Episode Transcript
We Americans enjoy a wonderful and powerful way of life, but internally and in relationships we may wish for better. Join me as we look beneath the surface and gain insights to transform every aspect of your life. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare, and this is the Spiritual American. Hello everyone and welcome to the Spiritual American. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare, and I'm your host. And today we'll be talking about the ouchies, what I call the ouchies. What is an ouchie? An ouchie is when we realize that we actually have done something or been a certain way that we don't wanna be, and it's a cold realization, a sober realization, and it feels like, Ooh, like, yeah, I was that way. As I was thinking about this, the ouchies are a part of the spiritual journey. Why do I say that? When we start meditating, what happens is my intellect, the part that can evaluate or notice or have realizations, get stronger and stronger and stronger as I meditate. That's a great, that's great news. Because all the hidden stuff in my mind begins to become visible. But guess what? It's not all good, right? And when I understand certain things, maybe I'll be able to see certain behaviors in others a little bit more clearly. But most importantly, I'm going to be able to see myself more clearly. And in those moments, occasionally there's a little ouchie like, oh yeah, I was really selfish there. And I was thinking about something, I'm gonna throw this out there. This is not the truth, but I just had a thought. I just feel like men and women, I was thinking about how men and women deal with themselves. I don't wanna use the word mistake or something, but let's say the realization of something that they wanna change. And I think that men and women generally handle things a little bit differently. But the ouchie, the ultimate, the spiritual ouchie is the same. But I feel compelled to share this thing that I was thinking about. For men, and again, I'm just saying this is not the truth. This was just my observation. I feel that men don't mind being wrong, but they don't wanna be weak. So for instance, a man might not say he's sorry because that makes him feel weak. But he will say, you know, I was really a jerk. He'll admit, I was really a jerk and I should have done that. I was really a jerk. I don't know what I was thinking. How can I make it up to you or I'm gonna make it up to you. Don't worry. So for a man, it's like he wants to maintain this feeling of strength. So he's not gonna apologize or make himself a little subservient or whatever he's gonna say, yeah, admit it, and then take responsibility and then try to make it up to the person, because he's focused on making the other person happy. So from a spiritual standpoint, it's more of a internal realization. Sometimes I'm talking about men now still for anybody, but for the for the man thing. There's nobody to make it up to. Like when I go, when I get a real ouchie, like a spiritual ouchie, uh, it's like, wait a minute. Like, here's an example. This was a woman, but it's an example I have this, uh, student who I was working with for like a year and we were working on the laws of karma. She took the karma class and it was about being responsible for your life, and she was really into it. So for a year we were working together and she would call me up and tell me what's going on in her life and so forth. So one day she called me up and said, I'm really having a hard time with money and I don't know what to do and this and that. And she was all reacting to the money situation. And I said, well. It's your money, it's your budget, you sit down and figure out what's going on with your money and your life. And in that moment she had an ouchie 'cause she was like, wow, I am really being helpless or I'm really not taking responsibility. So an ouchie means that you get a sense that on some level, you're not being where you wanna be and there's no sugarcoating it. You totally see it. So she was a female, but that was one ouchie that she had. So that the man thing I was sharing. So for men, that's what's going on the outside. For women, it's a little bit different. I wrote down here that men don't wanna be weak. Women don't wanna be wrong. So women might say, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Because they don't wanna say I was wrong, so I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I don't, I didn't know why I did that and they won't admit that they were wrong. It's like you're trying to, it's, it is like for the female, it's like you're trying to save yourself from I guess from taking responsibility, but it's like then we get into this chronic thing of being weak, like never asserting our own authority or taking responsibility. That's what that, student was doing. Like she was getting weak, that anxiety thing, not that all anxiety means you're weak, but she had a situation like where she has a truck. So she, the truck was, she was afraid the truck was gonna break down and she. She got outta the truck and she called me. She's like, you know, telling me what's going on. And I kind of talked her out of it, but there was nothing really wrong. But she was going off in this kind of weakened state. So women have a very high tolerance for being weak and they disempower. Women disempower themselves. So what would be the ouchie that you would have as a female? Ouchie you have as a female. Maybe when you feel helpless, maybe you over control too much. Maybe you are, maybe you didn't really show that you cared, even though you keep telling yourself that you do, something like that. Maybe my attitude towards my kid or my my husband or something. Maybe I have an attitude. Maybe I have a negative energy or maybe I'm irritable or maybe I'm. Having too much negative emotions and it's affecting the people in my house, and maybe I have to realize, well, maybe, yeah, I'm not really taking responsibility for myself. That would be an ouchie. So when ouchie means that you are gonna change it because you saw it. You saw it, nobody showed you. Nobody told you, you saw the problem. Now why am I telling this male and female thing, also? Because I think this male and female mechanism. A coverup for the real stuff that we need to see. When you start meditating, you start doing spiritual practice, you start seeing things on a deeper level. I have another example. So my whole life I was very close to my mom and I used to listen to my mom all the time and talk to her all the time. I used to talk to her like eight times a day, and that's not necessarily wrong. I'm not calling it wrong. But I was very dependent on that relationship. It was almost like we shared a mind. It was like we shared a brain and then when I had to make a decision, I had to ask her when it was like I couldn't think alone. And as I was doing this spiritual work, I realized that, wait a minute, maybe this is not the best thing. Maybe I need to pull away. And then I realized. Here's the ouchie. The ouchie is not that I was too involved with her or that I was dependent. The ouchie was that I was getting ego of the dependency that she had on me, also. Like I was feeling important or needed or something. And that's kind of, sometimes I call that the female ego, the mother, the ego of the mother. When you realize that sometimes this thing like, oh, I'm always caring for everybody else. I'm always taking care of everybody else. Or maybe I have friends that call me 80 times a day and that we have very few boundaries. There's always like, they always have access. Why would I let these people always have access and these people never get better, right? Maybe some of you can relate to this. You're trying to help these people and they never get better. I had a relationship once and I was with the person for a long, long time, and I spent a lot of energy trying to help this person, trying to make this person better. As soon as we broke up, the person went right back to the way they were before. So what was the ouchie? The ouchie was, wow. I really was trying to keep that person dependent on me so that I could feel important. That's a big ouchie. If any out any of you out there are picking that up, that's a big ouchie to get as a, as a female. So what is the benefit of the ouchies? So this one is called learning to appreciate the Ouchies. I wanna say that anytime you have a realization, like a cold, pure realization, I say cold because there's no sugarcoating it. It's like you see it. That's it. You were a jerk. You were selfish. You are full of ego. You were trying to keep that person dependent so that you could feel good about yourself. You meaning I, right? These are things that I did so I can, speak for myself. But once I see it, and once I feel that little pain of it, there's, it's never gonna be the same again. Sometimes I liken it to, we have these little scabs, and every time we have an ouchie it's like the little scab gets pulled off or the little bandaid gets pulled off and it's like, Ooh, ouch. Because now I see it. Now I see it. A lot of these ouchies are covered up by what we think is good behavior or noble behavior, and that's why I talked about that male and female thing before, because whether you're male or female, sometimes people say, they're yelling and screaming at, you know, in a fight, and then they say, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And then the next day they're doing it again. I mean, people think that's normal and I'm not here to say that it's good or bad. I'm just saying for me, I would rather get to the point where I don't have to fight. But there would be some realization that needs to happen in order for me to realize what's going on. Why am I fighting every day? And then I just say, I'm sorry and it's okay? And by the way, have you noticed that people say they're sorry, but doesn't, if they keep doing it, doesn't it degrade the relationship? This's something that happens to the relationship? If they keep doing it and they say they're sorry, how much can you forgive? Not, not forgive, like, but how much can you say, okay, yeah, it's okay, but then they keep doing it. So the ouchie would be the realization that we have internally that would stop us from doing that thing, or at least change it. There's an example from AA, from Alcoholics Anonymous that it says Alcoholics Anonymous will not stop you from drinking, but it will ruin drinking for you forever. So the ouchie, what the ouchie does is it shows you your sin, if you wanna say, or your vice or your, the underlying, hurtful thing that you're doing, or kind of, I wanna say sinful, slimy thing. That ugly thing. It's an ouchie because it's distasteful. I'd rather think of myself as a good person. I'd rather think of myself as a noble person or a religious person, or a caring person, or a good person, or a strong person. And then I find out that I'm sneaky, selfish, egoistic, weak, pathetic. Like I'm trying to use male and female words here, right? But like I find out that I'm actually being that. When I find that out, it hurts briefly. It's like, ooh, it's right. Okay. Yeah. Great. Okay. Yeah, I was doing that. But the good news is just like that Alcoholics Anonymous thing, it's never gonna be the same once you see it. 'cause once you see it, you're gonna change it. It's on its way out. So when you do, when you start spiritual practice, meditation. You are building up the power of your intellect and you're gonna start seeing some of these hidden realities underneath our behavior. The good news about that too is as I'm, as these ouchies are coming up and as these behaviors are coming into my awareness, my other behavior is starting to change. And I'm gonna say you're becoming more authentic. We had a class a few classes ago about ego. Ego is not good or bad, but it's a false self that gets put forward and people know that it's false. People know that you're not really arrogant like that. It's an act. It's like something phony. But when you start getting the ouchies, then that, that external show that we put on starts to calm down and your real self begins to come forward because you're not hiding, you're not pretending, you're not your subconscious is not. Trying to keep you from seeing the stuff that you're doing. It's kind of interesting too, if you can look at it without judging yourself. It's a very interesting thing to see that underneath the virtue that I think that I'm being virtuous is actually a vice. That's when you're really starting to have transformation. So the recap is when you're starting a spiritual journey, there's gonna be ouchies embrace them because that means you're making progress. And you want them because you wanna see what's going on. You don't want it to be running in the background anymore. When those things stop running in the background, your real self starts shining brighter and brighter and brighter, and you feel so much better because you're in control. So I'm gonna leave it there. I hope that gave you a little something to think about. I mean, if anyone has had an ouchie before, it's not like a normal, oh, I was wrong. It hits the heart. It hits the heart. It's the real thing. It was hidden from me, so it's not an ordinary thing. It's hidden from me, and now I see it. So it's very unique. It's very individual, and it's a blessing in a sense, because it means you're getting better. So I will leave it there. Remember, our slogan is Heal, empower, and Serve. And until next time, take care.
