There's a quite uncomfortable truth that a lot of people are sitting with right now. They have done the work or are doing the work, more work, maybe have joined a therapy, or started journaling, reading more books, started focusing on breath work. But on paper, they maybe aren't that better that they thought they would end up. And underneath all of it, the anxiety still somehow shows up, the overwhelm still hits, same relationship patterns. So the question isn't what's really wrong with me, rather, why hasn't all the work that I've really put haven't been able to move the needle? And today's conversation is for people that are actually sitting with that question. Welcome back to another episode of Healthy Mind, Healthy Life, the show where we have honest and grounded conversations about the inner work of being well in real life. I'm your host Cyan, as most of you would know, and today I've joined in conversation with Ben Ufana. Ben's work focuses on helping people move through anxiety, emotion, and overwhelm and the kinds of relationship patterns that really don't seem to resolve, even after years of therapy or self-help. Because he brings a practical and lived experience lens to the conversation, the kind that really names what people are actually going through. And might not, you might not actually find it anywhere on the internet. And we will while we talk about or break down the information paradox as well along with it. Today we're going to keep this really grounded, honest, and very, very useful. So, Ben, welcome to the show. I think you know that's that's really the kind of intro that really gets me going into a conversation. So I'm hoping to learn a lot of things from you.

Definitely.

Hey dear listeners, before we begin, a quick note from Heldiman Beyavek. This episode is created for educational and informational purposes only. The views shared by our guests are their own and may not reflect those of the host or network. Nothing in this conversation should be taken as medical, legal, financial, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional before making important decisions. We encourage you to listen with curiosity, think independently, and use this content as a starting point for reflection, not a substitute for professional guidance. Now, settle in and enjoy the conversation.

So, Ben, before we dive in, I want to start somewhere with your own journey. Because I think even after all the years that you have been doing this work, sitting with people who have already tried, you know, so much. And not necessarily they would want to believe that you know you could provide them uh with a solution because you know they would have their own set of reasons and questions and arguments that you know if it hasn't worked for the last five years, why would it not right now? So I'm curious to know before we go into any kind of mentality or uh you know frameworks or today's central theme, what do you really tell people about you know these kind of patterns that you're not really able to go outside of? And and uh the kind that actually quietly shapes how you do this work today.

I had to dig myself out of a very deep hole. I suffered a great deal of trauma, physical and emotional abuse during my childhood and adolescence and left me deeply scarred. And yeah, at the age of 14, I when I began to learn about the traditional Native American doctors and the visionary experiences they had, you know, through experiences like the Vision Quest, where you go alone four days and nights alone into the mountains without food and water. And at that point, I decided, well, if ever given the opportunity, this is what I'm going to do with my life. So by 17, I take it off on my own. I was living among a community of Kiowa Indians, I guess in India, you say Red Indians, but and attending Peyote meetings, and I began, you know, after meeting one of their last surviving traditional doctors, I began my apprenticeship. And so he would transmit portions of his own healing gifts to me. And then in order to earn the right to work with these gifts of healing, you go through the vision quest, the four days and nights without food and water. I was very hesitant to begin working on my own during my apprenticeship. It was like, not sure I know what I'm doing. And my mentor is saying, you have it. You have to begin working with people, and this is going to reveal itself to you. So, but when I did in my mid-twenties, as I was graduating college, I had so much of the trauma, the debilitatingly painful emotion surfacing during that time. And I found myself reenacting a lot of that, wounding those patterns in my romantic, very intimate relationships. And so instinctively, I taught myself to dive into the depths of the pain. And I would breathe with my awareness fully immersed in its depths and keep following it. And at a certain point, I could feel it breaking open and coming out the other side of my body. And as that happened, it gradually started breaking down or dismantling those patterns. Now, in my 20s, there was a considerable chunk of time that I was kind of lost in flailing. But when I had the opportunity, I well, I was exploring different therapeutic interventions, deep tissue body work. I did sessions of gifted healers when the opportunity presented itself, which really wasn't very often, but I was feeling that pull to return to the Wichita Mountains, which is the main place that the Kiowa people had gone to for to do their vision quest. And during the vision quest, there are times, you know, especially on the fourth night, where I'd feel this extraordinarily powerful presence descend into my body. At times it was like a near-death experience, and I could feel portions of my life cycling before my eyes rapidly, and I would be reliving traumatic events, sometimes which had occurred that I had completely lost touch with all that was coming back. I was all the vivid sensory impressions and the emotions, all that. And so, and in addition, I spent years training with a master from China and the internal art, So Xin Yi Kwan Bagwa Zong. And there's a lot of internal practice you do to build this power in your body. And one of the things that that especially struck me, no pun intended, is the intensive daily practice. Yeah. So the combination of like this whole system of meditation practices I developed, plus the Qigong practice. I still do the interventions. I haven't found any gifted healers I could go to in a long, long time. But I do the body work and the main thing I relied on is the vision quest, the four days and nights without food and water alone in the mountains. I came down about a month ago today, actually. Yeah, it was my 66th time to go through that. And going so many times, and part of it is you know being impressed upon by it was seeing these masters, and they, you know, develop this extraordinary, these extraordinary gifts and powers, these capabilities. It a lot of them, you know, some of them even possess paranormal abilities. And there's I know there's debate in India at this point, you know, like you have a long history yourself, like yogis and satus, and and these days, you know, a lot of people don't have the discipline, they're not doing the hours of intensive daily practice, but and and a lot of it's more of a facade and a big money-making scam thing going on, but and a lot of crazy drama playing out. But but through all this intensive practice that I'm describing, this is how it's progressively over time my own emotional wounding was healing. It's been a gradual progression. Now, there are times where I've worked with someone who's in the midst of a breakup, dealing with patterns of abandonment, unrequited love, and sometimes in as few as a few sessions, I've seen them have this massive breakthrough, you know, where they they cycle through the relationship and they were much lighter and resilient, more resilient. And they like let go of that unhealthy, toxic attachment. I've seen a number of these individuals end up within a rather short time, partnered with someone who was much, much healthier. And some people's bodies are much, much more fluid, they're more malleable. Myself, I think, because of a lot of the trauma that I experienced, I was pretty armored. And I had a lot of internal resistance too. So I had to teach myself. I had no one to explain it to me. I had to figure it out on my own, how to dismantle much of that armor through practice. But this is a long way of coming around to your question, is that as I've continued to do all this intensive practice, the meditations, I developed the Qigong, hours of intensive day, the practice going through the vision quest all these times, the fasting four days and nights without food and water, I become more and more of an empath. And I see and feel into people's bodies. And you were asking about why so many people, you know, they go through they've, in a sense, they've done the work, or so they think. And yet, to be completely honest, I have felt very disappointed with much of what I see out there. It's it's so surface level. I mean, psycho psychotherapy can play an important part of many of our healing journeys. And yet, I see a lot of people, and they can go through years of psychotherapy and they have the cognitive understanding. And yet they're still holding so much of that residue, the imprints of all those, all that adversity they've lived through, all the crazy ass dysfunctional dynamics from stemming going all the way back to childhood, adolescence, even from their adult relationships. And it's become so deeply ingrained, so wired into them. And so, with a lot of the commonly available modalities, yes, they do help to some extent, but it just doesn't go that far because like as I'm working with people, I'm seeing and I'm feeling in their bodies. And you know, what they call chakras are the subtle bodies, I feel that and I see it. And a lot of times they're grossly damaged and disfigured, or they fail to develop. Now, it's not all about chakras and subtle bodies, it's just that reflects what's happening in the mind, you know, in the brain, the mind, the body. You know, so you know, for example, like if you have a woman who gives birth through via the Caesarean section, and even more so if it's horizontal scarring, you know, in acupuncture they talk about the meridians in the body, the subtle pathways of injury, subtle pathways of energy, life force. With that incision, uh, plus the invasive trauma of the surgery itself, there's that shock that's left in the body, you know, the trauma the body holds on to. And and then I'm looking, seeing like that navel chocolate, sometimes it's like so damaged or destroyed. Many instances where someone has experienced childhood physical or sexual abuse, and and at the time the child is going through that, the the pain is so overwhelming, and there's often no source of comfort, safety, nourishment. And so as a child, you're left with these overwhelming, painful emotions, and and you internalize that, you carry that, plus the in imprints of that experience, and so looking in the subtle bodies of an individual, and you see where I'm seeing because of developing this capacity, where the stunting of development parts of the self have many parts have often failed to develop. There's this the the emotional wounding, the trauma itself, and all this undigested emotion that's held in the body. It takes up a lot of bandwidth. And yeah, so much of our capacity is not really available to us. So again, many of us, and I did myself, many of us need to go into psychotherapy to gain the cognitive understanding because you know, YouTube videos are just not enough, and we're reading a few self-help books. We can definitely benefit from a really gifted therapist. Yet we need to go beyond that. Although I was going through therapy, the patterns were continuing to continuing, you know, I continue to attract the same type of individual. I was forming attachments to women who were unavailable, disinterested, some were quite abusive, and the pain was excruciating. But I had to actually teach myself to go into the depth of those emotions, which one of many versions of this meditation practice I developed, you bring this person into your awareness, you see them, you feel their presence. You notice how it feels in your body, what emotions, what bodily sensations arise, where those feelings, emotions, bodily sensations are situated, and you breathe from the depths very softly, deeply, breathing all the way down to your abdomen, expanding your rib gauge as slowly and deeply as you can, and you keep doing that. A lot of times I'll be doing this for hours. I mean, most days, I'll do three hours of practice a day. It sounds like a lot, but you know, going back, a lot of the those who attain mastery in the internal arts in China, like, you know, Qigong and Xing Yiquan, Bhagwasong, they would do like, you know, three, four, six, seven, eight hours of practice a day. A lot of the yogis, the sadhus, the legitimate ones, you know, that really possessed that power, you know, that Shakti who had those cities, they too, I mean, just hours and hours of intensive practice. Some people are going to be like, well, who has time for that? It's like, well, how much time are you spending scrolling on your smartphone, scrolling through your social media feed? Even if you take, I mean, most people I'd say you you probably need at least a good hour of intensive practice. But if you just take some of that time that you're spending scrolling through your feeds or watching the idiot tube, which is my term for television, if you take the time and repurpose it for something that's going to help you heal and grow. But yeah, we need a lot more. You know, it's it's it's just the commonly available therapeutic interventions, useful to some extent, but by themselves, it's just not enough. And people tell me, I've done all this work on myself. It's like, really? It's I mean, it's you know, compared to I people in these disciplines having trained with a Native American doctor and a master from China and people in other traditions, it's like, yeah, okay. You've done your work, okay. That's we need a lot more.

I mean, you know, Ben, you have been to so many places and you have literally uh interacted with so many I mean wise people all around, and I will say it, right? I mean, rather than you learning something technically, I think the ones who actually learn something by their own self. I'm a believer of you know self-taught, so that could be a skill, that could be, you know, I mean, a skill like uh maybe a creative skill, right? Maybe meditation is something that um I would say that yes, you initially do need the footprints to start with, but eventually, you know, when you discover your own ways to really tap into that realm, I mean, you could be that guiding light for someone who might not have looked at, you know, discovering or rediscovering yourself in a way that uh you know you discovered, and that is, you know, you basically combine self self-taught skills with, you know, combine that with, I mean, the uh what was there out. I mean, um, you gained that wisdom in and you took that and then you worked on it. So, Ben, since you have been with so many, I would say, wise people, you interacted with these gurus. So, for someone who's listening to this right now, I would just want to perhaps end the conversation with this one small question who might have been doing this work for years and is still quietly uh tired of not seeing actual change. You know, what's a real practical first step that you would offer them this week? Now, I totally understand, you know, what you said earlier that you know we are not really doing enough, that we are really doing things that would make us feel relaxed and in our comfort zone, you know, scrolling. I mean, there's really a lot that social media has done to our lives in the postmodern context. But I'm curious to know from your perspectives, you know, what are the small acts that maybe they could try tomorrow that's actually different from what they have been doing?

(Cont.) Why Therapy and Self-Help Still Leave You Anxious (And What Actually Helps), with Ben Oofana

One of the best places to start is learning to work effectively with your emotions because our loved, lived experiences and emotional responses need to be thoroughly digested. So there's a lot we can learn through, say, books or working with a therapist or even talking with a friend or family member. But when you find yourself challenged by an individual or people or circumstances, it's triggering you emotionally, acknowledge what's happening, bring the person or situation fully into your awareness, notice what you feel in response to it, where these feelings and sensations are situated in your body, fully immerse your awareness in the depths of what you're feeling, breathe softly and deeply all the way down to your abdomen, also expand in your ribcage slowly and deeply as possible. Follow any feelings or sensations that arise as they go through their progression. Oftentimes the feelings will soften, become more diffuse. There's a sense of lightning relief. In some instances, they can intensify before they soften. If you're in the middle of a devastating breakup, they're probably not gonna soften just right away. It might feel a lot more grief and pain initially, but stay with what you're feeling, keep breathing into it. I would often do this for hours at a time. If you are feeling overwhelmed, one of the things that helps is, or two things, you can feel yourself becoming permeable, you just keep softening, and you feel you're just allowing the emotions to flow through you, emotions and sensations. Another thing is you can go out to walk in a safe place. In that case, I would stop and for a moment. I mean, doing this practice for so long, I don't have to stop, but for those of you listening, it's good initially stop and just tune into your body, close your eyes momentarily and and feel deeply what's going on, what do you feel? And as you drop. Into those feelings and emotions and you're breathing them. Begin to walk at a slow, gradual pace. Your primary focus is on what you're feeling. Stay with what you're feeling, keep breathing into it. And then the pace of your walk and your breathing synks up so that there's a certain rhythm or flow of feeling. And your walk will sync up with your breath and that flow of emotion that's coming out. So this is one of the most basic practices, and it's so crucial because if you're not digesting your lived experiences experiences and the your emotional responses to it, it's hard to move. It's you know, it's if it's still frozen inside of you, you're not gonna move very far. But the more you can drop into it and be digesting it, it makes you more fluid. And so in that case, whatever therapeutic intervention you're doing, whether it's working with a therapist or doing deep tissue body work, working with a gifted healer such as myself, then it's gonna make you far more responsive. You're gonna get far more out of it. You'll be far more receptive. Yeah.

I I think that really, you know, sends so many of our listeners on because uh that is something that I believe they might have been neglecting or ignoring for way too long. And I think that's fair you can tap into real change because see, it's something that also I would like to add, and maybe uh want my listeners to walk away tonight from this, is that I think that that real shift that we might be aiming for doesn't really come from doing more, folks. You got to understand. I mean, we have really been pointing towards the difference, the immense difference between uh quality versus quantity, right? It's the same analogy. I think it it it really comes from doing it differently, right, in a place that you haven't yet been touched, right? So you gotta sit with yourself. And Ben, I think you were spot on with that, right? I mean, even if you take a walk out in nature, and and and the reason why I say that is because I think nature is perhaps you know one of those things that it simply does help you reset yourself and comes back to that you know neutral point when then thereafter you can really start reflecting on a more, I would say, natural wavelength. And I think perhaps that is something that uh I would want you all to walk away from uh today's conversation. So Ben, I want to say that I I believe this has been a very, you know, a conversation filled with wisdom and uh one that's very grounded and useful for so many of us listeners because I think this is something that really comes from lived experience, because you know, you would really not reach that level of wisdom and I mean be able to connect with yourselves on a different level unless and until you have that lived experience. And that is not something that you gain just by reading a couple of self-help books or you know, just going on YouTube. So I I really want to thank you for sharing that wisdom with us tonight.

Years of intensive practice and discipline. And there's there's a lot of it, like the series of meditation practices I developed intuitively on my own, because for me as a matter of survival, having grown up with experienced a lot of that trauma in my childhood and adolescence. But then there are other practices, you know, like the internal practices I learned from the Chinese master that I wouldn't have ever figured out on my own. So we need both. And then, you know, the a lot of the intervention that I got from working with gifted healers. And then on the vision quest, that too, you know, we need the intervention because there's so much of the trauma that I carry, the emotional wounding, that had I not worked with the gifted healers and gone through the vision quest, would have never healed. You know, I'd still be carrying it. And I would like to, if it's okay, share a few things so that if people want to follow up. And I've written a lot of articles that people can read and explore.

Yeah. So, I mean, for listeners who actually resonate with this conversation, Ben, where's the best place for them to reach out to you? Because I believe this has really been a useful conversation, and I'm sure that so many of the listeners would want to get in touch with you and reach out to you directly and learn more about your work.

My main website is benrufana.com. Just as my name is spelled, b-e-n-o-o-f-a-n-a.com. I also have teachmeto meditate.com. And I'm able to work with people individually, whether remotely over the phone or through WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or whatever. And I also do in-person sessions, which are extraordinarily powerful. In addition, if someone is in the midst of their relationship, it is blown up, they're in the midst of the breakup, they've been ghosted, or I have uh offer a course called Breakup First Aid. It's about getting you through the initial devastation and getting you back on your feet. Let's break up first aid. And the next course, some people go through a series of really destructive relationships, suffering from abandonment, unrequited love. They find themselves keep forming attachments to the kinds of individuals that keep adding more to the emotional wounds. And so the deep dive is heal my heartache. Yeah, so break up first aid and then heal my heartache. And that's where you could learn a whole lot more. There's about brilliant and incorporate all these various practices and healing modalities so that you can heal and transform the suffering, whether it's breakup, divorce, ghosting, patterns of abandonment. And not only that, build the healthier foundation so that you find yourself drawn to healthier individuals and able to form attachments with individuals with whom healthy reciprocal love is possible.

Brilliant. So, folks, I would have Ben's website on the show also that you could easily reach out to Ben. And Ben, I again want to thank you for bringing this kind of lived experience in into tonight's conversation. So, folks, unfortunately, we hit today's minute mark on this podcast, but I just wanted to remind you that healthy mind in the life is indeed rooted in one quiet truth. That the inner work and the outer life aren't really separate, they are the same conversation, perhaps in two different rooms. So here's something that I already shared that I would want you to carry with from today that if the work that you have been doing hasn't really moved you the way that you hope, that doesn't mean the work was wrong. I repeat, that doesn't mean the work was wrong. It might mean that the layer underneath that it has been waiting patiently for you to finally meet it. So, you know, when you do it, maybe you know, on a more reflective scale, I think real change actually starts. So, folks, that's it from my end. This has been scien on healthy mind and the life, and thanks for being here, and I'll see you in the next conversation.