How to Unlock Inner Peace: A Journey with Metta

Adulting with Autism

Hey guys, welcome to Adulting with Autism, the podcast where we dive into the rollercoaster of adulthood through a neurodiverse lens. I'm April Ratchford, your friendly occupational therapist mom, proudly on the spectrum and raising an amazing young adult son with autism. Join us as we share stories, tips, and laughs, offering a supportive space for anyone navigating life's twists and turns. Grab your drink of choice, no judgment, and let's embark on this journey together. This is Adulting with Autism.

Hey guys, hey, happy Saturday. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm late and you're judging. Normally I get these things in the morning. It has been a busy week. I'm planning on going on vacation. Don't worry, my episode's up and running while I'm on vacation, so you will be hearing my lovely voice on vacation. However, in order to go on vacation, I had to scramble and get a lot of my paperwork in before going on vacation, which meant I didn't get a lot of recording done prior to this. So that's why I'm recording a little later and getting it up, brain fart, a little later than normal. However, I hope you guys had a great end of the week and that you guys are staying cooler due to the heat wave. It's still a mesmerizing 90 degrees, even though it's 8.30 here in Kentucky. I'm still melting.

However, I would like to introduce you to Metta Rebirk. She is an aspiring author and coach who has dedicated over two decades to helping experienced leaders realize their true potential and free themselves from anxiety. Her new book, The Twin Point Life Force, comes from questioning your thoughts and reveals how we can set ourselves free by questioning what we believe to be true. She has come to see that for all, the human life force emerges and inner peace reveals itself by questioning our thoughts about reality, which is true about anxiety.

So many of us sit there and have thoughts about ourselves that aren't true and run around and take up space in our heads without really questioning that thought. And she coaches into really breaking down that thought and wondering, is that thought really true, or is it something that we believe just because it's a lingering thought we have? So she talks about how to experience peace and joy in the present, no matter what your external circumstances look like. How to create a new life experience if the one you're in now isn't kind. How to break free from a negative thought loop when you inevitably get caught in one. I like both anxiety, self-doubt, self-sabotage, self-destructive habits, and how to feel free, how to feel inner peace regardless of not knowing and uncertainty. And that's the thing about anxiety. We're so busy worrying about the future and not focusing on the now that it gets us all ramped up.

And all we can do is take advice from Metta and really think about reading her book. Even you parents and caregivers, sometimes we get so caught up in worrying about our kids' futures and our futures and how it's going to relate to our kids that our anxiety ramps up, which ramps their anxiety up. So, sit down, take a moment, have your drink of choice, and of course, always no judgment, and welcome our guest. Hello. Good morning. How are you? Fine, thank you. And you? I'm doing well. Lovely, lovely. And I'm so sorry for the inconvenience for our last scheduled meeting. That's quite all right. Where are you in the world? I'm in Denmark, in Copenhagen. And you, my dear, where are you except apart from being in a car? Listen, sometimes the car is my best office. I am in Kentucky in the United States. Wow. I know Kentucky Fried Chicken. That's the only thing we're known for except for the derby. I'm so sorry, but now maybe you will enlighten me a little bit more about your lovely area. Now I want to go to Denmark. I'm like, I'm ready to travel.

Oh, it's a beautiful little country. You know, there are not many people living in Denmark. We are only 5 million. That's still a good portion. I was like, only 5 million? Yeah, one big family, you know. I know, just joking. But yeah, you're welcome and if you come, I will love to cook for you. You can even stay over here. I have a spare place. It's a deal. You just let me know a little in advance and I will make everything ready. So tell me, how is it that you got into letting people know that you can just revamp your life in later stages? Yeah. I don't know actually where to start, except from that I work with a lot of very successful people, actually. Apparently, they have achieved almost everything. But still, they were not very happy. And they were very insecure about what they had achieved. If, for instance, their father, they were proud of them or they had a lot of thinking going on that didn't really make them very happy. And then also myself, my own thinking about life and my kids and the world and everything. And then I started to be a little curious about what is a thought and what is a feeling and what comes first, emotion or the thoughts. And then I dived into that five, six years ago.

And actually, while biking in Copenhagen, I got a little epiphany that when I believed my thoughts, I had stomach problems. I had a lot of different kinds of problems. But when I didn't believe them, I was actually okay. And then I started to gather a lot of details and information and knowledge about the brain and the heart and what does it mean to be a human? And then I decided to write a book about it. And this is this book here that I'm going to show you. It's actually also on Amazon. And for the last five, six years, my life has changed into something much more friendly. I work with very skilled people who want to change their career. I work with leaders who want to become better leaders for people. And I have also become a much better mom. I'm not always, you know, busy telling the whole world how they should behave. I let them behave like they want to. And then I focus on how me, myself, I behave. I know there are a lot of parents out there that have adult kids that are on the spectrum or neurodiverse. Yeah. And they have all their lives connected themselves to their kids and have no idea. They've kind of lost themselves and have no idea how to separate their issues from their kids. And now that their kids are adults, they need to kind of separate themselves in order to really live their lives. And I think you have some of the answers.

I don't know if I have some answers, but I have come to see that when we meet another person, we don't really meet the other person. We meet our story about the other person. That means that actually we meet ourselves. And then we start judging. And then when the behavior of the other doesn't really match what we had imagined it should be, then we become either very upset and we find it very, maybe not respectful. And it's just because in an innocent moment, we believed something that was not correct. And of course, you know all parents they want their kids to have a happy life and when we see that our kids they may not be like we thought them to be or we wanted them to be we may even think that they that the life they have was not as good as it could be but what do we know. So when we get to know that, when we can kind of silent our own mind and listen to the other person, regardless of it's, you know, a child with certain challenges or whatever, we can start to become more curious about, who are you? You don't need to be like me to have a good life. and maybe even I can learn something from you. I have a good friend and she has a son who is now 16 and maybe he has a mind like eight years old. And we had a very lovely talk a couple of days ago, Annamita and I, and suddenly she discovered that the reason why she had been so miserable and so sad about her son, was because she thought that he could not have a good life. But that was only because she met him from her perspective, not from his perspective. And I think that when we become aware of ourselves, we are very busy with all the others. So we tend to forget that we need to pay attention to ourselves and to get to learn ourselves and especially become aware of our thinking about the world because the world is not how we believe it to be because the world is actually much nicer than the stories we tell ourselves about the world. But we don't know that. And also, there's also another thing here is that when we believe our thoughts to be who we are, it can be very difficult to let go of the thoughts. Because, you know, a lot of parents with challenging kids, they also become kind of victims of, you know, life, what has now, you know, emerged. So without this victim kind of head, who am I? If I'm not a victim, who am I? But we are not, we have a kid with special needs, but it's not who we are. We just try to do our best to take care of our kids. The problem arises when we believe it to be who we are. I don't know if it's a little weird what I'm saying. And then maybe you will ask me, but when do we know that we are, you know, pulling our own leg with the stories, making up stories? And that is when we can feel it, when we become stressed and get stomach problems. Some have problems with the shoulders, you know, different spots in the body that doesn't feel nice. Then we know that we are building up a story that we in a moment believe to be true. Our thoughts create our feelings, and it's the feelings that we react upon. We are not at all rational beings. And the brain actually doesn't know anything. The brain guesses. A couple of days ago, I was watching out of the window and I saw a guy like with a yellow shirt on and stuff. And then I thought, okay, wonderful. Now the municipality is going to work on the streets because it's so bumpy. And I was so happy and I started to think, okay, in two months time, it will be so nice. And then I just turned my head. And then I saw that this guy with a long line behind him was out walking his dog. So our brain, you know, picks up small bits here and there and then put it together. And the brain doesn't mind if it's not 100% reality, the story that is, you know, putting together. Something that is approximately correct is okay but not really because then a lot of misunderstandings arise so so when we become more aware of what's going on inside of ourselves and don't think that it's something that someone has you know imposed on me then we can start to meet whatever lands on our plate with much more peace and much more strength.

Do you think by accident a lot of therapists and doctors accidentally feed into the stories that we tell ourselves about our kids and it makes us seem like we're victims that we have kids with special needs until we believe these stories in our heads. And how can we break this kind of victim mentality of these stories in our brains? I think that we can take responsibility for ourselves. I no one can hurt me except me and the story that I'm telling myself if if I, for instance sorry sorry not good. I'm 60 years old, and when I was almost 23 years old, my twin brother died in an accident, actually in the United States. And we were very close. I discovered that I really never said I and me. I always said we and us. And suddenly I had to learn how to say I and me. And in the beginning i didn't thought that i could ever be happy again but then after years and and also some introspection i started to see that everything was okay and even though that my brother, he only lived almost 23 years, he got a full life. And the gift he brought to my life for the time we had together has also been part of who I am today. So when we look at what happens from another perspective. Everything is actually okay. And it doesn't mean that we don't become sad and, you know, totally, you know, I really hope that everything will be okay. But we can meet whatever comes with more grace and with more trust that everything is going to, is okay. Okay. Actually, I have discovered also that we never really exist in the moment. Like, either we are somewhere yesterday, years ago, thinking about what happened and why it shouldn't, or we are in the future. But the only thing that exists is actually this small moment you and I, we have now, which the next small moment is created upon. And in this small moment, you and I together, are you okay? Yes. Me too. Okay. So when we become more aware of what we have, it's so difficult to be scared. And, you know, it's not just me. we all have the same kind of, we are created the same way. So this is not just something that counts for me, counts for you, counts for your kids and all the listeners and the listeners' kids and their family and the whole shebang, you know. So, and when we look, when we become aware of this, you know, we can meet our kids with curiosity because we don't want anything actually to change because it is what it is. And. And it is even better than we could, you know, because we never really very seldom think about something that will be. We always think about something that will be even, you know, worse. And if we are so busy not being present, we don't see actually the small steps that our son is taking in his manner. Because we are somewhere else. And therefore we also, you know, scare ourselves because there's so many things that we kind of don't get, don't see. And it's innocent because it's very difficult to see what you don't see until you see it. And we also complicate life, really complicate life by not being aware of what's going on in our own head. And we believe also that all the others, they are so busy thinking about judging us, but actually, a small secret, nobody cares. They are so busy with their thoughts and their stories. So when we start to focus a little bit more on our own thinking and not so much on what we believe others are thinking about us. We can breathe. We can smile. Life becomes kinder, more peaceful, and we become nicer. Does this make sense? It makes perfect sense. How can we stay in these small movements? Yeah, I would love to be there all the time. Yes. But I'm not, so it comes and goes. But I know that when I forget to be aware and to be present, I know how to come back. You know, when you lay in bed in the morning, you're not asleep, but you're not awake. It's just in between. There's nothing. thing. You're just there in your bed. Those small moments, they are, you know, behind. It's a little like, you know, the sky without all the clouds. It can be very cloudy, but above the clouds, always blue sky. And it's like you and me, behind all the thoughts, you know, there's always peace. So when we become aware of this, we can let go of the thoughts. You know, we have around 60,000, 70,000 thoughts a day. They come and go. We cannot control that. But what we can control is that we don't need to be attached to those thoughts. Let them go, regardless of how weird they are. Wow. Okay. But the problem arises when we try to keep on to the thoughts, and especially those thoughts that really create a mess inside us.

So how can we break negative thought loops? We can stop being attached to them. But it can be very difficult if we think that we are our thoughts. And we think that we are a victim because even though that he doesn't feel well, it can be even more difficult to get, you know, if we are used to having a stone in the shoe and we think that having a stone in the shoe kind of defines who we are. We are the one who is fighting against the world for my kids. I'm alone. So then we will not easily take out the stone and throw it away. Because without all that, who am I? Who am I? But you are the one experiencing all this that lands on your plate. You know, the kid you were when you were five years old and the full-blown woman you are today, there's nothing left. The cells have been, you know, changed so many times and everything has changed so many times. But what is still, you know, the same is the awareness of, you know, It's like being in a theater and seeing a lot of different plays passing. You are the one observing. And then again, become aware, self-aware. But this doesn't feel well. What did I think just before I had this feeling? Oh, what if I die and my child is going to be left alone? Who's going to take care? yeah, okay, if I die before my child, can I be 100% sure that no one is going to care? Ah, 100%? Ah, maybe not. Without this thought in this situation, how am I? I'm actually okay. We have a very strong network, and actually my kid, who is now 22 years old, is having a funny time where he's living and he has friends and maybe even a girlfriend. What is the problem? The problem is my thinking about reality, not reality.

What can people do when they decide they want to completely change their lives? Like, what's the first step? Like, they know their kids are going to do what they're going to do. And they've decided to let go. But they no longer want to be the person they are. They're like, okay, this is not the life I want. I want to be somebody different. What do they do first? They're like, I don't know, what do I do first? Do I go back to school to be who I want? Should I do personal development first? Do I learn to meditate? Do I take care of my health? Where would you start? Maybe I would go for a long walk. Be silent. Be together with myself somewhere. Somewhere not doing anything looking out of the window try to adjust to be me to be in me together with me i presume also that a lot of your listeners they they are very busy people because they have been busy taking care of the family and i don't know what and they don't know themselves. So maybe be silent and be curious about what is hiding in there. Of course, you can go to school and you can go to yoga and you can whatever. But that's nice. If you like it, then do it. Everything that you like and that makes you smile, go ahead, my dear. but really to get to know you be silent it doesn't cost anything be silent. Curious, curiosity. And then every time you kind of want to hold on to something, a thought about, this is me, you know who I am, boom, boom. Then be, you know, courageous to

Book-“The Tipping Point: Life Force Comes From Questioning Your Thoughts"

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mette-reebirk/