82: Fulfilled with Anna Yusim

Host: Brandon Nappi 

Guest: Anna Yusim

Instagram: @theleadersway.podcast 

berkeleydivinity.yale.edu/podcast

Brandon:    Welcome to Within, the contemplative segment of the Leader’s Way podcast. I’m Brandon Nappi.

One of the things that comes up, whether it be in my one-on-one work with people in spiritual direction or what’s sometimes called spiritual guidance or spiritual counseling, what comes up with students in our preaching classes, what comes up with our late Leader’s Way fellows as they’re grappling with questions of adaptive leadership and innovation, is this capacity to hold paradox, the capacity to hold two truths simultaneously. Initially, folks grappling with any challenge, whether it be personal or a leadership challenge, often they bring to the challenge a kind of oppositional mind, a kind of either or way of thinking. I either need to do this or I need to do that, which is the opposite of this. I’m often intrigued by both-and solutions most of the time. Solutions that are both-and, that incorporate the key insight, the vital truth from both sides is the most vital way forward, is the path of possibility. 

I’m speaking abstractly, but to make this more concrete, one of the things that we’ve tended to do in the last century is we’ve tended to pit science and spirituality against one another, science and religion, science and theology. And of course, these are two different disciplines. They operate according to different rules. They ask different questions, but they’re not opposites, they’re complements. They’re not enemies, they’re companions. They’re both needed. They each offer a profound way of knowing the world.    

And so I’m often saddened, I’m often disappointed when I see in popular culture and social media the assumption that science and spirit by definition are diametrically opposed. And so for that reason, I’m really excited whenever leaders and thinkers and teachers can bridge the divide. And we have today a wonderful guest, a dear colleague and friend of mine, Dr. Anna Yousim, who has spent the better part of her career spanning science and spirituality. So if you’re someone who has received maybe the false dichotomy through teachers and intellectuals in your life, yeah, I invite you to listen in, to lean in to someone who’s integrated the world of science and spirit, not to say that they always operate according to the same rules or speak the same language, but she’s been a translator. 

So let me tell you about Dr. Anna Yousim. She’s an internationally recognized award-winning board certified Stanford and Yale educated psychiatrist and executive coach with clients, including Forbes, 500 CEOs, Olympic athletes, actors and celebrities. Dr. Yousim is the bestselling author of Fulfilled: How the Science of Spirituality Can Help You Live a Happier, More Meaningful Life. As a clinical assistant professor here at Yale Medical School, Dr. Yousim is presently working to create a mental health and spirituality program and hopefully one day center at Yale with Dr. Christopher Pittenger, which will be a bridge between Yale Medical School and Yale Divinity School. Super exciting. She’s published over 400 academic articles, books, chapters, scientific abstracts, book reviews and articles for the lay public on various topics in psychiatry. She’s a frequent contributor to CNN, Fox News, ABC, and she’s been a guest on hundreds of national and international TV shows, radio programs and podcasts. Dr. Yousim is a distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. 

Welcome to Within, a contemplative segment within the Leaders Way podcast that explores the convergence of mental health, art and spirituality through authentic conversations across wisdom traditions about personal and collective transformation. We welcome artists, musicians, spiritual teachers and healers to reflect on the sacred wisdom needed to heal the world’s deepest wounds. Within examines the inner path to wholeness, not through quick fixes or spiritual bypassing, but through courageous engagement with life’s profound challenges. 

Dr. Anna Yousim, welcome to the Leaders Way podcast. 

Anna:             Thank you, Brandon. It is such a pleasure to be here with you today. 

B:         Oh, I’m so excited for this conversation. We have known each other for years and we’ve been able to collaborate several times. And so this feels like we’re having tea, some old friends having tea together. And I know a little bit about your journey, but maybe not as much as our listeners would love to hear. So I mean, you’re a psychiatrist, you’ve spanned two disparate worlds, worlds that seem disparate anyway, the world of science and the world of spirituality. Can you share a little bit about your path? How did you discover your heart’s calling and how did you find yourself doing this amazing work in the world? 

A:         Absolutely. Thank you so much, Brandon. What a great question. And I, you know, 25 years ago, had anyone told me that I would be a spiritual person, that spirituality would be something near and dear to my heart, I would have laughed. It was the furthest thing from my mind. My journey began as somebody who was a student, very curious, loved mathematics. I come from a long line of math professors and everybody in my family loves math. They do math contest problems for fun. They do all these little puzzles, Sudoku constantly. So that’s what I grew up with. And then I went to this public residential high school in Illinois called the Illinois Math and Science Academy. And then I was on the math team there. And my plan was to go and become a mathematician or a math professor following suit because I had that same passion. I just loved math.

So I got into Stanford, went to Stanford to start to do all the same things I did before, started taking the higher level math classes. And suddenly all the classes are being taught by TAs. The majority of them are from China and most people don’t speak very good English and something. I can’t understand what’s being said. And so this persists and my passion for math slowly starts dwindling. And around the same time, I discovered the books of a Stanford existential psychiatrist, Dr. Irvin Yalom. And his books filled me with so much joy and so much curiosity to learn more about human nature, how the brain works, how our processes and existential dimensions of human experience manifest in people’s struggles and their behaviors. This I found to be so intellectually, academically, and viscerally interesting. So I read all of his books. And by the time I was done with Stanford, I was a pre-med and was going to be a psychiatrist. So that’s how my path sort of changed. But spirituality was not even close to the picture.

B:         Wow. As I listen to your story and I hope you’ll continue, I’m smiling because the universal theme, as I get to ask so many amazing people this question around how they discovered their heart’s calling, there’s two elements that always show up inevitably. And one is hardship. Some challenge happens that completely destabilizes the whole path. It sort of blows up the life plan. And actually, that’s how the discovery of the real work begins. And I’m not surprised to have heard it in your path. So please continue. What happens next? 

A:         Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there’s tons of that. I’m kind of giving you like the broad strokes, you know? Yeah, yeah. And so then I graduate from Stanford. I work as a management consultant for a few years, applied to medical school. And by the time I start Yale Medical School, I know that I want to be a psychiatrist. I wrote my medical school application essay about that. And also, at Stanford, I also study philosophy. And philosophy is essentially a way of mathematizing the mind, mathematizing human nature. So that was another way of just going as deep as possible into how we as human beings think about the world, think about purpose, nature, existence. Those were the questions that drove me. And I felt like psychiatry of all medical disciplines was the place that I can answer those questions and think about those questions together with other human beings in the service of bettering their lives. 

So I went to Yale, completed that. And then I was doing my residency and psychiatry at NYU. And it was only towards the end of my residency that a number of things start happening in my life that I was like, what in the world is this? And how does this fit into this model of the mind that I was taught over all these years? An example of that is I had just gone, I think, you know, towards the end of my residency. I also had met somebody who I thought was my soulmate. So I got very, very interested in this concept of soulmates and soul, et cetera. This person did not end up being my soulmate, but he was a wonderful catalyst for the process and for my curiosity and as an inspiration for this journey and this work. And I remember I had gone to the synagogue to listen to a lecture from a rabbi on this very topic. And I was walking home and I felt like compelled to go into this ice cream store and have an ice cream. 

Okay. So I’m sitting there eating this ice cream and this psychic and a young child come up to me and the psychic says, I’m a psychic and I have a message for you. Can I give you a message? I was like, sure. You look relatively innocuous. Give me your message. Little did I know. And so this woman sits down and ends up telling me all of these deep truths she couldn’t possibly know about my life. Things that aren’t on Facebook, things that maybe are in my journal, maybe, maybe not. And including the name of the guy who I thought was my soulmate, just kind of just … where did she pull this out of? Was she reading my mind? Was she getting some download from somewhere? 

But to me, what this basically said was, wow, the world works in a little bit of a different way than I’d always thought. I thought that all of our minds were separate and distinct. And here’s a woman who, is she reading my mind? Is she reading … Like what is happening here? This is not something I learned about in medical school. I’m supposed to be a doctor of the soul, a doctor of the mind, but something just happened that’s kind of like blowing up this paradigm. I need a new paradigm that’s more expansive of including this experience. 

And so that was one thing that was happening in my rational brain. But in my soul, something else was happening. I remember like distinctly this feeling of like, oh yeah, so that’s how things really work. Duh, of course. And so it was more of remembering. Medical school taught me something. It taught me a paradigm, but the world is so much faster. And it was almost like a remembering that this is how things work. There’s this whole other side. And so I had about 10 or 15 other experiences like this happen in the next year or two. And then I started studying Kabbalah, which started to give me some language and paradigms around this. 

And then eventually, over the next like seven years, I wrote a book that described all these experiences and my private practice in psychiatry with about fifty different cases from my practice, many of which had sort of a spiritual flavor or a flavor of things that are difficult to explain scientifically– or what I would call the science of spirituality. So that’s how it began. 

B:         Wow, it’s amazing. Thank you for sort of opening the book of your life to us. You know, I’m struck by the way in which maybe your own personal life parallels kind of the last century of science and the way in which we believe that the Newtonian world was the only world, you know, was the only way of explaining the world. And then in the early part of the last century, we discovered that at the quantum level, there are all these other rules that operate, many of which we barely understand. And so these two models can somehow coexist. Sometimes they seem disconnected. I believe somehow they are deeply one world. And I wonder if that parallel feels apt, that there’s a way of knowing through science and there’s a way of knowing through spirit. Obviously, there’s only one world, but maybe multiple ways of encountering and explaining and apprehending it. Does that seem fair or would you use a different way of explaining it? 

A:         Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that we’ve been trying for many decades and millennia, we’re always trying to reconcile the world of science with the world of spirit. And there’s many different ways that people have sought to do it, you and I included. And I think that oftentimes it’s a standalone for people. You know, they think it could be separate. And then other times they are and could be one and the same. And, you know, one of the things I’m working to do at Yale, as you know, is to create a mental health and spirituality center, showing that both the tools of medicine are vital for healing, especially mental healing, and that the tools of spirit are as vital, perhaps even more vital at times. So to be able to show the parallels, to show where they overlap and to show how they can be working together in the service of the upliftment of our consciousness individually and collectively. 

B:         That’s so beautiful. Well, let’s start with the book. And then I’d love to hear more about what’s unfolding here at Yale and your world. For some folks, they’ll hear the word science and spirituality in a title together and maybe be puzzled by their assumption that these things are incredibly separate. And of course, you’ve told us the story about how in your own life you’ve explored the ways in which your understanding was completely changed after medical school. Take us through the book and share with us maybe a case. Would that be a good way of beginning? What’s one of the stories that you maybe keep coming back to as you talk about the book and you reflect on this particular client in your life? 

A:         Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. I mean, so let’s first explain why science and spirituality can be such strange bedfellows, right? And so the reason, as I understand it, is because science is always looking for that which is verifiable through empiricism, that which you can see with your eyes, touch with your hands, smell with your nose, that which you could repeat through multiple experiments all over the world by different people. Spirituality and contrast is so often subjective, transcendent, deeply personal, and individual, not something that you could necessarily subject to experimentation. And the experience that I told you, which was such a deeply spiritual experience for me, and you could also say, “Was it spiritual or was it occult, or was it … who, what was going on?” But it felt very spiritual because it was about our place in the world and how our mind fits into that. 

So it’s not a surprise given the methods that are used to understand the spirit versus the methods used to understand science that they are strange red fellows. And this is why we’re creating such programs to figure out how to use qualitative methods of divinity, as well as the quantitative methods of science to come together to better understand, especially the practical implications of spirituality’s role in our healing and how to do that to help people very, very practically and tangibly uplift their consciousness. And as for a patient example, there’s a patient that I often describe, and I wrote about in my book. He was this amazing man that I saw for many years. And at one point, I was on a kabbalistic trip to the Ukraine to see the grave sites of the kabbalists who have lived in Poland. 

And I remember we had this one really sacred, amazing day, went to bed, and I woke up with a stark feeling that something was really, really wrong. And I checked my email, and my patient had literally written me one minute prior to my awakening, letting me know that he was feeling suicidal. And I was like, Oh, my goodness, what is happening here? But by virtue of having woken up right then, I was able to call him from the Ukraine and literally and figuratively talk him off the ledge. Had I not awoken, would he have been fine? Perhaps he would have, but what if he wouldn’t have? What was most meaningful about that experience to both me and my patient was that here I was 10 time zones or whatever, seven time zones and I was 5000 miles away. And somehow I got this transmission that my patient needed me. I don’t think that it was a coincidence that–I don’t just wake up in a start. I’ve actually never woken up in a start in the middle of the night like that. That was something that was very unique in my own experience. So to both him and myself, it was so meaningful that that happened. And it was experiences like this, the so-called synchronicities as Carl Jung called them, that I feel are the universes or gods or whatever it is that we want to call this higher force of consciousness’ way of guiding us. And that consciousness can guide us externally through these meaningful coincidences or synchronicities and also internally through our intuition. 

B:         Wow. That’s so powerful. Oh my gosh, thank you for sharing that. I mean, this brings to mind the notion of knowing or intuition. And in some ways, part of what unfolded that night was a profound knowing. Sounds like so strong that it woke you from your sleep. And I wonder, is this simply a gift that some have and that others don’t have? Are there things that we can do to cultivate this inner knowing? I think recently in the last year, as I’m showing up more and more on Instagram and talking about the spiritual life and creating larger communities around this, this is probably the single most common question that folks come to me with, questions of intuition. It’s really a kind of question of epistemology in a way, like how do I know what I know to be true? That’s the fancy word that philosophers would use. But the simple word, I think is also really helpful. How do I develop intuition? And can I move the dial in terms of my ability to apprehend what is true and to know the truth? And I wonder in your research and in your work with patients, how you’ve talked about and taught your clients about intuition.

A:         There’s so many ways to understand intuition, right? First and foremost, many will argue that it is an emergent property of consciousness, similar to any other emergent property of consciousness; our capacity to feel, to think, to be. And in my research, there’s three primary types of intuition that we encounter. The first one is akin to what Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, the behavioral economics economist who recently passed away, the author of Thinking Fast and Slow, he referred to it more as instinct. And this is the fast thinking process whereby you’re able to have pattern recognition and know the answer to something like this. So that is intuition type one. Type two intuition is when in close proximity with another person, you’re able to receive signs from that person outside of regular communication. And that can be based on what they are wearing, not saying basically when you could go in and know how somebody’s feeling without them letting you know. And this also happens without you necessarily even using the sense of sight, because there’s been experiments of people knowing when there’s someone behind them, when people knowing when others are staring at them, things of that nature. The third type of intuition is that intuition of a mother knowing something is wrong with her child completely on the other side of the world, or a twin having twin telepathy and knowing her twin is in trouble many miles away, similar to what I experienced with my patient that I described. So this is the categorization of intuition that I often use to understand it and how I talk to my patients about it. 

Another categorization of intuition is actually intuition as sort of a psychic phenomena of how we receive information. And so from that there is clairaudience, clairvoyance, claircognizance, and clairsentience. Right? This is how we receive.

B:         I love lists. This is fantastic. Take us through all of these. 

A:         For sure. So this is how we receive information. Clairvoyance is individuals who receive intuitive messaging by seeing with their mind’s eye. So being able to receive by seeing. Not seeing with their eyes, but seeing with their mind’s eye. They receive clairvoyance is you might hear a voice. You know, psychics may hear a voice. That’s clairvoyance–I’m sorry. That’s clairaudience. clairvoyance is seeing, clairaudience is hearing. Clairsentience is you know, you have an intuitive knowing through an emotional response or feeling something in your body. Claircognizance is you know something without really knowing how you know, you just know it. It’s more like a mental process. Sometimes something will come into your head and you’ll just know. So this is another categorization of how you can explain intuition, but it’s something I’m super interested in and I give a lot of talks on this subject. 

B:         And is there something that we can do to deepen any of these senses of knowing or is it just sort of, it’s a gift that you have or don’t have? 

A:         Yeah, yeah. So yes and yes, you know, to some degree, there are people who are born with incredible gifts. And it’s usually genetic. If you have a deep intuitive gift, your grandmother or your mother or father, somebody had that in your family, and it’s passed down. So this is one thing. That being said, all of us have the capacity to develop our intuition in all of those ways. And there are numerous individuals who help people and courses that you can take to do that. There’s actually this amazing woman named Wendy Coulter. She created the Medical Intuition Society and she teaches doctors to hone their medical intuition. I’ve been wanting to take her course forever. And so–and she does it by being able to see the body and to feel in and to get intuitive information, which you can use alongside the rational information that you have as a doctor. So there’s a lot of very interesting things going on in this field. 

B:         If you’re enjoying the Leaders Way podcast, you might like to join us in person as a Leader’s Way Fellow. The Leaders Way at Yale is a certificate program exploring spiritual innovation for faith leaders. The Leader’s Way at Yale combines the best of divinity school, retreat, and pilgrimage. Fellows meet in person at Yale for a week over the summer, then continue their learnings and mentor groups online. You can also take an online course or workshop with us here at Yale. Our learning space for faith leaders is hopeful, practical, and imaginative. Learn more on our website at berkeleydivinity.yale.edu. Clergy and leaders from every country, denomination, and seminary background are warmly welcome to join us for all of our programs. Now, back to the show. 

I wonder if you could connect the dots for us between this kind of knowing, intuition, and discovering your calling in life. This is also something that a lot of folks approach me about with lots of questions. I’m sure folks ask you all the time, how do I know that I’m doing what I’m meant to do? I might be working in a job and I’m not really feeling like all of my gifts are being used. As folks begin to ask big questions around, why am I here? And how can I fulfill my divine purpose? I love walking with people, asking those big questions around vocation. Is there a connection between intuition and purpose, or maybe just more generally, how does spirituality help us to more fully live into our divine calling? 

A:         Yeah, I love that question, Brandon. I know that both you and I do spiritual coaching, spiritual therapy for people around that very question. What is my purpose? How do I get in line with my divine gifts? I believe very much so, intuition can give you answers to those questions in life that nothing else can. That intuition is often the best resource and tool to give you the answers to the most difficult questions. Who to marry? What kind of work to do? What is the desire of your soul? I think those are just the most important questions. And how do you do that? What is the process through which that’s done? That is done by first and foremost, being able to first be clear on what it is that you need guidance for. Second, set the intention and your ask, and that could be from your intuition, from your higher self, from God. Well, let me say one other thing. I believe intuition, if we’re thinking about it from the sense, from spirituality standpoint, that intuition is the voice of your soul. And your soul is the divine spark within you. It’s the connection of the divine to every human being. And so through your intuition, you can get divine guidance. 

And so first you have to ask, you set the intention, and then you are open to receive. And as you receive, you will receive through synchronicity, or you will receive through intuitive messages through one of those four channels that we described. 

B:         It’s staggering. I think I probably would have disagreed with what I’m about to say earlier in my life when I was maybe, oh, I don’t know, more confined to a logical system. But I’ve just experienced too often in my life over and over this opening that happens when you set the intention to be open, when you consciously align yourself with the God of your understanding to use a language, the Holy Spirit to use Christian language, whatever language that you use to name this vast mystery, because the mystery, the reality of this mystery is always bigger than the language that we assign to it. That miraculous things begin to happen, right? That energy follows the intention. And I’m not sure that I would have bought that 30 years ago, but I’ve just over and over in my life seen through my own prayer life, inviting God to direct me. And what happens is quite extraordinary. So, for folks who are listening who may be new to the spiritual life, we welcome your cynicism and we understand any skepticism you might have. 

A:         As a matter of fact, we were both skeptics.

B:         Indeed, indeed. 

A:         At one point.

B:         I wonder if you could talk a little bit from your own professional experience, but from whatever research you want to draw upon, any research that supports this idea that spirituality is a powerful path to healing and wellbeing. There’s been so much interesting work on this over the years. We’re going to have Professor Laurie Santos join us in a couple of weeks. I know she’s done some work around this. I think in the last couple of generations, we have … even the secular scientific community has come to this realization that human beings need spirituality in order to be healthy human beings. And can you talk a little bit about this? This is exciting for those of us who are spiritual leaders already, who are clergy leaders. I know we have a lot of clergy leaders who are listening in who sometimes feel a little dispirited precisely because maybe some of their attendance numbers are not quite what they used to be. And sometimes even struggle like, gosh, is the role of a spiritual leader, is this even important? Does it even matter anymore? And actually scientists may have some hopeful things to say about this, right? 

A:         Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s been shown over and over again in many different contexts that spiritual beliefs and practices help people improve their mental and physical health and wellbeing and decrease depression, addiction, and numerous other ailments. And it’s been shown that individuals who attend church, for instance, very interestingly, have a significantly–five times less rate of suicide. And this is based on humongous effect sizes with hundreds of thousands of people, both men and women. And so they ask, what is it about church attendance that reduces suicidality? Do you know Brandon? Because obviously there’s so many factors, but there was one factor that was a little bit different than the others. It rose above. 

B:         I don’t know what could it be? 

A:         Okay. So the things that people often think are community, life-affirming beliefs, healthy messaging about life, being able to have the structure of church, being able to have the power of prayer. It wasn’t any of those. It was actually fear of committing suicide, fear of going to hell, actually; the moral prohibition against suicide of church going. Not to say it’s a good or bad thing, but that was the number one thing. 

B:         Interesting.

A:         Which church-going … super interesting, right? All the other things obviously played in as well, but that was the number one thing. Now that data, and this is data by Tyler Van Der Weel at Harvard University, that data is super powerful and it is relevant for the majority of populations, but it’s not relevant for one specific population. There is a certain population where church going actually increases suicidality. Do you know what that population could be?

B:         Gosh, no. Who’s that? LGBTQ.

A:         Oh, of course. Yeah. Interesting, right? Makes perfect sense in a way. Not all LGBTQ, but some for sure. 

B:         Yeah. Yeah. It’s something that we’ve talked a lot about on the podcast about how church spaces have not always been welcoming, affirming, how we can make church spaces feel more like communities of belonging. So, oh gosh, thank you for naming that. 

A:         Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s such important data. So this is one example. And beyond that, like within the world of addiction, the number one predictor of sustained recovery is actually having a spiritual awakening. And addiction is one of the two places in medicine where a spiritually-based model is the medical standard of care, which is super interesting, right? Addiction that other places–hospice care or end of life care. Yeah. Not surprising. 

B:         I mean, I’ve worked with so many thousands of folks in 12 step programs and I have seen the most miraculous things. And I’ve seen people talk about their own healing through spiritual language in ways that have absolutely moved me to tears. So, I mean, 12-step programs may not be the only way to recovery for sure, right? There’s many, many paths. And those programs have done an immense amount of good in and sharing of spiritual practices and principles with folks. I’m so glad that you mentioned that. 

One of the things in your book that I was so heartened to read that I’d love you to talk a little bit about is the power of giving and sharing in our hyper-individualistic world. I think often when Americans or Westerners think about fulfillment, think about happiness, we often do so assuming that this is a completely personal, private, insulated goal to pursue. And you have some interesting research in the book around how giving and sharing and how relationality and thinking about others and not just centering your own happiness actually creates happiness. The beauty here is that you’re actually happier when you’re giving to others. So can you share a little bit about that and maybe help us just to counterbalance this American narrative, this kind of hyper individualistic narrative?

A:         Absolutely. And there’s so many spiritual principles around that. In Kabbalah, they basically say that you want to receive, but you want to receive for the sake of giving to others. And when that is your goal in receiving, it changes everything. And it’s true. The more that we are able to give, the happier we are. It’s always the case. Whereas if we take in too much energy and we focus on ourselves, there’s always something wrong. There’s always someone to compare ourselves to. And then we lose the purpose. The purpose that comes to our life is through our capacity to share our ability to share that which is our unique energy, skill, talent, experience with the world. That’s a giving process. That is what is most useful. And there’s lots of data, which I’m sure Laurie Santos will also speak about, about spending habits and spending patterns. And when you give people money and you say, “Here,” like there’s been numerous experiments, “Here’s X amount of money. Here’s like $50. Spend it either on yourself or go spend it on somebody else.” And then they did a happiness meter afterwards. How do you feel afterwards? The people who spent it on others felt much better. And this has been shown over and over and over. The capacity to give and having a life where you are always giving to others fills you up. It’s a protective force around you. A life that is so self-centered leads you to the psychiatrist’s office where you talk often more about yourself. And if you come to me, it will be about how you can help others and how you can direct your energy outwards and do amazing things. But yes, you’re exactly right, Brandon.

B:         Well, I’m so glad to hear you mention that. And I wonder, do you ever receive any pushback? Like, “Hey, I came here to get better first. I have to be well first before I can help others.” 

A:         That’s 100% because I also help a ton of people who themselves are healers. And the healers have the opposite problem. They are so amazing at taking care of others. They’re not as good at taking care of themselves. They can give and give and give. I have a lot of doctors like this. They give and give and give until they’re burnt out. So for them, I’m like, “Stop giving. You need to stop. You need to fill up your own cup. And you need to set the boundaries with everybody else that until your cup is filled, you cannot give to others. You’re not allowed.” So you have to meet the person where they’re at. That’s absolutely true too. 

B:         Yeah. I know that both of us from time to time work with celebrities and pretty famous people. I actually don’t talk about this fairly often, but I thought maybe we’d take a moment just to pause because every once in a while, people ask me about it. And I sort of shrug it off. But I thought it might be worth a moment to pause, because we spend so much time in American culture worshiping celebrities, lifting up celebrities, emulating celebrities. And I wonder if we just take a time, take a moment to just unpack a little bit of our experience. Obviously, never talking about any one particular person. But I wonder what that’s like for you. I’ve done this for a number of years now, and there was an interesting learning curve. And in some ways, there’s ordinary people like anyone else, right? With all the foibles and struggles that the rest of us have. And another way, their foibles unfold in a context that sometimes is very much unlike the world that our listeners hold them in. 

A:         Absolutely. Yes. I think both of those are true. And I work with as yourself, many celebrities, and they are just people like you and I with the very similar struggles, very similar pains, similar sensitivities and vulnerabilities, a difficult past, and very real pains that they are grappling with in the present moment with love, life in the world. And at the same time, because of the public nature of their lives, oftentimes, some of the pains that they face are multiplied by 5, 10, 100 because everybody can see. So it’s not just them contending alone, but it’s the reputation at stake. “What do people think? What’s this going to do to my Instagram followers, my CIA contract, my this, my that …” da, da, da, da, all kinds of things like that. And the other part that I often notice is the perception that’s external, how the person is seen and how they actually see themselves and the delta between those two. And to understand that delta and to understand how authentic can a celebrity be, how authentic does a celebrity want to be? And what does that mean? Authenticity within that kind of status. 

B:         Oh, gosh, yeah, you’ve honed in on conversations that I’ve had a lot recently with some of the folks that I’m working with. And it’s around this question of persona. And of course, persona, you know, is the Greek word for the theater mask. And what happens when this kind of persona or this false self that you create is your livelihood, right? And for some of us, you know, for many of us, it’s the case. But wow, I mean, the stakes are really, really big. And what it means to be authentic and to be your true self. These are really, really big questions. But as you say, the stakes are multiplied in these incredible ways. I don’t envy, you know, life in so many ways becomes more complicated. So yeah, it’s, it feels like a privilege to do any of the one on one work that you know, that we get to do. I’m, you know, I’m struck by just kind of the trust that people bring to us. Now I’m just speaking of, you know, anyone that I walk with and that you walk with, right? The trust that they bring, the way in which they open up their lives. And I wonder for you in your own life, how do you balance the caring for others versus caring for yourself? I mean, a lot of people are bringing to you some of their most challenging personal and psychiatric and physical woes. And a lot of our listeners are going to be caregivers and spiritual leaders. And maybe we can learn from some of your best practice in terms of balancing the caring for others, holding their pain, versus caring for yourself. 

A:         Absolutely, Brandon. I mean, I feel like for me, self care has to be the top, top, top priority because I hold the space for so many. And if I am not well, I can’t be helping us. So, so it has to, it’s like at the top of, I feel like I’ve become a self-help guru, you know, or self-care guru because of this essentially, you know? And so what that means to me is every week I go to acupuncture. Every week I have this energy healer who like removes dark energy or any energy that I’ve accumulated from clients for me. Every week I work out. No, not every week. That’s every like day or every other day. I either do Pilates or I do go for a run or I go hiking in my forest and sleeping really, really well, eating healthy to the degree, you know, that I’m able with, depending on where I’m at, like all of those things. I feel like that’s the self care and having lots of people I speak with. And, you know, if I ever need for anything, it takes a village, it takes a team having tons of people to support. 

B:         Yeah. So I love that, you know, in the course of our conversation, we, we named both parts of the paradox, right? Caring for ourselves and caring for others. I hope I won’t sound too grumpy when I, when I name it. Sometimes I feel like we have this, we’re at a moment when we have the balance just a little bit miscalibrated. Maybe the self-care pendulum has overswung. We’re all caring for ourselves and we’re forgetting actually, that the purpose of our lives is to both care for ourselves and for other people to be in service in the world, right? And maybe this is just the way that, you know, that wisdom unfolds across time evolutionarily, right? We, we overcorrect for, for, for maybe the mistakes that we make. So I love that in this, in the course of this conversation, Anna, you’re just so balanced and holding both of those things. 

A:         Yeah. And I think you’re exactly right. Like whenever there’s an imbalance, oftentimes as we try to balance, we’ll overswing in the up and the other direction of the pendulum and then we’ll overswing in this way. So we’ll be a little bit too much. And then finally we find the balance, but also balance is a dynamic entity. So what is balanced today may not be balanced a year from now, a month from now, et cetera. So it’s all about being very intuitively aligned and listening to yourself, listening to your body. What do you need? What’s working? What’s not, and what do you need to change? 

B:         Oh my gosh. Thank you for saying this, you know, sort of reframing balance as, as a dynamic. I share this with, with the folks who come to me so often because they’ll often sit with such shame. My life is out of balance. I’ve done it wrong. And I remind them that we learn balance by being out of balance and that, right, there’s a constant recalibration that’s necessary. So thank you. It’s no surprise that, that we, that we teach in such a similar way after all these years of being connected and we’re both wearing blue today. So it’s like a Yale blue day. If you could tell us about your work right now at Yale, because it’s really exciting. It’s, I know it’s iterative and these are early, early days in some ways, but you’re forging a really bold, new path. And to be honest, I wasn’t sure that …  I won’t, I won’t say that on camera. We’re going to cut back. I’m shocked that the community was even ready for it. And I’m so thankful it’s working, but Evan, we won’t say that. And I’m so excited for the work that you’re doing here at Yale. I know it’s new. I know it’s iterative. I’d love you to talk about it and share what’s unfolded here at Yale for you over the last couple of years. 

A:         Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So after I wrote my book, Fulfill, which is about the science of spirituality, I started talking about the book at various academic institutions and just all over at Cripalu at Omega at, you know, at Copper Beach Institute, where you were the director at the time, which was so much fun. And then when I went to Yale, I saw professor Rohrabach, Bob Rohrabach, and he and I, I knew him from when I was a medical student. And at the time he, he liked my talk and he’s like, maybe you should consider coming on faculty. And so I was like, that’s kind of cool. You know, I was afraid that writing a book about the science of spirituality would undermine my credibility, but no, I’m being invited to come back to Yale. What a wonderful honor. And so I said, yes. And that’s when Dr. Rohrabach and I started talking about my creating this mental health and spirituality center. 

And at the time it was just an idea. And then a few years later, I got together with Dr. Christopher Pittenger, who’s the deputy chair of translational psychiatry research at Yale. And he and I started working together in the creation of this center. So in order to create a center, first you usually become a program, then eventually raise funds to become a center and then ideally create an Institute. So that is the trajectory I very much hope that we can go. And we at this point are at the program level and we have all kinds of exciting things, including mixtures every month between the divinity school and the medical school, where there’s a divinity faculty, the medical faculty presenting on a topic of their choosing. We had a really cool one with, um, from the medical faculty. It was a connection you made Brandon, on the psychology of addiction–Oh, no, no, no, of, of, um … addiction to revenge. Psychology of addiction to revenge. Yes, exactly. And then. 

B:         James Kimmel was on the show. So powerful. 

A:         Exactly. James Kimmel. Yes. So Dr. James Kimmel from psychiatry came and then we had Dean Joyce Mercer speak about the power of forgiveness as an antidote to revenge. So it was a really cool talk. That was the last one. And we have another one coming up, um, on the 22nd.

B:         Oh, that’s so exciting. And what sorts of things, um, are you working on in the program? 

A:         Yeah. So, I mean, ideally we hope to raise enough resources to be able to undertake several research projects. And we’re doing that through, um, right now, soliciting individuals privately, but also thinking about grants to the Templeton foundation that we can co-write together between medicine and divinity. So this is the big project. And we have our first three research projects all set and ready to go. As soon as we have the funds, and that will be number one, looking at the spiritual side of psychedelic use. Dr. Pitinger runs the psychedelics research program at Yale. They look at the neurobiology of psychedelics. There’s nobody looking at the spirituality of it. So we would do that. So that’s number one. Number two with Dr. Mark Potenza, who’s also going to be one of the co-directors of the program. Uh, we’re going to be looking at neural correlates of spiritual experiences. And number three with Dr. Al Powers, we’re looking at the way in which the intuition we’re talking about, the way in which you receive intuition, especially voice hearers and how voice hearing in a psychic who uses often voice hearing for the service of themselves and others is different from voice hearing in a schizophrenic for whom often the voice hearing is unwanted and difficult to control. 

B:         Yes. Wow. It’s so exciting. Um, we hope that some, um, some very enthusiastic philanthropists are listening right now. And are moving to write you a very large check. 

A:         Absolutely, they can!

B:         Oh my gosh. Um, so thank you, Anna, for all the work you’re doing. And it’s our custom from time to time to close with our, um, final five questions, which we affectionately refer to as holy cow because folks are mesmerized by learning things about you that they might not otherwise know. So the people want to know what do folks most misunderstand about you and your work as a psychiatrist?

A:         Maybe they think because it’s spiritual that it’s soft, but I think that it’s uber, uber scientific. And my goal is to bring science to the spirituality. 

B:         Oh, fantastic. What’s your go-to comfort food after a long day of, uh, of meeting with patients? 

A:         Uh, it could be like mac and cheese. Like that’s one of the comfort foods, which I don’t eat often, but it’s very comforting. Or Hägen-Daas chocolate chip mint ice cream. 

B:         Oh my gosh. Magical, magical. Um, what’s a bad habit that you’re willing to share? 

A:         Hägen-Daas chocolate chip mint ice cream. 

B:         Fantastic. What life lesson are you still learning?

A:         Letting go. Surrender.

B:         It is the lesson. It is the lesson. And what keeps you going when your inner critic tells you to stop? 

A:         That that’s just one of the many voices that I can listen to. There’s also intuition and there’s many other voices that are much more expansive, positive and powerful in my life. 

B:         Dr. Anna Yusim, thank you for your work, for your bright light and all you do in our community. I hope our paths cross soon. 

A:         Thank you, Brandon. 

B:         Thank you for listening to Within, the contemplative segment of the Leaders Way podcast. We trust this conversation has provided nourishment for your own growing and healing. Until next time, may you find deep peace and courage in all you do.