Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How To Relax The Need To Control Everything | Rosa Lewis

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

Plus: Navigating the "dark night of the soul," the power of saying "no," and how to be more present. Rosa Lewis is a mystic, awakening guide, artist and writer. She is the author of many books, most recently Unlocking the Depths of Being: Wholehearted Presence for a Mystical Reality. The last two meditations on this playlist are related to her book.   Join Dan and Emmy Award-winning journalist Allison Gilbert at 92NY on May 17th for a live conversation about how mindfulness can deepen connection and combat loneliness, available in person and via streaming. Register here. Join Dan, Sebene Selassie and Jeff Warren for Meditation Party, a 3-day immersive retreat at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY, October 16–18, 2026. Register here.  This episode is sponsored by: Function Health — 160+ lab tests a year for $365. Check your health the way Dan does at https://www.functionhealth.com/happier — use code HAPPIER25 for a $25 credit Quo — The modern business phone system. Try free and get 20% off your first six months at https://www.quo.com/happier Samsara — AI-powered fleet safety and operations platform. Request a free demo at https://www.samsara.com/happier Wix — Build your website with AI in minutes at https://www.wix.com/harmony

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, gang, one of the most venerable spiritual cliches is the notion of being present. It may be a cliche and therefore slightly annoying, but it is also an incredibly important concept and skill. Being awake and alive to your life during this limited period of time when you're here on this planet. So today we're going to talk about what being present, actually means, and then, crucially, how to actually do it. My guest is a meditation teacher and self-described mystic named Rosa Lewis. Rosa and I talk about why sadness and grief, which of course nobody likes, can actually enable presence, the difference between feeling

sadness and getting lost in self-pity, why the so-called dark night of the soul is a very normal stage in spiritual practice. Why, and this is counterintuitive, but why visualizing death can help you process the bad things that have happened to you, why saying no can be a spiritual practice, and much more. Before we dive in, I just want to say that if you want to meditate with me, I have two live in-person events coming up. On May 17th, I'll be at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. I'll do a guided meditation, and then I'll talk about how the practice can help you in this chaotic world. And then I'll take your questions. It's going to be great.

You should come May 17th, 92nd Street, Y. Then in October, I'll be doing my annual meditation party retreat with my friend, Sabinee Salasi and Jeff Warren. It's a weekend thing at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. It's really fun. We teach a bunch of different styles of meditation. There's also time for Q&A and socializing and pickleball if you're into that kind of thing. Your meditation practice really can be improved by doing it in the carpool lane. So come hang with us.

I'll put links to both of those events in the show notes. And we will get started with Rosa Lewis right after this. When you're in that level up mindset for your business, it's wild how much the basic stuff matters, like how you talk to customers and keep your team on the same page. A cleaner, more modern setup can make everything feel smoother, which is why today's episode is sponsored by Quo, spelled Q, the modern alternative to run your business communications. Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2 with over 3,000 reviews built for how modern teams work. That's why more than 90,000 businesses from solo operators to growing teams rely on Quo to stay connected, professional, and consistently reachable. Your entire team can handle calls and texts from one shared number.

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Really nice to be here. Okay, so so many questions for you, but the first one is you describe yourself as not only a meditation teacher, but also a mystic. And so I'd just be curious of what does that mean, actually? Yeah, I guess one of the most important parts of it is that there's a deeper aspect of reality than just the sort of logical, linear time, rational, material world that is sort of focused on by a lot of humanity has the main aspect of experience. And then there are these sort of deeper, more subtle realms of experience that are present. And time isn't always linear. There's like different ways in which causality can happen. And there's a connection to something bigger than just us. So you could

call that a kind of a divinity or a mystery or a Buddha nature or something that has intelligence and a rhyme in a reason that isn't this sort of like just logical, linear, rational material that we're in. And I would say that being a mystic is kind of communing with those parts of experience, being connected to them, being open to them, that being more the sort of baseline of reality and experience sort of like arising from there as its main source. So in the subtitle of your book, you use the word presence, like being present. It's called unlocking the depths of being, wholehearted presence for a mystical reality. I'm narrowing in on the word presence, because I think that's something that everybody gets,

being awake and aware right now, right here, in the present moment. If I understand correctly, and I hope you will correct me if I don't, that really is, for many of us, the gateway into what you're describing in terms of a deeper level of reality or mysticism. Yes. For me, it starts there because otherwise it's just, you're actually just adding ideas and concepts and going off into somewhere else. It's actually, yeah, you go through the door of presence. Wholehearted is in there as well because it's about, wholeness and feeling and embodiment and like showing up and being in the moment, committing to presence and committing to the full spectrum of what that can mean. And then as you practice and through meditation and other things, other aspects of experience, which I'm sure we'll talk about,

what it means to be in the present moment can start to get broader and more expansive. So whether or not a listener understands exactly what you, Rosa, pointing at when you talk about a deeper level of reality, aka the mystical, whether we get that or not, it's important to know, like, the only way to get it is through waking up right now. The only way to get to that state is by being awake and aware right now. Yeah, it happens by paying attention to your immediate experience in the present moment and being here with what is in your body, your heart, in your direct experience. So we're going to get to the how of all of this, and your book really lays out these like seven

aspects of our present moment experience that we can kind of unlock and investigate. But before we do that, I'm just curious, like, how did you get where you are now? Like, well, how does one become a mystic? I think the wise ass in me that will never go away would. say, you know, like just dozens of ayahuasca trips. So what's on your CV in order to get to call yourself a mystic? There are some psychedelics sprinkled in there. I think that psychedelics opened things up, but it's more meditation and shadow work focused, actually. It's interesting because now when I look back on when I was a child and a young adult, there were a lot of

elements of mystical experience there, but I was in a very rational paradigm. And so I was sort of like discounting that and seeing through that lens. But my sort of experience of when I first started experiencing these things is, well, there was a few things that happened at once. One was I got a bad concussion. And that just sort of like, it's kind of like opened my mind a little bit to what was going on. And then I sort of was listening to a few kind of like more spiritual things, Alan Watsy type stuff and having sort of like energetic response. to that, which I didn't really have a bucket to put that in. I was still in a very rational frame,

but just these sort of like big, overwhelming, emotional, energetic kind of responses where I would hear something and it would be like a sort of transmission quality where I would kind of suddenly be in a very different experience. And then, you know, sort of like synchronicities were showing up and things like that. And then I did a group shadow work therapy retreat. And essentially it's like a very, embodied therapeutic modality that is about opening these different archetypes and letting these modes and ways of being flow through you more fully. And my process was around opening up the lava

archetypes, so deeper level of feeling. And when that happened, it really, really transformed how I experienced the world, for one. I was like, I'm allowed to feel these things I'm normally just repressing with more of letting that repression out. Yeah, just more. archa-tipal, imaginal, energetic, emotional things started to sort of come into reality. And then the more shadow work I did and the more I later started meditation, the more meditation I did, the more sort of these altered states and different parts of experience started coming in. So interesting. So you're using some terms I'd love to hear some more about.

I don't know that I know exactly what you mean when you say shadow work or archetypal. or imaginal. I think I kind of know what you're talking about, Young Ian stuff, but especially for the listener who might have no idea, would you mind just teaching us a little bit? Yeah, shadow work is it's a union depth psychology, and then specifically the type of shadow work I did

is a specific type made by a man called Cliff Barry, but it's built on Young's work. And it's really that, essentially there are parts of you that either from birth or through your childhood or so young adulthood, it's like you will have learned that there are certain aspects of you that are not welcome, or certain parts of you that are not certain emotional responses

or to the type of shadow work that I've done with berries, it has four archetypes, so lover, warrior, magician and sovereign. Lover is really about emotions and feeling and that sort of realm, Whereas magician is a lot more about kind of like thinking and seeing options and being rational and being able to perceive what's going on. So it's almost like these kind of totally different modes that we have, a ways of being. And a really common one in our society is that you will have essentially sort of shut down the emotional mode quite a lot. And this was true of me as well. And learned to feel less because emotions are not welcome.

And then to compensate, you will think more and use your own. or get an inflated magician, use that more and be extra sort of rational and see through that lens to avoid a feeling. And then the shadow work bit is that the lover, the feeling is in shadow. It's like not accessible to you. It's not just like a free flow of feeling in your life. And so you have to basically go back and revisit and sort of unblock that aspect of your being so that that can flow more freely, you can be more in balance.

You can have more optionality in your range of how you experience the world, how you show but which bits of your being are accessible. And those four archetypes as well are good examples of archetypes being a kind of in this realm that's a bit less concrete and a bit less literal, and a bit more sort of energetic things can get a bit soupy. And archetypes are kind of like a way to gather a bunch of meaning and say like, ah, yeah, the lover archetype, it sort of gives people a sense of what you're talking about. It's sort of like a packet of meaning and information where it's like,

oh, yeah, that's like feeling. That's the bit of me that is embodied. and soft and open, whereas the magician archetype, it's more sort of mental. And so archetypes are kind of, yeah, ways of pointing towards something that can be a bit fuzzy and hard to grasp, kind of like a symbol. I'm going to say a bunch of words, and then you're going to tell me if the words make sense. The point of the words is to just make sure I understand what you're saying, because I think it's really interesting.

My understanding is that for, you know, a long time. time in many different traditions, we've had different ways of talking about aspects of our personality. The Buddha had a demon. He called him Mara. Mara was the like embodiment of delusion and greed and hatred. You know, in the Hindu tradition, they have inner avatars, like aspects of the personality in later Christian tradition. And I think maybe even ancient Greece in Rome, they had either demons or damans, D-A-E-M-O-N-S, and in modern psychology, we have the modular model of the mind where we have these different modes we go into, which either might dog us or we might have been told during our life are unacceptable. So we have various levels of health in our relationship with

different parts of our personality. Speaking of parts, there's also internal family systems where we name our different parts and enter into conversation with them. So like just we all know we have different aspects of our personality and occasionally one of these aspects or parts or demons has the steering wheel and occasionally other parts of our personality we have no visibility into it all because we weren't ever allowed to by the culture or by our family to have a relationship with them and i think what you're describing here is that you learn through this work to just kind of like end the war with the various aspects of your psyche uh with which you had unhealthy relationships with or just total lack of visibility into. How am I doing?

Yeah. Yeah. Specifically with the shadow work as well, they say that the aim is to have a, like a nice kind of conference meeting of the aspects and the sovereign can listen to all of the aspects and choose a way forward from there so that they're all present and all available. I like that metaphor. I want that for myself. for my own fractious intracranial committee. Okay, so thank you for your patience and letting me slash us learn a little bit more about you before we dive into your recommendations here. Just again, the book is called Unlocking the Depths of Being a Wholehearted Presence for a Mystical Reality.

And so in the book, as I understand it, and please you'll correct me if I'm misstating at any step along the way here. But in the book, as I understand it, there are these like seven aspects of experience when it comes to like being present that we can unlock. Now I'm not sure we'll get to all seven, but we'll do our best to work through some of them. The first is sacred sadness. So can you just talk a little bit about what that is?

Yeah, I guess everyone knows sadness, and I think a lot of people know what sadness feels like to feel when you're disconnected from the world, and it feels pretty bad, and you don't want to feel sad. Sacred sadness is really feeling sad, and feeling connected and feeling that sadness is a deep, connective force that connects you more deeply to yourself, to the world, to others, can open your heart, can make you realize what's important in life. And the reason it's first is because I found that with working with

people, it's like opening to grief and specifically grief that has a connected feel to it. it's like that's a kind of prerequisite for opening to anything mystical. There's a kind of like open-hearted, like willingness to be moved by life and the feeling that that is beautiful. There's not a kind of control where I'm only orienting towards good stuff. In Buddhist terms, it's like, you know, the craving and a version of just trying to make things different, trying to get to the good stuff, avoid the bad stuff. and when people can sort of get a bit of a flavor of sacred sadness or just opening to their grief more

and like feeling safe in that and like, ah, it's actually, this can be beautiful, this can be, it's still sad and it's meaningful and it's, then that just opens up a doorway for something, yeah, a kind of presence with less of that craving and aversion happening. That actually makes complete sense to me that there's something about allowing in the sadness that most of us spend a lot of time medicating away, either through actual medication or through scrolling or gambling or shopping or whatever. Finging on Netflix. Not against any of those things,

but if taken too far, you're actually just closing yourself off from like a really important part of life. And doing the hard thing of letting it in, I think you're saying, is a foundational aspect of, you know, living a more vibrant life. Mm-hmm. Yeah. A couple of things that help people with it is that I think in the book, I say open the heart requires an equal measure of beauty and heartbreak,

something like that. And I think art can be a way to do this in a way that's safer. So I recommend one of the exercises is listening to sad music and having a cry or also watching a sad film can do it, just something where there's like, that feeling of like the beauty of it is still present as well can be a way for people to sort of like ease in if they want to sort of dip their toes in the water a bit more with it.

I'm a big fan of using aesthetics, beauty art, to feel more. That is, I think, pretty readily accessible. If we were to go one click deeper into the less accessible, what else would you recommend in this zone? I guess there's like that moment of just when you're hammock cry, there's a sort of moment of like, oh, if I open to this, I'm just going to get so overwhelmed by like the depths of this sadness. It's kind of like you really let go and you're just, it's sort of like a fear of destruction from it. And it's almost like you do just let yourself be completely destroyed by it. And you sort of cry so deeply that you really hit the thing. And then you feel that release afterwards. And I think there's that process where you're just really like getting into this, really, really getting into the sadness and really letting it, letting a rip. And again, like staying with the present moment experience. So one thing I have as well, and for each chapter is a kind of, you can sort of get an inflated version of sadness where it then start to wallow and self-pity and stories about the world being terrible.

And it's not about going off into that. about the embodied experience of like letting it through with tears, with the direct experience in the emotion. If I'm understanding you correctly, it seems like the former could prevent the latter. I'm embarrassed to admit. I've actually never really done what you're suggesting here, although I find it very attractive as an idea,

as somebody who's not, doesn't allow himself to be super emotional, and I'd say that as a weakness. But if we, next time we're sad, like take it all the, the way, like really let it in, then you're allowing it to move through as opposed to this kind of ambient sadness we might have by looking at the news, for example, and we never really work it all the way through. We're just kind of stuck in this sadness rage cocktail. And then many of us

feel like subconsciously or consciously the need to kind of performatively be morose all the time as if that's going to help. But in fact, we want to let the motion move all the way through so that we can have the space to like take effective action depending on what our power and capability is. Again, I'm going to check in, am I reacting in an accurate, helpful way? Yeah. It's like there might be a backlog. There's almost always a backlog for people that sort of needs to be felt.

But as that opens up, it just becomes more and more kind of spacious and, yeah, helps build presence, build capacity to be here both because the sadness is sort of a part of what's allowed to be here and then also because there's less sort of backlog that's sort of trying to be avoided or carried or moved around. Perhaps a key word that you just used right there is allow. Because we do spend a lot of time fending off quote unquote difficult emotions such as sadness. Yes. And I think there's something here, which is, I really like that actually. I think all of these seven aspects are essentially about allowing a quality to come forward. It's not about like

creating an experience or needing to get somewhere or having experience show up in a particular way. It's just kind of feeling into a part that is likely to be repressed and giving it some space and letting it come through. Okay, so very practically the next time we're sad, let it rip, I think is what you're saying. Yes. And if that's difficult for you, find some sad music to listen and feel along with and see if that helps it feel safer and evoke some tears or a bit more feeling. And again, so whether we're letting it rip just because we have the capacity in the moment or we're going to help midwife the full birth of the emotion with some sad music. In either case, the pitfall of the path would be wallowing in it.

And so I think it might be worth you just clarifying again how we walk that line between taking it all the way and not wallowing. Yeah. So the key is it's the presence where we started and it's staying with direct. sensation and emotion in the present moment. And so if someone has like an embodiment practice, that might be easier to do through the door of really feeling the sensations in the body.

If someone's more of a meditator, it might be like or of a personal meditator, kind of like noting the sensations as they come or just something that if you're drifting off, just like staying with the body is the clearest way to stay with the thing that you want to be staying with. So if you find yourself getting stuck in stories of

I really have been screwed by my family and I'm like this I'm always going to be like this or nobody's ever going to love me like those are thoughts about the past and the future and what you really want is digging deep in a kind of gentle investigatory way

into like what's happening right now. Yep. All right. This is my new homework assignment. Coming up, Rosa Lewis talks about how to reconnect with the natural sensitivity that you had as a kid, but may have armored over as you've become an adult. This podcast is brought to you by Function Health, which is a service I have used personally

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slash happier to request a free demo and see how Samsara brings visibility and safety to your operations, that's somsara.com slash happier, somsara operates smarter. Well, let's move on to the second of the seven aspects that you talk about in the book, and that is sensitivity. What do you mean specifically by sensitivity? One thing I've discovered from working with a lot of people, one-to-one and in groups, is that people experience the world very differently. And there's a way that it's important to include that, because otherwise,

people are often trying to be someone else or something. There's a sort of move away from your own sensitivity, your own. One way I use to help people to get in touch with this is the way that you've always experienced the world since you were a kid. And it's sort of like, it's a very small part of you. And it's just before you get to the point where you have intellectual overlays and ideas, and strong desires and all of these things that are sort of maybe bigger and stronger and layered on top,

it's sort of like a small receptivity that can listen and notice what's here and be present with it and sort of receive. Yeah, and specifically your unique sensitivity. Like what does that feel like for you and to be you and what are the things that you're picking up on? and just sort of validating that, finding that and validating it and exploring it as a topic, really. So for you, the term sensitivity is kind of, and I just want to make sure I understand this, because I think it's interesting, especially when you invoke, like, how we were as kids. Like, there's some kind of factory setting for us of how we experience the world, how open our aperture is, maybe. it can get papered over, it can get paved over by the events of our subsequent life. But by sensitivity, I think you're pushing us to like get back in touch with this original stance.

Yeah, and it has a strong sort of like it connects to the quality of innocence as well, of just this sort of original, natural kind of been there since you're a kid. just how you receive the world before it gets gunged up with a bunch of stuff. Again, I find this very intriguing. I kind of like the childhood version of myself better than I like the current version of myself. So what very practically can we do to get back in touch with that? Yeah, so there's a exercise in the book, and it starts with just building some safety in the different aspects of yourself. So one thing that pulls us out of that kind of sensitive.

is that it's just not safe for the naturalness to sort of be itself. There's a sense of having to put on a posture or a mask or a defense, and they get stacked up as we go through life. So it's sort of like getting into a safe place, you know, like a place where you're meditating and, you know, I think it's going to come get you or you don't have to be a certain way. And then sort of letting that infuse and then spending some time. the question, yeah, what's the way of being that's been there since a kid is a good wit.

There's a few more questions as well in the book, but just sitting with that and trying to feel into other specific aspects of experience that I feel or focus on or sense. And then that's the sort of individual thing. And then also we do on retreats, I've sort of worked with this quite a lot where, again, it's the allowing thing. Often people are like, for some reason, have learned that they're not allowed to see what they can see. And actually, if you start saying to people, oh, just describe what you're seeing, sit in partners and just describe what you're seeing in their emotions, or describe what you imagine their in a world might be like. Or you can actually see a lot more than you think you can see.

There's like a lot more sensitivity there, but we've sort of learned not to include it because it's not polite or for many reasons, I guess. So you can also do it in sort of place. or small groups and explore it. So in the pairs, I want to get back to the individual practice in a second because I have an advantage over you because I have that actual words in front of me, so I'm going to read them back to you. But I'm just curious about the pairs thing. So you're sitting there and saying what you can see about the other person?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Like, how do you stop people from being dicks? Because I would be like, oh, well, I can see you have terrible taste in clothing or whatever. I don't know. I mean, I probably wouldn't genuinely be a jerk. but I mean, I might say things that they'll land well or want to say things that don't land well. Yeah, so I guess in the context of a retreat, we'll have a pretty good sort of baseline setup where it's about letting people have their experience and not taking it personally and kind of sharing what's coming up and having a bit of space for people to correct.

You know, if you have a projection about me and it's incorrect, I would have space to say, oh, it doesn't feel true for me. this actually feels true and just make much more space for there to be a sort of group experiment and a sharing and a high openness to what that could be as the sort of foundation of where we're speaking from. Feels interesting, slightly dangerous. Let's go back to the individual practice. It's called the trusting experience meditation. And again, this is to help us, you know, get in touch with what Rose is calling sensitivity. And so there are three. steps to this process. I'm going to walk through this rose and then I'll let you just hold forth on the other side. So it starts with some affirmations, like some things you can say to yourself and this is

the safety part you were talking about before. You know, your experience is welcome as it is. It's safe for you to see the truth. Shadows and dissonance are welcome. There's a deeper layer of meaningfulness. So you're just sending the signal, I think, from mind to body and beyond that you're Okay. Yeah. It's cool. The second step is space, just like leaving space for sensations or emotions or images to arise. I think this is probably helpful if you have a meditation experience, enough stability in the mind to observe whatever's happening without getting carried away by it, although that will, of course, happen. And then the final step is inquiry, and it's asking this question, what is a way of seeing or feeling that has, has been there since you were a child, what is something you're highly sensitive to? Yeah, this might be a, it might be an inquiry that takes people a bit of time. You know, it might even be an inquiry that takes people weeks and months to really get to

some of the ways that that is true for them. But essentially, I've just found working with many people one to one that it's kind of magical. It's almost like ways that they see the world. It's like the water they're swimming in a bit where some people are just really, keyed into other people's emotions and just get a lot of information about that. And don't even sort of realize that they get it or other people. It's like really a way more kind of like technical and notice. I don't know this one's hard for me to imagine because I'm not like this,

but like very specific high-res kind of technical things about experience or what's around. And it's just these sorts of different ways and modes. And something clicks in when someone realized. that about themselves and validates their experience. Because before that, it can be a kind of maybe like subtly leaving your own experience or something that happens, rather than just living in it and from it. And when you're living in it and from it, it's more free to flow.

Yeah. This is super interesting. Just to reset for the listener, we're walking through the seven aspects of the experience of being alive that we might not really fully investigate or even actively resist that we can use to be more awake and alive in our lives. In other words, be more present. One of the most venerable spiritual cliches, presence, but nonetheless extremely important, as discussed earlier with Rosa, like the gateway to what we might call the mystical. So the third, we've worked through the first two. The third is

the dark night of the soul, which doesn't sound super fun, but what do you mean specifically by it? Yeah, and that's the reason why it has to be included, because it is not the fun bit, but it is an important bit. What I mean by that is that, yeah, it's sort of pointing to that shadow work element and it's really that there is a lot in experience, in individual experience, in the collective, in the world that is hard to be with and intense and, yeah, overwhelming and we would ideally want it to be another way. Either from like an individual perspective, we'd want it to be the way that I specifically want it to be or equally like on a collective level there's obviously things that are just like

super inherently kind of sad and difficult and it's just about including that part of experience and not turning away and letting that be a part of what's here and letting that in to your system so that again it's like coming out of the craving aversion and coming into just a more kind of like a wholehearted welcoming of the full spectrum of experience. And yeah, this bit can get super sort of like mystical in the way that it shows up. And I think it's talked about in the stages of insight in Pappasana meditation as a way that as you meditate and pay attention to experience, you know, you get these different phases. And at some point, you're just in a lot of fear and disgust and misery.

And that's just like part of what needs to flow through in order to come further out into equanimity. But it also happens on this emotional level where it's almost like as you open the heart, as you open yourself to more presence, you're kind of opening to these more lovely, beautiful parts of experience. And that's great, but aperture is kind of going in all directions. And so as more comes in, more darkness is going to come in. And it's giving space for that to flow through so that it can be processed, it can be included, it can be welcomed, you can build the capacity to be with it and then you get this sense of like robustness and equanimity that can be present with a broader range of experience.

It's the bad news that we don't often lead with when we're encouraging people to get into meditation or spirituality or allowing to go back to that word that if you're truly letting stuff in, being more awake, taking off the blinders that our modern tech-obsessed world wants us to wear so that we're better consumers and scrollers, et cetera, et cetera, it's not all going to be bliss. Much of what you'll take in will be difficult, and that's why they call it the dark night of the soul. This isn't a malfunctioning.

This is a part of the path that has been recognized and described for millennia. Yeah, and I think there's something about including it. I mean, it's still painful and hard. part of including it is recognizing that it's kind of like, in my experience, there's no bypassing this completely. But if you don't talk about it and people hit that territory, then it can make it worse because people feel on top of the struggle, people then put a layer on, which is, I'm doing something wrong, there's something wrong with me, there's no way out of this, you then get this sort of extra layer of that this is bad. Whereas if it's something that is included and says,

this is going to come up, it's going to be intense. And one of the reasons it comes up is as an alchemical opportunity to transmute something or a chance to deepen your wisdom into greater equanimity or a chance to then people have more, more of a sense of resilience around it because they can see that even though it's hard, it can be a good thing that it's. coming up and it has a meaning, it has a purpose. There's good things to come from the experience, even if the experience itself, it's hard. In the book, you describe an exercise for kind of leaning into the thing that we don't want to lean into.

I think it's called the life, death, rebirth cycle. It's like a visualization to release stuck energy. Can you walk us through it? Yeah. The first step is to think about how you relate to death. and specifically, it's not that you need to take on relating to death in any specific way, but from a modern individualist, capitalist, rationalist world, a lot of people are really, really scared of death.

And it's not that you don't have to be scared, but there are other ways that you can relate to death, spending some time feeling that there might be something kind of nice about it also, like a returning home or a... release or these sorts of qualities might be in death. So the exercise starts by sort of just bringing in some of those possibilities and then spending a bit of time being with the imaginal qualities of death. Lots of people have a hard time understanding what the imaginal is, but death is actually one of the best ways to think about it because we don't have any,

there's no way of actually knowing what is on the other side of death. Everything we think about is death is inherently imaginal because it doesn't have a, logical concrete thing in our world. And so there's like some questions to connect people to this imaginal experience. And so it's sort of feeling into like, what do you imagine is there on the other side of death? What's the vibe of it? Even if it's just like a void that you think is death as a void, is it like a black void? Is it a white void? Is it a transparent void? Are there sort of like these imaginal, if you believe in God and a like higher intelligence, what does that intelligence know?

Like where are you going? Where is it compared to this universe? And just sort of like feeling through some of this, not to get the answer, obviously, because there's no way of validating, but just to feel it in your system imaginally, how do I relate to death and kind of build it out a bit

and get a bit of a more of a sort of emotional resonance going where it's not just, this is a scary, bad thing that I don't ever want to happen. it's more like, this is a experience that I'm going to go through one day and how do I relate to it? How does it show up in my experience and what is it?

And then once that's a bit more alive, you can use that to essentially bring in some bits of experience that you want to be different to how they are and just imagine them getting absorbed by that death and seeing if that changes how you relate to it in the experience and if it changes what's showing up at all. So if we start from the thesis that life can be difficult and there can be lots of dark nights of the soul and avoiding it

is not going to help us really. It might be good for a minute or two, but it's not really an abiding strategy. One portal into some deeper way of being alive is to kind of let it in. So if we start from that idea, it's a natural progression. I think you're saying to, all right, how do we practice this? well, let's conjure the thing that most of us are most afraid of, the most difficult aspect of being alive, which is the terrifying mystery of death. And let's see if we can't make it as vivid as possible in our mind through this guided practice or through this, you know, practice that we guide ourselves through so that we can maybe achieve a degree of equanimity with this inevitability. Yeah, exactly. It also sort of folds in on itself where if you

you're comfortable with that one of the things that keeps you away from the challenging stuff and in a more is this sense of I need to be in control, I need to keep experience together in a very specific way, keep the bad stuff out. And when there's a sense of death, ah, death is okay, it can sort of get this like metaphorical momentum behind it where it's like, oh, I can let go. The sort of smaller things that can seem a bigger deal, it's almost like a little mini ego death of just like, oh, well, I said something silly, never mind. You sort of like let that bit of your ego kind of die. Does that make sense?

It's sort of like the bad coming in doesn't seem as bad if it's just a sort of mini or quite major sort of ego death that's occurring. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like the way I understand or operationalize what I think you're saying is in light of death, the shit I'm worried about isn't that deep. then the trick is to keep death top of mind so that we can keep our problems in perspective. One way that I find helpful, and it's I really like the exercise you're describing, but one way I, perhaps additional way for people is the Buddha's five daily remembrances. Once in the morning and once at night,

I really have been able to get into the habit of just recalling this body is of the nature to grow old, get sick, die, I'm going to someday lose everything and everybody I hold dear. As a result, the only real possessions I have are my actions. And just doing that twice a day, I mean, it doesn't mean I never get carried away by bullshit, but I think I'm less likely to because death is closer. It just has more salience for me than it used to. Yeah, yeah, that's up. Coming up, Rosa talks about some more aspects.

of experience such as why falling in love with your experience of being alive can actually deepen your practice. Okay, we're moving through our list here. The fourth aspect of experience that you're suggesting we unlock en route to presence is, and these are your words, falling in love with experience. Say more, please. Yeah, there's going to be a reason to do it, right? It's one thing. Yeah, I just think it's kind of like letting that happen, letting beauty, joy, just all the lovely, beautiful stuff flow. And that's going to be different for everyone, like what that is, what makes them feel that about life. And I think spending some time really being with that in yourself and remembering moments and feeling the heart opening qualities of it and being inspired by it, just enjoying it. And I guess this one came up from working with people a lot.

It's there's such an easy self-punishing mode that people go into, either like for a love, self-critique or maybe turning practice into like another thing that you have to do. Discipline is obviously, can be an important part, but it can tip over into this sort of like, yeah, more just self-punishing and sort of practical, I have to go through the steps and I have to do it and I have to. And I've just found that the more people's heart is online, the more like open hardness and passion and joy that is flowing, the easier the path becomes.

And the more naturally it sort of stems from this place of love rather than sort of punishment, I guess. I mean, I don't think anybody's going to argue with this. This one sounds good. Yet again, I think the question is like, how? there's like a vulnerability required in it and I talk about this in there about that sort of soulmates or specific things or places might inspire a lot of love and the sort of downside of the thing that stops it is the same as if you're falling in love with a person where it's kind of scary to open your heart and like be vulnerable and really feel what you feel and like let it flow through you but

Yeah, it's just finding those people, places, things that inspire the joy and love in you and connecting to that and really letting it. So letting it be present. There's another guided practice here. The three steps are one, recall, recall a moment when you felt alive. And I think the words you use are where everything in experience was singing together could be a person, place, some sort of past mystical experience. the second step is to intensify it. You might say to yourself, let the felt sense of being in love live through you. If you're holding back,

turn the sensations up 10 times stronger. And then the third is inquiry. Third step is inquiry. Ask, who are you when you're connected to this love? What would it mean to live from this heart-connected place? Yeah. And there's something there, I think specifically the turning it up 10 times.

It's sort of trying to avoid the thing where it's like, oh, it's scary, I'm not sure I want to, or like self-judgment or things that stop you feeling. It's really just letting you, like, let it rip. And then the kind of connecting it back to who you are is that, yeah, falling in love with the experience is not, it's just unhooking the feeling from, and then I need to sort of get something from, like I'm falling in love with this place. And so I need to come back here all the time. We're in falling in love with this person. So we need to have this certain type of relationship. It's keeping it back to that the sensations that it's bringing up in you. And the mode and the feeling and the inspiration is the point.

It doesn't need to go somewhere. The process and the feeling of falling in love is the purpose rather than that sort of, I'm falling in love and then therefore I want this and this and this to happen. Right, right, right. Because that's not being present. that's projecting forward. Yeah. Okay, I think we can sneak in one more here.

So number five on your list is potency. It's actually potency, colon, the collie inside of you, collie, K-A-L-I, which I believe is a Hindu goddess. Am I right? It's a Hindu? Yeah. Please describe it. So this is letting the truth speak for itself.

and so there's lots of reasons in society to like be polite and say the nice thing or to be a bit kind of manipulative and to try and like dominate people and control people and get them to do what you want. And this is sort of letting go both of those and just letting the truth sort of speak for itself and come out in a very direct way. And when you do that, it tends to be very potent. One of the reasons I've specifically included the Carly element is because it's interesting actually, there's even something a bit gendered here maybe where it's like there's a lot of pressure to not speak the truth in our society and maybe in all societies.

And there has to be a kind of like fierceness and a fierce sort of commitment. And Carly is a goddess, she, you know, she has a sword, she'll cut off people's heads in the mythology, it's just like really letting the sort of truth just like say the thing that is true regardless. The gendered piece is maybe specifically she's a female, feminine goddess. The truth I'm talking about is not necessarily like a rational, logical, or this is the objective, ultimate truth. It's like as much the kind of like felt embodied elements of experience truth and kind of like

letting your truth be present and part of what's here. And, yeah, that can be quite disruptive. And I think there's something important about the archetype where it's saying, like, it's powerful to disrupt and say the difficult thing and let the truth be spoken. So that was the sort of importance of it, including the Kali element. I would imagine you would recommend that we say the truth without being jerks about it. So it's like the wholehearted truth. Yeah. So people will have a tendency, which is they might be wanting to kind of like dominate and say things that are trying to impress or trying to like put other people down or I guess that's kind of what I'm imagining when you say being a jerk. The truth would actually be if someone's sort of like dominating to put other people down in order to like feel good about themselves, the truth would be someone saying, well, right now I want to like say something that puts you down. makes me feel good about myself. It's sort of a step back where you're starting in the presence

and starting in the kind of like truth of what's in the present moment for you. And then there's another thing which is the other way that people can go is being polite and hiding and not saying what is true and being a sort of people pleaser. And then they need to sort of be pulled in a bit more into saying the hard thing. And then they might get the feedback from people that are being a bit of a jerk by saying the hard thing. And sometimes you just have to cut through people's desires for you to be so sweet and nice in some ways. No question. This may be gendered in that. Historically, for me, it's not like I've really held back from saying the hard thing, but I've been rude about it, which has not helped anybody. And I realize that may not be

true for women listening. Instead, they might have gotten the self-silancing route. I hear your advice as, you know, sensitive to everybody, wherever your conditioning is. Yeah, it's like using the heart as the compass of what is first connecting to what is wholeheartedly true and then being able to speak that. And I think there's something as well, which is, I think I mentioned this in the sacred sadness. It feels like that in terms of gender, it's like men explicitly are not given space to feel sadness. And it feels like that's really important. that men have given space to cry and to feel sad. And then this has almost a bit the opposite,

where it's like women are often not given space to speak difficult truths. And that's pretty important that that's given space. Yeah, not only not given the space to speak difficult truth, but punished for speaking difficult truth. Yeah. I think also in this part of the book, you talk about saying no more often? Yes.

Society asks a lot of people and, I guess there's like a clarity that can come online where being well-bounded and saying no in a modern, busy life. It's almost like if you're not super busy all the time overextended doing a million things, then you're not enough or something. There's like a societal message in there. And actually just being like, no, I don't want to do that. And that's no for me. That to me is good potency and cally energy of just clarity of what is truly aligned. for you and what actually really serves the truth of yourself and experience from a deep level.

And again, the key here is that whether you're speaking up, you know, speaking the truth in the moment, or saying no, it's about what's happening for you right now. This becomes spiritual or mystical only when it's directly connected to, what you're feeling right now. Yeah, I have a friend who's an authentic relating teacher, Margot Fisher, and she describes boundaries as letting the energy speak for itself, letting what's already here, let it fall where it falls. And that also has a very strong sort of kali element,

where it's like the sort of truth falls where it falls. It's almost like anti-manipulation is the kind of metric. we're almost out of time, but in closing here, just two final questions for you. One is, you know, anything you want to say in summary? Yeah, I think it can be a lot of information and it can feel like a lot to take in maybe. And I think one of the things I describe in the book is like giving yourself time for each of the chapters to show up in your life as something that, yeah, just like having some time. time, so, you know, sacred sadness, having some time to sink into that as a beautiful, tender part of experience. And the focus is really on the embodied and sort of wholehearted aspect of experience rather than that understanding. It's not about like needing to get some cognitive understanding. It's about going through a process in your body and your heart and

feeling things. And so giving yourself time to feel and be with each aspect. of experience is important. Final question is, can you just remind everybody of the name of this book and then anything else you're putting out into the world that we should know about? Yeah, so this book is unlocking the depths of being, wholehearted presence from mystical reality, and it's free. It's on my website. And then I'm writing two books currently.

It were going to be one, and then it became two, which is a surprisingly less overwhelming. I'm writing one big one. But yeah, one's about the living imaginal realm. So I guess these two books are sort of, it's almost like that unlocking the depths of being is the groundwork of getting into your being so that you can be more present and sort of safely and wholeheartedly present in experience. And then it's like from there, there's a possibility that it can open more into more sort of mystical territory. So one of the books I'm writing is called The Living Imaginal Realm, which is like, how experience is more imaginable and shamanic than modern society would like us to believe. But yeah, I would say like this book is really kind of like the groundwork for if that is of interest.

And also if there's any sort of mystical explorations or spiritual explorations with psychedelics or with any kind of interest in altered states of consciousness or anything like that, it's like this book is written to make that, yeah, safe, wholehearted, coming from presence, being connected to the body. So yeah. And you said it's available via your website. What's the website? Rosalumis.com.uk.

Great. I will put a link to that in the show notes so people can get more from Rosa if they want it. In the meantime, Rosa, thank you so much for making time for this. It was great to talk to you. Yeah, it's really nice to talk. Thanks again to Rosa Lewis. Awesome to talk to her.

Don't forget, if you want to meditate with me, I've got a new-ish meditation app. You can get it over at Dan Harris.com. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. Finally, thank you very much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer.

Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.