The Root System, Part 3

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. Good relationship lower stress. And do you all know that stress essentially means that that your fight, flight, or freeze rest and be yourself. You don't have to be watching to see what that person is thinking of you because you already know. And you're okay with that. And if you don't know, you can say to them, are you okay with me right now? Like, do you remember when you were in school, in elementary school? And do you did any of you ever send a note to anybody? Hey. Do you like me? I like you. Circle. Yes or no. So do you like me? I like you. I want you to know something. That's what the limbic system is asking all the time. It's what emoticons are about. See, emoticons are saying, are you okay with me? You okay with me? Do you wanna go to lunch? That's not an answer. Yes. Smiley face. Yes. Whatever. You see? Yes. Big smile. Yes. Little smile. But yes is not an answer. See, because the Internet and communication across just printed word is gray, and we don't function in gray without stress going up. K? We gotta know. I gotta know. I can live the struggle of life with you as long as I know that you're with me. I gotta know. And if you're not with me, I need to know too so I can know. I gotta know. See, we're made to have our needs filled so we can know, so we can go. Because if you if you're running on empty, you're not gonna get there. If you're running on full, you could pour it out and know how to pull over and get filled back up to go again. So when your stress is lowered, you're not having to watch for danger. And they they they recognize that it increases performance. Usain Bolt runs without stress. He's okay with him. The people of Jamaica okay with him. He he loves to run. He's confident in running. It's like, I don't know if I'm a do it this year, but you know what? Whether I do or I don't, I'm going. I mean, the guys, he's just he's just a wonder to watch. And he takes joy in running. It's he's not just saying, look at me. I'm the greatest in the world. He's just going, look at this. Can you believe I'm doing this? Two different things. So good relationship lowers stress, increases performance because all of you is on the field, so to speak. You you follow what I'm saying? And I use the example because I've been involved in baseball for so many years. If you look down the line at the bat on the batter's box and you're having to watch the third base coach to see if he likes you or not, to to see if he's for you or not, to see if he's good with you or not, to see if he believes in you or not, to see if he's confident with you or not, to see if he cares with you about you or not, to see if he's disgusted with you or not, or irritated with you, or wishes you weren't in the game, or hates that you're on the team. You're reading signs. You're looking down the third baseline reading signs. And not only are you doing this, but you're reading the guy's face. And I have seen so many third base coaches turn their faces away from the player at the batter's box. And do you know when a player is at the batter's box, all attention is on them. They are seen, and they are about to take an extraordinary risk. What do people say at at at pro baseball players? Like, every everybody has this permission when you're in a pro stadium. You bum. Guy strikes out. You bum. You're a bum because you struck out. And it's been shown that the hardest thing to do in the athletic world, the top of the top 10 hardest difficult most difficult things to do in the athletic world is to hit a baseball. For this round thing to hit that round thing in a certain place and make it go somewhere where somebody doesn't get it, and they're both moving. And it takes so fast ball takes less than a quarter of a second to get to the plate. Just the fact that somebody can even swing and touch it is a wonder. It's an amazement of creation. It's phenomenal. So when the person goes there and they look down the line, they see the third base coach go, you're with me, you're with me. And since you're with me, I'm all here between these white lines. Like, you when you remember when there's maybe a surgical residency, if you know that chief resident is looking for every single possible thing that you could do possibly wrong, you've got to lock your heart in a box and just go on overdrive, To overdrive, being cared about. So you're doing it in stress. And a lot of people are great and can perform for great number of years under extremely high stress, but they don't know what they're missing. They don't know what they're losing. They don't know what the cost is, but their family does. They can pull it off, but their family gets left behind, their friends get left behind, the marriage is left behind because they can't be present because they're on guard. They're hypervigilant. They're on alert. I remember we treated a physician who had worn a beeper before the cell phones became really involved. He wore a beeper for eleven years, seven days a week, twenty four hours a day. He was a surgeon. It's like when he came to us, he was circuits were just blowing out everywhere. Okay. So lower stress, But what is good relationship? Well, we'll get to that. But its opposite holds true. You would think I would put now bad relationship. Right? No. Impoverished relationship or poor. Poor relationship, one in which you can't be yourself because you see experience yourself in danger, increases your sense of wariness, hypervigilance, and it decreases your presence. You have to withhold your heart to perform. Your productivity may be the same, but you're not there. You're not all in. You're not able to forget the sidelines. You can't get into the flow. You could get the job done incredibly well, but you didn't learn a ton from it except relief. How many of you ever have ever said to yourself, I'm only as good as my last performance? Did anybody relate to that? Or I'm only as loved as I did well that last time? Or thank God that case is finished. You know, I gotta get up for the next one, or you follow thank God that deal got completed. I I get to rest for a while. I'm somebody for a few minutes. Then all of a sudden, you know, it runs through the bottom of the bucket. It's like, I gotta get up and get it done again. And we're not running out of vocation. We're running out of desperation. K? We're running because we're desperate. The the old movie Chariots of Fire, great comparison contrast between someone running in passion passion and somebody running in desperation. With that said, let's look at neediness. The most direct route between a and b is struggling, hopefully unwavering trust in God. That's we're about to just talk about neediness. So Chase, like, wait a minute. You just threw out a riddle. That's not a riddle. Clumsy is as good as it gets. If you're gonna raise children or if you're gonna live in this life, you've gotta get good at accepting that clumsy is as good as it gets. We're all giraffes running on ice. And I keep referring to the medical practice. Do you understand that doctors who are cut you open are practicing? So I want you to know that you're not gonna get away from your need of others, need of more, need of God to be able to trust as you continue to step into the place you don't control, which is called tomorrow, the future. For that matter, today. For that matter, this afternoon. For that matter, later. And I've got numerous stories about, you know, I prepared for what's coming next. I I never forget December, thirty first, New Year's Eve. Basically, we're doing a half a day at CPE. So I'd already decided what the day was gonna be like. We did check-in, then we did step group, then we did a process group, then we got to go as New Year's Eve, we could go home. So I was already planning to go home and decided how the group would go. So he's gonna say that, and he'll do this, he'll do that. And I I I was kinda like trying to get out of there by figuring out how it was gonna be doing our own surgery except with air. It's harder to sculpt with air, to be an artist with air, because it's between me and you, that space. And it turns out, I got a knock on the process group room door at 11:00 thinking nobody nobody knocks on the door. When process groups go in, it's kind of like considered you don't come in, the OR, so to speak, you know, unless you're sterile. And so it turns out the guy says, hey, Chip. I need to speak to you. I go out. He said, this guy that's in the group, he says his daughter just died. That guy had just said two hours earlier, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm grateful. This is the best New Year's Eve I think I've ever had in my whole life. He had just seen both of his daughters two days before, and they had done some work that they'd never gotten to do before. She had called and left a message. Please tell him it's so great to have my daddy back. And brain aneurysm. That morning, I go in there and say, your daughter's dead. And he's he's he slams himself up against the wall holding on with both sides of the wall, sitting in a chair, begging me for this to be a psychotherapeutic, psycho drama experience. Please, please, please make this something very, very harmful to me that you're doing instead of harmful to me that life has done. Please. And so even the best of everything, no matter how hard we give it to it, the effects aren't ours. A lot of different things can happen. We can predict, stabilize, statistical probabilities, even imminence. And even then, it can go. Space shuttle going to Ronald Reagan's hair. Like, I mean, you talk about getting it down to the decimal point and it still blew up. Like, I'm saying that the most direct route between a and b, we make our plans and we head towards their completion, is to develop an unwavering trust and confidence in God, which is back to Jeremiah seventeen seven and eight we spoke of last night. Blessed is the person now. Stephen James taught me that the word blessing See, all words are process words, and all words are relational words. It's amazing. If you look at a dictionary, every word in the dictionary is relational. It's relationship. And every word in the dictionary is actually almost not static. Instead, even the definition of static means opposite of that which keeps moving. So, I mean, even the word hermit is is defined by relationship and the distance from one. So, I mean, it's just mind mind boggling. But Stephen said that the word blessed really means going down to come up. You go down to your knees and open your hands to receive. And once you've received, you can eat and you can raise up. So blessed is the person who becomes able because they have to trust in God. And because they know that they're not in charge of the effects, they've got to get confidence in in in something greater than themselves, which is the second step of Alcoholics Anonymous. We admit that we are powerless over blank, whatever it happens to be, and our lives become unmanageable when we attempt to control our lives and our moods through this thing. And that can be all the things we had had on the board. I think the great ultimate addiction is addiction to control, and it's driven by the addiction for approval. Do you know? What will people think keeps us between five and five instead of the life we're made to live between one and 10? So so clumsy is as good as it gets. And we've got to become a people, and the heart does it, who are capable of living in clumsy to get introduced to And I keep using the Bible over and over again because it is a common reference point. Go look at it. Everybody's got one. If you can't, don't have one, go to a hotel, spend the night. There's a King James one in the drawer. I mean, you can get one. It's not hard. Right? Understand it's still a big seller. I mean, they're everywhere. I think I think it's even sold more copies than To Kill a Mockingbird. It's it's it's available. So I use this over and over again as a common reference point, but what's so remarkable, every human being has to become capable of living in the Beatitudes. You've got to become capable of living in the revolution. Life is not a straight line. It's the it's the path of a bee flying from the nest or the hive to the flowers back to the hive. And you watch the flight of a bee. That's our lives. That's the process of life. That's the line that we live on between a and b is the flight of a b. And the b is very clearly directed with a passion, a purpose, and a plan. And the b doesn't even know what it is, but does it extremely well. That's a bee. I don't know how big a bee's brain is. I'm not even sure it has one. And have you ever looked at it? We have a bird's nest in the under a glass on a desk in the in the entrance to CPE. And, almost nobody asked, what's the bird nest doing there? But people have said, I've heard never to touch it or look at it. I'm like, what are you talking like, it's like, nobody even asked what it is, but I've heard don't look at it. Like, somehow but the bird nest is there because a bird does that. It doesn't have any hands. It has wings, but it it has three little prongs for feet and a beak, and it makes something human beings can hardly do themselves with their hands. And it's so sophisticated because the soft grass is in the nest where the little babies are, and the rough grass is on the outside where the weather is, has mud on the bottom to keep moisture from coming up. And this thing's doing it without hands. Do you know? I've stood in the middle of a monarch migration. I mean, I was leaving the beach one day and I just went out to say bye to the ocean. And, I was standing there. It was a Sunday morning and and and then all of a sudden I realized I was standing in a tunnel where there were no there were no clear boundaries. And four monarchs went by. I'm like, And I looked down the beach and there were little dots going about. I could see as far as I could see and dots coming to me. And I remember monarch came and landed at my feet and touched a flower, got a taste, and gone. Embarrassed of it, and they know exactly what they're doing. They do exactly what they're made to do, and they do it with such expertise that on some level, it's amazing. So trust in God with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding and he will make your paths. And that occurs through trust, vulnerability, and neediness. And I want you guys to look at Isaiah fifty five two and three. It's the most amazing passage because it it presents us with a direct assault, a direct conflict. It says, come, all of you who are thirsty, all of you who are thirsty, come to the waters. For all of you who have no money, come and buy and eat. Now, did you get the conflict? For all of you who are thirsty, which means you need a drink, And for all of you who come to the waters, come to where the waters are, and you who have no money, come and buy and eat. Come buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Okay. Now we're talking about a weird economy that doesn't have performance in it. So what's the currency? Because it's clearly a currency involved. And the currency is conflict to our brains, but will engage our hearts. This currency, this conflict is a conflict to our brains, but will engage our hearts, which says, for all of your hearing, you don't hear. For all of your seeing, you don't see. Cause if you did, you would understand with your hearts and you would turn and I would heal you. That's the parable of the seeds from the book of Matthew 13. Here it is. There's a currency involved. What's the currency? How do you get this wine and milk? How do you get this water at the river? The currency is neediness. Unless you get good at neediness, you're not gonna have everything you need to have. Neediness is the currency that that is what purchases, what we need, what we're looking for, what we've got to have to be able to live well and expertly, so we can live in the Monarch Tunnel, so we can go from hive to flower, so we can make the bird's nest. I'm saying there's something going on within you that you don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about, but to something you just simply need to surrender

to. 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.