208 | 3 Powerful Lessons White Lotus Season 3 Teaches Us About Healing After Trauma

Can a luxury resort drama actually teach you how to heal after trauma?

In this episode, Michael breaks down White Lotus Season 3 and its unexpected lessons on identity, pain, and the illusion of resolution—all core themes survivors face during recovery. These pop culture moments aren’t just for entertainment; they reflect our shared struggles and can guide us back to wholeness.

Takeaways:

• Learn why clinging to old identities may be holding back your healing
• Understand how running toward pain (not away from it) brings long-term peace
• Discover the freedom that comes with letting go of the need for perfect closure

Take a full breath in and slow releasing breath out and discover how White Lotus can inspire your next steps in healing—no spoilers, just real insight.

00:00 Introduction to Healing with White Lotus

00:50 Thank You for Being Here

01:42 Diving into White Lotus

05:17 Understanding Identity as a Prison

09:10 Facing Pain Head-On

12:35 The Illusion of Resolution

15:25 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript:

 In this episode, I’ll share how season three of White Lotus can help us heal, grow, and step into the person we’re becoming.

Hey there, it’s Michael. Welcome to Whole again. A show about helping survivors of physical injury and trauma reclaim their strength and resilience. Through the wisdom of Kazuki and today we’ll step into a little pop culture. We’ll examine how season three of White Lotus can help us heal and step into the person we’re becoming.

But before we get there, I wanna say thank you. Thank you for being here. And thank you for being a fellow survivor. I know this journey you’re on isn’t easy. It’s not like you’re on some fancy vacation, like the people from White Lotus. Am I right? Healing is difficult. Some days are good. Other days are really hard.

There are ups and downs. There are headwinds and crosswinds, but still you’re sticking it out. You’re enduring. So I wanna say I. You’ve got this and I’ve got you. We might not have all the answers, but together we can figure it out. We can continue to pedal forward as we try to put a beautiful ripple into the world.

So again, thank you for being here. Now let’s dive into White Lotus. I’m a big believer that we can look across pop culture, today’s zeitgeist and pull in things that can help us heal and grow, become more resilient and White Lotus and Season three in particular has a lot of great lessons and some wonderful Buddhist underpinnings that tie back into mindfulness that I believe can help us as we move forward.

First of all, let’s start with the name White Lotus. One of my favorite quotes is from tick knock Hanh. He is not from Thailand. He is a monk though, and the quote is, no mud, no lotus, meaning that we have to go through the muddy moments in life to blossom as a beautiful lotus flower. So we’ll start there.

So whatever you happen to be going through, that’s the mud, that’s the dark and the dank of the pond. But soon we can blossom on the lily pad, like that beautiful lotus flower. Now, if you’re not familiar with White Lotus, and I know not everyone watches the show or has access to it, but White Lotus is the name of the resort in real life.

It’s a four Seasons resort. So it’s a pretty fancy pants kind of place. You gotta have some money in order to go there. Season one was in Maui, season two in Sicily, and season three in Thailand. And on the surface you might think the show is about the ultra rich, the one percenters that can afford a vacation like this.

And there is some first world Ultrarich problems that they deal with. Underneath it all, underneath all the wealth, there is something that’s quite special. It’s our shared humanity. Regardless of how much money we have, we all share some of these common struggles, these common challenges. So what season three does, I think more so than season one and season two is that it speaks to our shared humanity concepts that.

We all experience regardless of how much money we have, and we witnessed the guests at the resort dance with these concepts as well as those working at the resort that don’t have nearly the wealth the guests do, which underscores that regardless of our status or power, our wealth, we all have many experiences that we all share.

We’re all connected in this way. And the three that I want to illustrate today are our relationship with identity, our relationship with pain, and our desire for resolution, or the dichotomy of control, which I spoke about in an earlier episode this month in April that is pulled from stoicism. And all three concepts can help us navigate our healing journey.

So if you’re ready. Let’s dive in, and I promise no spoilers. I’m gonna keep this at a high level, and I encourage you to watch the show and let me know your takeaways on how the show can help you continue to pedal forward. Okay? Let’s start here with the concept of identity as a prison. Many of the guests we meet at White Lotus, as well as some of the workers.

Are clinging to an identity desperately the person they think they are all around the story, they tell themselves about themselves. It could be the identity as the rich dad, the college student trying to find her way. The high school friends that believe they’ll never change. The older guy who sees himself as a victim, these identities are like prisons and they’ve thrown away the key.

They might look like all that in a bag of chips on the outside, but deep within, they’re not happy. They feel trapped. They’re challenged to write a new script, and I think this can be common for all of us. I know I went through it. In the early phases of my recovery, I wondered who I would be if I couldn’t be who I was.

So we wrestle with this as we go through injury or illness or trauma, and you see the people at White Lotus going through it as well. Sometimes when we don’t know who will become, we try to go back to the old version of who we are. It’s more comfortable that way. People around us expect us not to change, but often that old version of ourselves hasn’t been serving ourselves all that well.

And that backpack, our old version carries, is quite heavy. Heavy from all the rocks that they put into it over the years. Or we try to step into this inauthentic, perfect version of who we think we should be, and that never ends well. Real healing, real happiness, the happiness that comes from within. Well, that type of happiness is an inside out kind of job.

It invites us to stop performing and simply be within Buddhism. Within the study of mindfulness, we learn that everything is impermanent. This moment too shall pass. That includes our identity. Our identities change over time based on what we experience, and when we try to clinging to them, try to control them, then that leads to suffering.

And when we’re unhappy with that identity, we pile onto the suffering. The ego digs its claws into that identity. It doesn’t wanna let it go and proclaims, this is who I am. But a more graceful path allows us to see what will arise, what will come up naturally to trust ourselves even as we go through this healing journey, that we trust that our new identity will emerge.

We can rewrite our script at any time we desire. Lesson one B in White Lotus is this money can certainly allow us to have really special experiences and can make life easier. No doubt about it, but as the old saying goes, money does not buy happiness. So let’s get to number two. What’s common again with the guests and those that work there is that they can’t outrun pain.

None of us can, especially you and me, based on what we’ve been through. Pain isn’t necessarily life, as Buddhist said, or one of my favorite characters from one of my favorite movies that Princess Bride Wesley said to Princess Buttercup, life is pain. But rather I see it this way, and I think this is a fair translation to what Buddha was trying to say.

In life, there’ll be suffering in life, there’ll be disappointment in life, there will be pain. Life is not pain. But in life we will have our challenges and we can’t outrun the pain. But I should say this, we’ll still try to outrun it. Even if we know better, and we do so in a lot of different ways, I’ve done it.

Maybe you’ve done it. We try to find something that will take the pain away, but it’s simply temporary. It’s only a mask. The monk in White Lotus shares with Tim the dad in a moment when Tim is vulnerable, I think he’s medicated. Says, people come here and they try to outrun the pain. They try to run towards pleasure, but when they get to pleasure, as the monk says, they find more pain because they never go within, they never go to the source or upstream or however you wanna look at it, to really deal with what’s causing the pain.

Everything else is simply a mask that works on a temporary basis, and then the pain comes back. But the way to deal with pain is to run toward it, not run from it. As we run toward it and we sit with it with compassion, then the power of the pain starts to diminish. Until we do this, until we allow the pain to be, it will continue to follow us.

Regardless of how many fancy vacations we take, regardless of all the different special places that we meditate, I believe we can practice mindfulness and should practice mindfulness wherever we might be. Yes, in Thailand, if we’re fortunate enough to go there, but also in your backyard or at the mall, or at work or in traffic, but most importantly, how we experience pain is determined by whether or not we try to outrun it or if we’re willing and courageous enough to run toward it, to allow it to be and meet it with compassion.

So it takes some of the power away from the pain. So that’s lesson two. And here’s lesson three. It’s the illusion of resolution. We love a good Hollywood story that gets wrapped up in a bow, don’t we? But when season three ends, again, no spoilers, there’s really no resolution. Yes, maybe for some characters.

Again, I’m not gonna name. Any names, but there’s a lot that’s just unresolved, and maybe that’s the biggest lesson out of all of this, because healing life as we live, it isn’t about neat conclusions. Life is rarely linear. Certainly healing isn’t linear and it’s almost never clean. We want it to be. We want it to be easy, but it’s never that way, and I think we want resolution because it provides us a sense of control.

We like closure. When people ask us, Hey, are you back to normal? They want that resolution. Whatever normal happens to look like, I still don’t know how to answer that. It’s natural to want things to be finished, but healing life, most of our stories, they don’t give us that gift of pure closure. Sometimes all we get is the opportunity to be vulnerable and courageous and sit with what is unresolved in Buddhist thought resolution isn’t the goal.

Liberation or awakening is liberation from the need to know letting go, or at least letting things be so we no longer feel like we have the need to fix things, to understand or solve things to make it certain. Instead, what we can hope for is to simply sit beside the pain. We’re experiencing without needing to explain it away.

It’s about coming to some level of acceptance, some level of truth that some wounds never fully close, but we learn to live with them anyway and that can help us feel whole again. So we give up this notion that we want resolution in everything and we allow things to be, and that might be one of the biggest lessons of all from season three of White Lotus.

Thanks again for being here and listening and being a member of our community here of Survivors on Whole. Again, I appreciate you. I’m glad you’re here.

In this episode, we talked about season three of White Lotus, and some of the lessons you can take away and apply them to your own healing journey, like how identity can be a prison and the power you have to rewrite your story any day you choose. We also talked about how you can’t outrun pain. And you can find happiness from the inside out.

And finally, the importance of knowing that resolution is an illusion that sometimes we just have to let things be and sit with what is, and that may be the most graceful pathway forward, so we can put a beautiful ripple into the world together again. Thanks for being here. I appreciate you

and if you wish to learn more about creating beautiful ripples and how to prevent a bad moment from turning into a bad day, please visit my website, Michael O’Brien schiff.com and sign up for my newsletter called The Ripple Effect. And join us each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday here at Whole Again, and discover how you can heal, grow, and become more resilient and celebrate our scars as golden symbols of strength and resilience.

Until then, remember, you can always come back to your breath. You’ve got this and we’ve got you.