[Danielle Balocca]: Hey listeners, this is Danielle. And Shelley. Shelley is a radical Dravidian and racial equity activist.
[Chelli Keshavan]: And Danielle is a community mobilizer and changemaker. And this is the Medford Bites podcast. Every two weeks, we chew on the issues facing Medford and deliver bites of information about the city by lifting the expertise of our guests.
[Danielle Balocca]: Join us in discussion about what you hope for the future of Medford. And as always, tell us where you like to eat. All right, thanks so much for being with me today. If you don't mind just introducing yourself with your name, pronouns, and a bit about who you are.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm Maureen Fallanceer, and I'm a mindfulness-based psychotherapist, clinical social worker, and also a meditation teacher. And my pronouns are she and her.
[Danielle Balocca]: All right, thanks, Maureen. So if you don't mind, I know you have moved away from the area, but hopefully you can answer this question for us. What is your favorite place to eat in Medford, and what do you like to eat there?
[SPEAKER_03]: OK, so my sister lives in Medford, so I get to come here and visit and taste, get little culinary taste tours. But I would have to say Colleen's is my favorite.
[SPEAKER_02]: part of the reason I know there's like great sandwiches and things like that but I always come home for mocha chip ice cream. I grew up on it in Brigham's and it's like oh yeah I always have to come and get some mocha chip so yeah.
[Danielle Balocca]: Well, thank you. And so we're here to talk about a few things, but we do know that you're coming to Medford to the library in January to talk about your book. I'm wondering if you could give us a little bit of background about you, kind of how you arrived at this place where you decided to write this book. And yeah, tell us a little bit more about what it's about.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so the book is called Reimagining Success, Manifesting Happiness and Fulfillment. And my husband and I, he's a psychiatrist. And we both trained here in Boston and then moved to Colorado where we raised our kids. And we were working both together in private practice work and with Department of Human Services and school organizations, lots of different interface with children and families and adults and doing that work. And we, you know, there's, there's endless need, there's endless need when it comes to working with people in struggling situations, right. And there's an old story that a teacher told me, we live in the southwest of Colorado, and a teacher told me a story called the river story. I don't know if your listeners are familiar with it. But it's a story about how two friends are walking up a path along a river. and they see some kids drowning. And they jump in the river and start pulling the kids out. And it's great. And then all of a sudden, they realize there's more kids coming, and there's more kids coming. And they're pulling out, and they're getting exhausted. And it's endless. It's absolutely endless. And all of a sudden, one of the friends gets out of the river and starts walking away. And his friend screams at him and says, where are you going? There's all these kids. And he said, I'm going up river to find out how these kids are falling in the river. And so when you do a lot of direct service work, after a few years, you're like, how did this happen? Right? You start going up river to try to figure out why is everybody falling in the river? And that's what my husband, Mark, and I ended up doing was starting looking at what are the patterns? Why are people falling in the river? What's going on? Is there any way to stop that? help people either not fall in the river or can we teach them how to climb out so that they're not coming down where we're seeing them after years and years of you know falling in and chaos and so um so we started this work where we started kind of mapping this idea that people had about living a successful life. Because a lot of people would come in our office and say, no, I'm successful. I have this job. I have, you know, three cars. I have whatever I might have, 2.4 children, you know, whatever it might be. But unlucky 0.4. Exactly, right? And it was like, but then some area of their life was a mess, right? They're like, I got a drinking problem, or I have anxiety, and I'm up every night, and I can't make it go away, even though supposedly, I'm a successful person, what's wrong here? And so we started breaking down, where's this breaking down? What's happening here? And what we came up with is that human beings have seven domains of functioning, we call them the building blocks. And so it's your psychological functioning, your emotional, your cognitive functioning, your spiritual functioning even, your social relational intimacy issues. And so of these seven areas, supposedly successful people are coming in having difficulty. And what we could see was, wow, they were really successful at like two areas maybe, like really gifted maybe even, right? Like I'm great at math or I'm great at this, I'm a great you know, I'm great at programming or whatever. They had something they were great at, a couple of things. And they were okay at three of them, let's say. But then there were like two at the bottom that they were really drowning and struggling in. And what we found was that when we looked at their whole story, that actually the two bottom things were dragging their entire life down. So people had this concept that if I'm successful in one or two areas, well then life will be great. And what we were seeing is no, because you're successful at one or two areas, and yet you're being really pulled down by this other issue. Like it might be alcoholism, it might be anxiety, it might be drug abuse, it might be I'm addicted to something, gambling, something like that. Or I can't do intimacy. I'm great at work, I come home at night, I can't do intimacy with my family. So what became clear to us was that these two lower domains were really pulling everything down. And if we could help people get those two domains up to just a level of competence, just not dragging us in the mud, then people could start realizing a more successful life or a more fulfilling life and what we came to define a successful life as was not like what you bought and what you owned and not those kinds of things but are you living your true nature you know your authentic nature who you really are and are you living a meaningful and fulfilling life for you whatever that means so that became our definition of success And by bringing up these lower two domains, we started realizing that people had a chance to actually realize a meaningful and fulfilling life for themselves because they weren't being undone by that. Does that make sense?
[Danielle Balocca]: It makes sense to me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so how like, so yeah, how do you do this? Or like, how can people kind of learn more about how this works?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so then it became, okay, let's look at why those are breaking down. And so when we started looking at those domains that were struggling, what we found was that pretty much consistently, people had some kind of trauma or pain or wound in those domains, right? And so, and some of it was big trauma, and some of it was like little life trauma kind of stuff. So I'll give an example, like we might meet somebody who said, you know, they're not functioning very well in the cognitive domain. They have a hard time reading, they're dyslexic, or it could be anything. Or they just shut down from school. They're like, I hated school, and I just don't do it. And yet, that cognitive functioning is getting in their way at work now. And they perceive of themselves as somebody who is stupid, or they can't learn. And when we go back and say, well, where'd you get that story from? You know, we would find, oh, you could deepen somebody down and find that they had a whole story in there about something like, I'll just make it up. You know, in fifth grade, I was reading my book report in front of Miss McGuire's class, and she yelled at me, and the kids laughed at me, and I just said, I'm never doing this again, right? Or the kid who strikes out at baseball and says, baseball is stupid. I'm never doing this again. And so everybody had these stories of pain and shutdown in them. So what we started doing was using, I started bringing together the mindfulness training I have and the psychology training I have to help people mindfully work their way down to that. Like what is that wound? What is that yeah but? What is that no that's there? And then showing them how they could actually release that old trauma that old wound and clear their system and come back to kind of like their what we call your essential nature it's kind of like who you were as a kid before you got shut down right it's like when we were little we'd go outside and play outside of trauma I know some people really had trauma as children but Most people have some memories of going outside as a kid, getting away from the grown-ups. And then there's this freedom, right? This freedom to just explore and be me, and young kids have that, right? And so that's what we're helping people do, is come back to their essential nature, who you are underneath. all the abuts and the nos and the fear and all that stuff, so that you actually can get back on track to realize your potential, to live out your dreams and goals, you know, the things that make your life meaningful. And so we came up with a protocol for how people could do this using some mindfulness, releasing this tension out of their body, coming back to their essential nature, and then building skill, right? So it's, It's like if you, let's say you'd love to learn how to swim, but you're scared of water. You know, chances are we go back and go, oh, there's a memory back there. I almost drowned when I was five years old. Right. And we go ahead and release that skill and get you back in touch with your essential nature. And somebody goes, oh, my God, I really love the water. I really do want to swim. Right. Which is lovely. But you still have to go take swim lessons probably. It's not like you just release your fear and suddenly you know how to do something. You still have to cultivate it. So we say that our true nature is rediscovered and cultivated. Rediscovered and cultivated. Who are you really? Who's your true nature? And how do you cultivate that so that you can actually get back on track where you want to be? Which is really fun. Yeah.
[Danielle Balocca]: Well, and it sounds like the way that you're talking about it now, it has very personal benefit, right? So I'm realizing my potential, what I want to be, what I want to do, being able to remove some of maybe those internal blockages to be able to do that. I can imagine, but maybe you can explain better how this would benefit like a community or how like if we were to work on this just generally how it could also have like that maybe ripple effect into it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh yeah, beautiful. So I love that part because I do want to help develop communities with this, right? So part of what happens in community is that when people come together for a shared experience, they don't realize they're bringing all this conditioning of their own, of their old pain, their old fears, their old what ifs, yeah buts, right? And so everybody comes back together or comes together with a great intention. And then we start grinding with each other around, well, that doesn't feel comfortable to me. Well, that doesn't feel comfortable to me. Right. So in this work, it allows us to actually release the personal edge we have and come back to that deeper nature, our deeper values where we do care about community. Often what I find as a therapist is that we have big, beautiful, open hearts until we're afraid. And as soon as we're afraid, doors start shutting and it's like me, mine, your other, I'm not in this. So I'll give you an example. I was working with a group and they had done a DEI training, diversity, equity and inclusion training, and they really wanted to diversify their I'll say a board. They wanted to diversify the board. But a year later, they actually weren't any more diversified. And so- Classic story.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And they were like, what's up? We paid for this expensive training. Everybody took it. How come we're not there? And so I came in and just worked with this group. And I said, so let me just ask a simple question. Everybody close your eyes. Let's get mindful for just a second. And just notice what happens if I say, so imagine half this board is now people of color, LGBTQIA people. Notice what happens and I could see people like like contract right and it's like so let's work with that let's work with that contraction that happens and everybody did it on their own we didn't share it wasn't it was all private work everybody did private work. But at the end, I said, well, does anybody want to share their experience? They don't have to, but does anybody want to? And actually, the leader of the group said, yeah, actually, I want to share mine. And which I thought was great leadership. And he said, what was interesting was, I couldn't believe it when you helped me deepen down, I found an old fear I had from when I was 12 years old. And it was an exchange that I had. with a black gentleman and he said, nothing bad happened. He said he bumped into me at a movie theater in line and he said, but I got really scared. He was really tall and I got really, really scared. And he said, and all of a sudden I realized I had formed a belief that I had formed a belief that black, this black man is scary. And he said, and I had no idea that was in there. And he said, until you asked us to, like, reflect on that contraction. And when he released it, he got back in touch with his own essential nature, he got back in touch with his heart. And he said, in that moment, thinking about the board being diversified was exciting. Like, I was joyful. I was like, Oh, my God, yeah, but let's do it now. Like, how do we make it happen now? And so it's things like that, that we don't realize that we have these, I call them formation, sometimes their inner child, like you got a inner four year old is freaking out or an inner 15-year-old is pissed off, you know, we all have these parts. And we don't realize how much they actually drive our behavior. And so this work is around how do we get in touch with the limits of that, the things that are limiting us, the fears or whatever that might be, the The doubts, things like that. How do we get in touch with that? And then release that so I can come back to my ground, come back to my centered groundness and go, this is who I am without my fear. And I think when communities do that. then that's when they remember, oh yeah, my heart is open to everybody. If it's not, chances are there's a doubt or a fear or something coming up. Does that make sense?
[Danielle Balocca]: It does, and I think for folks that are listening and are like, why are we talking about this on a Medford podcast? I do think it's very relevant to the way that our community is sort of in crisis right now, where I think fear is the base of a lot of it. It's like, how are we relating to our neighbors? like making decisions as a community. How are we deciding what our shared values are? And I do think that fear comes up a lot for folks. And I see it, right? I see like when people have conversations about different changes that they're seeing in the city or changes that they want, or like who's making the decisions, who isn't. I think that fear comes up a lot. And fear generally like throughout our country right now about like, what's happening? What's going to happen next? What are we going to lose? What are we going to gain? Like, yeah, so I think it feels very relevant.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think so. And I think so knowing, you know, one taking accountability for that, if I'm shut down to somebody, I probably have some doubt or fear about this person or about my experience with this person. And owning that is mine, you know. And then the other piece that comes up is in terms of That fear often then keeps us in a bubble, right? And so if I'm afraid of those kind of people, then I don't associate with them. I stay in my bubble of friends. I stay in my bubble of what's known to me, right? And the problem with that is that when we're in that kind of bubble, we start what's called othering, right? There's us and them, right? Instead of expanding that bubble to be more inclusive to, All of us belong. All of us belong. And so to me, how do we personally get through that? It's by releasing whatever fear we're bringing to that moment. That's what's going to empower us. It also empowers us to have our voice, right? A lot of people have beautiful ideas about the world. And they want to stand up and speak about them. And they're terrified to because I'm afraid of rejection. I'm afraid of shame, I'm afraid of whatever. And I think about like, you know, the way it is, the world is right now, it's it's in a lot of upheaval right now. And, and people have good ideas about how we could attend to it. But you have to have that groundedness in yourself, right? And a lot of times I'll hear people say things like, oh, speak even if your voice shakes. And yeah, I think that's a good thing. But I would much rather help somebody figure out how to release that fear so that your voice isn't even shaking. So that you're actually just really centered and clear. And you're like, you know what? I'm not trying to be difficult here. I'm just trying to include everybody. Something like that, right?
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, sounds lovely. And so people can learn more about your book at the library, and then you want to talk about your training?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so the book is called Reimagining Success, and it's available on things like bookshop.org if you like supporting independent bookstores. And then yes, you can get it in other places, like those big places.
[SPEAKER_02]: The evil empire.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, and there's also, there's also an audio version of the book. So if you're somebody who doesn't, I did that for I had a lot of clients who said they had dyslexia and things like that. And so I did an audio version for them. And so you can listen to it. And it has the mindfulness piece, which is nice. So it has some exercises that you can listen to that are that are helpful. And so there's that. And then Part of what I'm doing is I came home to promote a training that I'm going to start January 2025, so it's coming up this January, and it's actually a training for therapists that might be interested in learning how to do this work, how to show people how to release their own stress, their own pain and fear, even trauma, it even works for trauma, and then help them get grounded in this essential nature so that they have their strength, they have their seed going forward. But it's also available to people that I consider in healing and leadership roles. So right now we have a training going on in the southwest and I would say half that training is filled with therapists and the other half are people who are in healing or leadership roles. So for instance we have somebody who is part of an NGO who does global development work and for her it really helps her get her center and her voice when she's out there in the world working with a lot of chaos on the global scale. So it's good for that. It helps with burnout if you're in one of those jobs where you're doing a lot of caretaking and you're just like, oh my goodness, it's, you know, as the river story says, it never ends. It never ends. And we don't have any resources. Like, how does one meet this? And, and when people get in touch with this essential nature, what I tell them is, it's like you become oceanic. And yes, that might be a 90 foot rogue wave out there. But the ocean's bigger than the wave, right? The ocean's aren't bothered by waves, right? So it's a way of like really finding this deep centering in yourself. So that training will start in January and it's an in-person training, which is really sweet. Six months, it's a six weekend, six weekends. And the point of it is to have it be experiential where people get to do their own release, where people learn how to facilitate with other people. If you're a therapist, for instance, and you're doing therapy work. But also to create a cohort of people in the community in this area saying, we all know each other, we lean on each other, we've got each other, we all know this work. And we've got this center of refuge within ourselves. And when I think about coming into 2025, It sounds like a great idea to like create a group of people that are like, we know how to deal with stress.
[Danielle Balocca]: Well and like I mean I think that mindfulness like we didn't really go deeply into like describing what it is and I think some people have some understanding of it and. I think sometimes people lump it in with like meditation and like yeah there's definitely like an overlap there but I do think finding something in a time that feels like so chaotic and out of our control to like be centered to have at least some control over your own kind of well-being and mental health is is really helpful and like i will say that you and i did practice you practice this with me a little bit and and i was like very surprised as somebody who can be skeptical about these things it was like really powerful um so i mean definitely recommend it professionally and also personally um but yeah i think like a lot of people especially in january 2025 are going to be looking for a way to have some have some sense of control or some thing that they can do to feel empowered or centered or grounded. And this is, I feel like a great option.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and what's beautiful about this is, you know, a lot of times people will use mindfulness to focus their mind on something like their breath or something like that. And by doing that, you do calm your system, which is beautiful. But oftentimes, as a meditation teacher, I'll hear people say, but what's wrong with me, I got up off the cushion, or, you know, and then I yelled at my dog five minutes later, I'm a bad meditator. And what I tell people is, there's two different ways to use mindfulness. One is where we're calming the system. And that's beautiful. And that helps. And that is so so helpful. But the other piece is where we're releasing tension out of the body. And that's where we're using our mindfulness to release the anxiety, to release the heat, to release the pain. And that's where you get the emptying that then allows you to feel more stable for longer periods of time. Does that make sense? Yeah. So it's a both and kind of thing. Both are great. And they they just give different kinds of skills. So if you're somebody who it works for you to calm and that centers and that's great. And but if you're one of those people where you say why common center, but then I'm still me doing me. It's like, well, there's this other way that you can use it to actually release the stored tension in the body. We don't realize we're storing it in our body, but we are it's held in our shoulders and our back and our jaw. It's like this tensions just held there. And so to be able to release it gives us that opportunity, you know. And I want to say one other thing just about, you know, talking about people feeling like they have to do something. A lot of what I'm seeing is people feeling like we've got to stand up and we've got to, you know, some people are saying we have to fight certain things and some people are like, I'm one of the things I want to say about that is I watch a lot of my friends and people on Facebook or Instagram or threads or any of those social media, you know, blue sky. And, and I do see that we are called to do something, you know, to really help during this upheaval. It doesn't matter what your politics are, there's going to be upheaval, right. And so we're all called in community to help. And so there's kind of two ways that I think about it. One is there's this work of Joanna Macy who, she's an environmental advocate, really beautiful. She's in her 90s now, she's amazing. And one of the things she says to remind people is that you don't have to do it all. She said when it comes to healing the world, she actually has found there's like three buckets, three ways to help. The first is some people are called to massage or stop the pain. And she said, these are people who are doctors and nurses and, you know, those kinds of people, she said, lawyers, Sierra Club people, they go to court and stop, you know, something. And she said, so some people are called to stop the pain. But some people are called to change consciousness. And she's like, those people are therapists, coaches, school teachers, they change your consciousness when they're with you, right. And she said, and then there's these people that are the builders, they build the new way. And these are people who are in tech, maybe they build solar panels, they find ways to get garbage out of the ocean. And she said, you don't have to do everything, don't feel overwhelmed. Yours is to figure out what you're called to what your heart says, I can't turn away from this is mine to do. clear the blocks and the fears that are in the way so that you're empowered in your essential nature and then step in to do your piece to do. Are there moments like you know the other ideas like well if you live in a village and you say well I'm just the baker well I'm just the smithy well I'm just you know it's nice we have that but when when the village is on fire Everybody grab a bucket, right? We all come together as community in those moments. And it's like, tomorrow, you get to be the baker tonight, you're the bucket filler, right? So I think of it this way is like, how do we come back to this refuge? How are we going to resource ourselves? And then what's ours to do? What are we called to do? And just to do what you're called to do here. And if there's a big fire, sure, go ahead and grab a bucket. Like, let's just, you know, protect our community all together. You know, does that make sense?
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, it's very calming.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, that's what I'm hoping that this training is really calming, like the people that are in the Southwest are like, Oh, my God, we love it. I had one person tell me that she said, Oh, I got online to see when your Boston training dates were.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I was like, Why? She said, I'm thinking of taking the Boston training. I'm like, you're in the Southwest training. She goes, I know, but I just want more.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was like, Wow, that's, that's a good sit.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so yeah, so that's that's kind of where things are at and And I hope that this drops some gems in in terms of for your community and coming together. I really want to leave us with this idea that we all have open hearts. And when we feel safe and we feel OK, then our heart is way open to everybody. And when our heart closes is when we've been tapped by some kind of fear, some kind of doubt. And so for people to just start getting curious about that, if you're shut down from somebody, maybe take a moment to step back inside and just mindfully ask, what am I concerned about here? What? What am I frustrated with? What am I scared of? What? What's uncomfortable for me here? Because it starts with us. And once we can release that fear, that open heart just opens again. And then it's all of us again. Yeah.
[Danielle Balocca]: And so I'll put in our show notes some of the information that you shared, how to get your book, when the training will be in, when the library event will be. But thank you so much for sharing all this with us. Yeah, thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm so glad I got to hang with you and do this. I want people to have more freedom and joy and community and feel comfortable and resourced as we go through big waves.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. Well, thank you. Thanks.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. The Medford Bites podcast is produced and moderated by Danielle Balacca and Shelly Keshaman. Music is made by Hendrik Idanese. We'd love to hear what you think about the podcast. You can reach out to us by email at medfordpod at gmail.com, or you can rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Guys, what's the name of the podcast? Medford Bites. Medford Bites. Good job.