WEBVTT

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If somebody's like really contracted and their nervous system's really dysregulated,

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they were to open fully to redemptive love completely.

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It might actually be too overwhelming. Sometimes it has to be taken in bit by bit.

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Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer.

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Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with,

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or conversations rather, with spiritually awakening people.

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And we've done over 700 of them now. So if this is new to you

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and you'd like to check out previous ones, you know, you can

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just poke around on the YouTube channel itself. But if you go to batgap.com

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you'll find everything organized in various ways that are much easier to

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search then on batgap.com. Please consider subscribing to the channel. It helps in

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terms of YouTube's algorithm and all that to bring the show to more people. This

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whole thing is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and

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financially, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the website and there are

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also some volunteer opportunities, so you can get in touch with us about that. They

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They mainly involve proofreading transcripts, but there's some other things too.

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We have a volunteers page where you'll see some of the people who are volunteering and

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what they're doing.

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So my guest today is Savita Veera.

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Is that the way to pronounce it?

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Veera.

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Vira.

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Savita Veera, sorry.

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She is in Western Australia, so it's like 8 in the morning for her, 7 in the evening

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for me.

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She is a spiritual teacher, a mentor, an embodiment facilitator, and a healer.

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be getting into all this in detail, but she experienced a profound shift in consciousness

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after great tragedy, followed by years of further spiritual openings, mystical experiences,

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and deep healing.

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And she meets people as a teacher with generosity, humor, and grounded practicality, providing

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a safe space for them to open to their own divine light and inner wisdom.

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Okay, so you didn't write a book, so I didn't read a book like I often do, but I listened

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to everything you had on your YouTube channel.

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I did an interesting thing.

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I transcribed everything you have that I could find, other interviews you've done, talks

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you gave, and I fed it all into AI along with the notes you gave me, and I said, "Give me

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talking points and questions for an interview on this content."

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And bingo, within a minute, I had four pages of notes printed out with questions.

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You plugged me into the Maitre.

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I did.

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So, I've been doing that lately.

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It's kind of handy.

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So, you know, I'm coming up with some questions I wouldn't ordinarily have thought to ask.

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Plus I throw in a bunch of my own questions that the AI didn't give me.

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So it's not just an AI thing.

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What I've gathered is that one of the main themes of your journey is awakening through

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adversity.

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And it began with a childhood trauma and was catalyzed by the sudden loss of a mentor,

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leading you from a place of unconscious seeking to becoming a trauma-specialized spiritual

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guide.

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And of course, there are a lot of steps in between those two things.

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And this path seems to be the foundation of what you call authentic empowerment.

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Is that a fair synopsis?

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Yeah.

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Good.

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You mentioned some tragedy very early in life that kind of kick-started your seeking?

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Yeah, well I mean I had a difficult childhood, so there was that sort of background of that.

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Welcome to the club.

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And you know in hindsight, yeah, that's right, most of us do, there's a few lucky ones.

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You know, you look back in hindsight and you can see that seeking, trying to get away from

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suffering but not even necessarily being so conscious of the suffering.

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You can be sort of numbed out to it because that's part of that coping strategy of not

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even realizing how much is actually there, but little breadcrumbs, little snippets that

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come along that just like, "Oh, go this way, go this way," and that sort of happened through

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my 20s. I'd be directed to books and I didn't have any religious upbringing. I didn't have

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spiritual community or any sort of deep connection with spirituality, but there was something in me

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that just buy a Buddhist book or buy a book on healing, little bits of your impulses.

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Yeah, little impulses. I remember going to, you know, I only went a couple of times in my 20s to

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Buddhist meditation and I thought there's something here. I don't know what it is,

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but there's something here. And I think it was like a counting meditation or something.

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counting your breaths? Yeah, it was something like that and there was one lady in the group afterwards

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that said that she got to 10 like it was totally easy, you know, it just happened and something in

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me knew that it wasn't true and I knew that, I don't know what you can call it, the nun,

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running the meditation, I knew that she knew as well, but I didn't know what that was, I didn't

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know what it was, the underlying thing, but it's like that radar for truth, you know.

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So in other words, the woman was being inauthentic and you picked up on it.

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Yeah, well, you know, just innocent.

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I see. And people might be wondering, like, the big deal, I can count to 10, but I think what

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you're referring to is, you know, a meditation where you're supposed to, like, count the breaths

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without your mind wandering off. And, you know, if you try that sometime, you might find that

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you might be surprised how readily your mind wanders off when trying to do a simple thing like that.

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Yeah, and how it gets caught, yeah, caught in thought. So that was kind of my early years,

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mixed with lots of different just lots of different experience. Really saw lots of the extremes,

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you know, in life, from the poorest and some of the most traumatized sectors of society,

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to some of the wealthiest, you know, just by chance, not because I've got any connection to

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that in particular, but and all the suffering, you know, that comes with that. Fast forward...

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Before we fast forward too much, I had a long conversation with a friend the other day,

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whom I have long conversations with often, and we were contemplating how a very traumatic

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childhood can result in rather ardent spiritual seeking later, a little bit later on.

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On the other hand, you know, like the Bhagavad Gita, for instance, says that if you're really

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fortunate you'll be born in a pure and illustrious family or even a family of yogis, although

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that's more difficult to attain on earth.

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So you've got it easy.

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The Buddha, in fact, was born a king and grew up in a palace, and yet when he realized how

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much suffering there was in the world, he left all that and became an extremely ardent seeker,

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I mean, just enlightenment or bust.

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So we're just contemplating, like, which one is most advantageous?

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Not that we get to choose.

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And are we just burning off a load of karma if we have a very traumatic childhood, and

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then after that's burned off, we're free to soar high on our spiritual quest?

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Or is there some advantage to suffering because the desire to get out of it becomes so strong

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that you just don't take your spiritual practice for granted, you just go at it with all your

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might or whatever?

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What are your thoughts on that?

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The pressure cooker.

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I don't think that we can ever take one person's awakening or unfolding or whatever you want

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to call it and then kind of make a...

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generalization. Yeah, not even the Buddhists, as much as we love him.

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You know, because it's probably far more nuanced and complex.

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Yeah, you're probably right. You can't generalize too much.

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No, because for me it wasn't ardent spiritual seeking.

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It just happened so spontaneous. So you could say, well, it was the pressure, the contraction,

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the contractions were so great that then the expansion happened. And that seems to have been

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my thing. I get put in these koans where I'm backs against the wall or seemingly so, and then

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that lets go into a bigger awareness. Yeah, I think because our minds like to have it all wrapped up.

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up, you know. My mind's like to say, "Well, what is this?" It was so curious and that's

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beautiful. It just is, isn't it? Yeah. Well, you make a good point, which is that there

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are as many paths as there are people, and it is a little foolish to generalize, although

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you do sometimes see patterns. We'll get into that more as we go along. You don't need to

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go into specifics if you don't want to. How do you feel your personal experiences with

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trauma and tragedy led to your first profound spiritual openings?

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Well, the first opening was a glimpse.

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And the first one was the death of the mentor.

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Yeah, you had a mentor who got in a car accident.

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Yeah, and mentor with horsemanship, not a spiritual mentor.

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I wasn't doing any seeking spiritually or otherwise.

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And the shock of that, the suddenness of it, and his girlfriend at the time died as well

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in the same accident.

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They were both passengers in the car and he left behind children from a previous marriage

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and it was a pretty rough time.

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And so that period of grieving and shock and all of that, that's what led to that first

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really simple opening and a really simple moment of hanging out, closing the line. All that

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contraction, all that grief, all that, just even a me just fell away. And it was just this intimacy,

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this beautiful, simple, peaceful intimacy. And that was like the first crack, the first opening.

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How long did that last?

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I don't know.

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There's no sort of sense of how long I was there for.

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It could have been...

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I mean, it wasn't like weeks and weeks and weeks of peace, but...

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No, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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I guess you were...

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Susanna Marie was one of your mentors, wasn't she?

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Yeah.

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Yeah, and she had something similar where her brother died unexpectedly,

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shifted her into profound realization as

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traumatic as that was and obviously

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that's not the kind of impetus most of us

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would want to undergo to have a profound

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realization but what do you think it is

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about a shock like that that can

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catalyze an opening? I think it's

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probably a few things. The mind can

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kind of give up because it can't make sense of it

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and it can't fix it, it can't, there's

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nothing it can do. So like death, like that is like a koan itself, isn't it? Yeah. There's no controlling,

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there's nothing but surrender. I think that's part of it. I think the other part of it is like

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fully allowing ourselves to feel, you know, and I've had that experience many times later

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when I fully went into the grief, then the peace and the joy and the bliss would open.

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There's a couple of things in there.

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No, finish your thought. I thought you were stopping.

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Yeah, no, just how it's and it's so bizarre, you know, because in the past you grieve or you have

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grief and it's just it's all awful. You know, who would have thought that right at the center,

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if you fully let go into it, that there it is. Yeah, interesting. There's a couple of things

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in there that kind of jump out at me. One is there's this whole little section near the beginning

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of the Bhagavad Gita where Arjuna, the hero of the story, feels like, "I've got this, you know,

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I'm in control, I can do this, let me at these guys.

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And then he undergoes this shift where he all of a sudden realizes he doesn't have it

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and he's not in control.

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And at that point he surrenders to his master, to the Lord.

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Krishna was supposed to be an avatar.

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And the commentary I read was like, in life for all of us, as long as you think that you

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can do it, you're in charge, you're the controller.

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don't tend to surrender or look for some higher guidance or higher wisdom but kind of if you

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reach that point at which you know you're not in charge then you kind of fall on your knees

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so to speak and seek higher guidance. Yeah, yeah absolutely and that can be a really nuanced space

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for embodiment and trauma, because often in a kind of

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native way, people with childhood trauma or any sort of abuse or boundary violations,

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there's that loss of volition, you know, and all that comes with that. So

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there's some real nuance in healing that to a place where the understanding is that

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the infinite is safe. Yeah. And that really is, can take some time.

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I don't know if that makes sense. No, it does. And in a few minutes, we're going to get into

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talking about shadow work and healing and things. I wanted to just ask you a couple of quick

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questions before that, because you mentioned a minute ago going into grief and then finding

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peace after going through it.

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So we want to talk about that.

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But I just want to ask you, the idea of authentic realization and authentic empowerment seem

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to be central to your work.

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And correct me if I'm wrong, but I got that impression.

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Do you have the impression that there's a lot of inauthentic realization and empowerment

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going on?

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you emphasize authenticity? I think that there is probably a lot more that needs to clear that

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people realize in that way. I think that it's really easy for stuff to still be stored there

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in that sort of power center and for that to grab on, even with the openings that have happened.

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even though there might be a lot of clarity, there might have been lots of openings, there might be

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some embodiment, that can really grab onto it and create another sort of identity.

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I think that's really important, actually. There are so many examples of very impressive teachers

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who seem to have had profound awakenings, and yet then their behavior becomes very inappropriate

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and harmful to people.

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And you kind of realize, or I don't know,

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my sense of it is that there is a lot of buried stuff

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that they never had to confront.

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And it's kind of coming back to bite them, you know?

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Yeah.

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Yeah, and in some cases, the behavior

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becomes much more exaggerated in its inappropriateness

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than even that of a normal person.

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Yeah, yeah, because that whole outsourcing, you know, if students outsource their life

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to, oh, here's the guru up there, and that whole hierarchy thing.

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It empowers them.

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Then it, you know, yeah, and people can get drunk on that.

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Yeah.

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People can get really intoxicated with it.

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It goes to their heads.

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But it's so much more, sorry, go on.

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That saying of, it goes to their heads, you know, all the adulation, it's like,

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"Oh, I must be special. Everybody loves me."

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Yeah, exactly. And it's so much more quiet than that, the authentic power, when it comes through.

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And it's really all our contractions and stuff that gets in the way of it moving.

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It just knows which way to move.

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Yeah. It could be in a boundary setting, you know, and when it comes through, it happens so fast

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that the mind has to catch up with it. It's not something that comes from thinking our way

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through it. Explain that a little bit. I'm not sure exactly what you mean there.

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So if, for instance, there was a situation where there needed to be like,

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"This is this incarnation here, and that's that one over there," the distinction,

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it just will move. What needs to be said, what needs to come through just comes through,

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rather than having to think about it, you know, an intellectual exercise of,

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"Oh, I need to do this," or "I need to navigate it," because that's the separateness, navigating it,

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rather than it just like moving. I see. So you're speaking of spontaneous right

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action, I suppose, that being in tune with, you know, divine consciousness or whatever you want

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want to call it, then spontaneously behavior flows in an appropriate way, or hopefully

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does.

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Yeah, yeah, and it's a loving, you know, it's a loving thing.

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It comes from that deep, infinite, unconditional love for everyone involved.

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yeah and you can't it's not a predicted thing it's not a understood by the mind

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thing yeah obviously we have a mind and we can use it but the ramifications of

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every action are far more intricate than the mind could possibly comprehend and

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so if the mind had to figure out all the all the ripple effects that would you

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know, result from every action, it would be totally overwhelmed by the complexity.

00:19:57.080 --> 00:20:03.200
So what you're saying is simple, spontaneous, right action can flow from

00:20:03.200 --> 00:20:09.480
being grounded in a deep enough realization and, you know, that divine

00:20:09.480 --> 00:20:13.080
intelligence which can comprehend all the complexities of the

00:20:13.080 --> 00:20:17.960
universe, that could be the... there's a saying in the Vedas, "Brahman

00:20:17.960 --> 00:20:19.640
as the charioteer.

00:20:19.640 --> 00:20:25.400
So if that's running the show, then our behavior

00:20:25.400 --> 00:20:30.360
can be as it would be if we had some sort of omniscience, which

00:20:30.360 --> 00:20:33.440
is beyond human capability anyway.

00:20:33.440 --> 00:20:34.520
Yeah, that's it.

00:20:34.520 --> 00:20:36.680
And then the human just catches up and goes,

00:20:36.680 --> 00:20:37.920
oh, that was interesting.

00:20:37.920 --> 00:20:38.680
Yeah, wow.

00:20:38.680 --> 00:20:40.120
How did that come out of my mouth?

00:20:40.120 --> 00:20:42.520
[LAUGHTER]

00:20:42.520 --> 00:20:43.680
That's it.

00:20:43.680 --> 00:20:44.680
Kind of fun.

00:20:44.680 --> 00:20:45.560
Yeah.

00:20:45.560 --> 00:20:48.140
So this next question, what we've just been discussing,

00:20:48.140 --> 00:20:49.860
might be one of the answers to it.

00:20:49.860 --> 00:20:53.060
But you mentioned that coming home to our authentic selves

00:20:53.060 --> 00:20:56.980
leaves us open to a world of possibilities.

00:20:56.980 --> 00:20:58.740
Is this what we've just been discussing,

00:20:58.740 --> 00:21:01.460
the kind of possibility you're alluding to there?

00:21:01.460 --> 00:21:06.480
Yeah, in each moment, like that freshness, that newness.

00:21:06.480 --> 00:21:09.700
So let's talk about shadow work,

00:21:09.700 --> 00:21:13.140
and healing, and compassion for a while.

00:21:14.180 --> 00:21:18.380
You emphasize the necessity of healing past trauma

00:21:18.380 --> 00:21:20.180
to reach our full potential.

00:21:20.180 --> 00:21:23.020
And this involves shadow work, turning

00:21:23.020 --> 00:21:26.020
towards the unconscious aspects we don't want to see

00:21:26.020 --> 00:21:29.500
and cultivating deep compassion for ourselves and others

00:21:29.500 --> 00:21:31.540
to break cycles of suffering.

00:21:31.540 --> 00:21:33.380
And of course, many people are now familiar

00:21:33.380 --> 00:21:35.020
with the term shadow work.

00:21:35.020 --> 00:21:37.660
I've interviewed people such as Connie Zweig,

00:21:37.660 --> 00:21:40.020
who wrote a whole book about it.

00:21:40.020 --> 00:21:44.020
How do you define it and what is its role in healing?

00:21:44.020 --> 00:21:49.020
I define it as what's unconscious.

00:21:49.020 --> 00:21:53.020
What hasn't been brought to conscious awareness.

00:21:53.020 --> 00:21:58.020
I think it was the Jungian term originally, wasn't it?

00:21:58.020 --> 00:22:01.020
Yeah, I think so.

00:22:01.020 --> 00:22:05.020
And the term itself, you know, it probably has a lot of baggage.

00:22:05.020 --> 00:22:07.020
Everything has energy, doesn't it?

00:22:07.020 --> 00:22:12.020
everything has kind of like what the collective have put on it.

00:22:12.020 --> 00:22:20.560
So it probably has that sort of baggage of something a bit heavy and frightening, when

00:22:20.560 --> 00:22:23.460
really it's not.

00:22:23.460 --> 00:22:33.420
not, you know, and it's wanting to, life's wanting to have those parts of ourselves rejoin,

00:22:33.420 --> 00:22:36.260
you know, that movement of rejoining.

00:22:36.260 --> 00:22:51.980
So yes, it can be anything from beliefs to stuck emotions to patterns of behavior.

00:22:51.980 --> 00:22:58.540
You mentioned that for you, at least, it felt less like work and more like life was working

00:22:58.540 --> 00:23:03.940
on you, rather than you were having to work to work something out.

00:23:03.940 --> 00:23:07.140
Did I get that right?

00:23:07.140 --> 00:23:08.460
Can you elaborate on that?

00:23:08.460 --> 00:23:15.860
Yeah, I think it was both, because it was happening, you know, unconscious.

00:23:15.860 --> 00:23:19.740
Pandora's box had just been opened up.

00:23:19.740 --> 00:23:22.700
it was flowing, you know, it was coming up.

00:23:22.700 --> 00:23:27.700
But at the same time, there had to be that human portion,

00:23:27.700 --> 00:23:33.500
that willingness to meet what was arising,

00:23:33.500 --> 00:23:38.500
and the willingness to really engage in deep healing.

00:23:38.500 --> 00:23:41.140
- So on a day-to-day basis,

00:23:41.140 --> 00:23:45.060
like was just all kinds of like negative emotions

00:23:45.060 --> 00:23:49.540
or traumas that you had forgotten and things like that

00:23:49.540 --> 00:23:54.500
welling up and did it make it difficult for you to function or hold down a job or things like that?

00:23:54.500 --> 00:24:05.540
It was kind of like contraction, expansion, contraction, expansion. So it'd have these

00:24:05.540 --> 00:24:14.660
really big heart openings and unconditional love flowing. You know, I'd be looking at

00:24:14.660 --> 00:24:25.700
strangers, and there would just be unconditional love and all sorts of bliss and joy, and then

00:24:25.700 --> 00:24:33.140
there would just be a plunge back into suffering and contractions. I think that's natural. I think

00:24:33.140 --> 00:24:41.220
that happens to a lot of people. Yeah, yeah, quite wild. And then other times where just emptiness

00:24:41.860 --> 00:24:49.780
was looking. There wasn't any unconditional love feeling or any of that. It was just

00:24:49.780 --> 00:25:00.340
pure witnessing. So that would kind of go and then there would be the next contraction

00:25:00.340 --> 00:25:09.780
that would come. But I engage in deep somatic-based healing because my nerve system,

00:25:09.780 --> 00:25:16.500
because I'm extremely sensitive, which is one of my gifts. But my nervous system had gotten so

00:25:16.500 --> 00:25:24.820
dysregulated through traumas just kind of piling up on top of each other. So I really needed that,

00:25:24.820 --> 00:25:33.860
you know, that phase when it's wanting to come in and embody and have all the fragmented,

00:25:33.860 --> 00:25:41.540
because trauma really fragments us. So all those fragmented parts, like, yeah, you too, you as well.

00:25:41.540 --> 00:25:49.060
And that's the compassion, that compassion that wants all the parts of us that feel

00:25:49.060 --> 00:25:58.580
separate and lost and in pain and in confusion. Were you doing some formal somatic healing work

00:25:58.580 --> 00:26:08.100
under some kind of trained person? Yeah. Like, so therapeutic sessions in which you do something

00:26:08.100 --> 00:26:14.980
or other? Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Yeah. So through the body. Was it mainly talk type stuff or was

00:26:14.980 --> 00:26:21.860
there like physical massage or acupuncture or you know, those kind of things? A little bit of

00:26:21.860 --> 00:26:30.900
acupuncture, yeah, but more being with the body, creating the bridge of safety, because that's

00:26:30.900 --> 00:26:36.100
what's lost, isn't it? When we go through these things, it's that feeling that we're safe.

00:26:36.100 --> 00:26:45.300
So being with it, creating that bridge and getting the nervous system to come back down into some

00:26:45.300 --> 00:26:46.300
sort of relaxation.

00:26:46.300 --> 00:26:47.300
The excitation, yeah.

00:26:47.300 --> 00:26:48.300
Yeah, yeah.

00:26:48.300 --> 00:26:59.420
And then, you know, that presence, then allowing bits to come up, but it can't all come up all

00:26:59.420 --> 00:27:00.420
at once.

00:27:00.420 --> 00:27:01.420
Oh no.

00:27:01.420 --> 00:27:02.420
It's too much for the nervous system.

00:27:02.420 --> 00:27:09.820
So just in little bits, and then, you know, you're kind of emptying the jar bit by bit

00:27:09.820 --> 00:27:13.440
and then more can come up and more can be released.

00:27:13.440 --> 00:27:19.280
so body movements and the body wanted to do at the time. Yeah, you mean like got frozen?

00:27:19.280 --> 00:27:28.640
No, like through whatever happened at the time, you know, it wanted to push your boundary or

00:27:28.640 --> 00:27:38.240
it needed to fight or it needed to, you know, all the kind of primal survival instincts that are

00:27:39.120 --> 00:27:45.760
energy that's just gotten really stuck. Yeah. So this cycle of expansion and

00:27:45.760 --> 00:27:48.960
contraction that you went through, did you get the feeling that the

00:27:48.960 --> 00:27:53.280
expansion phases were kind of like a solvent

00:27:53.280 --> 00:27:58.160
where you know once you're exposed to that vastness for a little while

00:27:58.160 --> 00:28:02.400
all these tight things begin to loosen up and release

00:28:02.400 --> 00:28:05.840
and then of course you go into contraction as they release and then

00:28:05.840 --> 00:28:08.640
once they've sort of fizzled out in terms of that

00:28:08.640 --> 00:28:14.000
particular batch releasing, you open up to perhaps an even broader expansion, which triggers

00:28:14.000 --> 00:28:19.920
another release. Like you say, you keep going through this cycle. Yeah, yeah, I like that, a batch.

00:28:19.920 --> 00:28:29.920
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, some stuff will get burnt up just through grace.

00:28:31.280 --> 00:28:40.120
I had an experience of, because I had chronic illness as well, as a result of all the trauma

00:28:40.120 --> 00:28:47.120
and everything that had happened, I had an experience of the lady I was working with,

00:28:47.120 --> 00:28:50.280
with the somatic work, saying, "Oh, I think we need to slow down."

00:28:50.280 --> 00:28:53.600
I think that the nervous system— She thought it might be too much for you?

00:28:53.600 --> 00:28:58.840
Yeah, because my nervous system was so sensitive, and so it's like, "Yeah, I think maybe we

00:28:58.840 --> 00:29:07.240
to slow down. And I thought, "Oh, shit, I'm going to slow down. Let's get this stuff out."

00:29:07.240 --> 00:29:13.640
Yeah, let's get it over with. Yeah, yeah, let's get it over with. And I was going through another

00:29:13.640 --> 00:29:23.320
sort of koan in my life where I was living at the time, the land wasn't able to support

00:29:23.320 --> 00:29:29.720
my horses in a way that they would be as healthy as I would have liked them to have been.

00:29:29.720 --> 00:29:37.960
So I was looking for somewhere else and just couldn't bang up against. It's not working. I

00:29:37.960 --> 00:29:44.920
can't find anywhere. So those two sort of things were happening simultaneously. And then just out

00:29:44.920 --> 00:29:53.720
to lunch one day and another just massive opening happened and you know the food

00:29:53.720 --> 00:30:02.000
was blissful, just so beautiful you know, you want to go in and kiss the

00:30:02.000 --> 00:30:10.720
chefs, like the gratitude you know. And that gave my nervous system

00:30:10.720 --> 00:30:18.400
enough of a relaxation to the healing, you know, and shifting whatever else was

00:30:18.400 --> 00:30:25.660
there to continue. So, you know, how much that burnt up or chewed up, we don't know.

00:30:25.660 --> 00:30:29.360
I bet you the horses have been very healing for you. How long have you

00:30:29.360 --> 00:30:35.800
been around horses? I mean, ever since a young age? Well, the horse, no, I didn't, I

00:30:35.800 --> 00:30:40.520
wasn't born into a family that was horse orientated at all. I literally was

00:30:40.520 --> 00:30:50.680
born in with that calling, I suppose. When I was two, I asked for... it was the first toy that I

00:30:50.680 --> 00:31:00.040
asked for was a life... what do you call it? Like a life... Life-like. True to life form of a horse.

00:31:00.040 --> 00:31:08.200
Yeah. And I just took that everywhere with me. Just absolutely loved it. And when I was really

00:31:08.200 --> 00:31:10.600
young, my favorite book was War Horse.

00:31:10.600 --> 00:31:12.200
So it didn't come from...

00:31:12.200 --> 00:31:13.200
I saw the movie.

00:31:13.200 --> 00:31:14.200
Yeah, right.

00:31:14.200 --> 00:31:15.200
I haven't actually seen the movie.

00:31:15.200 --> 00:31:22.200
But yeah, so I don't know whether that was brought in from past lives, probably.

00:31:22.200 --> 00:31:23.200
Yeah.

00:31:23.200 --> 00:31:25.200
I never worked with horses.

00:31:25.200 --> 00:31:30.040
In fact, I had a very early experience of falling off a horse at a state fair or something

00:31:30.040 --> 00:31:31.040
like that.

00:31:31.040 --> 00:31:35.520
I was doing the horse ride so many times, getting ride on a real horse, that the guys got kind

00:31:35.520 --> 00:31:38.800
of casually sort of threw me up on the saddle and I went right off the other side.

00:31:38.800 --> 00:31:45.200
But, um, but anyway, I had, I did have an opportunity to work around cows for a

00:31:45.200 --> 00:31:49.080
while, you know, quite a few months of shoveling cow manure and just taking

00:31:49.080 --> 00:31:51.000
building fences and taking care of the cows.

00:31:51.000 --> 00:31:55.640
And they just had such a vibe about them that, you know, you, you kind

00:31:55.640 --> 00:31:57.840
of in train with their vibe.

00:31:57.840 --> 00:32:01.640
And I found it very profound and beautiful.

00:32:01.640 --> 00:32:03.040
It was really calming.

00:32:03.040 --> 00:32:04.320
Well, that's it, isn't it?

00:32:04.880 --> 00:32:12.280
It's like, it's common for, I think a lot of us that when we start having openings or,

00:32:12.280 --> 00:32:19.440
you know, that call comes or whatever, we want to go and be more in nature.

00:32:19.440 --> 00:32:20.440
Yeah.

00:32:20.440 --> 00:32:24.800
You know, like our wildness calls to us.

00:32:24.800 --> 00:32:26.760
It's part of it.

00:32:26.760 --> 00:32:33.120
But yeah, so with the horses, it wasn't really until I was older that I had sort of opportunity,

00:32:33.120 --> 00:32:43.040
my teenage years to start having stuff to do with them. And then I worked up north on a cattle

00:32:43.040 --> 00:32:52.720
station and worked with horses there. And then just throughout my life, I'd come in and out

00:32:52.720 --> 00:33:01.120
with it through my 20s. And then when I found my mentor with horsemanship, that was when I fully

00:33:01.680 --> 00:33:06.680
entered into and I've been with them ever since.

00:33:06.680 --> 00:33:11.400
But man, they can teach you some stuff.

00:33:11.400 --> 00:33:16.960
Yeah, we really are the students.

00:33:16.960 --> 00:33:18.440
- Yeah, I can think of a number of examples.

00:33:18.440 --> 00:33:22.640
I've seen programs for prison inmates working with horses

00:33:22.640 --> 00:33:24.920
and it's very therapeutic for them.

00:33:24.920 --> 00:33:27.120
I have a friend who has an autistic daughter

00:33:27.120 --> 00:33:30.040
and her daughter goes to horse camp

00:33:30.040 --> 00:33:32.800
where the horses work with the autistic kids

00:33:32.800 --> 00:33:34.400
and it has a great effect.

00:33:34.400 --> 00:33:38.280
And there's programs here in the US

00:33:38.280 --> 00:33:40.960
where kids who are in the inner cities,

00:33:40.960 --> 00:33:45.760
slum kind of areas, very high crime, high stress,

00:33:45.760 --> 00:33:47.820
they get to go out to the country

00:33:47.820 --> 00:33:49.440
and be with horses for a while.

00:33:49.440 --> 00:33:52.240
So I can probably think of a couple more examples,

00:33:52.240 --> 00:33:56.080
but it's a known healing modality.

00:33:57.040 --> 00:34:03.680
Yeah, and I mean, I sort of, you know, I work with people, obviously online with

00:34:03.680 --> 00:34:13.600
awakening and healing, but I also have clients where I work with their horses for helping the

00:34:13.600 --> 00:34:25.040
horses with the horse's trauma and the person with what's happening for them, and then finding that

00:34:25.040 --> 00:34:34.480
sort of meeting point. So it's less about the horse necessarily being the healing force, but

00:34:34.480 --> 00:34:41.520
it being a mirror of consciousness. Yeah, kind of a mutual healing.

00:34:41.520 --> 00:34:43.520
More of a mutual meeting. Yeah.

00:34:43.520 --> 00:34:50.400
Yeah, yeah. Because like with anything, I think there's some horses that would be

00:34:52.000 --> 00:34:56.720
at a soul level willing to participate in that, and then there's others that are.

00:34:56.720 --> 00:35:05.760
You know, so when I've ever used them in that capacity with clients, it's more as

00:35:05.760 --> 00:35:14.960
they just be themselves, exactly as they are, and what is it that you're drawn to in them,

00:35:14.960 --> 00:35:20.880
and then that is like a mirror for the person's own wisdom to come forward.

00:35:20.880 --> 00:35:26.380
for what they might need in that moment, if that makes sense.

00:35:26.380 --> 00:35:32.380
Yeah. There's a guy in the US named Cesar Milan who is called the Dog Whisperer.

00:35:32.380 --> 00:35:36.880
And his motto is, and people call him because they have problems with their dogs,

00:35:36.880 --> 00:35:39.880
but his motto is "Better human, better dog."

00:35:39.880 --> 00:35:45.380
Because he usually has to fix the human, and then that solves the dog's problem.

00:35:45.380 --> 00:35:53.780
Yeah, yeah, yeah, well I think that there's probably soul contracts going on, you know?

00:35:53.780 --> 00:35:54.780
Yeah, yeah.

00:35:54.780 --> 00:36:04.180
Where it's like, we're going to help highlight this for you, and really I'm just a translator

00:36:04.180 --> 00:36:08.460
to help sort of translate that.

00:36:08.460 --> 00:36:13.500
And they help us to slow down and to actually take notice.

00:36:13.500 --> 00:36:18.180
They remind, for me, they remind me of my wildness.

00:36:18.180 --> 00:36:20.180
You know, that natural power.

00:36:20.180 --> 00:36:26.060
And I think that that whole embodiment thing is like our wildness and the transcendent

00:36:26.060 --> 00:36:30.660
wisdom meeting and collapsing.

00:36:30.660 --> 00:36:37.980
You state that anxiety is often a symptom of past trauma, which is not surprising.

00:36:37.980 --> 00:36:42.620
And you mentioned that bringing compassionate awareness to these unresolved and incomplete

00:36:42.620 --> 00:36:51.420
fight-or-flight energies help to complete them. So how does one conjure up compassionate awareness

00:36:51.420 --> 00:36:55.420
if that's the solution to healing certain kinds of trauma or anxiety?

00:36:55.420 --> 00:37:00.940
But what if you're not feeling compassionate awareness? How do you

00:37:00.940 --> 00:37:08.460
turn it up so as to, you know, have it help heal these things?

00:37:09.660 --> 00:37:16.540
Well, you can't because that's us trying to manipulate it.

00:37:16.540 --> 00:37:19.180
It's there. It's available.

00:37:19.180 --> 00:37:20.860
How do you locate it, I should say?

00:37:20.860 --> 00:37:24.540
It's already there, right? So how do you tune into it?

00:37:24.540 --> 00:37:33.660
Well, you may need a bridge or a conduit or, you know,

00:37:34.220 --> 00:37:40.860
Someone in support of you that can mirror that back to you.

00:37:40.860 --> 00:37:52.140
It could be any sort of practice that feels right for you. Even just using imagination as a bridge

00:37:52.140 --> 00:38:04.140
can be helpful. It can start to relax the nervous system enough that maybe there's some safety here

00:38:04.140 --> 00:38:07.140
that I can open to, you know.

00:38:07.140 --> 00:38:09.140
Give me an example of how that might work.

00:38:09.140 --> 00:38:15.140
So if somebody's like really contracted

00:38:15.140 --> 00:38:18.140
and their nerve system's really dysregulated,

00:38:18.140 --> 00:38:26.140
they were to open fully to redemptive love completely,

00:38:26.140 --> 00:38:29.140
it might actually be too overwhelming.

00:38:29.140 --> 00:38:37.780
You know, sometimes it has to be taken in bit by bit, rather than all at once.

00:38:37.780 --> 00:38:48.140
So, you know, if we can create a space for someone, even in their imagination, that is

00:38:48.140 --> 00:38:55.940
peaceful and they're held, you know, it's a relative thing, but it's got a thread back

00:38:55.940 --> 00:39:03.260
to the absolute that's safe. So let's say you had a loving grandmother or

00:39:03.260 --> 00:39:07.300
something but she's passed away and so you might say okay imagine your

00:39:07.300 --> 00:39:11.220
grandmother is here with you now and she's holding you and she's singing you

00:39:11.220 --> 00:39:16.460
a lullaby or something so you mean that kind of thing? Yeah you could do that and

00:39:16.460 --> 00:39:20.860
that could be that could be a bridge. Okay. That could be using the imagination

00:39:20.860 --> 00:39:23.740
as a bridge to show.

00:39:23.740 --> 00:39:24.580
- Good.

00:39:24.580 --> 00:39:29.340
So grief, we've talked of anxiety,

00:39:29.340 --> 00:39:34.020
grief, that's an emotion that many people try to avoid.

00:39:34.020 --> 00:39:35.300
You connect it to love,

00:39:35.300 --> 00:39:37.640
saying that there is no grief without love.

00:39:37.640 --> 00:39:42.420
How does allowing ourselves to fully experience grief

00:39:42.420 --> 00:39:44.040
open the door to compassion?

00:39:44.040 --> 00:39:48.340
And I guess you, no grief without love,

00:39:48.340 --> 00:39:53.340
does that mean like, you know, if you didn't love your dog,

00:39:53.340 --> 00:39:55.900
you wouldn't be grieving if it died or something like that?

00:39:55.900 --> 00:39:59.400
If your heart is sort of cold and closed,

00:39:59.400 --> 00:40:02.240
then, and you're not experiencing much love,

00:40:02.240 --> 00:40:05.200
then you don't grieve for the people in Gaza

00:40:05.200 --> 00:40:07.720
or, you know, other situations,

00:40:07.720 --> 00:40:09.360
whereas a more sensitive person

00:40:09.360 --> 00:40:12.700
feels such other's pain very acutely.

00:40:12.700 --> 00:40:15.560
- Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

00:40:15.560 --> 00:40:22.160
And there's like the human element to it, you know, like our human hearts.

00:40:22.160 --> 00:40:28.640
And then of course there's like the infinite heart that can just hold all that suffering.

00:40:28.640 --> 00:40:32.040
There's no limit to it.

00:40:32.040 --> 00:40:34.840
So, yeah.

00:40:34.840 --> 00:40:46.200
But that's not to say that if someone was to die and there was just infinite joy for their

00:40:46.200 --> 00:40:50.920
passing that there's no love there, because there is.

00:40:50.920 --> 00:40:52.800
There's unconditional love.

00:40:52.800 --> 00:40:56.440
So it's not like a hard and fast rule.

00:40:56.440 --> 00:41:05.120
I guess what I'm just pointing to is not to contract or fear that grief because it is

00:41:05.120 --> 00:41:08.280
an expression of love.

00:41:08.280 --> 00:41:13.400
Yeah, and it's a natural thing.

00:41:13.400 --> 00:41:15.200
We shouldn't stifle it.

00:41:15.200 --> 00:41:20.040
No, and we've been so conditioned to.

00:41:20.040 --> 00:41:23.160
So conditioned to collectively.

00:41:23.160 --> 00:41:26.800
And even spiritual people sometimes intellectualize things away.

00:41:26.800 --> 00:41:33.060
Like somebody dies and you think, "Oh, they've just gone on to heaven or another loka or something

00:41:33.060 --> 00:41:35.000
like that."

00:41:35.000 --> 00:41:38.760
And if someone is grieving, they might say, "Oh, you shouldn't be grieving."

00:41:38.760 --> 00:41:45.860
There's even a verse in the Gita which says, "Certain indeed is birth for the dead and

00:41:45.860 --> 00:41:48.560
certain is death for the born.

00:41:48.560 --> 00:41:50.720
Therefore over the inevitable you should not grieve."

00:41:50.720 --> 00:41:55.720
But, you know, that can become...

00:41:55.720 --> 00:41:56.720
They're guilty as well!

00:41:56.720 --> 00:42:09.720
Yeah, it can be kind of an unnatural heartlessness or something if you try to force yourself to abide by such admonitions.

00:42:09.720 --> 00:42:18.720
Yeah, yeah. And it's not in truth, you know, what's really there. What's really true.

00:42:18.720 --> 00:42:19.720
Yeah.

00:42:19.720 --> 00:42:20.720
Yeah.

00:42:20.720 --> 00:42:23.080
Is that, you know, there's a human as well.

00:42:23.080 --> 00:42:28.280
I suppose one way of wrapping up this point is just to be authentic.

00:42:28.280 --> 00:42:32.780
You know, I think that term came up 15 minutes ago.

00:42:32.780 --> 00:42:36.200
If you're feeling grief, feel grief.

00:42:36.200 --> 00:42:42.000
Don't try to rationalize it as being unspiritual and you shouldn't be feeling it or something.

00:42:42.000 --> 00:42:43.880
Yeah, that's it.

00:42:43.880 --> 00:42:44.880
Be a human being.

00:42:44.880 --> 00:42:45.880
You're a human being.

00:42:45.880 --> 00:42:47.800
You're not just a divine being.

00:42:47.800 --> 00:42:54.760
also human being yeah absolutely yeah and I like to lean into the humanness

00:42:54.760 --> 00:43:01.360
because um it just is an allowance in that you know there's such an allowance

00:43:01.360 --> 00:43:09.080
but let's all just be human yeah um you noted that when faced with their own

00:43:09.080 --> 00:43:15.360
shadow people can often react with unconscious and cruel behavior and I

00:43:15.360 --> 00:43:17.400
found that point very timely.

00:43:17.400 --> 00:43:19.680
There's a lot of that in the world today.

00:43:19.680 --> 00:43:24.080
And I'm reminded of Jesus saying, forgive them, Father.

00:43:24.080 --> 00:43:27.360
They know not what they do.

00:43:27.360 --> 00:43:33.360
And I think here in the US, there's

00:43:33.360 --> 00:43:38.920
a lot of cruelty going on right now with people being captured

00:43:38.920 --> 00:43:44.720
and sent to third countries and put in, basically,

00:43:44.720 --> 00:43:48.200
hell holes of prisons in El Salvador and stuff like this.

00:43:48.200 --> 00:43:50.720
And they're not actually really guilty of anything.

00:43:50.720 --> 00:43:54.120
They're just being shuffled away like that.

00:43:54.120 --> 00:43:58.040
And so I think as a nation, we in particular,

00:43:58.040 --> 00:44:02.920
and many other nations, need to cultivate the capacity

00:44:02.920 --> 00:44:12.480
for compassion and not succumb to unconscious and cruel

00:44:12.480 --> 00:44:14.640
behavior.

00:44:14.640 --> 00:44:16.920
Whole nations do succumb to that.

00:44:16.920 --> 00:44:19.720
Nazi Germany is an example.

00:44:19.720 --> 00:44:22.260
But obviously, anything that a nation is doing,

00:44:22.260 --> 00:44:25.600
it's doing because enough people in that nation are doing it.

00:44:25.600 --> 00:44:30.080
And so there needs to be a kind of a national healing.

00:44:30.080 --> 00:44:33.120
But you can only start with yourself.

00:44:33.120 --> 00:44:36.480
So we keep coming back to this theme,

00:44:36.480 --> 00:44:41.480
but how can one be less unconscious

00:44:41.480 --> 00:44:45.200
and thus more kind and compassionate

00:44:45.200 --> 00:44:50.200
and sensitive to the suffering of others?

00:44:50.200 --> 00:44:54.840
- Yeah, I think it's just a willingness,

00:44:54.840 --> 00:44:59.580
a willingness to face that, face everything within us.

00:44:59.580 --> 00:45:03.400
And that comes back to what we were talking about before

00:45:03.400 --> 00:45:08.000
with the compassion, like compassion for what's here,

00:45:08.000 --> 00:45:12.440
unconscious within us, it naturally then flows out.

00:45:12.440 --> 00:45:15.720
We don't have to force it.

00:45:15.720 --> 00:45:19.480
It's just a natural movement.

00:45:19.480 --> 00:45:21.800
- Yeah. - So, yeah.

00:45:21.800 --> 00:45:23.880
- You mentioned that you're a very sensitive person,

00:45:23.880 --> 00:45:25.140
and that's good.

00:45:25.140 --> 00:45:30.140
Is there a way that, I suppose you just,

00:45:30.140 --> 00:45:32.360
you're just wired that way.

00:45:32.360 --> 00:45:35.640
You didn't do anything to sensitize yourself necessarily.

00:45:35.640 --> 00:45:37.720
(laughs)

00:45:37.720 --> 00:45:42.720
But I think spiritual practice can and does sensitize one.

00:45:42.720 --> 00:45:47.520
You just become more refined, more delicate in a way,

00:45:47.520 --> 00:45:52.520
less crude, less blind to your own shadows,

00:45:52.520 --> 00:45:56.260
since we're using that term.

00:45:56.260 --> 00:45:58.040
- Yeah.

00:45:58.040 --> 00:45:58.880
- Yeah.

00:45:59.720 --> 00:46:02.720
Yeah, well it's dropping into the wisdom of the heart, isn't it?

00:46:02.720 --> 00:46:07.720
Yeah, that's the key I guess, is just dropping into the wisdom of the heart.

00:46:07.720 --> 00:46:13.720
And at the same time, you know, you need to balance sensitivity with strength, do you not?

00:46:13.720 --> 00:46:19.720
Because if you became so sensitive that you couldn't go to the store, or something, you know.

00:46:19.720 --> 00:46:21.720
And I've known people who are like that.

00:46:21.720 --> 00:46:26.720
In fact, I've been like that on long meditation courses where you've been meditating for months on end.

00:46:26.720 --> 00:46:32.000
on end, it's like, "Oh, I can't possibly walk into town to buy a toothbrush. It's just like too much."

00:46:32.000 --> 00:46:40.720
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The nervous system is so heightened, it's like picking up on everything.

00:46:40.720 --> 00:46:48.160
So there's an integration factor that you have to somehow balance out with increased sensitivity.

00:46:48.160 --> 00:46:51.280
It's paradoxical, but yeah, yeah. It is.

00:46:51.280 --> 00:46:56.160
Sensitivity and strength, the two. Yeah, that's it, yeah. And I think that

00:46:56.160 --> 00:47:02.480
before we were talking about with the wildness meets the wisdom, kind of we throw in there in

00:47:02.480 --> 00:47:08.240
the sensitivity as well, you know. Yeah. Because I think that grounding, you know, like when you're

00:47:08.240 --> 00:47:14.080
talking about being with the cows and, you know, being with nature and being with the horses and

00:47:14.080 --> 00:47:24.880
that grounding really helps with that strength, that real like connection to the earth and being

00:47:24.880 --> 00:47:33.560
Yeah, connection to the earth. That's a good one. I mean, I think that sometimes, well,

00:47:33.560 --> 00:47:39.440
I remember, you know, when I first, I had interviewed Suzanne Marie, and then we were

00:47:39.440 --> 00:47:44.580
a couple of years later, we were at this conference in California. And I was just totally wigged

00:47:44.580 --> 00:47:49.600
out by all the, you know, the people and the energy. And I had like a six interviews and

00:47:49.600 --> 00:47:55.160
a panel discussion and talk to give and there was like unlimited chocolate cake at lunch

00:47:55.160 --> 00:48:02.040
and you know. And I was like, yeah. And I remember she said, let's take a walk. And

00:48:02.040 --> 00:48:05.600
so we took a walk around through this little wooded area and she said, let's take our

00:48:05.600 --> 00:48:10.960
shoes off and walk in the grass. So we walked in the grass and then finally I just lay down

00:48:10.960 --> 00:48:13.640
in the grass and like, oh.

00:48:13.640 --> 00:48:20.640
That's so funny. Your opinion on the cow and the chocolate cake too.

00:48:20.640 --> 00:48:25.640
But you know spiritual people are notorious for getting ungrounded.

00:48:25.640 --> 00:48:31.640
And so you know, personally I've kind of gotten into a routine of you know,

00:48:31.640 --> 00:48:37.640
plenty of exercise, plenty of sleep, you know, just nice grounding things

00:48:37.640 --> 00:48:41.640
in addition to meditating a couple hours a day.

00:48:41.640 --> 00:48:44.960
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah

00:48:44.960 --> 00:48:50.600
Okay, um, let's talk for a while about

00:48:50.600 --> 00:48:58.480
Awakening itself. We've talked about anything more you want to say right now about shadow and healing trauma and that kind of thing

00:48:58.480 --> 00:49:06.560
Okay, we can always come back to it if you think of something yeah, sure let's talk about the nature of awakening

00:49:07.200 --> 00:49:12.760
Your teachings point to it. You've used the word nuance and I've detected that in what I've heard you say.

00:49:12.760 --> 00:49:20.400
Nuanced understanding of awakening. I think this is important. It's not about escaping our humanity, very important,

00:49:20.400 --> 00:49:24.680
but finding the simplicity of truth within the complexity of life.

00:49:24.680 --> 00:49:31.680
And it involves devotion, finding safety in our divine nature, and learning to sync with...

00:49:31.680 --> 00:49:35.640
This last sentence I don't understand quite so well. Maybe you can explain it.

00:49:35.640 --> 00:49:41.120
learning to sync with linear time to experience the timeless. So comment on

00:49:41.120 --> 00:49:48.640
everything I just said in that little statement. Yeah okay well I'm thinking

00:49:48.640 --> 00:49:54.400
with linear time I'm really talking about our nervous systems because when

00:49:54.400 --> 00:50:00.840
our nervous systems are dysregulated we're really stuck we're stuck in the

00:50:00.840 --> 00:50:11.400
past or trying to rush towards some future point. And so syncing with it would be getting

00:50:11.400 --> 00:50:16.160
our nervous systems, you know, and that's that whole embodiment thing, hey, like getting

00:50:16.160 --> 00:50:25.040
our nervous systems to come into that point of balance and then we can experience the timeless

00:50:25.040 --> 00:50:26.040
here.

00:50:26.040 --> 00:50:30.040
So would it be a "be here now" kind of a thing, to quote Ram Dass?

00:50:30.040 --> 00:50:31.040
Yeah.

00:50:31.040 --> 00:50:33.040
The power of now, to quote Eckhart Tolle?

00:50:33.040 --> 00:50:38.040
Yeah, because we can have these openings, transcendent,

00:50:38.040 --> 00:50:42.040
but when the movement comes back in for embodiment,

00:50:42.040 --> 00:50:46.040
if our nervous systems are out of time, you know,

00:50:46.040 --> 00:50:50.040
and you'll see it, you'll go into like a café or something,

00:50:50.040 --> 00:50:58.840
And the person serving is under massive stress and their nervous system is pinging.

00:50:58.840 --> 00:51:04.960
It's on fast forward.

00:51:04.960 --> 00:51:07.720
They're out of sync with time.

00:51:07.720 --> 00:51:16.360
Or conversely, the opposite, when there's depression or collapse or just shut down.

00:51:16.360 --> 00:51:20.920
And so the nervous system's like really stuck.

00:51:20.920 --> 00:51:29.040
So either one is not lining up, it's not in sync with the moment.

00:51:29.040 --> 00:51:35.720
So we take care of that, you know, so that it can come and be here.

00:51:35.720 --> 00:51:44.200
So in your own life, describe your own experience with regard to time.

00:51:44.200 --> 00:51:48.200
I can elaborate on that question, but see what you got from what I just said.

00:51:48.200 --> 00:51:55.200
Well, certainly experience being out of sync with it.

00:51:55.200 --> 00:52:03.200
You know, when the nervous system is like that, when it was going too fast, when it was going too slow.

00:52:03.200 --> 00:52:05.200
You mean in the past for you?

00:52:05.200 --> 00:52:06.200
Yeah.

00:52:06.200 --> 00:52:07.200
Right.

00:52:07.200 --> 00:52:08.200
Yeah.

00:52:08.200 --> 00:52:13.920
And you know, it's not to say that the nervous system isn't going to spike, you know, and

00:52:13.920 --> 00:52:16.920
it's not going to have its fluctuations.

00:52:16.920 --> 00:52:22.760
It's not like it just goes into this dead zone of nothing happening.

00:52:22.760 --> 00:52:24.440
No one's there.

00:52:24.440 --> 00:52:30.640
There's still the body, but you can be with that.

00:52:30.640 --> 00:52:36.960
You can be with the fluctuations rather than leaving because that's what happens when it's

00:52:36.960 --> 00:52:38.080
too overwhelming.

00:52:38.080 --> 00:52:50.240
sort of we leave we leave ourselves we're frightening yeah so um yeah okay um my sense of

00:52:50.240 --> 00:52:58.240
you'd ever read a book uh by someone named uh i think it was suzanne siegel called collision with

00:52:58.240 --> 00:53:06.560
the infinite interesting book she was this woman who had this spontaneous awakening and it was quite

00:53:06.560 --> 00:53:11.760
radical and she couldn't really find any sense of personal self after that and it terrified her.

00:53:11.760 --> 00:53:17.520
And she went through like 10 years of trying to find a personal self before she finally gave up

00:53:17.520 --> 00:53:24.000
and realized something good had happened. But her motto became, "Do the next obvious thing."

00:53:24.000 --> 00:53:30.560
And that to a great extent is my motto. Not that I think about it all the time, but

00:53:31.440 --> 00:53:35.760
kind of nature presents the next obvious thing to you and then you do it

00:53:35.760 --> 00:53:44.160
without a lot of, we've talked about this earlier, without a lot of complexity, without a lot of

00:53:44.160 --> 00:53:51.360
intellectualization. It's like you can almost trust that you're going to be presented with

00:53:51.360 --> 00:53:56.800
what is supposed to be next and then you can do, then you just do that. So that's what came to

00:53:56.800 --> 00:54:04.800
mind when I started thinking about this topic of time. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And the horses

00:54:04.800 --> 00:54:15.520
are great for that because, you know, when you get out of alignment with that, they're going to let

00:54:15.520 --> 00:54:24.320
you know. They pick up on it, right? Oh yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, talking before about

00:54:24.880 --> 00:54:35.280
the other part of my work that I do, I'm always trying to put myself as much as I can in the

00:54:35.280 --> 00:54:46.160
hooves or the shoes of the horse, you know, and their awareness, you know, and that varies

00:54:46.160 --> 00:54:54.400
depending on the horse and their kind of makeup and all that sort of stuff. But it's just

00:54:54.400 --> 00:55:01.880
because we spend so much time in our thoughts or our minds, our awareness

00:55:01.880 --> 00:55:09.400
compared to theirs, they're helping lead us home with that.

00:55:09.400 --> 00:55:17.960
I've had clients that when I first met them, there's so many fragmented

00:55:17.960 --> 00:55:27.600
are parts of themselves that haven't seen me and I've seen them and they've gotten quite

00:55:27.600 --> 00:55:31.520
close and I think, "Oh, they still haven't seen me."

00:55:31.520 --> 00:55:35.800
And then I know how the horses feel.

00:55:35.800 --> 00:55:41.600
When we're going to interact with a horse and we're fragmented or we're not there, we're

00:55:41.600 --> 00:55:50.200
not high and we're not in the moment, they're like, "Oh, that person's not high."

00:55:50.200 --> 00:55:52.400
Yeah, they don't like it.

00:55:52.400 --> 00:55:53.400
They know.

00:55:53.400 --> 00:55:54.400
They really do.

00:55:54.400 --> 00:55:55.400
So, well, yeah.

00:55:55.400 --> 00:55:56.400
So you find that horses can...

00:55:56.400 --> 00:55:57.400
We got lost in it.

00:55:57.400 --> 00:56:08.760
Yeah, do you find that you can, either you yourself or people that you work with, with

00:56:08.760 --> 00:56:15.080
horses, you can help them to entrain their consciousness to the consciousness of the

00:56:15.080 --> 00:56:22.760
horse and thereby become more simple. Which is not to say we become like a horse in terms

00:56:22.760 --> 00:56:27.640
of our perception or our consciousness, but that's what I was saying about the cows. There

00:56:27.640 --> 00:56:33.440
was something so simple and grounded about the cows that just hanging out with them all

00:56:33.440 --> 00:56:39.040
day, I just been trained with their consciousness and just got into this like really subtle,

00:56:39.040 --> 00:56:44.400
settled state, even though I was, you know, working hard shoveling manure and building fences and

00:56:44.400 --> 00:56:49.920
stuff. I think probably a lot of people can relate to this. That's why we love animals so much. They

00:56:49.920 --> 00:56:57.360
not just cute and cuddly, but they actually have a good effect on our mentality, our consciousness.

00:56:57.360 --> 00:57:00.480
Yeah, come to resonance.

00:57:00.480 --> 00:57:02.320
Yeah, that's it. That's the word. Good one.

00:57:03.040 --> 00:57:05.040
in resonance with unity.

00:57:05.040 --> 00:57:07.040
Yeah, yeah.

00:57:07.040 --> 00:57:09.040
Yeah, absolutely.

00:57:09.040 --> 00:57:11.040
I'm sure there's some interesting stories here

00:57:11.040 --> 00:57:13.040
that one could tell, I don't know them,

00:57:13.040 --> 00:57:16.040
but about Native peoples,

00:57:16.040 --> 00:57:19.040
Aborigines in Australia or Native Americans or whatever,

00:57:19.040 --> 00:57:22.040
and their affinity,

00:57:22.040 --> 00:57:24.040
almost like a psychic affinity,

00:57:24.040 --> 00:57:26.040
with animals.

00:57:26.040 --> 00:57:28.040
As a matter of fact, I heard a story about this,

00:57:28.040 --> 00:57:30.040
where this, you know,

00:57:30.040 --> 00:57:33.580
It was some sort of indigenous hunter or something like that.

00:57:33.580 --> 00:57:38.020
And he not only had to worry about the scent he might be

00:57:38.020 --> 00:57:41.740
leaving, depending on where he was and which way the wind was

00:57:41.740 --> 00:57:42.540
going and stuff.

00:57:42.540 --> 00:57:43.740
But he had to worry about--

00:57:43.740 --> 00:57:48.900
not worry, but he had to be mindful of his moods

00:57:48.900 --> 00:57:52.940
and thoughts and so on, because animals could pick up on it.

00:57:52.940 --> 00:57:53.580
Yeah.

00:57:53.580 --> 00:57:54.620
Yeah, absolutely.

00:57:54.620 --> 00:57:55.100
Yeah.

00:57:55.100 --> 00:57:55.700
I love that.

00:57:55.700 --> 00:57:59.700
I love that connection back to our wildness

00:57:59.700 --> 00:58:02.700
and like you say, you know, Indigenous people,

00:58:02.700 --> 00:58:06.500
that connection to all our gifts, you know,

00:58:06.500 --> 00:58:08.420
because as you know,

00:58:08.420 --> 00:58:10.980
the gifts that can open with awakening,

00:58:10.980 --> 00:58:16.500
they're there in everyone, maybe in different ways,

00:58:16.500 --> 00:58:20.300
you know, some people are more leaning towards certain gifts

00:58:20.300 --> 00:58:25.300
and others towards others, but they weren't disconnected,

00:58:25.300 --> 00:58:28.420
you know, the Indigenous people from that,

00:58:28.420 --> 00:58:30.880
that connection with Earth and our wildness,

00:58:30.880 --> 00:58:34.260
the transcendent is in,

00:58:34.260 --> 00:58:36.720
it's right in the middle of the wildness.

00:58:36.720 --> 00:58:39.220
- Yeah. - Right in the middle of that.

00:58:39.220 --> 00:58:42.340
- And there's a point that could be added here,

00:58:42.340 --> 00:58:47.140
which is that it's not that horses are enlightened

00:58:47.140 --> 00:58:49.380
or babies are enlightened

00:58:49.380 --> 00:58:53.340
or indigenous people are enlightened because they're simple.

00:58:55.860 --> 00:58:59.260
That's a quite, and you feel free to disagree with this,

00:58:59.260 --> 00:59:02.060
but I think there's something Ken Wilber talks about

00:59:02.060 --> 00:59:04.580
called the pre-trans fallacy,

00:59:04.580 --> 00:59:08.620
where people say, oh, horses, babies, and so on,

00:59:08.620 --> 00:59:11.220
they're enlightened, we have to get back to that state.

00:59:11.220 --> 00:59:14.680
Well, we don't wanna get back to infancy,

00:59:14.680 --> 00:59:17.460
we want it because we're adults,

00:59:17.460 --> 00:59:20.340
but there's, you can kind of come full circle

00:59:20.340 --> 00:59:23.740
and achieve human maturity and your wisdom

00:59:23.740 --> 00:59:25.860
and your personality and all those things.

00:59:25.860 --> 00:59:30.820
And yet, as Jesus said, be gentle as doves,

00:59:30.820 --> 00:59:34.020
wise as serpents, gentle as doves.

00:59:34.020 --> 00:59:38.780
So you can kind of regain the innocence and simplicity

00:59:38.780 --> 00:59:41.100
of those examples.

00:59:41.100 --> 00:59:44.780
But you're not going to be simplistic.

00:59:44.780 --> 00:59:47.580
You're not going to be infantile.

00:59:47.580 --> 00:59:50.300
You could be very mature and wise.

00:59:50.300 --> 00:59:52.700
And yet, as simple as--

00:59:52.700 --> 00:59:58.180
Yeah, as Jesus also said, "Except ye be as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom

00:59:58.180 --> 00:59:59.180
of heaven."

00:59:59.180 --> 01:00:01.820
Yeah, that's it.

01:00:01.820 --> 01:00:11.340
And when you talk about enlightenment, and babies or horses or anything else being enlightened,

01:00:11.340 --> 01:00:17.860
that whole evolutionary arc, I just don't think that ... I think we like to have it

01:00:17.860 --> 01:00:25.300
wrapped up in kind of a box of that, well, they're there and that's there. And I like to just leave

01:00:25.300 --> 01:00:30.260
it to, well, it's the mystery, isn't it? Just unfolding in different forms.

01:00:30.260 --> 01:00:37.860
So that's good. I mean, I do think there is such a thing as levels of evolution and a whole kind of

01:00:37.860 --> 01:00:46.020
spectrum or scale of evolution. I mean, a mosquito is not the same as a monkey or that kind of thing.

01:00:46.020 --> 01:00:52.180
but you can't really make hard and fast decisions about it. It's just more of a broad understanding.

01:00:52.180 --> 01:01:00.420
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It leaves us kind of more open. You can feel it.

01:01:00.420 --> 01:01:06.740
Yeah, and certainly regardless of the level of evolution of anything, it's all the divine,

01:01:06.740 --> 01:01:13.540
you know, a rock for that matter. I've met some beautiful rocks here on the land.

01:01:14.260 --> 01:01:21.220
Yeah. Okay, so here's a question. We could call this finding safety in the infinite.

01:01:21.220 --> 01:01:26.740
You say that with trauma the body loses its sense of safety, and you speak of a deeper,

01:01:26.740 --> 01:01:32.820
absolute trust that is synonymous with surrender. The ancient traditions speak of our divine nature

01:01:32.820 --> 01:01:39.060
as never having been hurt or damaged, sort of being beyond the possibility of harm. Let's come

01:01:39.060 --> 01:01:46.140
back to like practicalities, how can people sort of establish their connection,

01:01:46.140 --> 01:01:52.780
or establish that as their foundation and thereby be in a state of

01:01:52.780 --> 01:01:56.700
safety regardless of the challenges that life throws at them?

01:01:56.700 --> 01:02:02.100
Well I think that comes back to what we were talking before about grounding.

01:02:02.100 --> 01:02:08.220
That's hugely important for the body and you know you're talking about

01:02:08.220 --> 01:02:10.020
about your conference that you were at,

01:02:10.020 --> 01:02:13.140
it's only in a mild way.

01:02:13.140 --> 01:02:16.100
I know you weren't flipping your lid or anything, but yeah.

01:02:16.100 --> 01:02:18.020
(laughs)

01:02:18.020 --> 01:02:20.700
- I was just kind of hyper-stimulated

01:02:20.700 --> 01:02:23.100
with all the people and the food and the talks.

01:02:23.100 --> 01:02:25.540
(laughs)

01:02:25.540 --> 01:02:27.580
- Yeah, exactly.

01:02:27.580 --> 01:02:30.300
And you had that direct experience of,

01:02:30.300 --> 01:02:31.740
when you grounded yourself,

01:02:31.740 --> 01:02:36.740
then the body can like, oh, okay, I'm safe.

01:02:37.020 --> 01:02:41.180
And so Mother Earth was the conduit to that.

01:02:41.180 --> 01:02:42.180
Mm-hmm.

01:02:42.180 --> 01:02:46.860
It was the bridge for your body, because it's all the one body.

01:02:46.860 --> 01:02:48.220
Yeah.

01:02:48.220 --> 01:02:53.140
And of course, the word "ground" is sometimes associated with being itself, the ground of

01:02:53.140 --> 01:03:01.620
being, you know, pure consciousness or whatever, being the sort of ultimate foundation of everything.

01:03:01.620 --> 01:03:12.620
doesn't mean that fear might not arise when that's coming. The first time I had that fear

01:03:12.620 --> 01:03:20.260
really come up, it was very much a psychological fear of the void. And it was like, "Oh, I've

01:03:20.260 --> 01:03:29.180
never felt ... I'd felt fear before, obviously." But that fear was like, "I'm going to be completely

01:03:29.180 --> 01:03:37.660
taken out like just non-existence and the fear like really arose but it was of a psychological

01:03:37.660 --> 01:03:45.180
constructed self that was gonna never exist again. Was this on the verge of some spiritual shift that

01:03:45.180 --> 01:03:53.980
you went through? Yeah just another opening. Yeah. Yeah. That happens to a lot of people

01:03:53.980 --> 01:03:59.900
there's sort of a threshold you cross where there's a big upsurge of fear after which it's kind of

01:03:59.900 --> 01:04:04.140
like breaking the sound barrier. It's smooth after you break it but until as you approach it, it gets

01:04:04.140 --> 01:04:10.300
really rough. Yeah and I think you know and certainly it for me it wasn't just a one-time

01:04:10.300 --> 01:04:16.860
thing. It wasn't just a one-time break the sound barrier and all is good. It revisited you know

01:04:16.860 --> 01:04:22.460
like the waves come like we're talking about before you know washing, expansion, contraction,

01:04:22.460 --> 01:04:30.140
Yeah. The batches. Yeah, that's it. And so the second time that fear really came up,

01:04:30.140 --> 01:04:39.100
it was experienced very differently and it was just experienced as the survival instinct in the body

01:04:39.100 --> 01:04:46.780
and there wasn't that psychological component of it. And my mind was like, "Oh,

01:04:48.380 --> 01:04:54.540
Like the fear of death is here and it's just a survival mechanism in the body.

01:04:54.540 --> 01:05:03.900
And then the next day in meditation I went into, I suppose, what spiritual people call

01:05:03.900 --> 01:05:11.820
Samadhi, where everything just collapsed. So that fear was like a precursor to the

01:05:11.820 --> 01:05:14.860
Samadhi that happened the next day? It was, yeah.

01:05:16.460 --> 01:05:18.700
Yeah, there's a saying in the Upanishads which goes,

01:05:18.700 --> 01:05:21.260
"Certainly all fear is born of duality."

01:05:21.260 --> 01:05:27.580
And it almost seems like, again, there's this sort of guardian at the gate of unity

01:05:27.580 --> 01:05:36.300
that is a fear membrane that you have to, you know, get through as duality merges into unity.

01:05:36.300 --> 01:05:39.500
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:05:39.500 --> 01:05:43.820
A phrase you use, in fact, you gave us this phrase to put on your little YouTube thumbnail,

01:05:43.820 --> 01:05:47.460
is healing the intimate divide.

01:05:47.460 --> 01:05:49.100
Is that what we're talking about right now?

01:05:49.100 --> 01:05:51.980
Or if not, what is this intimate divide

01:05:51.980 --> 01:05:53.900
that you were referring to in that phrase?

01:05:53.900 --> 01:05:56.980
And what does the process of healing it entail?

01:05:56.980 --> 01:06:01.460
- Yeah, that's absolutely what we were just talking about.

01:06:01.460 --> 01:06:03.500
- Okay, good, good timing.

01:06:03.500 --> 01:06:05.500
- Perfect, perfect timing.

01:06:05.500 --> 01:06:06.540
(laughing)

01:06:06.540 --> 01:06:07.380
Divine timing.

01:06:07.380 --> 01:06:12.060
- Doing the next obvious thing.

01:06:12.060 --> 01:06:16.380
Okay, two questions came in. Let's answer them, ask them.

01:06:16.380 --> 01:06:19.500
This one is from Michael Maitis in London.

01:06:19.500 --> 01:06:21.740
Michael, you're up late.

01:06:21.740 --> 01:06:25.740
Is it possible to manifest our desired reality?

01:06:25.740 --> 01:06:27.740
And if so, how?

01:06:27.740 --> 01:06:29.740
Interesting.

01:06:29.740 --> 01:06:35.740
The question denotes that it's a me doing it.

01:06:35.740 --> 01:06:39.740
That it's a separate someone.

01:06:39.740 --> 01:06:47.500
So I'll answer it in a slightly different way. I think there is something that we

01:06:47.500 --> 01:06:57.260
can offer ourselves to, offer ourselves to something larger than just our humanness,

01:06:57.260 --> 01:07:08.100
offer ourselves to healing and in that way we can align with what wants to

01:07:08.100 --> 01:07:16.420
really unfold, and what wants to really unfold might be better than what we ever could think

01:07:16.420 --> 01:07:17.420
that we want.

01:07:17.420 --> 01:07:26.160
You sort of get these ideas of we want to manifest certain things, we want to create certain

01:07:26.160 --> 01:07:34.460
things in our life, and they're not necessarily going to make us happy, maybe temporarily,

01:07:34.460 --> 01:07:38.340
It depends on what you're interested in.

01:07:38.340 --> 01:07:42.020
Yeah, sort of a let they will be done thing.

01:07:42.020 --> 01:07:44.260
Yeah, yeah.

01:07:44.260 --> 01:07:50.500
And it's understandable, you know, that drive because everybody wants to live a fulfilled

01:07:50.500 --> 01:07:51.500
life.

01:07:51.500 --> 01:07:59.980
You know, everybody wants to be healthy and that's just a common human thing.

01:07:59.980 --> 01:08:08.340
if we can trust that life knows better than us kind of what's good for us, then we can

01:08:08.340 --> 01:08:19.580
go, "Okay, well, let's, as a devotional thing, let's offer ourselves to this path and see

01:08:19.580 --> 01:08:20.580
where it leads."

01:08:20.580 --> 01:08:27.280
You know, there's these popular things like The Secret, and there's this lady named Esther

01:08:27.280 --> 01:08:32.320
Hicks or something who channels some entity called Abraham and it's all about

01:08:32.320 --> 01:08:37.480
manifestation. So manifestation has been a big popular thing in new age circles.

01:08:37.480 --> 01:08:44.560
But like you just said, and it's natural to have desires, we have

01:08:44.560 --> 01:08:49.840
desires, but absolutely yeah I had a teacher who one of his favorite phrases

01:08:49.840 --> 01:08:55.920
was "highest first". There's so many things you could want, want the highest and then

01:08:55.920 --> 01:08:59.920
and then let everything else kind of fall into line after that.

01:08:59.920 --> 01:09:04.920
Yeah, I love that. I love that. Yeah, it's really good.

01:09:04.920 --> 01:09:07.920
I was going to say one other thing about that.

01:09:07.920 --> 01:09:09.920
It's gone now. It might come back.

01:09:09.920 --> 01:09:13.920
Okay, you just go ahead and say it if it does.

01:09:13.920 --> 01:09:19.920
Here is a question from Prachi Dixit in Torrance, California.

01:09:19.920 --> 01:09:23.920
What would you suggest to help us uplift the collective consciousness?

01:09:23.920 --> 01:09:28.920
By uplifting collective, I mean lift humanity to its true nature.

01:09:28.920 --> 01:09:32.920
Yeah, I think that comes back to what we were saying before,

01:09:32.920 --> 01:09:40.920
that we can only be responsible for what's here in our shadows.

01:09:40.920 --> 01:09:46.920
So what's here in our unconscious is it's not just for ourselves.

01:09:46.920 --> 01:09:50.920
That is an offering to all of humanity.

01:09:50.920 --> 01:10:01.040
Our state of being is going to have a profound effect on not only the people and the animals

01:10:01.040 --> 01:10:08.960
close to us in our lives, but that ripples out.

01:10:08.960 --> 01:10:14.360
And that kind of almost goes back to the manifesting question with the trusting of what wants to

01:10:14.360 --> 01:10:22.240
unfold, you know, that you will be given what you need to live out this life, to

01:10:22.240 --> 01:10:29.280
offer. Yeah, yeah, the ripple effect that you mentioned is very important, I think,

01:10:29.280 --> 01:10:35.960
because all of us, all the time, are emanating some kind of influence. And if

01:10:35.960 --> 01:10:40.160
we look at the whole world and the state of it, then, okay, what are we looking at?

01:10:40.160 --> 01:10:45.840
we're looking at the collective total, sum total, of all the influences that are being

01:10:45.840 --> 01:10:48.360
radiated by 8 billion people.

01:10:48.360 --> 01:10:51.200
And obviously it's somewhat lacking.

01:10:51.200 --> 01:10:55.240
So what can we do to help the world radiate a better influence?

01:10:55.240 --> 01:10:58.260
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

01:10:58.260 --> 01:11:04.660
And we don't know what it's going to look like necessarily at the start.

01:11:04.660 --> 01:11:12.940
don't know in what way life is going to want to use us to serve. We have no idea

01:11:12.940 --> 01:11:19.700
and it's just trusting that it's going to find its way. I think it helps to just

01:11:19.700 --> 01:11:29.060
have the desire to be used by life or the divine. You know, St. Francis, "Lord make

01:11:29.060 --> 01:11:32.460
me an instrument of thy peace." You know, if you have that, you know, "Where there is

01:11:32.460 --> 01:11:39.740
this let me so that and so on I think if you have that sort of desire to be a an

01:11:39.740 --> 01:11:44.180
instrument of the divine then you're more likely to be one

01:11:44.180 --> 01:11:52.220
yeah yeah absolutely yeah and you know it can be in like the smallest thing it

01:11:52.220 --> 01:11:57.220
doesn't need to be some big thing it can be like just moment to moment

01:11:58.860 --> 01:12:01.180
Are we radiating that kindness?

01:12:01.180 --> 01:12:05.500
That, are we allowing that compassion to flow through us?

01:12:05.500 --> 01:12:08.300
Weariness, are we unconscious?

01:12:08.300 --> 01:12:10.980
Where it gets blocked, that flow?

01:12:10.980 --> 01:12:13.660
- No, small things are important.

01:12:13.660 --> 01:12:16.060
If we don't do the small things,

01:12:16.060 --> 01:12:18.660
we're probably not gonna do the big things.

01:12:18.660 --> 01:12:19.940
- Yeah, yeah.

01:12:19.940 --> 01:12:22.940
- I mean, I don't wanna seem like some kind of a,

01:12:22.940 --> 01:12:25.900
like I'm tooting my horn, but I can't walk down a sidewalk

01:12:25.900 --> 01:12:28.100
where I see a worm stranded on the sidewalk

01:12:28.100 --> 01:12:29.940
without bending over and picking the worm up

01:12:29.940 --> 01:12:31.940
and throwing it on the grass.

01:12:31.940 --> 01:12:34.300
It's going to die in the sun if it lies on the sidewalk.

01:12:34.300 --> 01:12:38.540
Yeah, it's beautiful.

01:12:38.540 --> 01:12:40.860
It's like a devotion.

01:12:40.860 --> 01:12:42.420
Devotion's coming through.

01:12:42.420 --> 01:12:43.780
I said, oh, the poor little thing.

01:12:43.780 --> 01:12:44.340
It's stranded.

01:12:44.340 --> 01:12:45.300
I've got to pick it up.

01:12:45.300 --> 01:12:47.740
[LAUGHTER]

01:12:47.740 --> 01:12:49.540
OK, devotion, good timing.

01:12:49.540 --> 01:12:52.860
My next point was about devotion and simplicity.

01:12:52.860 --> 01:12:55.380
And devotion is a recurring theme in your work.

01:12:55.380 --> 01:12:59.380
You speak of a true devotion of life itself that never abandons us.

01:12:59.380 --> 01:13:07.700
Okay, what do you think is the relationship between this devotion that you refer to and

01:13:07.700 --> 01:13:11.460
simplicity that you say is at the heart of any authentic realization?

01:13:11.460 --> 01:13:16.500
Oh, you just highlighted it beautifully in your story about the words.

01:13:16.500 --> 01:13:17.860
Okay, yeah.

01:13:17.860 --> 01:13:21.220
You did it for me, Rick.

01:13:21.220 --> 01:13:21.780
Okay, good.

01:13:21.780 --> 01:13:24.040
- (laughs)

01:13:24.040 --> 01:13:31.080
- We've got an invasive weed that grows here.

01:13:31.080 --> 01:13:33.500
It's a South African weed called Capeweed.

01:13:33.500 --> 01:13:37.560
And it really, you know, with cleared ground,

01:13:37.560 --> 01:13:39.200
it really takes over.

01:13:39.200 --> 01:13:44.680
And it's not good, anyone who's out there listening

01:13:44.680 --> 01:13:47.840
who's horsey knows that it's not good for horses.

01:13:47.840 --> 01:13:49.520
- Right, and it's probably invading

01:13:49.520 --> 01:13:51.760
their grassy fields and things.

01:13:51.760 --> 01:13:54.000
- Yeah, well actually,

01:13:54.000 --> 01:13:56.800
like yeah, some of the native Australian grasses

01:13:56.800 --> 01:13:58.760
are really good for horses.

01:13:58.760 --> 01:14:00.000
It's kind of interesting,

01:14:00.000 --> 01:14:01.440
kind of that whole, you know,

01:14:01.440 --> 01:14:03.680
what's actually good for,

01:14:03.680 --> 01:14:05.120
what would actually be good for the earth

01:14:05.120 --> 01:14:07.240
to be regenerated back to the native grasses

01:14:07.240 --> 01:14:09.320
would be good for the animals,

01:14:09.320 --> 01:14:12.240
would be, you know, that whole sort of.

01:14:12.240 --> 01:14:13.680
But yeah, the Capeweed,

01:14:13.680 --> 01:14:16.920
it's really quite bad here.

01:14:18.840 --> 01:14:29.560
And it's the job to pull it all out by hand is it's far more enormous than my body's capable of.

01:14:29.560 --> 01:14:30.060
Right.

01:14:30.060 --> 01:14:32.120
But I do it anyway.

01:14:32.120 --> 01:14:33.240
Oh, okay.

01:14:33.240 --> 01:14:42.840
And as I'm doing it, it's this simple act of devotion.

01:14:44.040 --> 01:14:50.760
just me and the horses and the paddock and the wades. Did you ever hear the story of the

01:14:50.760 --> 01:14:58.680
old man and the starfish? Yeah. Yeah, made a difference to that one, he says, as he picks

01:14:58.680 --> 01:15:02.280
the starfish up. And there's thousands of them on the beach. And the kid says,

01:15:02.280 --> 01:15:05.320
what difference does it make if you throw one in the water? Well, it made a difference to that one.

01:15:06.440 --> 01:15:10.640
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:15:10.640 --> 01:15:12.200
You guide meditations--

01:15:12.200 --> 01:15:15.240
I've heard some of your meditations on YouTube--

01:15:15.240 --> 01:15:17.720
to evoke the still mind of the divine.

01:15:17.720 --> 01:15:22.400
This is a good one.

01:15:22.400 --> 01:15:23.960
The second verse of the Yoga Sutras

01:15:23.960 --> 01:15:28.840
say, "Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind."

01:15:28.840 --> 01:15:31.400
Of course, it's in Sanskrit, but that's what it means.

01:15:31.400 --> 01:15:36.680
So, how in your opinion does quieting the mind

01:15:36.680 --> 01:15:42.280
help us access the timeless, peaceful state, the ground state?

01:15:42.280 --> 01:15:45.880
Well, it's more about where our attention goes

01:15:45.880 --> 01:15:52.120
than trying to quiet the mind. So, if our attention is constantly caught

01:15:52.120 --> 01:15:56.680
by thought, then that's what we'll get more off,

01:15:56.680 --> 01:16:04.120
just trapped in thought, but if our attention can rest in that gap,

01:16:04.120 --> 01:16:13.160
beyond thought, in the stillness, we get more of that. So that's sort of the tool that we have is

01:16:13.160 --> 01:16:21.160
where is our attention. Do you find that like when you're busy doing something, could be a simple

01:16:21.160 --> 01:16:26.840
thing like washing the dishes or a little bit more complicated like driving a car or even you know

01:16:26.840 --> 01:16:33.480
like right now having a conversation um do you find that there's a dimension that has

01:16:33.480 --> 01:16:41.320
that is always in stillness which maybe there wasn't when you were you know 15 years old or

01:16:41.320 --> 01:16:50.440
something but it's it's become a kind of a natural feature of your experience yeah i mean it was

01:16:50.440 --> 01:16:58.760
certainly there when I was 15, but I had no idea. It was kind of overshadowed by stuff, probably

01:16:58.760 --> 01:17:04.680
then. Too fragmented. Right, right. Yeah, I mean, it's there for everybody, but most people are

01:17:04.680 --> 01:17:11.480
overshadowed. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, it's kind of the music's too loud. Someone's turned the stereo

01:17:11.480 --> 01:17:12.800
Oh, too loud.

01:17:12.800 --> 01:17:15.000
Yeah.

01:17:15.000 --> 01:17:19.360
You took a fair amount about embodiment and also mysticism.

01:17:19.360 --> 01:17:27.440
So you seem to speak of a blend of mystical and groundedness.

01:17:27.440 --> 01:17:31.280
And you reference the archetypes of the divine mother

01:17:31.280 --> 01:17:32.800
and the warrior.

01:17:32.800 --> 01:17:36.000
And you work with subtle energies and benevolent helpers,

01:17:36.000 --> 01:17:38.520
all while remaining deeply rooted in the physical.

01:17:38.520 --> 01:17:40.820
So these benevolent helpers--

01:17:40.820 --> 01:17:47.720
I presume you're talking about guardian angels or something of that nature, some subtle beings

01:17:47.720 --> 01:17:54.300
that aren't obvious to the human perception, but are nonetheless among us and helping us?

01:17:54.300 --> 01:17:57.300
Yeah, I wish I'd known about them sooner.

01:17:57.300 --> 01:17:59.660
Well, they knew about you.

01:17:59.660 --> 01:18:01.900
They knew about me.

01:18:01.900 --> 01:18:04.580
They know about all of us.

01:18:04.580 --> 01:18:11.620
I don't really label them as sort of guardian angels or guardian anything necessarily.

01:18:11.620 --> 01:18:19.700
Just that they're there. They're there and they're support for us.

01:18:19.700 --> 01:18:23.460
How do you know they're there? Somebody might ask, how do you know they're there?

01:18:26.260 --> 01:18:35.780
As your path goes and as the more subtle senses open up, knowing things in that subtle realm,

01:18:35.780 --> 01:18:42.500
it's like I know that you're here talking to me. It's like that. It's really hard to explain

01:18:42.500 --> 01:18:53.700
that knowing. It just is. And when it comes through with really profound things

01:18:54.820 --> 01:19:03.380
that you need right in that moment and it moves you and it moves that emotion like you know it's

01:19:03.380 --> 01:19:13.940
authentic. Yeah. That's probably the best way to explain it. It happens a lot for me through

01:19:13.940 --> 01:19:21.380
just like a clear audience, sometimes a clear cognizance, just knowing,

01:19:22.660 --> 01:19:25.060
like hearing a voice that you know is not yours.

01:19:25.060 --> 01:19:27.220
Yeah, like intuition.

01:19:27.220 --> 01:19:32.100
Different to my intuition, and that's how I know.

01:19:32.100 --> 01:19:36.820
Like I know when it's like intuition that's arising in me

01:19:36.820 --> 01:19:41.140
or when it's another subtle being that's a helping guide.

01:19:41.140 --> 01:19:45.220
Ah, that's good. I bet you a lot of people listening can relate to that.

01:19:45.220 --> 01:19:49.540
For that first question, the manifesting question,

01:19:50.900 --> 01:19:56.500
that was the point that I was going to say that if he's offering himself to

01:19:56.500 --> 01:20:01.380
his spiritual path and his healing or whatever's happening for him,

01:20:01.380 --> 01:20:09.460
tuning into that internal navigation, the clearer we get, the easier that is. And that's going to

01:20:09.460 --> 01:20:17.700
help him in the fulfillment of a good life. Yeah, so it might seem a little esoteric to

01:20:17.700 --> 01:20:22.260
some people to think that there are these sort of subtle beings of some kind that are hanging

01:20:22.260 --> 01:20:29.620
around and helping us out, but it really can become obvious, kind of second nature, and

01:20:29.620 --> 01:20:32.580
almost something you can rely on, you know.

01:20:32.580 --> 01:20:37.780
Unless they decide that you need to do it on your own.

01:20:37.780 --> 01:20:43.460
Yeah, or unless you're pushing in the wrong direction, then they might block it, or I

01:20:43.460 --> 01:20:50.300
I don't know if it's them or what, but you might meet resistance and maybe if you're

01:20:50.300 --> 01:20:53.820
wise you think, "Okay, there must be a reason for this resistance.

01:20:53.820 --> 01:20:57.980
Am I supposed to push on through it or am I getting a sign that this is not the direction

01:20:57.980 --> 01:20:58.980
I should go on?

01:20:58.980 --> 01:21:01.220
I should go over this way instead."

01:21:01.220 --> 01:21:10.540
Yeah, and it's a whole journey that, like learning to navigate the realizations and

01:21:10.540 --> 01:21:11.540
the different stages.

01:21:11.540 --> 01:21:20.980
But yeah, they've certainly helped me if I've been maybe going on, "Oh, go down that way,"

01:21:20.980 --> 01:21:27.260
they're like, "No, maybe don't go that way."

01:21:27.260 --> 01:21:34.380
And it is very different to my own arising of knowing that.

01:21:34.380 --> 01:21:39.460
And then when we don't listen, we all get that, and then we don't listen.

01:21:39.460 --> 01:21:44.340
And that, even the not listening, is intelligent, because there's a lesson there that needs

01:21:44.340 --> 01:21:47.420
to be played out for whatever reason.

01:21:47.420 --> 01:21:48.420
Yeah.

01:21:48.420 --> 01:21:54.260
I don't perceive these things visually, but I had a friend who did, and he would say that

01:21:54.260 --> 01:21:59.760
he could be in a group of people, like that conference I referred to, and he would see

01:21:59.760 --> 01:22:04.780
these beings of some kind around people.

01:22:04.780 --> 01:22:08.420
And he didn't know exactly what they were doing, but everyone seemed to have their little

01:22:08.420 --> 01:22:14.140
attendance. And this is a whole bunch of spiritual people, spiritual teachers and stuff who are

01:22:14.140 --> 01:22:19.460
on this, in this conference. And you know, there are a lot of teachers and traditions

01:22:19.460 --> 01:22:23.900
who say that, you know, there are probably more beings in the subtle realm than there

01:22:23.900 --> 01:22:29.880
are in the gross. I interviewed this guy named David Spangler, who was one of the founders

01:22:29.880 --> 01:22:34.920
of the Fyndhorn community in Scotland. And, you know, he had been seeing and communicating

01:22:34.920 --> 01:22:41.640
with these things all his life. I think it's interesting. I mean, you know, it'd be big

01:22:41.640 --> 01:22:48.280
news if a UFO landed on the White House lawn, but think of the fact that there could be more

01:22:48.280 --> 01:22:55.320
beings in this world of a subtle nature than there are gross beings such as we, and that's

01:22:55.320 --> 01:23:04.920
even bigger news in a way. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's kind of, it keeps us humble too, I think.

01:23:04.920 --> 01:23:12.840
It keeps us humble that we don't get too wrapped up in our own stuff to know that there's

01:23:12.840 --> 01:23:20.280
these beings in other realms and perhaps we can't have the full picture here.

01:23:21.480 --> 01:23:27.800
I wonder if there'll come a time when humanity is so evolved that it'll be common for

01:23:27.800 --> 01:23:35.960
people's awareness to encompass a broader range of creation and it'll be kind of

01:23:35.960 --> 01:23:42.600
ordinary for us to perceive these subtler beings as opposed to just being some

01:23:42.600 --> 01:23:49.000
extraordinary thing that very few people have. Yeah, well that's it and it does, it becomes,

01:23:49.720 --> 01:23:51.720
it just becomes normal.

01:23:51.720 --> 01:23:56.600
Things that before, when you're sort of contracted and cut off,

01:23:56.600 --> 01:24:00.440
that would have just seemed like mind-blowing.

01:24:00.440 --> 01:24:08.360
It's just, of course, it's just normal. It becomes normal. It doesn't seem odd at all.

01:24:08.360 --> 01:24:10.040
Yeah, I know what you mean.

01:24:10.040 --> 01:24:10.840
Very beautiful.

01:24:10.840 --> 01:24:16.760
Yeah, a friend sent me a whole long, like 20-minute message the other day,

01:24:16.760 --> 01:24:18.680
and I hadn't talked to him for about a year,

01:24:19.240 --> 01:24:21.740
But I had been just thinking about him for a couple of days.

01:24:21.740 --> 01:24:24.820
And so when his message came, I called him up on WhatsApp.

01:24:24.820 --> 01:24:26.420
And I said, well, I'm not surprised

01:24:26.420 --> 01:24:27.340
that you sent me that message.

01:24:27.340 --> 01:24:30.180
I've been thinking about you for a couple of days.

01:24:30.180 --> 01:24:32.980
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:24:32.980 --> 01:24:34.300
And that's really common.

01:24:34.300 --> 01:24:35.900
Yeah.

01:24:35.900 --> 01:24:38.020
You shared a beautiful experience

01:24:38.020 --> 01:24:40.820
of the Divine Mother gazing through you.

01:24:40.820 --> 01:24:42.940
Can you speak about that a little bit more,

01:24:42.940 --> 01:24:45.980
and about the feminine aspect of the Divine,

01:24:45.980 --> 01:24:50.140
what it means to be an embodied mystic?

01:24:50.140 --> 01:24:55.020
I think what you're referring to was with my little doggie.

01:24:55.020 --> 01:25:03.780
When I was lovingly, very lovingly gazing upon him, there's that personal relationship,

01:25:03.780 --> 01:25:04.780
obviously.

01:25:04.780 --> 01:25:07.220
There's no one else that is his mother.

01:25:07.220 --> 01:25:13.580
I'm his mother, apart from his actual dog mother.

01:25:13.580 --> 01:25:23.140
I'm gazing upon him with all this love in that personal relationship, my motherly love, and

01:25:23.140 --> 01:25:30.820
then that personal just gets pushed aside and then it's like literally divine mother

01:25:30.820 --> 01:25:43.580
and gazing upon him. Unconditional love. And just a strange, so much love and intimacy,

01:25:43.580 --> 01:25:51.220
but like a strange detachment. There's not that personal relationship. It's not there.

01:25:51.220 --> 01:25:57.300
There's something else. It reminds me of a, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi wrote

01:25:57.300 --> 01:26:03.620
this poem called "Love and God," and there was a section in the poem where he said, "Personal

01:26:03.620 --> 01:26:10.420
love is concentrated universal love." And they said, "Ah," he said, "my heart flows when I say

01:26:10.420 --> 01:26:15.700
personal love is concentrated universal love." But I guess we could think of, you know, the

01:26:15.700 --> 01:26:23.780
Divine Mother or universal love as being a field of which we are just little conduits. And, you know,

01:26:23.780 --> 01:26:29.540
and ordinarily we feel love and it seems like it's kind of coming from us but probably it's

01:26:29.540 --> 01:26:37.700
coming through us to whatever extent it can. It sounds like in that case you know you

01:26:37.700 --> 01:26:44.740
had the realization that you know it was a much broader field that you were just the

01:26:45.700 --> 01:26:51.460
kind of a magnifying glass for. That's it, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

01:26:51.460 --> 01:26:57.860
That again is, I mean, I keep going to the global implications of this stuff, but

01:26:57.860 --> 01:27:04.180
you know, again, imagine if everybody in the world could be conscious conduits of universal love.

01:27:05.860 --> 01:27:11.620
It would be such a different world. Yeah.

01:27:11.620 --> 01:27:18.740
And that's all. It's inevitable, I think. It's inevitable. It's just,

01:27:18.740 --> 01:27:24.100
are we going to commit to, you know, our devotion, bringing our human

01:27:24.100 --> 01:27:28.180
devotion to our paths? Are we going to do that

01:27:28.180 --> 01:27:32.740
now, or are we going to wait? How much suffering is going to happen

01:27:32.740 --> 01:27:41.620
between those two points. Yeah. I mean there's no practical reason why everybody in the world

01:27:41.620 --> 01:27:48.020
couldn't be properly fed and housed and cared for with health care and everything else.

01:27:48.020 --> 01:27:56.580
It's just human, you know, limitations screwing it all up. These points, I mean, they seem obvious

01:27:56.580 --> 01:28:03.940
to us, I think, but I don't seem to be obvious to everybody in the world because, you know,

01:28:03.940 --> 01:28:10.440
people keep seeming to think that some particular, you know, political or economic or solution

01:28:10.440 --> 01:28:14.240
is going to come along to solve all our problems.

01:28:14.240 --> 01:28:20.980
Aldous Huxley said that there are no, all these problems that beset us in the world are not

01:28:20.980 --> 01:28:23.460
problems, they're symptoms.

01:28:23.460 --> 01:28:30.460
symptoms of the lack of the kind of realization that you and I are talking about.

01:28:30.460 --> 01:28:34.460
Yeah, yeah, symptoms of the core wound, separation.

01:28:34.460 --> 01:28:36.460
Right, on a mass scale.

01:28:36.460 --> 01:28:37.460
Yeah.

01:28:37.460 --> 01:28:43.460
You know, we were talking a minute ago about the Divine Feminine peering through your eyes at your dog.

01:28:43.460 --> 01:28:45.460
(laughter)

01:28:45.460 --> 01:28:50.460
There's also kind of the warrior archetype. I don't know if you talk about that.

01:28:50.460 --> 01:28:54.460
But how do you balance these two energies?

01:28:54.460 --> 01:28:59.460
And actually when you think of mothers and their mother they love,

01:28:59.460 --> 01:29:02.460
they often balance that with the warrior archetype,

01:29:02.460 --> 01:29:07.460
having to rescue a child from a vicious dog or whatever.

01:29:07.460 --> 01:29:11.460
But speak to that a little bit.

01:29:11.460 --> 01:29:13.460
Yeah, that's it.

01:29:13.460 --> 01:29:17.460
And that's that whole not rejecting our...

01:29:17.460 --> 01:29:22.860
I mean, I'm calling it wildness just because I like that word.

01:29:22.860 --> 01:29:29.740
Rejecting our wildness, rejecting that innate intelligence that would do that, that would

01:29:29.740 --> 01:29:39.300
protect the child, that would stand up for oneself or would stand up for others from

01:29:39.300 --> 01:29:46.620
that place that's not divided from life itself.

01:29:46.620 --> 01:29:56.260
And I think that there's probably still something in us that wants to separate that out, like

01:29:56.260 --> 01:30:04.780
that they can't coexist in harmony, that all-loving, unconditional, divine Mother that seems warm

01:30:04.780 --> 01:30:11.500
and welcoming, that it can coexist with the warrior archetype.

01:30:11.500 --> 01:30:14.180
And that's actually really necessary.

01:30:14.180 --> 01:30:18.180
Are you saying it can but it often doesn't?

01:30:18.180 --> 01:30:28.540
Yeah, it often doesn't and there's often, I think, a collective kind of pushing away

01:30:28.540 --> 01:30:29.540
of that.

01:30:29.540 --> 01:30:34.340
You know, like, "Well, I can't be that because I have to be this."

01:30:34.340 --> 01:30:42.140
You know, like that whole idea of it rather than it just being what it is, the truth of

01:30:42.140 --> 01:30:48.820
it and the truth of it is that it does coexist. Yeah, sometimes I think of

01:30:48.820 --> 01:30:57.740
spiritual evolution as a greater and greater capacity to contain opposites

01:30:57.740 --> 01:31:04.460
and paradoxes, not having to be black and white on and off this or that but being

01:31:04.460 --> 01:31:11.500
able to sort of hold the multi-dimensional paradoxical nature of

01:31:11.500 --> 01:31:18.220
the universe within your awareness. Yeah, yeah, and to be whatever the moment is.

01:31:18.220 --> 01:31:24.860
Yeah, whatever it calls for. Whatever it calls for, yeah, and it could come through as like a fierceness

01:31:24.860 --> 01:31:34.060
in that warrior. I mean Joan of Arc is a striking example of that. Yeah, she's a little teenage girl.

01:31:34.060 --> 01:31:40.860
Yeah, you can't fathom it, can you? I mean, and the unconsciousness of what they did to her.

01:31:40.860 --> 01:31:52.140
Right. If you read her biography, there was a profound mystical dimension to her that somehow

01:31:52.140 --> 01:31:56.100
impelled her to take on the role that she did.

01:31:56.100 --> 01:32:03.140
Yeah. She certainly had surrender sewn up, that's for sure.

01:32:03.140 --> 01:32:07.260
Yeah, what they did to her. You know, that reminds me of something I discussed in my

01:32:07.260 --> 01:32:10.700
I interviewed last week with Edamar Kurein,

01:32:10.700 --> 01:32:13.900
who's this Irish mystical woman.

01:32:13.900 --> 01:32:16.380
But we were talking about all the horrible--

01:32:16.380 --> 01:32:17.820
not that we want to dwell on this--

01:32:17.820 --> 01:32:21.700
but all the horrible things that have been done to mystics,

01:32:21.700 --> 01:32:25.060
and even like herbalists or whatever,

01:32:25.060 --> 01:32:27.940
during the dark ages, during the Middle Ages,

01:32:27.940 --> 01:32:31.740
people being burned to the stake for knowing about herbs

01:32:31.740 --> 01:32:34.180
or something like that.

01:32:34.180 --> 01:32:36.460
Or having mystical experiences.

01:32:36.460 --> 01:32:46.780
just it's probably in a way it's a sign of for optimism because these days such things

01:32:46.780 --> 01:32:55.580
are coming to the fore and people aren't being killed for them. They're being respected and

01:32:55.580 --> 01:32:59.020
it's being recognized more and more widely so that might give us hope for the world.

01:33:00.380 --> 01:33:08.700
Yeah, yeah. It's becoming more common, but I think that it's still in the collective, that fear of

01:33:08.700 --> 01:33:20.220
the mystical, and really it's this fear of death, isn't it? When you get right down to it,

01:33:20.220 --> 01:33:25.580
that fear of death, the fear of the unknown, the fear of what they can't control.

01:33:27.020 --> 01:33:34.220
Yeah, I mean just speaking of religious traditions, usually what happens after some great seer comes

01:33:34.220 --> 01:33:41.420
and establishes a whole new wave of knowledge is, after a generation or two, the administrators move

01:33:41.420 --> 01:33:49.420
in and take over the whole thing. And then they don't understand the mystics and they feel threatened

01:33:49.420 --> 01:33:55.420
by them. And so mystics end up getting persecuted and the whole thing becomes a complete polar

01:33:55.420 --> 01:34:01.180
opposite of what its founder intended. And then you've got mystic's intergenerational trauma.

01:34:01.180 --> 01:34:12.460
Yeah, really. Yeah. I mean, there's people that knew me prior to awakening and they might not

01:34:12.460 --> 01:34:20.460
come and say it to me, but they probably think I've totally lost my mind, you know, because it's so

01:34:21.180 --> 01:34:25.980
far from their paradigm of life.

01:34:25.980 --> 01:34:29.980
Yeah. They can't fathom it. They can't fathom it, you know, and it's

01:34:29.980 --> 01:34:34.620
um, they don't realize that that's actually, um,

01:34:34.620 --> 01:34:40.460
rather than an insanity, it's actually coming into sanity,

01:34:40.460 --> 01:34:47.580
the whole awakening process. And, you know, again, it's a matter of

01:34:47.580 --> 01:34:50.780
what is the norm. And someone like, someone like you is an

01:34:50.780 --> 01:35:01.060
outlier. You know, you're not the norm, thank God. But, you know, there could, there could

01:35:01.060 --> 01:35:07.420
and hopefully will become a society in which, you know, mystics are the norm. Which is not

01:35:07.420 --> 01:35:12.180
to say they'll all be sitting around, you know, contemplating their belly buttons, though

01:35:12.180 --> 01:35:19.840
practical stuff can get done. But from the kind of the normal higher state of consciousness

01:35:19.840 --> 01:35:22.000
is that everyone will be living.

01:35:22.000 --> 01:35:25.520
And then, someone who's not living that

01:35:25.520 --> 01:35:28.080
will be the aberration or the oddball.

01:35:28.080 --> 01:35:34.000
It's like, even think about how the world has changed

01:35:34.000 --> 01:35:35.960
since, let's say, the 1800s.

01:35:35.960 --> 01:35:39.320
And everything we took for granted in the 1800s,

01:35:39.320 --> 01:35:42.760
and a train was about as fast as anything could ever travel,

01:35:42.760 --> 01:35:44.420
and things like that.

01:35:44.420 --> 01:35:49.320
And there was no conception that there was

01:35:49.320 --> 01:35:52.380
other galaxies out there, even that we were in a galaxy.

01:35:52.380 --> 01:35:54.100
People didn't know what we were in.

01:35:54.100 --> 01:35:56.700
And now look at all the things we take for granted.

01:35:56.700 --> 01:36:00.780
I mean, look at our cell phone is a much more powerful

01:36:00.780 --> 01:36:03.220
computer than the computer that was used to get

01:36:03.220 --> 01:36:06.360
the astronauts to the moon.

01:36:06.360 --> 01:36:08.780
And we carry it around in our pockets.

01:36:08.780 --> 01:36:10.220
They can do all this stuff.

01:36:10.220 --> 01:36:13.580
So, you know, and the pace of change is accelerating.

01:36:13.580 --> 01:36:17.260
And AI, I don't think people realize

01:36:17.260 --> 01:36:21.220
what an earth-shaking development AI is

01:36:21.220 --> 01:36:24.460
and how it's going to really shake things up

01:36:24.460 --> 01:36:26.500
in the next, even in the next couple of years.

01:36:26.500 --> 01:36:27.660
It already is.

01:36:27.660 --> 01:36:30.220
Amazon has more robots working for it now

01:36:30.220 --> 01:36:31.420
than it does people.

01:36:31.420 --> 01:36:35.660
But anyway, as Dylan said, the times there are changing

01:36:35.660 --> 01:36:40.660
and it's exciting to be in the midst of it.

01:36:40.660 --> 01:36:44.940
But I think it has, it's not just technological change,

01:36:44.940 --> 01:36:46.420
I think it's spiritual change

01:36:46.420 --> 01:36:52.660
there's a real renaissance going on in that regard. Yeah, yeah. I saw you interviewed,

01:36:52.660 --> 01:37:03.940
I can't remember his surname, Father Sean, someone Irish? Oh yeah, Djaramud Ormulku,

01:37:03.940 --> 01:37:11.380
the Irish mystic about a month ago. Oh, Sean O'Leary. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, Sean O'Leary,

01:37:11.380 --> 01:37:12.380
Yeah, yeah.

01:37:12.380 --> 01:37:13.380
Yeah, he was a cool guy.

01:37:13.380 --> 01:37:17.540
And he was saying about his experience with a mystical being, saying that there was going

01:37:17.540 --> 01:37:22.940
to be three kind of segments of the evolutionary arc of humanity.

01:37:22.940 --> 01:37:23.940
Huh.

01:37:23.940 --> 01:37:27.420
I forgot what he said because it was a few years ago, but go ahead and remind us.

01:37:27.420 --> 01:37:35.700
Yeah, something about homeopsychopathia or something, and then there was homo spiritualis

01:37:35.700 --> 01:37:38.700
and then homo artificialis.

01:37:38.700 --> 01:37:40.700
I feel like a cyborg.

01:37:40.700 --> 01:37:47.700
There could be. I saw this little video the other day of this robot that's wandering around Austin, Texas.

01:37:47.700 --> 01:37:52.700
And it goes up to people and introduces itself and says, "Hey, nice Apple watch you have."

01:37:52.700 --> 01:37:57.700
"Hey, cool t-shirt." You know, and he can pick out all kinds of details about the person.

01:37:57.700 --> 01:38:02.700
And the reason there's a buzz about it is that nobody knows who owns this robot or where it came from

01:38:02.700 --> 01:38:06.700
or why it's wandering the streets of Austin.

01:38:06.700 --> 01:38:09.180
He's saying, "I'm not anybody's."

01:38:09.180 --> 01:38:10.180
He's sovereign.

01:38:10.180 --> 01:38:11.180
No one's slave.

01:38:11.180 --> 01:38:12.180
Yeah.

01:38:12.180 --> 01:38:13.180
Yeah.

01:38:13.180 --> 01:38:22.180
But when you were talking about 1800s, it drew my attention to horses, because obviously

01:38:22.180 --> 01:38:31.500
in the past, horses would have been so pivotal in our society.

01:38:31.500 --> 01:38:38.860
And I think now, with the raising of consciousness and evolutionary art that we're on, it's like

01:38:38.860 --> 01:38:50.460
a time of giving back to them, because our modern, all the modern comforts that we enjoy

01:38:50.460 --> 01:38:57.660
were literally grown off the back of horses.

01:38:57.660 --> 01:39:05.740
a lot of instances as kind of like slaves, really. Because if it wasn't for horses, we'd

01:39:05.740 --> 01:39:15.740
probably still be, I don't know, hunter-gatherers or something. They really advanced humanity.

01:39:15.740 --> 01:39:21.460
Sometimes people can have a negative idea or association. Not everyone has a positive

01:39:21.460 --> 01:39:27.780
idea or association with horses. More like, "Oh, well, you know, a really cold-hearted kind of,

01:39:27.780 --> 01:39:33.060
well, why would you bother? It's a lot of work," or it's a lot of whatever. And

01:39:33.060 --> 01:39:43.060
our gratitude to them is due, even if you've never had anything to do with them.

01:39:43.060 --> 01:39:50.340
Yeah, that's nice. And our gratitude to all the animal species. I mean, we've really given them

01:39:50.340 --> 01:39:56.980
a raw deal. You know, I forget who it was, it might have been Einstein or maybe it was

01:39:56.980 --> 01:40:06.100
Gandhi. Some quote about how, you know, you can kind of measure the level of evolution

01:40:06.100 --> 01:40:10.500
of humanity by the way it treats animals, something like that. And we're not doing so

01:40:10.500 --> 01:40:17.500
well by that measure yet. Not yet. Yeah, there's just, I mean, I live in a town where, I mean

01:40:17.500 --> 01:40:21.580
in a state where there are 3 million people and 23 million

01:40:21.580 --> 01:40:22.700
pigs.

01:40:22.700 --> 01:40:25.940
And there's a big controversy going on right now

01:40:25.940 --> 01:40:29.380
because California, which is more progressive than Iowa,

01:40:29.380 --> 01:40:33.660
insists that pigs be given at least 24 square feet of space

01:40:33.660 --> 01:40:36.380
to live in all their lives, which is what?

01:40:36.380 --> 01:40:37.620
Four by six.

01:40:37.620 --> 01:40:40.940
That's not a whole lot of space.

01:40:40.940 --> 01:40:42.780
But the Iowa pig farmers are saying,

01:40:42.780 --> 01:40:46.780
oh, you're infringing upon our business model.

01:40:46.780 --> 01:40:51.140
it's not practical to give them that much space and that they want

01:40:51.140 --> 01:40:56.020
them to be in little confinements where they can't even turn around because they

01:40:56.020 --> 01:41:00.540
somehow make more money and pigs are more intelligent than dogs by most measures.

01:41:00.540 --> 01:41:05.980
Yeah they're amazing. Yeah so this kind of thing I mean there's got to be some

01:41:05.980 --> 01:41:13.260
karmic consequences to the way we treat animals. Yeah that cut off it's just yeah

01:41:13.260 --> 01:41:18.860
And that's that whole thing goes back to the second question of like how do we

01:41:18.860 --> 01:41:26.900
how do we help? We help by attending to what's here because I think that the

01:41:26.900 --> 01:41:33.740
the level of compassion that is allowed to flow for all the parts of ourselves

01:41:33.740 --> 01:41:40.340
that are in pain or unconscious or wounded is directly proportional to what

01:41:40.340 --> 01:41:49.340
then flows out for others. And you can see it even with people that are very loving and

01:41:49.340 --> 01:41:58.140
kind but they haven't gone to that depth. And there'll be that moment of like, "Oh,

01:41:58.140 --> 01:42:05.860
that hurts," because they're not able to include that suffering of whether it's an animal or

01:42:05.860 --> 01:42:14.140
a person or whatever being in, but it's because there's parts of themselves that are suffering

01:42:14.140 --> 01:42:16.420
that haven't been included.

01:42:16.420 --> 01:42:22.140
So you're saying that if they could somehow reconcile or heal their own suffering, their

01:42:22.140 --> 01:42:30.540
own shadows, then compassion would be a spontaneous outcome or flow from that.

01:42:30.540 --> 01:42:33.740
Yeah, inevitably, I think.

01:42:33.740 --> 01:42:34.740
It's inevitable.

01:42:34.740 --> 01:42:35.740
Yeah.

01:42:35.740 --> 01:42:45.740
It's interesting, out of all the sages or mystics, Ramana Maharshi was one that I didn't know

01:42:45.740 --> 01:42:52.740
anything about him, but I'd heard his name and I was drawn to him, felt drawn to him

01:42:52.740 --> 01:42:53.740
over others.

01:42:53.740 --> 01:43:01.740
And then I found out later that apparently he was a real animal lover.

01:43:01.740 --> 01:43:08.460
Oh yeah, crows, he had a cow named Lakshmi, whom he considered to be enlightened.

01:43:08.460 --> 01:43:13.740
And he would often, while he was giving darshan, he would often just be staring at the squirrels

01:43:13.740 --> 01:43:16.620
climbing up and down the trees and things like that.

01:43:16.620 --> 01:43:18.620
It's funny, isn't it?

01:43:18.620 --> 01:43:23.540
Talking about all our capacities, how we have that capacity to know.

01:43:23.540 --> 01:43:29.980
So there was knowing in me that there was a resonance with him, with that whole connection

01:43:29.980 --> 01:43:32.780
with the animals and that love for them.

01:43:32.780 --> 01:43:35.020
Yeah, a lot of sages have been like that.

01:43:35.020 --> 01:43:36.300
St. Francis is famous.

01:43:36.300 --> 01:43:38.780
There's all these paintings of him with birds landing on him

01:43:38.780 --> 01:43:39.940
and things like that.

01:43:39.940 --> 01:43:42.700
And there was a story about Yogananda

01:43:42.700 --> 01:43:46.180
that this deer had come to live in the ashram

01:43:46.180 --> 01:43:48.180
and somebody fed it too much milk

01:43:48.180 --> 01:43:52.380
and it was dying because it had over drunk milk.

01:43:52.380 --> 01:43:54.660
And Yogananda was holding it in his lap

01:43:54.660 --> 01:43:57.940
and just loving it and praying for it to live.

01:43:57.940 --> 01:44:01.420
And then the soul of the deer said to him, let me go.

01:44:01.420 --> 01:44:02.380
It's time for me to go.

01:44:02.380 --> 01:44:03.540
You're holding me back.

01:44:03.540 --> 01:44:06.580
But anyway, it's quite typical, I think,

01:44:06.580 --> 01:44:11.020
of saints and sages having an affinity with animals.

01:44:11.020 --> 01:44:16.780
It's almost like an indicator of their level of development.

01:44:16.780 --> 01:44:20.460
Yeah, yeah, that inclusion of all beings.

01:44:20.460 --> 01:44:23.500
Which in a way is symptomatic of godliness, you could say,

01:44:23.500 --> 01:44:26.420
because God certainly loves all creatures.

01:44:26.420 --> 01:44:29.940
And if we are really kind of in God consciousness,

01:44:29.940 --> 01:44:31.340
if we want to call it that,

01:44:31.340 --> 01:44:35.580
then we're going to exhibit the same qualities as God.

01:44:35.580 --> 01:44:39.260
- And then you've got to balance that with practicality.

01:44:39.260 --> 01:44:43.020
You know, I'll go out in the forest to cut firewood

01:44:43.020 --> 01:44:45.820
with one of my friends who's very mystical.

01:44:45.820 --> 01:44:50.460
And, you know, you get too lost in looking at the amazing

01:44:50.460 --> 01:44:52.220
like mushrooms that have grown out.

01:44:52.220 --> 01:44:53.060
And you're just like,

01:44:53.060 --> 01:44:54.420
I don't want to cut this bit of wood

01:44:54.420 --> 01:44:56.060
because there's just so much.

01:44:56.060 --> 01:44:58.860
- Yeah, it's the home to these mushrooms.

01:44:58.860 --> 01:45:00.540
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:45:00.540 --> 01:45:04.380
That's practicality is that you gotta stay warm as well.

01:45:04.380 --> 01:45:06.380
So. - Yeah.

01:45:06.380 --> 01:45:08.860
But it's like not taking more than you need.

01:45:08.860 --> 01:45:10.900
I think that's an important principle.

01:45:10.900 --> 01:45:13.460
And that's again something like, you know,

01:45:13.460 --> 01:45:16.380
the Native Americans, they would kill bison,

01:45:16.380 --> 01:45:18.740
you know, buffalo, but only what they needed.

01:45:18.740 --> 01:45:20.700
And then they would use every bit of it.

01:45:20.700 --> 01:45:22.940
And then when the white men built the railroad

01:45:22.940 --> 01:45:25.540
through the West, you know, they would just stop the train

01:45:25.540 --> 01:45:27.500
and people would shoot all the bison

01:45:27.500 --> 01:45:29.820
and leave them to rot on the prairie,

01:45:29.820 --> 01:45:31.500
in part because they wanted to starve out

01:45:31.500 --> 01:45:33.260
the Native Americans.

01:45:33.260 --> 01:45:36.820
But, you know, completely idiotic way

01:45:36.820 --> 01:45:45.580
to behave that is indicative of the mentality of those people.

01:45:45.580 --> 01:45:47.340
Cut off from themselves, so they don't

01:45:47.340 --> 01:45:50.620
realize that what they're doing, they're doing to themselves.

01:45:50.620 --> 01:45:53.140
Yeah, exactly.

01:45:53.140 --> 01:45:55.100
I keep quoting Jesus, but he said,

01:45:55.100 --> 01:45:57.540
what whatsoever you do unto the least of these,

01:45:57.540 --> 01:45:58.580
you do unto me.

01:45:58.580 --> 01:46:01.640
I think everyone can say that.

01:46:01.640 --> 01:46:06.140
Well, aren't we full of wisdom, all this pontification.

01:46:06.140 --> 01:46:10.860
Anyway, it's a fun conversation.

01:46:10.860 --> 01:46:15.720
Yeah, so, and I apologize to people

01:46:15.720 --> 01:46:17.260
if you feel I've talked too much.

01:46:17.260 --> 01:46:20.300
Sometimes I talk too much and Irene is not in the room

01:46:20.300 --> 01:46:22.140
to hand me notes telling me not to.

01:46:22.140 --> 01:46:32.500
So, in any case then, so to wrap it up, you know, looking at the full tapestry of your

01:46:32.500 --> 01:46:38.180
journey so far, and your journey is far from over, you know, the trauma, the awakening,

01:46:38.180 --> 01:46:46.340
the shadow work, the devotion, what's been the ultimate realization for you so far?

01:46:46.340 --> 01:46:47.340
If that's a fair question.

01:46:47.340 --> 01:46:52.100
You can always tell me that's not a good question.

01:46:52.100 --> 01:46:58.660
life is living itself. Nice. And where does that, where do we fit into that equation?

01:46:58.660 --> 01:47:03.860
Go along for the ride. Yeah.

01:47:03.860 --> 01:47:14.340
Hopefully have some fun. So you interact with people, you do one-on-ones, I presume,

01:47:14.340 --> 01:47:20.260
you have maybe some kind of group meetings, different things like that, right? Yeah. And

01:47:20.260 --> 01:47:25.620
And actually you mentioned that you often get intuitive insights for clients before you

01:47:25.620 --> 01:47:28.780
have sessions with them.

01:47:28.780 --> 01:47:34.060
And then when you have the session, you realize, "Oh, this insight is absolutely pertinent

01:47:34.060 --> 01:47:36.620
to what this person just brought up."

01:47:36.620 --> 01:47:37.620
Right?

01:47:37.620 --> 01:47:38.620
Yeah.

01:47:38.620 --> 01:47:39.620
Yeah.

01:47:39.620 --> 01:47:40.620
Yeah.

01:47:40.620 --> 01:47:44.380
Sometimes it's an insight specifically for them.

01:47:44.380 --> 01:47:50.140
Other times I'm just drawn to talk about something totally random and it's exactly

01:47:50.140 --> 01:47:57.740
out what they needed to hear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I might even share something about my own life

01:47:57.740 --> 01:48:03.820
for some reason. I think, why am I doing this? And then it's for them. Good. So,

01:48:03.820 --> 01:48:10.220
people listening to this, I'll put a link to your website. And I presume that on your website,

01:48:10.220 --> 01:48:17.420
you have ways of getting in touch with you and Paige about events or services and all that stuff,

01:48:17.420 --> 01:48:23.340
right? Yeah, yeah, there's events page that they can go on and they'll see you in the next date,

01:48:23.340 --> 01:48:28.540
the 10th of August and just email. What are you going to do on the 10th of August?

01:48:28.540 --> 01:48:36.700
I'm going to do one that I've done before that the group really liked. I called it the

01:48:36.700 --> 01:48:45.820
healing chamber. How do you work out the time zones? Well, 10 a.m. my time, so it's not far off

01:48:45.820 --> 01:48:52.620
that now. Yeah, so okay, so that would be like nine in the evening in the central U.S. or whatever.

01:48:52.620 --> 01:48:58.140
Yeah. And you have an email sign up thing there on your site, so if people want to be notified of

01:48:58.140 --> 01:49:05.340
things they can sign up. Yeah, I get notified of the groups and various things. And if anybody's in

01:49:05.340 --> 01:49:13.980
WA or if they're in Australia or they're traveling here, I'm running a retreat for two days in

01:49:13.980 --> 01:49:21.500
September. In Western Australia? Yeah, yeah, right on the beachfront, Serbia. That sounds nice.

01:49:21.500 --> 01:49:28.300
Really beautiful, yeah, yeah, looking forward to it. Great, all righty, well keep up the good work

01:49:28.300 --> 01:49:34.140
and it's been lovely talking to you and meeting you. Yeah, really nice to meet you. Yeah, I really

01:49:34.140 --> 01:49:40.140
appreciate everything you're doing and everything that most of the people I talked to were doing. I

01:49:40.140 --> 01:49:43.580
I sort of feel like, in a way, if I can help them,

01:49:43.580 --> 01:49:46.340
then I can help the world through them,

01:49:46.340 --> 01:49:49.780
by just bringing them to more people's awareness.

01:49:49.780 --> 01:49:52.360
- Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

01:49:52.360 --> 01:49:55.180
- All right, so thank you. - Must be fun.

01:49:55.180 --> 01:49:57.020
- Yeah, it has been.

01:49:57.020 --> 01:49:59.860
Thanks to those who've been listening or watching.

01:49:59.860 --> 01:50:01.380
We'll have another one in a couple of weeks

01:50:01.380 --> 01:50:03.660
with a guy named Dan Kelso.

01:50:03.660 --> 01:50:05.380
And I won't talk much about him right now.

01:50:05.380 --> 01:50:08.820
We'll just see what he has to say when we have our interview.

01:50:09.820 --> 01:50:10.820
So thanks, Aveda.

01:50:10.820 --> 01:50:11.320
Thank you.

01:50:11.320 --> 01:50:40.300
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