Attachment Theory Meets Meditation: A Path to Real Healing w/ George R. Haas
In this episode, I sit down with George Haas—renowned meditation teacher and founder of Metagroup—to explore the deep intersection of attachment theory and meditation. We talk about why so many spiritual seekers struggle in silence, how early relational patterns shape our inner world, and what it really means to find safety, intimacy, and freedom on the path.
George’s approach blends deep psychological insight with contemplative practice. It’s honest, nuanced, and eye-opening—especially if you’ve ever wondered why meditation sometimes isn't enough. Whether you're a teacher, healer, or just someone trying to heal old patterns, this conversation will meet you where you are and offer a whole new way of seeing the path.
Takeaways
A powerful reframe on why some people struggle in silent retreats—and what that reveals about our nervous systems.
The surprising connection between early attachment and your capacity for spiritual insight.
A lens for understanding “spiritual bypassing” that goes deeper than the usual critique.
How to discern whether you’re actually healing… or just bypassing your conditioning.
A new invitation to see relational work as a sacred part of the liberation path.
GIFT FOR YOU
If you’re a meditation teacher or coach who wants to create unique meditations people listen to over and over again, enroll in my free course Meditation Script Mastery
Music Credit: Nova by River Roots - https://www.youtube.com/riverroots
Podcast Transcript
Lou: Hello there, friends. Welcome to another episode of the Art and Business of Meditation podcast. Today we have a special guest, George Haas. George is a renowned meditation teacher and founder of Metagroup. He is known for blending traditional vipassana meditation with modern attachment theory to support deep emotional healing and secure relating. He's a former artist and filmmaker. His path led him from New York's creative scene to studying under Shinzen Young and. And ultimately creating programs that guide students towards transformation through both mindfulness and psychology. He's also the host of the podcast I love you, Keep going. And his work continues to inspire those on the path of inner and relational freedom. George, welcome to the show.
George: Hello.
Lou: So, George, I thought we'd actually start with something really interesting that you shared on your inquiry form, a book that you're working on. Can you share more about this book and some of the background? Because I was really curious about the plot of it.
George: Yes, it's called Buddha Paper, and it is a. Well, it's a collection of wallpaper designs that I created. And it is also about how do you remind yourself in the environment that you're in, that each moment is sacred, simply by the token in the environment. And, you know, there's a lot of tokens that we put in the environment. If you look behind me, of course, there's a Tonka of Taparitsa, which is one of those traditional tokens that when you see it, you're reminded of that each moment is sacred, that you're this. This amazing unfolding. But I also understand that we exist inside of a culture. And, you know, each of us are in our little societies which are packed into this larger container of a culture. And our culture at the moment is very polarized. And so I thought that I would have a discussion of the sacred nature of life from the point of view of the fascist and from the point of view of the communist. And so the. The text of the dialogue is from those two points of view. But one of the other things about our culture is it's so complex and. And it's been going on long enough that embedded in. In our thought processes, in the way that we speak and declare things, we're in some sense transliterating or paraphrasing things that other people have said that encapsulate. You might call that the meme culture, except that when you actually check out the memes, the accuracy is appalling. Right. One of those would be never believe what you read on the Internet, Abraham Lincoln. So I thought that it would be useful to compare the colloquial usage of paraphrasing with the actual quotes. But then because the culture is so diverse, is a name enough. And so then I've also selected pictures of the people that have said it and given a brief bio of each one of them. So there's maybe 800 references in the book that each have a picture of the person. I think that in our culture, since we're such a white centric culture, we lose track of the minority status of white people in the world population. And so I also selected 100 photographers from around the world, half women and half men, and a picture each of them had taken, but I didn't show the picture. I described the picture text and then the picture of the artist. And when you go through those pages in the book, you actually have a sense of the variation of the planet that we're on. Of course, we're in a difficult time with climate change being indifferent to the particular politicians that are in office at the time and the effects of what that's going to do. And we do really have this moment now where either we decide to adapt this and, and, and welcome people that are going to be so displaced by this, or we're going to all go to war. I tend to be on the side of welcoming.
Lou: Keep the optimism.
George: Yeah, I'm not so optimistic. I, I just think it's practical.
Lou: Yes. Practical hope in some ways.
George: Yeah.
Lou: So it's clear that you have this. You know, you're an artist, and I know that was a big part maybe of your life. And it sounds like this is another expression of that. I'm curious.
George: This is my fourth book, so I have three others.
Lou: Yes. Is this. Do all the others have essence of, like, photography and like that sort of image art? Because it was clear just in going to. If you, if you go to George's website and you tell me if it's wrong, I'm imagining that some of your art or it just has this artistry to the site that you can tell is unique, that it's not just a cookie cutter. You know, pictures from online, that there's this kind of.
George: Most of them are mine.
Lou: Yes.
George: I made them.
Lou: I figured that. Or you have a good eye.
George: Yeah, I have a good eye, but I also made them.
Lou: Yes.
George: Yeah.
Lou: And so what. What came first, the artist or the meditator? And maybe also as this is the Art of Meditation podcast. Yeah. Do you see meditation as an art or more of a systematized, linear system sort of practice?
George: Interesting question.
George: If art is, what does that mean a skill the development of skill and the expression of a point of view. Then I would say, yes, it does become that in, you know, I. My teenage years were in the 60s, right. And so the Beatles White Album came out and we all started to meditate. It was just how that was right now. The superficiality of that was one thing or another. For instance, they wanted $400 for a TM mantra at the time, which I thought was a scandalous amount of money considering that minimum wage was $1.90 an hour. And so I talked a college student at Northwestern, I grew up in Evanston, Illinois, into giving me his mantra. And so I practiced with that, not realizing that the mantras were age related. And I had. Was using a mantra for people who were in their twenties when I was a teenager. And then Ram Dass's book came out, Be Here now. And then we were all doing that. And I found that the concentration practices were insufficient for coping with the sort of crazy state I was in from, you know, crap childhood. And so I used meditation in addition to copious amounts of drugs and alcohol, which were also around in the 60s, although the, you know, the psychedelics made me even crazier and I didn't want to go up so much as down. So I ended up in living in New York in my 20s and in the 80s, which was the time of AIDS. I didn't there that makes sense to anybody into saying that. But over the course of 10 years at that period of time, pretty much everyone I ever loved died horribly. It's a hard thing to go through. And that was really the thing that turned me into meditating in a deep way is to try and process the. The gravity of that, the grief of that and actually the barbarity of our society in reaction to that. And I turned to Trunkpa, which was also,
George: you know, in our culture, what you are able to receive are the things that are filtered through and then promoted in our culture. It's hard to find anything outside of that. And it is a really good filtering system for that. Trump, of course, was problematic in his addiction and. Etc and was it.
Lou: I could never unders. I could never understand that. Like it was always like so, you know, reading about Trungpa was like always like how is. How can you be. And maybe you know, like how can you be this spiritual master in some ways but also be addicted to alcohol? It never. It doesn't make sense in my head.
George: Well, I think that what you begin to understand is that the. If you don't do the preliminary work right I like to call it the preliminary word of resolving the conditioning of your childhood. You're just in an enlightened state while you reenact the, the trauma bonding of that early period. It's one of the reasons why we started Meditation and Attachment, which was so many people come into meditation practice not because they have some insightful idea into the nature of enlightenment or even the human condition. They're just suffering terribly and they want relief. And they've gone through the Western canon of solutions and found little in the way of relief and are looking for an alternative to. Of course, then you get into these intoxicating advanced meditation states and it's easy with the hubris of the human mind to think that that somehow has freed you of the traps of your conditioning when actually you've just walked by them and not really addressed them. And you know, we are in this, this Western culture where we are so privileged and we're so, so wealthy that we think that we can just skip to the advanced stuff and we don't have to do any of the beginning stuff because we're so wealthy.
George: Totally untrue. But that's what we think. And so in the meditation and attachment stuff, we wanted to get people to begin to address those structures of conditioning that interfere with everything and block everything so that you're then free to actually go into the intermediate and advanced practices without lugging all of that with you so that you don't just engage in the wreckage of that which happens over and over again.
Lou: So, yeah, and following that just so like an example, it sounds like if, if that preliminary work is not done, especially maybe if it's someone that has a lot of parental issues or, you know, and we all have, you know, parental issues or just little T or big T traumas growing up, they find meditation, they're still bringing that into their meditation practice. Maybe they're even going on a long retreat and they're having to be with that. But they, they don't, they haven't actually addressed the dressed and have the understanding to work with some of the things that might be showing up or might be actually blocking the experience of. Is it blocking the experience of going deeper into meditation or just not being able to skillfully work with it to actually experience the real benefits of meditation? Because yeah, you know, a 10 day silent retreat could actually be very jarring to sit with if you don't have those kind of preliminary skills. Is that, Am I following a semblance of that?
George: Well, it's a very complex question that you've just asked. You go on a 10 day retreat and you go into silence if it's a silent meditation retreat. And then the abandonment experience of the silence causes your attachment system to, to activate. The attachment system is called, is forcing you to seek proximity and comfort and soothing from somebody, but you can't because you're in a silent meditation treat. And the way that the attachment system works is to increase the pain of the separation until you actually connect. And so you find people after a couple of days, they just want to leave the retreat because they can't stand it. But what's actually happening is their attachment system is going off. And if you had 20 or 30 minutes of a conversation with somebody, it would shut off and you'd be fine to continue with the retreat. So this carrying over of the, of the tradition of silent retreats from Asia and dropping it into our culture without really understanding how that has an effect, I think is unskillful. So now is it possible that there's enough support where you would be able to have contact with somebody to talk and settle the attachment system? Sometimes it is. But you know, some of These retreats are 150 people and the staff is not anywhere adequate to do that. And so on the retreats that we run, we don't even do the silence anymore. It's just all talking the whole time if you want. We are of course focusing on the attachment connection. But what I also want to emphasize is that it doesn't change the effect or the depth of the meditation practice on the retreat by doing that. And so we're not, we don't think that we're gaining much by the silence. Of course, if you learn the skill of being on a silent retreat where your attachment system doesn't activate it, it can help you stay in a deeper state and be useful in that way. But I think often it's distressing, more distressing to people. We also teach a meta vipassana, an integrated meta vipassana. So the first part of the retreat is loving kindness practice until people are really settled into a place with themselves that's very tender and kind. And then they can go into the vipassana side where they begin to see how the, the conditioning of their early life has affected them and changes really the perception of the view. We like to say how you see things, but you'll. On some of those 10 day retreats, the first two or three days, everybody's freaking out because their attachment system is going off and they're having to stare at these difficult things without Much of a container for them. Whereas on the meta vipassana structure, that really rarely happens, that somebody is distraught because they've settled in. They've. They. They have a sense of safety in being able to form connection. And they've come into a very tender and kind place with themselves so that they can begin to look at what happened.
Lou: So I'd love to hear more about attachment theory. I am admittedly very novice in my understanding. Like, well, I know anxious, attached void and attached secure attachment. And then there's like the more chaotic. Maybe that's the name for it. But when I hear you talk about this, I'm much more studied and understood in ifs and parts work. And so when I hear you say, you know, the way that I would. The way that I would make meaning out of, oh, you showed up to meditation retreat and then there was a part that got activated or triggered or something like that and that kind of language. So I'd love to just hear you expand on attachment theory. And I don't know if you also have the parts work understanding, but how they might differ and how maybe attachment theory can be more supportive in certain ways.
George: Well, ifs is a mentalization framework that you lay on top of your experience. And the attachment work is really about developing your native mentalization process. So they differ in that way. There is the usefulness of the parts work in, in that because it's a predefined mentalization structure that you can learn, it can give you a leg up on developing mentalizing, particularly if you're. You're a poor mentalizer. But then it's a rigid framework which can be inhibiting in terms of discovering what your primary search for meaning might be. In the attachment work where we're developing mentalizing, we're really amplifying the native structure of the way that you perceive the world and in some sense identifying the beneficial strategies and reinforcing those and identifying the afflictive strategies and suppressing them and replacing them with beneficial strategies. So that you'll find that the mentalizing basis for the attachment work is much more dynamic. The ifs. The other thing is that because it's parts work and it emphasizes these very variations in how you hold that space. It's useful for organized people. But you probably wouldn't want to do it with disorganized people who are already really fragments in some sense. You want to take disorganized people and help them pull together into an organized structure. And the parts work tends to reinforce the fragmentation rather than help resolve that but, and I don't think that there's enough attention to who should be involved in this. For instance, direct trauma reprocessing with disorganized people is not recommended and not a good idea. But people are not screening for that, that and think that it's appropriate for all people when it really isn't. And so because the attachment work is an indirect trauma reprocessing system, even if you don't screen for it, it doesn't provide the same risk that the more direct trauma processing systems. Attachment theory was devised by John Bowlby, who was an English psychiatrist in London. And in a very simple, simple way. So don't historians come at me madly because I've made it so simple.
George: Between the wars, the First World War and the Second World War, Balby was in London and you know, because of the, the Nazi takeover, people were fleeing Europe and ended up in London. And so it was a very dynamic time for psychoanaly theory. And he was a student then and took in all of that sort of the Freudian side and the object relations side. Melanie Klein. And then you may also recall that during the Second World War, Germany bombed the residential areas of London in an attempt to discourage them from continuing war. And middle class people and wealthy people simply sent their kids to the countryside within the family system. But poor children were put into public foster care in the countryside. And when the war ended and the children were brought back to their families, the government engaged Bowlby to examine the kids to see whether there was any effect from that separation with their parents that the government would then be responsible for providing services for. And Bowlby discovered that there would be lifelong consequences, particularly for the younger kids under this age of three. And that was the origin of the idea of attachment theory. In observing children's responses to being separated from their caregivers, their attachment figures. He hired a woman named Mary Ainsworth, who was an American wife of a US diplomat who was in London at the time, to devise a way of examining the attachment strategies of children. And she invented the strange situation, which is a, a room that had a couple of chairs in it and some toys and, and the caregiver, you know, in, in the 50s
George: brought the kids in and they examined the interaction of the child and the caregiver in the strange environment and introduced a stranger into the environment and watched the reaction of that. And they saw three distinct patterns which you described as a securely attached infant, an anxious, avoidant infant which grows up to be a dismissing adult, and an anxious, ambivalent child who grows Grows up to be a preoccupied adult. There was a group of kids that didn't clearly fall into those categories and they were just set aside as cannot classify cases. And it wasn't until Mary Main, who died just recently, but she was up at Berkeley and her husband at the time, Eric Hesse, went back and examined the cannot classify cases and discovered the category of disorganized attachment or complex attachment. This is quite recently, you know, there hasn't been much in the way of effective treatment to change your attachment orientation. Really I would say maybe eight or 10 years we've had some effective treatment for that. So very, very recently, conventional psychotherapy doesn't really have much impact. And really what we've been having to do if you have an adverse attachment outcome is adapt to the native attachment strategy and in some ways over compensate in the way that you run your life. But now with the advent of these, particularly Dan Brown's ideal parent figure protocol approach has made a huge difference in terms of actually changing your native attachment strategy into earned security. But we would say you have organized people and then I'll give you the adult category, dismissing people, then helplessly preoccupied people, A fearfully preoccupied people, fearfully avoiding people, and then complexly disorganized.
Lou: And I'm wondering if there's like I'm always curious when I read a little bit on it. It's like I think I've been more. I'm definitely feel like more. I mean, I could be secure attachment. I don't think that that's necessarily true, but I always feel more like the avoidant, I think, in the way that I've shown up in relationships. And I'm just wondering like, are there litmus tests for, for people? Like, it's like, oh, the, you know, this is how this person typically would act in this situation. Just so anyone listening can, can maybe hear themselves in. In the example.
George: We might talk about it in the terms of view secure people think that they're capable people who can go out into the world and get their needs met and they have an expectation that the world will meet their needs. Dismissing people think they're the best thing that ever happened to the planet and that of course they would be willing to have collaborative, secure, functioning relationships with you if you were up to it. But since you're so clearly not not up to it, they'll just take from you what they want. At the core of that is this terrible sadness that there's nothing that they could do to get somebody actually be in a collaborative relationship. And so that the only way that they can get their needs met is by taking. But then that is expressed in this very big sense of it.
Lou: Is that like, you know, I hear that and I hear like more like narcissism. Is that like the. Is that in the realm of that kind of. And I'm not a big fan of labels. I think labels can be also.
George: The colloquial term narcissist generally means everybody who doesn't do what I want.
Lou: Yeah, it's gotten. Yeah, overused for sure.
George: But
George: the narcissism scale is the Masterson scale. At one end is the antisocial personality disorder, and at the other end is the borderline personality disorder. They don't really lay on top of each other too well. But you might say the antisocial personality disorder is a disorganized, hardcore dismissing person. And the borderline person is a dissociative, angrily preoccupied person.
George: You know, we often get into this idea that people have made a choice about this. Right. They see the better way and they see the nefarious path and they decide the nefarious. Nefarious path is better. And that actually isn't how it is with these views, is you grow up in a family system where that's what happened. That was what was modeled. And you got your rewards based on being good at the family system. And so you really learn in a deep way that the world operates like this. And the better I am at this system, the better I can get the things that I want. Life. And there's no awareness at all of another perspective or another point of view. And so we easily blame somebody for their conditioning. Like we say, oh, they're a narcissist, right. As if they have a choice not to be a narcissist. As if they're intentionally doing it to us when actually they're just not free. And they have the conditioning that makes them see the world in that way. And there is no insight, there's no alternative to that view. And that's why they engage in the way that they do. And everything they've ever gotten in their life has been through that activity. And so you're going to say to them, oh, that that's an inferior activity to this activity. And they're thinking, everything I ever got, I got through this activity. And you're saying. Saying it doesn't work. It works fine. So it's an interesting thing. The perspective needs to be expanded. And actually dismissing people have the easiest setup to fix because they can explore. If you look at it from that perspective, the attachment system and the exploration system, it's like a toggle switch. When the attachment system is on, the exploration system is off. The exploration system is on, the attachment system is off. The reason that dismissing people or narcissistic people can do what they do is because they suppress the attachments. They don't actually make strong attachments to people, but their exploration system is on. So that if you could convince somebody that this is actually a better approach, they could explore to see whether it was and if it was, they have the capacities to move quickly toward it. Whereas when you talk about a preoccupied person, their view is that there's something fundamentally wrong with them, that they can't do it, that they're helpless, but everybody else has got it figured out, so all I have to do is hitch my wagon to somebody else's and I'll be all right. And it's. And they of course get everything that they've gotten in life through this pretense of helplessness. And it's very hard to convince them that that isn't the way to go. And, and they don't have the capacity to explore, so they can't investigate that another path might be better. So it's hard, much harder for helplessly preoccupied people. When you. Then we're looking at the trauma line falling down, dividing the world and organized and disorganized, fearfully preoccupied people. It's a chaotic, volatile, painful, internal emotional life. And they feel that you have to save them, you have to rescue them and that, that you're morally deficient if you don't do it. There you are standing on the corner and somebody harangues you to rescue them and that you're a reprobate if you don't do it. How great does that feel? Yeah, so they're in some sense self excluding most people because most people can't deal with that. They end up with hardcore dismissing people because dismissing people don't feel anything. They're not put off by the empathetic experience of fearfully preoccupied person. Fearfully avoidant people, of course, hide. It's like they throw Harry Potter's invisibility cloak over themselves and go through the world making as little disruption as possible so that they're not targeted and they're not armed. They see themselves as fundamentally defective and valueless and the world is a hostile place that will harm them if they get caught. And then complexly disorganized people, any of that that I just said applies to them at any given moment, which is head spinning if you're Trying to relate to them.
Lou: That's wild. I know you work with training teachers and therapists and people in this modality for. I'm imagining that any teacher and thinking anything needs to always do their own work first. And so that's not, you know, they're coming and transmitting from a place that is actually whole rather than these parts work language like fragmented or a part of them. But it sounds like, you know, the same applies for attachment styles and for teachers that might be listening to this. How. How can they be aware of how they might be like with the students or their clients or the people that they work with. What are the. I'm not sure how I'm trying to frame this, but like, how could they know that their attachment style might be getting in the way of the, of the actual teaching or the actual therapy or whatever, you know, whatever it might be.
George: Well, we are an organization that does demand that people do their own work.
Lou: Yeah.
George: That you, that you earn security before we'll. We'll certify you as a solitator. But we do have a. You know, you don't have to start there. You can earn it as you, as you go through it. I think that that's important. It's. You're not going to be able to guide somebody from insecure or disorganized attachment to security if you actually haven't figured out how to get there yourself. That's our premise. The. But that being said, they're typical patternings in terms of coupling. Right. A secure person is most likely to connect to a secure person. So you could be natively secure with features. Right. We like to say dismissing or preoccupied features or a combination. You could be dissociative and work through that. Preoccupied people tend to form relationships with dismissing people. So you'll notice in therapeutic alliances if the. If the therapist is preoccupied, she's going to work with a lot of avoidant people. If the therapist is avoidant, they're going to work with a lot of preoccupied people just through the natural sorting of things. And then disorganized people. I would bet, since
George: I'm not aware of a single therapist training organization that tests for attachment or requires that you attend to attachment, that there are probably quite a few disorganized therapist. And then what you would notice is not. Not great boundaries and overworking, chaos and that sort of thing.
George: The. When you have trauma, of course the boundaries have to be really solid or there's never a sense of safety. And it's hard to get much done with that out. That Safety being the central theme of secure attachment.
Lou: So you talk about earned secure attachment. Is that simp. Is that just a term for doing whatever the attachment work is? And would that include. Would that have to include working with someone in a one. On one basis? Or is there a way to do that sort of work through meditation or on your own or. I mean, I know you have courses on it too, maybe. But is. Is earned secure attachment just the. The. The kind of, say, saying around doing the work to get there?
George: Well, we make a distinction between a natively secure brain and an earned secure brain. Natively secure brains have this marvelous dance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. The amygdala activates. It sends the information over to the hippocampus. The hippocampus evaluates whether the threat is real or not. If it's real, it amps up the response, and if it's not real, it settles the activation. So the brain is in this dance and in this balance. In dismissing brains, the sympathetic nervous system is suppressed and the parasympathetic nervous system is hyperactivated. So there's very little response to the environment in that brain and a constant suppression of the activation. When you earn security, you don't get a new brain. That is this marvelous dance. You get a brain that suppresses the sympathetic nervous system and hyperactivates the. The parasympathetic nervous system. And you compensate with the changes in the way that you view the world. It doesn't get you out of the native brain that you're in. You're in a preoccupied brain. Of course, it's the opposite. The sympathetic nervous system is hyperactivated. You're vigilant. Hyper vigilant. And the parasympathetic nervous system is suppressed. And so it's very easy to activate and very slow to settle. And when you earn security, you still have that brain, which still does that. You just relate to it differently. And it's not the native. And the disorganized brain, of course, is like stepping on the gas and stepping on the brake at the same time. It's just. You still have that. You just have a different way of relating to it. That's why we make the distinction between.
Lou: Got it. Yeah. How does this relate to how you describe when you talk about liberation? Like, is that more of the path through meditation and, you know, after doing the attachment work, or is there.
George: How we see it? Yeah, you do the attachment work so that you're free to form intimate bonds with people who will support the Deep exploration of meditation, that if you can't form these deep bonds with people, I don't have a secure base from which to explore. From the insights that you gather along the way can easily disrail you and cause you to not be able to proceed until you come back into balance. And if you're able to form these strong bonds, which are supportive and encouraging, you can rush out and explore and go to the edge of what you can discover and get completely discombobulated, come rushing back and they'll catch you and they'll help you re. Regulate, they'll help you integrate. But if you don't have that, what begins to happen is you limit the risks that you're willing to take in your exploration because you can't stand the discombobulation. You can't stand the. The difficulty of integration. You know, when,
George: when I came in, I had this idea of enlightenment and Shinzen said, and I think he said it, the best enlightenment is much, much better than anything you could have ever imagined and not nearly as good as what you did.
George: So my idea was that I would never have another problem. I was sick of problems that. That doesn't happen. But what you see, of course, is the nature of the human condition. Sacredness of every moment, every ordinary moment, this sacredness. And you see the beauty in everything and everyone and, and the absence of any real separation from people, from animal. You have genuine compassion for the suffering experiences of all living things. It's. It's a. A wonderful way of navigating the world.
George: And at the same time, of course, how do you process the. The magnitude of suffering in the world without it knocking you flat?
George: But, you know, in the meditation world I live in, people are coming in because they're looking for a way not to have to relate to anyone ever again because it's so disappointing. They just want to be able to be on their own and. Okay. And that's really, in some sense the opposite of what all of this is.
Lou: Fascinating. So it's in. Are you speaking to, like, the Sangha aspect of it? Like, if you can't, if you can't relate or connect with a Sangha in your practice, then you are in some ways limiting your own path because you're not going to be able to feel safe to go to the edges, or is it more, you know, not even a Sangha, but just like a, you know, a community or friendship of people that can meet you in your experience can. And it has maybe a depth to them that, you know, obviously, if you have A family member that has no idea what meditation is or has no idea what spirituality is. And maybe you have a big experience and you take it to them. You know, that's gonna. There's gonna be some dissonance there, I'm sure, for them to be able to hold you. But is it more specifically like actually the sangha or just deep kind of spiritual companionship that can. That you have bonds with or, you know, even your. Your partner?
George: Well, what I think is, is it's two or three or four people that are interested enough in you that they keep up with you the changes in your daily life. Right. What did you find out when you really think about exploration is you go out and find out the thing that you really need to know, and then you come rushing back and you express what you found out to somebody who's actually up to speed and interested in what your exploration is. And all you have to do to get that is do that for them because it's so essential. How. What is it that I've discovered? I've discovered this amazing thing. I can't wait to go tell my person this thing that I found out. And they can't wait to hear it. And you can see it in the way that they look at you. And it's useful to them so that your primary exploration and their primary exploration align enough so that there's a synergy between the explorations which supports each of you in risking the discovery. You know, if you go out to the edges of what you need to know, it's very easy to get completely knocked over by the discovery. And if there's nobody to catch you, no safety net, you just hit the ground, splat. And if there is somebody to catch you, you'll go that little distance to get it. And in the sharing of it with to somebody else, you have to be able to make sense of it in a way that you can communicate it, which is actually useful to your process in terms of integration and making sense of it. And you can't catch people up in this. They have to be with you in that sense so that they have to been hearing the installments all the way along so that they understand the transformations that happen.
Lou: Yeah, yeah. There feels like there's a real. I don't know, as I get older and I'm by no means old, but as I, you know, get older into, I guess you can somewhat say into middle age.
George: Middle age starts at 30.
Lou: Okay, then I'm definitely, definitely well on my way. There is that friendship starts at 55 right, good to know, Good to know. I got another 20 years. You know, the, the, the lack, the isolation and loneliness, it feels like an epidemic. The lack of friendship and deep relating. Would you say that in some ways the attachment is like a big component to that lack, just in a general sense of humanity? Or maybe West, I don't know, I can. Western, I guess. Relating.
George: Well, we could start an anti capitalist rant at this point to describe why we're in the state that we're in. Late stage capitalism, which is sort of anti relationship mainly.
Lou: Yeah.
George: But
George: the. In order for you not to feel lonely, you have to tell somebody who you are authentically. In order to tell somebody who you are authentically, you have to be willing to be abandoned. They don't like it. To be completely authentic with somebody, you have to be willing to be completely abandoned. And if you don't have people that you have a safe, secure connection with, that risk of abandonment is too much. And so we don't make it. So we don't tell people who we are authentically. And in that inauthentic dialogue with other people, our authentic needs are not met. And the anxiety that if they were to find out who we really were, we don't know whether they would leave us or not is constant. And so, so how do you risk that? How do you get to a place where if you're not so far down the rabbit hole of inauthenticity that you still know who you are, that you could express that to somebody and have them not only accept it, but completely delight in. That's who you are. That's what we're attempting to go for now. In our culture it probably 70% of people have challenges in doing that. So it's not surprising that you would encounter that, particularly if you have that challenge and then that remaining 30% of secure people have found other secure people who can do it, so they basically disappear from the equation of insecure and disorganized. And that the attachment disturbance is the thing that describes that. If you read Robin Dunbar, he says that most of us lose a significant relationship every two and a half years. When we're young, of course, and in school and in those social encounters that young people have the energy to engage in and the interest in exploring, you replace them fast and you don't really notice it. But as you move into middle age, as you say, or you move into old age, of course it's a numbers game. You don't meet anywhere near the number of people that you do. You don't form nearly the number of relationships you do. And there's that natural attrition of relationships so that you can find yourself without relationships. And Dunbar describes the west as people have one relationship an a relationship. They have no close friends and they have a group of people that they know socially, which means you're entirely dependent on one person for all of your emotional needs, which means if you want to go off and explore, you have to bring them with you, which means they have to leave their own. Or if they want to go off and explore, either you go with them or you're without them and dysregulated. So really is an intentional cultivation of these rich social networks which are quite broken by. Mainly it's by the economic system,
George: capitalism versus the church in a way. Because when we were embedded in the church in religious groups, of course, the generations were in closing. And in order to meet the need for migrant work, all of those systems had to be broken so that people would be able to be displaced from the family groups to serve in that way.
Lou: Yeah, what you're sharing strikes me as a term that I've only understood recently. But culture, work, really kind of reconnecting. We've kind of lost and have been in some ways poisoned in our culture. Like getting back to what. And we don't even have a culture really, in kind of the Western, the United States. It feels like the economics is the culture often. And so getting back to what actually culture is, which is deep relating, authentic relating and family and friendship and often families being together, grandparents being around. Yeah, there's definitely a poverty, I think, of opportunities that. To engage in cultivating that type of culture and relating. And so I think obviously doing whatever work that you're doing, anyone listening or anyone that's in any kind of inner work, hopefully is helping them be a better, be more connected, be more secure, so that they can also imbue that to the people that, you know, whether it's their kids, whether it's their relationships. But yeah, you're speaking to me too, as I think of. Yeah, I think of entering in the future into parenthood as we plan to have a child. And the question is around, like my wife asking me how many levels of support do I have? Like, you know, because she can't be there to. To take my. All of my emotional needs. And I think, you know, you're speaking to the same thing. It's like they say in just one or two, two or two or three. Like if you can have two or three solid emotional people that can really receive you. So yeah, encourage everyone to take account or take stock.
George: Get your Excel spreadsheet out.
Lou: Well George, I want to be respectful of your time. Is there any, any, anything else you want to share? We didn't really get a chance to talk about how you've grown. Just the teaching that you've grown like as far as, even on the business front if you would, you know how that's grown. But maybe we do around two at some point.
George: Happy to do that. Yeah, no, I'm, you know I, I took a job as a salesperson when I had my some deep insights into practice because I wanted to go on four retreats a year and so I worked really sort of terrible jobs.
Lou: It's good strategy though.
George: I, you know, I'm, I've always had to be self supporting so I needed a job where I could just say I'm gonna, I'm going to take off two or three weeks every quarter and go on retreats which I did for five years. So the, But I, I have to say I did learn sales.
Lou: Nice quick sales wisdom. George, what do you got?
George: Well, if you wanted, how are you going to make a living? How much do you need to make in order to, how much do you need to make and how many hours are you willing to work? And divide those two and you'll, you'll see a number that means how much you have to earn every hour in the work that you do. That's where you start. And then how do you design a system of teaching where people can afford your services and also you can make that, that money? I, around here I have a very strong conviction that people should be paid a living wage. And so when we calculate the cost of things, we're calculating the cost of a living wage for everybody who's necessary to put the stuff on. A lot of the non profit orientations in teaching, meditation, everybody volunteers and only if only a sort of skeleton staff is paid. But that, that I don't, doesn't sit well with me. So we don't do that. And then if you haven't heard of it, there's such a thing as a sales funnel. How do you attract people? How do you, what offering do you have in the west, most of the time the people that come are on the side where time is more valuable to them than money. So then how are you going to organize it in such a way that they feel the expense of time is worthwhile and then set up the cost structure around that. If you're offering people new ideas or approaches that, that they're not familiar with or hasn't come through one of the more established lineages, then you're going to have to introduce them to it. And then you're going to have to take them, the people that you introduce, grab those and pull them into a more intense experience of that, and then pull them into a more intense experience of that. What is it that you'll hope that they'll get out of it? You know, I'm coming from a place of a complexly disorganized person whose life was just decades of chaos. I can tell you, being having earned security, it's so much better. It is mind blowingly better, totally worth doing what you have to do to get there. But often you have to convince people, people of that. And Also, how many 87 things have you tried to change all of that and noticed that it had pretty much no effect? You have to persuade people that it's worth the investment of their time, energy and resources into an approach that will have an outcome that's predictable for them in order for them to be willing to do it. So that's all of the messaging side of it. And then you have to find a way to relate the material that you want. That means creating a curriculum. Unless you're teaching in some lineage where the curriculum is already together, but you're still having to digest the material yourself and then express it in a way that's authentic to you. And then the people that want that will come. The thing is, if you express it inauthentically, the people that want that will still come, but you'll be in the bind of having to pretend to be doing these things.
Lou: Yeah.
George: Whereas if you just go from the authenticity place, that's better. And of course you have. Meditation teachers are a low value commodity in, in our culture and that's straight white cisgendered men with letters behind their name. Everybody else is even less valuable in terms of a commodity. So you have to figure out where you're going to be in that. And because the economics are distributed based on all that stuff.
George: Your, your audience, for instance. I like to teach disorganized people. They have no resources. How do you, how do you support an teaching for an audience that has no resources? You have to get resource people to pay for it. Yeah, there's all that that have to go. That's how you do it.
Lou: Yeah. Beautiful, George. Well, I really appreciate all your wisdom. Just. Yeah. On attachment, on just your practice and your path. It definitely oozes out. And I, I just feel really grateful to be able to have this conversation with you in this time and thank you. Yeah, thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you next time. Oh, George, Where I always forget to give people the opportunity to talk about their website. Yeah, maybe anything you want to promote or where people can kind of find out more.
George: So it's metagroup.org is the website and we offer seven levels of teaching. So we have workshops periodically that introduce the material. We have level one, which is, I like to say, it's like a stone skipping across the pond of the subject matter. Level two is where the stone stops and sinks in and we have a deeper teaching around that. So level one and level two are mainly psychoeducation. Level two has the introduction to the ideal parent figure protocol so that you learn how to do that technique. Plus the we have a 90 hour meditation training program that's built around improving mentalizing and emotional regulation. Level three is for individual work for people that are insecure or disorganized, that are looking to Earn Security. Level 4 is for. For people who have native security with features or have earned security that want to develop the relational aspect and also the primary exploration piece. The Level 5 is for people who are in existing relationships. Whenever you begin to do your attachment work and you change your attachment orientation, all of the relationships that you have, you're going to have to renegotiate the attachment ingredients agreements because you won't be able to do the old agreements. And often you'll, you'll be able to succeed in doing that on your own. But if you have a significant relationship that needs to be adjusted and you need a referee, that's what that Level five. And so maybe surprisingly, but it certainly surprised me that the, the number one relationship that we work with as siblings because if you're in a challenged family role and you decide you're not going to do it anymore, the whole family has to adjust and one of your siblings is likely to be handed the role in your stead and none of them will want to do it. And so there's often that kind of adjustment. And then business partners is actually the second. Well, parent child and then romantic is the last one we do. And then level six is intermediate and advanced mentalizing, which is related to you've done your attachment work and now you're, you're headed off and to the pursuit of classical enlightenment.
Lou: Beautiful. Sounds like a robust journey.
George: Yeah. Yeah. You can clear the wreckage of the past. You know, it shows up in every moment. You know, you have the capacity to sense the object could be sensed. When there's contact, consciousness of that sensing experience arises, but it doesn't mean anything. It's just. Just sense data urgency. Does it need immediate attention? Does it not matter? Is there time for a pleasant experience? And then it's mapped to the database, the perceptual database. And if there's a meaning thread that's close to what this is, the whole thing just drops on it and rolls into conceptual reality. And you're in the reality of the present moment, which is entirely informed by everything that's ever happened that's in the same pattern. And if you don't change that database, you just create over and over again the same reality. And then part of that, of course, is, what do I do in response to this? And when you really get myopic, you see a couple of choices that you habitually take and you just take. And then in the next moment, you're stuck in the Samsari loop of just repeating over and over again the same old thing. And somewhere in there, you have to get a different meaning thread to attach to the present moment. And if you can do that, which is what the ideal parent figure does, when the reality opens up, it's completely different than it used to be. Nothing has changed. The self is. The self experience is almost identical. You're thinking, thinking, wow, I'm just acting completely differently than I normally do not. Oh, I had this insight that I should act differently because all of the intention and action for responses to the present moment precedes the self experience. You're. The self experience is just witnessing what you're doing. It's not causing it.
Lou: Got it.
George: You have to get that unconscious switch in the database that you make a different reality in order for anything to really change. And of course, the karma thing kicks in. You make a different action, and so the whole rollout of karma has changed, as opposed to just rolling back into the old one.
Lou: So powerful. Such, so deep. Yeah. So, so good. Thank you, George.
George: All right.
Lou: All right, friends, take care.
George: Bye.