Welcome to the Commune Podcast. My name is Jeff Krasnow. As we enter into our sixth year of the Commune podcast, we are re-releasing some of our most popular interviews with teachers who now have full-length

courses on the commune course platform. So this interview from 2022 is with Dr. Gabor Matte, a renowned

author and speaker on the topics of addiction, trauma, childhood development, and the relationship between stress

and illness. His masterpiece on addiction in the realm of hungry ghosts received the Hubert

Evans Prize for literary nonfiction, and he has been awarded the Order of Canada, his country's

highest civilian distinction. Our conversation focuses on Gabor's latest book,

The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a toxic culture. This book is an excavation

of the root causes, the societal ground conditions, if you will, that have led to our current epidemics

of mental illness and addiction. Both in the book and in our discussion, Gabor outlines

how the prevalence of illness and disease in our society is increasing, and this is not at all

surprising, but rather the normal consequence of a social system that runs

on short-term profit at the expense of long-term considerations.

We discuss the pathways to healing and how we might better meet the psychological needs of

our children.

Gabor also explains the connection between emotions and the immune

system, and we discuss how manifestations of individual disease represent a problem in the whole

community. If you like what you hear in today's interview, Gabor has two full-length video

courses on Commune, a return to wholeness and

Starting Fresh. A return to wholeness is a four-part workshop that connects the dots between

psychological pain and the warped values of our culture, offers a path to healing. Starting Fresh is

a 10-part workshop that helps parents and adult children

repair their relationship through a combination of self-reflection, somatic inquiry,

...