The One You Feed - Amoda Maa on Living Your Awakening

Episode Date: July 3, 2018

Amoda Maa is a contemporary spiritual teacher and author. You may recognize the titles of some of her books: How to Find God in Everything, Change Your Life Change Your World and Radical Awakenin...g. Her new book, Embodied Enlightenment: Living Your Awakening In Every Moment, is a powerful look at what awakening means, looks like and feels in your everyday life. She stresses that you can't think your way into awakening but that rather you feel your way into it. During this interview she talks about what that means and how to do it.Visit oneyoufeed.net/transform to learn more about our personal transformation program.Casper mattress 4th of July offer July 9th www.casper.com/savings up to $225 off your order Quip electric toothbrush fraction of the cost of other electric toothbrushes www.getquip.com/wolf and get first refill packet free In This Interview, Amoda Maa and I Discuss...Her new book, Embodied Enlightenment: Living Your Awakening In Every MomentAwakeningWaking up out of the dream of separationWaking up out of the dream of thinking that we are our thoughts and feelingsAwakening not dependant on or a precursor to one's psychological healthSurrendering the need to uphold oneselfSurrendering the psychological selfThe need for psychological safety giving rise to egoic tendenciesThe defense and attack found in righteousnessThe verticality of beingNot having an agenda of the outcome when opening ourselves to our experience and meeting it as it isHow to be free from sufferingThe strength of life's intelligenceThe ripening that happens within oneself when you've finally had enough of running away from painNo real relief from pain and no final freedom from pain when all you're doing is running away from itAm I willing to meet this exactly as it is?Trying not to tryTrue fulfillment is the emptying of the spiritual shopping basketThe paradox of trying not to tryAccumulating agendas = committing to a particular spiritual path and expecting that you'll feel worthy and good enoughLove is seeking to know itselfSilence is ever present in everything  Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Awakening is waking up out of that dream or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Starting point is 00:00:46 and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.
Starting point is 00:01:33 The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Amoda Ma, a contemporary spiritual teacher and author. She's the author of How to Find God in Everything, Change Your Life, Change Your World, and Radical Awakening. Her new book is Embodied Enlightenment, Living Your Awakening in Every Moment. Hi, Amoda. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. Thank you for having me on the show. I'm happy to have you on. Your book is called Embodied Enlightenment, Living Your Awakening in Every Moment. And I really enjoyed it. And we will get into the
Starting point is 00:02:15 book here in just a moment. But let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. It sounds to me that the bad wolf is the ego self,
Starting point is 00:02:58 the part of us that's seeking to protect itself on a psychological level. It's one thing protecting ourselves on a physical level, but on a psychological level, which leads to blame, attack, defense, all the armoring that we put up to protect our sense of self as a separate self. That's the first thing that jumps out at me about the parable. I would not call that bad, though. I would not call that evil. And that's where I would digress from the parable, certainly in the work I do and in my own life. I think it's true that we do, beyond ego self, who we really are as an expression of beingness, the one consciousness. So I guess one is born out of separation and the other one is born out of non-separation. And I think it's true that we do feed one or the other. We feed the sense of self as a separate me
Starting point is 00:04:07 when we are defended, when we relate to the world from a defended place, where we see an enemy out there, when we see ourselves as either superior or inferior to what's out there when we are reactive, responding from reactivity, from conditioned self. And if we unconsciously give our attention to that, then that's the wolf we're feeding. And that's the vast majority of the collective mess that we currently find ourselves in and then if we give our attention to something that is more more deep yeah deeper than the surface of who we are as a separate me if we give our attention to not the beliefs in our in our minds not the conditioned responses but if we give our attention to the tenderness of the heart, then we come to know ourselves as the open space, which is the place from which love and compassion and kindness and generosity flow from. And if we keep giving our attention to that, which is
Starting point is 00:05:20 quite a challenge mostly, but as we feed that more and more, then actually it becomes, at least in my experience and also, you know, that's part of my teaching, it becomes the natural state. It's not a battle anymore between the two because infinite intelligence or innate intelligence lives in and as the depth of who we are. And that is far more preferable, far more natural than the training and reactivity that we've had through social, cultural, parental conditioning.
Starting point is 00:06:03 So to me, it starts to become like an endless river that flows. So it's no longer a battle. Yeah. Excellent. Let's talk about awakening, because awakening is a lot of what you talk about. I think you use the word awakening sort of interchangeably with enlightenment. But talk to me about awakening. I want to read a line that you have here first to start because I really like this as a description. Awakening is the discovery of that which is still here and unchanging even when thoughts and feelings
Starting point is 00:06:38 change. Yes. Awakening is the waking up out of the dream of separation, where in thinking and in feeling, when we're identified with our thoughts and we're identified with our feelings. I am bad or I feel good and I am good or, you know, having negative thoughts, we tend to beat ourselves up about that and think that we failed or haven't got it right or need to improve ourselves. So we're identified with our thinking and we're identified with our emotions, both on the negative side and the positive side. And then we attempt to change our thoughts and change our feelings in order to become a better person or to become a good person or to become an improved, perfect person or to become a spiritual person or whatever. But waking up, awakening, is waking up out of that dream that you are your thoughts or your feelings. That doesn't mean not taking responsibility for thinking and feeling or being just a passive
Starting point is 00:07:52 passenger in that. But it does mean that our root identity is in a much more profound place within ourselves, not on the surface of our human experience. So waking up out of the dream of separation frees us from the idea of being me here and the world out there. Everything is inside. I recognize what you're saying a lot, but I have a question for you that I sometimes wonder, and your book brought the question up again for me, because some of what you're describing sounds like being more psychologically healthy, right? I don't see
Starting point is 00:08:37 the world as a threat. I don't feel bad about myself. I'm more psychologically healthy. And I don't think that's what you're referring to here. So can you help me understand the distinction between sort of just being psychologically not so hard on myself or not feeling so endangered by life versus what awakening is? It actually doesn't matter what your psychological state is. You could still wake up out of the dream of separation. So I'll just backtrack. As awakening flows into one's life, after awakening, then let's call it psychological health or psychological wholeness becomes more likely. But it's not a precursor for awakening. quite the opposite very often that very traumatic situations or experiences, very dark personal experiences can wake us up out of the dream of separation. And certainly that was the case in my experience in that psychological suffering became my doorway to liberation. And I was somebody who didn't have strong self-worth and didn't feel
Starting point is 00:09:47 good enough, didn't feel loved enough. So it doesn't matter what your psychological state is. So it's, yeah, it's very different. It'll be described in different ways, but for me, it was emerging with the totality. When I finally stopped looking for an answer to my psychological pain by becoming a better person, by improving myself and working on myself and actually surrendered to the brokenness of it, to the darkness of it, to the existential abyss of it, there was a deep let go, a deep surrender, a surrender of the need to uphold myself as anything. And that was the root of the transformation. So if anything, awakening is a surrender, it's a surrender of psychological self. Right, right. It certainly does seem to be that ability to let go completely is the basis of lots of transformation and awakening being one of them and the desire to control things. You say that personal evolution begins when the desire to be free of the tyranny of ego is greater than the need for psychological safety.
Starting point is 00:11:06 Yeah, and I guess that's what I was just touching on. The need for psychological safety is what gives rise to the egoic movement towards becoming something more or having something more or getting something more. having something more or getting something more in other words the hope of salvation or the opposite direction of running away from what scares us hiding from what scares us retracting contracting um staying in the in in the personal comfort zone psychological comfort zone and that movement which i call a horizontal movement, the horizontal movement of egoic mind, is that unconscious desire for psychological safety that keeps us trapped in the sense of being a separate me here that needs to protect itself from the
Starting point is 00:12:01 world out there. And then that gives rise to all sorts of things like greed and judgment and division, seeing the world through the eyes of division, good and bad, wrong and right, gives rise to righteousness. And righteousness always has defense and attack in it. And so starts the war, the war within and the war in the world. And at some point, the pain of that, because it creates personal suffering, the suffering of discontent, the suffering of fulfillment, and then the loss of that fulfillment and the seeking of that fulfillment, usually from the external world, but eventually it turns into the internal world. and that never brings any real fulfillment and finally we might have the courage and the willingness to turn our attention to what is unknown because beyond that psychological
Starting point is 00:12:58 safety it's an unknown dimension and then the possibility of surrender is is available to us I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.
Starting point is 00:14:08 And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.
Starting point is 00:14:23 Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really,
Starting point is 00:14:35 and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You say that the true purpose of the question, who am I, is to serve as a pointer to diving into the unknownness of this unbounded moment. So you're talking about the tradition there of some degree of self-inquiry, right? Of asking, who am I? Yes. And it can really be any question. It doesn't have to be, who am I. And any question that arises from the depths about being like, why am I here? What am I? What is my purpose? Where is true happiness? Or whatever the question is, it's all forms of the same arrow of self-inquiry. And its purpose isn't to find an answer. It isn't to land on some absolute truth that is satisfactory or satisfying to the
Starting point is 00:15:26 mind. It's about coming up to the edge of mind, the edge of mind that cannot find anywhere to stand. It's a groundless place. And that's when the possibility of real transformation in the sense of waking up out of the dream of separation is possible. But that edge means that we come up to what I call an existential abyss where the not knowing of who I am, what I am, the not knowing of whether I exist or don't exist, it actually brings up a lot of primal terror. But the capacity to face that within oneself, and when I speak with people about this, most people don't understand intellectually what I'm saying, but they understand it somewhere in their beingness, because terror comes up at that place of deep let go of self. So that's the place that if we can just soften into and not turn away
Starting point is 00:16:26 through this egoic mechanism that wants to pull us in this horizontal way, then we can drop into the verticality of being. And that's where freedom is. And it sounds complex, or it sounds out of reach, but it's actually very available to us. It's actually just a willingness to soften and open right here, right here, wherever you are. Yeah, as humans, we don't like not knowing. It's not culturally smiled upon. And in general, I think we don't like it. I just did a mini episode, it'll probably be out by the time listeners hear this, but it was about, there's that old Rilke quote about, you know, living the questions, you know, about not always having to know the answer, but being able to live your way into the answer. And I think that's what you're talking about is that I have no idea what the point is or what the purpose is or all those different things. And I don't turn away.
Starting point is 00:17:24 Yes. I don't grasp for an answer that doesn't really exist. Yes. And I'll add something to that, which is it's about not having an agenda of the outcome. If we examine when we're doing things or acting or making decisions or just meeting reality, meeting our life circumstances. It doesn't have to be a big decision thing or a goal thing. But just when we're meeting life, we tend to have an agenda of the outcome. If I open to this, if I soften to this, if I open my heart towards this experience in my life, there's a hidden agenda. I want something back. I either want peace, I want goodness in terms of
Starting point is 00:18:18 feeling good, I want goodness in terms of what I might get on a physical level, on an emotional level, on a security level. So we have an agenda around opening ourselves to our experience and really meeting it as it is. And that's a very tricky place. Once we start to see that, then we have a choice, which is to meet it as openness meet it in openness which is a great vulnerability without any agenda that's the not knowing i don't know what it'll give me i don't know whether it'll be good or bad or safe or unsafe i I meet it anyway. And that's the feeding of the good wolf. Because as we do that more and more, we start to live life without a safety net,
Starting point is 00:19:16 without a mental safety net, without a mental agenda, without a mental emotional strategy. And that brings us into real intimacy with what is and that intimacy is love and that love is intelligence and that intelligence is goodness and everything changes not only are we free from the divided inner state but we're free from suffering and that brings such a depth and richness to life it becomes exquisite whatever is happening so we're not lost on the surface on the waves we're actually operating as the open hand of the ocean which has no boundary and initially that
Starting point is 00:19:59 feels very vulnerable but actually it's the place of our invincibility it's the place of our invincibility. It's the place of our true strength, not the strength of an ego self, but the strength of let's call it divinity, or that's not a word I would normally use. But you know, the strength of life's intelligence, which is what is always moving us anyway. So let's talk about getting to that point. Because as you said, not having an agenda is one of those things that sounds relatively easy to do. But as a human, it almost feels like an endless loop sometimes like, okay, I don't want to have an agenda because but it all circles back in some level to reaching towards pleasure, recoiling from pain, which is so very fundamental. And I'm kind of curious, from your perspective, what are ways to help people get to that point where they can be open without having an agenda? The word that comes to mind for me a lot is curiosity, right? Because when I'm curious about something, I'm less agenda driven. I'm much more like, I just want to know, but it's not entirely there. And I also think, you know, maybe you could
Starting point is 00:21:11 just wrap this in your response also, but a lot of us come to the spiritual journey as a place of moving away from pain. And then comes this point where the pivot almost has to happen where we say, okay, whatever. I find for myself very difficult to get to pure places of motivation. Like I'm like, okay, well, you know, most of me I think is pretty pure here. But then there's that other part of me that just wants to feel better. You know, it seems like it's very difficult to find that place, which I guess is why so few people maybe do find it. Yeah, there's no real ABC. You know, maybe there have been attempts to provide a method, a roadmap, a how-to.
Starting point is 00:22:00 I find that that doesn't work. That's not how it works. There's almost a ripening that happens in the individual. That ripening is when you finally had enough of running away from pain, finally, because you've run away from pain your whole life in all sorts of strategies, hidden and not so hidden. sorts of strategies, hidden and not so hidden. When you've seen and felt in the depths of your soul that you've used this strategy of running away from pain for lifetimes, then there comes a point when you're sick and tired of it because there's no relief in that.
Starting point is 00:22:39 There's no final freedom in that. That's what I call the ripening of the soul then the willingness to meet that pain with curiosity which is the same as openness it's okay being curious about something that isn't so scary but when it comes to something that's terrifying whatever that might be a feeling in ourselves an emotion that comes up a you know, a dark space within ourselves, then it's not so easy to be curious. But at some point, because it can't be approached with the mind, it's like the mind's strategies finally come to exhaustion. Then it's as if the ego lays down its weapons, it bows down to the unknown and sacrifices itself on the altar of that unknownness. That's called surrender. Then there can be a merging of the small me, the separate me,
Starting point is 00:23:39 the ego self, with the totality, which we can also call the god self the vastness of existence consciousness itself beingness and all these words are going to mean different things to different people so i always use them in many different ways but not getting attached to the words but to sacrifice the ego on the altar on of that which is greater than ego self, which is always unknown to the ego, therefore it is frightened of it, terrified by it, and will run away from it. But finally, that can happen. That isn't something that we can do. That is grace. But we can ask ourselves the question when something comes up that we're frightened of and we notice our contraction our tightening our resistance our turning away from our manipulation our begging
Starting point is 00:24:32 and bartering and bullying with reality in that situation in that circumstance in that feeling when we notice that we can ask ourselves am i willing to meet this as it is, come what may, even if that means I am annihilated as the me that I think I am? Am I willing or not? And it doesn't matter what the answer is. There's no right or wrong. There's no spiritual brownie points. There's only the self-honesty. Now, that's self-inquiry.
Starting point is 00:25:04 Never mind the question, who am I Now that's self-inquiry. Never mind the question, who am I? This is self-inquiry. Then we can start to be honest. And that's what starts to change it. Because finally, at some point, we might say, yes, I'm willing. I don't know how, but I'm willing. And that is when grace enters I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.
Starting point is 00:26:05 We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr.
Starting point is 00:26:25 Bryan Cranston is with us. How are you? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm fascinated by this idea of trying not to try,
Starting point is 00:27:02 or the Zen idea of, well, if I'm perfect as I am, why do I meditate, you know, just this magic sort of place that you talk about with the openness or something that you say that speaks to this a little bit. And I love this phrase, you talk about true fulfillment, being an emptying of the spiritual shopping basket. Because I think that you said earlier, when we get to the point where we realize there's no running away from our pain, and I think most of us come to the spiritual path, because the obvious things, okay, so it's not money, okay, it's not sex, okay, it's not, you know, this or that, I've tried that and I've either tried it and failed or tried it and succeed. But whatever reason, I've seen through that. And now I come to the spiritual search,
Starting point is 00:27:52 but my mentality is very much the same as it was before. And I think, at least for me, that has been a long journey of finding my way through that. like, okay, it's like I picked a different channel on the TV. And frankly, I picked a channel that's more likely to lead me to the truth, right? I'm at least in the neighborhood now. But ultimately, I have to let go of that resistance. And for me, it's been the moments when by whatever method, and it isn't a method, but by whatever thing happens that I truly let go, that something usually fairly magical happens, but trying to let go is still trying. And so it's that paradox, like you said, and there is no ABC. And yet I ask everybody because I want one. Ask everybody because I want one.
Starting point is 00:28:50 Yeah, ABC, it's not an ABC, it's just an A, is the ability to see. When you start seeing the strategies, such as the one that you described, then there's a possibility of something fundamentally changing from the horizontal dimension of consciousness to the vertical dimension of consciousness which is where true change and transformation happens and much of the time yes the spiritual search is still on the horizontal dimension the shopping basket i refer to is not just the accumulation of practices and techniques and tools and methods and teachings and ideologies, although it's definitely that's a large part of it. But it's also the shopping basket mentality where we're filling ourselves up with or accumulating
Starting point is 00:29:39 agendas, the agenda for the outcome. If I'm on this spiritual path and I follow it and I dedicate myself to it, then there is an agenda, the agenda that I will become enlightened or the agenda that I will be free from suffering and pain, the agenda that I will become a better person. And I say very often, but I actually think I mean always that the core agenda is worthiness. always that the core agenda is worthiness. If we examine everything that we believe we're going to get from doing something or immersing in ourselves in something or following something, the core belief that drives that, the core agenda that drives that motivation is the need to feel worthy, the need to feel good enough. And that is rampant in spirituality, as well as in the rest of the world, in the secular world, that if I wake up, I'll be more worthy. If I find spiritual fulfillment, I'll be more worthy. Somehow we believe ourselves to be
Starting point is 00:30:47 worthy in that. And so that just perpetuates the polarity, the ping pong between worthiness and unworthiness. Then if we don't achieve that, if we don't get that, if we don't have that experience, if we don't get there, we're still carrying a belief that we're not good enough. Now that has to finally be surrendered. And that's a big one. So that's all part of the spiritual shopping basket, the accumulation of either things, physical things, structures, ideas, beliefs, or the accumulation of good feelings, the accumulation of self identities, me as a good person, me as a spiritual person, me as an awakened person, that all comes tumbling into the spiritual basket along the search, pretty much unconsciously,
Starting point is 00:31:41 we're not aware of this. But as we start to see that and examine that then true inquiry can start and then we can start to clear the shopping basket and eventually throw the shopping basket away itself so we're no longer shopping for anything in other words we don't have agenda the motivation the desire for simply meeting life as openness in which i i i am totally undefended i have laid down all my weapons of defense and attack and i meet reality as it is come what may even if it destroys me that's no shopping basket no contents to the shopping basket but that becomes the motivation for that is is for its own sake it's not for my sake it's for its own sake what does that mean that means that love is seeking itself love is seeking to know itself and then it becomes a very pure motivation, if you like.
Starting point is 00:32:47 And that changes everything. But that's a kind of purification that happens over time. And there is no ABC. There's only pointers, support, guidance, listening, and speaking from the truth. I listen to people that come to my gatherings. I really listen to them in ways that they probably can't listen to themselves. And then from that place, they speak.
Starting point is 00:33:16 And so it's listening to the truth and telling the truth. That's the purification process. Yep. And I think that that last piece about telling the truth is also telling the truth about where we are, if we might still have the motivations, the agendas, all that, you know, and it's being willing to say, I'm still there, or that's where I'm at. Not even I'm still there, but that's where I'm at. Because then is, that's the truth. And, and it I'm still there, but that's where I'm at, because then that's the truth.
Starting point is 00:33:45 And it's, like you said, there's only pointers. And I love the word ripening. I'm going to ask you a slightly different question here, because we're nearing the end of our time. But you say silence is ever-present in everything. What does that mean? It means as you start emptying yourself of agenda, as you start emptying yourself of all the negotiations and contortions around one's own experience to protect
Starting point is 00:34:20 oneself, to push the experience away, to to possess the experience and so on and so on when all that comes to an end there's only silence that's not a silence in the head it's a silence of being it's the silence of openness and that brings a great peace and that silence is always here whether there's something noisy going on or not it's it's a it's an inner silence and i think the best way i can point to it is exactly that which i said when all the mental and emotional acrobatics around one's experience especially when it's not wanted when it hurts or is difficult or is challenging or is irritating or is threatening, that's when we create a whole barrage of inner noise, the inner reactivity to protect ourselves from that, to push it away. And when that comes to an end, all there is, is the open space of what is
Starting point is 00:35:29 and that silence. Yeah. And I love in the book, the way you talk about the fact that silence is kind of always there, even as you said, if there's a noise outside, or even if my brain is busy. And, and I first heard this from, from Adyashanti, and he pointed out, for whatever reason, it hit me that it was like, you know, silence is the space that all this stuff is moving in. It's always there. And I kept looking for or waiting for the moment that silence would appear, or okay, all this stuff would shut up, so I could have some silence. And it was really interesting for me to start to say, oh, wait a minute. Silence is there.
Starting point is 00:36:10 There's just this other stuff that's sort of on top of it. But silence is all around it. It just was a different way of seeing for me and really helped me be able to touch a slightly, I don't know, deeper place. be able to touch a slightly, I don't know, deeper place. Yeah, it's really about seeing and experiencing the world, reality, one's experience, one's inner experience, and one's outer experience from an undivided state. The divided state says, this is not good, this is good, I don't want this, I want this, this shouldn't be happening, this should be happening. And that's a primary one. And that divides us. So we live from an inner noisiness, that division. But when there is no shouldn't be happening in our experience,
Starting point is 00:36:59 then we meet reality without any resistance. That lack of resistance itself is the silence. It doesn't matter whether it's thinking or feeling, because when there's no resistance, our attention isn't caught up in the thinking and feeling. Thinking and feeling happens, just like the waves on the ocean, but that's not where our sense of self is attached. We are the space within which all that happens. And that brings such a, such a freedom, such a peace that hasn't got anything to do with whether we're,
Starting point is 00:37:32 you know, having a challenging experience or a, or a gentle experience. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. We're going to have a post-show conversation here in a couple minutes where I'm going to ask you about dealing with irritation and about the books that are on your bookstand back there. But for the purposes of this conversation, we are done. And so listeners, if you want to hear the conversation afterwards, supporters of the show get to hear it. But Imota, thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed talking with you and I really enjoyed your book, which again, is called Embodied Enlightenment, Living Your Awakening in Every Moment. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Okay. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you,
Starting point is 00:38:33 please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition sign
Starting point is 00:39:08 Jason Bobblehead. The Really No Really Podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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