Gail Brenner 2nd Interview

Summary:

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, we could call it that, or about spiritual topics. I’ve done about 630 of them now, I think. 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. So, if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there is a PayPal button on every page of the website, batgap.com.

My guest today is Gail Brenner. I interviewed Gail in 2015 at the Science and Nonduality Conference, and that was kind of a crazy weekend. I had six interviews. I think I moderated three different panel discussions. I had one of which lasted all day long. And I had my own presentation, which I’d been working on for months. And I wasn’t able to sleep because I was doing so much. I was just really keyed up. So, I thought I had done kind of a lousy job, but I actually listened to that interview with Gail the other day, and I thought, wow, that was pretty good.

We had a good conversation.

Gail: Yeah.

Rick: So today we’ll have an even better one. But if you like what we talked about today, you might want to listen to that one too, because hopefully we won’t cover all the same points. We’ll be covering different things.

So, Gail, it’s been, what, six and a half years since we last had our conversation. Oh, let me read your bio first.

Gail is a psychologist, author, speaker, and lover of the non-dual, teaching with a fire that burns brightly. She is an expert in healing from early trauma and brings to this work years of experience with individuals and groups. Her work lovingly illuminates our everyday humanness with the deepest spiritual truths, and she is known for creating the safe space needed for inner exploration.

Gail has special expertise working with older adults–you can work with me today–and their families in the transitions of aging, death, and dying. She was an assistant clinical professor at the University of California at San Francisco, where she trained physicians and maintained a clinical practice. She has published numerous professional articles on coping with stress and chronic medical illness, and is the author of the award-winning The End of Self-Help and Suffering is Optional.

She loves exploring different cultures through international volunteering.

Okay. What kind of international volunteering have you done?

Gail: Well, before COVID, I was in Southeast Asia and I was working at an NGO in Siem Reap, Cambodia. We were working on a pilot project to collect data on the health and wellness needs of village families, and then the NGO was going to submit that data to the government to get some funding resources.

Rick: Great.

Gail: It was fantastic. It was like a peak time in my life, for sure.

Rick: Cool, how long did you do it?

Gail: I was there two months.

Rick: So, Gail, we last spoke over six years ago. I know this is kind of a “gotcha” question for some people, but how would you say you’ve grown in the past six years, personally, professionally? How has your perspective changed? Your understandings of things, your priorities, stuff like that? I think we all continue to evolve. So, in your case, what can you say about that?

Gail: Wow, that’s a huge question. I’ll start with professional. And what’s definitely deepened for me is my interest in trauma and early trauma—I’m sure we’re going to talk about what that is and what we mean by that. Helping people identify the conditioned patterns that kind of live in them, and help them to gain the understanding and compassion and skills to be able to move through them. And then bridging that together with a non-dual teaching.

I’ve been running groups in the past couple of years on this topic, and it just feels like I’m in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing. So that’s really evolved for me.

Rick: Trauma seems to be a hot topic these days. I know Zaya and Maurizio of the S.A.N.D. Conference did a whole movie or documentary about Gabor Maté, and that’s been very popular. And I suppose you could say there have been times in the history of contemporary spirituality over the past couple of decades where no one thought or talked about trauma very much. But you kind of feel like maybe after everything that people have been through over the years, they’ve just reached a point individually and collectively where trauma really has to be dealt with by many people in order to continue progressing.

Gail: Yeah, I think there’s been a movement in recent years in the world of non-duality and in people interested in the non-dual teaching. As you said, people didn’t talk so much about trauma and there was more of that pure, absolute, “What is non-dual reality?” and the realization of that. I think what’s shifted more recently is, “How do I live this?” Like, “Okay, I get it, I get it to some extent, I’ve had a taste of my true nature, and here I am in my daily life, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like that openness and bliss that I get in certain experiences that we might have.”

How do we live this? This is where my passion lies. How do we live this teaching in daily life when we’re caught in traffic and doing the dishes and the kids are screaming? That to me is where it’s really alive, because we’re humans—we’re not humans, and we’re humans—and really honoring our humanness. And that includes ways that we have learned to contract into our sense of separation for a lot of us through our early experiences in life, and to be able to untangle all of that—and when I say untangle all of it, I don’t mean, and then it’s done and then we never experience it ever again, it’s not like that. It’s like really being able to be with those experiences that we have, where we get caught or grabbed by our patterns and how do we deal with that and live with that in our lives? And there seems to be a real interest in that these days.

Rick: Yeah, I think that’s really important. And there have been teachers and probably are now who if we brought up the topic of trauma and all would say, “Oh, that’s just about you as a person, you’re not a person, forget that you’re a person and tap into that which is beyond your personhood. And then you won’t even have to think about it.” How would you respond if someone said that to you?

Gail: Well, it doesn’t seem to work. And when I say work, it’s like, “Well, yes, I get that. And then I go home for the holidays to my parents and it all goes out the window.” That’s a real experience that needs to be honored. And I think with that sort of absolutist kind of teaching, it’s a setup for us to feel like we’re doing it wrong or feeling badly about ourselves or, “I must not be getting it.” And those are all part of the inner critic and some of the harsh ways and shameful ways that we’ve learned how to treat ourselves. So my interest is in untangling all of that with openness and curiosity. Let’s throw out all the teachings and let’s take a look at what’s actually happening right now.

Rick: Yeah, I think it was Ram Dass who said, “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your parents.”

Gail: Exactly, exactly. Or in your relationship. Or, “What’s my life purpose?” Or, “I’m a people pleaser and I’m exhausted.” It could be anything. And these are all food for awakening, because when we really take all of these little ways that we get caught seriously as like, “There’s something here to look at and something that wants to be liberated,” then we can really deepen into whatever realization we’re living with.

Rick: Yeah. Now, going deeper—let me just ask you a simple question rather than pontificating, and then if I want to add something to it, I will. But, please define trauma.

Gail: It’s a buzzword, especially in this day and age, but it really means something. When I use the phrase “early trauma,” which is a phrase that I use a lot, it means what happened early on in our lives that made us leave our true nature, or contract, or develop strategies to try to cope with difficult situations? What are the feelings and the emotions that remain in us from that? How do these things show up in our lives? So there’s a sense of something that’s unresolved that lives in some kind of conditioned pattern. And we can call that trauma because it’s difficult. It was a challenging experience and it maxed out our coping abilities and we didn’t know what to do and we do our best. And it threw us off the path of really living our true nature and the naturalness of who we are.

There are certainly events that can happen like car accidents or violence, or those kinds of specific traumas that happen that have an echo in us that can last for some time, or a long time, or we end up learning how to live with that. So it’s really any experience that happens that is shocking or makes us leave our naturalness. And it includes an activation of the nervous system pretty much across the board.

Rick: Good, those are some good points, and I want us to embellish on them in a minute, but since you just used another term, “true nature,” let’s define that so that we’re all on the same page as to the words we’re using.

Gail: Yeah, and that’s a hard one. The word that’s coming to mind right now is “openness.” When we’re contracted into separation, where our mind is occupied with ourselves, our self-focus, if we really start looking at our thoughts when we’re contracted and caught in our patterns, there’s a lot of “me”: “I’m this,” “I’m not safe,” “I’m upset,” or, “That shouldn’t have happened to me.” And when that begins to be able to release, and it certainly can do that, there’s availability and openness. It’s almost like a non-definition of who we are. We’re just here, and available in reality to what’s happening and it’s not veiled by old patterns and stories and conditioning from the past. And we’re open to creativity and aliveness and curiosity, and there’s no defenses.

This is something I’m sure we’ll talk more about because in knowing ourselves as consciousness, we’re not defended, nothing is excluded. That’s all the province of the separate self. So “true nature”—I use lots of words interchangeably around that—it’s our naturalness, it’s our natural state, our natural way of being that’s not coming from fear and not coming from a sense of lack and not strategizing to make ourselves safe. It’s just alive here and now and open to life.

Rick: Good. I heard two things in there, essentially. One is there’s “true nature,” and then there’s how we tend to function or behave when we’re in tune with true nature or not in tune with it. So sometimes I think true nature is alluded to or referred to in terms of the way a person functions when they’re in tune with it, but that’s not really true nature. That’s more like the impact it has on our functioning or our behavior. Then “true nature,” you’ve referred to consciousness. There are ancient definitions of it in terms of Brahman or Atman or universal awareness, “That thou art” and that kind of thing. And ultimately that is not individual, it’s not personal. It’s universal, and therefore it’s actually not like my true nature, your true nature, his true nature. We all have the same true nature. Like the ocean is the same ocean for all the individual waves.

Gail: Exactly. It’s not an individual true nature. The word I like is “openness.” It’s like unconditional openness that’s alive. And there’s an embodiment in it, too. It’s like it’s alive, there’s a vibration in it. Even the embodiment is the coming-into-form of it. But in its pure sense, there’s this knowing of this aliveness.

Rick: Yeah, good. You were talking about how we come into this life and we kind of lose our true nature.

Gail: Let me just clarify. We lose our knowing of it. We don’t lose it.

Rick: Our knowing of it, right. Sure. And that’s pretty much universal, wouldn’t you say? I mean, how many people do you know who grew up in their youth, their adolescence, their adulthood, and were continuously knowing their true nature throughout that whole thing?

Gail: Yeah, it doesn’t happen too often.

Rick: Almost nobody.

Gail: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: Right. So that’s not a mistake then, and it’s not something one is guilty of in any sense. It’s just the human condition.

Gail: Exactly, and I always invite a lot of openness and compassion around all of it, around everything, around this whole exploration, because we tend to judge, and wonder if we’re doing it wrong, and I really want to give a medicine for that, which is, we’re humans, we grow up, we come into the world with whatever we come in with, we learn whatever we learn. And then, just that we’re even having this conversation, and whoever decides to listen to it, there’s something alive in our hearts where we can totally meet. And there’s something there to be explored then. It’s beautiful when we can do that.

Rick: Yeah. So, the mechanics of losing true nature is often described in terms of identification, and very often the movie screen analogy is used. Why don’t you just elaborate on that, even though most people will have heard that, but we’re building a foundation here for understanding what you’re doing.

Gail: Sure, and the movie screen analogy is that we think we’re the story playing out on the screen as opposed to the screen itself. And we can take our stand either way. I know we all know what it’s like to be completely embroiled in our stories and to think they’re true: the story of who I am, the story of what happened to me, the story of what I’m afraid will happen, the story of how I am in my relationships, the story of trying to find my life purpose. Those stories all have a sense of fear or lack behind them. When we can find our way through those stories and we know that they don’t define us, or we play with them not defining us, then we get to that question, “Well, who am I?” And then that’s where that analogy of the screen can be useful, like, ah, there’s this openness that all of this appears in. It’s this open, formless, timeless, alive vibration of life that form emerges from.

Rick: And let’s say a father takes his child to see a movie for the first time, and beforehand he explains to the child what he’s going to do: “Well, we’re going to go to this thing, we’re going to sit in seats, and we’re going to watch Spider-Man and all this interesting stuff that’s gonna happen. And it’s all going to be playing on a movie screen.” So they go to the movie and the movie starts playing and the kid’s really into it. But then he says, “Well, where’s the screen? I don’t see the screen.” And the father said, You’re looking at it, that’s the screen.” “Is Spider-Man the screen?” “No, the screen is kind of behind Spider-Man in a way. It’s that by which we’re able to see Spider-Man.” The kid would be totally confused. The father could explain that all day and the kid still wouldn’t get it.

Gail: I actually like a different analogy. I like the sky and the clouds. The screen is a hard one to get. Or a page with the words on the book. I like that one, too, but my favorite one is sky and clouds, that we’re not the clouds coming through, we’re the openness. That’s a little bit more tangible.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a good one, too. And we can actually add the sun in there. Let’s say it’s really cloudy and we don’t see the sun. The sun is shining perfectly well. Eventually the clouds clear away somehow and we see the sun shining. It’s not like the sun has started to shine—it’s been shining the whole time—it’s just that the obscuration has been removed.

Gail: Exactly. Very good, I’ll use that.

Rick: Okay. It’s not patented.

Now, in terms of the mechanics through which our true nature is overshadowed—the movie screen is overshadowed, the openness is overshadowed—it might be interesting to explore that a little bit. In traditional explanations, the senses are outer-directed by nature, the objects of senses are concrete, and the “self”—pure nature—is really subtle. If our attention is turned outwards, then it’s not turned inwards, on the self, to the self, and we forget about its very existence. Then we go through life having all kinds of experiences and those experiences impact us. They continually overshadow the self, and they also leave neurophysiological imprints which accumulate. These are called samskaras, and they accumulate more and more and more. So the reversal of this process—knowing true nature and living it 24/7, living it in daily life—is not sort of a snap-your-fingers instant thing. It’s something that’s going to have to be cultured. There’s a lot of conditioning that needs to be unraveled before that can be a living reality in an abiding way.

Gail: Absolutely. People can certainly have awakening experiences where things change dramatically in one split second, but then the living of that, no matter how large or small the experience—or no experience, it doesn’t matter—the living of it has to be addressed. And it’s a joy to do that. It’s such a beautiful exploration to see like, “Wow, how am I getting caught here? What is actually happening?” Let’s be really precise about that and untangling all of that. It’s a beautiful process. People say it’s hard because you have to go to what we typically call hard places inside, which means challenging emotions, but that itself is a label. It’s just an emotion or it’s just an arising of an experience or a contraction, and if we don’t call it hard, it’s interesting. And it’s something that we can definitely learn from.

I wanted to also add, if I could, to when you were asking, “How do we lose the sense of true nature and our knowing of it?” We’re born, and even before we’re born most times the parents know the gender at this point in time, the names are already picked out. There’s a physical body that’s growing in the mother. There are so many ways that we’re already made separate. Then as soon as birth happens, all of that is put on us, that’s a part of our development. That totally contributes to the forgetting of true nature.

Rick: Yeah. You know what my name was before I was born?

Gail: What?

Rick: Murgatroyd. My parents didn’t know what my gender was going to be—maybe they didn’t check in those days—so they referred to me as Murgatroyd. Then when I was born and my uncle sent a telegram to my parents congratulating them on the birth of Murgatroyd, the telegram operator was furious that anybody was naming their kid Murgatroyd.

Gail: See, so much identity already. You know, there’s a Zen saying, “What was your face before you were born?” If you really feel that: who were you before all of this started? Or, who are you?

Rick: Yeah. So, the mechanics of how we regain our true nature, or awareness of it, and unravel all this trauma. You just alluded to something that sounded like a little bit of an intellectual process of unraveling the mechanics of our experience. Perhaps just elaborate a little bit on this process you teach and how it would help a person progressively unwind deep trauma that is keeping us gripped in ignorance, we could say. That’s the word that’s often used.

Gail: Yeah. I appreciate your question because it helps to understand—even to get some intellectual understanding of—what happened, why am I suffering? What is this about? So that I can at least get a handle on understanding it. What that process is to untangle eventually has to be embodied and felt and known and experienced, but to have some kind of intellectual path around it makes sense to me.

The example I want to give is that of an infant, let’s say six months old, screaming in the crib, hungry, screaming for food. There’s no language available yet, there’s just verbalization, and not being met by the parent. The parent’s busy, or maybe there’s some chaos around the home that the parents don’t have the wherewithal to attend to the child’s needs all the time. What is the experience of that infant? It’s extreme physiological upset, like terror to the point of, “I could actually die.” And it’s true. If the food doesn’t come—we’re dependent for a long time as humans. So, there’s this terror that I’m going to die if I don’t get my need met right here. And then if the need isn’t met, so there’s no reflection of confirmation that that makes sense, or acknowledgement of the feeling and the terror around that, where does that feeling go? How does a being cope with that? It’s really hard.

We say that the emotions get lodged in the body. There’s some kind of contraction, and some people say that if that happens enough and it’s not explored and released, it might be the root of physical illness and physical problems that we have. Certainly, what arises from that contraction is, “How do I cope with this un-copable situation?” And then we come up with all kinds of strategies like hiding, or pleasing, or being hypervigilant to the people around us so that we can do the right thing to hopefully get our needs met. If there’s violence in the home, we want to disappear.

So many things can happen at that point, but the point here is that experiences happen. And for many of us, they happen over and over and over for years in our childhoods, and they get stuck somehow if we don’t have the love and care and support that we need to have these move through. It’s possible to have all this stuff move through. With good parenting, there’s an acknowledgement, there’s, “tell me your feelings,” a support to be able to develop the skills to work with our own feelings, that kind of emotional attunement. If we don’t have that, it just all kind of sticks and we’re scrambling to figure out how to cope. So the process of healing comes from that.

Rick: When you say that all this stuff gets kind of lodged or accumulated in the body, what I hear is there are actual neurophysiological impressions, alterations of the physiology in a subtle way, which modern science doesn’t fully understand it, and which the ancients also had their explanation of, and also probably didn’t understand it as a modern physiologist would. But the basic idea is that we accumulate gunk, we accumulate stresses, we could say, or impressions or samskaras, and they pile up layer after layer after layer after layer. And we actually don’t know how deep they go, how many layers there are.

Gail: There’s a lot of research on that now, a lot.

Rick: What’s it say?

Gail: Chronic trauma early on in life affects the brain development in certain specific ways that can be measured. An example would be a gratitude practice or a breathing practice that can help to calm the nervous system and shift the neurophysiology around. Those things are, at the neurochemical level, recommended because they help to, very grossly speaking, rearrange the brain and get us to a point where we can remake connections that were lost or learn how to work around them so that we can function well in our lives as adults.

Rick: Yeah, they really do rearrange the brain. And there are studies on long-term meditators where the prefrontal cortex is thicker and there’s all kinds of things they can measure with fMRI and stuff like that. And, in my own experience as a long-term meditator since the ’60s, I’ve had so many experiences, sometimes on six-month courses and other such things where really deep stuff has come out, stuff that I didn’t even know was there. Sometimes slowly and sometimes suddenly. I’ve had times when I’m deep in meditation and all of a sudden I’ll practically jump out of my chair because all of a sudden there’ll just be this deep—boom!—release of something. And then it’ll all sort of settle down again. I kind of have, I don’t know, a bias toward meditation or something. Through my own experience, I feel like there’s so many deep layers of stuff to be removed, or to be healed, or to be resolved, and one has to go really deep to resolve them, you know? I mean, let’s say, using an ocean analogy, if there’s all kinds of pollution deep in the ocean, you can’t clean it up just rowing around on the surface with a net. Something has to be done to get you down to those depths in order to really access those deep things.

Gail: I liked meditation for that, but I know it doesn’t work for everybody and not everybody’s going to do it to that extent, but that doesn’t mean you can’t go to those places and heal. That was so beautiful what you just described because what you provided is this open, unconditioned space for these things to come. I want to also use the word safety because stuff doesn’t usually come out that’s buried in us—old emotions or physical contractions or whatever—if there’s not a sense of safety. It went underground because it wasn’t safe, so there needs to be safety to bring it out. So when you’ve been meditating for a few days and you’re very quiet and there’s this open space and open heart and just openness to everything, which can happen in a long meditation retreat, it’s not surprising at all, like, “Oh, it’s time.”

There’s a sense where these things can, the way I say it is, “come for liberation,” come to be illuminated with consciousness, to be seen, to be felt, which is why they went underground in the first place. They weren’t seen, they weren’t acknowledged. They were so overwhelming, we didn’t know what to do with them. So they go underground and then we give them the conditions to come out for release, for liberation.

Not that it happens once and it’s over. I mean, you’ve been doing this many, many years and it still happens, I’m sure. And the same in my own experience. It’s not like we reach an end point and we’re healed. That isn’t it. But offering that open space is such a gift.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve been told that even the Buddha meditated all of his life. And I think it was either him or Vivekananda—who was obviously almost a contemporary—someone asked him, “Why bother if you’re already enlightened?” And he said, “Well, I just like to keep the mirror really clean,” something like that.

Gail: Yeah. Papaji said, “Stay vigilant in my last dying breath.”

Rick: Yeah. Huh, interesting. A similar way of explaining it, similar to what you just said is, like, when we go to sleep at night, we have dreams, right? And I think the dreams are probably, in many cases, a release of something that wouldn’t easily get released if we weren’t sleeping. But when we are sleeping, the body is deeply rested and it has these natural healing processes that can kick in when it doesn’t have to do other things. And so meditation can be like that, too, where you just settle into this deep, restful state, either in an individual meditation or on some kind of extended retreat. And the body naturally has its healing mechanisms and they kick in, they get going, when the body and mind aren’t being applied to other activities.

Gail: Yeah. It has to go slowly. For some people, sitting and meditating is too much.

Rick: Yeah.

Gail: There’s too much there that’s been unexplored. So, yes, big yes to meditation, and there are other ways. And I think people really need to hear that. Like, if you can’t meditate, it’s fine. I get it. I totally get it. And then you begin to just very gently peek in to see what might be there that wants to be brought into our awareness. And early trauma always happens in relationship, and it needs to be healed in relationship. So we don’t have to go it alone. We don’t have to sit there and meditate on the pillow by ourselves and feel every little thing. We can seek out help, or come to groups, or find ways, when we really want it, we’ll find our way to get support around this because we’re all going through it and it’s not always easy.

Rick: Yeah. And some great teachers have said what you just said. Shankara and Ramana more recently said not everybody can just sit and meditate. It might be that karma yoga is the best thing for you, engage in some kind of activity. And then later on after doing that for a while, you might find you can sit and meditate because enough clearing has taken place.

Gail: Yeah. So have that openness around it, and no judgment, whatever you feel that you need, honor that. It doesn’t have to be anything other than that.

Rick: Oh, yeah. I mean, this show is kind of a reflector of that. I interview such a variety of people and I never have the attitude that, “Well, everybody should be doing such and such.” Whatever works.

Gail: Yeah, exactly. I feel the same way.

Rick: Yeah. And obviously things do work. I mean, I’ve seen so many people get so much benefit out of so many very different things.

Gail: That’s right.

Rick: And that is kind of the way God rolls. I mean, you don’t see only one kind of flower or only one kind of animal. There’s this huge abundance of variety in nature and in the universe. And I don’t see why our spiritual progress shouldn’t also have a great deal of variety in it.

Gail: I love that there are so many teachers. We find our way to the ones that resonate. And I think that’s very valuable, to really trust ourselves inside about what we need, or if we don’t even know what we need, like, “what’s my next step?” If something’s burning in you or something’s curious or something’s fed up—I love fed up, like, “I’m fed up!” So I have to look for something beyond the known. That’s a beautiful place to be, to be fed up. And to follow that and to be with that. Not to follow it to fix it, no, but to be with it. Like, ah, let that flourish. Like fed up—what does that feel like? Burning question, curious, and just let that guide you because it will.

Rick: Yeah, that’s such an important point. And I’ve seen so many examples of it where it can manifest in terms of outward restlessness, like, “I need a new partner,” “I need a new job,” “I need a new car,” and people think, “I need to move to a warmer climate.” Or whatever, people think those things are going to solve their problem. And then you do that enough times and you realize that they aren’t. And at a certain stage, people recognize that, “Oh, there must be some deeper, some higher direction in which I can search.” And I think that’s an important milestone, when a person reaches that realization.

Gail: Absolutely, and that comes from that U-turn with our attention inward, not outward. Like you were saying about how, according to certain traditions, separate self is like the senses going out into the world. Intelligence, attunement, living this teaching of non-dual reality requires a U-turn with our attention inward to look at what’s happening here in our experience.

There’s a quote I’m really inspired by these days. It’s Simone Weil, and it’s, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

Rick: Hmm, that’s nice.

Gail: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” I love that, because it invites this investigation. What is that, that kind of attention? And when we do that U-turn out from the material world and into our inner landscape or whatever is arising in here, it gets very interesting.

Rick: Yeah, and not only attention to our own inner reality, but attention to other people. And maybe they’re correlated, maybe if a person has paid adequate attention to their inner landscape, they’re going to be more attentive to others.

But have you noticed—Irene and I often mention this—you’ll be talking to somebody and you’re listening to their story and they’re going on and on. You’re listening to the story and every once in a while, maybe you ask them a little question. And then after a while you say, “Well, let me tell you about what’s going on with me.” And they say, “Well, I think I gotta go.” Or they can’t pay attention to what you want to say. So there’s no reciprocity, they’re not interested, or it’s like that old joke, “Me, me, me, me. Okay, enough about me. What do you think about me?”

That came to mind when you mentioned that attention is the greatest generosity because there’s a certain generosity in being able to pay attention to people. I think there’s a respect implicit in it. And it’s not any kind of sacrifice because it’s actually very interesting to get to know people more deeply, if you can settle down well enough to do it.

Gail: Yeah, that deep listening to someone else, that open attention, not through veils, like, “I want you to be a certain way, or, “I’m scared to connect with you,” or, “I don’t want to be intimate.” Or I do and I don’t. With those veils dropping, there’s that possibility of intimacy with others. But I think that it goes both ways. I think some people are very attuned to being, to paying good attention to other people and they miss themselves. So it includes both.

 

Rick: That’s interesting. I’m wondering if that describes me. I don’t know if it does, but I guess you could use indulgence or interest in other people as a way of avoiding self-scrutiny. I mean, a person could throw themselves into charitable work of some kind or humanitarian work, and burn out because they haven’t attended to themselves enough. Is that the kind of thing you’re alluding to?

Gail: That could certainly be a dynamic. We have so many ways as humans that we’ve come up with to avoid ourselves.

Rick: Yeah.

Gail: And that’s one of them. So if you say—and this goes back to early trauma—so say that you’re born into a family, you’re the fifth of five kids and you don’t get very much attention and you learn to get all the “A”s and you make yourself useful or you do whatever you can to get attention from others. You learn very early on in life to leave yourself and to be very outward-oriented and other-oriented, to be attention-getting or pleasing to others, or whatever it is. In people who have that dynamic, the movement of healing is to turn the attention in and include, get to know our feelings, our thoughts, our body, our experience, our likes and dislikes. Some people don’t even know. And including all of that. We get to be included.

Rick: You think this is something anybody could just learn to do or do they need a therapist to help them?

Gail: I don’t think it’s an either/or. Yes, I think people can learn how to, people can make progress around that. But for some people, even to pay kind attention to themselves inside is a big movement. If they’ve been somehow brought up with the idea of inadequacy or worthlessness or whatever, even to be kind to yourself inside, or self-care, those kinds of basic things, that can be hard for some people.

Rick: Yeah. You think that part of the reason it’s hard is that, if you’ve been neglecting paying attention inside, when you dip your toe in that water and try to begin to do so, the water is too cold, you encounter discomfort and therefore you shy away from it and get back into the distraction so you don’t have to do it?

Gail: Well, that’s the nature of addiction and relapse that you just described. The addiction is to avoid it. Say there’s a period of being clean or not using or whatever, and then things are going to come up because that’s how it is. These feelings and difficult experiences are coming to consciousness and it might be overwhelming or there isn’t enough support or they’re not ready or whatever. And then there’s a relapse.

Rick: Yeah. Now addiction is an extreme example. If a person gets addicted to something, it becomes very unpleasant when they don’t have that thing for a few hours or after a little while. And so life is a constant attempt to kind of numb out. It’s like trying to push a beach ball beneath the water. It keeps trying to pop up and it takes a lot of effort to hold it down. But, of course, that was kind of one of the realizations I had, one night in July of 1968, when I was sitting in my bedroom in the basement of my father’s house, and I just kind of realized, if I keep going on like this, doing drugs and stuff, I’m going to live a very short, unhappy life. And I thought that the only way out of this is to turn within and start cleaning things out instead of trying to escape through various substances. But you know, for me at least, it was immediately rewarding. It was an immediate, ah, relax, relief from what I had been going through. And so it wasn’t like I had all of a sudden to confront this Pandora’s box of horrible stuff. Maybe for some people it is, but I’ve been able to manage that, I think, in measured doses over the years rather than anything that was too much to handle.

Gail: Yeah, I don’t know why, I’m the same as you. When I realized how much was going on inside of me that I wasn’t aware of, I was just like, “Bring it on.” I wanted to see everything and I wasn’t afraid of it at all. I just saw it as the ticket out of suffering. And it was. But, yeah, definitely people are built differently than that.

Rick: Yeah. There’s that old adage that, “God never gives you more than you can handle.” I don’t know if that’s true or not. I’m also reminded of Luke Skywalker saying to Yoda, “I’m not afraid.” And Yoda says, “You will be, you will be.” Like, “You ain’t seen nothing yet, kid. You’re gonna have to go through some stuff.”

Gail: But there’s a fire, yeah. I think that’s true, yeah.

Rick: So as we go along here, if anything comes to mind and I’m not asking the appropriate question to enable you to express it, say, “Hey, I want to talk about this,” and just kind of launch us into it, okay?

Gail: Yeah, well I have something in mind.

Rick: Do you now?

Gail: You were just reading my mind, I think.

Rick: Ooh. I should become a psychic.

Gail: Yeah, you’re psychic. Did you know that?

Rick: I’ve got to start cashing in on it. Well, go ahead.

Gail: I wanted to talk about what happens when we turn our attention inward toward ourselves and what does that have to do with healing trauma, and what does that have to do with freedom and living our full aliveness? How do we put all those pieces together? I guess the place to start would be to look at what a pattern is, a conditioned pattern. I know this because I’ve examined it a million times within myself, and I think anybody who goes in is going to see this. Maybe you’ll see something else, but what I notice is that there’s some story going on in the mind, so there’s something in the realm of thought and there’s usually what we call an emotion, and with that is some pattern of physical sensations. That gives a sort of broad view of what we need to investigate to be free of the effects of these patterns.

So, if somebody comes to me and says, “I’m depressed,” that doesn’t actually have a lot of meaning to me because it’s a broad word that could describe a lot of different things. I want to know what is actually happening, like if you’re suffering, or if you’re afraid of people and you feel like you need to limit yourself, or hide, or whatever the movement is, what is actually happening? That’s the beginning of the investigation because until we know how these patterns work, we can’t really do anything about them.

That’s why I think, to some degree, the standard and more absolutist non-dual teaching—”just drop all that and go to reality, go to reality, go to reality”—if you can do that, that’s great and I think that’s the right way to handle that, that’s the path to freedom, but when that can’t happen naturally and easily, then there’s something else that’s being called for and it’s really looking at what are these patterns? How do they show up? What are the triggers? What is an emotion? What is our experience?

And then when we bring the light of consciousness into that consciousness being timeless and formless, what is this arising, then? It’s what you’ve probably talked to many people about, objects that come in the context of awareness, and realizing, “Ah, this whole pattern boils down to a physical sensation that I’ve been interpreting or making sense of,” or trying to figure out, or get rid of, or whatever, to really get down to the bare experience of what it is and then being with that in this loving openness.

Rick: Yeah, that, “Go to reality, go to reality,” thing can be a recipe for a spiritual bypassing.

Gail: Exactly, yeah. And it can be a true recognition, too, but, yes, it can, if it’s skipping over some strong feeling or something, be spiritual bypass.

Rick: Yeah, I suspect that more often than not, it is a spiritual bypassing thing, from my experience. But I think this thing about the physical sensation is very significant, because we were talking earlier about how trauma does have a neurophysiological correlate or basis. Let’s say you’ve been over in Iraq and Afghanistan, you come back and you’re a pressure cooker of stress. That’s not just a mental thing; your whole neurophysiology has been assaulted and there’s a lot of chemical and structural abnormalities, I guess you could say, that have been inflicted upon your nervous system. Have you ever dealt with somebody who has PTSD?

 

Gail: Yes, not from battle as far as I know, but yes, PTSD.

Rick: I think they would probably tell you, “Yes, I have all this angst, or feeling in my solar plexus, or I have these headaches,” or there’s all kinds of stuff going on in their physiologies that are indicative of the stress that has been lodged there.

Gail: I don’t know if it’s an official diagnosis, but we hear complex PTSD, or CPTSD, which means that there’s trauma from early childhood that’s involved.

Rick: So the “complex” word alludes to early childhood as opposed to something more recent?

Gail: Yeah, and something specific. Like the complex means a complex array of experiences that happened back then. So there can be PTSD and the nervous system has to be included in the healing. And I can also speak to that word because nothing gets “healed” really. It’s just a return to our natural state and a recognition of what’s already true and already who we are and already the case. So “healing” is a word we use, I use it myself, and there’s a sense of healing, we feel better, but actually nothing’s healed. It’s just a matter of clearing away the veil so that we can recognize what’s already true. And for that to happen, with trauma, there has to be an attention to the body.

Rick: Let me just push back on that a little bit. Let’s say a person has suffered a lot of stress, some kind of abuse or battle fatigue, or any such thing. There have been physiological changes which are not desirable. And if the physiology can undergo positive changes such that it’s no longer holding onto those chemical or structural abnormalities, why wouldn’t you call that healing?

Gail: Well, I would say in that sense, there’s a shift that’s happening, but with that sense of relaxation, and returning back to the normal homeostatic state of the nervous system—of calm, basically, back to that sense of calm—that’s the pathway into relaxing our bodies, relaxing our attention away from the stories that go with that contracted physical experience. And then we’re more open to life as it is, to creativity, to inspiration, to wonder, to all of that. And so that’s not a healing that makes that happen. It’s a recognition of what’s already true.

Rick: Yeah, well, on the psychological level or mental level, it’s a recognition of what’s already true. On the physiological level, it might be a restoration of a more normal way of functioning.

Gail: That’s a good word, restoration.

Rick: Yeah.

Gail: Finding rest. Very few of us—we long for this deep rest and we don’t feel it. If I could say there’s one pandemic, it’s anxiety. It’s just the nature of life in our human world for most of us, and it’s hard to feel anxiety all day. We just don’t know how to rest.

Rick: I do.

Gail: Good.

Rick: I always get enough sleep, enough meditation, enough exercise, and then I do whatever I can do in the remaining hours, but that’s always my first priority.

Gail: Beautiful, yeah.

Rick: Obviously, since we’re talking about physiological stuff, there are all kinds of things one can do. I just mentioned exercise. I think that’s really important for everybody. Also things like yoga and maybe massage, and, I don’t know, sensory deprivation tank, or anything that can enable the nervous system to de-excite.

Gail: One of the kind of tools that I like the best, that’s the easiest, actually, is deep breathing.

Rick: Yeah.

Gail: Because there’s a lot around just slowing everything down. We go very fast in our culture these days, but slowing everything down, paying attention to the breath, putting our attention on the inhale and the exhale, getting curious about that. There’s physiological evidence that when we lengthen out the exhale in particular, we’re activating the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the relaxing part of the nervous system. For those of us with early trauma or perpetual anxiety or dealing with a lot of stress, whatever—I have a breathing practice myself, and it’s just been transformative. I love it because you get conditioned. There’s a conditioning, an adaptation in the body that once you’ve practiced it a while, the body just knows that relaxation state. You probably have that if you live that way.

Rick: Yeah. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Patanjali’s “Yoga Sutras,” but he has what he calls this eight limbs of yoga, and breathing is an entire limb or part of one of the limbs. There are all these different facets, everything from ethical considerations to physiological culturing things like breathing and various mental aspects of it. And sometimes people describe those as sequential. You’re going to go from this, you’re going to master this, then you’re going to get onto the next one and then get onto the next one. But how limbs actually develop is simultaneously, either in a fetus or in a child. They’re all growing at the same time. So I think one can utilize all kinds of different strategies involving different aspects of our mind-body system simultaneously, and they all supplement and complement one another.

Gail: Yeah, exactly. I think that if I’m remembering this correctly, the eight limbs of the Yoga Sutras are about preparing the body for meditation. So the final one is meditation.

 

Rick: The final one is Samadhi. There’s Dharana, Dhyana, and Samadhi, those are the final three, but still those can all develop simultaneously and in a pace with one another. It’s not like you have to really master one, then the next, and then finally you’re going to get Samadhi. You can have Samadhi on day one. Like we were talking earlier, you can have a glimpse of this inner awakening, but then you still have a lot of house cleaning to do in order to make it an abiding state.

Gail: Yeah. And the mind might tell you that you don’t have that house cleaning to do. The mind can usurp all kinds of experiences that we have. I find that a lot in people that I work with, “Oh, I’ve done that before. I thought I addressed that and here it is again.” It’s very useful to get to know how the mind works. The mind might say, “Well, I’ve had this awakening experience, so there’s nothing I need to do anymore,” and that may not actually be the case.

Rick: You know, this touches upon the whole issue of direct path versus progressive path. I’ve had discussions about this with our friend, Rupert Spira, and he was kind of hitting more on the direct, then I was hitting more on the progressive, but I think that both are aspects, they’re like two legs that you walk on. You can directly have an experience of your true deepest nature on day one, or at any time, and yet at the same time, it doesn’t mean you’re done. There’s going to be a continual progress. And if you talk to somebody like Rupert, they would probably say, “Yeah, you know, I know myself, I know what I am, but in many aspects of my life, I’m still progressing.” And so I don’t think it’s an either/or consideration.

 

Gail: I completely agree. The progressive path is a way to speak about it, but it’s in time, right? And there’s no time, so in the end, it is just the timeless experience of this reality.

Rick: Yeah.

Gail: We think it’s a path to get to being able to experience that, or live that, experiencing it a lot so that it’s integrated into our daily lives. It’s only moments, and it’s not even moments because that’s even too strong a word that creates time. It’s this unfolding of reality that if we follow it, from what I see, if we listen deeply and follow it, it takes us where we want to go.

Rick: So I’m sure that I understand what you just said, many people go through a phase—I did—of “I got it, I lost it, I got it,” and feeling like, “Oh, I’m just so blissful and smooth today,” and the next day it’s like, “Oh, my God, I can’t wait to go to sleep at night so I’m unconscious because this is agonizing, because I feel like I’ve lost it.” And eventually I think people pass through that phase and there’s just more of a continuum. Is that somewhere around what you were just describing or am I off on a different tangent?

Gail: No, that speaks to that. What I want to bring in is that. if we think of ourselves on a path, there’s an idea of the separate self improving. It’s kind of subtle in that. This is not about the separate self. We’re talking about two different things. Trauma healing, there can be a sense of that, that you just feel better and that’s great. But the realization of who we are, of our true nature, we don’t walk that as a separate self. And it’s not about a better separate self. It’s the recognition, over and over, of this timeless, formless being.

Rick: Yeah, but I still think that both are relevant. It’s like a person can be very attuned to their true nature, or say they are, and yet can be hitting on the young women who come to their satsangs, or doing weird things with money, or something like that. I’ve heard of people doing those things and then using the alibi that, “Oh, I am not the doer and it’s all just God’s will,” and stuff like that. So to my mind, whether the separate self is ultimately real or not, which I guess we can say it isn’t, there is still a person there who could use improvement. In fact, there’s some Zen story where a Zen teacher says to the students, “You’re all perfect just as you are, and you could use improvement.”

Gail: Yeah, yeah. And the reality is you do improve.

Rick: And we all need to, really.

Gail: Yeah, when we’re more attuned to ourselves, when we recognize when we’ve been triggered, when we are able to be more compassionate with what arises with ourself and with other people. I can tell you that “trauma-informed” is a phrase that’s used a lot these days.

 

Rick: Trauma-informed?

Gail: Trauma-informed. A trauma-informed school, trauma-informed prison, trauma-informed view of everything. We include in our understanding of whatever it is, that what we might call problem behaviors, or troubles, everything stems from trauma. And then we can look at it intergenerationally, culturally, and globally. It’s a big topic. For me, it’s brought out so much compassion. Almost immediately when I hear of anything, even something pretty bad, it’s very easy for me to have compassion because I can pretty immediately see that whatever happened is because of this person’s trauma.

Rick: “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.”

Gail: Exactly. It doesn’t mean it’s right, and it doesn’t mean we don’t need to change or do something about it, but it certainly helps with compassion and understanding.

Rick: So are there trauma-informed prisons these days?

Gail: There is the beginning of that for sure. There’s something called the Compassion Prison Project, and they’re bringing that view into prisons and doing an amazing job with it. And I think they’re not the only ones.

Rick: There was a recent Michael Moore movie, I think it was called, “Where Should We Invade Next?” or something like that, where he went to Sweden or some Scandinavian country, to prisons there, and the prisons were like these little mini country clubs in a way, not lavish, but comfortable, really nice, and it was an atmosphere in which traumatized people could chill out and heal. They weren’t just sort of thrown into a cell and allowed to stew in their own juices. There was an opportunity to really grow. And they were getting great results, too, in terms of low recidivism and stuff.

Gail: I bet they were.

Rick: The first time I went on a course with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1970, he went into this whole talk about how prisons should be like that and should make the people as comfortable as possible and give them every opportunity to heal and grow, and how punishment doesn’t really change personalities, but a nurturing environment like that could.

Gail: There’s a lot wrong with our prison system. A lot could be changed there, for sure.

Rick: Yeah, and schools.

Gail: And schools.

Rick: And lots of things.

Gail: Hospitals, the medical system.

Rick: Yeah.

Gail: The choices we make. You could say global warming, and everything that’s happening around that, it’s because of choices that we make, and we make some of them with lots of levels of blinders on, and it can all be viewed from a trauma lens.

Rick: Yeah, I have this friend named Mark Gober—he’s been on BatGap—who recently wrote a book called, The End to Upside-Down Liberty, and I’m reading it, and it’s making me kind of uncomfortable in a way. It’s very thought-provoking, but he’s kind of advocating a libertarian, voluntarism kind of society in which people can be trusted to do the right thing and without a lot of government constraints and controls. And I’m thinking, yeah, ideally, but I think people would have to generally be in a much higher state of consciousness to actually do that. Lao Tzu says that in the “Tao Te Ching.” He says, if you have a really enlightened society, you hardly need any government because people are just going to know what to do. But if you don’t, then the less you have that, the more control you’re going to need because people just won’t do the right thing.

Gail: Yeah, and it depends on who’s in control, making the rules.

Rick: Yeah, that’s very true. Well, that’s a little bit of a tangent, but anyway, what next? What haven’t we talked about? We have plenty of time left, but I want to make sure that we cover everything that is dear to your heart and that you want people to know.

Gail: The main thing I want people to know is that it’s possible to—and I will use the word here—“heal,” to feel better in your life and to have whatever understanding you have of the non-dual teaching and have that be an inspiration of how to live. Because that’s what I’m interested in. I’m interested in—other people are interested in other things, and that’s fantastic—but for me, what comes is our human lives, our individual lives that we live. We’re in our relationships, we go to work every day, we have friends who get sick, we whatever. And how do we—aging, we were just talking about before we started here, how do we meet that with grace and care and love and openness?

Rick: And so you’re suggesting that the non-dual perspective can help with all those things.

Gail: That’s my experience, absolutely. Yeah, because it’s an understanding of what is actually real and what isn’t. And in knowing that this human life is temporary, it arises, it’s beautiful. It’s in its myriad expressions, and it’s temporary and it’s going to end. So, with that understanding, what do we bring to the moments of our lives? To really live in those bigger questions.

Rick: Yeah, I think that’s important. And, also, since you just mentioned non-dual, yes, the human life will end, but life won’t end.

Gail: Exactly, exactly.

Rick: And that’s important, because if you think that, “Okay, well, maybe I’ve got 20 years left and that’s the end of my existence,” that would be a very different perspective than realizing, “Okay, maybe this body will have served its purpose, but my life will go on.”

Gail: Yeah, or life goes on.

Rick: Life goes on. Or my life, I mean, if we accept reincarnation.

Gail: Yeah, yeah, I don’t really know about that. But, yes, and here we are living this human life, and how do we want our relationships to be? And then what gets in the way of our relationships being the way we want them to be? And how do we navigate that? How do we find the freedom in that, and the intimacy that we long for? And the sense of safety. I think in general, people don’t feel very safe with one another. There are definitely communities where we can find that sense of safety, but it’s not a common thing.

Rick: When you say all that, it makes it obvious, and should make it obvious to people, that when you say non-dual, you’re not just brushing off all relative considerations as being Maya or illusory.

Gail: Quite the opposite.

Rick: Yeah, you’re able to sort of be in two boats at the same time, take that stuff seriously, all the relative considerations, and also realize that all the world’s a stage, or life is but a dream.

Gail: An example would be attachment to outcomes. That’s a concrete example. If we have an expectation, or an attachment to the outcome, we want something to be a certain way, that’s totally mental. It’s of the separate self. It’s created from somewhere. We might be able to look at the conditions that created that, or maybe not. But if we’re attached to an outcome, we’re set up to be disappointed. And then there’s that sense of inner and outer. It’s like, “I’m not one with life. I don’t feel like I’m one with life. I feel like life isn’t serving me, or life is disappointing me, or that life in the form of that other person is disappointing me.”

When there’s attachment to outcome, there’s friction, and clunkiness, and not free flow of living this beautiful reality that’s possible. And then letting go of attachment to outcomes—which is a big statement, it’s not like we just like flip the switch and let go—but at least entertaining that we don’t have to have our hands on the wheel trying to drive the bus all the time, because that doesn’t really get us the peace and happiness that we’re looking for. So, letting go of that sense of control or examining it and investigating it and seeing where it’s coming from and what it is and how it grabs and how it might be okay to just peek out of the comfort zone and not be so attached. It’s a completely different way of being, from doing and fixing, and future-oriented/outcome-oriented, to just plain being here, being open, being receptive, letting ourselves be guided, accepting things as they are, like welcoming our emotions instead of trying to fix them or avoid them. And then we’re more aligned with the free flow of reality as it is.

Rick: There are a couple of verses in the Gita that I find very useful in that regard. Some of them talk about how you are not the doer and nature does everything and you have nothing to do with it. You’re just kind of like a witness to it, and it’s just unfolding, as according to divine intelligence or something. But there’s another verse that says, you do have control, you have control over action alone, but never over its fruits. And it could be that different people at different stages of their growth, see those two things in their lives, or it could be that there’s a way in which they can be seen simultaneously. You have control over action, but never over its fruits. In other words, you do your best in the moment, whatever you’re doing. I’m doing as good an interview right now as I can with whatever comes to mind and the things I think to ask you and so on. But, I don’t know, the electricity could go out, or some people just won’t like this interview or something. I don’t have any control over that, so I can’t really be attached to it.

Gail: You can’t, but you can. You can and then you suffer, or you can’t and then you let it be.

Rick: Yeah.

Gail: But say you are attached to the outcome and you find out somebody doesn’t like the interview and then you feel badly about it and then you ruminate about how you should have done it differently. This is common human life. You may not do that, but that’s what a lot of people do. That’s just like a seed for suffering.

Rick: No, I actually do kind of do that. Very often after interviews, I’ll think, “Oh, I shouldn’t have said that,” or, “Oh, I should have said that.” It’s like I kick myself a little bit. And then usually emails will come in at some point. Some people say, “That was the best one you ever did.” And somebody else says about the very same interview, “That was the worst one you ever did.” So you get kind of flexible after a while.

Gail: Maybe we can just touch on practices.

Rick: Please, yes.

Gail: Because I think that people have different views on that. And my view is, I have used the word “practices,” but what I like is “lifestyle,” like if we want to live this conscious way of being, of being open in our relationships, of being able to listen deeply to others, of listening inside for how we’re moved or guided, and bringing compassion to ourselves, in my experience, it doesn’t just happen. It requires attention and care, and really keeping what you really want in the forefront. And that’s what I recommend to people, if you’re confused, like what do you really want here? Okay, then how can we make that happen? What needs to shift here for this moment, for your experience to be more aligned with what you’re actually wanting? And living that way consciously, it’s beautiful. It’s a lifestyle. It’s not magic, snap your fingers and everything in life just falls into place, no.

Rick: So to make that a little bit more concrete, could you give some examples from your own life about how that plays out?

Gail: The alignment you mean?

Rick: Well, just what you just said about being, I forget how you phrased it, but it was a little bit hypothetical or conceptual.

Gail: Yeah, about lifestyle and practices and whatever.

Rick: Yeah, that.

Gail: Yeah, okay. Slowing down a lot, frequently, like, “What’s actually happening here?” When I started my path, or somewhere in the very beginning when I started doing long meditation retreats and sitting in silence, I was blown away with what was going on in my inner experience. It had been happening all along. And I just never looked. And I was being driven by all kinds of fears. I had so much judgment of other people, somewhat about myself, but more others. There was so much going on.

Rick: And you hadn’t even been aware of that before.

Gail: I had not even been, I was shocked.

Rick: Isn’t that weird that we can have all that and be oblivious to it?

Gail: It was so inspirational to me though, because I was like, “Okay, I’m getting to why things feel off to me. Now I’m starting to understand why.” And then that began a huge desire to explore everything that was arising. But in terms of an everyday thing, slowing it down, taking time, taking a look at yourself often. Like I’ve gotten very sensitive to my body. Sometimes I’ll catch myself, my hands are in a fist or whatever, like, “Oh, there’s tension here.” And is there something that needs my attention? And just taking a breath and relaxing that. A lifestyle that’s very highly attuned to what’s happening inside, and a sensitivity to when things feel off.

Rick: There’s a nice phrase that encapsulates that, self-referral, as opposed to object-referral. It’s kind of an introspectiveness where you’re not sort of withdrawn from the outer world, but you kind of have—there’s another phrase, I forget the Sanskrit, but this is actually a traditional thing called “the lamp at the door.” The intellect sort of establishes itself at the juncture between absolute and relative. And there’s this kind of simultaneous inward and outward illumination that takes place.

Gail: Exactly, it’s not a retreating from the world at all. In fact, it’s a tuning in and a seeing of what’s alive, this aliveness, and then bringing that, living that, and that illuminates everything. Yeah, so it’s not separate. It’s the end of the inner and outer. There’s just being with what’s arising.

Rick: Yeah, and it enhances everything. If we can do this stuff, life is going to get better because we won’t be blundering blindly and crashing into things, so to speak.

Gail: That is my experience.

Rick: Yeah.

Gail: And if we don’t do that—I recently wrote something about—we’re in a little room and constantly bumping into the walls, and it doesn’t feel good to live that way. It’s clunky and mysterious and confusing.

Rick: Yeah, if you ever read the Carlos Castaneda books, Don Juan used to talk about impeccability, and it was kind of like this. He talked a lot about attention also, but it was sort of a right use of attention such that one did not blunder. And he would consider that if you stubbed your toe or something, you just weren’t being attentive enough.

Gail: And then as we live this more and more, there’s space for, I want to say it’s a phrase that’s used, “unlimited potential.” You used the word self-referral—I might say now self-focus—there’s spaciousness that comes, and then we’re not always so attentive to the past or how the past is living in us now. There’s a freedom from that. So we’re actually open to life. And I’ve had many experiences in my life where—I told you the other day, I live a nomadic lifestyle, and that came totally from listening. Like, I never thought of that. It was just certain conditions happened in my life, and it clearly came through, like, this is how I was being moved. I didn’t know why. And sometimes there was a lot of not knowing around it, but having the openness to being able and willing to listen to what comes through and honor it and respond to it, even if it doesn’t make sense, even if it’s surprising, and to make the space for that.

Rick: How do you discern between an intuitive listening to impulses which you can trust to be in your best interest, and whims, where you’re just sort of like, “Yeah, I think I’ll do this because I feel like it.” A lot of people live very whimsical lives where they just kind of are like a leaf blowing in the wind, and they sometimes attribute it to intuition, but it’s sometimes questionable whether it is.

Gail: Yeah, well, first of all, it could be. That could just be their life stream. What I would say about that is just wait a little bit, let it be, let it sit. What does it feel like? And open, don’t grab onto something quickly, like I’m supposed to do this now, or this or this, but to really give it a chance to gel and to feel solid, I want to say, inside, and just to let it be and not jump on everything.

Rick: Yeah, I suppose you could also see like, “How is it going for you?” You know, I mean, are you happy with the way life is turning out, or do you feel like, “Ooh, I should have been a little bit more committed here, or stable there,” or something like that?

Gail: Yeah, even that’s tricky because the mind might come in doubt. “It’s like this, and is it supposed to be?”, and that’s all mind. So I can’t give you one specific answer, like how do you discriminate intuition from flightiness, because it’s a path in itself.

Rick: Yeah, I raise these points because for me, I think there was a phase where I was being much too flighty because I just didn’t—I don’t know—I was sort of thinking, “All right, I’ll just kind of go with the flow and it’ll work out,” but it was too undisciplined, too unguided, and now I think I’ve found the right balance.

Gail: Maybe it was meant to be like that so that you got a teaching from that, like, “Oh, this went too far,” and now you’re back, and it doesn’t mean you did anything wrong or that anything shouldn’t have happened the way it happened.

Rick: Yeah, I’m going to ask you a question here that came in from a guest named Katrina, and don’t know where she’s from, but the question is, “How do you work with clients with unworthiness issues?”

Gail: Yes, big question, yeah. And just as I hear that question, I feel the compassion, because it’s such a difficult cloud to live under. Unworthiness is a story that we tell ourselves, and by far, across the board, it comes from some experiences that happened when we were young.

Rick: Give us an example. Define unworthiness.

Gail: We tell ourselves we’re not good enough. We speak to ourselves harshly. “I can’t do this,” or, “I failed at that,” or, “I should have said that or done that.” And not just like we all say that and let it go, but to live in the shame of, “Who I am is not good enough.” Very painful for people.

And all of what I just said, it’s a story, it’s mental. These are ideas, these are ways that we talk to ourselves and ways that we describe ourselves, and that’s coming from the mind. So my question is, “What happened early in life that you developed that conclusion that somehow you weren’t good enough or that you were worthless?” There would be lots of ways to go with that. I like to do inner child work with people, so identifying the age of the young one inside who somehow got stuck at that stage and that belief about themselves. That part isn’t us, but it’s arising in us. So being able to have compassion for that young part that felt inadequate, that didn’t get the love and care that she needed, and to be able to be with that part in a loving way.

This is a big question, but that’s part of it, to do that inner child work, and also to understand and to investigate in the moments of feeling that sense of unworthiness, what’s happening in the body. Many of us are in our heads, trying to figure everything out, trying to make sense of the reality of what we’re living in, make sense of ourselves and our past, but to take that journey inward and down into our bodies and see what’s happening in the body physically when there’s that thought pattern going of unworthiness. And there might be numbness, which is a whole other thing we could talk about, or there might be some contractions inside, and just to be with that and let that be.

These are ways to get out of repeating. The more we repeat that story, the more we’re going to live by it. So we need to open up and see what else is going on that’s creating that story and that is living in us in the moment that we can take care of.

Rick: So when you say, “in the body,” you have somebody tune into what they’re feeling physically in association with unworthiness or any other thing? What do you do with that? Do they just keep feeling it until it dissolves, or do they do some breathing exercise while feeling it, or what?

Gail: Well, there’s a lot of ways to go, but it’s not about fixing it. So the very first step, and it’s a big one, is just being with it, just making space for it, because it’s an indication of something that’s been suppressed, back then, sometime, because there weren’t the conditions to be able to deal with it with care and love and compassion. So being with it, first of all, that’s really important, and letting it be. And often what happens is the story subsides. We have compassion for ourselves in that moment, not forever, but we learn that we don’t have to define ourselves by that story, that without that story, if we turn the switch that we can’t think it or we lose interest in what it’s telling us, we can tune into our aliveness that’s here right now.

 

Rick: You say it’s not about fixing it, but don’t eventually these things kind of get fixed? I mean, you wouldn’t expect the Buddha or Ramana or somebody to be a hodgepodge of inner stuff that hasn’t been resolved.

Gail: Well, because we stopped giving them attention and we understand them in a different way, they dissolve or they soften, and they don’t have the power. That’s the thing, they can still be there. The thought, “I’m unworthy,” or, “I did that wrong,” that can be there, but we know our experience is so much broader now that we don’t give that attention. That’s why you said we can control our actions, but not the fruits. We can control where we put our attention, and that’s key. If we feed thoughts, we’re going to get more thoughts.

Rick: Yeah, I would imagine that the more you can tune into your universal nature, the more absurd a statement like, “I am unworthy,” actually sounds because who is unworthy? Who are you referring to here? Well, it’s just this little thing, and I know I’m much more than that.

Gail: That’s exactly it. I’m really glad you said that. And with repeated explorations that way—nothing’s immediate, so I can’t give a pat answer, “Do this, and you won’t feel unworthy anymore.” No, it’s a process of inner exploration and inner embodiment so that we can recognize what’s happening here and know that there’s way more going on than what our minds tell us.

Rick: What I experience and makes sense to me is that as we grow, there’s a greater sort of a span of a range of dimensions of what we know ourselves to be. I’m still a guy who likes cheesecake and likes skiing and doesn’t like other things, and so I have my personal preferences and quirks, but then—what’s so funny?—Irene thinks that’s funny. But there’s also a level at which all of that has no relevance because Being or true nature or whatever is not something which could eat cheesecake or ski. It’s a silent field of awareness that is beyond preferences or—

Gail: Yeah, and memories.

Rick: And beyond individual limitations.

Gail: And then there’s Leela, which I’m sure you know, the divine play, and that’s what that is, “Oh, great, I like cheesecake and I don’t like cream puffs.”

Rick: Right.

Gail: Yeah. It’s fun.

Rick: Yeah. So when I hear somebody talk about inadequacy or many other things, I think, “Okay, yeah, but if you could somehow expand the scope of your experience, of your awareness, then there might still be some little thing like that on the surface, but there’s a much deeper dimension in which shortcomings or limitations like that just don’t have any place.”

Gail: That’s exactly where this deeper exploration takes us. It’s not about getting rid of anything, or that thought shouldn’t happen anymore. The shift of identification really is what you’re speaking to.

Rick: Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to say.

Gail: I don’t define myself by that anymore. It can be there, no big deal. “I’m unworthy,” or, “The sky is blue.” It’s no different of a statement, just the statement going through the mental realm here, but we can always open to our aliveness. And when we identify with those kinds of statements that feel very limiting, it’s like we’re in tunnel vision and we’re not seeing all of what’s possible.

Rick: Yeah, well, it’s good this is coming up because this is kind of what we were talking about in the beginning when we were using the movie screen analogy or the clouds analogy and talking about identification, and about what is true nature and all that. What we’re saying is one can live a life or develop a life in which there’s just a much vaster scope of one’s perspective or perception, but there’s just—

Gail: And being and possibility and everything, because then we’re open to what life shows us. We’re not busy trying to control and fix everything.

Rick: Yeah, I guess the wave analogy comes in handy. A wave might say, “I’m just a little wave.” But if a little wave also realizes, “Oh, I am the ocean,” then one’s size as a wave is not that big a deal.

Gail: So an inadequate wave who knows it’s the ocean, softening of that, it’s just like, ah, there’s a tenderness in it. Then like, yes, that little wave thinks it’s inadequate, but it’s not really.

Rick: Yeah, okay, good. What else here? You wanted to talk more about practices. Are there some more aspects of that that you want to bring up?

Gail: Well, there are many tools that we can use to support us along the way. But the point is to do them, to make it a lifestyle, to not expect that there’s an end point, or that healing’s going to go at a certain pace, or that I got it and then I lost it and there’s something wrong with me. Those are common mindsets that people have. To just be very kind to yourself and keep going.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good.

Gail: And get support, that’s another. Some people think like, “Oh, I have to fix this myself or figure it out.” And it’s way more—I’m going to say easier, it’s just better to—we come together and we help each other.

Rick: There’s a beautiful thing towards the end of the 10th mandala of the Rig Veda, where it says something about being together in a group and knowing your minds to be functioning from a common source, and how an assembly is significant in unity. That’s one of the phrases there. But there’s something about a collection or a gathering of people who have opened to their true nature being exponentially more profound than each of them singly.

Gail: Yeah, and you feel that. When you meditate in a group, we all kind of know that sense. Jean Klein has a beautiful quote, which I’m not going to be able to say verbatim, but “two people rarely meet.” We’re seeing each other through our veils of conditioning and we’re not actually meeting each other. And, hopefully we know that experience, even if it’s for a split second of the dropping of those veils, or somehow they’re just not there anymore, and that possibility of actually meeting ourselves as the other.

Rick: Yeah, and I think if that can be the case, then a relationship can be much more profound than most people get to experience. Because there’s just so much more depth to it. In fact, there’s an outline in one of your books here, maybe it’s the one where you had like 52 different nice little essays. One of them was discovering the true nature of relationships. We’re kind of getting to that. So what is the true nature of relationships?

Gail: Well, there’s no relationship. The true nature of relationship is no relationship. But when we bring that into form, it’s seeing the other, apparent other, not as other, but we meet as the one heart.

Rick: I see, right.

Gail: I don’t want to set this up as like, “all my relationships are like that,” they’re not. But just to even get a taste of that, or even imagine what it would  be like, or go into the next interaction you have after listening to this, and be open and deeply listen, and speak from your own experience, and not from history or patterns, or what you’re expecting it to be like, even if it’s a very familiar relationship. Like be super fresh with this person in front of you, and just experience what that’s like. This I guess goes along with practices I often suggest for people, to go out and play, like find your edge and play there. What would that look like, going outside the comfort zone, or showing up in a relationship without a veil, or listening rather than speaking, and listening deeply, or it could be anything depending on what our edge is. And do that. Like, I like to go to a cafe that’s busy, although that’s not happening so much these days, and just contemplate people, watch people, just see that as not separate, and be there in love and not judgment, and just to play with what that might be like.

Rick: There’s another one here that is a good one. I remember this one. I listened to all these, but there was one, “Oh, this.” I’ve heard you talk about that quite a bit. And I could relate to it, because I think what you’re saying with that is a sort of acceptance of whatever arises as being kind of a—well, the way I see it, as sort of an “all is well and wisely put” expression of the divine play, things unfolding at every moment—and not railing against the way things are arising, because they are arising for a purpose, and just sort of recognizing that in each moment of your day. Is that what you meant by that?

Gail: Consciousness says—of course it doesn’t “say,” but just to put it into words—it doesn’t say, “I like this, I like that.” It doesn’t say, “I want that to be different.” It doesn’t reject, “I don’t want to look at that.” Everything that arises in form emerges from this one awareness. So consciousness, if it could speak, it would be saying, “Oh, there I am, there I am. Oh, it’s this, it’s that, it’s that, it’s that.” It’s not saying anything more than that. No interpretation, no judgment, no preference, no separation at all. It’s just like the acknowledgement of what is, as it is, unconditionally.

Rick: No sort of, “Ooh, this shouldn’t be happening,” because it is happening.

Gail: Exactly.

Rick: Like Byron Katie always says, “If you argue with reality, you’re gonna be wrong 100% of the time.”

Gail: That’s right. Yeah.

Rick: All right.

Gail: So then I would suggest a practice, like when we go around saying, “Oh, this,” to everything, and then see what arises with that, there’s going to be an, “Oh, not this,” at some point, and then there’s that resistance, and like, “Oh, okay.” Notice, “Ah, there’s some resistance,” and meet that, and meet that feeling. What’s behind that? Is it fear or sadness or? What is the root of that, and be with that lovingly.

Rick: I’d say that one overarching conclusion I would make about this conversation, and just about every conversation I have, is that if there’s one thought I could instill in people, it would be that there is a great range of possibility for any human being, there’s a great range of potential unfoldment of deeper understanding, appreciation, experience, and whatever else we do in life, that should be our ultimate priority, unfolding that, exploring that. And to the extent that it is, and to the extent that we pursue it, life will be fulfilling and interesting and exciting, and be an adventure.

Gail: We’re in it, we’re grounded in it, embodied, living it.

Rick: Yeah.

Gail: In an embodied way.

Rick: And if one is feeling that life is drab or boring or meaningless or frustrating or anything else, it’s not that it really is, it’s just that we haven’t somehow—it’s like you might bite into an orange and conclude, “Ooh, oranges are bitter,” but you’re just tasting the surface level of the orange. When you get into the inner value of it, it’s sweet.

Gail: I love that, yeah. Take a bite of life.

Rick: All right, so anything by way of wrap-up or conclusion point?

Gail: Yeah, I want to say one more thing. We’ve talked about non-dual awareness and awakening, and then trauma healing—what we’re calling it—and they’re both needed, they’re not mutually exclusive. This is my concern, let’s say, about traditional therapy, that it’s about, as far as I can see, helping people to improve and feel better in their lives, and I totally get that, but it doesn’t get to the core of the nature of identity. And so trauma healing is needed, and this investigation into the nature of identity that’s offered by the non-dual teaching is also needed. And when they come together, it’s a beautiful opportunity for deepening, for freedom, and for the capacity to live this teaching.

Rick: Yeah, didn’t you write a book about—oh, yeah, The End of Self-Help, that’s what I was looking for.

Gail: Yeah.

Rick: And which is what you just said, essentially, which is not to say that self-help is utterly worthless, but it just doesn’t go deep enough.

Gail: Right, there’s no “self” to be fixed.

Rick: Yeah, right.

Gail: That’s what it is, there’s no “self” that needs to be helped. We need help, but it’s not to improve ourselves, or be a better version of ourselves, that’s a common phrase, it’s to really—it can be, there’s nothing wrong with that—but it’s not going deeply enough, it’s not going all the way. And “all the way” means to understand that we’re not anything that our thoughts tell us that we are.

Rick: Yeah, I would say it’s a both/and thing. I mean, you can be a better tennis player, a better violinist, a better cook, a better anything. Better lecturer, or whatever you do, better astrophysicist. But life is not just about those things. And if you neglect the sort of deeper dimension, then those relative pursuits will never really be satisfying.

Gail: And there will be a sense of anxiety or dis-ease, or “Isn’t there more?” That’s a sign that there’s more.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good, I’m glad we’re touching upon this. And I think a lot of people feel that way, that—like you were saying earlier—anxiety, a lot of people are sort of feeling like, “There’s gotta be more to life,” but not knowing quite what it is or what it might be, and kind of searching for love in all the wrong places, so to speak. There was a song by that name.

Gail: There was.

Rick: Not only love, but just searching for meaning.

Gail: Gratification.

Rick: Gratification in all the wrong places.

Gail: Right, and if there is a searching for meaning or gratification, let’s investigate that. Let’s not keep searching and spinning. For anybody spinning, let’s stop the spinning and go deeper and see what’s actually going on.

Rick: Okay, so what do you do with people? I know I listened to a couple of sessions of a webinar you had, and people were really enjoying that from what I heard them saying. Do you have those periodically, and how else can people listening to this plug in to what you’re doing?

Gail: Great, thanks. I do those periodically. On my website, there’s an events page, and I always put events in the newsletter I send out every Friday. I do courses, also, sometimes through Open Circle. I have one coming up with SAND. These are longer courses, so five sessions or six sessions, whatever it happens to be that time, but they’re an opportunity to go deeper into this possibility of trauma healing and awakened living. There are guided meditations, and we go into small groups to digest the material. When you get activated to really understand, like, “Oh, these are my patterns, and this is how it affects my life, and this is how it lives in me,” we need to digest that. So we go into small groups and have a chance to talk about it. It’s quite structured, because I like to have a very safe environment that people can feel very comfortable in. So, yeah, I offer those courses as well.

Rick: Yeah, I noticed on the scienceandnonduality.com website that you had a course. So I suppose there’s a link on your own website to that course on their website, is there?

Gail: There is, yeah, under my events page.

Rick: Okay, so I’ll just link to your website, and people can go to your events page. And obviously that’ll change over time as the years roll on.

Gail: Yeah, that starts February 12th this year.

Rick: Okay, there’s time for people who are listening to this. It’s about a month from now.

Alrighty, so I think that pretty much covers it. As I mentioned in the beginning, I’ve interviewed Gail previously, and so if you enjoyed this interview, you might want to go back and listen to the first one, which we did in person.

And there’s a page on BatGap of upcoming interviews, so you can check and see who we’ve got scheduled. Next week is Ed Kelly from the University of Virginia, who is a colleague of Jim Tucker and Bruce Greyson, both of whom I interviewed in the past year. Ed’s main thing is about consciousness being fundamental, and matter kind of more an emergent thing rather than the other way around. Many scientists feel like consciousness is just a product of the brain. Ed’s whole research has been about disproving that and suggesting that consciousness is really rock bottom. So I think that’s important. We’ll be talking about that.

And if you’d like to be notified of new interviews when they’re posted, there’s an email signup tab on batgap.com and a bunch of other things that you might find of interest if you explore the menus. There’s an audio podcast of this, if you’d like to listen to things while you ski in the woods.

So, thanks, Gail.

Gail: Thank you so much, Rick. Thanks everybody.

Rick: Yeah, thank you to those who’ve been listening or watching and we’ll see you for the next one.