Lucy Grace 2nd Interview Transcript

Lucy Grace 2nd Interview

Summary:

• Introduction: Rick Archer introduces the show Buddha at the Gas Pump and the guest Lucy Grace, who had a previous interview two years ago and has been busy interacting with people around the world ever since.
• Lucy’s update: Lucy shares how her life changed after the first interview, how she received a lot of requests for sessions and guidance from people who resonated with her story, and how she learned some valuable lessons along the way.
• Lucy’s work: Lucy describes the nature of her work with people, how she helps them connect with themselves and their truth, how she deals with their projections and expectations, and how she witnesses some amazing transformations and experiences in her sessions.
• Lucy’s resistance: Lucy admits that she had some subtle resistance to doing more things, such as group sessions, writing, or teaching, and that she preferred to sit in her garden and write poems. She also reveals that she felt a strong energy coming in, urging her to move and do something.
• Lucy’s astral experiences: Lucy describes how she sometimes has out-of-body experiences where she meets a guide who gives her messages and instructions about her life purpose and work. She shares a vivid example of one such experience where she was told to move into a group of guides and harvest the lavender of her life’s suffering for the benefit of all.
• Lucy’s poetry: Lucy reads some of her poems that reflect her process of surrendering to the flow of life and letting go of resistance. She explains how her poetry comes from a somatic place of energy and how she enjoys creating and sharing it. She also shows the cover of her new book, “This Untameable Light”.
• Lucy’s friends and retreats: Lucy talks about the friendships she made after her first Batgap interview, especially with Shalane and Riaz, who are both spiritual poets and teachers. She expresses her gratitude for being seen and known by them and how they deepen each other. She also announces her plans to visit the US in October and give two retreats, one on writing and one on presence.
• The common background of Lucy’s clients: Most of them are either from Adya, Susanne Marie, or John Prendergast, who are spiritual teachers that Lucy respects and admires. She finds it fascinating that there is an energy that draws them to the same people.
• The confusion around the no-self concept: Lucy shares an example of two women who came to her door and asked to sit with her. One of them claimed that there was no one here, but also longed for a relationship. Lucy helped her see that she could be both a no self and a self at the same time, and that denying any part of reality or wholeness is not helpful for spiritual maturity.
• The importance of experiencing rather than understanding: Lucy says that many people get stuck in their concepts and ideas about spirituality, and that they need to let go of any goals or attainment and be intimate with themselves and existence. She says that this is felt and experienced, not known by the mind. She also says that she can entrain with people and see the being behind the conditioning, and that by witnessing it, she brings it into being.

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. We’ve done nearly 700 of them now, and if you haven’t really seen any of these before and would like to look at past ones, go to batgap.com and there’s a past interviews menu. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there’s PayPal buttons on the website and a page offering alternatives to PayPal. Also, I’ve got a little project going where people are helping proofread the transcripts of all these interviews if you’d like to help proofread get in touch. And I guess that’s enough for starters. Our guest today is Lucy Grace. Lucy was on BatGap nearly two years ago, and Irene and I have stayed in touch with her ever since, consider her a friend. And a lot has happened to her since she was on BatGap, and people really liked her first interview, so we decided to do a second one. So here we are. Welcome, Lucy.

Lucy: Thanks, Rick. So good to be back.

Rick: Yeah. Lucy’s in New Zealand, an island off the coast of northern New Zealand, right?

Lucy: That’s it. Yeah, off the coast of the North Island.

Rick: So she has winter there now. It’s 47 degrees and she thinks that’s cold. Or was that you? There’s somebody I was talking to the other day. Oh, it’s winter. It’s 47 degrees.

Lucy: Yeah, that was me.

Rick: Yeah, that was you.

Lucy: Yeah. So I’m in a shirt, but I’m freezing, right?

Rick: Anyway, so Lucy’s first interview was really a hit with viewers, as I mentioned, and she’s become very busy interacting with people around the world ever since then. So we thought we’d start by just having Lucy give us an update on what’s been happening with her since we last spoke. And we also thought we might discuss some of the questions that people most commonly ask her. And if we are not raising a question that you would like to ask her, as I said, you can send in a question if you’re one of the live viewers of this interview. So, Lucy, what happened after your first interview? Was it kind of like a huge deluge of contacts and stuff after we did the first one?

Lucy: It was, yeah. I think people who saw my first one will remember that I had really had most of my awakenings over the course of my life just by myself, you know, just without any exposure to conditioning around awakening or any spiritual teachers or kind of any even community around it. I would just have these awakenings and then back up was really the first one, the first time I talked about it. It was the first time I really I never spoke with others about it. I’d sometimes sense in around the community and try a little like, has this ever? And then I’d be like, oh, no, we’re not going there. This person thinks I’m nuts. So I and I had really kept it to myself. And I think the funny thing is, is I had been in that place of opening and opening and opening more deeply and more deeply and more deeply. And all of my life had fallen away. Those who have seen the first one will know this. I won’t rehash that. But I had left my marriage. I had of 16 years, I had left my career and humanitarian aid work of 15 years. I had left my family home. So I’d left everything. And, you know, as within, so without the inside had completely changed. And so the outside has to rearrange and it had. And so at the point I I met you guys, I had kept getting offered these humanitarian aid roles. And I kept saying no, because it’s a small industry and you get no one. And I knew that as we kind of emerge within, we change. And what we’re drawn to changes really deeply. And I knew aid work I was done with, but I had nothing else to go to. And I had no idea what was going to happen, but I felt really at ease and peace in that. But but one day after about six months of getting all these offers and turning them down and not working, I sat on my deck outside in the sun. And I said to God, OK, the next door you open, I know it’s not humanitarian aid. I was thinking maybe I’ll be I’ll go into working at the hospice and caring for dear people and things. I said to God, the next door you open. And when I say God, I want to be clear. I mean, consciousness, awareness, not a man sitting in clouds, the trees, whatever we want to call it. And I said, the next door you open, make it the right one, because I will walk through it. And there was something in my being that was just resolute. I can’t explain it, but I just said it. And then I forgot about it. And three days later, Irene messaged me and said, this is kind of weird, but would you like to be on the show? I’m sure you wouldn’t. But would you would you consider it? And I thought, God, no, I don’t want to do like why? I don’t want to talk. I had just emailed you guys to ask how to donate. And then her and I had got chatted.

Rick: And you had had this far out experience where you were just like wondering what to do and trying to figure things out. And as you’re waking up one morning, you heard this voice which said Buddha at the gas pump and you had no idea what that was. So you Googled it and you found us.

Lucy: Yeah, exactly. So that was previous during my awakening. So I hear so I heard that and I looked up Buddha at the gas pump. I heard it and you can hear about all that in my first interview and I found you guys and I’d been listening for a year or two or three. I can’t remember. And then I emailed Irene one day to say, I’d love to donate. You’ve been so amazing. And then we got chatting and then she heard some things. And then so this day I had just said this prayer three days earlier and I had been turning down big jobs, a dream jobs. I’d been getting these offers as if life was testing me, you know, the head of comms for Asia Pacific for a big national charity, things like this. And I was like, wow, that’s tempting. But I, you know, and I said this prayer, the next door, just make it the one you because I’m ready now. And yeah, and I read message three days and then my first instinct was no. And then I thought, oh, shit, I promised God like this is that. And I just knew and I knew and I was like, OK, so on I went and I did the first. But I knew and I didn’t. It was a big part of me that thought this is just a yarn with it, because by then I’d been chatting with you guys quite a bit and Zoom with my kid. And I just thought this is a yarn. This is we can do this and it’ll be nothing. And after the interview, I kind of had that two hour chat with you and then sat out on my deck and thought, well, that’s that done and kind of and thought and then suddenly my phone was ping, ping. And it was only the live. It was only after the live. But so not even the recording. But it was.

Rick: That’s because they have your email or something. Maybe I put that in the show.

Lucy: It was Facebook.

Rick: Facebook, I said, right.

Lucy: So they were messaging. There were quite a few messages through Facebook and just people who could identify with different parts of the journey. And I think because my life is this life, my life has traversed so much, you know, through poverty, trauma, deep aloneness and community and then coming into the world and and working and being being a normal person, but having all of these mystical experiences and things, deep awakenings through the whole thing and motherhood and marriage and divorce and illness, deep illness. There were so many sectors of society that could relate to that. So if you’d been really ill, you could relate to me in that way. And I get this kind of these things. You know, some people were like, I was I’ve been sick for years and I don’t understand what’s happening. And and they could see, I think, hope and that, well, I’m a mother or I’m a father. And I, too, am going through this portal of parenting and it’s breaking me apart. Or I have these mystical experiences and I feel completely alone. So I would have to. So it was beautiful. I felt so touched that people were getting in touch. And we as we connected, I started noticing things and I started noticing people are really hungry to find understanding and seeing and validating, because often people are really alone with this in their communities, you know, even in the churches and there with their families and their jobs, they don’t they can’t find themselves outside of themselves. There’s these deep awakenings happening to people and not everybody is within groups and things. And often they’re happening in homes, you know, with mothers with. And so I was getting this influx and by email and message. And but I still was kind of thinking, what do they actually want? You know, because there was so little conditioning and I was really open and quite naive, I think. Again, I just talk to life. I talk to the hologram when I feel like I need something. And I said, show me what is it that they need? What is it they want? There’s all sorts of like my wife’s dead. Can you talk to dead people? You know, all sorts of different, a big pool. And and after I said that prayer, someone in my own community turned up on my doorstep and she she talked about a ghost stories for about half. I saw your interview and she’s going on about her ghost story for about half an hour. And in the end, I just looked at her and I said, what is it that you want from me? What is it I can do for you? I was pretty direct. What is it you need? Because mystical experiences are not awakening. Right. Mystical experiences are a deep blessing. I’m really humbled by those and I’m really grateful for those. But they are not awakening. They are not this place where all the reference points for ourselves dissolve. You know, like I can witness a beautiful sunset, but I don’t own the sun. And it’s the same with mystical experiences. So when so she’s here and she’s talking about seeing ghosts, which I wouldn’t even consider a mystical experience. But she’s seeing these things and she’s confused by it and wondering what it means. And when I said, what is it that you actually want? It was so moving because she looked at me and she said, I just want to know connection. You’re connected. She just really went there and she said, you seem really connected and I want that. Tell me how. And I thought, ah, that’s what people want. That’s actually the common theme in every single email. People want to experience being experienced the way that they are and all the parts of them. They want seeing and knowing and they want to know how to deepen and connect. And so once I knew that I was it was kind of a couple of days later and I thought, OK, I’ve got I’ve got it. I understand the work. I understand. And people started asking for sessions. I I never did anything. I never made any decisions. But I was already trained as a counselor, which was weird. You know, I was a

Rick: What kind of a counselor where you trained as?.

Lucy: I’ve trained in a few different modalities, but one is path work. I have this. So it’s looks at the different parts of the psyche and how they can band together or be against one another. And another is Hikomi therapy. So Hikomi is a deep in the body feeling therapy. So I had done and I’d done undergrad psychology. You know, I’ve done all sorts through my humanitarian aid work, but I had been certified in these things. And but I’ve been sitting on it and thinking I’d like to work in hospice. And so I hadn’t really. So then people started asking. I had been doing counseling already, but just normal counseling some years earlier. And then people started asking for sessions. And I thought, well, OK, so we started sessions. And then just the beauty and the majesty of it all was amazing. And I had a wait list before long and I was full and I couldn’t take any more. And and I thought, well, OK, I’ll just it seems to be working. I’ll keep doing it. So we had these sessions and it was really every single person was different. So the work was different with every being that I encountered in a way. It was about giving them space to really connect with themselves, helping them to connect with them and their truth and understand the process they were in with awakening. And through understanding that process, I saw that people could really relax into it, that they could let go of fear when it was validated and when they had some some some reference points for it, because there’s so much within awakening is so intimate. Everybody’s experiences can be different, but there are themes. And yeah, but it was it was interesting. It was I think I found I mean, first of all, I was just blown away by the beauty and the privilege of people sharing their hearts with me. Really sharing their hearts. People come and they are often with me. I have some that are still with me from after that batgap from a year or two ago, a couple of years ago. And the level of intimacy is profound. They really let me see them. Some of the deepest fears that we all have as human beings. We all have these places that can be stuck or bound or afraid. And people really let me into that. And I felt like that was there was so many times I can remember cutting a sandwich in my kitchen and thinking, I’m so grateful. I’m so great. Like the privilege of of doing that work. But I was also like, oh, this will probably end tomorrow and that’s fine. And but I’m doing it seems to be happening. So I’m doing that now and I kept going. And I went through this year after that Batgap of having to learn a whole lot of lessons around discernment and around. Yeah, there were tons of lessons came through, but around it could be kind of boundaries and around money. At first, I was just like, I’m doing it all for free. A lot of it was for free or for super cheap. And then I’d find people way less than counseling fees and I’d find people coming and they’d been coming for a long time and say things like, oh, yeah, I’m off to Bali for this amazing holiday.

Rick: Oh. brother and they hadnt paid you anything

Lucy: And I’d be thinking, OK, so it’s time to charge. So I learned some valuable lessons because it wasn’t that I didn’t it wasn’t that I thought I couldn’t charge. I had nothing around that. It was just I was to be honest, I was so open hearted with it. Almost naive. I was just like, of course, of course I can. And I just trusted really deeply. And so I still do. But I’ve learned some boundaries and some kind of learning to make it sustainable, like I needing to do it in a certain way. And actually, that was a beautiful lesson around how people value things, too. And there was things around time. I was kind of pouring so much time that I could almost burn out. And there was these lessons that the personality had to go through to be like, oh, actually, there’s a pace. Like, you know, there’s a way to do this in a really sustainable way with time. And other things were around what it brought up and other people. And I think this is a theme with awakening for people as well. Actually, it speaks to a lot of us who come into these deep places within us. We often can shed a lot of conditioning and we can shed a lot of places where we’re bound. And so I found, you know, when there’s this authentic place of real joy and real openness, I think it can actually be quite hard for some people to be around. So there was this place of, you know, I think Adya says this perfectly, he says, look at Jesus. He got crucified. You know, like, and I’m not at all like putting it, saying like, look at me. But a lot of clients would say this to me, and I experienced it with people too, where it was like, the way that you’re free and the way that you’re in joy makes me angry. It makes me angry. And I find it hard because I’m not, is kind of the essential part of it. And so there was that.

Rick: People were angry because you were so free and happy and they weren’t?

Lucy: Yeah, it’s a really interesting dynamic. At first, I didn’t kind of understand it. But as I got to know people more and more in the sessions, they would say, yeah, it brings up rage in me. Or they would say and I would say, great, let’s be with the rage.

Rick: Jesus, you know, I listened to your past interviews. You’ve paid your dues. This isn’t falling to your lap. You know, I just want to say quickly that one thing I have one impression I’ve gotten having gotten to know you and listen to, you know, our first interview and some other interviews you’ve done is that you know, it’s like you’re guided, first of all. And you had probably everybody is, but you had a certain destiny to fulfill, which perhaps you’re starting to fulfill now or, you know, maybe you’ve had several destinies fulfilled, but you were definitely leading to this, you know, doing what you’re doing. And you were kind of put through the ringer to undergo whatever changes you had to undergo, no matter how painful in order to be prepared for this. You agree with that?

Lucy: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. But I can understand the tenderness around it. Like, why can’t I have mystical experiences like you? Some people saw back up and that’s what they saw. Like you’ve got this blessed, you know, why did these things happen to you? And that’s all I can say. It’s like, I don’t know, but that’s the portal. Let’s be with.

Rick: You said something in another interview I just listened to about people being born awake or you were born awake or some such thing. And I’m under the impression that people are born at whatever level of evolution they last attained in their last life. So some people come in at a really high level. Some people come in and not such a high level and have a lot more growing to do over the course of many lives. But that doesn’t necessarily mean even if you come in at a high level, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be an easy ride. It might actually be harder because you have a certain crucible to go through, you know, a certain annealing process in the oven of life before you are able to step into the destiny you were born for in this life.

Lucy: That’s it. And we all walk our wars here. There is no avoiding that. We can’t know the reasons we’re here always, but we all have our crucibles to go through. And I like to call them holy wars, but also we all suffer. It just looks different. But the beauty about that lesson as I went through that, that was another lesson was that I came to this place where I saw that it’s absolutely okay. And it happened fairly quickly. People can see each other however they like because I won’t be free until I allow everybody to see me however they like. You know, there’ll always be a gap between. So it doesn’t actually matter. What matters is what this means for you on your path and how we can use that to deepen you and open you. And it’s beautiful when people say, oh, I feel some anger. Like the love is so much and the love is touching on something in me that feels unlovable. The love is touching on something in me that wants to scream and fight. You know, I had this beautiful client one day who sat down with me in first session and she said, you know, if I’d met you five years ago, I would have gone because of the love and the light. And she’s like, it would have been too much. And she’s like, but actually, now that I’ve listened to some, I see that there’s, yeah, exactly that. There’s steel inside that, that we have to be able to love in a world that doesn’t value love. And a lot of people experience this. That’s the only reason I’m bringing it up. It’s a common thing for people who have come into these really authentic places of openness and joy, like to be able to maintain them in a world that doesn’t value that. It takes immense strength and it’s really beautiful. But these were all kind of these lessons I had to go through and kind of, and then it was, and then I went through another portal. So there was quite a few that I, like, obviously, because there was a flooding of people and I hadn’t been exposed in that way before. So suddenly I was like leaping through this new lesson. And there was a big one around life inviting me and saying, will you make this a way that you’re special? Will you make this a way that you’re the wise one? Like, will you get another identity from this? So suddenly I’ve got all these people saying.

Rick: In other words, you’re asking yourself that, whether you might fall into thinking you’re special.

Lucy: Yeah, like it feels to me like an invitation from life to see, because as we deepen in these places, the ego is a tricky bugger, right? It’s subtle. It’s really, really subtle. And we can even find like, it’ll even find ways to say, oh, it’ll latch onto humility. Oh, I’m the best at being humble. Or I’m the best, you know, like it’s a tricky bastard. So it felt to me like I was watching for that a lot. I was watching for, I mean, because people have their projections, right?

Rick: So in other words, you were staying alert. So as not to get.

Lucy: I was. So not to make a new identity because I’d shared so much identity before the first Batgap. I’d shared some, I was pretty empty and even my home and my relationships. So and it’s not that that’s ideal. It was going, it’s the kind of the vortex in between the new stuff coming in. But I was really kind of careful not to make a new identity out of the rarefied mystical genius.

Rick: You know, I think that’s really important because a lot of spiritual teachers don’t do that. And there they end up getting too big for their britches, you know, and then they get in all kinds of trouble. So I think it’s really good to have that self scrutiny at every stage of the game.

Lucy: It’s so key and it’s actually for my, it’s for my deepening. You know, this is my path too. And so the invitation was, and what will you make of this? Will you become the wise one? Because there’s no, it’s not about a me that’s wise.

Rick: Jesus was tempted in that way. Don’t you remember that he got up on the devil kept saying the way the story goes, you know, let’s see you jump off this cliff and I’ll save you. Or, you know, you can have all these powers or this or that. And he said, get thee behind me, Satan. You know, he was tempted with the self aggrandizing, you know, offers.

Lucy: Wow, that’s fascinating. I don’t remember that. But I could see the play of existence. And I could see, because when people came, they had, everyone has their projections, you know, for some, I’m the divine mother. And when I say I, I mean, the skin suit, I’m masquerading and obviously, but I can see the projections and they sit with me and we bash through those pretty quick. And that’s part of their awakening and equalizing as well. It’s beautiful for, but I might be the divine mother that they never had the love they longed for. And they can finally find, or I might be the guru or the savior or the object of desire is another one. There’s these kinds of things. They have these kinds of projections. And so I was kind of learning about all that too. I could see it and it was really, it was really easy to smash through that fast. So say someone had a, I’ll try and give a proper example, but say somebody had a projection of, oh, it’s the divine mother who’s finally going to love me into wholeness. You know, the way that my own parents couldn’t. I would very quickly try and move them into, they wouldn’t say this. I can just read it in the system. I can feel it. And I would kind of quickly try and move them into actually grieving the parents that they didn’t have, you know, that they could, that nobody can love you into wholeness. No mortal outside of you, what you’re really grieving. And I would lead them through a process, but what you’re really grieving is separation from all, the all. And every human has this and it’s tender and it’s really okay. And there’s a part of everyone that longs for deep wholeness and connection. And you will never ever find that outside of you. It’s certainly not in me. And the process is to grieve that you’ll never find that outside of you. And then we can get on with the business of everything else. So there was all of that kind of stuff happening like in that year. And meanwhile, people were asking me, were you, were your private sessions I can’t get into? Can you please do group sessions? Could you do things at your house? Could you, I had this group of people who wanted to banded together and wanted to come in person. And I keep kind of saying no, I just, I was a bit of a reluctant, you know, I was just kind of.

Rick: New Zealanders or were they going to fly over in from all over the world?

Lucy: Yeah, Kiwis, Kiwis were here. But people, yeah, to be honest, people all over the world were saying, would you hold online? Would you hold a sangha? I remember someone saying that I didn’t know what sangha was. I had to Google it. What does that mean? So I Googled it and asking me to write what I was teaching or how I awakened and asking me for all these different things. And I just kind of politely would say no, not right now, maybe one day and was doing all the doing all the sessions and things. But I had this really subtle resistance. I didn’t notice it consciously, but it was a subtle resistance to any more roles. You know, I just didn’t want to accumulate more identities and more roles. I love to just sit in my garden and write my poems. And I kind of felt a bit sneaky. I felt like I was wasting time. I felt like God had summoned me, you know, and then I’d be sitting in the garden, like lost in poems, wondering where the poems were coming from, thinking a really subtle feeling of I’m wasting God’s time right now. I should be. I should be doing all these other things. And that’s how the year, like the first year after that, that kind of ticked along. And the sessions were getting, were just incredibly potent. And I couldn’t deny that. So even though I had these resistance and pretty crazy shit would happen and sessions that I

Rick: just like what?

Lucy: Oh, gosh, I could take a few different examples. Well, one, one was a client in Canada. He is still a client and he anyone who watched my first Batgap will remember that I had this. One of the things that happened to me was this blasting out. Some people call it Kundalini. I don’t put concepts around things, but of energy out of my heart. Well, after we just had one session and the first session, he said he had been extremely depressed and ill for years. His wife had left him. He had been on the bridge ready to commit suicide. And he’s he saw a Batgap with me and the back up with me and got in touch. I don’t know that that was like the thing between the suicide. And I think he’d already decided not to commit suicide, but he saw my back and got in touch. And we had the one session and that’s it. Just telling me the situation. And then the second session, he was like a different and he got on. I don’t want to perpetuate any miracle myths or anything. I really don’t. So let’s not do that. But I was pretty skeptical. But he got on and he said the strangest thing happened. I was sitting after our session looking at the drapes and I was thinking the drapes were ugly. I needed to fix them. And I heard he said he heard the words judge nothing. And then he felt energy just pour into his body. And he talked about this stuff. Now, I really didn’t go into like because I don’t know this man. And I just kind of went, OK, that’s fine. And let’s not get sidetracked with all that. And he was saying, but my life, I feel amazing. And I was thinking kind of in my head, all this could change in a week. Like, let’s just keep our eye on the ball here. So we did. But it’s been a year and a half, a year and a half, and it hasn’t. His whole life changed. He got girlfriends. He’s lost a ton of weight. He started working. He’s got his Peloton. He’s got his two puppies. He’s full of joy and an absolute blessing to his commute. Like he says things like I was in the bike shop and this man was buying his son a bike and I just decided to buy it for him. You know, and he just says this. And but it’s not all sweet and plain sailing. It’s not some spiritual orgasm because, you know, as you know, like when we wake up, then we meet in these deep, deep ways. We can have this period of of bliss of this period, this honeymoon period. But then we often meet the kind of the shadows on the path. So he is going through a lot of stuff now as well with these places, these knots where he’s bound. But things like that happening.

Rick: I’ll tell you a story. There was a great saint in northern India who people would pray to him and, you know, have a picture of him. And, you know, they’d have problems with their finances or their legal troubles or their children or whatever they would pray. And then things would just work out for them. You know, it’s like their prayers were answered. Then someone asked the saint, “Well, how is this happening? You know, you’ve never met these people in person. Are you doing something? I mean, do you hear their prayers and you change things for them?” And he said, “No, it’s the department of the Almighty and he takes care of it.” And then there was a desire for further explanation. And the explanation was that, well, when someone is in tune with that cosmic intelligence and people, you know, put their attention on that person in a way that they become a representative of that cosmic intelligence. And whereas without a representative, it’s too abstract for most people. And so they can’t really relate to it or pray to it or, you know, direct their attention to it. But whatever, you know, whether it’s a contemporary teacher or one of the great luminaries of history, just by sort of evoking their aid, even though they might be 2,000 years deceased or whatever, we are kind of triggering the Almighty, cosmic intelligence, to come to our assistance. And so it sounds to me like you have served that function a little bit for at least that guy in Canada and perhaps for other people.

Lucy: Absolutely. I think there’s no — it’s nothing, again, nothing about a me that’s special and doing anything. It’s a place for them to project, how I see it, is it’s a place for them to project all their own innate intelligence, wisdom, grace, until they’re ready to internalize and claim it themselves.

Rick: Yeah, it needs some kind of concrete point of focus for those who are oriented that way. It’s too abstract to just sort of find it within or find it in the cosmos or whatever.

Lucy: I think it’s layered. I think it’s that, and I think it’s an energy. Something happens like an energetic attunement, like when you put instruments beside each other, it can happen. But I also think there’s something about, like you said, when we open, something in our being opens. We open to the archetypal energy of the thing, and whether it’s through Christ or whether it’s through some punter down at the pub or whether it’s through me on the screen, it’s a conduit. It’s not that I’m doing it, it’s a conduit for it. And then it’s all about this is yours. There is nothing outside of you that you need for this. So it’s a process, but it’s amazing. I mean, like one woman I’m just remembering now was pretty early on. I think actually it was probably about six months down the track. She got in touch out of nowhere, and she said, “Please, can I talk to you? I really need to talk to you.” And she didn’t have a reason. Often people had a reason. And I got on the Zoom, and I had no idea. She’s very normal, kind of a PhD and a skivvy, you know, like a turtleneck. I just want to say she’s really normal, because if I heard this, I’d be like, “She’s nuts.” She’s very normal, and she said to me, brace yourself, she said, “I woke in the night. I’d been sick for years, and I woke in the night, and I saw you in my room, and I saw you glowing love and joy.” And she said, “I had never felt joy before like this. I had never felt this, and it filled my body.” And she hadn’t seen my Batgap. She had no idea who I was. And she said, “Did you do that? Did you choose me? Did you do that?”

Rick: How did she track you down?

Lucy: She heard the word — sorry, I didn’t finish the story. She heard the word “Lucy Grace” when she saw this. And I was actually just curious. I was holding it very lightly. I still do. But she had some tears when she said it, and for her, it was meaningful. So I would never take away from that, but I hold it really lightly. But she heard the word “Lucy Grace.” She Googled me the next day and found “Batgap.” That’s what she said.

Rick: That’s far out. That’s just how you found “Batap.” You heard the words.

Lucy: Yeah, she heard — yeah, exactly. That’s true. I hadn’t thought of that. But she said to me, “I wanted to get in touch, because I want to know, did you pick me? I wondered, did you choose?” And I said, “No, I have no idea.” I was curious about, “What do you mean you saw me? Like, what, did you see my whole body? Did you just see my face, like, shoulders up? What?” You know, she said, “No, I just saw your face beaming at me.” But that wasn’t as interesting to me as after it. She said, “And then now I have a job, and it’s only at the library, but I’ve been able to get out of bed. I’ve started interacting. My husband’s delighted, and I’m down at the library doing admin, even though my old work was amazing.” That’s interesting to me, that it changes things for people. And so a lot of different things.

Rick: That’s really cool. And what really interests me also is sort of the cosmic orchestration of things, you know, like the fact that you heard Buddha at the Gas Pump, and she heard Lucy Grace. And, you know, I’ve been guided by impulses all my life, and you have too. And it’s like — it’s just like this curtain, and there’s a puppeteer maybe on the other side of the curtain pulling the strings and popping these little ideas into our heads. And I even think it works that way with people like Einstein or George Lucas or, you know, people who have a huge impact on the culture. They get ideas. And where did those ideas come from? I think that it’s almost like some higher intelligence, which wants a certain thing to be introduced to the world, sees someone who is capable of introducing it and inspires them. Beethoven used to say that, you know, he didn’t write his symphonies. They came through him, and he was suicidal and would like to have ended his life. But he said, “I just have an obligation to bring through all this stuff that I’m coming out with, you know, as long as I can stay alive.”

Lucy: Yeah, and it feels that way. It feels like, it’s as if we open enough, like something in this lifetime, in this human, has been able to open enough and attune to the pulse of nature, which is our wake state. It’s a natural state. It’s nature. It’s as if every cell is God, and we can attune to that flow and feel what wants to happen instead of the mind making a plan, you know, instead of me writing a script for Lucy and forcing myself to follow it, oh, the house, the car, or this blah, blah, blah, or the job. We stop writing scripts for ourselves and following them, and we feel, we listen to what wants to happen. It’s kind of bodily. Like Lucy wants to sit in her garden, drink green tea, and watch the birds all day. You know, that’s really the truth of it. But, you know, there’s things that want to happen, and we can feel that pull. Everyone knows this place. We can feel that pull, and we can choose to either open to it and go with it or let go and surrender, or we’ll often be dragged, and it’s almost like the path of suffering or the path of joy. Like if we really attune and listen, it’s quite a feminine way, receive life, like receiving life, I am that. So it’s about the whole. What is the whole doing, not what the individuals want. And it’s not self-sacrifice because when we tune into this, the plans of life are always so much more amazing and incredible than little Lucy’s brain can think up. You know, like you don’t even know that you want that, you know, and it’s a beautiful thing. And it was a big part of my life. My whole life has been about that really, is reading the hologram, reading the messages in nature, in life, and moving, learning to move with it. And each of us has this individualized, customized plan and messages that come to us through the hologram, through life. Some of us here. Yeah.

Rick: It’s really cool. And I’ve had that a lot too all my life. And sometimes making rash decisions, you know, like you had, leaving your marriage or leaving a great job or various things like that, which goes against all logic. It’s kind of like Jack and the Beanstalk, selling the family cow for a handful of beans. Didn’t make any sense, but, wow, it really paid off.

Lucy: Yeah, yeah. It’s not about a mind that knows. It’s a feeling place. The mind wants to know, but the being understands. It’s really slowing down and listening to light. And trust. It takes trust.

Rick: Yeah.

Lucy: But there is that, yeah.

Rick: Which is not to say that people should just act on all of their whims, presuming there’s going to be cosmic guidance or something like that, because you can really mess yourself up that way. There’s a kind of a discernment that’s needed to distinguish between genuine intuitional impulses and just, you know, whims, fanciful, crazy ideas.

Lucy: Yeah, that’s right. The body often knows first. The body’s kind of the gateway. We can feel like the impulse of nature. It’s something that won’t leave us alone, and there’s an opening. We can feel the body can kind of expand a little. It can be really slight and subtle as that’s a yes, or a deep and kind of a contracting can be the stomach just darkening a bit. But if we get to know the language of our own body, then we can start moving with life. And sometimes we hear, we can see repeated messages in form. You know, like someone will say, I had this great idea. Why didn’t you let it go? And then someone else, it’s so strange, says the same thing later that day or the next day. And form will send repetition like this to speak to us. But the trick is we have to be listening. We have to be conscious and be open and aware. I’m always listening. I’m always watching what’s coming up in form that’s telling me who I am.

Rick: That’s really good. Yeah, I do that too. It’s kind of like you learn to see everything that happens in life as not in any way arbitrary or accidental. It’s not just dumb stuff, you know, happening in the world. Everything is pregnant with meaning and significance, even little things, but particularly big things. I mean, there’s a kind of a cosmic script that is being played out, and, you know, we have to be alert to, you know, to the storyline that’s being presented.

Lucy: Yeah, and sometimes the mind doesn’t get it, and I still have that. So I just want to touch on what you said earlier about impulse. It’s not a kind of whimsy throwing out of responsibility or duty or any. It actually took me years to leave my marriage, even though I knew. I kept having the messages, and I kept feeling this is finished now because we emerge. As we emerge more deeply, we change in resonance with things, changes, resonance with jobs or resonance with people, and we’re called to emerge into the next. And so it took me some years. I was listening to it, but it can take time, too, and that’s okay. You know, some things need time.

Rick: Well, I think that’s important. I mean, otherwise, if we took every idea that popped into our heads seriously, our life could be very chaotic.

Lucy: Yeah, and actually that links perfectly with this because I was in this year. I was having these sessions and crazy things happening and all sorts of other things as well and going through all this, but really sitting in my garden and, like, the kind of resistance in me to people inviting me to do more things was actually life inviting me. But I was kind of going, “I’ll just do the dishes. I’ll just make something nice to eat.” I was kind of like, “Oh, tomorrow, tomorrow,” you know, and sitting in the garden. And then I had this, like, “Is this really where life is taking me? Is this really?” And it was that kind of sense, and I still couldn’t find it in myself. It’s hard because as we have these big awakens, I don’t know if you’ve experienced this. I know a lot of people have. Any personal will or ambition, it kind of just melts away. There’s a lot of us who sit for some time. Often there’s a period where we have this in-between space where there’s no drive to achieve or to all of our old goals and things fall away. But then what happened to me was interesting because I’d been in silence for so long. I really had spent most of my time. I started feeling this energy come in, this doing energy. It was quite big and forceful, and I’d be like, “But I’m sitting with God. I’m sitting in being.” It was palpable. I could feel it burning up through my stomach, kind of saying, “Move, move. It’s time to move,” and I kept not listening. I was kind of like shutting it down. Anyway, eventually, it was about December last year, early December last year, so we’re in July. I had one of those experiences that I talked about in my first BatGap, and I hadn’t had it for some years, where I go out of my body and I meet that guide who tells me what’s happening in my life. In my first BatGap I talked about when I went and sat at a table, and she told me, “It’s fine. You’re going to get a job.” I hadn’t got any jobs out of uni, and I was worried, and I’d worked really hard. She said, “You’re about to go into journalism, going to get a great journalism role, and it’s all going to be fine.” She told me about the trajectory of my life.

Rick: When you say that, how vivid is this? Is it as if you’re actually sitting with a person at a table, or is it more dreamlike, or is it like a ghost, or what?

Lucy: No, no, it’s not a dream at all. I leave the body. I talked about this in my first one, but on that particular experience, I don’t remember actually leaving. I just sat at a table with these two guides, and they told me. I was 19 or 20, maybe 23 actually, because I’d graduated.

Rick: So it’s just as vivid as if you, in your human body, are sitting at a table with some people.

Lucy: Yeah, yeah, and I talked about it in that Batgap saying it was so funny because they’re so human. They laugh with each other, and they joke. But then I left the table. I got so excited about the prospect of a job that I left the table, floated back into the home, into my flat, and was above my flatmate, saying, wanting to wake her up. I could see her sleeping body. This is all real. I could see her sleeping body in the bed below me, and I tried to, but of course I wasn’t real, so I can’t. But she kind of goes, “Oh,” so I couldn’t because I wasn’t informed.

Rick: So it’s not dreaming. It’s like a subtle body astral projection kind of thing.

Lucy: Yeah, but it’s not deliberate. I would never try to do it. So that hadn’t happened in quite some time. And yeah, in December, it happened. To be honest, I really wondered whether I’d speak about this on here because it feels a bit strange, and it feels a bit, I don’t know, exposing or like there’s something in that. But then I just thought, no, I will, because I want people to see the process that some of us go through to be able to come into these places. I want that to be real because we can become objects rather than subjects, you know, with people’s projections, the girl, the mother, and our lives still continue. Our deepenings still continue. You know, people have all these ideas about enlightenment and things, and I don’t. I’m not enlightened. I don’t consider myself enlightened. I don’t actually believe in enlightenment as a concept. I think that existence is limitless and we deepen and continue always. So my life too. And so I had one of those experiences. I found myself walking with that same guide who’s only come to me a few times, but every time everything she says happens. And we were walking outside and there was a group of people that I was with and they were just, we were just normal people and we walked along further and she said quite kindly, it’s time to move now. It’s time to move. I’d had this whole year of resistance and she kind of moved me into a group that I understood were like guides or I don’t like the word teacher because I think we’re all teachers and we’re all the torch. And I really think, and that was one of my resistances. I was like, I don’t want that, but she moved me into this group of what I’ll say are guides and I could recognize the people and she said, it’s time to move now. And she was kind. And then in that experience, I didn’t have the same resistance. There was a neutrality. It was just like, yeah. And then we were in a room and it was black kind of marble and she stood at the front and it was kind of professional, very professional. And there was all of this lavender, like a field of lavender between her and I, and I was cutting the lavender and putting it in my arms. And I knew I had this kind of imprinted knowing that this is the harvest of my whole life of all that suffering you talked about earlier. And it’s not a harvest for me. It’s a harvest for the one, for all. And that I was cutting this lavender, I was piling it into my arms and I knew that that’s what was coming. This is the time now that everything in my life had led to this and this just is and it has to be. And I was putting it in my arms and she flew toward me really fast and she said, it’s time to work like this and with her finger right in my face, the kind of softness had gone. And I said, I know I will. And she said, this is the thing that cracks me up and it stayed with me. I still think of it sometimes. She goes, I don’t want to see you lying in a hammock all day. And then, and then, I was like back, I was awake because I am, I was asleep, but it’s an experience. It’s just not a dream. It’s so hard to, and I woke up and that’s the bit that stayed like, I don’t want to see you in a hammock all day because I do. I spent a lot of time just being and writing poems and things. And so I sat with that for a while. Actually, maybe I’ll read a poem to you now out of my, which is about that. It’s about surrender. And I went, I put all of these up on my Facebook page, but people never know what they’re about.

Rick: My sister loves your poems, by the way.

Lucy: Oh, that’s so nice to hear. I think they’re just quite human for all of us. This one I wrote at that time, actually it was earlier when I was feeling the resistance. I was feeling the resistance, but I knew, and the poems come and I don’t really understand where from, and then I write them and then I see the lesson for me. And this one was called The Only Prayer. There is a flow to life that we must follow, a place where the mystical meets the mundane, the profound collides with the profane, where every butterfly’s wing points the same way. And we can read the runes, pull another card, scry our lives all we like, hoping for a different roll of the same dice. But we do know, we know grace’s whisper, beckoning us on journeys we wouldn’t choose, breathing us things we would rather unknow. And so we will go, dancing or dragged, every day the same prayer. Take these hands, this heart, these lips for your work, your words, I am wholly yours. And yet still I can grieve the things I’m asked to release. I suppose then there’s only one prayer I ever need to know, and that is please, show me how to let go. So I wrote that at the time where, before this dream, where I could feel what you and I were talking about before, the pull of life, the will of life. But the little one was saying, “Ah, tomorrow.” And then I had this dream, you’d think that would be enough, kind of six months ago. And I did, I started kind of feeling like, okay, I need to move. But it still wasn’t enough. And then in January, I had a really significant experience that helped move me, January of this year. And it was pretty simple, but I was in meditation, and I fell into, I don’t know how to explain it, but I fell into, maybe it’s a bit like a pool. You know when you find a beautiful lake and you go and there’s nature all around and just the majesty and the awe and the beauty of it, and you kind of, “Ah, it’s so beautiful,” you look around. It was like that, but we all do that in meditation, but it was a pool, an endless pool of an individualized, a little essence of me. So often I find merging with God, merging with the all natural, but this was different. It’s really hard to explain. I kind of went into this essence that I understood was a layer of reality, and it was all that I am. And I felt the beauty and it was just like, “Ah,” and I went into that. It’s like experiencing myself. It’s hard to explain because I often merge with the all, but this was different. And what happened was the being was checking. It was just happening. I wasn’t doing it. It was just happening for about 40 minutes. The being was just checking for any parts of arrogance. It was like, “Is it here? Is there here any superiority?” It was kind of just happening, and what about there and there? It felt like that, and it was like easing into it and then checking and then checking, and it kept coming back, “No.” And here, is there any like superior? Is there any separateness, as a better word, separateness here? And as I came out of that experience, something in me, in the personality, needed to experience that, needed to be shown the imprint of, “No, this just is, and there’s a humility. Now go. Get to work.” So it was like that. I think I had a block that I didn’t know consciously still, really subtly around, “Let me not elevate myself.” I didn’t like–people would say, “Can you do a sangha?” I’d look it up. I’d see someone on a chair with everybody at their feet, and I’d be like, “For God’s sakes.” Like, you know, like in robes. No, for me, we sit together, side by side. Like, if I told you the truth of what I feel, you’d probably laugh me out of town, but the feeling in me is, “I want to wash your feet.” It’s that. That is the honest feeling. How on earth can I sit on a chair on stage? I have no interest in that. So I think that experience helped me there. It was out of body, kind of like, “It’s okay. It’s okay. This isn’t here in your system,” and I could feel that. Then there was this kind of–after that, I kind of realized in the month of January, I kind of went, “Well, every day I’m praying. I’m saying to God, ‘I’m yours,’ and I mean it.” I just kind of naturally say it, like, “Take me. I’m yours. Colonize me, you know, and use me.” If I don’t listen, how can I say that to God every day? Again, when I say, “God, I’m in consciousness, I’m in life, I’m yours, life, existence.” Like, Lucy’s done everything she wanted. Like, you know, I had the careers. I had the travel. I did the thing. Like, there’s nothing here that needs anything. Use this body for the all. What is it you want? I thought that that was to care for dying people. That was my, like, “Let’s do that,” you know? It seems, yeah, that there’s a different thing. Actually, I’ll read a poem about that if that’s okay. It’s just popping in. I hadn’t planned to read that.

Rick: These poems you’re reading are from your new book that you’re just coming out with?

Lucy: Yeah.

Rick: Just hold it up. Let’s see the cover.

Lucy: I just got this yesterday. I didn’t even think I’d have it for this, but it came in the post. I don’t know if you can see that.

Rick: What is the title?

Lucy: It’s called “This Untameable Light.”

Rick: Oh, cool. Yeah, again, this wasn’t a plan. I never would have written a poetry book. I just was writing poems, and someone in America reached out. He had a small publishing house about a year ago, and he said, “Please, would you publish?” And I said, “I’ll talk to you,” and I had a chat with him. And then I was like, “Nah.” And then I kept saying, “Okay, I’ll do it myself.” So I’ve actually just done it myself now. I’ve self-published it. But it’s, yeah, so, yeah. But this is a poem, a prayer from that. You know, what I love about poetry is that it penetrates through the limited mind. This is why I think it helps, and straight into the being. And the being is the part that’s never forgotten who we are. So I think that’s why this pours through. But I don’t know, and I don’t mind. I’m not really attached. I do it for the joy of it, truth be told. Like, creating it’s been such a joy. But this is that prayer. Like, if I’m saying this every day, I need to listen. Great Spirit, move me. Return me to the borders of my body, that you may take me where you want me. Work through me. Use my hands, these feet, this tongue. The sweat from this brow. Take any humble skill that I may have for your work. Colonize my heart with your love. That I may bring heaven to earth through these cells. Now, that I may fill the world with understanding, kindness, compassion. Not wait for some other body to do it. Infuse me. Let me lead with love, even within the tyranny of my own humanity. Let me be your humility. Walking. Imbue me. I am wholly, completely, devastatingly yours. And so I realized after that experience and the pull of me, like, if I’m saying that kind of prayer every day, and I do, just naturally, how can I turn away from the hand of God? Sometimes the hand of God reaches down and it says, Rick, you need to do a podcast. And it makes no sense. So you’re kind of like, okay, that might be fun. I’ll just give it a whirl. And it’s the fabric of existence moving. And so I just finally kind of in January went, okay, all right. And then I got to, and I kept saying, don’t lie on a hammock all day. I don’t want to see. So I got to work and I came up with some ideas. I was like, what have people been asking for? They wanted a sangha. And so, and then they wanted, people wanted, they kept asking, how can we talk about our awakenings and find a community where we can ask questions around that? So I started some different programs and got a website built. I had no idea how to do that. I had to reach out. That’s a huge thing. And a lot of faff around that too. Like people, the website designer wanting it to be a logo and wanting it to be all, and I was like, none of that stuff. Like no brand development, basically. I just, I can’t do that.

Rick: I have an idea. Maybe you could set up a camera so that you could lie in your hammock and do your sangha from the hammock.

Lucy: Kiwi styles.

Rick: Yeah. Best of both worlds.

Lucy: Yeah. So that’s starting in August, actually, that sangha now. So yeah, people just sign up online through that for that. But it’s a place to come and bring our hearts questions. And I don’t know, I figure God will just lead it all. And I don’t think about it too much. I just, I’ve done the things people have asked for or invited me into. And that’s kind of it. And I get the sense that none of this is complete for any of us until what has nourished us comes back to nourish the world. You know, like that’s just part of it. And so whatever we do, it doesn’t matter. We could garden all day and still be deeply perfect and loved by existence. But when this energy of doing comes in, we need to listen to it, you know, and move with it.

Rick: I think the world is in peril. And I think that the divine, or whatever we want to call it, needs people to serve in the, to help with the awakening that is taking place and that has to take place if we’re to pass through that peril and continue on as a species.

Lucy: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And our emergence always serves the whole in that way. It always serves the whole. And I think what I see is that the benefit of this work, of coming together to kind of validate each other or help shepherd each other, it’s like friends on the path, like hands to each other, is that we grow one another. You know, like I’m really fascinated by the way that kind of light comes in. And it seems to seek out its equivalent in darkness to bring it forward and so that we may meet it. And then as that kind of is met and dissolves, this is just my kind of crude look at it, then we’re asked to embody that. We’re asked the next part is embodying that. It’s not just about what we’ve realized in that particular piece. It’s about how we embody it. And I get really fascinated by the ways that we stop that embodiment of truth because awakening is really just, it’s about being with what’s true. It’s really humans have so many ways of putting things between us and existence. People think awakening’s fancy. And I use the term awakening loosely. Like they think it’s fancy. They think, and actually it’s really about dissolving the barriers between me and life. We were talking about how life speaks to us before, but we put things like addictions and anger and judgments and all sorts of things between us and life because we want to lessen the impact of life on us because we’re beautiful, open, sensitive by nature, creatures, feeling creatures. And we come into our lives and we get all these messages about why we’re not lovable or whatever, and we put these things to soften the blow. Like one of my clients is a heroin addict, and he talks about being really open when in his teens, he’s in the UK, and putting heroin between him and life to soften the blow of it. And we do it. For some it’s chocolate. For some it’s wine. But we all have them. Every single human I come into contact with has their addictions or their anger or their rage or their gossip. And we put these things between us and life. And as we kind of dissolve, as we meet what’s true, because a lot of us kind of deny what’s true. We don’t want to see that about ourselves. We live in this place of either willful denial or unconscious denial, and we pay a huge price for the places we’re not true. And that’s kind of what awakening is. It’s just finally just going, okay, what is true? And let’s look at it. And as we meet it and move through it, life comes forward. We get more and more open and close with all of existence until it kind of becomes us. It just enters us then because we remove these things in the way, and we just come into — that’s what oneness is. It’s deep intimacy with what is true.

Rick: Good. Okay, let me ask you a few questions that have come in, and we’ll see where those take us. So let’s see. There was an early one that came in. Question for Lucy from Millie Nair in San Jose, California. What is one line or phrase you would give as advice to your past self and why?

Lucy: Yeah. You know, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. Again, I think that a lot of advice kind of goes through the mind. And if I could — this is really true — if I could meet my past self now, I would actually probably just hold her, and I would probably sit with her and emanate all the love that I could to her. That’s what I would do. But if we were to translate that into words, it would be something like all is well and all is deeply well and all shall be well. It’s that sense. But I would hold her and just sit with her and love her, yeah, and all that suffering. Yeah. But if you feel that you need some advice, Millie, then you can ask your future self to advise you. You can sit in meditation and just get curious, see what happens and say, “What is my highest expression? What does it want to tell me?” and see what comes through.

Rick: Good. Okay. Here’s one from Mark Peters in Santa Clara, California. This is similar, actually a similar question. “If you could pass along just one bit of wisdom you’ve gleaned over the past few years to your adolescent self during a rough patch, what would you share?” And more to his question, “In a more time and mind-bending challenge, what counsel or words of kindness do you imagine 30 years from now you might offer to your present day self?”

Lucy: When I think of my teenage self, he said teenage self, right?

Rick: Yeah, yeah, adolescent self.

Lucy: Adolescent self. I honestly feel like I would say, “Keep doing what you’re doing. Keep opening.” I was really good at feeling and opening and letting life in. There was no strategy behind it. But I remember friends saying, “Oh, you’ve broken up with a boyfriend. Let’s go out and go drinking.” And I would say, “No, I’m staying home. I need to cry. I need to grieve.” I would just tell her to keep on keeping on. Everything that we are moving through is the path. And I would just wrap her in that sense of, “This is right. This is perfect. This is it.” We’re all moving through different things, but we often equate things that are unpleasant or sadness or anxiety or stuff like that with things that are bad. And actually, it’s just unpleasant, but it opens us and it deepens us. When we let our hearts break, when we let ourselves go into what’s here and form, this is when we can meet these new places in ourselves and really come into this deep intimacy with truth, with what is. And so I would just say that. Yeah, I don’t feel like I have any advice. I feel like the path is perfect and it was perfect. Maybe if I went to my sick self, I think that was really scary, being sick and not knowing would this last forever and ever. I think I would just pat her head and just smile at her and say, again, all is well, all is well, because everything, looking back, everything was part of the fabric of what I am. That being unwell brought me into deep presence because the body is so frail. You really are pulled into that place. So everything has its meaning, but it’s often in hindsight that we see it. We get so upset with ourselves and we kind of want to reject anything and form that doesn’t meet our ideas of what it should be or even our ideas of enlightenment. We want to control our way to peace, but it’s really about just meeting exactly what’s here. That’s the trick.

Rick: Yeah, these questions about what you would tell your younger self are rather hypothetical because life doesn’t work that way. I mean, if it were possible to do that, I would probably ask my younger self to get on to spirituality sooner and not go through so much self-destructive behavior with drugs and stuff because then you have to do a bunch of repair work after you’ve done all those things. But life doesn’t work that way. So my attitude is if everything that has happened was supposed to happen because it happened, and as Byron Katie says, if you argue with reality, you lose every time. But we have the present, and in the present you have some leeway. You have some choice. So you want to be sure to do the best with this because that will determine how the future goes. So anyway, maybe that’s–

Lucy: But also that is the path, right? So it’s like when we look at nature, nature tells us exactly what’s happening with us because we are nature. People always use the example of the caterpillar turning into a butterfly. But we can say this– When we look at that, we can let go and release into this is sacred process. We can’t rip that caterpillar out halfway and scream at it, “Why won’t you surrender? Why won’t you become a butterfly? Why won’t you?” And it’s saying, “Because I’m in this part of my sacred process. This is sacredness, our humanity.” And all layers of reality have value, right, to our humanity too. And so that part where you were taking drugs or you were doing the thing will have its purpose, and it deepens, and it opens often, and it brings in. Our suffering is a kind of alchemy. Our suffering is turned to wisdom and gold and gifts for the world as we move through. Not always. Some of us get to the end of our lives, and we’re just completely– And that’s fine. Next time around, we come back to it. But it’s all sacred process. There’s nothing wrong.

Rick: Yeah. And actually, if you help a butterfly out of its cocoon, even when it’s almost fully developed and you can see that it’s starting to emerge, if you help it, you cripple it for life because its wings don’t develop the strength they need to be a full-fledged butterfly if it hasn’t gone through the struggle of emerging from the cocoon.

Lucy: That’s right. And we seem to be so comfortable with this with nature. We don’t ask a seed to bloom, right? We don’t stand in our garden and scream at our vegetables, “Why aren’t you ready to harvest?” I mean, it makes no sense. So why would we ever do that to ourselves? Why would we wrong make ourselves for not being spiritual enough or not be– And we do have to have a certain level of– There’s a balance of care and consciousness and acting in the best way that we can and walking our paths in the best way that we can. But there’s also a need for compassion. People can be so hard on themselves that they’re not spiritual and they’re not good enough, they’re not–all this kind of stuff. And what you just said about the caterpillar is really important, actually, because I think it’s so interesting how we as humans stop our own emergence. When I talked about this process of the light comes in, it draws up some dark so we can meet those paths, and then the task is to embody it. I see life as this laboratory or this practice of embodying what we’ve realized, and it’s like a jellyfish. It goes in, out, in, out as it goes forward. And we do the same, but we go forward all the time. But I’m really fascinated by that place where we can often stop our embodiment. We can stop at that part in the process. So we can sometimes have awakenings or realizations, but if we can’t be those things in the world, it doesn’t matter what we know. It matters what we are. And we can stop from a really tender place. It’s not because we’re assholes. It’s not because we’re lacking. It’s often looking at what’s resonant, whether that job is really resonant or that partner is really resonant. The emergence wants us to grow on the outside as well. So we have these realizations on the inside, and it’s asking us to manifest that outside. But that’s the place, the embodiment of it. I can be too afraid to tell my friends I don’t want to take drugs anymore, and I can override myself, or I can be too afraid to leave that job that I know deep down isn’t my calling anymore because I’ve changed. And we can stop that emergence in its tracks, and then we end up spinning in fear or other things instead of allowing the process to keep going because as we emerge and form the embodiment of it, new light comes in, and it asks for a new emergence, and we keep growing that way.

Rick: Good. Okay, here’s another one. This is from Julian Bates in Nottingham, UK. “What you spoke of, people’s rage, is a kind of spiritual envy. The poet-musician Leonard Cohen said that when one is shining, this envy/hatred can spontaneously emerge in some people. We can shine in a variety of ways, but when it is of our spiritual essence, it seems to strike people so personally. Isn’t it fair, valid, to protect oneself from this, to safeguard the innocence, the aliveness of it?”

Lucy: I’m curious about what you mean by protect oneself from it. I think it’s a natural process. I really do. I think that–

Rick: I guess protect oneself from people’s reactions, I think. I think maybe he’s–you know, Jesus said, “Don’t hide your light under a bushel.”

Lucy: I think–

Rick: Maybe he’s saying, you know, we might start shining, and then it stirs up people’s envy or anger or things like that. And, you know, so one might put the bushel back down to hide the light because you want to safeguard your innocence and not be a target for people’s unhealthy emotions.

Lucy: Yeah, so there’s a couple of things here. There’s something about boundaries, isn’t there? So we all have the right–we’re sovereign, and we’re allowed to say– So here’s an example. When I first left my husband and my job, somebody really, really dear to me, somebody who I looked up to all my life, stood in the street and screamed at me, and she said, “I don’t understand you anymore. Like, where have you gone? You’re completely different.” And she was crying and screaming and going through her own grief about it. “Why would you leave a good man? You were happy, and why would you leave your career and, you know, all the money of your old life and all that kind of stuff?” And she was so upset. And I could see the places where my freedom and my ease and my joy challenged the places she was stuck. So I can see it for what it is. And I said later–I, like, calmed her down in that moment, went away, and I had a cry and let myself feel the grief of that because there’s grief. If anything arises in presence, it’s just not as sticky. It’s okay that we feel people think there’s something about, like, awakening or rescue you from the challenges of life or that you can escape feeling. Sadness arises, and part of allowing is letting it, and letting it move through like weather. So I had a little cry, and then I said to her, “I love you, and I really hope that you can accept me as I am because this is who I am. This is the truth of my being, matching the way of my being. I didn’t divorce a man. I divorced all the ways that I was lying to myself about who I was. So this is my marriage to the truth of me, and I will stay with that no matter what.” And I said to her, “If you need to go, that’s okay, but this is who I am, and exactly I won’t stop shining. I will be who I am. And I love you, but this is true for me.” And I think it’s really important to hold that. This love isn’t some boundaryless, saccharine, fluffy silliness. It’s a mighty, honed, deeply powerful thing, and it has to be to exist like this in the world. But people are allowed their fear. They’re allowed their contractions, and they are allowed their rage. I don’t have to stand in the wake of that. It’s not about I’m so loving you can just spew all over me. But nor do I have to condemn it. I just walk away, and I see it for what it is. That’s the important part, is seeing it. It’s about that person. Yeah, so never should we shrink to appease somebody else. Flowers don’t stop blooming, you know, because it’s raining or because the flower next to it has died. When we bloom, when we really shine, we give everyone else permission to do the same, and it’s such a gift. It’s such a gift to be all that you are and to really let yourself do that. But no one can give us that permission. We give it to ourselves, and it takes work. It can take work. We meet these dynamics over and over until we become extremely comfortable with them. And again, like that thing about Jesus being crucified, and he said, “Forgive them, Father. They know not what they do.” So there’s no charge in it. There’s no, “Oh, I have to change your mind.” No, you do you, and I’ll be over here shining.

Rick: Good. Okay, here’s one from Daksha Mohar. “Since I am struggling with long-term health issues and trying to somehow console myself, does Lucy have any insights or opinions about her own past health journey? Does she think it served something or was part of an opening? Love you, Lucy. Thank you for being with us again.”

Lucy: Thank you so much. I really feel that. Yes, it’s served many things, and I really understand the loneliness and the grief of being unwell. It’s almost like nothing else. It’s its own portal. It’s its own crucible because it’s so lonely. Other people, they get, you know, fair enough, they get sick of hearing about it. I remember my husband being like, “Oh, for God’s sakes.” You know, and yet we are dealing with the skin suit that we’re in being so broken, and so it’s completely isolating. So just first of all, just huge compassion for you there. Really, really, I really understand that, and we don’t have any trajectory. Like with parenting, we know, “Oh, the child’s going to get older eventually.” But with illness, we could be stuck in this for the rest of our lives, and it could get worse. We never know. It’s a really scary place to be, and it’s one of the deepest gifts of my whole life, and I mean that. I’m not just saying that. If I’m honest with you, I feel a bit sick now. It still comes in for me sometimes. I woke up this morning, and you can hear my voice is a little scratchy, and I feel a bit sick in my being, so I’m a bit slower than usual. But what it gifts me, what I see it gifts me is this deep presence because you have to be so tender with the body. The body is so tender that you have to be with it. And in the big picture, the gifts of it are just immense. I think there are certain periods in our lives where we are called into silence, where we are called into a lot of stillness or a lot of isolation, and I think this is the way that life can bring us there when we’re not listening, when we’re not. And I think looking back for me, often we’re only as, there’s that old saying, there’s a few reasons, there’s often, you know, that we’re only as sick as our secrets. I was holding a lot of trauma and a lot of pain that I just, but I didn’t know consciously. I’m not saying this is all sickness. I never ever want to imply that, that I couldn’t turn toward. And I think there was something about it opening, you know, starting to make the body break down. I also think there’s an at the exact same time because the deeper we go into the stuff, the more we can hold paradox. It’s like, I think that’s part of it. But I also think that awakening, deep awakening seems to bring illness into the body for a lot of people. I saw a paper not long ago about the link between chronic fatigue and awakening. It was really interesting. I can send that to you if you want. Someone had done a study on it and you know, you mentioned St. Francis of Assisi last time being unwell and we know Adya was really unwell and can get unwell.

Rick: It was actually prior to his awakening. He came back from the Crusades and he was really sick and you know, for a long time in bed. And then when he finally came up out of the fever or whatever it was, it was like, it was a whole new world. You know, he had been transformed.

Lucy: Absolutely. It is really. It is this fire that we burn into being in. I mean, really, we lie in bed all day, the clock, we kind of do what we can do. We drag ourselves around. But mostly we’re alone with ourselves and things are rearranging for me anyway. I can talk about my experience. Things were rearranging, reforming, taking shape. I just didn’t realize that then. I didn’t realize that that’s almost cellularly. Yeah, everything was changing.

Rick: You’re in the chrysalis phase. You’re in the cocoon being reconfigured.

Lucy: Yes. And also it deepens compassion. It deepens humility. You know, I think it takes away a huge amount of judgment from the system because we stop thinking all these grand ideas about our strength, you know, and our choice and our kind of will on life. It’s like life is saying, you’re not in charge here. You know, boom, down you go.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, one thing you mentioned in the last interview was that somehow a voice or something came to you and said, the reason you’re going through all this is that we’re making sure you don’t have any ego left, you know, smashing it out of you.

Lucy: Oh that was during parenting.

Rick: Yeah, with Rosie in her first few years.

Lucy: Yeah, this is before I knew any spiritual lingo or anything. And they said to give you the opportunity to transcend your ego. And I didn’t understand what that meant. I thought that was stupid. Even now I find that kind of silly language, but it’s a bit cheesy. But yeah, I think illness brings us so many gifts. And I think each person needs different gifts. But to trust, and this is the place that we all come into in our fires and our holy wars is trust, you know, this place where can I let the petri dish of my experience be trust. And that’s kind of intentional. We can fall back into trust over and over again, deliberately training ourselves to do that, whether we’re in parenting, whether we’re in the fires of illness, whatever it is, whatever we’re doing or walking or whatever griefs or pains arouse. Can we connect into a place of trust? This must be for me. I trust that this must be for me and keep falling back into that. Now, that’s partly what I work on people with because there can be so many hidden areas where we’re bound. We can’t trust for certain things. Like I’m thinking of a client all of a sudden that he had a very critical father in the real world. His father was extremely abusive and critical and we’d worked together for a long time. He was deep into a spiritual path and he just couldn’t understand why he couldn’t surrender. Why won’t the system just trust like you have this trust? And we were kind of going through all these pockets and we landed one day when we’re kind of in a meditative state together and we were trying to find the answer to this. And we landed in this place, I’ll make it quick by just saying it fast, but he realized because of his father being critical, he felt like God was critical. Like behind it all, God is an asshole who hates me in some way and he will not catch me if I fall. So why would I trust that bastard was kind of the underlying script. So I would say one of the most potent things for awakening or the fires that we’re walking in is cultivating that trust. So do whatever you need to, to address the blocks in the way of it. So really deeply looking at how can I fall into trust in this moment, in this moment? If nature is intelligent, if the wisdom of existence is intelligent, it must know what it’s doing. Like the bigger purpose has such innate intelligence. How can I know? Yes, it’s painful, but let me see if I can find trust and find what’s whole already and go with it. I think that’s something when I was sick that I did do well. I just gave in. I would lie in bed. I would crawl to a bath and stay there for half a day. I would just, just, I didn’t, you know, there was so much of me that allowed what was happening. And I think that’s key. And I cried if I was scared.

Rick: I think that’s the big if, if nature is intelligent. And I’m not sure if a person feels it isn’t or has never considered whether it might be. I’m not sure what the best formula is to come to the realization that it is, but it seems to me it would make a huge difference in one’s worldview. If you don’t think nature is intelligent and, you know, everything is just dumb, gross stuff that has no meaning or significance, it’s really easy to see how a person could be depressed or suicidal or, you know, just have a really bleak outlook on life. You know, but if you do see everything as being imbued with intelligence and the whole thing is some divine play, then it’s a very different perspective. Yeah.

Lucy: Yeah.

Rick: Okay. Any other thoughts at the top of your head right now?

Lucy: About illness?

Rick: About anything. I have some thoughts we could go off on, but I want to just check in with you to see if there’s anything there. I think I would just touch on that if something’s coming through the body, because it’s one thing, the psyche, our spirit, our flesh, it’s actually all one thing. There’s not borders. So if something’s coming through, to just really trust this moment. So if my body wants me to feel something, I’m feeling it because it wants me to. There doesn’t need to be a reason. I think that’s really, really powerful. And I think it’s a bit like fuel. It kind of melts off. We accumulate all this stuff from zero to now. And as we melt it a bit like fuel, that is enlightening. So it’s being with what’s here and touching it and letting it in. So if I’m sick, I’m sick. If I’m frustrated that I’m sick, I’m frustrated that I’m sick. Let me meet that. I think that’s really key. Yeah. I think that’s what comes to mind. It’s not a defect. It’s a perfectly functioning body.

Rick: Another thing that I’m aware of about you is that since your Batgap interview, you made a few really good friends. There’s Shalane Harkin, and there was some therapist guy in California you mentioned. Any others? Talk about them. One thing I love about Batgap is all the friends I’ve made, these people I never would have met had I not been doing this all over the world. And usually the people I interview have the same experience because they start connecting with all kinds of people they never would have met.

Lucy: Yeah, it’s been incredible. It’s been one of the great blessings of my life. I actually think it’s been the greatest blessing of my life. I feel like most of my life, nothing’s been for free. But this was just like this blessing that was given. And yeah, gosh, Shalane and Riaz is the person you mentioned in California. My dearest friends, my dearest friends are now mostly in America.

Rick: You never actually met them face to face.

Lucy: Yeah, but I’m coming in October. So I’m so excited about that. So I get to see them and hold them. But there’s been such an intimacy and finding people that can see these places in us. And this is why people ask for sangha. This is why people, because if we build all these rooms in us, I used to think that only I could only find this connection with God, with life, sitting and being, you know, I talked about in my childhood and my first Batgap, how I was always just sitting and being because everything outside of me was so violent. I used to think I could only find it there. And then these incredible people. So that’s why I kept it quiet. And then these people have come in and it’s the most amazing revelation it has been to find myself in others. And I say this is what people need in their sessions and in their groups is because if you haven’t realized these places in yourself, you can’t see them in me. And when we see them in another, we almost call them into being. We almost bring them forth. It’s the most beautiful alchemical process. So light expands light. We deepen together. And it’s, yeah, it’s been such a gift to be seen, to be known and to connect in these ways. Yeah, I’m deeply grateful.

Rick: So when you come to the States, you’re going to give a couple of retreats or something?

Lucy: Yeah, that was another thing I was kind of like, no, I don’t think so. Yeah, it just kind of happened. Shalane is a poet. You can see her back up too. She’s an incredible mystical poet, but she said, hey, let’s do a writing retreat. Let’s teach people. We always talk about how our poetry comes through on a kind of wave of energy. We call it somatic poetry. So if we tap into that energy, then we write from the energy and we talk about how that’s both of our processes. And she said, cool, let’s do a retreat where we teach people the somatic writing so that to help them tap into their creative flow and tap into the muse more easily. And I thought, well, if I’m going for that, that was a no brainer. That’s like, yeah, awesome. Let’s do a writing retreat. And I thought, if I’m going for that, I have these people asking me to do a spiritual retreat and in-person retreat. And I thought, well, I’m there, so I’ll do that as well. So, yeah, so I’m going to do a four night retreat, just deepening into presence together. And I’m really, really looking forward to that. I’m really looking forward to that. Yeah. And I have a couple of my friends who will help with that.

Rick: That’ll be in the Bay Area someplace. Yeah, I’ve got a beautiful venue. It looks like it’s going to be the one I’ll book for early November this year. And it’s got 340 acres of redwood forest.

Rick: Is that the 1440 place or some other thing? No, no, they didn’t get back to me. It’s called Mount Madonna.

Rick: Oh, I’ve heard of that. Yeah, Adyashanti has given a lot of retreats there.

Lucy: Right, right. Yeah, yeah. So it’s been beautiful. It’s been really strange, actually. Most of my clients, like I would say 90%, are either from Adya or from Susanna Marie or from John Prendergast. And I didn’t put it together, mostly from Adya or Susanna. And then I realized that Adya was their teacher. I find that so fascinating. I think there’s an energy. It’s the same. They seem to be drawn to the same people. It’s so interesting. And then what you said about Mount Madonna. So, yeah, I’m really looking forward to that. And yeah, just coming together, coming together for light, expanding light. It’s such a beautiful process. I can’t wait. Yeah. And I’ll probably do some in Waiheke, actually, too. I told a couple of clients, “I’m coming, I’m coming.” And one who’s in Texas said, “Can you do one in Waiheke? I actually want a reason to go to New Zealand.” And I was kind of like, “Seriously? You can’t go this way?” And she said, “Absolutely.” I’ve had a few people say that to me, yeah, that they’d love to come here. So I’ll probably do one next year here as well.

Rick: There’s some nice retreats centered there. Oh, beautiful. This is a tourist place. But it’s really low-key. It’s very wild, and it’s an island, so it’s vineyards and ocean. And there’s beautiful centers, and I would be able to get one in a heartbeat because none of them book out. Whereas on your side of the world, I was like, “What? They booked out two years in advance.”

Rick: That’s great. All right. We have a bit more time, so people can send in more questions. Or perhaps if it comes to mind, you could think of some other questions and things that people typically have been asking you. What have been some particular areas of interest or inquiry?

Lucy: Yeah, I think a lot of people that come to me, they want to talk about the no-self thing. That comes up a lot, a lot. There’s this confusion in people around what is reality, what’s not reality. If I’m talking about feeling feelings and meeting the things between us and life, some people – I mean, I had two women come to my door yesterday. They just turned up, and they said, “We heard about you. This happens. Sometimes we heard about you. Can we sit with you for a bit?” Of course, it was a bit awkward because my house is really messy, but I would come on in. One was about 17. She’d been in silence for 10 years with Osho. Another was kind of a 30-year-old Swedish girl who was living here. I sat them down, and this is a good example. This was just yesterday or the day before. The one that had been with Osho for 10 years said to me, as she got talking, they asked questions, and they did their thing. We just had a cup of tea. She said – she kept saying, “There’s no self here, but there’s no one here. There’s no one here to do all this.” Then a little bit later – I was very gentle with her – and then a bit later she said, “I really long for a relationship. I really long I live a lot of my life by myself.” I said to her, “If there’s nobody here, who is it that’s longing for the relationship?” We managed to get to this place. I won’t go into the whole conversation, but where she said – I said, “Could it be that all of this is true all at once? Could it be that we’re one thing, but we’re actually also the human and that we don’t need to penalize any part of reality or leave out any part of reality?” I think this is really important in the path. I see so many people get stuck in their concepts. What the mind has learned is spirituality. I laugh sometimes. You know, like the Buddha at the Gas Pump Facebook page. It’s hilarious sometimes because people will be defending the fact that there are no self. You know, incorrect, and I think it’s the same mechanism. The mechanism that thinks it’s a self is exactly the same as what clings to being a no self, and it’s that mechanism that wants seeing through. We are a no self and a self all at once, but somebody who’s defending not being anything, that can only belong to a self. I find that fascinating. Like if we’re saying with our words, “I’m a no self,” but with our actions, we are being a self because I must be right. I’m right-making and wrong-making. Only a self does that. There’s nothing to defend when you’re not a self. You wouldn’t even, you know, it’s so fascinating to me. So people often say, “Well, what’s right and what’s wrong?” And I talk a lot about wholeness. Wholeness includes everything. The body of God is everything. So we’re really afraid of that, actually. We’re really afraid often of a wholeness because we want a right or a wrong to subscribe to. We want to know that we’re on the side of right, that we’re safe, that we’re doing the right thing the right way. And there’s something about the rigidity and all that that actually stops awakening unfolding further, that need to release into all as well, and all levels of reality can be honored. I think it’s a sign of spiritual maturity when people can allow their humanity, their bumbling, fumbling humanity. Yeah. And let it be there.

Rick: Nisargadatta said just that. He said the ability to appreciate paradoxes is a sign of spiritual maturity. And, you know, we might ask, “Well, if the wave realizes that it’s fundamentally the ocean, does that mean that there aren’t any waves?” No, there’s still waves. But the waves and the ocean are all one thing, but they’re just different aspects of one thing, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t waves. And there’s a lady I interviewed named Jessica Nathanson who has really focused in on this because somehow that’s become her role because she’s seen how much harm this overemphasis on there not being a self has done to people. People have become nihilistic, depersonalized, disinterested in their families and children and jobs, even suicidal, depressed, all kinds of things like that because of this overemphasis. And I think it’s perhaps one way of looking at it is that it can be a valid teaching if you’re a recluse and you’re supposed to just sit in a hut and not be engaged in the world. And there is a level for everyone at which it is true, but there are more manifest levels at which it’s not true. And the way Vedanta deals with it is to say that there’s the ultimate reality, which is just universal cosmic being, Brahman, but then there is a more relative reality, which they call Vyavaharika, which is the transactional or the practical reality in which we live life. And you deny that at your peril. I mean, if you just completely dismiss that there is no significance to relative considerations and you don’t have a personal self and all that stuff, it really can hamper your not only happiness and effectiveness in the world, but your spiritual evolution itself.

Lucy: Absolutely. Absolutely. For me, it’s getting rigid around a view. It’s getting rigid, and it’s like a straw. If our body is the vessel, is the straw for light to stream through and express through, if we clench the straw, then the air gets stuck. So any place we’re braced or defended or decided stops us falling back into grace in this really open way. If we’re denying any part of truth, any part of wholeness, like the fabric of existence is love, and love includes everything. It just does. Like we see this in nature. There’s mud and there’s blossom, and none of it is better than the other. It’s all just part of sacred process. It’s all a piece that’s needed. So it’s not that there’s no body or that the body is irrelevant. It’s that you’re not only your body.

Rick: That’s it. Yeah. I guess one way of putting it is that, of course, you’re a person. You’re just not only a person. There’s the personal and the impersonal, and if the range of our appreciation or perspective grows wide enough, then we incorporate both simultaneously and in an integrated way in which there’s no conflict between them.

Lucy: Yeah, yeah. The world is not not real. It’s just impermanent, but it’s still real.

Rick: Yeah, and one way of putting it is, yeah, it’s not that it’s an illusion. It’s just that it’s more than what we perceive it to be.

Lucy: Yeah.

Rick: We’re misperceiving it, but that’s not to say there’s nothing there.

Lucy: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. We don’t need to invalidate any part of life. When we’re doing that on the outside, we’re definitely doing that on the inside too. We’re divided. We’re creating division. Whenever we’re divided, we’re moving against the oneness and the wholeness of everything. So non-duality, in that sense, can be really dual if it’s othering something, that this isn’t real and this is.

Rick: Like you said, the people who come to you who are saying this are not happy campers. How’s it working out for you, people?

Lucy: Yeah, it does take from the joy of existence. All of us, the ultimate, can rest in being, kind of allowing everything to go, and then the person, if it’s allowing all, can enjoy the beauty and the sacredness of very ordinary things because it’s here and it’s intimate with it all and it’s allowing it. So we really kind of, I don’t know, bleed out the joy of this reality, of this existence, for no other sake than the joy of it and what’s here, that we get to eat, that we get to breathe and watch birds, that we can swim. I mean, yeah.

Rick: Yeah. If we zoom out to the God’s eye view of it, then we can say, okay, it’s all God, but God’s no dummy. I mean, this must be happening for a reason. So God is, you know, in Sanskrit they use the word lila. It’s a divine play, which is better than if there were just absolute nothingness for all eternity. It comes into existence for a purpose, and we’re part of that divine play.

Lucy: That’s right, and we can use. It’s not one or the other. When they meld and merge together, that is potency. We can use the ultimate, all that we are, to tend the human and its suffering and its joy. That is really how I live. It’s all at once, and in that place we don’t have that fear around suffering. We don’t have that fear around living because all that we are is holding that and is tending that, so we can move from both places. It’s really incredible.

Rick: Yeah. Are you about to read a poem?

Lucy: I was thinking of it. Yeah, one came into my head.

Rick: Okay, go for it.

Lucy: Did you have a question, though?

Rick: No, you go ahead first. I’m looking something up.

Lucy: Yeah, this is just about nature because it’s a natural state, right? It kind of includes all just like nature does. So when I need sound healing, I bathe in cicada hum. When I need ministry, I let the grass lavish its deep devotion upon me, and the dew drip its sermons right into my heart. I anoint my feet in puddles, and I praise mud. I was never alone. Who am I fooling? I was fathered by mountains, mothered by ocean. I was taught by landslides and caught by the woman I became during them. Stars serenade me with their chorus of hallelujahs, offer themselves up as pimpricks of wonder and guidance in the darkness. Trees salute me, stand guard and strengthen me, offer their wisdom if I’m listening. I am all existence. My friends are rocks and praying mantises. I thread their hearts through mine like an endless chain. Let the sky teach me loyalty to warmth and shadow. The humility of hail and the sanctity of change. And through it all, love, a blaze from magma up through the souls of me. I give the mother my body for colonizing. We are ember and water. All at once, we are so deeply loved. Just like this, with our limping, broken hearts, full of fear. We are and are and are sacredness, perfect process for this and another thousand reasons. We are blessed. So that’s about including everything. Yeah, allowing all just like nature.

Rick: Yeah, I was just looking up this Nisargadatta quote, which probably most people have heard. He said, “Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between these two, my life flows.”

Lucy: And there’s a relaxing in that, you know? There’s a kind of an open ease of like, “Oh, yeah, and this, and this.” And then we can move from that place in the world. We can only really give what we embody. And if we’re clenched and braced against, that’s always going to show up in the way that we move.

Rick: Yeah. And there’s something you mentioned also about not mistaking understanding for realization or something like that. I think that’s important. I think sometimes people psyche themselves into—they drill certain concepts in so much that it becomes a bit of a brainwashing, which they mistake for realization.

Lucy: Yeah, which I have such compassion for because what I see is that when we lack experience—this is really experienced. When we lack experience, we seek to know, and we build ideas, and we get fearful that we’re not as evolved or as realized as our brother sitting next to us there. And then we worry it’s because I’m bad, I’m wrong, I’m deficient in some way. So why have I been in the ashram for 40 years alongside this fella, and he’s got somewhere and I haven’t? And all of this is also such a masculine kind of lens of looking at spirituality, that there’s a goal, there’s something to attain. I always say to people when they start working with me, “Our work will go deeper if you leave behind any ideas of attainment or goals. Let’s just drop them out now. This is intimate. This is you with you and you with existence.” And I say you mostly. But I do have such compassion for it because people feel like spiritual failures. Let’s just say it how it is. Often they come to me and they say, “I have done all the things, and I don’t know why it’s not working.” And then we actually go into it. And we see this as somebody who’s fairly far down their path. There’s a lot of compassion, a lot of patience, an open heart, refined virtues. And I think it’s so key to be able to let go of any ideas and any needing to know. Because when we’re trying to know, what we’re trying really to do is control. And we can’t control our way to peace. The mind is a beautiful tool. I don’t leave anything out. It’s important. Discernment, critical thinking. But this is felt.

Rick: Irene’s going to let a dog in here. Keep going.

Lucy: This is felt and experienced. And the being understands. The mind knows. So, we can’t, this isn’t a script we can follow. It’s really listening to what’s true.

Rick: Yeah. And so, this is an important point you’re making, that it’s about experience, not just understanding. And I think the two are important. One without the other is like trying to take a hike on one leg. But what do you do to help people create more of a balance between experience and understanding? What do you recommend to help their experience blossom more fully?

Lucy: I think it’s really about, we can do all these different things outside of us. But the theme I see is always returning into our own hearts, turning the light around, coming in. And really, we can think things can look like the same thing on the outside for everyone. Everyone could be meditating, right? But actually, one’s thinking about what’s for dinner. The next is leaving life to be in bliss, which is fine. You know, everybody’s path is different. And there’s different ways that this expresses for everybody. But it’s always going to be coming back in and touching what’s inside of me in a really honest, really direct way. So, I think that it’s about sitting with what’s here and really, really coming into presence with it. And I do that in my sessions with people and allowing it all to be here. So, when I leave denial, when I step out of this and look at what’s truly here. So, if I’ve just snapped at my daughter, I tend to take kind of the last 24 hours. What’s happened? We don’t need to know the whole life. What’s happening in form? What is form speaking to you? What is it showing you? I got contracted here or I got frustrated. And we go into that portal. That’s the place to go. I remember Adja, I have a lot of respect for him. I remember him saying he used to go to a cafe every time he felt these contractions. And he would stay there until he had got to the root of what had happened within his system. He would journal. He would be writing stuff down. Yeah. And this is what I was talking about earlier. When I say we put so many things between us and life. And to really awaken, to bring life in, we have to meet what is here. So, that’s what I would say. And that’s whatever does that for you. It could be walking in the woods, but really presently. Because I can walk in the woods and have a podcast or I can walk in the woods.

Rick: That’s me. I just listened to one of your interviews today while walking in the woods.

Lucy: And I mean, that’s beautiful. So, we don’t take away from all that stuff. If it meets us and nourishes us, that’s perfect. But it’s being really honest with myself about whether I’m really going there. Am I going there? Because what I see in my work is that each being is different. They come to me with different stuff. Some are really transcendent. They can merge with God. They’re transcendent, but they cannot be in pleasure or purpose in their lives or connection. Others are on the other side. They can really access pleasure. They can dance around a fire pit naked. They feel embodied. But they don’t really seem to have this proper connection. And so, it’s kind of about bringing it into the center, into the middle place, into wholeness. How do we, what, so what part of your process and your being is the point of growth? That’s the piece. And it’s about bringing it in. But all of it is accessed inside and in truth. What’s happening? What’s showing up for me in form to kind of direct me and guide me and show me where I’m really at? We can have a lot of ideas about ourselves. But what’s really happening in my life?

Rick: Do you find that you have the capacity to entrain with people? So, you kind of get on their wavelength and tune in, and you find yourself just kind of knowing them in a way, even though you may have just met them, and stuff comes out of your mouth that’s just what they need to hear.

Lucy: Yeah, yeah. It’s really humbling. Because there’s nothing in you that is not in me. There’s nothing I see in you that is not in me. And I don’t know what happens, but I can, it’s as if I become nothing and you become me. I’m already nothing, right? Silly. But it is that, and I can feel. But I don’t tell people. I don’t sit here like this and tell them. That’s not useful. Lead them on a path to find it themselves. This is the thing. And if I’m showing them what their life is saying to them, they’ll say, “Oh, this happened today.” And I’m like reframing it. This is life’s language. It’s saying this, and it helps them get that skill and contact that skill in themselves. So, they start going into the world and they start reading life in that way. Oh, life’s speaking to me that way. So, it’s reframing what’s happening in existence. What do you think is being said there? What’s being shown? So, that I internalize the guiding light. It’s not in me. It’s not outside of them. It’s really connecting you with you. And that is God. And that is grace. And that is the all. That is the light. It’s in you. So, it’s making that come to the forefront. And actually, there’s a beautiful alchemy that happens because as I see that in you, as I look through the conditioning, otherwise it’s my conditioning talking to your conditioning, right? But as I look through the addictions, the grief, all the things, at the same time as holding it, I see the being. And in doing that, just by witnessing it, we bring it into being. It’s like the wave becomes a particle. We bring that forward by being with each other in that place. And that’s powerful. Just the light of awareness on it is powerful. And then there’s all the other things, like the imprints of a loving relationship when you haven’t had that. The imprints over and over again of non-judgment. Yeah, so, you know, you’re addicted to wine. And a lot of men have porn addiction.

Rick: Your voice just broke up there. You just said, I think you were just starting to say you’re addicted to wine, but your voice broke up or froze on the word wine. So, start from that sentence.

Lucy: Yeah, so you’re addicted to wine or you’re addicted to porn or you’re addicted to gambling or you’re addicted to all of these things that we think is so shameful. And we want to address those. We definitely want to clear those things. They do not serve you or life. But by being so ashamed of all these parts of ourselves that we have to bury them and hide them away, we can’t really be with them. And it’s when we can be with them in this non-judgmental container that a lot of ease can come in around them. A lot of kind of compassion and a lot of, you know, that’s when we can never shift darkness outside of us until we meet it inside of us. You know, and when we do that, then things can start changing. We’ll long for a better world, but it starts here. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, starts here. Great, Lucy. Well, that was nice. Great conversation. You’re a really easy person to interview because it just flows so effortlessly. And, you know, you come out with such great stuff. You quashed my bad habit of talking too much quite naturally because I’d rather listen to you than listen to myself. But anyway, so you have a new website, and I’ll be creating a link to it on your page on batgap.com, on both pages, the old interview and the new interview. And you’re coming to the States in October or November of 2023. And it’ll be interesting to see how things continue to unfold for you because you definitely seem to have a kind of a divine purpose or mission. And you’re young. And, you know, I think that you’re going to have a real interesting life over the coming decades. I mean, not that you’re not having one already, but you’re playing a beautiful role in the world.

Lucy: Thank you. Thank you. As are you. As are you, which I think you know. Yeah, I’m really grateful. And I would be just as happy to work in the hospice. So let’s see. Keep doing that.

Rick: Who knows? You may end up doing that.

Lucy: Yeah, yeah. And my book is out to actually for preorder on Amazon.

Rick: Okay, I’ll link to that on your BatGap pages.

Lucy: Yeah, yeah. It comes out in November, but preorders are up now. I’m told preorders make a difference. I don’t understand any of that stuff, but that’s what I’m told.

Rick: Probably if there’s a lot of preorders, it helps to maybe their algorithms, you know, raise it up higher or something. Also, when they actually start shipping them, there would be this big surge of shipments, and it would be probably marked as a bestseller or something in its particular genre. So good for people to preorder it. It helps you.

Lucy: Yeah.

Rick: So I’ll link to it.

Lucy: And hopefully really helps them, too. I think that, yeah, as I said, poetry can get under the mind. It can get in that way that sometimes concepts and things delivered in another way can’t, which I love.

Rick: Yeah. And you’ll have links to your retreat information, right, on your website.

Lucy: Yeah, it’s all on my website.

Rick: Oh, there already?

Lucy: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, good. All right. So thanks so much. Get ready for your phone to start pinging.

Lucy: It’ll be tumbleweed this time. I’ll be like, “Great, I’m going to the beach.”

Rick: Crickets. But anyway, it’s good being your friend, and it’s nice being in touch, and we’ll stay in touch and keep on trucking, as they say. Sending you so much love and I mean it.

Rick: Good. Yeah. All right. So thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. My next guest is a woman named Etta Jackson, who has written a number of interesting books. I’m listening to one now called “The Role of Consciousness in Governance,” about how there’s kind of a big change happening in the world, and nations have destinies, and how there’s a kind of a divine purpose to different nations, and how consciousness, and especially the raising of consciousness to higher values, helps guide the destinies of nations, and so on. And she’ll be talking about some other stuff, too, I’m sure, but anyway, that’s the theme I’ve picked up so far from her. And be sure to go to BatGap and explore the menus. Sign up for the email newsletter if you want to. And if you’re watching this video still, subscribe to the channel. It helps. Speaking of algorithms, it helps boost a particular interview if you like it, and also if you subscribe to the channel. YouTube automatically brings these things to people’s attention more if they show that kind of response. So we appreciate it when people do that. All right, thanks again, Lucy. We’ll be in touch. Keep us informed of your adventures.

Lucy: Bye, bye.

Rick: Bye, bye.