The One You Feed - Mary O"Malley

Episode Date: May 11, 2016

This week we talk to Mary O'Malley about awakening to the world around us Mary O’Malley is an author, teacher, and counselor whose work awakens others to the joy of being fully alive.  Her inspired and transformative approach to compulsions offers a way to replace fear, hopelessness and struggle with ease, well-being and joy. Through her individual counseling and coaching, books, classes, retreats and ongoing groups, Mary invites people to experience the miracle of awakening. Acknowledged as a leader in the field of Awakening by many Mary clearly sees both the big picture and the details of human patterns and conditioning.  She possesses an extraordinary ability to understand and connect with people. And she is skilled in empowering people to work with difficult mind states resulting in greater inner awareness and presence and a greater capacity for joy.  Eckhart Tolle says, “Thank you, Mary, for your contribution to the evolution of human consciousness.” Her latest book is called What’s In the Way, Is the Way: A Practical Guide to Awakening. In This Interview, Mary O'Malley and I Discuss: The One You Feed parable The intertwining of good and bad, the yin and yang Dealing with eating problems How what we fight, we empower Creating a relationship with the dark side The impact of the early years of our lives The conditioned self How we are addicted to struggle Being present to life instead of thinking our way through life The "low-grade suffering" that permeates our lives The storyteller in our minds The Four Let's- Let Life, Let it Be, Let it Go, Learning to not listen so closely to the storyteller in our mind The difference between being here for life and being in a conversation about life For more show notes visit our websiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's a huge difference between being here for life and being in a conversation about life. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, 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. 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, 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. Hey, y'all.

I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. This January, join me for our third annual January Jumpstart series. Starting January 1st, we'll have inspiring conversations to give you a hand in kickstarting your personal growth. If you've been holding back or playing small, this is your all-access pass to step fully we'll have inspiring conversations to give you a hand in kick-starting your personal growth. If you've been holding back or playing small, this is your all-access pass to step fully into the possibilities of the new year. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Mary O'Malley, an author, teacher, and counselor whose work awakens others to the joy of being fully alive.

Her inspired and transformative approach to compulsions offers a way to replace fear, hopelessness, and struggle with ease, well-being, and joy. being and joy. Through her individual counseling and coaching, books, classes, retreats, and ongoing groups, Mary invites people to experience the miracle of awakening. Mary clearly sees both the big picture and the details of human patterns and conditioning. She possesses an extraordinary ability to understand and connect with people, and she is skilled in empowering people to work with difficult mind states, resulting in greater inner awareness and presence and greater capacity for joy. Her latest book is called What's in the Way is the Way. Hey everybody, we finished the first round of the One You Feed coaching program with a bunch of people who have successfully made significant and sustained changes in their lives. I'm happy for all of them and have enjoyed

getting to know and working with everybody. We've incorporated their feedback into the program and as a result, it has evolved into an even more robust experience. We are now ready to make it available to you starting today. One of the changes we've made to better serve you is to have a limited window of time during which people can sign up. Starting today, you can go to oneufeed.net slash coaching program and sign up to learn more. This window will be open for the next two weeks. The enrollment window will close at midnight on May 25th, which also happens to be my birthday. If you're interested, don't put off looking into and signing up for the program. You can make the changes to your life that you've been considering. I'd love for you to be one of the success stories here.

So go to oneufeed.net slash coaching program and get started today. And here is the interview with Mary O'Malley. Hi, Mary. Welcome to the show. I'm so glad to be here, Eric. I am very excited to get you on. Your book is called What's In The Way Is The Way, which the minute I heard the title, I was like, I think I want to talk to her. And after having read the book, I want to even more. So I'm looking forward to getting into your book. You cover a lot of topics that we spend time on, talking on the show a lot, and you've got some interesting perspectives on all of it. So we will get to that in a minute, but we're going to start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she 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 granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second. And she looks up at her grandmother. She says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother quietly 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? Well, it's been around for many years, and it comes from what I call duality. You know, there's a good part of us, and then there's a bad part of us. And I think if we look at history, we will see that actually fighting the bad always empowers the bad. And if you look at the, you know, to me, one of the most important symbols that have ever

been on this planet is the yin and yang symbol. And here is the dark and the light that they aren't on opposite sides of a line, that they're actually intertwined. And in the dark is a point of light, and in the light is a point of dark. So in my experience, I tried to get rid of the bad. And I'm a Taurus, so I have a very, very strong will. And a great example out of my life is that I learned how to take care of the heartache of my childhood through eating. I started, the first memories is when I was around 10. And then I dieted and ate and dieted and ate. And then being a Taurus, I once went one month without food and two more times, two more times for two weeks without food and a number of one week periods without food because by God, I was going to get rid of this urge to overeat. And it eventually brought me to the place where I gained 97 pounds in a year.

And it was only when I began to realize that, yes, there are these two parts of me. But rather than trying to starve the so-called bad, I like to use the word dark much more than bad or evil. Rather than trying to starve it or make it bad or wrong, my work is about creating a relationship with it. that the statistic that I want to bring into this conversation is that the U.S. Surgeon General's report is 98% of every pound that is lost in America is gained back plus some within a year and a half. And that's what I think we're beginning to take another step beyond that parable and realized that what we fight, we actually empower. And it was when I learned how to be in relationship with this so-called bad part of me that would, you know, just eat absolutely everything under the sun that it began to calm down. And now, you know, I lost the extra weight and now my body stays the same weight

and I can eat whatever I want and have for years. So that's my offering to this conversation is that it is in creating a relationship with the so-called dark side that you actually heal. Excellent. And your book, at its heart, really says that most of our life, the challenges that we face and the trouble that we face are a result of the fact that we basically are struggling with the way everything is. You basically use an analogy of we are always in what you call a peaceful meadow, but that we are surrounded by clouds of struggle. And those clouds of struggle are largely self-invented. And I think it's really important to, I wouldn't quite use the word self-invented, that when we were young there, when we first showed up here, we were like dry sponges and there wasn't a thought in our head. And we just absorbed the energy of the people around us. I like to say if our parents were arguing in a soundproof room down the basement, we were up in the attic, we could feel it. So it's like we send it down from generation to generation. We absorb what I call the conditioned self or what Eckhart Tolle calls the mind-made

me, that our mind actually makes this me that talks all day long and if you had a little door in your forehead you could open it up and watch what it's doing it's mainly struggling with life usually little struggles you know like the length of the stoplight or how your hair looks on a particular day but it can struggle it can go all the way into, you know, life and death struggles just because your boyfriend didn't call you when he said he was going to call you. And so we are, I like to say, we're addicted to struggle. And yet that's not who we are. That's something that was conditioned into us. There are so many lines from the book that I love. I could probably just read them over and over to the audience and they would do well.

And I'm going to put some of the favorite ones that I had in a downloadable we'll have, which listeners can get at oneufeed.net slash Mary. But I'm going to read one right now because this, I think, describes me very well. One of the mind's favorite ways of staying distracted and far away from what you're experiencing is to create problems and then try to figure out how to fix them. In fact, it could be said that your mind is a problem factory, churning out problems all day long. It is astounding to recognize that once it solves one problem, there is usually only a very short period of time before it comes up with another problem.

And we keep on feeling that if we just solve this, if we change our husband, or if we lose 10 pounds, or if we win the lottery, then everything would be okay. But we don't see that that puts these clouds between us and the living experience of life. That really what we long for is not the joy of the fancy new car. That's kind of a fake joy. We long for the joy of coming back to life, to actually be here for life. And most people are not. They think their way through their lives. You talk a lot about sort of like a low-grade suffering that permeates us. And I definitely have that problem mind.

I've gotten a lot better at learning not to listen to it so much. But one of the things that you talk about is that the problem mind is largely driven by what you call the storyteller. And we talk on the show all the you're suggesting is that we turn towards the things in our life that seem problematic. And we experience what those emotions are. And that makes total sense. And again, it's something that we talk a lot on the show about. We also talk about not believing the thoughts that you have. And so I'm curious about, let's just take an example of,

I am telling myself a story about how nobody likes me because for whatever reason, nobody was friendly to me today. So there's two options that I can go to there. One would be I could go into what that feeling feels like and turn towards it. The other option is to recognize that what I'm telling myself there is probably not true. And so I'm not going into the feeling and experiencing it in that case. I'm actually trying to, you know, in more of a cognitive behavioral therapy way, I'm trying to sort of recognize the untruth of that thought. And I'm curious from your perspective, are those both just different tools that we use to get to the same place? Or help me understand how you balance those two things. Beautiful question. So down towards the end of the book, there's what you call the four lets.

So down towards the end of the book, there's what you call the four lets. And the first let is let life. There are challenges that each one of us have that bring up such deep feelings, you know, like the illness of a loved one or our own illness or a foreclosure on our house or, you know, we're involved in a robbery, you know, that they come into our house. And there's just so much that gets stirred up that we have very little option until we have awakened for a long time to actually stand with these feelings and let them move through us. And that's where we use the art of living in question. So we actually turn it over to life. Then the next is let it be. And that's a big chunk of this work of where you learn how to actually bring your attention into your immediate experience. And you can do that in your body, with the emotions, with the stories. And you begin to realize the power of focused human attention to heal what I call bound-up energy. A lot of people call them feelings.

They're really bound up energy. It's all it is. And we're discovering that when our energy and our immediate experience come together, then these ancient feelings, they move through us. That's when you begin to move. You move to the next let, which is let it go.

And the more you do that, that there's something about not just overriding a feeling. You will see that, you know, let's say the boyfriend doesn't call. He said he was going to call at 10 and he doesn't call at all until the next day. And we have all sorts of feelings about that. But if we follow it back, you'll see it's rooted in something very young. And so if we just say, you know, that's not true, that's not true. We don't go in and get down to the root of it and with our attention set it free. But the more you do that, the more you come to that place you're talking about.

Something arises, and you see that's not the truth. And you just let it go, and then that brings, well, actually, the better way to say it is, it lets go. But it didn't work in my four lets. But then that brings us to the final, let go. But it didn't work in my four lets. But then that brings us to the final let go. That you actually begin to open to life, not as you want it to be, not as you think it should be. But you're actually here for life and feelings and thoughts and sensations are dancing through you. But you are the awareness that is present for it all.

The warmth of the sun, the sadness in your chest, the wonderful taste of the morning coffee, whatever. That's who we are. And those four lets really help you to see how we can move into let go. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart Series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like

building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present and future all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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

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by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? 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. You say that learning to see what your mind is really doing, rather being lost in it is an important step towards

unhooking from the game of struggle. Right, right. The first step is understanding that there is something that talks in your head all day long, and it's very, very busy, and it has an opinion about everything. That's right. And then beginning to think of the possibility, maybe this is not who I really am. And my job is to make you fascinated. I use the word curiosity a lot. The ability to be curious. So it's the difference between saying you have a meeting at work and you have to do a presentation. And you're sitting in your office before a presentation and, you know, you're

sitting in your office before the presentation and your heart is pounding wildly and, you know, sweat is dripping down your face. And what most of us would say, oh my God, I'm so afraid. I'm so afraid. You know, what did I learn in that class the other day? You know, how can I manage this fear? manage this fear. What awakening is about is the discovering the ability to say, ah, fear is here rather than I am afraid. And the more you can do that, the more you can see these different stories that most of them are rooted in the first six years of your life. That's when the foundations of this storyteller were created.

And so you get familiar with how your anxiousness talks, how your terror talks, how your despair talks, how your hopelessness talks, how your self-judgment talks, how your not-enoughness talks, and you get to know them enough that they arise and you say, oh, hi, and they pass right on through. And so this is the sort of thing that is traditionally very easy to say and much harder to actually do. And so let's talk a little bit about the path from I am 100% identified with my thoughts and my emotions to a place that I am

relatively open and spacious around those things. It's not, at least my experience has not been, and the experience of a lot of people I know is, you don't go from one of those extremes to the other in a couple of days. Right. So, so what, what would you say to people who are just starting on that process about how you work with those things? Because you maybe not, and I know the word successful is not really, we're not trying to be successful, right? But, but we're not getting much space around our thoughts. We're not becoming more spacious or more open or more welcoming. It's a hard process, is what I'm saying. Yeah, but it's the only game in town,

you know? And my main mentor, Stephen Levine, was once asked, how long does this take? That's the mind. How long does this take, you know? And he said, it's the work of a lifetime. And what I say to that is that it really is the way out. It's almost like we've been caught in a prison of this separate, conditioned self. And this mind has only been around about a million years, you know, give or take a few years. So that's a very short, you know, segment of time, you know, in universal time. And so we're very young as a species and we have been totally identified with this struggling self. And all you have to do is look at history or the evening news to see what that is like. So the first step is beginning to contemplate the possibility that

maybe whatever talks in your head all day long is just a conditioned self. That's the first step. That begins to intrigue us. And I would say, well, in the book, at the end of each of the 10 chapters, there's what's called the remembering section. And I really started just by laying a very basic foundation. You know, what we're doing is different than anything we've ever done before. And this is not something you can do and you can do it right. But what you can do is start cultivating curiosity. You can start doing things like you're saying that for five minutes every morning, I'm going to sit on the porch and my intention is to have my attention with the sound of the birds and the Christmas of the air or the smell of my tea. And you'll find that most of the

time you'll be gone. You'll slip away. That's the first step to really see there's a huge difference between being here for life and being in a conversation about life in this struggling self. When you begin to see that there's a huge difference and you begin to see what you're missing, you're missing life, the experience like we knew when we were very young, that there was no separation between us and this living adventure of life. That's when you begin to feel the passion that you don't want to get rid of this storyteller. You need it for maneuvering through reality. You don't want to make it bad or wrong.

It's all about becoming curious and to give yourself the gift of just five minutes a day where you choose one thing that you're curious about and bring your attention back to it. Now, a really important point. I was a part-time meditator for 10 years. And then Stephen... Been there. Yep, yep. And then Stephen told me, he said, you know, if you sit for one

hour and bring your attention back to your focus one time in that hour, that's time well spent. It totally changed my experience because before in those 10 years, I was trying to sit to get some place. Now, and I sit every day and have for decades now. Now, I am sitting and I try even not to use the word meditation. I sometimes call it a returning practice or I call it a listening practice. I'm sitting because I want to be curious about what sits here. And the more I'm curious about what sits here, and the more I can see how it all operates, the more I see through it keep coming up for me. I mean, I read a lot of stuff, right? I'm talking to somebody every week, and that just seems to be a theme that keeps coming back. This attitude of being curious about what's happening with ourselves seems to be such a powerful thing if we can engage in it. Why is that? Because anything else beyond curiosity is still this fix-it problem-solving mind. And oh my God, it wanted to problem-solve. I felt like such a failure. I can remember the first long meditation retreat I went to, and I would open my eyes and, oh my God, I knew everybody else was in nirvana. Of course they were. And now I know that World War I, II and III,

Vietnam War, you know, maybe a little of the Iraq War was going on in everybody's head. You know, but it sure didn't look like it. But when I became curious, that's when things began to open again. And that brings us to the second skill. And I used to call it compassion. But I now call it spaciousness. And compassion is an attribute of spaciousness. Also kindness and allowing and forgiveness and acceptance, all of those. But the more you're curious and the more you can begin to see how young this struggling self is, you know, in your head.

Let's go back to the boyfriend not calling, you know, and now it's an hour later and he hasn't called. And there's a voice inside of you that says, I'm never going to speak to him again, ever, ever. You know, of course, you're going to speak to him tomorrow. But if you listen, you'll hear how young that voice is. And the more you see that, the more you just begin to have space. Oh, that's the sad one or the rejected one. And the more that you bring spaciousness to what's going on inside of you, which naturally arises from curiosity, the more all of this stuff can just pass right through you. So you talk about that there are, I think it's eight core spells, you call them, that basically we cast over ourselves or, you know, we're cast over us as part of our upbringing.

Can you explain what you mean by spell and maybe give us an example of one or two of them? I love the word spells. And this has come out of, I've worked with people over 30 years now. And this has come out of, I've worked with people over 30 years now, and I've gotten to see into the minds of hearts of thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And Stephen Levine once said, the very first time I saw him, he said, you know, I want to create a hat. And when you put it on your head, it instantaneously broadcasts over a loudspeaker all of your thoughts. And everybody in the room groaned. There was really a collective groan that moved through the room. And it's not only that we don't want other people to see what's going on in our storyteller, but we don't want to see what's going on in our storyteller. And as I began to listen and I create a safe place where people

can begin to be real and then explore the storyteller, I began to see there was eight core spells. And I love the word spells because it's something that's laid over the top of us. It's not true and it can be lifted. And let's just do the basic thing of, let's say your mother was very afraid of spiders. So you became afraid of spiders. So the eight core spells, the first two are the basic, you know, the real core, basic foundational spells. You know, I'm separate from life and life is not safe. Then there's the three, you know, operating spells. You know, I got to from life and life is not safe. Then there's the three operating spells. I got to do life. I got to do it right.

And I'm not doing it right enough. And if you watch, basically, if you had that little door on your forehead and you could watch, you'll see that's what the storyteller, it's really trying really hard to get this all together so then it would be happy. And that's the fix-it mode that, you know, the sad thing about the fix-it mode is one in a hundred times it works. So it's the carrot in front of the donkey. That is the problem is that it occasionally works or it works for a very short amount of time, which makes it so much harder to see through.

It's easy to see through something that never works. But that occasional challenge. Yep. It just keeps us sucked into it. But what we don't see is all of that operating, all of that, I got to do life and I got to do life right. And I'm not quite doing it right enough. And I got to adjust this and lose weight and make more money and whatever, and lose weight and make more money and whatever, is all trying to take care of what I call the three hidden spells. And before I say them, you know, I've worked with people all the way from CEOs of major corporations to, you know, developmentally disabled teenagers to, you know, housewives to therapists.

And we all have these hidden spells, Eric. And the first is, because I'm not doing it right, I am wrong. And because I'm wrong, I'm unlovable. And because I'm unlovable, I am all alone. And if your listeners would take a moment and think about those middle of the night things, you know, when you're woken up and the mind is just going crazy, you know, and you'll see these spells, but you'll see it all comes to the real core spell of this separate self, I am all alone. So you asked for an example. I think that the thing that comes to mind is that I really, truly, I tried to kill myself three times because I was completely unlovable. I mean, not only was I unlovable, I was bad and wrong to my core.

And even at one time, I'd been drinking and I was mad at myself and I hit the bed. I was just so frustrated and there was a board across the end of the bed under the duvet cover and I just kept on hitting it. And hitting it until I passed out and then woke up the next morning with a broken arm. So I know those hidden spells very well. And I tried therapy and I tried, you know, psychologists, psychiatrists, medication, group therapy, hypnotherapy, group therapy, hypnotherapy, you name it, mental hospitals. And it wasn't until I began to become curious, and especially about this judging quality in my head that I swear went to law school and was president of the debate club. And it could convince me of anything. And once I started being curious about it,

and I actually carried a notebook around because I really wanted to see this operating. And I started looking at it and said, I never judge you, that voice did. So I carried a notebook around and I went in and drew a wheel on a piece of paper, huge piece of paper in my bedroom. And on the spokes, I began to put all of these different things and drew a wheel on a piece of paper, huge piece of paper in my bedroom.

And on the spokes, I began to put all of these different things my judger would say. And the more I could see it, the more I unhook from it. I call it look to unhook. So here I am, I now travel the world, I write books. You know, never, ever had any vision of that whatsoever. And every once in a while, that judge will come up when I'm, you know, a very, very close family member has been very ill. And it's very heartbreaking.

And, you know, I work full time and try to be there for this family member and at times I just am stretched and when I am, the judger will come but I say, oh hi, are you having a bad day? So that's the power of beginning to see. That's why I did the spells. It's all about learning how to see how this storyteller operates and in the seeing is the spells. It's all about learning how to see how this storyteller operates. And in the seeing

is the movement. We don't need to fix it. We don't need to judge it. We don't need to rearrange it, rise above it, get rid of it. In the seeing is the movement. And that's what we're discovering, the power of human attention to heal. Yeah, and I think that's one of those things we were talking a little bit earlier about how this isn't easy and it doesn't happen immediately. I think there's a tendency to do this for a couple hours and go,

well, you know, I don't feel any better. Whereas really this is a process that we need to keep doing. I mean, it's part of the reason I started this show, honestly, was to be reminded consistently like that thing that's carrying on all the time in my head is not the truth. Because left to my own devices, I identify pretty strongly with it. And so, you know, getting that sort of constant reminder to like, okay, you know, that's not you, take it, take a step back. Yes. and it's why I do groups and phone counseling

and retreats and all of that, so we can gather together and be real about it. And we discover that everybody else is doing the same thing. It's just so wonderful. So a really nifty thing to add into our lives is to become what I call a tightness detective. That you begin to realize, you look out in nature and you see that everything flows in nature. You know, water flows, light flows, day flows into night, winter into spring, sap flows for

heaven's sakes. And you begin to realize if you're around a baby, you see that everything flows through it, you know, madness, sadness, gladness, you know, and then you see us as adults. There was a study done once of children that all of them were breathing their natural breath, you know, like dogs and cats breathe the whole trunk before they went to preschool. Not one was breathing their natural breath by the time they went to first grade. So we've all learned how to tighten. And it's when we begin to use this tightening as our biofeedback mechanism that you begin to see that any thought that tightens you is not the truth. It's from the conditioned self. And it's almost like we have to have that because some of these spells are spells. They are very strong. I mean, you know,

if I could break my own arm through the spell of I am unlovable and broken and bad and wrong, own arm through the spell of I am unlovable and broken and bad and wrong, you know, that's how strong they can be. But you begin to see, you begin to have these moments where you relax back into life and your belly lets go and your chest begins to open and you feel this aliveness and you're just here. And then somebody honks their horn, you know, and then you begin to notice, oh, and that helps people immensely. You know, and here's a thought in the middle of the night and it's just, you know, and all of a sudden awareness kicks in and says, wow, I really think that thought is true, but it makes me tight.

says, wow, I really think that thought is true, but it makes me tight. So it can't be the truth. So I had the little statement, if it makes you tight, it's of the fight. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harnon Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket,

it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present, and, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeart Radio

app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. thought that was really, in addition to the practices that you did at the end of the chapter, which are very well structured. And I think what I like about it is one of the things we talk on the show all the time about is start really small. If you start small with something, you can build into something really great. But most of us start with, you know, I'm going to meditate an hour a day, and that's just doesn't work. And so you're, you're, you're, you call them remembering practices build very slowly from a very small, which is great. And then just these very small invitations, like I said, to come back. And I find one of the things that helps me more than just about anything a lot of the time is just to come back to recognize, like, where am I and what's happening? Like, what do I see? What do I hear? What do I smell? What

do I feel? Just like, it sounds so simple, and it is so simple, but getting in the habit of doing that, you know, 3, 10, 20, 30 times a day really makes, at least for me, makes a big difference. Yeah, me too, because that's what we long for. I love that quote by Alan Watts, the very beloved Zen philosopher, he said, you know, no matter how many times you say the word water, it will never be wet. And we got this idea that enlightenment was coming to this unending state of orgasmic bliss. Oh, coming to this unending state of orgasmic bliss, you know. And really, it's about opening right here, right now. Everything we long for, everything we truly are is right here.

And we long for it. But we long for this version of the now. Oh, I want the now. we long for this version of the now. Oh, I want the now. But the now includes loss, death, pain. And so much of this work is what's in the way is the way that the more we begin to become curious and we notice there's something pretty spectacular that we're missing. Yes, it has suffering in it, but it's pretty wonderful, this thing called life. And then we notice how much we are away from it. Then we begin to become fascinated by what takes us away. We're not trying to get to the now. I can't tell you how many people have told me,

I don't do being in the now very well. Well, we can't try to be in the now. That's our natural state. All we need to do is learn how to see with our attention all of this conditioning that we've taken on. And it's just when we step back from it, it begins to become as ephemeral as a cloud. And you begin to understand that the light of your attention is like the sun on the morning fog. It literally dissipates it. And then, here we are. Now, I just watched the clip from Andrea Levine, Stephen Levine's wife, and Stephen just died, you know, a few months ago. And to me, Stephen Levine is one of the most aware hearts that we have on this planet. She talks in this clip about that they really have been able to, you know, have a life where they really are practicing all of this. And yet, in the last couple of years in his life, it was challenging.

Of course. And can we, you know, Stephen would say, die before you die. before you die? Can we learn how to be here not only for the joys, but for the headache, for the heartache when the boyfriend doesn't call, for the stomach cramps, or for the anxiousness at the light when it's taking too long because now you're going to be late to work. Can we learn how to be curious about these and bring them spaciousness so that when we die, and it's true that all of us are going to have that, and as we get older, this whole system begins to break down. Can we have that breaking down and opening into the next phase be a process that enlivens us rather than a process that contracts us? Yep. And that is path towards, you know, of going from complete identification with our brain to that spaciousness. And I think,

I know I did, and you know, you talked about it with the meditation, you know, I finally started to get a daily meditation practice when I stopped expecting anything to happen from it. Exactly. You know, when I just finally went, oh, okay, I did it. And I think that so many times this idea of being able to work with our thoughts, of being able to get some distance, of being able to see the storyteller, for me is the sort of thing that just took a lot of reps. Yeah. And I'm not saying, I mean, I am in no way, shape or form like done with that.

You know, it's, it still happens a lot and I still get entangled, but I think it's so important when we talk about these things to, to talk about that, that this stuff, you do it over and over. It's not instant results. It's not, you know, it's not like taking a drug. Absolutely. And the ego expects a drug. The ego wants a drug. And that's not the path back home again. And in my book, The Gift of Our Compulsions, when I self-published it before my publisher

picked it up, I put the story of the tortoise and the hare in there three times. And of course, when they edited it, they took it out all except for once, because it is the plot. And that's not how the ego works. The ego wants results right now. Oh, actually tasting my morning coffee is going to make a difference in my life, says the ego. And I say, yeah, it is. And I've got a little analogy that I use. It's like drops of water in a bucket. And you look down and the bucket is not even, the bottom isn't even covered. And you say, oh, you know, I'm not going to do this anymore. But if you keep on with it, you know, you look down one day and, oh, my God, the bucket's half full.

And then one day your foot is wet. So it's just that it's not a have to, it's something that begins to happen when you really see there's a difference between this story about life and actual life. And the strange thing is, we really want this, Strange thing is, we really want this, but we're also terrified of it. Because the last time we were fully open, we got scared. So we need to be so kind with ourselves. And we need to, as you are so beautifully saying, go slowly. And we also need to realize that most people at this time on the planet still go to their deathbed identified with this condition self.

And a lot of people in power are totally identified with it. But there's more and more people. I'm working with it. But there's more and more people. I'm working with engineers and I'm working with, it just, you know, it's really exciting to see how I'm working with people at Amazon and at Microsoft. You know, this is beginning to come into, seep into the cracks in so many places. And I think people want to make a difference in the world. And they don't realize that one of the most powerful ways they can help the healing of our planet is to heal the war inside of them. So we're nearing the end of our time. I want to visit one area of the book that I found challenging for me, like that, that sort of, I went, I don't know about that. And so I'm really curious about it,

because it's an area that that I often, well, that just raises interesting questions for me. And you talk about the fact that there is an underlying intelligence under everything, which actually, the way you describe describe it made so much sense. Like, oh, of course there is. Like, because I'm this creature and, you know, how did I go from a single-celled thing into this creature? How did I, how does my heart beat? How does my digestion, that there's this,

that there is this intelligence driving everything and that there's this underlying beauty. And you talk about life being for us. And I'm good with the intelligent piece up until there's almost like a conscious design for me that's out there. Like I believe, like what you say, that what's in the way is the way. I absolutely believe it is those things. It is the barriers and the challenges and the things of our life that are the grist for the mill. But I'm curious about, I guess I'm just curious what you think about when I'm saying that I have that challenge with there being sort of a, like that, for example, that my girlfriend

breaks up with me because that's a way for me to, um, experience challenge in life. That seems, I don't know, I wrestle with that. So I'm just kind of curious. I'm not even sure that's what you were saying, but I just thought I think it is very helpful to have a set of beliefs, understanding that we can never really know if they're true, but a set of beliefs that engage you more with life rather than cause you to struggle with life. If we don't know, we should choose stories that give us power versus stories that take our power away. Exactly. And that my experience is, is the more that I've come out of the clouds and the more I see this spectacular thing. I mean, I'm looking out this window to this magnolia tree that I'm looking right over

the top of it and it's all these bare twigs, and it's just filled with these purple and pink flowers. I mean, and all of that was made out of stardust. Right. And what is it that took stardust and created the DNA molecule? I don't know what it is. I mean, I think we've given it the name God and we've created all sorts of religion around it, which is really mostly the human ego. But when I quiet down, I see there is an intelligence here. here. And when I begin to realize that this came all in one fell swoop when I was writing the book, that life is set up to bring up what has been bound up, so it can open up to be freed up,

so we can show up for life. And when I began to get out of that idea that this is happening because I did something wrong or they did something wrong or God, whatever God is, fell asleep on the job, all of a sudden I was not the victim anymore. Now I am being fascinated and it just really amazes me sometimes to watch how, with myself and with people that I work with, when you begin to realize how much this dance is for you. Now, truth is always paradoxical. You know, so, you know, is there a divine, you know, thing underneath it that has everything, you know, set, you know, in stone? And, well, no, there's free will and, you know, set, you know, in stone and well, no, there's free will and, you know, and all this. Well, it's kind of like a combination of both of them.

And what it is, is you begin to be fascinated by what is showing up. And, you know, whether it's my mind deciding, you know, oh, it's more peaceful if it sees this or, you know, whatever. peaceful if it sees this or, you know, whatever. When I begin to notice what any particular situation brings up inside of me, and I begin to do what I call in the book, the U-turn, the Y-O-U-turn, and you begin to notice what is going on, you begin to put the pieces of the puzzle together. And the best way I can describe it is I describe it sometimes like we're in the wind tunnel. Great analogy, yes. A 10,000-piece picture puzzle.

And every once in a while in the wind tunnel, you could just get it right. And you're just, oh, man, God, this flying is wonderful. Then we're slammed against the wall or our clothes are ripped off and a puzzle goes into our eye and all that. And what we're doing in this work is we're stepping out and we're becoming curious. And that's the place where life is for you. And you just take a piece out and when you look at it, you're not the victim to it anymore. And then you put it down on the table and more and more that puzzle begins to fill out. And you see by these situations that life is putting you in that help you to bring up what has been bound up. You can see it.

You see through it. And you're not hooked anymore. And you're not a victim to anything. You're now more and more fully engaged. And I'm like you. I get hooked. And Andrea shared it so beautifully on the video. She said, we've done all this practice, and it was challenging at times.

But she said, we had this ability to come back to the heart, which is our main brain. Back to this, which is, this brain is dualistic. It likes this, it doesn't like that, it thinks this is good, that is bad, this is right, that is wrong. Look at history. This brain is engaged. It is sensitive to what is. It is inclusive rather than exclusive. And as far as I can see, it's the only way to live.

And by this brain, you meant your heart. Heart brain, yes. And it is a brain. We found that out now. It's a brain. Yeah, there's a lot of great stuff in your book about that topic, too. It really is a wonderful, wonderful book. I really enjoyed it. I love what you just had to

say there. I mean, for me, I'm a member of 12-step programs, right, where there's an idea of you turn your life over to the care of God. And I'm like, well, I don't know what that is. And what I finally recognized for me was it didn't really matter. It was the letting go of it, you know, taking it out of my clutched bad hands that I'm not sure what the mechanism is. Yeah. But everything works better when I do that. Right? It's like, you know, that seems to be the evidence that I can see is like me letting go works.

Yeah. And so you just imagine, you know, you're at your family, you know, for Easter or whatever. You're at your family for Easter or whatever, and Uncle Bobby is having an argument with Aunt Josephine or something like that, and somebody else is doing something else, and you can just feel yourself tightening. And then you go, no, wait. Life is for me. There's something here for me to see. All of a sudden, it's not happening to you. All of a sudden, you are engaged with it. And my experience is every single experience has something to show you, not only about this

conditioned self, but also about how it is safe to open and engage with life. And then life becomes an adventure. And that's what we long for. When know, when we buy the fancy car or have the liposuction or whatever, what we really, really long for is to be here for life. Couldn't agree more. Well, Mary, thank you so much. This has been a very fun conversation. Like I said, I really enjoyed the book. I got an email today from your publisher who said, really, I mean,

I rarely see gushing like that over a book. And so it was very, it's a special one. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's my joy. you can learn more about Mary O'Malley and this podcast at one you feed.net slash Mary