The Truth Hurts Podcast: Page 11
You know exactly what the right thing to do is, and you still find yourself doing exactly the opposite. According to Gili, this isn't about a lack of knowledge or a lack of self-discipline. It's emotion taking the wheel, the same way it works in animals, through an ancient mechanism of fight, flight and freeze. Even completely ordinary people, with no troubled background at all, can find themselves in a single moment doing something they would never have believed they were capable of. The real question isn't what you do when you're in control of yourself. It's what happens inside you the moment that control disappears.
Read the episode notes: Can We Tame Our Emotions? | The Truth Hurts, Episode 10
The body starts sounding the alarm, and you carry on as if nothing is happening. Gili tells how hot flashes, migraines and a period that stopped swept over her with no medical reason behind them, and in the middle of all that a lump in her breast turned up too. She says that the moment she understood how many of other people's needs she had been putting ahead of her own, most of the symptoms disappeared almost immediately. All except the lump, which, the way she sees it, stayed another three months, like a reminder. She also tells why the visit to the doctor felt like slapping on a band-aid, and what finally helped her listen to her body before it starts shouting.
Read the episode notes: Collective Consciousness and Personal Truth | The Truth Hurts, Episode 9
You probably know this one. You know exactly what needs to change, and you stay right where you are anyway until the situation becomes unbearable. According to Gili, the reason has nothing to do with laziness or with not wanting it. It has to do with our first memory of change, from infancy, when change was forced on us and we had no control at all. Ever since then the subconscious links every change to fear, even a change that is good for us, and would rather stay with the familiar. And when the midlife crisis at 40 arrives (it can come earlier or later too), that's exactly the moment when your basic needs are already met and the existential questions start coming up.
Read the episode notes: Why We Resist Change | The Truth Hurts, Episode 8
You're right back in the same situation, the same kind of partner, the same fight, the same feeling of "here it is, happening to me again". As Gili presents it, that's no accident. Our subconscious remembers everything from the moment we were born, it's constantly trying to repeat itself, and so, without noticing, we're drawn to situations we already know. Even your least logical reaction in a tense moment belongs to a five- or six-year-old child who is still at the wheel. Once you look at that straight on, you can start changing direction.
Read the episode notes: What Really Shapes Our Lives? | The Truth Hurts, Episode 7
You tried medication, you changed your diet, you went to doctors, you sat with psychologists, and the body still isn't getting better. That's what Tal went through for almost four years, until she found, in her words, that the perfect checklist hadn't healed her, because the way she sees it the source was in the soul and not in the body. Gili Man Wolner explains, as she presents it, why even a good practitioner doesn't hand you answers: she shows you what you can't see about yourself. And she has sessions of her own, she says, because even someone who works with other people has blind spots.
Read the episode notes: Why Go to Therapy? | The Truth Hurts, Episode 6
There are things you know without knowing where they came from, and without having a word for them. You can push them deep down, keep quiet about them for years, and build a tidy life plan instead, one that's supposed to make up for it. Gili tells how on the very day she checked off every item on the list, the degree, the career, the family, she felt for the first time in her life what it means to have your heart break. That wasn't an end point. It was the beginning of understanding that she actually knew nothing.
Read the episode notes: Who Is Gili Man Wolner? | The Truth Hurts, Episode 5
You always want one more thing. A little more recognition, a little more quiet, a little bit more, and the moment you get it the next want is already waiting for you. Gili explains that this wanting isn't just another feeling that rises and fades. According to Kabbalah it is the actual material that all of reality is built out of, in inanimate matter and in us. The way she sees it, every want that comes up in you points to something you're missing right at that moment, and that holds for wanting food just as much as for wanting appreciation or control. The question she invites you to ask isn't how to get rid of the wanting. It's which wants are really running you.
Read the episode notes: The Will to Receive: The Force Behind Creation | Episode 4
You react to everything that happens to you, but who decides how you'll react? The way Gili sees it, the event itself is completely neutral. Your reaction is the thing that exposes what's buried inside you. And it doesn't stop there. She shows how three months in a row, from Shvat through Passover, push you forward one step at a time: breaking down your self-image, then focusing on what you do have, and finally a real freedom that doesn't need to escape anywhere.
Read the episode notes: Passover Cleaning, Inside and Out | The Truth Hurts, Episode 3
Something happens, and you can't get past it. It keeps coming back as a thought, it settles into a feeling, and sometimes it breaks out in the body, a flush in your cheeks or a leg that starts bouncing on its own. The way Gili Man Wolner sees it, what happened was never in our control, and even the first reaction, the spontaneous one, is almost automatic. But there is one point that really is up to us. Not what happened, but how long we stay stuck in the feeling that we are the victim of it. A moment, an hour, or seven years.
Read the episode notes: It Hurts Less, but It Still Hurts | The Truth Hurts, Episode 2
You can eat the healthiest food in the world, sleep enough and run every test there is, and still get a diagnosis with no idea where it came from. Gili Man Wolner offers a different angle: illness is the body's correct response to a stimulus that is wrong for it, and that stimulus isn't always sitting on your plate. Sometimes it's sitting in your thoughts. She draws a line between guilt, which only hits you over something that already happened, and responsibility, which simply helps you know what to do next. Real balance isn't choosing between faith and doctors. It's making room for both of them at the same time.
Read the episode notes: Starting from the Beginning | The Truth Hurts, Episode 1