The Root System, Part 1

Transcript of a Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversation with Dr. Chip Dodd. Lightly edited for readability; speaker labels omitted.

You're listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. Sage Hill is a social impact organization that helps people see who they are made to be so they can do what they're made to do. The following podcast was recorded at this year's Sage Hill training, an in-depth experiential training that helps people bring their heart to what they are called to do. To learn more, you can visit sagehilltraining.com. Happiness and perfectionism have a lot in common. We think of, perfectionism is the what we think of as the in-depth form of seeking happiness. And perfectionists look at people who are seeking happiness as kind of a shallow version of wanting something, but they're sellouts. But the seeking of perfectionism and the seeking of happiness is pretty much the same thing Because it's it's all about it's all based upon the postulate, when I if I can get this, then I will have that. If I can get this, then I will have that. That's perfectionism, and that's happiness. K? So serious folks seek perfection, and shallow people seek happiness. Do you see it? I'm being ironic or facetious a little bit. But that is that in spite of the amount of technological advancements that we've made and we have made phenomenal I mean, it it's like based upon the capacity of what we're capable of doing, it's amazing we're still miserable. Do you know? And based upon the knowledge that we've garnered over the years, it's amazing we haven't fixed this, figured out how to fix this. So but the the proof in that technological advance and that knowledge increase is that there's something that it doesn't fix, it doesn't make okay, it doesn't address. But we continue because we are so contemptuous towards neediness and so get into fear and feelings related to neediness, being in need, that we are willing to do anything to get out of being in a position of being powerless or in other word in other words, relational. Because the powerlessness of being human puts us in relationship with our own nature, with ourselves, with our own hearts. And then it's gonna put me in a position of having to need you because the food of life is you with me, me with me, and me and you with God and me with God. And then applying myself upon the face of the earth to create versus okay. That's what I just said is become who you're made to be, do what you're made to do, and you'll have what you're made to have Versus, you get what you're made to have by doing what you're made to do and then you become somebody. You gotta have this ability and then you go out and do that ability and then you become someone. See, we're set up by our, demand and technology and our demand of knowledge to make me whole, and all it does is basically make me smarter, make me healthier, but it won't make me wholer. In fact, it doesn't make me sane. The word sanity means wholeness. The word insanity means lack of wholeness. And the lack of wholeness almost always comes from not knowing what to do with my emotional and spiritual self. I don't know what to do with my heart. And so, almost all of us have been trying to stay away from it, our hearts, because once you get into your heart, you're gonna wind up being needy and needy means vulnerable and vulnerable means trouble. So, okay, what I gotta do to stay away from my heart? And even the thing that we're getting into, this is just a tiny little point, but the, virtual reality. You can put the world on your face and have an experience of being alive and you never leave the room. Where is there that is an attempt to reduce our struggle to be no struggle at all. So that you have the world at your fingertips, you experience in your brain a vicarious life, but you don't have one at all. So, I mean, that's what I'm saying by that something in the underbelly of technology and knowledge, which is gorgeous, just like the Internet is magnificent. It's just magnificent. But the underbelly, what we try to do with it, it's the next set of drugs. See, technology for a human being who's attempting to escape being human is a drug, and knowledge is a drug. So happy I'm just coming back. It's isn't it something that that the serious folks are perfectionistic? Never give up on always trying to get there. You know, someday we're gonna arrive. And when we arrive, it's all gonna be good. We will create heaven on earth because God didn't do a very good job. We gave up on God a long time ago if technology and knowledge is gonna fix us. So in God, God seems to be very clear about, no, I'm gonna do everything I can to help you become you. And then once you become you, it's gonna get a lot better in a bad place because you're never gonna fix this place. It's pretty out of whack. It's gonna take an emotional and spiritual redemptive cure for this place to be any better. And it ain't gonna change, you change. You're gonna be the change. And when you change, it's not gonna change the world. It's gonna you it's gonna give you opportunity to offer change to another. The world's not gonna change the whole time you're here, and it hasn't since we started, except we've gotten smarter and more advanced technologically. We can cure diseases, but we can't cure the heart. So and then the second thing, if you need a mantra, feel your feelings as you find them again. Become able to tell the truth about them and give them to the process. And God owns the process, by the way. You can say give them to God or give them to the process because God owns the process. God owns life. God started it. He's in it, and he'll deal with it. So you could you could do it any way you want. I prefer to say give it to the process because most people, by the time they get to being in need, have already tried giving it to God, and it doesn't it doesn't connect. Do you know? That's like like people say, you you just need to let it go. Have any of you already told just to let it just let it go. You just need to let it go. It's like, okay. Okay. I'm a work on letting it go. Do you know? I'm a try to let it go. Well, that's just like telling somebody not to worry about something that's bothering them. I mean, that doesn't work either. Do you see? So give it to the process means hand it over, tell someone, get with someone about it, get good at being in need, throw it out, watch for results. Do do do you see? Stay in the process. So, so feel your feelings, tell the truth about them, give it to the process, give it to God. But it starts with being willing to face your life. So you face your life, then you feel your feelings, then you tell the truth about it and give it to the process. And in the process, you will become whole. And wholeness means you become capable of living between grief and celebration. You get good at one between one and ten. You don't you don't try to spend your life creating wholeness by living your life between four and six. And if you really get great, you'll be between five and five, which actually makes you a stoic or a supreme Buddhist. If you get good at living between five and five, you basically have disappeared. And that's the supreme Buddhism or stoicism. The highest achievement of stoicism is to be unbothered. And, if you're living, you're made to be bothered. Jesus says it in terms of, Matthew eighteen two and three. He said, unless you change, they're talking about faith and importance and so on, the disciples are. And Jesus said, brought a child child to stand with him. So I don't know if he was standing or not, but a child would be like little bitty, you know, and said, unless you change and become like one of these, you can't enter into the kingdom of heaven. You can't get what I'm talking about. You can't even recognize what faith even means. And then he also says, unless you have faith like a child. But here's the great paradox of what he says, I think. He says, unless you change, has anyone in this room ever changed himself or herself? And the answer is no. You've never changed yourself. You've created new habits. You've done things that your willpower can allow you to do, but you haven't changed yourself or changed your life. You can only ultimately confess yourself through recognizing the depths of your own neediness, your own powerlessness. All of my attempts to make my life a certain way, frankly, just didn't work. So changing yourself, unless you change, becomes becoming in need of change and admission of the need. Alright? Unless you change and become. Well, only by you can't become unless you're changed. And become, who's he talking about? What are we talking about becoming? You're talking about becoming who you're made to be, who you're created to be. So unless you change and become like one of these, and he refers to a child. And a child, the child's expertise, the child's true expertise is imagination and neediness, vulnerability. Pretty astounding stuff. And so what I want you to know is that the spiritual root system becomes a great admission of the heart is more powerful than culture because the heart is identical across all cultures and up and down throughout history. The what makes the difference in culture is what people do to hide feelings. That's culture. So culture either cultivates that which is who we're made to be or becomes a cult to run away from the definition of our sameness. It's amazing. See, human beings are the only creatures that carry life within them that are capable of using their faces to hide their hearts. Everything else in nature doesn't have the capacity to have that level of willpower or consciousness, either one, to be able to hide that which is happening within them. And we can create, therefore, cultures within our own homes and our own families. Cults. What do we do to hide what's happening behind the front door? Put a face on it. And now it's called putting a Facebook on it. And then that that's rooted in our pursuit of happiness and perfectionism and how we spend our lives taking our insides and comparing our insides to other people's outsides. And we wind up deficient, needing to work harder to be normal. And normal is how you look. Normal is not who you truly are. So when actually we've got the definition of normal and common mixed up, common is how everybody looks the same. Normal is how you're really made. And we pursue common in the name of normal, and we lose normal to be common. And then we lose our identities to be normal and wind up being common, which means like everybody else, we end up becoming a cog in the wheel or a digit in the numbers or a thing in the production or a and then we miss our lives because we weren't ourselves. And then we miss the the design of life because we wouldn't surrender to it. And then we miss everything we could have because we wouldn't be who we are. So Stephen keeps saying that that, when and I love the phrase, I would love a pill, but there isn't one if you're gonna live. There's only a path. And so we we're not offering you a pill, we're offering you a path because everybody in here has already tried the pills or you wouldn't be here. You obviously are looking for something else or you're looking for the next pill and you're gonna find that this isn't one and we're gonna greatly, irritate you. But the spiritual root system is awakens us to the reality of the truth within us and that the truth within us has got to be lived in reality. And so what the spiritual root system does, what it really does, it oxygenates and hydrates who you are, the roots of you, which allows you to get your roots fed so that your trunk can be strong, your branches can be fueled, and your fruits can be abundant. So what what the spiritual root system does, it oxygenates and hydrates whatever it is that you're after. It doesn't change your system or your theories or your profession. It makes your theories, your imagination, your goals, your profession full of you. So but it oxygenates and hydrates. It doesn't matter what you believe, you still need this because you're a human being made like all other human beings. You still need this. You still need a path to make you whole. So, so that the spiritual root system oxygenates and hydrates who you are, what you're doing, where you're headed, where you wanna go. It puts the passion and the intimacy and the integrity back in you. You're fueled. Whether you're pastor, physician, rocket scientist, mommy, daddy, child, it returns you to unless you change and become like one of these, wherever you're headed, it's not gonna give you what you're looking for. It just won't. Because we work at CPE with people who have achieved more than most of us will ever even really conceive. I'm talking about the greatest universities, the greatest OR experiences. So it's amazing how the people I've gotten to be with who are the great achievers, and I've gotten to be with the great underachievers too. And both groups are the same, except the achievers, in many ways, are worse off because they achieved and it didn't fix them. The underachievers can still hang on to the resentment or the dream that if I could only this, then I would have that, you know, waiting on the lottery ticket or one more try. The people we see have come closer to unless you change and become, like, I got nowhere else left to go because I've already achieved everything pretty much that could be found.

This is Stephen James, the executive director of Sage Hill Counseling. Thanks for listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. If you're interested in learning more about the power of our core eight emotions, I encourage you to check out Chip's book, The Voice of the Heart, A Call to Full Living.