51. [WISE MAN] WITH STEPHEN ANDREW - HOW WELL DO YOU LOVE?
Stephen is an 'old man who drinks too much coffee' and my counselor. He has been a guiding light in our co-parenting journey for nearly a year. I couldn't not have him on the podcast.
He is a heart activator, a wise elder, & a men's circle facilitator among his many, many other invaluable services to humanity.
I implore you to listen deeply to our conversation and to connect with him online or in person if you have the opportunity.
"The individual is like a garden to be tended, not a machine to be repaired". I practice Motivational Interviewing; this is a collaborative conversation to strengthen a person's own motivation for change. I hold a few principles that govern the work. First, I will focus on you being heard and believed, Second, be kind. Third, teach and demonstrate empathy and compassion and be helpful with your internal conflict... I practice being in the here and now with individual, couple and group work."
Stephen R. Andrew LCSW, LADC, CCS is a storyteller, trainer, therapist, author and the CEO (Chief Energizing Officer) of Health Education & Training Institute. He maintains a compassion- focused private practice in Portland, Maine USA where he also facilitates a variety of men’s, women’s, co-ed, and caregiver groups. Stephen has had significant experience working with people suffering with addiction, mental illness and training staff within the Department of Mental Health.
He is also the co-founder of Agape, Inc. which supports the Men’s Resource Center of Southern Maine whose mission is to support boys, men and fathers and oppose violence and Dignity for People Using Opiates, a radical movement to change the conditions precipitating the opiate epidemic in our communities.
Stephen is the proud father of Sebastian, and co-author of Game Plan: A Man’s Guide to Achieving Emotional Fitness.
His Podcast: Conversations in Compassion
https://open.spotify.com/show/5qcnqykEZF8k8AhYnbndIa?si=ed09f7e244d24f9f
Pocket Books by Stephen Andrew
https://www.hetimaine.org/bookstore
https://www.facebook.com/stephen.andrew.940641
Find me on instagram @birth.advocate and all of my offerings on my website www.birthadvocate.me
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Music The Ancients (feat. Loga Ramin Torkian) by Azam Ali
The following transcript is AI generated and will have errors
Emily: Foreign.
Emily: Welcome to Soul Evolution.
My name is Emily, also known as the Birth Advocate. I am a retired nurse, health coach, women's circle and ceremony facilitator and and the host of this podcast. Here we dive deep to reclaim our rites of passage with a big dose of birth story medicine, intentionally curious conversations with embodied wisdom keepers, and a sprinkle of polarity as we will hold space for our men from time to time too.
I hope you find nourishment for your soul here, as you probably heard my course so youo Want a Home Birth, your complete guide to an Empowering Physiology Theological Birth is now available.
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Emily: Welcome Stephen, to my podcast Guest. I am so ridiculously honored to have you here.
You are maybe one of the most humble human beings I have come across. But I'm going to tell you how much this moment, here, sitting here with you, bringing you on my podcast means to me.
Because you are.
You are a heart activator.
It is so profound, the experiences that I've had with you. It's.
I've only come across maybe, maybe two or three other people in my life that I can think of that just emanate such love and compassion. It's like an angelic realm.
When I'm sitting in your office, it is.
It's so contagious. And you, you lead by example. I mean, that's. That's what I'm gathering from the work that you do, and we'll get into what that work is. But I'm just.
I'm just enamored, you know, you're really setting an example, not just for me, but for men. You know, the work that you do with men and our lack of eldership is so profound.
And you are filling that need, that deep, deep need.
And, yeah, it's just, you know, my podcast is called Soul Evolution because I'm interested in all in this soul evolution. And the way that you speak and the way that you teach and the way that you function in the world, I feel like is a beautiful example of a soul evolving.
So with nothing else to say on that, I'm going to allow you to sort of introduce yourself in whatever way feels good to you.
Stephen: Well, first, thank you for heart activation.
I just really appreciate that term.
I think, I think I've visited the deepest amount of pain that individuals can find in their lives early in my life. And so what that really has done for me is to say, if I've seen the darkness, then I can find the light.
And the light for me has been, you know, empathy and compassion.
That we could literally become a part of the human experience if we could figure out how to get out of the pesky ego and to move towards love and move towards that empathy and compassion and radical acceptance.
So my life's work has been primarily to try to figure out how to bring that more specifically into the helping profession, try to ask helpers to be the role model of our communities, to demonstrate with every word and every phrase to the best of their ability that.
That compassion, that radical acceptance.
So that's.
It's. It's been a long journey. It's been painful journey.
You. You don't hold that kind of leadership position without getting injured along the way.
And I, you know, I don't know why, but it's never.
The. The focus point has never changed.
As, as a young man that was experiencing a lot of violence, I made a decision that that focus was going to be my way out. It's going to be my way of not having to experience all that violence.
And when I talk about violence, I don't talk necessarily about Physical. There's so many levels of violence that happen.
You know, I think of all judgment as a form of violence.
So spiritual violence, by having a particular right position, a belief system that says, this is the right one, that's a spiritual violence or emotional violence, where this is, you know, that I need to fix you because you, you're broken in some way.
Physical violence, which happens out of reaction.
The reaction is basically, I, I should win. I should be better than you. I should have power over you.
And, you know, also intellectual. They're, you know, we. We spend time becoming authorities of something, and then nothing else matters except for the authority itself. All of those forms of violence just are constant in our culture.
And the more we move away from connection and as we are through media and other, seems that we move away, we get more and more into our pesky ego of what's right.
And as you know, I've said the phrase more than once, which is, you know, to hold a right position is to destroy a relationship.
Emily: That'S a big one. It just, it shines a bright light on that pesky ego. Just puts it right in the spotlight.
Stephen: Yeah. And it's. It, you know, it. There's nothing wrong with the pesky ego. The question is, where's the focus of it? Where do you. Where do you want to focus it?
And so you have to have a focus.
And so what ends up happening is that we.
If you don't practice focusing your pesky ego, then it will run all over the place.
And what it will run for is power and control over another human being.
Emily: You know, I've spoken a bit about my father in our sessions just to orient the folks listening. Stephen has been counseling Isaiah and I on our co parenting journey, and it's been lovely, actually.
I didn't realize we've been seeing each other since March.
We'll be coming up on our anniversary here soon.
Yeah, but I was gonna say my. My dad, as I've mentioned a few times in our sessions, my dad is quite an interesting human. But one of the. One of the most profound teachings that he has given me amongst a lot of other things, is never to like, do not inflict your will upon another.
Like, that is.
That is his like line. That's his boundary. You do not inflict your will upon another. And like, I was born with a very strong will.
And so this, this has been.
This has been a big journey for me.
But I mean, here you are, you know, also, then again, just reflecting in this teaching, and I'd like to know a Little bit more, though, Stephen, if you'd like to share about, you know, the origins of how you came to this place that you are now, you mentioned that you've experienced a lot of pain, different forms of violence, but you also said something about, you always had this focus, though, this orientation, and I want to know a little bit more about that.
Like, as a young child, you were aware that there was another way. Like, tell me a little bit more about what you meant when you said that.
Stephen: Well, the real issue was that when you start to separate from your family of origin, you know, whatever that is. And as you just talked about your dad, you know, you're taking with you a set of values or beliefs or, you know, just.
They operate in your cell structure. And, you know, at 14, I was laying in a. In a prison with, you know, just a very violent, violent situation where, you know, I didn't matter.
And nor did all the boys that were in there matter. We would just, you know, put together in, you know, small cots, beds, you know, three to a room and with no toilet, and we were just there.
And, you know, you could, you couldn't imagine the United States government doing that to young people, but we were doing that. We were doing it, and we were, you know, placed there.
And when I was there, I was the smallest boy in the room, and I was white. And I knew that if I didn't have some other value, I would probably die here.
So what I learned was that if I became a helper, if I, if I, I, if I could just get outside of the injury, step outside of my own injury, and be present for another human being.
At 14, I realized that I might save my life.
Now, that probably is not the easiest way to find some kind of spiritual direction, but that's where it was. And I do think our suffering takes us to a find our essence of who we are.
And I, I can honestly remember the moment that says, I, I'm going to. I'm just going to help people.
So when it was, you know, I, soon after that, became somebody that worked in the kitchen.
I gave the biggest kids a scoop of mashed potatoes because I knew they were going to be hungry.
And, you know, the, the cook was always upset with me for giving out more food, but I, I really looked at somebody and thought they could use more food than somebody else.
And, you know, I, you know, the whole idea of the people that survive concentration camps, of people who gave away the morsel of extra. You gave them the morsel of food away, and those are the Ones that found the way in the midst of the worst tragedy of our culture, where 5 million Jews and others were, you know, taken to death camps.
So that's my experience. That was my experience.
If I gave away a scoop of mashed potatoes on a red kid's plate, I gained power.
I gained outside of my own pain.
And it's, it set the direction.
You know, I was the.
I was an executive director of $1 million nonprofit with a high school diploma that was given to me by a D minus average.
You know, I mean, what. Because those things didn't matter.
Didn't matter to go to school. It didn't matter to do those things. What mattered is that I got up in the morning and I helped somebody.
And later on I realized that I, I was going to be hampered to help if I didn't get a degree or I didn't get a graduate degree or it didn't become, you know, if I didn't do the right thing.
But I didn't believe in the right thing. I was sitting in classrooms where I was like, this is, this is absurd. This is for the privileged.
This is for people that can afford to do this out there. And I was yelling at professors. I was like, this is crazy.
Do you understand there's heat in this room and that there's thousands of people outside with no heat?
What, what are we doing?
Oh, we're theorizing about social work.
This is crazy. So, you know, to me, it didn't make sense, but I was going to do what I could do to find ways to have power and control.
So I now have an office. I now have people show up and sit with me, and I hopefully do some remarkable, incredible things with them to focus them on compassion and empathy.
See if I can ask them to just put the pesky ego aside for something greater is called love.
And the pesky ego is made up of, you know, I deserve. I, I, I should have, I, I, I, I, I should have power over other people. I should have enough resources.
I should, I should, I should, which is toxic shame.
So that's, that's the journey, how I got there.
It really did save my life. I mean, this institution had a highway on one side and a graveyard on the other. And I always thought, which side am I going to end up on?
Am I going to find a highway of life or am I going to die here?
You know, it was that cruel.
Emily: And you've done a lot of work with boys. I don't know what you want to call the housing that they keep Them in halfway housing or what is it like? Didn't you run a boy's home for a while?
Stephen: Yes, I ran a residential treatment center for addiction, multiple levels.
Started as a counselor, then became a head counselor, then became the executive director.
Primarily men at that point, boys and men. I developed six residential treatment centers on Cape Cod at one point for people that were struggling with what was called mental retardation.
But really it was developmental issues and women and men and soul in, you know, in crisis.
And then came here and did the same thing again for an addiction agency.
And I also.
I also ran into a woman.
I don't know if I've ever been able to find her again and thank her, but she was in a relationship with me when I was in my 20s. And to be honest, Emily, I was pretty crazy guy.
I mean, anything you want to say about misogyny? I was clearly that at 21 or 22, you know, I didn't really see women as very valuable. I just focused on guys because I just spent my years, five years of my life at an institution with just boys and men.
The place was crazy. I mean, there was one woman who was the psychologist, and I thought, well, she's at least nurturing, but she's crazy too.
So I didn't really have any sense.
My mother had a very serious mental illness and addiction and was just completely crazy and out, out to lunch, very violent.
So I didn't really have any sense of women. And this woman came into my life and I'll never forget her. She. She said, you know, you're such a good man, but you got no idea how to be with women.
So I'm going to give you this gift certificate to go and sit in a men's group. Now I'm 21 years old, out of prison, going to our goddamn continuing ed men's group with a bunch of guys that, you know, we.
We went to the facilitator's home that was, you know, like in the middle of Boston that was beautiful and gorgeous. And I. I still living in a one room, a horrible situation, you know, and here I am going to this continuing ed men's group.
I was so out of it made no sense for me to be there. I mean, none of the guys had anything to do with my life, and I had nothing to do with their lives except I get to witness these guys opening up about things, about how they wanted to be kind.
And I thought, you're. You're going to get killed, man. But they weren't going to get killed. They'd already, they'd already achieved levels in which they could be kind. That kindness to me was a privilege in, in a violent world.
But after 12 weeks, I kind of got. Wait a minute. Men. Men really do need to kind of figure out how to get together in a circle and not be a team or a music group or just, you know, really sit together in a circle.
I was, I was hooked.
I mean, she left me, which makes perfect sense. She left me, you know, and, and I had no interest in relationships because that felt like I was back in prison.
So, so I, you know, I'm sad to see her go. She was delightful woman and lived with me for a couple of years. But again, I had no skillfulness. You don't take somebody out of a raw situation and expect them to have some skillfulness to be in relationship.
It just doesn't, you know, just doesn't make sense. It takes a lot of skill to be in relationship and people don't get it. And they think it's automatic.
Emily: Say more, please.
Stephen: Well, they think it's automatic that we, that we automatically love. It's not true, you know what, what love is, it's secondary to a pesky ego that wants power and control of the destiny of one's life.
And you have to learn how to set it aside to love. Well, and if you can't do that because you haven't been taught, you haven't witnessed it, then you. The statement you just said earlier, Emily, is that my will will take over, my will will always take over.
Because it's the pesky ego.
And you're born with. I loved how you said it. You're born with this willfulness and you know it will get in the way of your loving. Well, and except when the moment you decide, I'm going to put it aside to listen.
Well, to engage. I love the phrase to listen to disappear.
And what I mean by that is you listen to person so much that you disappear into their soul.
And then you can set a boundary, then you can tell people what you need, but we don't have the right order. We're just fighting around what we need. We can activate the pesky ego, but we want to make it secondary.
So life's journey is about moving it from that 2 year old who wants what they want to moving it to I'm here for you, dear one, and this is what I need.
And that journey, that, that flipping, that movement from the, the two year old separation to a adult who loves, well, it's a huge journey. And if You've got no support.
If you've got no idea what it is, how are you going to make that journey?
How do we train politicians making policy and protocol to have their first thought be about the people they're serving, not their own Pesky.
And that's a switch. That's a shift.
So I became very focused on men's work. It's been. It's been a long journey.
Places that have taken me to probably done 50 or 60 sweat lodges with men, sat with circles of men all throughout my life.
I now have seven men's groups, probably the most in the community, with up to 12 men. They're packed.
There's no room in the end for now turning people away. I just added my seven form, you know, it's just. It's just remarkable.
Emily: Yeah, it is.
Emily: I love that they're. That you're offering it and then that they're coming.
You know, this podcast is primarily women listen, but I do interview fathers to tell their versions of birth stories. And once a season, I try to have on a male guest like yourself to speak more for the men.
And because women, so many women listen, I would love if you could talk a little bit, maybe to the women, ways that we, you know, some skills that we can build to be more compassionate for our men in this time and what men are going through this.
It's just. It's a wild time for both men and women.
Yeah, but what might you have to say to the women out there in relationship, likely bringing up small children or maybe about to have their first child?
Stephen: You know, it's a beautiful question, Emily.
You know, to. To first, I just want to say to. To the women, you know, that are a part of your podcast that, you know, thank you.
Just thank you for the level in which you care for the children, people in your life.
On one hand, that has been part of the oppression, and on the other hand, it's incredibly valuable to the culture as a whole.
There's so much oppression.
I don't know what we can talk about. But the politics of the presidency was all based on.
We don't trust women to have power.
It. It's such an oppression that I can't even begin to speak to.
My goal with men is to have them understand that oppression.
It's not their first thought.
Their first thought is their training has been that they're to protect their provider, perform.
None of those have anything to do with listening compassionately.
You know, I would want women to have some more patience with men, but I actually don't know if that's the right answer.
I found that men were really, really do better when there's really good boundaries with them. Like, you're gonna have to do something about your life.
I can't emotionally just be here for you and not expect you to do something about your life.
I'm not gonna take care of your children and your house and your being so you can go off and be a warrior and. And not have myself nurtured.
So I think there's something in boundaries for women that the messages are so that you're supposed to take care of, take care of, take care of, and somehow you're more successful if you don't have boundaries for your emotional life.
I think women are trained to. Not you, you know, not even like each other. Sometimes some kind of competition about some foolish guy of having more or less than or.
I do want to have one piece of demand.
You know, if anything comes out of this podcast, I would just make one demand, and that is women. Expect the men in your life to have some compassion.
Just expect it.
Don't give up on it.
Be fierce about it. You don't have to fight about it. You just have to say this. If you want to love me, if you want me to be open sexually, if you want me to be open physically and emotionally and spiritually with you, then you're going to have to figure out how to be skillful and compassionate.
Emily: Mm.
Stephen: And I think it. I think it'll make the person a better man. I think it breaks their oppression.
It. It causes them to get out of their comfort zone.
But without the demand, relationships are just going to hover around the lack of real connection.
They're going to get into the maintenance of life. They're going to maintain their homes and their children's lives, and they're going to be kind, and they're going to show up to the multiple events that their kids have and do all of the right things.
They're going to be kind to each other, but it's going to miss something.
And we came here, Emily. We came to this planet. We got through this entire labor process and popped out for one reason, and that was to love. Well, and there's no.
There's nothing else.
You know, all of that painstaking struggle for the births or.
Or the maintaining one's life is about this one single issue, which is to love well.
And if you don't ask the person in your life to love you, well, if you don't make that demand, then you're the one that's causing your own pain.
And you don't have to be mad, you don't have to scream, you don't have to be a victim and say, well, because as a woman, I'm never going to get it.
It's not going to ever happen for me. So, you know, women live longer without men.
It's crazy.
They live longer without men and men live shorter without women. So I mean, if they don't have women in their lives, they die. So it's, it's upside down.
It's, it's not a mutually empowering, loving relationship, which is our goal. Now we've got a thousand things to distract us from that. From TV sets to social media to.
The list goes on and on and on. Work and family and children. And I just. Even children.
Children become more important than this journey of mutually empowering, loving relationships.
And I love children centered. I love that. But the truth is children centered is for them to witness two people, no matter where they are in their lives, doing mutual empowerment with each other and witnessing that kind of level of compassion.
So when people don't do that, then the question is, okay, I'm going to try and I'm going to get a coach and I'm going to do our best. And if I can't do that, then I'm going to go, I'm going to have to say goodbye and go and do it because my son, daughter deserves to witness people doing mutual loving acts to each other.
Otherwise what are we doing?
We're caring for our kids. I get that.
But isn't the next generation going to be focused on self centeredness? If I'm just caring for them, where are they going to witness mutually empowering and loving relationships? Heterosexual, homosexual, whatever level of sexuality there is, and we're missing it.
We feed our ego, pesky ego all the time with what's right. We abandon the work.
Emily: I love simplicity.
I love thinking it's simple to love. Well, and we all know that it is. It's really, it takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of skill and we do need examples.
And that's exactly what you're saying, is that we need to be setting that example for our children.
Stephen: Yes.
Emily: And I think so many people. Absolutely. I mean, I just, I could name off, they're all over the place out there who put their children first instead of their relationship.
And you're proposing that they should actually be putting their relationship first for the children to see that example. And I, I so agree. And if the relationship is, is not functioning, if You've set that boundary.
Hey, I need compassion from you. And of course I need to be giving compassion as well, but.
Stephen: Exactly.
Emily: It would be better to not be in that relationship.
Stephen: Well, and, and that's the duality. That's the duality. You, you give it and you expect it. It's a support and demand.
If you just use support because you've been trained as a woman to give support, to be kind, to give compassion and not get it for yourself, no demand, then that's oppression.
Then compassion becomes some kind of injury.
It's actually a duality.
I'll lead with compassion and I expect it.
And that's mutually empowering.
And we, we have enough resources as a culture to make sure that we don't separate out roles. Like, you go into the forest and get the meat so we can all have protein, and I will stay here and take care of the children.
We're beyond that.
We're beyond that. It's not perfect, but we're beyond that. We now need to hold as a new generation the idea of mutual empowerment.
When we have situations that show us that we're going to still think women are subordinate.
Doesn't really. It doesn't help. And men, I'm sorry, if you're listening to this, you're probably not, but if you are, you need to take the lead to make sure that your partner, male, female, trans, whatever your partner hears and feels the compassion before you set boundaries, before you give them what you think is right.
Otherwise you're just diminishing the value of another human being.
Emily: So, Hal, let's talk a little more tangibly about how to set this boundary when asking for compassion. Because we all have our, our triggers and like, I can just, you know, I'm just thinking obviously of my own experience here, but, like, trying to set a boundary to get compassion.
What can that actually look like? Tangibly.
Stephen: Please tell me what's.
I love it.
Well, it, you know, it's. It's. First you have to role model it. You have to role model it. Unless you're unsafe, then move on, get out of there. If you're emotionally, physically and spiritually unsafe on a regular basis, get out of there, get some support for yourself and empower yourself to move on.
But once we're beyond that Maslow theory of, you know, beyond the safety question, you know, we're looking for connection. We're looking for and the belief, the powerful belief that connection is the absolute healing energy of one's life, that love is the connection that helps somehow the human spirit all the cells knows that it's present.
It gives you quality and quantity of your life.
So what is it? Well, what it is, is that real compassion is the ability to listen at a place where you don't matter, that you hear the spirit of another human being.
You hear the wishes and desires.
And then you can also say, I expect out of you. I expect out of you. I expect you to hear my deepest whisperer for hopes and dreams. I'm what I need you to.
I. I love Gottman's work where he said, you know, you're more affirming of your. The person you're walking alongside of, you're three times more affirming.
You see the beauty in them, you see the value in them. You, you, you expect somebody to do it instead of what ends up happening is they're not skillful. When you get down to maintenance and maintenance is, would you, did you?
Could you? Would you? Did you? Could you? Would you? Did you? Could you? And that becomes your relationship. Would you, did you? Could you?
Emily: What, do you live in my home or something? You spying on us?
Stephen: It is painful.
Would you like to watch a TV program tonight?
Could you take out the trash before.
I just haven't gotten to it.
Did you get a chance to stop by at city hall to get the permit? Would you? Did you? Could you? Would you? Did you? Could you?
No affirmations.
I love your smile.
I appreciate how much, how exhausted you were today and you still showed up for our boy.
What if that was 3 to 1? What if you fell to sleep tonight and you said, I did three affirmations to everyone. Would you? Did you? Could you?
What if that was your prayer, like, let me get up tomorrow, I make sure I do a 3 to 1 ratio.
Then if you're not getting it, then I want you to ask for it. And if you don't get it, then I want you to ask again. And somebody. Often people ask me, how many times do I ask?
And I say, 443.
And they'll say, why that number? I said, it doesn't matter.
There's a point in which if you're listening to yourself, you know that I've asked long enough.
There's no number.
But it's all practice.
You are put here spiritually with this relationship, with a practice of working through the things that are in your cells that have nothing to do with this person.
Emily: Louder for the people in the back.
Yes, yes.
And please, would you please weave in here the spiritual components of parenthood?
Because I have no doubt in any cell in my being or any corner of my soul that my little boy did not come in here to expand me in every way possible and to show me exactly the places and the spaces that I can move more deeply into love.
Stephen: Yeah.
Emily: And the fact that he chose me and Isaiah to be his parents is just so. It's so comical.
Stephen: Yes. So comical.
You can feel it. Like, how did, what, what, what, what happened? How did this happen? And then because that being your son, is there to recycle every hour and year of your life, own process of growing up.
So every place you've been hurt is going to run up against it. And you're going to have to figure out how the hell do I have empathy and boundaries here?
How the, how do I do this without projecting my injuries, which are natural, not wrong, but my injuries, onto him so that the next generation doesn't have to carry it?
But without my consciousness, without my spiritual practice, without my support in terms of my community, if I don't have those things, then I am going to react.
So when my son does something that I've been hurt by when I was five, I don't even know what it was. I can't even remember it, but he's going to run up against it and I'm going to feel this activation in my body and I'm going to do my best not to project that activation onto him because he has given me a gift, a spiritual gift to reenact, recreate my storyboard in good ways and in not so good ways, both are true.
And they're all going to get activated. And if you, if you really don't see that, you're just going to project. And he's going to take this baggage, this. This duffel bag full of stories, some good and some not so good, and he's going to go into his journey and he's going to find a lover and he's going to project all of that onto them.
And they're not going to be skillful because I didn't teach them how to be skillful with it. I didn't demonstrate it. So I'll just hope that he finds an old counselor who can help coach through the shit.
Sorry about my language.
Emily: It's welcome.
Stephen: It's just. It's just many different ways this universe has given us to heal and we're privileged to do this.
If as long as we keep it simple, as you said earlier, we came to love, well, there's, there's no complication in that, except when we forget. And the pesky ego wants us to forget.
Because it's a hard journey.
It's a hard, hard journey to keep that as you right in front of me all the time.
Emily: Yeah.
You know, one of the biggest ways that you helped me illuminate when I'm not being in compassion, which you know, admittedly is often, which is so interesting too because you know, the work that I do is literally holding space for others and being a compassionate soul, just witnessing.
But when it comes to personal relationships, it feels like a completely different ball game.
But what you have said is about that whole right, relate. Right. Being right. You know, when one is right, then it destroys the relationship. And I would just like to dive into that a little bit more because for me that was an illumination moment because I need to be right.
Stephen: Right.
Emily: And you need to be wrong. Right.
Stephen: Exactly. And, and, and it's willful that you said it. You know, you, you popped into the world with a process. You are so clear about it. Like I am willful. And it will, it will serve my life.
I will be successful. I will, you know, get out of my way.
It's willful.
Emily: Right.
Emily: And you know what?
Stephen: It.
Emily: I love, I love that about me. I really love that so much.
Stephen: Exactly. And it's beautiful.
Emily: It is.
Emily: It's gotten me a lot of beautiful things in my life and I actually can channel it in my service to others. And it's beautiful. But it also, it's duality, like it's a double edged sword when it comes to being in intimate relationships.
Stephen: And everything has a duality.
And so any, any, anything that is so I mean, you know, to, to offer, you know, my helper is also a nemesis. My, my decision to be of service to other people has had me not be of service to myself.
It's always got a duality. And so are you working on the duality?
Not just the one that's given you life enhancing skills.
Can you do both? Can you be willful and at the same time yield?
Can you do both? And the ego that loves your willfulness don't want you to yield to anything. Get out of my way.
I am smart. I am. I know what I want. I know what is right. I know what works. Get out of my way.
Now as you just said, that's beautiful because people follow you. They, they get it.
At the same time there's a, there's a shadow side to that and that is to yield.
Yeah. And to yield is to have power. And to know when to do one and the and not the other is just really about the journey, about what we're doing here.
Emily: Yeah, it is.
Stephen: I love the. I love the metaphor, Autry. You know, you're just kind of. You pull it back. You got the bow and you said. And you think. You're thinking to yourself, how long do I hang on and where do I let go?
And that's the beauty of it. That's the beauty of life.
And if you're. If you're like, holding on and going, all right, all right, I'll just keep aiming. Nothing happens. But if you pull it up and you snap it, it won't happen either.
You really trying to find that spot within you, the soft spot that says, this moment needs for me to yield.
Emily: Yeah.
Emily: And that.
Emily: I mean, that goes so deep just for women.
Emily: Right.
Emily: Because of all of the indoctrination and, like, the feminist movement, making women more like men and, like, independent and, you know, but we all like men and women both. You know, we both need to have a willfulness and a yield.
But I think for women especially, it is.
It's difficult for us to soften.
Stephen: Yes. It's really.
It represents the messages, at least for the last generation. There are messages coming that if you soften, then you're not a strong woman.
Nobody. It's very interesting. Empathy and compassion are seen as weaknesses.
Emily: Yeah.
Stephen: They are the greatest strength that we'll ever have.
But we don't get it. We don't get. That's why I want to lead with it.
I just read an article by a. One of the smartest, you know, sort of Buddhist people in the. In the country, and they were saying, you know, that you could.
You could do too much compassion and therefore not, you know, do. Do compassion to avoid. And I thought.
You're not thinking about the duality.
Compassion is the. See, the minute we put those messages out, we make it weak again.
We lead with it, and then we speak to what we need, unless we need to deal with safety. But. But the truth of the matter is we have to lead with empathy and compassion.
And it feels like we're yielding. It feels like we're doing something that is opposite of what we've been trained to do.
And it's not helpful.
Everybody walking around saying, I, I ism, I ism, I ism.
Not helpful. We can have a weird. We gotta figure out a larger context here that we start loving. We.
Emily: Yes.
I'd love to give you some time to talk about the work that you're doing in Portland. And you also, like, travel internationally to teach. What is it called? Motivational Interviewing.
Stephen: Yep, yep.
Emily: I would love to give you some time here as we wrap up to talk about what you are doing. And your approach.
Stephen: Is, how do I do that?
Emily: It's a lot.
Stephen: Well, so motivational interviewing is a methodology of helping that has an incredible amount of evidence.
Emily: Yeah, I was looking. There's been studies done on it. Research studies.
Stephen: Oh, they're amazing. I mean, it's somewhere around 2000 clinical studies and you know, 1200 journal entries in academic study, academic literature.
Emily: Would you say that motivational interviewing is just a fancy way of saying compassionate listening?
Stephen: Well, the problem is that compassionate listening is really only one step and motivational interviewing is a two step process.
And what it means is that you do compassionate listening. Radical acceptance.
You're looking for that empowerment of the human spirit. And then you're listening for something greater, which is the hopes and dreams.
And if you just do respect, if you just do listening, if you're just centered on the individual, then the individual will have a tendency to stay the same.
But if you can hear the whisper of the hopes and dreams.
So I have a phrase that will carry me most of my life, which is, you meet people where they dream.
Emily: You don't meet people where they dream.
Stephen: Yes. Instead of meeting people where they're at.
Emily: See, compassionate listening, Oh, I love that so much.
Stephen: You know, compassionate listening is only just a reinforcement of what your injury is, but you're doing it for a purpose. And that is that we have dreams. And that's where I went back to loving.
Well, as a dream, it's the thing you want. When that final moment is over and you're taking a breath and you're realizing that you're going to drift or transist into another state, you want to just.
You'll have a question that will just arrive to your head. I'm not supposed to tell people this, but it's a secret. But there's a question that will come. How well did you love?
And it doesn't say how well were you loved? It was how well did you love?
And that means that you have to do both. You have to be supportive and loving and stay what you need. If you don't do both, you're not loving well. Because if you're just loving, which is what women were taught to do for generations, then they become less than.
They become like they don't matter.
You're going to have to love well. You're going to have to build both sides. I'm here for you, dear one. And I'm here for me, dear one.
So what am I doing? Well, as you already told you, I'm doing seven support groups. Ten support groups in total.
I'm honored to sit in a women's group where they let me be a part of that circle.
Do two other coed groups. They're all about learning the skill of empathy and compassion.
It's not about therapy or brokenness or anything else. It's about, we need to be more skillful.
If we're not, it's going to be amok.
As you know, I've written six tiny books now.
I tried to write one book, and I got all blocked up in my brain that it wasn't good enough. So I decided to write six tiny books.
The last one was called Embrace the Mystery, which I love, because you have no idea what the outcome's going to be.
Holding on to what?
Just the idea, Steve. If I do this, will I get love?
I don't know. I don't know. Because the minute that's the mystery, you're embracing the mystery. If you do this, you have done your best to create a garden for the harvest to be, but you have no idea what the harvest is going to be.
So just do your best so that those books are out. As you know, I've done a bunch of podcasts, conversations and compassion.
My 43rd came out this week.
This is about poverty, about the power of unpredictability, what that does to people.
The one before that, about a woman who struggled with chronic illness, a radical pope.
So I'm just trying to find many different ways to. I go all over the world because I get a chance to try to see this as not a us thing or Portland, Maine thing.
It helps me expand that this is a human endeavor. It's not about culture.
I learned so much.
You know, when I. When I had a conversation with a person in China, I have no Chinese. I don't. I can say Nihau, which is hello, that's it. But that person had no English.
And we still, with the translator, found this energetic connection.
And she. She said to me she was. She was struggling with substance use and opiate addiction.
She. She said, all I want is my own place and. And. And a job and to take naps in the afternoon. When she was talking about her dreams, I thought, me too.
Me too. I was, you know, here I am, completely across the country, sitting in a stage, 175 people watching us, and she wants the same thing I want.
We don't even have the same culture. You know that.
That's why I do it. That's why I've been in Singapore and Poland and it doesn't. Humans are humans.
They all came to do the same thing.
Emily: Yeah, yeah. And you do a lot of work with addiction, right? Specifically.
Stephen: Yeah, it started there. It started there. It, it, it's moved to.
We all have self medicative things that we do to keep us from feeling our, our pain.
And so one of the traps in a human condition is to find some compulsion so that we don't have to feel our pain. You know the constant checking of social media can be a compulsion that people then take away from their relationship.
There, there's just a cycle of compulsive obsessive things that people do that really take them out of the work.
Emily: Totally. Totally. I call it numbing.
Stephen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're, they're numbing their suffering.
Emily: Yeah.
Stephen: The problem is their suffering is the greatest message to do the work. And so if you numb it that you don't do the work and you stay stuck and you live in a world where you don't live as long and you don't live the kind of quality that you came to do.
Emily: Yeah.
Stephen: And you don't pass it on to your children.
Emily: Right.
Emily: Now you mentioned your circles are full. Are, are, is there a way if people wanted to work with you or join one of the circles, can they, can they do that?
Stephen: Yeah, they, you can always reach me through, you know, my email and that's heartquest2mail.com that's heartquest2mail.Com
we can find a space for you place because there's so many, I mean there's a hundred and plus people.
There's always movement people coming and people going.
Emily: Love that. I'll link that in the show notes. And what about Agape?
Stephen: Agape? Well this is my craziness again. But Agape was an idea that I had in 1990 about trying to deal with men and violence.
I thought that the way the culture was managing men around their violence was very, very, I don't know, derogatory or oppressive. You're bad, you're bad, you're bad. When the men are not bad for their violence, they're, it's by.
They've been trained, they've been trained to, to kill another human being.
And that, that, that kind of oppression, it has to leak out somewhere if you don't have any boundaries. So, so I, I started this non profit to have men help have men.
And again I got into trouble with it because you know, people thought that men who are violent should be in the Correctional system, they should be, you know, all that kind of stuff.
So I ended up doing training, you know, training interns to work with people for free or no service. And Agape has also given out emergency funds for people when they're in transition in their lives so that they can make the transition.
So things like sober housing or something like that that they need to get started in their lives.
The greatest opiate addiction comes.
The biggest problem with death and opiate addiction is transitions between prisons and community or residential treatment to the community. These transitions are the most deadly times.
So we tried to provide some emergency funds for that.
I have a small cadre of interns from graduate schools sitting with me to help provide support services to people for free or low cost.
Those are the things that we're trying to do with Agape. It's board of directors, it's a non profit.
And we're also trying to do some very significant advocacy around Unhoused, which are, you know, 85% of it is male.
Again, little or no gender conversation about that.
So those are, those are the things that Agape is trying to do. It's just a place for me to have a non profit and be creative, to try to figure out things that we don't have to have the government tell us how to do it.
Emily: So I hear that you do a lot.
You do a lot.
I just, I want to know, Stephen, is your work, you know, truly what fills you up? Or do you also like, what do you do for yourself?
Stephen: I would, I would imagine that if this was an interview by another man, you would have said that. Congratulations, you've done a lot of work.
The interesting thing about filling yourself out outside of work, there's two answers to that. First, Emily, I have never had a work day in my life for a long time.
Emily: I believe you.
Stephen: I get up in the morning and I try to nurture my being so that I can do another good day of hanging out with people.
I'm blown away by the honor that people give me to sit with them.
I'm always doing my prayer, which is to pause, reflect and ask and yield.
So I don't, you know, maybe I'll get a job someday. Maybe I'll have a work life. I don't know.
I love being creative. I love, I love writing a tiny book. I love, I just finished.
Anybody's interested in a lifebook for couples?
It's just all it is is a little workbook where couples could sit down and, you know, do little questionnaires or think about their mission in Life as a couple.
You know, I love that stuff. I love my son, I love my wife.
They tolerate me a lot. I don't understand why I give out Christmas presents or donations to causes. People look at me funny because I didn't go out shopping for gifts and.
But I look, I, I love all that and my friends and people in my life are supportive beyond belief. And I, I just feel loved. I have two God children.
They, both of them think the world would be.
I couldn't be any more blessed.
Emily: Well, thank you so much for coming to share today about this simple fact that we are all here to learn to love well and for setting the example of the skill set that is loving well and reminding us that.
Stephen: It'S.
Emily: Not only about giving and receiving, giving love and, you know, giving compassion, but also asking for the boundaries that we expect also to be loved and to be giving compassion and that we're doing this for the children to set the example.
Yes.
Stephen: It's really what parenting is.
Emily: Yeah.
Emily: Yeah. I think there is a. A tremendous awakening, revolution, rebellion, whatever you want to call it, happening right now. And people are saying it ends with me and this generation, my generation, where a lot of us are very committed to changing the direction of ancestral harms.
So, yeah, yeah. I just appreciate you so much.
Do you want to.
Emily: You.
Emily: You dropped your email, but do you want to drop a website or a social media or anything that I can then link out in the show notes for people?
Stephen: I think you could ask people to kind of hang out@agapemain.org and as a nonprofit as it does a little bits of work with the world in terms of trying to create this.
Other than that people find each other.
Emily: Thank you, Stephen.
Stephen: Thank you. Thank you for asking.
Emily: Le.
Thank you for listening through to the end. I do hope you found good medicine in today's episode and that it encourages your own soul evolution.
I have a few new offers, both in person and virtual, that I'd like to tell you about. Beginning in January, I will host a free in person perinatal women's circle for anyone trying to conceive, pregnant or postpartum, seeking community and support.
There will be a focus on preparing for natural birth and healing from birth trauma.
Children are welcome. You can sign up via my website.
I also now offer a monthly online virtual village circle for families seeking an empowering physiological conception, pregnancy, labor, birth and postpartum. It's just $10 a month or free when you purchase my online course.
So you want a home birth? You can gain access by signing up via my website.
As always, I host women's circles once a month at my home in Southern Maine. All women are welcome. For details, go to my website.
I have 20 years of experience in the medicalized system. I let my nursing license expire in 2023 and now I walk with women seeking a physiological, instinctual and deeply spiritual conception, pregnancy, labor, birth and postpartum journey.
I help prepare and repair for the most expansive rite of passage that women get to experience in this lifetime. It is my greatest honor and sole mission to hold sacred space and witness women as they claim their own inner authority and power.
Emily: I am a fierce advocate and guardian.
Emily: Of natural birth using the culmination of my life's experiences including my own impression embodied wisdom when it comes to being a home birthing mother, nearly two decades of experience in our healthcare system and a year long sacred birth worker mentorship with Anna the Spiritual Midwich.
I support births with or without a licensed provider present at home birth centers and the hospital.
I offer birth debriefing and integration sessions for women, their families and birth workers.
I offer therapeutic one to one sessions, individually tailored mother blessings, closing of the bones and fear and trauma release ceremonies.
If any or all of this resonates, I offer a free 30 minute discovery call if you have a birth story to share or if you're a embodied wise woman, witch healer, medicine woman.
Emily: I am also interested in sharing your.
Emily: Contribution to our soul evolution.
You can book in via the link in the show notes.
Thank you so much for your love and support everyone. Until next time, take really good care.
