having of my anger.

I’m having an experience of anger or I’m having an experience of sadness. And yes, there are rules about that that we learned and are learning, but the experience is what we’re looking to unpack actually.

Lorne Brown 

And coming back to the broader idea of people are suffering and they’re looking for peace, resistance. I’m curious because it’s when you have. Where does your concept of resistance play into this? Because the Buddhist say pain is inevitable, suffering is optional, and you can have anger, sadness, fear, all these feelings. You can have these experiences when you suppress, depress them, push them away, project them out. That seems to be resistance and leads to the suffering. But I’d love for you to unpack that a bit more about, because there’s one thing about having these feelings. There’s another thing about resisting these experience. There’s nothing about accepting these and based on how your perception is and what you’re doing with those is a different outcome for each individual.

Lorena Monda 

Yes. I love that to unpack resistance. I used to do a workshop called The Myth of the Resistant Client because in psychology we’ve weaponized that word and we’ve weaponized it even now. There’s this whole movement in the psychedelic world about destroying your ego. It’s like it’s this pushing against this experience that a person may be having. So resistance is an example of that. In IFS, they call that protector, the protectors. It’s again, resistance or this idea that I’m having an experience and I’m not letting myself have it or I’m not curious about it or I’m not willing to take a look at it. If we unpack it, we notice that that experience of resistance exists for a reason. We can really unpack it. We can understand what is it and how do I do it? When my sadness arises, how do I manage it? How do I squelch it?

How do I dive into a pool of it and never come out? What am I doing with the experience that I’m having? And along that unpacking, there’s things that we as healers, we get frustrated with our clients because they’re not changing in the way that we want them to. And to me, what is that called? Iatrogenic, the problem that’s created by the doctor. I think of it like that.

Lorne Brown 

Why do we tend to push these parts of ourselves away in the first place? Why do we resist these and push certain parts away?

Lorena Monda 

Yeah, I think that we all have, to go back to the computer analogy, we all have operating systems that were put in place a long time ago. If we think about the milieus that we grew up in, not just family, but cultural, et cetera, the societal milieus, and what’s permitted, what’s not permitted. So sensitivity in this culture is not super permitted. And so in families, there are lots of messages that a person can get. In the culture, there are lots of messages a person can get about being sensitive to oneself or being sensitive to others. And so the kind of sensitivity that’s cultivated when you go inside and you start to feel your feelings and notice that your thoughts are just thoughts and notice that what you’re doing with your thoughts and feelings is also a thing that requires a kind of sensitivity. And we’re not in a milieu that supports that all that much.

And I want to say that on the other side of it, on the other side of it, being in a milieu that supports that is almost magical. The kind of sense we begin to make with ourselves when we know, oh yeah, I’ve learned how to deal with my anger, my sadness, my joy in this particular way, and it doesn’t even make sense. These rules that I’ve learned don’t even make sense. They don’t actually help me meet the moment in a way that serves anything, that nourishes me, that serves my relationships. And so once we get into the magic of it like, oh, there’s something that’s wanting to happen that is coherent. You use coherence. In 26 years ago, I used the word wholeness and it’s the same. It’s like when these aspects of ourselves are working in alignment and interplay with each other, a kind of magic happens.

Lorne Brown 

And that’s that experience of peace. Even you can be peace in an unhappy situation and you start to access intuition what it seems like. And I often describe it as it feels like you have this flow and receptivity and all of a sudden inspired thought comes through you lead to inspired action when you’re in coherence.

Lorena Monda 

Yes, beautiful. And peace is one aspect, but sometimes it’s turbulence. Sometimes it’s not peaceful. But what I would say, the active element is connection and engagement and aliveness. So aliveness in the turbulence, aliveness and engagement and connection, and sometimes it’s peaceful.

Lorne Brown

Well, you’re not at the full effect of it when you’re in coherence. If you’re experiencing it, it could be uncomfortable, but there’s just another aspect of you that you’re aligned with, that you’re tuned into, which makes it a different experience.

Lorena Monda 

And I would say, and you’re connected. You’re connected with whatever’s in front of you. I mean, to me, that’s the thing. That’s what gives me a great amount of joy is I’m connected. I’m connected with my tulips and my garden. I’m connected with you in this moment. It feels joyful to me.

Lorne Brown 

I think you hinted on it, but I wanted to bring more attention to it. It’s like we have these unconscious programs that got imprinted on us that we didn’t really choose, it seems, and we have these unconscious programs that are running and this work seems to, as you start alluding to this, is this process work that you’re sharing helps you undo those programs and rewire those programs or tune into, like you said, this coherence, this intuitiveness. Can you touch a bit about this? Because some people say, “Well, why do I do this or why do I feel this way?” And I get the sense there’s no room for blame here.That’s why you get curious. You do have accountability, responsibility to do your healing, as in the body seems to tell you where your unconscious programs are. 

Lorena Monda 

It sure does.

Lorne Brown 

So can you share a bit of that? There’s no blame and what these unconscious programs are. And again, maybe share a little bit about your bracket on Hakomi. I’m not really familiar with it, but I have a sense that the body giving you signals is part of this work of Hakomi, but I could be totally off.

Lorena Monda 

No, you’re right. Hakomi is about all of it too. Hakomi Mindfulness-Centered Somatic Psychotherapy: A Comprehensive Guide to Theory and Practice, one of the first actually. And so what we’re unpacking is people come to therapy or to healers because something’s off usually. And I love it when someone comes and says, “I’m doing great and I really want to enhance that,” but that’s rare. So we’re looking at not so much why. So that’s where the extracting blame happens is it’s not so much why is this happening, it’s what is happening and how is it happening? And so we’re looking at that. We’re looking at what’s happening in this moment.

How is your experience being organized in this very moment? That’s what Hakomi does. And what are the elements of that experience in this very moment? And how are you sometimes organizing out things that might be good for you, that might be nourishing for you? And how did you learn how to do that? We weren’t born learning how to do that. And so we’ve been indoctrinated not just by our family early in life, that’s a thing, but by our culture, by society, by the time that we’re living in. I mean, we can just think of the messages we’re getting right now at the societal, culture, and global level and feel. We can feel in this very moment, we can think of one and feel how it’s starting to shape our bodies, what happens in our stomach, what happens in our heart. And so if we can bring that to awareness, A, it starts to liberate us a bit.

We can start to see, oh, it’s not just me. And this is where connecting is an important thing because it’s not just me. If anxiety’s the number one symptom in the US, psychologically, it’s not just me. And so let’s see what contributes and let’s see what the choice points are that I don’t know that I have in this moment. Not some kind of thought about, oh, I could run more or I could do this more, but right in this moment, what am I doing and what’s something else I could be doing if this thing that I’m doing is not necessarily nourishing or makes me feel unhappy or makes me feel angry? What else could I be doing? What other thing could I be doing?

Lorne Brown 

Going back to the body question that’s related to this, so it seems like the body is central to this kind of work. How does the body reveal these unconscious beliefs? How do you see that in your practice?

Lorena Monda 

Everything from in this moment you can start to feel like you may feel, oh, I have some tension in the back of my neck. And then if you go toward it, it can give you information about maybe there are some thoughts you’re thinking, maybe it’s an attitude you’re holding, maybe it’s some future prediction that you have that you don’t know if it’s going to come true or not, but it makes you tense like it’s going to be like this. So that’s one way. Another way is chronic. Chronic symptoms often can be unpacked to not just a physical cause, but they often have psychological or emotional components, not necessarily that the emotional components are the cause, but they are an aspect of the experience of having this chronic condition. And so the body is very communicative. The body is way more sensitive than we give a credit for.

Lorne Brown 

And I find this work is somatic type work because you have talk therapy, which is often a top-down approach, and then you have somatic approaches, sounds like Hakomi, which is a bottom-up, and often we need that bidirectional because as many have said, your issues are stuck in your tissues, so hence that’s why the body is so important. It’ll communicate to you. What about for someone who lives in their head? How do you help them begin to reconnect to their body?

Lorena Monda 

Yeah, if we slow everything down, I mean, this is what I love about the work of Hakomi, is that we’re working in mindfulness, so we’re slowing everything down. So if someone’s living in their head, often they’ll go to story or they’ll go to theory and we ask – 

Lorne Brown 

We’re meaning makers. We give it meaning, right?

Lorena Monda 

And it’s a great thing. We want that. That’s part of our wholeness. We want that capacity to think and make meaning, but it’s not the only thing that we’ve got in our toolbox of experience. Sometimes the bottom-up, meaning that comes from intuition, for example, that’s a great example of bottom-up. You have this sense and there’s not necessarily words for it yet, but if you stay with it, it starts to connect. That’s the magic. It starts to connect itself to other things inside and outside. And so if someone’s in their head and they’re willing and they’re willing to, “Let’s slow this down, see if we can distill what’s in your head to a thought, what’s the thought?” So someone will name the thought that they’re having, then it can do something like, “Let me play that thought back to you and notice what happens when you hear it.” So then something will happen.

They’ll have more thoughts or they’ll notice something in their body or they’ll have a feeling. We slow it down and we start to connect the thoughts and the meaning maker, which is wonderful to the rest of us.

Lorne Brown 

It reminds me of that step three in Byron Katie’s inquiry. So she asked, you have a thought or judgment, you ask if it’s true because you’re trying to change perception, you can say yes or no. Then do you know for sure absolutely it’s true just to show you really, you’re God, you’re running the show here, you know for sure. And then the third is when you have this thought, how does it make you feel? So that’s what you just shared there is when you gave it back to your client to let them hear it and then let it land a bit so they do some introspection.

Lorena Monda 

Right. And the question is how does it make you feel? But it’s more than that. It’s what else happens besides the thought? What else happens inside of you? Maybe a sensation happens, maybe a memory happens or our internal landscape is rich. Thoughts, meanings, attitudes, a lot, the realm of mind, memory, image, realm of mind, then sensation, energy, posture, gesture, the realm of body, and then the realm of emotion, which is linked to mind and body. And then the realm of spirit, this mysterious layer where we’re connected to something bigger than ourselves on any level. Some people now are talking about ancestors, but nature, the universe, the divine for some people. So it’s rich in here and it is coherent. And it’s not the idea of coherence, it’s the experience of coherence. I know you’re after this.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. Going back to these kind of core beliefs and unconscious beliefs, one of the things you said, I have a question for you, but what you reminded me of is how things pop up, like different memories. And when I do some of this conscious work for myself and with my clients, I’m always amazed how an old memory from 20, 30 just pops up and their first reaction is like, “Well, I haven’t though of that forever or this doesn’t make sense. This is a silly one.” And I’m always like, “Oh, go for it because if it doesn’t make sense and it’s silly, usually there’s a gem.” And then so much emotions come up from that, but they start to go into the memory. It’s amazing and the release that they can get when they can –

Lorena Monda 

Yeah, I have a great story about that. So I’m an acupuncturist as well, and I was working with someone who she came in with Western diagnosis, chronic fatigue, and I was working with them and we were doing acupuncture to help her energy stabilize. It was kidney energy we were working with. And it was a long time ago. Again, it was part of this question of what creates deep and lasting transformation toward wholeness. And so I had this brilliant idea. I had never done it before. In the middle of the session, as the needles were working, I took her pulses. And what I noticed, and I just held on, I held on, and I noticed that the energy had come up, and then I was like, “Oh yeah, your energy’s up.” And then I took her pulses again a couple minutes later, and her energy had crashed back down.

And I said to her, “Your energy was up and it crashed back down.” And she said, “I’m having a memory of my

Early life. When I was about four, my father had a heart condition, and when I was four, my sister was six, we were running around the house, and my mother would say, you want to kill your father?” So this natural exuberance, she kind of froze. She had this freeze reaction on the table right there in that memory. And I was like, “Oh, so years and years of squashing your exuberance is going to make it to where your system has learned that it’s not okay to have energy because you’re going to kill someone.” A big example of that, of how memory ties in.

Lorne Brown 

And it shows that they talk about, they use the terms big T and little T, so people think for something to imprint on your nervous system in not a healthy way has to be some big trauma, right? But little trauma, and I say this all the time because it’s one of my most interesting ones that I see in my practice where their memory is they got picked up late from daycare and they have abandonment issues because of that. Nobody would’ve thought anything of it. In this case, shushing the child, but that imprinted her on her. It makes me want to tie in. You said how do you get that Lasting transformation. And so we’ve discussed that we’re carrying unconscious programs and you shared how these get imprinted on us. You gave a great story, for an example, being shushed when you’re four years old and just economics, culture, gender, all that stuff imprints on you.

And the common programs we see people carrying are, I’m not enough, or I need to control something to feel safe. So we’re understanding where they come from. We’ve talked a little bit about how you can’t really think your way through these beliefs. You got to do the process work, that’s the bottom up. What actually allows these patterns to shift then? So you’re doing this work and when someone revisits a pattern like this woman on your table or a memory in a safe state, because she’s in a safe state on your table now when she revisits, that’s the difference versus just going and talking about it versus the work you got your needles in and you’re doing with consciousness, with presence, the work. What’s happening internally when somebody revisits a pattern or memory in a safe state?

Lorena Monda

Yeah, I think what shifted is a kind of specificity and nuance, which is we discovered a long time ago that thinking isn’t enough, that insight isn’t enough to make core transformations, that we actually have to, that’s why Hakomi is experiential. We actually have to have new experience. And so to go back to that client, this unpacking, in Hakomi, we call that moment where we’ve been doing it this way all our lives and it hasn’t been satisfying or nourishing and we’re right up against it. We see that we’re doing it. We have the memory and we remember, oh, this is where it comes from. That place right there we call the nourishment barrier. And that’s one side. We can explore all the things that led up to it. But what you’re talking about is exploring the other side of the nourishment barrier. What’s on the other side?

So in this case of this client, I said, so when she was older and I said, “So is your father alive?” And she said, “No, he died.” And I said, “Did you kill him?” And she said, “No, he died on his own.” And so what’s it like in this moment to know that you didn’t kill your father? That you’re free of that idea that you could kill him with your energy, with your exuberance, with your loving life. What’s it like? And then we started, again, it’s subtle, specific. We started to unpack what was happening in her body, which was a huge sense of relief. She just realized for the first time in her life that she didn’t kill her father.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, because there was that guilt and shame, right? The blame.

Lorena Monda 

Absolutely.

And so then we are going to follow that sense of relief. We’re going to let the body have and we’re going to keep following it. Let’s keep staying with the sense of relief. What comes with the sense of relief? And for her, I’m not sure I remember, but for many people, when we get to that moment where they’ve gone to the other side and we start to follow it, there’s some natural impulses that arise. The life force wants to assert itself and we keep following, we keep following. And usually what people do, this is where it’s not like coaching, it’s not like a beeline, keep going, keep going. It’s more like usually what people do is they get to the other side of this nourishment barrier and they go a little bit and then they get a little scared or they don’t know or they run out of ideas or they go back and we just keep staying with it.

We just keep staying with it. We just keep letting the process unfold. It’s not a beeline for transformation. What needs to be brought in now, what needs to be acknowledged now. It’s slow.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, it can be slow. And safety seems to be, and the nervous system plays a part in this change, right? Absolutely. And that’s that I have my process I call notice, accept, choose again, notice is bringing awareness to the situation and acceptance is not resisting the parts.

Lorena Monda 

Beautiful.

Lorne Brown 

Using tools to accept. And in that state, I think what’s happening is two things. One is there’s a sense of safety. Resistance is dropped because you’re accepting, so you’re no longer resisting. And part of it is observing that part of you. You’re observing the feelings. And I think what’s happening, the meaning I’ve given it is that you’re tuning yourself into your higher self. So these uncomfortable feelings, these body sensations act as portals to presence and you tune into your higher self and that metabolize these uncomfortable feelings. That’s why you reminded me that when you said the life force, it wants to insert itself and that’s why you can’t think your way through it. I call it you got to feel your way through it, but more importantly, it’s that witness consciousness. And again, do I believe this is actually what’s happening? I have to give it meaning.

My brain needs that, but I just know when you notice and you accept this happens and then you’re in a state where you can integrate, and that’s what I call choose again, because now the resistance is fully accepted, you’re tapped into another part, now you get to integrate. Can you tie this into your work?

Lorena Monda

Absolutely. I guess one course correction I would make from my seat is the higher self, that idea. I would say the coherent self, the whole self.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, I don’t know what to name it.

Lorena Monda 

Consciousness is that – Higher, lower, I don’t know.

Lorne Brown 

But it’s all part of you

Lorena Monda 

Because maybe it’s a side self. I don’t know which direction we’re going in this particle.

Lorne Brown 

I’m going to give you a metaphor. I call it higher self because people use that term, but I’m going to tell you something other than my ego part of me. There’s another aspect of me that does it. So here’s the metaphor I use with my patients when I say, why does this work or how come? So Lorena, when you bite an apple, you have to pick up the apple, take a bite and chew it. But you don’t consciously say, now I’m going to release salivary enzymes. You don’t consciously say, now I’m going to release acid in my stomach. Now I’m going to absorb. You don’t say, I can’t talk now. I can’t do work. I can’t go to bed. I got to digest the apple. No, your autonomic nervous system, another aspect of you metabolizes the apple, no matter whether you’re exercising, resting, or sleeping.

I say that when you become fully present and aware of your feelings, you tune into another aspect of you and it metabolizes it. Yes.

Lorena Monda 

And because it’s all happening.

Lorne Brown 

I don’t know how to. No, The Tao that can be named cannot. Exactly. Like I said, I have to give it an understanding. I don’t know what it is. I just know that when I sit in my uncomfortable feelings, not embellishing them, not wallow them with curiosity, I breathe into them and I observe them and I practice this long enough. Within seconds, there’s resistance drops. There’s all of a sudden peace – They’re not fighting.

Lorne Brown 

It just changes. There’s a shift. And then I feel full receptivity. Like you said, the other, what else could I do? Or something else comes through me. And if something else doesn’t come through me, like you, I’m on the journey. I’m getting practice at just sitting and watching and being at peace in what I would call an unhappy situation. What’s an unhappy situation? There’s a part of me that has a desire that’s different than what’s happening. That’s why it’s concerning in unhappy situations

Lorena Monda 

I call it minding the gap. The gap between reality and how we want reality to be. The other thing, I just want to put this in here, that when I was doing this research on core transformation and what was it and how did people do it, who did it, 100% of people got stuck.

Lorne Brown 

Tell me more because I’m curious about your research when they’ve had transformation. I’d love for you to highlight some of these things. So can you unpack that a bit more? So all those that ended up having transformation, during the road, there was an obstacle that got stuck.

Lorena Monda

Right. And the secret, here’s the secret. Here’s the one thing everybody did. They gave up the fight with themselves. That’s what you’re talking about. They gave up the fight with themselves in the moment. In the moment they noticed, oh, in this moment I’m having this experience and I’m fighting the experience I’m having, or I’m here and I don’t want to be here, or I’m sad and I’ve been sad all my life. I have a list in the book of things people said to themselves at that moment where they were in the fight. And then that acceptance that you’re bringing in, it’s not an idea of acceptance. It’s an experience that happens in the body.

Lorne Brown

It’s a bodily. Yeah. So I love you to clarify that because again, you can’t pretend and fake okay, you can’t say, okay, I don’t care anymore, but you’re really feeling your body. That doesn’t work. The nervous system, that aspect of you, you can’t trick it by saying, I believe this and think this. It’s a body awareness sensation because it feels, for me, when I’m in that resistance, there’s a contraction restriction. Yes, absolutely. And when I’m not, there’s an expansiveness and lightness, a sense of relief.

Lorena Monda 

Yes, a sense of relief. And sometimes it could be two things happening at the same time. I remember at one point in my life, I was crying over a relationship that didn’t work out, and I was crying and I was feeling this incredible joy that I let myself have the grief. So there’s an emotional component too, that we’re aligned with ourselves. We really are in ourselves and our body does love that. It does relax when we’re doing that. I mean, it’s kind of how I can do hard things is, yeah, I’m doing a hard thing and I might have some tension around it, but I can also have this choice point where I can lean back, I can settle in, I can open my heart, I can get very curious. And all those fuel a kind of expansion and relaxation.

Lorne Brown 

And again, it’s not forced, right? It’s this curiosity going in. There’s a sense of kindness, compassion for self, and acceptance doesn’t mean you like it or resign to it as well.You talk about your research. My observation of interviewing people like yourself, so the teachers of consciousness, the healers, if somebody said, “What’s the key theme I see in everybody’s work?” We may use different words, but there’s this key thing of surrender or acceptance because when you get into this on a whole level, whole body level, the resistance drops. So it seems that it’s not that you like this reality or don’t like this resistance, you call it the gap. I always think of an electrical system. When there’s resistance in electrical system, the energy, the electricity doesn’t flow very well. And if you lower the resistance, all of a sudden the energy flows better. And that’s like us, that when we call chi stagnation Chinese medicine, when we have stagnation, resistance, we develop pain and disease.

And when we have chi flow, no resistance, we have health. When I hear you sharing your ideas, to me, and I’m asking for confirmation, it seems like a part of your work with that curiosity and coming in and observing and coming alongside yourself is accepting all the parts. And in that acceptance, the resistance drops. It doesn’t mean you like all the parts, it doesn’t mean you’re resigned to all the parts. It just means you’re accepting that this is the reality now.

Lorena Monda 

Yes, you’ve landed with yourself in the here and now. You’re in reality now. You’re in reality. We live in kind of an irreality, and so you’re in reality. The reality is I’m sad. The reality is I’m angry. The reality is I’ve been angry for 50 years. The reality, and I’m going to land here because I want to see what else is possible.

Lorne Brown

When we talk about coherence, or as you talked about the spiritual transformation, when you’re in coherence, how does this show up in relationships in conflict or stress? So when you’re out of coherence and when you’re in coherence, just so people can start to recognize it.

Lorena Monda 

I have a little rubric for relationships. It goes like this. First, you let yourself be yourself, then you let another person be themselves. Then you are willing to change for another person. Oh, people fight this one a lot.

Lorne Brown 

I’ve packed that one. I get the first part. I let myself so I can accept myself. When I can accept myself, then it’ll be easier to have to passionate accept other.That part again. Now the part where you say I’m willing to change for somebody else, can you give this more practice?

Lorena Monda

Yeah, you let yourself be yourself, you let another person be themselves,

But we’re not two islands. So then for some dialogue to happen, you have to be able to take in the other person in some way, and sometimes you have to change for them. To be willing to change for them is a big step. Here’s a little story from my life. My husband comes in every night and he says, “Honey, I’m home.” But sometimes I’m writing a book, sometimes I’m doing something. Sometimes I’m going, “Oh God, he wants me to pay attention in the middle of this.” And one day I had the brilliant idea of, “I’m just going to go to the door and greet him for five seconds, just greet him, be happy to see him.” It changed our relationship, but I had to be willing to do it. I mean, it was a long road to do it the other way. “Oh, you’re always interrupting me.

Oh, I always have to. Always you expect me. “All the things we say,” Now let’s go to couples therapy or whatever and work out your expectations and my expectations. “And instead,” Wow, what if I just, as an experiment, went to the door and greeted him and it changed our whole relationship? “So that’s what got me onto this. Oh, I had to be willing in that moment to change. There’s the fourth part too, to be willing to let another person change because we have our ideas of who people are and they stick in our head and we don’t recognize all the ways that are not that. And so that’s how I kind of view relationships like where am I? Am I not letting this person be themselves? Do I wish they were someone else? Or am I not willing to be the one that makes the small shift that changes this dynamic that we’ve had for all these years?

Is it me? And then am I not willing to see that this person is making some offerings toward reconciliation or doing some changing themselves? Am I not willing to see it because they’re always like this? So that’s kind of how I.

Lorne Brown

Okay, thanks.

Lorena Monda 

You’re smiling.

Lorne Brown 

It’s being present, right? So it’s still an inside job, right? It’s all what you’re doing, right? 

Lorena Monda

It is.

Lorne Brown

You don’t need them to be different for you to be okay.

Lorena Monda 

Rule two, letting them be themselves.

Lorne Brown 

Exactly. If somebody wants to begin this practice today, what would be the first step?

Lorena Monda 

I love the intelligence of people when they’re on this journey. The first step is to notice what you’re listening to this in this moment, and we’ve said a lot of words, it’s been dynamic. And just notice if you stop for a moment, what are you drawn to? What sticks out in your mind?That’s where I would start with first. What are you drawn to? If we had 50 people in the room, everyone would say something different or there’d be some people that agreed or that resonated with each other, but there’d be a wide range of what people got from this, listening to this, what people were drawn to, what was stirred up inside, and that’s where you would start. And then you go out there and you, with the idea that it’s an inside job, I love what you’re saying, that it’s you that’s directing this process, you, the listener, that’s directing your own process.

I say this to my students and clients, you can trust yourself. You can trust your process, but you have to let it unfold a little bit before you take control over it. You’re never going to have control over your own process ever, but you can guide your own process, but you need to let it spool out a little bit, unfold and see what’s wanting to happen. That’s the thing we say in Hakomi work a lot, what wants to happen next? 

Lorne Brown 

Can you touch a bit more on then when you have this experience and you started to call it wake up or coherence, it goes backwards. Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by that?

Lorena Monda 

I’m going to start with something really tangible. I’ll start with my relationship with my dad who lives in the house right there in front of mine. We had a very stormy relationship when I was growing up, and we butt heads a lot. I left home early and I didn’t do a ton of therapy on my dad, I would say, but the work that I did on myself got to a point where he could live there in that house, and I love him. I appreciate him. It wasn’t hard work. It was the work I was doing on myself. And then he started, just from the changed me, having insights. We weren’t talking about any of this, it wasn’t cognitive, but he started having insights and having memories and saying things to me that really erased the past. I have to work to have memories of the stormy relationship we have.

So that’s a very practical way

Lorne Brown 

I’m going to unpack that a bit for our audience because I’ve experienced this with a family member where I did the inner work and then my relationship with them changed. It just changed. And then I’ve had multiple clients where whether it was a parent or a spouse or a child, and they did the work, so the child and the spouse or the parent didn’t do it. And when they started shifting, their relationship with that person changed. There was a different dynamic. Not only did their perception change, so they were different, so they weren’t reacting to them, but certain things in the external environment that that person didn’t do started doing. So it wasn’t just like, “Oh, my experience changed.” You could see it in the outside world. So I would say yes, when you do this work, it has. I think it’s in the course of miracles.

When you heal, your whole constellation heals. 

Lorena Monda

I think it’s that way.

Lorne Brown

That’s right.

Lorena Monda 

And it’s not mechanical in that it’s not. Again, there’s nothing to fix. It’s not that, okay, my dad and I are working on this issue together and looking at our history together. We’re not doing any of that. I’m doing my work, and then something new appears in our relationship, and then something new appears in him.

Lorne Brown

Yeah. We’re all connected. That’s a whole lot.

Lorena Monda 

We’re all connected.

Lorne Brown 

And if people want to learn, because sometimes people need a facilitator for this, so if somebody wants to learn more about your work or connect with you, how do they do that?

Lorena Monda 

I have a website, lorenamonda.com.

Lorne Brown 

We’ll put that in the show notes.

Lorena Monda 

It’s a minimal website. It doesn’t have a lot of words, but it does have some links to my work, and that’s a place to start. There’s the practice of wholeness, which is really simple. It’s a simple book. I wanted to call it. They have those idiots guides, like The Idiot’s Guide to Humanness or something, like the basics. These are the basic components, the place to start.

Lorne Brown 

Check out our website. And then her book is called The Practice of Wholeness: Spiritual Transformation in Everyday Life, and I’ll remind you, it was written in 2000, so she has evolved, so worthwhile to reach out and connect with her. I think in the last two decades she’s added to her repertoire, but she does, in Lorena’s work, she teaches that healing and transformation don’t come from fixing what’s broken, but from reconnecting with those parts of us we’ve rejected, avoided, or even suppressed. And I get the sense that wholeness is not perfection, it’s about integration.

Lorena Monda 

Yeah, and that’s what the practice is, practicing it. We’re practicing it because wholeness is a big thing. It includes the whole universe, so there’s a long way to go, time and space, all of that. But it’s a practice. It’s a practice of coming home to ourselves, of connecting.

Lorne Brown

Well, thank you for this. I knew your partner was acupuncturist herbalist. I forgot you were. So psychotherapist, Hakomi, trainer, author, and acupuncturist. So you got some really cool integration happening within yourself.

Lorena Monda 

Yeah, I like all the things. So many things. We live in a time when there’s so much available, but we’re the medium.

Lorne Brown 

Right. Lorena, thank you very much for today. We’ll put your website in the show notes, and I’m glad we got to connect, and I’m glad that your partner John gave me a copy of your book.

Lorena Monda 

Thank you, Lorne. This was fun.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you for spending this time with us on the Coherence Code Podcast. I’m Dr. Lorne Brown, and I will see you next week for another conversation on Coherence and Healing. If this conversation resonated with you, please like, subscribe, or follow the show, and also share it with someone who might benefit from it as well. Remember to take a moment to breathe, reflect, and stay connected. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.