 Welcome to Shrink Rap Hawaii. Boy, have I got a show for you, I think. My name is Steven Philip Katz. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist here in Hawaii and with me today I have Dr. Dean Nelson. Welcome Dean. Hello, how I went on the show. It's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me, Steve. So, yeah, I'm really glad I did and I'm really glad you accepted. It was all kind of last minute and somebody once said if it wasn't for the last minute nothing would have happened. And no, really, it's a surprise. I'm thinking, is he really going to show up? He showed up, you took over, it's all yours now. So you sent me all this information that I just read about two hours ago about your life and I thought the most interesting piece for me was the little piece that you sent around, I guess, to the people that were going to your high school reunion? Yes, yeah. Oh yeah. And that's how I found out that you had also been a dancer. Yes. So, all right, you know, you know, remember that show, you know, this is your life? Yeah. All right, so this is your life. Where did you grow up? Who's going to traipse in? Who's going to traipse in? Do you remember Little Murray? No. When I pulled the angel wings off of him. No, okay. Where did you grow up? I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. I'm an original Norwegian bachelor farmer. I'm from Lake Wolbigon. Oh, what? No kidding. Yes, absolutely. Oh, wow. What town? St. Paul. Yeah. And how'd you get out? I heard about airplanes. I know it sounds true, but at those point only wealthy people flew. Right. And I had lost my scholarship in football or my ability to play football and I found out that I couldn't afford the school I went to. Where was that? I went to a small college, the only one that probably let me play called Luther College in Dekora, Iowa. And so then I had to pay for my own schooling. But you got a football scholarship? Well, let's just say it didn't cost me anything to go to school there. They never called them scholarships. What position did you play? I played wide receiver and I returned kickoffs. Oh, so you could run? Yes. I actually was very fast, very, very fast. So you left there? Yes. And then what? Came here. I came to Hawaii when I was in Hawaii. What was the connection? Well, you know, there was a profound underground. This is, of course, most of people my age, I'm assuming. We're influenced by the Vietnam War. That is what marked you as a male. You had to figure out what you were going to do about Vietnam. In those days, Hawaii, the University of Hawaii, had no out of state tuition. Do you know what it cost me to go to school in Hawaii for one semester? What? $86.25. And that was your registration fee? Yeah, that was, no, that was your whole fee. That was tuition? That was tuition. So it was like, stay cold and maybe go to Vietnam and stay in Hawaii or, I mean, Minnesota or fly to Hawaii and stay in school and continue studying. Let me go that again, you know, it was just like, wow. So I'd gone on my first plane ride in California. So you knew nobody? I knew no one. Wow. That's Hutzpah. 1968. Again, a Hutzpah in stupidity. Hutzpah has some sort of bravery. This was just stupidity. Wow. And you were studying what? I did the basic anthropology, sociology. I don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up courses. Yeah. And then what? Well, then I ran into a brilliant teacher of the dawns who's still here. Someone I consider my mentor and still my first teacher, quote, unquote Betty Jones of Dance As We Dance, and I started studying dance. And then all of a sudden all the lights went on because now I could use the physicality that I was really longing for that I missed from football with artistry and with the full discipline of everything on board. So you were a dance major? They didn't have a dance major in that period. So I finished my degree and then I went on to get my MFA. Oh, wow. Wow. At UH. No, I got my MFA from Utah, University of Utah. Oh, with a concentration in dance? It was a choreography. Oh, wow. Yeah, a choreographer or dancer, whatever. So then I started my own company. But that's all kind of sorted. Sorted? Pretty sorted beginnings, right? Pretty exciting. It was a very, very delightful way of spending one's youth. You only get a young body one. Right, it's beautiful. Yeah, that was fun. And then what? Well, then I had a period where I realized that I was 31 and where I was going to be at 40. It was one of those crossroads, I think, maybe you hit at 30. I realized that I didn't want to be either that physically in pain or that poor, and I made a huge shift into medicine. And what did you do? Well, there were some years in there because I was scared of science and so I sold real estate and just kind of, I call them my lost years where I just really couldn't put the pieces of my life together, quite frankly. But I had fallen in love and I was in Seattle. Anyway, it really was the discipline of dance. You and I chatted a little bit before the show about the discipline of the arts. I think classic musicians and probably dancers are some of the most disciplined. So a light went off that said, if you have the discipline to dance and what it takes, the everydayness and the pain and the poverty as well, you can apply that to anything. And so it took me longer or harder to accomplish the sciences because I had to go back and start all the way up to algebra to do the pre-meds. Well, you slipped something in there that interests me. You said in Seattle you fell in love. Well, as a lady, I'm sorry, there's no real short story. I met my wife at a Buddhist seminary. Sounds like the name of a book. So I met my wife at a Buddhist seminary and at that point I had invested in a sailboat. I didn't have a house. She had a house in Seattle, so I moved out to be with her. Where does the sailboat figure? A bunch of guys got together, a bunch of Buddhist guys got together and bought a sailboat. And we ran it as a charter business down in St. Thomas. Is this really where you want to be going? Did the wife come to St. Thomas? No, I eventually gave up on the boat and moved with her. Aha, aha, aha. Okay, and so you started with the sciences. You went back to undergraduate classes and stuff. Actually, I didn't need to go to undergraduate. I did a crash course and it was called pre-med, which is all sciences, all the way up to physics and calculus. And then what happened? And then I went into Hellfield and a light went off. It was one of those light went off because I had a prediction of all things by an astrologer. He says, you're going to continue working with the body but with energy. Seriously, seriously. And the light went out. I went to see a chiro and he said, what the hell do you do? This is a weird field. He says, we work with the body's energy and I went, I'm there. And it wasn't totally chiropractic, however, that really excited me or what I was passionate about. It was energy. We work with energy. The true authorities, in my opinion, on energy in the body are the Chinese, the Chinese medicine and Tibetan medicine. So eventually I just, chiropractic was what my degree is in but my real study was in Chinese medicine and Tibetan medicine. But you're a licensed chiropractor, yeah? I'm a licensed chiropractor, licensed acupuncturist. And unlicensed, strange. So when did that become your full-time life? 1988. I think I was finished school with it. I started doing body work in 1988 and got the degree in 92. And so I've been doing that for 24 years. And that was where? That was in Minnesota. I went back to Minnesota. Yes, yes. My wife was a flight attendant for Northwest and so we needed to be a base where she had seniority, so we went there. And you stayed there till when? I stayed there and we came back here in 96 having adopted a child and he's a brown person. And Hanai. And I was tired of getting stared at in grocery stores. In Minnesota he was unusual. He was unusual, yes. And of course I was chomping at the bit to come back to Hawaii. I've always considered this home from the moment I stepped off the plane. It's funny, people either get that feeling or they're gone in two years it seems. Yeah, that's right. It's almost like you don't bother to get to know for two years. I mean, I don't mean to be callous, but there's no sense. There's no sense, right? Right, right, right, right. And so you felt like this was home immediately? Yeah, actually Kailua, right. I agree, but just don't say that. K-word, K-word. Obama, the old red stage, right? Right. Okay, so we rented a house on the beach when I went to school here in 1968. I was just going, there couldn't possibly be a better place to raise a family. Wow, wow. So I came back. So did you immediately start doing chiropractic work when you came back? I did. I opened a clinic in Polly Palms and because of the acupuncture and the various modalities I was bringing in, I was lucky and we succeeded quite well. Is that what I read? Is that what the Wind Horse? Yeah, Wind Horse Healthcare. That's a combination of all the things you do? Wind Horse is a Tibetan word meaning lungta or the chi, the life force that powers you. And if you get that right in the body most everything takes care of itself. And you do that with acupuncture and chiropractic? The actual treatment modality, I mean this is so sweet of you. The actual treatment modality involved a very strange and wonderful form of chiropractic called network combined with cranial, combined with acupuncture, combined with herbs and then the key thing was as I taught meditation every week at night. So you were almost, you were signing, if you came to me it was because you wished to also learn about your mind and how your mind affected your body. And that was the, still is the pivotal piece about my approach to healthcare. That fascinates me of course, you know. Do you think? The mind-body connection, right? Yes. That one was the one that was the most fascinating to me. It is to this day. You just came back. Yeah. You were gone for six months? Yeah. Again, what has happened is again we had a wonderful life and we became empty nesters and at that point I wanted to be on retreat more. I wanted to, I think Haviv says it well. He says, I've become a heroin addict for the sublime state. And so at this point I have been a Buddhist now for 40, 44 years, 42, yeah, 42 years and I wanted to be on retreat more and more. I wanted my life empowered by a retreat mind more and more. And so now we go on retreats in an RV. Way meaning? My wife and myself, who's also a Buddhist. Not that there's, I mean anything particularly special about being a Buddhist but those are the trainings that we bring. So where did you go? Each year we kind of design something, you know, and my wife had never been to the Canadian Rockies so most of our trip this year was focused on the Canadian Rockies but our idea is to, we call ourselves sight snobs. We try to find isolated pukas where we're alone and virtually can't see anybody and I'm not bothering anybody and also not bothered by anybody. So can you paint me a picture? Wait, I think we have to take a break. They're whispering in my ear and we'll come back very shortly and remind me I want to go back and I want you to paint me a picture of what that retreat looked like. Okay, stay right there. Don't touch your mouse. Aloha, my name is Josh Green. I serve a senator from the Big Island on the Kona side and I'm also an emergency room physician. My program here on Think Tech is called Health Care in Hawaii. I'll have guests that should be interesting to you twice a month. We'll talk about issues that range from mental health care to drug addiction to our health care system and any challenges that we face here in Hawaii. We hope you'll join us. Again, thanks for supporting Think Tech. For a very healthy summer, watch Viva Hawaii. We're giving you the best tips and with our best health coach here. So Viva health coach. Viva la comida saludable. Hey everybody, my name is David Chang and I'm the new host of a new show, The Art of Thinking Smart. I'm really excited to be able to share with you secrets on giving yourself a smart edge in life. We're going to have awesome guests and great mentors of mine from the political, military, business, nonprofit. You name it. So it's something for everybody. So Dr. Dean, we left off you. We're going to paint me a picture of your retreat. How many? So I can have a feel for what that was like. The retreat is just so marvelous. After a while, the only kind of quote unquote help or shrine room you could say that I need or meditation room I need was nature. In some ways, from the very get-go, nature has always been my church. And it works very well with Buddhism, especially the kind of practices I was doing was just simply being nature. I said because I was stupid, I really needed the power of nature to help me into this state of presence. It's not particularly esoteric. It's just there's many, many, many levels of presence of how to actually be present and what opens up to you as you reduce the neurotic speed of your mind. What opens up the monkey mind, right? So once you start to diminish, this is an aside, I just saw a scientific study saying that we think 50,000 thoughts a day. I figured that out. It's about one per second. I mean it's really, really, really bizarre. Most of those are completely dumbing down our game. They're just stupefying us. So of those, 90% are negative. Wow. And 95% of those are redundant. You thought of them yesterday. So it's really a kind of a state of the mind. So at some point in my life, I wanted to just see what 25,000 a day seemed like or something like that. Can you do that? Yes. There's no question. Yes. Oh, absolutely. Oh, absolutely. So our retreat is unique in a sense that we're not a place where you can meet, you blend a little bit of life. You could say we don't. You blend a little of mundanity, meaning cooking and such with your life and walks and such. But I think the unique part about it, when I tell this to other men, I'm sorry if it sounds a little, I don't know, humorous, is that we don't speak to each other. We don't even say good morning until two o'clock in the afternoon. So it's like you truly are on a retreat. We just make our tea and then we practice. We do meditation practices until about one or two. And the silence part of it is one of the key things that's made at work. And so we're always in those astoundingly beautiful places. So we both find individual places where it's quite secluded and then we do our practices. So what would I see if I'm watching a movie of this between, I don't know, seven and one or two o'clock in the afternoon? What am I going to see you doing? Well, I mean the classic practice for first just reducing the amount of noise is called mindfulness. And of course it's the darling now, but it's kind of considered a remedial tool for just getting the noise down to some level where you can have some joy in your life, where you can actually be present enough to not be your own kind of worst enemies. And sometimes mindfulness is actually translated as making profound friends with yourself. Which sounds simple, but if you say to somebody, you're going to be quiet for an hour, many and most people completely panic. Right? It's true. I was working with a client the other day, she couldn't do five minutes. I've had Navy SEALs say they would rather go on missions in armed forces than have to do meditation because it's so profound to actually meet your own mind. But there's really nowhere out but in. You have got to at some point in your life. But still, I don't know what this movie looks like. I'm watching you do mindfulness meditation or whatever you're doing. So I set up, I get one dog, she gets one dog, I set up my red chair somewhere. A dog, DOG dog. Yeah, we take dogs with us on the retreat. I set up in the first hour, I probably do some sort of meditation. But I also work with intention and motivation. So I'm setting up intention and motivation. Those things, I'm really contemplating what you're trying to do, what do you hope to affect. Can you give me a sample? When you're setting up intention and motivation. You intend to clarify your mind to benefit the world. Simple stuff like that. But right, don't you do that? Isn't that why you get up in the morning? I get up because I know I'm going to have coffee. In some ways, I need a positive reward to leave the word coffee is mantra. Coffee is the word mantra. Coffee, coffee, coffee. That's it. Okay, so you got up for the word mantra, but then you go and now you're gone. And then I know I have it very... I don't know if it's... See, I'm talking about myself. I told you that's my fault. No, I love it. It's much easier for me. So my routine, or whatever you want, ritual to give it a highfalutin word, is the coffee. Then I do what in some circles known as morning pages. I write a thousand words or two thousand words or whatever. But in November, I call it non-no-ri-mo. Do you know about that? No, I don't know that. There's this project of writing a book in one month every year that's done by tens of thousands, if not a hundred, around the world. No, I didn't know that. And you submit it and some of them get published. Wow. So that's the goal to write. For me, it's 30,000 words in 30 days. No. Right. So I'm doing it. Yay, Steve, this month. So it's the same thing, though. It's my morning pages, right? So I just sort of stream of consciousness. Well, the word you used was really... We have a ritual. I have a ritual that I go through. And I actually do have a morning meditation with tea. And actually, that literally is probably the first thing I do is just literally drink tea with precision and utter appreciation and open my senses to the beauty of the birds or the waterfall. You're always in these outrageous places. Well, yeah. And I live on Kailua Beach. Yeah. So I do my writing and then I go on the beach with the dog. Yeah. Yeah. So it made me feel better about this nonsense now. I mean, it's my... Not nonsense. Don't you love it? Would you want to live your life without it? I wouldn't want to die, but I really appreciate it. I'm grateful for it. Okay, so you set your day with appreciation. You have these rituals. And then meditation is just another form of height in making your entire life a ritual. Right. In some sense. Right. So you want more of the movie filled in? Yes. Okay, so then once I do those practices... So is it that you're... I'm interrupting again. I'm sorry, but I really want to know what it looks like. So are you sitting on a log or walking with the dog? No. What are you doing? We've got these 999 folding chairs that you get at Walmart. Uh-huh. Sometimes I take a cushion with me, depending on what kind of posture I want to take. And I usually get one dog. She gets one dog. I've done my team meditation. I set up motivation and intention. And then, quite frankly, I'll spend some time on lineage. Your line of juice. For instance, in any Hawaiian protocol, you're going to listen to lineage chance first and foremost. So folks that you've got to thank for getting you there. So then I'll do lineage chance at some sort of... Your ancestors? My ancestors. Quite frankly, my lineage chance is very vast at this point. And you flesh those out almost like friends to tell you the truth. They become... They literally become a part of your retreat, these lineage holders. So you think about each one of these people. Do you say their name? I can say them very fast or I visualize them. It depends on if I want to spend time with that particular aspect of my practice. So these... But lineage is very important. Like blood relations or people who have taught you or all the most above. Most of these people have taught me, but certainly Jesus is there, Buddha is there. For instance, people who have... The people who have given their lives to see the goodness and love and aloha is said, I thank those people. I bring them into the retreat. But what about your biological lineage like your parents and people like that? Yeah, they're in there too. I mean, you know, your family, if you think about it, your family, they're rooting for you. They're rooting for you. They're rooting for you. They're rooting for you, right? I hope so. Yes, no, you don't even hope. They want to see you succeed. So yes, they're there, but they're not quite as high up as some other individuals. Do you have a set... Do you do the same people every day? Oh, no. No, I do different people pop up. But again, I'm just establishing the ground. Then I do relatively... I'm trying to look for... Then I do start doing what's called deity and some esoteric practices having to do with body and yogas and things like that. Mantra practices. They're sometimes called sadhanas. The main one of which I do is medicine Buddha. Tell me about medicine Buddha. I would like that. You know, I thought about it. I wonder if they'll ask me about medicine Buddha. At some point in the development of humankind a thought came that it is a marvelous thing to care for one another, to actually try to help somebody get out of pain. That took an awakening. And that lineage that you could think of as a first medicine woman, the first medicine man, the shama, that tradition shamanic, that tradition of us trying to help one another out of pain took a Buddha, took an awakening. Buddha means awake. So that practice goes back to that level of antiquity and covers all the way up to Dr. Blank Blank Now. It's a lineage of people who actually wish to care for one another and get them out of pain. So that's the lineage of medicine Buddha. So I looked up medicine Buddha, right? Yeah. And I saw this guy sitting like this. Lou. Yeah. So is that the guy, the first guy? He was actually considered a human at some point, but now it's more like a force. An awake force of compassion, caring. I mean, if you think about your healthcare givers, it's a pretty extraordinary field. Yours included. It's extraordinary that one would want to spend their lives trying to help people out of their different morasses and pains. Well, yeah. I mean, it's selfish too, right? Because it's healed by self. That's a good point, yeah. I think that's why... It's its own journey in that sense, yeah. It's why I'm in it. Yeah. Which goes into a whole other realm of interconnectedness, right? Which is what we were talking about. Sunday. Yes. In the interconnectedness, and you're talking about this illusion of separation? Yes. Mm-hmm. Can you talk a little bit about that? You know, take me back a little bit. Illusions... Well, it's feeling that we're separate from the rest of the world. Yeah, most of your psyche, most of those 50,000 thoughts that you have a day, are to cover up this fear that you're separate. Yeah, you were talking about how we use all this energy to create this myth. You've created a myth that you're separate, and then once you've created this myth that you're separate, then you have to go around, protect it, and maintain it for the rest of your life. I mean, there's many times you must end up at the end of the day, and the only thing you can say is that you survived. You, you survived. You, the big you, the big me, the big I, I survived. Really? That's what life's about? So at some point, that becomes really, really fishy. The reason it becomes fishy is because of pucas. It's all about holes. There's holes in this fear-based model of protecting yourself where aloha comes in, where love comes in, where brilliant comes in, where luminosity comes in. And because you aren't, because you could say the ignorance that created the separation in the first place isn't as smart as the intelligence that made that paradigm, these pucas, there's holes where aloha comes in. You know you're built from love. You know you're built from aloha. What a beautiful place for us to end with aloha. Aloha, everybody. Join us again next time on Shrink Rap Hawaii. Thank you.