Speaker 1: We have been trained to try to fight the dark,
Speaker 1: and we don't know how to pay attention to it.
Speaker 1: We don't know it's for us. We don't know that
Speaker 1: it always comes bearing gifts. Welcome to the one you feed.
Speaker 1: Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the
Speaker 1: thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or
Speaker 1: you are what you think, ring true, and yet for
Speaker 1: many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good wolf. Thanks for joining us on this episode. We
Speaker 1: have a return guest, Mary O'Malley. She's the author of
Speaker 1: many books and a speaker, and has studied with Patricia's
Speaker 1: son Stephen Levine, Jack Cornfield, Pema, Children, Audio Shanty, and more.
Speaker 1: Since the early nineties, she has been writing books, speaking
Speaker 1: to groups, leading retreats, and working with people all over
Speaker 1: the world. Hi, Mary, welcome to the show. I'm so
Speaker 1: glad to be here. I am so happy to have
Speaker 1: you back on. I was looking and it has been
Speaker 1: six years since we talked, Oh my goodness, and yet
Speaker 1: your book What's in the Way is the Way, and
Speaker 1: our conversation has stuck with me as much as any
Speaker 1: other I've had over the time. I was ellen you
Speaker 1: beforehand about one idea of yours that has really stuck
Speaker 1: with me that we'll get to in a minute. But
Speaker 1: let's start like we always do with the parable. In
Speaker 1: the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild
Speaker 1: and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside
Speaker 1: of us that are always a battle. One is a
Speaker 1: good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,
Speaker 1: and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things
Speaker 1: like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops
Speaker 1: and thinks about it for a second, looks up at
Speaker 1: their grandparents, says, well, which one wins, and the grandparents says,
Speaker 1: the one you feed. So I'd like to start off
Speaker 1: by asking you what that parable means to you in
Speaker 1: your life. And in the work that you do. It's
Speaker 1: a very well known parable. It points to a very
Speaker 1: important skill on our journey. But it only works to
Speaker 1: a point. I can remember the moment when I realized
Speaker 1: that every single atom, every single atom that makes up
Speaker 1: every single thing, has a positive a negative charge. And
Speaker 1: in my own journey, I have discovered that there came
Speaker 1: a point where, rather than turning away from the negative wolf,
Speaker 1: you know, and not giving it any power, it didn't
Speaker 1: fully heal. But it's when I turned towards it, when
Speaker 1: I befriended it. You know that famous you catch more
Speaker 1: flies with honey than you do with vinegar, you know.
Speaker 1: And I am now dealing with cancer, a kind of
Speaker 1: cancer that I'll have the rest of my life, and
Speaker 1: I have to take chemo every day, which my body
Speaker 1: doesn't like. So I'm right at that edge where it
Speaker 1: really feeds the negative a lot. My mind doesn't like this,
Speaker 1: my body doesn't like this, And it has taught me
Speaker 1: that the ability to bring space around the difficult, to act,
Speaker 1: bow to the difficult, to say you are welcome here, then, then,
Speaker 1: is when it loses its power over me. So yes,
Speaker 1: to a point very important, But there is a point
Speaker 1: beyond which we need to become that place that includes
Speaker 1: both the easy and the difficult, the joyous and the sorrowful. Well,
Speaker 1: I am sorry to hear about your cancer diagnosis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I call it my benevolent teacher. I fierce but benevolent teacher,
Speaker 1: And most of the time I am opening to what
Speaker 1: it is bringing me. It has brought me so many gifts.
Speaker 1: I think that we crawled into our minds when we're
Speaker 1: very young, and we became human doings rather than human beings,
Speaker 1: and we think our way through our lives. That's why
Speaker 1: I love that Alan Watts, the famous Zen philosopher, his
Speaker 1: quote so much. No matter how many times that you
Speaker 1: say the word water, it will never be wet. And
Speaker 1: so I think to loosen our grip on our minds control.
Speaker 1: It's addiction to try to control life. It's very helpful
Speaker 1: to come across a really big challenge because it highlights
Speaker 1: that urge to contract and resist, But it also highlights
Speaker 1: the power of soppening, opening and showing up for it
Speaker 1: most of the time, not all the time, but most
Speaker 1: of the time. I am very grateful for this. If
Speaker 1: it's okay, I'd like to talk a little bit more
Speaker 1: about that is that okay, And the reason I want
Speaker 1: to talk about it is that you're a beautiful writer
Speaker 1: and you've got lots of great things in your books,
Speaker 1: and we talk about lots of things on this podcast,
Speaker 1: but it's very easy for listeners to sort of go, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, like that's easy when things are going well,
Speaker 1: And that's true, and so I love when we can
Speaker 1: talk to someone when they're actually sort of really in
Speaker 1: the really difficult moment months of life. And so i'd
Speaker 1: love to start with asking you. You said most of
Speaker 1: the time you're grateful for it. Some of the time
Speaker 1: you're not. So I'm assuming you're a human like the
Speaker 1: rest of us exactly, and you have your moments where
Speaker 1: you're like, I don't want this, I don't like this,
Speaker 1: this hurts, it sucks. Go away. Yes, yes, especially in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night when I'm woken up again,
Speaker 1: you know. But it happens so much contraction opening, contraction
Speaker 1: opening that when the contraction comes and in a way,
Speaker 1: the contractions are coming even more deeply. But I'm really
Speaker 1: realizing these are the core contractions I took on that
Speaker 1: cut me off from my essence, cut me off from
Speaker 1: who I truly am cut me off from the joy
Speaker 1: of being alive, cut me off from the ability to
Speaker 1: enter the great river of creation and be it rather
Speaker 1: than do it. Especially in the middle of the night
Speaker 1: when it ms, when I'm woken up again and I
Speaker 1: just wake up into just really not feeling well and
Speaker 1: my bodies and pain and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: That reaction is so strong that it wakes me up.
Speaker 1: And one of the questions that I asked that it
Speaker 1: just comes without changing anything, Notice what is here? And
Speaker 1: that takes me directly into pure awareness. Now I am
Speaker 1: that which can see what is going on rather than
Speaker 1: being identified with it. And the more I do this,
Speaker 1: the more my heart just opens too. How much my
Speaker 1: mind learned how to struggle, how much I absorb the
Speaker 1: collective belief that life is I'm separate from life, which
Speaker 1: is so untrue, that life is not safe, that I
Speaker 1: must control it, and believing that I've never really quite
Speaker 1: controlled it right enough. It's so painful to be back
Speaker 1: in that world, which I call the secondary world. But
Speaker 1: that ability to come so strongly, then awareness kicks in.
Speaker 1: Usually I have to ask without changing anything. Because we're
Speaker 1: addicted to struggle, we're trained to follow struggle wherever it goes.
Speaker 1: And when I asked that question, all of a sudden
Speaker 1: I step back. I am the awareness that can see
Speaker 1: what is going on. And the more I do it,
Speaker 1: the more my heart opens. And that is what this
Speaker 1: poor little, separate, struggling mind that we've all taken on
Speaker 1: that has created so much heartache on this planet. I mean,
Speaker 1: all you have to do is look at history or
Speaker 1: the evening news to see where that brings us. But
Speaker 1: our minds are this wonderful tool we've been given for
Speaker 1: maneuvering through reality, but they're not reality. And how you
Speaker 1: connect with reality is through your heart. Science now is shown.
Speaker 1: It's a brain, our heart is our brain. Size is
Speaker 1: now shown what arivating medicine has known, you know down
Speaker 1: through thousands of years that it is the emperor. It
Speaker 1: is our main brain. And cancer has deepened that pathway
Speaker 1: back home to my heart. It's deep in the reactions
Speaker 1: so I can see them. But used to be a
Speaker 1: very faint, dear trail from my mind to my heart,
Speaker 1: but now it's an eight lane freeway, and sometimes it's
Speaker 1: shut down because the ice and snow of my struggling mind.
Speaker 1: You know, now I can't drive on this freeway, but
Speaker 1: slowly and surely that freeway becomes more and more available.
Speaker 1: When I talked to you six years ago, I remember
Speaker 1: one thing that you said, and you just referenced it
Speaker 1: in what you were saying a minute ago. And it
Speaker 1: had to do with saying that life is safe. And
Speaker 1: I struggled, slash struggle with that idea. And when someone
Speaker 1: say to me life is safe, I would point out
Speaker 1: exactly what's happening to you as an example example of
Speaker 1: life needs being safe. So talk to me about how
Speaker 1: those two things reconcile with each other. So there was
Speaker 1: a time when there was not a thought in our head,
Speaker 1: not a thought. We were very tiny and slowly and
Speaker 1: Shirley ram Das calls it somebody training. I love that
Speaker 1: we all took on this somebody training. And if you
Speaker 1: watch it, this condition mind that talks in our head
Speaker 1: all day long, you'll see it's dualistic in nature. It
Speaker 1: likes this, it doesn't like that. I think this is good,
Speaker 1: this is bad, this is right, this is wrong. And
Speaker 1: we can literally spend our lives going back and forth.
Speaker 1: Oh I get it, I lost it, I get Oh
Speaker 1: my god, it lost it. No now I've got to
Speaker 1: try to get it again. You know, Stephen Levine tells
Speaker 1: a story about a woman who was ninety three and
Speaker 1: she was under death man and she said, it can't
Speaker 1: end now because it hasn't started yet. When you begin
Speaker 1: to step back and begin to watch, and that's a
Speaker 1: huge part of everything I offered, my books, my courses,
Speaker 1: you know all this. When you be able to strengthen
Speaker 1: the muscle of your awareness so you can begin to
Speaker 1: watch this conversation that happens in your head all day long,
Speaker 1: you realize how dualistic it is. And something came to me.
Speaker 1: There was this great quote Lynn Andrews, who wrote all
Speaker 1: those books about you know, Agnes whistling Elk, the Manitoba
Speaker 1: Indian medicine woman she went to study with. They were
Speaker 1: very famous in the eighties. And I won't remember the
Speaker 1: quote exactly right, but she says something like this, everything
Speaker 1: begins with a circle of motion. Without positive and negative polls,
Speaker 1: there would be no movement, there would be no creation.
Speaker 1: Without your dark side, your beauty would not exist. And
Speaker 1: then I had the very wonderful grace to spend many,
Speaker 1: many years hanging out with Stephen Levine, who wrote many
Speaker 1: books on death and dying. He had the Hahneman Project
Speaker 1: for a number of years where you could call his
Speaker 1: house twenty four hours a day if you were dying,
Speaker 1: a love one was dying, you know, your child was
Speaker 1: kidnapped and raped, and he would be there for you.
Speaker 1: And so he has walked with tens of thousands of
Speaker 1: people through this dying process, and he was the one
Speaker 1: that really showed me the beauty of the dark, that
Speaker 1: the dark is fertile. In fact, my first book there's
Speaker 1: a whole chapter, chapter eight, called the Fertility of the Dark.
Speaker 1: And so we have been trained to try to fight
Speaker 1: the dark, and we don't know how to pay attention
Speaker 1: to it. We don't know it's for us. We don't
Speaker 1: know that it always comes bearing gifts. I wrote a parable.
Speaker 1: I seemed to like writing parables. I'm in the middle
Speaker 1: of writing a new one about a journey through the
Speaker 1: valley of forgetful us into the mountain of being. But
Speaker 1: years ago I wrote a parable about somebody hearing about
Speaker 1: these treasures. They were high up in the mountain and
Speaker 1: they had to go and do training and climbing classes
Speaker 1: and go to ri I to get all their back
Speaker 1: and they go up and they find it in the cave.
Speaker 1: They find there's diamonds, roomies, and emeralds, and they fill
Speaker 1: their back back with it and they bring it down,
Speaker 1: and for the next twenty years they just feel more
Speaker 1: and more empty, and then they hear a voice that
Speaker 1: says the treasure is still up in the cave. And
Speaker 1: then they eventually get up in the cave and they
Speaker 1: find there's nothing there except this old, rusty thing. And
Speaker 1: when she picks it up, she realizes it's a key,
Speaker 1: and it's the key to showing up for life, which
Speaker 1: is what we long for more than anything. We say
Speaker 1: we long for a maide or more money, or light
Speaker 1: bobs section or whatever, but what we long for is
Speaker 1: a pure connection with life exactly as it is. And
Speaker 1: our challenges will be our teachers if we learn how
Speaker 1: to listen. We don't have to like it. We don't
Speaker 1: have to like it. I'd like to say it's trustable,
Speaker 1: always likable. We don't have to like it. Makes me
Speaker 1: think of one of the four Bodhisata vows in Zen,
Speaker 1: which translated different ways, but you know, one way of
Speaker 1: saying it is darmigates are countless. You know, I vowed
Speaker 1: awake to them. All. Everything treated in the right way
Speaker 1: is a da everything. As you were talking that, you
Speaker 1: were talking about the contraction, and I realized as you
Speaker 1: were saying that, I was thinking, you know, there's the
Speaker 1: big contraction, which is you're dealing with one of the
Speaker 1: bigger things you can contract around. And then there's the
Speaker 1: thousands of tency little ones, this constant that makes me
Speaker 1: now as I'm saying that, I got the bodhy Sutta
Speaker 1: vows on my mind. But greed and hatred and delusion
Speaker 1: rise endlessly. You know. The greed is I want this.
Speaker 1: The aversion is I don't want that, I don't want this,
Speaker 1: And the delusion is how confused we are about this
Speaker 1: is my tran This is my interpretation, how confused we
Speaker 1: are about what that grasping and pushing away does to us.
Speaker 1: And that's what you're saying. It's that grasping and pushing
Speaker 1: away which cuts us off from life. And thus the
Speaker 1: further we are cut off from life, the more we
Speaker 1: feel like we need to grasp exactly, and if we
Speaker 1: begin to pay attention, the more it wakes us up
Speaker 1: that it is all for us. I wrote this when
Speaker 1: I first started awakening decades ago, and it's taken me
Speaker 1: all these decades to really live into it. And I
Speaker 1: calligorified it. And it's still behind my toilet. Very profound
Speaker 1: place to have it in my bathroom. No, and silently
Speaker 1: respect the perfection of everyone and everything in every situation,
Speaker 1: especially when it's not at all apparent. There is an intelligence.
Speaker 1: I was saying to a friend the other day that
Speaker 1: was struggling with life and is beginning to open to life,
Speaker 1: which is opening to trusting the flow, which includes the
Speaker 1: dark and the light. And he said, but it's not trustable,
Speaker 1: you know, And I said, well, I said, just try
Speaker 1: this on for size. Whatever that is the breathes that
Speaker 1: keeps the planet spinning as they do, that heals the
Speaker 1: cuts on your skin, took stardust and created the DNA molecule,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, it's just mind boggling when you
Speaker 1: recognize it. And then I said, you arose out of
Speaker 1: mystery and you were once one cell and it developed
Speaker 1: it as seventy trillion cells. I mean, what is it
Speaker 1: that knows how to do that? And they all work
Speaker 1: together without a thought from you. Silently respect, Our poor
Speaker 1: minds will never ever agree with that our minds are dualistic. No,
Speaker 1: that's not true, because all of this bad stuff is happening.
Speaker 1: But to begin to shift your relationship with the soap
Speaker 1: called bad, with the so called negative, you know, it's
Speaker 1: like Agnes whistling Elk said, without your dark side, your
Speaker 1: beauty would not exist. Honor all as a part of
Speaker 1: the great spirit. It does take a while to learn
Speaker 1: how to begin to notice this addiction, to struggle, to
Speaker 1: begin to step back, to begin to watch it, to
Speaker 1: begin to allow your heart to open. And then you
Speaker 1: come more here and it is so evident there is
Speaker 1: something far more intelligent than you in charge. And then
Speaker 1: you let go all the more right. And I think
Speaker 1: the only way for me to get to life is trustable,
Speaker 1: or to relating to that innate intelligence, is I have
Speaker 1: to be willing to let go of my beliefs about
Speaker 1: what's good and bad, what's right and wrong, what I want,
Speaker 1: what I don't want. From a very personal perspective, my
Speaker 1: small mind, life is not trustable, life is not safe life.
Speaker 1: To that perspective, it's in these moments of deeper connection, right,
Speaker 1: these moments of really not just intellectually knowing we're interdependent,
Speaker 1: but feeling it, seen, recognizing it that like I'm not
Speaker 1: separate from all this. Then all of a sudden that
Speaker 1: makes sense. It's like, oh, I get it, you know.
Speaker 1: And when we talked six years ago, I don't think
Speaker 1: I've had enough of that happening to me. Intellectually, I went, well, okay,
Speaker 1: I guess maybe what she's saying, but I hadn't had
Speaker 1: those experiences where I went, oh, as you say, I
Speaker 1: am life, yes, yes, yes, and everything is we Yes,
Speaker 1: we have gotten caught in in me. And you know,
Speaker 1: life is evolution. It's a constant evolving, just like once
Speaker 1: two feet talk, you know, and you have evolved into
Speaker 1: who you are today. And in every single shift in evolution,
Speaker 1: as the old way is dying. In the news being born,
Speaker 1: there's all he's been chaos. That's the chaos of birth,
Speaker 1: and we are living in that time. We are moving
Speaker 1: from a me oriented consciousness. And you can see it
Speaker 1: in the response to COVID. You know, the people that
Speaker 1: are me, me, me me, and the other people that
Speaker 1: are we we weak, We we I am here for
Speaker 1: the good of the whole. There's one thing I would
Speaker 1: shift as a time bit, and what you said it
Speaker 1: isn't so much that you let go of these old
Speaker 1: beliefs that come from the me kind of consciousness. It's that,
Speaker 1: under the light of your accepting attention, they let go.
Speaker 1: When I got that, it just made everything so much easier,
Speaker 1: because there's nothing really I have to do except follow
Speaker 1: this call to pay attention, follow this call to ground.
Speaker 1: Every morning, at the end of every single meditation, I
Speaker 1: bow and say, let me open to whatever you bring
Speaker 1: me today. Let me listen. When we try to fix it,
Speaker 1: even to get it to let go, it brings up
Speaker 1: a resistance in that. That's how it's built, you know,
Speaker 1: just like if you touch us, see an enemy, you
Speaker 1: know it goes, you know. But the heart, it is
Speaker 1: the heart that when you meet whatever darkness you are, experience,
Speaker 1: whatever struggle, even those death by a million cuts, those
Speaker 1: tiny struggles, all day long, they are here to wake
Speaker 1: us up and over and over again we learn how
Speaker 1: to soften our belly, allow a deeper breath, open our hearts,
Speaker 1: and show up. There's a line that you have I
Speaker 1: think sums up a lot of your work. I guess
Speaker 1: it's two lines and two handy sentences. You say, lasting
Speaker 1: healing comes from being curious rather than controlling, from mercy,
Speaker 1: rather than manipulation, from responding rather than reacting. It is
Speaker 1: about opening what has been closed, reclaiming what has been hidden,
Speaker 1: and remembering what has been forgotten. God whoever wrote that
Speaker 1: that was really good. And it's a it's a journey.
Speaker 1: It is a journey. The mind is used to quick fixes,
Speaker 1: and when you really kind of settle into the journey
Speaker 1: and know you're right where you need to be on
Speaker 1: the journey. Byron Katie, you know well known teacher has
Speaker 1: a quote, life is simple. It doesn't happen to you,
Speaker 1: It happens for you. And everything happens in the right
Speaker 1: time and in the right way, neither too soon nor
Speaker 1: too late. You don't have to like this, but it's
Speaker 1: easier if you do. Now I disagree with that last one,
Speaker 1: because I do not have to like that. I have cancer.
Speaker 1: So I say, it's easier if you trust it. You
Speaker 1: don't have to trust it, but it's easier if you do.
Speaker 1: But again, it's not our minds that can trust. Our
Speaker 1: job is to get to know it, to bring it awareness,
Speaker 1: to bring it mercy, and slowly and surely, this amazing,
Speaker 1: amazing brain called our heart the armoring begins to fall
Speaker 1: around it because you're not ashamed or afraid of anything
Speaker 1: in that struggling mind anymore. And then the heart begins
Speaker 1: to speak, and you realize the heart is connected to everything,
Speaker 1: and it includes rather than excludes. That's where the doorway
Speaker 1: to freedom lies, as far as I can see. So
Speaker 1: you've got a new course called falling in love with you?
Speaker 1: Do I have that right? Yes? Right? You say that
Speaker 1: the person we most deeply long to receive love from
Speaker 1: is ourselves. Sale more about that, Well, there's that great
Speaker 1: quote from Buddha, and again I won't maybe get all
Speaker 1: the words right. You can search the world over and
Speaker 1: you will find no being more deserving of love than you.
Speaker 1: So this whole process, I mean, I would say, you know,
Speaker 1: I took on a hell of a lot of trauma
Speaker 1: when I was young, and I went as far away
Speaker 1: as you could and still survive. In my twenties, I
Speaker 1: tried to kill myself three times. I was not even
Speaker 1: worthy of existing, you know, And then life began to
Speaker 1: bring it back. And it is a journey from our
Speaker 1: minds to our hearts. Who had have said the longest
Speaker 1: eighteen inches in the world is from our minds to
Speaker 1: our hearts, and so slowly and the armoring of my
Speaker 1: heart began to fall away. And it wasn't, you know,
Speaker 1: like it would go he you know, you know, the
Speaker 1: mind would take oh, you know, and then the heart
Speaker 1: would is softened again and surely learned how to trust
Speaker 1: the heart. So a couple of years ago I gathered
Speaker 1: quotes from my own work and from other people all
Speaker 1: of the world, and I created a little book and
Speaker 1: it's just, oh, it's such a nifty little book. And
Speaker 1: it's a Neil Donald Walsh does the introduction, and it's
Speaker 1: just a series of quotes that lead you from You
Speaker 1: start with this premise that falling in love with you
Speaker 1: is the most essential thing you can do. If you
Speaker 1: want to heal the planet, if you want to heal
Speaker 1: your family, if you want to heal yourself, fall in
Speaker 1: love with you, and then it has quotes that shows
Speaker 1: how we got our hearts so closed, and then it
Speaker 1: shows quotes about what is the journey back. And people
Speaker 1: were so touched by that. I spent the last year
Speaker 1: creating a course and so we're just finishing it. We'll
Speaker 1: be doing it in the fall again, where it's an
Speaker 1: eight week course and you get something every so that
Speaker 1: little book is fleshed out and you really see that
Speaker 1: your home is your heart, and you really see that
Speaker 1: there's absolutely nothing inside of you to be ashamed of,
Speaker 1: our afraid of. You've always been doing the best that
Speaker 1: you knew how with the condition you have been given,
Speaker 1: And slowly and surely you moved beyond those ideas of
Speaker 1: falling in love with you is selfish, or falling in
Speaker 1: love will make you a namby Pamby. You know, falling
Speaker 1: in love with you, being kind to you is giving
Speaker 1: yourself permission to, you know, be unskillful in the world.
Speaker 1: None of those are true, and slowly and surely we
Speaker 1: make it through all of those and then cultivate how
Speaker 1: to be curious, how to do what we're talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: about how to step back and really see the mind
Speaker 1: for what it is, and how to help open your heart.
Speaker 1: And then the last week, every week I say, well,
Speaker 1: this is my favorite week. But it's about that you
Speaker 1: are being given the gift of opening your heart again
Speaker 1: for the world. It's not just for your own healing
Speaker 1: for the world. It's for the world. And they talk
Speaker 1: about how that makes such a difference because when you
Speaker 1: move from your heart mind rather than your head mind.
Speaker 1: You interchange with the world in a much different way.
Speaker 1: And you know the importance of being present for the
Speaker 1: grocery store clerk who's been snyed, you know, and you
Speaker 1: have met that enough inside of you. They said, oh,
Speaker 1: just like me, and your heart opens to them and
Speaker 1: she can't hold on to that. She can't when she
Speaker 1: is you. You just have that presence of meeting her
Speaker 1: exactly the way she is. That is what's going to
Speaker 1: heal our world, one interchange at a time, and it
Speaker 1: starts with falling in love with you. I mean, everybody says, oh,
Speaker 1: you'll be kind, be kind, and we leave ourselves out
Speaker 1: of the equation. And yet that's where true kindness comes from,
Speaker 1: is with ourselves. So let's assume that people buy into
Speaker 1: that idea. And I would suspect we've talked about self
Speaker 1: compassion on this show often enough that listeners of this show,
Speaker 1: if they've listened to it for a while, are bought
Speaker 1: into this idea. And let's assume that we've done a
Speaker 1: little bit of work and we kind of know why
Speaker 1: our hearts are closed, right, We know a little bit
Speaker 1: about what we went through and we were younger, and
Speaker 1: yet it still feels hard to do. What are a
Speaker 1: couple of the pathways back to our own heart, to
Speaker 1: falling in love with ourselves, to realize that everybody in
Speaker 1: your life is gone and drag, especially the people that
Speaker 1: drive you crazy. They are specifically there to highlight the
Speaker 1: parts of you that are closed to you. And so
Speaker 1: you begin to rather than immediately reacting to somebody you know,
Speaker 1: maybe it's your mother in law, maybe it's your brother,
Speaker 1: maybe it's your sixteen year old son, rather than getting
Speaker 1: caught in reaction, you catch your reaction and you maybe
Speaker 1: need to leave the room for a moment or something
Speaker 1: like that, but you learn more how to respond. So
Speaker 1: that's what comes to mind first. But really it is
Speaker 1: as simple as giving yourself the gift of a few
Speaker 1: minutes every day that you breathe in and out through
Speaker 1: your heart. This is an energy center in the middle
Speaker 1: of our chest, and when you bring your attention there
Speaker 1: and you breathe in and out through your heart, it's
Speaker 1: literally like there's a small little glowing ball in the
Speaker 1: center of your chest, and as you breathe in and out,
Speaker 1: it begins to grow, it begins to amplify and you
Speaker 1: begin to be able to feel when your heart is open.
Speaker 1: There is a difference in energy, especially in your chest.
Speaker 1: It goes all over your body, but you can notice
Speaker 1: the most in your chest. So you begin to be
Speaker 1: compelled to I mean, every week in the course, there
Speaker 1: are you know, seven or eight invitations to bring the
Speaker 1: week's lesson into your life, and I say to people,
Speaker 1: choose at least one. And one of those core ones
Speaker 1: are breath thing in and out through your heart or
Speaker 1: placing your hand over your heart. You know, you're watching
Speaker 1: TV and your favorite character gets hurt, you know, and
Speaker 1: you can just feel everything inside of you contracting, and
Speaker 1: then you just bring your hand over your heart and
Speaker 1: you breathe in and out for your heart. And then
Speaker 1: maybe you come up with a little mantra, the mantra
Speaker 1: that your mind most needs, like everything is okay, we're okay,
Speaker 1: it's safe to be here. Something along that line. You
Speaker 1: say that our core addiction is to struggle, and that
Speaker 1: all of the other addictions are an attempt to numb
Speaker 1: out from the heartache and stress that come hand in
Speaker 1: hand with struggle. So you're basically saying, if we've got
Speaker 1: other addictions, or you've got a book called Compulsions. We've
Speaker 1: got these compulsions. They are an attempt to deal with
Speaker 1: the strain and the exhaustion and heartache of our core addiction,
Speaker 1: which is that we're trying to struggle. Yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's it's full of fear, doubt, confusion, shame, rage, helplessness, despair.
Speaker 1: But those are all the energy constructs of the separate self.
Speaker 1: And this is why when I self published my book
Speaker 1: The Gift of Our Compulsions, its title was healing and
Speaker 1: being healed by our compulsions. I mean, where have you
Speaker 1: ever heard that? You know? But yet in the heartache
Speaker 1: that I took on that, uh, I learned how to
Speaker 1: over eat, you know. And then I went away to
Speaker 1: college and I learned how to drink, and then I
Speaker 1: learned how to take street drugs, and all of that
Speaker 1: was an attempt to manage this, you know. For me,
Speaker 1: the kind of fear I experienced was dread, that horrible
Speaker 1: feeling of something really bad is going to happen. It's
Speaker 1: going to happen because I did something wrong. And when
Speaker 1: all that didn't work, I tried to kill myself three times.
Speaker 1: It kept somewhat of a lid on the pain that
Speaker 1: we all carry. All of us carry this pain of
Speaker 1: being separate from life and the pain that has come
Speaker 1: from trying to do life rather than be life. But
Speaker 1: that was not my destiny to stay caught in that world.
Speaker 1: Life began to show me step by step out of it.
Speaker 1: And that's when the compulsions fell away, Because I mean
Speaker 1: when I was trying to control the eater, which was
Speaker 1: my main compulsion. I once went a month without food
Speaker 1: and I was so hey, I got this right. What
Speaker 1: you try to control controls do And that next year
Speaker 1: I gained ninety seven pounds in a year because I
Speaker 1: was trying to contain it. And there is a real
Speaker 1: dramatic shift in working with compulsions when you realize that
Speaker 1: they are a finely crafted survival system that is created
Speaker 1: inside of you in order to manage all of your pain.
Speaker 1: And now, if you listen, they will become your guide
Speaker 1: out of that world of struggle. Because when you're compulsive,
Speaker 1: that's when the pain that is the deepest is close
Speaker 1: to the surface and it so needs your attention. Do
Speaker 1: we start right there? No, you need to strengthen the
Speaker 1: muscle of your attention to be able to stand with
Speaker 1: what you have run away from your whole life. And
Speaker 1: that's been my journey, really slowly and surely learning how
Speaker 1: to strengthen the muscle my attention. You know, I get
Speaker 1: caught and then I ask, oh, okay, what's going on
Speaker 1: here right now? You know? And then as my mind
Speaker 1: would quiet, my heart would open, and slowly and surely
Speaker 1: the to overeat went away. It's come back a little
Speaker 1: now that I'm dealing with cancer. I'm also a COVID
Speaker 1: long hauler from the vaccine, and so I'm dealing with
Speaker 1: a lot right now. And I have these little moments
Speaker 1: where I always keep a chocolate bar in my house,
Speaker 1: and you know, for decades, you know, I have a
Speaker 1: piece or two, and I have these moments where I
Speaker 1: want to inhale the whole bar and I start, but
Speaker 1: then I become aware. And most of the time now
Speaker 1: not in the beginning, but most of the time now
Speaker 1: that that doesn't last very long. It's not like I
Speaker 1: try to stop it. It just starts becoming uninteresting. The
Speaker 1: more interested I become in, oh, what is the compulsion
Speaker 1: trying to take care of? And then if I can,
Speaker 1: if I have time, I can go sit with it
Speaker 1: and meet what the compulsion is trying to take care of.
Speaker 1: And years ago, before eckart Toley was well known at all,
Speaker 1: I interviewed him and there's this wonderful quote that came
Speaker 1: out of the interview, and I won't it's a long quote.
Speaker 1: I won't remember at all, but the beginning of it
Speaker 1: is to welcome what is is the ultimate spiritual practice.
Speaker 1: If you learn this, you will not need to read
Speaker 1: any more books or go to any other teachers. And
Speaker 1: that's taken a long time to learn that. I get it,
Speaker 1: and then I go into the resistance. But it's like
Speaker 1: if you've ever watched a child being born, you know,
Speaker 1: the head comes and then they head goes back into
Speaker 1: the head cause out they head goes back in. And
Speaker 1: it just reminds me of Roumi's poem The Guesthouse. And
Speaker 1: Roomy is probably most well known poet in the world,
Speaker 1: and the Guest House this is his most well poem. Well,
Speaker 1: people only know the first half of it, and the
Speaker 1: second half of it is Roomy at his most obtuse,
Speaker 1: except for one line, learn the alchemy that true human beings. No,
Speaker 1: as soon as you accept the difficulties, you've been given
Speaker 1: a door. No. The door opens, and I said a
Speaker 1: door for many years until I went back and read it,
Speaker 1: the door, the door out of struggle. Our challenges are
Speaker 1: tailor made for us, and more and more of us
Speaker 1: are learning how to be conscious human beings by learning
Speaker 1: how to not fight the process and instead show up
Speaker 1: for it. And we need to gather together. That's why
Speaker 1: I have groups. We need to support one another because
Speaker 1: the collective mind, you can see it on the evening news,
Speaker 1: it's going through its death throws of this dualistic mind
Speaker 1: that I'm better than you because the color of my skin,
Speaker 1: or my religion or my sexual preference, or I'm going
Speaker 1: to stop you from voting because I want to have
Speaker 1: all the power of Oh my god, that's so crazy
Speaker 1: if you look at it from the mind. But if
Speaker 1: you look at it from the heart, you see that
Speaker 1: we're being woken up out of the world of struggle
Speaker 1: and back into an intimate, alive, trust filled connection with life.
Speaker 1: Egart has another quote, Life will give you the exact
Speaker 1: set of experiences you need in order to become a
Speaker 1: conscious human being. How do we know they're the right
Speaker 1: set because you're having them. I think that's just brilliant.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Egard Toty. I love that you referenced that
Speaker 1: that desire to overeat is coming back as you struggle,
Speaker 1: because again, it's sort of humanizes this process that isn't human.
Speaker 1: The other thing that I was struck by going back
Speaker 1: through some of your work is I looked at the
Speaker 1: gift of our compulsions. In particular, was it wasn't like
Speaker 1: you went, oh, I am overeating because of the pain
Speaker 1: that I had as a child, and if I just
Speaker 1: become curious about what this is asking for me, I
Speaker 1: won't ever over eat again. Exactly. It was not like that, right.
Speaker 1: It was a long process of becoming incrementally more conscious,
Speaker 1: and as you became more conscious and you healed more
Speaker 1: and more, it began to fall away. And I think
Speaker 1: that's a really important piece of this whole puzzle is,
Speaker 1: particularly in the quick fixed world we live in, there's
Speaker 1: a real tendency to be like, well, I was feeling
Speaker 1: like over eating last night, and I remembered what Mary said,
Speaker 1: and I thought about, why is it that I want
Speaker 1: to overeat? And I realized I am feeling kind of sad,
Speaker 1: And now, okay, I recognize I'm feeling sad, and then
Speaker 1: I go eat, it must not work right exactly. It's
Speaker 1: a very incremental process of awareness, growing and growing and
Speaker 1: growing and growing and growing, and a heart opening. When
Speaker 1: I self published The Gifts of Our Compulsions, I put
Speaker 1: the tortoise in the hair in three times the story,
Speaker 1: you know, and I think they took it out except
Speaker 1: for once. Hopefully they left it in. I can't remember.
Speaker 1: But it's the tortoise that plods along. It's the hair
Speaker 1: that runs around that wants to fix anything. One of
Speaker 1: our core addictions is to fixing, and it comes from
Speaker 1: the seed thought that I am not okay as I am,
Speaker 1: and that just sucks us into the world of struggle yea,
Speaker 1: And the tortoise just plods along and it's okay, that's okay,
Speaker 1: I'm right where I need to be. I love that
Speaker 1: three times. There's something you talk about in that book
Speaker 1: that I love to unpack a little bit. And you said,
Speaker 1: you're describing working with feelings, and you say, what I
Speaker 1: was doing with these feelings was probably different than anything
Speaker 1: I had tried before. I wasn't so much feeling these
Speaker 1: feelings as I was meeting them. Talk to me about
Speaker 1: the difference between those two things. For most people feeling
Speaker 1: is being identified with them. So let's say a wave
Speaker 1: of anger comes, you know, and you say, I am angry,
Speaker 1: and now I must do something about this. I get
Speaker 1: into it, I stuff it whatever. That's an endless game.
Speaker 1: Feelings will keep on coming and going the rest of
Speaker 1: our lives. But meeting is the ability to relate to
Speaker 1: them rather than from them. The easiest way to do
Speaker 1: that at the beginning is in your body. Every single
Speaker 1: feeling you've ever had has a commensurate energy pattern in
Speaker 1: your body. And the energy pattern of grief is different,
Speaker 1: and the energy pattern of anger, which is different than
Speaker 1: the energy pattern of shame. And it is so magical
Speaker 1: when you begin to strengthen the muscle of your attention
Speaker 1: of that, you can begin to wake up. You're ready
Speaker 1: to stomp into work and tell your coworker off, and
Speaker 1: you know, and and give your resignation and you know,
Speaker 1: and so on and so forth, and then all of
Speaker 1: a sudden you can, oh, wait, okay, who's here, And
Speaker 1: you could eventually get to the place where you actually
Speaker 1: can dialogue and have a healing conversation with let's say
Speaker 1: it's anger. But at the beginning, this is oceanic for
Speaker 1: most people, fear can come, Oh my god, in tsunami waves,
Speaker 1: anger can come, rage can come, despair can come. But
Speaker 1: when you find the patterns in your body and you
Speaker 1: just bring your attention and you feel that rage is
Speaker 1: this hot ball of fire in your stomach area, and
Speaker 1: for a moment you actually bring your attention there, the
Speaker 1: attention heals. And I'll get back to that in a moment,
Speaker 1: but that's a really important point to get attention heels.
Speaker 1: And just like if you're having a bad day and
Speaker 1: you go to a friend and that friend after oh
Speaker 1: my god, I've heard this so many times, you know
Speaker 1: we'll get off of it or all poor you. But
Speaker 1: if that friend just listens to you and you can
Speaker 1: feel the intensity of their listening, that energy won't be
Speaker 1: able to hold on inside of you. You'll express it
Speaker 1: and it will move through. We can learn how to
Speaker 1: do that with ourselves. And so you bring it to
Speaker 1: that hot ball of fire, and at the beginning you
Speaker 1: just notice how big it is, or does it move
Speaker 1: around or is it on the surface, or that's bringing
Speaker 1: your attention and your immediate experience together. We're talking about feelings,
Speaker 1: but really it's energy trapped and that attention. If you
Speaker 1: can really learn how to pay attention without trying to
Speaker 1: make something happen, and that takes a while to learn,
Speaker 1: then that energy will let go and then you may
Speaker 1: walk into work and you may still need to say something,
Speaker 1: but it comes from such a different place. It doesn't
Speaker 1: come from reaction. It comes from response. Well, my experience is,
Speaker 1: and having had the kind of childhood I did, there
Speaker 1: was all sorts of stuff stuffed inside of me, and
Speaker 1: I used to think of them as monsters. I just
Speaker 1: you know, ninety seven pounds a year, that's a lot
Speaker 1: of weight gain. But I began to realize they're just
Speaker 1: children in monster costumes. It's just frozen energy that wants
Speaker 1: to be set free. And as I learned how to
Speaker 1: bring my attention to it, and slowly I don't need
Speaker 1: to ask how big it is or whatever. I'm really
Speaker 1: there with it, and slowly and surely you can feel
Speaker 1: Anger's world and it gets acknowledge. I see you, I
Speaker 1: understand while you're feeling this way, and that energy can't
Speaker 1: hold on, it just moves right on through you. That's
Speaker 1: the alchemy of attention attention heels. I like that. As
Speaker 1: we talk about compulsions, you talk about an idea of
Speaker 1: managing our compulsions, which is similar to controlling right right.
Speaker 1: And yet, particularly if we're dealing with destructive addictions, we
Speaker 1: don't want to just be like, well, just whatever happens happens.
Speaker 1: So you talk about moving from management to engagement. Can
Speaker 1: you share a little bit about what that means. Okay,
Speaker 1: this management that hand my left hand. My right hand
Speaker 1: is engagement. Okay, this is what it was like when
Speaker 1: we were young. Engagement hand is way up in the air.
Speaker 1: You can't even see the management hand. Right. Happen When
Speaker 1: we grew up, slowly and surely, the engagement hand comes down.
Speaker 1: Were more start thinking our way through our lives, and
Speaker 1: the management hand comes up. And that's where most people
Speaker 1: live from trying to manage their experience, trying to control
Speaker 1: their experience, trying to get to what they want and
Speaker 1: get rid of what they don't want, and that just
Speaker 1: brings suffering and what all the while we're longing for engagement,
Speaker 1: we're longing to come back to life again. This work
Speaker 1: isn't about knocking management. It isn't trying to manage management.
Speaker 1: It's just adding engagement. And you will find that management
Speaker 1: slowly comes back down again, never goes away, because as
Speaker 1: adults we need management. But it's engagement that heals, whether
Speaker 1: it's engaging in this moment and your heart just blooms
Speaker 1: with the joy of being alive, or whether it's engagement
Speaker 1: with your compulsions. The U s Surgeon General nineties seven
Speaker 1: per cent of every pound that is lost in the
Speaker 1: US is gained back plus some within a year and
Speaker 1: a half n of it. And that is because what
Speaker 1: we try to manage manages us. What we try to
Speaker 1: control controls us. So you know, oftentimes I'll work with
Speaker 1: somebody that they will be in the twelve step programs,
Speaker 1: or there will be in narconon, or they'll be you know,
Speaker 1: an o A or a A, and I absolutely honor that,
Speaker 1: but more and more that becomes less supportive of what
Speaker 1: the true healing you want. As you begin to learn engagement,
Speaker 1: you know, and you still may go back there and
Speaker 1: because the community so wonderful, but you're no longer seeing
Speaker 1: yourself as wrong and need to be fixed because you
Speaker 1: are an addict of whatever you are addicted to. I
Speaker 1: don't want to overly manage this interview, but accasionally, when
Speaker 1: you're hitting the table that's coming through very loud in
Speaker 1: the microphone. Okay, sorry, dog on it. You're getting excited.
Speaker 1: I like it all right. Yeah, you say that letting
Speaker 1: go of controlling compulsions is not the same as giving
Speaker 1: yourself permission to be compulsive exactly. You know, I got sober,
Speaker 1: you know, the first time in Columbus, Ohio, and in
Speaker 1: a twelve step program, and there was not a lot
Speaker 1: of recognition that my addiction was an attempt to cover
Speaker 1: over these certain things. But I think that the addiction
Speaker 1: treatment world is becoming more inclusive, more aware, more awake,
Speaker 1: which is a good thing. It is your your friend
Speaker 1: of mine has a whole new system mindfulness, alternatives about
Speaker 1: how to bring what we're talking about into any works
Speaker 1: with addicts, and he's just getting really wonderful results because,
Speaker 1: as we said earlier, what you resist persists, and yet
Speaker 1: what you engage with it loses its power over you.
Speaker 1: And that's come the world of struggle, this addiction to
Speaker 1: struggle that we have been trained in, that humanity has
Speaker 1: been trained in for eons, and now we're learning a
Speaker 1: new way. And in fairness to twelve step programs, they
Speaker 1: actually start from the very beginning with admitting powerlessness and
Speaker 1: surrendering the material itself is actually right in line with this,
Speaker 1: it's just the way some of the people engage with it.
Speaker 1: You talk a lot about curiosity being sort of a superpower.
Speaker 1: Talk to me about why curiosity is so important to
Speaker 1: all of this work. The kind of curiosity I'm talking
Speaker 1: about is not what most people think of its curiosity.
Speaker 1: I wonder what that is, you know, it's it's curiosity
Speaker 1: in the head, you know, and that that has its place.
Speaker 1: But this is the kind of curiosity where your attention
Speaker 1: is here with your immediate experience, where you begin to
Speaker 1: become fascinated with what is, rather than being caught or
Speaker 1: reacting or trying to get away from what is. And
Speaker 1: I think, I mean, you look at children, Oh my god.
Speaker 1: You know, they're a bundle of curiosity. And we can
Speaker 1: know that absolute joy of being alive again, we can
Speaker 1: feel at one with that. That's when our curiosity has
Speaker 1: been engaged, when we learn use it to see what
Speaker 1: has caused us to shut down, so that it can
Speaker 1: let go and we can open again. And no, it
Speaker 1: is okay to be here, that this river of life
Speaker 1: is for you. And then it all becomes fascinating a
Speaker 1: friend of mine in the conversation it is, okay, I
Speaker 1: gotta go into the daily grind. And I said, wow,
Speaker 1: that's just such a hard way to live. I said,
Speaker 1: what about unfolding into the great adventure of your day,
Speaker 1: knowing that life will bring you exactly what you need.
Speaker 1: And he said, you just changed my day. And then
Speaker 1: he started laughing and he said, I think you changed
Speaker 1: my life. And that's curiosity, is that fascination with this
Speaker 1: highly intelligent, very benevolent although if you don't trust artists
Speaker 1: they won't see it that way. Process that is for
Speaker 1: us working with our thoughts and our emotions. Internally, it's
Speaker 1: a very slippery place in there. Things are hard to
Speaker 1: kind of get ahold of, and you try and be
Speaker 1: aware and you get called all over. And so I
Speaker 1: find it's often really helpful to have some fairly concrete
Speaker 1: approaches to this. And to that end, you have some
Speaker 1: questions that I think are really helpful frame works for
Speaker 1: doing some of this. And so I thought maybe we'd
Speaker 1: start and we could talk through the four check in questions, right,
Speaker 1: and let's say this first. You know, it is so
Speaker 1: true they say we have sixty thoughts a day, good God,
Speaker 1: and I add that the repeats from the day before,
Speaker 1: and we just tumble from one thought to another to another,
Speaker 1: and we're happy when it's kind of calm, and we're
Speaker 1: really upset. And so it can be very helpful to
Speaker 1: give yourself five minutes a day, five minutes a day,
Speaker 1: and if five minutes is too much, you give yourself
Speaker 1: two minutes a day where you choose to focus in life.
Speaker 1: It could be your breath, could be the sensations in
Speaker 1: your body, it could be the music of life, the
Speaker 1: sounds around you. I had to start with the sounds
Speaker 1: because too intimate. I had moved so far away from
Speaker 1: my body and from being present for myself. And the
Speaker 1: first time I really started coming back to life was
Speaker 1: it was like, oh wow, there's light, all these sounds.
Speaker 1: There's the bird, there's the car, there's the dog, there's
Speaker 1: the eater turning on. And the key to that is
Speaker 1: knowing that most of the time in those five minutes,
Speaker 1: you're going to be gone. Your attention is going to
Speaker 1: be up in the stream of thought, because that's what
Speaker 1: we've been conditioned into. That's where the collective mind of
Speaker 1: humanity is right now. But to choose a focus and
Speaker 1: then bring your attention back to that focus. If even
Speaker 1: if you only do that once in that whole time,
Speaker 1: that's time really well spent because you have strengthened the
Speaker 1: muscle of your tension, and more and more you will
Speaker 1: see the difference between having your attention in your stream
Speaker 1: of thought and having your attention here in life as
Speaker 1: you move throughout your day. It can be very helpful.
Speaker 1: The four questions is one of the ways that I've
Speaker 1: framed it my first book is there's two statements. What
Speaker 1: is right now? And this to my new statement, I'm
Speaker 1: working with with the cancer without changing anything. Notice what
Speaker 1: is here? And so the four questions you're talking about
Speaker 1: is in the Gift of our compulsions. Compulsions and the
Speaker 1: first one in this moment, what am I experiencing? I mean,
Speaker 1: that is the same thing I'm trying to say with
Speaker 1: what is in this too? And I'm trying to remember
Speaker 1: how did I say it? Um, what's in the way?
Speaker 1: But I did a whole radio show on how this
Speaker 1: theme has been all my book showed hip this way,
Speaker 1: the first one I showed him this way. You know,
Speaker 1: the four questions in the Gift of Our compulsions and
Speaker 1: just that question, in this moment, what am I experiencing?
Speaker 1: But I found that some people got a little okay,
Speaker 1: well what am I experiencing? You know? So that's why
Speaker 1: I changed it to in this moment, notice what is here?
Speaker 1: And that became more um pointed. You can notice that
Speaker 1: you have heartburn, you can notice the rising and falling
Speaker 1: of your breath, you can notice the air back aches.
Speaker 1: You know, it's just noticing something that is real, something
Speaker 1: in the living moment. Now, the more you move into
Speaker 1: this kind of way of working with life, you're gonna
Speaker 1: come across the challenges when everything inside of you wants
Speaker 1: to go away. And so the second question for this moment,
Speaker 1: can I allow this to be here? And that if
Speaker 1: you really feel the heart of that that unhooks you
Speaker 1: from this becoming doing mine? Oh okay, it's the quote
Speaker 1: from Byron Katie we talked about earlier, Eckhart totally, you
Speaker 1: know that life is for us for this moment, I
Speaker 1: can allow this to be here. If I was writing
Speaker 1: the four questions, I would actually add another one. You know,
Speaker 1: for this moment, can I give it my full attention?
Speaker 1: You know that's the key. Then that automatically brings you
Speaker 1: the third question for this moment, can I bring this compassion?
Speaker 1: I can't remember exactly how I phrased it, but open
Speaker 1: your heart to it. You begin to see how much
Speaker 1: you've been trained to struggle. You begin to see how
Speaker 1: how much fear there is inside of you, how much
Speaker 1: of a feeling of not being enough. I've worked with
Speaker 1: people for thirty seven years. Everybody has it. Stephen Levine
Speaker 1: has this wonderful quote. Let's see if I can remember.
Speaker 1: When you finally see how much fear there is inside
Speaker 1: of you, you will turn to it like a mother
Speaker 1: turns toward a frightened child. And that's that third question.
Speaker 1: Your heart begins to open to it. For a Oh,
Speaker 1: You'll just ask that question and nothing will happen, But
Speaker 1: just keep on asking that question. And then the last
Speaker 1: one is, in this moment, what do I truly need?
Speaker 1: And that's listening. It's not asking our head. You're really listening.
Speaker 1: Maybe we need to go laid down, Maybe we need to,
Speaker 1: you know, talk to a friend you, maybe we need
Speaker 1: to go take a bath, and maybe we just need
Speaker 1: to sit there and breathe. You begin to listen from
Speaker 1: the inside out so that you move with life from
Speaker 1: the inside out rather than from the top. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: love those four questions because I think they give us
Speaker 1: a way of working through interior experience, which is, as
Speaker 1: I said, the word I use as slippery or it's confusing,
Speaker 1: or it's very easy to get busy. Yeah, it's very
Speaker 1: easy to get lost in. And I think having some
Speaker 1: structured approaches can be really helpful, and you'll find the
Speaker 1: five minutes will automatically start going longer. You know, I
Speaker 1: meditate every day and I have no timing, but it
Speaker 1: just is, you know, it's probably three five minutes. It's
Speaker 1: just you know, it has a beginning, middle, and end,
Speaker 1: and no one's done, you know, because it's it's the
Speaker 1: art of listening. That's what meditation is. It's not the
Speaker 1: art of trying to get to a better place. It's
Speaker 1: the art of listening to what is right now, and
Speaker 1: slowly and surely that will come to the forefront, and
Speaker 1: struggle will go to the background, and then with cancer
Speaker 1: it will come to the forefront again. But then you learn,
Speaker 1: you learn from it. And I just have learned so
Speaker 1: deeply to bow to the living process. I've given to
Speaker 1: not fight with it, even though I have my moments,
Speaker 1: but they don't last very long like you. Sound for
Speaker 1: me was the door opener for meditation. I've been meditating
Speaker 1: on again, off again for a long time. And I
Speaker 1: started meditating in a day and age when there was
Speaker 1: not an internet, and all you had were booked, and
Speaker 1: there weren't teachers that you could easily get. I mean,
Speaker 1: at least you know. I was living in Ohio and
Speaker 1: every book seemed to talk about breath practice. So that's
Speaker 1: what I tried to do, but it just never clicked.
Speaker 1: And then I started doing sound, and I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: now I see why people say this is enjoyable. You know,
Speaker 1: Now I get why this is actually not torture. Yes,
Speaker 1: life is saying, hey, you in there, I'm here, Come
Speaker 1: be with me. I'm a dog barking, I'm the wind
Speaker 1: in the trees. You know. It helps me, especially as
Speaker 1: I'm maneuver throughout the day. If I'm very tired and
Speaker 1: I'm waiting and going to lots of doctor's appointment and
Speaker 1: I'm waiting in the waiting room, I just closed my
Speaker 1: eyes and just listen to the sounds, and you know,
Speaker 1: my heart opens, you know, just you know, all these
Speaker 1: other people that are, you know, seeing the doctors for
Speaker 1: challenges and the nurses that are overwhelmed, and then I
Speaker 1: just feel so connected. And then I'm just so grateful
Speaker 1: if the doctor's really eight, because I get all this
Speaker 1: time to just really sink into being well. Mary, we
Speaker 1: are out of time for the main interview. We're going
Speaker 1: to continue in the post show conversation for a couple
Speaker 1: of minutes, and you and I are going to talk
Speaker 1: about the five great teachers you talk about in What's
Speaker 1: in the Way is the Way? Listeners, if you'd like
Speaker 1: access to post show conversations, add free episodes, and all
Speaker 1: kinds of other things, you can become part of our
Speaker 1: community by going to one you feed, dot net, slash join. Mary.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. I hope it's not six years
Speaker 1: till we do this again me because this has been
Speaker 1: just enjoyable to dance with you and to bring this
Speaker 1: message to the world, because I think humanity we're really
Speaker 1: collectively waking up, just like I am with the cancer
Speaker 1: and waking up even more. We are collectively waking up
Speaker 1: with all the challenges, and I feel great possibility or
Speaker 1: humanity now, So thank you for letting me share this.
Speaker 1: Thank you it's a beautiful and hopeful message. If what
Speaker 1: you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making
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