If somebody's like really contracted and their nervous system's really dysregulated,
they were to open fully to redemptive love completely.
It might actually be too overwhelming. Sometimes it has to be taken in bit by bit.
Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer.
Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with,
or conversations rather, with spiritually awakening people.
And we've done over 700 of them now. So if this is new to you
and you'd like to check out previous ones, you know, you can
just poke around on the YouTube channel itself. But if you go to batgap.com
you'll find everything organized in various ways that are much easier to
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whole thing is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and
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also some volunteer opportunities, so you can get in touch with us about that. They
They mainly involve proofreading transcripts, but there's some other things too.
We have a volunteers page where you'll see some of the people who are volunteering and
what they're doing.
So my guest today is Savita Veera.
Is that the way to pronounce it?
Veera.
Vira.
Savita Veera, sorry.
She is in Western Australia, so it's like 8 in the morning for her, 7 in the evening
for me.
She is a spiritual teacher, a mentor, an embodiment facilitator, and a healer.
be getting into all this in detail, but she experienced a profound shift in consciousness
after great tragedy, followed by years of further spiritual openings, mystical experiences,
and deep healing.
And she meets people as a teacher with generosity, humor, and grounded practicality, providing
a safe space for them to open to their own divine light and inner wisdom.
Okay, so you didn't write a book, so I didn't read a book like I often do, but I listened
to everything you had on your YouTube channel.
I did an interesting thing.
I transcribed everything you have that I could find, other interviews you've done, talks
you gave, and I fed it all into AI along with the notes you gave me, and I said, "Give me
talking points and questions for an interview on this content."
And bingo, within a minute, I had four pages of notes printed out with questions.
You plugged me into the Maitre.
I did.
So, I've been doing that lately.
It's kind of handy.
So, you know, I'm coming up with some questions I wouldn't ordinarily have thought to ask.
Plus I throw in a bunch of my own questions that the AI didn't give me.
So it's not just an AI thing.
What I've gathered is that one of the main themes of your journey is awakening through
adversity.
And it began with a childhood trauma and was catalyzed by the sudden loss of a mentor,
leading you from a place of unconscious seeking to becoming a trauma-specialized spiritual
guide.
And of course, there are a lot of steps in between those two things.
And this path seems to be the foundation of what you call authentic empowerment.
Is that a fair synopsis?
Yeah.
Good.
You mentioned some tragedy very early in life that kind of kick-started your seeking?
Yeah, well I mean I had a difficult childhood, so there was that sort of background of that.
Welcome to the club.
And you know in hindsight, yeah, that's right, most of us do, there's a few lucky ones.
You know, you look back in hindsight and you can see that seeking, trying to get away from
suffering but not even necessarily being so conscious of the suffering.
You can be sort of numbed out to it because that's part of that coping strategy of not
even realizing how much is actually there, but little breadcrumbs, little snippets that
come along that just like, "Oh, go this way, go this way," and that sort of happened through
my 20s. I'd be directed to books and I didn't have any religious upbringing. I didn't have
spiritual community or any sort of deep connection with spirituality, but there was something in me
that just buy a Buddhist book or buy a book on healing, little bits of your impulses.
Yeah, little impulses. I remember going to, you know, I only went a couple of times in my 20s to
Buddhist meditation and I thought there's something here. I don't know what it is,
but there's something here. And I think it was like a counting meditation or something.
counting your breaths? Yeah, it was something like that and there was one lady in the group afterwards
that said that she got to 10 like it was totally easy, you know, it just happened and something in
me knew that it wasn't true and I knew that, I don't know what you can call it, the nun,
running the meditation, I knew that she knew as well, but I didn't know what that was, I didn't
know what it was, the underlying thing, but it's like that radar for truth, you know.
So in other words, the woman was being inauthentic and you picked up on it.
Yeah, well, you know, just innocent.
I see. And people might be wondering, like, the big deal, I can count to 10, but I think what
you're referring to is, you know, a meditation where you're supposed to, like, count the breaths
without your mind wandering off. And, you know, if you try that sometime, you might find that
you might be surprised how readily your mind wanders off when trying to do a simple thing like that.
Yeah, and how it gets caught, yeah, caught in thought. So that was kind of my early years,
mixed with lots of different just lots of different experience. Really saw lots of the extremes,
you know, in life, from the poorest and some of the most traumatized sectors of society,
to some of the wealthiest, you know, just by chance, not because I've got any connection to
that in particular, but and all the suffering, you know, that comes with that. Fast forward...
Before we fast forward too much, I had a long conversation with a friend the other day,
whom I have long conversations with often, and we were contemplating how a very traumatic
childhood can result in rather ardent spiritual seeking later, a little bit later on.
On the other hand, you know, like the Bhagavad Gita, for instance, says that if you're really
fortunate you'll be born in a pure and illustrious family or even a family of yogis, although
that's more difficult to attain on earth.
So you've got it easy.
The Buddha, in fact, was born a king and grew up in a palace, and yet when he realized how
much suffering there was in the world, he left all that and became an extremely ardent seeker,
I mean, just enlightenment or bust.
So we're just contemplating, like, which one is most advantageous?
Not that we get to choose.
And are we just burning off a load of karma if we have a very traumatic childhood, and
then after that's burned off, we're free to soar high on our spiritual quest?
Or is there some advantage to suffering because the desire to get out of it becomes so strong
that you just don't take your spiritual practice for granted, you just go at it with all your
might or whatever?
What are your thoughts on that?
The pressure cooker.
I don't think that we can ever take one person's awakening or unfolding or whatever you want
to call it and then kind of make a...
generalization. Yeah, not even the Buddhists, as much as we love him.
You know, because it's probably far more nuanced and complex.
Yeah, you're probably right. You can't generalize too much.
No, because for me it wasn't ardent spiritual seeking.
It just happened so spontaneous. So you could say, well, it was the pressure, the contraction,
the contractions were so great that then the expansion happened. And that seems to have been
my thing. I get put in these koans where I'm backs against the wall or seemingly so, and then
that lets go into a bigger awareness. Yeah, I think because our minds like to have it all wrapped up.
up, you know. My mind's like to say, "Well, what is this?" It was so curious and that's
beautiful. It just is, isn't it? Yeah. Well, you make a good point, which is that there
are as many paths as there are people, and it is a little foolish to generalize, although
you do sometimes see patterns. We'll get into that more as we go along. You don't need to
go into specifics if you don't want to. How do you feel your personal experiences with
trauma and tragedy led to your first profound spiritual openings?
Well, the first opening was a glimpse.
And the first one was the death of the mentor.
Yeah, you had a mentor who got in a car accident.
Yeah, and mentor with horsemanship, not a spiritual mentor.
I wasn't doing any seeking spiritually or otherwise.
And the shock of that, the suddenness of it, and his girlfriend at the time died as well
in the same accident.
They were both passengers in the car and he left behind children from a previous marriage
and it was a pretty rough time.
And so that period of grieving and shock and all of that, that's what led to that first
really simple opening and a really simple moment of hanging out, closing the line. All that
contraction, all that grief, all that, just even a me just fell away. And it was just this intimacy,
this beautiful, simple, peaceful intimacy. And that was like the first crack, the first opening.
How long did that last?
I don't know.
There's no sort of sense of how long I was there for.
It could have been...
I mean, it wasn't like weeks and weeks and weeks of peace, but...
No, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I guess you were...
Susanna Marie was one of your mentors, wasn't she?
Yeah.
Yeah, and she had something similar where her brother died unexpectedly,
shifted her into profound realization as
traumatic as that was and obviously
that's not the kind of impetus most of us
would want to undergo to have a profound
realization but what do you think it is
about a shock like that that can
catalyze an opening? I think it's
probably a few things. The mind can
kind of give up because it can't make sense of it
and it can't fix it, it can't, there's
nothing it can do. So like death, like that is like a koan itself, isn't it? Yeah. There's no controlling,
there's nothing but surrender. I think that's part of it. I think the other part of it is like
fully allowing ourselves to feel, you know, and I've had that experience many times later
when I fully went into the grief, then the peace and the joy and the bliss would open.
There's a couple of things in there.
No, finish your thought. I thought you were stopping.
Yeah, no, just how it's and it's so bizarre, you know, because in the past you grieve or you have
grief and it's just it's all awful. You know, who would have thought that right at the center,
if you fully let go into it, that there it is. Yeah, interesting. There's a couple of things
in there that kind of jump out at me. One is there's this whole little section near the beginning
of the Bhagavad Gita where Arjuna, the hero of the story, feels like, "I've got this, you know,
I'm in control, I can do this, let me at these guys.
And then he undergoes this shift where he all of a sudden realizes he doesn't have it
and he's not in control.
And at that point he surrenders to his master, to the Lord.
Krishna was supposed to be an avatar.
And the commentary I read was like, in life for all of us, as long as you think that you
can do it, you're in charge, you're the controller.
don't tend to surrender or look for some higher guidance or higher wisdom but kind of if you
reach that point at which you know you're not in charge then you kind of fall on your knees
so to speak and seek higher guidance. Yeah, yeah absolutely and that can be a really nuanced space
for embodiment and trauma, because often in a kind of
native way, people with childhood trauma or any sort of abuse or boundary violations,
there's that loss of volition, you know, and all that comes with that. So
there's some real nuance in healing that to a place where the understanding is that
the infinite is safe. Yeah. And that really is, can take some time.
I don't know if that makes sense. No, it does. And in a few minutes, we're going to get into
talking about shadow work and healing and things. I wanted to just ask you a couple of quick
questions before that, because you mentioned a minute ago going into grief and then finding
peace after going through it.
So we want to talk about that.
But I just want to ask you, the idea of authentic realization and authentic empowerment seem
to be central to your work.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but I got that impression.
Do you have the impression that there's a lot of inauthentic realization and empowerment
going on?
you emphasize authenticity? I think that there is probably a lot more that needs to clear that
people realize in that way. I think that it's really easy for stuff to still be stored there
in that sort of power center and for that to grab on, even with the openings that have happened.
even though there might be a lot of clarity, there might have been lots of openings, there might be
some embodiment, that can really grab onto it and create another sort of identity.
I think that's really important, actually. There are so many examples of very impressive teachers
who seem to have had profound awakenings, and yet then their behavior becomes very inappropriate
and harmful to people.
And you kind of realize, or I don't know,
my sense of it is that there is a lot of buried stuff
that they never had to confront.
And it's kind of coming back to bite them, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, and in some cases, the behavior
becomes much more exaggerated in its inappropriateness
than even that of a normal person.
Yeah, yeah, because that whole outsourcing, you know, if students outsource their life
to, oh, here's the guru up there, and that whole hierarchy thing.
It empowers them.
Then it, you know, yeah, and people can get drunk on that.
Yeah.
People can get really intoxicated with it.
It goes to their heads.
But it's so much more, sorry, go on.
That saying of, it goes to their heads, you know, all the adulation, it's like,
"Oh, I must be special. Everybody loves me."
Yeah, exactly. And it's so much more quiet than that, the authentic power, when it comes through.
And it's really all our contractions and stuff that gets in the way of it moving.
It just knows which way to move.
Yeah. It could be in a boundary setting, you know, and when it comes through, it happens so fast
that the mind has to catch up with it. It's not something that comes from thinking our way
through it. Explain that a little bit. I'm not sure exactly what you mean there.
So if, for instance, there was a situation where there needed to be like,
"This is this incarnation here, and that's that one over there," the distinction,
it just will move. What needs to be said, what needs to come through just comes through,
rather than having to think about it, you know, an intellectual exercise of,
"Oh, I need to do this," or "I need to navigate it," because that's the separateness, navigating it,
rather than it just like moving. I see. So you're speaking of spontaneous right
action, I suppose, that being in tune with, you know, divine consciousness or whatever you want
want to call it, then spontaneously behavior flows in an appropriate way, or hopefully
does.
Yeah, yeah, and it's a loving, you know, it's a loving thing.
It comes from that deep, infinite, unconditional love for everyone involved.
yeah and you can't it's not a predicted thing it's not a understood by the mind
thing yeah obviously we have a mind and we can use it but the ramifications of
every action are far more intricate than the mind could possibly comprehend and
so if the mind had to figure out all the all the ripple effects that would you
know, result from every action, it would be totally overwhelmed by the complexity.
So what you're saying is simple, spontaneous, right action can flow from
being grounded in a deep enough realization and, you know, that divine
intelligence which can comprehend all the complexities of the
universe, that could be the... there's a saying in the Vedas, "Brahman
as the charioteer.
So if that's running the show, then our behavior
can be as it would be if we had some sort of omniscience, which
is beyond human capability anyway.
Yeah, that's it.
And then the human just catches up and goes,
oh, that was interesting.
Yeah, wow.
How did that come out of my mouth?
[LAUGHTER]
That's it.
Kind of fun.
Yeah.
So this next question, what we've just been discussing,
might be one of the answers to it.
But you mentioned that coming home to our authentic selves
leaves us open to a world of possibilities.
Is this what we've just been discussing,
the kind of possibility you're alluding to there?
Yeah, in each moment, like that freshness, that newness.
So let's talk about shadow work,
and healing, and compassion for a while.
You emphasize the necessity of healing past trauma
to reach our full potential.
And this involves shadow work, turning
towards the unconscious aspects we don't want to see
and cultivating deep compassion for ourselves and others
to break cycles of suffering.
And of course, many people are now familiar
with the term shadow work.
I've interviewed people such as Connie Zweig,
who wrote a whole book about it.
How do you define it and what is its role in healing?
I define it as what's unconscious.
What hasn't been brought to conscious awareness.
I think it was the Jungian term originally, wasn't it?
Yeah, I think so.
And the term itself, you know, it probably has a lot of baggage.
Everything has energy, doesn't it?
everything has kind of like what the collective have put on it.
So it probably has that sort of baggage of something a bit heavy and frightening, when
really it's not.
not, you know, and it's wanting to, life's wanting to have those parts of ourselves rejoin,
you know, that movement of rejoining.
So yes, it can be anything from beliefs to stuck emotions to patterns of behavior.
You mentioned that for you, at least, it felt less like work and more like life was working
on you, rather than you were having to work to work something out.
Did I get that right?
Can you elaborate on that?
Yeah, I think it was both, because it was happening, you know, unconscious.
Pandora's box had just been opened up.
it was flowing, you know, it was coming up.
But at the same time, there had to be that human portion,
that willingness to meet what was arising,
and the willingness to really engage in deep healing.
- So on a day-to-day basis,
like was just all kinds of like negative emotions
or traumas that you had forgotten and things like that
welling up and did it make it difficult for you to function or hold down a job or things like that?
It was kind of like contraction, expansion, contraction, expansion. So it'd have these
really big heart openings and unconditional love flowing. You know, I'd be looking at
strangers, and there would just be unconditional love and all sorts of bliss and joy, and then
there would just be a plunge back into suffering and contractions. I think that's natural. I think
that happens to a lot of people. Yeah, yeah, quite wild. And then other times where just emptiness
was looking. There wasn't any unconditional love feeling or any of that. It was just
pure witnessing. So that would kind of go and then there would be the next contraction
that would come. But I engage in deep somatic-based healing because my nerve system,
because I'm extremely sensitive, which is one of my gifts. But my nervous system had gotten so
dysregulated through traumas just kind of piling up on top of each other. So I really needed that,
you know, that phase when it's wanting to come in and embody and have all the fragmented,
because trauma really fragments us. So all those fragmented parts, like, yeah, you too, you as well.
And that's the compassion, that compassion that wants all the parts of us that feel
separate and lost and in pain and in confusion. Were you doing some formal somatic healing work
under some kind of trained person? Yeah. Like, so therapeutic sessions in which you do something
or other? Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Yeah. So through the body. Was it mainly talk type stuff or was
there like physical massage or acupuncture or you know, those kind of things? A little bit of
acupuncture, yeah, but more being with the body, creating the bridge of safety, because that's
what's lost, isn't it? When we go through these things, it's that feeling that we're safe.
So being with it, creating that bridge and getting the nervous system to come back down into some
sort of relaxation.
The excitation, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And then, you know, that presence, then allowing bits to come up, but it can't all come up all
at once.
Oh no.
It's too much for the nervous system.
So just in little bits, and then, you know, you're kind of emptying the jar bit by bit
and then more can come up and more can be released.
so body movements and the body wanted to do at the time. Yeah, you mean like got frozen?
No, like through whatever happened at the time, you know, it wanted to push your boundary or
it needed to fight or it needed to, you know, all the kind of primal survival instincts that are
energy that's just gotten really stuck. Yeah. So this cycle of expansion and
contraction that you went through, did you get the feeling that the
expansion phases were kind of like a solvent
where you know once you're exposed to that vastness for a little while
all these tight things begin to loosen up and release
and then of course you go into contraction as they release and then
once they've sort of fizzled out in terms of that
particular batch releasing, you open up to perhaps an even broader expansion, which triggers
another release. Like you say, you keep going through this cycle. Yeah, yeah, I like that, a batch.
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, some stuff will get burnt up just through grace.
I had an experience of, because I had chronic illness as well, as a result of all the trauma
and everything that had happened, I had an experience of the lady I was working with,
with the somatic work, saying, "Oh, I think we need to slow down."
I think that the nervous system— She thought it might be too much for you?
Yeah, because my nervous system was so sensitive, and so it's like, "Yeah, I think maybe we
to slow down. And I thought, "Oh, shit, I'm going to slow down. Let's get this stuff out."
Yeah, let's get it over with. Yeah, yeah, let's get it over with. And I was going through another
sort of koan in my life where I was living at the time, the land wasn't able to support
my horses in a way that they would be as healthy as I would have liked them to have been.
So I was looking for somewhere else and just couldn't bang up against. It's not working. I
can't find anywhere. So those two sort of things were happening simultaneously. And then just out
to lunch one day and another just massive opening happened and you know the food
was blissful, just so beautiful you know, you want to go in and kiss the
chefs, like the gratitude you know. And that gave my nervous system
enough of a relaxation to the healing, you know, and shifting whatever else was
there to continue. So, you know, how much that burnt up or chewed up, we don't know.
I bet you the horses have been very healing for you. How long have you
been around horses? I mean, ever since a young age? Well, the horse, no, I didn't, I
wasn't born into a family that was horse orientated at all. I literally was
born in with that calling, I suppose. When I was two, I asked for... it was the first toy that I
asked for was a life... what do you call it? Like a life... Life-like. True to life form of a horse.
Yeah. And I just took that everywhere with me. Just absolutely loved it. And when I was really
young, my favorite book was War Horse.
So it didn't come from...
I saw the movie.
Yeah, right.
I haven't actually seen the movie.
But yeah, so I don't know whether that was brought in from past lives, probably.
Yeah.
I never worked with horses.
In fact, I had a very early experience of falling off a horse at a state fair or something
like that.
I was doing the horse ride so many times, getting ride on a real horse, that the guys got kind
of casually sort of threw me up on the saddle and I went right off the other side.
But, um, but anyway, I had, I did have an opportunity to work around cows for a
while, you know, quite a few months of shoveling cow manure and just taking
building fences and taking care of the cows.
And they just had such a vibe about them that, you know, you, you kind
of in train with their vibe.
And I found it very profound and beautiful.
It was really calming.
Well, that's it, isn't it?
It's like, it's common for, I think a lot of us that when we start having openings or,
you know, that call comes or whatever, we want to go and be more in nature.
Yeah.
You know, like our wildness calls to us.
It's part of it.
But yeah, so with the horses, it wasn't really until I was older that I had sort of opportunity,
my teenage years to start having stuff to do with them. And then I worked up north on a cattle
station and worked with horses there. And then just throughout my life, I'd come in and out
with it through my 20s. And then when I found my mentor with horsemanship, that was when I fully
entered into and I've been with them ever since.
But man, they can teach you some stuff.
Yeah, we really are the students.
- Yeah, I can think of a number of examples.
I've seen programs for prison inmates working with horses
and it's very therapeutic for them.
I have a friend who has an autistic daughter
and her daughter goes to horse camp
where the horses work with the autistic kids
and it has a great effect.
And there's programs here in the US
where kids who are in the inner cities,
slum kind of areas, very high crime, high stress,
they get to go out to the country
and be with horses for a while.
So I can probably think of a couple more examples,
but it's a known healing modality.
Yeah, and I mean, I sort of, you know, I work with people, obviously online with
awakening and healing, but I also have clients where I work with their horses for helping the
horses with the horse's trauma and the person with what's happening for them, and then finding that
sort of meeting point. So it's less about the horse necessarily being the healing force, but
it being a mirror of consciousness. Yeah, kind of a mutual healing.
More of a mutual meeting. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Because like with anything, I think there's some horses that would be
at a soul level willing to participate in that, and then there's others that are.
You know, so when I've ever used them in that capacity with clients, it's more as
they just be themselves, exactly as they are, and what is it that you're drawn to in them,
and then that is like a mirror for the person's own wisdom to come forward.
for what they might need in that moment, if that makes sense.
Yeah. There's a guy in the US named Cesar Milan who is called the Dog Whisperer.
And his motto is, and people call him because they have problems with their dogs,
but his motto is "Better human, better dog."
Because he usually has to fix the human, and then that solves the dog's problem.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, well I think that there's probably soul contracts going on, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Where it's like, we're going to help highlight this for you, and really I'm just a translator
to help sort of translate that.
And they help us to slow down and to actually take notice.
They remind, for me, they remind me of my wildness.
You know, that natural power.
And I think that that whole embodiment thing is like our wildness and the transcendent
wisdom meeting and collapsing.
You state that anxiety is often a symptom of past trauma, which is not surprising.
And you mentioned that bringing compassionate awareness to these unresolved and incomplete
fight-or-flight energies help to complete them. So how does one conjure up compassionate awareness
if that's the solution to healing certain kinds of trauma or anxiety?
But what if you're not feeling compassionate awareness? How do you
turn it up so as to, you know, have it help heal these things?
Well, you can't because that's us trying to manipulate it.
It's there. It's available.
How do you locate it, I should say?
It's already there, right? So how do you tune into it?
Well, you may need a bridge or a conduit or, you know,
Someone in support of you that can mirror that back to you.
It could be any sort of practice that feels right for you. Even just using imagination as a bridge
can be helpful. It can start to relax the nervous system enough that maybe there's some safety here
that I can open to, you know.
Give me an example of how that might work.
So if somebody's like really contracted
and their nerve system's really dysregulated,
they were to open fully to redemptive love completely,
it might actually be too overwhelming.
You know, sometimes it has to be taken in bit by bit, rather than all at once.
So, you know, if we can create a space for someone, even in their imagination, that is
peaceful and they're held, you know, it's a relative thing, but it's got a thread back
to the absolute that's safe. So let's say you had a loving grandmother or
something but she's passed away and so you might say okay imagine your
grandmother is here with you now and she's holding you and she's singing you
a lullaby or something so you mean that kind of thing? Yeah you could do that and
that could be that could be a bridge. Okay. That could be using the imagination
as a bridge to show.
- Good.
So grief, we've talked of anxiety,
grief, that's an emotion that many people try to avoid.
You connect it to love,
saying that there is no grief without love.
How does allowing ourselves to fully experience grief
open the door to compassion?
And I guess you, no grief without love,
does that mean like, you know, if you didn't love your dog,
you wouldn't be grieving if it died or something like that?
If your heart is sort of cold and closed,
then, and you're not experiencing much love,
then you don't grieve for the people in Gaza
or, you know, other situations,
whereas a more sensitive person
feels such other's pain very acutely.
- Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And there's like the human element to it, you know, like our human hearts.
And then of course there's like the infinite heart that can just hold all that suffering.
There's no limit to it.
So, yeah.
But that's not to say that if someone was to die and there was just infinite joy for their
passing that there's no love there, because there is.
There's unconditional love.
So it's not like a hard and fast rule.
I guess what I'm just pointing to is not to contract or fear that grief because it is
an expression of love.
Yeah, and it's a natural thing.
We shouldn't stifle it.
No, and we've been so conditioned to.
So conditioned to collectively.
And even spiritual people sometimes intellectualize things away.
Like somebody dies and you think, "Oh, they've just gone on to heaven or another loka or something
like that."
And if someone is grieving, they might say, "Oh, you shouldn't be grieving."
There's even a verse in the Gita which says, "Certain indeed is birth for the dead and
certain is death for the born.
Therefore over the inevitable you should not grieve."
But, you know, that can become...
They're guilty as well!
Yeah, it can be kind of an unnatural heartlessness or something if you try to force yourself to abide by such admonitions.
Yeah, yeah. And it's not in truth, you know, what's really there. What's really true.
Yeah.
Is that, you know, there's a human as well.
I suppose one way of wrapping up this point is just to be authentic.
You know, I think that term came up 15 minutes ago.
If you're feeling grief, feel grief.
Don't try to rationalize it as being unspiritual and you shouldn't be feeling it or something.
Yeah, that's it.
Be a human being.
You're a human being.
You're not just a divine being.
also human being yeah absolutely yeah and I like to lean into the humanness
because um it just is an allowance in that you know there's such an allowance
but let's all just be human yeah um you noted that when faced with their own
shadow people can often react with unconscious and cruel behavior and I
found that point very timely.
There's a lot of that in the world today.
And I'm reminded of Jesus saying, forgive them, Father.
They know not what they do.
And I think here in the US, there's
a lot of cruelty going on right now with people being captured
and sent to third countries and put in, basically,
hell holes of prisons in El Salvador and stuff like this.
And they're not actually really guilty of anything.
They're just being shuffled away like that.
And so I think as a nation, we in particular,
and many other nations, need to cultivate the capacity
for compassion and not succumb to unconscious and cruel
behavior.
Whole nations do succumb to that.
Nazi Germany is an example.
But obviously, anything that a nation is doing,
it's doing because enough people in that nation are doing it.
And so there needs to be a kind of a national healing.
But you can only start with yourself.
So we keep coming back to this theme,
but how can one be less unconscious
and thus more kind and compassionate
and sensitive to the suffering of others?
- Yeah, I think it's just a willingness,
a willingness to face that, face everything within us.
And that comes back to what we were talking about before
with the compassion, like compassion for what's here,
unconscious within us, it naturally then flows out.
We don't have to force it.
It's just a natural movement.
- Yeah. - So, yeah.
- You mentioned that you're a very sensitive person,
and that's good.
Is there a way that, I suppose you just,
you're just wired that way.
You didn't do anything to sensitize yourself necessarily.
(laughs)
But I think spiritual practice can and does sensitize one.
You just become more refined, more delicate in a way,
less crude, less blind to your own shadows,
since we're using that term.
- Yeah.
Yeah, well it's dropping into the wisdom of the heart, isn't it?
Yeah, that's the key I guess, is just dropping into the wisdom of the heart.
And at the same time, you know, you need to balance sensitivity with strength, do you not?
Because if you became so sensitive that you couldn't go to the store, or something, you know.
And I've known people who are like that.
In fact, I've been like that on long meditation courses where you've been meditating for months on end.
on end, it's like, "Oh, I can't possibly walk into town to buy a toothbrush. It's just like too much."
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The nervous system is so heightened, it's like picking up on everything.
So there's an integration factor that you have to somehow balance out with increased sensitivity.
It's paradoxical, but yeah, yeah. It is.
Sensitivity and strength, the two. Yeah, that's it, yeah. And I think that
before we were talking about with the wildness meets the wisdom, kind of we throw in there in
the sensitivity as well, you know. Yeah. Because I think that grounding, you know, like when you're
talking about being with the cows and, you know, being with nature and being with the horses and
that grounding really helps with that strength, that real like connection to the earth and being
Yeah, connection to the earth. That's a good one. I mean, I think that sometimes, well,
I remember, you know, when I first, I had interviewed Suzanne Marie, and then we were
a couple of years later, we were at this conference in California. And I was just totally wigged
out by all the, you know, the people and the energy. And I had like a six interviews and
a panel discussion and talk to give and there was like unlimited chocolate cake at lunch
and you know. And I was like, yeah. And I remember she said, let's take a walk. And
so we took a walk around through this little wooded area and she said, let's take our
shoes off and walk in the grass. So we walked in the grass and then finally I just lay down
in the grass and like, oh.
That's so funny. Your opinion on the cow and the chocolate cake too.
But you know spiritual people are notorious for getting ungrounded.
And so you know, personally I've kind of gotten into a routine of you know,
plenty of exercise, plenty of sleep, you know, just nice grounding things
in addition to meditating a couple hours a day.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah
Okay, um, let's talk for a while about
Awakening itself. We've talked about anything more you want to say right now about shadow and healing trauma and that kind of thing
Okay, we can always come back to it if you think of something yeah, sure let's talk about the nature of awakening
Your teachings point to it. You've used the word nuance and I've detected that in what I've heard you say.
Nuanced understanding of awakening. I think this is important. It's not about escaping our humanity, very important,
but finding the simplicity of truth within the complexity of life.
And it involves devotion, finding safety in our divine nature, and learning to sync with...
This last sentence I don't understand quite so well. Maybe you can explain it.
learning to sync with linear time to experience the timeless. So comment on
everything I just said in that little statement. Yeah okay well I'm thinking
with linear time I'm really talking about our nervous systems because when
our nervous systems are dysregulated we're really stuck we're stuck in the
past or trying to rush towards some future point. And so syncing with it would be getting
our nervous systems, you know, and that's that whole embodiment thing, hey, like getting
our nervous systems to come into that point of balance and then we can experience the timeless
here.
So would it be a "be here now" kind of a thing, to quote Ram Dass?
Yeah.
The power of now, to quote Eckhart Tolle?
Yeah, because we can have these openings, transcendent,
but when the movement comes back in for embodiment,
if our nervous systems are out of time, you know,
and you'll see it, you'll go into like a café or something,
And the person serving is under massive stress and their nervous system is pinging.
It's on fast forward.
They're out of sync with time.
Or conversely, the opposite, when there's depression or collapse or just shut down.
And so the nervous system's like really stuck.
So either one is not lining up, it's not in sync with the moment.
So we take care of that, you know, so that it can come and be here.
So in your own life, describe your own experience with regard to time.
I can elaborate on that question, but see what you got from what I just said.
Well, certainly experience being out of sync with it.
You know, when the nervous system is like that, when it was going too fast, when it was going too slow.
You mean in the past for you?
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
And you know, it's not to say that the nervous system isn't going to spike, you know, and
it's not going to have its fluctuations.
It's not like it just goes into this dead zone of nothing happening.
No one's there.
There's still the body, but you can be with that.
You can be with the fluctuations rather than leaving because that's what happens when it's
too overwhelming.
sort of we leave we leave ourselves we're frightening yeah so um yeah okay um my sense of
you'd ever read a book uh by someone named uh i think it was suzanne siegel called collision with
the infinite interesting book she was this woman who had this spontaneous awakening and it was quite
radical and she couldn't really find any sense of personal self after that and it terrified her.
And she went through like 10 years of trying to find a personal self before she finally gave up
and realized something good had happened. But her motto became, "Do the next obvious thing."
And that to a great extent is my motto. Not that I think about it all the time, but
kind of nature presents the next obvious thing to you and then you do it
without a lot of, we've talked about this earlier, without a lot of complexity, without a lot of
intellectualization. It's like you can almost trust that you're going to be presented with
what is supposed to be next and then you can do, then you just do that. So that's what came to
mind when I started thinking about this topic of time. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And the horses
are great for that because, you know, when you get out of alignment with that, they're going to let
you know. They pick up on it, right? Oh yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, talking before about
the other part of my work that I do, I'm always trying to put myself as much as I can in the
hooves or the shoes of the horse, you know, and their awareness, you know, and that varies
depending on the horse and their kind of makeup and all that sort of stuff. But it's just
because we spend so much time in our thoughts or our minds, our awareness
compared to theirs, they're helping lead us home with that.
I've had clients that when I first met them, there's so many fragmented
are parts of themselves that haven't seen me and I've seen them and they've gotten quite
close and I think, "Oh, they still haven't seen me."
And then I know how the horses feel.
When we're going to interact with a horse and we're fragmented or we're not there, we're
not high and we're not in the moment, they're like, "Oh, that person's not high."
Yeah, they don't like it.
They know.
They really do.
So, well, yeah.
So you find that horses can...
We got lost in it.
Yeah, do you find that you can, either you yourself or people that you work with, with
horses, you can help them to entrain their consciousness to the consciousness of the
horse and thereby become more simple. Which is not to say we become like a horse in terms
of our perception or our consciousness, but that's what I was saying about the cows. There
was something so simple and grounded about the cows that just hanging out with them all
day, I just been trained with their consciousness and just got into this like really subtle,
settled state, even though I was, you know, working hard shoveling manure and building fences and
stuff. I think probably a lot of people can relate to this. That's why we love animals so much. They
not just cute and cuddly, but they actually have a good effect on our mentality, our consciousness.
Yeah, come to resonance.
Yeah, that's it. That's the word. Good one.
in resonance with unity.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm sure there's some interesting stories here
that one could tell, I don't know them,
but about Native peoples,
Aborigines in Australia or Native Americans or whatever,
and their affinity,
almost like a psychic affinity,
with animals.
As a matter of fact, I heard a story about this,
where this, you know,
It was some sort of indigenous hunter or something like that.
And he not only had to worry about the scent he might be
leaving, depending on where he was and which way the wind was
going and stuff.
But he had to worry about--
not worry, but he had to be mindful of his moods
and thoughts and so on, because animals could pick up on it.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
I love that.
I love that connection back to our wildness
and like you say, you know, Indigenous people,
that connection to all our gifts, you know,
because as you know,
the gifts that can open with awakening,
they're there in everyone, maybe in different ways,
you know, some people are more leaning towards certain gifts
and others towards others, but they weren't disconnected,
you know, the Indigenous people from that,
that connection with Earth and our wildness,
the transcendent is in,
it's right in the middle of the wildness.
- Yeah. - Right in the middle of that.
- And there's a point that could be added here,
which is that it's not that horses are enlightened
or babies are enlightened
or indigenous people are enlightened because they're simple.
That's a quite, and you feel free to disagree with this,
but I think there's something Ken Wilber talks about
called the pre-trans fallacy,
where people say, oh, horses, babies, and so on,
they're enlightened, we have to get back to that state.
Well, we don't wanna get back to infancy,
we want it because we're adults,
but there's, you can kind of come full circle
and achieve human maturity and your wisdom
and your personality and all those things.
And yet, as Jesus said, be gentle as doves,
wise as serpents, gentle as doves.
So you can kind of regain the innocence and simplicity
of those examples.
But you're not going to be simplistic.
You're not going to be infantile.
You could be very mature and wise.
And yet, as simple as--
Yeah, as Jesus also said, "Except ye be as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom
of heaven."
Yeah, that's it.
And when you talk about enlightenment, and babies or horses or anything else being enlightened,
that whole evolutionary arc, I just don't think that ... I think we like to have it
wrapped up in kind of a box of that, well, they're there and that's there. And I like to just leave
it to, well, it's the mystery, isn't it? Just unfolding in different forms.
So that's good. I mean, I do think there is such a thing as levels of evolution and a whole kind of
spectrum or scale of evolution. I mean, a mosquito is not the same as a monkey or that kind of thing.
but you can't really make hard and fast decisions about it. It's just more of a broad understanding.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It leaves us kind of more open. You can feel it.
Yeah, and certainly regardless of the level of evolution of anything, it's all the divine,
you know, a rock for that matter. I've met some beautiful rocks here on the land.
Yeah. Okay, so here's a question. We could call this finding safety in the infinite.
You say that with trauma the body loses its sense of safety, and you speak of a deeper,
absolute trust that is synonymous with surrender. The ancient traditions speak of our divine nature
as never having been hurt or damaged, sort of being beyond the possibility of harm. Let's come
back to like practicalities, how can people sort of establish their connection,
or establish that as their foundation and thereby be in a state of
safety regardless of the challenges that life throws at them?
Well I think that comes back to what we were talking before about grounding.
That's hugely important for the body and you know you're talking about
about your conference that you were at,
it's only in a mild way.
I know you weren't flipping your lid or anything, but yeah.
(laughs)
- I was just kind of hyper-stimulated
with all the people and the food and the talks.
(laughs)
- Yeah, exactly.
And you had that direct experience of,
when you grounded yourself,
then the body can like, oh, okay, I'm safe.
And so Mother Earth was the conduit to that.
Mm-hmm.
It was the bridge for your body, because it's all the one body.
Yeah.
And of course, the word "ground" is sometimes associated with being itself, the ground of
being, you know, pure consciousness or whatever, being the sort of ultimate foundation of everything.
doesn't mean that fear might not arise when that's coming. The first time I had that fear
really come up, it was very much a psychological fear of the void. And it was like, "Oh, I've
never felt ... I'd felt fear before, obviously." But that fear was like, "I'm going to be completely
taken out like just non-existence and the fear like really arose but it was of a psychological
constructed self that was gonna never exist again. Was this on the verge of some spiritual shift that
you went through? Yeah just another opening. Yeah. Yeah. That happens to a lot of people
there's sort of a threshold you cross where there's a big upsurge of fear after which it's kind of
like breaking the sound barrier. It's smooth after you break it but until as you approach it, it gets
really rough. Yeah and I think you know and certainly it for me it wasn't just a one-time
thing. It wasn't just a one-time break the sound barrier and all is good. It revisited you know
like the waves come like we're talking about before you know washing, expansion, contraction,
Yeah. The batches. Yeah, that's it. And so the second time that fear really came up,
it was experienced very differently and it was just experienced as the survival instinct in the body
and there wasn't that psychological component of it. And my mind was like, "Oh,
Like the fear of death is here and it's just a survival mechanism in the body.
And then the next day in meditation I went into, I suppose, what spiritual people call
Samadhi, where everything just collapsed. So that fear was like a precursor to the
Samadhi that happened the next day? It was, yeah.
Yeah, there's a saying in the Upanishads which goes,
"Certainly all fear is born of duality."
And it almost seems like, again, there's this sort of guardian at the gate of unity
that is a fear membrane that you have to, you know, get through as duality merges into unity.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A phrase you use, in fact, you gave us this phrase to put on your little YouTube thumbnail,
is healing the intimate divide.
Is that what we're talking about right now?
Or if not, what is this intimate divide
that you were referring to in that phrase?
And what does the process of healing it entail?
- Yeah, that's absolutely what we were just talking about.
- Okay, good, good timing.
- Perfect, perfect timing.
(laughing)
Divine timing.
- Doing the next obvious thing.
Okay, two questions came in. Let's answer them, ask them.
This one is from Michael Maitis in London.
Michael, you're up late.
Is it possible to manifest our desired reality?
And if so, how?
Interesting.
The question denotes that it's a me doing it.
That it's a separate someone.
So I'll answer it in a slightly different way. I think there is something that we
can offer ourselves to, offer ourselves to something larger than just our humanness,
offer ourselves to healing and in that way we can align with what wants to
really unfold, and what wants to really unfold might be better than what we ever could think
that we want.
You sort of get these ideas of we want to manifest certain things, we want to create certain
things in our life, and they're not necessarily going to make us happy, maybe temporarily,
It depends on what you're interested in.
Yeah, sort of a let they will be done thing.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's understandable, you know, that drive because everybody wants to live a fulfilled
life.
You know, everybody wants to be healthy and that's just a common human thing.
if we can trust that life knows better than us kind of what's good for us, then we can
go, "Okay, well, let's, as a devotional thing, let's offer ourselves to this path and see
where it leads."
You know, there's these popular things like The Secret, and there's this lady named Esther
Hicks or something who channels some entity called Abraham and it's all about
manifestation. So manifestation has been a big popular thing in new age circles.
But like you just said, and it's natural to have desires, we have
desires, but absolutely yeah I had a teacher who one of his favorite phrases
was "highest first". There's so many things you could want, want the highest and then
and then let everything else kind of fall into line after that.
Yeah, I love that. I love that. Yeah, it's really good.
I was going to say one other thing about that.
It's gone now. It might come back.
Okay, you just go ahead and say it if it does.
Here is a question from Prachi Dixit in Torrance, California.
What would you suggest to help us uplift the collective consciousness?
By uplifting collective, I mean lift humanity to its true nature.
Yeah, I think that comes back to what we were saying before,
that we can only be responsible for what's here in our shadows.
So what's here in our unconscious is it's not just for ourselves.
That is an offering to all of humanity.
Our state of being is going to have a profound effect on not only the people and the animals
close to us in our lives, but that ripples out.
And that kind of almost goes back to the manifesting question with the trusting of what wants to
unfold, you know, that you will be given what you need to live out this life, to
offer. Yeah, yeah, the ripple effect that you mentioned is very important, I think,
because all of us, all the time, are emanating some kind of influence. And if
we look at the whole world and the state of it, then, okay, what are we looking at?
we're looking at the collective total, sum total, of all the influences that are being
radiated by 8 billion people.
And obviously it's somewhat lacking.
So what can we do to help the world radiate a better influence?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And we don't know what it's going to look like necessarily at the start.
don't know in what way life is going to want to use us to serve. We have no idea
and it's just trusting that it's going to find its way. I think it helps to just
have the desire to be used by life or the divine. You know, St. Francis, "Lord make
me an instrument of thy peace." You know, if you have that, you know, "Where there is
this let me so that and so on I think if you have that sort of desire to be a an
instrument of the divine then you're more likely to be one
yeah yeah absolutely yeah and you know it can be in like the smallest thing it
doesn't need to be some big thing it can be like just moment to moment
Are we radiating that kindness?
That, are we allowing that compassion to flow through us?
Weariness, are we unconscious?
Where it gets blocked, that flow?
- No, small things are important.
If we don't do the small things,
we're probably not gonna do the big things.
- Yeah, yeah.
- I mean, I don't wanna seem like some kind of a,
like I'm tooting my horn, but I can't walk down a sidewalk
where I see a worm stranded on the sidewalk
without bending over and picking the worm up
and throwing it on the grass.
It's going to die in the sun if it lies on the sidewalk.
Yeah, it's beautiful.
It's like a devotion.
Devotion's coming through.
I said, oh, the poor little thing.
It's stranded.
I've got to pick it up.
[LAUGHTER]
OK, devotion, good timing.
My next point was about devotion and simplicity.
And devotion is a recurring theme in your work.
You speak of a true devotion of life itself that never abandons us.
Okay, what do you think is the relationship between this devotion that you refer to and
simplicity that you say is at the heart of any authentic realization?
Oh, you just highlighted it beautifully in your story about the words.
Okay, yeah.
You did it for me, Rick.
Okay, good.
- (laughs)
- We've got an invasive weed that grows here.
It's a South African weed called Capeweed.
And it really, you know, with cleared ground,
it really takes over.
And it's not good, anyone who's out there listening
who's horsey knows that it's not good for horses.
- Right, and it's probably invading
their grassy fields and things.
- Yeah, well actually,
like yeah, some of the native Australian grasses
are really good for horses.
It's kind of interesting,
kind of that whole, you know,
what's actually good for,
what would actually be good for the earth
to be regenerated back to the native grasses
would be good for the animals,
would be, you know, that whole sort of.
But yeah, the Capeweed,
it's really quite bad here.
And it's the job to pull it all out by hand is it's far more enormous than my body's capable of.
Right.
But I do it anyway.
Oh, okay.
And as I'm doing it, it's this simple act of devotion.
just me and the horses and the paddock and the wades. Did you ever hear the story of the
old man and the starfish? Yeah. Yeah, made a difference to that one, he says, as he picks
the starfish up. And there's thousands of them on the beach. And the kid says,
what difference does it make if you throw one in the water? Well, it made a difference to that one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You guide meditations--
I've heard some of your meditations on YouTube--
to evoke the still mind of the divine.
This is a good one.
The second verse of the Yoga Sutras
say, "Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind."
Of course, it's in Sanskrit, but that's what it means.
So, how in your opinion does quieting the mind
help us access the timeless, peaceful state, the ground state?
Well, it's more about where our attention goes
than trying to quiet the mind. So, if our attention is constantly caught
by thought, then that's what we'll get more off,
just trapped in thought, but if our attention can rest in that gap,
beyond thought, in the stillness, we get more of that. So that's sort of the tool that we have is
where is our attention. Do you find that like when you're busy doing something, could be a simple
thing like washing the dishes or a little bit more complicated like driving a car or even you know
like right now having a conversation um do you find that there's a dimension that has
that is always in stillness which maybe there wasn't when you were you know 15 years old or
something but it's it's become a kind of a natural feature of your experience yeah i mean it was
certainly there when I was 15, but I had no idea. It was kind of overshadowed by stuff, probably
then. Too fragmented. Right, right. Yeah, I mean, it's there for everybody, but most people are
overshadowed. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, it's kind of the music's too loud. Someone's turned the stereo
Oh, too loud.
Yeah.
You took a fair amount about embodiment and also mysticism.
So you seem to speak of a blend of mystical and groundedness.
And you reference the archetypes of the divine mother
and the warrior.
And you work with subtle energies and benevolent helpers,
all while remaining deeply rooted in the physical.
So these benevolent helpers--
I presume you're talking about guardian angels or something of that nature, some subtle beings
that aren't obvious to the human perception, but are nonetheless among us and helping us?
Yeah, I wish I'd known about them sooner.
Well, they knew about you.
They knew about me.
They know about all of us.
I don't really label them as sort of guardian angels or guardian anything necessarily.
Just that they're there. They're there and they're support for us.
How do you know they're there? Somebody might ask, how do you know they're there?
As your path goes and as the more subtle senses open up, knowing things in that subtle realm,
it's like I know that you're here talking to me. It's like that. It's really hard to explain
that knowing. It just is. And when it comes through with really profound things
that you need right in that moment and it moves you and it moves that emotion like you know it's
authentic. Yeah. That's probably the best way to explain it. It happens a lot for me through
just like a clear audience, sometimes a clear cognizance, just knowing,
like hearing a voice that you know is not yours.
Yeah, like intuition.
Different to my intuition, and that's how I know.
Like I know when it's like intuition that's arising in me
or when it's another subtle being that's a helping guide.
Ah, that's good. I bet you a lot of people listening can relate to that.
For that first question, the manifesting question,
that was the point that I was going to say that if he's offering himself to
his spiritual path and his healing or whatever's happening for him,
tuning into that internal navigation, the clearer we get, the easier that is. And that's going to
help him in the fulfillment of a good life. Yeah, so it might seem a little esoteric to
some people to think that there are these sort of subtle beings of some kind that are hanging
around and helping us out, but it really can become obvious, kind of second nature, and
almost something you can rely on, you know.
Unless they decide that you need to do it on your own.
Yeah, or unless you're pushing in the wrong direction, then they might block it, or I
I don't know if it's them or what, but you might meet resistance and maybe if you're
wise you think, "Okay, there must be a reason for this resistance.
Am I supposed to push on through it or am I getting a sign that this is not the direction
I should go on?
I should go over this way instead."
Yeah, and it's a whole journey that, like learning to navigate the realizations and
the different stages.
But yeah, they've certainly helped me if I've been maybe going on, "Oh, go down that way,"
they're like, "No, maybe don't go that way."
And it is very different to my own arising of knowing that.
And then when we don't listen, we all get that, and then we don't listen.
And that, even the not listening, is intelligent, because there's a lesson there that needs
to be played out for whatever reason.
Yeah.
I don't perceive these things visually, but I had a friend who did, and he would say that
he could be in a group of people, like that conference I referred to, and he would see
these beings of some kind around people.
And he didn't know exactly what they were doing, but everyone seemed to have their little
attendance. And this is a whole bunch of spiritual people, spiritual teachers and stuff who are
on this, in this conference. And you know, there are a lot of teachers and traditions
who say that, you know, there are probably more beings in the subtle realm than there
are in the gross. I interviewed this guy named David Spangler, who was one of the founders
of the Fyndhorn community in Scotland. And, you know, he had been seeing and communicating
with these things all his life. I think it's interesting. I mean, you know, it'd be big
news if a UFO landed on the White House lawn, but think of the fact that there could be more
beings in this world of a subtle nature than there are gross beings such as we, and that's
even bigger news in a way. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's kind of, it keeps us humble too, I think.
It keeps us humble that we don't get too wrapped up in our own stuff to know that there's
these beings in other realms and perhaps we can't have the full picture here.
I wonder if there'll come a time when humanity is so evolved that it'll be common for
people's awareness to encompass a broader range of creation and it'll be kind of
ordinary for us to perceive these subtler beings as opposed to just being some
extraordinary thing that very few people have. Yeah, well that's it and it does, it becomes,
it just becomes normal.
Things that before, when you're sort of contracted and cut off,
that would have just seemed like mind-blowing.
It's just, of course, it's just normal. It becomes normal. It doesn't seem odd at all.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
Very beautiful.
Yeah, a friend sent me a whole long, like 20-minute message the other day,
and I hadn't talked to him for about a year,
But I had been just thinking about him for a couple of days.
And so when his message came, I called him up on WhatsApp.
And I said, well, I'm not surprised
that you sent me that message.
I've been thinking about you for a couple of days.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that's really common.
Yeah.
You shared a beautiful experience
of the Divine Mother gazing through you.
Can you speak about that a little bit more,
and about the feminine aspect of the Divine,
what it means to be an embodied mystic?
I think what you're referring to was with my little doggie.
When I was lovingly, very lovingly gazing upon him, there's that personal relationship,
obviously.
There's no one else that is his mother.
I'm his mother, apart from his actual dog mother.
I'm gazing upon him with all this love in that personal relationship, my motherly love, and
then that personal just gets pushed aside and then it's like literally divine mother
and gazing upon him. Unconditional love. And just a strange, so much love and intimacy,
but like a strange detachment. There's not that personal relationship. It's not there.
There's something else. It reminds me of a, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi wrote
this poem called "Love and God," and there was a section in the poem where he said, "Personal
love is concentrated universal love." And they said, "Ah," he said, "my heart flows when I say
personal love is concentrated universal love." But I guess we could think of, you know, the
Divine Mother or universal love as being a field of which we are just little conduits. And, you know,
and ordinarily we feel love and it seems like it's kind of coming from us but probably it's
coming through us to whatever extent it can. It sounds like in that case you know you
had the realization that you know it was a much broader field that you were just the
kind of a magnifying glass for. That's it, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
That again is, I mean, I keep going to the global implications of this stuff, but
you know, again, imagine if everybody in the world could be conscious conduits of universal love.
It would be such a different world. Yeah.
And that's all. It's inevitable, I think. It's inevitable. It's just,
are we going to commit to, you know, our devotion, bringing our human
devotion to our paths? Are we going to do that
now, or are we going to wait? How much suffering is going to happen
between those two points. Yeah. I mean there's no practical reason why everybody in the world
couldn't be properly fed and housed and cared for with health care and everything else.
It's just human, you know, limitations screwing it all up. These points, I mean, they seem obvious
to us, I think, but I don't seem to be obvious to everybody in the world because, you know,
people keep seeming to think that some particular, you know, political or economic or solution
is going to come along to solve all our problems.
Aldous Huxley said that there are no, all these problems that beset us in the world are not
problems, they're symptoms.
symptoms of the lack of the kind of realization that you and I are talking about.
Yeah, yeah, symptoms of the core wound, separation.
Right, on a mass scale.
Yeah.
You know, we were talking a minute ago about the Divine Feminine peering through your eyes at your dog.
(laughter)
There's also kind of the warrior archetype. I don't know if you talk about that.
But how do you balance these two energies?
And actually when you think of mothers and their mother they love,
they often balance that with the warrior archetype,
having to rescue a child from a vicious dog or whatever.
But speak to that a little bit.
Yeah, that's it.
And that's that whole not rejecting our...
I mean, I'm calling it wildness just because I like that word.
Rejecting our wildness, rejecting that innate intelligence that would do that, that would
protect the child, that would stand up for oneself or would stand up for others from
that place that's not divided from life itself.
And I think that there's probably still something in us that wants to separate that out, like
that they can't coexist in harmony, that all-loving, unconditional, divine Mother that seems warm
and welcoming, that it can coexist with the warrior archetype.
And that's actually really necessary.
Are you saying it can but it often doesn't?
Yeah, it often doesn't and there's often, I think, a collective kind of pushing away
of that.
You know, like, "Well, I can't be that because I have to be this."
You know, like that whole idea of it rather than it just being what it is, the truth of
it and the truth of it is that it does coexist. Yeah, sometimes I think of
spiritual evolution as a greater and greater capacity to contain opposites
and paradoxes, not having to be black and white on and off this or that but being
able to sort of hold the multi-dimensional paradoxical nature of
the universe within your awareness. Yeah, yeah, and to be whatever the moment is.
Yeah, whatever it calls for. Whatever it calls for, yeah, and it could come through as like a fierceness
in that warrior. I mean Joan of Arc is a striking example of that. Yeah, she's a little teenage girl.
Yeah, you can't fathom it, can you? I mean, and the unconsciousness of what they did to her.
Right. If you read her biography, there was a profound mystical dimension to her that somehow
impelled her to take on the role that she did.
Yeah. She certainly had surrender sewn up, that's for sure.
Yeah, what they did to her. You know, that reminds me of something I discussed in my
I interviewed last week with Edamar Kurein,
who's this Irish mystical woman.
But we were talking about all the horrible--
not that we want to dwell on this--
but all the horrible things that have been done to mystics,
and even like herbalists or whatever,
during the dark ages, during the Middle Ages,
people being burned to the stake for knowing about herbs
or something like that.
Or having mystical experiences.
just it's probably in a way it's a sign of for optimism because these days such things
are coming to the fore and people aren't being killed for them. They're being respected and
it's being recognized more and more widely so that might give us hope for the world.
Yeah, yeah. It's becoming more common, but I think that it's still in the collective, that fear of
the mystical, and really it's this fear of death, isn't it? When you get right down to it,
that fear of death, the fear of the unknown, the fear of what they can't control.
Yeah, I mean just speaking of religious traditions, usually what happens after some great seer comes
and establishes a whole new wave of knowledge is, after a generation or two, the administrators move
in and take over the whole thing. And then they don't understand the mystics and they feel threatened
by them. And so mystics end up getting persecuted and the whole thing becomes a complete polar
opposite of what its founder intended. And then you've got mystic's intergenerational trauma.
Yeah, really. Yeah. I mean, there's people that knew me prior to awakening and they might not
come and say it to me, but they probably think I've totally lost my mind, you know, because it's so
far from their paradigm of life.
Yeah. They can't fathom it. They can't fathom it, you know, and it's
um, they don't realize that that's actually, um,
rather than an insanity, it's actually coming into sanity,
the whole awakening process. And, you know, again, it's a matter of
what is the norm. And someone like, someone like you is an
outlier. You know, you're not the norm, thank God. But, you know, there could, there could
and hopefully will become a society in which, you know, mystics are the norm. Which is not
to say they'll all be sitting around, you know, contemplating their belly buttons, though
practical stuff can get done. But from the kind of the normal higher state of consciousness
is that everyone will be living.
And then, someone who's not living that
will be the aberration or the oddball.
It's like, even think about how the world has changed
since, let's say, the 1800s.
And everything we took for granted in the 1800s,
and a train was about as fast as anything could ever travel,
and things like that.
And there was no conception that there was
other galaxies out there, even that we were in a galaxy.
People didn't know what we were in.
And now look at all the things we take for granted.
I mean, look at our cell phone is a much more powerful
computer than the computer that was used to get
the astronauts to the moon.
And we carry it around in our pockets.
They can do all this stuff.
So, you know, and the pace of change is accelerating.
And AI, I don't think people realize
what an earth-shaking development AI is
and how it's going to really shake things up
in the next, even in the next couple of years.
It already is.
Amazon has more robots working for it now
than it does people.
But anyway, as Dylan said, the times there are changing
and it's exciting to be in the midst of it.
But I think it has, it's not just technological change,
I think it's spiritual change
there's a real renaissance going on in that regard. Yeah, yeah. I saw you interviewed,
I can't remember his surname, Father Sean, someone Irish? Oh yeah, Djaramud Ormulku,
the Irish mystic about a month ago. Oh, Sean O'Leary. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, Sean O'Leary,
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, he was a cool guy.
And he was saying about his experience with a mystical being, saying that there was going
to be three kind of segments of the evolutionary arc of humanity.
Huh.
I forgot what he said because it was a few years ago, but go ahead and remind us.
Yeah, something about homeopsychopathia or something, and then there was homo spiritualis
and then homo artificialis.
I feel like a cyborg.
There could be. I saw this little video the other day of this robot that's wandering around Austin, Texas.
And it goes up to people and introduces itself and says, "Hey, nice Apple watch you have."
"Hey, cool t-shirt." You know, and he can pick out all kinds of details about the person.
And the reason there's a buzz about it is that nobody knows who owns this robot or where it came from
or why it's wandering the streets of Austin.
He's saying, "I'm not anybody's."
He's sovereign.
No one's slave.
Yeah.
But when you were talking about 1800s, it drew my attention to horses, because obviously
in the past, horses would have been so pivotal in our society.
And I think now, with the raising of consciousness and evolutionary art that we're on, it's like
a time of giving back to them, because our modern, all the modern comforts that we enjoy
were literally grown off the back of horses.
a lot of instances as kind of like slaves, really. Because if it wasn't for horses, we'd
probably still be, I don't know, hunter-gatherers or something. They really advanced humanity.
Sometimes people can have a negative idea or association. Not everyone has a positive
idea or association with horses. More like, "Oh, well, you know, a really cold-hearted kind of,
well, why would you bother? It's a lot of work," or it's a lot of whatever. And
our gratitude to them is due, even if you've never had anything to do with them.
Yeah, that's nice. And our gratitude to all the animal species. I mean, we've really given them
a raw deal. You know, I forget who it was, it might have been Einstein or maybe it was
Gandhi. Some quote about how, you know, you can kind of measure the level of evolution
of humanity by the way it treats animals, something like that. And we're not doing so
well by that measure yet. Not yet. Yeah, there's just, I mean, I live in a town where, I mean
in a state where there are 3 million people and 23 million
pigs.
And there's a big controversy going on right now
because California, which is more progressive than Iowa,
insists that pigs be given at least 24 square feet of space
to live in all their lives, which is what?
Four by six.
That's not a whole lot of space.
But the Iowa pig farmers are saying,
oh, you're infringing upon our business model.
it's not practical to give them that much space and that they want
them to be in little confinements where they can't even turn around because they
somehow make more money and pigs are more intelligent than dogs by most measures.
Yeah they're amazing. Yeah so this kind of thing I mean there's got to be some
karmic consequences to the way we treat animals. Yeah that cut off it's just yeah
And that's that whole thing goes back to the second question of like how do we
how do we help? We help by attending to what's here because I think that the
the level of compassion that is allowed to flow for all the parts of ourselves
that are in pain or unconscious or wounded is directly proportional to what
then flows out for others. And you can see it even with people that are very loving and
kind but they haven't gone to that depth. And there'll be that moment of like, "Oh,
that hurts," because they're not able to include that suffering of whether it's an animal or
a person or whatever being in, but it's because there's parts of themselves that are suffering
that haven't been included.
So you're saying that if they could somehow reconcile or heal their own suffering, their
own shadows, then compassion would be a spontaneous outcome or flow from that.
Yeah, inevitably, I think.
It's inevitable.
Yeah.
It's interesting, out of all the sages or mystics, Ramana Maharshi was one that I didn't know
anything about him, but I'd heard his name and I was drawn to him, felt drawn to him
over others.
And then I found out later that apparently he was a real animal lover.
Oh yeah, crows, he had a cow named Lakshmi, whom he considered to be enlightened.
And he would often, while he was giving darshan, he would often just be staring at the squirrels
climbing up and down the trees and things like that.
It's funny, isn't it?
Talking about all our capacities, how we have that capacity to know.
So there was knowing in me that there was a resonance with him, with that whole connection
with the animals and that love for them.
Yeah, a lot of sages have been like that.
St. Francis is famous.
There's all these paintings of him with birds landing on him
and things like that.
And there was a story about Yogananda
that this deer had come to live in the ashram
and somebody fed it too much milk
and it was dying because it had over drunk milk.
And Yogananda was holding it in his lap
and just loving it and praying for it to live.
And then the soul of the deer said to him, let me go.
It's time for me to go.
You're holding me back.
But anyway, it's quite typical, I think,
of saints and sages having an affinity with animals.
It's almost like an indicator of their level of development.
Yeah, yeah, that inclusion of all beings.
Which in a way is symptomatic of godliness, you could say,
because God certainly loves all creatures.
And if we are really kind of in God consciousness,
if we want to call it that,
then we're going to exhibit the same qualities as God.
- And then you've got to balance that with practicality.
You know, I'll go out in the forest to cut firewood
with one of my friends who's very mystical.
And, you know, you get too lost in looking at the amazing
like mushrooms that have grown out.
And you're just like,
I don't want to cut this bit of wood
because there's just so much.
- Yeah, it's the home to these mushrooms.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's practicality is that you gotta stay warm as well.
So. - Yeah.
But it's like not taking more than you need.
I think that's an important principle.
And that's again something like, you know,
the Native Americans, they would kill bison,
you know, buffalo, but only what they needed.
And then they would use every bit of it.
And then when the white men built the railroad
through the West, you know, they would just stop the train
and people would shoot all the bison
and leave them to rot on the prairie,
in part because they wanted to starve out
the Native Americans.
But, you know, completely idiotic way
to behave that is indicative of the mentality of those people.
Cut off from themselves, so they don't
realize that what they're doing, they're doing to themselves.
Yeah, exactly.
I keep quoting Jesus, but he said,
what whatsoever you do unto the least of these,
you do unto me.
I think everyone can say that.
Well, aren't we full of wisdom, all this pontification.
Anyway, it's a fun conversation.
Yeah, so, and I apologize to people
if you feel I've talked too much.
Sometimes I talk too much and Irene is not in the room
to hand me notes telling me not to.
So, in any case then, so to wrap it up, you know, looking at the full tapestry of your
journey so far, and your journey is far from over, you know, the trauma, the awakening,
the shadow work, the devotion, what's been the ultimate realization for you so far?
If that's a fair question.
You can always tell me that's not a good question.
life is living itself. Nice. And where does that, where do we fit into that equation?
Go along for the ride. Yeah.
Hopefully have some fun. So you interact with people, you do one-on-ones, I presume,
you have maybe some kind of group meetings, different things like that, right? Yeah. And
And actually you mentioned that you often get intuitive insights for clients before you
have sessions with them.
And then when you have the session, you realize, "Oh, this insight is absolutely pertinent
to what this person just brought up."
Right?
Yeah.
Sometimes it's an insight specifically for them.
Other times I'm just drawn to talk about something totally random and it's exactly
out what they needed to hear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I might even share something about my own life
for some reason. I think, why am I doing this? And then it's for them. Good. So,
people listening to this, I'll put a link to your website. And I presume that on your website,
you have ways of getting in touch with you and Paige about events or services and all that stuff,
right? Yeah, yeah, there's events page that they can go on and they'll see you in the next date,
the 10th of August and just email. What are you going to do on the 10th of August?
I'm going to do one that I've done before that the group really liked. I called it the
healing chamber. How do you work out the time zones? Well, 10 a.m. my time, so it's not far off
that now. Yeah, so okay, so that would be like nine in the evening in the central U.S. or whatever.
Yeah. And you have an email sign up thing there on your site, so if people want to be notified of
things they can sign up. Yeah, I get notified of the groups and various things. And if anybody's in
WA or if they're in Australia or they're traveling here, I'm running a retreat for two days in
September. In Western Australia? Yeah, yeah, right on the beachfront, Serbia. That sounds nice.
Really beautiful, yeah, yeah, looking forward to it. Great, all righty, well keep up the good work
and it's been lovely talking to you and meeting you. Yeah, really nice to meet you. Yeah, I really
appreciate everything you're doing and everything that most of the people I talked to were doing. I
I sort of feel like, in a way, if I can help them,
then I can help the world through them,
by just bringing them to more people's awareness.
- Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- All right, so thank you. - Must be fun.
- Yeah, it has been.
Thanks to those who've been listening or watching.
We'll have another one in a couple of weeks
with a guy named Dan Kelso.
And I won't talk much about him right now.
We'll just see what he has to say when we have our interview.
So thanks, Aveda.
Thank you.
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