Maija Haavisto: Meditation, Dissociation, and Healing

00:00 — Chronic illness, loving-kindness, and discovering meditation

Pranab · 00:01

Hello. I'm with Maija Haavisto.

Maija Haavisto · 00:03

Hello.

Pranab · 00:04

Writer, therapist, author of two books I really love, Loving Awakening and Shattered White-Out. Loving Awakening is a book on awakening, healing, psychology, emotions. Shattered White-Out is a book about dissociation and a parts view of challenging [unclear] personality disorders.

I'm here with Maija to talk about all things meditation, therapy, chronic illness, and some of the challenges of moving between those communities and more. So hello, Maija.

Maija Haavisto · 00:41

Hi. I would also like to point out that Shattered White-Out is especially a book about dissociation in the context of society. Obviously there are other books on trauma and dissociation, but I feel like the perspective is a bit different.

Pranab · 01:00

Awesome. Just to start, you have a lot of good writing on Twitter, Medium, your books. This is not going to do it justice, but I'd love to give a cursory overview of your experiences with meditation, nondual experience, therapy and being a therapist, and chronic illness. Sort of a high level, just to help people get oriented. I know that's challenging.

Maija Haavisto · 01:27

Yeah. I started writing professionally back in the year 2000, which was also when I got very ill, when I was only in my teens. I got chronic fatigue syndrome, or more accurately known as myalgic encephalomyelitis. Since then I've developed a huge number of different health conditions, but that's mostly the main one.

I used to write more medical books and novels focused on chronic illness and disability, because of course those were very relevant subjects to me. Then nine years ago I started quite suddenly getting into meditation. Before that I had been like, mindfulness is when people write this stuff on sunset pictures, and that's very trite and boring. Then I got into it and I was like, wow, this meditation stuff is actually quite helpful for me, and it's really relevant to me.

I practiced this form called TWIM, which is a form of loving-kindness meditation using jhanas, which can be called altered states. This felt like really my type of meditation because it was very focused on positive feelings and feeling love for yourself and other people. From there, I also started discovering these psychological techniques that are somewhat similar to meditation, but most people would not consider them meditation, such as Internal Family Systems and somatic work, and many other practices.

Pranab · 03:31

Nice.

So in the last few years, let's say the last six years, what has led you to write—let's start with Loving Awakening as a book?

Maija Haavisto · 03:43

Yeah, I felt like there was just no book that was exactly like mine. Even when I was writing it, I had so many conflicting feelings because I felt like these techniques are highly beneficial, but already back when I was writing it, I was seeing that especially meditation can cause a lot of harm, both physical and psychological harm.

So then it was like, okay, how do I write a book that does justice to the way that these techniques can be very beneficial, and in some cases they are probably not beneficial and can even be harmful? This is a subject that I still really struggle with: how to skillfully deal with this. Because many people find meditation incredibly helpful, and then if you say, actually, it can also be incredibly harmful, that often leads to a lot of conflict and people even saying, no, that's certainly not even possible.

Pranab · 04:51

Yeah. We'll get into that a bit more, even if we don't have a synthesis. I'm curious to start: how would you describe the benefits of jhana practice, focusing on positive qualities, that TWIM-style meditation, or maybe meditation in general? What do you see as the positive vision for meditation and how it's affected your life?

Maija Haavisto · 05:17

For me, it was very easy to access these positive emotions, and it was even kind of shocking at first. If it's actually super easy for me to access happiness and joy and these feelings, why am I not just feeling them all the time?

This is not the case for everyone. Many people really struggle to access these feelings at all, or can only access them very slightly because of trauma or other reasons. But for me it felt very easy, and it felt like it's making me much happier and really improving my quality of life. Of course this led me to be like, meditation is so great.

Taking into account that my experience was also very unusual, literally my first meditation session felt powerful. For most people it's definitely not like that. It's more like you meditate a hundred times and then you're like, yeah, my life feels better.

Pranab · 06:32

Yeah. What do you make of that? Do you have any sense-making around what made it work for you quite early on?

Maija Haavisto · 06:41

I feel like it was just that it was all very close to me. I feel like I'm naturally a very happy person, and I was just living through a very hard time in my life related to my chronic illnesses worsening and some other things. So it was very close already.

Pranab · 07:05

Yeah. How do you relate to the range of experience? It sounds like with a lot of what you've experienced, there's—I'm not even sure if this is the right way to describe it—but high highs, and then with the chronic illness, lower lows. I imagine with equanimity and other meditation qualities, it's maybe not experienced that way. But how do you relate to that, and how has that changed over the years? The challenges plus the feelings of bliss and all that, all together in a given day or week.

Maija Haavisto · 07:39

Yeah. It's a bit funny that loving-kindness meditation is literally one of the most original Buddhist practices, but still many people feel like it's too feel-good focused. You're supposed to sit still and be calm and nothing happens, and that's what meditation is all about. If you feel bliss, then you just get addicted to bliss and you focus on the bliss and you miss what meditation is all about.

I feel like there is a little truth to it, but mostly it's not like that. Of course, it was not just about joy and bliss. It was also that meditating every day was definitely increasing my equanimity. So when bad stuff happened to my health, it was less devastating. I was also reaping the more traditional benefits of inner calm or inner peace or whatever you want to call it.

08:55 — When meditation helps and when it harms

Pranab · 08:55

Yeah, so I want to get into the downsides. Before we do, everything you just said, I would love to understand how you view how that might be perceived both in the therapy communities you're in and the chronic illness communities you're in. Because I can already see triggers or tensions that arise from what you shared there.

Maija Haavisto · 09:17

Yeah. The thing is that therapy communities often have a very weird and, I feel, very one-dimensional view of meditation. It's like you do mindfulness, and then you feel like your chronic pain is reduced and you deal with it better and your chronic illnesses get better. There is some truth to it. Obviously they didn't just make it all up.

But I feel like it's really not taking into account that, for a lot of conditions where people seek therapy, both physical and mental conditions, meditation may not be appropriate, in my opinion. Or it might be that some ways of meditation are appropriate and can be helpful, and others might be very harmful.

Then the chronic illness community basically sees meditation and mindfulness and spirituality as these brainless New Age, holier-than-thou people being like, have you tried yoga? If you just meditate, you will get better, and then we don't have to give you medication, and you will just think yourself into wellness. That's seen as a very triggering and even abusive framework. I can definitely see why, because it often is.

Pranab · 10:47

Yeah. Going into more detail, for the therapy side, what are some of the techniques that might actually be less helpful? This might be too specific, but maybe what's a way of seeing that therapists could have to then have a deeper understanding? Go into the details of how some techniques can make things worse. The idea that maybe techniques can cure these things, but maybe they actually can't be cured. That sort of thing for therapy, and then we'll get into chronic illness.

Maija Haavisto · 11:31

Yeah. I feel like a lot of mental health professionals are too focused on EBM, evidence-based medicine. They read a journal article that finds that in this group of people, mindfulness helped people with depression or chronic pain or something. And yeah, maybe thirty percent of people dropped out, but we don't have to consider that because, well, who knows what happened to them, and some people benefited.

But in reality, no approach works for everyone, and you really have to understand what these approaches even are. Because mindfulness is basically Buddhist meditation, which was not developed as a treatment for trauma or depression or chronic pain or stress. Most of these concepts didn't even exist back then. It was developed for reaching spiritual enlightenment, which is very different from healing depression or chronic pain.

Pranab · 12:37

Yeah. I think what I liked a lot about your book is that it feels very inclusive of all of that—a much broader spectrum of the human experience, including deep pain, mental health conditions, trauma—in a way that is worth highlighting as different. Because within Buddhism there are purifications, and you can loosely equate little-t traumas with samskaras and that sort of thing.

But I'm curious: what harms happen when you don't include these things? How does practice change, in the way you highlighted in your book, when you include these ideas and these frames of chronic pain, chronic conditions, all that sort of stuff?

Maija Haavisto · 13:23

Yeah. I feel like one of the main things is that in therapy and mental health care, if a patient says, this medication doesn't work for me or causes a whole lot of side effects, or I tried to do this mindfulness thing that you told me to do and it's making me worse, then it's viewed like, well, you're either doing it wrong, or you have to push through these side effects and then you will see the light and will be healed.

Of course, spiritual communities do a similar thing to some extent. If you complain that meditation feels bad, you're very often told that sometimes it just feels bad, and that doesn't mean there's anything wrong. Or you might be told that you're meditating wrong, so you have to do the same technique that you're already doing and just not do it wrong like you're doing right now.

Of course this idea can have some truth to it. Meditation causing you temporarily to have a bad mood doesn't mean that the technique is wrong or that you're doing it wrong. But if the person is, for example, feeling like they are approaching a mental breakdown, and they are told, yeah, whatever, you just need to try harder and sit with it and sit through it, it's probably not a helpful approach.

Pranab · 14:55

Yeah. What do you wish you could tell meditators or meditation teachers about a better approach that could be more inclusive and supportive of people who are maybe more prone to, or just happen to be closer to, a mental breakdown or challenging experiences?

Maija Haavisto · 15:16

Yeah. I think the most important thing is to try to really listen to the person: what is going on? It's not really that if someone has chronic pain they should try this technique, and if someone has depression they should try another technique, because people are much more complex than that.

For example, when I started meditating, I found body scans helpful for dealing with my chronic illness. Many people with chronic illness say, no, this is horrible. This just makes me focus more on my illness, and it makes me feel really bad. Then the meditation people will say, yeah, that's kind of the goal. It's making you see reality more clearly. But sometimes there's no point in seeing reality more clearly if your reality is actually very bad.

Pranab · 16:11

Yeah. For you, was it the same effect when the body scans helped? Was it seeing reality more clearly, or did it do something else that made it more beneficial in that case?

Maija Haavisto · 16:23

I feel like for me, body scans were mostly helpful for helping me relate to my body in a much more neutral way. Because for many people with chronic illness, it's like, my body is a kind of bag of problems that I just have to carry around, and when it says something, it has a problem and this sucks.

When you do body scanning, you can notice that, hey, there's a lot going on in my body that's not an alarm signal, that's not saying something is wrong.

Pranab · 16:56

Yeah. I like that you mentioned it's not that if you have this problem, do this technique; if you have this problem, do that technique. Because everyone has different views, or a different collection of views within their body-mind.

For one person with one cluster of attributes, one technique might make it worse. For another person with a different cluster of attributes, maybe that technique actually helps them more into right view. So I sometimes get excited in my mind: maybe there's a way to map these views out and help assess where someone is, and then give a better thing there. But it does seem like the best thing there is just to have a wise teacher [unclear].

Maija Haavisto · 17:46

Yeah. Of course, as a therapist my main goal is to avoid doing people harm. If someone is saying, I'm doing this meditation and I think it's making me worse, I'm like, okay, I believe you. This might actually be making you feel worse, and that might be a bad thing rather than a sign of something good happening.

Generally spiritual teachers, their view is a bit different, because it's like we're chasing enlightenment and it's going to be ugly and awful at times, or it might be ugly and awful at times. Both of these are kind of true, but I still feel like avoiding harm is the most important thing. [Unclear]

18:29 — Awakening, suffering, and spirituality as connection

Pranab · 18:29

Yeah. I'm curious how you view what the goal may be or is. In some ways that might be too modernistic or too limiting—is there really one goal and all that? Maybe a better thing is: what is your view of what progress is, generally speaking, in the communities that you're in?

Maija Haavisto · 18:53

Yeah, I think that's a great question. When I started meditating, I think my very initial goal was to feel better. Then I was using Buddhist methods to feel better, and I was like, well, I guess Buddhism is right, and Buddhism says that if you keep doing this thing that already makes you feel better, then you can actually be free of suffering. Sounds great, I'll sign up for that.

So my goal was to reach enlightenment and be free of suffering. Then at some point people started telling me that this is actually not true. There is something that's called, or can be called, enlightenment—many of them don't like the term at all—but it's not actually going to eradicate suffering. Then I was like, well, damn, I guess it's too late to bail out.

Pranab · 19:54

Yeah.

Maija Haavisto · 19:55

I feel like it's a huge problem if there are a lot of people who are chasing a goal, and many people do believe that this goal is realistic and exists. I don't believe this goal exists, so I see it as a problem to chase it. I see it as a religious goal, kind of like if you accept Jesus into your heart, you will go to heaven.

Of course anyone is free to believe that they will get to heaven by believing in Jesus Christ, and I don't believe it's true. It really depends: if you live your life as before and hold this belief, it can still be positive even if it's not true. But if everything in your life is around this goal, and then the goal is impossible, then it can be a problem.

Pranab · 20:52

Yeah. How do you view what awakening is good for, I guess? Okay, great, it's not going to eliminate suffering in this dogmatic or ideological view. You've had experiences with that and wrote a book around Loving Awakening, so it seems like there's something it's good for. I'm curious how you view that.

Maija Haavisto · 21:18

Yeah, my view of spirituality is very interpersonal, and it's about connection. Spirituality is all about increasing connection. This goes for yourself, so increasing connection and understanding of who you are, and increasing connection to other people and other things, whether that's the universe or God or Mother Earth or whatever it feels important for you to connect to. It can also be things like baseball or dogs or many other things.

Pranab · 21:55

Awesome. That's also the way I would tend to answer it. I have other words as well, but connection tends to come up as the thing I [unclear], as one thing to emphasize.

Maija Haavisto · 22:08

Yeah. Of course many Buddhists really don't like this view, and they are like, well, obviously that's not Buddhist. I'm like, okay, fine, I think I'm not a Buddhist anymore, so I don't have to have a Buddhist idea of what spirituality is.

Loving Awakening talks a lot about how I feel that many Buddhists treat Buddhism as a form of transcendent avoidance. Their goal is to go into a cave, meditate for ten years, then you have no problems, no suffering, everything is chill. It's like, yeah, sure, you can have zero problems if you sit in a cave alone for ten years. Try going into the real world, and suddenly you do have problems.

Pranab · 22:59

Yeah. How does connection help with those problems, or change the way you show up to relationships and problems and people and all that?

Maija Haavisto · 23:11

Yeah. Of course connection doesn't always solve problems, because sometimes connection is what makes you see that avoidance has been helping you avoid a lot of the problems. Now with connection, you actually have more problems, because you're admitting to yourself that this is an issue and this is an issue.

But I feel like one of the Buddhist concepts that I do find very helpful is compassion, which I find deeply connects to Internal Family Systems. I feel like Internal Family Systems is mostly about compassion. Some schools of Buddhism also really stress compassion and its importance, so they are on the same page with this.

Pranab · 23:59

Yeah, one thing I like a lot about the way you describe IFS is that IFS is a placeholder for just a parts model of the mind. If I'm understanding your view correctly, there's less of an emphasis on firefighter, manager, all the specific dichotomies in it, but really just seeing protectors and then hurt parts as exiles, and the general parts model of the mind. Am I getting that right?

Maija Haavisto · 24:32

Yeah. It's really that we are not really one person, which of course is also very much in agreement with Buddhism. Many people think, I'm this and that, and this is my identity and this is my personality. Of course it's much more complicated, because your personality is wildly different in wildly different situations, and that's completely normal.

You are made of many different parts, and many of them are trauma. When you see this, it's easier to have compassion for yourself and for other people and society as a whole.

25:18 — Two forms of dissociation

Pranab · 25:18

Maija, I'd love to understand your view of dissociation, and just understanding what dissociation is in your view.

Maija Haavisto · 25:27

Yeah. I think it's a pretty important question because it seems like everyone has a slightly different definition. Sometimes people are deciding that my view must be the same as their view, or my view must be someone else's view which they find bad, and then it turns out that my view is actually quite different. My view is mostly fairly consistent with general dissociation research, nothing very controversial there.

The idea is that there are two main types of dissociation. One is the one that I think many people think of when they hear the word. It means that you're zoning out, or you feel tired or confused or cannot focus, or feel like, okay, I don't want to go into this topic, or cannot remember stuff. So it could be called distraction.

Sometimes people are very aware of when this happens, and sometimes people experience this basically all the time. Sometimes it just feels like, I'm tired and I don't really feel like thinking right now, and it doesn't feel emotional or trauma-related or anything at all.

From an IFS perspective, this is generally considered to be one part. Of course, a person can have many parts, so maybe one part is more about confusion and one part is more about making you tired. But these are individual parts that really try to get you away from something trauma-related, or what they perceive as trauma-related, that's very, very unpleasant or that they expect you would be overwhelmed by.

Pranab · 27:15

Yeah, to reflect it back, things that pull you away from the present moment in one general sense, but really it's things that pull you away from challenging experience or intensity in some sense.

Maija Haavisto · 27:28

Yeah. Then the other type is in some ways quite different, and this is often called structural dissociation. This is kind of the official term, and it can also be called something like compartmentalization. From an IFS view, this is not like one dissociation part or two dissociation parts. It means that your whole system—the parts are too separate from each other, or many parts are usually separate from each other and don't really know what's going on.

The extreme example is what is known as dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. Of course, the movie view of that is someone has distinct personalities and they have different names and dress differently and stuff like that. This is fairly rare, but structural dissociation is anything but rare.

People have a milder version of this. They can still have distinct personalities, and sometimes they do have names and identities and genders, even if the person may call themselves the same name and wear the same style of clothes all the time. But internally it may feel very different.

Pranab · 29:03

It reminds me of the TV show Severance. In some ways it's a decent modern depiction of being the same person, but split or severed or disconnected from yourself, or having different parts of yourself that are—

Maija Haavisto · 29:16

Yeah, and of course this is a fiction trope that has intrigued many authors. If you think of Frankenstein's monster and many different fiction characters, they have this kind of [unclear], like good and evil or something like that.

Pranab · 29:33

Dr. Jekyll and Hyde.

Maija Haavisto · 29:37

That's what I meant. But real life tends to be much more complex and nuanced rather than someone having a good personality and an evil personality.

Pranab · 29:48

Yeah, and I'd love for you to talk about that complexity and how that plays into how we think about personality disorders in general. It sounds like this informs a lot of how you frame that, and why personality disorders itself is not a very helpful frame.

Maija Haavisto · 30:04

Yeah. I do want to add one more thing: when I use the word dissociation, I normally refer to either one of these phenomena. Sometimes people are confused because they're like, well, they are completely different things. Of course in some ways they are very different, but I feel like they are both similar in some ways. The goal is to distract you from something, not allow you to see something.

I sometimes call dissociation that you're not allowed to see something. Of course that's just a nice term which does not describe a hundred percent of instances of dissociation very well, but it describes most of the stuff that I'm trying to point out.

Pranab · 30:58

What is the spectrum of what it looks like between more minor dissociation and structural dissociation?

Maija Haavisto · 31:07

I don't know.

Pranab · 31:08

What's a way to map that terrain a bit more?

Maija Haavisto · 31:13

Yeah, I feel like that's a very complex question and kind of hard to answer in a limited amount of time. But I would argue that most people have more than mild dissociation. Of course it depends on our definition: what is mild, what is medium? Is it about how strongly you're dissociated? Is it about how strongly it impairs your life? Or actually maybe it doesn't feel like it impairs your life at all. Maybe it feels like it's just helping you out, which is certainly possible.

I feel like these can look like so many different things. For example, some people who have a very dissociated vibe, they always feel the same. They just come off as very distant, and you just can't really connect with them. Then I have some friends who come off as very dissociated to me, and their vibe is that there's a different person every day.

32:20 — Personality disorders, trauma, and parts

Pranab · 32:20

Yeah. This seems like a good segue into personality disorders.

Maija Haavisto · 32:27

Yeah. I'm really not fond of the term for many different reasons. One is that, in a more philosophical sense, it feels very violent that you're literally saying that someone's personality is disordered. From an IFS perspective, this is very much not just semantics, because in IFS we talk a lot about shame and we talk about exiles. If you say that something is not allowed, you're only pushing that stuff deeper and deeper inside, where it tends to cause much more problems.

Of course, in a sense this goes deeper than just the term personality disorders. It goes into the whole term disorder and psychiatry, and the whole idea that we have stuff like mental pathology, a term which I don't like at all. Personality disorder is kind of an extreme example.

Pranab · 33:35

Yeah. What do you wish people knew? Maybe people who experience things that could be described under that label, and people who know people who could be described under that label.

Maija Haavisto · 33:49

Yeah. I feel like it's important to really pay attention to the way that all of these are common trauma responses that happen on a spectrum. For example, we often talk about narcissism or narcissistic personality disorder, and most people have some narcissistic traits and parts. These are very, very common trauma responses.

Then there's the, to me, very bizarre idea of a narcissist. People say, this is a monster, this is barely even a person, this is like a horror, evil villain thingy. It's really like, no, these are very traumatized people. I feel like if you focus on there being a narcissist and then there's the others, it makes you unable to see that you also likely have narcissistic parts.

Pranab · 34:56

Yeah. It sounds like seeing the common humanity, seeing that shared nature, can just help with compassion and empathy.

Maija Haavisto · 35:07

Yeah, but I'm strongly of the opinion that it's not a coincidence that personality disorders serve some roles in our society and in the psychiatric system. In the psychiatric system they serve the role of, it's a horrible patient I don't like to work with, so they must be bad. In society in general, it serves the role of, my parent was fundamentally different from me, my ex was bad, fundamentally different from me.

I'm not saying—horrible abusive relationships happen, there are horribly abusive parents—but still, casting people into a role of evil and then calling the evil personality disorder: I see why it happens, but I really don't think it's helping anyone.

Pranab · 36:00

Yeah. To be clear, you're not defending the behavior that happens here. I think you've actually been vocal about behavior that can be seen as narcissistic and abusive.

Maija Haavisto · 36:15

Yeah. I have quite a lot of experience of [unclear]. I've had an abusive parent, I've had abusive friends, I've had an abusive partner. I've seen a lot of very, very problematic patterns. I've seen physical violence and other types of physical abuse. Often people think, you're defending them. No, I'm not defending any behaviors that harm others. I just feel like this is not helping anyone, to call them personality disorders.

Additionally, I also feel like it's very important that I believe that abuse is generally a result of dissociation. For example, in narcissism, the abuse is not caused by the narcissistic parts as such; the abuse is caused by dissociation. This is why, for example, in what sometimes gets called borderline personality disorder, which is an equally horrible term, dissociation also plays a huge role. There are many people who would not fit the criteria for either one of those and are still abusive or treat their loved ones badly, and I believe that's always because of dissociation.

This is of course not a very mainstream view, but this is also not only my view. In my book I also cite, for example, forensic researchers who believe in this or have a very similar theory.

Pranab · 37:55

Yeah. The reason this view is helpful: one, separating the behavior from the person, that alone is very useful and freeing. But two, it outlines a path for healing for people who experience these challenges or these conditions. Or, conditions is probably not appropriate, sorry—they experience this set of characteristics in some ways.

Maija Haavisto · 38:19

Yeah. I work with people who have had problems with domestic violence on both sides. I've worked with people on both sides of sexual assault and things like that.

It's actually quite easy for me to be compassionate, even though I also have experiences of these kinds of things committed towards me. I find it very easy to be compassionate because I see where it's coming from, and that these people are not monsters or evil. They usually are really struggling themselves, and they feel horrible about having these kinds of parts.

Pranab · 39:09

I'm curious if there's anything else you'd like to share around personality disorders or dissociation.

Maija Haavisto · 39:14

Yeah, I think I said most of the stuff that's important. I'm working on an article about this topic, but most of what will be in it is already in my book Shattered White-Out.

39:29 — Is society built on dissociation?

Pranab · 39:29

So connection and compassion are clearly really helpful for healing, for having a more beautiful, rich life. As you mentioned, it can surface more problems in a way. It can surface more tensions, it can surface the ways that avoidance is actually helpful, that trauma is actually helpful. What makes connection so triggering, intrapersonally and interpersonally?

Maija Haavisto · 39:57

Yeah, I feel like most trauma is heavily related to avoidance. Dissociation is also a form of avoidance. I posit in my book that the whole society is built on dissociation. It's founded on dissociation.

Of course this is a very bold claim that I can't really fully defend at short length. So anyone who's like, that is completely outrageous, I recommend reading my book. It's completely free, so you can read it. Then you can decide for yourself whether this makes sense to you, or maybe it's still outrageous. In the second case, I would really like to hear from you, and we can talk about this.

Pranab · 40:42

Yeah. We'll have a bookmark to how connection and compassion relate to the chronic illness community. And again, a bookmark of nondual awakening and some of the problems that it causes. But I'd love to get into some of the stuff with Shattered White-Out: once you take this parts model of the mind seriously, and the fact that many parts are trauma responses and come from trauma, how that emerges into behavior in society. It's a pretty compelling argument, and I want to get into some of that.

Mainly around: what is the core thing for why dissociation is helpful, or what allows it to give society structure? Yeah, let's go with that. I have another question that just came up.

Maija Haavisto · 41:38

Okay. I actually want to go a bit back and add: I feel like the parts model is very important for understanding yourself and understanding why other people are behaving in ways that may seem like, why are people so weird or bad or wrong? And it's parts.

But also, it has helped me a lot with living compassionately in the world. I don't see, there's so much evil and bad. I see it as trauma, and I feel a lot of compassion. I feel like this helps me a lot in dealing with difficult situations. The world is burning, and war and climate change, and we have a lot of stuff going on. It helps a lot that I don't feel crushed by it all, or that, my God, there's so much evil. This is what helps a lot. Then we can go back to your actual question.

Pranab · 42:37

Great. Thank you. That's great to emphasize because there's the seeing of it, but seeing it can be a lot without the compassion and care for yourself and others that can balance it out, it sounds like.

Maija Haavisto · 42:51

Yeah. As for society being built on dissociation, I really feel like it allows traumatized people to live together. The world is burning in so many ways, but mostly it also works. It works kind of surprisingly well. Sure, people are dying of preventable causes all the time, but we are still here. Humankind is still here.

I believe dissociation has caused almost all of our problems, such as wars and racism and stuff like that. But dissociation also helps when people are not able to invoke enough compassion. Dissociation is what allows them to live in a world that feels wrong.

Pranab · 43:55

Yeah. It's the thing that both causes—it's the root of the world's suffering—and it's the way that we can push that away, or live somewhat functionally with all that suffering.

Maija Haavisto · 44:11

Yeah. I also would like to add that I have no idea how it would work out if the dissociation was not there. What if our world was a real paradise then, and there would be no war and we would all be happy and treat each other well? But I also don't know what would happen. It's probably for a reason that we live in our current iteration of the world.

For example, some aspects of society might not work if we had this highly hypothetical world with very little dissociation.

Pranab · 44:53

Yeah. If you could snap a finger and have everyone not have dissociation, it sounds like you probably wouldn't do that because it would just lead to too much chaos or too much disruption, too much short-term disruption that just wouldn't be—

Maija Haavisto · 45:11

Yeah, if it were to happen right now, it would probably be a complete disaster. But if you ask me, what if we could exist in a world that never had dissociation, then I have no idea, because I have no idea what that world would be like.

Pranab · 45:27

Yeah. In some ways it feels quite analogous to a person. If you could snap a finger and there's some person in front of you on the road—

Maija Haavisto · 45:33

Yeah. Yes.

Pranab · 45:35

Exactly. Could you talk more about that?

Maija Haavisto · 45:38

Yeah, I was actually going to bring it up because I work with many people who are frustrated by their dissociation. Sometimes they have parts that go, can't we just fix it now? I don't want to dissociate anymore, let's just get it over with. Even if I had some magic wand or technique that could do this, it would likely be a very bad idea.

Pranab · 46:03

Yeah.

Maija Haavisto · 46:04

I also think it's what actually happens to some people who meditate and experience horrible stuff. For some people, dissociation gets worse, and for some people the dissociation suddenly is greatly reduced, and it's very destabilizing.

46:23 — Why you can’t speedrun healing

Pranab · 46:23

Yeah. I'm really interested in that messy middle and the problem of healing too fast. I have a couple of friends who've had some really big challenges with that. Maybe the better phrase is trying to heal too fast, or working on healing. I'm not sure exactly what it is, because if it is true healing, what is true healing? There's all this stuff there.

Some background: I've been in meditation circles for a while. I've worked at a psychedelic therapy company that does legal psychedelics work in Oregon in the US. I've had experiences with all these healing modalities, and there's lots of claims of ten years of therapy in one day, and just solve the suffering now.

Of course these things are really great. It is definitely much better, I think, to live in a world that has things like MDMA and loving-kindness meditation and meditation retreats and IFS practitioners than a world without those things. And I've seen firsthand how those things have caused people to go into psychiatric institutions and just feel a lot of pain.

I would love to explore what problems happen when someone tries to heal too fast or loses the ability to dissociate for a while, what that looks like, how they relate to that, and your experiences around some of that.

Maija Haavisto · 47:54

Yeah, I personally like using the word speedrunning for the attempt to do that. I work with people who have tried to do that. For example, people who have multiple therapists, or they're like, I'm doing IFS, next I'm doing Alexander technique, and then I'm going on a retreat, and then I'm doing yoga.

I try to remind them that you can't speedrun this. That's not to say that it's not helpful to use different techniques, but I feel like especially it's a male tendency to be like, I will throw all my money at this, I will throw all my time at this, and then I will be better very soon.

My own experience: I had a very traumatic few years from 2018 to 2020, and then I had a lot of acute trauma. Because I didn't know how to dissociate, the trauma was very raw and it was almost ever-present. So of course I also had this: this really sucks and I have effective techniques. Let's just get this over with.

For me, there was soon a realization that my chronically ill body could not handle this. My mind would have been able to handle this, but I have an illness that's heavily tied to the autonomic nervous system, and trauma healing is also tied to the autonomic nervous system. So it was like, no, I cannot actually do even two sessions of IFS per week.

Pranab · 49:44

Yeah. I would love to get into that because on one hand, it's clear that techniques like IFS are in a lot of ways more helpful than talk therapy. It sounds like what you're highlighting is that it can be more helpful, but there's an inherent limiter that each person may have, in a way that too helpful can actually be unhelpful. A dose dependency on this stuff.

What are ways that you think people can find that speed limit themselves, in a way that they don't speedrun it and stay within appropriate measures? Because the other side is not attending to oneself in a way that is helpful, and staying with chronic patterns and dissociation in a way that could actually have been healed a bit more. How do you think about navigating that and finding a middle way that's appropriate?

Maija Haavisto · 50:43

Yeah, I feel like, with a lot of things, for many people a solution is in parts, because even this desire to speedrun things comes from a part. Like all parts, the part is trying to help you, but it doesn't mean that it's actually helpful.

Of course, the goal might just be that this part feels like, my God, life sucks. I want my life to not suck. But sometimes parts also have more ego-related goals. For example, I'm a person who's good at inner work, so I have to finish this all in three months so people see how great I am.

Pranab · 51:30

Yeah. I think the challenging thing is, okay, if it's all parts, what if I just do a lot of parts work? But that desire itself, if it's fueled from a thing that's adding more tension, or it's coming from dissociation, then the parts work is done in a frame that can be more challenging. This is my interpretation. Feel free to push back, but that's how I'm hearing it.

Maija Haavisto · 51:52

Yeah. Very often, even in people who don't have the speedrunning tendencies, when they attempt to do IFS there's a part that's like, okay, let's do IFS, I will do this IFS thing because I'm great at it. Of course the goal in IFS is to not have any part doing it, because parts cannot do it. Traditionally IFS is done from the Self, that is outside of any part. That's a bit of a simplified idea, but generally you can't have a Mr. Master Healer part to just fix everything.

Pranab · 52:33

Yep. What are some of the remedies there? What's coming up for me is seeing how jhana-like practices, or finding bliss, finding ease—you have a few free guided hypnosis videos that I think are really helpful there. It sounds like that could be one way to support some of this stuff. But I'm curious, when someone's in a position like that, what are some remedies or ways they could move to something more beneficial?

Maija Haavisto · 53:02

Yeah. Of course, I also want to add that it is not just a problem with speedrunning, because therapy and meditation don't just work linearly. If you do an hour of IFS every week, then you heal the same amount every week? Obviously not. Sometimes you can have a breakthrough, no matter which technique you're using, and sometimes it actually goes very easily, and sometimes it can be very hard, and it can even take months to integrate.

So even if you're very chill and not overdoing anything, you can still end up in a situation where it feels like, I healed too much too fast. What now? I feel like two of the main things for integration are social interaction and physical movement.

Of course, with chronically ill people, you can't necessarily prescribe someone to go to yoga class or dance class or go swimming. I work with people who I might tell, can you roll over in bed today? Maybe you can't do that today, maybe you can roll over in bed tomorrow. But any physical activity can be very helpful. It can help release something that is trying to work its way out, but it's still kind of stuck in there.

Social interaction is more for, okay, I healed a huge pattern of mine and now I'm like, who am I right now? Then talk with other people, and it's like, yeah, I'm still me. I'm a little different, but still me.

Pranab · 54:47

Yeah, what I'm hearing is that there's a meta-systematicity that's required here. It's not just, okay, dissociation, clear it. Then the second system is, too much, then do exercise. But if that's too much—there's a lot of things to be in balance, and there's an ecology here.

What I'm hearing as well is a gradualist view can be really helpful. Sometimes movement can be as little as rolling over in your bed, and sometimes even that can be too much. This concept of too much and too little, it just seems really hard to state from a top-down external perspective. It really comes emergently from a person. Ideally, if there's a one-on-one relationship that person has with someone that has some view externally, maybe community seems like a way. Those are some of the things that I'm hearing from that.

Maija Haavisto · 55:43

Yeah, but of course parts who really want to control things are taking a lot of notes right now. Healing is also not really a process that you can fully control.

Like I already mentioned, when I was really working acutely on my acute trauma some years ago, I would feel physically exhausted for days after a single IFS session. Of course I tried, if I do this differently, or if I try that. Then it just turned out that this was how it worked for me because of my physical health. For other people, it may or may not work like this. But sometimes healing may make life suck more, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Pranab · 56:33

Yeah. I think especially on Twitter, you have people with a range of systems and body-minds describing doing some of the same stuff with widely different effects. Someone might genuinely get a lot from going all the way or very quickly, or, I combined these psychedelics and did these practices and did this many hours of IFS, and I really just feel great. That's in some ways an outlier kind of thing.

If someone else looked at that and was like, let me just do all these things, without seeing how they currently are, that actually could lead to a lot of challenge and trauma. Or then say, these techniques are bad and these are really horrible for people. And they can be.

It's a cautionary tale. The thing to emphasize is where one is. Like you said, even this whole discussion could be seen or perceived in a very manage-y, control sort of way. That control itself can create more tension. It's some of the paradox of doing all this stuff, it seems like.

Maija Haavisto · 57:42

Yeah. I would distill this message into: healing is complicated and messy and unpredictable. That doesn't mean that we cannot try to apply the best practices to make it as safe as possible. We're not trying to make it more unpleasant than it has to be.

Pranab · 58:03

Yes.

Maija Haavisto · 58:04

Sometimes it will be unpleasant. Especially with meditation practices, even if you are doing something that's not harming you, which can be hard to tell, there might be a lot of unpleasant stuff, and that's how it goes.

Pranab · 58:23

What I find interesting about this is that there's so many middle ways here. Unpleasant, but not too unpleasant. Fast, but not too fast. With any of these, any particular person may actually have very similar views, but almost be on the opposite side of the middle way, so to speak, compared to you or to me or to anyone.

That's what can actually make it feel quite complicated, because there's all these tensions to work with and to balance. The things that certain people emphasize can seem contradictory, even though there's similar territory. That's another challenge here.

Maija Haavisto · 59:03

Yeah.

59:04 — Somatic parts work and the body

Pranab · 59:04

Yeah. The last thing to get into is the value of somatic work for support in this whole area. We've often referenced IFS as a thing that can help, and the parts frame, but I think a key distinction is the value of a somatic approach to IFS or just parts work in general. That's more the way you work. It's closer to somatic parts work rather than off-the-shelf IFS or other things like that.

Maija Haavisto · 59:33

Yeah. Somatic work is a bit hard to define, but it generally works with the body and bodily experiences. For example, where different emotional experiences are located. It can use components like movement, but it's not necessary.

From a somatic perspective, you might see that I have a part that's located in my shoulder, and it feels like a tight black rope or something. Then you can work with the part with IFS, you can talk with the part, or you can work with it as if it was a real black rope, which is fascinating to me.

Even people who have done this work with me for a while often have parts that are very skeptical, because they cannot understand: why would working on a black rope that doesn't even exist, how could it possibly be helpful? But the thing about somatic work is that it's often very helpful for the autonomic nervous system. For example, when parts are in fight or flight, as parts very often are, or when parts dissociate, with somatic work we can focus on that better than with IFS.

Also, with IFS, sometimes parts get very triggered if we try to approach emotional topics, and with somatic work we can often do things that are very helpful, but they are much less triggering.

Pranab · 01:01:21

Yeah, and they're less triggering because they don't activate the ideas or concepts of the thing. They actually get a bit more into underlying physiology and the experience of those things.

Maija Haavisto · 01:01:30

Yeah, but I feel like somatic work also has a lot in common with dreams. If you think this whole description sounds very weird, it's like taking images that you could also have in dreams, but we're in waking life and we can actually modify these images, or modify dreamlike imagery.

01:01:57 — Nonduality, energy, and physical illness

Pranab · 01:01:57

Awesome. I would be curious about now going into the ways that nondual experience and awakenings have caused challenges for you. We got into that around the nervous system, how that's related to the autonomic nervous system, as well as how chronic symptoms are. I'd be curious if you could talk about that.

Maija Haavisto · 01:02:20

Yeah. I feel like the most common ways meditation causes harm to people—and some of this is temporary harm and kind of normal, and some of this can be much more dramatic and longer term—most of the stuff that people get is trauma-related and so-called dark nights, or dark night of the soul, which are also generally somewhat related to trauma. So these are psychological stuff.

I've had my share of dark nights, but if it was overwhelming, then it was overwhelming for three hours. So it was not a big deal. But unfortunately it seems like meditation has interacted with my physical health in a number of very damaging ways. This actually originally started back in 2018.

Back then, everyone around me was telling me that meditation might actually heal some of your chronic illnesses. Meditation is good for you. It's normal if you feel bad. I was like, okay, I guess this is how it is. Now I will feel bad, and in the future I might feel better.

Pranab · 01:03:37

Yeah, and what would you tell the 2018 version of yourself now? How would you relate to some of those experiences now if you were there in a coaching or therapist relationship with yourself?

Maija Haavisto · 01:03:49

My God.

Yeah. It really started for me with a weird period of insomnia, which made no sense because I was literally the least stressed I've ever been in my life, and I just couldn't sleep. Already back then I figured, okay, this is probably meditation, because I literally cannot figure out any other reason for this.

Then I started getting a lot of migraines. I had been having chronic fever for many, many years, and the chronic fever actually disappeared because of meditation. So this helped me feel like, okay, I'm actually having a lot of migraines, but this fever went away. Maybe it is true that this will heal my body or heal some of my issues.

Pranab · 01:04:42

Mm.

Maija Haavisto · 01:04:43

Then in 2022, a few days after I got into full nonduality, my autonomic nervous system started acting in really weird ways, and this started developing into heart symptoms. This was really scary. This was not like palpitations or something. This was angina, which could last for more than 24 hours and was very intense.

I was like, okay, this surely cannot be a good thing. Still people around me were trying to minimize it. They were like, well, that's probably just anxiety. I'm like, well, anxiety is not something that physically stops you from walking or standing up.

Pranab · 01:05:36

Yeah. It sounds like it was the last nondual shift, the big nondual shift, that happened, or related to that—the heart conditions emerged after that.

Maija Haavisto · 01:05:51

Yeah, but for example, when the migraines started getting really bad—and this is actually a common experience, I know so many people who have got what we often call energetic migraines, because it feels like they are very heavily connected to energetic stuff.

Of course, many people are like, well, energetic stuff—if we're talking about energy body and chakras and kundalini—many people think, well, my bullshit detector is really running high. That's not real. I totally understand that because I would have never believed that it was real.

I was a science writer. I was writing textbooks on receptors and molecules and peer-reviewed studies. It has been a huge, huge paradigm shift. It was very hard for me that this stuff that I didn't used to believe even existed is now causing me physical health issues.

Pranab · 01:07:01

Yep. The challenge too is that, even within the field of energy, a meditation teacher told me when I asked him about it that there's not really a definitive guide to matching energy with the body. For constipation, is the physical causing the energy block, or is the energy causing the physical block? It's hard to know, and there's not really a way.

I know the teacher Ken McLeod, who I don't have a relationship with. I like his books a lot. He has talked about having twenty years of physical challenges from energy work first. I think the Tibetan traditions tend to talk about it a bit more, but there's this ignorance that we have as a species around how energy works with physical stuff. Curious if you—

Maija Haavisto · 01:07:54

Yeah. Especially also me coming from the chronic illness community, it's very hard to discuss this because people think, well, this is absolute bullshit. This sounds like me effectively saying that if energy can make me sick, then energy can heal all of you. I certainly hope that this someday turns out to be true, but at least for now, nothing like that really seems to be true.

It's just been so disorienting and bizarre in so many ways. Especially a few years ago, when it became clear that this stuff is extremely serious and it can actually kill me. Then last year I developed heart failure. Even though I kind of had an idea that this could happen, it was obviously devastating, and it was so bizarre.

What makes it even more bizarre is that I have a good friend who also has heart failure and chronic migraines and several other conditions I have from this. Every single day I think, this cannot be true. This is way too bizarre, this makes no sense. There are parts that are like, this doesn't make sense. It cannot be true. We will somehow fix this, we will figure it out.

Of course I've tried a lot of mainstream medications, which are kind of unavoidable when you have heart failure. But I've also tried—people tell me, this is a good energy healer, they did this and that for me. And like, whatever, I will have to try something. Unfortunately, they have not been able to fix this. I'm sure that after this episode airs, there will be people telling me their favorite energy healers, and maybe there is one among them who will be the one to fix this. And maybe not.

Pranab · 01:10:22

Yeah. There are a lot of reasons why people would want to just block out the sadness from this, because this lack of control, lack of predictability—it just feels scary.

Maija Haavisto · 01:10:42

Yeah. I totally understand everyone who's telling me that you're insane, this is physically impossible, or you're making stuff up. I totally get it, because this does not fit any normal explanation of how human bodies work.

But honestly, my background is in science and medicine, and I would not be saying this stuff—which also has a huge personal cost to me, because people may label me as insane or whatever—I would not be saying this if I was not certain that it's actually true.

Pranab · 01:11:28

Yeah. Even way earlier in the conversation, for lighter stuff, it seems like a lot of people will invalidate your or one's experience when doing so just keeps them safe. It allows someone to stay in that version of reality: these things are good, these things are this, this is that. To allow for someone's experience means letting go of some of that certainty and knowing, which is all very scary.

Maija Haavisto · 01:12:06

Yeah. One of my biggest issues with the spiritual community, even long before these severe health issues started, was that many people—and it was almost all men; there were women too, but mostly men—were just constantly telling me that I'm meditating wrong.

Of course now people are telling me that, well, you did this to yourself. If you had not meditated wrong, this would not have happened. Which also means that this other person, who is not meditating wrong, will never have this issue. This, of course, is called a just-world theory: everything that we experience, or everything that other people experience, is something they brought upon themselves.

Of course, it's possible that I did meditate wrong in a way that allowed me to attain full nonduality, allowed me to attain a lot of benefits, and I still messed up and caused myself a deadly illness. That is possible. But the people who are telling me I did this to myself, they also don't have any solutions.

Pranab · 01:13:21

Yep.

Maija Haavisto · 01:13:22

So if someone has a solution that's like, you're doing this wrong and I know what you should be doing, yeah, sure, I'm interested.

Pranab · 01:13:33

Yeah. I think the challenge to all that has a lot of self-view around should and blame and wrong and right, as if those were all primitive concepts that are actually underneath all of it. But it seems like just a lot of things happened, and there were many things that were beneficial, and other things that, for whatever causes and conditions, have caused all these challenges.

To me, the—I don't know if this is the word—the more appropriate response is just sadness and compassion versus judgment.

Maija Haavisto · 01:14:05

Yeah. One question people ask me very often, especially my clients who are aware of this, is, okay, how can I meditate in a way that I'm not at risk for these kinds of severe issues?

I say, I don't know, because my understanding is that these physical issues are energetic. All meditation that actually works, or is not completely useless, does in my experience and belief activate the energetic body. So I believe that it's not possible to meditate in a way that's risk-free in this sense. Obviously, these are very rare issues.

The thing that I feel is important is that I was chronically ill when I started, and my friend who has these issues was also chronically ill. If someone had told me that chronically ill people have a much higher risk of running into severe physical issues, I probably would have been, yeah, let's not do this.

Pranab · 01:15:29

Yeah. There's the other side of it too, where meditation makes someone accident-prone to nondual experience. In some sense, it could have happened. It's likely that it wouldn't have happened without meditation and practice, but for some people that is just a thing that happens—

Maija Haavisto · 01:15:46

Yeah, for sure. My main beliefs about meditation safety are that if your health is already very poor, if your physical health is already impaired, it's really like, do you really want to do this? Because if I had a choice again, I would not. But then there's the more psychological risk, and there I believe that there is much more that we can do to mitigate the risk.

Pranab · 01:16:19

Yeah. How likely, or how possible, might it have been to meditate enough that it supports on one level, and then stop before it gets deeper? Support to the level of maybe helping reduce the fevers, not that you necessarily even had any direct influence or control over that. But to go about it in a way that's just enough dose that it leads to some benefit, but not too much.

Maija Haavisto · 01:16:49

Yeah, I don't believe it would have been possible for me. Because it definitely feels like once you open the energetic Pandora's box, it's out there.

Pranab · 01:17:01

Yeah.

Maija Haavisto · 01:17:03

Of course, that's not to say that someone else might not be able to do it, but I don't think I would have been able to do it. So many people I've met have been due to meditation, and my literal day job is something I would not have if it wasn't for me starting meditation. Of course it's impossible to say what my life would be like if I had never started meditation. It's all speculation. But I am very sure that I would not have heart failure.

Pranab · 01:17:37

Yeah. In some ways, all we can do is rely on our intuitions. Again, any kind of science around this I think can be helpful, and I think there will be more good science and data. A general guideline of, if you have chronic illness, be very, very careful about meditation, seems really useful.

For any given person, only they can decide: should I do a retreat? Should I not do a retreat? How do I do it? There's no top-down guidance, and the principle might be go slow, start steadily, work with a community or teacher. But again, balancing recommendations with, fundamentally, who knows?

Maija Haavisto · 01:18:26

Yeah, it's complicated. Of course therapy also has its risks, and it's possible that therapy can also have these energetic effects. That is something that troubles me, even though it has not been an issue in practice in my work. But I don't know what can actually happen, what is possible.

Pranab · 01:18:56

Yeah, in some ways it reminds me of that—I think it might be Chögyam Trungpa or some other teacher—“Better not start. Once started, better finish.” It's sort of apocryphal, and I'd say I still don't like the phrase. But in some ways, at this stage of my relationship with meditation, I'm really exploring what that really means and what that's like, because to me it doesn't feel resolved.

It's a thing that a lot of practitioners hear and are like, yeah, ha ha. But actually taking that seriously is quite scary. What implications does that have for meditation, communication, and teaching and all that stuff?

Maija Haavisto · 01:19:35

Yeah, I have similar feelings about the phrase, but I feel like it's true in many ways. If I had stopped when I had started developing these physical health issues, it was probably way too late for me and might have led to even more problems. Of course I have no way of knowing.

01:20:05 — Bulgaria, intuition, and a different spiritual practice

Pranab · 01:20:05

Yep. And one thing—

Maija Haavisto · 01:20:07

[Unclear]

Pranab · 01:20:08

Switching gears a bit, you mentioned you moved to Bulgaria mainly for spiritual reasons. I'm curious how location has played into some of this stuff for you.

Maija Haavisto · 01:20:22

Yeah. For one, I always had a curious relationship with places. By places I usually mean entire countries or large regions, rather than, my grandma's backyard is a special place. This in a way started when I was a child. I got really interested in India: India is super cool and I want to go there, and Indian food and Indian culture and this and that. I've still never been to India, but I've had a similar relationship with many places.

I lived in the Netherlands for a long time, and it's a very, very special place to me as well. Nowadays my special place is the whole Balkans region, and it actually feels much harder to explain. If people ask me, why did you move to Amsterdam? It's something I can explain very rationally, in a way that makes sense to most people. When people are like, why are you obsessed with a region of Europe that is poor and has a troubled past of wars and dictators and all kinds of things? It's like, yeah, that's a good question.

Pranab · 01:21:47

Yeah. Even if it's hard to answer, I'm curious, what's it been like now, in ways that you like?

Maija Haavisto · 01:21:58

Yeah. Obviously this is a very, very different country, and it's a very different culture, which is not entirely Western even though it's kind of Western. When I moved here, it was very like, okay, the language is hard. I don't understand the culture very well. Back then they were not in the euro. They are not even using the Latin alphabet here.

So it was definitely scary. Am I doing something completely insane? I'm doing something that I don't fully understand, and what if it's a terrible idea? But I also felt like I was getting so many signs, in a woo sense, that every possible signal was saying, trust your intuition.

So far it has been pretty great. But if people ask, what do you mean by spiritual reasons? It's very hard to define. The only way that I can really define it is that in a sense it's Sofia, where I live, and in a way it's Bulgaria, but in many ways it's the whole region.

Pranab · 01:23:25

Yeah.

Maija Haavisto · 01:23:26

Of course people often ask me, do you believe in past lives? Do you believe that maybe you lived there in a past life or whatever? I don't personally believe in past lives, but who knows? I don't really have a better explanation either.

Pranab · 01:23:47

Yeah. Well, we're about at our time. I'm curious what other topics or anything else feels useful to share, or things you want to talk about before we stop the recording.

Maija Haavisto · 01:24:03

Yeah, I would just quickly like to add: since I drifted farther and farther away from Buddhism, which relates to a whole bunch of different things—both my issues with the actual religion as it was created thousands of years ago, some of which relate to the spiritual community around it, some of it relating to my experiences with meditation—my spiritual practice and spirituality nowadays really revolves around this region. For example, Balkan music.

It's kind of hard to explain because this is not a thing. I cannot send them to a Wikipedia page for Balkan music as a spiritual practice. That does not exist. It's weird for other people. It's honestly quite weird for me, but currently it's working out for me. I have no idea what's next or how I'll feel about this later, but I guess I will see. [Unclear]

Pranab · 01:25:20

It's interesting how there's a nonconceptual knowing around it, and a following of that intuition. I'm hearing a sense of just following what seems appropriate, and who knows what that may lead to, but that's what's happening.

Maija Haavisto · 01:25:44

Yeah, but it's certainly been very complicated because of my poor health. Moving to a different culture when you're in very poor health is not just a thing you can do. It's certainly been full of complications, but I'm currently very happy that I did it.

Pranab · 01:26:09

Nice. Awesome. Thank you, Maija. People can find you on Twitter. How do you pronounce your handle?

Maija Haavisto · 01:26:16

You can pronounce it DiamonDie. It's my old—

Pranab · 01:26:19

DiamonDie.

Maija Haavisto · 01:26:20

—IRC nickname from 1997.

Pranab · 01:26:25

Nice. Maija's on Twitter at DiamonDie. She has a couple of books, Loving Awakening and Shattered White-Out. Both have subtitles that I don't have in front of me that explain what the books are. They're both free. You have many other Medium articles that are wonderful about a lot of this stuff and more, other books you've written in the last twenty years. Anything else you'd like to share before we close?

Maija Haavisto · 01:26:52

Yep. I also have a lot of other things, like I have a lot of poetry online. Some of it is actually explicitly about things like spirituality or Buddhism or meditation, and most of it is not. But I feel like all of it closely relates to everything we have talked about.

Pranab · 01:27:12

Awesome. And you're also open to new clients?

Maija Haavisto · 01:27:17

Yes, I am.

Pranab · 01:27:19

Awesome. All right. Well, thank you, Maija.

Maija Haavisto · 01:27:22

Thank you so much. It's been a great conversation.