Chelan Harkin Transcript: Ecstatic Poetry, Hafez, and Mystical Inspiration

Chelan Harkin Interview

Summary

The discussion explores how commitment, healing, and openness helped Chelan Harkin’s poetry emerge with a sense of inspiration beyond deliberate effort. It also considers how people can move through pain and self-censorship to express their unique gifts more fully.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can I reconnect with my creativity and express myself more freely?
• Where can creative inspiration come from, and how can I work with it?
• How can hypnotherapy help with emotional healing and self-acceptance?
• Why can pursuing a deeply meaningful goal involve pain and change?

Key takeaways

• Taking a committed first step can create momentum and open up unexpected support.
• Creative work may flow more freely when perfectionism and the need for control loosen.
• Making space for emotional pain can help release old patterns and reveal a more authentic voice.
• Each person has a unique capacity for expression that can be stifled by fear and past experiences.
• Hypnotherapy helped her connect with an inner sense of wholeness, wisdom, and worthiness.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done over 600 of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the Past Interviews menu. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. If you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the website. There’s also a donation page that suggests alternatives to PayPal. My guest today is Chelan Harkin. Welcome, Chelan.

Chelan: Thanks, Rick.

Rick: Yeah, we had a Senator Tom Harkin in Iowa for years. Any relation?

Chelan: Not that I know of.

Rick: He was really nice. Anyway, I first heard about Chelan from Mary Reed, who was on BatGap several years ago. She sent an email and said, “I saw on the BatGap website that you have hundreds of suggestions for guests, so I’m just checking to see if the intuitive poet Chelan is in your queue. She’s causing a major stir right now in spiritual circles with the recent release of her first book, Susceptible to Light .” I’ll show the cover of that book on the page here: Susceptible to Light . She’s frequently compared to Hafez, Rumi, and Rilke, so much so that Daniel Ladinsky, renowned author of seven books on the great mystic poets, reached out to her personally and has generously endorsed her book. Her second book is due to be published next month, just five months after her first.

And that’s now, because her second book, Let Us Dance , which I’ll show on the screen, is coming out today, isn’t it?

Chelan: Yeah, this morning.

Rick: This morning? Cool.

Chelan: It became available.

Rick: Good. Yeah, good timing. And that wasn’t actually pre-planned, was it? I mean, in terms of having it coincide with this interview.

Chelan: There’s a little story about that. Okay, we’ll talk later, maybe?

Rick: Okay, good. But first, let’s hear a little story about you. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Very soon in this interview, within the next few minutes, I want to have you read a poem. But let’s start by just telling us how you got to what you’re doing now.

Overcoming the Fear of Publishing Her Poetry

Chelan: Sure. Yeah, the last seven months have been completely transformational in all kinds of ways. So, rewind to November 2020. I had a big collection of my poetry that I’d been sitting on for about 12 years. I’d vaguely been thinking, “Maybe someday it would be nice to publish a book,” but it was just a dream that didn’t really have legs. I had all kinds of inhibitions about what that process might reveal, and I was scared to move forward with it. So I was in this paralysis mode, unable to move forward.

Then the energies catalyzed in this very precise, by-design-feeling way, and my motivation really became activated. I decided to move forward and treat the process of publishing as an experiment rather than a success-or-failure situation. So I just started taking these steps forward and reached out to everyone, even in my very distant circle, who had any know-how about publishing. Things started moving, and doors started opening at an incredible rate.

I decided to self-publish this first book, Susceptible to Light, and I didn’t know anything about the process. So I bought two books that I’d loved dearly, both written by Daniel Ladinsky—these Hafez books. I was deeply inspired by them again, and the books have beautiful formatting, so I wanted to be inspired by that formatting. Then I did another experiment. I decided to pray to Hafez every night and ask for inspiration and publishing help. I really went for it with this prayer. I asked Hafez to find all the delegates in the spirit world and all the delegates in this world to be my marketing team.

Every night, I had this intense, focused prayer. I would go on a night walk and just chat with Hafez, and my poetic inspiration started flowing through me like never before. It was really noteworthy that something had changed. Anyhow, long story short—not even that long of a story—three weeks into that prayer, Daniel Ladinsky discovered my book and reached out to me. All kinds of things have opened since then.

Rick: Yeah, you and I were talking yesterday, and we were recollecting a quote. I looked it up, and here it is. It’s from English explorer W. H. Murray. He said:

So that’s what you did. Another part of Mary Reed’s email was, “Your story of connection to the great Muse is inspiring.” Was that what you mean by Hafez? Is Hafez sort of your muse?

Chelan: Good question. I learned about Hafez’s poetry. For those who might not be familiar, Hafez is a mystic Persian poet.

Rick: Kind of like Rumi, sort of in that genre, right?

Chelan: Yeah, yeah. Maybe a little bit more irreverent, but very similar. I don’t actually remember when he lived. Anyway, I heard a Hafez poem in a therapy session when I was, I think, 20 years old. It was so potent, really penetrating, and it had a major impact on shifting the way I thought about God and spirituality. So Hafez’s poetry has been an inspiration for a long time. But my poetic process really began a long time ago, when I was about 21.

Rick: A long time ago—11 years ago, yeah.

Chelan: Yeah, 11. It feels like a while. Poetry had been an important part of my life, but there was a lot of efforting involved in it. Then, I don’t know, one day I decided again to do an experiment. I committed to writing what I said was a bad poem for 30 days and sharing it every day. That commitment really loosened me up and gave me permission to explore and let things flow more.

On the second day of that experiment, something really cracked open wide in me, and a poem came pouring through. Rather than this effortful process that would take weeks or months to finally scramble a poem together, this just came through as quickly as I could write it. That’s been my process ever since.

Rick: Which poem was that that came streaming through?

Chelan: Should I read it?

Rick: Yeah.

Chelan: I’ve marked it.

Rick: Which one is that?

Chelan: It’s called “Say Wow.”

Rick: I think I have that one here. Yeah, I do. “Say Wow.” I’ve got to show it on the screen. Go for it.

Chelan: Okay, great. “Say Wow.”

Rick: Wow, I have to say that was great.

Chelan: Thank you.

Rick: Yeah. And so you say it kind of poured through, and you just scribbled it down as fast as you could. Try to elaborate on the subjective experience. Were you taking a walk or something, and this whole thing came to you? I’ve heard of things like that. For instance, Mozart said that sometimes the whole symphony would come to him in a flash. Then he would have to sit down and write it all out for all the different instruments, but the whole thing was cognized in seed form or something.

Chelan: So, yeah, I was in my college computer lab, and I’d made this commitment, so I was going to write my poem. And yeah, it really just happened. What still happens is that it’s like I’m retuned to a different frequency. There’s a buzz that comes over me, and the words just start coming. It kind of feels like they’re pouring through. That’s how it felt. There was an urgency to it. I just needed to write it down as quickly as I could.

What I’ve learned is that if I don’t do that—if I don’t find a pen or get to a computer—it’s gone. The magic is gone. I can remember the basic theme of the poem, but there’s no life to it.

Rick: Do you fiddle with it and tweak it and refine it, or do you pretty much write it down the way it came, and that’s it?

Chelan: Yeah, good question. Just ever so slightly, not much at all. So this book of poems that I just put out—well, both of them are this way—but the book I just put out today, Let Us Dance, is all poems that have come through in the last seven months. For every poem that came through, probably five to ten others have, but the ones in this book are the ones that needed almost no edits at all.

Rick: So the best ones tend not to need edits.

Chelan: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: And when you feel a poem coming, is it sort of like the beginnings of labor pains? Do you get a tingling in your toes? Is there some kind of feeling like, “Oh, here comes one”?

Chelan: It’s always really exciting when one comes, and they come a lot, so it’s a very familiar feeling. Yeah, there’s a tingle. There’s a full-body tingle to it.

Rick: And you’re not trying to make it come; you’re just kind of minding your own business, and all of a sudden, here comes a poem.

Chelan: Totally. Exactly. Yeah, I’ve noticed walking can bring them on, though. Walking and being in the shower can also bring them on, and driving, too. There’s an urgency to it, and almost a slight sense that the experience is very pleasant.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Chelan: But there’s an urgency to it, and it would be a little uncomfortable not to write it down.

Rick: Interesting. Speaking of taking a shower, I was taking a shower a couple of hours ago, and I was listening to the radio. They had a story on NPR about this guy who had suffered some kind of brain injury. He was perfectly articulate; he could talk perfectly well. But what happened was, he suddenly could play the piano, and he’d never played before. They were playing stuff that he plays, and it was fantastic, complicated, beautiful stuff. He took his mother into a music store, sat down at a piano, and just started playing this amazing stuff. The salesperson in the store came over and said, “Wow, how long have you been playing?” He said, “Just a few hours.”

Chelan: Oh my God!

Rick: So where does that come from? And in the case of poems, where does that come from? Do you feel like there’s some kind of transcendent or celestial source of intelligence? I guess a muse is supposed to be some higher being that is your muse? Or what?

Chelan: Yes, yes. So it feels like there’s a mingling of me, my spirit, I guess, and something else, because if I were just to try to sit down and write a poem right now, it wouldn’t be that great. There wouldn’t be that much to it. So it definitely feels that way.

And you asked, like, how do you crack that open? How do you access them? I don’t know if there’s any kind of formula to that. But before this cracked open in me, I was really in a place of acute suffering, and I felt that there was no space in the world where I could share my heart and my voice authentically. Really, my primary desire in life was to be able to do that, but I had all kinds of conditioning and really repressive tendencies. So I was unable to do that, and it was so painful.

I feel like I was kind of walking around constantly with this deep prayer of, “Please, I need to be able to do this.” So, in some ways, I think it had to do with that: just a really, really deep desire for a really potent, true, deepest-level connection with something.

Rick: Yeah. I have a feeling that everybody in the world has sort of genius locked up in them.

Chelan: Right. Easily.

Rick: And certainly, the routines and the pressures of the world kind of kill that genius, or repress it or dampen it down.

Chelan: Yes.

Unfulfilled Yearning and Human Suffering

And there’s this sort of deep, repressed yearning, which I think perhaps accounts for a lot of the suffering people experience. Because there are multimillionaires who are just begging for change on the street.

Rick: And there’s this sort of deep, repressed yearning, which I think perhaps accounts for a lot of the suffering people experience. Because there are multimillionaires who are just begging for change on the street.

Chelan: Yes. And, yeah, perfectionism, too, has, I think, a lot to do with clamping that down. In my experience, there’s just a cracking open to a willingness to get out of control to some degree, to allow that to happen. And there’s also, I think, just such a deep preciousness about where this genius lies. I think it’s our most intimate self, and we still want that to be beautifully received. And then we have trauma around ways people have related to our creative expression in the past.

Rick: In other words, they told you to go get a job as an accountant or something and forget all this poetry stuff and that kind of thing.

Chelan: Yeah, yeah. But I agree with you. I really do think that we all have some kind of genius that wants to express itself in its unique way, that all of us have that.

Rick: Yeah. Often when I think along these lines, I always extrapolate it out and think, what would the world be like if everybody in the world unlocked their full genius, their full potential?

Chelan: Yeah.

Rick: The world would be so radically different.

Chelan: Oh, totally. Yes. Well said. I have a poem that kind of speaks to that.

Rick: Yeah, let’s do that.

Chelan: That’s actually not one of the ones we have written down.

Rick: Okay. It doesn’t matter.

Chelan: I’ll just go with it. Okay, it’s called “Probing Joy.”

Rick: Which book is this from?

Chelan: This is from Let Us Dance.

Rick: Okay, your new one.

Chelan: Okay, “Probing Joy.”

Rick: Great, love it.

Chelan: Thanks.

Rick: And, you know, on this theme of everybody having repressed genius, I think a lot of people sort of externalize the blame, although perhaps some of it can be externalized. In other words, they might say, “Well, that was my parents,” or “It was the educational system,” “It’s the government,” or “It’s the deep state,” or whatever. And maybe there’s some blame to be assigned to external influences. But ultimately, you can take it from here. Ultimately, I think we’re the ones who have to kind of take the initiative to unlock that inner potentiality, no matter what, no matter why it has been locked up.

Chelan: Yes, yeah. And actually, the degree to which I felt really stuck, stifled, and stymied with this deep, deep level of authentic expression, the suffering of all that, and just my lack of contact with that, was really, I think, like my voice was in this incubation period. And now that it’s busted out, it does so with such gusto, and such joy, and such verve and excitement, and such a deep belief that this capacity exists in all people. And just a really potent desire to share that.

I don’t know that I would have had all of those beautiful benefits without the struggle of not having that for so long.

Yeah. If you help a chick out of its egg, you’re probably going to kill it, or if you help the butterfly out of the chrysalis. So there’s a certain struggle and having to make that effort to escape that confinement oneself. But you end up—at least in these examples, the little being ends up healthier as a result, or ends up living as some kind of—see?

Yeah. If you help a chick out of its egg, you’re probably going to kill it, or if you help the butterfly out of the chrysalis. So there’s a certain struggle and having to make that effort to escape that confinement oneself. But you end up—at least in these examples, the little being ends up healthier as a result, or ends up living as some kind of—see?

Rick: Yeah. If you help a chick out of its egg, you’re probably going to kill it, or if you help the butterfly out of the chrysalis. So there’s a certain struggle and having to make that effort to escape that confinement oneself. But you end up—at least in these examples, the little being ends up healthier as a result, or ends up living as some kind of—see?

Chelan: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: I mean, were there birth pains associated with this blossoming of creativity? Did you have to go through some kind of purgatory in order to clear stuff out?

Chelan: Oh, hell, hell yeah. Major. Yeah, yeah. So I’m 32 now, but in my 20s there was just this really beautiful gauntlet of intense healing. To heal means to encounter your pain, is the way I describe it, and move through it. Anyhow, yeah, just intense healing and then intense creativity.

Rick: Were you doing spiritual practices and seeking and reading, or what?

Chelan: Mostly embodied practices.

Rick: Such as?

Chelan: Hypnotherapy was my primary tool.

Rick: Oh, that’s right. You became a professional hypnotherapist?

Chelan: Yep. But personally, too, I just would use that all the time. I spent a lot of my 20s hypnotized. And it was so interesting, because you said, “Does the Muse feel like it comes from a celestial kind of out there, maybe source or something?” But then also, when I would crack open my heart, really, and do a big cathartic release, almost always under that would be a poem.

And then also, more recently, when I decided to publish this book, it was like this rapid-fire skin shedding and burning through all the reasons that I hadn’t published it before. There were many, all kinds of limiting assumptions and just old, old frameworks that I needed to move through, and that is not comfortable. That’s why so many of us don’t pursue the things we most care about, because it’s painful. It is painful. Totally worthwhile, but there’s pain associated with it.

Rick: When you were being hypnotized a lot, can you explain a bit what that experience was like? Most people probably don’t have a really clear understanding. And have you ever been hypnotized into a deep meditative state? Go ahead. You elaborate.

Discovering the Possibilities of Hypnotherapy

Chelan: Sure. Yeah, well, I like to say I had a boyfriend in high school whose mom was a hypnotherapist, and she was always trying to convince me to get sessions. I thought she was so wacky; I thought it sounded so wacky. I wasn’t really exposed to alternative modes of therapy at all—until I was. So I like to say that, because I think a lot of people have all kinds of kind of wacky assumptions about what hypnotherapy is or can do. And I empathize with that.

Rick: You think about stage hypnotists and all, who make people look like a chicken or something.

Chelan: Exactly. It can feel manipulative and stuff. But then I was in such an acute, desperate, and constant state of distress that I became more open to anything that might help.

Rick: Why were you in such a state of distress?

Chelan: Well, I related to my suffering as though there was something wrong with me, and I didn’t know how to share my pain with others. I’m a sensitive, perceptive person who just really needs to live in a profoundly transparent, open, and embodied, truthful way. And I didn’t know how to do that. So really, it was agony.

Rick: And that was causing the suffering. Yeah.

Chelan: Oh, yeah. And so one of my good friends told me about a mutual friend who had been trying hypnotherapy. I got this hypnotherapist’s number right away, and I did a long-distance session with him that night. That first session transformed my life.

Yeah, so basically, it’s an extremely beautiful method of hypnotherapy that really affirms that we all have an essential, inherent part of us that has always been healthy and happy and whole, and inherently worthy of love and acceptance. So that’s kind of the premise, and that we all have all the wisdom within us that we need to heal.

And so I really got in touch with that part of myself. Through getting in touch with this part of myself that was not only not broken, but inherently just totally worthy of love, I really dismantled so much in me. For the first time in my adult life, my consciousness was kind of unlocked from all these pain stories, and I was able to sink deeper into true, true connection with a much truer self. So I think all healing is really a process of the development of consciousness.

Rick: It sounds a lot like my experience in meditation. It’s just a different way or different angle of going deep, exploring those finer levels, and clearing out the detritus that has accumulated.

Chelan: Exactly. Yep, yep.

Rick: Interesting. This theme that we’ve brought up a couple of times now keeps coming back. There’s a phrase in the Brahma Sutras or someplace that says, “There’s no joy in smallness.” And as I’m talking to you, I keep thinking of that. Being constricted, being forced to run on one cylinder when you’re an eight-cylinder engine causes pain. And you think about the opioid epidemic, and all people are in pain because they’re bottled up. They can’t express their full potential, and they take the wrong angle, trying to just block things out even more. But I think it’s a core issue.

Chelan: Should I read a poem about that?

Rick: Yeah, please. Is it one we have down, or do you just want to grab one?

Chelan: We have it. It’s just about encouraging the fullness itself. And it’s called “I’m Too Much.”

Rick: Got it.

Chelan: This one reads well. Okay, let me make sure I have the right one. Yeah. And there’s a lot of societal ideas about being too much and too big and arrogant.

Rick: Yeah.

Chelan: Whatever.

Rick: Too big for your britches.

Chelan: Too big for your britches. And of course, when we’re just all that we are, sharing our full light, it’s beautiful. It’s nourishing to others and doesn’t take from others. This poem is about reframing and reclaiming the phrase “I’m too much.” Here we go. I’ll let the poem speak for itself.

Rick: That is so good. Thank you. The whole notion of enlightenment is realizing one’s essential nature as Brahman. Brahman actually means “great.” That’s what the Sanskrit word means: “the great.” The idea is that you engulf the universe. What you truly are is so vast that the universe is a speck of dust within that vastness, or greatness. That’s cool. I don’t mean to sound so dry and intellectual in response to these, but they remind me of these types of things. They ping other thoughts. Obviously, you’re capturing something that the saints and sages experienced, understood, and wrote down in various scriptures. So it’s a perennial wisdom, and you’re expressing it beautifully.

Chelan: Thank you so much, Rick.

Rick: I listened to a couple of your interviews, like the one Mary Reed did with you, I think, and another one or two. In one, you said you felt like the top of your head was going to blow off or something because there was so much energy coming through. Has that settled down and been integrated?

Chelan: Yes, it has. A couple of months ago, I really had to have a talking to with this muse. I told it I needed a little bit of a vacation, and it’s actually calmed down a little bit since then. The intense feeling, where it actually started to hurt a little bit, was right in the beginning stages of the process of publishing this book, Susceptible to Light. That was when I was going on these night walks and asking Hafez for inspiration. It was really torrential. It felt like a tap had just been turned on full blast.

Rick: Kind of sounds like your crown chakra is opening or something?

Chelan: Yes.

Rick: Do you feel like, in a way, you’re a kind of sense organ of the infinite, or one of God’s appendages, serving a particular function?

Oh, wow, that’s a really nice way to think of it. I’m really grateful. I love this experience so, so much. My experience of my poetry is that I have such incredible trust in it, whereas I struggle with plenty of self-doubt in other areas. But with poetry, it’s just like, “Oh, I completely trust it.” I know it needs to be shared, and that there’s value in sharing it, and I’m so grateful for that experience.

Chelan: Oh, wow, that’s a really nice way to think of it. I’m really grateful. I love this experience so, so much. My experience of my poetry is that I have such incredible trust in it, whereas I struggle with plenty of self-doubt in other areas. But with poetry, it’s just like, “Oh, I completely trust it.” I know it needs to be shared, and that there’s value in sharing it, and I’m so grateful for that experience.

I’ve worked really hard. I’ve done a tremendous amount of just being on this path, which is messy and hard and intense. But I’ve really tried to keep my heart open, going into all the reasons it’s closed and then opening it again. There’s something about that that I think can be more universalized. I think blessings and just cool, cool grace can come to people from doing that. But I don’t think I’ve gotten too lofty about it.

Rick: No, I’m not saying that you think you’re God’s gift to humanity or something. But I have the same sense: you’re kind of a servant, and you’re serving a particular function within your particular skill set. It’s having an influence on the world. Because you’re doing that, it’s like the powers that be—the gods, whatever—say, “Okay, we got a live one here. Let’s give her some juice.”

Chelan: Yes. And it’s intensified so much since I started taking it seriously and validating the process more, as I did when I started publishing my work.

🩺 Parenthood, vulnerability, and the work of healing

Rick: And we haven’t mentioned it, but you are a young mother. How old are your kids?

Chelan: Four and one.

Rick: Four and one. So it’s not like you’re sitting around twiddling your thumbs. You’ve probably got a lot to do with them. And what does your husband do?

Chelan: He’s an audio engineer.

Rick: Oh, great. Wow.

Chelan: Yeah. So he helped me a lot with the setup.

Rick: Handy.

Chelan: Yes.

Rick: I imagine that all of that helps to open your heart. You mentioned trying to keep your heart open. I’m sure they’re nice little heart openers.

Chelan: Yeah. Parenting is hard for me. I’ll just be really transparent about it.

Rick: Is it?

Chelan: They are heart openers, and they’re my motivation to open my heart more than anything else. Do you have kids, Rick?

Rick: No, just animals.

Chelan: Okay, right on. Not everyone feels this way, but for me, kids bring it all up. It surfaces all the limitations that want to come up to be cleared, because you do just want perfect, unconditional love for your kids. So all the escapist tendencies and all the issues with intimacy and all of that surface. I call it accelerated growth, being a parent, because there’s more motivation to do the work. But it’s also deeply humbling, because it just puts your face in it.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, relationships of all kinds kind of put your face in it.

Chelan: Yes, yes.

Rick: Sometimes people with a monastic inclination regard that as a quagmire that serious spiritual seekers should avoid, but I think for the vast majority of people, that’s exactly what we need.

Chelan: Yeah.

Rick: And without that, you can become very self-absorbed and idiosyncratic.

Chelan: Yes.

Rick: You don’t have the mirror you need to reflect your stuff back to you.

Chelan: Yes, you said it. And kids are such fine-tuned mirrors.

Rick: Yeah. Have your kids inspired any poems?

Chelan: No.

Rick: Some kid poems?

Chelan: Actually, maybe one or two. Maybe they’re not in the book. No, I don’t feel that anything really inspires my poems. In the past, a couple of people have asked me to write poems for this or that—custom-written poems—and it feels awkward.

Rick: So if you’re asked to be the poet for the next presidential inauguration, you’ll decline?

Chelan: No, I would accept. I would read one of the poems that came through on its own, but that felt like it most fit the occasion.

Rick: Okay, do you want to read another one now?

Chelan: Sure. I’ll read the one that really took off in quite a wild way. I have a lot to thank it for, including why I’m here with you right now. It’s what connected me with Mary Reed, and it just went viral.

Rick: What’s it called?

Chelan: It’s called “The Worst Thing.”

Rick: Oh, yeah. I’ve heard of this. Good.

Chelan: I’ll just share a little bit before I read it. Before sharing this poem, I would get about 35 likes on my poems on Facebook. Fifty was amazing, and three people sharing it was really cool—stuff like that. And then I shared this one, and 30,000 people shared it.

Rick: Wow. Took off.

Chelan: Yeah, it totally took off. It’s so interesting. One person in particular shared this poem, and 10,000 people found it on her page. The other day, I got curious and went back to her page to look at other posts, and her other posts get 10 likes or whatever. Every single thing about this process was like the forces of the universe were saying, “This is happening.” And it all just went. Anyway, I’m so grateful for this poem. So, so grateful. I wouldn’t have connected with Daniel Ladinsky. This is the one, “The Worst Thing.”

Rick: Yeah, I guess in the intro, we explained who Daniel Ladinsky is.

Chelan: Yeah, I can talk more about that. That’s a really cool story.

Rick: Okay, we’ll do that later.

Chelan: Sure. “The Worst Thing”:

Rick: Great. Love it.

Chelan: Thank you.

Rick: Yeah, I’ll send you a song later. If I’d thought of it, we could even have played it now. It’s called “Everything Is Holy Now.” I forget the name of the songwriter, but basically, it talks about when he was a boy at school, going to church, God was this distant thing. And now everything is holy, every leaf, every birdsong, everything. I think that’s really the reality. I think the whole universe would come to a screeching halt if God were not functional in every little subatomic particle.

Chelan: Yes. Wow, yes.

Rick: Yeah, next week I’m going to interview a guy about intelligent design, which I had a sort of skeptical attitude toward. It has this sort of pseudoscientific connotation. But he’s right on. He explains in great, great detail scientifically how we really couldn’t have a universe if there were not some guiding intelligence.

Poetry as a Challenge to Separation from God

Chelan: Interesting. Yeah, it’s a real paradigm, a way of living and relating to all things: this othering of God, and putting God outside of us. We are disconnected from our bodies, ourselves, wisdom—everything. There’s an alienation of experience in this paradigm, and that’s one that my poetry is really doing a lot to try to crack open.

Rick: Yeah. And there’s a kind of popular bias. People are ostracized and ridiculed for speaking the way we’re speaking right now in certain circles, in scientific circles, and many others. The “New Atheists” are all the rage and very popular—Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett and people like that. So there’s some kind of a theme in the culture that feels that appreciating everything as holy is somehow old-fashioned and superstitious, or something like that.

Chelan: There’s so much conditioning in our society around opening our hearts. All the sacred scriptures talk about the heart, that it’s the seat of God, whatever. But the thing is, “Open your heart” sounds like such a nice thing to say, but we don’t, because there’s so much pain in there, and there’s so much to move through. And there are so many ideas that we’re not allowed to feel; we’re not allowed to go into all the feelings we find when we really do open our hearts and connect with what’s in there.

And there’s so much beauty and wisdom in there. But there’s also pain before you’re allowed to get to the beauty and the wisdom and the good stuff. Sometimes the pain is too much, so I think there is a lot, in all kinds of ways, that shuts us down from really connecting with this implanted divinity within us. And then, when our heart is shut down, we’re screwed from connecting with beauty and love, which I do think is built into every part of the natural world.

Rick: Yeah. Well, let’s play with this one for a few minutes. As you were saying that, I was thinking of crabs and snails and conchs, and things like that, who need their shell. They would be so vulnerable without their shell, but they also have to venture out of it in order to get food and stuff. I don’t know how good an analogy that is for human beings, but you can see why hearts get shut down, because we’re battered by so much and we need to protect that tender thing.

Chelan: Yeah.

Rick: But then, on the other hand, that entraps us. Because, as we’ve been saying earlier, we’re meant to be the universe—we’re meant to be vast—and yet we get hung up in a little shell. So how does one navigate the metamorphosis so that one can be utterly open, and yet not vulnerable in the sense of being damaged by that openness?

Chelan: That’s such a good question. Well, how do we open it all in the first place? I feel like we just really need either a very deeply safe environment or even just another person around us, because the reason that we don’t open to the hard stuff or share our full selves is because it’s been presented to us as if we were struggling too much. We’ve been told that it will be a liability to our belonging, and we’re so wired for belonging that we need to play these roles that we think will get us the belonging we also want.

So we need loving people around us to know that it’s safe to go into our messy, painful stuff, and that people will still totally cherish and love us. For me, with hypnotherapy, I was able, in that state, to create a safe enough place inside myself and really connect with this part of me that was like, “Oh, I’m good. Actually, at the deepest level, I’m okay.” And that didn’t obliterate all of my limitations and foibles and shadows and things, but then it actually allowed me to encounter them and move through them rather than just stay stuck in them because I thought they were me. Does that make sense?

Rick: Yeah. And I’m glad you mentioned hypnotherapy, because I was thinking there are processes that enable a person to simultaneously cultivate both strength and sensitivity. As a matter of fact, a few weeks ago, I interviewed Anita Moorjani, and her new book is called Sensitive Is the New Strong.

Chelan: Oh, yeah.

Rick: And it’s kind of a contradiction in terms, because sensitive seems vulnerable. How could sensitive be strong? But I think we can perhaps understand how it could be, and maybe we could even elaborate on the point a bit.

Chelan: I would love to talk about that point. Yes, I really deeply, deeply believe that I am sensitive to truth. And I think a good synonym for sensitive can just be being very perceptive. When things aren’t aligned with truth and feeling, that hurts, because we are so sensitive to love and truth, and that’s so important. Then it’s a journey of finding a way to address those things that isn’t coming from being victimized by them, but allows us to speak about them.

Rick: Well, this image comes to my mind of the strong man. He’s like the bully: “Man, get out of my way.” He barges his way through the crowd; nobody gets in his way. It doesn’t matter who he tramples on—he’s strong. But really, such a person is weak. They’re just expressing a sort of inner inadequacy that they’re trying to compensate for by being a big bully. There have been such people who have conquered nations and done big things on the world stage. But I think the people we most admire—the great geniuses, the scientists, the composers, the poets—are people who were acutely sensitive. They’re the ones who really tapped into some deeper genius, and whose work has stood the test of time.

And, yeah, I think it feels safer to be open when you know that you, that we also as humans, have the capacity to move through pain. So then, when we find tools to be able to do that, we’re more resilient, and we’re just not as afraid of what comes at us. So it’s easier to just say, “Here I am,” to the world. And I think also, when we really can open our heart in that sensitive and strong way, we challenge the assumption that we will be hurt. And maybe we won’t be as much as we once thought.

Chelan: And, yeah, I think it feels safer to be open when you know that you, that we also as humans, have the capacity to move through pain. So then, when we find tools to be able to do that, we’re more resilient, and we’re just not as afraid of what comes at us. So it’s easier to just say, “Here I am,” to the world. And I think also, when we really can open our heart in that sensitive and strong way, we challenge the assumption that we will be hurt. And maybe we won’t be as much as we once thought.

Rick: No, I know what you mean. I was just reading something yesterday, I think on Susanne Marie’s Facebook page, and she wrote this thing about how she has been on BatGap. It was about how, when the individual sense of self drops off and is no longer predominant, then one knows oneself as cosmic being. Then everything is passing through you—the good, the bad, and the ugly—but it doesn’t shake your status as cosmic being. There’s a saying that Brahman is the eater of everything: that container of everything has the capacity to contain all extremes of the universe without itself being perturbed.

Chelan: Totally. I have a good poem for this moment. Shall I?

Rick: Yeah. Which one?

Chelan: Okay, actually, it’s another one that I didn’t give you. I had a cool, really cool experience recently. I said a prayer—this whole journey has just been an incredible experiment and experience with prayer. Recently, I said a prayer. I was just like, “I want to level up. I just wanted to get out fast, out of some old patterns.”

The next day, this lady reached out to me whom I’d never met. She was like, “Hey, I found your poetry. Can I give you a four-hour session in this type of healing I’ve never heard of?” And it was for free. So I was, “Oh, sure, okay.” It was incredibly potent and powerful. There have been really two times in my life when I’ve had these extremely profound experiences of the “I am” from a totally different vantage point. This was one of those. It was about two months ago, and then this poem came out right after. It’s called “There’s an Essence.”

Rick: That’s great.

Chelan: Thank you.

Rick: It reminds me of another Vedic saying. It goes, “Anor aniyan mahato mahiyan,” which means smaller than the smallest, bigger than the biggest.

Chelan: Yeah, that was a very, very profound, profound experience. The main thing I came away with was that first line: “There’s an essence within us that can neither be enhanced nor diminished.” It is just completely satisfied in its own nature. There’s nothing you have to do to get to exactly where you want to be. And also, this inherent essence is just sewn with the profoundly satisfying experience of connection. There is nothing you need to do or try for to earn connection, but we just have it within us and can drink it in and totally enjoy it.

Rick: If you have infinity and subtract 100 from it, you still have infinity. If you add 100 to it, you still have infinity.

Chelan: Oh, wow. Yeah.

Hafez, prayer, and the connection with Daniel Ladinsky

Rick: So what were you saying about Daniel Ladinsky? There was some interesting story about him.

Chelan: Yes, yes. So, mostly, he was really my primary poetic inspiration. He’s really the only poet I feel has influenced my work. I bought these two books of his because I liked the format and needed ideas for my books. Basically, Daniel Ladinsky does all of the English renderings of Hafez’s poetry, which was originally written in Farsi.

Rick: So does he translate from the Farsi?

Chelan: No. He actually doesn’t even speak Farsi. But he uses the translations, and then he’s an incredible poet in and of himself. He had a mystical experience with Hafez that inspired his writing, so he kind of takes the translations and infuses them with what he believes is the original intended spirit sounds.

Rick: Seems like Hafez is messing with people. First he messed with Daniel, then he messed with you.

Chelan: I think he’s a total trickster. Yeah. Anyway, I bought these books of Hafez rendered by Daniel Ladinsky, and that’s really what started cracking this process open. After three weeks of intense and joyful conversation with Hafez, like Daniel Ladinsky, I get an email from him in my inbox.

Rick: How did he even get your email?

Chelan: I have no idea. I actually don’t think I’ve even asked him. I should ask. So he found me and he said, “Hey, Chelan, I found your book. Congratulations. It seems like it’s doing really phenomenally well, even internationally.” He was so generous and kind and celebratory.

And then I had used a quote of his in my Amazon description that I had misquoted. So he was totally relaxed about it. This was late December, so he said, “Sometime next year, at your leisure, just if you could amend that.” Then I wrote him this totally unfiltered email because I was in this complete state of awe that he had reached out to me after I had been praying to Hafez. I just told him the whole story. I said, “Oh, my God, Daniel, I’ve got to tell you this whole story.” So I did. I told him I had this ‘A’ team of dead authors, and Hafez was in charge of them. I sent him a poem that I felt was particularly inspired by Hafez.

It was my commitment to myself to really ask for the things that I wanted. So I said, “Daniel, while I have you, could I send you my book? And if you’re genuinely moved to do it, would you consider endorsing it?” I just sent that off on a wing and a prayer. I assumed he had all this fan mail, and he might never respond to me.

Then that night, I got an email back from him that said, “So, Chelan, this is strange on so many levels, because I rarely reach out to people. People misquote my work thousands of times every day. So it really must have been Hafez that nudged me to connect with you.”

Rick: Yeah.

Chelan: And he said, “And this is extremely rare. I’ve never done this before, but I just really feel that you and I need to coauthor a book together.”

Rick: That’s cool.

Chelan: So that was just like the skies opened, and it was pure bliss. I just had this hysterical moment.

Rick: So he wrote some kind of intro to one of your books, but are you actually going to coauthor one with him?

Chelan: We started, and that launched us into this extraordinary few months of intense collaboration. We were both just inspiring each other. It was like this wild, poetic dance. We’d talk and send each other, like, 20 emails a day. It was like a poem that kept evolving.

We started working on a book together called Letters to and from a Young Poet. The German poet Rilke wrote a classic called Letters to a Young Poet, so we were going to do a kind of spin-off and modernize it, but it was going to be more back and forth. We made really wonderful headway with that.

We also started working on a book of haiku called Two Zucchinis Dancing: Sweet Haiku from the Kitchen. It’s all just haiku about food, and it was so fun. It was the most exhilarating, joyful experience of my life. We also dabbled in some other ones. Those are kind of shelved in terms of really bringing them all the way home for now. But, yeah, he wrote me a foreword for my book, and he’s just a good, good friend.

Rick: That’s great. That’s exciting. It’s really incredible—not just that it happened, but what was incredible about it was the way that it happened.

Chelan: Can I read that poem that I sent him?

Rick: Yeah, please. Do I have that one here?

Chelan: I think so. It’s called “Hafez Was Generous and Susceptible to Light.” This is the poem I’m reading from Let Us Dance. Okay:

Rick: That’s great.

Chelan: Thank you. Really nice. Thanks.

Rick: Do you mean this literally? We’ve sort of touched on it, but new-agey type people often think of there being Ascended Masters or some celestial beings or whatever that are interceding in human affairs in various ways, and perhaps using certain individuals as representatives of their intentions, or as mouthpieces through which they can speak. So do you literally feel like something like that is going on with Hafez, or this ‘A’ team you mentioned?

Chelan: Well, it’s so interesting. I mean, it’s hard to deny it anymore.

Rick: Yeah. I’m not pooh-poohing the idea. I kind of believe it works that way. But I’m just asking if you do.

Chelan: Well, we have so many layers to us. One part of me is totally like, “Rah, rah, let’s ask dead poets for help.” And then the other part of me also, kind of stubbornly, has a doubt about the mystical and things like that. But, yeah, after this experience, I’ll say I find myself experimenting with it more. And I think that’s all I can really say.

But, I mean, self-published poetry—I had essentially no connections with anybody. I had no marketing team. And just the way that this has expanded, it’s hard to understand why things would have happened like this without some kind of influence.

Rick: No, I think the universe works that way, personally.

Chelan: But I kind of like not being certain about it.

Rick: Yeah. No, that’s good.

Chelan: There is a dynamic edge to it, like, “Okay, I’m gonna keep trying this. Let’s see how it goes now,” and getting information as we try these things.

Rick: I have a lot of respect for the scientific method and for the relationship between science and spirituality. I think they each possess qualities that the other needs. What spirituality needs from science is the empirical, a little bit skeptical attitude—not being blindly faithful. Taking things as hypotheses that should be tested rather than things that you need to believe in.

Chelan: Yeah. And that’s very important. Yeah.

Rick: And what science needs from spirituality is the whole toolkit of being able to explore these subtle dimensions, which materialist science doesn’t have a clue about.

Chelan: Yeah, totally.

🕊️ Spiritual upbringing and a powerful experience in Israel

Rick: A couple of questions came in, and if anything pops to mind or there’s a poem you want to read, don’t wait for me to ask you. Just go for it. But I’m here now. Does Mary Reed live in Washington, D.C.?

Chelan: Bethesda.

Rick: Bethesda.

Chelan: Maryland, not Bethesda, Maryland, right on the border.

Rick: All right. So I think this is from Mary. She says, “It would be interesting to know about Chelan’s spiritual upbringing.”

Chelan: Oh, sure. Sure, yeah. So I grew up in the Baha’i faith.

Rick: Oh, boy. Yeah. Seals and Crofts.

Chelan: Yeah. So the Baha’i faith, for those who aren’t familiar with the Baha’i teachings, is basically just a beautiful worldview, a really unitive worldview: that all people are inherently very interconnected, and that the crowning point of our maturity as human people is to be able to operate harmoniously worldwide as a global society. And that all religions come from the same source, and their purpose is to help humanity develop both spiritually and socially.

Anyway, there’s a lot of real beauty there, and I’m so grateful for it. I think it really helped me have a trajectory for my mind and heart, and it gave me even just the concept of God and the concept of prayer. But then, interestingly, the Baha’i teachings say that you can’t inherit a religion from your parents. It just doesn’t work. So no matter how beautiful your faith is, you really need to go through the process of finding your own relationship there.

For the last 10 years or so, I’ve also been really in a process with that, shedding a lot of pieces of it and re-finding some pieces.

Rick: You still love them?

Chelan: That’s a very nice, mature thing for a religion to say, because usually they’re very possessive, and if you leave the fold, you’re fallen, and so on. I think a lot of people in the Baha’i community would do well to take that advice.

Rick: Yeah.

Chelan: So it’s funny how our conditioning around religion can sometimes be a stronger player than the teachings themselves.

Rick: Sure.

Chelan: So I don’t know. The community is continuing to evolve, which is wonderful. But I’ll just leave it at that.

Rick: Yeah. Well, I think most people in every religion would do well to heed the advice of its founder, you know.

Chelan: Yeah.

Rick: It’s the exception rather than the rule.

Chelan: Just—point. Yes.

Rick: It’s interesting that you grew up in the Baha’i faith, because that came out of Persia, which is modern-day Iran. And that’s where Hafez was.

Chelan: Yeah, that is interesting.

Rick: I don’t know. You were probably Hafez’s wife in that life.

Chelan: Maybe. That would have been an interesting life. He was exiled several times. I’d have been down for that.

Rick: Maybe you were his mother. I don’t know.

Chelan: Ah, that’s hilarious. Maybe I was him.

Rick: Yeah, that’s what I mean. Of course, you could have been.

Chelan: The title for this book, Let Us Dance, actually was given to me at a really profound moment. I was on Baha’i pilgrimage when I was 21. The whole Baha’i Holy Land is in Israel, and it’s a nine-day pilgrimage, going to visit all these holy sites. The place I was most excited to go to was the prison cell of Bahá’u’lláh, who’s the founder of the Baha’i faith.

A Meditative Experience in a Prison Cell

A big group and I went to this prison cell, and there was always time to meditate and pray and such. So I closed my eyes for what really felt like an instant. I’ve never had an experience like this one. I opened my eyes, and everyone had left the prison cell and the door was closed. I was alone in this prison cell.

At that time, my relationship with the Baha’i faith was very complex. I feel like the primary tension was needing to listen to my own inner voice and intuition and guidance system, and wondering if that was okay. Anyway, I opened my eyes, and I was alone in this prison cell. I really heard, without ears, a very clear voice inside of me that I took to be Bahá’u’lláh’s, which said, “Let us dance.” What that communicated to me was that I was invited to go on a really authentic, dynamic journey with God. I just cracked my heart open and started singing, and there were these amazing acoustics. I knew that was going to be the name of a book of poetry one day.

Rick: That’s fantastic. Yeah, yeah. Experiences like that, I take very seriously and quite literally, but with a grain of salt. That could have been Bahá’u’lláh. I think that kind of thing has happened to so many people. I mean, Muhammad had some kind of visitation from angels, which cracked him open, and he kickstarted his whole spiritual trip that he went on. There are many examples throughout history, so this kind of stuff happens.

Chelan: Yeah. And, yeah, whether or not, you know, it had an effect.

Rick: Yeah, for sure. That’s really interesting. Did you ever figure out how long you had actually been in the cell with your eyes closed?

Chelan: Well, it’s interesting, because there were a lot of Persians in my group, and they would pray for so long in all these spots. I was really hoping to get some time alone, and there was, like, no way. So I imagine it was a while.

Rick: And you must have gotten really deep because you didn’t even hear them leave.

Chelan: Didn’t hear them leave. Didn’t hear the door close. Nothing.

Rick: Wow.

Chelan: It’s bizarre. Yeah.

Rick: That’s really cool.

Chelan: It was really bizarre. And the trip to Israel came a month after. You mentioned the guy with the brain trauma who started playing piano, right? It happened a month after. Surprise brain surgery.

Rick: You had brain surgery?

Chelan: Yeah, for an aneurysm in the central artery of my brain, which they found accidentally.

Rick: Were you having symptoms?

Chelan: No symptoms, no health issues.

Rick: So they did a CT scan for some reason?

Chelan: Yeah, I had a sort of jaw issue. And I don’t even know why I got it. So weird. I went to get an MRI for the jaw issue because it was pretty low-key. It doesn’t make sense.

And they were like, “Oh, your jaw is fine, but you’ve got a blurry area in your brain. It might be an aneurysm. You might want to follow up on that.” And I did. It was this gigantic aneurysm, and they said I wouldn’t have lived to be 30. So that was just a very dramatic time in my life, and it was shortly after all of that that poetry really cracked open wide for me. Just interesting things that all play a part.

Rick: That is very interesting. Was it very deep in the brain?

Chelan: It was in the central artery of my brain, behind my left eye. I’ve got an excellent scar from here to here. And yeah, it was pretty well in there.

Rick: Geez.

Chelan: Yeah, no joke.

Rick: That’s very interesting. Well, I’m glad they found it.

Chelan: Yes.

Rick: Okay, a few nice little questions have come in here. Here’s one from Andrea Gutfleisch in Mannheim, Germany: “Where do I find this amazing poem? It really goes deep. We’d love to read it again. Love to hear about how Chelan was unpacking her gift.”

Chelan: Which one? Which poem?

Rick: I’m not sure. But they’re all amazing. So, you know, you have two books, and a lot of your poems are on your Facebook page. And I will put links on BatGap to both of your books on Amazon that people can just click on.

Chelan: Fantastic. Thank you so much.

Rick: Can they get the physical one, or is it a Kindle, or what?

Chelan: Yep, it’s an e-book. Both are on Amazon. And then there will also be signed copies of both books at my local independent, mom-owned bookstore. It’s called Waucoma Bookstore, W-A-U-C-O-M-A.

Rick: Out there in Oregon, you mean?

Chelan: Yep. And it’d be really fun to blast them with sales. They’re so great. Yeah.

Rick: And yeah, so if everybody listening could just fly to Oregon and buy it there?

Chelan: They ship them around the world.

Rick: They ship them. So send me information about that, and I’ll put that on your page also.

Chelan: Yeah. And then I’d love to stay in touch with listeners, too. I’m still sharing new poems pretty much every day, so Facebook is the main platform I use for that.

Rick: You know, another thing you might want to do: I’m listening right now to a book on Audible from a guy I’m going to interview. I said, “If I have to read the book, I’m not going to get through it. But if you can send me an audible version, I’ll listen to a couple of hours a day.” And so I really enjoy it. So you could actually consider making an audible version of your book.

Chelan: I know I will down the road. There are two people who are doing that for me at this time. So I think I’ll use those until I like the idea of having my voice read them. But yes, that will happen then, for sure.

Good. Someone named Anwat Bradley in Santa Cruz asks: “Any plans for audiobook versions of both the books? Hearing you recite your beautiful poetry sends a love light and joy vibration straight to my heart. Thank you and bless you.”

Rick: Good. Someone named Anwat Bradley in Santa Cruz asks: “Any plans for audiobook versions of both the books? Hearing you recite your beautiful poetry sends a love light and joy vibration straight to my heart. Thank you and bless you.”

Chelan: Thank you.

Rick: So there’s a sign from the universe.

Chelan: Yeah. Right.

Practices That Support an Open, Clear Creative Channel

Rick: And here’s another question that came in from Angelika Kollin in Tampa, Florida: “Has Chelan experienced that consumption of certain foods or exposure to modern-day ‘noise’ like social media or TV has had a negative impact on her ability to download these poems? And equally, are there some beneficial practices or ways of living that can increase one’s ability to be an open and clear channel?”

Chelan: Oh, what a good question.

Rick: Yeah.

Chelan: So, regarding the first, sort of a two-part question: For the last seven months, I’ve lived off of a steady diet of peanut butter toast and hemp mochas. So no, I don’t think so with the diet, and that’s just because I was focusing at such a pace. Like, being a mother and writing poetry, I just couldn’t be bothered with food prep. I mean, I eat other things, too. But that’s to say that I don’t think that’s a factor for me.

And then I’ve also never consumed so much social media, because I’ve just been in this intense, beautiful communication with people about my work. But Facebook—these things are tools, and they can be used in all kinds of ways. When you’re putting out love and you’re just not letting in the stuff that bothers you, you can hide people’s posts and stuff, so you can really just create a beautiful, nourishing virtual garden for your heart. So that has been my experience being on Facebook.

But then, in terms of other practices, anything that just continues to open my heart, and trying to grow in strength to be able to be more wisely vulnerable—sharing and opening when it feels right. I do a lot of healing work of all kinds. So anything that really works for you, I think, to allow you to let go of old energies and perceptions that have been kind of stuck in you, is profoundly helpful for me.

Rick: Yeah. And there are so many things, as exemplified by all the people I’ve interviewed. There are just so many different paths and practices and teachers and teachings.

Chelan: Of course.

Rick: And I just have the attitude of finding what resonates with you, what works for you.

Chelan: Yes, because it can be overwhelming. There are so many different methods of healing practices and meditation practices and this and that. So, yeah, do your best to just start trying, if that’s what you’re looking for. And then whatever works for you, keep going with that.

Rick: And you need to sometimes dedicate yourself to something and not be a dilettante who just flips from one thing to the next. But on the other hand, if you dig your heels in and just stick with one thing that isn’t working and persist with it for years and years, you could actually waste time. So you have to kind of find the balance.

Chelan: Yes.

Rick: Mirabai Starr gave a nice talk one time called “Bees in the Garden,” and how she felt that the way bees go from flower to flower and extract nectar from each one, we can do that as spiritual practitioners without being dilettantes, without being superficial dabblers.

Chelan: Yeah. Cool.

Rick: Want to read another poem?

Chelan: Yeah. Let me do that. Let’s see, I’ve got all these poems flagged. Maybe I’ll just open to one of them. Oh, this one actually feels appropriate. So there was a time when I really thought I needed to read all these sacred scriptures and be very well-versed intellectually to, I guess, merit—to be worthy of spiritual joy. So this poem kind of speaks to that. It’s called “Name-Drop Gods.” Okay.

And I think there can be a really beautiful thirst for knowledge, and that can be a very beautiful and enlivening thing. But then I think there’s another way to relate to the academic pursuit of spirituality, where it is kind of putting our destination out there, like, “If we read enough…” So that’s the one I’m speaking to there.

Rick: Yeah. Also, it’s a personal proclivity kind of thing. I mean, some people are inclined to do certain things, and some people are inclined to do others. But I think a universal thing is that there really has to be the experiential component, whether or not you garnish it with intellectual understandings. Yeah, the experience is really what those understandings are all about anyway. So you should make sure to get that.

Chelan: Yeah. And some intellectual understandings can unlock us and open us to that experience. But then there can also be a collecting of intellectual experience that doesn’t necessarily get us where we want to go.

Rick: Yeah, I’d say they serve a couple of functions. One is to just alert us to the fact that certain possibilities exist, which we might not otherwise be aware of. And another is to kind of safeguard the path, in a way, so that we don’t mistake some certain experience for something else, or have a certain level of experience and assume we’re finished, for instance, which I’ve actually heard some people say. Whereas, if we had a little bit better understanding, we’d realize that there’s so much more.

Chelan: Yeah, it’s a harmonious relationship between—

Rick: Balance.

Chelan: The experiential is a nice way to go.

Rick: There’s a cook named Bobby Flay, and he has his own TV show, and he’s really good. A really good cook has a good balance between a lot of knowledge about cooking and also an intuitive, creative approach to it, so that he’s not strictly bound by that knowledge.

Chelan: Yeah, and I feel I enjoy kind of just being an advocate for this experiential way. More of my poetry is geared toward that because I don’t think it gets enough cred, or enough potent advocacy for this process of experienced spirituality or embodied spirituality, you could say.

Rick: Yeah, so I like talking about that. Let’s just see here. Yeah, maybe you could read one or more of these which kind of jumped out at me: “The Sacred Wears a Good Costume,” “Heart Warriors,” or “Our Great Cocoon,” if you’d feel inclined to read one or another of those.

Chelan: Yeah, absolutely. Let’s see. Well, I’ll read “The Sacred Wears a Good Costume.”

Rick: Okay.

Chelan: For starters, anyway. And I’ll also plug this dear friend, Mary Reed, our mutual connection. She’s going to put out an incredible film sometime in the near-ish future, and my poetry will be part of that film. And this one will be in there: “The Sacred Wears a Good Costume.”

The sacred wears a good costume. She loves to dress up as the ordinary. Sometimes, like a queen in peasant clothes, she cloaks herself in the mundane to get a break from all that fawning. So how do you know it’s her in there? Look closer at things when you can, and to your heart she’ll give a certain knowing wink.

Rick: For those who are just listening to the audio, Chelan just winked.

Chelan: I’m actually not a good winker.

Rick: You did okay.

Chelan: Yeah, okay. Oh, thanks. I can only wink with my right eye.

Rick: Because of the brain surgery?

Chelan: Oh, no, I don’t think so. Can you wink with both?

Rick: Yeah, I can.

Chelan: Oh, yeah. Oh, nice. What a great capacity. Can you raise both eyebrows?

Rick: Yeah, I can.

Chelan: I mean one at a time.

Rick: I don’t think so. No, I can’t do that. I can scrunch up one side of my face. See that?

Chelan: Oh, that’s great. Yeah.

Rick: My mother used to call it my Buffalo face because we visited relatives in Buffalo, and I started doing it then.

Chelan: Funny. Can you frown? Some people can’t frown.

Rick: Yeah, sure.

Chelan: Oh, that’s not much of a frown. That’s more of a scowl. But you can’t do the downturn lift.

Rick: No, no. You try that. Let me show you that. Okay, let’s see. Yeah, that was a good poem, “The Great Cocoon.” It kind of harkens back to our theme of God hiding in plain sight. We didn’t use that exact phrase, but there’s a nice phrase: God is in everything, and everything is in God. It works both ways, you know? But I feel it’s literally true. And that means everything. I mean, this kombucha bottle or whatever—if you could see it in its true nature, you’d be looking at God. God’s not some puppeteer on some cloud, pulling strings. He’s totally infused into everything.

Chelan: Isn’t it amazing how dense we can be? This quality of divinity can be everywhere, and we can have such blinders on. It’s such an interesting dynamic.

Rick: It’s amazing, yeah. The power of Maya, the power of illusion. That deludes God, God herself, you know? Because if God is really the ultimate and complete, all-pervading reality, then we’re God. And yet we have forgotten it. So somehow, we’re God having forgotten who we are, or what we are.

Chelan: Yeah. And it’s a juicy waking-up experience, though. Let me read a poem. This is called “I No Longer Pray,” and it kind of touches on this. I was just really frustrated with prayer all my life. It just felt kind of abstract and vague. Like, is anybody out there? Is anybody listening to me? Maybe something would happen? In some very deluded, very vague way, I didn’t feel connected to it intensely or potently, and I was frustrated with that. But I also felt like, if there’s something that works, if there is a universal force or a network we can connect with and ask for our soul’s desires, or ask for help or whatever, that is the master key. And it’s free and universal, so I really wanted to tap the power of prayer and just didn’t really have a clue.

But I’ve had some really extraordinary prayer experiences, just really being direct with God, really being about all the things—my anger with God and my frustrations and my desires. And this experience in the last seven months was my first time really feeling like I was plugged in, and like things were actually being received and shifting because of these prayers. So here we go. This is called “I No Longer Pray.”

But I’ve had some really extraordinary prayer experiences, just really being direct with God, really being about all the things—my anger with God and my frustrations and my desires. And this experience in the last seven months was my first time really feeling like I was plugged in, and like things were actually being received and shifting because of these prayers. So here we go. This is called “I No Longer Pray.”

Rick: Very nice.

Chelan: Thank you.

Rick: Yeah, that’s great. I couldn’t begin to write poems like this.

Chelan: No?

Rick: I don’t think so. I mean, we all have our gifts, you know.

Chelan: But I couldn’t begin to interview. Yeah, exactly. We were talking about this a little bit yesterday. One of your magical capacities is to interview people.

Rick: Yeah, I’m perfectly happy with that. I mean, I’m not going to become an NBA basketball star either.

Chelan: Yep.

Rick: No regrets about that.

Chelan: Exactly. We don’t have to do it all.

Rick: Yeah.

Chelan: Yeah. But it is satisfying, you know, if there is something implanted in there that we really want to do, to pursue that.

Rick: And that’s an interesting point in itself. I interviewed a guy named Steven Cope a few weeks ago, and we were talking about dharma. Dharma meaning that course of action which is most evolutionary and most appropriate for each individual, given their gifts and what they can do to serve. And I think everybody has one. And it’s not necessarily going to make your world-famous or rich or anything like that. But everybody has one. And when you find it, it can be extremely gratifying.

Chelan: Yes.

And life can be very fulfilled. Like we were saying an hour ago, the suffering is very often a consequence of our not having found our dharma and not having unlocked the inner gift which we intuitively know is there.

Rick: And life can be very fulfilled. Like we were saying an hour ago, the suffering is very often a consequence of our not having found our dharma and not having unlocked the inner gift which we intuitively know is there.

Chelan: Yeah, I wonder. I mean, I don’t feel either way, ultimately, about this. But if there’s always a thing, sometimes it’s just kind of infusing our experience, whatever it is, with our joy. I don’t know if it’s, like, a really distinct thing. Maybe they do. I don’t—maybe they do.

Rick: Well, when I was interviewing him, we were talking about people who work at Amazon warehouses or Walmart or something. And, yeah, you know, could that really be their dharma? And I gave an example of a woman who works at our local Walmart, who is just so much fun to interact with.

Chelan: Totally.

Rick: She’s always laughing and helping people. And she seems to be having a grand old time.

Chelan: Totally. I have a really distinct memory of a guy working at the airport as the guy who would give you your tickets. And I was like, “Man, this guy’s totally enlightened.” He was just filled with light and sharing it with everybody. And for those people, their work is transcendent above what they do because they’re showing with their way and their actions that that kind of radiant joy can be had in any space.

Rick: Yeah.

Chelan: And it’s pretty profound when people are able to do that.

Rick: But he probably sees, you know, a couple of thousand people a day or whatever, and uplifts every one of them.

Chelan: Exactly. But I do have a poem about what you were talking about. It’s so spot-on, I must read it.

Rick: Please. What’s it called?

Chelan: Well, before I read it, I think we all have things that bring us joy, for sure. And then when we can put meaning behind what brings us joy through sharing that in some way, in a way that benefits others, then that, I think, is our dharma. It doesn’t have to be that complex. I think we can demystify that. To some degree, it’s just the path of what really brings us joy, because whatever it is, if we’re coming from that place, it activates that in those we make contact with, and that’s such a potent gift. Okay, so here’s “The Thing That Makes Your Heart Sing,” as this poem is called.

Rick: Wonderful. Love it.

Chelan: Yeah.

Rick: It’s really good.

Chelan: It’s nice how our conversation has just naturally brought up these thematically aligned poems.

Rick: Yeah, it’s cool how a certain point will come up and then you’ll say, “I’ve got a poem for that.” And you really nailed a lot of these different subtle points in beautiful verse. There’s another one I want you to read. It’s “The God Who Made the Octopus.”

Chelan: Oh, sure. That’s a fun one.

Rick: I like that one.

Chelan: That one came through right after this incredible satsang that I was invited to participate in with Mary Reed. And I think she sent you that video.

Rick: I’ve listened to that. Yeah.

Chelan: Ah, you have listened to it? So, yeah, I’m so glad—

Rick: I don’t usually watch videos. I listen. I extract the audio from them and listen to them while I walk in the woods.

Chelan: Yeah, okay. Here we go. “The God Who Made the Octopus”?

Rick: Yeah.

Chelan: Is that the one? Okay, “The God Who Made the Octopus.” Awesome. So, “The God Who Made the Octopus.”

Rick: Very nice. Have you seen My Octopus Teacher, by the way?

Chelan: Oh, recently. And I loved it so much.

Rick: Yeah, it’s great.

Chelan: I loved it.

Rick: It’s a documentary, for those who don’t know. It won the Oscar for Best Documentary. But everybody who watches it just tells me they loved it. I think it’s on Netflix.

Publishing Let Us Dance and trusting the process

Chelan: Can I tell you about the process of publishing the second book?

Rick: Sure. You can tell me anything.

Chelan: Cool. Great. So, this book is roughly 100 pages longer than my first book, and all the poems have come through just in the last seven months, which has just been incredible. But I wasn’t really sure when it was going to end. Another thing that’s just important to mention is that this whole journey has just been completely easeful. There’s been no pushing or forcing or stress. It’s been very amazing like that.

But then I wasn’t sure when I was going to get around to publishing this next book, and it didn’t feel like there was any climactic moment. I didn’t have anything planned for that. Can we show the picture of it again, Rick?

Rick: The picture of what?

Chelan: Of Let Us Dance.

Rick: Yeah, sure.

Chelan: Thank you.

Rick: Okay, I’m showing it now.

Chelan: Oh, cool. So you see that beautiful fire woman dancing in the middle. I had found that picture, and I thought I would need to have an artist remake it so it wasn’t plagiarism, or so I didn’t have to pay a whole bunch for it. That was really my main holdup with publishing this book.

Then a generous person reached out to offer to make me a website pretty much for free. She said, “Hey, I know you don’t have a cover yet, but can you just give me a picture that can be a stand-in?” This was two weeks before today. So I gave her that middle picture of the fire woman dancing. While I was doing that, I saw that it was free for commercial use! I was like, “Oh, man.” I felt like I got a cosmic wallop in that moment. It was like, “Chelan, this is free. You need to run with this, and you need to have it done by July 3, your interview time with Rick, so you can announce it at Buddha at the Gas Pump.”

Then it was just like that poem or passage you read about how everything comes together when you commit. So, really, I put this book together in the last two weeks. It was useful, even though it was intense. I’m so grateful to have had this motivation. The way all the things aligned is very cool.

Rick: Yeah. The whole principle of effortless action is, I think, significant.

Chelan: Yes.

Rick: I mean, maybe some things need to be a little difficult for some reason, but I think, for the most part, if you’re really in tune, action is always going to be useful, because nature operates according to a principle of least effort. If you throw a ball, there are an infinite number of trajectories the ball could take. But the ball takes the most efficient trajectory. It takes the one with the least expenditure of energy, the least effort.

A human being can function in tune with the laws of nature in a similar way, such that nature supports your activity and you’re not pushing and pulling against the flow of nature’s intentions. Then every action is effortless.

Chelan: Totally. And, yeah, sometimes I think people can interpret that as just pure passivity.

Rick: No, no, it can be dynamic.

Chelan: You can be a participant. It’s dynamic. It feels to me like surfing a wave.

Rick: Yeah.

Chelan: You have to learn some skills, and then you just get out there and wait for that beautiful wave. Then it flows you to places you couldn’t have imagined.

Rick: Surfing is a good example, because surfers, or any really top-notch athletes, have an effortlessness about their performance, which is part of the reason we love to watch them. It’s so artful because it’s so natural, and there’s no awkwardness or clunkiness—just smooth.

Chelan: Totally. And that actually describes well how it feels. When a poem is coming through, it’s like a wave is coming. You need to get ready for it.

Rick: Yeah.

Chelan: The equivalent of standing up on the board would be, “I need to get a pen really fast.”

Rick: Yeah. Hang ten.

Chelan: Yeah.

Rick: Do you still write them most days?

Chelan: Almost every day. Yeah, the last two days—because it was just this, you know—

Rick: Getting your book finished?

Chelan: Getting it all finished and stuff. But it was respectful. It was like, “I’m not going to bother you today,” the Muse. But, yeah, almost daily.

Rick: That’s great. It’s daily. Do you feel a sort of maturation or evolution taking place?

Chelan: Oh, I’m so glad you asked. Yes. “Let Us Dance” feels like it has a very different tone than “Susceptible to Light.” At the heart of both is the intention to liberate expression, affirm inherent light, and help people navigate their shadows.

I got so much affirmation with “Susceptible to Light” that it encouraged me to expand, try new things, and speak more boldly. It really empowered my voice. So I would make experiments and see how they were received. They were well received, and that emboldened me further. I would say there’s a bolder tone in “Let Us Dance.”

My writing really transformed through working with Daniel Ladinsky, too, because I was writing like 60 hours a week, like never before, just pulling from the depths, right?

Rick: Like what? Just poems, or all kinds of stuff?

Chelan: Mostly this book, “Letters to and from a Young Poet.” A lot of time was poured into that, and then it was then—

Rick: Was there prose in that, or is it just all poems?

Chelan: It’s almost all prose.

Rick: That’s going to be very interesting, yeah.

Chelan: Yeah. It’s really a potent book. I hope it gets completed someday.

Rick: Oh, it probably will, just in time for you to go on the Oprah show.

Chelan: There you go. And then just a ton of poetry. I was also working on a book that he was encouraging, which will also come to life someday. It’s called “Becoming the Full Moon: The Many Phases of Love, Creative Expression, and Wholeness.”

Rick: Wow.

Chelan: That’s another book of prose.

Rick: Yeah. I look forward to reading this stuff. We’ll have to do another interview.

Chelan: Thank you so much.

Rick: One of these days.

Chelan: I’d love that. Yeah. It was really through that process, working with him, that I really reidentified as, “Oh, I am a poet. This isn’t a side gig. This is what I do, and this is what I’m here for,” really connecting with that dharma sense in a very potent way. So it’s transformational.

Rick: It’s great.

Chelan: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, so is there anything else that we want to talk about? Or certain poems that you’re going to kick yourself if you don’t read?

Chelan: Good question. Are there any more questions?

Rick: No other questions have come in from people that I know of. Irene would have sent them over. And in terms of the poems you sent me, let’s see: “Susceptible”—no. “A More Loving Candidate,” “Crown Chakra,” “Hafez Was Generous”—you already read that one. “Don’t Know What to Call”—no. “Make Your Love Visible,” “The Soul’s Homeland,” “Things Are About to Get Interesting.” Those are some of the ones.

Chelan: That I haven’t read yet. I’ll read one more of those.

Rick: Okay, which one do you want to read?

Chelan: I’ll read “The Soul’s Homeland.”

Rick: Okay, good.

Chelan: I did a little editing of this poem today, actually, so I’ll read this printout here.

Rick: I’ll show it on the screen, but there will be a few edits.

Chelan: No problem. Yeah. Okay, “The Soul’s Homeland.”

Rick: Awesome. Very nice.

Chelan: Thank you.

What’s next

Rick: So this is really cool. I’m really glad we got a chance to do this.

Chelan: Wow. And the two hours flew by. At the outset, that seems like a lot, but no, no problem there.

Rick: It always flies by, you know. As Kermit the Frog said, “Time’s fun when you’re having flies.”

Chelan: Yeah, and again, Rick, I just so appreciate the lack of spiritual egotism that you bring, and just the authenticity.

Rick: I’ve had it beaten out of me over the decades.

Chelan: But it’s not prominent in you. And just how good that feels, and how I love—it’s so nice to connect with people on such a human level. You bring a lot of this wonderful, authentic human stuff forward.

Rick: Well, thanks.

Chelan: I really appreciate you.

Rick: So do you. That’s why people like you so much, because you’re so genuine and unpretentious.

Chelan: Oh, good. I’m glad I come across that way.

Rick: Yeah.

Chelan: You never know. It’s always hard to know.

Rick: You’re kind of buoyant. You’re like that guy at the airport who just cheers up whoever you encounter.

Chelan: Thank you. Thank you. That’s nice to hear.

Rick: You are a light in the world.

Chelan: Oh, thank you so much, Rick. Back at you.

Rick: And we need more lights like you.

Chelan: Oh, can I talk about what’s coming up?

Rick: Yeah, sure.

Chelan: Yeah. So, let’s see. Gosh, I wish I could remember the dates. My friend Mary and I are doing a live-streamed series of episodes in which we’ll be diving into themes around the experience of coming out as kind of a mystic, you could say, and embracing the messiness of that process. It’s about trying to be on the path of living authentic truth. And there’s more. One of the episodes is going to be called “Redefining God.”

Rick: You mean video webinar, Zoom-type things, right?

Chelan: Yeah. People can sign up to be part of this, and it’s on my website. I’m glad I remembered that. So, Chelan Harkin, first and last name, dot com. You can find it there. It’d be so nice to have you. It’s going to be wonderful. Mary’s the coolest person ever.

Rick: I’ll link to that from your page on BatGap. And also, probably you can put it on Facebook, too. Mary will probably have it on her webpage or Facebook or whatever.

Chelan: Fantastic.

Rick: Yeah, I assume.

Chelan: And then in the coming months, I’m also going to be putting out an album of my music.

Rick: Whoa, music? All right, I see a little guitar on the wall.

Chelan: Oh, yeah. That’s mine.

Rick: You didn’t tell us about that.

Chelan: Such a great guitar. Small guitar, big sound. Yeah, singing and poetry are my two main avenues.

Rick: You should put some of your poems to song.

Chelan: I haven’t found a way to make that work. I would love to be able to do that. But poetry and song poetry are different things.

Rick: Yeah.

Chelan: You can get away with kind of cheesy rhymes in song poetry because the melody is so nice. That works.

Rick: There are a couple of people who did that well. Dylan obviously had some incredibly poetic songs. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years ago.

Chelan: Wow.

Rick: Donovan had some really great poetic songs. And there was a group called the Incredible String Band, whom you’ve probably never heard of, but I’ll have to send you a song or two.

Chelan: My favorite musical poets are the Indigo Girls.

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Chelan: Incredible lyricism. And the Abbott Brothers. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him—or them.

Rick: Never heard of them.

Chelan: Really beautiful music. So that’ll be coming out. And then I’m also going to be a panelist with the Center for Contemporary Mysticism in October. That’s going to be fun, just a Q&A about all kinds of different juicy subjects.

Rick: Neat. Well, you’re not running out of things to do. You mentioned that somebody paid you $500 to come and give a talk. What was that all about?

Chelan: Oh, yeah. Well, that was really cool. My four-year-old son has a hard time getting to sleep at night. So sometimes, when we’re not feeling very patient, we just take him on a long drive. I was on one of these long drives not more than a few months ago, and I just said a little prayer quietly, because he was sleeping in the back, for speaking opportunities. I’ve really never done any public speaking. Then, like, two days later, I heard from two people who wanted me to be on a podcast, and then this other person who was like, “Hey, I’d love to pay you. I have this organization, and the theme is moving forward with grace. Can you be the keynote speaker for 500 bucks?”

Rick: Wow.

Chelan: Okay. Well, sure. So I’ve just really been saying yes to all the things that open. That’s a capacity I’ve been wanting to develop, and I still want to develop. So if anybody has things they’d like to invite me to join them in—any of the listeners—I’m open. I’m excited.

Rick: Right.

Chelan: That was a really good experience. And these three podcasts before this one, Rick, I feel I wouldn’t have been ready for this without those.

Rick: Neat.

Chelan: So I’m grateful for that process.

Rick: Well, Mary said in her email to me—I don’t think I read this part—she said, “Your listeners would very much enjoy having the chance to hear from her before fame swallows her up. I’m not exaggerating.” So it seems like you’re on a roll.

Chelan: We’ll see what happens. I’m saying yes to all the things. I do want my work to reach people.

Rick: Sure.

Chelan: It’s had a very beautiful effect, and I’m so grateful for those words. So nourishing. It’s the coolest thing imaginable for me for my work to reach people, especially because I had held it close for so long and hadn’t shared it. So I would love it to have as wide a reach as it possibly might. We’ll see what comes with that.

Rick: Yeah. I think there’s a deep human tendency to want to expand one’s territory of influence. And that can have a dark side to it or a light side to it, you know?

Chelan: Yes, absolutely.

Rick: But it’s one of those natural human drives, I think.

Chelan: That’s interesting.

Rick: Yeah.

Chelan: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that, kind of assessing my motivations and things, and thinking about how attachment to fame just really comes from feeling—from a sense of…

Rick: Smallness.

Chelan: Like a not-enoughness, and wanting to lean on that crutch of other people’s approval, or whatever. And that doesn’t help. That doesn’t help anyone, let alone ourselves.

Rick: But if the impulse is pure, and if the motivation is pure, then you can utilize that natural tendency for good.

It’s exciting, and it’s fun. It’s really fun to have a platform to share love and truth, and joy and liberation. It’s great. So anyway, gosh, I don’t want to say goodbye.

Chelan: It’s exciting, and it’s fun. It’s really fun to have a platform to share love and truth, and joy and liberation. It’s great. So anyway, gosh, I don’t want to say goodbye.

Rick: Yeah, well, we’ll be in touch. And I’ll be putting up that BatGap page. If new things come up, I don’t put up people’s announcements of every new event or something, but a book, a new website, or something of a permanent nature—we add those to people’s BatGap pages if they want. So for those listening or watching, there’ll be several links on your BatGap page that they can follow, like a link to your Facebook and to your website and all. Obviously, people know how to sign up for emails and become your Facebook friend and all that kind of stuff. We’re going to work on that Facebook friend thing.

Chelan: Oh, yeah.

Rick: You’re maxed out.

Chelan: Yes. Thank you so much for all your support. I deeply, deeply appreciate it.

Rick: Yeah. Well, thank you for doing this. It’s been a lot of fun.

Chelan: Totally fun.

Rick: And we will be talking to each other again.

Chelan: Okay. Thanks so, so much. I wish you just all the best and all the good that there is.

Rick: Yeah, and same for you. And thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. As I mentioned earlier, next week I’m going to be interviewing a guy about intelligent design, which I find fascinating. And I don’t care if some people think it’s pseudoscience or something. I think there’s something to it, and this guy expresses it brilliantly. So that should be an interesting, kind of science-y conversation. But if you hang in there with us, I think you’ll learn stuff. I certainly have been in preparing for it. So see you next time. Talk to you later.

Chelan: Thanks. Bye. Thanks to all the listeners. Thanks. Nice talking with you.

Rick: Yeah, bye-bye.