The One You Feed - Mary O'Malley on How to Fall in Love with You

Episode Date: July 22, 2022

Mary O’Malley is the author of many books and a speaker and has studied with Patricia Sun, Steven Levine, Jack Kornfield, Pema Chodron, Adyashanti, and more!  Since the early 1980’s she has been writing books, speaking to groups, leading retreats, and working with people all over the world.   In this episode, Eric and Mary O’Malley discuss how to bring awareness and attention to our heart and learn to fall in love with ourselves. But wait, there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue tathe conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you! Mary O’Malley and I Discuss How to Fall in Love with You and … Learning to embrace the difficult makes it lose its power Noticing what is here brings awareness and openness Our minds are a tool for maneuvering reality, but are not reality How our challenges will be our teachers if we let them Understanding that our heart is connected to everything and is the doorway to freedom Her course, “Falling in Love With You” How your home is your heart The pathways back to YOU What you try to control, controls you One of our core addictions is fixing ourselves The difference between meeting and feeling our feelings How attention heals The importance finding curiosity in your immediate experience Mary O’Malley links: Mary’s Website Twitter Facebook By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! If you enjoyed this conversation with Mary O’Malley, check out these other episodes: Mary O’Malley (2016 Interview) Byron Katie on The WorkSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We have been trained to try to fight the dark, and we don't know how to pay attention to it. We don't know it's for us. We don't know that it always comes bearing gifts. 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 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. 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 reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. On this episode, we have a return guest, Mary O'Malley. She's the author of many books and a speaker and has studied with Patricia Sun, Stephen Levine, Jack Kornfield, Pema Chodron, Adi Ashanti, and more. Since the early 1980s, she has been writing books, speaking to groups, leading retreats, and working with people all over the world.

Hi, Mary. Welcome to the show. I'm so glad to be here. I am so happy to have you back on. I was looking, and it has been six years since we talked. Oh, my goodness. And yet, your book, What's in the the Way is the Way, and our conversation has stuck with me as much as any other I've had over the time. I was telling you beforehand about one idea of yours that has really stuck with me that we'll get to in a minute. But let's start like we always do with the parable.

In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, 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 grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent 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's a very well-known parable. It points to a very important skill on our journey, but it only works to a point.

I can remember the moment when I realized that every single atom, every single atom that makes up every single thing has a positive and negative charge. And in my own journey, I have discovered that there came a point where rather than turning away from the negative wolf, you know, and not giving it any power. It didn't fully heal. But it's when I turned towards it, when I befriended it, you know, that famous, you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar, you know, and I am now dealing with cancer, a kind of cancer that I'll have the rest of my life. And I have to take chemo every day, which my body doesn't like. So I'm right at that edge where it really feeds the negative a lot. My mind doesn't like this. My body doesn't like this. And it has taught me that the ability to bring space around the difficult, to actually

bow to the difficult, to say, you are welcome here, then that is when it loses its power over me. So yes, to a point, very important, but there is a point beyond which we need to become that place that includes both the easy and the difficult, the joyous and the sorrowful. Well, I am sorry to hear about your cancer diagnosis. Yeah. I call it my benevolent teacher, my fierce but benevolent teacher. And most of the time, I am opening to what it is bringing me. It has brought me so many gifts. I think that we crawled into our minds when we were very young, and we became human doings rather than human beings.

And we think our way through our lives. That's why I love that Alan Watts, the famous Zen philosopher, his quote so much, no matter how many times that you say the word water, it will never be wet. And so, I think to loosen our grip on our mind's control, its addiction to try to control life, it's very helpful to come across a really big challenge because it highlights that urge to contract and resist, but it also highlights the power of softening, opening, and showing up for it. Most of the time, not all the time, but most of the time, I am very grateful for this. If it's okay, I'd like to talk a little bit more about that. Is that okay?

And the reason I want to talk about it is that you're a beautiful writer. And you've got lots of great things in your books. And we talk about lots of things on this podcast. But it's very easy for listeners to sort of go, well, yeah, you know, like that's easy when things are going well. And that's true. And so I love when we can talk to someone when they're actually sort of really in the really difficult moments of life. And so I'd

love to start with asking you, you said most of the time you're grateful for it, some of the time you're not. So I'm assuming you're a human like the rest of us. Exactly. And you have your moments where you're like, I don't want this. I don't like this. This hurts. It sucks. Go away. Yes. Yes. Especially in the middle of the night when I'm woken up again, you know, but it happens so much contraction, opening, contraction, opening that when the contraction comes in, in a way the contractions are coming even more deeply, but I'm really realizing these are the core contractions I took on that cut me off from my essence, cut me off from who I truly am, cut me off from the joy of being alive, cut me off from the ability to enter the great river of creation and be it rather than do it. Especially in the middle of the night when it comes, when I'm woken up again and I just wake up into just really not feeling

well and my body's in pain and so on and so forth, that reaction is so strong that it wakes me up. And one of the questions that I ask, it just comes, without changing anything, notice what is here. And that takes me directly into pure awareness. Now I am that which can see what is going on rather than being identified with it. And the more I do this, the more my heart just opens to how much my mind learned how to struggle, how much I absorb the collective belief that life is, I'm separate from life, which is so untrue, that life is not safe, that I must control it. And believing that I've never really quite controlled it right enough. It's so painful to be back in that world, which I call the secondary world. But that ability to come so strongly, then awareness kicks in.

Usually I have to ask without changing anything because we're addicted to struggle. We're trained to follow struggle wherever it goes. And when I ask that question, all of a sudden I step back. I am the awareness that can see what is going on. And the more I do it, the more my heart opens. And that is what this poor little separate struggling mind that we've all taken on that has created so much heartache on this planet. I mean, all you have to do is look at history or the evening news to see where that brings us. But our minds are this wonderful tool we've been given for maneuvering through reality, but they're not reality. And how you connect with reality is through your heart. Science now has shown it's

a brain. Our heart is our brain. Science has now shown what Ayurvedic medicine has known, you know, down through thousands of years, that it is the emperor. It is our main brain. And cancer has deepened that pathway back home to my heart. It's deepened the reactions so I can see them. But it used to be a very faint deer trail from my mind to my heart. But now it's an eight-lane freeway. And sometimes it's shut down because the ice and snow of my struggling mind, you know, no, can't drive on this freeway. But slowly and surely, that freeway becomes more and more available. When I talked to you six years ago, I remember one thing that you said, and you just referenced it in what you were saying a minute ago. And it had to do with saying that life is safe. And I struggled slash struggle

with that idea. And when someone say to me, life is safe, I would point out exactly what's happening to you as an example of life not being safe. So talk to me about how those two things reconcile with each other. So there was a time when there was not a thought in our head, not a thought. We were very tiny and slowly and surely, Ram Dass calls it somebody training. I love that. We all took on this somebody training. And if you watch it, this conditioned mind that talks in our head all day long, you'll see it's dualistic in nature. It likes this. It doesn't like that.

It thinks this is good. This is bad. This is right. This is wrong. And we can literally spend our lives going back and forth. Oh, I get it. I lost it. Oh, my God, I lost it.

No, I'm not going to try to get it again. You know, Stephen Levine tells a story about a woman who was 93 and she was on her deathbed. And she said, it can't end now because it hasn't started yet. When you begin to step back and begin to watch, and that's a huge part of everything I offer, my books, my courses, you know, all this. When you be able to strengthen the muscle of your awareness, so you can begin to watch this conversation that happens in your head all day long, you realize how dualistic it is. And something came to me, there was this great quote, It is.

And something came to me. There was this great quote, Lynn Andrews, who wrote all those books about, you know, Agnes Whistling Elk, the Manitoba Indian medicine woman. She went to study with, they were very famous in the 80s. And I won't remember the quote exactly right, but she says something like this. Everything begins with a circle of motion. Without the positive and negative poles, there would be no movement. There would be no creation. Without your dark side, your beauty would not exist.

And then I had the very wonderful grace to spend many, many years hanging out with Stephen Levine, who wrote many books on death and dying. He had the Hanuman project for a number of years where you could call his house 24 hours a day. If you were dying, a loved one was dying, your child was kidnapped and raped, and he would be there for you. And so he has walked with tens of thousands of people through this dying process. And he was the one that really showed me the beauty of the dark, that the dark is fertile. In fact, in my first book, there's a whole chapter, chapter 8, called The Fertility of the Dark. And so we have been trained to try to fight the dark, and we don't know how to pay attention to it. We don't know it's for us.

We don't know that it always comes bearing gifts. I wrote a parable. I seem to like writing parables. I'm in the middle of writing a new one about a journey through the valley of forgetfulness into the mountain of being. But years ago, I wrote a parable about somebody hearing about these treasures. They were high up in the mountain, and they had to go and do training and climbing classes and go to REI to get all their back. And they go up and they find it in the cave. They find it.

There's diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. And they fill their backpack with it and they bring it down. And for the next 20 years, they just feel more and more empty. And then they hear a voice that says, the treasure is still up in the cave. And then they eventually get up in the cave and they find there's nothing there except this old rusty thing. And when she picks it up, she realizes it's a key. And it's the key to showing up for life, which is what we long for more than anything. which is what we long for more than anything. We say we long for a maid or more money or liposuction or whatever, but what we long for is a pure connection with life exactly as it is.

And our challenges will be our teachers if we learn how to listen. We don't have to like it. We don't have to like it. I like to say it's trustable, always likable. We don't have to like it. Makes me think of one of the four Bodhisattva vows in Zen, which translated different ways. But, you know, one way of saying it is, Dharma gates are countless. You know, I vowed awake to them all.

Everything treated in the right way yeah is a dharmagate everything as you were talking you were talking about the contraction yes right and i realized as you were saying that i was thinking you know there's the big contraction which is you're dealing with one of the bigger things you can contract around right and then there's the thousands of teensy little ones, this constant that makes me now, as I'm saying it, I got the Bodhisattva vows on my mind, but greed and hatred and delusion rise endlessly. You know, the greed is I want this. The aversion is I don't want that. Don't want this. Exactly. And the delusion is how confused we are about, this is my interpretation, how confused we are about what that grasping and

pushing away does to us. And that's what you're saying. It's that grasping and pushing away, which cuts us off from life. And thus, the further we are cut off from life, the more we feel like we need to grasp. Exactly. And if we begin to pay attention, And if we begin to pay attention, the more it wakes us up, that it is all for us. I wrote this when I first started awakening decades ago, and it's taken me all these decades to really live into it. And I calligraphied it, and it's still behind my toilet, very profound place to have it in my bathroom. My toilet, very profound place to have it in my bathroom.

Know and silently respect the perfection of everyone and everything in every situation, especially when it's not at all apparent. There is an intelligence. I was saying to a friend the other day that was struggling with life and is beginning to open to life which is opening to trusting the flow which includes the dark and the light and he said but it's not trustable you know I said, well, I said, just try this on for size. Whatever that is that breathes you, that keeps the planet spinning as they do, that heals the cuts on your skin, took stardust and created the DNA molecule. I mean, it's just mind-boggling when you recognize it. And then I said, you arose out of mystery, and you were once one cell, and it developed into 70 trillion cells.

I mean, what is it that knows how to do that? And they all work together without a thought from you. how to do that. And they all work together without a thought from you. Silently respect. Our poor minds will never, ever agree with that. Our minds are dualistic. No, that's not true, because all of this bad stuff is happening. But to begin to shift your relationship with the so-called bad, with the so-called negative. It's like Agnes Whistling Elk said, without your dark side, your beauty would not exist. Honor all as a part of the great spirit. It does take a while to learn how to begin to notice this addiction to struggle, to begin to step back, to begin to watch it, to begin to allow your heart to open. And then you come more here and it is so evident there is something far more intelligent than you in charge. And then you let go all the more. Right. And I think the only way for me to get to life is trustable or to relating to that innate

intelligence is I have to be willing to let go of my beliefs about what's good and bad, what's right and wrong, what I want, what I don't want. From a very personal perspective, my small mind, life is not trustable. Life is not safe. Right. Life is not trustable. Life is not safe. Life is not. From that perspective, it's in these moments of deeper connection. Yes. Right. These moments of really not just intellectually knowing we're interdependent, but feeling it, seeing it, recognizing it. Yes. Yes. Like, I'm not separate from all this. Yeah. Then, all of a sudden, that makes sense. It's like, oh, I get it, you know? And when we talked six years ago, I don't think I'd had enough of that happening to me. Intellectually, I went, well, okay, I guess maybe what she's saying. But I hadn't had those experiences where I went, oh, as you say, I am life.

Yes, yes, yes. And everything is a we. Yes. We have gotten caught in a me. And, you know, life is evolution. It's a constant evolving, just like once two feet tall, you know, and you have evolved into who you are today. And in every single shift in evolution, as the old way is dying and the new is being born, there's always been chaos. That's the chaos of birth. And we are living in that time. We are moving from a me-oriented consciousness, and you can see it in the response to COVID, you know, the people that are me, me, me, me, and the other people that are we, we, we, we, we, I am here for the good of the whole. There's one thing I would shift just a tiny bit in what you said. It isn't so much that you let go of these old beliefs that come from the

me kind of consciousness. It's that under the light of your accepting attention, they let go. When I got that, it just made everything so much easier because there's nothing really I have to do except follow this call to pay attention, follow this call to ground every morning. At the end of every single meditation, I bow and say, let me open to whatever you bring me today. Let me listen. When we try to fix it, even to get it to let go, it brings up a resistance in that. That's how it's built. You know, just like if you touch a sea anemone, you know, it goes, you know, but the heart, it's the heart that when you meet whatever darkness you are experiencing, whatever struggle, even those death by a million cuts, those tiny

struggles all day long, they are here to wake us up. And over and over again, we learn how to soften our belly, allow a deeper breath, open our hearts, and show up. 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. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan 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. There's a line that you have that I think sums up a lot of your work. I guess it's two lines and two handy sentences. You say, lasting healing comes from being curious rather than controlling, from mercy rather than manipulation, from responding rather than reacting. It is about opening what has been closed, reclaiming what has been hidden, and remembering what has been forgotten. God, whoever wrote that, that was really good. And it's a journey. It is a journey. The mind is used to quick fixes, and when you really kind of

settle into the journey and know you're right where you need to be on the journey. Byron Katie, well-known teacher, has a quote, life is simple. It doesn't happen to you. It happens for you. And everything happens in the right time and in the right way, neither too soon nor too late. You don't have to like this, but it's easier if you do. Now, I disagree with that last one because I do not have to like that I have cancer. So I say it's easier if you trust it. You don't have to trust it, but it's easier if you do. But again, it's not our minds that can trust. to bring it awareness, to bring it mercy. And slowly and surely this amazing, amazing brain called our heart, the armoring begins to fall around it because you're not ashamed or afraid

of anything in that struggling mind anymore. And then the heart begins to speak and you realize the heart is connected to everything. And it includes rather than excludes. That's where the doorway to freedom lies, as far as I can see. So you've got a new course called Falling in Love with You. Do I have that right? Yes, right. You say that the person we most deeply long to receive love from is ourselves. Say a little more about that. Well, there's that great quote from Buddha. And again, I won't maybe

get all the words right. You can search the world over and you will find no being more deserving of love than you. So this whole process, I mean, I would say, you know, I took on a hell of a lot of trauma when I was young. And I went as far away as you could and still survive. In my 20s, I tried to kill myself three times. I was not even worthy of existing, you know. And then life began to bring me back. And it is a journey from our minds to our hearts. Who would have said the longest 18 inches in the world is from our minds to our hearts. And so, slowly and surely, the arm ring of my heart began to fall away. And it wasn't, you know, like, it would go, you know, the mind would take, and then the heart would soften again, And I surely learned how to trust the heart.

So a couple of years ago, I gathered quotes from my own work and from other people all over the world. And I created a little book. And it's just, oh, it's such a nifty little book. And it's a Neil Donald Walsh does the introduction. And it's a Neil Donald Walsh does the introduction. And it's just a series of quotes that lead you from, you start with this premise that falling in love with you is the most essential thing you can do if you want to heal the planet, if you want to heal your family, if you want to heal yourself, fall in love with you.

And then it has quotes that shows how we got our hearts so closed. And then it shows quotes about what is the journey back. And people were so touched by that. I spent the last year creating a course. And so we're just finishing it. We'll be doing it in the fall again, where it's an eight-week course and you get something every week. So that little book is fleshed out. And you really see that your home is your heart. And you really see that there's absolutely nothing inside of you to be ashamed of or afraid of. You've always been doing the best that you knew how with the condition you have been given. doing the best that you knew how with the condition you have been given. And slowly and surely you move beyond those ideas of falling in love with you is selfish or falling in love will

make you a namby-pamby, you know. Falling in love with you, being kind to you is giving yourself permission to, you know, be unskillful in the world. None of those are true. And slowly and surely, we make it through all of those and then cultivate how to be curious, how to do what we were talking about earlier, about how to step back and really see the mind for what it is and how to help open your heart. And then the last week, every week, I say, well, this is my favorite week. But it's about that you are being given the gift of opening your heart again for the world. It's not just for your own healing for the world, it's for the world. And I talk about how that makes such a difference. Because when you move from your heart mind rather than

your head mind, you interchange with the world in a much different way. And you know the importance of being present for the grocery store clerk who's being snide, you know, and you have met that enough inside of you to say, oh, just like me, and your heart opens to them, and she can't hold on to that. She can't. You just have that presence of meeting her exactly the way she is. That is what's going to heal our world, one interchange at a time, and it starts with falling in love with you. I mean, everybody says, oh, you'll be kind, be kind. And we leave ourselves out of the equation. And yet that's where true kindness comes from, is with ourselves. So let's assume that people buy into that idea. And I would suspect we've talked about self compassion on the show often enough that listeners of this show, if they've listened to it for a

while, are bought into this idea. And let's assume that we've done a little bit of work and we kind of know why our hearts are closed, right? We know a little bit about what we went through when we were younger, and yet it still feels hard to do. What are a couple of the pathways back to our own heart, to falling in love with ourselves? To realize that everybody in your life is gone in drag. Especially the people that drive you crazy. They are specifically there to highlight the parts of you that are closed to you. And so you begin to, rather than immediately reacting to somebody, you know, maybe it's your mother-in-law, maybe it's your brother, maybe it's your 16-year-old son, rather than

getting caught in reaction, you catch your reaction. And you maybe need to leave the room for a moment or something like that. But you learn more how to respond. So that's what comes to mind first, but really it is as simple as giving yourself the gift of a few minutes every day that you breathe in and out through your heart. This is an energy center in the middle of our chest. And when you bring your attention there and you breathe in and out through your heart, it's literally like there's a small little glowing ball in the center of your chest.

And as you breathe in and out, it begins to grow, it begins to amplify, and you begin to be able to feel when your heart is open. There is a difference in energy, especially in your chest. It goes all over your body, but you can notice the most in your chest. So you begin to be compelled to, I mean, every week in the course, there are, you know, seven or eight invitations to bring the week's lesson into your life. And I say to people, choose at least one. And one of those core ones are breathing in and out through your heart or placing your hand over your heart. You know, you're watching TV and your favorite character gets hurt, you know, and you can just feel everything inside

of you contracting. And then you just bring your hand over your heart and you breathe in and out through your heart. And then maybe you come up with a little mantra, the mantra that your mind most needs, like everything is okay. We're okay. It's safe to be here. Something along that line. You say that our core addiction is to struggle and that all of the other addictions are an attempt to numb out from the heartache and stress that come hand in hand with struggle. So you're basically saying if we've got other addictions or you've got a book called compulsions, we've got these compulsions, they are an attempt to deal with the strain and the exhaustion and the heartache of our core addiction, which is that we're trying to struggle. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's full of fear, doubt, confusion, shame, rage, helplessness, despair. But those are all the energy constructs of the separate self. And this is why when I self-published my

book, The Gift of Our Compulsions, its title was Healing and Being Healed by Our Compulsions. I mean, where have you ever heard that? But yet in the heartache that I took on, that I learned how to overeat, and then I went away to college and I learned how to drink, and then I learned how to take street drugs. And all of that was an attempt to manage this. For me, the kind of fear I experienced was dread, that horrible feeling of something really bad is going to happen. It's going to happen because I did something wrong. And when all that didn't work, I tried to kill myself three times. It kept somewhat of a lid on the pain that we all carry. All of us carry this pain of being separate from life and the pain that has come from trying to do life rather than be life.

But that was not my destiny to stay caught in that world. Life began to show me step by step out of it. And that's when the compulsions fell away. Because, I mean, when I was trying to control the eater, which was my main compulsion, I got this, right? What you try to control, controls you. And that next year, I gained 97 pounds in a year because I was trying to contain it. And there is a real dramatic shift in working with compulsions when you realize that they are a finely crafted survival system that is created inside of you in order to manage all of your pain. And now, if you listen, they will become your guide out of that world of struggle. Because when you're compulsive, that's when the pain that is the deepest is close to the surface,

and it so needs your attention. Do we start right there? No. You need to strengthen the muscle of your attention to be able to stand with what you have run away from your whole life. And that's been my journey, really, slowly and surely, learning how to strengthen the muscle of my attention. I get caught caught and then I ask, oh, okay, what's going on here right now? And then as my mind would quiet, my heart would open and slowly and surely the urge to overeat went away. It's come back a little now that I'm dealing with cancer. I'm also a COVID long hauler from the vaccine. And so I'm dealing with a lot right now. And I have these little moments where I always keep a chocolate bar in my house. And, you know,

for decades, you know, I have a piece or two. And I have these moments where I want to inhale the whole bar and I start, but then I become aware. And most of the time now, not in the beginning, but most of the time now, that doesn't last very long. It's not like I try to stop it. It just starts becoming uninteresting. The more interested I become in, oh, what is the compulsion trying to take care of? And then if I can, if I have time, I can go sit with it and meet what the compulsion is

trying to take care of. And years ago, before Eckhart Tolle was well known at all, I interviewed him. And there's this wonderful quote that came out of the interview. And I won't, it's a long quote, I won't remember it all. But the beginning of it is, to welcome what is, is the ultimate spiritual practice. If you learn this, you will not need to read any more books or go to any other teachers. And that's taken a long time to learn that. I get it. And then I go into the resistance. But it's like, if you've ever watched a child being born, you know, the head goes, and then the head goes back

in, or the head goes out, the head goes back in. And it just reminds me of Rumi's poem, The Guest House. And, you know, Rumi is probably the most well-known poet in the world. And The Guest House is his most well poem. Well, people only know the first half of it. And the second half of it is Rumi at his most obtuse, except for one line, learn the alchemy that true human beings know. As soon as you accept the difficulties you've been given, a door, no, the door opens. And I said a door for many years until I went back and read it. The door, the door out of struggle. Our challenges are tailor-made for us.

And more and more of us are learning how to be conscious human beings by learning how to not fight the process and instead show up for it and we need to gather together that's why i have groups we need to support one another because the collective mind you can see it on the evening news it's going through its death throes of this dualistic mind that i'm better than you because the color of my skin or my religion or my sexual preference, or I'm going to stop you from voting because I want to have all the power. Oh my God, that's so crazy. If you look at it from the mind, but if you look at it from the heart, you see that we're being woken up out of the world of struggle and back into an intimate, alive, trust-filled connection with life. Eckhart has

another quote, life will give you the exact set of experiences you need in order to become a conscious human being. How do we know they're the right set? Because you're having them. I think that's just brilliant. Thank you, Eckhart Tolle. 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. And you never know who's going to drop 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. I love that you referenced that that desire to overeat is coming back as you struggle because again it sort of humanizes this process that isn't human. The other thing that I was struck

by going back through some of your work is I looked at the gift of our compulsions in particular was, it wasn't like you went, oh, I am overeating because of the pain that I had as a child. And if I just become curious about what this is asking for me, I won't ever overeat again. Exactly. It was not like that, right? It was a long process of becoming incrementally more conscious. And as you became more conscious and you healed more and more, it began to fall away. And I think that's a really important piece of this whole puzzle is particularly in the quick fix world we live in, there's a real tendency to be like, well, I was feeling like overeating last night

and I remembered what Mary said and I thought about why is it that I want to overeat and I realize I am feeling kind of sad and now, okay, I recognize I'm feeling sad. And then I go eat. It must not work, right? Exactly. It's a very incremental process of awareness growing and growing and growing and growing and growing. And a heart opening. Yeah. When I self-published The Gift of Our Compulsions, I put the tortoise and the hare in there three

times. The story, you know, and I think they took it out except for once. Hopefully they left it in. I can't remember. But it's the tortoise that plods along. It's the hair that runs around that wants to fix anything. One of our core addictions is to fixing. And it comes from the seed thought that I am not okay as I am.

And that just sucks us into the world of struggle. Yeah. And the tortoise just plods along and that's okay. That's okay. I'm right where I need to be. I love that three times. There's something you talk about in that book that I would love to unpack a little bit. And you said, you're describing working with feelings. And you say, what I was doing with these feelings was probably different than anything I had tried before. I wasn't so much feeling these feelings as I was meeting them. Yes. Talk to me about the difference between those two things.

For most people, feeling is being identified with them. So let's say a wave of anger comes, you know, and you say, I am angry, and now I must do something about this. I give into it, I stuff it, whatever. That's an endless game. Feelings will keep on coming and going the rest of our lives. But meeting is the ability to relate to them rather than from them. The easiest way to do that at the beginning is in your body. Every single feeling you've ever had has a commensurate energy pattern in your body. And the energy pattern of grief is different than the energy pattern of anger, which is different than the energy pattern of shame. And it is so

magical when you begin to strengthen the muscle of your attention enough that you can begin to wake up. You're ready to stomp into work and tell your co-worker off and give your resignation and so on and so forth. And then all of a sudden you can't oh wait okay who's here and you could eventually get to the place where you actually can dialogue and have a healing conversation with let's say it's anger but at the beginning this is oceanic for most people fear can come oh my god in tsunami waves, anger can come, rage can come, despair can come. But when you find the patterns in your body and you just bring your attention and you feel that rage is this hot ball of fire in your stomach area, and for a moment, you actually bring your attention there. The attention heals, and I'll get back to that in a moment, you actually bring your attention there.

See, attention heals. And I'll get back to that in a moment. But that's a really important point to get. Attention heals. And just like if you're having a bad day and you go to a friend and that friend, oh, my God, I've heard this so many times, you know, well, get off of it or all poor you. many times, you know, well, get off of it or all poor you. But if that friend just listens to you and you can feel the intensity of their listening, that energy won't be able to hold on inside of you. You'll express it and it will move through. We can learn how to do that with ourselves.

And so you bring it to that hot ball of fire. And at the beginning, you just notice how big it is or does it move around or is it on the surface or that's bringing your attention and your immediate experience together. We're talking about feelings, but really it's energy trapped. And that attention, if you can really learn how to pay attention without trying to make something happen, and that takes a while to learn, then that energy will let go. And then you may walk into work, and you may still need to say something, but it comes from such a different place. It doesn't come from reaction. It comes from response. Well, my experience is, having had the kind of childhood I did, there was all sorts of stuff stuffed inside of me. And I used to think of them as monsters. I just, you know, 97 pounds in a year, that's a lot of weight gain. But I began to realize they're

just children in monster costumes. It's just frozen energy that wants to be set free. And as I learn how to bring my attention to it, and slowly, I don't need to ask how big it is or whatever. I'm really there with it. And slowly and surely, you can feel anger's world, and it gets acknowledged. I see you. I understand why you're feeling this way. And that energy can't hold on. It just moves right on through you. That's the alchemy of attention. Attention heals.

I like that. Yeah. As we talk about compulsions, you talk about an idea of managing our compulsions, which is similar to controlling, right? Right. of managing our compulsions, which is similar to controlling, right? And yet, particularly if we're dealing with destructive addictions, we don't want to just be like, well, just whatever happens, happens. So you talk about moving from management to engagement. Can you share a little bit about what that means? Okay. This is management. That hand, my left hand, my right hand is engagement. management, that hand, my left hand, my right hand is engagement. Okay. This is what it was like when we were young. Engagement hand is way up in the air. You can't even see the management hand, right? Happened when we grew up. Slowly and surely the engagement hand comes down.

We more start thinking our way through our lives and the management hand comes up. And that's where most people live from, trying to manage their experience, trying to control their experience, trying to get to what they want and get rid of what they don't want. And that just brings suffering. And all the while we're longing for engagement. We're longing to come back to life again. This work isn't about knocking management. It isn't trying to manage management. It's just adding engagement. And you will find that management slowly comes back down again. Never goes away because as adults, we need management. goes away because as adults we need management but it's engagement that heals whether it's engaging in this moment and your heart just blooms with the joy of being alive or whether it's engagement with your compulsions the u.s surgeon general 97 percent of every pound that is lost in the U.S. is gained back, plus some within a year and a half.

97% of it. And that is because what we try to manage, manages us. What we try to control, controls us. So oftentimes I'll work with somebody that they'll be in 12-step programs, or they'll be in Narconon, or they'll be in 12-step programs, or they'll be in Narconon, or they'll be, you know, in OA or AA. And I absolutely honor that. But more and more, that becomes less supportive of what the true healing you want as you begin to learn engagement, you know. And you still may go back there because the community is so wonderful.

engagement, you know, and you still may go back there because the community is so wonderful, but you're no longer seeing yourself as wrong and need to be fixed because you are an addict of whatever you are addicted to. I don't want to overly manage this interview, but occasionally when you're hitting the table, that's coming through very loud in the microphone. Okay, sorry. It's a dog on it. You're getting excited. I like it. I like it.

I know. All right. Yeah, you say that letting go of controlling compulsions is not the same as giving yourself permission to be compulsive. Exactly. I got sober the first time in 1994 in Columbus, Ohio, and in a 12-step program. 1994 in Columbus, Ohio, and in a 12-step program. And there was not a lot of recognition that my addiction was an attempt to cover over these certain things. But I think that the addiction treatment world is becoming more inclusive, more aware, more awake, which is a good thing.

It is. A very dear friend of mine has a whole new system, mindfulness alternatives, friend of mine has a whole new system, mindfulness alternatives, about how to bring what we're talking about into any works with addicts. And he's just getting really wonderful results. Because as we said earlier, what you resist persists. Yeah. And yet what you engage with, it loses its power over you. Yeah. And that's come the world of struggle, this addiction to struggle that we have been trained in, that itself is actually right in line with this. It's just the way some of the people engage with it. You talk a lot about curiosity being sort of a superpower. Talk to me about why curiosity is so important to all of this work. The kind of curiosity I'm talking about is not what most people think of as curiosity. Oh, I wonder what that is. It's curiosity in's curiosity in the head, you know, and that has its place. But this is the kind of curiosity

where your attention is here with your immediate experience, where you begin to become fascinated with what is rather than being caught or reacting or trying to get away from what is. And I think, I mean, you look at children, oh my God, you know, they're a bundle of curiosity. And we can know that absolute joy of being alive again. We can feel at one with that. That's when our curiosity has been engaged, when we learn, use it to see what has caused us to shut down so that it can let go and we can open again and know it is okay to be here, that this river of life is for you. And then it all becomes fascinating. A friend of mine ended a conversation the other day, said, okay, I got to go into the daily grind. And I said, wow, that's just such a hard way to live.

is such a hard way to live. I said, what about unfolding into the great adventure of your day, knowing that life will bring you exactly what you need? And he said, you just changed my day. And then he started laughing. And he said, I think you changed my life. And that's curiosity, is that fascination with this highly intelligent, very benevolent, although if you don't trust artists, they won't see it that way, process that is for us. Working with our thoughts and our emotions internally, it's a very slippery place in there. Things are hard to kind of get a hold of and you try and be aware and you get called all over. And so I find it's

often really helpful to have some fairly concrete approaches to this. And to that end, you have some questions that I think are really helpful frameworks for doing some of this. And so I thought maybe we'd start and we could talk through the four check-in questions. Right. And let's say this first, you know, it is so true. They say we have 65,000 thoughts a day. Good God. And I add that 90% of them are repeats from the day before. And we just tumble from one thought to another, to another. And we're happy when it's kind of calm and we're really upset. And so it can be very helpful to give yourself five minutes a day, five minutes a day. And if five minutes is too much, you give yourself two minutes a day where you choose

a focus in life. It could be your breath, could be the sensations in your body. It could be the music of life, the sounds around you. I had to start with the sounds because too intimate. I had moved so far away from my body and from being present for myself. And the first time I really started coming back to life was, it was like, oh, wow, there's light, all these sounds, there's the bird, there's the car, there's the dog, there's the heater turning on. And the key to that is knowing that most of the time in those five minutes, you're going to be gone. knowing that most of the time in those five minutes, you're going to be gone.

Your attention is going to be up in the stream of thought, because that's what we've been conditioned into. That's where the collective mind of humanity is right now. But to choose a focus and then bring your attention back to that focus, even if you only do that once in that whole time, that's time really well spent because you have strengthened the muscle of your attention. And more and more, you will see the difference between having your attention in your stream of thought and having your attention here in life. As you move throughout your day, it can be very helpful. The four questions is one of the ways that I've framed it. My first book is there's

two statements, what is right now? And this to my new statement I'm working with, with the cancer without changing anything, notice what is here. And so the four questions you're talking about is in the gift of our compulsions. The first one, in this moment, what am I experiencing? I mean, that is the same thing I'm trying to say with what is in this too. And I'm trying to remember, how did I say it? What's in the way? But I did a whole radio show on how this theme has been, all my books showed up this way, and the first one showed up the way, but I did a whole radio show on how this theme has been through all my books, showed them this way, and the first one showed them this way, you know, the four questions in The Gift of Our Compulsions. And just that question, in this moment, what am I experiencing?

But I found that some people got a little, okay, well, what am I experiencing? You know, people got a little, okay, well, what am I experiencing? So that's why I changed it to, in this moment, notice what is here. And that became more pointed. You can notice that you have heartburn. You can notice the rising and falling of your breath. You can notice the air back aches. It's just noticing something that is real, something in the living moment. Now, the more you move into this kind of way of working with life, you're going to come across the challenges when everything inside of you wants to go away. And so the second question is for this moment, can I allow this to be here? And that, if you really feel the heart of that, that unhooks you from this becoming,

doing mind. Oh, okay. It's the quote from Byron Katie we talked about earlier, Eckhart Tolle, that life is for us. For this moment, I can allow this to be here. If I was writing the four questions, I would actually add another one. For this moment, can I give it my full attention? You know, that's the key. Then that automatically brings you the third question. For this moment, can I bring this compassion? I can't remember exactly how I phrased it. But open your heart to it.

You begin to see how much you've been trained to struggle. Begin to see how much you've been trained to struggle. You begin to see how much fear there is inside of you, how much of a feeling of not being enough. I've worked with people for 37 years. Everybody has it. Stephen Levine has this wonderful quote. Let's see if I can remember it.

When you finally see how much fear there is inside of you, you will turn to it like a mother turns toward a frightened child. And that's that third question. Your heart begins to open to it. For a while, you'll just ask that question and nothing will happen, but just keep on asking that question. And then the last one is in this moment, what do I truly need? And that's listening. It's not asking our head. You're really listening. Maybe we need to go lay down. Maybe we need to, you know, talk to a friend. Maybe we need to go take a bath. Maybe we just need to sit there and breathe. You begin to listen from the inside out so that you move with life from the inside out rather than from the top. Yeah. Yeah. I love those four questions because I think they give us a way of working through interior experience, which is, as I said, the word I use is slippery

or it's confusing or it's very easy to get lost in. Yeah, it's very easy to get lost in. And I think having some structured approaches can be really helpful. Yeah. And you'll find the five minutes will automatically start going longer. You know, I meditate every day and I have no timing, but it just is, you know, it's probably 35, 45 minutes. It just, you know, it has a beginning, middle and end and no one is done, you know, because it's, it's the art of listening. That's what meditation is. It's not the art of trying to get to a better place. It's the art of listening to what is right now. And slowly and surely that will come to the forefront and struggle will go to the background. And then with cancer, it will come to the forefront again.

But then you learn. You learn from it. And I just have learned so deeply to bow to the living process I've given, to not fight with it, even though I have my moments. But they don't last very long. Like you, sound for me was the door opener for meditation. I had been meditating on again, off again for a long time. And I started meditating in a day and age when there was not an internet and all you had were books and there weren't teachers that you could easily get. I mean, at least I was living in Ohio and every book seemed to talk about breath practice.

So that's what I tried to do. But it just never clicked. And then I started doing sound and I was like, oh, now I see why people say this is enjoyable. You know, now I get why this is actually not torture. Yes, life is same. Hey, you in there, I'm here. Come be with me. I'm a dog barking.

I'm the wind in the trees. It helps me, especially as I maneuver throughout the day. If I'm very tired and I'm waiting, I'm going to lots of doctor's appointments, and I'm waiting in the waiting room. I just close my eyes and just listen to the sounds. And, you know, my heart opens, you know, just, you know, all these other people that are, you know, seeing the doctors for challenges and the nurses that are overwhelmed. And then I just feel so connected. And then I'm just so grateful if the doctor's really late because I get all this time to just really sink into being. Well, Mary, we are out of time for the main interview.

We're going to continue in the post-show conversation for a couple minutes, and you and I are going to talk about the five great teachers you talk about in What's in the Way is the Way. Listeners, if you'd like access to post-show conversations, ad-free episodes, and all kinds of other things, you can become part of our community by going to oneufeed.net slash join. Mary, thank you so much.

I hope it's not six years till we do this again. Me too, because this has been just enjoyable to dance with you and to bring this message to the world because I think humanity, we're really collectively waking up just like I am with the cancer and waking up even more. We are collectively waking up with all the challenges and I feel great possibility for humanity now. So thank you for letting me share this.

Thank you. That's a beautiful and hopeful message. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. 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 signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.