READ OUR INTERVIEW IN PSYCHOLOGIES HERE

Dr Dina Glouberman is the visionary Co-Founder of Skyros Holistic Holidays on the Greek island of Skyros, and author of the classic books Life Choices, Life Changes; The Joy of Burnout; You are What You Imagine; Into the Woods and Out Again; and most recently ImageWork: The Complete Guide to Working with Transformational Imagery.

Dr Martin Rossman, leading imagery author in the USA, has said about ImageWork, 'In my 50 years in the field, this is the best book I have read about working with imagery for healing, creativity and personal transformation. A landmark book—I shall be studying it.'

Dr Glouberman is also the founder of the Aurora Centre for ImageWork in Puglia, Italy which offers ImageWork retreats and training programmes. She is an internationally known psychotherapist, coach, consultant, and pioneering specialist in burnout and in imagery. (www.dinaglouberman.com)

Dr Glouberman is offering a five-part Introduction to ImageWork training course in January-March 2024 hosted by Onllnevents;  for information and booking please go to https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/cc/introduction-to-imagework-with-dr-dina-glouberman-2765779

She is also offering a 5-day Fundamentals of ImageWork in-person practitioner training course in Puglia in May 2024. For information please write to lynnljones@btinternet.com  

Do you make time each day to imagine how you WANT things to go?

Let me know in the comments!

WHO AM I?

I'm your host, Eve Menezes Cunningham, author of 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing and Editor-in-Chief of the Irish Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy.

I'm a trauma therapist (with lived experience), supervisor and Self care coach (integrating yoga therapy, NLP, EFT and crystals as appropriate) helping people connect with and take better care of their Self. Past Chair of BACP Coaching I run Feel Better Every Day with Eve Menezes Cunningham (aka selfcarecoaching.net).

I started The Feel Better Every Day Podcast because I realised that even with the focus of my work being self and Self care, I often struggle. And so do so many of my colleagues! We're all human! So I interviewed several of them including neuroscientists, authors writing about health and wellbeing, fitness professionals, therapists, coaches, energy workers and medical professionals.

We ALL have gaps and even gulfs between what we would LOVE to be doing for ourselves each day and what we actually do. My hope with each episode is that you'll go easier on yourself and do something rather than nothing from your own ideal self or Self care repertoire. Create a life you don't need to retreat from! Let me know how you get on! I really love hearing from y'all.

WANT TO WORK WITH ME?

If you’d like to create a life you don't need to retreat from and learn how to befriend and heal your mind, body, heart and soul, join the Extra Embodied (Wellbeing with Eve) community at evemc.substack.com ~ if you're listening later, you'll have instant access to the rich archive of recordings (for paid subscribers) and older posts (for all subscribers) from the time you join.

Thanks again for watching, listening, reading, sharing, commenting, reviewing, SUBSCRIBING and joining us.

@thefeelbettereverydaypodcast

@evemenezescunningham

Hi, I'm Eve Menezes Cunningham and welcome to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast, helping you connect with and take better care of yourself and create a life you don't need to retreat from.

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Welcome to Episode 16 of the Feel Better Every Day Podcast.

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Today's guest is the delightful Dr Dina Glouberman, author of The Joy of Burnout, Image Work and so many other gorgeous books and she's talking about finding joy through burnout, image work, gratitude and so much more.

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I'd love as you listen for you to think about your own experiences of burnout or near burnout and recovery

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and I hope you enjoy the episode

So welcome Dr Dina Glouberman thank you so much for joining me on the Feel Better Every Day Podcast

I'm really excited to be here I think it's such a great idea

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and you've just been so lovely.

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You're known for co-founding Skyros, the retreat in Greece and also for many, many wonderful books including most recently ImageWork.

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How long have you been doing all this and what are you working on at the moment?

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How long have I been doing all this?

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Should I say 50 years?

50 years or more.

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Doing different things but I think the thing is that are kind of basic is one is the area of the imagination.

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I've always

I've been interested in opening yourself up to your vast imagination, understanding who you are, finding out your own truth.

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I was always interested in the truth and I saw that the social truth that mediated by the language was going to give you something very partial and the thing about imagery is that it goes really

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both personal and universal.

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And so that was always very exciting because it took me through all my difficult times.

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So image work is a big area for health and healing, for creative things, for understanding your relationship to life, all the things that life's about.

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And it really, I'd say, brought me where I am now.

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the other thing is burnout. I burnt out as well didn't know I'd burnt out until 10 years later or something the word and I said ah that was what it was and that's when I realized that what people said about burnout too much work and no life work balance it was just not true because for me I'd always worked too hard I'm sure you did and no life balance and and

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As long as I was wholehearted, I was fine.

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It was when I became divided against myself that became a problem.

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And that's how I wrote the book, The Joy of Burnout, because somehow you have to find... It's almost like your organism is standing up for joy, saying, you can't do this thing.

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You can't drive yourself to destruction.

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You need to find your joy again.

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And I burned out.

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I didn't get my full energy back for 10 years.

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So, seven years, seven years.

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Yeah.

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and the other thing I'm very into is community is yes creating uh Skyros the first and foremost thing was that people would come to a place where they could be themselves in a community and that which I call a soul community because it values you for who you are and who you're becoming and not for your role as wonderful a traditional community I was just talking to one of the um

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Italian men here I'm in Italy right now and he's saying he can't go back to his hometown to live there because he won't be able to go to the hairdresser he wants to go to the butcher he wants to go to or anything else he wants to go to because there are there are rules about that's his uncle and he has to do that and that's you know so these traditional communities they are wonderful for love and care but not if you're a little bit different absolutely

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you know so that's why I call this old community and I've also started something here in Fulia which is called Aurora and also running courses but also creating community and people can find out about though they can access links in the show notes so they can sign up and find out more

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um what would you like to tell me about if you had all the time and energy in the world what would be your ideal self-care both for basic self-care and for connecting with the divine if that's something you do in the morning yes that was quite an interesting question you know so I do have this thing which I

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I'll tell you the ideal, I suppose, and then I'll tell you what I really do.

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So I do have this thing that I learned from the shamans, that before you get up in the morning, you say, thank you for my life.

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And I've started also saying, when I remember to do it, thank you for life, because I think my life is like my personal life, but thank you for life, thank you for the bigger picture of life.

Okay, then I'm in the ideal, I jump out of bed,

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I take a shower this is this is what I watch people do they rush out and they take a shower and then they're all you know gotten rid of all the uh the tiredness and everything then I would do my exercises after drinking only water uh-huh hot or cold or room temperature

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and then I would do my meditation and my meditation is not the normal breathing one but it's one about aligning your mind, heart and soul with your well your mind, emotion and body with your soul and then envisioning the day and so on it's a way of setting yourself up for the day then I would always walk to the cafe and then and then

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I mean that's ideal real and everything else you have to go to the cafe and then and it's partly because I live on my own and you go out and you meet the world and there is some research that says that the people that you meet um that those connections yeah

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okay the basic principle which I actually do do really is that you have to set yourself up to meet the day and set yourself up to meet the day and I learned this when I had small children that if I got up and I hadn't done that for myself then I'd feel pushed around by their needs and demands

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but if I had found my little center and felt I knew who I was you know because I had to remember that every morning maybe everybody else remember who I am once I was settled then it worked yeah you know then I could meet the kids with myself instead of feeling like a victim of what they want so that's

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this sort of ideal thing now the one thing is well sometimes I say something positive and sometimes I forget i i sort of struggle out of bed I don't know that I jump out of bed unless I've sort of laying there for too long and I realize I'm going to be late I almost never take a shower I mean this is why this is my big

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ideal thing I think is a really good thing to do people always love it but for me I'm one of those people that find transitions difficult the idea of stepping into a shower when I've just got up is yeah is beyond my um uh I don't know my whatever my ability to do so

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Well, we've done it a few times when I really had to do it and go somewhere.

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I have started to do exercises in the morning and the way I started to do that was my trainer gave me a three minute exercise and I said to myself I can do three minutes wonderful and it's now gone up to nine minutes I just trained I checked it but I'm still doing it she keeps telling me do this do that and then I'd come back she said did you do it and I'd look at her and we'd both laugh

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But now I do do and it does help and then I do part of my meditation necessarily the whole thing but the thing I always do is the thing that we talked about and is the visioning of the day and what that's about is I vision at the end of the day being happy what am I happy about or what do I feel good about and how did I get there

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and the end of the day feeling bad what's the bad feeling how did I get there and that really sets me up to see what attitude I need for the day so for example what I haven't said to you is before I did this podcast I did that because I do that before everything I do so my positive ending was that I kind of tuned into you and trusted you Eve which I do and then I relaxed

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very generally whenever I do that before a workshop before anything it always turns out that it's not about teaching as much as I should or but it's always about the connection yeah the connection then it works well that's why it is for me anyway absolutely that that's so wonderful and the giving yourself permission then to relax yeah that's right now I forgot to say I do go to the cafe that that is in my real

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yeah morning as well I I occasionally take this longer walk but depends on on how busy I feel and I eat breakfast and all my life it's taken me three hours even when I was most busy three hours between when I get up and when I sit down at my desk I don't know how many people

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Partly I think I once had a stress test which said that my cortisol is too high at night and too low in the morning and it takes me time to get there.

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but whether or not I would be going for a walk or just sitting and staring with my tea it seemed to be three hours I think sometimes it's a bit less now but yeah I'm not the sort yeah writer friends who like jump out of bed have their tea at the desk and they're writing already for the first three hours no it's not I can't do it I care unless I have a deadline and then and then

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when you have a deadline everything changes as you know but otherwise three hours you know is my so if anybody thinks they're slow I'm probably slower I love that because it takes me a while I have a really kind of long morning routine to make me feel like I can handle other humans I can deal with humaning um so I yeah I'm not one of those people who leaps out of bed and is immediately

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and I think the other thing is it's my time yeah you know and if I think well I have to go to the cafe in the morning and I'm going to have to do my shopping and this that and the other thing I get anxious yeah and to have some time and actually this originated I just remember from an um am I taking too long not at all okay so many many years ago

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when I couldn't get out of bed because and I would put the snooze alarm on every five or ten minutes for an hour and I worked out that it was because in my picture when I got out of bed I would be bent over with my work because I was very busy then so why would you want to get out yeah and at that time

I promised myself that I wouldn't do anything before I had a cup of tea.

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It was very simple.

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And that cup of tea got longer and longer.

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But that enabled me to get out of bed because I was coming out of bed straight to work.

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Yeah.

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It was a space.

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Brilliant.

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It was a space for me.

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And I'm sure there's a lot of people that would benefit from that.

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Definitely.

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So what about later in the day and before bed?

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What would be your ideal and what is the reality?

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Well, I don't know what my ideal is for the rest of the day.

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I'm sort of more ideal in the morning.

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a lot of my self-care is the imagery so so what happens is uh as i said i'll do that visioning exercise and I'll do it as I said just before anything I'm doing like a workshop or whatever yeah I have an exercise which I love which is called The Golden Path

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you do is you have two mountains which are two opposite things you tell yourself like I'm no good I've never been any good or I'm so fabulous I can heal the sick and raise the dead and then and then you walk down the path in the middle and you breathe you have a walking meditation and you get what the real truth is because on that wonderful moment as Thich Naht Hanh used to say and um

He was a Vietnamese person for people that don't know and who I loved and so if I get stuck into stuff I might say you know I just don't know what to do now I'm going to walk the golden path so I go into my negative and positive stuff

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and then I walk the golden path.

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I also do that if I wake in the night and can't sleep sometimes.

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If something's bothering me I might do the golden path or the simplest thing is I have an image of the light behind me which is the light of the soul or whatever you want to call it and you just step back into the light and you breathe and then something is different then you see things differently or I have a consultant sitting across

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and I say to someone I'm feeling really awful I don't know what to do about this can you help me depending on who what I need help with I'm a different person then I change seats and become the consultant and I look at myself and I have this question what can you see about so and so they don't know about themselves so I look at myself get a sense

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when I say look at myself I look at the place I was sitting yes yes who had some remnants of yes there and I get a sense of it and I and I give advice so sometimes I might say I think you're fine you're just getting worried about nothing or I might say I think you're in a mess and this is what you do about it so those are some of the things that I I don't

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What I find that works for me that maybe works for most people is that you get up and you do your work and you get everything done and you make sure to keep busy and you make sure your time is fully committed and then no harm is going to come to you.

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I think the world is realizing that that is not the way forward I think there's more and more about the importance of rest and we're not machines

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but it's not just rest it's not about rest only it's about coming back to myself sensing what's the right way forward because I do notice that people who do do that they're very efficient but when the time comes that they need to be creative find a new way forward that's more difficult because they're kind of more rigid in yeah in this thing of I have to get things done

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and by the way when I work with other people like either work with someone like my assistant and my administrator or work in a group I try to start with a check-in so we both have a check-in you know me and my administrator Lynn we always start off with a check-in which begins

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I invite you to throw away what's on top of your mind and see what comes up from one.

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Oh, I love that!

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Really wonderful.

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because you throw away all the blah blah blah yeah blah blah yeah and you really get in touch we do that and then we send each other love yeah we do all that I think that is why we are still together after all these years because you know I'm not a thing and I also just like this weekend I had a master class for my um

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and I said let's start with a check-in and it's so important that we did that took a long time but we were together and people felt supported and it turned out had some difficult stuff happening and for us to go straight into what we were doing would have missed that yeah and one of the women

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It's inspiring because she had just been told by the consultant that she had a tumour and he didn't know what kind of tumour it was.

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And she said to him, in order for me to be able to work with you and trust you, I'd like you to get an image of this tumour for me.

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of this tumour so she asked him to do image work basically because that would connect her to him and she would trust him and he did brilliant and he gave her an image of of the tumour which she found a bit scary yeah she felt connected to him so that was so interesting she couldn't just do the work

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of this is blah blah blah she had to make a connection and I think that is real self-care you know and my experience of meetings where you don't do that is everybody comes with their stuff and if it's not good stuff you've had a bad time or time coming to work

SPEAKER 3

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it all flies all around yeah you know so that's really important to me I love that because it's self-care in relation to the people that you're spending the day with yes um yeah and is there anything else like kind of in terms of winding down or anything else that you'd like to add about ideal and essential or

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okay so so I think you were asking about the night routine yeah uh I was thinking about that that I do try to finish working early but that's probably because I'm I'm hopeless at night I just don't want to do it you know I'm done um and I do try to eat early and not to eat afterwards sometimes

22:03

extremely unsuccessfully but I don't stay off the computer as they say stay off the screens because I'm in Italy right now for two months and so on the people that I'm close to a lot of them are not here yeah connecting with people on skype more important than not having yeah so I spend time on screen very often with other people and that makes me feel part of the experience

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world of people that I care about and that care about me so I think that's really important wonderful so the sound just went but you were saying about how you're on Skype with people and it's more important to connect people that I care about rather than to stay off the screen absolutely yeah and then when I go to bed I tend to play a little um

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audio of some kind like a podcast or something just briefly I suppose it's the tradition of bedtime stories I never had those I don't think my mother my mother was an American she came from Jerusalem and she I think the concept of reading to the child didn't cross her consciousness but but

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I think that thing of being able to listen yeah I don't I don't that's another thing I don't do as much as I would want to is read yeah a lot more and now I tend to kind of listen and I'm sorry I'd like to get back to reading more actually

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okay but i mean they're different things aren't they they're it's a different I love that you're giving yourself that story time before beds in whatever form yeah I'd love to know what you'd be doing if you could go back 50 years or longer and send yourself some love and advice around self-care or anything else what might that be okay that's it that's a good one because that's one of the things I do with imagery yeah go somewhere else and look back

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okay so let me just I'm gonna have to do it I'm going to do it I'm going to go back to when I was in my 20s oh you know so I'm looking at her and I'm saying oh my god you know you're in a hurry aren't you and you and you always think you haven't got enough time and you're never going to accomplish what you're supposed to accomplish in life and um and some of it is like really

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kind of great that you kind of left your country came to England wanted to explore the world but some of it is like you know you're anxious a lot you're depressed a lot you don't feel good about yourself a lot and I guess I want to say slow down yeah I just want to say slow down it's all there for you

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it's all there for you if you slow down and if you slow down all those things that are important will occur to you but when you're speeding around the place you're doing a lot you're accomplishing a lot and you will go on to accomplish a lot of things write a lot of books start a center do a lot of things that make a difference in life to other people but the pace

is unforgiving of yourself and if I could start all over again with you I'd do it all slow motion

Amazing thank you so much where can people find you online and I'll have the information in the show notes but what's your website

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My website is dinaglouberman.com and you can find things about the centre here, Aurora, about Skyros, about my books, about your courses.

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I'm starting a course with online events, Introduction to ImageWork in January, really great course, and then I'm doing one training course here in Italy by the sea in May.

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and then one in October which is a retreat and and the courses in I haven't done this training in Italy yet but the ones here we turn away as many people as come because once people come here they never want to go and we create community and people great Italian restaurants and and drink coffee and great cafes

Thank you for listening to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast.

27:28

As you listened to Dr Dina Glouberman, I wonder if you asked yourself about your own experiences with burnout or near burnout and I'd love to hear from you around how it impacted your self-care

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What you do to minimise, avoid, recover, prevent, however you deal with it.

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We live in such a busy world, it's really challenging sometimes but there are always things you can do and I'd love to know which of the things you've heard today appeal and that you might try.

So please leave a comment or rate, review, share, all of the above.

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this episode like all episodes so far has been produced by me, your host Eve Menezes Cunningham and I am very much also looking forward to sharing next week's episode with my good friend Kathie Bishop

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who's a medical herbalist specialising in vaginal health and she's also the author of Your Power Portal so we're doing this issue to coincide with the hips and reproductive organs element of

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the Love Your Whole Self Chakra Journey that I'm running over on Substack and on my blog which you can find at evemc.substack.com or selfcarecoaching.net and I hope you'll find it beneficial learning about how you can work with your hips and your reproductive organs

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to support your sacral chakra in supporting you and helping to begin to ground all the work we've been doing these past few weeks.