Lorne Brown:
By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either 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 guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.
Today on the Conscious Fertility Podcast, I have Diederik Wolsak and this is going to be one of those episodes. That’s for everybody, as in it’s not just for those that are trying to conceive. And obviously if you are trying to conceive, I think you may find some value and benefit to this as well. Now, Diederik is the founder and program director of the Choose Again, attitudinal Healing Center. He is the lead facilitator of both the Vancouver and Costa Rica arms of the organization. He’s an international workshop leader. He’s a public speaker and a relationship counselor with years of experience in group facilitation. And he is the author of Choose Again, six Steps to Freedom and Diederik. I have a copy of this digitally that I’ve read, and then I got a written copy because I found out that Diederik, although I knew of him from being in Costa Rica, I found out he’s in my province of British Columbia, and today he’s in my city. So we’re going to hang out later today and I’m hoping to get you to sign this. So depending on how this interview goes, maybe you’ll sign copy of your book for me.

Diederik Wolsak:
I’ll be delighted. I’ll be delighted. Yeah.

Lorne Brown:
And welcome to the podcast. I want to share with the audience too, you’ve been doing this for a while. You’re now in your eighties. That’s correct. Right?

Diederik Wolsak:
I’m 82 and counting.

Lorne Brown:
So at the time of this recording, you’re 82 and counting, and I love the title of your book. I have my process, and in my process, one of the steps is choose again. So I would like to just start with kind of what inspired you to create the Choose Again process, and how did your own personal story or journey shape the development of the six steps that’s included in the Choose Again process?

Diederik Wolsak:
Okay. Well then we have to start 80 years ago or 82 years ago when I was born in Indonesia and spent the first three and a half years of my life in Japanese camps. And when I came out of the camps, which according to my mother, I survived by one week when the bomb dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, I had a week to live. I was swollen up with edema and the end was near, but the bomb saved my life. And that’s always been an interesting question. Was that worthwhile for me or was that an unfair trade? But I came out of the camp and then the following years were spent in Indonesia until I was eight. And then I was sent to foster care in Holland. And by that time I was angry isolated, pretty crazy looking back at it. And I’ve looked back at it through a variety of methods, very lonely, unaware, really of who I was or what anything else meant.
Everything was very strange to me. So then when my teenage years came on, I was having labeled many things from autistics to bipolar to certainly clinically depressed. I became a very successful alcoholic and I drank a bottle of we gade for many, many years. And I was also an athlete. I played for national teams. So there was a balance of looked success, like success, but underneath all of it was intense self-hatred and deep guilt. And that guilt I discovered in a holotropic breathing in 1985 when I was talking about the camps in a workshop and I couldn’t talk about it. So my throat closed up and I couldn’t understand why, but I wanted to find out why. So I did a holotropic breathing. And in that breathing it became immediately clear that I held myself responsible for all the suffering I’d seen in the camp for my mother’s suffering and all the deaths and disease I’ve been witness to for three and a half years. And not only that, I also was responsible for all the camps in the world and I was responsible for the second World war. And whenever I tell that story, I want to make absolutely clear, this is not a feel story for me story. It is a story to illustrate that whatever happens in your youth is exactly the same. It doesn’t look the same, but we all have stories where we develop a deep, deep, deep held belief in guilt and whatever the form of that guilt takes is irrelevant.

Lorne Brown:
I wanted to just check in on or talk a little bit about that. It’s amazing because in the process work I see for myself and for my patients how as children we take events and then how we perceive them and turn them into these programs or stories. But usually they’re not good stories, right. Have you ever figured out why that happens? Because if parents get divorced all of a sudden it’s the kid’s fault. You said you felt responsible for the war for crying out loud as a child. I don’t know. I mean, I just know that it’s something I’ve observed. I don’t know why that’s the case. I don’t know if you’ve come across that in your 80 years of living.

Diederik Wolsak:
Well, I couldn’t say that. I know the why. I could say what my interpretation would be. And that is because, and you have a deeply held belief in separation. We believe we’re separate. And if you look at the story in the Bible, the first thing that happens is we’re kicked out of paradise. And I think that is an archetypal story. So at a deep level, we believe that separation really is the number one issue, the only issue, and that I have done something in order to be in separation. I’ve done something. And that’s why I’m no longer part of the oneness. And as you know, the ease teaches is the West teaches individuality. And individuality from my point of view is nothing other than glorified separation.

Lorne Brown:
And so this is important concept I guess, and we’re going to continue on your story and how you came up with these six steps. But some of the concepts that I think I’m aligned with from reading your book is kind of like you’re talking about separation and wholeness, that a one is that we’re not separate. We’re whole from a materialist perspective, it really does look like we’re separate, right? I’m here, you’re there. Our skins are separate, but there’s another dimension it seems like where we can experience this wholeness. And the external world is a reflection of our inner world. I get from your work. And the issue of this separate is that we continually look for the external world, relationships, money, accolades, to make us feel whole and complete. But that is a futile mission. You’re never going to get it from the outside. Did I get your understanding of how you perceive

Diederik Wolsak:
The world brilliantly encapsulated? Yes, absolutely.

Lorne Brown:
So I wanted to continue though. So you had an upbringing, you were brought up in a camp, a prisoner camp, round war, and you had built up a program or belief that somehow you’re guilty, that you’re for fault for all the terrible things that you saw going around in the world.

Diederik Wolsak:
But it’s exactly the same as what you said earlier, that you and I both have come across many, many people whose parents are divorced and how inevitably a hundred percent of the time the child is responsible for it. And if you consider for a moment that a lot of parents can say to their children, you make me so happy, I don’t know if you have children, if you have children, you’re probably guilty of that.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah, I have two

Diederik Wolsak:
Children. I certainly did too. So when I say to you, you make me so happy, and tomorrow I walk in with a frown on my face, what’s the message I give you? Make me unhappy. In other words, I hold you responsible for how I feel. And that’s the curse that unfortunately falls on every single relationship that spends time in what I call relationship hell. I hold you responsible how I feel, and you hold me responsible how you feel.

Lorne Brown:
Our common friend, Gila Gola, who’s been on our podcast episode 10, I don’t remember the other one who studied a lot with Gordon Neufeld, the attachment therapist, talk a lot about that, that we’re raised by behaviorists versus developmentalists. So there’s always these conditions. And so if your parents get divorced or if your parents are just pushing you and you need to get an A plus that these young children, especially were born at different sensitivities, it seems like some people are not sensitive and some people are sensitive. Sensitive, as in if somebody picks you up late from daycare, it could create abandonment issues for somebody. And again, so as children, I’ve heard people describe it as our brain is always in theta, meaning we’re a sponge, we’re just taking everything in. And so I’d love for you to talk on this from your work and your experience. It’s a Dan Siegel quote, and I thought maybe you could elaborate on it. And I’m just coming into because of what you said, he has this idea that the environment creates your mind and then your mind creates your environment. Have you ever heard of that quote?

Diederik Wolsak:
Yeah, I have to listen to it for a minute. The environment creates my mind,

Lorne Brown:
And then your mind creates your environment as in how you’re raised, impacts the programs you get. And then once you hit that age of 12, you see the world perceive it through the lens of that subconscious. So now everything you’re experiencing, you’re creating now your environment. So your external environment is a reflection of how you run stories or programs or given meaning. And the meaning you give it is through your history. So your environment creates your mind, your subconscious programs, and then after you reach a certain age, your mind, your beliefs create your reality. Do you believe that?

Diederik Wolsak:
I have a little problem with that, and that would be if I have a twin brother, which I don’t, but let’s say I do, and we’re brought in the same environment, we’re still going to have completely different personalities. We’re still going to set and create a completely different set of core beliefs. And the core beliefs will create my world after that that I totally agree with. I’m curious about who is the I that makes the initial interpretation? So my brother and I both grew up in the county’s two and a half years older. He has very different issues from what I do. So in other words, his interpretation of what happened is very different from mine. I have a second brother, and when the three of us are together and we talk about our parents, we have six parents,

Lorne Brown:
Six parents,

Diederik Wolsak:
I’m not sure. It’s a little bit of a chicken and egg story.

Lorne Brown:
And

Diederik Wolsak:
To me it doesn’t really matter. What does matter

Lorne Brown:
Is

Diederik Wolsak:
Once I’ve developed a set of core beliefs and I do that in the first eight years of my life, then my world will be consistent with those beliefs in that I have no choice. So that means that telling myself, oh, but that’s not true. You’re seeing it wrongly doesn’t make any difference because the ego is not hearing that. What does make a difference eventually, and then you get to our process is to recognize those beliefs and you recognize them about how you feel. So in this work feeling is immensely important, not because it’s important for its own sake, but because it’s important because it tells me who I think I am. So you’re wearing a blue shirt, I don’t like blue shirts. I have an emotional reaction to that. Where did that come from? It’s not about the blue shirt. The blue shirt is a neutral event, but maybe I was beaten by a man when I was three who had a blue shirt. And so my memory, my history creates my present world and that history is put together by a construct that I call re, and that construct, thank God can be transformed.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah, that’s the transformation part. You were sharing how you had this program of guilt, and then I’m assuming that because you have this program, you mentioned you were an alcoholic, so you try to numb it and curious what your life was like and then what was the turning point for you where it sounds like you’ve been able to heal and continue to heal so much so that you created an organization that helps other people have transformation. So can you tell us a little bit about your trajectory and then I’d love to go into your steps.

Diederik Wolsak:
Yeah, so the trajectory started in 91, I believe. When somebody gave me a course of miracles and I opened it up and I read Sin is lack of love as darkness is lack of light. And I thought, my God, that’s what I’ve always known to be true.

Lorne Brown:
Sin is lack of love as darkness is lack of light.

Diederik Wolsak:
So if you go into it a little deeper, sin is actually nothing other than the belief and separation. And that belief in separation comes from the guilt that I hold about myself. What is that guilt? That guilt is not based on something I’ve done. That guilt is based on the fact that I have made a self that’s in direct contradiction to the loving self that I truly have. That’s what I’m guilty for. So I’m not guilty for stealing or lying to you or cheating on my wife or any of the other things we normally feel guilty about. That’s not the guilt we’re talking about. That guilt is just a symptom. The symptom of the self agent that I developed though I read that line, but the next, unfortunately the next line had the father and the Holy Spirit and God over it and the sun.
And I said, well, that’s not for me. So I threw the book away and then two years later I was back into heavy drinking and sweat and deeply depressed. And I heard myself literally say, there has to be another way. And I opened that book again, and this time I didn’t see any of the offend language. I only saw love. And the biggest message I think I got immediately from the course was literally the self you think you are is not who you are and that the self you think you are is unchanged, has not been affected by your behavior, by the horrible things I’ve done, by the lies I’ve told by whatever shit I pulled off in my self. Hatred didn’t affect that loving self in any way at all. That was a breathtaking realization that meant that even for a person like me, there was hope. Something could be changed. And then we had to find out how to do that. Now of course, as you know, probably is a brilliant teaching that I see not so much as anything to do with religion or religious fingers or God for that matter, but more a manual for living. And I started doing the lessons and if you look for example at lesson two and lesson two says, I’ve given everything, all the meaning it has for me.

Lorne Brown:
Can you say that one again?

Diederik Wolsak:
I have given everything, all the meaning it has for me.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah, I always say we’re meaning makers,

Diederik Wolsak:
Right? Exactly. So if you live that, then you recognize there’s no reason for any upset given it that meaning it doesn’t have that meaning. And eventually with training, and this is a mind training. With training, you learn to ask, show me another meaning. And you ask that of your loving self. And your loving self is always ready to give you that. You get another meaning, it leads to another experience.

Lorne Brown:
So this is the part where I think process work is needed. Why I like your six steps, because you can’t think your way through this because it’s the meaning we gave it. And this idea of feeling oneness or I’ve heard many of the experts on our podcast, they say, you’re innate or inner nature is peace and joy. And then you have these veils that what we call thoughts and feelings, you’re not your thoughts and feelings. So that’s a concept, but it seems like you need a process to tune into this oneness. It’s not like, oh, you can pretend it. You really have, it feels like there’s a shift that’s happening and again, and then through that shift, all of a sudden you give it new meaning. But it seems like there’s something happening inside of us. And I’m curious if you have words, Daoism, they say the dao that you can speak is not the Dao. It’s so hard. What we want to talk about using language for something that I don’t, the sages say you can’t give a language, but we do our best. But my experience is this is not an intellectual thing, although we’re doing it right now, intellectually, there is a process that you go into and a shift happens. You go from that suffering to this sense of relief or peace. And I’m wondering if that’s been your experience personally and the people you work with, if that’s what’s happening.

Diederik Wolsak:
Absolutely. What you said earlier, the absolute truth you cannot talk about because it cannot be known verbally, but the process can be talked about. The process is based on simply recognizing. The step one is that I’m upset that there’s a disturbance. And the beauty of that step is there’s absolutely no story. So in our work, contrary to almost any other process I’m familiar with, I’m not interested in the story. And that’s because I decided long ago that the story only has one purpose and as to try to convince you of the truth of what I’m going through. And my job and the job of the people that I work with in our organization is to recognize that that is none of that is true. All of what I’m telling you, all of the story I want to tell you over and over because you’re a billion therapists and I see you once a week and I feel so good that you listen to me.
I get to tell you the same story every week. And I feel heard and I feel listened to and I feel validated, but nothing happens. And in our work, I’m not interested in your story. I couldn’t care less. I’m interested in taking ownership. So that means now we go to step two of our process, which says it’s about me. So it’s not about the fact that my wife was unfaithful, it’s not about the fact that you stole money from me. It’s not about the fact that I did something terrible either. It’s about me and that step is a guilt trip unless I take the leap of faith and recognize that nothing has ever been wrong. Now that is a foundational position to take in order to heal because as long as I think something has gone wrong, there has to be a fault. It’s your fault or mine.

Lorne Brown:
So this is about, if I can unpack this. So the first step is recognize that you’re upset. So that’s step one, step two, it’s me, it’s all about me. So is interpreting that there’s no room here for victim. Then this is about accountability and responsibility, and this is that expression I hear, it’s not happening to me, it’s happening for me. Or there’s the external world, something’s happening in the world. That’s the trigger, but everything else is in me because I’m giving it meaning. If we can unpack that. Exactly.

Diederik Wolsak:
Exactly. And I’m glad you used the victim, the word victim. This is the anti victim process. It takes me out of error, allowing myself to see myself as a victim. As a victim, I get to be right. And you’re the victimizer. Now, of course, in that wonderful realization, I seem to forget that I’m the victimizer and you’re the victim. In other words, we’re both in that game. So that has to be removed. Blame has to be removed entirely. Not self blame, not blame a father. And that can only be done if I take the leap of faith and say, I don’t know what this is for, but it could only be for me. That is foundational. And for a lot of people that’s very, very difficult. And even for a trained mind that I would say after 30 years, my mind is relatively drain. I still have moments where I say the hell with step two, this is not about me, this is about blah, blah, blah. Actually two seconds later. So honey,

Lorne Brown:
It’s a good point before we go into step three to set that expectation because I mean maybe there’s a few people that are fairly enlightened that they don’t fall into their wounds. But I bet from where you were from as a child, as a young man to somebody, now at the time the recording is 82, the amount of times you go, I’ll use the word unconscious or fall into your wound or believe in the story, all the evidence that it’s them, not me, happens less often. And rather than being in it for months or years, you’re in it for minutes. Maybe an hour wake up

Diederik Wolsak:
Quickly. Yeah, I have the great fortune to be in a wonderful relationship with a partner who knows and works his work as well. So we don’t allow each other to stay in an upset. It just, it’s not going to happen. However tempting it might be, it’s just not going to happen.

Lorne Brown:
And we didn’t mention this, but in your book it says Six steps to freedom. This is the difference between the suffering that people are experiencing in the world. You see it. I see it in my practice to a sense of freedom. So I want to know what that means to you. I think you touched on a bit this wholeness not feeling separate. There’s a sense of peace and freedom, but I’d love to hear more about your process. So first you got to recognize you’re upset. Then there’s the accountability responsibility that’s happening For me, you’re saying having faith that it’s not about what you think it is. I always use the word Diederik is I get curious. I’m like, okay, I believe that I’m so right. I get it, I’m right. But I always have that voice now that says, but maybe I’m not, how can I get curious and just find that gem where this is happening for me? So even when I’m like, I feel like I’m a hundred percent right, I still into step two of yours, how’s this for me or it’s about me.

Diederik Wolsak:
Well, and the being, right? The course has, I see the course as a toolbox when I compare it to going and being wheeled into an oral room, you see these hundreds of stainless steel tools and the people that are in there know how to use it. So if I know the course inside out, then I have all the tools or as many tools as I need. And one of them is of course the well-known phrase. You can be right or you can be happy.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah.

Diederik Wolsak:
This is one that I used to hate because I was always right. Well, I still am and I’m happy, I say, but it’s impossible. You can only be one or the other. So that’s key. The one word I wanted to mention about step one is to, if you were ever to witness someone during a process, the temptation to say, I’m upset because, and at the moment I hear or my staff uses the word because we say, stop. There is no because yet because you have no idea. And again, you go back to a lesson from the course and it says, I’m never upset for the reason. I think. So that to me is a brilliant teaching. Immediately I think I’m upset because X, Y, and Z, but that’s not true. So to recognize simply that in itself is not true, gives me the freedom to continue and to become, as you say, develop a curiosity.

Lorne Brown:
Can you unpack that? I want for our audience to understand that because for those that are new to this kind of work, they’re going to be like, no, I’m upset because they’re believing their story. So you sit in the, that’s your step one. And in the course it says, I’m never upset for the reason I think, can you unpack that a bit?

Diederik Wolsak:
Yeah. That’s simply an acknowledgement of the fact that my ego is going to tell me why I’m upset with my IG ego is a set of beliefs. So from the ego point of view, there’s a very good reason why I’m upset. And why is that true for the ig? Because the ego only finds evidence for itself. So if I tell you to go into Cardale tomorrow and come back and tell me how many yellow Volkswagens you saw, and you come back and I say, how many black Cadillacs did you see? And well, you didn’t ask me. You asked me to look for yellow Volkswagens, you will only see yellow Volkswagen. That’s comes from your belief. So whatever I see will always be consistent with my beliefs. And that’s why I take a position that I have no free will. The only free will I have is to have the decision maker grow up and recognizing that what I’m seeing, what my opinion is based on is a false self and that false self can be transformed. That free will I have. But if I don’t do that, I have no free will. The beliefs will continue to act on my behalf, will give me every bit of information I need in order to be right about who I think I am.

Lorne Brown:
So I get a sense that your process before we go into step three is how I interpret it, I want to give a language, is it’s rewiring the subconscious programs. You have beliefs, you have a lens that you experience the world through, and this process is changing the lens. You’re rewiring the brain and now you’re going to experience reality different because you now have a new perception because you’ve changed the programs.

Diederik Wolsak:
Exactly. I often compare to when you come to Costa Rica, I hope you will, you’ll see the rainforest and if you want to make a bath in the rainforest, you’ll take need a strong arm and a sharp machete and you can make a path. However, if you don’t keep that path open a week later, you won’t be able to find it. So what we’re doing here is making new neuro paths

Lorne Brown:
And

Diederik Wolsak:
Ego has a 24 high lane running through my mind. All the thoughts automatically run on that highway. They always have. It’s beautifully paved, it’s well lit, it’s the easiest thing to do. My thoughts rung along that highway. What I’m doing now is making a new neuropath and maybe I can get one or two thoughts to start going down that path of the jungle with mine training. Eventually what happens to the 24 lane highway, it becomes overgrown. It has potholes, the lights don’t work anymore. And it becomes more easier and easier and easier for my thoughts to run along the new neuropath. And in doing so, I widen that into a 48 lane highway.

Lorne Brown:
I love your metaphor. I use a similar one about walking on a path, the one that you walk on eventually wears. And if you don’t walk on the old path, the grass will grow. And in neuroscience they say the synapses that fire together wire together. And if you don’t use something, you lose it. Right? You prune them. So perfect. So step one, recognize I’m upset. Two, it’s about me. Step three.

Diederik Wolsak:
Step three was for me very difficult because it is what are you feeling? And when I started my work, I didn’t know what I was feeling. I was either depressed or in a range. That’s the range of my emotional experience. So I had to make a feeling list. I made a feeling is of 64 feelings on it that we use in our process. And the reason I did that, because I recognized that the feeling will eventually, if I allow it, take me back to an early memory of when I first felt it. And the beauty of that is of course that let’s say I remember something when I was four or five. Of course it’s completely different from what I just experienced, but the content of the experience is the same. And there again, you have immediately a demonstration and an illustration of I’m not upset for the reason. I think I thought it was about you stealing from me, but it actually is about my father who said he would take me to the park and he didn’t. And the experience of those two events completely unrelated is the same emotionally. So feelings in themselves are completely irrelevant. I couldn’t care less what you’re feeling, but they’re hugely important In order to take me back to memory

Lorne Brown:
In clinical hypnotherapy, that’s what we do. We don’t trace the story, we trace the feeling. And so the stories will be very different, but that experience feeling will be the same. So you can find that initial experience. So in that course, a miracle quote that you’re calling, feel my feelings, step three. But you’re never upset for the reason you think. So basically everything’s like a replication. We’ve been imprinted on up until about age eight, and then we just keep replicating. I’ve heard some think or say that the whole goal here is to heal. And so we’re going to keep our external environment environment’s going to keep triggering this old trauma until we finally use your six steps to heal it. And then you don’t need the external environment to trigger it anymore or it’s not in you. So it can’t be triggered.

Diederik Wolsak:
It won’t be triggered anymore. See, if I don’t have the beliefs, then that experience will not trigger the belief that would normally give me an emotional explanation, emotional experience of whatever happened.

Lorne Brown:
And there’s the freedom because you’re not triggered.

Diederik Wolsak:
That’s where the freedom comes in. So I’m completely free of judgment, free of a reaction to what you do. Now when you lie to me, because you always do, I know you really well, and I know you’re a liar, it doesn’t bother me. It’s not about me

Lorne Brown:
Except a step two, it’s about me.

Diederik Wolsak:
Nobody. Step two only applies if I have an emotional reaction,

Lorne Brown:
Right? Okay,

Diederik Wolsak:
So people misunderstand that everything I see is a judgment of myself. If you lie to me, that means I’m a liar. No, it doesn’t. It only means that if I have an emotional reaction to it. So if you’re lying, I can say you’re lying. If I have even the slightest trigger around it, it has nothing to do with you. It’s my issue and I need to heal that. I need to figure out where that comes from

Lorne Brown:
And hence the freedom. So now the external environment’s no longer triggering inside of you. So the world could go to shit and you can be at peace in that unhappy situation, in that experience because you’re not being triggered by the external environment. You are your own environment. You are tapped into yourself, which is some people call peace and joy.

Diederik Wolsak:
Exactly. And then it’s funny you mentioned that because yesterday I did a webinar on overwhelm and how the world is going to sit and how upset people are. And when I discussed doing this webinar with my staff a week ago, I said, I have trouble doing this webinar because I’m not upset. So I can’t relate to it anymore.

Lorne Brown:
I assume it’s not that you don’t care and the power of now I heard totally, I’d love the language he gave this, you can be at peace in an unhappy situation. It’s not like you’re resigned to, you’re flipping like, oh, look what’s happening. People are dying or people are losing their jobs. It’s not that you’re like, oh, this is wonderful. It’s just that there’s not this massive emotional trigger inside of you so you can be at peace in an unhappy situation mentally. You still know this. You don’t like this from society. This is not in quotes good yet. There’s not this huge charge inside of you, hence the freedom.

Diederik Wolsak:
Exactly.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for clarifying that. I’m curious in the step three feel my feelings. Do you have tools for that? Because I find I like to bring in a lot of my tools here, but it’s uncomfortable to feel your feelings. You have to have that willingness, courage to experience those feelings. In my work, it’s not about indulging and wallowing in these feelings. We bring up the feelings part of the neuroplasticity, we want to activate them. So now we can have a different experience and basically I say heal it. But I’m curious because there’s a fine line. It’s easy to fall into that wound where you’re fully at the effect of it again. And like you say, when you go to talk therapy, imprinting the story. So what kind of tools and support do you bring into that part of your process? Feel my feelings. So they don’t get lost in the feelings, but they can stay witnessing those feelings

Diederik Wolsak:
Because as you said, indulgence is not loving. Indulgence is an act of self hatred. And I have a little illustration of what a feeling is. When I used to have a friend and he and I used to sail from Vancouver to Victoria. On one occasion I saw a little red flag in the water and I said, well, what the hell is that? I’ve never seen that before. And he said, well, that is a little flag that people put on a spike in a submerged log. Feeling is that little flag, the submerged log is the belief and the submerged log will sink your boat unless you avoid it. So the feeling is simply telling me I’m believing something about me that’s not true. And that is my shortcut to the whole process. As soon as I feel something of a trigger, I said, what am I believing right now? Oh, that again, that’s the thing again, the replay of that one, but that’s the shortcut. And of course people that I have been doing it for a long time use a shortcut. If you’re new to this process, I really recommend you go through all six steps over and over and over until it becomes a routine.
Until you also start being able to map, you’d be able to map a feeling and know what belief chooses that feeling. So one of my beliefs that still plays from time to time is that I can lose love. Now, before 20 years ago, 30 years ago, that was debilitating, absolutely paralyzing. I constantly was absolutely convinced I was losing love. Now it comes up once or twice a year and it’s a little flicker. I said, oh, there understand again, I thought I was done with it, but I’m not. And then you get to the forgiveness

Lorne Brown:
And I noticed, you see what I love about it, and knowing where you’re in the work, when the program comes up, you have a little smile because you don’t really believe in it. You feel it. You also are aware that you got the tools, the process to transform it. And it’s kind of like cute. Oh, there’s that old program. Wow, I’ve been working on this, what, 50 years, six years? And here she is

Diederik Wolsak:
Again. Exactly. And the verbiage I use at that point is, oh, honey, so you don’t attack your ego because your ego is the attacking first forcing your mind.

Lorne Brown:
And

Diederik Wolsak:
A lot of people in the beginning do that. I feel so stupid that I did that again. Ego made you do it. And then your ego tells you you’re stupid and then your ego punishes for it. Wake up to the closed circuit,

Lorne Brown:
Step three and four. I think there’s a connection there. You actually started going in I think into step four. So step three was feel my feelings. And then step four,

Diederik Wolsak:
Step four is to allow that feeling to take you back to a memory. And that’s

Lorne Brown:
What we’d call regression in hypnosis. Then regressed

Diederik Wolsak:
To, you can call it that. And a lot of people say, well, I don’t have any memories before 15. Wonderful. The script has your earliest memory. If that is at 15, that’s your earliest memory. I’ve worked with people who claim to have memories of in utero experiences, and I always thought, well, that’s a little over the top, but it’s your experience, not mine. And then I had one that was actually that too. So that’s really probably as early as you can go is in utero, not necessary. What is necessary that you find one because then it becomes like a domino falling. So the first upset that you remember that brings up that feeling, I’m in the crib, my father slammed the door and I went like that. What meaning did I give that? What does it say about me? It can say I’m not important. It can say he doesn’t love me if I was the little baby, Jesus, do you think he would’ve slammed the door? No. He would’ve been touring around me with all kinds of wonderful incense and you name it, but he didn’t. So the message I got, I don’t matter, I’m not important. I’m not loved. I’m disposable. I’m worthless. Any of those come up and every one of us has memories, and those are whatever happens now that you’re in at my age, a replay of those memories.

Lorne Brown:
So this is that idea that everything is a replication or as you shared in the course of miracles. How did you say it? This is not the first time it’s happened. That’s not the language. What was the language for it? That everything is from the past, your childhood. I’m using the term everything is a replication. Oh, it’s not happening for the reason you think.

Diederik Wolsak:
Yeah, I’m never upset for the reason. I think

Lorne Brown:
Thank you. I’m never upset for the reason I think. And so this sounds like step forward to use that. When did I first feel this? I’m really gentle with it. And when I ask the people I work with, I just say, just like when?

Diederik Wolsak:
Yep, just like when. That’s the line we used to. Yeah, absolutely. And then dad will tell you, well, my mom and dad were fighting in the kitchen. I was upstairs and I wanted to help them. And so I went down and my dad whacked me and sent me back upstairs. Didn’t happen to me. But that’s the story I hear a lot. The one you mentioned earlier is absolutely universal. My mom or my dad was five minutes late picking me up from preschool or from swimming. That is a moment of abandonment. That’s unbearable. And that plays the rest of your life until you recognize and what we do either with our process or in a circle, for example, we can go to the 12 or 14 people that are in the circle and ask, is there a loving way to see it? Can you see it differently?
And then the client who happens to be in the process can hear, yeah, my mom was shopping. She was busy. Or my dad had a phone call he had to take before coming over, or he had to buy something for me and surprise me. Or in other words, it said nothing about me. And that is something important to learn, that whatever happens me says nothing about me. What happens around me in the camp said nothing about me, but I made it about me. I made it my fault. And that’s because the Igor is a guilt seeking machine. It’ll find it.

Lorne Brown:
It is a key thing. No, it sounds like there’s no room for blame in this process works. So when you said I gave it meaning I made it about me, as in it’s really an unconscious process at that. It’s just the nature of the ego that your father hits you or somebody’s been raped or beaten, that this child internalized it, that somehow it must be my fault that I was raped or beat. We create those programs. So it’s not that it’s your fault. You have these programs. It just seems to be part of this reality that we live, that a lot of these things happen unconsciously. Again, I haven’t figured out why we do this, have these negative beliefs when we’re young, but it’s something we have. And as adults, we’re able to go in and change those beliefs and then have a whole new experience.

Diederik Wolsak:
So the question why, which part of your mind do you think is asking that question?

Lorne Brown:
Why do I have these beliefs? I don’t know. Do you

Diederik Wolsak:
Know? It’s the ego. The ego wants to make itself important,

Lorne Brown:
Right?

Diederik Wolsak:
And then wants to say, well, if you can’t figure out, I got you. In other words, when you work with the three parts of my mind that we work with, which is the loving self, which is unchanged, the ego, which is set of beliefs and the decision maker that’s in the middle, that is going to have to become an adult and listen to the ego and the ego will ask us questions that cannot be answered. The purpose of ego in order to solidify its position,

Lorne Brown:
Right, solidify its position. You said three kinds of mind. There was the ego,

Diederik Wolsak:
The ego, which is the set of beliefs, the loving self, which is the essence of my being, which is the oneness, which is call it God, call it whatever you want to call it. That’s who you are.

Lorne Brown:
Some of our experts call it big C, big consciousness and little

Diederik Wolsak:
C, big consciousness.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah, I think you call it big self and little self. If I big self

Diederik Wolsak:
And little self,
The big self, that capital S self and the smaller self. In the middle there is an entity that has to be able to bridge the small self and the bigger self because the capital self doesn’t know of. The ego has no idea. The small self has no idea of the capital self. So there has to be a third entity, there has to be an interpreter. And that interpreter hears what the ego says and then turns to the loving self, the capital self. I said, what do you think? Is there anything to that? And the loving self, in my case, I have a really boring loving self. It always says the same thing. The response is always, there’s only love. And I get it out loud, I get it whispered. I get it in whatever form. That’s the only response I get. In other words, my capital self is not interested in the story at all. It says you’ve just forgotten that there’s only enough.

Lorne Brown:
And when you tune into that capital self, big C consciousness, higher self, that’s where you have this sense of peace and freedom.

Diederik Wolsak:
Absolutely.

Lorne Brown:
And then steps five and six,

Diederik Wolsak:
Well, five and six are, forgive me for believing at that moment. I made up something about me.

Lorne Brown:
So it’s a forgiveness practice for self,

Diederik Wolsak:
For exactly. So you’re five minutes late picking me up from swimming. I make up that I’m not lovable, I’m not important, I don’t matter, whatever it is. And then I do the forgiveness. Forgive me for believing I’m not lovable or forgive me for believing that you don’t love me. And then the response, this is the program is designed as you read in my book, it’s designed to be done by yourself because what I wanted to avoid at all costs is any dependency on another person to do it with you because that is inevitably in my mind at travel because you won’t do it. You and I agreed we would do three a day or 10 a day, and you only did one. We’re too busy. And then I’m back in my shit again. So it’s designed to do by myself.

Lorne Brown:
It’s inner work. And you do your inner work.

Diederik Wolsak:
Exactly.

Lorne Brown:
It’s about you, you’re responsible. What are some of the challenges people face when you work through these steps? You’ve been doing this for so long. What are some of the common challenges that you have seen that people have when they’re working through these steps and maybe what you recommend to overcome them?

Diederik Wolsak:
I would say the biggest for most people is step two, to really accept the fact that I’m not a victim, nor that I’m a victimizer. And to accept the fact that nothing really has ever gone wrong. And then more people will say, well, how about when you get cancer? And I say, well, how about when you get cancer? The question always is inevitably, what is this for? And I don’t know if I put it in my book and if it didn’t, I should have. I can tell you the story of my father in the camp, and it was the most fantastic illustration of our circumstances do not dictate your experience. It was the last days of the war, the day before Capillation and my father weighed, I weighed about 200 pounds. He weighed 95 pounds, same size as I am, so there’s nothing left of the guy.
He was ill and he was thrown in a barracks on top of a pile of bodies, corpses because he was dying. So he was thrown on a big pile of bodies and within minutes somebody was thrown throwing the top of him. And that person proceeded to have diarrhea all over his face. And what my father reported, that was the moment, the only moment in my life I experienced love at that moment. I knew what God was. And what a brilliant illustration of the dad experience of love. Call it the is of God, call it whatever you want to call it has nothing to do with circumstances. So when I look at situations like Gaza and Lebanon and whatever else is going on, Asheville, Florida, I remember that story and I remember that I don’t know what people are going through. The only thing I can feel is my belief that this is what I would experience if I was in that situation. And I don’t know if that’s true

Lorne Brown:
With your father’s situation too. I have a question what you think? I have a guess of how he experienced tuned into this, what you call the God energy, but he was dying. They threw him on a bunch of dead bodies, threw a dead body on top of him, which ended up having diarrhea on his face. And that was his experience of feeling love. And you shared how that shows you circumstances are not so relevant or don’t have to be relevant. It sounds like when you’re in that place, you have no choice now, but to fully surrender. And when you fully surrender, that’s when you tap into this, when you fully surrender, this is my interpretation, you go into present moment and when you’re present and you surrender resistance drops, and now you can tune into capitals big consciousness. Exactly. That’s my interpretation, what I think might’ve happened through my own experiences.

Diederik Wolsak:
So what happens in surrender, I surrender to the fact that I don’t know, sorry. What I let go of is the idea that I have any idea of what’s going on and that I have a reason to feel X, Y, and Z. And I’ve surrendered my judgment making machine of telling me what I should be feeling out of this circumstance. And there are many times in the last certain 10, 12 years where I’ve had circumstances where surrender were lifesaving, literally because I gave up all idea of knowing what should happen right now. I have no idea what should happen right now. And because I gave that up, there was zero resistance or zero energy into changing anything because the energy to change says there’s something wrong right now. And that’s not true. There’s nothing wrong right now. But I only can do that when I’m free of that energy. And when I’m free of that energy, automatically I will take steps or I’ll say something that changes circumstances but not to change the circumstances. So you see, it has to be free of an intention of change.

Lorne Brown:
That’s that expression and conscious work not being attached to form an outcome. There is a part of you that wants change parts of us, but this whole integration of becoming whole again is bringing all those parts together but not being attached to form an outcome. There’s that delicate balance because when you have an attachment as do this, I mean I know this has to have happened in your group work relationships. They come in, they’re so excited to do your six step process, they want to do this because that’s going to change their partner. Or you want to not feel depressed anymore, but soon as you’re doing the work to not feel that way, obviously there’s a part of you that does not want to feel depressed or wants your partner change, otherwise you wouldn’t show up to Costa Rica to do the six steps. But when you’re attached to form an outcome, you create the resistance. And so there’s that delicate balance of just doing the process for the sake of the process. And then everything shifts. It’s been my experience, but you’re smiling, so I want to hear what you have to say.

Diederik Wolsak:
Well, I’m smiling because twice you said I want to change my partner. In other words, you forgot step two.

Lorne Brown:
Yes,

Diederik Wolsak:
My partner doesn’t need to change. Nothing needs to change. I need to change how I see it. How am I going to do that? By changing the eye that sees.

Lorne Brown:
And when you do your work, your steps,

Diederik Wolsak:
One

Lorne Brown:
Or two things will happen. One is your perception to the situation changes. So your perception to the partner changes. So there’s no longer a trigger.

Diederik Wolsak:
Exactly.

Lorne Brown:
And then sometimes the second thing happens, the external environment changes. Your partner actually changes. Maybe he didn’t maybe or he or she, you think they’ve changed because you’re perceiving them differently. But maybe they really have, as in they never put the toilet seat down and now you don’t care if they put the toilet seat down, you had a shift and then all of a sudden without you asking, they’re putting the toilet seat down.

Diederik Wolsak:
Like last year we had a neurosurgeon, the head of neurosurgeon is one of the big hospitals in the states, and he had some like 80 neurosurgeons on his staff was a huge hospital. And he said, it’s amazing when I come back to the entire staff’s changed, said, yeah, he changed your mind.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah,

Diederik Wolsak:
You changed how you saw them and because you changed how you saw them, they no longer saw your anger or your grief or your depression. And no longer did they feel responsible for that. That’s what happens. So when say you have a sick child and you look at that child with concern, what’s the message a child gets? It’s making you unhappy. Jerry Polsky told me a beautiful story about that. He used to work on cancer words, and particularly with young children. And on that word, some kid would die every day, but whenever he came on the word, it was a happy word. The kids were happy, they were laughing, they were singing. They couldn’t really dance because they were too sick. But it was a happy sphere till the parents walked in and it became, oh my God. And why was that? Because the parents walked and walks in with so much guilt.
They call it grief, but it was just guilt. They did something. They’re responsible for how that child feels. What happened to the child? I’m responsible how my mother feels. And now we have sobbing, sobbing, sobbing, hanging onto each other and deep, deep, deep, deep, deep sadness. But if you take that away and you recognize that I know what this is for, I’m not responsible for how my child feels, and thank God my child is not responsible what I feel. And if I can look at my child with nothing but love, which is also by the way, the only way to cure. If you have children that are all drugs, for example, stop looking at them with concern, they’ll come around. But if you look at anyone for a moment, even with concern, you’re giving ’em a message. And that is they’re responsible for your concern. Because concern is not love. Love is not concerned, love knows.

Lorne Brown:
Taking that example just is making me think, because some people are like, I can’t not feel sad if my child’s like this. In that process of feeling your feelings for me anyhow, in my process, work for myself. And what I share is it’s about being authentic. And I like the quote from the book Presence Process by Michael Brown where he says, rather than trying to feel better, get better at feeling. So accept that you feel sad. And rather than resisting, try not to feel sad. Accept that sadness because there can be peace or bliss. There’s sometimes beauty and sadness and tears of futility and emotions, energy, emotion, emotions. They’re very natures to move up and out. And so if a life situation happens and it brings up emotions in 90 seconds, Jill Bolt Taylor and one of the neurosciences say, it will move up and out of you. And then you’re back to your nature, peace. However, if you suppress it, if you repress it, if you project it out, if you believe in it now, it gets stuck in your tissues and now you’re constantly feeling it. So this brings me to my question. I have this sense that it doesn’t mean you’re always at peace. You’re having a human experience. Emotions will come up, but they’ll come up. They’ll come through you, and they let go of you unless you hold onto them.

Diederik Wolsak:
You’re

Lorne Brown:
Not expected to feel great all the time unless you’re in a light master.

Diederik Wolsak:
Of course, of course. That’s your birthright. So I see it completely differently. I see that sadness comes up briefly for me to say, what am I believing about me? And it’s always guilt. It’s somehow it’s my fault that this is happening. And when I recognize a nothing is happening that’s wrong, then that sadness has absolutely no source. There’s no root for it anymore. And so you can look at every circumstance with love, the phrase, the peace that cannot be disturbed. And the other phrase is to be in the world but not off the world.

Lorne Brown:
And there’s a practice to that because the reality for me for many, maybe for you too, is you have these emotions. So you have this process to find that peace. But most people, while they’re in body, will have moments of that human experience of the sadness. And again, if you think you’re never supposed to feel sad, now you’ve created a whole new program of guilt, right?

Diederik Wolsak:
I would never say the word supposed. You couldn’t get that out of my mouth more than should. You’re feeling sad. Wonderful. Next step. What is this sadness saying to you about you, not about your child, not about your partner dying about you? It was so interesting. Yesterday. There were a lot of people were over a hundred people on the call, and one was a woman who just being diagnosed with breast cancer. She was very upset about it. And we talked, we worked on it literally for maybe two or three minutes. And what came out, what she found out was she’s still grieving her husband who died 20 years ago, cancer. It had nothing to do with her cancer. She had projected all her feelings onto that loss. And as long as she believed that you, you’re going to lose someone, yeah, you’ll be grieving. But once you know that, that is impossible.
And so what this work is about, it really, as Stan Grove says, it’s transpersonal psychology. It takes it out of the personal and not, and as long as I hear people say, I hear it all it every day, but it’s only human to feel that. And then I’m reminded of a great line in the African Queen, which is a movie maybe too old for you to have seen, but Catherine Hein and Bogart in it, and Bogart a drunk and they go through something very difficult together. And Katherine Hain is a missionary, straight laced, and Bogar reaches for the bottle. And she says, there’s no need to drink right now. And he said, well, it’s only a human to have a drink right now. And what does she say? We’re on the planet to overcome being human. And that is what I absolutely adhere to. Do I live it? A hundred percent? No. Do I live it 1%? I hope so, but I will never allow myself to go back to justifying an experience because it’s a human experience. Gaza is a human experience. It’s not a divine experience. So the goal of our work is to be more and more connected to the divine, which is a funny word, which simply means the absolute truth of who you are.

Lorne Brown:
It reminds me first of all, that what I’m hearing is that every situation, when you recognize you’re upset, you’ve now have an opportunity to tap into the divine. It’s an opportunity. Every moment there’s an opportunity.

Diederik Wolsak:
And what prevents me from connecting with the divine at that moment is my belief. And that belief is manifested in the feeling. So if I justify the feeling and say, of course I have a right to feel. Of course you have a right to feel it. Feel the rest of your life, be my guest. I’m not joining you. I’m not joining you in that feeling. So when I shared with you when we had a conversation last week when I was diagnosed with cancer, we laughed and laughed and laughed. I’ve never laughed so much. It meant absolutely nothing to me. Now, stays on occasion was a little more triggered, but also not very often. She’s an advanced teacher, but it never affected me. One moment I only looked at what is this for? How is this the vehicle by which I return to peace? That was my process.

Lorne Brown:
Thank you. I want to share, I want to lay my formula with your formula. And I do this because as I shared, I feel there’s a truth or a process that really works well. And it was one day just all the trainings and the workshops and the reading I do, it just became apparent to me that they were doing very similar stuff. Some have six steps, some have 20 steps, some have two steps, whatever, but they were similar. So I am going to share with you why I resonated so well with your book, especially since one of my steps is called choose Again, and I’m going to tie ’em into yours. So my first step is to notice everything that happens is neutral and we give it meaning. When you believe in this story, you make it real. So the key is to notice that I’ve been triggered.
Two, accept what is. When you fight with reality, you suffer. When you resist what’s happening or we fight with what’s happening, you create more resistance. Resistance doesn’t feel good. In Chinese medicine, we call it cheese stagnation. When you accept what is it doesn’t mean you like it. It doesn’t mean you’re resigned to it. It just means this is what I’m feeling in this moment. Resistance drops. I believe this basically is a how to now, because your feelings can act as portals to presence, and presence is tapping into your higher self. Then step three would be choose again. Once the resistance drops and you have this, you know it because that stress feeling, that tightness, that resistance, stagnation, there’s a sense of relief. Peace. Now your whole brain rather than reptilian brain, choose again. How do you want to be in this world? And this is where you become that deliberate creator.
My default is always could be gratitude, but you can start to create other experiences in your body. So this process of NAC, that’s my process. And when I look at yours, recognize I’m upset and it’s about me. That’s the noticing. Feel your feelings. Remember the first time you feel it. That’s my accepting. And then establish my mistake in judgment and embrace the truth. That’s the choose again, where we do gratitude or we’ll do a clearing or we’ll do inner child, but we start to give ourselves new meaning, new programs. So I see familiarity. Here’s the last question I have for you, and then we’re going to meet later today at my clinic. Where does free will play in all of this then? Do we get to choose our feelings?

Diederik Wolsak:
No, you don’t choose your feelings. It’s your beliefs that choose your feelings. So if I heal all my beliefs, I would be enlightened and I would be in a permanent state of absolute joy. However, I’m not enlightened. And so I still have beliefs, and those beliefs still create a reality for me from time to time. That reality after many, many years, 30 years of practice and living it on a day-to-day basis and with clients, that reality is infinitely more joyful than I ever thought possible. I mean, I’m living a life that I could not have imagined. There’s no possible way. If you told me 30 years ago, this is what your life is going to look like. First of all, you’re going to live till 82. My life expectancy was 62, born where I was during the war was 62 of my life expectancy. So all of this is completely the result of doing this work and the result of no longer believing the self. I made up no longer defending it, recognizing it’s a false construct and I made it up. I take ownership of it. Nobody did it to me. We never blamed parents. We never blamed circumstances, we never blame anything outside of us in our work. Whatever happened outside of us was how we were going to get to peace eventually. What was it for is the question.

Lorne Brown:
I love it. So it’s all in our work, and as you shared it from your history, like the upbringing and your environment that you grew up in to having the freedom. So you can go from suffering to freedom by changing your beliefs and you have a process. So I’d like to end by letting people know you have a book called Choose Again, six Steps to Freedom. And then can you share a little bit about how people can work with you in your organization? I know you’re in Costa Rica, I don’t know if you work, there’s other places people can connect with your groups.

Diederik Wolsak:
Yeah, we do circles, but really the magic, if you can use that horrible world happens at the center and the center is in the middle of the rainforest. When you wake up in the morning at five 30 to the sound of our monkeys and birds singing and the forest is alive with an incredible life forest that you will not experience in the West end. Things already start shifting. And I choose that location originally because I was working with youth that was at risk drug users. And I learned at one point, I was driving a young girl home from downtown and we drove by a copper beach and she said, that’s the kind of tree I used on the first time. And so I recognized that to move people out of their normal environment opened would drop some barriers to healing in others, take ’em out of completely out of the familiar, and that’s what this place does.
So descent with Costa Rica bureau for 10 day workshops, sometimes people stay for two, in which case you’re there for almost a month. We also have circles, we also have individual counseling. I offer a circle on Saturdays in English and on Mondays in Dutch. I may be doing that for a while longer, but my energy is now that I can use this kind of energy maybe three or four times a week, and then I wiped out the battery shelf life has been reduced considerably. It’s a fantastic program. I love it. And then the results we’re getting is far phenomenal. Go to juice-scan.com and that’s where they, oh, there

Lorne Brown:
We go.

Diederik Wolsak:
All the information, they got some images of the center, of the people, of the environment, of the beauty of it, and it’s a breathtaking place.

Lorne Brown:
Choose again.com everybody, and I’ll put that in the show notes. Rick, thanks for getting up early to do our interview today, and I’ll see you at our normal time for you at our clinic today.

Diederik Wolsak:
I’ll be just awakening then. Thank you, Lorne. It was an absolute pleasure and I look forward to seeing you in the flesh.

Lorne Brown:
Perfect. And I’m going to bring a copy of this, so hopefully you’re willing to sign it.

Diederik Wolsak:
I’ll put some words in it for you.

Lorne Brown:
Thank you.

Diederik Wolsak:
Okay, talk later. Talk soon. Bye-Bye.

Speaker 3:
If you’re looking for support to grow your family, contact Acubalance Wellness Center at Acubalance. They help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach using low-level laser therapy, fertility, acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the Acubalance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to Acubalance.ca. That’s acubalance ca.

Lorne Brown:
Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne Brown official. That’s Instagram, Lorne Brown official, or you can visit my websites, Lornebrown.com and acubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.