A tender sit with Vince Fakhoury Horn on Palestine, identity, and dharma. He speaks about his family’s Palestinian history and what it’s like to live with the unrelenting waves of grief, fear, and anger that never end. And how that reckoning has matured his spiritual practice into waking down, rooted in the body and the world.

We move through themes of overwhelm and the pull to look away, adult development and spiritual lineage, intergenerational healing, and somatic-imaginal explorations that widen our capacity for care. Alongside these, we reflect on identity and race, the cycles of trauma and history, and the small levers of care (political, economic, and personal) that let practice meet reality.

At the heart of it is the question: how do we not look away from Palestine, and let that gaze deepen our practice and our care?

"My current best pitch for parent relationship work is: come for the suck reduction, stay for the most powerful spiritual practice and contact with the divinity I've come across thus far. My work with my mom has simply been by far the clearest and most powerful path to connecting with sacredness, divinity, and grace. It's filled a hole in my heart.Easiest thing to point at is a 95% reduction in harsh inner critic and just completely believing that I am not. My parents have been the most obvious vessel of divine love and grace in my life. And I doubt I'm unique in this experience.What feels powerful about this is that at no point have I needed to put faith in anything. I trusted my trust and distrust. What do I trust about my mom's dad? How much do I actually believe she loves me? How much did her parents love her?"These powerful tweets from Johnson captured my attention over the past few years, along with his heartwarming shares about conversations with his mother. He touches upon something deeply powerful here - the relationship with parents as both a source of potential pain and an opportunity for profound spiritual growth.Even for those with decent relationships, vulnerability with parents isn't easy. And as Ram Das famously said, "If you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week with your family." Parent relationship deepening remains vastly underrated and under-discussed as a spiritual practice.Some people admirably dedicate their entire lives to certain spiritual practices, bringing immense rigor and determination to their development. What if we could bring that same rigor, drive, and sense of the sacred to deepening our relationships with our parents? Johnson's journey exemplifies this possibility, which inspired this conversation.

May all beings be immersed in boundless love. The Love Library — https://service-guild.notion.site/Love-Library-92fc1e8212fc4ac397aa03a1415b2553 Tasshin's book about Metta, The Path of Love — https://tasshin.com/metta-book https://tasshin.com/love/

In our personal journeys, we have experienced some beautiful synergies between meditation and parts-work. And the goal of this conversation was to explore these synergies. We started with discussing the limitations and potential pitfalls of parts work. We then delved deeper into the relationship between parts work and meditation, exploring how the wisdom of traditional mediation teachings can help us overcome the limitations of parts work. And then we also go into how parts work can greatly augment spiritual and meditation practices.

This is part two of our conversation about parts work, following up on the part one — Intro to Parts Work

Timestamps: 0:00 Limitations of Parts Work and turning it into "energy work" (less conceptual & verbal, more energetic) 3:00 Can anyone start or are there “therapy prerequisites”? Find the channel that works for you (often verbal) 7:05 View of “dealmaking” & deceptive/subtle agendas (eg. “negotiating between parts”) 11:00 Goals & Intentions: like meditation, have one to get you to start, then drop when you begin 12:35 How has Theo seen people move from verbal to imaginal and somatic? 15:45 IFS and “reification vs nebulosity” 20:00 Understanding “default emotions” as deeply reified, conceptual, disembodied 23:45 Blending in to your parts to allow them to be fully felt 26:20 Recommendations on skills to develop to safely blend in 29:50 “Tapping into a reservoir of wellbeing” as a skill 35:10 Parts work and concentration states support each other (jhanas, core transformation) 42:55 Emotional Untangling & Wellbeing work as a core part vs. just Concentration/Insight paths of awakening 44:15 Avoiding failure modes of “pure IFS” (“everything is only trauma” , “heal all the exiles”) 48:40 What is The Path? 51:10 Parts work freeform, letting go of steps & folding into a mode of attention 54:30 View of meditation hindrances: befriend, not fight 56:55 3 Marks Practice: Seeing Dukkha from parts interactions 58:20 "Parts" lens as a frame upgrade to early buddhism and psychological concepts 1:03:20 Suffusing this into your life as a way of being, enjoying the process 1:05:40 Emptiness & parts work 1:08:30 Issue of conflating parts work with truth seeking Resources: - Romeo Stevens' Threefold Training Model https://neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com/2021/03/threefold-training.html

We (Theo and Pranab) recorded a conversation talking about our "parts work" journeys — how we see parts work, what makes it transformative, how we got started, what helped us, some insights, practical tips, and more. If you've been curious about the idea of IFS or other parts-based self-exploration frameworks, this conversation might serve as a useful primer to help you dive deeper. We'll record one more conversation going deeper and nerding out on parts-work in the context of meditation, talking about its limitations and maybe even doing a live demo :) Resources: - Richard Schwartz (founder of IFS) on The Tim Ferris Show - Gendling's Focusing - Theo's Website - Pranab's Twitter 

Mykola Bilokonsky runs the Public Neurodiversity Support Center, with an aim to develop it as the single best resource on the internet by and for neurodivergent people.

Here, Myk beautifully and intensely talks about his life story as an autistic individual and then outlines his theory of Autistic Identity Trauma using The Matrix film series as a map.

This was less of a conversation and more of a performance art. I felt honored to hold space for Myk's expression.

"Core Transformation is about altering a deceptively simple pattern with large ramifications.  The pattern is that when you desire something, you make a contract with yourself to suffer until you get the thing."  — from Romeo's blog post on Core Transformation (http://neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com/2019/07/core-transformation.html) 

If you're curious about Core Transformation and want to get a taste of it, check out my website (untanglingself.com) and reach out to me on Twitter (twitter.com/nowtheo)