In the Deep with Catherine Ingram Welcome to In the Deep.
I'm your host,
Catherine Ingram.
The following is excerpted from a session of Dharma Dialogues held in Byron Bay,
Australia in September 2017.
It's called Free Your Loved Ones of Worry About You.
This morning I was on the phone with my mother who lives on the 11th floor of a building.
She lives in a condo by herself.
She's 87 years old.
In a building on the southern coast of Florida,
Which is about to be hit by one of the largest hurricanes in the history of that region.
In a couple of days it's due in that area.
And so we were talking about all her options and her preparedness.
Of course,
The local governments are insisting that people evacuate,
But my mother and her friends are not going to.
She feels that that's just as dangerous or more so to be out on the road when you're 87 years old.
And she was amazingly sanguine about the situation,
Just what to do,
Kind of.
And there was this moment,
It was late afternoon for her,
And there was this moment where she,
In an uncharacteristically wistful way,
Said,
The ocean is so still,
It's like glass.
She's looking out at a vast expanse of ocean from where her balcony is.
She said,
It's like a sea of glass.
And she said,
And the sky just seems also so still,
There's hardly a cloud.
I said,
Well,
Mom,
I think that's called the calm before the storm.
But then I went with it.
I realized why I put that into the equation.
And I said,
It sounds very beautiful.
And she said,
It is really beautiful.
And we had this moment of just silence together.
Of course,
In the context of being present with the beautiful stillness that she's experiencing.
And of course,
All the while,
The awareness of what is about to happen.
So her bathtub is filled with water,
And she's purchased a lot of drinking water,
And has candles and lots of batteries and so on and so forth.
Food that doesn't require refrigeration and all of those things.
And she's pretty relaxed.
And I hung up the phone and reflected how much more at ease I felt knowing how relaxed she is,
How she's not in panic.
Now,
If she were in panic,
I would be thrown into,
Naturally,
A feeling of what can I do,
A kind of worry,
A kind of feeling of I should have been there,
I should try to get there,
All kinds of crazy thoughts.
But what she transmitted in this conversation was ease.
And it's not the first time I've reflected on how wonderful it is to offer ease to your people about your own life,
Right?
I've said many times that in that kind of simplicity of being and your own steadiness,
What happens for other people who love you is that on their list of worries,
Your name doesn't appear,
Right?
You're not on the list of worries.
Now,
Of course,
I do have concern for my mother and her friends.
But what I don't have is a sense of her being in panic and being in high distress.
So we tune our awareness not only for our own benefit and for our own well-being and ease and joy and all the great things that come with it,
But also for those who love us.
It serves as a kind of modeling.
It's a kind of example of possibility.
And it also allows them to feel that at least in this one part of their life there's some sort of encouragement.
Anyway,
It just came to me to speak about this,
Fresh in the awareness.
So,
As you know,
I've got a son who over the years has been in bouts of turmoil.
And I'm always his rock.
He knows that he can call me and that I have a listening ear and an open heart and unconditional love for him.
And what you just said,
I know,
Is I'm not on his list of worries.
I'm on his list of rock.
Yes,
Exactly.
At the top of the list.
Possibly.
But what I also realize that I give him in that is my trust in him that he is OK.
Yes,
Yes,
That's really important,
Too.
That you're a place perhaps,
And this is another,
I think,
Something that comes when you sit solidly in your own beingness.
You can see that shining in people even if they're a little unsteady.
You can still see it.
And to the degree you can see it,
They can sense that you're seeing the part of them that's sane and OK.
And so you're transmitting their OK-ness back to them.
Exactly.
That's the part I talk to when I talk to him.
Yes,
Exactly.
Right.
Yeah.
I often have the sense here in this circumstance in which we have Dharma dialogues.
I I tend to assume that I'm going to speak to Buddha nature.
Right.
That's the assumption.
And it's I know for myself at times when I have felt crazy and if I'm with someone who I know really understands me and is basically speaking to that,
Which is sane,
It calls out the sanity.
It calls out that which is fine.
Yeah.
I'm just appreciating this moment of being able just to sink in and be quiet and calm this crazy animal and also just really realizing how you know,
It's the same one,
All these different voices that are that we talk to ourselves with to calm ourselves or to fire ourselves up.
I mean,
It's the same voice that's kind of setting all these impossible tasks and then trying to calm yourself through it.
And then and it's like,
Like,
What is the cheese at the end?
It's like,
What is that?
It was it feels like,
You know,
I'm setting myself so many impossible tasks just to be able to do it all and coaching myself through it and,
You know,
Picking myself up and,
You got this,
You can do this.
And it's like,
Actually,
What am I doing it for again?
You know,
It's interesting.
I mean,
We kind of coach ourselves through and in a way that kind of shows that we've got it together.
Right.
But well,
At least that's the way I talk to myself.
But I guess the question with the question really is,
It's like,
So what is,
You know,
Well,
What is the driver?
What is the motivating driver for the whole entire production?
And that's the one to kind of come to terms with,
Because that one,
It can be this subliminal thrusting motion going on inside of oneself that,
You know,
Is basically is basically the voice behind the voice.
It's like,
You know,
The voice you're describing is the one that is in production and gets all the job done.
It's the other voice,
The silent partner,
You know,
Which is the driver,
Which might have to do with,
You know,
In many cases for people,
It's ultimately,
It's thinking that that's how they're going to get love,
You know,
Whether it's people who are trying to make billions of dollars,
You know,
And they want to have all this stuff.
But ultimately,
Probably,
Bottom line,
What they really want is to be loved.
And that's often the driver for people.
Self-esteem is a big driver,
You know,
Kind of,
But in a way,
That's also connected to wanting to be loved,
You know.
But I often remember the metaphor that Papaji used about,
You know,
It's like the policeman dressing up as a thief,
I mean,
Sorry,
The thief dressing up as the policeman to chase the thief,
You know,
Just to keep that story going,
Just to keep it in perpetuity.
But it's just in these moments where you can just really like go to silence,
Where you see how that whole thing operates,
Basically just perpetuating itself.
I had this sense when we were sitting,
We both had mentioned on the way here,
Mary Ann and I were talking about,
She was telling me about a story with a cyclone and the people who were actually experiencing the eye of the cyclone.
And but as we were sitting here,
I was sensing like being in the eye of a hurricane or the eye of a storm,
But like a worldwide storm,
You know,
Which feels sort of like things that the earth is just,
You know,
There's a certain way that it is storming in a lot of places.
And I was sensing just the quiet that one can tune into as a kind of eye of the storm,
You know.
And that's often the case in busy lives,
You know,
That you have to be the eye of the storm just to keep functioning.
But my recommendation always is to avoid the storm.
Right.
About just stay in the calm before the storm.
Yeah,
Stay in the calm before the storm or just get out of the way of the storm or don't enter into the storm.
You know,
Just to really make that a priority and to really to know that that is the way of health and the way of.
And also it allows you to then be operating at your highest capacity,
Whereby then your actions become very,
Very efficient.
You know,
This comes as great efficacy with everything you do because you've got this clarity and calm and you're not worn out,
You know.
And so those are the ways that you have to look at the underlying drivers that are kind of keeping the whole thing in motion,
Even though that's not healthy and,
You know,
It's I mean,
Some systems can handle more than others.
And I think your system can handle a lot.
I guess I'm just trying to see how far it can go.
Well,
You don't have to do that.
Don't have to do that.
No,
No,
No.
I would recommend not,
You know,
Why push it to the collapse point?
You know,
And a lot of people do,
Of course.
You know,
I think a lot of people get ill because their silent driver has been running the show and they're basically a slave to it.
So there's a very,
There's a lot of evidence now,
There's a lot of evidence in sort of the healing world looking at these matters.
There's a book called Radical Remission,
Do you know it?
Her name is,
The author is Kelly Turner.
I actually met her on a bus before this book was published.
I met her on a bus in New York.
I just instantly gravitated to her and sat next to her.
And we had this incredible conversation.
And she was working on her thesis for this book.
So the thesis was,
She interviewed more than a thousand people around the world who had had basically totally radical remissions from terminal illnesses.
The illness disappeared.
And no one,
To her knowledge at the time,
Had ever done a proper scientific study in interviewing all those people as to why do you think this happened?
What did you do?
And she identified nine consistent factors that people,
Over and over and over again,
She heard in these stories of radical remissions.
These are people who some had been through conventional treatments,
Some had done conventional and alternative,
Some only alternative,
Etc.
But anyway,
The illness had progressed and had gotten to the point of terminal when they had these turnarounds.
Anyway,
She published this book and it became a New York Times bestseller.
And now it's this whole huge sort of movement centered around her work.
But some of the points,
Of course,
In the book,
Certainly some have to do with physical things like diet and exercise and things like that.
But a lot of them have to do with what you might call these spiritual and psychological magical realms and have to do with really deeply listening to your intuition.
Like that seems to be a very consistent one about illness and about healing,
Like really listening,
Because a lot of these people basically had to listen to their own inner voices about that,
Even though the medical system was telling them something else.
And also being really authentic,
Like living in your deeper truths and not in some sort of suppression of oneself.
I thought that was really interesting.
And really tuning into joy a lot.
She was saying that five minutes a day of feeling joy helps bump up your immune system.
And her whole premise,
According to all the now a lot of the medical research that's come in in support of her work,
Is that it's basically your own immune system that's going to radically cause a remission,
That is your own immune system kicks in and cleans up the cancer.
Right.
So what I would say to you is that I feel that your own intuition is sending you messages.
Right.
And you just have to start listening,
Like,
Seriously,
You know,
As we all do.
I'm not singling you out in this,
But I ignored in my own case for years and years and years,
You know,
And I didn't end up in any kind of big illness.
But I certainly know how the system felt like it was getting weakened.
You know.
So it's another part of awakened awareness is that you have a fine tuning to your physical system and to your psychological system.
And you know when you're starting to get tired.
Yeah.
I really noticed that I think yesterday morning when I woke up and just in this as the whole world kind of comes together,
It's like you wake up and everything starts coming into place to do what's going on and what you're dealing with.
It's like,
Okay.
And as that was all coming together,
There was some part of me that was looking for that voice that says,
Yeah,
Okay,
Got this.
And it wasn't coming.
And I was like,
Then it came.
I was like,
Yeah,
Okay,
I got this.
I was like,
Oh,
My God,
What if that voice doesn't come?
You know,
It's like,
What happens when that one doesn't come up?
It's like,
That one's really important to this whole system.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well,
Of course,
You know,
You do have responsibilities as a mother and in a job and so on.
And so,
Yes,
You can have this most of the time.
But I would just say,
You know,
Plug in a lot of caretaking for you and a lot of quiet and calm and unscheduled time.
I think that's the number one for you.
The number one prescription is unscheduled time whereby you can actually just really do nothing much and or just do whatever you feel like doing in the moment,
You know,
Without having to be somewhere where it's already laid out.
And then the next thing and the next thing,
You know.
And I know for mothers,
It's definitely a challenge.
You know,
You don't really,
There isn't a whole lot of extra time of your own.
But whatever there is,
I would say,
You know,
Guard it,
You know,
Really protect it.
Yeah,
One has to be able to really just tune in even in the midst of that flow,
You know,
And just go to quiet.
Yes.
It's happening.
And sometimes it's just a matter of just stepping outside and just listening to what's going on.
Absolutely.
It's amazing when you just step out for a moment,
Whatever it is that's going on in the office and the conversations that everything is like so important and so busy and you step outside and there's just like this few little tweets in the trees.
Yes,
Absolutely.
You know,
And you go,
Oh,
Wow.
It's like there's nothing at a hurry here.
Right.
Yeah.
You know,
We're very we're very lucky to be living in nature as we do here.
And so that you can always it's always,
You know,
Quite clear in terms of its transmission of of a certain type of beingness and intelligence.
Now,
Of course,
Nature can get wild as well as we're seeing on the globe.
But in so far as we live in this rather gentle environment,
We can always you know,
It's like a,
You know,
A meditation is being broadcast everywhere we go.
A tuning fork.
Yeah,
It is a big tuning fork.
Exactly.
And just to look at the sky and the ocean and hear the birds and yeah,
The rustle in the trees,
You know,
It's just such soothing sounds.
It turns out that soothing sounds of nature,
Even if they're played on like a a digital device,
Are actually good for your immune system.
Another recent medical discovery is that it should there's a certain calming of everything and a bump up of the immune system if you're listening to or hearing nature a lot.
So.
Yeah,
It's all the ways that one is keeping this instrument tuned,
Right?
And wanting to,
Then it makes better music,
You know,
You want to do that as an offering.
More and more,
You're just giving it as an offering,
You know.
OK.
Thank you.
I've got a lot of coincidences going on lately in my life and I don't think they're coincidences anyway.
I'm not believing in coincidences at the moment.
I'm very overwhelmed with my other sensual overload going on lately.
What do you mean?
All the people in my life's names and just coincidences is overwhelming me with.
I can't put the puzzle pieces together and I can't add up correct sum to the equation of my life.
Yeah.
So you're finding a lot of synchronicities of different situations.
Oh yeah,
To the point of insanity,
Which makes me really question what this is to the point of insanity.
I just question,
Over question,
Analyze every single thing.
Well,
One thing that is important to understand about so-called coincidences is they can only really be measured against the amount of incidents.
Are you following me?
So in a day you might have,
Who knows how many thousands of thoughts,
How many thousands of moments of this and that.
So there are sometimes intersecting situations that we call coincidences.
But they're only intersecting,
Their number is usually a minuscule number compared to the incidents.
So a lot of times what we do with our brains is we have a tendency to confirmation bias.
And we then look for patterns.
That has been really helpful for us evolutionarily.
We look for patterns.
And we tend to emphasize when we find a pattern,
It gets higher emphasis.
And things called like coincidence get a lot of weight on them.
Whereas we don't notice so much all the times of the moments of the day when there is no coincidence.
Yeah,
Except for me personally lately,
They've all been very significant incidences of coincidence.
Yes.
I just believe what's meant to be,
What's meant to be.
Yeah.
Got a lot more questions than I have answers.
I guess that's part of life.
That's good.
Yeah.
Yeah,
It keeps going in that direction.
You know,
Even at times you thought you had answers to some of the questions.
And even those answers fall away in time.
One is left more and more in the mystery and everything you thought you knew gets revised.
Right?
And gets freshened up.
And which is great,
You know.
It's a great understanding.
It's a great place to sit in the mystery of this.
Right?
So you may be sensing that,
Even though I haven't spoken much,
But that my inclination is very,
Very practical and has to do with how you use your attention to basically have your own experience of this life.
You make your own experiments in this life.
Yes,
I've had many,
Many,
Many coincidences in my life.
Yeah.
As you can imagine,
Given my age,
I've had many,
Many extraordinary coincidences.
And at this point I just see them as simply that,
With nothing extra,
No magical anything,
No other meaning than what I give it.
So it's really stripped down into truly direct experience without any laying on of anything extra.
And then you're really looking at everything from this kind of point of clarity.
Yeah.
Right?
You don't have any need for other types of interpretation.
But that's not to say that I didn't used to when I was younger.
I would make a big deal about various kinds of coincidence.
I would think it meant some kind of other kind of power or supernatural thing,
Slightly.
Yeah.
It is what you make it,
I guess.
Yeah.
Another thing I was reading a little about yesterday for some reason was butterfly effect.
Yeah.
Because of,
Yeah,
Playing out scenarios in my mind and different decisions I've made.
Yeah,
That's a good way to apply that particular metaphor.
It's otherwise been greatly debunked.
Except I was told that no matter what,
It will always be the same.
So what do you mean by that?
I was told that even if I had made a different decision,
I would have still been on this path.
I would have been in this place.
Well,
It's something that couldn't possibly be known by anyone.
Yeah.
Right.
So I guess that's the opposite to that theory then.
Yeah.
And more of destiny sort of an opinion,
The person I was talking about.
Right.
Yes.
Yes.
Which we can't know.
Maybe it's true,
But no one could know it.
That free will and destiny debate has been going on in philosophical circles for centuries.
Again,
It's in the mystery category.
So what I recommend,
And of course it's just an offering,
I'm not assuming that it's the way to go,
But again,
Is to strip it down to your really honest,
Direct experience such that when you speak,
You're really just speaking as simply as telling someone how to get to the post office,
Right,
Through the fact that you've been there many,
Many times.
So you start to come from that level of speaking from what you really know,
Really know in your heart of hearts.
And I know it's tempting to take on teachings and spiritual ideas.
And,
You know,
Believe me,
I took them on myself for years,
You know.
But I can just tell you from the on the other side of it,
Letting go of anything that has been imposed by some belief system is really where the freedom is and also where the insight in your own genius starts to arise.
How did you learn to think,
Have thought?
Well,
Let's ask the question slightly differently,
Because obviously I was born with a brain and one starts thinking at a pretty young age.
But another way to ask that question is how did it happen that I would,
That my thinking became more free?
And that was a process of elimination,
Of seeing through things that I would have to look at and say,
Actually,
I don't really know this.
But you do know what you've experienced.
Being where I've been,
Seeing what I've seen.
Say again?
I've been where I've been and seen what I've seen.
Yes,
Exactly.
Right.
And when you speak from that,
There's an authority in it.
Not that you're trying to be an authority,
But there's an authority that comes when you speak from your own direct experience.
Right.
And you can hear,
Your attention starts to become very finely tuned when you hear someone speaking.
You know,
Poonjaji,
My teacher,
Says it very simply,
A true teacher only gives you his or her experience.
All the rest are preachers.
Right.
The preachers give you the old time religion,
What's written in the text.
They give you,
And the preachers come in all kinds,
There's new age preachers,
Obviously,
Not just old time religion,
But there's a lot of new age preachers around.
You know?
Sure.
But a real teacher is only going to talk to you about what they actually experience and a real friend in terms of,
If you want to just talk about sharing heart to heart,
That's what they are sharing.
How old are you?
I'm 20.
I just turned 20.
You just turned 20.
Cool.
Lovely.
Very lucky to be 20 and interested in these matters.
Yeah.
You know?
I can't work out answers,
Only questions.
So give me a question.
A question is?
What's your real question,
Actually?
My real question?
Do we all make this up in our own mind?
OK,
So let's ask a question that is really your question,
Because I can't,
We can't,
None of us can speculate what all of us are doing.
But what is your,
Here you are,
20 years old,
Young man living in Byron Bay.
What is your theme in your life right now?
What is your burning?
My theme is different messages.
But I guess what is what is it your like,
Are you searching for something?
Are you wondering about something?
Are you?
Is it best to wait for stuff to come out of the blue?
Or take rain and action?
So I'll answer from my own experience.
There's some times when it's time to stop.
And to wait for what you might call the pull,
Right?
To be attracted like a magnet.
So there are times,
There's times for that.
And then there's times for rolling up the sleeves and getting really creative with something,
You have a vision of something or you have an idea or you want to help out in some way.
In some circumstance.
And that takes effort and energy.
And that you find yourself rolling out toward that.
But again,
In the deep quiet in which you can sit as your general space,
These pulls and attractions become very,
And also need to stop,
They become very,
Very clear.
And so you start to rely on your own system to tell you if there's a time to pull or to be pulled or a time to push.
Right.
Often you can wait for the pull if if you're just content.
Yeah.
Right.
You wait for a pull to do this or that.
To no extent am I ever content 100 percent.
Yeah.
But there could be moments of being content 100 percent.
And that's the recommendation as well to really let moments like my mother had this morning looking at the sea of glass,
Just quiet.
Right.
Where there's nothing much else going on,
Just really experiencing being.
Yeah.
It's difficult.
Yeah.
Life's difficult.
If it.
Life has a lot of bumps in the road,
Definitely.
It does.
Life has a lot of hardship.
Do you recommend to focus on the good times,
Not the bad times and try and forget that even though you can't really forget,
Try and forget,
Not dwell on the past?
Yeah,
I would recommend not dwell on the past and to really seize the day and to really enjoy your life.
Right.
I know that you've heard this from older people probably a lot,
But,
You know,
To be 20 years old,
You know,
And have,
You know,
A strong,
Healthy body and be young and have tremendous energy and creative juices running and it's very,
Very it's a great time of life.
Great.
And often it's we miss it.
I mean,
Almost everyone I know was suffering all through their 20s and 30s.
You know,
We miss it.
And you look back at photographs of yourself and you think,
You think,
Gosh,
I wish I'd known I would have been having a lot more fun with all that bounty that no one had at the time.
But,
You know,
It's very common developmentally that people in their 20s are still sort of working out with who am I and who I am in the world and kind of ego needs and all of those things.
But given that you have come to this room,
You could take a little shortcut if you want and really let yourself truly enjoy in what even if it's just a moment here and there.
Right.
Where you don't where nothing else is needed.
Right.
You don't need a girlfriend or a boyfriend or you don't need some kind of recognition from some other body or a group of people.
You don't have to be on a stage.
All of those things,
Just a moment here and there in your day where you just go,
Wow,
Nice to be alive.
Yeah,
Yes,
It is.
It is great to be alive.
