Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: Ever wonder why the more effort we exert to seek happiness, peace and fulfillment, the more we may feel depressed, anxious and empty? We perceive some code tapping within us, but we can't quite decipher its meaning. Our lists of pros and cons, our commitments to daily journaling or hot yoga, our carefully mapped out five year plans, all, all begin to dissolve, and we begin to lose hope. But now is when we are the most ripe, the most juicy, the most ready to just let go and fall into the magnificent heart of reality, the paradox of being in the world but not bound by the world. The labyrinth has a rich tradition rooted in this paradox. We enter these sacred spaces where universal being manifests itself with each of our steps physically grounded, with the weight of our bodies and the bliss of full presence. In my twenty s, I came to such an intersection when my efforts became exhausted with futility, my despair became mental illness, and hope was vanquished. Somewhere along my healing journey, I was given the famous Rilka quote from a letter he had written to a young poet who was despairing over the uncertainty of his life as a writer. Rilka's quote has remained a touchstone for me for decades. I offer his words as the foundation for each unfolding conversation of the labyrinth, where there is no theme, there are no pre written questions, and there is no particular aim for the dialogues. I'm just honored to share space in the spirit of Rilka, to live the questions now, so that perhaps without noticing, we will live along some distant day into the answer. Welcome to the labyrinth.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: I'm here with my best friend, Lisa Carly, hoteling in her 2001 Hyundai Elantra in Buffalo, New York. It is about 1130 on a Saturday night, and this is generally when Lisa and I just begin our conversations, right? So just a little background information about how this came to being. I had to really coax, cajole, trick, and, yes, even convince Lisa to participate in this dialogue, and I'm very happy that I've done so. I want to welcome you, Lisa, to unraveling religion. How are you doing this evening?
[00:02:22] Speaker B: I'm doing awesome.
[00:02:24] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: I'm glad to be here.
[00:02:25] Speaker A: So, Lisa, we're armed with some stuff, right?
[00:02:28] Speaker B: We are armed with some stuff, indeed, as usual.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: I mean, we've got all the essentials, right?
[00:02:33] Speaker B: We have everything we could possibly need, it's true.
[00:02:36] Speaker A: And then some, because we've got Mike's hard lemonade, Pringles, american spirits, Eckhart, ole Rumi, and what else?
[00:02:46] Speaker B: Kaplo.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: We have Roshi, Philip, Kaplu's Zen teachings and practice and each other. And each other, which is the most vital aspect.
But tonight, in talking with Richard Wicka, who is the brainchild of think twice radio, we were discussing a lot of different things, and one of the things that came up was identity. And Lisa and I often talk about identity and from approaching it from multiple various aspects and deconstructing it in many different ways. And I thought it'd be a good theme for the show and just wanted to introduce that notion that that'll be sort of the theme for tonight's show.
So in talking about identity, Lisa, where to begin? Where do we begin with identity?
[00:03:46] Speaker B: Well, I think the point that Richard was bringing up earlier about where the locus of identity is, is probably a good beginning.
Internal. Do we derive our identity from an internal sense, or do we extrapolate it from an interpretation of our perception of the environment? Or is it some, I guess, constellation of.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: Yeah, so, and it's interesting because Richard and I and my friend Graham Sears, who's been a guest on unraveling religion, have gone back and forth about pretty much the nature of what is truth and what is reality. And identity fits into that nicely, I think. And I thought that my approach of identity is one that I think is best articulated by Eckhart Tolle's. He approaches it in a few of his works. I love his audiobooks. And there are two that come to mind. One we were just listening to driving over here, and that is in the presence of a great mystery. And in that, Tolle talks about thought forms and about how the child and the toy are the first formation of a story that we create in our minds about who we are and how that toy, as the child grows in years, transitions to relationships, thought forms of beautiful partners or attractive partners, or some quality of partners that are special, that add to the meaning of what that person's identity is. So that people, in a sense, who are wondering why relationships may not work may be approaching it not from a position of what may I give offer and how may I serve this person, but what is this person adding to my identity?
And so I just wanted to know your thoughts about that, Lisa.
[00:05:54] Speaker B: I totally agree with that.
[00:05:56] Speaker A: You do?
[00:05:56] Speaker B: Yeah, completely.
I was just having a conversation with another very dear friend recently about the same exact question, and my perspective is that rather than sort of coming into relationship or even if we're not in relationship and we're seeking relationship that we're often looking for, as you said, the qualities that another person has that either we feel can accentuate what we already feel about ourselves, or that they have something within them that we feel we lack. In other words, more generally, that we come into relationship seeking wholeness. And I guess my own philosophical position in that regard is that what would it be like to come into relationship already feeling whole?
[00:06:55] Speaker A: Right.
Yeah. Oftentimes we don't examine the reasons why we enter into relationship because of socialization and biology. And so what winds up happening is that the beginning of a relationship, inherent in its beginning, is sort of a story that we tell ourself that is an end of our story or completion of our story of who we are, that wholeness that we are all seeking, which really, I feel is like an aspect of misdirection, or it's not necessarily misdirection, but really that wanting to merge into wholeness with another human being is an impetus that is directed towards people because that's what we see and relate to. But that same drive, if turned inward, can be a very powerful tool to commune with ourself, which is sometimes fractured but inherently whole. It's our psychology, psyche, and sort of belief systems that don't allow us to see that clearly. Do you agree? What do you think?
[00:08:18] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I definitely agree with that. And you and I were talking about this the other day that I think it really depends on your orientation or perception of truth, as you and Richard and Graham have been talking about, and whether you have this sense of. That there's an absolute truth or that truth is something that evolves through the process of being fully present in the.
How I.
How I understand that distinction is that I think if you believe or hold this notion of an absolute truth, then you seek relationship and you seek another person as the truth.
[00:09:05] Speaker A: Right.
[00:09:05] Speaker B: And that somehow, through communion with this other person, that you're going to arrive at some truth that doesn't already exist. And I guess that sort of connects to this idea of wholeness, that if you feel that within yourself, you embody this wholeness, then I think that minimizes or takes the edge off of that neediness, that searching for the someone else to arrive at some absolute truth that feels absent from yourself.
[00:09:38] Speaker A: Right.
So I don't know if listeners have any idea about me at all, but I did want to give a little background about Lisa and just wanted to. If you could talk a little bit about where you're coming at this from an existential, phenomenological, philosophical perspective.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, that's a big bite to chew off, but, yeah, my orientation. Anybody that knows me knows that I'm oriented through my own lens of an existential perspective, a phenomenological perspective. And for people who aren't familiar with what that means or who don't have a real experiential sense of it, and who might perhaps have an intellectual sense of it, my understanding and the way that I try to embody that and live that, is that it's the experience itself that allows us to connect most deeply and authentically on all levels, first, with ourselves, second, with our immediate experiencing, and third, with the great mystery that lies outside of ourselves.
And I even say that cautiously, because lying outside of ourselves, what is that exactly? I mean, my own belief, as you know, is that there is sort of this universal presence energy that is both a part of me and connects me to other people, as well as their experience of the universal might be very different.
And so I guess I come to this conversation, and I come to all of the conversations that we've had from this position of subjective truth.
[00:11:47] Speaker A: So what is subjective truth?
[00:11:49] Speaker B: Right? And so what I mean by that is that the truth is in the unfolding and that somehow it's experienced rather than it's something that's sought after. There's a knowing in the moment.
There's this sense of it being in alignment with our authentic expression of the moment and our perception of the moment. And a lot of times, because you and I both have a background in mental health, the example that we often use is, well, I don't fully understand the subjective reality of someone, let's say, for example, someone who's sociopathic or who's in the midst of a psychotic episode. And so what I try to do in my relations with people is I try to best understand what their subjective reality is as it's unfolding in the moment.
[00:12:46] Speaker A: Sure.
And what you're talking about has been approached by different people in different ways. But excuse me, one of the books that come to mind is Gary Zukoff and his book the Seat of the Soul, which was a follow up book that in content was not associated with his original book, the Dancing Woolly Masters, but came out of his experiences writing the dancing woolly masters, in which he found he was a layman studying quantum physics, I think, and found that amazing synchronicities began to come about in the writing of the dancing woolly masters. And his observation of that process lent itself to his writing the seat of the soul. And in a nutshell, the seat of the soul is about what Zukov defines as authentic power. And that authentic power, he says, is the alignment with the personality of the soul. And so it sounds like that's one approach of what you're speaking about. What do you think?
[00:14:04] Speaker B: That's. I definitely understand where Zukov is coming from, from that perspective, but I think that we get into nebulous territory when we start using language like the soul. I agree, because we don't really clearly have that defined from my perspective. I wonder how important it is that we define it. Is it necessary or is it superfluous? Or is it just a construct for our own infinitude? Maybe that's another way to explain something that is inexplicable and that is both within our grasp of the moment, but it's out of our intellectual grasp. So, again, I think the infinitude of our being is something that in the moment, we can have a connection with another person or with a waterfall or something in nature, with our child or whatever experience we happen to be, and listening to a beautiful symphony or a poetry reading, as we did tonight, that connects us with that sense of our infinitude. And maybe that's a way to construct the word soul might be a way to sort of conceptualize, intellectualize this notion of infinitude.
[00:15:30] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. No. What is the soul? I mean, that's like, what is God?
[00:15:36] Speaker B: What is truth?
[00:15:37] Speaker A: What is truth?
These are language lingual constructs. I mean, they're just constructs. They're pointers to something that is ineffable and really beyond the description of.
You know, I think it's really interesting, Lisa, because one of the things that arises for me here now is I know you have done a lot of work, as I have gone through a long process, a birthing process, to bring who you are in this moment.
That has been both a lot of work, but also there's something inherent in you that has not changed. Or would you disagree with that statement?
[00:16:37] Speaker B: Hmm.
I think that perhaps the unique position of being adopted comes into play in that regard.
To the extent that I think I came into the world a bit unmoored.
[00:17:07] Speaker A: What the hell does that mean, unmoored?
[00:17:09] Speaker B: Unmoored? Yeah, like, you know, Gre.
Like a ship out in sea without anchor. There you go.
[00:17:23] Speaker A: I understand now.
[00:17:29] Speaker B: And just kind of feeling a little bit lost on the waves, not being anchored, particularly by this sense of, oh, this is my family. Yeah.
[00:17:41] Speaker A: But ultimately, that is our existential condition.
[00:17:45] Speaker B: Exactly. And I think that maybe when I've pondered it deeply, as you know, that I have, I think that that's been my draw, in fact, to existential thought is this notion of that I sort of came in on these very stormy seas without land in sight, without an anchor, as I said before, without any illusions. I think that's even a better qualification, in fact, that I didn't have the illusions that a lot of other people have of like, oh, I'm connected, I'm attached to this particular family or whatever that is. And certainly I was adopted into a loving family and that was great.
But I think that did.
[00:18:36] Speaker A: We want to talk about attachment theory here? Why don't we?
[00:18:38] Speaker B: Yeah, we can definitely talk about attachment.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: Talk a little bit about attachment theory.
[00:18:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean as Joel well knows, I've done a lot of research and thinking and writing on attachment theory and in my own academic work as both a master's level and doctoral level student of psychology. And I wrote my master's thesis on motherhood identity. And so I had to study a lot around attachment issues. And basically attachment theory holds that the first weeks, months of a newborn's life are critical for the formation of attachment to the mother. And that happens through very complex processes that even now we don't fully understand. But we certainly.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: Neurobiochemical.
[00:19:32] Speaker B: The neurobiochemical, exactly right. And we certainly do understand that there's an exchange of oxytocin, vasopressin, which are hormones that we now understand, encourage and facilitate bonding.
I guess one of the questions arises is what happens to a child that doesn't get that foundation at an early age?
And I think that certainly looking at the trajectory of my own life, the trajectory of my own relationships, that I can definitely see where that has had some impact in my life. However, I don't see it as a negative, having had negative consequences, particularly in my life. Others might perceive that differently. But again, being a phenomenologist, I come from the perspective of what is my.
[00:20:25] Speaker A: Experience and what is negative, what is.
[00:20:27] Speaker B: Positive and what is negative and what is positive.
[00:20:29] Speaker A: Those are judgment values.
[00:20:30] Speaker B: Those are judgment. Exactly. And for me it's very much about that.
I feel that those experiences have been that foundation and those early experiences have been very positive for me because I think it pushed me much earlier away from the illusion of this sense of someone's always going to be there for you, that I have to find my place within the world and within relationship.
And because of that early unmooring that I think that I had to really rely on myself to sort of find that point of being. Who am I?
[00:21:17] Speaker A: A fundamental question for all of us.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: A fundamental question for all of all.
[00:21:21] Speaker A: Mystical traditions is a fundamental question. Am I, or what am I?
[00:21:25] Speaker B: And I think what I've seen and what I've experienced as a difference between the way I go about answering that question and the way that maybe others go about answering that question is, I think for myself, I'm less likely to look outward to other relationships to answer that question and more inclined to look inward to answer that question.
[00:21:45] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:21:46] Speaker B: And I use the word answer carefully because I don't conceive that there really is an answer. But I guess in terms of where to direct the work, the work is more directed inward than it is outward in relation.
[00:21:57] Speaker A: And there's an integration and understanding. Right. It's not arriving at some place exactly.
[00:22:02] Speaker B: Oh, certainly not arriving at someplace for sure, ever.
[00:22:07] Speaker A: This continues on.
[00:22:08] Speaker B: Correct? In my experience, yeah.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: So with attachment theory, let's talk a little bit about how that relates to identity.
[00:22:21] Speaker B: Well, I think, mean, the only place that I can speak about that from is a more intellectual, academic place. And the reason why I say that is because as Eckhart Tolle was talking about as well, that a very young infant, a few weeks old, few months old, they don't have the linguistic capacity to be able to describe their experience yet.
[00:22:44] Speaker A: I want to point out that because I've been going back and forth with some people on Facebook, actually, about the nature of sort of truth and truth value and consciousness. And really a part of that is recognizing that the infant's experience, from what I gather, is really a slow eroding away of this universal experiential connection with all.
And that slowly erodes away through this process of socialization and growing biology, biological processes. And so then we get into the place of story making or storytelling, which is where identity and ego come into play. Right.
[00:23:53] Speaker B: Yeah, that's my understanding as well. Yeah.
And so I think that going back to kind of your question about what the early infant experience is that we don't entirely know, of course, because they don't have the linguistic tools to be able to share with us what their experience is.
But I think that.
I'm not sure exactly.
[00:24:45] Speaker A: Lisa and I.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: What did you ask me?
[00:24:47] Speaker A: I don't remember.
No. I think we were talking about identity and its relation to identity and its relation to attachment and identity formation. And I think where I was going with this is I was wondering if you want to talk a little bit about your work, both, and go wherever you want with this, but personally and professionally with motherhood identity.
[00:25:21] Speaker B: Well, I think that my interest in this topic of motherhood identity really arose after the birth of my first child, but even more significantly, after the birth of my second child, and they're two and a half years apart.
And my daughter now is ten and my son is seven.
So this has been obviously a decade long journey.
But what my experience was of motherhood, of early motherhood particularly, was of extreme ambivalence, extreme isolation, and a real Gestalt shift from the life I had known before, which was very social and engaging, where I had a multitude of friends into a world that felt very isolated, of raising a child, of being disconnected from a social world in a sense.
I never talked to anybody about it. I never shared with anybody what my experiences were. One, because I was pathologizing them, and two, because even more deeply, I think that I really felt that it was something unique to me. I didn't believe that other mothers were sort of experiencing this.
By this, what I mean is this extreme ambivalence. And I mean ambivalence in the real, truest sense of the definition of feeling this deep love for my child. But at the same time feeling resentful of the new isolation and disconnectedness that I felt from the broader world. And that disconnectedness from the world actually led to a deeper disconnectedness to myself, which is interesting, kind of, given what we were just talking about, about having this internal locus of identity versus an external locus of identity. And I think that maybe the crack in the wall that I thought I had so carefully constructed up to that point really was that maybe I wasn't so internally derived as I had originally thought. And so after the birth of my son, two and a half years later, I really came up against this very deep.
It wasn't on we. But it was something even deeper than that. And I shirk back a little bit from calling it a postpartum depression. Just because I think that, again, is sort of pathologizing the experience.
[00:28:15] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: And for me, I'm more interested in talking from an experiential place.
[00:28:22] Speaker A: Because one of the things that labels serve to do is they sort of, oh, we understand it now. We can move on.
[00:28:28] Speaker B: Exactly.
Oh, I get what that is.
[00:28:31] Speaker A: Without delving into the emotional content that is really there.
[00:28:33] Speaker B: That's great. Yeah, exactly.
For me, the experience was so difficult, in fact, that my previous work with Foster kids, which was what originally my master's thesis was going to be about, actually the identity development in foster care. Youth was my original thesis topic, really gave way to me having a conversation with my wonderful advisors at the university I attended, who said to me, well, this motherhood stuff that you're going through, that you're sharing with us. Why not make that your thesis?
I sat with that idea for a little bit and decided that I was so embroiled in this world that it was really all I could talk about. Right.
A couple of things happened for me at that time that sort of kind of broke things open. And the first was that espousing to the theory of attachment parenting.
I wore both of my children in a baby sling, and a lot of other mothers were sort of noticing that I was doing this and asked me where I had gotten my sling, and I made my sling. And so they asked me if I could make them one. And so I started kind of this small business of making baby slings. And at first, it was just sort of a commercial enterprise, and this is going to make a little bit of money and get me doing something aside from just focusing on the children. But really, it turned out to be this amazing gift and these synchronicities like you were talking about.
[00:30:21] Speaker A: How did it turn out to be an amazing gift?
[00:30:23] Speaker B: Well, amazingly, because what I offered to these mothers was not just, here, buy this sling and go home, and good luck with it. But I basically said, after the baby is born, I'll help you fit the baby in it, make sure that you're comfortable in it, show you how to use it in vivo. Like, here's the baby, and let's figure this out. And so what that allowed me was a really privileged position in these mothers lives where they were inviting me into their homes weeks, sometimes days, after their first child was born. And what I realized was many of the women, in fact, I have to say, a vast majority of the women with whom I worked really were experiencing very similar unwee anxiety.
[00:31:23] Speaker A: When you say unwee, could you just.
[00:31:24] Speaker B: Like a boredom, like kind of what their life lost, some of the luster that it had previously had.
[00:31:33] Speaker A: Lack of purpose and meaning.
[00:31:34] Speaker B: Lack of purpose and meaning.
And this sense of just, I think, such a gestalt shift. And really, I think one of the issues is that in our culture, we don't have good rituals to sort of welcome women into motherhood. It's literally, you give birth and now you have this child. And oftentimes we don't have our mothers or grandmothers or aunts or other women around to sort of help facilitate that process. No community.
[00:32:02] Speaker A: And I know we've spoken about.
[00:32:03] Speaker B: We've spoken about this at length. Absolutely.
So I really was invited into this very privileged space with these women because maybe they didn't feel entirely comfortable talking to their partner about what they were experiencing in the same way that I wasn't, or they weren't comfortable talking to family about it, or even other mothers. And so for some reason, me coming into that space as a near stranger allowed them to sort of share with me what they were really experiencing in the moment as it was.
[00:32:39] Speaker A: And let me just preface this and let everyone know that Lisa, by her very nature and way of being, is what they call in psychology an opener, which is a relationship that has developed very quickly, where people feel very comfortable with you and divulge in a very genuine and authentic way their story. Right. You find that that's a part of your experience.
[00:33:08] Speaker B: Right. Thank you. I appreciate that.
[00:33:10] Speaker A: Well, it's true.
[00:33:11] Speaker B: It's a very gracious compliment.
[00:33:13] Speaker A: Just the truth.
[00:33:15] Speaker B: Anyhow, thank you.
And in these moments, as these women are sort of sharing with me what's unfolding for them, what I realized is that they had the courage to speak about what their experience was, and I didn't. And my own lack of courage both frightened me and embarrassed me.
And I felt called to. If I was going to be in this privileged position to hold this space for these women, then I felt a responsibility to do that for myself, that if I'm going to be able to authentically hold this place that I'm being called unexpectedly to do that, I needed to do some work on myself to really be able to hold that space adequately and to honor their experience, to walk the walk, basically.
Then I began to look at my own mothering experience and really come to terms with the actual experience of it. What was I experiencing? And so, concomitantly, as I said, I began working on my thesis.
[00:34:29] Speaker A: Let me just stop you there and ask, how do you do that for people who are ordering?
[00:34:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll tell you, that was extraordinarily difficult.
I'm glad you sort of stopped me in that place.
Yes. Because I make it sound like, yeah, okay. All of a sudden, I just decided, no, what it really meant for me, how I experienced that, was that when I was with my children, I was really trying to be as fully present with what was arising in me at a given moment with the children. And I'm sad to say that in my experience and in many of the experiences that other mothers graciously shared with me, that what we often found ourselves coming up against was rage, anger, rage. And really fairly inexplicable for most of us. It was like, why am I so angry? Where is this anger coming from?
Being the dutiful intellect that I'm supposed to be as an academic and writing a nerd. Exactly right.
And writing a master's thesis for all that is supposed to purport to be.
I set out to create this eloquent mythology of what the mothering experience was like, using my own experience and then sort of validating it and verifying it and integrating it with what other women shared with me and checking and rechecking and crafted something that I thought was magnificent and wonderful and passable and would give me those glorious ma letters behind my name.
So I gave it to a very dear friend of mine who's a family doctor, and said, would you mind taking a look at this and just giving me just your quick feedback? And she looked it over and was like, wow, this is really beautiful and eloquent. And where's the rage? Yeah, good question. Right? And I was like, the rage?
What are you talking about? I don't have any rage. What?
No. Getting angrier by the moment and realized, oh, shit, this is crap. I've just totally like what Eckhart Tolle was talking about. Intellectualized, totally creating these content formations and nice intellectual niceties around these really deep and emotional places. And I think we all do that.
[00:37:12] Speaker A: And I just want to stop you there, because I think in my own process, part of the difficulty is that we don't have language for the emotional terrain, in the varied emotional terrain that we experience in the human condition. So that when we try to articulate things and point them out linguistically, there's a great gap. There's a great gap in what other people understand within themselves, what I understand within myself, how comfortable and fluent I am in my own language as opposed to somebody else's. And I think part of this is just the external impetus to the external emphasis on our life, that there's a kind of neglect of the inner life, and it's a collective condition that we are socialized in, which is perpetuated in a capitalistic consumerism culture that is problematic.
[00:38:16] Speaker B: And that devalues process. Like we were just talking.
[00:38:18] Speaker A: It devalues process.
Really, when you want to talk about what our experience is versus what is our experience, I guess you could just stop it there. What is our experience, and what are we distracting ourselves from internally that is so terrifying? I think that's a really fundamental question, especially in this. And you can see it permeates our society. And I don't mean to get off on a tangent here, but with the hyperviolent media, the hyper sexualized media, and it's reflection and perpetration of violence in our culture, that's experiential, that is seen one against the other.
And really, from my perspective, that I've been able to overcome great violence that was done to me through silence and persistence and through integration and understanding. And what has borne out of me from that experience is really, I guess it could be summed up in a term or two words would be respect and gratitude.
But I'm sorry, I went off on a little tangent.
[00:39:46] Speaker B: Go ahead. I don't think that you did, actually, because what you were talking about was sort of the far reach of this capitalist notion, which, as we said, devalues process, looks at outcomes, and also sort of sets us in this competitive frame of mind rather than a cooperative frame of mind.
[00:40:18] Speaker A: Very problematic.
[00:40:19] Speaker B: Very problematic. And in fact, this ultimately, one thing about my thesis that I am quite proud of is that I really followed where it led. And I didn't try to shape it in a particular way.
I didn't start out with a hypothesis, necessarily. I just tried to follow my experience of what it was and then kind of take it where it led me.
And where that led me was sort of to the core of some of these issues that you've been talking about with this product versus process, this outcome versus the experience, the moment to moment experience, the individual versus the collective.
[00:41:08] Speaker A: Go ahead.
[00:41:08] Speaker B: I was just going to say, really, you can see it in motherhood. It really becomes like a base relief.
[00:41:15] Speaker A: Against this backdrop which is perpetuated by the next generation.
[00:41:19] Speaker B: Exactly. And I think that most people are fairly comfortable or have seen, will know what I'm talking about when I say that it gave rise to this hyper parenting or helicopter parenting or whatever we want to call that.
Basically my conception of that, which I ended up exploring pretty in depth in my thesis, was this notion that our children, too, are products, that our children, too, are a reflection of ourselves.
And I don't mean that.
What do I want to say? I'm not saying that in a judgmental way. I'm saying that in terms of that, what my children produce, what they do, how early they walk, how early they talk, how early they read, where they are placed within their class rank, that somehow that has seemed to overwhelm the domain of parenting. Right.
[00:42:27] Speaker A: Which is really born out of a fear of what's going to happen to my child. Right.
[00:42:31] Speaker B: It is, I think, authentically born from that, from a very genuine place. Absolutely. It's definitely born. And that's why I'm saying, when I'm speaking in this way, I'm not speaking of it from a place of judgment. No, it's a place of observation.
[00:42:45] Speaker A: Yeah. But it's good to get at that core, that it's the very nature of parenting, in one sense, yes.
[00:42:55] Speaker B: So I think that what I was observing within myself was exactly this, that I was losing the moment to moment with my children and focusing instead on getting them reading early and getting them to music groups early and doing all of these things, because I think in my mind, there were a couple of things. One, there was, as we were just talking about this sense of, like, they need to be accomplished, because as a mother, their accomplishment is a reflection of my quality of being a mother. Sure, that was one aspect of it, but the deeper aspect of it, which took a little bit more layered, peeling away of the layers to get, at least for me, was the sense of that it really was a way to ameliorate my own anxiety that I was born in the. From that point in time, I grew up with the legacy of girls having equal opportunity.
You can be anything you want. You can go to college.
The world is your oyster. And sort of to have the red carpet rolled out before you of feminism and say, okay, this is what you can do anything that you want with your life. The red carpet rolls out in 20 different directions, and you go to college and you get good grades, and you do whatever you're supposed to do. And then at some point, you have children, and you find that those two worlds don't often coalesce neatly.
[00:44:48] Speaker A: They conflict by their very nature.
[00:44:50] Speaker B: By their very nature, they often conflict. And I certainly experienced that conflict, but because I had children and I felt like, okay, I've had these children, and I need to take responsibility for them, I sort of opted out of my academic trajectory that I was on in order to take care of them and take full responsibility for them.
I think that the over parenting that I engaged in was really coming from this place of feeling lost and feeling this gnawing anxiety that something was off. But I couldn't identify what that was. And so by continuing to just put my attention on my children, it was a really good way to not really be present with my own experience. And so that's why doing my thesis, I think, on this topic was even more challenging, but also extraordinarily fruitful. And so going back to my friend, the family doctor, who said, where's the rage? That's when the real work began, really, up to that point, it was an intellectual exercise. And when she invited me to explore, really, it was an invitation that I don't think I would have permitted myself to do. And so, as it happens, which, sadly, was not infrequent, where I would get really angry about something a week later, whatever. From her making this comment to me, I remember walking upstairs and finding that the upstairs hallway was completely trashed. The kids had been playing, and they just walked away, and there were toys everywhere. And it was just a disaster. And that instantly, I mean, it was just instantaneous that this feeling of rage came up in me. And it's hard to explain, I think, for people that maybe haven't experienced rage before, but I think most of us have. But it's like something sort of takes over in you, and it feels very hot and burning.
[00:47:04] Speaker A: Let me just stop you there. Eckhart Tolle. If anyone's going to follow up with in the presence of the great mystery or the power of now audiobooks, he talks about this very notion also in a new earth, the pain body.
I don't know if you're familiar with that.
[00:47:21] Speaker B: I'm not.
[00:47:22] Speaker A: The pain body is an entity. Energy. It's just energy that arises, that is, of itself. And what is required for it to dissipate is really attention. Attention as to what it is.
[00:47:34] Speaker B: Yeah. And that was exactly my experience. Exactly my experience. And I realized that I have to go into this. I have to really fully be in this moment of experiencing this rage and this anger. And so I literally sat down on the floor with all of this debris around me and examined. Okay, what's immediately arising for me in this moment and what's immediately arising for me in that moment was, well, I'm too good to be picking up after the kids look at. I'm in the middle of a master's degree. I have an undergraduate degree from an esteemed university, and I have all of these things. Like Eckhart tolle just talked about, these content formations, identity constructs. Identity constructs.
[00:48:34] Speaker A: And it doesn't matter whether they're educational material, spiritual. Spiritual constructs. That I'm a spiritual person.
[00:48:41] Speaker B: Yes, exactly.
And to sit in that and to admit that I felt that cleaning up my children's toys around me was beneath me was very painful. It was a very painful realization of how intractable my ego had become, really. And so then I was like, okay, wait a minute. That's not the end of this. And began to peel back the next layer. And really, as I peeled back layer after layer after layer, experientially, I sort of arrived at this place of pure nothingness and darkness, and I described it in my thesis. And because this is the image that I sank into the experience of it was riding the dragon down, and that I literally got on the back of the dragon and let it ride me to the depths. And at the depths of that was this profound sense of emptiness.
And I think. Go ahead. Exactly. No, please, go ahead. Yeah.
[00:49:56] Speaker A: Well, it ties back to the. What was the word? Unmoored.
[00:50:00] Speaker B: Unmoored.
Exactly.
To that. Unmooring. Exactly.
[00:50:06] Speaker A: So it reminds me of this Sinead O'Connor quote, and it's actually a lyric to a song. I'm sailing on this terrible ocean I've come for myself to retrieve.
[00:50:16] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And we've shared that song before together. Absolutely, yes. So I think that, ironically, this anger that I was experiencing in this moment brought me back to that fundamental. To that fundamental unmooring, that condition that we all share.
[00:50:36] Speaker A: So whether it's motherhood or exactly being lost in a career, that you are maybe a CEO of something and have this identity formation around being a CEO and all the things associated with that, the responsibility that is driven by basic survival needs of, like, I need to make money to provide for my family and whatever, but it juts up against our inherent condition.
[00:51:03] Speaker B: Right, absolutely.
And so I think for me, in that position, there was sort of an ironic laugh, perhaps, of like, well, here we are right back at the beginning again, and all this. I was 35, 36 at this time, and was like, oh, my God, all that work that I've done, and I'm right back at the same place that I was two weeks after I was born.
And I think that that goes back to exactly what we're talking about, about this identity, is that fundamentally, we are all unmoored and that we are grasping for the land, we are grasping for the ship to come and rescue us or whatever that is.
[00:51:50] Speaker A: Absolutely.
But by its very nature, that is true. But there's also the inherent way in which we experience this, which is there's an evolutionary content to things. Right.
[00:52:08] Speaker B: What do you mean by that?
[00:52:09] Speaker A: Well, it seems like in some ways we remain stagnant, but in some ways we evolve.
[00:52:16] Speaker B: Oh, well, you and I have talked how many times about the spiral? Right, right, yeah, exactly.
[00:52:22] Speaker A: Tell us about the spiral.
[00:52:23] Speaker B: Well, and you can sort of elucidate it along the way, too, because you and I, in fact, through our conversations, have really sort of helped to flesh this out. So I don't want to claim it, that I understand it in its totality, but, yeah, this notion that it might look like we're coming back to the same place again, but really, it's one step up from that place or two steps up from that place. And meaning what I mean by steps up is an awareness that we have a.
We're evolving. Exactly. And maybe actually even a better way to think about it is that we're deepening. So rather than moving up, we're moving down. That there's a deepening.
[00:53:06] Speaker A: Moving in.
[00:53:06] Speaker B: Moving in. Exactly. Yeah.
For me, that's exactly the process that happened in. That was this deeper sense of awareness, of consciousness, of, wow, I've been trying to.
All of this parenting, hyper parenting, over parenting that I was doing, was really trying to ameliorate this deeper anxiety of being so thoroughly unmoored, which actually had.
[00:53:35] Speaker A: Little to do with your children, probably, although they were the target.
[00:53:39] Speaker B: They were the impetus of it, but. Right. Certainly they had nothing to do with it.
I think that the shift then for me became, how do I be as present with myself in my role as a parent as I possibly can be?
[00:54:02] Speaker A: Right.
[00:54:03] Speaker B: And the other sort of irony, I think, that evolved from this awakening was this sense of I am so disconnected from my own child, my own inner child, my own childhood. I don't know how to be with them. In this place of chaos, of wonder, of wonder, of awe.
I've lost that sense of play.
And really that there's something about them teaching you. Them teaching me. Precisely. And so I think that something in that paradigm switched for me of like, wait a minute, I need to shore up, so to speak, to them and let them teach me, let them be the lighthouse for me.
[00:54:55] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:54:56] Speaker B: Rather than me sort of knowing, okay, this is where the anchor is and come here. That it really was a paradigm shift for me.
[00:55:04] Speaker A: Significantly, because we've talked about value and truth. Right. But inherently because each being has value no matter where they are. In the process, our work is to honor and respect that.
[00:55:19] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:55:20] Speaker A: And in that respecting others, we come to really respect ourselves.
[00:55:25] Speaker B: Absolutely.
And I also felt that it was really important for me to begin to serve as a model in that regard of being fully present with myself, to model for them, them being fully present with themselves. That if I can't be fully present with myself, I am tacitly disapproving of them being present with themselves.
[00:55:53] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:55:54] Speaker B: And how can I switch that paradigm to say that this is the way that.
To move through the world in such a way as you can find your authentic self.
[00:56:05] Speaker A: Yeah. When you started this train of thought that it really boils down to genuineness and authenticity.
It can be manifest in motherhood, but it can also be manifest in a street sweeper or someone homeless.
[00:56:25] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:56:25] Speaker A: As well as a president.
[00:56:28] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:56:29] Speaker A: So that in this play that we are all experiencing, the roles that we take are much less significant than how we relate in a deep, experiential way to those roles through genuineness and authenticity.
[00:56:45] Speaker B: And I think to use those roles as guideposts for our own authenticity.
[00:56:52] Speaker A: Well, recognizing the inherent power differential that exists in society. And my favorite poet is always, and he's here with us tonight, Rumi. And Rumi was well known for honoring children. There was a way of greeting adults, and there was a way of greeting children. And he used to take the time to honor the children as adults in a very respectful.
So I think that's a great teaching. Of all the things that Rumi left behind, that is one great one. I think that the valuing of that process of children is beings unto themselves, whole and complete.
So, yeah, that's cool.
What else, Lisa?
Oh, I know. I wanted to talk about you passing me another mics you got.
[00:57:58] Speaker B: Absolutely.
And thank God they're twist offs.
[00:58:05] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:58:05] Speaker B: Mike's.
[00:58:08] Speaker A: I would have had to pull a frat boy rugby molar trick, which sometimes chips and sometimes doesn't. The teeth.
[00:58:20] Speaker B: And at our age, it ain't good.
[00:58:23] Speaker A: I'm too old for that.
[00:58:24] Speaker B: Ain't good.
[00:58:29] Speaker A: So, yeah, identity takes many forms. And I think that for me, I so often, time after time, found myself in relationship after relationship. And relationships really served as a model of teaching for me.
I'm very open about the fact that I had repressed memories, and how those memories emerged in me was through the trust of someone else. I had to value the process of someone else because I could not trust my own inner process. And when I did trust that person, that they were not deceiving me or lying to me, I had to turn it back in myself and ask, what is deceptive in myself? What is unknown in myself? And when I did that, memories emerged into my consciousness. And that whole process for me was intensely painful and just, I mean, intense, but really served to teach me that a few things, that regardless of the enormity of the emotional content that we have to process, which sometimes can be biochemical and not always addressed with medication, but sometimes can be addressed with medication, there's also the emotional what you're talking about, the experiential process of, you know, it's interesting, Jack Cornfield, I think, in his book, either, I think it was a path with heart, spoke about how he was like a buddhist monk, and he had meditated for years and years and years, and he found himself after all this time of spending time in meditation, having sexual fantasies during meditation, which is natural and normal. But what he did was he brought awareness to that. And what he found at that would not surprise anyone, but it's a great mystery. And what he found at that was a deep loneliness, which is also deeply, deeply embedded in our human condition and our existential question.
[01:00:53] Speaker B: Very much, right? Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that what's been arising for me is this sense that many people come into our lives and that we have to sort of make a decision at some point about how far we let that person into our life, what we share with them, how intimate that relationship becomes, what the boundaries of that relationship are.
And I think the real evolution for myself in that process has been to allow myself to stay open, to really feeling out the contours of each different relationship that comes in.
[01:01:53] Speaker A: I have something that I often say in conversation, which is every relationship has its own integrity, structure and function.
And the other word that has come to me recently is discernment. So discerning what those things are.
[01:02:11] Speaker B: Right.
[01:02:13] Speaker A: Let me ask you a question. How do we do that?
[01:02:16] Speaker B: Well, for me, again, and this probably won't come as a surprise, it's very experiential, and it unfolds in the moment, and it not only unfolds in the moment, but it also unfolds in the moments when I'm not with a particular person and how that feels and what imprint the person has left on me.
But coming from this place of wonder and openness and really feeling into the energy of what, boy, this is difficult territory, I think, because we're not accustomed to doing this particularly. We're much more accustomed to establishing boundaries around the relationship. This is friend.
[01:03:03] Speaker A: And based on what? Based on position.
[01:03:06] Speaker B: Based on position, age difference.
[01:03:08] Speaker A: So that some homeless guy who could have tremendous impact and meaning in your life.
[01:03:13] Speaker B: Right. We discard them.
[01:03:15] Speaker A: It's discarded because this is a discard.
[01:03:17] Speaker B: Or a child, as we were just talking about. Exactly.
And so I think that, as you were saying, this shift with my children and kind of seeing them as equal, energetic beings that have come into the world, perhaps they've come into the world at a different time than I did. They came in three decades later. But really, that. That is just a dew drop in the time of eternity.
[01:03:49] Speaker A: A flash of lightning.
[01:03:50] Speaker B: A flash of lightning, exactly. And to really remain open to both what I have to learn from this person and what this person might be needing from me at this particular time. And I find that that's the difficult part to discern well, for believe.
[01:04:10] Speaker A: Yeah. For you it is. And for me, it's clear, actually, Lisa, and I can tell you what it is.
It is always for me, at least theoretically, and not always in practice, and I recognize this. But to what may I offer to this person?
[01:04:26] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[01:04:27] Speaker A: First and foremost, what may I offer to this person?
[01:04:30] Speaker B: Right.
[01:04:30] Speaker A: And in that process of giving and giving fully of oneself in the moment, full attention, full being, full faculties, and full.
Just the fullness of my experience of really, usually silence and listening, that what they may offer to me is revealed because there's something in us that wants to reciprocate when something's given, and that's to give back.
[01:04:57] Speaker B: Right? Yeah, absolutely.
[01:05:01] Speaker A: Cool.
[01:05:03] Speaker B: And I think just my own process in this has been really trying.
[01:05:21] Speaker A: To.
[01:05:22] Speaker B: Feel into the moment.
[01:05:25] Speaker A: What does that mean?
[01:05:27] Speaker B: When I'm with a person?
What is it that comes up? Okay.
At all levels.
[01:05:33] Speaker A: Let's break it down into this way.
When you say that, what senses are you using?
[01:05:39] Speaker B: All of them. Like, really trying to bring to bear? All of the senses.
[01:05:43] Speaker A: What are all the senses?
[01:05:45] Speaker B: Well, I think that when I can be in this quiet space, like you're saying, with another person present, what comes up in me? What comes up in my thoughts, I.
[01:05:57] Speaker A: Think that's the mind's eye.
[01:05:59] Speaker B: The mind's eye, right.
[01:06:00] Speaker A: What is the mind's eye?
[01:06:01] Speaker B: What arises internally, intellectually, cognitively, in an imagination? In imagination, intuitively, what do we. Intuitively, exactly.
[01:06:10] Speaker A: What do we feel physically in our body?
[01:06:12] Speaker B: Correct. That was the next thing I think is that. And I'm kind of going in order of what I think is the most salient, perhaps, to the aspects that we're less aware of. And it's not because they're not equally as salient. It's because I think, as we were talking about earlier, in our culture, we don't have the training to access them as readily.
[01:06:33] Speaker A: No.
[01:06:33] Speaker B: In other, more primitive cultures, they might be able to acknowledge the.
Exactly.
Well, I mean, primitive in a positive way.
[01:06:42] Speaker A: Sure.
[01:06:43] Speaker B: Meaning that less intellectualized, more being present with the moment, and less of this sort of western individual sort of orientation that we accustomed to. Exactly. And so when I say use all of my faculties to sort of be present with somebody, I think it's this layering process exactly in the same way that I did. Having this strong reaction to my children leaving a mess in the hallway and feeling this anger rising in me, that it really was this sort of dissecting of each of the emotional, emotional, intellectual, physical, intuitive, spiritual, energetic. All of these different levels. I mean, somatic, somatic, I guess a way to think about it is like, if you were to run your way up through the chakras at the base core level, at the prime primitive level, what am I feeling? And then sort of moving up to the more spiritual place of, okay, what is sort of happening between us that's not being spoken and that maybe isn't even.
That we can't even linguistically capture. But just to be present with that.
[01:07:53] Speaker A: As well, that's what poetry, I think, is.
[01:07:55] Speaker B: Absolutely, of course. Yeah. It's like an attempt to sort of.
[01:08:00] Speaker A: Grasp the silence and the space.
[01:08:02] Speaker B: Exactly.
[01:08:02] Speaker A: In the language. Yeah.
[01:08:03] Speaker B: And so I think that for me, in those moments, that it's really a settling into and giving space to each of these different ways of being with another person and really being present with what's arising for me at all these different levels, and finding that in some situations that I might have this very strong emotional draw. And, wow, I feel so safe, for example. And so I take this feeling of safety, and then I construct language around it. Oh, I feel safe around this person.
But then maybe something else arises, let's say, somatically, where I'm like.
[01:08:55] Speaker A: The head in the heart.
[01:08:56] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. The head in the heart. And maybe where something on a physical level, like something doesn't quite mesh, doesn't click, or it doesn't click, or whatever kind of language we want to try and use around that, or vice versa, where you have maybe like a strong sensual or physical reaction to somebody, and yet there's something emotionally that doesn't quite click or whatever it is. But I think that for my own journey into this way of being with other people, it's really about exploring what is arising in me, and that it's not about the other person per se. It's really about giving space to the moment of what is arising in me.
[01:09:49] Speaker A: So people will say that. I can hear people saying, that's pretty selfish, or that's pretty self absorbed or narcissistic. Or narcissistic.
[01:09:58] Speaker B: Right.
[01:09:59] Speaker A: But I know because of my own experience, that that is absolutely not the.
[01:10:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, you know, again, let's go back to what we talked about, about how people perceive you and how you know yourself to be in the world.
[01:10:13] Speaker A: So just to revisit that, when we were at the studio with Richard, we were talking about identity, and we were talking about. It was what philosopher?
[01:10:23] Speaker B: He was talking about Sartre.
[01:10:25] Speaker A: Sartre. And he was talking about the transvestite.
[01:10:30] Speaker B: Who was perfectly happy.
[01:10:32] Speaker A: Who was perfectly happy dressing in women's clothes, looking himself in the mirror, and then the moment he thought someone was looking in, he was devastated. He was devastated.
[01:10:44] Speaker B: Right.
[01:10:46] Speaker A: So that's sort of what we're examining right now. Right?
[01:10:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
So I guess kind of jumping off that comment of like, well, maybe that's a very narcissistic position.
I don't experience it that way, because what I feel like I am doing is that, again, like I was saying about what I was trying to model for my children, that by me being fully present in my experience of another person, I am, too, allowing them to be fully present in your model experience.
[01:11:23] Speaker A: But let's talk a little bit about what this really is, which is presence, which is awareness, which is really. What does that allow? It allows responsiveness.
[01:11:32] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:11:32] Speaker A: Right?
[01:11:33] Speaker B: I believe so.
[01:11:34] Speaker A: Well, it does. Yeah, that's my experience, too.
So that the cultivation of awareness is really the cultivation of responsiveness, and from a buddhist perspective, could be termed, like, skillful means or right action to respond, knowing not. Because with the knee jerk reaction, what is that? It is unexamined life responding to a situation which is not understood, which is so much of what we experience and what we are. It's what I am oftentimes.
And I think that when people argue against meditation, for instance, and say that it's a self absorbed or selfish act, that, yeah, you can take your seatbelt off. I think we're about an hour into the conversation. Alyssa, should we start driving?
[01:12:31] Speaker B: We should.
[01:12:37] Speaker A: So that. Yeah, so that, you know, I just think that the cultivation of awareness through it is what we are. We are responsive. It's just the level to which we are able to respond. So what we want to do is increase that so that there's more compassionate response, there's more understanding and self and other in the relationship.
And joy, Harjo and I on unraveling religion.
We had a difficult beginning in the conversation, but came to a place of understanding what the show was termed, which is sacredness and relationship. And that this disconnect that we're speaking about, which is in part because of identity and socialization through spiritual practices, doesn't have to be meditation. It can be many different forms of self cultivation, introspection, contemplation.
It is about affirming.
It's about affirming what we are, which is really.
It is a unified reality.
And I'll say that I am you and you are me. In one sense, that is ultimately very deeply true. But how do we recognize that until we experience that, and then once we experience that and bring that back into the relationship, then I can honor you and you can honor me.
[01:14:11] Speaker B: And you and I have certainly shared multiple times in our relationship where we've had that feeling of deep connection.
[01:14:23] Speaker A: One mind, one mind.
[01:14:24] Speaker B: One mind, one heart.
[01:14:26] Speaker A: You speak what I think, I speak what you think.
[01:14:28] Speaker B: And even beyond that, I mean, even to that place of just beyond silence. Beyond silence. Yeah, we've been there many times. Many times.
[01:14:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:14:42] Speaker B: So I guess kind of what you were just sharing before about that. By being in our own awareness, how is that narcissistic? How is that ultimately compassionate?
[01:14:59] Speaker A: How is it ultimately beneficial and beneficial? Yeah.
[01:15:02] Speaker B: And from my experience, again, that when I find that when I'm in that place of being fully present in what's arising in me, that any agenda drops.
[01:15:15] Speaker A: Away, it's a very important point that.
[01:15:18] Speaker B: Any sense of directing the moment or manipulating, and I don't mean that in a negative way. I just mean literally shaping the moment to have a particular outcome, all of that falls away, and the only thing that remains is the pureness of being. Exactly. Is the pureness of being and bringing in all those senses, the sensual, the community.
Like, I'm thinking through the chakras, how we communicate, how we see one another through our third eye. I mean, all of these ways of being become purified when we are fully present with our own being, because.
[01:16:00] Speaker A: I'm sorry, but we are matter and we are spirit. And in that body mind combination of one expression, in the moment of body mind, we have full capacity to.
And I really shy away from this notion of extrasensory perception, or esp, paranormal. That's all bullshit.
There are things that we know, we know when we know, and you can call it a lot of different things.
[01:16:36] Speaker B: Well, again, it's this idea of trying to linguistically capture something that is. Or validate or validate it or empirically test.
[01:16:44] Speaker A: Right.
Oh, it's on this sheet of paper.
[01:16:47] Speaker B: That it says exactly when you know.
[01:16:52] Speaker A: You can test things through your own experience, which is what the Buddha recommended.
[01:16:57] Speaker B: Well, and now here again, we sort of run up against the. The question that you and I have discussed in the past, too, is then how do we then describe or conceptualize the experience of someone who has a profound mental illness.
[01:17:20] Speaker A: Yeah. Which I have had.
[01:17:23] Speaker B: And how do we come to this place of.
Well, that's their reality.
[01:17:31] Speaker A: It calls into question, really, what is responsibility and what are we responsible for, exactly? What is the boundary that arises in the moment collectively for that person?
[01:17:42] Speaker B: Right.
[01:17:43] Speaker A: I mean, that's a very big, broad, existential, absolutely question that is filled with meaning and purpose. Which is probably, at this point in time, unanswerable. But I think that we're going to get to a clearer understanding of things as the evolution of being predominantly physical, a spiritual being in a physical reality. And I think really, the realization that we are really in a spiritual reality that is partly physical will take place. And that question and the responsibility. And what the responsibility for that person with profound. Whatever it is, whatever that subjective experience is, which is hindering their inner experience, their contentment in their relationships, or even ability to function. Ability to function in the world, if they're not hurting anyone, then really, what is the point?
So just to tie it back home, we are on Delaware and Allen. We are at Allentown Trading Company, and some car just came to a screeching halt.
But it's 1250, and this is going for a little while. I think we can continue for a little while, if you're cool with that.
[01:19:06] Speaker B: Yeah, of course. Are you kidding me?
[01:19:08] Speaker A: For us, it's early.
[01:19:09] Speaker B: This is early.
It's not 06:00 a.m.. Yet.
[01:19:13] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's not 06:00 a.m.. Yet. It's only ten to one.
We have a few more mics. Hard to go through.
[01:19:19] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, we do.
[01:19:23] Speaker A: And I have to let the audience know that I really am tempted to delve into the Pringles, but I don't.
[01:19:31] Speaker B: Think that it'll be appreciated.
They're 40% more cheese tastic.
[01:19:39] Speaker A: Wow. How can I not?
[01:19:41] Speaker B: You have to. You must. You must indulge in Pringles.
[01:19:49] Speaker A: Delicious.
[01:19:50] Speaker B: Cheese tastic.
[01:19:51] Speaker A: In fact, she's tastic.
Oh, my God.
So, really important questions, because how do we relate to the marginalized people like myself who are marginalized?
I think I've developed the sensitivity to it because I have experienced it in my reality, and I've lost people who I hold most dear because of it. And I think that it's made me very sensitive and aware to the fact that not only do all people have value, but what is my responsibility in restoring other people's ability to connect?
[01:20:36] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[01:20:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:20:39] Speaker B: Okay, so let's talk about this idea of connection. What is it that we're ultimately connecting to?
[01:20:44] Speaker A: Yeah, well, it's true, but our perceptions now are that it's predominantly a physical reality, a physical universe with a spiritual element.
That is our perception. But I don't think that that's ultimately what reality manifests as. I think it's one expression that it is.
You can approach it this way, which is kind of a cop out in one sense, but I'll go this direction just because I think it's easy to follow, and I don't know how else to describe it, but the heart Sutra says, form is emptiness, emptiness is form. So that these two interplay are really just the same thing, the same expression, and this is how it manifests in this moment in time.
But collectively, I often wonder to myself, what is my responsibility in the collective, as a part of the collective?
And I think when you begin to form an answer like we've been talking about, that's when the problem arises. It's like Shinru Suzuki's Zen mind, beginner's mind. He talks about what is a good father? A good father does not know he is a good father.
And someone who claims he is a good father is probably not a good father. So that when you have that identity formed in your mind that I am a good father, it sort of prevents you from that responsiveness that I'm talking about, that we have been talking about, that in the moment, responsiveness that is a continual unfolding of the human experience. Right?
[01:22:30] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[01:22:35] Speaker A: So I just wanted to turn to.
At the infringement festival tonight, I had the honor of reading a eulogy, a poem that I wrote for my step grandfather, Hiram Augustus Miller.
And I read it, and I read through the day, and I read one true season. I read this, an open letter to Miller, and I think I wanted to shift, because you're a poet and I'm a poet, that I thought we'd approach this from a poetic lens.
So really, what are we expressing when we write poetry?
[01:23:30] Speaker B: I think that answer will be different for everybody.
For me, I find that it ironically gets me out of my head and gets me much more into a feeling space.
[01:23:45] Speaker A: Yeah. Why is that important?
[01:23:47] Speaker B: Well, for me, particularly. Oh, come on. You know the answer to that question.
[01:23:51] Speaker A: Go ahead.
[01:23:51] Speaker B: They don't, um.
I think it would be an understatement to say that I tend to be very cerebral.
[01:24:03] Speaker A: What, people fell asleep in this conversation five minutes in.
[01:24:10] Speaker B: Exactly.
Right.
Boring.
And I find that, for me, when I really, first of all, I don't write poetry in any sort of disciplined way. That poetry asks me to write it.
[01:24:37] Speaker A: Yes, it does.
[01:24:40] Speaker B: And I think that that's a very different way for me to be in the world, because usually I'm so.
Why? What?
[01:24:50] Speaker A: Why does it ask you to write it?
[01:24:53] Speaker B: Well, I think it's something that, usually it arises because some experiences happened, some interaction with another person, or is it.
[01:25:05] Speaker A: Stuff that can't be really processed intellectually or expressed intellectually?
[01:25:10] Speaker B: I think it can be expressed intellectually.
[01:25:13] Speaker A: People fall asleep five minutes into.
[01:25:15] Speaker B: Exactly.
I wrote a poem about us even. Remember I shared that with you, and I could share it now.
[01:25:24] Speaker A: Do you have it memorized?
[01:25:25] Speaker B: No, but I have it in my trusty iPhone.
[01:25:29] Speaker A: Yeah, that's cool.
[01:25:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
And I think that it comes from a more feeling place, and because I think there aren't rules necessarily around it, that it allows for the openness in the same way that, as I said about sort of feeling into another person, writing poetry is really feeling into an experience, but using linguistic constructs to try to.
What's the word? I want?
[01:26:16] Speaker A: Conveyor. Express.
[01:26:18] Speaker B: Convey, express. It feels even deeper than that. Like.
[01:26:27] Speaker A: Commune, communicate, commune.
[01:26:31] Speaker B: I think that that's an even better maybe way of expressing it.
And also I find that poetry, at least for me, is a way to sort of say what maybe falls outside of polite conversation.
[01:26:54] Speaker A: Sure. Or one of the reasons why I love poetry. Because it breaks down the barriers that societally are in the social contract.
[01:27:02] Speaker B: Exactly. You can talk about even an experience that you have with somebody that you may or may not even share with them, particularly that something arose in you and it was so powerful, and there was something either.
I think there's something basic about it, about it usually goes to something very, like you said, ineffable, but very emotional. I think. I don't know. I feel like I'm sort of struggling for the words.
[01:27:35] Speaker A: No, I think it captures. It lassoes or captures something that is a part of the ineffable experience, not even emotional, but beyond emotional, the experience of that we are consciousness, and the experience of that consciousness and what that is and how it expresses itself through the formation of this physicality, the body and the psyche and psychology of human beings.
So that I really think that it's one of the reasons why I truly love poetry, because I notice that poetry is great in and of itself. But I'm much more interested in how poetry builds community, which is what my mentor, my creative writing teacher, mage Reagan, taught me.
For those of you who don't know, he was my first guest on unraveling religion as I went from crawling to walking as a radio host.
But Mage was beautiful. And for those of you who haven't had the opportunity to listen, Mage had many, in a very beautifully articulate, experiential way, conveyed things about the nature of our daily experience in a way that was unique to Mage, that he taught me to find my own voice in my own.
So did you find it on your phone, Lisa?
[01:29:17] Speaker B: I did, in fact.
[01:29:18] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:29:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
So this is a poem that I wrote in, I don't know when did I write this?
I don't have a year on it, but I wrote it to capture, I think, the quality of many conversations that I've had with a multitude of people and that reach to the center and to the edges at the same time.
And so I think I'll just go ahead and share it without more.
We smoke in rings around our truths, slipping words through the unseen circumference of love from one to the other, no beginning, no end, creating instead in dashed diameters from the center of infinity to the edges of the abyss.
So we stave off the cold by the heat of our words, encircling, reaching for the center.
[01:30:45] Speaker A: That's nice.
[01:30:46] Speaker B: Thanks.
[01:30:47] Speaker A: That's a fucking good poem.
[01:30:49] Speaker B: Thanks, man.
[01:30:50] Speaker A: Sure. Absolutely.
Do you have any more on there?
[01:30:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
Got time.
[01:30:57] Speaker A: Go ahead. Yeah. Let's see what else you have. What else comes to mind?
[01:30:59] Speaker B: Let's see.
Um.
This is another poem, I think, that often reflects the connections that we make through communication and the ways that people save us through that reaching out and connecting with us.
Your words that night.
Your words that night. While I sat on my porch, swirling in my own smoke, birthing ghosts in the cool, dark emptiness, were the midwife to my winter.
Your words sliding into my ear, slipping into my heart, holding me up before myself as the past and what may come. Your words that night fell into me as brilliant leaves descending from the weight of too much beauty, laying bare the frailty of dry branches, no longer able to hold such gloriousness.
Your words that night melted me from the weight of too much coldness and packed expectations frozen in another time after the snowmen. Your words that night. My words that night danced on the fallen leaves and made a carpet of crushed gold to properly welcome this winter.
[01:32:41] Speaker A: That's beautiful, Lisa.
That rings in such an authentic way, such a genuine way.
[01:32:48] Speaker B: Well, you and I have been to that place.
[01:32:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:32:50] Speaker B: Many times. We have been many times.
[01:32:54] Speaker A: That is an amazing, amazing poem.
[01:32:56] Speaker B: Thank you.
[01:32:57] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, holy shit.
[01:33:00] Speaker B: And this coming from the nominated best poet in Buffalo. I take that as quite a compliment. I take that as quite a compliment.
[01:33:13] Speaker A: I had the ballot box stuffed now, so I have one that ties into. Because I broke out my collection of stuff. And it's actually a poem that ties into attachment and identity formation. Not identity formation, but the experience of distancing ourselves from the experience of that connection and youth of childhood or infancy. And it's very short. It's a super short poem and I've read it before, in some times, it has served great for great meaning with me. And it's called childhood remembered.
It goes like this, childhood remembered.
Autumn stream leaf still searching for her lost branch.
And in that, that's the whole poem, so that's the end. But that autumn stream leaf still searching for her lost branch is each one of us. I think you know what I mean, longing for what? Not really childhood, but that connection of the experience of that unified the unity with all things that we had in infancy that we lost through our socialization and identity constructs.
[01:34:51] Speaker B: Well, I think the thing that arises for me in that is that it's the leaf that's searching for the branch, but the leaf emerged from the branch and therefore has the branch within it, and that it needs to sort of, again, sort of winding back to what we were talking about, attachment, again, that one could look at this simply as, oh, the leaf is the child leaving the mother. The mother is the branch.
But I think that it reminds me actually of, I think I've told you this about my daughter when she was six or seven. We were watching this show, remember?
[01:35:32] Speaker A: I do, yeah.
[01:35:33] Speaker B: We were watching this show where these people had stumbled upon this body of water that could give them eternal life, and they drank it accidentally, but then obviously realized that they weren't aging. And the young boy who was 1617 met a human and immortal, put it that way, immortal, and fell in love with her. And he offered her to drink from this water and that if she drank from the water, she too would have immortality and that they would be able to be together forever. And I remember asking my daughter, because we were watching it together, well, what would you do? And my daughter said, looked at me in sheer stupidity of, well, this is a no brainer, like, okay, well, what would you do? This is quite an existential question. How does a six or seven year old answer this existential question? Well, of course I wouldn't drink the water. Well, why wouldn't you drink the water? Because I have to die. Because in order for new life to come, I have to let go, and.
[01:36:45] Speaker A: For our life to have meaning, and.
[01:36:47] Speaker B: For my life to have meaning, I have to let go of this reality. And, wow, was that a really powerful. And how certain she was of it. That's the part I think that was even more sure.
[01:37:00] Speaker A: And it's another example of Asha's teacher.
[01:37:04] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And the sense of when I was listening to your poem that of course the leaf has to let go of the branch and the searching is not for the branch without the branch that was left behind it is the branch that is now within the leaf.
[01:37:26] Speaker A: Well, that's an enlightened leaf.
[01:37:28] Speaker B: It's a pretty enlightened leaf.
That's right.
Exactly.
I don't know if that's what your intent was or it wasn't behind the poem, but that's what sort of emerged for me is that the branch is ultimately in the leaf and it's whole.
There's nothing lost in the wholeness of the leaf because it had to leave the branch. It had to let go to make way for something new. And it too will find its way back into the ground, or whatever it.
[01:38:07] Speaker A: Is, as a part of all things.
[01:38:08] Speaker B: As a part of all things. And it's not that it stumbles upon that, it's that it always is that. And it has to come to its own sense of this is who I am. I already am this wholeness.
[01:38:21] Speaker A: Right. I like that.
[01:38:23] Speaker B: Yeah, that's great.
[01:38:24] Speaker A: Yeah. That's beautiful. Do you have another one?
[01:38:26] Speaker B: I got lots.
[01:38:27] Speaker A: Sure. Let's go.
[01:38:28] Speaker B: Let's go.
[01:38:29] Speaker A: You might want to put your seatbelt back on.
[01:38:31] Speaker B: I know. You might want to put your seatbelt on.
[01:38:33] Speaker A: True.
[01:38:51] Speaker B: All right, well, I am going to share my poem that I have shared with you many times. You and I have sat with this poem many times. And this is probably.
I wouldn't call it, I wouldn't rank it in any way in terms of like, oh, it's the best poem I've ever written, but it's the most powerful for me.
[01:39:24] Speaker A: Sure.
[01:39:26] Speaker B: Interestingly, the reason why I think it has the most power for me is because I really have no idea what it means.
So in the truest sense of the word, it really came through me and I've sat with it for many, many years. I wrote this in the late eighty s. And it is a poem that continues to just revisit me and call to me. Okay, we'll put it out there and see what. Let's see and see what happens.
[01:39:57] Speaker A: See if anything arises.
[01:40:00] Speaker B: Yeah, let's see. Okay.
I have walked lifetimes across sand and marble in a darkness deeper than antigenesis. I have walked with my mothers, daughters and lovers toward iridescence. A simple glow from far away, far ahead. And we walked in sandals, guided only by hope and imagination to light the journey.
I buried dark little ones along the way.
Lovers were carried out to see, to see.
One mother remained, holding fast my small hand, saying Rosary's bellowing chants. We ascended a great mountain.
Bloodied. My baptism began.
I paused. A dark man enters my mother smiles as she looks on. We come with sudden joy as we watch the sun ascend beyond the distant trees. Together we create paper dolls from dried lotus petals. A bird shadows the fiery orb. I look up to marvel at its splendor. The gust from its mighty wing flapping sweeps my fragile angels from the palm of my hand. I cry in anguish, screaming, lunging to the ground alone, grasping palms of dirt and lilies.
This power comes through me and I push my insides out, screaming, not my own.
This bird above ignites as a wing enters the sun. Too close, amongst the dirt and lilies and lotus dust, there lay my daughter, dark and lovely. I say goodbye to her and walk on alone. My tears fall a great distance and her waterfall is thus born. I sit myself upon the cliff's edge and a fish emerges from my belly, branded upon its gills. I am. I place a feather between my legs, consume the fish, take the leap of faith and forever. I am the dragon.
[01:42:22] Speaker A: I know that one.
[01:42:23] Speaker B: You know that one?
[01:42:24] Speaker A: I do.
So, do we want to enter into past and future lives?
[01:42:31] Speaker B: Let's do it.
[01:42:33] Speaker A: You want to?
[01:42:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:42:34] Speaker A: All right. What do you got to say about that?
[01:42:39] Speaker B: Oh, boy.
Yeah. Something about that has a past life quality to it, doesn't it? I know.
Oh, yeah. Definitely. Absolutely.
So, what quality of that?
Snacks. Of past life do you.
[01:43:00] Speaker A: I don't know. Am I way off?
[01:43:02] Speaker B: No.
[01:43:03] Speaker A: Maybe I'm drunk on Mike's.
[01:43:04] Speaker B: No.
[01:43:05] Speaker A: Speaking, which. Could I have another one?
[01:43:06] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[01:43:10] Speaker A: Thanks.
[01:43:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:43:12] Speaker A: For everyone listening. Okay.
[01:43:14] Speaker B: Want to make that clear?
[01:43:20] Speaker A: So what about past lives?
[01:43:27] Speaker B: That's a poem that, like I said, continues to revisit. Call me.
And I think that's why it's so hard for me to discern it. Because it feels like it's of me, but it's not of my memory. It's not of my.
[01:43:48] Speaker A: I'm right with you.
[01:43:49] Speaker B: You know what I'm talking about.
[01:43:50] Speaker A: So, what are you talking about?
[01:43:52] Speaker B: Can you articulate it?
[01:43:53] Speaker A: Because I know what you're talking about, but they may not.
[01:43:55] Speaker B: I know I wrote that poem, I said in the late 80s, but actually I wrote it in 95, which even has more significance, which I know. You know what that means. Yeah.
In 1995, I experienced my own mental breakdown.
[01:44:16] Speaker A: Sure.
[01:44:17] Speaker B: In first hospitalization.
And that poem was written after that experience.
And I think because of having the boundaries so blown out of the water.
[01:44:34] Speaker A: Sure.
Identity ripped out.
[01:44:37] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. I mean, ripped to shreds.
[01:44:39] Speaker A: Yeah. What is left?
[01:44:40] Speaker B: What was left? Exactly. And what was left were these. Something's left.
Realities. Realities.
And a sense of, like, I didn't have to hold it together anymore.
[01:44:54] Speaker A: Yeah. Isn't that glorious?
[01:44:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:45:00] Speaker A: What a relief.
[01:45:01] Speaker B: What a relief. Yeah, exactly.
And I think that it invited something in of me not holding things together. Invited things in that maybe I wouldn't have allowed in previous to that experience.
That's a real powerful poem for me because I think it speaks to the expanse of time. The expanse of time.
And I think also, too, that as I reread it now, and being present with what's arising in this current reading, because it's dovetailing with this idea of being unmoored and this idea of being born, and then I'm alone.
And it's interesting because I am both the mother and the child in this poem simultaneously.
And that I give birth and I abandon the child and go on alone.
[01:46:02] Speaker A: So that self contained is a metaphor for our adulteration.
[01:46:06] Speaker B: Absolutely.
And my mother is with me at the beginning. And somewhere along the way, as I'm giving birth to my own child, she's no longer there. And so I think that there is something about this idea of this existential aloneness. And we give birth. And in the giving birth, too, we are ultimately alone.
[01:46:32] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[01:46:33] Speaker B: And then the child to whom we give birth is, again, ultimately alone as well.
[01:46:39] Speaker A: It reminds me, what comes to mind is.
I don't know how to pronounce it, but he wrote a poem called.
It's a little poem, and I don't know what it's called, but it goes like this.
We were born into this world alone, we die alone. This is also an illusion. I will show you the way. Not to come, not to go.
[01:47:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:47:11] Speaker A: And speaking about that. Yeah. I have a poem.
[01:47:16] Speaker B: You have a poem?
[01:47:17] Speaker A: I have a poem.
[01:47:18] Speaker B: Really?
[01:47:18] Speaker A: I do.
[01:47:19] Speaker B: How shocking. It's so good that you're willing to step outside of your comfort zone once in a while.
Speaking of stepping out of your comfort zone.
[01:47:26] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:47:27] Speaker B: You know what? You owe me big for this.
[01:47:29] Speaker A: Oh, we're dancing.
[01:47:30] Speaker B: We are dancing.
[01:47:31] Speaker A: Can I tell you my master plan?
[01:47:32] Speaker B: What's your master plan is have this.
[01:47:34] Speaker A: Conversation go beyond the bars closing.
[01:47:39] Speaker B: Oh, yes. But in the future, that's fine. Well, in the future, many things could happen.
Cheers to that.
[01:47:48] Speaker A: So in talking about the expanse of time from the Bhagavad Gita talks about the transmigration of the ocean of the soul through the ocean of birth and death.
This inspired this poem, which is, I think it speaks for itself and it doesn't kind of articulate in the way that yours does, but it indirectly infers that we were so what you're saying.
[01:48:24] Speaker B: Is that I should be the number one poet in buffalo.
[01:48:28] Speaker A: Sure, go ahead.
[01:48:31] Speaker B: Take you on. Little poet poet slam. Little poet slam.
[01:48:35] Speaker A: That's what we're doing right now.
[01:48:36] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[01:48:38] Speaker A: But this is called the watchman.
Sorrow's fountain, wellspring rain, light, passing days.
Moon around earth and seasons.
Life's texture is autumnal, constant.
Where do the leaves come and go?
Stars and grass are the great way, knowing and not known. Mark these days, motionless as I watch the sun dissolve in time.
And so I think that this is talking about incarnation after incarnation after incarnation. My relationship with this earth and this sun and this moon. Yeah.
[01:49:40] Speaker B: It's also reminding me of one of the first really powerful poems that I wrote, too.
That sort of came at the beginning of this. I think it was like, in 92.
[01:49:56] Speaker A: 91.
[01:49:57] Speaker B: 92. And I had a very.
I think that was sort of the beginning of my own sort of spiritual awakening. Away from a religious sense, of course, and much more into a deep spiritual sense. And arriving at this place of what does it mean to connect with another person? What does that feel like?
What is that experience?
And I think that it does connect to this idea of, like, as you were talking about. About those forces that draw us together. You and I have often talked about that.
[01:50:41] Speaker A: Some call it karma. What is your.
[01:50:42] Speaker B: Some call it karma, reincarnation, past life, whatever you want to say. And I'm a little more skeptical about labeling it in that way.
[01:50:54] Speaker A: Well, I don't worry about labeling it exactly, because you can label it all you want, but there's an undoubted connection. There's an undoubted connection between people that is inexplicable.
[01:51:04] Speaker B: Exactly.
[01:51:05] Speaker A: Not even oftentimes, but on rare occasions. It is inexplicable.
[01:51:09] Speaker B: Exactly. And I think that this poem. Let me see if I have the year on it. I think it was in 91 or something. 92.
That I really. I think for the first time in my life, had a connection with another person that was so profound and ineffable, that really, poetry was the only way that I could even approach it.
[01:51:36] Speaker A: Let's go to this place.
[01:51:37] Speaker B: Let's go to this place, man.
[01:51:38] Speaker A: Okay. Let's talk about this.
[01:51:41] Speaker B: Okay. So this poem was a way to sort of try to express that ineffable connection. And my place in that connection and my place beyond that connection. Or the connection beyond my place, if that's a better way to say it.
[01:52:02] Speaker A: You're drunk.
[01:52:03] Speaker B: I'm drunk, man. Here we go. Let's do it. All right.
Wise fairymen. Spiritual, other I long for your wisdom to enter me. Yet I know the truth of the timeless river, and its cold voice chills me even as I hear it. I am deaf in my search for selflessness. I have not even begun, for I know not the self of which I wish to abandon, nor the other I wish to embrace. Self in the river, other in the river, self lost in the other in the river, self found in the other. The river. Wise fairymen approach me in your wisdom and teach me to float atop the undulating, lonely moments of time into the suspension of my destiny, where I shall find self in my oneness with you and lose self in oneness with God. The river lures me as it whispers its gospel. I was always the same, and yet every moment I am new.
I approach the threshold, sandy, where you rule in calm, barefoot, I seek you out. You call me wise woman. I am wise in that I seek. No. You are wise in that you live. Your wisdom beckons me. Nothing was, nothing will be. Everything has reality and presence. You call me, select if I am, then carry me to the depths of the river and drown me. Then I shall be wise. Then I shall know love. Then I shall know the truth of the river as I dissolve into other, real, present and free.
[01:54:03] Speaker A: Was that the Fairmin and river? Is that from Siddhartha?
[01:54:07] Speaker B: Yes, it is.
Absolutely interesting. Yep.
[01:54:12] Speaker A: My old buddy sent me that book a long time ago. Yeah.
Which segues into this next poem.
So it's. Oh, yeah. No, not this one.
This one's called Heart a goodbye on Highland Avenue.
Can you speak of what you feel in the ocean a tear in the eye of fish?
Do you look at the moon?
Smooth, soft and quiet like the backdrop beneath our fears always there an embrace that never ends.
So that's one poem that was actually the person who gave me siddhartha.
I think we hugged goodbye, and later on I reflected upon that, and this poem came out.
But I'm going to transition sort of skirt around that to this other poem, which is a song of time breathing.
It's called a song of time breathing.
A simple life.
Every man as an uncrowned king, lifted from the dirt of the rose bed to become water, air, petal, thorn, leaf, sunlight.
Tomorrow, yesterday, today.
Written in clouds, our blood beats into the song and words of our everyday breath, breaking moments into years.
And there's a natural experiential logic that I can follow. Not even logic, but just process in this. But it's quite beautiful.
[01:56:22] Speaker B: Quite beautiful. Yeah, absolutely.
[01:56:25] Speaker A: So how are you doing? It's 128.
[01:56:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:56:28] Speaker A: On a Saturday night night's young. You got your tango shoes.
[01:56:32] Speaker B: You got your tango shoes.
[01:56:33] Speaker A: I got my tap dancing shoes, sweetness. There's no place to tap dance around here, though.
[01:56:38] Speaker B: Oh, we'll find some place.
Get my sniffer off. I'll find it.
Oh, God.
[01:56:49] Speaker A: So, yeah, although I haven't done the.
[01:56:51] Speaker B: Dancing scene in Buffalo.
[01:56:53] Speaker A: No, you haven't? No, that's two of us. I've done the drinking scene, but not the dancing scene.
[01:57:04] Speaker B: But I think there's something else that was arising for me too. As you were reading, is this sense of that sometimes when we make these connections that I think by being fully present with ourselves in those connections, that we also have to understand that other.
[01:57:27] Speaker A: People are in different places.
[01:57:29] Speaker B: Are in different places. Exactly. And to really the best that we can to honor our own experience while.
[01:57:38] Speaker A: Honoring theirs as well.
[01:57:39] Speaker B: Exactly.
[01:57:41] Speaker A: No, it's kind of why I sort of skirted through, but.
Yeah. No, I mean, let's talk about deep, soulful connections. Yeah. Have you had them?
[01:57:57] Speaker B: Asshole?
No, never.
[01:58:06] Speaker A: You're drunk.
Or maybe I meant get drunk.
[01:58:11] Speaker B: That's your reality.
[01:58:15] Speaker A: But.
[01:58:18] Speaker B: I don't know, Joel. Have I?
[01:58:19] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I don't know. I don't want to speak for you, Lisa, really.
[01:58:24] Speaker B: What's stopping you now?
[01:58:31] Speaker A: I do feel like we often go to this place and I love it.
[01:58:38] Speaker B: Yes, we do.
[01:58:39] Speaker A: Collective. Collective soul groups. And within that, more intimate and more intimate and more intimate soul connections.
And you and I have spoken before about memories of, you know, before we've. Well, before I've incarnated. You know, I feel like whether those are true or not, it's a part of my experience here in this moment.
[01:59:11] Speaker B: Well, you know, it's been mine, too.
[01:59:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
And I think that conventionally it's looked at like lunacy, but really it's the most natural thing in the world. You know what I mean?
[01:59:21] Speaker B: Coming from two people.
[01:59:26] Speaker A: That'S awesome. Thanks for pointing that out.
[01:59:30] Speaker B: That's what I'm here.
[01:59:36] Speaker A: Think. You know, I've experienced.
It's fantastic is what it is.
We're using the Pringles holders.
The Pringles? You're crushing the Pringles, Lisa.
[01:59:53] Speaker B: No, you put it there.
[01:59:58] Speaker A: But I can remember a few meetings of people that were. Time stopped.
One was when I was in college and I was in the bird.
[02:00:20] Speaker B: What, you saw the bird over the water?
[02:00:22] Speaker A: No, it wasn't a bird. But that's something else we can talk about. It was a fish.
[02:00:26] Speaker B: Oh, fish, right. Yeah.
[02:00:28] Speaker A: That's. Okay. Birdfish.
Yeah.
So I walked down the steps of in this party, and there was someone standing there and I swear to God, time stopped. Turned out this person was very influential in my process in college of just learning how to negotiate stuff as a young adult.
But that time stopping is an interesting phenomenon, isn't it?
[02:01:05] Speaker B: Definitely, yeah, absolutely.
[02:01:09] Speaker A: What do you think that is?
[02:01:13] Speaker B: I don't know what it is, but I know.
[02:01:15] Speaker A: Have you experienced of it? Yes.
[02:01:17] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely.
In the sense of instant recognition.
Instant recognition. And you know that in this reality you've never seen that person before.
[02:01:36] Speaker A: I'm right with you.
[02:01:37] Speaker B: And that you see this person and something inside of you instantly knows this person.
[02:01:50] Speaker A: Knows this consciousness.
[02:01:51] Speaker B: Exactly.
[02:01:54] Speaker A: You can call that or label that karmic connection, but it's really something much more profound, much deeper. Right.
[02:02:00] Speaker B: Well, I don't know. I don't know what it is. And it's something that, you know, that you and I have talked about this a multitude of times. Right. What is intimacy really? I think maybe the bigger question is what is the meaning of those connections, of those particular connections?
[02:02:28] Speaker A: Well, I think in part that answer to that question, what are the meaning? Plays out in the incarnation itself. So if you never see that person again, perfect.
[02:02:40] Speaker B: Right.
[02:02:41] Speaker A: You know what I mean? Is it always as it is?
[02:02:43] Speaker B: Right.
And what happens when you sort of weave in and out of that? There's a weaving in and a weaving out. Isn't that the coming together and a letting go?
[02:02:58] Speaker A: Isn't it just a metaphor or an archetype of all relationship, though?
[02:03:04] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
And it's also, I think, for me, I think because I'm tenacious, persistent, and I think because those experiences are so sacred to me that I always want to be in that space with that other person and to explore what that means and what can arise from that.
[02:03:37] Speaker A: Sure.
[02:03:39] Speaker B: Again, kind of going back to what we were talking about, about the teaching and the learning and the sharing and the exchanging, I think for a long time that I had the view that this person would give me some wholeness that I didn't feel that I had. But over time, as I sort of sit with that, it's fallen away and the recognition that I am whole in myself and that maybe that's why, if.
[02:04:11] Speaker A: It played out this way, Lisa, that is the reason why.
[02:04:14] Speaker B: Exactly.
Right. The way that it has played out is exactly how it needed to play out.
[02:04:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[02:04:26] Speaker B: And that as you shared with me recently, you're like, Lisa, this is always going to happen to you. Right. Like it's going to keep happening, those connections, that depth of connection.
[02:04:41] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, that's just what you do, it's how you move through the world. Yeah.
[02:04:48] Speaker B: And maybe it's because of.
I don't know. Is it that early unmooring? I don't know.
[02:04:55] Speaker A: Yeah. Is it the early mooring? Yeah. Could be.
[02:05:00] Speaker B: I don't know.
And, I mean, it's hard for me to say because I don't know any other way to move through the world.
[02:05:11] Speaker A: Well, if I look at my own life and I look at the parents I was born to and the circumstance I was born to, there is a rationale and a logic on so many different levels for it.
[02:05:34] Speaker B: Me too.
[02:05:36] Speaker A: So I can resign myself to know that if that has happened in the past that way, with purpose. That my present is filled with purpose and my future will be filled with purpose.
Whether we concede or not. And I think it's all a matter of. It's not seeing for the answer of what is meaning. Because meaning is a process.
[02:05:58] Speaker B: Right, exactly.
[02:05:59] Speaker A: And going back to every relationship has its own integrity, structure and function. That is also revealed in the great expanse of time.
So really, that there are no questions, really, to be asked when you reach a certain point. Because there's another poem that I wrote. It's called dharma goes like this.
Each man's tatio complete in each moment. And a tatio is like a dharma expression, an individual's expression of truth. So that dharma is whole and complete in each moment. And a person's expression of that truth is complete in each moment. And that is both what's subjective. But it is also, as it is, full and complete. Objective and subjective. So that is the totality of what I understand.
[02:07:02] Speaker B: So where are you at right now, my friend?
[02:07:04] Speaker A: Well, I'm looking at the pack of american spirits.
And we've smoked a shitload of cigarettes tonight.
[02:07:13] Speaker B: Cheers to that.
[02:07:14] Speaker A: Cheers to that. We've drank some mike's hard lemonade.
But you know what we haven't done, Lisa? We've shared poetry, but we haven't shared roomy.
[02:07:27] Speaker B: You know, I was thinking the same thing.
[02:07:30] Speaker A: God damn it.
You're a much better reader than I am.
There's a section. Will you read something?
[02:07:39] Speaker B: Yes.
[02:07:40] Speaker A: It's on the knobs. I just was reading it today and I was thinking, I've read this book. This is for everyone listening. This is essential Rumi. Translation by Coleman Barks. It's the new expanded edition. And I got it at inspiration point. Sandy St. Louis's bookstore on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo.
You can find it any place, but I've read this book and given away so many copies.
[02:08:10] Speaker B: I have one that you've given me.
[02:08:12] Speaker A: Yeah, I keep giving it away. So this book is an arrow that's going to be sent forth someplace. And I don't know where yet. But what I wanted to read. I wanted you to read that I was reading earlier was on the knobs, which is about sexual wanting.
And this Coleman barks became studied under a Sufi teacher. And here it is studied under a Sufi teacher. And when I read him now, I'm only now understanding how little I understood before.
So it's page 54 of controlling the desire body. How do you kill your rooster, Hussein?
Go ahead, Lisa.
[02:09:10] Speaker B: On the desire body, Sufis call the wanting nafs.
From the urgent way lovers want each other.
To the Sanyasin search for truth. All moving is from the mover.
Every pull draws us to the ocean.
Rumi says it's important to live the wantings as they come. And not get stuck somewhere stagnant. He was asked once what to do about a young man caught doing some indecent act.
The story doesn't mention what exactly? Masturbation, peeping tomming, whatever wild wantings young men think to do.
Rumi told them not to worry about it. It just means he's growing his feathers. The dangerous case is a kid who doesn't do indecent acts. Who then leaves the nest without feathers. One flap and the cat has him.
Be careful, Rumi suggests, about shaming sexual behavior in an adolescent. Or anyone who hasn't yet had his or her fill of erotic trancing. Often the closest we come to surrender is orgasm. In Rumi's symbology, the rooster is a symbol for that energy.
How did Hussam kill his rooster? By dissolving into the play. The nafs are energies that keep us moving, stopping nowhere. Union with the divine continually unfolds. Next to the glowing drive in movie, the junkyard's rusted stacks of old desired bodies.
Let the beauty we love keep turning into action, transmuting to another. Another?
What have I ever lost by dying? Rumi asks. Exchanging one set of nafs for the next chopped rooster energy becomes another dining room story. Particles of praise shine in the sunlight. Anything you grab hold of on the bank breaks with the river's pressure. When you do things from your soul, the river itself moves through you. Freshness and a deep joy are signs of the current.
[02:11:29] Speaker A: Wow.
That's the pinnacle of some shit, right? Really?
[02:11:35] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[02:11:41] Speaker A: You can't find that anyplace else. You know what I mean? Not in that way.
So, Lisa, it's quarter to two, our listeners are probably fast asleep about 40.
[02:11:54] Speaker B: Minutes ago at least.
[02:11:56] Speaker A: And so I want to just thank you for being a guest tonight. This conversation has been, oh, it's going.
[02:12:04] Speaker B: To be worth it to see you on that dance floor, my friend.
[02:12:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[02:12:09] Speaker B: Remember that holds up your end of the bargain.
[02:12:11] Speaker A: I will.
[02:12:14] Speaker B: The carrot you offered.
[02:12:15] Speaker A: But I'm wondering if you'll read one last poem. I just want to know if there is anything you wanted to say as we're winding down here.
[02:12:25] Speaker B: Thank you for inviting me to enter into this most sacred of spaces.
[02:12:31] Speaker A: It is a sacred space because it's a space of friendship. Yeah.
[02:12:34] Speaker B: Thank you.
[02:12:37] Speaker A: So thank you, everyone who's lasted this marathon episode.
What a joy. And I just want you to all to know that this is the baseline of our friendship and our conversation and our love for one another. So this is what we share in exchange, is love in life.
And I wanted you, Lisa, to read my favorite Rumi poem, which will sum up everything we've been talking about in a very beautiful way.
[02:13:11] Speaker B: It'd be my pleasure.
[02:13:12] Speaker A: It's from the essential, roomy, even page 32. I have it memorized because it's my favorite. It's called only breath.
[02:13:21] Speaker B: I know this one.
[02:13:22] Speaker A: Yeah, this is a good one.
[02:13:25] Speaker B: Not Christian or Jew or Muslim. Not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi or Zen. Not any religion or cultural system.
I am not from the east or the west, not out of the ocean or up from the ground. Not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist, am not an entity of this world or the next. Did not descend from Adam and Eve or any origin story. My place is placeless. A trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul I belong to. The beloved have seen the two worlds as one, and that one call to and know first, last, outer, inner. Only that breath breathing human being close.
