Dragons and Power Recast: Farewell to a Beloved Sensei - Leadership Embodiment with Wendy Palmer

Wendy, thank you so much for joining me for the podcast. I've been looking forward to this interview for some time now.

Wendy Palmer: My pleasure. I'm happy to share my thoughts and ideas with you and people and get it out there.

Liz Wiltzen: I first came across your work a couple of years ago. You were a speaker for the Wisdom of the Body Summit that Sounds True had put on.

They gathered a collection of leading experts in the field of embodiment. And that's when I was first introduced to your work and your practices, and it really floored me how effective it is and how accessible it is and how quickly people can access it. And as I've been preparing for this interview and diving more deeply into your work and reading some of your books and doing your practices myself, but also playing with some of your practices with my coaching clients...without exception, there's a shift.

There's a shift from worried or anxious or fearful or constricted to grounded and centered. They have access to their wisdom and their creativity and it happens really quickly. So I love the power of your work and I'm excited to have you here on the podcast to talk about it.

[00:04:04] Wendy Palmer: Well, thank you. And thank you for your kind words.

I'm delighted that you resonate with it. And that's been my goal is to make the principles of Aikido and mindfulness accessible to people in their everyday lives. And I think we're the only leadership development and coaching model that is not based on psychology. And the thing about psychology is that it's problem oriented.

And coming from a martial arts background, we don't have time. We just have to be able to make the adjustment. And in the face of what I call low grade threat, which is martial arts training or everyday life stuff coming at us, we need to be able to shift and adjust really quickly and recover that resourceful self, that, that creative, really connected self.

So we're going to lose it, but the idea is how quickly can we recover it?

Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. Well, I love what you're saying. Well, first of all, I want to say one thing that you said is, Your capacity to change the energy in the room, which is really the space in which everything's unfolding, is directly proportional to the degree to which you are centered.

And that centered means connected to your wise, kind self. And so I want to talk to you today about what trips us up and how to skillfully recover to center. And as I was listening to a podcast you were on, I heard you quote Bruce Lee, and I loved it so much. He said, “When we are under duress, we do not rise to the level of our expectation.We fall to the level of our practice.”

Something that clients will bring to me all the time, and I know with myself and my own life is, how can I know how in the moment, in the time of conflict, in the time of challenge, how do I stay calm and centered and that's the answer, isn't it?

[00:05:56] Wendy Palmer: So, let me be clear. In my view, we don't stay centered. Nobody stays centered. Anyone who says they do, I'd like 10 minutes with them. I'm not buying it. The founder of Aikido, someone asked him how he stays centered. He said, Oh, I don't stay centered, but I correct so fast no one can see it. So, we're going to constantly lose it, unless we're like the Tibetan Lamas who've been trained since they were three years old.

We are all neurotic on this planet. We have an ego, we're afraid of loss, we want stuff, we don't want discomfort. And our body, even though our mind knows not to be reactive, we react, right? We know we shouldn't get mad over small things. Everybody knows that, and yet...

and so the reason is because our limbic system, our body is 200 million years older than our neocortex, and our limbic system is still on the savannah.

It's got fight, flight, freeze. That's all it's got. That's what it comes in with. And the limbic system's theory is if you're not being eaten by the lion, don't change your behavior. When you change your behavior, it takes effort and energy for the first, depending on whose research you believe, 10, 000, 100, 000, whatever, repetitions for it to become ingrained.

And then you won't have the energy to outrun the lion. So that's why the body likes homeostasis. The mind is creative. It has great ideas about what we could do and being compassionate and being creative. But when our body experiences, and I like the term low grade threat, so high grade threat is you could die.

[00:09:43] Wendy Palmer: Okay. So let's do a little contrast. So we get more of a feeling. Okay. So, first if we tighten up our muscles, if we close and cross, we release cortisol, which is the chemical that’s called the stress hormone. So let's just do that because that shuts down our creative brain. So if we cross our arms and stomp a little bit and think of something that was annoying that happened recently for a few seconds, we'll just relive that, let the story play out for a few seconds.

Okay, stop. Doesn’t take very long.

Now I'm going to coach us into a different energetic state. As we inhale, we lengthen our spine and think Up out the top of our heads. As we exhale, we soften our chest, breathing down, thinking of something that makes us smile. We do it one more time, inhale, uplifted, exhale, softening, settling, thinking of something that makes us smile.

Now we're going to straighten our arms. And imagine little lights in our fingertips. What we want to do with this is we're getting the testosterone going. When we fire extensor muscles, we get testosterone. That's the creative risk taking part of the brain. Good. And then think about the space around us.

Just pay attention to the room behind us, to the sides, that's opening up a little bit and then ask ourselves if there was a little more ease. Just wonder for a few seconds. Now let's think about that same event again. And as I think about it, it's different. For some people it's a little bit different, for some people it's very different.

But the idea is that I helped us change the muscle groups in our body. And we got different chemicals, and the different chemicals changed the brain. So using the body as a shortcut. Telling ourselves, don't worry, doesn't do any good. If we fire extensor muscles, we uplift, sit up straight, open up, testosterone begins to be released.

That's the creative risk taking part of the chemical that hits our brain. And then when we think of something that makes us smile, we get a little bit of oxytocin, cousin to dopamine. It's the feel good chemical, the connector chemical. So we actually want a cocktail of testosterone and oxytocin. And we want to minimize the cortisol.

And anytime we tighten up or fire flexor muscles, we get cortisol, which shuts down the creative part of our brain, makes us feel separate. And that we have to somehow manage our life or survive.

[00:12:16] Liz Wiltzen: So I hope the audience felt that and that, that's so fast, right? You have another one that I read somewhere and I started playing with it where you said, I'm on a walk and I'll just think long neck, long fingers.

Open and light. How fast is that? It's an instant state change.

[00:12:36] Wendy Palmer: Yes. And when you're saying that, when you're saying long neck, then you lengthen. long fingers that don't clutch the fingers, but straighten them. I like to think of lights in my fingers too. And then light and open. It’s a quality of lightness and a quality of expansiveness.

[00:12:53] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And then I love the science that you're bringing in of what's actually happening with hormones and chemically in your body that is enabling your mind to then follow the body instead of the body reacting to the mind.

[00:13:08] Wendy Palmer: Yeah, that's right. So it's a shortcut when we use the body and we change the muscle groups, it changes the chemicals, it changes our brain, trying to talk ourselves into not being worried.

It takes forever. And for me, it just doesn't work. Yeah, this is a shortcut and it allows people to make a shift much more quickly.

[00:13:26] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And then the other beauty of this is that it is something that you can so easily practice back to the Bruce Lee quote, we fall to the level of our practice. And I love the flip on that.

It's like under duress, we also get rise to the level of our practice. So the more that you have practiced, the more available that thing that you want is. Your center, your path back to it, because I just practiced half an hour ago so I know where it is.

[00:13:54] Wendy Palmer: No, I couldn't agree more. And I think the more we practice it, the more familiar it becomes, the easier it is to access like the flow state.

So I'm a woman, I'm small, I'm older, and I have guys in my martial arts school that are half my age and twice my size. So I can't manage them with just this physical body. I have to be able to tap what's often called the zone or the flow state, which implies some things coming through me. Now, most people have had glimpses of it and you know, you might have it a couple of times a week.

My view is we should have it five, six, seven times a day. We should be able to tap that zone or that flow state. So we need a little technique to be able to do it. And the more we do it, the more familiar it becomes, the easier it is to access that. So my theory is that we access the zone or the flow state when we're efforting at something and we fatigue.

And when we fatigue, we back off. And when we're not doing so much, there's more space for it to come through us.

[00:14:57] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah.

[00:14:58] Wendy Palmer: And to bring some science into it, we're made of atoms, and atoms are primarily space. They're 99, 999 percent space. So if I think of it that way, I can think of myself as more porous. And then when we're in the zone of the flow state, people usually describe it as it was coming through me, not I was doing it.

Even our basketball players who have big egos won't say I did it. They say it was coming through me.

[00:15:25] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah.

[00:15:25] Wendy Palmer: Have a sense that we're tapping something beyond just our physical body. And when we can do that, then we can have access to all kinds of amazing. Potential that I don't think we can access if we're trying to do it ourselves from our individual Sense of personality or ego.

We need the bigger self

[00:15:46] Liz Wiltzen: As I was reading your teachings. I was so clear that everything that we need like say Let's name 10 things. I might need I might need courage, kindness, compassion, patience, ease, curiosity, flexibility, anything. Those are all in the space all the time. But if we don't have access to the space, because we've pulled in, that makes it hard for us to access these qualities that are in the space.

[00:16:18] Wendy Palmer: Absolutely. And so I want to point to something. Space is an interesting sort of relationship. For most people, space is something to be filled. Now people in design, remember in the old days when we had flyers and then they were so crammed with information, you couldn't even see what time the game started.

Remember those flyers that were on the telephone poles and they were bright colors and you couldn't read it.

Liz Wiltzen: We’re dating ourselves.

Wendy Palmer: So design comes in and design puts space, Right? White space. I had a client once who said, I need more white space in my mind, which I thought was a really cool comment. So white space opens things up a little bit and you can actually get more information.

But here's the thing about opening up. We have to be careful because if we just say, “open up”, and people do it and they get too big, they'll space out. So space is a powerful element. That's why coming from martial arts, we shape the space, organize it, design the space. So we start by filling the space in the room, just that sense of when you come into your house, your presence fills the space, you can open up a little bit.

And then we want to practice out in the world to be more open. Often people go out into the world—there’s a thing called personal space, which is according to neuroscience, if you put your hand out, your system thinks this is you inside your reach. And there's a thing called a peripersonal space, which includes your family, your friends, they’re part of you.

So you can work at a distance. In other words, if I'm traveling and I call home, my family is inside my personal space. Like it's a felt sense they're there.

Now they've coined a term called an extra-personal space, which is when you were to talk, let's say the Dalai Lama, and he's got 50,000 people in the audience, and he fills that space in the room and you can feel him all the way to the back of the room. That's an extra personal space.

So he's able to, what we call, hold the space, and that means that your personal sense of energy actually fills the space. the environment so people can feel it, which is different than just having my little bubble and then talking to you out there.

So the bubble for inclusion, people need to shape that space and practice expanding it.

And when we want to take action, it's a triangle. You don't say to the family dog “Sit” with your arms open, you point. So the way a boat goes through the water or a knife goes through a piece of fruit, we have to sort of cut our intention out

into the world. So we make that gesture, we make it a triangle, and the triangle's action. But it's a big triangle that has space around it and behind it.

And then I invite qualities to come through me to focus into that point. So my intention is focused and clear. Does that make sense?

You shape the space either in a triangle or a circle, and then you practice making it bigger and bigger, until you can really imbue that space with certain qualities that other people feel.

[00:19:40] Liz Wiltzen: And it feels like there's also a verticality that's really important that you ask people to get in touch with as well. In the center of that space, there's, is it, would you call it a verticality or how would you?

[00:19:52] Wendy Palmer: I would absolutely. So the personality, which is our ego, the part that's trying to get more stuff and have less pain and all that, it’s very horizontal. I'm dealing with you. I'm dealing with stuff. It's out there in front of me.

So if I can go vertical first, I have a sense of up-liftedness, connecting, like in Tibetan Buddhism and Aikido, we talk a lot about heaven and earth, just like big energy. So uplifting, connecting all the way up, and then breathing, connecting all the way down into the earth.

I can establish a connection to a more, I'm going to use the term universal self, and then I can bring that into dealing with the thinginess of the world.

[00:20:32] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. Yeah. And so you've got this vertical, this extension, this lift upward, you've got this sending your energy downward as well, like grounding it. I love what you say that grounding by itself makes the space too heavy.

that you need that verticality. Yeah. Speak a bit more to that. What's your thought there?

[00:20:59] Wendy Palmer: So the earth is spinning approximately a thousand miles an hour, which would fling everything off of it, except we have gravity. I love the image of a DNA strand. Einstein said there are no straight lines. So with centrifugal, the up energy is a spiral, like a DNA strand.

And it's always going up, and we can just relate with it. And then gravity is a spiral, always going down. And so the idea of a DNA strand, I can use my

breath. Inhale and then spiral up, and exhale and spiral down. And I think of it as way up, since the Earth is spinning a thousand miles an hour and we can relate to space.

We can breathe way up and then we can breathe way down. Often what we need is an image or some words to be able to activate that I call the concentration. So with mindfulness you have awareness and concentration. Awareness is noticing I just got heavy. I started to sink and then I use concentration to uplift, soften, and open up. If the concentration is interesting or attractive, then I can stay with it. So for me, it's attractive, the idea of DNA strand spiraling up through my body at the top of my head and then spiraling down into the earth. That gives me more, it's juicier and I engage more with it.

And then I sense it more. In my experience, rather than just thinking, you know, I'm slouched and I think, yeah, uplift, it's a thought, but there's no sort of accompanying state change. So the concentrations are really good little quick concentrations to change our state.

[00:22:45] Liz Wiltzen: I love what you're pointing to: that you need to be interested for it to become embodied. And I just want to share an example.

A friend of mine is recovering from COVID and she had really bad vertigo and she was starting to run a lot of fear stories that she was never going to recover. She was never going to have balance again. She was never going to be able to ride her bike again. And she was already not healthy. So then this weight of this whole thing coming on top of it.

So you have a very generous offering on your website, you have a page that has seven guided practices and they're different lengths. One of them's 27 seconds, one of them's three minutes, one of them's 11 minutes, one of them's 20 minutes. It just depends, for different reasons, and you can just listen to them online or you can download them and have them with you.

And so I sent them to her because you had one about working with patients, a s in people who are not healthy, and also one for working with, generating your own connection with your immune system.

And I sent it to her and then saw her three days later and she said, Oh my God, so helpful. Thank you so much. Thank you And I also mentioned you’ve said, You could imagine a bird spiraling, riding a thermal up and then floating down on that spiral, so there’s another thing you can do.

And she said, Oh my God, we live in the mountains. We see Ravens doing that all the time. She said, I can totally relate to that. And she just lit up.

So I'm just appreciating how you're saying if, if it is, Curious to you or resonant or alive for you, it’s going to really expand the resonance of the practice that you're doing.

[00:24:37] Wendy Palmer: Absolutely. Because our neurosis is so interesting, our concern, like what if this happens or what if that happens? I can't believe she did this... and we spin it and it's in Technicolor. It's like IMAX theater and then usually centering practices are like a little 10 inch black and white screen...Follow your breath...

Well, follow your breath screw that when I've got this huge, neurotic story going and spinning in Technicolor.

So I've always thought that the practices need to have more juice to match the juiciness of our neurotic view about spinning stories and our concerns and our irritations and all those things. How we really build them up and make movies and stories and they're, they're full of images. So we should do the same.

To put ourselves into a more resourceful state, you know, bird riding a thermal because right in California, we would see it all the time. Birds ride the thermals and they go up on the inside and they float down on the outside of the thermal.

And then I imagine that the spiral floating down kind of goes around the outside and kind of softens my eyes and my shoulders. Or another image is the fountain image. So the inside of me is always going up like the center of a fountain and the outside of me is always softening down. So I can have more of a sense of relaxation, because relaxation is a really profound state.

And most people misinterpret collapsing for relaxing. In other words, you know, if you just go “Relax”, and people kind of flop. So there's a heaviness to that that's a collapse.

But if you watch our world class athletes relaxing before they do their event, they're not collapsed. You see them very energetic.They're shaking out their shoulders. They're trying not to use any more muscles than they need to, but it's a state of readiness, relaxation.

[00:26:34] Liz Wiltzen: Ah, yeah.

[00:26:36] Wendy Palmer: It's not a collapse. Collapse is something different. So if I'm relaxed, I should be able to, in a heartbeat, take action.

In martial arts, it's really important to relax because our timing is better and we need to be able to take action in a quarter of a second. So one way to work with that sense of relaxation is the fountain image. The inside's always going up. So there's an upliftedness and a readiness, and the outside's always softening down. So we're not using any extra tension or muscles that we don't need in the moment.

[00:27:15] Liz Wiltzen: Let's talk about the personality self. And the three things that you say the personality self is always going for.

[00:27:25] Wendy Palmer: Okay. If we're head type oriented, which I am, we're usually into control when we're in our personality, which is sort of like our ego.

And then the heart wants approval.
And then the belly or the gut wants safety.

So, they take a lot of energy, these strategies, to try to create security. It's our security part of ourselves. For instance, we're constantly trying to get the right amount of approval. And you know, I want to be in control, but I don't want to be a control freak. So, those strategies can be really exhausting.

And there are strategies developed in our childhood to try to create security. So there's nothing wrong with them. I'm an avid gardener, so I like to think of them as compost. And we know that compost is shit, but if it's treated properly, and then we put it on the soil, wonderful things can grow. Beautiful vegetables and flowers and so on.

So if we can treat that part of ourselves with kindness and compassion and acceptance, it can start to become wisdom and compassion.

When we're centered, we move from control in our head to perception, kind of big picture thinking. We can see more. We move from needing approval to feeling compassion when we're more centered.

And we move from a sense of trying to create safety to a sense of confidence or courage. So when we make the shift, the qualities of the different centers,

change. And that's what we really want to be able to do is make that shift. It's almost like, you know, you have the figure eight or the Mobius strip.

We are going to lose it. It's a guarantee. And then we recover it. And we lose it and we recover it.

And coming from the mindfulness background, if the part of us that is our compost self can be treated with kindness and understanding, like I'm a very judgmental person and what I understand about that is when I was a child, if I was judgmental, I could feel like I was right. And that made me feel secure. I'm right. I know what I'm doing. And so on. So when my judgments come up, which they still do, I'm able to go, Oh, look at you. You're just, you're trying to create security. That's okay.

And then I can move from judgment to compassion or inquiry or something else. So I don't have to stay in that judgmental place.

I sometimes joke, but it's really true, before I started my mindfulness practice, I never thought I was judgmental. I just thought I was right.

[00:30:00] Liz Wiltzen: (Laughs) Well, so what is really cool about what you're saying here is—so that if the pivot then is the head wants control, but you're going to shift to perception—like I can feel control is very narrowed and perception is very spacious and wide.

And then the heart wants approval. What a shift to go to compassion—the focus goes off, “What do I want?" to, “What can I offer? What can I bring? How can I contribute something helpful into the space?” So that's, again, it's like this collapsing in versus expanding out, and then the safety—to go from needing safety to finding courage—makes so much sense.

[00:30:52] Wendy Palmer: Yes. And in order to aid myself in that transition, one of the things that we work with here are archetypes. It comes from a very esoteric Tibetan Buddhist practice that I won't go into right now. But to make it more modern and accessible, it helps to bring certain qualities.

So when my head feels tight enough, I'm in control.

If I actually think of the Dalai Lama, because I've spent some time around him, so I can, it's kind of a visceral feeling, all of a sudden my head starts to open. I feel like my mind expands and I have more perception.

When I'm wanting approval, and I have that, if I think of Mother Teresa, because I studied her, again, these are not random archetypes, there are archetypes that I resonate with—I studied Mother Teresa, I was really amazed when she wanted to go to Calcutta, but it didn't work at that time in the 90s— but when I think of her, then, um, Now it doesn't last, but those archetypes help to trigger those positive qualities.

And when I need more courage, I often think of either the founder of Aikido or Nelson Mandela. Now I spend time in South Africa and I saw Nelson Mandela. Wow, what a presence. So thinking about that makes me, it activates a little more sense of courage coming through me or Mother Teresa compassion. Now I'm talking about famous ones. They don't have to be famous. I'm just pointing to some. People use their pets, they use family members, some people will use aspects of nature.

So the idea is that you think about those archetypes and as you think about them, it can shift your energy. So that can give you a little boost in shifting from the personality, our more reactive self to our centered self, which is our more resourceful self.

[00:32:38] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, and what I found in your practice is that you actually encourage and invite that, that as you conjure that quality, that having a little bit more of that would support you, and then you conjure someone or something that embodies that quality, you say, imagine it behind you in the space, infusing you with that quality. And it's really a cool felt experience. You can actually feel entering into your body and, and coming through you. And I think that's because we have that quality in us and we just have lost our access to it.

[00:33:16] Wendy Palmer: Yes. And to imagine our body's more like a colander. It's more porous, and it can flow through us. We do have all of those in us.

I do want to be careful, because of my spiritual practice, of inadvertently strengthening the ego, like I have that quality in me. That's, it's, there's nothing wrong with that, but I just don't want to strengthen that sense of me, me, and more me.

[00:33:42] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah.

[00:33:42] Wendy Palmer: I really want to strengthen the sense of we, the sense of universal energy that I'm a conduit for rather than I manufacture it

inside myself. So of course, I have wisdom, compassion, all of that. When I try to find it inside my body, I usually hit a lot of negative, I have a lot of self critic, like I'm not really that compassionate or I'm not really that courageous. If I can imagine that it really flows through me, I can be a conduit for it.

Then I'm not as caught up in the me-ness of it, and I'm more a part of a larger universal we. I'm not going to lose my me. I mean, we're not trying to, we just want a better balance because percentage wise, we spend more time in the me world than we do in the we world. You know, even 50/50 would be good. I could spend 50 percent of my time connected to universal energy and feeling that I'm connected to things and part of things and I can be a conduit. That would be great. But most people are around 90, 95 percent me, and then they touch into universal energy, you know, 20 minutes a day when they meditate, but you have 24 hours in the day.

[00:34:56] Liz Wiltzen: I want to bring in something that you teach that I think sounds like me, me, me, but isn't me, me, me. And this is in your book, The Intuitive Body, you talk about the three functional attentional states: Dropped attention, Open attention and Blended attention. And then that goes into Ellipted attention.

So I would love you to speak to that series of attentions.

[00:35:29] Wendy Palmer: So the dropped state is a sort of reference point. And we do need a reference point because we're not, well, at least that's over my pay grade to say I'm reference-less. You know, it would be nice and some of my spiritual teachers kind of have that, but the reference point is:

How do I connect? And as you mentioned earlier, sort of a vertical alignment, so that I'm present, head, heart, and belly or core, sort of like a vertical line, I think that is dropped attention, sort of a starting place, a reference point.

And then, open attention is that sense of expansion, what I would call the peripersonal space, where we include others, we begin to expand. We begin to have a larger presence.

And blended attention is more like the extra-personal space, where we have a sense that we're really all interconnected. That can be hard because, um, the me can be so, it's like, I'm here and you're nice, but to have the experience that you and I are really interconnected takes a bit of concentration, the experience of it, which is different than the idea of it.

[00:36:39] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah.

[00:36:40] Wendy Palmer: Because if you've read the books, we have the ideas. But I've been around some amazing teachers who embody that, they resonate, they just exude a sense of Thich Nhat Hanh was one, I could just feel him, you know, in a huge room with all these people. It was palpable, like the Dalai Lama, the sense that we're all connected. Because their experience of it was so strong, we all caught a glimpse of that.

So that's something that we want to practice, that's the sort of blended, the big one. And then there's the open attention, which is getting bigger. And then there's dropped attention, which is our reference point of aligning ourselves, head, heart and belly. And these days I'd like to think of it sort of an alignment that's beyond the body even, it goes up out of my head and down into the earth.

[00:37:34] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, and you say something really cool in the book that that dropped attention is finding a you can trust and a home to come back to in yourself. And I think that speaks to how you said, if it's just all space, you're just like, Ooh, all spaced out. You also need this coming into this dropped attention as well so that you're oriented Into, um, something, something you can trust. I love how you said that. It's so beautiful, like a place to come back to. And that helps you when you come into experiences of ellipted attention. So say about the atom in the nucleus again, and then how you see the ellipted attention.

[00:38:23] Wendy Palmer: So with an ellipse, the energy isn't a circular, it's oval and the energy kind of goes out and comes in and goes out and comes in. So when I'm in an ellipted attention, I see you and then I worry about what you think. My attention is pinging out and then coming back and pinging out again.

It's not a stable state. Like if you spin a top, what makes the top stay up is that it's balanced inside that spinning. An ellipse is when the top starts to wobble. So an ellipted state is more of a wobbly state.

In an atom, you have the nucleus and then you have the electrons going around it. So the nucleus is stable and the electrons whiz around it. And I don't know enough about atomic energy to know if the atom starts to wobble what happens to it. But I imagine it doesn't stay well. So if you think about that sort of nucleus as being the center point, and everything can whiz around it, but the center point stays, like with the top, and then what happens when it starts to wobble, that's ellipted attention. And when we're wobbly, we're unstable, and we tend to be reactive. And it also takes a lot of energy to try to manage an unstable state, a wobbly state.

[00:39:44] Liz Wiltzen: Because we're getting pulled off center, off being the center of the space that we're inhabiting. And you say when that happens, if you just toggle back into dropped attention, you come back into that place in yourself, and then you expand back out again and can include the electrons, the circumstances and things that are whizzing around us. It's so rich, like we can all get our heads around this and in a moment, in like 30 seconds, you can recover.

[00:40:15] Wendy Palmer: You can do it in five seconds. So inhale up, lift, exhale, soften, and then open up.

Or we have a little, one of our tang lines is noble, awesome, shiny. We often sign our emails this way, and it comes from an Aikido teacher I had once.

He was teaching a seminar and he had this beautiful, flowing, powerful technique. And we were practicing and he stopped us. He said, Oh, you're so stiff. And he showed it again. And then we practiced and he stopped us again. He said, now you're all spaced out and weak. And he was trying to explain what he was looking for.

And he said, I want to see your noble. I want to see your awesome. I want to see your shiny.

So noble is, that's the uplifted state that dignified uplifted state. Awesome is the expanded open state and shiny is the warmth.

It’so important to cultivate warmth. If we want to influence people, one of the best ways to influence people is if you're warm, then people are drawn to that and they relax and they're more likely to listen to you.

So noble: uplift, awesome: extend, shiny: warm.

Boom, boom, boom, five seconds. You can make a shift in five seconds. We have a one second centering.

I had a client once, She was always arms crossed, leaning on the table, everyone experienced her as being really aggressive in the organization. And I was working with her on this practice and she said, I can't sustain it.

And I said, well, you don't have to sustain it. You just need to do these little blips of it. And she said, like a lizard pushup. I said, yeah, like a lizard pushup. And many people in the organizations that we work with—we work with very fast paced organizations that people feel they don't have any time—so they love the lizard push up because they'll be in a meeting, someone will say “lizard push up” and everyone goes bing, they just you know, pop up and open. And then that changes the energy in the room. And often the conversation can flow a little more easily.

And then you can also use the archetypes, the inspiration, often if I'm dealing with criticism and I can center myself, put it out there and look at it, have a little distance and ask myself, I wonder what Nelson Mandela might say? Now, really, I have no idea, but asking that question puts me in more of a resourceful, open state.

If the criticism gets inside me, my own criticism or anyone else’s, then it starts to make me tight and reminds me of all the other times I was criticized. And it starts a whole process. My process is I'm a failure. And then right behind that, I want to judge the other person. Like if someone's criticizing me, my first thought is I, Oh God, I screwed up. And second is, but they didn't do something.

Some people jump onto other people right away, and other people just keep beating themselves up. We all have a pattern from our childhood and how we deal with criticism. So the idea is to not take it inside or if it did get inside to take it out and look at it.

So taking the criticism out and having, it's fun now to have a container, a little bowl or a basket or something like that, put it there and then look at it. And when I'm centered, I'm more resourceful and I tend to be able to see multiple perspectives. I may think I still disagree. I might understand why that person criticized me. I might have more compassion that maybe they were afraid or struggling, and so they lashed out.

So that's our tool for listening without taking it personally, to actually have a concentration that we do. Let it land in the space or put it in a container, look at it and then invite an inspirational archetype as a way to sort of wonder about it, rather than just react to it. So that's the second competency.

[00:46:14] Liz Wiltzen: Well, I want to ask you a bit more about that, because there's two other things you say that I think are so important. When you say don't take it personally, another way you've said that is don't make it solid.

Don't make yourself solid. Don't make the person saying the thing solid. Don't make the feedback itself a solid thing. Because if it's solid, now you can feel attacked by it. It'll hit you. And so there's that porousness, that spaciousness of being, even in your own self, like you're not solid.

[00:46:50] Wendy Palmer: Yes. Because if there's a feeling of solidity, of a real me, then we experience impact.

So a martial arts thing, you know, if I get hit, I feel the impact of it in my body and then I've got a whole negative process that goes with impact. If it can go into the space, I'm not impacted so much. And as you're pointing to, the porousness really allows me to have a more resourceful response.

[00:47:15] Liz Wiltzen: And so now I want to bring in, and I may get the pronunciations wrong, Uke and Nage, when you're practicing Aikido.

Wendy Palmer: Yes, good for you.

Liz Wiltzen: Thank you. Did I, did I pronounce it right? Because I just read it.

Wendy Palmer: You did. Yes.

Liz Wiltzen: So Uke is the person who is in the position of attacker and Nage is the person who is receiving the attack. And Uke's job is to attack with full intention and clarity. And Nage's job is to open to the attack, to be responsive as the attack comes in.

So I just love what that practice and what is happening there—but I want you to speak to, because you say something about letting, like receiving the attack or letting it penetrate. Now, I might be off on that.

So, so speak to me about that.

[00:48:14] Wendy Palmer: So, I'm not letting it into Wendy personality. So that’s the difference. Wendy, “you know, oh yeah, I hear you, right, I receive it, I'm screwed up.” Not that.

What I'm letting it into is my centered self, centred self is a more universal self. It's a more porous self. When I'm on the Aikido mat, actually, and somebody attacks me, I try to receive it, and I let the attack be drawn up toward the sky and down toward the earth. So it kind of can dissipate in that double helix that I talked about.

Now, the interesting thing is when I'm the attacker, and I've had a couple of teachers in my time where I went to attack them., and as I got close to them, all of a sudden the aggression went away. And I had this—and I've seen plenty of other people, really strong, tough guys—and all of a sudden get this stupid smile and you can't be aggressive anymore. It's not possible. Like it changes. I come in, I'm feisty. I'm Irish. I'm going to lay this punch on or I'm going to make this thing and then I get close to them and everything just...I had a

teacher once, he was my first teacher and he was a real tough guy, he'd been a cop for years and he studied with the founder of Aikido, we call him Oh Sensei, and he waited I think almost a year before he was allowed to attack the founder.

He was training, and he'd been trained in a number of martial arts already. He was black belt in 3 or 4. And he said, I just kept thinking I'm going to get my hands on this little guy—because he was a small Japanese guy, Oh Sensei—I’m just gonna get my hands on him. I'm going to prove that it doesn't. So he said he was invited to attack. He went to attack him and the next thing he knew, and to hear this man say this phrase, because it was not a phrase he would use:

The next thing I knew, I was rolling in the corners surrounded by pink clouds.

Now, this is a tough guy, right? And I never had an experience as radical as that, but I have had experiences where I went to attack and all of a sudden I felt soft and I had this stupid smile on my face. So that's how that is an incredible power. When just through the felt presence of the personal space and the environment, the aggression can be neutralized through the feeling of softness.

So the idea of letting back in, it comes in. I often say the one with the most juice wins. If I have more noble awesome shininess than they do aggression, their aggression doesn't get to dominate.

So if I can let it in and think it goes up to the heaven and down into the earth, and my concentration is good and I can really feel that, then their aggression, it's hard for the aggression to stay solid because it's touching something that's really strong, but really light. And open and warm.

Because human beings love flow, the body loves flow. Because of mirror neurons. You know what mirror neurons are?

Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, but say for the audience in case they don't.

Wendy Palmer: If you see me eat a piece of lemon, you watch me do that, your body will go through a kind of a contraction.

Liz Wiltzen: You just said it and I'm doing it.

Wendy Palmer: Yeah. Yeah. So that's a mirror neuron. You're watching me and then your body reacts.

So because of mirror neurons, if I can be more warm and shiny and light than that energy is aggressive, that aggressive energy will be drawn into my warm, shiny lightness, so to speak. So that's why we want to practice a resourceful state that's light, that's open, that's compassionate, that's warm, because it can really affect other people.

And I saw Thich Nhat Hanh do it once, I was at a talk he was giving and this deranged person came bounding through the door and was screaming and all these people jumped up to try to protect Thich Nhat Hanh and he goes No we’re alright, let him come, let him come... and he went right up to him and he kind of stood over him, and then he sat down, and within about 30 seconds he had his head on Thich Nhat Hanh’s knee and he was stroking his head.

[00:52:24] Liz Wiltzen: Wow Yeah,

[00:52:26] Wendy Palmer: I mean, you know, he had such presence of compassion and kindness and love that this guy, who just was really crazy, was completely settled because Thich Nhat Hanh’s energy was stronger than this guy's craziness.

[00:52:44] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love what you're saying. So if you can bring, if there's some toxic energy in the space and you can bring more of your noble, awesome, shiny, more of your warmth and your strength and your presence into the space, because you said before with the the atom and I'm the nucleus and I'm holding the space and the electrons are in the space...I'm not responsible for the electrons. I'm responsible for the energy in the space.

[00:53:15] Wendy Palmer: Exactly.

[00:53:16] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. I don't need anybody to be different than they're being.

[00:53:21] Wendy Palmer: Just let them be. I mean, they're doing what they need to do. All you can do is plant the seeds. And, you know, when the time is right, maybe the seeds take hold, but we can't change...you know, the Simpsons, it’s a comedy...

Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, yeah.

Wendy Palmer: Marge is great. She said, people who say you can't change other people are just quitters.

[00:53:46] Liz Wiltzen: (Laughs) Well, well, and, but then you make a really good point that... So, so let's say that someone’s level toxicity is 80 percent of the space, and you can only get to 60%. You can't get to like your 85 percent more light than their toxicity. Then you say, you just bow, you bow to them.

[00:54:04] Wendy Palmer: Yeah. Well, so, so there's three levels of practice. The one level is that I can do it. I'm practicing, I'm growing. I've had some win experiences.

The second level of practice is I'm at my training edge. I can feel myself growing. It's kind of stressful, but I'm growing.

And the third level of practice is I can't do it yet.

Liz Wiltzen: (Laughs) Not mastery!

Wendy Palmer: So that's the benchmark that I'm going to. So I say when people are training Aikido, you should have all three.

You should have some win experiences. But if you have nothing but win experiences, you won't grow. You'll just get lazy and that's it.

If you're always at your training edge, it's really stressful. And if you're always in, I can't do it yet, it's depressing.

So you actually kind of need all three to keep humility, to keep growing, and then to have a sense of confidence too. So, you know, ideally it would be a third of each. So those levels, you know, there's moments where I'm like, I can't do it yet.

And I want to look at that and go, okay, a year from now, if I encounter that situation, I would like to be able to up my game and be more noble awesome shiny than they are toxic. But at this point not yet, that’s why I want to keep practicing and growing.

[00:55:21] Liz Wiltzen: I love that. Not yet. Just... “not yet”. You have an altercation with someone and you get totally triggered and you melt down and you leave the space and you say, “Not yet.”

[00:55:31] Wendy Palmer: A friend of mine, Sophia Bornstein, she's a meditation teacher, she said, you know, my navigation system is something I really need to learn from.

She goes, when I screw up, it doesn't get mad at me. It says recalculating.

Liz Wiltzen: (Laughs) Yeah. Recalibrating. So good. Yeah.

Okay. So I have a couple other places I want to go with you, but I want to make sure that we weave in that thread of the third quality, the third competency of leadership.

[00:56:01] Wendy Palmer: Yes. So action, how do we really take a stand? How do we take action?

Taking a stand, taking action, speaking up...they’re all triangles. I alluded to this earlier.

Listening, receiving feedback is circular.

It's kind of building blocks of life, sperm and the egg, right? The egg is round and it accepting and invites in and then the sperm is triangular and it goes forward.

So how do we shape our energy or design our energy so that it moves into a triangle. So when I'm doing what we call entering techniques in Aikido, that’s a triangle. And we really extend in, extend through to create the technique.

My thought is, is to make the triangle so big that we can bring our inspiration behind us.

I call our inspiration people, our posse. Maya Angelou calls it her entourage that she's bringing with her. The idea is that we're coming with a whole set of support behind us. So the triangle has a, it's really big, and that's something we want to develop, the extra personal space. Our back is open and behind us there's the feeling that the posse is almost like a warm breeze and it flows through us.

Then we want to focus it, and our focus, our intention, if we have an intention, a sense of purpose, something we want to accomplish. One of the things that we do when we go into organizations is we bring wooden swords to give to the executives. And when the focus point is clear, so energy, or ki, as we say in

Aikido, is like light. It's nice, it's open, but focused light is a laser. One of the most powerful elements that we know is just focused light.

When we're able to focus our intention and shape it energetically into a triangle and really put it out there, and we can empower it through gesture, so a sense that something bigger is coming through us, and, and here's an interesting idea too:

When we take a stand, when we speak up, when we say what's important, we need to do it without expecting people will hear us. Often when people say something, they want to be sure that the other person heard them. They may hear you, they may not. They may actually hear something completely different.

Liz Wiltzen:(Laughs) It’s amazing how often that happens.

Wendy Palmer: Yeah. Wow. Really? That's not what I...yeah.

Liz Wiltzen: Not even close.

Wendy Palmer: So the idea is I just put it out there and the person that I'm speaking to or the situation I'm speaking to is included in my triangle, but I'm not focused on them. I'm focused on speaking what's true for me or acting on what's true for me.

So in Aikido, I don't focus on my attacker. I focus beyond them. They're just in the space and my intention is going through them. And that way I can manage the big guys. If I'm focused on the big guy, then I'll tend to experience impact. We talked about earlier.

[00:58:59] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah.

[00:58:59] Wendy Palmer: Because I'm trying to get them. But I'm not trying to get them. I'm trying to go through them.

This is the idea and then ideally they get swept up in that flow, in that clarity and they move with it.

[00:59:14] Liz Wiltzen: That's so good. ‘Cause I've watched several videos of Aikido throws just to get the feel of what, what is this practice about? And there's a... and you say this in your book somewhere I think...

So, so someone's going to punch you and that punch is coming straight for you. And you just gently reach up and take their arm and direct that energy through the space where it's already wanting to go. You don't, yeah...

[00:59:44] Wendy Palmer: Yeah. And the gentle part is important. People think power is impact because that's what it used to be in the eighties.

When the first mixed martial arts, all these different martial arts came together and fought each other. So when they first came out, all these tough guys and karate guys and kickboxing guys and boxers and the Gracie Jujitsu guys beat everybody because Gracie Jujitsu, Brazilian jujitsu, is super soft.

And they condition themselves tremendously so they can take one hit or one punch and then they get their hands on you and it's good night, because you can't ,and I say this often because I have a very soft style of doing Aikido—the reason I say it's powerful is you can't fight what you can't feel.

So if it's hard I can feel it I can fight it, I can counter it. If it's soft and there's a Russian martial art called Systema it's also incredibly soft, and they just tie people up like that. They just get them down and people, all the tough guys, all the punchers, the kickers, they can't do anything. Softness is a power. It's different than this: I need to be grounded and strong. I think that's just stressful.

I need to be light and soft so I can be adaptable and I can work with things and I can accept things, we’ve talked about that earlier, the power of acceptance, and possibly redirect. But if I'm hard, I'm very feisty and I'm very anti authoritarian. And when I feel somebody come on hard, I'll immediately stiffen against them physically and intellectually as well.

But if they present it in such a way where there's a kind of a receptivity and a softness as, as their clarity, but not hardness, I'm much more likely to listen.

[01:01:33] Liz Wiltzen: Okay, let's talk about resilience, can we? Because you are talking about acceptance and you're talking about adaptability and flexibility and flow. I was listening to a podcast by a guy named Blaine Fian, it’s a podcast about Aikido. He said something about resilience that I so wanted to ask you about because I loved it so much and I've never heard anything like this. He said, and this is a paraphrase, resilience is the capacity to navigate dislocated expectation.

[01:02:18] Wendy Palmer: Hmm. Dislocated. That's an interesting word to use in that context. Uh, interesting. Um, yes, I, I resonate with that. Um, that's just such a new way of thinking about it that I have to kind of let that settle in a little bit. I mean, to me, resilience comes from not self-generating. Before COVID, I would, for the last five years before COVID, I traveled 150, 000 miles a year.

[01:07:19] Liz Wiltzen: Okay. I want to pivot to, I want to, I want to pivot to boundaries. It is because,

Wendy Palmer: (Laughs) Oh, yes.

Liz Wiltzen:(Laughs) Why are you laughing?

[01:07:40] Wendy Palmer: They don't work.

Liz Wiltzen: They don't work. Yeah, I mean, that is a perhaps controversial thing to say.

Wendy Palmer: Well, I'm just talking about my personal experience. When I, you know, I sense a boundary, I feel compelled to push against it. Now I'm housebroken. So I, but, all martial artists, our job description is to break boundaries.

That's what we train to do to try to get through that. Teenagers, you know, that's part of their job description for the most part as well. And so the stronger the boundary, the more excited I get.

Liz Wiltzen: (Laughs)

Wendy Palmer: Yeah, I'm like, Oh, it just, it just brings energy. When we’re doing in person things, we have this thing for centering, which is you take my wrist and you push against me quickly and my body puts up a boundary, right?

It just automatically puts up a boundary to try to protect itself. And then when I do go around the circle and do it, people get stronger. Well, a few people will just flop, but most people get stronger. Push against them and they push back and then you push back. It's a, it's a thing that the body does for the most part.

Then we find if you inhale, uplift, exhale, think of somebody that makes you smile. We have people open their arms, ask the people to push again. And this time, let all the pressure on the wrist dissipate into the space between us. It's really hard for people to push. I'll say push harder, and I'm standing on one foot and light and open.

I'm like “push” and they can’t, because they're pushing on space. You're pushing on someone else, then you can get energy. If you open, then people don't get that extra energy to push back against you. Now, You don't want to, you know, take toxic energy in. You don't want to take the hit. So that's why you put it into space. We've covered that.

[01:11:29] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. It feels like, what I find boundaries to be are, what an actual healthy—boundary isn't even the word because it's clarity—and that's the triangle shape that you're talking about. And one thing, when I very first heard that talk that you gave two years ago, it was so good because you're talking about this, the space, the container and the clarity What we tend to do when something comes in that we don't like or don't want, we pull our energy in, thinking, “I'm going to keep them out”, but the result is we have less space to be in, to live our life in.

Like we keep pulling in, here's the wall, you stay on that side of the wall. If there's a wall that you've got to stay on that side of, I’ve got to stay on this side of it.

Wendy Palmer: Yes.

Liz Wiltzen: So that's what's beautiful about what you're saying.

I want to read something that you said in your book about boundaries because, again, I think this is not the normal, what's in the lexicon right now around boundaries, but I just resonate so deeply with it.

So you said, “In my experience, protecting ourselves is not really possible. And in my belief, protecting ourselves is not the point. The point is to keep living in a way that is compassionate, skillful, and creative. Being hurt is not a terrible thing. It is a fact of life. We can experience hurt and still go forward with an open heart.

We can go ahead even though we are afraid to move. We do not have to wait until we are healed to love.”

[01:13:10] Wendy Palmer: Well, thank you. That was a nice quote. It was nice to hear you read it. And yeah, it reminds me of Georgia O’Keeffe, the painter. She paints these flowers, her quote I love, “I've been afraid every single day of my life and it's never kept me from doing anything.”

So it's not a matter of healing, as I said, or not being afraid, you know, it's a matter of inviting courage to come through us, inviting compassion to come through us, inviting wisdom to come through us, connecting to our universal selves.

So if it's okay, I'm just, you can put this in or not. I'm going to give this a little visualization.

So please, if we just take a second and uplift and then go up and imagine we just go out to the stars. So the night sky and then out to the galaxy, you know, our galaxy is in the Milky Way and there's more than that. And it's just this huge, vast expanse. And then let's look back at the earth floating in space.

We've seen the pictures of it. And let's just for a moment be still and just see the earth floating in space. Beautiful blue marble, no boundaries, clouds, shapes, colors.

And then let's let ourselves be drawn back to the earth.

And we land wherever we land on the planet. And as we do that, we just take a moment and just have that sense that we're all interconnected and it's huge, and we're a point of light and everybody is a point of light, and these lights are interconnected, like a spider web of humanity shimmering around the globe.

These days I've been encouraging that, because of what's going on on the planet, that if we can really have a sense of interconnectedness, I think it's good for our hearts and our spirits.

[01:15:28] Liz Wiltzen: Thank you so much. It's been a rich and wonderful conversation.

[01:15:32] Wendy Palmer: Thank you so much for inviting me. It's been a pleasure and I appreciate your energy.

And I'm hoping that some people will find value and start to develop little practices to keep their noble, awesome, shiny awake and alive.

[01:15:46] Liz Wiltzen: Okay, be sure to check out the show notes you guys for Links to Wendy's website, leadershipembodiment.com, where you'll find the practices that I mentioned earlier in the conversation as well as all of her books, every single one of which is excellent and well worth reading, and a list of the other trainings she has available if you'd like to study with her personally.

Thanks for joining us today, everyone. If you like the show, I'd so appreciate it if you could follow, and share it with people you think would love it. It's an unpaid labor of love and your support encourages me to keep it coming. You can find show notes, leave comments, and sign up for my newsletter at the podcast website trackingyes.com.