Total Health: Karla McLaren On How We Can Optimize Our Mental, Physical, Emotional, & Spiritual Wellbeing

Often when we refer to wellness, we assume that we are talking about physical wellbeing. But one can be physically very healthy but still be unwell, emotionally or mentally. What are the steps we can take to cultivate optimal wellness in all areas of our life; to develop Mental, Physical, Emotional, & Spiritual Wellbeing? As a part of our series about “How We Can Cultivate Our Mental, Physical, Emotional, & Spiritual Wellbeing”, we had the pleasure of interviewing Karla McLaren.

Karla McLaren, M.Ed. is an award-winning author, social science researcher, and empathy expert. Her work focuses on her grand unified theory of emotions, which revalues even the most “negative” emotions and opens startling new pathways into self-awareness, healthy empathy, and profound healing. Karla is the author of many books, including The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings are Trying to Tell You (2023), and she is the creator of the Empathy Academy online learning site at https://empathyacademy.org/

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?

I had two parallel and overlapping childhoods. In one, I was the fourth child in a large, bright, funny, and artistic family. In the other, I was a part of a group of neighborhood children who were being molested by the father of one of our friends. Interspersed with laughter, music, free-range play, and fort-building (which sometimes required excavating large portions of our back yard), there was a backdrop of abuse, silencing, and sexual wounding that led me to become highly vigilant and perceptive about the moods and actions of my molester.

Of course, this translated to every part of my life, and I used my hypersensitivity and hyper-empathy to navigate in a world full of danger. This helped me in many ways, and it made me particularly able to befriend and work with animals. They were my real friends, because unlike humans, they didn’t lie, and they especially didn’t lie about how they were feeling. Animals helped me make it through my childhood, and they made a safe space where my hyper-empathy was welcome and workable. With humans, not so much.

What or who inspired you to pursue your career? We’d love to hear the story.

The emotions themselves inspired and informed me! I struggled for many years as a kind of strange outsider among humans, though my hyper-empathy made me very aware of the emotions and intentions of others (thank goodness). But I noticed that pretending not to feel emotions (and often lying about them) was a regular everyday thing for humans. I wondered why that was, and what would change if people could learn how to feel well and properly?

My family also had a joke phrase, “emotional genius,” that would always get a big laugh. The idea of someone being both emotional and brilliant was such a massive contrast that I always came back to it. What if we could be emotional geniuses? What if we could learn how to feel in deep and functional ways?

All of this simmered in the background as I fell into my love of writing, and eventually, I focused my writing on healing from trauma through the power of emotions, and learning how to work skillfully with empathy. I also became a social science researcher, because good research is the most amazing public service, and it’s an absolutely marvelous place to utilize my hyper-empathic skills in service to healing and justice.

None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Was there a particular person who you feel gave you the most help or encouragement to be who you are today? Can you share a story about that?

My mother, Kara Hubbard, always held onto an image of me as a writer. My teen and early adult years were very tumultuous, and I spent a lot of time either homeless or very, very poor. She knew how much writing meant to me, and she celebrated everything I wrote and all of my ideas.

I remember one birthday in my early twenties when she got me a writing portfolio (I still have it), which I loaded up with all of the tiny writing jobs I had gotten — writing comedy for a small newspaper, writing articles for property management magazines, and winning a few poetry competitions.

That portfolio acted as a kind of talisman and throughline as I struggled as a single mom to keep my and my son’s lives somewhere near functional. Her gift helped me see myself as a writer and not just as a struggling mess.

Can you share the funniest or most interesting mistake that occurred to you in the course of your career? What lesson or take away did you learn from that?

Oof. I wrote my first book (about healing from childhood sexual assault) on a computer back in the 1980s, and I didn’t remember to save it regularly to a floppy disk (remember those?). The computer crashed, and I lost my entire finished book. That wasn’t funny, but it was illuminating, because it helped me see how writing was a cathartic healing process for me.

When I write something, I’m working through it in real time, and when the piece is finished, so am I. The learning transfers from my mind and my body onto the page, and I feel changed and complete once it’s done. It’s a deeply healing ritual of awareness and completion.

There was a rawness to that lost book that I could no longer access, and rewriting it brought out a different type of knowledge. I wouldn’t have experienced that transition if I hadn’t lost that entire finished draft.

Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

The Jungian analyst Robert Johnson wrote two tiny, powerful books called He and She, and each one looked at gender through a mythological lens. I read those when I was about 12, and they set me on a path of feeling more deeply and understanding the importance of myths, stories, and ritual.

The myth in She was about Psyche’s journey into maturity, and a particular part of the story, when Psyche takes her two coins and her two hunks of bread into the dangerous realm of the underworld, still resonates with me to this day. I lived for many decades in that underworld, and through the story of Psyche, Robert Johnson helped me understand how, eventually, to get out and live in the sunlit world again.

Can you share your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Why does that resonate with you so much?

“Our work of love is to listen to the genius in emotions, make room for ritual and paradox in a world of quick fixes and pathology paradigms, and support deep empathic healing in ourselves and our waiting world.”

In my work, I challenge the status quo for the benefit of those who are suffering, and this quote reminds me about how to continue doing the work of love in an unjust world.

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? How do you think that might help people?

I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to update my 2010 book, The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You. It’s the first book ever to present the emotions as a complete realm of gifts, skills, and forms of genius. Since I first wrote it, I’ve developed the work further, returned to grad school to become a social science researcher, and developed a licensing program and online learning site to teach others my applied work, which is called Dynamic Emotional Integration®. This newly revised book is being published in June, 2023, and I’m so glad to welcome it into the world!

During the pandemic, when most social services were shut down, I also got involved with a small local nonprofit (Sonoma County Acts of Kindness) that does direct outreach and meal deliveries to our unsheltered neighbors. I became their donations coordinator, and I regularly go out in my car, the Green Machine, and bring food, clothing, tents, sleeping bags, treats, and supplies directly to the camps and spaces where people are trying to survive.

OK, thank you for all of that. Let’s now shift to the core focus of our interview. In this interview series we’d like to discuss cultivating wellness habits in four areas of our lives: Mental wellness, Physical wellness, Emotional wellness, & Spiritual wellness. Let’s dive deeper into these together. Based on your research or experience, can you share with our readers three good habits that can lead to optimum mental wellness? Please share a story or example for each.

The quality of our cognition is informed by our ability to identify, listen to, and work with our emotions.

Identifying emotions means developing a robust emotional vocabulary so that we can bring clarity and articulation to our feeling lives.

Listening to emotions means learning their language so that we can understand what gifts and skills they contribute to our awareness.

Working with our emotions means turning toward our emotions and developing the skill sets we need to work directly with their unique genius.

Do you have a specific type of meditation practice or Yoga practice that you have found helpful? We’d love to hear about it.

My mother was a yoga teacher, and I grew up in a culture of meditation, but I didn’t find yoga or traditional forms of meditation compelling. They were too static for me. It wasn’t until I found Gabrielle Roth’s 5 Rhythms dance practice that I felt at home. I need to be able to move and be free!

I also developed my own set of mindfulness practices, because the ones I learned didn’t include emotions in ways that I found helpful. Many were actually emotion-avoidant, which isn’t good! I call my practices the Empathic Mindfulness practices, because they intentionally recruit the healing influences of emotions to help people ground, focus, heal, and rejuvenate themselves.

Thank you for that. Can you share three good habits that can lead to optimum physical wellness? Please share a story or example for each.

So much of physical wellness relies upon our position in the socioeconomic strata: do we have access to health care, mental health care, and dental care? Do we have access to fresh food? Do we have enough time to rest and care for ourselves?

In consideration of the inequalities that plague so many of us, I would make this very simple: Move, laugh, and love.

Movement can be anything, and it’s available to all of us.

Laughter is an excellent cardiovascular exercise, and it connects us to people in healing ways.

And love means that we’re in trusting and healing relationships. Research suggests that social support is vital to better health outcomes for all physical and psychological conditions.

Do you have any particular thoughts about healthy eating? We all know that it’s important to eat more vegetables, eat less sugar, etc. But while we know it intellectually, it’s often difficult to put it into practice and make it a part of our daily habits. In your opinion what are the main blockages that prevent us from taking the information that we all know, and integrating it into our lives?

Honestly, I place the blame on our wildly over-busy lives. End-stage capitalism has many of us running on hamster wheels in a cage that will never go anywhere. When we’re eating convenient foods or easy-calorie foods, it’s a symptom and a response to a system that doesn’t take our true needs into account.

“Unhealthy eating,” in my observation, is a symptom of the real problem. It’s not the problem.

Can you share three good habits that can lead to optimum emotional wellness? Please share a story or example for each.

I’ll refer you back to the three habits I wrote about in the mental wellness section, and I’ll add these three: unvalence your emotions, understand quantity, and understand nuance.

Unvalencing your emotions means challenging the damaging idea that there are positive emotions or negative emotions. If you believe that there are positive or negative emotions, it is very unlikely that you’ll ever learn to work with them all.

Understanding nuance means knowing that your emotions arise at many different levels of intensity, and that you can learn how to identify and work with all of them simply by developing a rich emotional vocabulary (you can find a free Emotional Vocabulary list on my website). Once you can identify your emotions at various levels of intensity, you can “catch” emotions that you may have trouble with earlier in their trajectory, and develop robust emotional skills.

And understanding quantity means realizing that it’s normal to feel more than one emotion at the same time (think of crying with happiness or laughing when you’re angry), though there aren’t many English words to describe feeling multiple emotions at once.

Do you have any particular thoughts about the power of smiling to improve emotional wellness? We’d love to hear it.

There was some research on that, but it’s currently in contention. Smiling is a social display mechanism, and it can help other people feel more comfortable with you. However, smiling can also be a manipulative tactic people use to get you to trust them, so it’s important not to idealize smiling.

At this point in our understanding, I’d say smile when you like to smile, but don’t use smiling as a way to avoid a full repertoire of expressions and emotions.

Finally, can you share three good habits that can lead to optimum spiritual wellness? Please share a story or example for each.

I’m agnostic about spirituality, following my father, who felt that humans aren’t perceptive enough to claim certainty in either direction. So as an agnostic, I’ll say that whatever helps you in this area, as long as it doesn’t force you to separate from your body, your emotions, or your thought processes, enjoy it!

Do you have any particular thoughts about how being “in nature” can help us to cultivate spiritual wellness?

Nature has so many positive benefits, not the least of which is to remind us that we are animals on our home planet, and that in the grand scheme of things, we are just momentary beings, and pretty insignificant ones at that. That knowledge helps me reset myself and decide which, among the hundreds of ideas I have about how to alleviate suffering, makes the most sense to focus on. Otherwise, I get overwhelmed by the ways that we humans have created such unequal and unjust systems for each other.

Ok, we are nearly done. You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

I have studied the troubles humans create for each other for many decades now, and I’ve landed on this: If humans could learn how to work with their emotions instead of repressing them or expressing them all over other each other, we could become an exemplary species. My life’s work is devoted to this idea.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we both tag them :-)

Matthew Desmond is a writer and researcher I admire deeply. He focuses on the ways that eviction laws and poverty itself have become money-making opportunities for far too many people in the US. I’ve come face to face with the equally failed homelessness industrial complex and the nonprofit industrial complex in my own street outreach work, and I’d love to be able to talk to him about what is possible, if anything, to turn this predatory and intentionally unworkable system around so that safe and affordable housing can be available to all.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

I’m online at my personal site, https://karlamclaren.com/ and also at my online learning site, https://empathyacademy.org/

Thank you for these really excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success.

Thank you!