Summary:
- Background: Georgette Star has over 30 years of experience in empowering adults and youth to live joyful and purposeful lives.
- Roles: She is an intuitive Soul Stream Life Coach, Mentor, and Method trainer.
- Life Blessing Institute (LBI): Georgette founded LBI, a transformational learning community focused on human potential, spiritual awakening, and soul actualization.
- Programs Developed:
- Maiden Spirit & Peace Warriors Youth Programs
- Individual and Community Rites of Passage Celebrations
- Soul Stream Method Practitioner Training
- Current Projects: Working on a documentary film titled “The Woman’s Rite,” which addresses ageism and promotes empowered elderhood through creative expression and spiritual awakening.
- Education: Holds a Master’s degree from the Naropa Institute and a Doctorate of Ministry from the University of Creation Spirituality.
- Personal Life: Enjoys being a mom, grandmother, artist, and forest dweller, and values her connection with nature and collaborative creativity.
Full transcript:
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 over 700 of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the interviews menu. I think we’re going to still have that menu. We’re redesigning the website, but you’ll be able to find it. We’re redesigning it so it’ll be even easier to find things and look nicer. 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 are PayPal buttons on every page of the site and a page that offers alternatives to PayPal. I haven’t mentioned this lately, but we have a bunch of volunteers doing different things, and if you’d like to volunteer in some way, get in touch. One of the things is proofreading transcripts. Some people really enjoy doing that. I haven’t mentioned this lately so it’s slacked off a little bit, but we still have some to proofread. Another thing is we have this AI chatbot called the BatGapBot, which over 4,000 people have used so far, and 500 or 600 people use it per week. It’s loaded with tens of thousands, over 100,000 documents of a BatGap nature, spiritual and philosophical stuff, including 1,700 of the world’s sacred texts. So it’s kind of a, you could call it a vertical bot, meaning it’s a specialist in this kind of content, as opposed to a horizontal bot like ChatGPT, which gobbles up everything on the internet and it’s kind of diluted if you really want to ask spiritual or philosophical questions. So you’re actually going to get better results for those kind of questions with this than you would with a commercial bot. And so there’s a menu item for this on batgap.com. It’s called the BatGapBot. Okay, my guest today is Georgette Starr. Georgette is an intuitive Soul Stream Life Coach, which she will explain, and mentor, with over and purposeful lives. Her deep quest for self-realization and sharing this journey with others inspired her to found the Life Blessing Institute, LBI, a transformational learning community designed to guide individuals on the journey of spiritual awakening, actualization of their soul’s agenda, and human potential. Through LBI, Georgette developed a variety of programs, including Maiden Spirit and Peace Warriors Youth Programs, individual and community rites of passage celebrations, and the Soul Stream Method practitioner training. Currently practicing as a Soul Stream Life Coach and Mentor, Georgette is also working on a documentary film titled, “The Woman’s Rite.” The film examines the challenges of ageism faced by women and explores how these limitations can be transformed through spiritual awakening, creative expression, and conscious rites of passage. It highlights the opportunity for women to step into empowered, vibrant, and respected elderhood, offering their wisdom, creativity, light, and love to a world that deeply needs their contributions. There will be a link on Georgette’s BatGap page, not only to her website, but also to that film, so you can watch a trailer or a promo of it. Georgette holds a Master’s degree from the Naropa Institute and a Doctorate of Ministry from the University of Creation Spirituality, which was founded by Matthew Fox, who has been on BatGap. In addition to her professional work, she cherishes being a mom, a grandmother, artist, forest dweller, and daughter of Mother Earth. Okay, so Georgette, you were wondering what inspired us to invite you to be interviewed on BatGap. Well, it seems like we’ve known you for a long time. I met you in person at one of the S.A.N.D. conferences and you brought me a really lovely goodie basket or goodie bag. I forget all the things that were in it, but there were probably some chocolates and some cards and some, you know, useful, interesting things, and that was really sweet. No one’s ever brought me a goodie bag at a S.A.N.D. conference, so you’re unique in that respect. And you and Irene have struck up a friendship and been corresponding for years, and you know, so you’re just kind of like an old friend. And we always had it in the back of our minds that one of these days we would interview you, and I guess this is a good time because you’re working on this film. This is a really important thing, and you know, we wanted to help you boost support for that and bring awareness to it.
Georgette: Wow, thank you so much, Rick. I’m so honored to be here with you today, and you know, I want to share with you and Irene, you know, I’ve heard the analogy of like the spiritual path of awakening to be somewhat like climbing a mountain. And at the bottom of the mountain, there’s cities and villages, and there’s just people everywhere that you can talk to about what you’re experiencing and find some support and communion. And then the farther up the mountain, the less, the more rarefied the air and people kind of drop off because it gets a little harder, a little more challenging. And then, you know, there’s these peaceful plateaus where you find a whole village up there, way up high where it’s like a comfortable place and everybody’s meditating together and it’s wonderful, but there’s still this calling to continue and there’s this sense of like being, eventually kind of being somewhat alone on the journey because there aren’t that many people that one can actually share some of the embodied experiences that are very uncommon. And so I remember, especially after what I would consider like the major shift for me in my sense of self and reality, listening to these interviews over and over and over all day long for days and weeks and months because it was so helpful for me to hear other people share their story.
Rick: BatGap interviews or what?
Georgette: Yeah, BatGap interviews.
Rick: Oh, great. Okay.
Georgette: Yeah, I probably, I can’t even remember how many. But there was something so stabilizing about, first of all, understanding that every human being is so unique and every path is unique. And that was comforting to me as the air became more rarefied and there were less people that I could share my experience with or find community with. And so, it’s been like a lifesaver to me, and I’m just so appreciative of both of you for your generous act of service that you just show up for over and over and over again.
Rick: Well, thanks. There’s this old Bengali saying, “If no one comes when you call, then go ahead alone.” But you know, fact of the matter is we’re not alone because there are a lot of people around the world these days who are into this kind of thing, on this kind of journey. And one of the reasons I actually started BatGap was I was in this little meeting group here in Fairfield, Iowa. We’d meet once a week and have these discussions and some people had had profound spiritual awakenings, but when they would tell friends about it, friends would be skeptical. They’d say, “Oh, come on, I’ve known you for years, you’re just Joe Schmo, you know, this couldn’t happen to you or somebody like you.” And so, I thought, “Oh, I’m going to start interviewing these people and demonstrate to a wider audience that this happens to, and can happen to, ordinary people,” which is the tagline of BatGap, “Conversations with Ordinary, Spiritually Awakening People.” And we actually sometimes intentionally avoid interviewing some of the more famous people, although we also interviewed them, but you know, we are happy to interview, you know, housewives and truck drivers and just ordinary people who have had a spiritual awakening just to make it clear that it is not the exclusive right of, you know, somebody who floats two feet off the ground or wears white robes or anything like that. It can happen to anybody. It’s everyone’s birthright.
Georgette: Yeah, it’s rare that someone kind of Eckart Tolle, right, they just have these bursts of complete realization. And for me, the journey of awakening has been more like, you know, they talk about the thousand-petal lotus, so I think the petals are infinite. Like, there’s just like another opening and another opening at it. At every opening, there’s another, also another challenge, too. And so, it’s like a never-ending, unfolding process.
Rick: That’s one of my main themes.
Georgette: Yeah, that it never ends, the journey never ends. And later on, I’ll be talking about my mom because she was such an incredible teacher and guide and example in many ways, including becoming a conscious elder. But she was determined to use this incarnation to her very last breath to process anything that is not of pure light and love. So, anything that she would come up, any fear, any anger, any reaction pattern to whatever was happening, like even when she was interacting in her assisted living care center and dealing with lots of challenging things, and she just used it all as an opportunity to evolve.
Rick: That’s great. I guess we could say that everything is an opportunity to evolve, even though sometimes things can be very challenging, obviously, and I don’t want to make light of that. But I just feel like the whole universe is one giant evolution machine and there’s nothing that is designed to prevent you from evolving. It’s all designed to help you evolve.
Georgette: Yes, and on the process, there’s a disorient, like a dissolving of the self that we once knew, right? So, during the dissolving phases of the awakening process, like, we really need the support of each other and spiritual communion and connection to stabilize and to be able to function in this world and fulfill our destiny path in terms of how we’re here to contribute to the evolution of not just our own, but the collective.
Rick: Yeah. On this thing of ever evolving, a quote I’ve mentioned many times on this show is from St. Teresa of Avila, she said, “It appears that God himself is on the journey.” So, you know, no matter how high up you are, so to speak, there’s a next horizon, there’s evolution yet to undergo.
Georgette: Absolutely. I wanted to also just acknowledge that on the journey to get to this moment, which is obviously a whole lifetime, but specifically to this interview, I had to fill out some paperwork, right, to, you know, information.
Rick: Information forms.
Georgette: Yeah, I had to fill out, like, pick a category.
Rick: Right.
Georgette: And I just was looking at that, like, how do you pick a category? And then the whole problem of language. Like, everything I say, I know is not actually true. Like, the words never can convey. And so, I just wanted to acknowledge that we have to make concessions, right, for the purpose of communication, but that was a challenge. So, eventually I ended up on Awakening Process Facilitator, but even that doesn’t sound true, but I’ll take it for now. But when I really sat with what, if I could choose a category, there would be no one else in that category, or maybe there would be, but it would be somewhat something like, ‘bowing down like a servant to the mystery.’
Rick: Hmm, that’s nice. Yeah, the reason we have categories is, you know, we have a categorical index on BatGap and there’s Buddhism and Hinduism and Judaism and Psychedelics and Therapists and, you know, Creative Artists and all kinds of different things. So, you know, obviously a person could be in many categories. In fact, we did have people in like three categories up until last year, and but, times 700, that’s over 2,000 people on the page, you know, listings on the page. It wasn’t that helpful. So, Irene went through the whole thing and tried to narrow them down to one category, and then I emailed everybody I had interviewed and said, “We had to choose just one, then would you like to change it? Let us know. [Laughter]
Georgette: I know, I was thinking, like, how could, you know, if I could pick one category, like, okay, I am a teacher. I mean, that is a function.
Rick: Sure.
Georgette: You know, but, and there is spirituality embedded in what I teach, but to claim the title of spiritual teacher, somehow for me that seems less than, at least for me, like, bowing down to the mystery that nobody knows, like the deeper truth of ultimate reality.
Rick: Yeah, there’s a great line toward the end of the Rig Veda, which it’s something, a rough paraphrase, it’s something like, “From whence did this creation come?” He said, “The gods don’t know because they were subsequent to creation.” Perhaps, you know, Brahman or the highest God knows. Or maybe He doesn’t know. And if He doesn’t know, maybe nobody knows. So, even like the Rig Veda is saying this. [Laughter]
Georgette: And you end up right back at the mystery.
Rick: Yeah, that’s cool. I think it’s a good attitude to have, don’t you? Not to be cocksure of our beliefs and opinions and convictions and so on.
Georgette: Yeah, I like that symbol. I think it’s called the orzo.
Rick: Yeah, the snake biting its tail?
Georgette: Yeah, well, it’s an open circle. It’s a circle that leaves-
Rick: Oh, yeah, the Zen thing with the brush stroke. Yeah, yeah.
Georgette: I really love that symbol because it’s like an invitation to always know there’s never a completion. Like, there’s no, it’s always open to the mystery and open to, as we talked a little bit before we started our conversation recorded today, around the scientific method of just always looking at, I think you described it as like, everything is a working hypothesis.
Rick: That’s right.
Georgette: And the best of our knowledge are filtered through our most recent up-to-date conditioning that we’re looking through.
Rick: Yeah, some spiritual teacher, might have been Nisargadatta, I forget who, said, “Well, the bad news is you’re always going to be in free fall. And the good news is there’s no ground, you know, you’re never going to go splat.” [Laughter]
Georgette: That’s so good! That is so true. Yes. I’ve been talking to a lot of people about this topic of like, aging into saging or from role to soul or transitioning as a human being into an elder season or cycle of life, and that concept of befriending the unknown, like, we’re always in it, but we just don’t realize that we have lots of coping mechanisms to recognize how much we don’t know. And wisdom often, it’s like after so much life practice of surrendering into the unknown, like we get better at it.
Rick: Yeah.
Georgette: It gets easier to trust that free fall, even though there’s always going to be a biological response in the body to something that feels uncertain.
Rick: I think fundamentalism of any sort is probably a reaction to the uncertainty and fear of the unknown. You know, you want certainty, and so you grasp onto something that somebody has told you, and then as soon as you grasp onto some limited perspective and make it absolute, it clashes with every other perspective. So everybody else is wrong now, and I’ve got the best perspective here. They’re all going to hell. I’m going to the special heaven. But it’s, you know, it’s obviously a kind of very tenuous or indefensible position because it’s not ultimate. And so, it’s constantly going to be challenged by – but if you take a God’s eye view, what would God’s perspective be? It would incorporate all perspectives.
Georgette: Yeah. Well, in the mapping system that my mom taught me that I’ll share later, like there’s a perspective that looks at all these different realms of human development, and one of them is represented geometrically by the square, or the number four, and that sense of like becoming like really stagnant within a structure, there’s quite where it, there’s some point in the beginning where it can be helpful as a building block, but then when it becomes stagnant, we fall inside the square, and then we’re just looking at the walls and there’s no fresh air, there’s no progress.
Rick: Yeah, I had a spiritual teacher who outlined what he called the fundamentals of progress, and they were stability, adaptability, integration, purification, and growth. And you know, some of those qualities are kind of opposed to one another, like stability and adaptability. If something is stable, how can it change? How can it adapt? But then there’s integration. Perhaps its stability and adaptability can be integrated with one another. And then purification, you know, you need to continually purify the mirror or the vehicle through which this is experienced, and then all of that results in growth.
Georgette: Well, I love that. I mean, when we talk about, you know, having to have concessions for language. It’s like, language is so binary, right? It’s like this or that and that’s not reality. So, all of those things can be simultaneously true.
Rick: Yes.
Georgette: And work together as an integrated whole. And old systems eventually do have to crack open, though, in order for transformation and evolution to happen.
Rick: Yeah, yeah, I mean speaking of the way you just said it, things can be simultaneously true. Nisargadatta, again, said that the ability to appreciate paradox and ambiguity is a sign of spiritual maturity.
Georgette: Yes, absolutely, I feel that.
Rick: Which means, you know, paradox, things can be paradoxically opposed or incompatible with one another, but both can be true. Like, “Certs is a candy mint, Certs is a breath mint,” you know, that kind of thing. The Certs paradox.
Georgette: Yes, I’ve heard of a t-shirt that was like “a pair of ducks.”
Rick: Yeah, I used to know two doctors that practiced together and they were also meditators. I used to call them “the divine pair of docs!”
Georgette: That’s great. Yeah, you know, another sign of like wisdom developing, right, is like the capacity to be able to withstand the tension of being, holding both, you know, being in the center of the polarity or the duality and knowing that both can be part of the same wholeness in the center.
Rick: What do you think about what we’re just talking about in light of what’s happening in society today in which there seems to be greater polarity than perhaps in our nation’s history and, you know, the tensions that that causes and how people seem to be seeing things from such diametrically opposed perspectives. What do you think that, I mean, I think that anything that happens in society is kind of symptomatic of something happening at a deeper level. And so, what do you think this signifies?
Georgette: Well, once again, I’m bowing to the mystery here because it’s beyond human comprehension, but I do believe there’s like these compensatory counter-movements on the journey of evolution that you can only see from big, vast cycles of time. And there’s something like, in a sense, like the old, talking about the structure, right? The old structures, like they have to like, get to the breaking point before a new possibility can come in. And, you know, I was reflecting upon, like, why has my journey somewhat emphasized the sacred feminine as being that principle in humanity as being so important to strengthen? And I have always been drawn to the Baha’i metaphor of humanity as the great bird. And the Baha’i metaphor describes one wing as being the masculine and one wing being the feminine, or men and women. And I don’t see it quite so literally. I think of more of this giant, like this vast cosmic bird flying through the universe, and the masculine side, which is not a gender, it’s one side of the polarity, right? It’s the yang energy in Taoism. It’s just been more strengthened. And so that wing is stronger than the feminine side and so the bird is just spiraling out of control. And that’s kind of where we are right now. And there’s some upsurges of effort, right, with all these people on the path of spiritual awakening, right, to connect to those more internal ways of connecting to Self and others and compassion and empathy and all of that. we just haven’t reached that point where we’re coming back into some kind of balance.
Rick: Yeah, some ancient traditions and even modern prognosticators feel like, you know, we really have to go through a almost catastrophic collapse of social structures and, you know, order in society and so on in order to rise to a new, kind of a more enlightened world. And, I mean, do you view it that way or do you think we can transition without too much cataclysm?
Georgette: I do have a hopeful, optimistic focus. I do believe in the soul of humanity as being on the journey to wholeness and to more balance. And I know it’s sketchy and challenging and right now we just happen to be in one of those really tense moments politically, right? With the elections coming up and that, you know, we feel all of that tension right like there’s… It reminds me a lot of like, the contraction process of the birthing, you know, the labor process where there’s just like these incredible moments of tension and it’s painful, right? And then eventually there’s a release and a relaxation and something can open up. And so I tend to feel more like we’re in that, you know, birthing process. The soul of humanity is in a birth or a labor process and that there’s enough God force in awakened humans to help us move ultimately to something better. I don’t know what it’s going to look like along the way though. Right now it certainly isn’t very pretty.
Rick: Yeah, so you’re thinking maybe we won’t need a cesarean. The birth is going to go successfully. Well, as you say, I mean, when people will be watching this for years and they’ll look back and they’ll know what actually happened, but you and I at this point are like, “Oh my God, what’s going to happen?”
Georgette: I know! You know, something I just thought it was interesting. Of course, you know, I’m going to talk later about my mom and her teachings in the Nine Pathways Mapping System, but I took a look at the charts of the two candidates.
Rick: Interesting, okay. The numerology charts?
Georgette: Yes.
Rick: Yeah.
Georgette: And, you know, just a real brief look, but it was really fascinating to me just looking at Kamala’s middle name. Do you know what her middle name is?
Rick: No, I know her first name means “Lotus.” In fact, I have a friend who has a t-shirt that says “Lotus for POTUS.”
Georgette: Well, her middle name is Devi.
Rick: Oh, Devi. Okay, I heard that, yeah, which means “Goddess.”
Georgette: Just saying.
Rick: Yeah.
Georgette: You know, there’s little signs of, little sparks of life coming up in different places and different ways, and I don’t know what it all means, but I can’t help but notice. And I also know that it doesn’t help the world for us to dwell on what is beyond our control. What helps the world, how we can contribute to the creation of a more balanced world, more healthier planet and human population is to do what we came here to do, which is exactly what you’re doing. You and Irene and all of your team, you know, you’re choosing to use your creative life force to contribute, right? And I love that and I also really appreciate that, you know, you’re a little farther down the road in your, you know, your age, right?
Rick: 75, just turned 75 a couple weeks ago.
Georgette: Yeah, so you didn’t hit the wall of, ‘it’s time to retire’, right? Right?
Rick: Bit boring.
Georgette: People do, many people do. And it’s kind of baked in.
Rick: Yeah.
Georgette: Unless they’re, you know, for someone like yourself who’s done a lot of spiritual practice, those, that conditioning comes up and it just kind of turns something off. And then we stop feeling like we have what it takes to contribute and, you know.
Rick: Yeah.
Georgette: We want to keep the lie alive.
Rick: Well, I’ve done maybe 25 years of my life doing stuff that had no intrinsic meaning to me, it was just ways to earn money, but then the other, at least another 30 years or so has been teaching meditation or doing spiritual stuff, which was meaningful to me, or you know, BatGap, which is meaningful, and it doesn’t feel like work at all. It’s like, Irene has to say, “Rick, it’s Sunday, let’s stop, get away from the computer, stop working, let’s do something else.” And I think, “What working? This isn’t working, this is like exciting, this is fun.”
Georgette: Yeah, that’s just a real example or role model, right? Of tapping into where the world’s need and our personal joy can meet our personal sense of fulfillment. And that’s going to be really unique for everyone, and not everyone is going to have an external sense of big purpose, but it will be small, in small ways, every day. And the way they show up and shine. And it’s, I think that’s what we most need right now, to make it through these tumultuous times is to stay focused on where the light is, where we can bring the light and be the light.
Rick: Yeah, I’m reminded of Joseph Campbell saying, “Follow your bliss,” and I don’t think he meant just, you know, “If it feels good, do it,” which is what we went by in the 60s. It’s more like, you know, bliss is actually different than happiness or sensory gratification. It’s a subtler value. And I think that the more in tune with the force of evolution we are, the more bliss tends to resonate in our experience. Even if we’re doing something that externally might not seem like a spiritual occupation or something, one can take the long view and be patient and, you know, who’s it, someone said, “If all is not well…”… He said, “All will be well in the end, and if all is not well, it’s not the end.” [Laughter]
Georgette: I was in the grocery store the other day and I saw this, this quintessential, like, elderly woman who was like decked out, she had her little suit on, she had her makeup, she had her hair perfectly, and she came up to me, she said, “Excuse me, excuse me.” She goes, she was very direct, she said, “How old are you?” [laughter]
Rick: That’s funny.
Georgette: I said, “I’m 66.” And she said, “Well, I really like your coat, and I love your braid. Don’t ever stop putting your hair in a braid.” And I’m like, “Okay.” And then she says, “I have made it my life purpose to show up wherever I am, every day, and say a good word to somebody.
Rick: Oh, how nice. That’s sweet.
Georgette: Yeah, and that was her way. Her way of bringing – that was her bliss.
Rick: That’s beautiful. Yeah.
Georgette: And sometimes, I don’t know about you, Rick, but – because you’re in a different phase, but sometimes I know that I’m called to do something that isn’t easy. So there’s bliss in knowing I’m aligned with a calling and it’s divine, right? I know that, but what I have to go through to do it isn’t pleasant. It’s challenging.
Rick: Yeah. I mean, you remember Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane saying, you know, “If it’s possible, let this cup pass from me.” And then after a while, he said, “All right, you know, but thy will be done. Whatever.” Wasn’t going to be easy, but I guess he resigned himself to it, that fate being in kind of the divine order of things.
Georgette: Yeah, and the awakening process isn’t always easy. And actually, the aging process isn’t always easy.
Rick: What was the second one? The what process?
Georgette: Aging process.
Rick: Aging process, no, of course.
Georgette: Yeah, especially in a world that is so programmed towards anti-aging. So, you know, it’s, you know, there’s trailblazers out there who are giving us a new vision of possibility for what that can look like. And yeah, I want to be part of that.
Rick: Yeah, well this would be a good segue to talking about the Women’s Rite documentary project that you’re working on. You know, I could just let you take it from here or I could ask you some kind of question, like about, let’s say, let’s talk about the evolutionary value of the, let’s say, the last quarter of one’s life. Some people might think, “Well, it’s all over, I’m not going to have the kind of fun I used to have, you know, or anything. I’m too old for that. But, you know, this could be the best time of one’s life, couldn’t it?
Georgette: Oh, absolutely. You know, I think of like a rose that, you know, its petals are just glorious in its midlife, and then all the juice and the medicine goes into the hip, into the rose hip. And so for, it’s actually our most potent time, because we’d had all of these life experiences, and we process through so much and we have, if we have been processing through things, we do have some wisdom and the capacity to be a steady state of resilience and presence for those who are more in the turbulence of their younger years and their awakening process. And so, you know, my perspective is it’s actually our time of ultimate power. And, you know, I think of, you know, our culture doesn’t teach that. But there are cultures who do and have. And, you know, what might it look like if every child from the time they were born were given this impression through the media, through images, through stories, that the elder phase of their life is going to be a time of incredible well-being and vitality and opportunities because they will have less they’ll have more time, right? They’ll have more, hopefully they’ll have more time and more resources, they’ll have more space, because they’ve done a lifetime, right, to be able to become mentors, conscious mentors, to show up in new ways and… I think of my mom again as an example of someone who, even up to her, when she could no longer like be, like she worked until she was 78 in the marketplace as a physical therapist and she continued her spiritual practice of awakening and she became rather luminous. And when she wasn’t able to physically contribute in that way, she started collecting adult godchildren. Anyone that she felt like was missing, she called it like the mother to the motherless, missing that kind of like really focused support and spiritual support and even though she couldn’t physically help them, she could talk with them and pray with them and that was her form of being able to contribute and she did that for people just talking on the phone all the way till her last, you know, week of her life.
Rick: That’s great, yeah. I’m thinking it’s more blessed to give than to receive, but you know, it’s perhaps more blessed because it’s actually more enjoyable if you can do something like what your mother was doing. You know, being on the giving end of a situation like that is very gratifying and evolutionary. You become a conduit for the force of evolution, actually, when you step into a role that is conducive to people’s evolution.
Georgette: Yeah, absolutely and also skills, she had some skills and they became very fine-tuned, and we all have that, we all have that ability, but not everyone becomes wise. Some people just get old.
Rick: Yeah, it kind of depends on how you live your life. Um, What you do during it? Yeah
Georgette: Yeah, so I can tell you a little bit more about how the project came to be.
Rick: Okay.
Georgette: My life, this lifetime, has been informed by a series of visionary experiences and dreams. And this one began, came out of a vision. But that vision started around the time I turned 65, when I started getting all of these social security and, you know, all the propaganda and, you know, all all these messages coming in. Okay, you’re old now. And I was so surprised. I really didn’t think I had those beliefs until I hit that age. Until I started having to make those changes because I suddenly felt like my motivation dropped off and I just started thinking like, oh don’t buy anything new. You need to start giving away your things. Like this is like a subconscious like thing going on in my mind and it was pulling me away from life, actually. And I remembered that, when my mom was towards, she was in her 70s, and she told me once she was so afraid that people would find out how old she was, because she was still working. And I…
Rick: They might make her stop working? Is that what she was afraid of?
Georgette: Yeah, yeah, she was terrified that anybody would find out her age, because she was ashamed of it. She felt like it was a bad thing, and that if they found out that maybe she would lose her job or she would lose respect. Because that is one of the cultural messages, right? Unfortunately, that you become more invisible and not as valuable. And for a female, even more like you have no more beauty on top of it. So, she told me and for some reason I had the presence of mind to say, “Mom, that doesn’t sound right and would you like to have a ceremony, a rite of passage?” And I only knew about this because I’d heard someone tell me a story about having a celebrated rite of passage when she began her elder cycle. And so my mom came up to Oregon, I gathered a bunch of friends, she didn’t know any of them. And she told her story and she got the feedback and everybody gave her little gifts and we created what was called a grandmother bundle with all of these little objects to represent like how we see her, how we want her to see herself. And I swear to God, it like a 24-hour change. She went from being like, “Oh, I don’t want anybody to know,” and being ashamed, to being very proud of it. And she put a staff in the ground, “I’m an elder now.” And she presided. And I watched that and I saw that. And I wasn’t thinking of that for myself, but I’m having those negative thoughts about myself. And I went to Hawaii for my birthday. I was very blessed to have that experience. I was meditating at a peace garden and I had this luminous visionary experience. And this is hard to describe going back to words and all of that, the concessions of language, but there was like a gathering of luminous beings around me that somehow I knew they were called The Pearls. And they were basically inviting me into a rite of passage to take on, to say yes to take on a rite of passage that would be documented for others to see as an example of how we can make it through that negativity into a new possibility through connecting with the deeper truth of who we are, which of course is the soul stream or the light. And I wasn’t so sure I was up for that, but I felt the call and when I came out of the meditation and I wandered out through the gift store, I saw a pearl. It was a pearl necklace, and I just looked at the pearl and I knew if I took it home, it would mean I was saying yes. And I’m wearing it today. This is my pearl. I said yes to having that, to being a stand-in, to step in to represent all women, all humans, because this is not a gender issue, right? Like the transition into empowerment at aging, um and have that documented in a film. And it started as an idea that just came through in spirit. And I just started talking to a few people about it and suddenly it started gaining momentum and people started coming in and um a year later there’s a film crew and a whole project has manifested out of that. And we’re now in the just entering the post-production phase, but I just have found it really fascinating in this lifetime because I can see how many times this has happened over my life where when I’m listening and trusting and acting on that inner guidance and knowing, something happens in the outer world.
Rick: Yeah, so if you could summarize in a few sentences what the main purpose of this film is?
Georgette: The main purpose is to bring awareness to this topic and to contribute to the cultural narrative and to present another possibility of what it could look like and also what we need in order to make that transition in a positive way. And the thematic backdrop is actually a rite of passage ceremony, which includes some of the pieces that we all have to face kind of being symbolically enacted. And, you know, I can tell you more about the ceremony a little bit later on down the road here.
Rick: Okay. You know, we’ve all heard that more traditional indigenous societies value older people and they don’t just lock them away in homes where you can’t see them, they become kind of the spiritual guides for the community. And, you know, I see your film as being a contribution to restoring that value. We were talking earlier about how society might go through a big tumultuous transition, but might end up in a much better place after that. I think this will be one of the characteristics of that much better place, the kind of reestablishment of the value of older people and the critical role, really, that they have to play. They’re not just kind of, you know, just put them out to pasture and, you know, out of sight, out of mind. They really have a critical role to play, which if they don’t play, society is impoverished as a result.
Georgette: Absolutely. And these rites of passage are a way to stop, to pause, and to acknowledge, and to be conscious about stepping into that role or into that phase in a way that feels empowered and having other people reflect that back and to confirm it.
Rick: Yeah.
Georgette: Yeah.
Rick: It’s cool that you do a ceremony for it too, because, you know, we have baptisms, we have graduations, we have weddings, we have ceremonies at various stages of our lives, but who does ceremonies for, you know, becoming an older person or, you know, retirement? I guess they give you a gold watch if you’ve been working at the company long enough, but for the most part, there’s no traditional society-wide ceremony for, you know, when you turn a certain age, 65 or whatever.
Georgette: Yeah, well, maybe this is a good time for me to just kind of give you a little snapshot of what that was like. There was an elder who’s farther down the road from me who was going to be the one to initiate me into elderhood. There was a community of men, women, boys, and girls that gathered and the ceremony started. Everyone had kind of passed through an arbor and added their touch to it, so they put flowers on the arbor and then they found their seats. And then the elder walked beside me to take my place. And I found that really beautiful, to not be alone on that walk. Like there was someone to show me what it could look like moving, you know, farther down the road. And so there were a few other phases to this ceremony. So we, you know, I found my spot. And the first part of the ceremony was I held him, I called it looking in the mirror. And so a little boy held a mirror. He kind of held it. It was a mirror that belonged to my mom. And he kind of held it right here at his chest. It’s just how it worked out. He kneeled down in front of me and he held this mirror to me. And my intention was to look in the mirror and look at all the wrinkles and look at all the things and really call out what’s challenging about this part of the journey. And what I anticipate are the challenges about this part of the journey. But actually what happened instead, Rick, is that right at that moment that he put the mirror there, the sun came up over the trees and a big burst of light went onto the mirror and it reflected back into my face. And it was just like, okay, that’s the deeper truth, right? Like, all of those limiting ideas are something that I’ve been Taught or I’ve seen role models and they’re not really the truth. And so I put that mirror down and that was one phase of the ceremony, and the next phase was in recognizing that the journey through a lifetime we pass through different seasons and phases, right? But in a sense we never really lose connection with all of those different facets. So, for example, there was a girl who came up to represent the the innocence and the enthusiasm of the child archetype. And she blew bubbles, and all the children blew bubbles, and there’s bubbles everywhere, and then you know, we felt that, right, and then we hugged and that was like to represent the merging and the reintegration of that, you know, how they say you go back to where you started at the end of your life. If you’re lucky, you know to reclaim that, that joyful present aliveness of just being here and now and excited about what creative opportunity there might be. And so there was an integration of the child. The next was a mother with two children that came up and she was to represent the season of our life. That’s, and this is non-gendered really. You know, where it’s all about the selfless service, and, and then we had an integration of that. You know, these are not the phases I’m in anymore but they’re still in me and they’re in all of us as archetypes. And then the midlife person who’s, this was a CEO, a woman who’s a CEO of her company, and she’s like in that phase of her life where she has to persevere, it’s like persevere, keep going, keep at it. It’s, you know, it’s like a a time of strength and perseverance and you know we… I remember that woman that I used to be, where I was so motivated by the marketplace and work in the world. And, you know, we hugged and integrated. And then the last one was the elder and so, you know, just the kind of acting out, like this this opportunity we have to become whole and complete as we age into that sage function because when I, when I really go deep into what’s true about what it means to be an elder for me, I don’t really identify with it. Like I don’t say I am an elder really. if I do, those words don’t really ring true. It’s more like, eldering is a function, it’s a way of being that I can go in and out of, right, when it’s called for. But I choose to be available to be called for that and to respond to the call when life presents an opportunity or I create an opportunity.
Rick: Did you choreograph that whole ceremony? Did you figure out who was going to do what?
Georgette: It was created by a council of women who I formed when I first received this inspiration because I knew I couldn’t create it on my own. And, in fact, that’s one of the wisdom pearls that I have gathered in this lifetime. It’s just no fun to do anything on one’s own, really. I mean collaboration, at least for how I’m organized, is like what brings the juice and the joy and so I didn’t want… I just want to be a part of that process, and I was willing to be the one who stands in to represent that woman, or that human, right, who, yeah, it’s more of a metaphor than a thing. So, I helped to collaborate on that, but there were others who designed the ceremony.
Rick: Okay, nice. Okay, let’s turn on the Wayback Machine and, you know, talk about your childhood, your adolescence, your early life, and you know, some of the things you’ve gone through. I get the impression that you’re one of these people who had some pretty interesting stuff going on even from an early age.
Georgette: Yeah, well, you know, because I have the perspective of the soul map, which I’ll talk about later, like I see every human being as being so unique in what they come in with and what they’re here for. And I feel like I came in with a lot of development already, and so I think, in some areas, and I think I just woke up really early. And so I just want to describe briefly that I had many ecstatic mystical experiences as a very young child. I would never have been able to talk about that or describe that to you but I just remember like laying on the cement and, in the summertime, with water on the cement, and the warmth of the sun, and the water, and the body, and just like this sense of like just becoming being part of everyone and everything. So, undifferentiated well-being, and many experiences like that, being underneath the tree and just smelling the sap and the senses seem to be gateways to this explosion of love and presence. And that went on until I was around 10 and then I had a like a massive contraction. And my dad had a a major heart attack. And you know, we thought he was going to die. Fortunately, he didn’t die, but he also was never well again. But my sense of being safe or secure, that freedom to feel safe enough to just blend with everyone and everything, really shut down for me. But something else opened up and this became my search for the divine, for God. I do remember so vividly in all the Bible school classes and everything, the only thing that made sense to me was this idea that God is love. Like, that seems so true and so logical, but I didn’t feel it in the church. I didn’t feel it really very much from any of the people. I just didn’t. There was no aliveness. So I asked my parents if they would take me to other people’s churches. And so at age big church in San Francisco. A Buddhist monastery. Somehow I got into a Mormon situation, I’m not sure how.
Rick: They showed up at your door. [Laughter]
Georgette: But the one that really, really made a difference, changed my life, was my mom took me to a Hindu guru in Berkeley, California. I was 12 years old, and we took the bus, and you know I loved, they were chanting, they were singing and chanting, and the music, I’m like wow this is so cool! You know I loved that part. And then they took me to see the master, and he didn’t speak English, but someone was translating, and he had a peacock feather and he just hit my forehead with a peacock feather. They gave me a mantra and then they, the instruction was to go home and at night to put your attention right here and to say the mantra. And so, I did. But before we left, we had to wait for the bus, and I was so filled with energy, I couldn’t stand still. I was like running back and forth while my mom was waiting for the bus, just filled with life. And that’s when I knew there was something going on. This is, there’s something here. And so, I would, you know, get in my little bunk bed at night and I would concentrate here and I’d say the mantra and I’d get these like painful headaches, but for some reason I persevered and sometimes that would pop open, and when it would pop open, that’s just some way to describe this, I would just go back to that feeling of the waves of well-being and beyond the words to describe. And this was going on, you know, in my little bunk bed for years.
Rick: Interesting, that must have been Muktananda, right? Peacock feather?
Georgette: Yeah. I think it was later I researched to find out who that was. Yeah, it was Muktananda. But I never had a conversation with him again. It was just the instruction to meditate.
Rick: Yeah, that’s cool. I wish I’d learned to meditate when I was 12. Took me six more years during which time I did some damage to myself that had to be repaired. What was this about mom and Jane in the kitchen? It was in your notes. What was that?
Georgette: So throughout my whole childhood, but around 12 when I was old enough to like really be paying attention, my mom was in the kitchen often with my godmother Jane who was also quite a bit older than my mom so she was a mentor for my mom. And Jane had taught my mom a numerologically-based mapping system and they would be having, they were reading charts of neighbors and friends and relatives and having these conversations about the metaphysical perspective on what a life is all about. And both of my parents were metaphysically oriented. They were both Rosicrucians and they were both really compassionate human beings. And I just was kind of born into that field.
Rick: Yeah.
Georgette: Yeah.
Rick: The Bhagavad Gita says what a good fortune it is to be born in a family of yogis.
Georgette: Yeah, well, I would say they were more like wounded healers.
Rick: But yeah, they were cool people to be raised by.
Georgette: Yes, and I didn’t know any different, right? So I never even thought I’d like to learn this. It was more, it was just a conversation going on in the background of my life.
Rick: Yeah.
Georgette: And later it became more of a, something that came to the front.
Rick: So that meditation you learned when you were 12 and you got a mantra, you kept doing that throughout your adolescence?
Georgette: Yeah. And I also continued to have these visionary or intuitive impulses, like knowings of things, that just continued on and on, like small things to big things, that I for some reason knew to listen to and trust and act on.
Rick: That’s great. So, apparently you missed the whole drug phase that many of us went through in those days.
Georgette: I didn’t miss it completely. Yeah. I mean, I tried, but I found that I was experiencing like a natural high from this ability to tap into this inner source because it also was a source of creativity. Like there was when, you know, there was just be like all this music that would flow out of me and poetry and, you know, just it was so joyful that doing something to alter that also kind of felt like bringing me down. So, I wasn’t, I tried and I didn’t spend a lot of time with it.
Rick: Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, that was kind of my conclusion once I, I mean, I took drugs quite a bit for a year before I learned to meditate, but after I learned to meditate, I never did them again. But my feeling was, “Hey, I feel better all the time than drugs made me feel temporarily, so why would I do that anymore? Yeah, I mean, I see all these poor people taking fentanyl and all this stuff, and you know, it’s like, there’s a better way. I mean, whatever chemicals these drugs are able to trigger in your brain, your brain can produce them on its own and much more enjoyably than introducing some artificial substance. Now, that’s not to say that psychedelics don’t have value under certain circumstances, but still, we’re capable of tremendous bliss just through our own neurophysiology.
Georgette: Yeah, absolutely. And I wonder why it is that we have, many of us, have a resistance to that. Like, we’re not, even though we know that that potential is there, we make other choices.
Rick: I think to a great extent it might be due to lack of proper guidance. I mean you had really good guidance as a child, given who your parents were and their open-mindedness taking you to all these different things and you know the average kid doesn’t get that. You know I didn’t have a clue that this kind of thing existed until I was 17 and it took me a while to find something that I could really do. So I finally started when I was 18 but you know ideally there should be an introduction to this in grammar school appropriate to the age level of the children. And there are some schools which do that, but it’s, you know, pretty rare. And if it’s ever, if there’s ever any attempt to introduce it into the public schools, it usually gets shut down by religious fundamentalists.
Georgette: It’s really, really true. Well, I do feel really blessed. My godmother, Jane, also, she had a guru. And, um, I was just, his name was Charan Singh.
Rick: I vaguely remember hearing about him.
Georgette: I was like 14 when I started going to these groups and I was just so drawn to anyone who was talking about spirituality that was a little different than the way that it was being portrayed to me in our family church. So, I actually was initiated by that guru, which is kind of like, I never saw him. He was like somewhere on the other side of the planet. And also there were all these rules, like all the things that you had to not do in order to be pure enough, right? And I was doing all that stuff, you know, it’s like, okay, quit everything, everything. I mean, some of it was just ridiculous, like food restrictions, like don’t like pour any honey you have in the house out, like just, you know, celibacy was, it didn’t work for me ultimately. And I had to find, I wanted to be pure enough to know God, you know? Even though I was knowing God, I just didn’t realize that’s what it was, you know, all along. And so, I went through like a, you know, that process where you give your power away to an outer authority in order to somehow find that out there, you know, the God out there. It didn’t work for me ultimately and I had to find the inner strength to say, you know, to my godmother that this isn’t my path.
Rick: Yeah, and then more often than not, it turns out the guru is doing all the things he’s telling everybody else not to do. I’m afraid that happens pretty often.
Georgette: I will never know. I did have one of those visionary dreams where I was walking down the street and he was walking down the other side of the street and we just went like this. There was no contact.
Georgette: Interesting. A question came in from somebody. This is Paul Diaz in the United States. “How does an older person work through feelings of resignation when facing the physical challenges of aging? The pull to just sit on the couch seems to be intensifying as I age, but at a deeper level, I know it’s not in my ultimate best interest.”
Georgette: That is such an important, good question. Just asking the question, like I feel like questions are like keys because it opens up like the cosmic URL or whatever, you know, the Google in the sky. There is, it just opens up the possibility that there is to ultimately become the answer to that question. So just asking it is like inviting an exploration of that feeling, like that feeling of like, well, I might as well just stop or give up or, and you know uh investigate to inquire to discover what that really is about. So, I can give an example of one that came up for me recently like I used to love to dance and I would go to like group dancing like ecstatic dance things and this was years ago and I really loved it and then COVID happened and none of that was possible and then when I thought about going again, I just found like resistance. Like I’ve been saying I want to do this now for years. It’s like, why am I not doing this? Like I just want to sit here. I don’t want to go. And when I really tuned in, what I discovered is that there was a belief under there that was, I’m too old. I’m too old. Like a woman my age should not be, there’s a certain way that you’re supposed to look. There’s a certain way you’re supposed to behave. And that’s, and so I discovered there was a limiting belief that now I could question, “Is that really true?” and “Do I really have to hold that as true?” So, self-inquiry and like going into the emotion and discovering what that might be.
Rick: Yeah. One thing I would say to Paul is, there’s a saying, “Sitting is the new smoking.” And you know, as I mentioned earlier, I’m 75. I’m pretty physically active and I really feel like, you know, I sit so much at the computer when I want to actually accomplish things that I can only accomplish at the computer. And I just, personally, I just get kind of stir-crazy if I sit here too long. I got to do something. So I go and walk four or five miles in the woods every morning, and I’m usually listening to stuff or talking to people on the phone, but it’s great exercise. It’s hilly, so I get a lot of exercise. Before that, I was playing pickleball for a few years before COVID struck. So I don’t know what Paul’s physical condition is or his age, but it would be, my personal recommendation is get off the couch, do something, you know, if you’re bored by just walking, listen to a podcast, listen to Buddha at the Gas Pump while you’re walking, and, you know, find something you enjoy that doesn’t have to be walking, can be all kinds of things, and just build up, you know, build it up. I mean, you know, it’s so good for your health. It’ll add years to your life. I think my resting heart rate is in the low 50s and my blood pressure is a hundred over 60 or something like that.
Georgette: Wow!
Rick: So, um…
Georgette: That’s amazing.
Rick: And maybe some of that is genetic. I don’t know. But in any case, I’m not bragging. I just want to set an example that to say that, you know, getting older can be… I mean, the oldest man to climb to the summit of Mount Everest was 81. And I saw an article about some lady in her 90s who was doing triathlons, which are these really intense physical things. So, yeah, use it or lose it, man. [Laughter]
Georgette: Yeah, well, I just feel so much compassion for the inertia, like that feeling of, like, wanting to like just stop because it does feel to me like there’s also so much pressure, evolutionary pressure, that we’re all feeling on some level on the planet today as it is that it’s like almost like a natural coping mechanism is to be safe, you just stop, right? And a freeze, it’s a freeze response. And when we recognize that maybe that’s… we’re picking up on that collective energy, it’s possible to summon the motivation to just try moving. And, you know, it is really true that movement is life. And even if it’s the smallest movement, it’s possible. And there’s so many resources online for like online yoga and just simple things that are designed for people who have, don’t have as much mobility. So there’s lots of resources.
Rick: Sure, it all depends on what your condition is. You could join a square dancing group or you could play pickleball. Pickleball is great, a lot of older people do it. All kinds of things. And it’s fun, it makes you feel good, it actually creates endorphins and stuff in your system and helps with purification of the system. Anyway, we don’t want to harp on that too much. One thing I thought about though is, let’s say a person just feels tired and they feel lethargic and all. It could be that, like you know how you said when you were 12 and you learned to meditate, all of a sudden you had so much energy you were running back and forth at the bus stop. Sometimes people find if they do an effective meditation practice that they start to get a lot more energy and they find themselves becoming more dynamic. There’s a verse in the Bhagavad Gita which is “Yoga is skill in action.” And the whole teaching of that book was that, you know, this going into the transcendent can actually be a preparation for dynamic activity and can make you more dynamic. Like, you know, if you want to shoot an arrow, you can’t just hold it on the bow and let go of it, it’s just going to flop to the ground. But if you pull it back on the bow, it’ll shoot with great speed. And meditation can be like that, where you bring your mind to a state of silence, and then when you come back to activity, you just feel energized and you’re more motivated to do stuff.
Georgette: It’s a really, it’s a good question though.
Rick: Yeah.
Georgette: And I’m glad that it was brought to our focus just a little bit today because that is one of the perils and pitfalls of the programming around aging. And everything just gets smaller and smaller and smaller and it just doesn’t have to be that way. And we all have to find our own way.
Rick: Yeah, okay. Another one of your notes here was initiation of motherhood.
Georgette: Oh, okay, going back again, we’re reeling back to the earlier life. I feel that the experience of conception and pregnancy and labor and birth and then responsibility for parenting and mothering was also a huge initiatory process for me because suddenly my path was, my life was no longer about me. It was about being of service. And that started for me, I had my son when I was 18. So I started that really young of recognizing every choice I made had an effect on someone else and always had to be taken into consideration. And so I feel like it took me immediately onto the the path of service and also the miraculous, the recognition of the miraculous experience of having a human body and having a female body and the miracle of, you know, just the miracle of it all.
Rick: Yeah. I mean, just as you’re doing a whole thing about the evolutionary value of the older phase of one’s life, whatever you want to call it, I imagine one could make a documentary, and perhaps some have been made, about the evolutionary value of the motherhood phase. There’s a lady I interviewed a couple times in New Zealand named Lucy Grace, and she had this young child, and the child was, you know, she was used to this nice meditative routine, you know, and all of a sudden she has this kid that won’t let her sleep or do anything, and she’s like, “Oh my God!” But she very clearly got the message, “This is your spiritual practice now. Get into it. Take advantage of it.”
Georgette: Yes, I remember Lucy and her daughter and just absolutely like every, you know, if we keep rolling it back to earlier, like for a girl, her first really big initiatory experience is with her first menstruation. And that’s another, that has been, for some reason, I felt called to acknowledge these rites of passage for women at these different ages and phases, and in fact for more than 15 years of my life, I was dedicated to and created a program called Maiden Spirit that was all about helping girls to experience the conscious and celebrated rite of passage at their first moon experience, but also to prepare them for becoming conscious young women in a way that gave them access to their wisdom source within. So it was a spirituality and rites of passage program for girls and that started because I was working with women and they had daughters and they kept asking me, “Maybe would you do something like this for our girls?” And at that time I’m like, well, I’m not qualified for that. I don’t have that experience. I have a son not a daughter. I you know, thank you for, you know, trusting me with that, but I’m not going to do that. And then I had another one of those visionary experiences again in Hawaii and this time I was camping at a ancient village site in Maui and I had another really profound experience of being a child, being a little girl, and being chased into a cave. And it was really scary and somehow I found my way out of the cave and I was hiding underneath a banyan tree. And that person left, and then I started to hear the sound of tinkling bells, just thousands and thousands of bells, and out of that same cave came a light, a beautiful light, and then out of the light emerged this tall woman. And she just kind of beckoned to me and I followed her into the cave and she took me down into the cave into a cavern and it was really beautiful and I felt really safe. And she said, “This isn’t the way it should be.” And somehow I knew when she said that, like that not feeling safe, not feeling safe as a girl, and not feeling good about myself as a girl, and then I don’t remember what happened. It was like something went dark, I don’t remember it, but I knew when I came out of it, when I woke up or my eyes opened up, I felt so like empowered and so happy, so glad to be myself, so just so alive. And then she said to me, “Now, I want you to go out and bring the other girls back to me.” And that was my instruction to create that program, to create a place where I could bring the girls to have that experience, to support them in having that experience. And that became the beginning, the visionary inspiration and instruction that turned into Maiden Spirit.
Rick: That’s cool. You have some pretty amazing visions. That was all just like in a meditative session? Amazing. Wow. What do you think when you hear the statistics these days about all the kids, especially young girls, committing suicide and they’re all addicted to social media and they’re so concerned about what people are saying about them on social media. You know, it’s like there’s a kind of an information overwhelm now that kids have that we didn’t have when we were that age, and it’s taking a toll. What would be your advice to young girls or to their parents or whatever about that particular thing?
Georgette: Is is concerning, you know, the dark side of technology. In fact, I was just talking to a young school counselor and she was telling me that her girls that are like age 12 or so are all talking about, they all do TikToks, and they do like their morning routines. And their morning routines involve like 15 different products. And they’re asking their mothers for retinol and other anti- aging products at the age of 12. And I’m like, wow, what is that all about? And she said, well now because we’re on, you know, the social medias, everything is all about your face. And so there’s like this incredible, like need to like look a certain way. And, um, it is very concerning. Um, I think it’s really up to the parents to recognize that they need to have limits, but also to find alternative opportunities for their children to be in environments where they’re having a different, an alternative type of experience in education. And there are programs like that. I know Maiden Spirit was specifically designed for that. And, you know, there was many, many, you know, when I started that work, there was hardly anything for girls like that. And now there’s many, many programs, I’m not in touch with what they are at this moment. But there are resources and I think it has to be really intentional.
Rick: Yeah, maybe this would be hard for a 12, year old or a 13 year old, but eventually I think you, if you’re fortunate, you come to the realization that you are so much more than your body. And I mean, I don’t mean to keep talking about myself, but I’m sometimes so oblivious to my body that, you know, I mean, Irene says, “Have you combed your hair this week?” Or you know, “Do you realize how ridiculous that outfit looks that you’re wearing?” I think, “Oh, okay, I don’t know.” And I think when I was younger, I also was kind of a basket case, but I was very hyper concerned, you know, aware of it and how nerdy I was, or whether my hair looked good, or you know, whether I had zits on my face, or stuff like that. I hopefully grow out of that stuff. I know that that there have been cases of beautiful movie stars who just fall into a deep, deep depression when they start to lose their beauty. So I think the normal spiritual development process should enable a person to realize the truth of the matter, which is that we are way more than our physical body. The spiritual teachings all say that, you are so much more than your body, but it doesn’t just have spiritual significance, it has kind of practical significance for the way one feels throughout life, you know, our social interactions and stuff like that.
Georgette: Yeah, I mean, the perennial questions, like, who am I? That deep question, that for me opened up when I was 12, right? It began. And because of that, I began to access resources, right, that pointed back to that deeper truth that we are so much more than we appear to be. And the body is an incredible blessed vessel, an instrument, but it’s not who we are. And, but the world keeps telling you that you are, it is.
Rick: Yeah.
Georgette: And so, it’s a, it takes a tremendous amount of mental and spiritual strength to counteract those, you know, those forces.
Rick: Yeah, the body is a vehicle, like your car, you know, it’s nice to have a car that works well, but you are not your car.
Georgette: Yeah, absolutely. So, somehow, so interesting, like we’re going back and forth, like there’s no linear flow, but you know, I can see there’s like this thread that runs through from the beginning of my life until now, and it’s taken different forms of expression, but it always has that common thread of like, remember the deeper truth of who you are and what this life really is. And when we forget, to reach out to someone who’s established in that knowing, to reconnect and re-stabilize again. And it’s…
Rick: Yeah, I think another thing about all this is the whole fear of death thing. I mean, speaking of aging, as we get old, I don’t know how it is for most older people. Maybe you would know because you’ve been studying this and making a movie about it, but does fear of death become more acute as most people get older? And, you know, obviously it would seem that a spiritual orientation would help to ameliorate that.
Georgette: Well, that has been, I haven’t done a tremendous, a lot of research, but that has been my experience so far. That, yeah, those who have a direct connection have developed the resources and the skills and the capacities to be able to trust the unknown, to be able to step into the unknown, and because we don’t know what that’s going to be, how that will be, cultivating that sense of trusting one’s ability, like you said, to free fall, but there’s no ground. Like that, it becomes much more of like an anticipatory, like, I can’t wait, almost, like, I’m looking forward to that, you know, this is tough being here in the body and, you know, there are inevitable, you know, there’s just different kinds of challenges at each of these ages and stages, these different rites of passage in human development. There’s just different challenges, but, you know, the same skills and capacities that we can develop will help us to meet those challenges. So, you know, meditation, just stilling, getting quiet and tapping in. You know, that was something I felt was so important to teach those children. That was the very first in the curriculum, it was the first thing we talked about. It’s like, you know, the real you. And I would take them on a guided journey to meet their inner wisdom source. And then they would, that’s where I learned that the wise man, the wise woman, the wise one is an archetype because those children actually know. They already know. So many of them, now, we might call the elder, the wise elder, they already have it inside and they can connect to it and they can get their own information and knowledge and be guided by that inner resource. And it doesn’t, you know, that doesn’t end.
Rick: Yeah, that’s important too. I mean, on the death thing, there’s that saying, “Die before you die,” you know, which I think means, you know, get to that level of life that is beyond the manifest and which is eternal and immortal and so on. And most of the people I know who’ve had near-death experiences, I’ve interviewed a lot of them, and you know, they’re like, completely obliterates the fear of death because they’ve had a glimpse of something that’s so marvelous. Not that they’re in a hurry to die, but you know, when it happens, no big deal. But this thing you just said about the young people finding this sort of inner guidance, I mean, this relates to what we were just saying about social media, how people are so influenced by, they call them “social influencers,” you know, “I’m an influencer.” You know, but what kind of influence are a lot of these people exerting on young people? So, I think that the ability to have greater self-determination and autonomy and less…you know, I mean, not only young people, but it seems like a huge swath of our society these days is easily brainwashable, and being able to be more centered in oneself and less permeable, less influenced by external stimuli is a critical need in our day and age.
Georgette: I couldn’t agree more. So, you know, I talked a little bit about the, you know, the nine pathways of the soul. Those are realms of human development and this is one of the realms of human development is being able to kind of withdraw from outer focus to discover all that is within. And eventually that is often described as the scientist who is, you know, willing to ask the questions and explore to discover the answer. But then there’s a point where the scientist can’t find the answer by looking outside and asking anyone or anything and becomes, turns and faces the mystery and becomes a mystic.
Rick: Nice. Did you have a guru other than Muktananda? There was a point here, you said, “Leaving my guru.”
Georgette: Yeah, that was the first one, Charan Singh.
Rick: Oh, right, that guy, yeah.
Georgette: Yeah, leaving him was scary because I was still believing that the god is out there, right? And, you know, I’ve had many, like I said in the beginning, like there’s these progressive openings and shocks and awakenings and there was a certain point where, and then I’d like fall back into like God’s out there and I’m separate, right? Like a toggle switch, like I’d have these expansions and I’d fall back to feeling like I’m separate and I’m in charge and, you know, going back and forth and back and forth. But there was one one big opening that happened for me um about five years ago, and I just want to present it because when we started our conversation I talked about, you know, like the mountain and having less people to be able to talk with or communicate with. This happened for me, on the way, I was on my way to a a retreat with Shakti Caterina Maggi who…
Rick: I oh, yeah, I know Shakti, sure, Shakti, I interviewed her.
Georgette: Yes. She’s a wonderful non-dual teacher. I really like her feminine expression of that. Um, and I was following my gps, right? I’m following my gps, although my intuition is saying, “Don’t do this! Don’t go this way! Don’t go this way!” And I didn’t listen. And so I’m ending up, I have no idea, I feel like I was on like mountain road, like, you know, logging roads, kind of, like, I just, it took me the fastest route. And over the Santa Cruz mountains up to Mount Madonna, it’s in Santa Cruz, it’s a retreat center. And about, I don’t know, I didn’t realize I was this close, but maybe it was like two or three miles. And it’s winding, like this. And there’s, there’s no room for two cars and blind curves. And I’m being careful, but all of a sudden and there’s a wall of mountain right here, so there’s nowhere to go, and there was a truck coming right at me, and it was right into me.
Rick: It hit you?
Georgette: Yeah, it hit me.
Rick: Wow.
Georgette: I had, it was like my worst fears being like alone in a deserted area, being in a car accident by myself. All these things that I’ve had in the past that were… I was afraid of, happened. But what also happened is that, okay, my car smashed into the mountain. The guy stops, he comes out, and all I remember is he had like a gold, he was Mexican and he had a Guadalupe gold charm right here. I’m looking at his charm, I’m looking at this Guadalupe, and he’s talking to me, and all of a sudden I just… It was so weird. It was like I suddenly lost my sense of individuation, like I totally felt him completely as myself, the mountain, my car, the human sitting there crunched, and you know traumatized. It all happened all at once, and then I don’t know how this worked out, but somehow my car was somewhat drivable. And the guy was, I think he was on high on pot, and he didn’t give me his real license. It was sketchy. But somehow I drove my car, shaking and rattling, to the retreat center and I get there. Of course, my car never, I mean, my car had to be towed from there, but I never left that state. But my body was traumatized and so I walk into my room, I have a roommate, I’ve never met her before, I just said, “I was just in a car accident.” She goes, “Well, I’m a somatic trauma therapist, so let me help you.” So she immediately put her hands on me and my body trembled and shook and did all this stuff and then I went on with the retreat. I’ve never been the same.
Rick: Really? That’s interesting. I mean, so that was kind of a watershed moment and things have never been the same since. Very interesting.
Georgette: It’s been difficult to express or communicate, and for a few years I really needed things like Buddha at the Gas Pump, and a few other people that I could talk to, because my experience was so out of the ordinary. And so, it was as if, like at night, I’d be laying in bed and I couldn’t tell where I was. Like, I couldn’t tell where the ceiling was, or the floor, I just felt like I was all of that. That sounds lovely, but it was really scary. It was like for so much of my life, I had this really concrete feeling of being a separate human being. And even though there was these moments of expansion, there’d be a contraction back. And this time, it just never contracted back. So, just, it took a while to reorient to how to, you know, it was a little challenging and now it’s like there’s a silence and a stillness and an emptiness. Like when I came out of that rite of passage, my older rite of passage, I thought people were going to be right there in front of me to give me a hug. That’s not what happened. They all moved out into a big semi-circle and I walked down into empty space. And that’s how it is. It’s like even now we’re talking and we’re having this flow of communications, creative, beautiful, and I feel such an emptiness inside, a stillness, a silence.
Rick: And in this context, emptiness doesn’t have a negative connotation, it’s more of a, like you said, stillness and silence. You might even be able to say fullness, but it’s a stillness and silence.
Georgette: Yeah, it’s going back to the paradox. The “pair of docs.” (laughter). Like, it’s full on. Like, I’m here, I’m doing all the things, I have to go through all the human stuff. I mean, the body’s experiencing that, but it’s also experiencing the all of it.
Rick: Interesting. I’ve heard of other instances, and I think it’s probably come up in some of my interviews, where a traumatic experience like that precipitates an awakening. And it’s…
Georgette: Yeah, I’ve heard that too.
Rick: Yeah, and it doesn’t reverse…
Georgette: I don’t recommend it.
Rick: No, I mean, there are probably more graceful ways of doing it, but yeah.
Georgette: I mean, mostly it’s been nice, like, you know, these little, you can integrate afterwards.
Rick: Yeah.
Georgette: I remember my friends, like, you know, they could listen, but they just couldn’t, like, understand or relate, and I didn’t know how to explain what was happening, and yeah.
Rick: Yeah.
Georgette: So, it’s funny, I even forget, like, time, you know, thinking of, like, stepping into this elder season. Like, when one is identified more as the self, there is no time.
Rick: Yeah.
Georgette: So, there’s no old age either. There’s no, you know what I mean? It’s like, it’s just now.
Rick: Yeah. Well, the word “identified” is a good one because obviously there are all these different dimensions to our life and one dimension is the body and it is aging, but if that’s your primary locus, then it’s a problem, you know? But it could be much more peripheral than that, and you could be primarily established in being, which is ageless.
Georgette: Yeah. Yeah, I love having this human. I find the senses, it’s like going back to where I started as a child, but now there’s more of like a individuated consciousness here, so it’s not so diffuse.
Rick: Right.
Georgette: But the senses are like what bring me so much incredible, like, happiness and just feeling the aliveness. Like, sometimes, like, I’ll just look at something and I’ll just really see it. It’s so incomprehensibly beautiful.
Rick: Yeah, you know, it’s said that a progression after self-realization can very often be the refinement of the senses. And that refinement sort of needs the establishment of pure consciousness in order to have a stable foundation, otherwise it can be too overwhelming to have the sensory refinement. But once that’s there, then, you know, the sensory richness can become extremely profound. One teacher once said, you know, “Until you’re established in the Self, God realization is out of the question.” He couldn’t even tell a phone from a distance, you’d be crushed, you know, so you need that stability. And then the senses can just, you know, really start to flourish.
Georgette: Yes, I totally, I remember with Jane, you know, she used to tell me that there’s Self-realization before God-realization.
Rick: Exactly, right.
Georgette: And I’m like, “What? I don’t get that. Why? Why would you want to have Self-realization if you could just go right to God-realization?” So, it took me a few decades of maturing to recognize the importance of developing the vessel to be capable of withstanding the intensity.
Rick: Another analogy might be a small, shallow pond can’t rise up in great tidal waves, you know, it would only just stir up the mud, but an ocean can do that.
Georgette: Exactly.
Rick: This also pertains to the idea of devotion, which, you know, the expansion of the heart. Okay, so we have about half an hour left. I I want to make sure that we don’t miss out on something important. So there are a few little tidbits from your younger years, but maybe we’ve covered that. And you have alluded to this work you have done with young girls and also young boys, and we might want to talk more about that. And then there’s the Life Blessing Institute, and then there’s the Women’s Rite, well, maybe there’s more to say about the Women’s Rite documentary project. And so, of all those things, and then there’s Matthew Fox, who you studied with, Thomas Hübl you studied with. So what would you like to cover in the next half hour?
Georgette: Well, I do want to just mention again, my filter, I guess, is always looking towards what’s working, what can feel better, how can it be improved, rather than what’s wrong. And one of my greatest teachers around this concept is Matthew Fox. And the way that I discovered Matthew was, I was at a Franciscan renewal center for just some contemplative time, and I went into the library and I looked at the books and I saw this book and it just had the title of “Original Blessing.” And I’d never heard of original blessing, I’d certainly heard of original sin.
Rick: (laughter)
Georgette: And I mean, it’s almost like that moment changed my life. Like, wow, you mean this, like, all this really is, is like sacred and a blessing, this human experience, this human body, this creation is inherently good and sacred. And I didn’t really even need to read the book. I mean, it was just like, yes! That resonated with me. And later became like woven into everything that I do. And I’ve heard you talk about this many times, Rick, but whatever we focus on will increase. So why don’t we focus on how to bring more love and compassion and beauty and justice into the world? And even if it’s just like that woman in the grocery store who told me she liked my braid. So the main tenet of creation spirituality is that life, creation, is a blessing. And I also really loved that woven into that philosophy is this idea that spirituality is lived both through science as well as through spiritual practice or spiritual values. And I like that. I also like that Matthew really specifically talked about the feminine aspects of the divine and really celebrated that and it resonated with me. I just found an organization and a community and a belief system that I could fit into somewhat. But life as original blessing is, I think, the main takeaway for me from that whole educational process because I got my master’s through the Naropa Institute and the Creation Spirituality track and my doctoral project was to create the curriculum to train mentors for the main spirit work, but I always appreciate and bow down to, you know, important mentors along the way. And Matthew Fox was one of them.
Rick: Yeah, he’s a neat guy. I first saw him at the S.A.N.D. conference and liked him a lot and then interviewed him a little bit later.
Georgette: Oh, yes.
Rick: Yeah. But, you know, what you’re saying here I think is really important because I know I’ve gone through phases in my life under the influence of certain spiritual teachings where I kind of maligned and belittled life. It was more like something to escape from, you know? Let me get off the wheel and, you know, kind of like life sucks then you die kind of a thing. And, you know, there are spiritual traditions which emphasize that, you know, this world is horrible, but then you’ll go to heaven if you’re a good person. But, you know, to me, that kind of demeans God. I mean, it kind of makes God into some kind of sadist who would just set up this torture chamber for everybody as opposed to seeing the beauty of life and the potential and the value of it as something to enjoy rather than to escape from.
Georgette: Yes, yeah, we have so much power in our, we don’t have much free will or choice, but we do have the choice of where we put our attention.
Rick: Yeah, wiggle room, I always say when the topic of free will comes up. It’s like, I can’t play basketball like, you know, LeBron James, but I can do, you know, within my dharma, within my field of possibilities, I can, you know, there’s a window of freedom and you can move it this way or that way. You know, greater freedom, greater bondage, depending on what you do with that window.
Georgette: Well, I say, let’s do, let’s do love.
Rick: Yeah, great. What are these Soul Stream Life Map readings?
Georgette: Okay, so Jane and my mom were practicing this life mapping system, and they eventually, when I entered into my, my first wave of career path was as a hands-on healer, and I did body work and that quickly transformed into a body-centered coaching or counseling method called Hakomi.
Rick: Oh yeah, I’ve heard of that.
Georgette: Yeah, with Hakomi, I’d be working with my clients and we’d, you know, come to a place where they’re repeating patterns, they’re stuck and it’s just recycling and nothing that we’re doing is helping to break through. And I would go consult with my mom and she would give me some impressions from her looking at their soul map, that would be helpful for me to bring back into the session and would often help to catalyze a breakthrough. So I, after years and years of consulting with my mom, it became obvious that I should take it on and learn. And so I did. And what I find really helpful as, as we both know, as everyone knows, the map is not the territory. So it’s like language, you know, it’s a pointer, symbolic. It can help us to gain access to what we are own deeper knowing. But it is helpful and it also helps, I find it really helpful, for kind of getting out of the self-criticism and judgment that so many people have around the places where they have fears and have limiting belief systems and as well as to step more powerfully into their gifts and abilities. It’s also really helpful when you have a kind of a basic understanding about how a human’s operating system works to be more compassionate and patient with the differences because everyone is organized really differently and just like we have a genetic inheritance like it’s not going to change tremendously. Like if I didn’t know what my partner, my husband’s soul code is, we might have more friction because I just understand. Like there’s nothing, it’s nothing personal. Like there’s some areas that we just don’t understand each other or jive because he has a different degree of development in that area or he’s more developed. Like he’s real analytical and I’m more mystical, and we just, it’s just helpful to like have this understanding that is impersonal in a sense.
Rick: And so how do you do it?
Georgette: Okay, so the real nutshell version is that it’s a mathematical process. There have been throughout time and cultures many numerological systems. The ancient Egyptians had a system, the Hebrew Kabbalah is a, there’s a numerical system, um, I think the I Ching may be a numerical system, um, but Pythagoras is the Greek philosopher who was given credit to what became the system that my godmother Jane was taught. And I don’t really know anything more about her mentors, but it’s based on this idea that your full name at birth and birth date can be translated to numbers. So there’s a mathematical sentence. It’s like your cosmic URL. You put it up there and you click the button and it just kind of shows like a basic framework for, not for the truth of you as intelligence of light that’s the presence of the divine spark that is the real you, but it can elaborate or illuminate some of the framework for this lifetime. So, your sense of purpose, the need for fulfillment, the personality structure of your human self, your greatest abilities. It also reveals what are called in this system the karmic learning pathways. And those are the areas that i’ve found most useful in working with clients, is to see where there are areas in those nine pathways where there’s something that’s occluding that they were born with, and then it just gets layered on top um, so it just kind of it creates… and I found it to be a really useful assessment tool for helping people move past those barriers or move actually consciously recognize them for what they are and then have more compassion with the the the process of melting some of that. Um… I guess in some systems you would call it like a trauma reaction or a samskara or or a vasana, depends on the system.
Rick: Yeah, I listened to, I converted your book about the nine pathways to audio and listened to the whole thing. And there was useful stuff in every chapter, I thought, that pertained to anybody in every chapter, but I imagine that, you know, there would be different classifications of people that it would pertain more to than the other ones would. Yeah.
Georgette: We’re all, we all have to evolve on all of the nine pathways and we’re learning and developing on all of them all the time. It’s just there’s specific ones, like there’s an archetypal energy that represents my purpose in this life and it’s manifesting right here with you because my number is nine, that for that particular part of my map, and that’s all about selfless service. So I’m willing to get past my forest monk-like introversion and show up here and have this conversation because I know it might touch somebody and make a difference in their lives. And if it does, that’s fulfilling to my sense of purpose. And that’s what’s, you know, I can’t not do that. It’s just there. And even when I’ve tried to have a different kind of lifestyle, it’s like the desire to serve and contribute always overpowers that. So, it’s kind of like, yeah, that’s an example of a specific archetype that affects me personally, but all human beings have to learn about selfless service and being connected to the greater good.
Rick: Yeah. And the actual mechanism of boiling it down to a number, I don’t understand it, it seems kind of arbitrary to me, but, you know what name you happen to be given. I could have been given a different name, but I don’t know. It’s not something we could resolve, but you know, there’s a lot of things I don’t understand, so that’s just one of them.
Georgette: I can share with you what my mom told me about that.
Rick: Okay, what’d she say?
Georgette: She said that the name is, it’s a vibration, right? Like it’s a vibration, and it’s, in in a way, the parent is tapping in or tuning in to that vibration and is being influenced by the incoming soul to choose that name. Because it’s –
Rick: I was named after my father. [Laughter]
Georgette: Yeah, so was I. So was I. So that’s just what she said. And this is where, you know, the logic and reason, like, my predisposition is to try things and see if they work, and then if they do, I’ll develop some faith in them And because I was born into the system and I practiced and I discovered it to be so accurate, I just gained confidence and kind of gave up the need to totally understand all the logic and reason for how the system works.
Rick: Yeah. I know that in the Vedic system, they use Jyotish or Vedic astrology to help to determine what a child should be named based upon their chart. In my niece’s case, her name was supposed to have a “ca” sound, start with a “ca” sound, so they named her Camille, which fit with her Jyotish thing. So yeah, there’s all these systems. And of course, if they named her Amy or something, I don’t know what kind of effect that would have had on her life. Maybe nothing, but you know, why not?
Georgette: Well, you know, if something’s useful, you know, of course we always have to have our own filters, right, and check everything with what really resonates. But I have found it to be a really joyful way of interacting with people. I love doing those readings.
Rick: Yeah.
Georgette: Something happens, it’s not just the map, because there’s an intuitive element to it. You know, it’s just like something starts to come through that is beyond the map itself. And, yeah.
Rick: It’s almost like a catalyst for you to just sit and interact and have the stuff come through.
Georgette: Exactly. Yeah.
Rick: So you still do those I presume over Zoom or Skype or something?
Georgette: Yeah.
Rick: And how’s the film coming along? It looks like it’s, I mean, have you, do you have enough funding? Are you going to be able to finish it up on time?
Georgette: We were able to do an Indiegogo fundraiser and get enough money to pay for all the filming. So that part’s done. Thank you, God! And now we go into post-production, which is a tremendous job to edit four and a half days of film distilled down into probably a half hour film. And it’s going to have poetic elements to it and it’s, you know, working with a director and an editor and that is a slow process, just even organizing all the files. So all of that to say, we’re going to be in post-production for months and months, and probably in the spring, hopefully by the end of spring, we’ll have something to actually bring forth to the world. And we might need to do another fundraiser, I don’t know. Most likely.
Rick: Wow, that’s a cool project. See you at the Oscars.
Georgette: Well, thank you. I so appreciate you recognizing the value of this topic of, you know, bringing light to this, to empower that spiritual awakening, even more so at this age and stage.
Rick: Yeah, you know, as we’ve been talking, I’ve been thinking about this, the spiritual significance of every age, you know, your single-digit years and your adolescence and your, you know, married years and business years and retirement years, I mean, each one has its own flavor and its own evolutionary potential.
Georgette: Exactly.
Rick: And, you know, none of them are better or worse than the others. And we’ve, if you believe in reincarnation, we’ve probably been through thousands of such cycles. You know, so you just take full advantage of each one as you go.
Georgette: Yeah, I love metaphors and I love the nesting doll metaphor.
Rick: Yeah, the Russian dolls.
Georgette: Yeah, like we just progressively like become more expansive, but we never really lose the core, right? Like the spark at the center, it just develops and mature and, you know, we’re here, you know, to develop on all of these pathways as human beings, but we’re also here to, through the ripple effects, through our interconnectivity, to contribute to the creation of a more enlightened culture, right? And so, it’s, there’s two different levels of evolution going on at the same time. And, you know, who knows what the smallest thing, like I’m thinking of those, you know, those mentors I had when I was in my early 20s that taught me about living off, you know, having this opportunity to live off the land and learning how to live off the grid. And they didn’t teach me like, you know, like, here’s the book and here are the steps. They just lived it and I just watched them. And all these years later, I’m like, wow, I’ve recreated that in my life so much. And so, you know, that opportunity to contribute through the ripple effect by just being, like, more completely aligned with who we are here to be and to eventually become, like, I describe it like, you know, another metaphor is the pearl, right? The pearls came to me, the pearl was given to me, like, what is a pearl? And, you know, how’s a pearl formed?
Rick: There’s an irritant in the oyster.
Georgette: Yes. So, every age and stage, you know, of our development, like, there’s, along with, like, the fun and the, you know, the creativity, there’s also irritants.
Rick: Yeah.
Georgette: And they have to be, like, worked. And then, slowly, in the fullness of time, if we stay with our process and don’t become lost, we become like living pearls.
Rick: If you could imagine an ideal society in which children were raised in the ideal manner and each phase of life was lived in what you would conceive of as the ideal manner, what would that look like? This is a big question, but what would that look like, both individually and collectively? What kind of world would it be?
Georgette: Hmm, hmm. Well, what kind of world would it be? I guess every child would be given that education from the beginning. Like, they would be directly invited into communion and connection with that wisdom source within and be mentored and guided in how to actualize their realizations or their feelings, their knowings into contribution, like to find their gift and then bring it into the world and be supported in being able to do that and be, you know, infused with a vision of possibility that is in, like, inspiring rather than degrading, you know, about what it means to have a physical body, what it means to have a female body if you’re a female, a male body, whatever type of body you’re given, what it means to be at these different ages and phases would all be like kind of described as desirable and good. So, I guess education from the beginning, spiritual education from the beginning.
Rick: Yeah, I’ll add to that if I may and maybe you can elaborate more, but you know, you think of all the problems in the world with climate change and social unrest and wars and poverty and famine and disease and, you you know, drug abuse and all these things, I mean, any one of which almost seems insoluble, unsolvable. But, you know, ultimately, who’s creating all that stuff? It’s us. It’s everybody in the world. You know, it’s just a reflection of our collective consciousness, our collective level of development or undevelopment, and, you know, we’re trying to tackle all these problems through political means and economic means and so on. So I heard the other day someone said, “There isn’t a poverty problem, there’s an ethics problem.” And you could kind of say that with all the different problems that I just enumerated. It all comes back to the state of consciousness of each individual in the world, all eight billion of them. And I don’t know, I think that’s important for people to contemplate because if we, as Einstein said, if you try to solve a problem with the same level of consciousness or understanding at which it was created, you’re bound to fail. So one of the themes of my life has always been that we need too… Remember that radio show called New Dimensions, where Justine and Tom’s, and I forget what her husband’s name was, but their little intro was always to say, “It’s only through a change of consciousness that the world will be changed.” And I used to love that show. And I think that’s what it boils down to, you know? We obviously need all the other stuff. We need education and technologies and food, things, and all the different things that we need to make a world. But if we don’t have the consciousness piece in place, then the foundation is missing, and we’re always going to have all these problems. So I didn’t mean to give such a speech, but I just wanted to make that point.
Georgette: Oh, that’s beautiful. I couldn’t agree more, and I also love hearing you share your wisdom.
Rick: Yeah. Well, you know, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. I didn’t dream any of this stuff up. It’s just things I’ve come to believe over the years based on my experiences and observations.
Georgette: And it is also part of what makes what you do so unique and beautiful is that you do enter into the glow of communion with another soul and you share your side.
Rick: Yeah, it’s also the biggest criticism I get. People say, “You talk too much, I just want to hear the guest.” But people don’t usually want to do a two-hour monologue, they want to have a conversation.
Georgette: Yes, well because for me, you know, speaking publicly is one of my fears, right? So the gentleness of being able to flow back and forth has been really important for me and I knew it would be that way with you, which is why I said yes to this and also because I really, you know, I know that spirit has shown throughout my lifetime that there are important ways that we can contribute to the creation of a better world through that shift in consciousness. And this project, The Woman’s Rite, and it’s like R-I-T-E, the rite, but also behind that is all the women’s rights that are being challenged, that are not well established on the planet. There’s an awareness of how, the real pragmatic side, how will that change if we don’t have a change of consciousness?
Rick: Yeah, there’s some politicians now who are actually saying women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, it’s like they want to take us back to the 1910s or something. So, you know, there’s a guy who has a political sign in his yard, we walked past it when we walked the dogs around the block. It says, “Take America back.” I’m thinking, “Where do you want to take it back to? The 1840s or something?” I think moving forward is a better idea.
Georgette: Yeah. Now, if we look at his soul map, we’d probably see he has a karmic lesson and, you know, some really fundamental area of, like, marriage, home, and family or something. I don’t know. You know, zooming out to the big picture also helps me to stay in that more neutral space, even though I have preferences.
Rick: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. There’s the sort of the universal value of it all, and the God’s eye view, and then we’re individuals, we have preferences.
Georgette: Yes, yes.
Rick: So how can people get in touch with you?
Georgette: Oh, well, you know, I know you’re going to share my website.
Rick: That’s right.
Georgette: And a specific link to the Woman’s Rite Project.
Rick: Yes, I will.
Georgette: And also I love doing the Life Maps if anyone’s interested. I have trained some others to do that also. I am thinking about creating a monthly Zoom gathering for people who are interested in the topic of illuminated aging, vivacious aging, and through the expansion of consciousness. And so I can give you more information about that. It’s just, you know, I’m going to see if they’re, you know, just in my community, if there’s an interest there. And if there is, also.
Rick: I bet you there will be, just as a result of this interview. There will probably be a lot of inquiries, and make sure you have some kind of email list people can sign up for.
Georgette: Yeah, on my website there’s a place to sign up for my newsletter and there’s also a Contact Me page.
Rick: Yeah, so if somebody’s watching this a few years from now, who knows what you might be doing, but go to your website and see what’s going on.
Georgette: Yeah, and you know, as I’m a baby elder, I just stepped through the portal, right? And I’m like out in the space, and it’s like, it hasn’t filled in yet. It’s just like, wow, I don’t know what’s next. And I’m open. I’m befriending the unknown, and showing up here today with you has been part of that.
Rick: Nice. Well, thanks, Georgette. I’ve really enjoyed doing this, and if I ever get out to Oregon, I’ll come and visit you. And I don’t know, I’ve never been to Oregon. It’s one of the few states I’ve never been to.
Georgette: Oh, I’d love to come visit, and please give Irene a big hug for me, too.
Rick: Will do. Okay, so thank you everybody who has been watching this, and if you happen to be watching the live one or watch this in the next few days, my next one will be with a fellow named Thomas LeGrand, who has written a book called The Politics of Being, about how a lot of things we talked about today, how spirituality is kind of the ultimate sauce which will make politics a a much more wholesome instrument for the well-being of society. And I’m just listening to his book now. Interesting guy, he’s been working with the United Nations for a couple of decades, doing all kinds of cool things, and he grew up, not grew up, but he has been in Thich Nhat Hanh’s community in Plum Village in France for a long time. Okay, good. Talk to you later. Thanks everybody. Thanks Georgette.
Georgette: Thank you Rick. Bye.
Rick: Bye.