An Interview with Wendy Craig-Purcell

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Wendy Craig-Purcell, author of the book, “Ask Yourself This: questions to open the heart, expand the mind, and awaken the soul.” It’s a little intimidating developing questions for an interview with someone who is such an expert on questions, but she is also the founding minister and CEO of the Unity Center in San Diego, so I hoped she would be stocked full of empathy and forgiveness if I fumbled things a bit. She was.

I found her book to be very provocative in both its style and writing. Lots of books attempt to provide answers. That may work well when you have a situation for which you need a specific prescription. But usually life is more complicated than that; constantly bombarding us with difficult situations and uneasy responses. Wendy’s book helps the reader by providing the right questions. You can then create the answers for your own life. Below are excerpts of my interview with Wendy Craig-Purcell. I hope you take pleasure in reading this interview with Wendy as much I did talking with her.

MM:    Wendy, thanks so much for your time today. I really enjoyed your book and am looking forward to this opportunity to talk with you about it. I’d like to begin by learning a little more about you. Can you tell me what was your motivation behind writing this book?

WCP:   I’ve been in the ministry for 30 years and I’ve had so many people in my own community and other locations ask me to write a book. I kept putting it off because of other demands on my time. Finally, I began to realize that we are living in such extrodinary times and circumstances today. I felt that basing my book on a series of questions could be very timely now because circumstances today are so different than we have been faced with before. We need creative and new answers to find our way through. To get at the right answers requires a different set of questions.

MM:   What are the different circumstances today?

WCP:   Different economics. The world is shrinking. The Internet has fundamentally impacted our lives. I read about a program on the History Channel that discussed the 100 most important inventions of the last century. The number one item at that time was the printing press because it put into the hands of the ordinary person information that was not previously available. That question asked today would probably have a different result. Today’s number one most important invention would more than likely be the Internet. It equalizes the playing field for individuals and businesses, but it comes with both positives and negatives.

MM:   We live with ourselves 24/7. Why do you think it is difficult to know ourselves?

WCP:   Because we allow ourselves to pursue things that are more external than internal. Our culture seduces us to think outside of ourselves for a sense of fulfillment. At the heart of much spiritual and philosophical practice is the prescription to go within. This takes time. It takes valuing what could come out of that process, rather than sleep walking through a lot of our lives. We spend so much of our lives being distracted, whether its by watching TV or some other form of empty entertainment. Many people are addicted to shopping. It fills up a lot of time. For a lot of people it’s scary to sit in silence and probe deeper within. Yet the rewards are enormous. We can learn that what’s motivating us in these outer pursuits is something that is distracting us from our true purpose. We all are given the same 24 hours in a day. We all make choices, consciously or unconsciously, about how we’re going to spend those hours. We either live our lives by design or by default. When we live by design, we live consciously. It’s all about making choices. We learn that we cannot do everything and that not everything is equally important.

MM:   Your book also includes some examples of questions we can ask our children. My daughter is 14. I think teenage girls today deal with so many unique challenges. They feel pressure to look a certain way or else they don’t fit in. Do you have advice for parents on how to help their teenagers handle these difficult years?

WCP:   Regardless of our age, we all have different layers in our lives. It’s important that we take time to turn within and begin to listen to our inner selves. The first thing the average person is going to hear is the untrained, undisciplined mind that jumps from one topic to the next. The thing is, our minds don’t become trained unless we train them. As a result, what we hear when we look inside is actually the voice of our culture or the voice of teachers who might have said discouraging things about our work. That’s not the inner listening I’m talking about. There’s something deeper that touches upon the things in our lives that really do matter. We all are influenced by the messages in our culture. As parents we have to find a way to counter or neutralize the messages the culture is giving to our teenagers. With every TV show, commercial, magazine article, there’s a cookie cutter look of what it is to be an attractive young woman. To neutralize that takes a lot of conversation; dialog between parent and child. These kinds of conversations take time and so many parents today are so pressed for time that we give glib answers when faced with these kinds of situations.

MM:   You also talk in your book about emotions. A lot of people struggle with this and find themselves in unhealthy habits or experiences as a result. Why is it difficult to know our own emotions?

Learning to manage emotions is not an easy thing to do, but makes a huge difference in our lives.

WCP:  Howard Martin, co-author of the book The Heartmath Solution talks about his belief that the next most important frontier for humanity is the ability to manage emotions. Learning to manage emotions is not an easy thing to do, but makes a huge difference in our lives. You can’t manage them if you don’t know what they are. I can ask people to write down a complete a list of all the emotions and feelings possible and it probably will be a very short list. But really there are hundreds of emotions we feel. Not only do we need to identify them, but we also have to understand where they’re coming from. We tend to think our emotions are caused by something external. That is definitely how they’re triggered, but emotions are internal reactions. Going back to the question about teenagers and how they feel about their bodies – during my teens I was dedicated to ice skating. I got up every morning at 4 am to practice, took private lessons and worked very hard. As a result, I had a strong desire to look a certain way. This is an example of the kinds of pressure that can result in negative feelings about oneself. These kinds of feelings are really touching on something much deeper – a person’s sense of self worth.

MM:    We talk a lot about people improving their lives. I’m all about change, but then I’ve also met people who seem perfectly content where they are in their lives. Where is the line between acceptance and making changes?

WCP:   It’s really not a line. If you want to make a change in your life – say to become more physically fit – then it goes to recognizing what’s motivating the change. You know that it’s a healthy decision to lose weight, diet or exercise. If your motivation is one of love and joy and acceptance, then you’re going to feel good about yourself. If, however, its driven by a lack of self worth or acceptance, then it’s going to feel very different when you’re in the process. Outwardly to anyone looking at what you’re doing – it’s going to look the same. So you can’t judge it by the actual behavioral changes. It’s the motivation behind the change that’s the distinguishing factor.

MM:   One of the questions you describe in the book is about letting go of the size of the life you know in order to allow for something bigger. You describe how we all have a tendency to think small. Why is this?

WCP:   There’s less risk. If we think small, it’s more common than thinking big. Less required growth. I believe there’s two things going on when we’re dreaming big. The dream itself and the pure joy of thinking about that and accomplishing it. Equally important to achieving the goal is what the person becomes in the process of moving toward it. Whatever the goal or the dream is, the “you” as you are right now can’t actually achieve it. It’s not a negative thing. In order to achieve it, you have to grow into it. Who must I become to achieve that goal? How must you be in the world? What do you have to let go of? What fears or limited beliefs or wounded messages did you have growing up? These can all get in the way of living a larger life.

MM:   In your book you describe the importance of how we act when no one is watching. In fact, you give an example of how we behave when we’re driving. I paid particular attention to my driving today and I want to confess this is not so easy. Even when I try my hardest to be compassionate, people cut me off or I get stuck behind every red light. It can bring out the worst in people!

WCP:  Questions like the ones in my book, help you to go deep within yourself. It can also help you to see glimpses of yourself in situations that no one else sees you in. With the practice of going inward and observing your own behavior and subsequently asking yourself the right questions, you can say “oh, hmm, look how I reacted to this.” Human nature is such that – insights like this can help us make little shifts in our behavior. We realize that we could make a different choice here. It’s all about remembering things like that. In fact, I think it’s the cumulative effect of these little changes over time that make a big difference in the end. I think it’s better to make little changes consistently over time than to tackle something so big and not follow through.

MM:   I think sometimes when you let your guard down and reveal something about yourself, if you don’t get the reaction you expected from someone else, you regret it. Or sometimes you’re in situations – such as a toxic work environment where you know others are not necessarily trustworthy in their reactions to your authenticity. How can you be “real” if you don’t feel it’s safe?

Sometimes we’re in toxic relationships or environments to be the candle… Change happens when bright lights move into dark places.

WCP:   I believe strongly into tuning into your gut. There’s usually a good reason behind that kind of instinctual insight. If my intuition were telling me to just hold back a bit, then I would follow that. It’s important to remember that these kinds of situations are not usually all or nothing. Pretending to be someone else or being unauthentic is not the same thing as choosing how much to reveal of your authentic self. It’s a matter of degrees. It’s important to know when to not show all of yourself if you’re in a situation where perhaps doing so would cause you or someone else harm. You are learning to modify your behavior based on your assessment of the current situation. That’s a good thing. In business management there’s something called situational leadership – you cannot use one kind of leadership in all situations because not all situations are the same. Perhaps there is another way to approach a situation to get a better result. In those times when you feel comfortable you can say, “I am going to be more of me in this situation because I’m willing to take the risk.” You’re making this decision out of a choice of awareness. I believe we are in the places that we’re in order to both teach and learn. Sometimes we’re in toxic relationships or environments to be the candle that might inspire a tiny bit of change. It’s nice to be with other bright lights but change happens when bright lights move into dark places.

MM:   In your book you tell a story of taking your son to a movie where the person behind the counter told you how you could have lied about your son’s age to get the children’s discounted rate. I tried that once when I was a kid – to lie about my age to get in on the discounted movie rate, but the person at the counter asked what year I was born in and I wasn’t prepared for that question. I learned at a young age that I’m not a good liar!

WCP:   Whether we know it or not we teach all the time; by our words and by our actions.

MM:   The Indigo Girls have a line that says, “it’s a thin line between pleasing yourself and pleasing somebody else.” Your book delves into some questions on people pleasing. How can you balance yourself on that line of pleasing yourself or someone else? Especially if you’re a recovering people pleaser?

WCP:   You have to go back to how you feel and what the motivation is in each opportunity to do something for someone else. Is it coming from a sense of fullness in you and desire for the other person? Or from a place of resentment and I have to do this? Many of us wish we could have a simple formula for situations like these. It doesn’t work like that. But there are questions that help us get understand ourselves better so we can truly get at the heart of the matter. These questions can become so valuable. Part of the reason I took the approach I did with the book, is because there are so many books with lots of good, helpful information, but you have to learn to practice that technique. There’s value in that. But the idea of asking really good questions and having a few you work at, helps you get at your own answers. There’s a portability to it. After awhile people find their own answers coming from inside of themselves. I look at it this way. sometimes we have to learn from experience. If you don’t know how to ride a bike I could explain to you how a bike works from the perspective of physics. I could also describe what it’s like from my own experience of riding a bike. But until you get on a bike yourself and have your own experience and feel what its like going off balance, you can never truly understand about riding a bike. You have to get on the bicycle and experiment. No one else can tell you what that’s like for you. Finding your good answers or making good choices and decisions sometimes requires that kind of trial and error and we’ve got to make it safe for ourselves to do that.

MM:   We have only a limited amount of time left and I want to talk with you about the topic of people and their names. In your book you reference the concept of holding people hostage to their past. When someone changes their name, they frequently are met with people who refuse to call them by the new name – whether it be a family member of colleague. Is this similar to holding someone hostage to their past?

WCP: The larger question about how to react to someone who is trying to hold you hostage to your past depends on who is doing this to you. If it’s coming from a spouse or life partner or family member, then you can have a discussion. You can choose a private time and say, “I’ve been making some changes in my life and I have a request. Would you consider updating your picture of me? It feels to me by the some of the things you say or do that you are holding me to my former self. Would you update that?” You can then go into details of what that would look like. You can tell that person “If you were updating your picture of me it would look like this or sound like this.” With people that are more on the periphery of your life, you might choose to address it with them, but then let it go. If they’re not going to update their pictures of you then it’s really not about you. It’s more about them. What’s most important is that you have the updated picture of yourself.

I wish to express many thanks to Wendy Craig-Purcell for her time in discussing her book, “Ask Yourself This.” Go to Wendy’s site where you can download and read the first chapter.  By reading this book you can learn some important questions to ask yourself so you can become the teacher of your own life. I encourage you to read it to learn more about the person you spend the most time with: you.