TA Ep. 167 Dr. Gay Hendricks - Are You Sabotaging Joy, Peace & Alignment with the Upper Limit Probelm?

Dr. Gay Hendricks: well, thank you, Leigh Ann. It's my pleasure.

Leigh Ann: We, we were chatting off air just briefly and you said, can you, you'd love to have a question no one's ever asked before. And I'm hoping to bring one of one or two of those in, but for the audience that might be new to this topic of upper limiting the big leap, I do want to make sure we cover some of the basics there.

But actually before that. I have a little bit of a selfish question of my own, which is when it came to actually writing the book, you, I, I've read the book, obviously you had been in practice, you were starting to see these patterns within yourself, probably within some of your clients or patients, but when it actually came to that crossover between I'm seeing this and I'm going to write a book about this.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Yes, but in a kind of a strange sort of a way. Um, excuse me. It's allergy season here and the, uh, trees around here are pumping out all of the things that, uh, we Southern Californians are allergic to. Uh, so I'm going to take a swig off my big water bottle here.

Leigh Ann: Oh, please do. I'm in Dana Point. Not, not too far. Not too, too far. So I know, I know it.

And so Sandy was riding very high and took us on as clients and, um, sold us to Prentice Hall for a great deal of more advanced money than we'd ever. contemplated in our lives. And we were both university professors at the time. So, but we quickly changed our own upper limit, expanded it. And, uh, so, [00:03:00] uh, but the big leap was the result of many years of just writing one book after the other.

And the reason I, I hedged a little bit was because I put off writing The Big Leap for many, many years, uh, not for any other reason but timing. Uh, I would get, um, something juicier that I wanted to do and then I would need to finish that and then I'd get back to The Big Leap. Um, I probably spent 30 years thinking about that book.

Leigh Ann: Oh my gosh.

I, um, I write them out, of course, with a with a computer, but I'm always sounding the poetry of them and the sound of them in my mind. It's, um, I don't know if you call it a writer's trick or what, I don't know where I learned that from, but it just seems like the natural thing to do to make sure it sounds good as well as looking good on the page.

Leigh Ann: Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah.

But I, I wrote the proposal for that Actually, I wrote the first line of the proposal something like 120 times to get it just the way I wanted it. And again, that's not unusual for creative artists. Um, uh, one of my favorite Leonard Cohen songs, um, called, uh, Take This Waltz. It's adapted from a poem by Lorca.

Yes.

Leigh Ann: it almost sounds like you're tapping into some intuition there too. Like it's a feeling and when you read it out loud and you get that feeling, you know you've got it right.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: And that's finally what happened after that 120 different iterations of the first line of the proposal for conscious loving. I got it right. And the thing is that once I got that kind of voice right, the rest of the book was so much easier to write because all I had to do was Keep tuning into that original voice and, uh, that carried me right along through the whole thing.

So there's a number of ways you could do it. But, um, it, if you can, um, find that voice that's perfect for this material, it would be different with every one. That's what's exciting about being a writer. Um, I recently had to calculate up how many books I'd written and it turned out to be 51.

Leigh Ann: Oh my God.

And then there was my kind of self esteem phase, which was like characterized by learning to love yourself. My book learning to love yourself, which were a lot about self esteem and how to feel better about yourself. And then I went into, as I worked with more and more executives, that's when I went into the big leap territory because I kept seeing this thing called, I called it the upper limit problem, where people would have something great happen over here.

So it was a creative cauldron. And we kept getting in my counseling center, we kept getting a lot of these extremely bright executives that were emotionally about not even eighth graders. you know, because they've been so praised for this all their life. And quite frankly, there are some of them still walking the seats of walking around the whole halls of power, with names you'd recognize who basically have eighth grade emotional development with, uh, unbelievably, uh, immense cognitive powers.[00:10:00]

Um, pause for water once again.

Leigh Ann: Sure. I'll pause with you because I am always sipping on some water. Well, you're giving me the perfect segue, which is I could talk your ear off about writing because I aspire to write and that's been something since I was a child. child. I think that was the first thing I said I wanted to be was a writer. So that is always in the back of my mind. And even hearing you describe that you went through different phases of writing topics or genres is very expansive for me to hear.

Yeah, we don't need to be boxed in with one thing. I think being very multifaceted, that is very, inspiring and expansive for me to hear. So I could spend the hour talking all about writing. I won't because I don't think the audience that will be as expansive for them. With that said, you already teased this idea of upper limiting.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Well, now we're doing this on video, so you can tell if I'm lit up at a glance here. Um, and remind me, what was the first question?

Leigh Ann: Just, what is

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Oh, what is the basics? Okay. Well, basically an upper limit is when you find some way to knock yourself back down after a period of feeling good, or it could be something you do out in the world that kind of messes up something that's going on.

And he says, take the rest of the afternoon off. So the guy skips across the parking lot, gets in his car, drives home, proceeds to have the worst argument he's had in months with his wife and kids. Hmm. Why does that thing keep happening over and over again? And the thing I came up with is that human beings are basically allergic to feeling good for any period of time without messing it up in some way.

Leigh Ann: hmm. Mm

Dr. Gay Hendricks: years ago that people started living in cities and towns. You know, that is not a very long time ago. And I've been in countries today where a great many of the people walking on the street don't have shoes.

So there are various levels of poverty, but that's one of the basic ones to look for if you're looking for how a society is doing. And so, um, human beings got here by having lots and lots of tools for dealing with adversity. And that leads us then in a time of when we start feeling good for any period of time to knock ourselves back down.

And there's lots of beautiful stores here with jewelry and things. And there's this one store that I walk past often and I walk past and I paused to look in the window at these beautiful rings that were being displayed. And I just paused and sort of drank in the beauty of them. And then I started on down the street and 10 seconds later.

And I realized there it was, the upper limit problem again. I didn't know how to continue to walk in beauty, you know, on down the street carrying with me the beauty that I just apprehended. I didn't somehow felt afraid of that. And so I closed in and soonly my mind begins to think of. negative imagery.

And there we go. And so that's the upper limit problem.

Worry, criticism, deflecting, squabbling. These were your four core.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Yes. And something to also remember and think about with the upper limit problem is what they're based on. And all upper limit problems come out of fear. And there are only a few fundamental fears that I call limiting beliefs that sit down there in your unconscious and actually affect whether you're going to have the upper limit problem or not.

One of the biggest limiting beliefs, Leigh Ann, is the belief that I'm, I'm fundamentally flawed in such a way that I don't deserve the good things.

Leigh Ann: Mm

And it's because your self esteem is an inside job. It's never going to be fixed by the things you have or the things you put in your mouth or any of that kind of thing. It's. That feeling of fundamentally that you are loved and lovable. And so that feeling deep inside that you are loved and lovable.

Leigh Ann: Mm hmm.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: focus on that place of expanding that place of not feeling entitled, like just being I'm entitled, but just feeling like you belong here in the great flow of creation, this universe, that I'm part of it. I'm not some separate, separate unwelcome entity that can never quite fit into the rest of the universe.

Leigh Ann: Mm hmm. It, um, to give a little context, so I have, I have a practice and I work one on one with clients. I use a technology called EVOX, which is, we can measure the tones in their voice to see what emotions are imbalanced and then we output balancing frequencies, but I pair that with this. subconscious work.

And I'm actually starting a PhD in depth psychology in September over at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. So the, the unconscious, the beliefs, this is kind of the world I, you know, the lake I swim in every single day. And what I've seen time and time again, even though People are coming in with all sorts of different areas of turbulence in their life and all sorts of different beliefs.

Ultimately, they all kind of go into one of two buckets, either I don't deserve it or it's not safe.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Both contributing to what we are attracting in and what we are repelling.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Mm hmm.

Leigh Ann: And that is so profound and it almost gives us clues. What, what do you feel like? I tell people think about what is it that you're attracting in that you seem to be experiencing a lot of that you don't want that it's like, it just keeps coming into my orbit, a type of person, a type of job, a type of experience.

And likewise, what are those things you are wanting? The relationships, the jobs, the lifestyle, the finances, et cetera, that you are wanting that seems sort of ever elusive. Now we need to go down and break, you know, kind of look at the subconscious and where some of that stuff is coming from.

Leigh Ann: Yeah. I, and I do find a kind of Perry. Cause one of the questions I had, which it was just knowing this upper limit framework. is immense. I catch myself all the time ever since reading the book. Oh, I'm doing it. Oh, I'm doing it again. I'm doing it again. And so often that's enough to get me to course correct or pivot my thoughts and let whatever that negativity was or that sabotage go.

But sometimes it's really sticky. Sometimes my brain is like, no, no, no. We really need to stay in this place, which then in that case for me, and with clients and patients, it's okay, let's do the deeper digging. Why can't my subconscious let go of this? I'll give you a really clear example in my own personal life.

And then the next month it would completely drop back down. And I really did a lot of reflecting on that. And, um, ultimately, like when I really did that deep, deep work on it, I realized. What's happening here is I'm afraid, ultimately, I'm afraid to be seen. Something in my subconscious is telling me that's unsafe.

And when I track that back to its origins, for me, I think that really tracked back to some early childhood sexual abuse. And it was like, Ooh, when I was seen as a child, It wasn't good. I didn't like that. So being seen could be really dangerous. And so I, I want to avoid being seen. And at some point my subconscious was like, this, this amount of being seen is too much.

Can I start to believe that not everyone wants to treat me that way? And two, that even if there are some bad people, I attract for whatever reason, I have so much more power and autonomy to protect myself. And that is like the dismantling of some of those deeper beliefs for me that that contributed to that.

And so anyway, the point I'm making is sometimes just identifying the upper limit is enough for me. Other times, like when it keeps coming up and it keeps coming up, I got to actually listen to That deeper thing that's being communicated and then hear it, release it, expand it.

And the moment you begin to say, Oh, that may be something in here. inside me that's tripping this upper limit swish rather than something that Apple is doing or, you know, something out there. Always start looking at the easiest place, which is in your own inner limitations. And I really appreciate the way you then saw what those limitations were and saw what they had to be based on some fear of being seen.

Leigh Ann: Yeah. Yeah. Cause when I was reading the book, so much of what I was thinking about is 100 percent there is this sort of evolutionary primal response. We're kind of working against, which is the unknown is inherently dangerous. That's kind of how our nervous system labels things. And that, that is that old, old primal piece that we're working against a little bit.

Um, but then we do have life experiences, especially some of those early childhood life experiences that can create these beliefs that we don't even realize are running so much of the show. But I feel like your book presented it in such a clear way, which is these beliefs are running the show. Here's like that big picture of what it's doing.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Yes, and that's why I say to ultimately that the only problem we need to contend with is our ability to receive because it's so much easier to put your attention on solving a simple problem, which is. My ability to feel good for longer and longer periods of time and my ability to get along well in my relationships for longer and longer periods of time to Remember that it's not always about just solving problems or slapping mosquitoes kind of thing, but it's about expanding our ability to feel good and to let ourselves participate in the big flow of life.

Leigh Ann: mm hmm. You know the imagery that immediately popped into my mind as you were saying that is it's almost like with the upper limit issue We've got one. I don't know like 12 by 18 canvas and it's sort of like that's it This is all the room we have to paint a pretty picture But the expansive idea you're presenting to us is like what if instead of one little tiny 12 by 18 canvas It's this scroll that is Ever going like you can just keep unrolling it and unrolling it and unrolling it And painting that beautiful picture forever

Leigh Ann: Moo.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: was the challenge of it, you know, not to see them as young thugs, but to see them as brand new entities, um, and learning possibilities. So anyway, I, um, I got in this habit of always, you know, keeping everything filed and on notes and I asked Rondas, where are you getting this stuff? After his lecture, I went up to him and I said, where are you getting this stuff?

And so I, um, this was a brand new field to me. But the thing about Ram Dass is later on, I found that space for myself. And, you know, I can talk for three hours myself without looking at notes because it is all there. And it's an amazing thing that could be that there could always already be these tracks of knowledge and lines of knowledge in the world that run through humanity.

You know, like here, we still see Canadian geese coming south sometimes, and, uh, because they make a particularly distinctive sound that's unlike any other bird in our area. And so, um, how do they know it? And same thing with the turtles that live on the coast of Argentina, but every year they swim 1500 miles out to Ascension Island, which is only three miles, um, to lay their eggs.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that if you can allow yourself to kind of slip free of the bonds of your ego and needing to be right and Those kinds of things are kind of addictions of life. If you can slip free from those and live for a little while in that field of pure consciousness, kind of a sublime kind of not knowing, uh, wonder is another great word for it.

And, um, who was it? One of the great, uh, writers of the, of, uh, success, Napoleon Hill says, the one thing that stands between us and success is our parents, our town, our history, our ancestors, that At some point, we have to take that and jump free of all of that. And many of us, of course, spend our lifetime batting up against our ancestry and, uh, picking fights with it.

Leigh Ann: Mm hmm. I, I think that poem is a perfect segue into a question that I think we, we both already know the answer to, but I want to ask it here for the audience sake, which is, so is there any limit then? Is there any cap to the amount of joy and peace and alignment that we can feel?

And then I wrote the book in, whenever it was, 2008, and The Big Leap. And so, um,

it's the perfection of something that I've been thinking about for 50 years. And here's the thing, inside you, Lianne and Insight, every person that watches this and listens to it, they have that same thing that there's something down in there that we and they need to be paying attention to that needs to be brought forth.

And if we bring that forth, then we get to have a happy, successful life. And if we don't, we get lost in the infinite circuitries of our subconscious of things that are keeping us from being who we really are meant to be.

And I had this moment of, Oh, this, This could be enough. This is where a lot of people stop where it's just like, great. I have a full schedule. I show up. I do that every day. I don't expand into anything else outside of that. And there's nothing wrong with that. If that is what is kind of that ultimate fulfillment, but I, I always have that little nudge of like, Ooh, okay, here's, here's what I need.

It's the next thing I want to bring into the world, the next thing I want to pursue. And it's not, you know, at the expense of the thing I've built so far, but it just was an interesting thing because it became so clear to me that I have a choice. I can choose to go, great, this is it. This is enough. I'm going to stay right here with my full schedule for the next 50 years.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Yes, because I get email all the time from people who are going through their upper limits and nobody's ever yet sent me one out of the thousands I get. Nobody's ever said, I found the edge.

Leigh Ann: Yeah,

Dr. Gay Hendricks: You can't go any further than here.

Leigh Ann: it's scientifically proven. This is, this is it. You will explode if you have any more goodness.

And so everybody kind of took this into consideration. And then said, wait a minute, you know, let's, let's experiment with this a little bit. And then we found that we did not indeed explode at 30 miles an hour.

And so then we kind of go, Oh yeah. Once we get comfortable with a certain amount of abundance or goodness, whenever we want to go to whatever that next level is, I feel like it almost is inherent that that upper limit is going to kick in a little bit. And so approaching it from that of like almost expecting it, like, Hey, I'm sure I am trying to go to the next level.

Some of this upper limit stuff might come in, versus if it's this intention of like, Ooh, I got to get to a point where I never ever experienced that again. I don't know how realistic that is. Hmm.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: unrealistic. In fact, I recommend that instead of thinking of it as a linear up and down thing, think it of your learning as a spiral, that your ascension into your genius is a spiral where as you come around, even at a higher place. you'll see or experience some of the same thing you experienced here.

And I've had both kinds, and now I request that my, uh, lessons be largely in the form of a tickle feather, unless there's something I absolutely need to experience that couldn't be done any other way than a painful experience. And so, uh, I think if we can allow ourselves to experience our lessons in a gentle way, which may mean picking them up quicker.

If I think of the several times in my life when I've experienced that, it's often because there was something I wasn't paying attention to 18 times that I finally got to pay attention to through something unavoidable. I had to stop and pay attention to it.

Leigh Ann: Mm hmm. I think of so many of the cancer and chronic illness patients I work with and want to be careful with my words here because, of course, there also are physiological contributors that can lead to cancer and chronic illness. And also what I so often share with them is sometimes cancer is the body setting the boundary that you didn't.

And thankfully the people I work with, they're, they're coming to me saying, okay. I do want to take some ownership of this. You know, on social media and some other places I've gotten comments that it's, you're victim shaming and it's just genetics and there's nothing, there's nothing you can do about it.

Thankfully, I don't actually tend to work with those people because the people coming to me are very much so, like, I do want to do that deeper digging.

You know, if you could put it into a minute or 10 seconds or whatever. And he said something that made a huge impression on me. That at that time in his work, he would bring people in for a large conference when they started working with him, and he would say to them, uh, listen, you're, you're going to get the same medications and everything, but you're also going to have to put in some work here because you're going to need to meditate for a while.

And so But he told me that at that point he would ask them to take Responsibility for doing those things and he said that sometimes a half of them would drop out And, boy, there's a really interesting statistic, isn't it? Um, that, uh, and I've had that the same thing, not with cancer, but I've had that a lot with people who needed to go to a certain level in themselves that they hadn't accessed yet, that they, You know, they weren't ready to put away that last sip of whiskey a day, or they weren't, you know, they weren't ready to cut up that last credit card.

And one of the things that we've noticed is that commitment is really the key to everything that if you have. Both feet on the floor and both feet indoors and have closed the back doors and are making a genuine commitment. That's a very different thing, but so many people make an incomplete commitment, you know, like one foot is out the back door and when they commit to the relationship.

And that one little thing becomes a huge thing that then prevents any other kind of intimacy from taking place. So, um, oftentimes when couples come here, the first thing we work on with them is commitment, even though they may have been married to each other for 30 years. You know, what, what's, what's missing in the commitment here?

the better person you are being. The better you are serving others. And so it was very much like, actually don't listen to your heart. The heart is evil. The heart is deceitful. And I have recently started to ponder these bigger [00:48:00] questions, which it might get a little heavy for a second, but I'm, I'm, I wouldn't necessarily categorize myself as a Christian or religious in that way.

I think I feel very much, very spiritual and connected, but don't ascribe to a particular religion, but zooming out and going, okay. Let's just say the world's going to end one day. One day this planet is going to like, poof, go up in a ball of fire and asteroid hits us, it's all over. Why, why does anything I'm doing right now then matter? In a sense, you could say it doesn't. And then that could leave you feeling very hopeless. That's like, well, then why do anything? Which ultimately always takes me back to this place of if, if, if there isn't a bigger purpose, which in a lot of ways I still do feel like there is, I feel there Something other, and there's a connectivity we all have to each other.

That's it. Of what I was taught. And by the way, when I say authenticity and fulfillment, I'm not necessarily talking about instant gratification where it's like, Ooh, I just, okay, what will make me happy just eating ice cream all day? It's not that it's a deeper sense of joy, fulfillment, authenticity. So what are your thoughts?

Leigh Ann: A belief system.

The downside of them is they get eaten sometimes because they don't have the protection of the herd to scare away predators. But we're, if you're in that 5 to 10 or 11 percent, you just have to keep looking all the time. You can't stop looking for how to improve this moment or how to, if you've just invented the electric light bulb, you next, the next thought is not, oh wow, let me stop and.

Have a glass of shampoo and your next thought is, Oh, how can I get that to three buildings instead of just two buildings? You know, it's that kind of thinking that I think characterizes the human being at our very best. Well, the purpose of life, I decided to make up my own based on what I most love to do.

Okay. doesn't appeal to me very much. You know, if you're a Buddhist, you say life is suffering, the cause of suffering is wanting and so you go through that particular loop. That appealed to me a little bit more, but none of them ever appealed to me in the slightest because they didn't feel organic to me, what the meaning of life is.

While I explain to others how they can do it for themselves, or while I work with those who are interested to learn to do it for themselves. Um, the only joy, I mean, there's an old saying about a fable about a king who found this great jewel that lit him up and made him feel, you know, connected to the universe.

Like with me. I express it in the way that I just did that I expand every day and love abundance and creativity because that's what feels best to me. And then what feels best to me after that is not just to enjoy it for myself, but to watch it wake up other people and to talk about the same ideas with other people.

And, um, Nothing gives me more satisfaction. So until somebody comes up and whispers a better meaning of life in my ear, I'm going to stick with that one.

And when I think about on my deathbed, what, what would be the only thing I could look back on and have regrets is if I looked back and said, Ooh, I had this idea to pursue this thing, but I didn't out of fear. You know, if there's no other reason that I didn't pursue it, then just fear that I would have some serious regrets around.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: It's worth having regrets around because they, you know, like one of my favorite quotes comes from the Gospel of Thomas, one of the apocryphal Gospels that's not in the official Bible that they, um, stopped putting new things in way back there. Um, but the Gospel of Thomas says, if you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you.

But if you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you. And there's a lot to be learned from that. Um,

Dr. Gay Hendricks: I do. People are going to start, uh, giving me negative sideways glances here in about 30 seconds. So, uh,

Leigh Ann: Okay. Okay. I'll I'll rein it in. Well, the question I was going to ask you at the end is, um, that I'll leave you to just ponder that I, I think so often about is, um, The question I was going to ask is if you were sitting down with a friend right now and could talk to them about anything, whatever's lighting you up most right now, what would that thing be?

So maybe one day I will, I will get the answer to that question,

Dr. Gay Hendricks: well, let's do it. We could do a whole conversation on that because I know immediately what I do. And it's very carefully laid out in my mind based on, uh, thousands of conversations I've had in the past. So, um, uh, we have a very elegant, quick way of getting to the heart of things like that, that I'd be happy to come on for another hour sometime and teach you.

Translation by

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Thank you. Great being with you too.