Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - A Conversation about Love, Divinity, and Meaning with Neal Allen and Anne Lamott

Episode Date: December 15, 2021

On today’s episode of “The Language of Love,” Dr. Laura Berman sits down for an intimate conversation with husband Neal Allen. Neal Allen is a coach and writer who studies and practices traditional and contemporary spiritual paths. His book “Shapes of Truth: Discover God Inside You,” is one of Dr. Berman’s favorite new books and she is eager to share how you can apply the deep wisdom within this book to your life. Neal Allen will help listeners discover how to find the divinity within, including what divinity means and how even a non-believer can connect with a deeper meaning and purpose. Allen explains how his time at the Hameed Ali's Diamond Heart group helped to awake him to the false stories about himself and his reality that he had been stuck in, and how he was able to ‘burn down his house’ discover how to see the many colors of divinity within them. “There are 35 colors that you can find within yourself,” says Allen. “And each of them has to do a way in which you are divine.” Allen explains what these colors mean and how you can learn to find your colors in yourself and in others. During the episode, Dr. Berman also gets a chance to speak with Neal Allen’s wife Anne Lamott. Anne Lamott is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bird by Bird,” “Help, Thanks, Wow,” and “Stiches.” She is also a public speaker and writing teacher, and one of Dr. Berman’s favorite writers. Lamott talks to Dr. Berman about dating when you’re middle-aged, and how one should approach the process of looking for love. How do you know when he’s “the one” or when he just ticks most of your boxes? “Hold out for the person you would want to be best friends with, even if they aren’t going to your romantic partner,” says Lamott. You can find Neal Allen’s “Shapes of Truth: Finding the Divinity Within” on Amazon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm Dr. Laura Berman, a sex and relationship therapist. And for the past three decades, I've been helping people learn how to love and be loved better. That's what we're doing here on The Language of Love, where I get to answer calls and emails from people just like you. My goal with The Language of Love is to help you discover more meaningful emotional and physical intimacy and to help you build more awareness of how precious and sacred your sexuality really is. Be sure to email me or reach out with your very own love sex relationship

questions, and I might just answer them live on the air. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. I'm excited to share the teachings and the wisdom of this week's guest, Neil Allen. He is a teacher, a writer, a spiritual coach, a spiritual seeker. He wrote a beautiful book recently called Shapes of Truth, Discover God Inside You. And we're going to get into what's so cool about this book and how practical it is. I also had a brief conversation with him, Neil and his wife, famed American novelist and activist Anne Lamott, who wasn't feeling great tonight, but was able to share, before we got started, a little bit of wisdom about love and older age. I had two really long-term relationships, but with both of them, both men, I had felt

I liked a lot about it but if they were women they wouldn't have been my very best girlfriend you know because I had a very best girlfriend who really did check off everything on the list brilliant kind intimate articulate and fun you know just lovely in the way that your very best girlfriend is and with the men I've been with I think I really like to be with them or have them around or whatever it took care of but then with Neil I thought you know what I thought to my baby self, I thought, if he were a woman, I'd want to be best girlfriends with him. Aw, that's such a compliment, Neil. Yeah, that's what I would urge your listeners just to hold out for.

Hold out for the person who you'd want to be best friends with if they were not going to be your romantic partner. Yeah, and that you could talk to forever and that you could be your true self with. Yeah, and in my case, I lucked into the kindest woman on earth. Aw. Thank you for the service you're doing in the world, Laura, and I'll turn you over to Neil and Shapes of Truth. He will not mention that I did think of the title. I'm glad you cleared that up. Nice to meet you. You too. Feel better. Thank you so much for

hopping in. Thanks, Annie. Everybody loves a love story, but I think it's just the way that you all speak about each other and support each other's work and intellectually and emotionally are just so attuned. And it sounds like it was really that way from the very beginning. And we'll get into the body shapes a little bit, but I love that on your, it's something I would do and did when I was dating, put them through the gamut on the first date, put her through the process. Oh, that's true. I made her cry. That's right. She came in and on our first date, she was talking about something that was bothering her. And so I like hearing what's bothering people. And so I asked her about it and then we went through the process. Yeah. This kind of mysterious

process that I do. Yes. We're going to talk about that. So as I was saying in the introduction, Neil Allen is, I would say your whole life, you've been a spiritual seeker. You're a teacher. You're first and foremost, I think you probably identify as a writer, but he wrote this book that I just absolutely love. And I was kind of stalking him on Instagram because I didn't know how to reach him. And eventually he saw the message and said, here's my email. But he wrote this beautiful book called Shapes of Truth. The subtitle is Discover God Inside You, which is so great because it really describes what the book is about. It's not easy for a subtitle to describe what the book's about, but that really fundamentally is. And so I congealed all of my notes. I had a million

highlights and questions for you. And just things that I want to share with everybody about some of the fundamentals. Obviously, they can read the book and get much more specific. But first of all, if I understand, you can paraphrase this or correct me, but the fundamental piece of this is divine body forms, is what you call them. And identifying them and connecting with them, which we'll get to in a moment, and identifying and connecting with them both to work through an issue that is bothering you or a conflict or a problem or get yourself supported and find that internally referenced support that's always available to us. But then it also is really valuable as a general practice to help you get closer and closer

to that God connection within you. Yeah, that's better put than I could have done it. I'm not very pithy about the book, unfortunately, but it's basically there are 35 colors, objects with a color that you can find in yourself. And you can have this trippy experience of actually seeing yourself as a yellow ball inside you. And each of them has to do with a way in which you are divine, a particular way in which you are divine, which you and everybody else is divine. Yeah, a noun of value. And so if you see a red ball, you are noticing that you have strength and discrimination in you, the ability to do things in you. And if you see yellow, you know that you're in the presence of your own curiosity, of your desire to pull something close

and look at it. And if you see amber, you're seeing your own perfect value that you were born with. And what's odd about these things is that anybody can find them. They're very easy to retrieve. You just have to know where to look and how to look. And I want to get into that, but let's just, I just want to back up one second because the thing that was so fascinating to me about this is I talk a lot online and on this show about what I call embodiment practice and the shamanic soul retrieval. And there are all of these ancient practices around going into your body and finding the point of tension and giving it a color and a shape. And in a way, that's kind of what's happening in this with these shapes but what's so fascinating to me and i want to ask you

about before we get into the nitty-gritty of where these shapes are and how to work with them from the way that you describe them and you talk about this coming i think from the teachings of hamid ali originally and you've kind of you're summarizing and bringing it to us operationalizing it for us but that these are universal that's what was so wild to me like if you see a red ball this is what it means. It's totally bizarre. The Sufi actually are the only people who have known about these as far as Hamid Ali and I can tell. Hamid Ali is a guy who is a guru type who runs a mystery school, quite brilliant at helping people remove the obstacles of their ego. In an Eastern kind of way, you can move into enlightenment, presumably, if you go through

his program. And he focuses particularly on the obstacles in the way and less on visualizing what bliss would be. And by being very kind of scientific or careful about making sure that it's kind of evidence-based work that he sees can be handled by people in the same way and can be repeated, like in a scientific method. Along the way of doing this kind of work, he discovered that the Sufi who had found five of these had missed and had not noticed that there were 30 more. And he discovered 35. And all I've done in my book is take it out of the mystery school. It's been kind of locked in this mystery school for 30 or 40 years. And everybody in the mystery school agrees that, yeah, red is strength. Yeah, yellow is curiosity. And they all come into it

on their own. And the universality has been proven through kind of thousands and thousands of people going through his mystery school and it's shapes too it's like a ball or a pillar like if it's for strength you see a pillar in your spine and and then it changes color like i remember i i was making a note of this that you kind of stick with it because it can show up as one color but if you stick with it that sometimes is a distraction and then it turns into something else if you ever see something really rosy especially in the beginning before the resolution a really beautiful. Like that's your ego trying to distract you. There were so many cool things like that. So it's not just colors, it's shapes, right? Shapes of truth. And the 35 body forms both have color

and shape. Well, I guess the first five are more color, right? No, no, they're all color. And people have different abilities to see them in different ways. Everybody sees the colors. some people can smell scents that go along with them. Some people can get a sensory touch that goes with them. And most people can, for some of them, notice the gem or the element or the shape. Everybody sees the color. So they're usually referred to within the mystery school by their color. So the red aspect, he calls them aspects, I call them body forms. But anyway, he calls them aspects, because here's the trip, is that they are aspects of God insofar as a human being participates in godness. So it's an access point to God within. And so it's basically letting you

be able to find the God within and notice that that's who you are, rather than the parasitic superego inner critic who's yelling at you all the time and telling you to build up your defenses and do all of that kind of stuff. This is who you are if you stripped away all of your identities, all of your roles. In fact, it's who everybody is, and yet it's divine and beautiful, and you get to appreciate that, right? Normally, we think that if I strip away what's special about me, I'm a blob. Here, it's basically showing you, you strip away what you think is special about you, your identities, and all that kind of stuff. You're actually God in a very human form that's in this location that you're sitting in, but isn't all that different from anybody else.

And it gives you a sense of what I love is that, well, the 35, as you said, there are the main five, you know, the first five, which are curiosity, strength, will, compassion, and power. But all of these have qualities. I was kind of smiling to myself thinking, you know, it's like a recipe. I need a little compassion and will and some knowingness and some personal love, a little brilliancy dashed in, like this is what I really need. So what I wanted to ask you is because most of the examples in the book, you're facing something or you're just exploring and you find the shape and that tells you what you need. And then you can kind of go into that and experience that. But do you ever go in knowing what you need and find it that way? Or do you wait

and see what divine quality? You can do that. Yeah, sure. Generally at first, by the way, just so everybody understands this, it's very difficult to do on your own. So it's too bad, but it just is. And so at first you're going to need a friend. You're going to need somebody. If you're actually searching for these, you're going to need somebody who's prompting you with the questions. The reason for that is that you have an inner critic, a defensive system that doesn't want you to go there. And that's why these have been hidden forever, right? So if you're left to your own devices, you won't go there. Yeah. Yeah. You're not going to be allowed in very easily. And so at least at first you need

somebody to help you with it. Generally speaking, it's a good way to go in is to say, you know, it's been on my mind. My partner does this really annoying thing and I know it's small, but it's been bugging me forever. And I just, he did it again this morning or she did it again this morning and that's just bugging me. And then you wipe that thought out and then you go in and the person asks you a bunch of questions. What will generally happen at that point is your belief in your own suffering, your belief in that that annoying thing is insuperable to you. You just beat your head against the wall and you're going to keep beating your head in the wall. It's just a horrible thing in your life. That belief will show up as a particular kind of object. So when

I see they show up as an object. This is so trippy and weird, but true, is that somewhere in your torso or your neck or your head, a little area will open up as if your organs in that area have been moved aside. And it's like a little snow globe shows up, and then something pops up in the middle of it, right? And usually the first thing that pops up is brown or gray. It's got tension to it. It's a little ugly and it might be a kind of metal band right behind your forehead or quite often it'll be a kind of blobby gelatinous thing sitting inside your solar plexus. And you're just visualizing this. You're like closing your eyes and you can kind of sense it and see it inside yourself. It looks strangely real. You can even tell while it's going on that

you know the difference between your imagination and this chair is a chair and you are Laura and I, you know. It feels very real. And this feels more like this chair is a chair than it feels like my imagination. But at any rate, it shows up. It's like a snow globe opens and you're just peering into it with a kind of internal visual sense, which people say, oh, I'm not able to see things inside my body. I'm not able to go into my body. Everybody's scared. I promise you this is simple. And this everybody can do. And so, you go inside, you see that thing. After a while, you just look at it and you just pay attention to it as a physical object. And so, what you've done is somehow mentally and physically, you've transformed an emotional issue that's a bunch of

words after all. That's what emotional issues are, a bunch of concepts and words put together and stories. And you've turned that emotional issue into a little object inside a snow globe inside your body. And all you're doing is kind of looking around, you're looking at the back of it and the front of it and the center of it and looking all around. And for some reason, by spending time with it, just that two or three or four or five minutes, maybe 10 minutes at most, it starts to disappear and dissipate. And to me, it always feels like it's kind of ways. Thank you. You saw me. You saw what you believe. You didn't deny it. You didn't avoid it. You didn't try to fix it. You just let me see held space and witnessed it. And you showed up for it.

You know, I always feel like those places where we stay really stuck repeatedly or get really triggered are those earlier wounds that we just don't want to be with. And there are, you know, that's what they talk about in parts work, right? There are these old parts of ourselves, these young parts of ourselves that just want to be seen and heard and felt. And what you're describing is a beautiful way of doing that because you're bearing witness, you're sitting with it. Tell me all about it, basically looking at all the different angles and then it feels seen and understood and heard and it's like, okay, I'm done. Well, and then it disappears and then there's a feeling of contentment. And then if you're lucky, first few times it might

not happen, but eventually it happens that a second object appears and that's one of these 35 objects. And that object is always the divine aspect inside yourself that's the support for the belief that you have that emotional issue and replaces the emotional issue with the knowledge that, no, I'm not a weakling, I'm strong. Or no, I'm not incurious, I'm curious. Or no, I'm not powerless, I'm powerful. And you can tell the difference. You can tell it's a real divine quality because it's both simpler and more vivid. And it's in the catalog of colors that's in the back of the book. They're 35 colors, they're 35. And so you can see if it's red, it's, oh, I must've been questioning my own ability to be able to do things and accomplish

things. And I actually have that ability built into me. I don't have to pull it out of the outside world by faking it and so how in your experience because i know you work with a lot of clients and take people through this process obviously if it's like a trauma history or some big horrible issue that's really insidious and long-standing it might take a little bit longer but in general how quickly does the relief i know you feel this sort of sense of oneness and relief and release when it first disappears and the divine body form hopefully appears. But how long does that last? How sustainable is it? So that'll last the first few times that it happens. That'll last anywhere from a few hours to a few days. But then it's like anything else.

It requires a lot of repetitions. Sorry, but everything requires repetitions. And if you do it And 20 or 30 times, I'd say, something different happens, which is, all of a sudden, the light bulb goes off and is, oh, I'm that. I'm not who I thought I was, who is this defensive creature who's grasping for being able to be liked and loved and believes that they need to draw energy from other people to have any oomph themselves. and all the sort of problems that our egos create for ourselves, I'm not that person. I'm actually this simple thing inside that's got this internal beauty to it. And it may be called God, and it may be called consciousness, and it may be divine, but it's also just little old me. And that's weird, right? And once that starts to come through, then people tend to accelerate their practice. Because the nice thing about this is that it's a constant reward system. Every time you have an issue of suffering and you use this to go into your suffering,

you're going to open a little bit of this more elegant reality to yourself that allows you to be more comfortable in the world. And so, it starts to amplify itself. You start to do it more often, a lot of people. And then eventually, some people come to recognize in a very sustained way that that's who they are. Now, there's other work that goes on at the same time, because remember, you're looking at your suffering. And so, you're also doing repetitive work with allowing yourself to spend time with your emotional suffering, which is most of the release of emotional suffering. Most of it is spending time with it. If you think about it, most people, when they hit a hurt feeling, they'll do anything they can to get out of that hurt

feeling as quickly as possible. And if you spend 10 seconds or 20 seconds with a hurt feeling, that's a lot. And you're spending the rest of your time, even if you still sort of sense it in the background, trying to either fix it or distract from it or do something other than see it where some see heroes and others see egos bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes while others follow the noise we follow the money learn more at bloomberg.com yeah i feel that so strongly and i really try to model that more than ever before you know even as i've gone through really horrible traumas and dramas more recently just you can't go over under or around it you have to be with it and sit with it and go through it. I mean, not that I ever loved it before

and earlier in my life, I certainly would have done anything to avoid it. Now, not, you know, now I kind of get it, but it's still astounding to me how as just a culture, we are so pain averse and people are so afraid of sitting with their pain in any way. And that's one of the things that I want to say to y'all that this book will give you a pathway to do that that feels, I think, much more containable and strategic. And I think that can help a lot of people who know that they need to do this kind of work, but don't want to sit there and wallow and talk about their abusive parent or the horrible thing that happened last week or last month or whatever else. and this is almost like a form of body work somatic experiencing and inner child work all

at once it's really cool i'm curious if you'd be open i don't know what's going to happen and i honestly don't even have a specific issue that i want to uh you want to try it but yeah let's do it yeah okay so close your eyes okay and if you're not driving you can do this with me guys okay take a couple of deep breaths. Everything in spiritual work starts with a couple of deep breaths. Isn't that funny? Anyway, so take a couple of deep breaths and then all you're doing is looking inside your head, your neck, your torso, and just tell me anything localized that you notice that's sticking out, a feeling of cold or hot or tense or smooth or anything, and tell me when you found something. Okay. It feels smooth in my neck. It feels

tight in my head and in my shoulders and my chest, it feels sort of like tendony, like string. Okay. I'll pick one of them. So you feel tense in your head. Where is the tension? What part of your head? It's like a headband kind of where my headphones are. It's like a headband. So it's in the front and how far is it from like how wide is this band of tension it goes from under one ear around the top of my head and around and down under the other ear under the other ear okay so it forms a u across the top of your head is it in up here like a little ram horns okay so it's got a ram horn at the bottom of it okay and so how wide is this band it's pretty wide at the top i mean i would say it spans from like my crown to the middle of the back of my head okay and how

thick is it this is so weird all right it's not thick on the outside of my head like above it's The thickness is inside. And I would say, you know, what is that like about an inch? Okay. So it's about an inch thick inside and it's just barely inside your head. It's actually on the surface also. It goes down under your ears and forms these ram horns. What's its density? If it was a material, what would it be made of? Wood, metal, water, air? It seems like it's like a metal, but not like between wood and a metal. You know, it's harder than wood. Harder than wood, but it's solid and it's harder than wood.

Is it porous or is it completely solid? It's solid. Okay. Does it have a shiny exterior or a matte exterior? How the hell do I know this? Okay. I'm just seeing it as matte exterior. And what color is it?

A yellowish gold. color a yellowish gold and is it the same color inside it as it is on the outside or does it have different colors let me look inside it because it's solid it looks solid but let me see if i can see inside it you can see inside it the laws of physics don't don't apply here it's like it's like the color of blood when it's inside the body you know how it's like that blackish red okay so it's blackish red on the inside and does it graduate out to the yellow gold or is it distinct two different colors distinct it's like the gold is the container and it's filled with that where some see heroes and others see egos bloomberg sees the era of billionaire

athletes a fad to some the future of money to others we see crypto's trillion dollar swings the end of jobs or the end of human struggle we see the endless funds fueling the ai hype while others follow the noise we follow the money learn more at bloomberg.com and is that made of the same substance as the gold no it's like um gel it's like a gel okay is this band going from the top of your head down into the ram horns at the below your ears is this band uh still or is it moving it's still and is it attached or is it uh floating i think it's floating i don't get the sense that it's attached okay now all i want you to do now that you've described it brilliantly to me all i want you to do is look at it you only care about its physical

properties. You don't care why it's there or how it got there. Oh, it's so hard for me. I want to ask all those questions. Okay, so you're just looking at it. You're just looking at it. Look from the inside, from the outside, from back, from whatever direction you want to look at it. You can even go inside it and look out from the inside of it too, if you want to, but just pay attention to it. If anything changes, let me know. And if nothing changes, then just keep looking. Well, something immediately changed. And that is that the blackish red, it's almost like slime. You know how kids make that slime. That's what it's like. It turned green. Okay. So now it's turned green and it's still gelatinous in there, right? It's a little more fluidy, but it's a little more soupy, but it's green.

Okay. And what kind of green is it? It's like a lime-ish green. It's sort of the color of the, you know, the kid's slime, the lime green kid's slime. Yeah, yeah. And it's still yellow gold on the outside and green now on the inside. Yeah. Okay, just keep looking. Okay, now this is so hard to imagine that I'm not suggesting all of this in my mind,

but it's wild. Okay, so now the gold part, it's like it's pixelating a little bit. Okay, so it's breaking apart a little bit. It's breaking apart a little bit. It's still in form, but it's like staticky. The gold also, it's like mixed with purple and white and blue. So you're seeing a kind of rainbow of colors in there. Yeah, sort of like static on a TV, but those colors.

Mm-hmm. okay so i'm just still looking at it let's see if anything it's very pretty it's got like the it's still in its form oh this is interesting so now the slime is sort of becoming uh liquidy and it's running down the sides of my head from the middle it's like running down is it draining it's draining into the ram horns okay it's draining into the ram horn yeah it's kind of falling down and it's sort of gathering there so it's collecting there yeah as it drains does it become hollow where it's draining or does it or something else actually disappearing the top so now the band has disappeared from like one temple to the other temple

that part of the band and the staticky stuff it had become is gone as is the green slime inside and now there's just these two little horns on my jaw bones here that are flattish and now they're on the outside the same width that one inch but they're still gold and they're filled with this green stuff and how tall are they they go from my temple down in front of my ear and kind of curve up around my jaw on both sides. Okay. And they've moved outside of your... And they're outside of my face. I know you've got two of them. Just accept that probably the other one will change too. If it changes, just look at one of them and just pay attention to it and keep your attention on the physical qualities of the one ram horn. Now it's becoming

an actual horn. That's pretty. You know, those beautiful horns, like the browns and whites. Now it's a literal horn, but with nothing inside. It's sort of hollow. Keep looking. Let's see. And you don't have to do anything with your body or think anything. You're literally just watching. You're just watching. Oh, you're just paying attention to this funny little object that is inside you. And in this case now outside you. Yeah. I don't know if this is normal, but it feels like it's almost in front of me turning around like in a display case almost. It's not really. So it's moved all the way out away from your head and it's now sitting outside of your head. Just pay attention to it and tell me where it goes. It's sort of gently turning,

like it's on an invisible turntable like an object of art and it's a hollow beautiful horn what it does as i'm looking at it see i couldn't make this stuff up the things that are happening that's what's so weird it's disintegrating i'm sure you've heard weird stuff like this a million times but it's disintegrating into gold dust okay and it's sort of like little fairy lights just yep so just follow the fairy lights and see where they go they're just like going out into the air and sort of merging with it they're disappearing yeah so they're kind of here and now the and as they move out of farther away they disappear tell me when the last of them has disappeared okay they all went now there's just like a lucite platform where that was spinning

where the ram's horn was is that important since it was just i don't know so look at the lucite platform what's its diameter it's probably two inches square on two inch by two inch and looking you can see through it like a piece a chunk of lucite it's almost like if i were looking through it across the table or something and i see purple pants you know like smudged purple pants like if you were looking through thick lucite at something but it's not inside the lucite it's like i'm looking let me just look should i look above the lucite and see if the sure do people show up Because my I can't believe I'm saying this. My Nana, who, of course, I mean, that's probably why I saw purple is always wearing purple, although she usually wore lavender, not this dark violet color.

But she's standing there in a violet pantsuit. Oh, do people come in these situations? Yeah. Yeah. She's been showing up a lot for me lately. My Nana. So, I want to take your attention off of your nana and off the lucite and go back inside your head and tell me if there's anything going on there now. No, that band is gone.

Okay. How do you feel? I don't feel the tension. So, go look at the back wall of your torso and tell me what color you see. i see a rod like a cylindrical rod but it's kind of like royal blue but have you ever seen those titanium kind of colors so it sort of is iridescent almost like an oil spill where it has kind of purplish reflections on it but it's royal blue okay is it hollow no okay so you're seeing a solid bar. Solid bar of blue. Is that a thing? Is that a body shape I'm seeing? Yeah. Which one is

it? Knowingness mixed with the platinum of will. And you've got some iridescence. So you're actually exploring the whole catalog at the same time. Okay. And so do I do anything with this rod other than welcome it just welcome it just look at it it does feel very different to look at it actually there's a really sweet sense in my chest when i look at it which is different i was very kind of removed you know i was very objective from the band looking at the band and this does have a feeling i mean maybe the band did too and i wasn't tapping into it but this has a nice feeling to it. It's sort of like when, you know, I guess it's a supported feeling. Well, it's particularly supportive because it's essentially replacing your spine

and telling you in a particular way that you're okay with your steadfastness, with your will, with your ability to persevere and you came out and that's that's what happens usually people come out very quickly after seeing the divine form i liked it i like that rod a lot yeah i just go in there and find you can you can that's it that's a little more tricky show up she was in a violet colored suit pantsuit with a flowered shirt. I could totally see it. She was just sitting there grinning at me. You know, it's interesting. You saw some purple beforehand too. And it's the one place where I differ with Hamid is he doesn't list purple in his catalog. He doesn't? And my clients see purple a

lot. And as far as I can tell, purple being royalty, it's the color of, I deserve to be a queen i deserve to be a king meaning i deserve to have a spiritual life i'm worthy of that love yeah yeah and that is my nana nana represents how worthy of love i am so it makes sense that she would have shown up cheering me on that's very sweet yeah i love that so there you go you got a little demo i'd say only about 20 of people no less than that probably 10 of people see a divine object the first time around. Really? You're really tuned into this. Just so you know, the first object that appeared, you're really helpful to yourself. And you were helping that object along. You bathed it in gold light of truth. And so you're basically trusting the

process. And so you brought that trust physically into that first object. And then you brought compassion into that was that green. People usually don't bring gold in, but they'll often bring compassion in to help because they're suffering and compassion is the love that rises in the presence of suffering. And so they bring it in to help them be able to see it. And then the green disappears, the gold disappears, and just the muddiness and ugliness of the object takes precedence. And then it all drained and all it did that. And it was a blink and you were in that cylinder. And part of me was thinking, oh, is it supposed to be silver? Because I'm not seeing silver. And I was just like, this is what I see. I just said it. But it's also common early

on that you'll see that iridescence. You'll see that rainbow because you're actually just it's so impressive. Yeah. All of the colors are in there and you're getting a glimpse of that. Yeah. It's very cool. Well, I'll keep playing in there. I definitely have been doing not this work really, other than reading your book and playing with it a little bit. But being with myself, holding myself, going inside, that has been my life, certainly intensely for the past 10 years, but even more so for the past nine months. So yeah, I was probably primed for it. Yeah. How are you doing, by the way? How are you doing? What's it like now? Yeah. I know people ask you that a lot.

No, every day is different. But the nice thing is that now I have several normal days and even good days before i have a bad day whenever that's going to show up or a bad hour or whatever so it's really like all grief it's just really sporadic and unpredictable but what i really appreciate is i can feel my energy slowly coming back that was really one of the most shocking because i've experienced a lot of grief in my life and a lot of loss but the way that this floored me physically like just in terms of my stamina my i mean just doing one thing during the day and just to be able to get up without being exhausted and do something like this and feel energized and not want to just go back to sleep makes me really happy because i can feel it slowly it's going to

be a process but i can feel it slowly coming back and the only thing that has saved me has been staying in my body. I don't think I'd be doing this well if I hadn't made that commitment from day one. And I learned the hard way when I got cancer within a year of my mom dying, which was my big, horrible, horrific, soul-wrenching loss before this. And that was nothing compared to this. But I didn't really deal with it. I just went right to making meaning out of it and writing books about it and spiritually connecting with her. But I just stayed up here where I like to be. And then I got breast cancer within a year and was really sick. And so this time I was like, I am staying with myself 100%. And I have, and I'm really glad that I have

because it's really helped. And also it's taught me a lot about, I'm not doing what people need for a long time. You know, I'm not going to make anything out of this for a long time, even though my purpose is always heal, learn, teach. I mean, it's just astounding to me how bad people are grieving. It's what we were talking about with being so scared of pain and how people just don't know how to be with themselves. That's why I love your book so much because it's such a beautiful tool for guiding people to start doing that in a really divine way. Oh, thank you. The funniest thing about wisdom to me, I don't know, I occasionally get pushed through some kind of wisdom, and I have to shed it in order to make room for new wisdom. It never stops both puzzling

me and delighting me. Yeah, there's so much more. That's why there's nothing more scary to me than someone who thinks they know it all, because the more you know, it's so obvious that there's so much more to know. You have to keep making room. And that's what you were talking about with just being a seeker of truth. And this astrologically is a time, and I'm seeing this everywhere, where just these huge truths are being revealed within ourselves that we never really saw and within the world. It's just a really interesting time. And so the guidance for doing this is in the book. I mean, it's difficult. I wish you could tape this or even listen to this, which you could, but it's so specific. And you saw how Neil was asking me what color is it and what texture is

it? And what density? Okay, now look at it. What else do you see? So you do need someone kind of guiding you through that. So if you can get a buddy or a friend or a partner, all the instructions are in the shapes of truth. Discover God Inside You, the beautiful book by Neil Allen. And I'm going to keep practicing. I'm going to have to get a friend to practice with me, but I'm going to keep doing it and see what shapes I can find. And I can imagine, because I do this with, we call it the completion process. It was created by this spiritual teacher named Teal Swan, but I love this process incorporated into the work I do as a therapist where someone's having an emotion or a feeling and we locate it in their body and give it a color and a texture

and make it bigger. But then I say to them, okay, so what's the first time you ever remember feeling this way. And it's a totally different process from there. Just like we've talked about with spirituality, they all are climbing different paths up the same mountain. What I love about this is that it really is working not only with your internal world, but with your body, which is the bridge to your soul, but with your body at the same time. The nice thing about your body is that while your mind can deceive you and can be less than a truth teller because you've got this inner critic voice that's interfering with you, Your body can't lie. In a certain way, your body, it's learned how to repair itself. And to repair itself, it has to be very objectively clear about what's wrong. And it can't go around making up stories because it's got a very, you know, you got 17 million cells in your body, and each of them is monitoring itself and making sure everything's okay.

And that's what a body's job is to do is to and then send out for help to come in. And it doesn't have any time to tell stories and to lie. No time for lies. Yeah, yeah. I love that. Thank you so much for joining us. Is there anything else you think is important to share about the book or your work or anything else?

God, nothing's important. That's what's important. And whenever anybody says the words, and this is important, I add the words to me. Yeah. So what they're really saying, this is important to me. It doesn't have to be important to anybody else. Yeah. Anything else you'd like to say?

I've loved talking to you. Thank you. I thought we were going to talk about love. I would love to talk specifically about love with you sometime, but that's another time. I would love to. Can we set up another time and talk all about love? Oh, I was prepared to talk. See, I love talking about love.

I like talking about my book, of course, but I love talking about love. Okay, well, let's do both. Let's have you back and talk all about love another time, because I know that you have a lot to share there, and I'm always wanting to learn more and share more about how to love and be loved better, and you and Anne are doing a great job of that, obviously. So thank you for all that you do in the world and all the love you give and share. And check out Neil's book, Shapes of Truth, Discover God Inside You. We're going to have him back and talk all about love another time.

But if you want to hear about that or anything else, you have any specific questions, you can always email or leave a voicemail. Thank you. That was really so great. I really appreciate it. And thank Anne for rallying post that you're a beautiful heart and a beautiful writer. and i really appreciate the time spent i mean it about getting back and talking about love i'd love to talk to you bye bye take care bye i'll see you next time

where some see heroes and others see egos bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes while others follow the noise we follow the money