Caroline Myss & Anne Lamott: Hope and Renewal

hello everybody and welcome thank you for joining annie and me uh it is such a pleasure for me to interview annie on her new book which is dusk night dawn it is stunning it's beautiful it's on revival and courage and i've read it twice and and i have to say it's a pleasure for me to be in the interviewer's seat which i love and so uh hello sweetheart hello honey you're great to do this oh no no it is such a pleasure and so my first question is i and i think this is i love this question when someone asks me this what inspired this beautiful book out of you oh by the way of all the beautiful books you've written and this is what number 10 well it's my 19th book yeah your 19th and a new york times bestseller i might add so what inspired well my last book was called um almost everything thoughts on hope which i had originally wanted to call doomed thoughts on hope because the world had gotten so weird and grim politically and environmentally but my publisher said no i couldn't do that so i went on book tour for the book on hope and everywhere i went people felt hopeless they felt this existential exhaustion they felt overwhelmed by what was going on in their families and in their nation and they felt clueless as to where to even begin to the the restoration and so i sat down to to write about what i thought might be useful stories i could tell that i thought would give some inspiration or even direction so can i just read the first paper okay okay let's go okay we are older scared numb on some days and enraged on others with even less trust than we had a year ago the devastating pandemic and the federal government's confused and deadly response was simply the final straw to a few years of crushing developments a u.n report on climate catastrophe was published months before my wedding in 2019 the report of the extinction of one million species just three weeks after major buzz kill our poor country has been torn asunder i await the reign of frogs and i've gotten so much less young i got medicare three days before i got hitched which sounds like something an old person might do which does not describe adorably ageless me i mostly love being in the third third of my life as it is the easiest that life has ever been except for well the bodily aspects and the dither and fogginess and i wouldn't go back a year well maybe back two years before the two u.n reports which have changed everything at our wedding we were all the people we loved most in the world gathered in a redwood grove to celebrate the miracle that neil and i had found each other and fallen in love and toughed out some conflicts we celebrated and overrate of course while outside the sacred circle our nation and the world seemed to have reached the point of no return so we danced that was glorious and i hate to be a downer but now what where on earth do we start to get our world and joy and hope and our faith and life itself back gorgeous thank you i mean it i mean but and part of that journey when you're answering that question which is an ongoing theme in your book yeah takes the reader into the soul again and again and again and again you are always weaving into the soul in this book and always describing it yet again yet again yet again in so many delicious ways and i i i i want to talk about that because i think the question the comments you make in the book and the way you weave back into the soul again and again in this kind of organic divinity the way um you see the soul present at every dance at every wonder and when you're sitting on the seashore when you're at the airport no matter where it is your soul's walking next to you like a companion like handing you a pair of glasses and saying look at something this way so i'm going to read something okay my turn yes i love this the soul is the lighthouse from which we see the vast celestial ocean a kiosk from which we observe whatever passes by the purest expression of our being alive the one part they couldn't wreck in the paranoid sense of the word they charles berkowski said if you don't have much soul left and you know it you've still got soul plato said his soul is immortal and imperishable my new husband who still reads plato if you can believe it is prone to the random obi-wan pronouncement and he says that the soul is made of friendly awareness and the awareness of that awareness i love the precision with which you describe the soul it's it it it tells me again and again when i read your work that you know what you're talking about well you know it takes me five drafts to get it as precise as you think it is so that passage which is probably say two or three hundred words could have been a day's work of taking out all the stuff that some of the stuff that i just saw was thought was so area diet or brilliant i took out you know and i took out some of the stuff that tried to be more comical so that people won't think i'm a depressive and um and i just keep working it until finally it's like a polaroid like the first image appears and i had i could see the kiosk i could see the lighthouse id ashanti who i love said the part of you that's a the part of you that sees you're afraid is not afraid you know and and everybody that i love that i've read including you goes to that understanding that we are uh that the the truest part of us is not what people see or who we pretend to be or who we leave and think we are but that it's the inside russian nesting doll that you keep opening up another identity or persona that you aren't but that you've been pretending to be or agreeing to be all these years and then finally there's this little being like in that chapter my sunday school kids um there were three of them that day one of them said she thought that she was young she was i forgot seven or eight she said she thought the soul was a little um kitty rabbit pikachu creature in the very in your very heart and if you know who pikachu is it's like so it is loving awareness and then the boy who was about 15 and kind of cranky um said he thought it was a silvery snow globe in the center of you you know and so the kids i wrote down everything they said because it kept helping me get closer and closer and you know just with writing i know this is true for you too you keep figuring out what it isn't that you're doing and then you get closer and closer to what you were sort of aiming for all along and i just wanted a really clean description of our truest deepest inside uh person looking out with probably wonder and um a kind of kind of touched by it all instead of with opinions or judgment or blame you know just with wonder okay so here's a question okay why why do you think it's important for it's like part of your charism part of what you are meant to be doing is to navigate the waters of the soul and to describe that and so why is it important for people to have a new navigator of the soul to describe the content of the soul in contemporary language why why do people need that so much now well everywhere i go when i'm talking in public which i haven't done for a year but and everywhere i go in in my little community in my own little galaxy here people just feel a lot of overwhelm i mean there's a constant stream of data and endless shifting and and and you know like plays of light and and uh it's just kind of pandemonium on the in the visible level and on our screens on our tv scroll the entire telecommunications empire which we often have going all at once and um and so i think it's really important to say um that's all really great conversationally but you seem to be feeling really exhausted and i'm kind of flattened by it all and i'm wondering if we might just sit here a minute and breathe our way into something a place in us that that might be fully alive and not defeated and not depressed and and just like uh like neil my husband his his work at shapes of truth is constantly about um that's the name of his book which i thought of by the way okay truth.com but anyway um it's always always always about getting like back to curiosity you know and people that i'm close to and people that i speak to you've lost a lot of those child aspects like you know jesus saying you must become a child to you know to get into the kingdom of heaven which is a sweet gentle heart and a and a more spacious awareness of life it's not about what's on the tv set tonight it's not about the oprah interview or msnbc it's about this deeper pure truer thing there's a great phrase in the hebrew bible in one of the psalms where the psalmist probably david in one of his states says he talks about deep calling to deep so that i think we imagine the waterfall calling to the stars say but we also understand it from the mystical level or the level of soul to mean the deepest deepest part of my heart calling to the sky calling to the birds the calling to calling to the galaxy you know all all one but and as soon as you are connected umbilically to something bigger than what's going on in your kind of rattle trap pinball machine mind you're free and you can breathe again and you have lots of energy again right you're back in the saddle it's true yeah right i think it's been my observation that i think a lot of the suffering that i see people have is actually a spiritual crisis and psychological and i think it comes from having a disconnect from their soul from their organic holiness that they they don't realize they're disconnected from and that fear of being attached to your own goodness to your literally to your own goodness to your own life force in the in in the true sense of love force right and that your spiritual identity instead of your persona in the world and the person you know like in the book my friend duncan says that when you meet him you meet his bodyguard you know yes so we we present our bodyguard and we don't want to look like we're true and real and vulnerable because when we were kids that meant we were about to get hurt either by a big brother or on the blacktop at school and so um the truth of our spiritual identity is not about how we looked that day or how many people came to our reading or how we're doing financially or in any way at all even people that are very very very ill fine because you know i think it's really important for people to understand that you don't need a terminal diagnosis to throw out all that false crap that has kept you flying so low for so long barely skimming the treetops but when people get really sick they get serious and they grow i'm not going to carry around that false persona anymore and i'm not going to get together very often with my uncle dan because whenever i do he makes me really small and i can no longer afford that you know and people start to do it if they're um pushed to it but you don't have to you can decide that you're a person of soul and spirit now where do you start well you push back your sleeves you you be where always where your butt is and you you breathe and that is our umbilical connection to to both depth and expansion but i agree with you completely that it's it's a total spiritual catastrophe that people are undergoing collectively now well i think and i'd love your opinion on this i think that people confuse soul with religion and and they think that somehow or other that the nature of the soul is associated with religion when in fact the soul is this cosmic life force come back here i had to turn the heater off i was overheating i didn't want to sweat but the soul is this cosmic right horse that has no religion it is this incredible power that it transcendent and and i want to tie that to something that really made me pause in your book and i'm i i need to say quickly that my understanding is it's soul it's the exact opposite of religion yes yes yes like in the venn diagram of religion and soul if there's a little overlap it's it's not very impressive yes yeah yeah i would agree one of the one of the points you made in your book which i i thought if you were here when i was reading it i would have stopped right here and i want to dive into it is um when you were talking about what women fear in an audience like you were giving in san diego and that so many women felt that they'd squandered their lives and that's the phrase you used that they'd squandered their lives why do you think that is well i think that um there is such a institutionalized contempt for women that if it's not one thing they're falling short enough it's another either they haven't kept their weight down or what do they have to show for themselves or whatever that days is on that day's menu item to make women feel that they just missed the boat whereas it's not even true it's it's a way like neil again my husband talks a lot about the super ego you know and that the superego is there it's a parasite and it's it kept you safe it kept you alive when you were a child you didn't run out in the street you didn't get hit by a car you didn't swim out past your ability to stay afloat i call it in the book dread i say dread was my governess growing up and there's that voice inside of you that is just unless you have an awakening or awakening every few hours from that trance there's a voice that's telling you that you're falling short you haven't gotten enough done you you raised those silly children or you worked all your life or you did both or you you know women feel terrible you know i'll say oh i forgot i forgot to go to the gym after i had the baby you know and and i probably get on and i had a baby 31 years ago but it's a joke because otherwise it would be another thing i feel bad about that i forgot to go to the gym after i had a baby there was just and so the women in san diego who were the for the most part very accomplished women whose lives were relatively easy had all of these different things that they could feel bad about on any given day you know that they hadn't worn enough sunscreen that they had at this but that you've squandered your life i think is the way that you can make yourself feel worse about yourself that you have this one precious life and you wasted it's like something you wrote probably 25 years ago that i live by and i repeat constantly is your um idea that we get a hundred dollars of psychic money every day right we get a hundred dollars in our bank account and you really you have freedom you have free will you can spend it however you want you can go to the gym for an hour and a half but you have to pay for that that could be 21 so now you have 79 dollars to spend for the rest of the day you could get on the phone with a bunch of people who you feel like you have to call back today because somebody's bugged you to do it and that's fine you get to call them all back be on the phone with them which you hate and which is kind of toxic for you however that's going to be 24 more dollars so that's 24 off 79 and that's the squander is doing things that you don't want to do like to do and you don't actually have to do but somebody said you should do or you or that super ego or the governess name dread said you really have to do because your mother would have you know my mother had a really miserable life but so to um be to have a bad voice telling you that you've squandered it is first of all it's it's the lie machine you know you probably i don't know anyone who squandered their life i know lots of women who didn't work and who raised their kids and the kids have been gone for 20 years now and it would be easy for them to think that but what they've done all day is to do the sacrament of putter like that you know and they have been in close contact with people in their community who couldn't get out of the store themselves and they brought them things and they've done sewing projects and they've volunteered at the food pantry and at the soup kitchen and they worshiped and they studied and they listened to music well listening to music all your life is not squandering your life it's one of the deepest deepest processes we can do which should do that one of the deepest dives we can go into um inside of our per inside of the outside surface stuff is to really listen to a piece of music for 20 minutes so i think it's a yet another thing that a mean thing that women can tell themselves about and they get very afraid when they believe it well and it struck me it struck me that there but what we have in our society and hopefully maybe we're seeing the beginning of this false value break is that we've been worshipping at the altar of the god of productivity we're not productive and if the way prayers are answered is not in some kind of productive form like what should i do god will get this job and it's got to be this there's some kind of productive visceral physical proof that we we have never somehow been able to value our lives unless there is a productive manifestation of it and that we've we we do not understand the values of the soul or the needs of the soul and it it's been my experience and and honestly my whole career this journey of learning that in fact the soul is the powerhouse it's the battery that operates everything it's not the mind i mean it's it's the soul that is mission control and it is the soul that thrives it thrives on love and it thrives on on perception and it thrives on compassion and it thri and what i realize and this is a real challenge for me to communicate as well as i realize it and and i and i'm actually thrilled about seeing this but it's kind of like how do i communicate that we are this intuitive enterprise and that the higher sense of our intuitive system is all about our capacity to read others not ourselves our lower intuitive system is about reading the world our immediate world for survival but our upper and what really unlocks this passage to get into this is something you emphasize in your wonderful book which is forgiveness [Music] yeah and before we go into that which is my favorite topic um i think earth is forgiveness school but um everything that i was taught i was i was raised by by left-wing intellectuals and i was raised to do really really well i was 35 before i realized that b plus was a good grade there are i was i had a baby and i was barely making it like c plus but when i was a child um if we brought home b pluses they would say the great palace lie was well we're not criticizing you we're just wondering how much harder would it have been to get an a minus but the catch was if you got t minus the question was was there still time in the quarter to bring it up to a full a right so you really couldn't win for losing and if you if you got on that tennis court you'd already lost if you agreed to get on that court you'd already lost but so what what i finally realized with my parents and i've written about this so much is that they were the addiction was like this forward thrust that it's like the ever ready bunny versus the the kiosk or the battery pack or the lighthouse inside of us there was the forward thrust that you stay one step ahead of the of the abyss right because a failure or a whatever whatever you know losing a job or or doing poorly in school or whatever and and that um it turned out that everything that contributed to any spiritual awakening or insight or life i have came from being coached having birth coaches you've been one of them to fall into the abyss you know the dark night of the soul and then you know the american way is if you have screwed up and you haven't successfully done forward thrust and you do fall into the abyss then you just go to ikea and you get a really festive throw rug you know to like lighten it lighten up the load so people won't think you're a depressive but if you are willing to fall to be in the abyss i mean it's pretty abysmal but in the abyss is god and in the abyss is you without any of your bakery or your burnished surface your you know the stuff that pleases small crowds so um i've always been able to hold out for people the possibility that if they feel that they're in the abyss hallelujah you know thank god because they've been running for for 65 years or 23 or whatever it's been so far and and if you go by what the world says you'll spend your whole life it's like it's like being greyhounds at the track chasing the mechanical bunnies you know and when one greyhound catches the bunny it's metal and it's fake fur when we were coming up we're about the same age of ourselves get your act together get your activity will you get your act together and then you have an act right you weren't bored to have an act you were born to be fully alive to be present to be curious to be a child again to to give genius to be spontaneous to be spontaneous to make mistakes fall um onto forgiveness which is such a huge huge part of healing of um spiritual and psychological healing um boy i just you know it's it's been really hard for me i'm not a i'm not a natural forgiver and i have to forgive myself for not being a good forgiver but i eventually forgive you know i wrote a book called grace and then a parenthesis eventually you know grace's spiritual wd-40 that really will untangle the the knots and the clench but it's it's not going to be tomorrow right after lunch necessarily eventually though and there will be forgiveness there will be whether or not you are alive for it or not you know whether you're still on this side of eternity or not but c.s lewis said something that helped me enormously um in my 20s he said if you decide to become a person of forgiveness which is the most beautiful profound way to live and the way to actualization he didn't say all that visit if you be want to become a person of forgiveness maybe you don't start with a gestapo you start with your uncle dan and you you do the work you find the people you find the book or you find the denise levertoff poem where somebody gives you a little place to start and you go oh for pete's sake i wonder i want i wonder and then you know in in recovery people when i first got sober people always said you take the action and the insight will follow you don't figure it out is not a good slogan you know but i was raised by an electoral so it's my default place i'm going to break the code i'm going to figure out how to forgive my uncle dan but what if i take the action that i know that if i want to have loving feelings today and right now i do loving things i take the loving action i do the radical self-love i get myself a lovely cup of tea or a you know a halloween sized pack of m ms i reach out to someone who i know no one else called that day because they're annoying you know jesus doesn't say to just love and serve everyone unless they're annoying or they don't share your political views you know it's like get thirsty people water feed the kid kids that's it's all you have to do get thursday night you might be the thirsty person get and there's many kinds of water get thirsty people water and feed children and we'll let it go with that but so you take the action you get in your car and you fill go to safeway and you fill a couple bags with delicious canned goods and a can opener and some cereals junky fun cereal for the kids and you go over to where all the service workers live and you anonymously drop off you know a ton of groceries and uh and that more than anything is going to make your heart soft it's like the actions of love and generosity are like meat tenderizer on our heart and once your heart is a little bit softer you don't look at your uncle dan with so much judgment and contempt you think oh my god what a schlub what a sack you know but and at the same time i think one of the greatest absolutely i i couldn't agree with you more i also think in i've seen and i've come to believe deeply that forgiveness is the first self-initiated mystical act that we do and and that it is because it doesn't make any sense and and our mind will say i'm not doing this i'm not doing this i'm not doing this because our mind thinks we're the center of the universe and it likes that position it's comfortable there and it really does think the world was created for us and it loves that illusion and it dwells in that illusion and it thinks that all courts of law should work out in our favor and he can't figure out why things work out in anybody else's favor because doesn't it no this universe was created for us and forgiveness is actually about our deciding i'm going to withdraw my soul from that story i'm not going to be caught in that spectacle anymore that's a great line i'm going to steal it i'm going to write it down and then i'm going to steal it okay i'm going to withdraw my soul from that story yeah i love that yeah but then but that is what it is yeah exactly but i'm done participating in that story i'm done and i'm going how do you stop you become aware that you're doing it again and it makes you it hurts you so you just stop doing it no i i i what i what i love to teach people is that um it that the universe is two things it is incredibly impersonal incredibly impersonal i mean it's it's for me god is law it is just totally impor everything is law our body operates on law i mean at a certain age we start menstruating in a certain age we're going to stop our heart has mathematical law to it our our i love when i learned pythagoras i realized that his version of numbers completely make the chakra system come alive i mean everything is law and order in this universe that's the nature of god so it's completely impersonal we jump we're going to fall off a cliff and at the same time it's totally intimate therein lies holy paradox and the intimacy is prayer so so prayer is is in a miracle is when the divine completely bends the laws for you and makes what the ordinary mortal would say is impossible possible in the words of teresa of avila nothing's impossible with god all things are possible so and that's why jesus would say you just don't get what i'm doing here if you understood the mystical laws you would get that the force of the soul is malleable and that the mystical laws are malleable and they just work right through you when you are an allied ship with the sacred these laws once this is one once something's in physical form it's history it's history once something has happened to use it as a reference point means you are you're dealing with history which is why um with with forgiveness you are holding your choosing to hold on to history and to uh not forgiving i mean you're holding on to your history and insisting it become your present moment [Music] and you and it's like keeping the debt alive and the the amount of your life force that you have to pour into those corpses to keep them dancing in the moonlight is so strong and i think what people think that forgiveness is like telling people it's okay what you did it's not forgiveness is saying i get that we had to that this event for whatever reason had to happen and it woke up in me it woke up in me a level of fear or a level of contempt or level of vengeance that i didn't know i had and that's for me to deal with now right and i didn't know that and it could have been anybody could have woke that up you did and i have to deal with that mm-hmm right um i also think that yeah it definitely rolls you of all of the stuff in like i got rolfed during the last four years of my own inner donald trump and that was very valuable a very very other person in me to me was the person who is positive she's right almost like the buddhist do you want to be halfway you want to be right i want to be right and that will make me very happy to know when i'm right and if my opinions are not right i would have different opinions but you know and that is just the cycle of circle of hell yourself with you go ahead it will it it helped me see this thing inside of me that it's like we're talking about earlier i don't want that person in my plane anymore i don't want the bombastic know-it-all person traveling with me i mean they can be with me but i don't want to sit in the same row with them i'm not going to kill them i'm not going to get rid of them i can't anyway but i'm going to make them really really comfortable towards the back of the plane i'll get them a blankie in some of those snack boxes the tapas box is really nice at united and um but but to make the awareness is where the beginning of um for lack of a better word the healing or the freedom begins the awareness i don't forgive this person i wish them ill you know like the my friends my friend writes these um he calls them the anger songs and it's like may all of your children do poorly in school you know oh my god and uh he's a priest a jesuit i bet he said jesuit may all of your children do poorly in school um but so to just become aware of that and that it's you that it's making crazy doesn't hurt other people for us not to forgive them they usually are not even aware of it which is double infuriating but if you as c.s lewis says want to become a person of forgiveness it's a huge to me the hugest decision you could make in your life this starts now and then it starts you start being robbed of the stuff you don't forgive the people who you still um blame my a friend of mine in a recovery movement for people with tiny control issues unlike myself um she saw someone who had tattooed on her arm it's not them and i just love that because left to my own devices which i'm not the left running device i i believe it is them this makes me feel kind of crunchy and rashy and and uptight and it's something in me that is responding in a way that is either superior or this sort of victimized self-righteousness that i am capable of and it's but as soon as i'm aware of it instead of shaming myself or or or getting back into that forward thrust and getting busy busy busy busy um i can go well honey that's so cool that that has come forth for you and what neil does at shapes of truth is he has people bring physically their super ego out on on the table so he can talk to them and he'll say to them well who hired you well we think our parents did it to them because it's them or the teachers or the whatever we hired that person we think we're safer and we're gonna get farther with somebody keeping us scared and moving forward and ever upward and um and to become aware of it so that what we do what neil and i have done with the superego on the table say you know i'm glad you're here i will never get rid of you but i'm wondering if you might want to be the ethical consultant for the operation and you would go wait in the library and you wouldn't be here with me at my desk or at the dining table but if i needed an ethical consultant we would go get you and until then you could just read you know it's about not cutting off parts of you that are less attractive let's say or adorable than others there's a great acronym in recovery fun and acronym but people look at the word intimacy as meaning into me i see you know and that when i'm not hiding from the parts of me that are just so loving and compassionate and full of wonder and curiosity i'm hiding and pretending um not to see the parts of me that are scared or small or cringy or um or miserly oh my god those hard parts in my heart but if i move into the awareness then the heart is automatically start softening and if i say it out loud to you then you're going to tell me your hardness of heart stories we're going to start laughing about it and we're going to knowing the two of us we're going to start duking it out as to who has had the harder heart then we're going to be laughing and horror and laughter is carbonated holiness so we're already taking it from a see a dark secret spider and rap corner to you know a chapel and then you know trevor noah said last week something i loved so much he said when you laugh with someone you know you're really sharing something and so instead of being in that shame and isolation of a little kid pretending not to feel all these emotions we weren't allowed to have you and i are ripping and jamming and we're laughing and we're really sharing something and then it becomes bread for others because one of us who write about it it becomes medicine always always and that and i and i i really love your emphasis on love i i and the power of love in in and all that you say about love again and again in all your books but in but as you talk about love with forgiveness and this wonderful soul cocktail of what makes i'm back the human being thrive right and what i for the longest time have found to be the most extraordinary paradox is that the soul thrives on on love it thrives on truth it thrives on honesty it thrives on all the good things we are integrity intuitive hits it thrives on keeping us healthy and again and again we shut that down and we go the other direction we go the other direction and we we need a therapist to help us open up to love but we never need a therapist to help us open up to be angry nobody ever goes to a therapist and says i want to be a more angry person i i want to develop my anger i want to develop my temper this is like the effortless effort but we have to go to a therapist to open up to do what feels the best yeah what i i find that so paradoxical annie i can't even i think what the hell is wrong with you i mean what what is wrong with you why why do you need help to do what comes the most naturally that feels the best and that is what comes the quickest [Music] yeah well um you didn't i don't think we got owner's manuals for that as children i didn't my parents were not happy together in their marriage and they should have raised teacup poodles instead of children what i thought the mess i got was to just do better and to just stay busy what you were talking about earlier like if you're sitting and spacing out and staring off into space like a cat a grown-up always came along whether it was a parent or a teacher and they said don't you have something to do you know do you have homework is your room clean and so first of all we've learned to stay on guard and we learned to um to be to appear to be being busy and then we learned to appear to be all sorts of certain ways we appeared not to be angry my mom's from england and uh liverpool and i was raised that if you were angry or sad you didn't eat you know if you're angry outside of the dinner table you went to your room without eating so therefore i agree with you to were you sent to your room yeah your center room without eating if you were angry or sad and it was uncomfortable for them you know i'll tell you uh you you and you sat there in shame because you had wrecked dinner for everyone plus you were hungry but um let me tell you what my friend this the same jesuit who writes the angry songs psalms may all your children do poorly in school um he talks a lot about shame because it's such a central part of our of the sad package the package of us that is um most longing to be seen and loved and accepted and tended to with love but he says um the rules for all the five rules for all adult americans is that you must not have anything wrong with you or different about you have i told you this before no you must have not have anything wrong with you or different about you if you do you really need to get over it as quickly as possible you need to correct it uh if you can't get over it or correct it you should just pretend that you have that it's no longer actually an issue you're fine and the fourth rule is that if you're gonna um if you can't even fake it you should just not show up because it's very painful for the rest of us to have to be with you and the fifth rule is if you're gonna insist on the right to show up you should have the decency to be ashamed and this is what p you should have the decency to be ashamed if you're going to insist on showing up that's what the shame monster tells you that's what how people got us to work harder that's how people got us to keep our weight down when we were able to that's how people got you to um like for women be like i was like a little flight attendant in my family you know because i had this i had so much shame i looked different i was way too smart i was good at math i had this crazy hair the whole thing and the way that i i live by those rules and every every writing student i've ever had i tell them those rules because i said what you're up against is a shame your voice doesn't sound to you as good as isabella yendes or as uh mary oliver's your your what you have to write about isn't as dramatic or as insightful or profound you're nothing is as good as almost anyone's you know and you need to you show up and you insist on not being ashamed you know back when i before i turned on woody allen he said 80 of life is just showing up and and so you show up and you refuse to be shamed you break all five rules if you want to get anywhere you are gonna what you're gonna have this most wonderful and fearfully made about you is gonna be what's different about you or what's a little off you know and then as you start to get older you start to find people like remember the karass that vonnegut talked about whereas your groups around starts to involve odder and other people you know people who are having trippier and more mystical or out more out their thoughts and little by little you put together your precious community and for me that the precious community is where the shame was um first tended to and that was where i began to become a person of forgiveness beca and so for me the shame and the forgiveness are part of there's on the same quarter mile on the path that you must walk through that and that what you started this all by saying is the awareness that it's there like you said you um you withdraw your story from from from you withdraw your soul from that story and thank the person for eliciting these old old feelings that you're gonna go now deal with it's the same thing with the shame and the forgiveness when you when you have the shame or you don't forgive somebody has helped that become visible it's like neil bringing the super ego out on the table so he can talk directly to it it's like you know what i'm gonna deal with this now thank you thank you for bringing it to my attention absolutely and you know in a funny way you've given a description of um the spontaneous capacity to to live spontaneously yeah versus dragging the weight of your history with you and another way to describe that is the difference between forever living your fate versus opening to your destiny which is in destiny is a spontaneous force it is it it it bubbles up it requires the energy the grace of the soul destiny is is present time it's it's vertical and and fate is horizontal one is kronos one is kairos and and when what what forgiveness really is is a release from all the the like grade school lessons as hard as they are as hard as they are it's like a graduation day it's like a graduation day that says oh i get it i get that life on this planet will never be around me it will never be my definition of fear it will never be that that bad things happen but that badness is universal it's not and and now it was my turn to experience it and however it is we we recognize that none of us is immune to the shadow side of the human experience and we'd like to think we are and that's the problem is when we start thinking we are we are embracing something that is not true none of us is and when we finally get to a truth that says all things all life breathes together whatever happens to one can happen to me therefore how how i treat one i treat the whole and you start living from that higher altitude and i honestly believe that one act of forgiveness a true act of forgiveness is somehow an act of grace so powerful that it impacts the whole in ways we will never understand because we don't get how we don't get how the light of the soul works we don't and we don't see how we're all interconnected this is where faith comes in this is where we have to operate on on faith and trust and i think when we experience things like synchronicity or or i was just thinking about you i was just holding you in my heart and look at that here you are [Music] that's those are experiences of how that soul internet works yeah wasn't there something a page from the book you were going to read where we started i well i read that first page and then i love this one i love several but eat this is unforgiveness because i just think i just love this each full act of forgiveness and even each partial act is not only a miracle but a prize of redemption as with books of snh green stamps but instead of a toaster you get a unit of peace each act of forgiveness gives us more awareness of the beauty that surrounds us and of the friendly light inside the tiny and usually ignored part that hasn't been faked cheapened or exploited it is an infinitesimally small point of light like when our ancient tvs were turning off an eternity the world in a blade of grass it's stunning it's stunning you how how you describe it thank you it's absolutely stunning well you know we think that you and i just mostly write about love and forgiveness love and forgiveness love and forgiveness in all of its the different ways that um we have experienced it and gotten stuck and gotten free and then wanted to carry the word that um if you want to get free can can you give me a quarter inch of forgiveness can you give me just a quarter inch yeah what's the deal if you can meet if you can give me a quarter inch of softening your heart towards this person or towards this government or towards whatever i can promise you a miracle buckle up but then the person goes well let me get back to you on that you know i can give you freedom and peace of mind if you can just give me a angstrom unit of soften of a softened approach so well let me get back to you on that there's this guy i know i've told you this who helped bill wilson get aa started in 1935 and this is so you but um he told bill wilson he said sometimes i think that heaven is just a new pair of glasses and so without coaching and birth coaches and speakers and poems we often have our bad glasses on where we're seeing how uh you know we're just full of judgment and this is good and this is bad this is good this bad this person's annoying i wonder if i can correct their behavior you know whatever and um or racing around trying to get one more thing done one more thing done one more thing done which is just the death of all spontaneity and life one more thing done and you put the good glasses on and you become like a woefully little kid walking along looking at each leaf you know which is very annoying when you're the parent or the auntie that they want to look at each sleep but that's how that's how we can be too and be blown away that the daffodils right outside my window there were not daffodils there a week ago you know and just yeah daffodil if i'm paying attention is to see god you know it god and his distressing guys are heard distressing guys with a yellow clown frills on and a big nose but if i am paying attention then i'm seeing the divine in a daffodil that's the most common of all flowers in california do you know there was a time when when the statement you know you see god in the small details teresa's wonderful teaching it wouldn't have meant anything to me any it wouldn't have been anything to me i would think what are you talking about what are you talking about just like the first time i went to um actually one of the few times i ever went to um a lecture and it was uh from a guru master and and i thought what is everybody doing here listening to him i was in my 20s and i watched how everybody just was filled with such reverence when this man walked in and i thought what the heck is this about and and then someone asked him about what's the greatest way to get to god to get to he said become a fully healthy holy you oh for god's sake yes really get me out of here what uh i came all this but you know what yeah now i find that that i'm spending the rest of my life teaching that how did it how did that happen and that's what you that's what you're teaching and we could sound so vague and empty but after all the journeys we've been on all the experiences at the end of the day now that we're in the third the last third of the third of our lives what i have to say to people what you have to say is actually everybody it's love forgiveness treat each other with the greatest kindness and that has that will be more valuable to you than anything else you can do i also i think we might want to mention god oh and then there's yes well yeah never but okay can i tell before we i know we're almost out of time but can i tell one story that i don't think maybe it's in the new book i can't remember but and it doesn't go with any question you asked but i love it it helps me and i wear this story around my neck of a woman um who in my recovery group my uh from alcoholism who had had a awful oral cancer she'd have part of a jaw removed part of her tongue so she had a speech impediment she was fine she was completely fine you know they took care of it and challenged chair chels just was very hopeful and more more grateful than almost anyone else you were going to see that day and years later she announced during the meeting that it had come back and she was going to need to go back to the surgeon and she was going to probably need some more radiation and everybody started that fluttering around of oh oh well you know my beautician's nephew had that same kind of cancer and they're just fine now and oh i know that people are doing oxygen therapy now and kale and you can get over the right and she just waved it all away and she said you know what god's got it and so my sisters my elderly sisters in recovery gave me this for my 60th birthday it says god's got it and all day every day i'll start to agitate because i do i was raised to figure it out i didn't know figure it out was a bad slogan i'll start to figure out okay wait i'm gonna okay wait all right hold on okay hold on okay wait and then i go god's got it and as soon as i get my sticky fingers off of the controls and i do the sacrament of ploppage and i slip down and i breathe for a minute then i think god goes wow thank you good i'm on it thanks for stopping by i kind of go to bed with that when i'll say it like here's my list take care of it while i sleep morning yeah and and that is that's exactly what i do yeah these are the people that need healing these are the people who have asked for prayers yeah that's what i need this is this and um i have the angels who work who heal the healing angels take me out of my body and work on me during the night and um you get the night shift i get the day shift and that's how i pray someone told me that there are unemployed angels fluttering around us all the time and they're just wishing they would have get a job and that if you could say oh hi is anyone available right now it's like the happiest part of their day you think that's true it's a wonderful thought i wish for a whole i want to thank you and everybody get this book it is beautiful dusk night dawn annie thank you thank you big love to you thank you thank you everybody you

Channel: Caroline Myss

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Id: it_IJe-sa4k

Length: 59min 6sec (3546 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021