Dr Pedram Shojai
Check out the LIFE GARDEN Course to map out your own priorities.
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Podcast transcript:
[00:00:00] Welcome back to the Urban Monk. Dr. Pedram Shojai. Today we’re talking about self sabotage. Why? Because we all do it, and there is a really interesting framework around awareness and consciousness that I think, uh, needs to be layered into all this self help talk about why you’re self sabotaging and all that.
So here’s an excerpt from a weekly call I do with my Urban Monk Academy Uh, I, I left a couple of the questions, anonymized it, took people’s faces off of it, just because I don’t want to share people’s stuff, but there was a couple kind of generic questions that I think are public facing okay. And uh, this conversation is about you.
It’s about where you’re not looking at the areas of your life that maybe need eyeballs on them. And that is probably where your energy and your power is trapped. Enjoy.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Today’s topic none of you are guilty of this, but I’m going to talk about it anyways, is self sabotage. And it’s a big one because the dang pesky thing just keeps coming back. And so I want to talk about it within the [00:01:00] context of urban monk, conversation, but then really dive into.
The questions to ask and how to use self sabotage as a teacher too. You’ve got teachers everywhere. They’re under your nose. So let’s start with that. Let me just get into it. So first and foremost I kind of want to contextualize self sabotage as. Stagnant energy in our life systems. I like to look at it as a situation, if you will, when we don’t have clarity of our true priorities, and so we’re driving without a destination. And so the nomenclature that would be common in the urban monk lore would be the weeds in your garden. So you’re watering weeds. You’re spending a lot of your energy on things that aren’t necessarily aligned with the plants that you’ve chosen for you. And the challenge always is that a lot of this crap happens under the radar. And you don’t realize you’re doing it until someone yells at you, until, your life’s falling apart, until, fall, fall of the breadcrumbs.
But sometimes it’s hard to [00:02:00] understand that what you’re doing is self sabotage until the scar tissue is already there, right? And so obviously one of the tools to avert hitting that iceberg is awareness, right? And so when we are self sabotaging, very few people consciously are self sabotaging, right?
It’s an unconscious, below the conscious awareness thing, So as we bring our awareness to, say, our physical, emotional, mental senses, our streams of awareness. It starts to light up the different areas of our interoception, extra section, proprioception, all these areas that we’ve become aware of as we start to layer awareness.
And say a Tai Chi practice, a meditation practice, a prayer ritual, whatever it is, that layered awareness then makes it harder for these gremlins to crawl around unnoticed. So that’s why we do these things, right? That’s why we continually strain ourselves and take time out of our [00:03:00] days to wake up because the lullaby is loud, And so we are here to stay. awake and I might wake up awake, but I can quickly fall back asleep. Just get me plugged into my day and plugged into, my worries and my to dues and the hum drum. And next thing I know, nine hours have gone by and I’m hunched over a desk and pissed off and hungry and whoops, what happened?
So you have to bring the awareness to be like, get up, stretch, you should eat some food, right? How about exercise? Like all these things are part of that to bring us to a place where we can recognize when In this case, we are acting against our stated goals. What are the stated goals? The plants in your garden.
And so some of this. Obviously comes from old programming in the subconscious mind. Those of you who’ve done the life garden work. You review your goals, you have your affirmations, you reprogram these, the whole affirmations of saying, henceforth, you are free from the influence of any misrepresentations from my self conscious mind.
Like all that kind of esoteric, hermetic Christian wisdom, I think [00:04:00] comes in really handy in the overwrite of the Negative memes and understanding that this self sabotage it’s probably something that’s been hanging around for a minute. You could develop new forms of self sabotage because we’re so creative, but these overarching themes, they tend to hang with us for a bit, don’t they?
And that’s where integration again, comes in as an antidote. Fragmentation allows self sabotage to thrive in the shadows. Okay? Write that down. Fragmentation allows self sabotage to thrive in the shadows. So when we have better integration of mind, body, spirit, it creates coherence. And it doesn’t, I want to be clear about this, it doesn’t just go poof, make your self sabotage go away.
It just makes it more visible. And then you have to address that, ? And the tools that you all have in front of you are actually pretty carefully designed to give you a structure to do it. Like a hundred day gong builds. integration and [00:05:00] consistency so that, regardless of how you feel, you get up and you do the thing,
and you keep checking the boxes and you do the thing. And in that dedicated act of self love and that ritual of self actualization during a moment of time that could be, personal hygiene for all those levels of mind, body, spirit. It allows you to integrate and go, oh, yeah.
Okay. Maybe this isn’t in my best interest. I, that ice cream looks good. Ooh, does that ice cream look good? But you have a moment where you go, ah, Maybe that’s not what I need to be doing right? You only have a moment. it’s a very brief Opportunity to intercept it.
And if not let’s try it again tomorrow, right? It doesn’t feel as good. Does it? It doesn’t feel as good. So Where it tends to show up, I think is really important, relevant, and apropos here, is it shows up on the edges of your growth, If you are, if you set the thermostat to dull, and you’re living there, you’re just in the place that you’re at.
But someone says, hey Kathleen, I just started a hiking club, and you got to wake up a [00:06:00] half hour earlier and join a bunch of strangers to go, hike some place. You’re like, Ooh, Oh, I don’t know. I really like strangers. I don’t even like people like, wow, I like my sleep. And all those things push on that.
And you’re like, I should probably go walking with my girlfriends, but dot, dot. Oh, but my sleep is so disturbed my morning sleep. I need, and you start filling in the gaps. You start coming up with all the excuses why you can’t go with these ladies. Those are the moments you catch yourself.
Those are the moments where you become an edge walker, if you will. So you apply directly the work of awareness to the moment where you’re like, ah, this is where I’m self sabotaging. I keep complaining about being lonely and not having enough girlfriends in this town. But that poor lady just asked me to coffee and I told her I was busy.
What am I doing? Why’d I do that? And then, hopefully you have the opportunity to recoup and go back and say, Hey, sorry, Betty, let’s go get that coffee. I was so preoccupied. But I would love to get coffee with you. Oh, look at that. I got a new friend and she comes with [00:07:00] friends, right?
And it, that edge cuts into new opportunity. That edge cuts into a life that’s been waiting for you. But before that, man, can we say some dumb things and say no to things that we should probably say yes to or say yes to things that look like ice cream, right? And so both sides of that can burn,
so that is why I am emphatic about this. Need to stay present, ? And stay present with the intensity of what you’re feeling in that moment, because it tends to be the bedfellow of discomfort.
I don’t really like the way that feels. It brings up my trauma. It brings up my past. It brings up my, reluctance to face my fill in the blank. So I’m just going to say, no, I have, I got work to do. And you don’t ever live your life fully.
That sucks. We all do it. We all do it every day, but that’s where we catch it. And so in terms of the tools that you all have at hand I’m partial to this. I know a guy, right? But I think the hundred day [00:08:00] commitment is really important. Because self sabotage thrives in ambiguity and when goals are unclear.
State your goals, stand by your goals, push through the hundred days, do it again. And in that process, and those of you who’ve done multiple gongs can probably attest to this, you start to, the gremlins start showing themselves. And you’re like, ah, look at that. There I go again. How am I going to do it differently this time?
Am I going to choose a different path? I said I wanted to lose weight, sleep better, communicate better with my spouse, fill in the blanks. But here I am doing the same old dumb thing. I keep catching myself doing and by keep catching after the second or third time. Now you’re like, okay,
it’s me. And that’s when you get an opportunity to reflect back and say, okay, maybe I’ll change it. And that’s when you recognize the things that are the weeds. Okay, this is a weed. I’m putting energy into this. This is draining my resources, draining my energy. It is actually pulling the water away from my stated goal.
And then when you identify the weeds, you [00:09:00] become way better at having a mental map of how to address this as you visualize your life garden and the things that you said were important to you and asking yourself, look how much water in the form of energy, time, money, resources do I have available?
And if my stated goal is to have these plants thriving, what, why am I pulling water away from this plant? Why am I watering this one over here when this one’s withering, So it just allows you to quickly do the energy economics of where your flow can go. And then at that point, again, we’re talking about the edge, right?
We’re on the growth. So it’s like walking on hot coals or, climbing some rock face or doing a hike that’s outside of your comfort zone. It’s a stretch goal. You start to then say, okay, wow. Okay. I found a bogey. I found a demon. I found a gremlin. Now I have to challenge myself to face this.
Because it is the courageous version of me that [00:10:00] is now aware of the self sabotaging version of me that no longer serves us. So deliberately challenging yourself to do the thing, Let’s just say you’re really bad at making friends cause you’re in a new town and you had all your girlfriends, but now you’re in this new town and you don’t know anybody and all these people look so happy together and I’m so lonely and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Like you get into this whole thing and you did this thing where Susie said, Hey, come to tea with me and some of the moms and you. Blew it. You were just like, Oh, I’m busy. So how do you face that? Oh, yeah. You can call Susie and see if you could get on the next train, but maybe be, you just go sit at the coffee shop and say, hi, I’m so and so I’m new to this town and I see you at this coffee shop all the time.
I just wanted to see, what’s your name, right? It’s terrifying, but it’s a growth edge. It’s a growth edge. That’s difficult if that’s your growth edge. And guess what? If you knew that was your demon to slay and you started getting butterflies when you thought about what you [00:11:00] needed to do to slay it, probably in the right room.
That’s the hardest part. But you’re probably in the right room at that moment. So this is where strength, resilience, and awareness, I think all really come forward and take a bow on center stage. It’s, it becomes about your Nervous systems ability to stay present with discomfort. And this is where I feel the multi septual, I keep saying septual, it’s a terrible word because everyone thinks sexual, like multi sexual.
What is that? Multi septual, like the multiple streams of perception become incredible teachers. I’ll give you an example. Kung fu stances. For those of you who know my kids started karate again and the guy’s like, why don’t you do it with them? And I’m like, why don’t I do it with them? Old man could still throw some kicks.
And so I’m in the back throwing kicks and it’s great. It’s great. It’s just wow. And everyone’s wow, your dad’s a bad ass. I’m like, you don’t want to know who [00:12:00] my dad is. But I still got it. I should stretch, I’m out there doing this and it feels really good and it brings me back to my roots where, he’s okay, get into a square horse.
So you get in this deep stance and your legs start burning and your first instinct is, oh, I should straighten my knees. This hurts. That’s not what we’re doing here, son. And so you stay in the discomfort of your legs burning and then you breathe and then guess what? Your legs tell you 30 seconds, two seconds, eight seconds from now, Hey, this sucks.
This hurts. Let’s get out of it. And you’re like, I understand we’re going to stay here. And in doing that, you train, it’s called Kung Fu hard work. You train your resilience to override the discomfort and say, it’s fine. It’s how Vipassana meditation works, right? The first couple days you sit there and you like feel, the air over here and you get a little more awareness and, that’s nice.
And then they go, okay, game on. Sit there, don’t move. And you’re like, oh, shit. Every ache, every pain. My [00:13:00] leg goes numb. My nose is itching. Ah, it’s just, bleh. And the training is, so what? Just observe it. It’s just discomfort. It’s just a feeling. You associate it with discomfort. You’re running from it.
What’s going to happen if you just stay here 20 seconds, 30 seconds, four seconds later, I need you passes same thing in life. So bringing that operating system to the forefront and addressing the gremlins with the same kind of relationship with discomfort, I think. Brings. Your power to this campfire.
And so as you start to feel wiggly. Okay. This makes me feel uncomfortable. It’s gonna breathe. And you could get into, there’s breathing practices, right? And this is all I have a whole thing that’s happening around like genetic profiles and certain people will be more mental. Some people will be more visceral.
Some people want to massage their body, right? There’s different ways we all react differently, but one perfectly good response to this can [00:14:00] be, wow, I feel really uncomfortable. I’m going to take five deep breaths to my lower abdomen and be with this. Another could be, wow, I feel really uncomfortable.
I’m going to dance and wiggle out this discomfort, but feel it. Now there could be, I’m going to try to tap it. And then there can be, I’m going to do the five whys, right? Which is why do I feel this way? Why that, and just keep probing and probing to get to the depth of the discomfort. And the first thing would be, why do I feel uncomfortable because I don’t know these girls. Okay. But why do I really feel uncomfortable around that? It’s because I’m not in a great place in my life right now and I don’t want people to see me. Okay. Ooh, a little better. But why that?
Because I haven’t really been making good food choices and I’m not getting along with my spouse and I’m just in a dark place. So I’m, I’m in a funk. Okay. Why that? I have been waiting on taking care of myself because I’ve been in a funk and I can’t get started because I’m in a funk.
Okay. Why that? And again, [00:15:00] I’m just, you just keep digging and you’re like, okay, so I’m in a funk and everyone’s been trying to get me out, but I’ve just been making excuses why I can’t get out. Shit, maybe I’m just gonna call this girl and go out for coffee. And that’s how it short circuits itself.
Is you get to the place where you just run down your excuses and realize that you’re just making excuses because you’re uncomfortable. And you’re usually making excuses and self sabotaging because you don’t want to feel the discomfort. And that comes in so many flavors, right? Like I’m not, that’s certainly not a one size fits all, but you all can relate to how you have done this or how you persist in this on a weekly basis in your own lives.
Can’t you? We all do it. We all do it. Today was a particularly good day for Pedram. They’re not always that way, right? I got up at 5. 30. I did three parts of my gong before, the kids budged. I had my fourth part done and I gotta go work out after this. Not bad. It’s 1. 24. They don’t always come that way.
I was struggling to get some push ups done in a hotel room in New York last week. I’m [00:16:00] sat on my ass all day with a guy sneezing on me. That’s life. That’s life on an airplane. And so I just want you all to understand that nothing is going to help drive away the discomfort. We’re not talking about heroin here, Nothing is going to help drive away the discomfort because the discomfort itself is the teacher. So you lean into the discomfort. And ask the baby why it’s crying. You lean into the discomfort and you say why? You dig deeper and deeper to figure out why possibly self sabotage is on the menu for you, right?
And why the self sabotage keeps coming back. If the same flavor of self sabotage comes back, like you’re pretty intelligent, you’re like, Oh, here I am doing that again. Most of us are pretty wily. We will self sabotage in different ways. And, be pretty good at not leaving a paper trail for a while.
So then we got to play Sherlock to figure out why, how we’re doing what we’re doing. But we do, because at the end of the day, if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll find it. You’ll find it. You’ll find [00:17:00] it. And when you do, just realize that you’re not a bad person, you’re not going to hell for this. This is the fundamental underlying crisis of the human condition.
We avert pain. And there’s an entire industry of medicine,, supplements, gurus, everyone out there saying, I’ll take the pain away from you. Just give me your money.
And it’s all just trying to feed sugar cereal to children, right? The real name of the game is growth. And that growth comes from facing that discomfort. Growing through it to be a bolder, more aware, more capable version of yourself. That’s all I got on that. Any questions? Questions and comments. At times you really can’t seem to get into the action needed at that moment, despite your better judgment. How can we best address this? That’s a very good question, Marlene.
And the question is unfortunately it’s a bit of the elephant in the room because most of us are driving by looking in the rear view mirror, Like shit, what [00:18:00] did I just, what was that bump I just drove over? And that’s where. I cannot overemphasize the critical importance of doing mind, body awareness practices to have you be in the room and have your eyes actually looking through the front windshield, And I would say that the next 10 times, you’re going to see it in the rear view mirror and be like, and there’ll be a couple of times you’re like, ah, I just missed it. And eventually you’ll start seeing it out of the side of your eye and eventually you’ll see it straight in front of you and you’re gonna be like, monkey, no, I’m not doing that again this time.
But it takes a little bit of effort to bring, to turn the lights on and bring your awareness into the room in a way that will, again, remember what the prefrontal cortex does, it’s the negation of impulses. We impulsively self sabotage. That’s the monkey mind. And so this ability to stop the impulse lies directly in the domain of the prefrontal [00:19:00] cortex, which happens to lie right behind your third eye and all, all these practices we do happen to activate that region of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex.
And I can geek out, I’m writing whole chapters on this crap for you, but let me just say, do your awareness work and you will bring the PFC online and it will eventually negate those impulses. And stop you from making the bad decision, or at least, it’s ah, I had that glass of wine, but I’m not going to have the second one.
Right? There are places where you could pump the brakes and pull out. Beyond, going fully into mistake mode. And then there is the kind of front facing. Oh yeah, no, I’m good. Sparkling water, please. Like just on your game. I’m not making that decision tonight. It’s a school night, whatever it is.
And that might not be the best example, but that’s where the mind body awareness comes in. I can’t give that to you. Nobody can give that to you. I’m a master Qigong practitioner. I tell you, I cannot give that to you. You have to [00:20:00] dig and find the light and wake up your own awareness. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling snake oil.
The comfort side of it is the brain liking the familiar sabotage, chaos, stress, et cetera, is familiar pattern to relieve the pressure. Absolutely. Rainy. Absolutely. That is the case, but the outcome. Yeah, it’s say, okay a good example. How does heroin work? Oh, man, that felt so much better.
I feel so much better right now and then 20 minutes from now I’m gonna be like, oh my god, I did heroin again. I keep telling myself to stop right? It’s not that different It’s not that different from what we do. It’s just a strong drug that happens to be really good at it, right? And so that’s where we catch ourselves sedating ourselves with these impulses and sabotage.
I needed this pep talk. Come to Jesus, reminded of the stories I tell myself about consistency. Yay, Lauren. Started going to therapy Saturday, EMDR, love it. Going through history reminded me of everything that I’ve lived through and managed not survive, but a life worth living, amen. So [00:21:00] why don’t I do my morning exercises?
They’re so much easier. Lots to sit with. Yeah. And listen here’s what all the research shows. I can’t tell you to do your morning exercises and compel you to do them. You have to decide to do them and the. Pain of not doing them has to outweigh the pain of doing them. And that’s where ritual and consistency and habit stacking take the cake because.
I, right now I’m doing a new gong today’s day 22, I’ll check this off in an hour or so, and I just finished a hundred day gong, three days before this one started. I don’t like losing momentum and I’m doing a lot to keep that momentum. And after 30 odd years of this dude has so much momentum.
I got tailwind behind me, right? That didn’t start that way. So you gotta just put one foot in front of yourself. And then again, and those dedicated acts of self love eventually, it’s like saying what’s the point of saving money? It’s only a nickel put in the piggy bank, And eventually you will start yielding interest. from your daily deposits. [00:22:00] That’s how it works. Monkey, no. It’s, there’s actually a whole philosophy called Dragon’s Play by Deng Ming Dao. You’ll find it’s a great classic Daoist story classic of the fundamental dynamic, the balance between the sage and the monkey, which we all face.
Monkey wants to drink. Wine, the monkey wants to slack off, the monkey wants to goof off, the monkey is wild and fun, and the sage says monkey no. Now somewhere in between is a fun human, right? And there’s the balance of Taoism that I think would be really fun to talk about if you guys want in the coming weeks, maybe next week.
Thank you all. I should be here next week. I have a little bit of unforeseen travel that may come up with some filming stuff, but I’ll let you know in advance if that happens to land on Tuesday. I don’t know yet. I’m still, there’s still calls out and I might be on a bird that day, but suffice it to say the hard drives are coming in with really cool interviews that I’ll share with you as soon as they’re edited.
So thank you all do the work, have a great week. Thank you.
Hope you [00:23:00] found that useful. It’s all about you. It’s all about what you’re doing and how you are turning the light of your awareness back onto your life, not bleeding into tick tock, not out looking at what the news is telling you to worry about. But what are your priorities? Where is your life’s trajectory going?
And where is your energy going and reconciling the difference? That’s often where we find the places that we self sabotage. Uh, but awareness, that’s the campfire. You got to bring it back into your life. Hope you enjoyed that. All the stuff that I talked about is part of the core Urban Monk work. If you haven’t done it already, I’ll put a link in the show notes here.
But it’s called the Life Garden. Um, it’s good for you, right? If you haven’t done that kind of work, um, now’s probably a good time to start. Hope you’re enjoying this format. I am as well. Um, I gotta say, transparently, like the podcast I love having guests, but when you have to commit to a guest every week, it ends up [00:24:00] becoming kind of like a book report parade, uh, with people who are like, let me tell you about, you know, what my next book is.
And that gets a little old. So I just want to invite people when there’s conversations worth having and the rest of the time I’d rather just kind of serve my audience and serve my community and, and, uh, drop wisdom and do research and share it and all that. So let me know, uh, wherever you’re consuming this, how you’re liking this format in particular.
Um, I’m playing with formats just so I keep it fresh because if I get bored, it sucks, right? Um, And, um, I love people. I love my guests, but I don’t want the pressure of bringing guests every week and making it a big production and bringing on sponsors. And, you know, it just, it becomes a commercial deal.
And then that gets kind of yucky as well. Um, it’s just a guy over here, um, helping his audience and hopefully serving you. Let me know what you think. I’ll see you next time.
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