614 Buddha at The Gas Pump Interview – Clay Lomakayu Miller
>>RICK: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually Awakening people. I’ve done about 610 or 12 of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out some of the previous ones, go to batgap.com 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. My guest today is Clay Lomakayu Miler. Clay lives in Cottonwood, Arizona, just outside of Sedona, where he has been serving clients from all over the world to assist them in living at the center of the circle of who they are. Medicine of One is the outcome of this service. It’s also the name of a book that I just finished reading. It is a non-dual shamanic path that has formed from his work with clients for 25 years and his time in the ancient sacred land of the Southwest. He uses a unique form of healing called Soul dreaming to help free people from the stories from their past, so they may give the world their true presence. He is also the creator of primordial movements for trauma and emotional integration. He considers his primary service is the sharing of Medicine of One. At his side or his wolf dog helpers, in other words, his dogs, assisting people with their presence and love. Medicine of One is summed up in the one noble truth, which is to live at the center, where, from true being, comes our true doing. The first action is the true action of self-love. That last thing I just read reminds me of a verse from the Bhagavad Gita which is, established in being, perform action. Welcome, Clay.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Welcome. I’m just doing the Bhagavad Gita, according to Gandhi.
>>RICK: Did he do a commentary on it or something?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: He did his short commentary while he was in jail.
>>RICK: Nice. When you say doing what you’re alluding to here is that you make your living these days by reading audiobooks and putting them up on Audible.com. You were just telling me you get to choose the books, so you choose all these cool books you’d like to read, and you read them out loud, and get paid for it.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: And I have fun. That’s the main thing. I don’t read the book, I live it.
>>RICK: I know what you mean. You just kind of tune into the wavelength of that book.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: I never look ahead. I never read ahead. I don’t know what’s ahead. I just jump in and let it come through and try to imagine that there’s somebody there that I’m talking to. That I’m connecting with. That’s my main way that I do it. I make a lot of mistakes that way though.
>>RICK: Then you just have to redo a passage?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: I have to do a lot of editing.
>>RICK: That’s okay. That’s the way I read your book, the Medicine of One, I listened to it while I was walking around in the park or washing dishes and things like that. That’s how I read most every book I read these days, kind of kill two birds with one stone, get some exercise and listen to a book. You were referred to us by the Reverend Bill McDonald, who’s a good friend that we’ve interviewed a couple of times. I guess you got to know him because you did an audio recording of one of his books. When we announced that we were going to interview you, a couple people got in touch and they said, wow, I really love this guy’s YouTube channel. He has all these cool videos on it. I actually haven’t even much looked at your YouTube channel because I was so busy listening to your book We actually did get a question here. Might as well start with it, from Mike Kappeler in Chilliwack, British Columbia, which is outside of Vancouver. He said, I really value your YouTube channel. It was my first introduction to Nisargadatta Maharaj’s teachings. Thank you so much. I’m very grateful for the time you took to make those audiobooks. I’ll keep reading his question here. Even though this is a little bit premature to ask, I’ll ask it. What is your experience with Nisargadatta Maharaj? How were you influenced by him?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: That’s where the whole aspect of shamanic non-duality comes from because very often, shamanism actually can easily invoke duality, different levels of worlds, different spirits. It’s that, it’s the whole, I use a circle to talk about what is very difficult to talk about, which is, who you really are, your true presence. A circle is actually a sphere. It’s you just here, quiet, not thinking. It’s space essentially; it’s spaciousness. That is, ‘I am’, essentially. Nisargadatta, unlike a lot of people actually, talks about going beyond ‘I am’, beyond the circle. He discusses a lot of things. To me, I take in these books, I don’t try to gather information or concepts. I absorb the teachings by living them, so to speak, and then they find their way into my work. I also have done a lot of the Ramana Maharshi. He doesn’t talk as much about what’s beyond ‘I am’. ‘I am’ is the circle. As you read in the introduction, for me, to live at the center of the circle, whose center is nowhere and circumference is everywhere, is the one noble truth. For me, many people read Nisargadatta, and they stay on that level of just reading or listening and gathering concepts. Then there are some people that try very hard to do what he suggests you do. They have a very difficult time doing it because it means you need to live at the center of the circle. Basically, Medicine of One is how to help people move to that center point. In a way, Medicine of One is everything that Nisaragatta does not talk about, which is life, psychology, normal problems. What do I want to do with my life? Those types of things. Trauma. He, especially as he got older, had no patience for anything but the absolute.,
>>RICK: There was also a quote that I had from him someplace if I want to take a minute to pull that up. Basically, he said, forget I Am That. That was the name of his book. He said it goes so much deeper than that. I’ve realized so much more since then. He said that towards the end of his life.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Yeah, and the thing is, to me, the only thing you can practice or occupy is that experience of being that, the presence, the circle. Beyond that you can’t do anything. I look at it like dropping a pebble in the water, and your sense of ‘I Am’ is your separate nest within that pool of water. But the absolute is beyond that. It dissolves, so you can’t talk about it because there’s nobody there to talk about it.
>>RICK: When you use the circle metaphor, could we envision, let’s say, a bicycle wheel, where there’s the hub of the wheel, and then there’s all the spokes. Most people are kind of stuck out on one spoke or another or they’re kind of scattered among a bunch of spokes that, in other words, the attention is fragmented and outer-directed. You’re advocating getting down to the hub from which all the spokes emerge. If you could live at the hub, then you’d kind of be at the center of everything rather than, and therefore not at the mercy of, the relative world. You’d kind of have a silent center or foundation from which to live. Would that be a fair description?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Yes, that’s it. The difficulty is I look at those spokes of the wheel. The way I look at them as they’re our stories. They’re our tendencies, they’re our habits, and so they’re what I call little eyes. As we move through life, because everybody’s surviving from the time they’re little people. Within the story our emotions, and the way we survive, is not to let them move. They create a force of spin. That is what pulls you out of the center. Most people’s habit to survive is to get rid of that. If I can get rid of that, then I’ll be at the center. Everybody tries to throw out of the circle what they don’t like within themselves, which sometimes could be ‘I want to be loved’, or their anger at not being loved, or all kinds of feelings that we try to get rid of. What they do by the pressure of pushing them out, you actually allow them to pull you toward them. The Medicine of One, by becoming the circle, which is that spacious presence. Nisargadatta only infrequently uses that sense of awareness. He uses the word affection, affectionate awareness. To me, that’s what the circle is. It’s affectionate awareness to everything that moves in the circle. It lets it move and allows you then to free the energies that are trapped and liberate your gifts, which then by living at the center can come through you into the world.
>>RICK: Sounds good. I often think of people trying to push things out as being like people trying to push beach balls under the water, and you have to apply all this effort, and they keep trying to pop up. It becomes a full-time occupation, trying to keep them under the water. What you’re saying I think, is allow yourself to experience these things and process them, and then you won’t expend all that energy trying to repress them, and then you’ll have tons more energy because they will have been resolved hopefully.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Also, what it does is when you push them away, they own you. You become them. You think that’s who you are, because they have a point of view and a story that they believe that’s what happened. Part of being the circle is to give up what you believe – mostly – except hang on to the essential ones that believe I’m greater than these spins, so to speak, or the desire to. I avoid using the word self-realization, but it’s just to be, to live at the center, and everything that comes from that. It’s this thing of, we invoke the circle, to become the circle. With an emotion, many people try to process them mentally even though they’re working with them, they’re trying to allow them to move. The big thing for me is the vibration has to be brought into the physical presence, the vibration of the emotion that isn’t just general.
>>RICK: In the soul dreaming that you mentioned…
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: It’s a dream of, first I want to know what people want. What do you want? How do you want to feel in the world? Do you want to feel more trust? Do you want to have freedom? Do you want to speak your truth? Love. That’s a feeling. Once I know what they want that’s the only thing I know. I’m going to – a dream is going to come through me, a journey, that will help carry them to that. The dream is full of vibrations that can be places, objects, people. Frequently sort of psychic material comes in where it looks like something that happened. I’m actually channeling it like a musical instrument. That’s where my voice comes in. Again, that’s where the use of my voice came from. Because I cry, I yell, I scream, I hit on words. It’s a journey through the vibrations. If they can live the journey with me, they will arrive at the end. Basically, it’s by being the sort of quiet affectionate presence and allowing themselves to be affected by the vibrations, so they might shake, cry, tremble, laugh, but it’s effortless. They’re not trying to do anything. That’s a passive way. The active way is I use a person’s body and voice which I call, for want of a better description, primordial movements.
>>RICK: Can you think of an example as a case in point of someone you worked with where you did the soul dreaming and how that went? Also, when you say it’s a dream, do you mean a dream that you, Clay, have during sleep at night? Or is it more of an altered state, in the waking state, where you channel some kind of knowledge that comes through?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: That’s a good question. The person is present.
>>RICK: You’re sitting with a person in a room or something like that?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Well, basically the best places for me to do it is in my home because nature becomes different, nature becomes part of it then. It’s more inward rather than nature-oriented. I use music too because it’s another vibration. Practically speaking, what happens is once I establish what they want, in which case, I actually use a circle, and in this case, the spokes are just the four directions. We establish what they want. A person could use animals to describe those, because those are just qualities that you want to bring in. Then, I take them into a deep state for about five minutes, slowly taking them down. I start the music, put my hands on them, whatever presents itself, that’s what I go with. I’m trusting that it will, that what will come through me will be the right thing that will lead them to where we want to arrive at. Frequently, when that happens, it doesn’t make any sense to my mind. It’s not like it comes from something they told me. That’s why it is dreamlike. It can have sometimes a linear storyline, but it can often be very dreamlike. I could start out, I could say, I could put my hands on somebody, and what comes through is ‘mom’, and that’s the beginning of a story right there. That’s a big story, ‘mom’. Okay, so suddenly, I sweep them back to a moment that somehow is sitting in them. If they can let it move toward them, and they can move toward it, then it will cause a reaction in them as they just be with it. Some of the time, most of the time, perhaps they know what it’s about. It’s like hitting the nail on the head. Sometimes, not always, they don’t know, but sometimes they don’t really have to know. Then by my letting it come through me, that’s like grabbing a thread, and I follow the thread. I follow the thread by feeling each moment. It leads me to the next moment. Sometimes what comes in is a stubbornness inside them. There’s always a part of many people that they’re there because they want something, and they want to grow, but there’s another stubborn part that’s connected to their survival and control, and it doesn’t want to. That’s really the problem. That part, because it sort of controls, it keeps them away from the emotion it causes them to think all the time. That’s sort of what we’re trying to do is, these unmoved emotions energize the thinking. Rather than trying to grapple with the thinking, and show that mind a different point of view, and talk it out of what it feels, I go down below it to what’s driving it, to dissipate that, so that it’s no longer energizing it. At the same time, I always tell people, but you must give up what you believe, which many times is you must give up being right.
>>RICK: I presume you’re meaning things like, not that you shouldn’t believe the earth is a globe and not flat, but rather someone might think, well, I’m a loser, I’m a jerk, I’m a bad person – that kind of negative stuff about themselves, and you’re asking them to give up those sorts of things.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: That’s more on the surface. Take somebody that’s been traumatized, victimized. They have to give up the belief in their victimhood even though it looks like that.
>>RICK: I know you have this whole victim/warrior polarity that
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: The way I look at it is those are the two ways that we survive, or people sort of jump back and forth. The victim becomes completely owned by the energy so frequently they can’t stop talking about it. They don’t like the feeling. They also want to get rid of it. The warrior in a sense, the true warrior, never talks about it. They make a good soldier, but they don’t make a good husband when they come back home though because they’re so disconnected from that world. They’re very difficult people to work with because emotion is a language they don’t even know. I’m trying to tell them, look, I know everything you’ve done to survive is not letting this in, but now if you want to go beyond that, you must let this in. Here’s the core, the most difficult, is the relationship to powerlessness. If you can actually soften and feel the energy of powerlessness, but remember, you’re the circle feeling it, you’re not the powerlessness. That’s where you give up your belief. You give up by identifying yourself as the circle, as spaciousness, as presence, which is as simple as when I go, ‘mom’, that energy comes into me. I just do it. Then, I suddenly just step into feeling the space around me. I go ‘mom’, and I take a breath, and I feel the space. I just let it come in. It rushes through me. And, to me, it’s always opposites. There’s always an opposite. Well, everything exists because of opposites. If there’s a ‘mom’, that ‘mom’ is like, could even go as far back as an infant laying on their back in a crib, and it’s dark and cold, and nobody’s there. That story plays out for their whole life, and they grew up and they might even be 50 years old. And still, that ‘mom’ is inside of them. They’re still angry with mom, and they still play out the dynamic. Because what they believe about the story is, mom didn’t love them. The ‘mom’ is one movement, but the other movement is the rage. It’s like contraction is the ‘mom’. Then there’s an expansive, usually explosive part that can be different. But it’s specific when I go, ‘mom’, that’s very specific. It can’t even completely describe it. Which is why it’s beyond just taking generally emotions like anger and go beat on the bed with a racket and blow off steam. That doesn’t work. It doesn’t. You blow off steam, and you sort of let it out, and then it comes back. This can happen in five seconds. I’ve had many people that were ready, and it happened very quickly, although it can take some time to get them to that point.
>>RICK: You’ve been doing this stuff for 20 years or something, right? You’ve probably met with hundreds of people over that time. I think we’ll gain a clearer understanding of what exactly you do as we go along, but do you find that a fairly significant percentage of people undergo quite a radical transformation in a short amount of time? I don’t know how long they spend with you, but does it last? I mean, do they really resolve something, and then five years later, it’s still resolved.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Yes, if they give up what they believe.
>>RICK: That might be easier said than done.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: It is. It’s very difficult to give up being right. But right invokes wrong. If you’re right, you’re going to be wrong, too. That’s the circle. It’s like, okay, right and wrong are there. Or, in my circle, I have one that feels they’re right. It talks sometimes, and the thought is there, but I just don’t accept it. I don’t take it in and completely believe it. That’s what I mean by giving up being right. It isn’t that you won’t have the thought, or it won’t make its appearance, or you’re in an argument, and you can feel yourself doing it, ultimately to just sort of practice realizing that if everybody’s right, I mean, that can’t be truth.
>>RICK: I think it was the Buffalo Springfield who sang, nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong. For What It’s Worth was the name of that song. Are you still doing this or has COVID kind of put the brakes on it?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Somewhat, but starting when I started writing my book in 2013 I sort of let go working the internet, the websites. It became a whole different ballgame. Back in the beginning, you could manipulate the search engines to end up on a front desk. That no longer became possible in that way. You had to have a lot of the social platforms, and it just isn’t my thing. I started to just let that go and focused on my book. Then I started doing audiobooks. So, I can have a busy month, or I can have a month free. The nice thing is that’s not how I make my living anymore. I have no attachment to it. But I feel, I don’t know, I feel I’m supposed to keep doing it. I feel that there’s a service there; that this is important for me as a person too because in a way, it’s my social life.
>>RICK: Can you do it online with people, or do they have to come to be with you physically?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: No, actually, the sort of primordial movement one I often do online. Or sometimes it can be just kind of a counseling session. Usually, I can make an impact on somebody, if I can get them to do something like ‘mom’ with me and do it. But it can be very difficult because I encountered the stubborn one. They might go instead of ‘mom’, they’ll go, mom, mom. The mind’s very clever. Also, when I use the body when I say that ‘mom’, it’s like I’m reaching with my hands facing toward the sky. It’s more of a helpless position. One way they can change the vibration is they move the hands facing down, or to the sides. Your hands are so important in bringing in emotion to your body, it’s dance. Even by a little, this (hand mudra)
>>RICK: You know about mudras, right? In Indian dance, the hands are so expressive, and they’re doing all these things.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Yeah, and I’m sort of invoking that by using these different positions in places of the body, and the voice is like music, and you have to hit the right note. If you don’t hit the right note, it won’t move, it won’t energize it, so to speak. We’re trying to energize what people have basically tried not to energize. By doing that, we are owning it rather than it owning us. But we are owning it with love, which is just space, which is just the sky to the wind.
>>RICK: There was another part to Mike’s question, let me ask that he said, with talking about your YouTube channel, with having so many different teachers and traditions on your channel from Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, kriya yoga, etc. Is there one specifically that you practiced? Do you ever get confused with such a variety of different spiritual things that you’re putting your attention into?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: With most religions or -isms, I always try to look for what they have in common, rather than what they don’t have in common, or where they conflict. I ended up with my own. That’s what Medicine of One is basically. I don’t particularly consider myself a follower of any of them. I’m a follower of Medicine of One which uses, I feel I’m just taking the knowledge that’s been out there in many different forms, and I’m just allowing it to come through me in a circle in the desert the way that it wants to. It comes through me through my interaction with people.
>>RICK: I could describe my own experience that way in terms of not being an adherent of any particular religion, but kind of respecting them all by recognizing that they all have the same fundamental source. Many people, the deepest people in all the religions, I think realize that. Other people don’t, and they’re out on one of the spokes, and they see all the other religions as being in conflict with theirs and so on. Somebody else sent in a question. I think, actually, it was Irene. Irene Archer from Fairfield, Iowa, wants to know, I want to hear all about your greatest teachers and helpers. How many are currently in your pack? You have some cool stories about your dogs in your book, by the way.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Yeah, they’re difficult stories. They’re my stories of loss.
>>RICK: One got bit by a rattlesnake and other things.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Well, I had dogs when I was very young. Then when I moved and lived in Sedona, and did archaeological tours and stuff, I got a wolf. I actually got an 80% wolf, as a pup. That was my way back into that. That was also just about the time that I started doing what I do. He just; they aren’t at all; I mean, I can yell and scream like crazy when I’m doing a session. If somebody went by the house, they would think some kind of form of domestic violence is going on [laughing] probably, but my dogs, they just lay there.
>>RICK: That’s just dad doing his thing again.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: That dog was Dakota. The thing is with these types of dogs, which I call wolf dogs, because they’re very close to that breed, species, that they don’t often get along with other dogs because they’re so territorial or protective. It always adds an extra component to taking care of them. That was Dakota, and he died of cancer, and I wrote a song for him. The chorus goes, I am what I am, always spirit again. And I’ll be with you always my friend, in our life, I was free, you just let me be, wild, wooly, and free. Now it’s all up to you to be wild and free, to be the soul that you are. It goes something like that.
>>RICK: In your book, you actually sing some of these songs, it’s sweet.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Then there was a dog named Wolf. A very similar type of dog. He would lay next to people. The dogs would lay next to people, oftentimes when I’m actually doing the session. I sometimes get people that are afraid of dogs. I just use that because fear, of course, is one of the main things to be the circle to — the vibration of it. It can be a way to sort of relax to that. I always look at it as well, there’s a reason, and sometimes the dogs are laying on either side of these people at the end, and it’s been an important part of their experience. Or, somebody is afraid of a height, and they’re walking along this cliff and the dog is right there with them. They feel that the dog was consciously helping them. There are many dogs, but I’ve had some bad traumas with the dogs. I had my face ripped open by one when I broke up a flight, and the other one was bit by a rattlesnake.
>>RICK: You almost lost a couple of them in the desert, but they showed up again.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Yeah, they’ve run away, and I used to chase them. In more recent years when they run away, I just wait.
>>RICK: For them to come back. We have a dog that’s kind of psychic actually. We can’t say (geez, it’s kind of nice) maybe we should take a walk because that would be too blatant. So, we resorted to language such as well, it’s pretty cool out and looks like it’s not going to rain. The dog will actually come running in from the other room, ears perked up, tail wagging like, okay, okay, let’s do it. He actually picks up on the thought, if we practically even just have the thought that we might take a walk. He comes running in. There’s a guy named Rupert Sheldrake who wrote a book called “Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home”.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: The one I know is the mor?
>>RICK: Morphogenetic fields. Anyway, we’re getting a little off. But actually, it’s nice.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Well, actually morphogenic fields is in a way sort of related to the way you can look at what I’m tapping into when I dream with people.
>>RICK: Let’s talk about your own life a little bit. You’ve been through some stuff. You had this horrific car accident when you were 25 and various other things. I got the impression in reading your book that you look on it all now as learning experiences, and you wouldn’t be who you were had you not gone through all those things as traumatic and as injurious as they may have been.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Yeah, it’s another way for me that without my difficulties Medicine of One would no more exist either because it’s what’s brought me through it because I still have a lot of difficulties from that accident. On every level, I have to every day be that love to myself to feelings of powerlessness, and helplessness, and frustration, and all the things that most normal people have going on in our life. It’s really through using it myself, even with all the stories with my dogs, and how to move through the traumas quickly, rather than have them own me so I can keep loving dogs. For me, there was a period where it was my sort of journey in the underworld in San Francisco, and somewhat in New York, I was a bartender. It was back in the early 70s, it was North Beach and all the poets and musicians. I used to go to a place called the Coffee Gary and play my guitar and sang. Janis Joplin used to sing there. Drops of LSD in the eyes. [laughing]
>>RICK: I heard you mention that. People actually did it that way? I had never heard of doing that. Why would you do that rather than up your nose or something?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: It’s very quick.
>>RICK: Gets it into the bloodstream
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: I wouldn’t recommend it.
>>RICK: This car accident, you were 25. You got an Aston Healey. Was that what James Bond drove? Or was that an Aston Martin that he drove?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Probably an Austin Martin. The Austin Healey had a huge six-cylinder engine. It could go back then, in 1960 or 65, I think. It had an overdrive. I had actually bought the car. My father died. I drove the car back to Michigan to go to my father’s funeral, and it broke down. No, actually, the car broke down before that, and I left it there. When my father died, I went back to Michigan, and my uncle helped me rebuild this whole car for six weeks from the bottom up. We actually filed down the cylinders to make it because we couldn’t get new ones and things. I was driving back with a friend from Michigan to California, and still doing stupid things.
>>RICK: You mentioned you had a Quaalude and a beer.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: A friend handed me a Quaalude, I said, okay, and then we drank a half a beer, and I got too relaxed. At the same time, I had taken it up, the engine was broken, so I took it up to 120, and as I was coming down, I looked off the side of the road for a minute, and then all of a sudden, I’m at one of these marker posts. I hit head-on, and I overreacted, turned the wheel, and apparently it flipped. But did not keep flipping. It flipped and landed on the top. This was a ragtop; all they had was a piece of cloth on the top. It actually shaved off part of the steering wheel. These are teeny cars, and there’s no room in them when you’re in them. There’s no place to go. The seats are on the floor as it is. Your feet are straight out in front of you, but somehow, I got away from the pavement, almost. It did hit my head and my shoulder. I slid for 330 feet underneath it. I was knocked out for 15 minutes, but the friend that came out with me managed to stop a doctor. The two of them flipped the car, and I walked out, and I went to the Justice of the Peace the next day for reckless driving. I just left the car. It’s actually a perfect example of what you don’t want to do. If something happens, and you just walk away.
>>RICK: What else could you have done? I guess they gave you a fine for reckless driving. The car was probably totaled.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: What I mean is emotionally, and I’m also talking these days, somebody might at least go to a chiropractor or something or get things checked. I didn’t do anything. It’s like a cowboy falls off the horse, and just, I’m okay. On a physical level, these sorts of things collect in us too.
>>RICK: Yes, as traumas and as physical injuries. So, you’ve had problems all your life because of that accident.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Yeah, actually, without my knowing it. I did not know exactly what happened. In fact, I’m still learning, but probably only within the last 15 years of how it basically drove my head, down into my spine,
>>RICK: Kind of compressed your vertebrae or something.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: It caused all the soft tissues to, it’s like, I got stuck in the reaction to curling up into a ball to get away from the pavement and stayed there. The first effects were pressure in the head on the sides of my head about six months later. It started to affect the brain because of the blood flow, basically. I went through all kinds of stuff for closed head injuries; football players, biofeedback, looking at the brain, the brain waves, and I went to many specialists. When they looked at my brain, it looked like I had closed head injuries, slow places in the brain, which, some of this perhaps I don’t know, could have resulted in allowing me to do some of what I do.
>>RICK: That’s interesting. There are stories of people having brain injuries, and then suddenly, they become an expert pianist, having never played piano before. Some kind of gift, some kind of ability, I forget what the name is, but I interviewed a lady who studies these people. It’s like Rain Man or something; some kind of ability will blossom all of a sudden after the brain is injured in some way. Some scientists theorize that the brain is like a filter that actually shuts down a lot of the input that we would otherwise get. In some cases, some injury to the brain can diminish its filtering ability, so we’re suddenly flooded with information or abilities that we didn’t have before.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Right. Maybe it’s like with the morphic field thing, you’re now resonating with another field that you couldn’t resonate with before, and all that talent comes through.
>>RICK: There is this guy who actually performs concerts. Now he does this amazing improvisational piano stuff. He just kind of makes it up on the spot. He wasn’t really a piano player before that. It just kind of started happening after he had this, I forget whether it was some kind of stroke or injury to his brain. It’s not something you’d want to have happen necessarily, but sometimes these things happen. It raises intriguing questions.
>>RICK: Obviously, you did all kinds of other things, various educational experiences, traveling all over the world, and all over the country and everything else. At what point do you feel like spirituality became sort of an explicit motivation, like in your mind, you began to really question, in a spiritual sense. Maybe you’d always been doing that or, or maybe you had and didn’t know it, and at a certain point you knew it?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Well, I guess the line I would draw would be between when it became part of my work in the world. Before that, it was just when I was really young, I just had this sense of wanting to live an aware life. I studied acting, but when I studied acting, it was a spiritual discipline for me because to me it’s the study of the human heart. Why do we do things, and early on, I learned that the best acting of course, is those who are able to, I remember this phrase, your point of power is in the present. It is really an actor’s ability to be present that allows the best actors to do what they do. The only difference is they’re creating an imaginary present to react to and believing it. They have to be very present because otherwise the mind gets in there. The stakes are very high when you’re being filmed or performing to be good. The mind wants to get in there and make sure that you say things right and all that. It’s the same thing with the audiobooks. A lot of people read the book, and try to do it without making any mistakes, so that becomes what it sounds like.
>>RICK: Too tentative? Too tentative while they’re doing it because they’re trying to be too careful.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: There’s too much attention placed on being perfect, so to speak, not making any mistakes, as opposed to having fun and just being kind of a channel. I like to sort of take on the persona of whoever wrote the book.
>>RICK: You kind of mind-meld with them, I guess.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Which is for me interesting because with Nisargadatta, he’s very unique, he’s got a real edge.
>>RICK: He was a real character.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: He was like a sharp knife. Ramana is like a butter knife. He’s got a choppiness, a staccato next to him. That’s why in a lot of his books, especially I am That and his earlier books, that’s the way I read it. I’m trying to, I’m taking him in. It’s like this sharpness. It’s by my taking him in that I take in those learnings on a certain unconscious level. Later on, newer translations put his words together in a different way that didn’t have that, so I didn’t read them that way. I read them slower. Sometimes, I actually have a lot of wonderful people that give me a lot of compliments, but I also have some people that almost hate me.
>>RICK: Me too! [laughing]
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: It’s like, I hate that voice, but I guess if you work to have everybody like you, you’re not going to be very good.
>>RICK: I don’t think it’s possible. It’s funny, I mean, you look at any YouTube video, and there’s always some thumbs down. I’ve never seen a YouTube video that has only thumbs up. Actually, I can put you in touch with a guy, if you’re interested, who spent time with Nisargadatta. He’s been on BatGap a couple times, is a friend of mine. Timothy Conway is his name. He lives in Phoenix, as a matter of fact. He’d be happy to tell you some anecdotes about what it was like being with Nisargadatta. He’s a great guy. In fact, I think he’s talking about moving to Sedona, so that’d be interesting. You don’t seem like the kind of guy who would have done a regimented daily spiritual practice. It seems like your whole orientation is more fluid than that, and kind of more earth-oriented, or something or other? Am I right?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Yes, and no. I’ve done a very easy, not stringent, every morning yoga practice for 35 years.
>>RICK: Must be a must help with your body too.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: It just sort of gets me so I can think a little bit, and I know my body needs that, especially as we get older. It’s not like I go and sit for two hours starting at 4 am in the morning. My thing would be just to go out in the circle, where it’s beautiful, and I’m in a powerful place, and just be. Sit there at the center and just keep bringing myself back to that. At the same time, my body-mind self gets to enjoy the elements. I just use that to bring myself back.
>>RICK: When you say go out and sit in a circle, do you mean like you’ve created a circle of rocks or something out in your yard, and it’s like a power spot that you’ve created for yourself where you go and sit?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Most of these are actually circles out in the national forest.
>>RICK: That you’ve created, or they’re just out there?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: That I have created. I have a whole webpage that’s on medicine circles in medicine wheels. My first one was up on this mountain where Jerome is, in a rock called rhyolite. For me, it is a place I don’t really promote as they are sacred power spots for me. Most people feel that they are too, but I don’t say much more about it than that. People that do my form of vision quest, that’s where they sleep, in the circle. Part of their reason to be out there is to gather what’s out there that they’ve tried to throw out. We use objects like maybe their anger could be a cactus that’s been broken off somewhere, or maybe their innocence as a child is a little white flower, or maybe they’re rocks. The whole thing is to work with themselves and bring them into the circle. I help them work through that. But the circle I use as a way to talk about your ‘I Am’, physical, true presence. It’s also a place on the land that, when you stand out there, the circle makes the feeling of the spaciousness of the sky. It takes you into it. It is circles within circles on to infinity. The circle is both a physical place that has an energy, but it helps take you into the circle itself, and you get to enjoy it too.
>>RICK: I’ll tell you a funny story. About 30 years ago, Irene and I were on our way out to Parker, Arizona to visit her mother, and we did our first camping trip. We spent the night in Sedona, and I guess it’s north of town, there’s a stream that comes down. We camped there. We went into town the next day. We actually went to the Chamber of Commerce and said, we hear about all the power spots in Sedona. How do you find the power spots? They actually gave us a map. Here are the power spots. We went to some trail head, and we were hiking along looking for the power spot. We kept running into all these other people. We sort of would sheepishly ask each other, have you found the power spot? [laughing] I don’t know. I did once have a really profound experience in Sedona one time. I was with some friends. I went to that Slide Rock State Park, and we were swimming and sliding down through the water. As it began to get dark, we just kind of sat in a circle actually. I was drawn inwardly so deeply that I couldn’t talk or anything else. I was just gone for a while, and I could hear them talking, but I really couldn’t interact. Maybe that was the influence of Sedona. I don’t know.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Well, I think that’s the fact that the earth has places that have particular energies. Just on a very almost superficial level, magnetic and electrical, and fault lines and water under the earth creates as it flows. I do think that these places help us. They help us go to what’s already within us. I guess some people get too attached to the outside of it to think that they need that then. I have places that are this bone rock. It’s a bone-white rock, it creates these smooth washes. To me, it’s got the highest resonance. It’s much more high for me than the red rock. Different colors, that’s one of the things. Sedona is a place of color, its color, the green, junipers and cypress, and the red rocks. I live on the other side. Sedona for me is the masculine, the red fiery rock. I live on the feminine side, which is more rolling. Mingus Mountain is a kind of feminine mountain because it’s very soft and flowing. Some circles I have are right in the middle. They sort of are the connection between the two forces or sides.
>>RICK: This thing about picking up objects. There was an interesting story in your book, Medicine of One, where you were with this guy, and you’re down by some stream, and you asked him to just sort of go along the stream and pick up anything that might be meaningful to him. One of the things he picked up was a dirty sock, something that most of us wouldn’t really want to pick up. It turned out that it had significance to him because when he was little, his mother had made him wear socks on his hands, instead of gloves when he went to school, and the kids ridiculed him for it. It turned out this ended up being a very cathartic experience for him with your help and interaction. Maybe you could talk a little bit about either that specifically, or about that whole thing you do, where people find particular little objects, and somehow it helps to bring about a healing for them with your assistance.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: I’ve had times where actually there’s a place, sometimes there’s places out in the middle of nowhere, where people like to dump their trash. All forms, not just garbage from food, but mattresses, electronic devices, cans, flat tires. I found it an interesting place to take people for them to gather what they’ve thrown out of the circle of themselves in order to have peace. One way to look at that is you could pick a theme of, to gather all the people who’ve hurt you. Now, you’re not really, what you’re doing is, perhaps you’re picking something that reminds you of that person, but what you’re really picking up is everything you feel in relationship to that person. That’s what you bring into the circle, all your feelings. So that sock, it’s clearly not something you pick up that you like; in fact, the more it would be better to say that you probably don’t like them because that’s what you’re pushing away. The sock was about this story, and his mother shaming him, making him feel this shame. So, there’s the vibration of shame for one. Then there’s the rage with his mother, which is really the one that needs to move, to just sort of energize it all. That’s what I’m trying to get him, rather than to tense around it, to get away from it. Think about it, I’m actually bringing in all the vibrations in relation that that sock could have anything to do with, and if he can, and he’s doing it in the circle. The circle helps him be the circle to that vibration. Then it can move that story out of him, in a sense, so he is no longer carrying that with him. It happens really, ultimately, in a few seconds. There are sometimes people who have been to therapy their whole life, but a lot of therapy is just talk. Or, if they do take people into their feelings, oftentimes there’s regions the therapists aren’t comfortable going, so they stay away from them. Rage is probably one of them. I mean, how do you love rage? How do you honor that? It can actually be quite simple. One thing about when you bring in a violent feeling, is when you bring it in, you take a breath and you let it move, what comes in is its opposite. The tears, the sobbing, the weeping, because that’s what’s energizing that rage, the hurt.
>>RICK: Have you found that there are people who have come to you who had done a lot of therapy and hadn’t made much progress, but then when they work with you, they have breakthroughs?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Absolutely. I actually get psychologists and psychiatrists that come. The only problem with that type is they can be so analytically minded. It can get in the way. They know too much already, so to speak.
>>RICK: I was going to say, are there other people who just come work with you, and they think, it’s not working for me? Nothing’s happening.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Of course. I get fewer of those people because my website is pretty straight on. I try not to attract anybody that’s not right for me, so I probably scare away a lot of people. But that’s my intention in a way. Most of the people I get these days; they’re ready. But I still get some people that say, no, I can’t do that. It’s like they can’t do it. It’s like, I can’t do that.
>>RICK: You mean, they don’t want to do what you would recommend that they do? Is that what you’re saying?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: They don’t want to engage the field.
>>RICK: But you’ve kind of warned them ahead of time. That’s what you’ll want them to do.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: I actually had a couple of women towards the beginning of the year. Two doctors, two women doctors, and one was completely on board, but the other one, actually, when I did a session, part of her session was this wall, the dominance of this wall. It was a wall to me as well and that actually comes into the session. When we were out in a circle working, I worked with her friend who participated fully, and then after, this other woman watching that, it was like, I don’t think I can do that. I said that’s fine. You don’t have to do anything. I don’t have an agenda. That’s really my point with everybody. It’s like, you don’t have to do anything.
>>RICK: I picked that up about the way you work. It’s like you’re not forcing anybody. There was that guy who was in “The Secret” who ended up going to jail because he kind of forces people to be in a sweat lodge much hotter and longer than they should have been. Some people died. There’s other people who were getting people to do stuff that’s potentially dangerous, like walking on hot coals or doing really scary things. I didn’t get the sense that you try to put people through anything like that.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Well, I think that most people are hard on themselves. They have a pusher. That’s part of the problem, so even when somebody does my form of a vision quest, it’s not about suffering. It’s not about severity. Sometimes somebody could be out there one night, and that’s all they need, is one night. They could sleep in town the next day.
>>RICK: I see like, set up tents and spend the night sleeping on the ground.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: No tent, just sleeping in the circle on a sleeping bag pad. If it’s raining, there might be a tent, but no camping gear. It’s very minimal, and sometimes people are unsure if they want to do that. I say, well, we’ll just figure it out, we’ll see if that’s the right thing to do once you’re here. I always tell them, there’s no right way or wrong way. Sometimes if a person who generally pushes themselves to do things like that, it’s a positive thing for them decide to be soft on themselves and loving that. Okay, I don’t need to do it another night. That’s really the essence to me. That’s what I’m trying to get have people to have, a different relationship with their emotional being, where they are the softness to themselves.
>>RICK: Nice. And that note actually segues us back to a thought that I had towards the beginning of our conversation, where we were talking about the beach ball analogy of people trying to push beach balls under the water; in other words, trying to stuff and stifle one’s emotions or, painful inner things. I’m always reminded of the opioid epidemic, which is so terrible in the United States. That’s an extreme example of a principle, which I think is similar, in terms of people’s addiction to their cell phones or other things that they use to kind of numb themselves out, but of course, with opioids, it kills them. I don’t know, maybe you can just comment on that phenomenon on a societal level, what we’re doing to ourselves, and what it might take, again, on a societal level, to open up to the kind of sensitivity and honesty that you’re trying to inculcate in people. You’re working one on one, and you help people kind of ‘un-numb’ themselves, and it seems like the whole society needs to get un-numbed, a lot needs to be processed, so that people aren’t in these addictive behaviors.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Well, here’s the way I look at it; I always tell people, let’s say that is a person’s mission, just what you describe, to help have a positive effect on that societal addiction to things like that, to run away from their pain. That’s where for me the one Noble Truth of to live at the center. To live at the center means first you have gone and been this true action of self-love to what moves inside of you; your gift is coming into the world, and it’s the golden rule, you treat everybody the way you want to be treated. You become, it’s that old thing, you are the demonstration of what you want other people to be. It sounds like what you’re talking about is perhaps more of an activist type of role to affect people on that level.
>>RICK: Not that you would necessarily be the activist to transform society, but it seems to me that society needs transformation. One of the symptoms of its sickness is this attempt by millions and millions of people to numb out, to stifle and suppress and not feel the things that are uncomfortable to feel, and it’s not working.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: No, but the thing is, the way I look at it, people have always found ways to avoid it, and now they just have a lot more toys with which to do that. Unfortunately, to me, part of the worst thing is that we don’t go to stores anymore and have connections with people, in the local grocery store, or the little hardware shop, and that’s why, in the whole addiction to the social platforms, that’s in the illusion of it. I guess that has to start when people are children, they have to be sort of educated. To me, I’m more of an individual, as you said, deal with one-on-one, affecting it on that level. Beyond its effect of each individual’s vibration, changing the whole, I don’t have an answer to that.
>>RICK: That’s what actually, I mean, I remember hearing some parable about some father giving his son a whole bundle of sticks that was all bound together and saying break it in half. The son couldn’t do it, and then, as it worked out, they had to untie the bundle, and he could break each stick individually and get the whole thing broken. I mean, the point of the analogy is that if society is going to change, then every individual has to change in some fundamental way. Another good example would be a forest of trees, and if they’re all kind of gray and withered, you can’t just spray paint the forest, you have to water the roots of each tree, and then you’ll have eventually a green forest. Like you said a minute ago it has to start when you’re young, but most of the people listening to this obviously are not young. So, there must be a means, and you actually help to provide a means. There are many means whereby we can do some remedial work and heal stuff that — it would be nice if it hadn’t happened in the first place — but it has. We need to have as many efficient means as possible for people to purge themselves of these things and live the happiness that is really ultimately their birthright, I would say.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: As you were talking, one of the things that seems to be at the core is that, in the sense of living at the center, many of those types of people, whatever their gift is to the world, it’s not happening, it’s not able to come through them. They don’t have a sense of worth. That’s part of the pain they’re coming up with — this lack of worth, of value. To me, it’s one of the principal pains that I have with people. To me, freeing up — when I move the emotional energies, I always look at it as liberation. I never use words like let go because when you liberate those energies, it’s like — I brought my flute here. It’s like we’re all born like a flute, and we have these holes which you could tie up with all the chakras. We all come with a song (I don’t play this much anymore), it’s in harmony, things happen to us, the holes get gummed up. Then it’s out of harmony, we don’t feel worth or value. Our song doesn’t get to come through, and we find ways to medicate that core feeling. Of, of course, it goes down to that question of ‘who am I?’ Ultimately, you have to pass through, ‘I’m really not what I do’. [laughing]
>>RICK: As Deepak Chopra (or somebody) always says, we’re not human doings, we’re human beings. We have to get in touch with our innermost being. That’s nice — a phrase you said a few minutes ago — that we all have some kind of gift to give to the world. A few months ago, I interviewed a guy named Steven Cope, who wrote a book about dharma. His point was that everybody does have some gift to give to the world, which is not to say, we’re all going to be Einstein’s or Mozart’s or anything like that, but in our own sphere of influence, there’s something precious that we alone can contribute. Most people don’t really find that groove in life. Many people don’t (I don’t know the percentage), but his effort in writing that book, and I think your effort in saying a lot of things you’re saying here, is to help more people find it. There would be a kind of a frustration, obviously, if we don’t find it, or can’t find it, because whether we’re conscious of it or not, there’s an urge to express it. If it’s not being expressed, we’re going to feel that as some kind of bottled-up-ness.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: A classic kind of situation is a woman who married young and had children, and is the type that does everything for everybody, so she loses herself. She’s 50, and now she doesn’t know who she is. She’s tired of thinking about everybody else, and nobody thinking about her. In a way, unfortunately, there’s a payoff for giving too much. The payoff is that first of all, you’re in control when you’re the giver, and second of all, you want something, you want that sort of positive feedback when you’re doing these things for other people. On an unconscious level, it’s sort of like you’re constantly earning your worth and value in that way, but you realize that people take it for granted eventually. So, they just take it for granted. They expect you to do that. Anger builds up in that person and all these other feelings, and they don’t know, ‘who am I’? What am I here to do?
>>RICK: Are you describing women that you actually worked with? Or is this just a hypothetical?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: I’ve had many women like this.
>>RICK: What would you do to help such a person?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: First of all, I’d say what do you want? How do you want to feel? When I say that these are big feelings, so to speak, like freedom. Maybe they don’t trust themselves, maybe they don’t trust other people. You can’t do much if you don’t trust because you get in the way. There might be four of these things like trust, freedom, maybe one of the things is love, but more in the form of self-love. They don’t know what it is to love themselves. To me, part of that is, it’s such a cliche, what does that really mean? To me, it really means being this loving presence to everything that moves in you. That’s where it begins. There might be another word like, worth. Just worth, from within you, not coming to you from the outside. Once we lay that out, like in this circle with the four directions, and they work with each other. It’s like we want to then find out their journey through life, probably when you were already a child, and I don’t really necessarily go through telling me their story. It comes through in the dreaming aspect; frequently, that’s how I start to bring things into the circle, I’m helping them do that. To me, they’re stuck in that story that they lived for 20 or 30 years, because of an older story, probably that they’re stuck in. What’s stuck is the emotional energies that energize their need to do this in order to have value, but it really doesn’t have value. You could get caught up in the psychology, but if you can just get them to keep identifying themselves as this presence to their emotional being, and let them move, things just change. They loosen up so that their gift is freed. Let’s say clarity was one of the things that they wanted, then maybe they didn’t know what they wanted, maybe they didn’t know what they were supposed to do. Something loosens up, and now they know because maybe an inclination that they had, they trust it now. “Oh, I can do this”. This is that gift I call the spine of your life.
>>RICK: I wanted to ask you about that. Go ahead and say more about that too.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: That’s sort of the last place I end up with people when I’m in the circle. We’ve sort of brought things into the circle; we’ve moved them with the idea of them being at the center. I help people find usually a stick, it could be a flute, it could be a walking stick, anything to sort of embody what I call the spine of your life, which is this thrust. I use the example of a theater, a drama, a play. They have what they call a spine in them that everything ties into. People’s lives. Characters also have their spines that everything comes out of. It’s this thrust in their life that is, most people usually have always been doing it in a way, it just hasn’t allowed to express itself. Somebody could work in a tech company, and really not want to be there. Maybe they’ve been doing Reiki, and they want to work on people and help people instead of work for this tech company. I ask them well, what do you do? What do you like the most about the tech company? What you find out is what they like most is maybe they’re actually the tech person in the tech company that helps people with problems. What they really liked the most about it is helping people, and they’re helping people who come with a problem. They’re distressed, and they’re helping them have peace. The spine is a phrase. I had a musician once, and they talked about being in this church and playing music, and everybody just kind of calmed down and felt really peaceful. Their spine was to be the harmony that brings peace. They use the musical instrument, but it’s also you as a person. You have to be it. That’s why it’s always to be the harmony that brings peace, or it starts with being and then from your being, it comes into the world. It comes to you and through you first. It’s not something you manufacture or do. For some people it is some form of just love, to be a love that creates freedom and empowers people. That love you resonate with like that musical instrument you resonate with. That’s really how you affect the whole world because you’re that resonance. Not constantly by doing you let it be done through you.
>>RICK: That’s good. There’s a lot in what you just said. Just to put it my own words to make sure I understand. The spine of your life would be your core purpose or that course of action through which you can best contribute to the world. Am I right so far?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: It could find its form through many types of work, or even just being a mother.
>>RICK: It doesn’t have to be some glorious thing, although being a mother can be glorious. It’s the word dharma, that’s the word that the Vedic tradition has used for it. One thing about dharma as I understand it is that not only is it the thing that really kind of lights your fire, but it’s the thing that you’re best suited to perform, that you can perform it most easily. Like you said, you don’t do it, it does you. If you find that channel, that groove, then you kind of don’t feel like you are doing a heck of a lot. You might be dynamically active, and yet you feel like it just flowing without resistance.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Yeah; it’s like with what I do. To me, what I considered the main thing that I do is get out of the way. [laughing]
>>RICK: Perfect. What is that bumper sticker? Let go and let God.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: That’s a talent that takes practice to get out of. Because we’re wired from the time we’re kids to get in the way.
>>RICK: It’s true, the more the ego kind of congealed as it has to at a certain stage of our life. The more we know, we kind of try to take over and run the show. There’s a Vedic saying, which is, Brahman is the charioteer. In other words, Brahman meaning the totality, the wholeness, the oneness, and it is, but if you think you are, then you really don’t have the same vision as the wholeness, and things would go more smoothly if you let the wholeness take the reins.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Yeah, I had an interesting conversation, an email exchange, with somebody last night where it was around the word control. To me, in control invokes exactly what it is, there’s tension usually in control. Most all of us want to be in control. We don’t like feeling out of control. That’s where the whole core feeling of softening, but let’s face it, we’re not (in control). We’re going to die, things happen, look at all the flooding, and all the things that happen in the world that we can’t control. To me, it’s the difference between that whole thing of go with the flow. It isn’t as if you’re just jumping in the river and floating down wherever it takes you. I use an example of a raven flying in the air. The raven is having a lot of awareness with the air currents and everything and is making constant adjustments with its wings and stuff. At the same time, it’s riding the wind, so it’s trusting. It’s these three things. It requires will, so there is will, but it doesn’t have to have, to me, the energy of control. It’s this threesome of will, awareness, and trust.
>>RICK: I like the nursery rhyme on this point, Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. The stream is doing most of the work carrying the boat, but you are just sort of gently making adjustments like the Raven so that you don’t end up in the brambles or hitting the rocks. You’re doing something, but the stream is really doing most of it.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: And you’re experienced to learn how to read the stream
>>RICK: Good point.
CLAY LOMAKAYU Learn how where there’s, oh, that’s probably a rock.
>>RICK: Or some ripple you see. Mark Twain talked about how riverboat captains could read little eddies and things in the river that would indicate some snag that might damage the boat. They just learned to read it, but there too the Mississippi was doing most of the work. Good. What haven’t we covered? Is there anything that, we’re going to hang up and you’re going to think, golly, I wish I talked about that?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Well, probably not. I think I’ve pretty much touched on most aspects. The only aspect I would share perhaps is this sense of to live at the center and the circle. I begin one of my books with the story about the Hopi, and some natives in South America, not sure what group it is, but they believe by their activity in a certain location they keep the world in balance. The Hopi story is that they believe we’re moving into the fifth world. Each world was destroyed by man’s greed essentially. If you look at most things, it’s greed for love land power, which is driven by fear.
>>RICK: We’re talking chronologically or, there might have been four other civilizations that died out.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: It’s almost biblical. Destroyed by fire, ice, and a flood. The last time they came across the Pacific Ocean in reed boats on these seven steppingstones, probably Hawaii was one, landed in Central America, and they were given instructions by their earth god Maasaw, to migrate, to journey on the land in all the four directions where the land meets the sea, turn around and come back. It actually creates kind of a swastika the way it swirls, but they were ultimately to arrive at the center. They look at all these abandoned settlements throughout the Southwest as the migrations, the footprints of the migration.
>>RICK: The Anasazi and people like that?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Exactly. The settlement at the center, by their spiritual practices, which are forms of vibration, dance, thought, behavior, they keep the world in balance. They live on the top of the Colorado Plateau, which is one of the most stable landmasses on the earth. It’s like plywood, as opposed to normal wood. It’s got these layers and stuff, so it’s very stable. It’s got magnetic properties that are different. Apparently, when all the cataclysms happen, it’s a safe spot. That’s where they ended up. That whole sense of when I first got here, the influence of the southwest and the land and the peoples that also has come into Medicine of One. I just thought I’d share that.
>>RICK: It’s interesting. Do you have any opinion about cataclysms? Do you have any opinion about, what might come in the coming decades for humanity?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: I don’t have my own prophecy. But it’s coming.
>>RICK: A lot of people feel it’s coming.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: I mean, nothing can last forever. The whole climate change thing,
>>RICK: It’s accelerating.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: I don’t want to be negative, but I think those things are almost past the point of no return. It’s just something that the world’s going to have to adapt to.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: I mean, look at what just happened in New York City.
>>RICK: It’s outrageous. Nothing had ever happened like, the previous record of rainfall in Central Park was one inch, and this time it was over three inches. We can only speculate, but I have an optimistic streak in me. Despite a good many solid reasons why we might all be going to hell in a handbasket, I feel like there’s this spiritual thing going on at the same time, which is not maybe so obvious as hurricanes, but it’s providing this kind of counterbalancing influence, which hopefully will grow and grow and grow and eventually get the upper hand and that we’ll really undergo some very beautiful transformation and not just end up in some kind of dystopia.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: I agree with that. I don’t know if it’ll happen on this planet.
>>RICK: It may not happen in our lifetimes.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: I don’t know. Some people believe that the earth experience almost is what it is, this is exactly what it is, all this experience that we have. Once you move beyond the need to have these, perhaps there’s another level.
>>RICK: There are a lot of interesting teachings about that.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: I would like to think it could happen on this earth, and maybe it will. Maybe it will have to be just communities. I have that (optimism) too. It’s sort of like a balance between not pessimism, but, sort of like, it’s staring you in the face, and man just doesn’t, the whole greed thing is what drives man. Money.
>>RICK: Well, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Let’s hope that comes true. One final point that has occurred to me a number of times while I was listening to your book and also while talking to you today is, I put myself in the shoes of people who are listening. You say certain things that sound great, like live in the center, and find that quiet place within or however we would phrase it, and I kind of hear people saying, I want to, but I haven’t quite figured out how. What kind of advice do you have that people can take with them, so to speak, to make progress to achieving what you’re advocating?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: It’s interesting because it’s all I’ve been talking about. I sit in front of many people who do exactly that, ask how do I, exactly? And I go, that’s what I’m telling you. [laughing]
>>RICK: Let’s say, a typical person working eight hours or raising kids or whatever, a busy life, how do they incorporate something into their life, so this actually becomes an actuality?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Well, that’s it. I think a person has to find a space for themselves to have some form of practice when they practice being, what I call their big ‘I’, even if it’s when they’re driving in the car so that it becomes part of everyday life. The shift, the key, is this shift between that most people have with this relationship with their emotional being. It’s one of disconnect, rather than one of, actually, let me say this. One of the things I do at the end, once I get the spine of a person is I have this ribbon of cloth that we write on, some way to help them to move to the center. It’s got to begin with your breath because everything that is the opposite of what people are stuck in, is this upward controlling movement, where too much thinking, holding the breath, and tension in the body. The first thing you’ve got to do is be able to come down, feel the space and take a breath. It sounds pretty simple. It’s ridiculously simple. To invoke that, in that moment, when you have a feeling that you don’t like, as opposed to letting it sweep over you with tension, that’s the key switch. If you can learn that, then you can undo the web. Most people try to undo the web with their mind, and this is without the mind. The key, the trick, is going to be, okay, how do I bring in that vibration? Well, one of the ways is using the body and voice and whatnot. When a person might just sit there in front of me and start telling a story. The feeling comes in when it’s a hurt feeling. You can literally see their body starting to contract. They sort of want to cry, but they’re trying to stop it, you got to do the exact opposite. You let the story bring in the feeling and take a big breath and step into the space around you and just be love to that vibration. Whatever it is. That’s what moves you to the center.
>>RICK: Good. Very nice. Let’s say people want to work with you in some way. What are the options? Let me show your website here on the screen. Showing it now, you won’t be able to see it, but I’ll link to your website from your page on batgap.com. What can they expect? What are some things that you might do with people? I guess they can get in touch with you through the website and so on, right?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: The best way to get me is email. If they need to talk on the phone, that’s fine, too.
>>RICK: Do you want me to put your email address on your BatGap page for people to click on?
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: That’s fine. I do Skype sessions, but just read that page and see if it’s right for you. The main things I do aren’t that many, although it can look like it. It’s this soul journey that’s called the soul journey session. It’s sort of dreaming. Some people come to me just for that. If you have a deep core problem you’ve been working on, then I usually suggest what I call my bare-bones retreat that spreads over three days. What I do works quick, I don’t spend a bunch, it’s not activity-oriented retreats, it’s very focused, and I fill up the person’s cup each day so to speak. I try not to overfill it, and then they have space to go out and go on a hike or whatever else they want to do. Then I have a different version of that retreat, where they actually stay in the circle. That’s the vision quest version. But basically, the soul journey is usually where I start, the vision quest, or the retreat because it gives me things that we never figure out with our minds. Sometimes I don’t need that person to tell me anything about themselves. All I do is I take that session, and then before I see them the next day, I choreograph it, look at the different movements in it, and I try to see, how can I bring this into their body more strongly. Usually a vocal element to it, like ‘mom’. Okay, that’s got a body movement, and so I try it the next day. I may take them through those without ever talking. Then their story comes out as we do that, in a way. It’s as if to get them to a place where they feel complete for now. Obviously, you’re not going to achieve everything, and sometimes it’s just giving people a sense of what they need to do, and they have to be patient with themselves. When you’re dealing with people that have been severely traumatized, it’s going to take time. The key thing I always say to people is what I want them to go away with is that experience of true action of self-love. That moment of something like the feeling of terror; how to be this circle to the feeling of terror. A person that has that terror in them is a person that’s usually driven by a lot of anxiety. They worry a lot. They’re trying to constantly think about what’s going to happen at the next stoplight. What’s this person thinking? They were probably terrorized when they were a kid. Then I do just a straight sort of counseling and see what’s going to happen. Some people just make an appointment. They don’t know what they want to do. I just say okay, we’ll figure it out.
>>RICK: Great. I will put your website and your email address on your page on BatGap.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: You might put a link, if you feel like it, to my YouTube channel.
>>RICK: Yes, it’s no problem. I’ll link to it.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: I have a lot of resources. It’s me in front of the cameras sitting in front of a circle talking about Medicine of One. It’s a ton of audio.
>>RICK: I was so busy listening to your book that I didn’t look much at your YouTube channel. That sounds good.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: I gave you one link. I didn’t feel like overwhelming you with a bunch of stuff.
>>RICK: I like to take in as much as I can during preparing for these things, but I wanted to get through your book. Thanks, Clay, I really appreciate your taking the time to talk to me like this.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Thank you, Rick.
>>RICK: Thanks to those who have been listening or watching beneath this video. If you’re watching it on YouTube, there will be a link to the page on BatGap for Clay for this interview, and there will be links to all things we’ve discussed, YouTube channel, books, website, email address, and so on. Thank you very much.
Next week I will be interviewing a fella named Jeff Vander Clute, who lives in Crestone, Colorado, and seems like a very interesting guy. We have an upcoming interviews page on BatGap if you want to check out who we’ve got scheduled for the next few months. Thanks for listening or watching. I will see you next week and thank you again, Clay.
>>CLAY LOMAKAYU: Thank you. Have a good day.