Inner Bonding: A Path To Physical, Emotional And Spiritual Health

Dr. Margaret Paul

Thank you so much.

Jana Danielson

I want to just start, tell us a little bit about how you came to this area of expertise and then follow that up with why you think it’s so important for us to fall in love with ourselves.

Dr. Margaret Paul

Well, like so many people, I came from a dysfunctional family, my mother was pretty much of a raging narcissist by the time I was five, I was a wreck and so she of course thought that was my fault and took me to a psychiatrist and he was awful. And I remember thinking that I could do a better job than him. And that’s when I decided to do this work because I knew even at five that I could do better than he was doing. And I never actually wavered from that, but I did go to school and learn traditional psychotherapy which I practiced for 17 years. Wasn’t at all happy with what happened with that with my own therapy. I had tons of my own therapy working with clients. That’s when I started to pray for a process that would really work. And I asked for a teacher or a process and I met Dr. Erica Chopich. She’s the co creator of inner bonding. She had half of it and I had half of it and spirit put it together. So of course we had to meet and that’s been evolving for the last 38 years and it’s completely changed my life.

Jana Danielson

I mean I love how you qualified that with it. It’s been evolving for 38 years. I feel like we’re growing up in a world in a society these days where we want to Google, we want to diagnose and we want to get the 21 day fill in the blank fix and go on our merry way. But the fact that this is like four decades in the making, let’s start first of all with help us understand why is it important first of all to learn and has learned an important word, you know, that we learn to love ourselves. Let’s dive into that.

Dr. Margaret Paul

Well, see most of us didn’t grow up with role models, for how to take responsibility for our own feelings, how to take responsibility for our own pain, our own joy, our parents didn’t know how to love themselves. Most of us had parents who role modeled many forms of self abandonment, let me just go through the four major forms of self abandonment. One is we learned to stay in our head, because our feelings were in our body and we didn’t know how to manage them. So we went up in our head and learned to ignore our feelings and another is we learned to judge ourselves and that creates a lot of anxiety and guilt and shame and depression. And then third we learned to numb our feelings with various addictions and fourth, we learned to make other people responsible for our feelings. Like my parents said, you know, you make me angry, you make me sad, blaming me for their feelings. 

And so most of us grew up thinking somebody else is responsible for making us feel bad or good or worthy or safe. So this creates a lot of problems, it creates a lot of problems for ourselves creates anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, anger, aloneness, emptiness. And it creates problems in relationships when we expect somebody else to give us what we’re not giving to ourselves. So learning to love ourselves is not only vital for our own well being, our own peace, our own joy, but it’s vital for relationships. It’s vital for health. If you’re abandoning yourself, you’re creating a lot of stress and stress is one of the major causes of illness. And so there’s so many reasons to learn to love yourself physically, emotionally, spiritually, so many reasons uh for your own happiness, peace and joy for your relationships, for your health and well being.

Jana Danielson

So for our audience, they might be sitting here thinking, you know, listening to you and thinking, what does that even mean? Like what can you walk us through? What does it mean to love yourself? And if someone feels disconnected right now or what you’re saying is almost like another language, right? Like, I think, I think sometimes that happens. How do you start the process of loving yourself?

Dr. Margaret Paul

Well, that is what the inter bonding process is about. But let’s say that you have a baby and you want to be a good parent. What do you do when the baby cries? Well, most people, yeah, they pick up the baby, they try and tune in as the baby hungry as the baby needs a diaper changes the baby need rocking as a baby. Lonely good parent tries to tune in, even though the baby can’t tell them the parent opens to well, what does my baby need, but we’ve learned not to do that with ourselves, not to tune into our feelings. Our inner child is our feeling self, that’s our essence, our soul, our true self that communicates very often through feelings. Feelings are feelings having an enormous amount of information for us. So when we ignore them or numb them out, we’re not getting the information. So step one of inter bonding is learning to take the journey from head, focus, mind, focus into body focus. Because this is where your feelings are, your feelings are in your body. And so if if you’re not in your body, then you don’t hear the baby inside crying. I call it having your inner baby monitor on so that you hear the moment you’re feeling anything other than peace and fullness. 

If you’re feeling anything other than that you’re feeling empty or if you’re feeling alone or angry or anxious or depressed, then there’s something to pay attention to. There’s something to learn about how we’re treating ourselves. Most of us assume that these feelings are coming from something external. And there are feelings that come from external things such as the loss of a loved one where we feel grief, we feel the loneliness, the helplessness, We feel the heartbreak people being mean and unloving to us is hurtful to our heart, bad things happening, saying things on tv of people hurting each other. But those are the feelings of life. These feelings like anxiety and depression guilt, shame, emptiness, aloneness, anger, jealousy. These are coming from how we treat ourselves and most people don’t realize that. So these feelings they’re so important to tune into. So step one getting present in your body, being aware of your feelings and wanting responsibility for them. That’s how we start.

Jana Danielson

Okay so while I mean I think we should just if it’s okay with you, can we just continue on this process? I’ve got a few questions but let’s kind of go through the process and then we’ll loop back.

Dr. Margaret Paul

Okay, good. So um inner bonding is based on the premise that there’s only two intentions to choose from at any given moment. One is the intention to protect against our pain with various forms of controlling and self abandoning behaviors. Like I just outlined the various ways we abandon ourselves and the other is to open to learning about what’s loving to ourselves and to others. So in step two we breathe into our heart and we consciously open to learning about love and we teach people how to access a higher source of love and wisdom and compassion. It can be their concept of God, a guardian angel, a higher teacher, their own higher self, whatever. It doesn’t matter what they believe in, what matters is that they’re open because that information is there. So in step two we’re opening to learning and we basically invite that presence and we say I invite in your love and your compassion, your wisdom, your strength into my heart. And that creates what we call an inner bonding the loving adult. It’s the loving adult that goes to pick up the child see. So we have to be a loving adult in order to learn. So in step two we’re creating the loving adult. Then in step three, we go back down into our feelings, let’s say in step one, we went in and what we were feeling was angry. And so we go inside and instead of assuming that were angry at somebody else, anger is generally a projection onto others of how we’re treating ourselves. 

So we would say to our feeling self, what are you angry at me about? What am I doing? That’s making you angry. And then we go inside to the feeling and we let the feeling answer and that feeling might say I’m angry at you because you don’t even know I exist, you just completely ignore me or you judge me all the time. Or you’re always just numbing me out with all these addictions, you’re nicer to everybody else. You’re nicer to the dog and the cat than you are to me. You don’t care about me at all. I just, you know, it’s like I’m not here. So that’s often what happens when we go inside is we discover we’re completely abandoning ourselves and then we project that anger out or we think somebody else is making us feel alone or guilty or shamed, but it’s really us. And then we go a little deeper into what we call the ego, wounded self. This is the part of us that exists in the lower left brain that has absorbed all of our fears and false beliefs. That’s the part of us that’s treating us badly. Because if we were being a loving adult, we would be loving ourselves. But most people haven’t developed a loving adult. The beauty of inter bonding is that the practice of it actually developed new neural pathways in your higher brain for the loving adult. But in the lower brain is this wound itself, this ego. And we ask, why are you, why are you treating us so bad? Why are you judging us? Why are you ignoring us? And that wounded self? 

This is how we discover our false beliefs. The wound itself might say, well our feelings are too big to handle. We can’t handle them well, that was true as a kid, but it’s not true. As an adult, we can learn to do that, or the wound itself might say, well, I have to judge you if I don’t judge you, you’ll just sit on the couch and do nothing or you know, I’ve got to push you, I’ve got to get you to be perfect. You’ve got to be perfect to do everything, right? So other people will see you and love you and value you and then you’ll be okay. So there’s so many different false beliefs that people are operating from and this is how we become aware of them. And once we become aware of how we’re treating ourselves and the beliefs that underlie that then we go to step four and step four is again opening to that higher source of love and truth. And we’re asking what is true about any of these beliefs, Is it true that judging myself will get me to perform and then I have control over how people feel about me and then I’m okay. Is that all true? Well, of course, none of it is true. Number one, we don’t control how other people feel about us. Number two, judging ourselves usually makes us feel immobilized. 

We get scared of making mistakes and so none of these beliefs are true, but we have to find that out from our higher guidance. And then we ask what’s loving to myself, my inner child, my soul, what’s loving to me, what action do I need to take? And once we get that information, step five, as we take the action and step six is we go in, we evaluate how am I feeling And if I’ve taken a loving action for myself, I’m gonna feel some relief, I’m gonna feel low, less of that pain of anxiety or anger or depression, I’m going to feel more worthy. That’s what loving action does. So that’s a very brief overview. Obviously this takes practice, it takes practice to get in your body, it takes practice to remember it open to learning, it takes practice to learn to connect with your higher source of love and wisdom.

Jana Danielson

So it feels to mean what you’ve just explained, like there’s this beautiful dance in the steps between going within and then opening up to, you know, a higher power and then going back in and then coming back out. Would you, would you agree with that very simple analogy in this process? 

Dr. Margaret Paul

Oh Yeah.

Jana Danielson

And so if we have an audience member that’s kind of following this and really connecting to what you’re saying, like you have on this day, become an answered prayer for them that they may not even know that they that they had how in the steps that you’ve laid out so beautifully, you know, so clearly, and I think I probably know the answer, but I’m gonna ask it how, what kind of time frame, like how much patience do we need to have with ourselves and with the process, because I imagine it’s like riding a bike the first time you go through it, you might be like, well that didn’t work or I fell off and skinned my knee on that one. Can you talk to, you know, the longevity of how patient we need to be with the process and with ourselves and how over time we can start to evolve it. So it becomes part of who we are. Is that what the goal is that? It becomes part of our operating system?

Dr. Margaret Paul

Yes, that’s right. That’s why I said that as you practice it you develop new neural pathways in our upper brain. The left brain is the action oriented part. This is like the male aspect out in the world and the and the and the right brain is the feminine aspect that can connect to spirit. Now when our actions are coming from our lower left brain, they’re not loving. So these actions when they’re formed by this, they’re not loving and that’s where most of us have been. This is habitual. So obviously it’s going to take time to learn to connect and take actions here. And the lower right brain. Is that soul that inner child that needs nurturing. But when the lower left brain is in charge, that part is ignored. It gets no nurturing at all. So you know, it’s like the question is like how long does it take to be a parent? How long does it take 

When you have a child and you have a baby? How much patience do you need with learning to be a good parent, learning to be a loving parent forever. So to me this is a lifetime process for me. I’ve been doing it for 38 years. I’ve gotten really good at it. I operate most of the time as a loving adult. I have been able to achieve what I call Atwell divine connection which took a lot of practice. I can connect at any time and I teach people how to do that, but it takes practice all of it takes practice. Don’t forget we’ve all been practicing a self abandoning way of being our whole lives and anything worth learning takes practice. But the good thing is that every time you take a loving action you’re going to feel better. So then you start to see, oh this is working for me.

Jana Danielson

I want to ask you what your opinion is on. You know, you talked about remapping or creating new neural pathways in the brain, what is your opinion on brain versus mind set? Because we’re here on the medicine of mindset summit, are they the same? Are they, you know, is there a chicken? And is there an egg? What talk to me a little bit about that Brain versus mindset?

Dr. Margaret Paul

Well, I believe that our mindset, we choose our mindset, we choose whether we’re open or closed, controlling or or or surrendered. We choose whether we’re loving or unloving, we choose our mindset and since we have neural plasticity in our brain that affects our brain, our mindset greatly affects our brain.

Jana Danielson

Okay, that was so clearly answered thank you for that. And so let’s go one step further. How does this idea of, you know, a positive mindset creating new neural pathways, how does it connect to the physicality of our health and wellness?

Dr. Margaret Paul

So when, you know, it’s not just a positive mindset. You know, a lot of people have just done affirmations and think positively and they haven’t found that to work very well. It’s really a mindset of being open to learning about loving yourself first and foremost, and then being able to share your love with others. We don’t have love to share. If we’re not loving ourselves, we’re not filling ourselves with love, then there’s no love to share. And when we’re not loving ourselves, we create a tremendous amount of stress. And so of course we create illness and I work with people all the time who are very ill. Let’s say they have cancer and they, you know, they eat well, they exercise, they don’t know why they are ill. And one of the major reasons they are is because of self abandonment. They’ve just ignored themselves. 

There’s many, many women who get cancer because they learn to be caregivers, caretakers give, give give and maybe if I give enough, I’ll get something back and it never happens and they get so depleted. This was me. I was very ill when inner bonding came in. Thank God it came in because I don’t think I would be alive and I didn’t know why I was ill because I’ve been eating organic for 60 years. I ate really well? I exercise? I was married, I had kids, I had a wonderful practice. Why was I ill? And it was because of the self abandonment because I was a caretaker. Taking care of everybody but me emotionally, I’m taking care of me, but not emotionally. I wasn’t taking responsibility for my own happiness, my own peace, my own joy, my own fulfillment. I was taking care of my husband, my kids, my parents, my clients, you get depleted when you do that or when you’re waiting for somebody else to do it for you. You end up feeling empty and alone and stressed and all of that affects your physical health.

Jana Danielson

I know there are people watching this right now that you know, are looking into your eyes and feel that you are speaking directly to them. Do you, I often get the question, you know, just even in the work that I do like, but but how like I feel frozen, I feel like like I’m on a playground playing frozen tag with my friends and no one’s coming to, you know, to run under my arms so that I can go running again and join them in tag. How do you, how do you encourage or inspire those people that like you said, do the affirmations every day, do their meditations, you know, go for their walk. They feel like they’re checking all the boxes, what has to happen for them to take that first action that kind of flips the switch for them?

Dr. Margaret Paul

Well, I’ll tell you a little story. When I was 45 years old. When inner bonding came in, I just had my 83rd birthday and I am incredibly healthy. So that tells you that it’s working really well. But I was 45 and I was sick and that’s when inner bonding came in and one day I was doing, we have an anger process and inner bonding that it’s a three step process that eventually lets your inner child and get angry at you. And I was doing that process and my inner child said to me, I don’t count with you, you don’t know I’m here. How sick do I have to make you before you pay attention to me. That was what came out of my mouth, how sick do I have to make you before you listen to me before you know, I’m here before you pay attention to me before you treat me at least as well as you treat the dog well I heard it and this was a big turning point in my life because I have been such a caretaker And when you’re a caretaker, you don’t know if the people around you love you for who you are and really want to support you and loving yourself or if they love you for what you give to them. And I was completely terrified to find out that the people who said they loved me didn’t, but I wasn’t willing to die. 

And I knew I had to take the risk of learning to stop caretaking, stop taking responsibility for everybody and take responsibility for me for my feelings. And I had to make two life changing decisions. One I was willing to be hurt because I thought I was gonna really get hurt and I did and the other is that I was willing to lose everybody else, But I wasn’t willing to lose me anymore because I was lost. I had lost me in caretaking everybody. So I made those two decisions and everything I was afraid of happened. My parents disowned me. My 30 year marriage ended and two of my three Children were mad at me but I got me back, I got my health back, I got my integrity, I got my alive nous my creativity, my work sword. So even though it was such a really, really hard time I would do it again. Yes, it took courage. I look back and I’m so grateful I was brave enough to take. You know that stance of learning to love myself and to find out the truth. You know those people, those friends of mine, I had friends, fortunately who applauded me and one of my kids was really happy that I was taking care of myself. Finally he knew how sick I was and he said go for it, mom, the other two were mad at me but you know, I look back now and I think oh I am so grateful that I was willing to do that. I just started practicing in our bonding all day long. 

I just started staying tuned into my feelings and the minute I felt anything other than peace and fullness, I went through an inner bonding process over and over and over and every time I had an interaction like with my ex husband where I didn’t show up for myself, I would come back to the drawing board and I had notebooks where I said, okay, I said this, he said this, I said this, oh here’s where I abandoned myself and then I went to my guidance and said what would have been loving to me, what would have been loving to me in that moment and I rehearsed it like a play and develop those new neural pathways in my brain until I could speak in a way that was loving to me rather than caretaking everybody else.

Jana Danielson

First of all, Margaret, I want to just acknowledge the heart wide open moment that you just gave us the authenticity and I feel like you know the inner bonding process, just like many people in, you know, in our, our space, we get gifted with these moments that we have a choice right? And so I want to acknowledge that because um that was, that was very special. And so I want to thank you for sharing that with our audience. I wonder if you can, I want to look back to what you termed the at will spiritual connection is the ability is that the outcome of committing to the inner bonding process so that you can create this at will connection when you need it.

Dr. Margaret Paul

So let me explain about that a little bit able to connect to spirit. Spirit exists at a higher frequency than we do because we have to be denser so we can see each other and some people can see spirit but not everybody. So we want to raise our frequency. We wanna raise our energy level to that of spirit so that we can access that information. It took me a long time to understand that there’s two basic things that affect our frequency. One is our intention to learn. If we’re open to learning that automatically raises our frequency quite high. That desire to learn is very, very powerful. That’s the mindset. See the desire to learn about love. The other thing is the frequency of your body. So if you’re eating junk food and sugar and drinking, you know, a lot of non organic coffee and smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol and taking drugs and all that and and eating, you know, the factory farm foods that are so filled with pesticides and eating the processed foods and all that very hard on the body very, very hard on the body. It lowers the frequency of the body that makes it very hard to access your spiritual guidance. 

Now when I was younger, I had a big weight issue. I don’t have that at all now. But I did then. I was real addicted to processed food and sugar even though I started eating organic really early boy, was it a struggle for me? But once I started to practice in her bonding and really learned to love myself all the addictions, all all the addictions went away because it is so important to me to stay connected with my higher guidance. And and so it’s really easy at this point for me to eat very, very cleanly. I don’t put anything in my body that could lower my frequency. And so it takes these two things, the energy of your body and the energy of your mind which is your mindset being open to learning when people do that, they find it that it’s easy. It’s easy to have that access. Spirit is always here. I mean that we were not dropped here alone. Spirit is always here guiding us in our highest good. But we have to be open to it. Now for me at this point since I’ve been doing this for so long. I mean it’s there’s no way that I want to live without that connection without that guidance without knowing that I am never alone. That spirit is always there watching out for my highest good, bringing me the peace, the joy, the love that life is all about. So that’s what motivates me to keep doing in reminding I do it all the time. I do it every day and to eat really really cleanly. That’s what motivates me. And that’s what allows me to happen.

Jana Danielson

Really appreciate how you’re bringing together the practicality of what we’re fueling our body with with our ability to go deep inside and you know be this loving adult to your inner child. I think it’s important that and for you know, for our listeners who may be if they’re like I don’t understand what frequency is and why does eating food and you know going through this process raise my frequency. Can you touch on that?

Dr. Margaret Paul

Our bodies were not meant to handle non food items. There’s so much you go into the supermarket and all the center aisles are basically non food and are our bodies are not meant to handle that. What I tell people about food because I do nutritional psychology a lot is that if people didn’t eat it 500 years ago, don’t eat it now. I mean it’s quite simple because the body just doesn’t handle it. It’s too hard on the body. You think, you know when I grew up which was quite a long time ago. Nobody had cancer. Nobody had ADD Nobody had ADHD Nobody had autism. Nobody very few people had heart disease or Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. I mean you just didn’t hear about it until all this junk food kind of started with T. V. Dinners in Crisco. And then and then all this started to happen. Well if it affects the body with illness that way it also affects your ability to keep your energy high, you’re not healthy, you can’t keep your energy high. 

Makes it very hard to connect to spirit. Now. Now the other thing that I hope motivates people is that you know, there’s so many young people that say well you know I’m young and I’m fine and I don’t have to eat well and I can wait but you know you don’t know what all of that is doing to you. And if you want to reach my age at 83 and be vital and alive and not have any of the illnesses that so many of the people my age have, you got to start now you can’t wait until you’re not feeling well. You know it’s again it’s part of loving ourselves, not not only to be able to connect with our higher guidance but to be healthy and vital and alive and clear in your mind and not have to go through. I mean there’s so many people I know with cancer and diabetes all of that so. 

Jana Danielson

And all in the name of convenience and right like when we get told all this as you were talking, it reminded me of when my three boys and their 17, 19 and 21 now, but when they were younger, my mom and dad had gone to Costco and he bought this Costco size box of these gummy, these little gummy treats right? That I could, right? And I said dad like they this is like so full of sugar and he kind of cut me off, he’s like no Jana right on the box, it says it’s made with real fruit juice. So I thought it was right. So we end up subscribing to what we see on a package that makes us believe that it’s fruit juice. I mean there’s probably real grapes or real oranges in here. And so thank you for reframing that for us because I think that so much of what we see in here now in advertising almost creates this divide that it’s too expensive to eat healthy. It takes too much time. Here is a viable option that impacts just more than the physicality of who we are, the way you’ve explained that it impacts our ability to connect with our higher self with that higher guide. And so I want to ask um in terms of your area of expertise, you know this body of work that has been evolving. Would you say that there is anything that’s not being talked about enough that you want to you know, either reiterate or highlight at this part of our conversation.

Dr. Margaret Paul

Yeah. So I had a ton of therapy before inner bonding and not one therapist ever told me I was responsible for my feelings, not one. And that is something that’s not talked about is teaching people how to take responsibility for their own feelings rather than being victims rather than being a victim of their childhood or a victim of their partner or a victim of God or whatever they think they’re a victim of, that’s that’s a really sad way to live that is not talked about much and neither is being able to connect with your higher guidance at will.

Jana Danielson

You think it’s not being talked about enough because maybe that client won’t come back if they don’t, if they don’t feel like they need the therapist that way or what do you think is the disconnect there?

Dr. Margaret Paul

The therapists don’t know. No, they don’t know. Many therapists who come to me for help probably have my practices therapist. They don’t know, They weren’t taught this isn’t taught to them in schools, just like in medical school they’re not taught about nutrition. Well therapists are not taught how to take responsibility for their feelings or connect with their higher guidance.

Jana Danielson

So I want to know, I mean, I feel like, you know, over the past 35 minutes we have covered so much information. I have gotten, you know, so much clarity on the process of inner bonding The concept of looking within and then looking without and going back go back in. I want to know in your 83 years of wisdom, what are some of the mindset hints tips, tricks habits that you and I’m sure they’ve also evolved over time, but like right now in your life, Margaret, what are you doing obviously besides the inner bonding process, what other things do you do in a day or in a week? That really keep that mindset piece front, like on your radar?

Dr. Margaret Paul

So there’s a couple of things. One of the things is that I actually ask all day long what loving to me now, what’s in my highest good now? I’m asking it all day long, I don’t actually do anything without getting that guidance. And people will find, even if they’re not practicing in our bonding, they start asking that question, what’s loving to me now, what’s my highest good now? They’re gonna start to get answers what, you know, regardless of what they believe, they will start to get answers. And the other thing is to start to notice who you really are on the soul level. One of the things I’ve learned to do, which loving parents do is to mirror our intrinsic qualities, not like a good grade, but like kindness, compassion, integrity, generosity. And so what I’ve learned to do is to actually out loud say to my inner child, oh, I so appreciate your perception about that. That was so creative. Thank you so much for your creativity. We need to tune into our intrinsic qualities. Too many people judge their worth by their money or their looks or their clothes or their house, these are external, that’s not who you are. And people need to learn to define their self worth intrinsically by who they truly are on the inner level.

Jana Danielson

That is so beautiful and the way you framed it felt simple, right? And then that’s I think what so many people are looking for and so help our audience. Where can they find you if they want to see more of what you have done or connect with you, where can they find more information?

Dr. Margaret Paul

Yeah, so if they go to innerbonding.com, we have a very big site, there’s a free course, free seven day course they can take, there’s many, many books of mine that they can read to learn inter bonding. There’s many courses that I have every two weeks. I have inner bonding membership community where I’m online for an hour and a half and I bring people through an inner bonding process and I talk on a topic and then I do laser sessions with people so that they can really see the inner bonding process in action and that’s quite an inexpensive way of learning and practicing inter bond, so there’s so many ways people can learn this.

Jana Danielson

So many ways Margaret, thank you so much for your time and you know bringing this, I am grateful that you had this download that you made the courageous choices that you did so that you know, hundreds of thousands of people on this planet have been impacted by your work. And I always say there are no coincidences. It’s not a coincidence that you’re here with us this week on the medicine of Mindset. And I know your impact will just continue to permeate out through our audience. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Margaret Paul

And thank you so much.