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 almost 620 of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the past interviews menu. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers so if you appreciate it and would like to support it there is a PayPal button on every page of the website. And then there’s a page with our address and stuff like that on it in case you’d like to use some method other than PayPal. My guest today is Lucy Grace. ‘Hey, Lucy’. Lucy is in New Zealand. I’ve got to start by reading an email we received from Lucy a couple of months ago. She said Hi, Rick and Irene. I live on a remote island called Waiheke. Is that the right pronunciation?
LUCY: Yeah, Waiheke
RICK: in New Zealand. I just wanted to say the deepest thank you for what you do. Your work just touched my life, opened my heart, supported me on my journey more than anything else. Funny story I thought you’d like. I’ve had and continue to have spontaneous shifts for the last four years in particular., I had no idea what was happening to me when the big one of 2018 happened. I never had a teacher or even knew about any of this. I was googling the funniest things trying to find out. I was 36 at the time and before bed one night I prayed sincerely for help figuring it out. I woke in the morning and I heard the words ‘Buddha at the Gas Pump’. I was stumped. WTF? I thought I mean seriously try decoding that message. I found but I guess you googled it again and found BatGap and you say your life changed. Through you I understood myself and found guidance, a million thank you’s keep doing what you do. So we were kind of blown away by that message and kept in touch with Lucy and started corresponding back and forth. And we’ve had a bunch of little chats on skype since then, played around with her daughter doing magic tricks. And, you know, this, Irene, and I, you know, feel like we’ve found a new friend. And we thought that you the audience would really like to hear more about Lucy’s story. In fact, when you wrote that thing, Lucy I posted it on Facebook and people kind of flipped out they were really inspired by it. And they thought, Wow, does BatGap have agents in the celestial realm or something promoting it. But anyway, it’s a cool story. And having told that, do you want to just start embellishing from there? Or should we take kind of a chronological approach and you know start with your childhood and work our way forward?
LUCY: Yeah, I suspect probably childhood and forward would make more sense.
RICK: Okay. So you’ve told us that you had a very impoverished childhood kind of a welfare child ashram sort of set up – start with that.
LUCY: Yeah, so my mom had me when she was 20. She was a very free spirit, on lots of drugs and tattoos on her knuckles.
RICK: What on her knuckles?
LUCY: Tattoos. She yeah, she was the wild child of the family, the black sheep of the family. And my first part of life was in a woman’s refuge home. And then we went from couch to couch wherever we could get a place to rest. And eventually, at five, we found a home in a really rough neighborhood. So childhood for me, poverty really has a way, relative poverty really has a way of shrinking your world. So I stayed in this one house for 13 years with just mom from five until eighteen. And within the home, there was a lot of chaos and violence. Emotional violence and physical violence. Mom was a beautiful, beautiful woman but she has mental health things going on and especially at that time. And she had a lot of pressure. She was a solo mom. So she was doing her best with what she could but so yeah, within the house, I kind of orbited her chaos in a way. She was always this swirling vortex of energy, of kind of self-hatred and darkness, and yeah, she kind of lived in a place of atonement, if that makes sense. Like that she just hated who she was. And really, I was in a small house with just her. So she would have these periods of, you know, breaking down. She would hold everything, and then she would beat me and yell at me. And I would have to hide I would often hide in the toilet. It was the place I could lock the door, and she would bash the door down. And eventually, she would come to because underneath all of that wounding, and that trauma that she was carrying, she was a beautiful person and is a beautiful person. So eventually, she would break down and she cried, I’m so sorry, you know, forgive me. And so I had a lot of this. And in myself, I felt light. And I often had a lot of joy. But I was, yeah, stepping around this darkness and in close relationship to this darkness. You know, there’s nothing else to dilute it. There’s no dad, there’s no siblings. And there were three possibilities for my dad. But all three of them left us. So that was kind of the architecture of my childhood. Outside the home, it was incredibly, incredibly rough. It was one of New Zealand’s roughest neighborhoods. I don’t know if it still is, but I won’t go too much into all of that, but a huge amount of violence and unsafety. You know, I’ll give one example or a couple of examples. For example, when I was eight, somebody broke into our house and tried to rape mum in front of me. And that was a task for him to get into a gang. So to get into the gang, he had to rape somebody. So this kind of stuff it was really unsafe and violent. And actually, for me, as a kid, when that happened, I was kept awake, I was asleep in my bed, and I could not sleep. I kept feeling this presence kind of waking me and I was able to call the police and stop that from happening. He ran away and all of this, but yeah, constant break-ins. In the end, we had locks on the inside of all our doors so that if someone broke into the kitchen, we could lock ourselves in the bedroom and stay there so they could ransack the house and we were safe. We had bars on the windows, we had horns that made a loud noise beside the bed. It was really, really rough. And we often went without food. We had to go asking for help for food and sometimes no power because we couldn’t pay the bills. It was cold.
RICK: What city was this?
LUCY: It was in Hamilton, New Zealand in a place called Fairfield. And actually, every other house was a state house. And in a way, it’s funny because I was the lucky one. We had our own house mum had saved and bought our own house. Everyone else had state housing. And they often had bare feet, the other children. I remember nits, you know nits going around the neighborhood and a lot of the kids got their heads shaved because they couldn’t afford the nit treatment. Whereas I was lucky and mum would prioritize …
RICK: By nits you mean lice I think, right?
LUCY: Yeah. So it’s really at that level like you’d look around the neighborhood. Oh, all the kids are getting their heads shaved, you know, their hair. And the lack of dignity and that and mom always looked after me in a way that meant I never had to do that. She actually, in that particular case, sold our couch to the pawnshop to get the $20 to buy the nit treatment. You know, she did so much for me in that sense. And I always came first. Yeah, and that space, I guess I always kind of felt like I was somewhere I didn’t belong. I really didn’t fit in this neighborhood. I just had that feeling of what are people doing and what you know. And so I would go to God, I would go to what I thought of as God. And it was funny because looking back I had so much light no matter what happened outside. I would get so shaken up and I would go into shock. I mean even now when I hear police radios, you know I go back to childhood because there was always police radios and break-ins and helicopters but still I would return to base. It seemed after a couple of days I seem to go back to being a very joyous kid. I was alone a lot, there wasn’t the money to go on holidays, we never went to the cinema or anything like that. So, and I had toys, but not lots, you know, I used to really sit alone a lot and kind of go into this place of just deep silence inside and find this place of love and nourishment there. And Mum ended up turning to religion when I was about eight, you know, hardcore Baptist, you know, really hardcore. And so I’d go to church with her, and I used to get totally into it. I would get hot hands, they’d be speaking in tongues, and I’d be there like, you know, worshiping and I remember very innocently, I must have been about seven or eight saying to mum, she was saying, ‘we have to go to church it’s Sunday, but I don’t want to go’ and I said to my mum, ‘Mum, God’s not in church, God’s everywhere, like a human being made that church’. And I said to her, ‘Mum, God’s in me’ I have such a vivid memory of this. ‘He’s in me’, I said, in the childlike way, ‘I’m God too and we can stay home today. We don’t have to go’. And she freaked out. You know, it was blasphemy. How could I say that? And so I stopped saying things like that. And I and I could see the holes in it. I could see that well, if God is a loving God, why won’t he allow people to be gay? Or why is this wrong? And this is right. That’s not love. And I used to see the holes really early on but, but I kept going, I eventually left all that. And that’s kind of childhood for me. I just stayed there in that home until I was 18. And I always had a deep sense of reverence and connection with the God in me and just kept it quiet.
RICK: That’s, that’s great. You mentioned that there were a lot of visitations and that kind of thing. From what, by whom, or?
LUCY: Yeah, when I was a child. It’s so funny for me talking about this stuff because I never talked about it. But I actually went through my old journals for this interview to try and remember because the childhood stuff is a lot hazier. And I found this entry that said, I was sad today. I was hungry. And it said but God came. And I felt this great energy come over me. So it still happens now and the only way. I don’t know how to describe it. The only way is this great energy comes onto me and almost envelops my body and fills me with a kind of deep peace. And I had that in childhood. It was like, just a hug from the other side. And it was comforting. For a few days that would stay with me. That kind of merging goes through the body. If a hug is around the body, this would go into the body. Things like that. And I could hear from a very young age, I could hear comforting words. I could hear. I mean, yeah, I could give lots of examples, I guess. I mean, one day, we had a little Māori girl that lived across the road and there was so much violence in our neighborhood, kids would get beaten up and left for dead by the river.
RICK: Let me just interject that the Māori are the indigenous New Zealand people. So when you say a Māori girl, that’s who you’re referring to? Yeah.
LUCY: And she was new to the neighborhood. And she had no friends and she was living with her granddad. And she had no toys. None. So she used to come to my house to play with my toys, and I had a few Barbie dolls and things. And one day I heard ‘give those toys to her’. It’s just one example.
RICK: Just like a voice.
LUCY: Yeah, just within and it’s not me. So I packed up the toys, but I loved those Barbies, I want them. And I had had to make donuts and sell them door to door to earn the money to buy them and it was hard-earned you know. And I’m packing them up and I’m even looking at my favorite dress, and I hear ‘there’s more joy in giving than receiving’. You know, this is just one example. And so I took them to her and mum said to me you have to be sure because ‘once you’ve given you can’t take it back’. And I gave them and sure enough the joy in giving it was such a beautiful lesson. So there was this intimacy. But I want to be clear, in childhood, it was less that loud hearing now it’s quite intense since all these big shifts, but back then it was much softer. It was much gentler, it was less. And in a way, I knew it was the god in me and now I look back it was that voice that I now know so intimately. So I always had comfort there you know, when Mum was having a bad day with her mental health and I was locked in the toilet hiding or whatever I could feel presence with me and I could hear comforting words, and I never really felt alone.
RICK: Yeah, have you heard these stories from people like, I don’t know, Christian Sundberg that I interviewed about a month ago and, and other people who say that we plan out our incarnation on Earth and the circumstances we’re going to be born into and stuff and there are some wise beings that help us plan it out. Then we end up coming into this life and very often it’s a huge shock because of the contrast from where we had been to where we now find ourselves. But they don’t abandon us. And I guess we could say God, in the universal sense doesn’t abandon us. But also if there are some kind of guardian angels or something, they don’t abandon us. They’re kind of keeping an eye on us and sometimes intervening if they can to make things a little easier on us. That kind of sounds like you. That’s what was happening to you.
LUCY: Absolutely and has happened in more intense ways after this period. I’m sticking to the periods.
RICK: We’ll get into those more intense things too, as we go along.
LUCY: Yeah, yeah absolutely. I loved the Christian Sunberg it really resonated with me as truth as my truth that resonated was my truth And I have felt that presence all along. For some reason. That was my path to be in that place for a really really long time absorbing the energy of mum that chaotic energy was imprinting on me.
RICK: I’m sure you were having a really good effect on her to just the way you say your daughter has a good effect on you, although in a different kind of chemistry, but I bet you are as a big blessing to her existence and still are.
LUCY: And let me be clear, mum has been the greatest blessing and I’m not just saying that. She is highly sensitive, which is why she’s the black sheep. And she was so in tune with nature, I would have chosen mum for this reason. She’s so connected to nature, we didn’t have a car because we were so poor until I was 14 when we got an old banger. But we would walk everywhere and mum would point out trees and birds and there was this deep connection there in nature. She was the kindest, if someone hurt me at school, and as a mum, this person was mean they call me ugly or whatever. She would say their hearts are hurting. Only hurting people hurt others. So the lessons I got from her were vast and that, really seeing what a person was and that they were beauty underneath. But the trauma was running the show. Yeah, so she was a blessing to me. She absolutely.
RICK: And I think she’s still alive the way you’ve referred to her.
LUCY: Yes, she’s still alive. Though I won’t show her this because she is very religious. And this would freak her out so I don’t talk to her about any of this. I haven’t really talked to anyone about any of this.
RICK: Yeah. That’s a whole topic in itself. We won’t get into that right now about why religious people shouldn’t be threatened by this kind of stuff, and that it’s actually a blessing, but we’ll leave that for another time. Okay, so now, we haven’t really I mean, when you were young like that you didn’t have any idea of what spirituality was or that there was formally such a thing or anything, you were just kind of going along, but you had this sense of God and you were getting guidance and so on.
LUCY: Absolutely. No, I had no idea about this whole spirituality kind of, I don’t know if what you want to call it the subculture, until literally when all of this kicked off in 2018 in a big way. I never equated it with that. It was just I assumed in a way that everybody had this. And I still think they do I still think many many people have this deep connection or these experiences that they just don’t share. So for me, it had always been a very intimate personal thing.
RICK: Yeah. Was that there’s a, I forget the name of the there’s a polling organization in the United States that’s, that’s done polls of the whole population about the number of people, Gallup, the Gallup poll about people who have mystical experiences. And that is a very significant percentage of the population do but a lot of people are afraid to talk about it.
LUCY: Yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure. We’re always guided. We’re always supported.
RICK: So you mentioned this big awakening thing that happened in 2018. But I take it there were some preliminary ones also.
LUCY: Yeah, so 18, I left home and I went to university. Even then, I didn’t know how to apply for university. I applied for one course. And like, it was one of the hardest courses to get into. And by some magic, I got in. So off, I went to the big city. And I, I mean, because of how we lived, I really had very little conditioning. I was not exposed to films, literature, music. You know, so here I am, I land in the big city. And I didn’t even know how to turn on a computer. I mean, it was really I mean, this is 2000. So computers weren’t as common as they are now. But I was pressing the screen in my first class going why isn’t it turning on. And the girl next to me said, you know, the hard drive, there’s something Oh, there’s something under here, let me see. So that I mean, this is just to illustrate how green I was I and in some ways, culturally green. But in other ways, I had been exposed to things many wouldn’t have been. So I went to university and I was 19. And I was loving being in the world. Finally, I had a bit of money. I was working two jobs, and I was paying my own way. I could buy nice food and clothes. And my flatmate had been watching an Oprah show. And on the Oprah show was Gary Zukav. I don’t know if you know him. He’s got Seat of the Soul.
RICK: I was just reading about yesterday. That’s his, his being on the Oprah show and getting launched there and all that anyway.
LUCY: No way! Because this was a big moment. Um, yeah, so I was making dinner and I’m kind of watching it over his shoulder. But while I’m making dinner, he said, the personality and the soul are different. And he said something like that. And I was thinking about this for a few days, and I bought his book. I never read the book, by the way, I bought it. And I read the first half of the first chapter, and then I put a little rabbit ear on that and for 20 years I didn’t read it. But I read the first couple of pages one night, and there was a line saying the personality is separate from the soul, you know, sounds really simple. Now I know it sounds. But at the time, I was 19. And that had been my experience, but I’d never heard it said. And I went and sat in the window of my bedroom. And I was looking at the stars and I was thinking, he says the personality is separate from the soul. And then, yeah, then there was this deep recognition in the body. And what happened, I can just say what happened, as the experience as I experienced it. It was a vision, kind of where the skin all fell away and fell down. And then I had this recognition, I’m not Lucy. And it was a shocking, shocking thing I really was like, and as the skin fell, and the body fell, and I was still me, I looked to the sky. And I saw almost like paper doll people I saw black silhouettes, all holding just stretching and stretching, and I knew those to be my lives. And I had never heard of reincarnation, I’d never thought of reincarnation. And I wouldn’t have even been able to name it as that then. This is just the experience. I knew that they were my lives. And as that came in the thought arose, that can’t be true, because otherwise, they’d have to be a way of dropping the body. And then I realized fuck that’s death. That is what death is. And I had this shock. And as all of this was happening, it was an imprinted kind of knowing. And you know, I just want to caveat this sounds really cheesy and trite now, but at the time, I have to own it. This is what happened. There was a knowing that there wasn’t time there was a knowing that all of those lives I was looking at are happening now. And I know that sounds cheesy …
RICK: Ah no a lot of people say that time is not linear, we just kind of interpret it as linear, but it’s actually – everything is happening simultaneously.
LUCY: Yes. So this happens. So I sat and chewed the fat on all this for a couple of days and I felt really tender, I felt like, God, I’m not …. And I knew this deeply. And it was a bit of a, it was grief, I was, you know, trying to come to terms with that. And over this period of time, lots of other things started happening, I started seeing spirits. And I would see they would just not all the time, just sometimes. And it would happen sporadically when I wasn’t really ready, or and it really frightened me, to be honest, I didn’t like it. They were just normal people like I can see them as I see you sitting here.
RICK: How do you know there were spirits were they kind of like ghosts like or …
LUCY: it’s really cheesy, but they kind of have a translucent hue. And often the energy that was coming was needing something from me, which is why it frightened me, they would come toward or they would, it was a kind of desperation. And it would really frighten me it would be out of nowhere, you know. And that went on for 10 years that and I kept trying to turn it off. And I couldn’t and then there was I ended up managing it later. So at that time, and I won’t go into all of it. But I’ll give one example of things that were happening at that time. And, and let’s be clear, I had this experience of Lucy falling away. But I want to be really clear because that was not what happened later. I was still localized and a person then. I was still a person having a shift in perspective. It was a bloody great shift. But it was still a person seeing through some untruths. You know, and I was seeing spirits and all this. But yeah, consciousness was localized in the person then. And I would have these beautiful, beautiful experiences. One was, you know, I’m walking to work and went there every day. But this day, I don’t know why but I stopped at the top of the hill and I turned back to look at the hill, I walk every day and it was glowing, everything was golden, the tree, and I had this Epson low absolute awe. I was only 19. And I looked at my hand and it was glowing, too. And I knew it was the same as the tree, you know. And I had this reverence utter knowing that, ‘Oh, my God, I’m in a body again’, was the feeling. And it was and that was so rich. And it was I had this impression, this absolute knowing of it took so much to get here. I can’t give words to this feeling. I can’t find the way to describe the actual knowing that it was something like there were so many paths, there was so many things I had to align had to do to be in this body standing on this ground in this moment. And I’m so grateful was the feeling of I’ve got this chance was the feeling to be here again. How marvelous, you know, so these kinds of things were happening a lot. I just went on with life. I was happy to be at university. I didn’t talk to anyone about this stuff.
RICK: Before we lose that point. Do you have a feeling or an insight that this, what you just expressed is actually true of everyone, even though they might not like their lives or feel like life is meaningless or difficult or unfair? So do you sort of see human life or human incarnation as a blessing or an opportunity for everyone?
LUCY: I would never want to speak for everyone else. Because I don’t know why you’re here, why anyone else is here. I don’t even really know why I’m here if we’re talking about knowing. But I can know my experience and these things have absolutely happened. So in a sense, yes, I do. I do hold that because I’ve experienced that. I do think that we can’t know why we’re here but this is such a great blessing to be here. And
RICK: Yeah, yeah, that’s why I brought it up. It came up in Christian Sundberg’s interview too, and I read a quote out during that interview. But, according to some spiritual traditions and teachers and all, it’s, it’s a pretty big deal getting to be human. It’s a good opportunity.
LUCY: I mean, that was the sense. And it wasn’t a sense from the person. It was. It was a kind of knowing that enveloped me, like a memory of how much it took to get here. And I couldn’t quite grasp the memory with the human mind. It was a knowing an all-pervasive knowing of the gift that it is to walk here, again, and the opportunity, you know, to be wisdom and to be love, instead of just knowing those things. Yeah, it was, it was really, really beautiful and no words I know can do justice to that. But yes, yes, I suspect we’re all, we’re all on the same boat.
RICK: I guess. So I mean, I’m no authority on it. But you know, a number of wise people that I respect have expressed that perspective. And if, as you say, you know, there’s this whole chain of paper dolls filled silhouettes that represented your different lives, you know, and we keep going through life after life in order to move along the evolutionary spectrum. And, and I think that, ultimately, is the purpose of each life, although obviously, there are very different lessons to be learned and experiences to be had in each life. But ultimately, they have the same overall purpose. Evolution.
LUCY: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this is mirrored for us in nature. It’s everywhere. Everywhere. We can see this we’re shown this if we have the eyes to see.
RICK: Okay, so let’s see. So there was that experience, you were 19. And at a certain point, maybe this is years later, you started googling things like remembering who you are. angels visiting or energy pouring out of my heart causing body paralysis.
LUCY: I started so this is kind of around the 19-20 mark. Things ticked on, as usual. I was at university, but some pretty big other things happened when I was around, maybe 20, 22, 23. Yes, some, I had a really strange experience we had a dark energy in one of our flats and even when you were young, we were partying around it and didn’t make too much of a fuss. But everyone knew you don’t go in that room. There’s something in there, you know, and we were all spooked out and joking, but it was very real, I have to say. And one night, I woke, this is a couple of years after all these experiences, but I carried that light, I always carried that light. Even though I didn’t speak about it. There was a joy and a peace and a kind of okayness in me. And I was asleep one night, and I woke to find this dark, heavy energy. I’ve had a lot of experiences with energy coming on the body, actually, on my body, and kind of trying to get in was the feeling it was rattling my whole body. It was a very intense thing. I often think of it sometimes and think I wonder what that was. And it was really feeling like a battle. And I don’t know is that a battle between an element of myself with myself, but it was really, really intense. And what came from the being was, ‘I am from God, you are not I am from God, you are not’ that just is what came out of me. And it maybe was 60 seconds and then it left. But I was really afraid and I slept with my flatmate that night. Things like that would happen. And then a really big thing started which continued through my life. I graduated university, with a journalism degree, which was a big deal in my family. No one had been to university, but I wasn’t getting a job. I had this kind of naive, like, everyone’s gonna line up and offer me a job and nobody was and I felt really afraid. Because I’d come so far come through all of that childhood or somehow got through university paid my own way and no jobs were coming. And one night I Ieft my body. That was the first time it happened. And I went to a different place and I sat at a table with two women. And they were very human in their ways one of them was young and very kind and the other was old and quite grisly and, and they told me what was going to happen in my life and it all come true. And that was the first time it happened. But it’s happened about six times in my life since then, at different intervals. So they spoke with me and they said, ‘don’t worry, you’re about to get this incredible job, you’re going to be the envy of all your friends. Just, it’s okay’. And then they showed me a green hill with a ladder on it. And they showed me falling off the ladder. And they said, ‘Oh, but you’re going to fall off the ladder in Europe’. And I said, ‘What do you mean? I’m going to die?’, you know. And then they started joking. And I often think how interesting that they were so human because the old woman said, ‘Oh yeah, you’re gonna die’. And the young girl said, ‘Don’t you’ll scare her’. And I was like, what’s going on? And I want to be clear, this is not dreaming. This is absolutely real. It’s as real as you and I are. And so what happened then was I got so excited about the job, and I left the table, and I came back into my flat, and my flatmates were all sleeping. And I had a best friend who I told everything to, and I went into her room, and I could see her as floating above, I could see her sleeping. And I really want to tell her, ‘I’m about to get this amazing job’. And I’m trying to wake her, but of course, you know, I’m, I’m not physical, so I can’t. But what’s interesting here is she kind of went, mmm mmm mmm, while I was …
RICK: Something was impacting her?
LUCY: Yes, something was impacting her but I couldn’t. So I thought, I’ll give up on this. And I went back into my body, which was in the bed. And sure enough, I ended up getting an amazing job at our national news station. And that that was really lucky that happened by a series of coincidences. And I had this junior reporter role. And yeah, later on, I left all that when I went to Ireland. So they were right. And yeah, so I found myself in the news and hated it didn’t fit there. I was …
RICK: You were a reporter of some sort.
LUCY: Yeah, a junior journalist, and in all fairness I made coffee a lot and gave out newspapers to the senior journalists.
RICK: And you knew how to make donuts already.
LUCY: But it was, it was a really lucky landing. I, my friends are working in juice bars and magazine shops out of uni, you know, and I was in this. I was on the telly sometimes, very rarely, but sometimes. But it wasn’t. I thought I was going into journalism to save the world, you know, to make things better. And actually, I learned pretty quickly it was to sell advertising. And yeah, I ended up leaving, I was sent to this woman who had lost her husband and a child in a car accident. And I had to take the camera crew to interview her. And that the editor said to me before I left, I was there about a year and a half, he said, ‘get tears on camera, you have to make her cry’. And went there and he said, ‘juice it up’. I remember him saying that. And I just, I felt so bad about myself doing this, you know, and that was the big one. The others weren’t. So I went in and I did, I made her cry. And I went into her beautiful home, you know, into her grief, I was maybe 23 or 22. I was probably 22. And I was really conscious that I don’t know what it is to really love a child or a husband. And here I am going into and so I did it. But I still did it. I said what are the plans you had that you don’t have any more and I knew that would make her cry? And after that the next day I quit, I just said, and it’s been a series of my life of having to make these choices? Are you going to go with what’s true? What you know to be true? Or are you going to go with what gives you some street cred or what society tells you you should want? And that sounds a bit cheesy, but it’s real. I was getting a lot of street cred from my friends for being at the news. And when I was at parties, people say what are you doing? I could say, I’m a reporter at One News, you know, and it was fancy. And I had never been fancy. The little girl in me wanted that. But I had to make this really tough call of saying I know this isn’t right. And I know I have to go. So I left and I had nowhere to go and everyone thought I was crazy. My family thought I was you’re throwing away this career. I could really see the two paths. I could really see I could stay here and be a news anchor and I’ll be miserable. Everyone will think I’m great, but I will be miserable. Or I can just go so I jumped and I’ve kind of done that a lot in my life. It’s like what are you going to choose? You or this you know,
RICK: That’s great. These things are like tests, you know, and I think it’s not just some mundane circumstance where you have to, you know, there’s some kind of cosmic significance to making a decision like that. It’s kind of like it’s a test and based on the decision you make it can change the trajectory of your whole life.
LUCY: Absolutely. And I could see that I remember standing on a precipice and seeing two paths. And actually, there was me and only one other girl who were Junior reporters, there were only two in the whole year. And she’s now a news anchor. So I saw that I saw that, but it was a hard choice. I mean, I really struggled with it. But yeah, so I left, met an Irish boy, and went to Ireland. And in Ireland, this is when all the trauma from my childhood came through. So I’d always buried it. And I didn’t realize. So I ended up kind of waking in the night screaming a lot and things I couldn’t control. A bit like Vets when they come back from the war, basically.
RICK: Like PTSD
LUCY: Yeah, I got diagnosed with it. So I ended up being forced to go to like a psychotherapist because I was I didn’t want to, I kind of had this attitude of no, my childhood will not have any bearing on what’s going to happen. I can control what I do. And I can, you know, so I was really like, I’m fine. I’m just you know, but I was waking in the night and screaming and I would see people over me and I was forced basically to go and do the, do the work on the personality structure. And I was diagnosed with PTSD and did a lot of work for a year. And the reason I’m saying this is because I don’t want there to be any illusions that there’s just some big spiritual pop and stuff happens. I worked really, really hard on cleaning out the psychology and stuff. I didn’t know I was doing that then I was kind of forced to do it. Because of the nighttime screaming, my boyfriend was like, You got to sort this out. This is crazy. I was freaking him out in the middle of the night. So I did a series of therapy. And right at the end, I spent one year in Dublin. And again, I walked I was sleeping and I walked with that guide.
RICK: You What?
LUCY: At the end of Dublin, I woke up and I was walking in another plane with that same guide that had visited me earlier. And we were in the most beautiful place. And it was very, very real. And she said to me, ‘you can ask me any question and I’ll answer it’. And I went and asked her every question I’d ever wanted to know. And she I knew that I had all the answers. And she said, but you’re not going to remember any of this when you go back. But the thing I remember is she said to me, ‘I am always with you. I’m always with you’. And she said right, you have to go back now. And I said ‘no, no, no, no, I don’t want to go back. This is so beautiful. Don’t send me’. And she said, ‘you must’. And I heard di di di di, di di di di in this place and I looked around saying what’s that? And then I was back in my body in the bed and the alarm was going but I was wide awake, you know. And so there was this, it feels like they gave me this gift of the alarm being in both places. So that yeah, it was this complete validation like, Oh, my God. So, looking back after that I had six years in London, which for me was the only period of my life where I was really separate. I went through the six years in London of being really untrue to myself and going as far from grace as I possibly could. Well, not as I possibly could. They could have been much worse.
RICK: But you were still with the Irish guy, right?
LUCY: Yeah, yeah, I married the Irish buy in the end. And so I went to London and I was in the city and I was kind of free. It’s the first time I think it’s the time I really went to sleep. And the only way I can explain it as normal stuff, we were just partying a lot, drinking a lot. We’d stay out dancing and drinking until 5 am with this group of Irish and English friends and we would stumble home with the birds. And you know, we were in the pub every day after work and I was never good with drinking. I would get so unwell the body really said no. But I kept trying determined to be part of the game you know. And just in my relationship there was a knowing a deep knowing that it wasn’t right. But it was safe. And I had huge compassion for that little girl in me that needed safety. So but I just wasn’t being true in so many ways. I wasn’t being true in my relationship. I wasn’t being true in my job. I was staying quite small. I was working now for a big international NGO. And I was offered promotion after promotion. And I kept turning it down, saying, ‘No, I want to be free. I want to travel’ and I was traveling all over. And I was kind of staying, hiding. And what I’ve come to see is, you know, there are a million ways to hide if we want to. And that’s really that period is what I was doing. And I think that’s why the guide came in before that period and said, I’m always with you, I think. Yeah, and yeah, I just, I went through that. And, and I’m glad I did, actually, it was probably really beneficial to go through all that to kind of really live in a way that wasn’t true. Because then you, you know the difference, right?
RICK: Yeah. Here’s that quote from Amma. ‘Keep hope and use hardships to rise. Only when one gets a few blows in life does one learn to look within. It is when we experience tragedy that we wish to learn how to transcend that sorrow’.
LUCY: That is so beautiful, I can feel that. I’ve often thought of it. Like, someone said it to me once and it stayed with me like an arrow. It’s like the deeper backwards you go, the deeper down you go into suffering. It’s like the higher, the higher, you can go. It really breaks open the body in a way and increases the sensitivity to bring you to this place of deep listening and deep receiving because you’re in pain, and you don’t have to be in the position I was in, you can just be a normal person whose parents don’t really give you much attention.
RICK: And people shouldn’t be thinking, Okay, I think I’ll party for the next decade. So that I can be really spiritual. So that’s not what we’re suggesting.
LUCY: No, no. And the partying wasn’t the suffering. That was the hiding, that was really not facing what I knew to be true. And I had a huge empty hole in me. I would be at the pub, talking small talk thinking at the deepest part of me did not want to be there with every fiber. I knew it was wrong. But I was in that delusion. You know, I was just like, This is not me. This is bullshit. But it’s what was happening. And I honor that.
RICK: So how did you finally get out of that phase?
LUCY: We left London and we came home and I got really sick. So basically, I wasn’t doing what I should do. And I hit a wall. Looking back, didn’t see that then. Got so sick, and nobody knew what was wrong with me. I went to every doctor, every naturopath, every holistic doctor, and the blood tests kept coming back as your white blood cell counts really high. So something’s wrong, but we don’t know what. And I was so ill that for about six months I was just in bed most of the time. I completely lost my voice for six weeks. I mean, all of it. There was a period where my partner, the same Irishman had to wash me in the shower because I couldn’t stand up and I would be on the floor. I was just and they were diagnoses of chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia. There are all these different things floating around. But it was really these syndromes when people didn’t know what was wrong. They bash you into a syndrome. Yeah.
RICK: You know, there are examples of that kind of thing happening to people prior to a spiritual awakening. Adyashanti went through something like that. St. Francis of Assisi went through something like that, you know. If you ever saw the movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon, he was like, really sick and in bed for a long time. And then when he finally came out of it, there was this, you know, it was a whole new world for him. But there are numerous, numerous examples. I don’t know what it is exactly. Maybe some huge load of karma being worked off. Or maybe, you know, nature is forcing you to just shut down so you can re-tool your whole orientation.
LUCY: You know looking back, I see that quite clearly. And I’ve often reflected on it. At the time it was honestly agony. I was really frightened. I had been fit I used to be one to go to the gym and do a spin class followed by Box Fit class. I had been vibrant and all of my vibrancy was gone. I couldn’t do anything. And I was really frightened. I used to lay and of course, I told my boyfriend you go out you do things. I used to just lay alone all day looking. And I couldn’t sleep all the time. So you just lie there. And I think there’s a couple of benefits to this if I see it from the higher perspective now, and one is it kept me out of life, I had just got back to New Zealand. There’s no coincidence This happened when I just got back was a couple of months into being back. And so I couldn’t reach all my friends, I couldn’t re-establish a life that would have continued like the old one. I was kept down. Now back at my life all the time I was kept out of normal life, I was kept out in childhood and really University in London were the only times I wasn’t excluded from living normally. So this was another period of no. And as I lay there, I would have visions things would happen. It was this kind of thing like there is this in-between existence really where you, you float between the body and out of the body, and you are kind of processing a lot. I’ll give one example of something that happened when I was ill that I still don’t understand. And I certainly didn’t then. Another going out of the body but it was very different. I woke and I found myself in complete blackness, everything was black, and I’m awake as I am now with you. And I was black, I was that but I was the mind. And I was exactly what’s looking out of my eyes now. But there was nothing, there was no infrastructure no person. I was in the blackness and I was the blackness deep silence deep. And the mind looked for an identity. And I looked for I know, I’m supposed to be a person, but I couldn’t remember which person. I looked, I looked, felt around with my mind for an identity, there was nothing. I felt around for infrastructure, there was nothing. This is black, and I am that. And then fear came in this kind of current, very gentle current of fear. And I went through this tunnel, this sucking, and I went back through the top of my head again. And as I came into the body, I filled the body, the memory of, ‘Oh, I’m Lucy’ came in, and I have parents. So I have that. And as that all came in, I saw a cross and it was time/space. And I knew that was my location. Okay, I’ve got an identity, I’ve got location. And then interestingly, the bedroom I was in sprung up, like that. Kind of went around me as I came into the body, up sprung the bedroom. And here I was. And so this is when I knew nothing about anything of this. I’d been deeply unwell, I’d hardly been doing anything. And I remember the shock of it. And I remember sitting up and feeling like it was like a hologram springing up. That was the most impactful part of it for me was when, and I’m looking around, but what am I going to do? I looked over at my boyfriend who doesn’t, I never really shared any of this with and I thought, I’m not going to wake him up and tell him so I just left it. And I never really I might have told him I can’t remember in the morning. But things like this would happen when I was sick. Eventually. I was working. And so hearing, we were talking about hearing. Before I would get told where to work. Back when I was in Ireland and I wanted to work in humanitarian I heard the word UNICEF and I googled UNICEF and I ended up getting a job in London. The same thing happened. I was really sick. And I had this desire of I’m going to need to work because we were burning through savings. My partner wasn’t working and I heard Oxfam. And I thought, what’s that? I don’t quite know. And I yep I sent an email. I just sent one email because I was so sick. And I sent this email to them saying, Are there any jobs? Here’s my CV. And they said no. And then two months later, they emailed me, here’s a job do you want to interview? I was still extremely ill, but I managed it and went to the interview and then had to rest for like a week to recover. But I got that job. And so then I found myself very ill but having to work.
LUCY: I was deeply supported in that because my partner couldn’t get a job. So he was able to pick me up every day manage the whole house, he would get me from work, I would sleep all evening, I would eat something and then just and then all weekend I would have to rest and I mean that I would be in bed all weekend he used to take me for drives because I was so I’ll just so I could look out the window. And I used to see people running in their jogging pants and think they don’t know what they’ve got like my body just wouldn’t work. So I was in the silence all the time for a couple of years and I do the odd thing. I tried to do something and be like I can do this and I looked quite normal so I could put on a nice dress, go out and see some friends. And I would try and talk and hang out for half an hour an hour, I would get home and just cave. And just. Yeah. So I would try to be normal. But I couldn’t be I wasn’t able to be. This went on for a couple of years like this some mystical experiences like I just described. And this between world of silence, and …
RICK: It sounds like you have a syndrome of having a voice actually explicitly tell you what you need to hear Oxfam, right or Buddha at the Gas Pump? Or is this has happened. So whoever this is this guide or whatever, it’s kind of an interesting relationship you have.
LUCY: Yeah, and it comes in different ways. And it’s often, and it’s always it’s often – these are just little examples
RICK: That happens often.
LUCY: Oh, yes, yeah and often …
RICK: to this day?
LUCY: Yes, yeah. And often the language is not mine. So like they’ll say, words that I would never use. So that helps. Or they’ll say words that are then reinforced by something outside.
RICK: All right, here’s a question from Irene. Most people tend to categorize their spiritual path. In your case, you do not resonate with meditation or have a teacher or read books, etc. Would you say your path or teacher was simply life itself and a continual divine guidance and love of others?
LUCY: Looking back now, absolutely. I see that. I see that life was the curriculum that, like the education was the experience itself. And I also see, later down the track, when I was saying, when the big blast had happened, there were two really big blasts. I was saying, Why is this happening to me? Why is this happening to me, and I was really, and I stumbled across a quote from Osho. And I had no idea who this dude was, I was thinking, Who is this guy? But okay, and I read this quote, and it said, ‘There are two paths – one is meditation, and one is love’. And it really landed because I have always had and you know, I’m conscious I don’t want to sound cheesy with saying this. So I want to be really clear that when I say love, love for me, it’s not experienced in a kind of fluffy, saccharine, wishy-washy kind of way. This love is deeply, deeply settled, and deeply powerful. And it can say no, and, you know, it’s not this, like, I’m love and light thing. It’s very whole, and it’s really in the body. And it’s very powerful and deeply compassionate. And, you know, and that has, it’s not my love, but I don’t, I don’t own it. I don’t think of it as mine, but it has always flowed through me. And I mean, for example, I thought it was normal. I just, and I still think it’s pretty normal. I think it’s just clouded over and some but I was on the tube in London one day, and I don’t know if you know …
RICK: Like the subway.
LUCY: Yeah, Subway. I love that word, Subway. Um, and there’s all these people and I’m only five foot two. So I’m quite little. So I’m under all these armpits. It was like sardines, right. And I was with my friend, and I would get this, I get it a lot on public transport, I would just get love just rising and rising. And this is when I was in my lost years, you know but it’s still there. And this love for just, I turn to her and said, ‘Do you ever just feel like you love everyone so much?’ and she looked at me. And I said, ‘I just want to hold them and tell them it’s all gonna be okay’. And she said, ‘No, I hate people they’re disgusting’. And I remember going ‘Oh’ you know. And I’ve had that a few times where I’ve shared this feeling and it hasn’t really landed. As I think people see it as either foolish or insincere. And it’s none of those things.
RICK: Sounds good to me.
LUCY: So that love has always been ever-present. And it’s why I went into aid work. You know? I couldn’t. I couldn’t see – I needed an outlet for it.
RICK: What was that thing about falling off a ladder on a hill? Was that a literal experience or some metaphorical thing?
LUCY: Yeah, no, it was metaphorical. They said you’re going to get a great job and then you’re going to fall off the ladder in Europe. So I fell off the work ladder and went into aid work which was incredibly fortunate. That was so competitive to get into humanitarian aid and to jump from this journalism role to this humanitarian aid role was, you know, it was I was really grateful I was really lucky that when I wanted to do something when I put tension on it, I seemed to be able to do it.
RICK: So that was Oxfam?
LUCY: No, I went through Fair Trade in Dublin and then UNICEF in London and Save The Children in London for years. And then Oxfam. I can’t remember where we were.
RICK: You went through that phase where you were so sick that you could hardly but you got the job with Oxfam, you said, and you had to just recuperate all the time when you weren’t working. I think that’s kind of where we left your story.
LUCY: Some mystical things happening and recuperating, and anytime I tried to join life, it was a big no from the universe. And I really had to face myself and ended up in a leadership role in Oxfam. It was a really big job and got married, bought a house on Waiheke this tropical island, and was really going like for the three big m’s marriage, matrimony and mortgage, I kind of was doing the normal thing. And that there was so much of me that was kind of just holding it together. When I look back, I was kind of walking this path that never felt true. I loved the work. And I was shining in the work at that point. And I was giving the work all that I was. But I knew that there was some quiet voice in me that knew the marriage was not right. But it was really shut down. Because I was too scared. You know, and I have such compassion for that. Too scared to leave the safety. That person had been the only safety I’d ever really known. And, you know, I’d had this crazy childhood, I’d done everything by myself through uni. And here was this beautiful man, and we were best friends, who was very stable and very loving. But there was so much to me, I often felt unmet, you know. So I’m in this marriage. And one night, I had another one of those experiences where I was told what was coming. I had a lot of, I know it to be lucid dreaming now. But back then I didn’t. And you know, there was no conscious or active spiritual search for me. But I used to have a feeling of wanting to know the truth. I had this constant like, I want to know the truth and in these lucid dreams I would be like, oh, I’m dreaming I can fly and have fun. I’d like flying or do fun things but I’d always try and find another person to ask them. What are we doing here? Tell me what I’m doing here. And it was like, often they would talk, I find that amusing now. They would speak and tell me but there was a huge whooshing sound in my ears so that I wasn’t allowed to hear what they were saying. This particular night, I’m in a lucid dream. And I asked one of them, what are we doing here? And she said, ‘I’m just going to tell you what’s coming for you’. Then she said, ‘You’re about to have a baby girl, you need to prepare yourself. And you’re about to go to Europe. You’re going back to London, and you need to let go of a particular thing in London or you never will. And I said, ‘I’m not going to London we’ve no money’. And then I mean I left the dream. And I went to work the next week and sure enough, my boss said, “We need to send you to Barcelona for work. Why don’t you take a few weeks in London?” And then I thought I’m definitely pregnant. And I was pregnant and I knew it was going to be a girl. So off I went to London and you know these things were happening. I wasn’t at all awake in that way. But I yeah, there was lots of that lucid dreaming stuff. It’s really picked up since the big shifts. And basically, I had a girl a little girl, and a wonderful pregnancy full of light and ease but the minute she was born… It was a really violent labor. She got stuck and she was round the wrong way. And it was 40 hours. It was like I know a full working week. And I was determined to do the birth vaginally so I was saying no C section I and I just remember being in the space of saying this is the most horrendous pain and I hadn’t got any anesthetic, and she got stuck on my hip. So it was just, I think, and the reason this is relevant to this is I’m pretty sure that as she was being birthed, I was so determined to do it. Some, I think she might have moved energy or she broke open the body in some way that set something off. Because it was like day and night, I had her had this glorious pregnancy. And I was up ladders painting the house at 40 weeks, you know, I was so and then I had her. And this detachment and this blackness
LUCY: Actually feels really tender to talk about it because it was I had all of the stuff during my life, all the break-ins, all the violence, all the trauma, the illness, even when I had the illness, and I felt at my worst, I could still feel the light inside. I remember shuffling down the street when I was practicing walking again. And I was trying to, if I can just get to the end of the street, I would be amused because I, could still see the light, I could still feel the lightness of my being under the illness. And I used to watch that when I was set on the lightness of my being the sparklers here. But when I had Rosie, everything left. I couldn’t hear anymore. I would reach for the hearing for the guidance and it was gone.
RICK: Do you think it was a kind of a postpartum depression sort of thing?
LUCY: It lasted two years, I think, looking back that it was needed. It was part of the process. And thank God, I wasn’t diagnosed with postpartum depression, because, and I wasn’t. I went to a doctor and they said it might be it might not be. But that if they had medicated me, I wouldn’t. I don’t think I would have gone through this beautiful natural process that life had led me through. I basically needed breaking open. It’s like everything else hadn’t bought me to my knees yet. It was like no matter what I’ve been through I was a fighter. I was like I can, you know. And it’s like I needed this. Absolute annihilation. And it was …
RICK: Kind of like a dark night of the soul then.
LUCY: I read that later and it resonated. I read it much later. And I thought ‘God was that what that was’, but I couldn’t find God. I just couldn’t feel I had always felt it. And she didn’t sleep. So I was waking up at one point in one month, she would wake every half an hour. And like imagine that. I mean, really imagine a couple of years of not sleeping.
RICK: Having met Rosie, I wouldn’t be surprised if she still carried on like that. She’s such a bundle of energy.
LUCY: She’s awesome. She’s such a joy. Yeah, she actually thinks now I’m super lucky. Now she sleeps until 8 am. But um, yeah, it was the most shocking and tense and I was 35 when I had her. I was living my life I had, you know, and suddenly I and I would move to a new place. So I had no support. I didn’t have many friends yet. I had to leave my job. So all of these things that made up Lucy were stripped away
RICK: So just to tie up some loose ends here with what you said. It sounds like you said that. If you had opted for a C section, or if you had taken, you know, allowed them to numb the pain in some way, you wouldn’t have gotten the full lesson or something that you needed. You wouldn’t have had the experience that you needed to have in order to shift you into this new period of your life that you’re you haven’t finished telling us about yet. But that actually had a good effect. Is that kind of correct?
LUCY: Yeah, I don’t know. The truth is, I really don’t know. I don’t know if it was the birth or if it was something else. All I know and I did have drugs, I had to have drugs on my hip when she got stuck in my hip but the rest of me wasn’t there were no drugs. So all I know is I had this weird determination to have her that way. And doctors kept saying that you’ve been in labor, 35 hours, 38 hours let us cut you and we will just bring her out.
RICK: They weren’t worried about Lucy’s wellbeing under the circumstances.
LUCY: They did. They got to the point where they said if you …
RICK: I meant to say Rosie, not Lucy. Rosie.
LUCY: Yeah I understood. They got to the point where they said if you can’t do it soon, we’re going to wheel you in. And some power came over me. I mean, I felt like a lion. And really, it’s otherworldly. And I just went I have to do that. And I just did it. I don’t know. I don’t know how I mean, they cut me and they didn’t want, they used a sucker and it was just carnage. And then I hemorrhaged. And they almost lost her and she was all gray. And it was, it was gnarly. It was gnarly. And, and it was beautiful. It was all of it. It was absolutely all of existence in one, one kind of experience. I remember when I was having her and she was about to come out. I was suspended in some other world and I, I felt just completely like a warrior. You know, it was beautiful. So it was beautiful. And it was horrendous all at once. But I don’t know if that was what did it. But yeah, I went into this period of having to let go of every attachment I ever had, you know, wearing nice dresses, going sitting in the boardroom and feeling meaningful, doing work that I loved, all of my friends again. And I was really isolated. They had this little mother’s coffee group. And they were all like baking and had like nice hair. And I would go along like with my crazy hair and my kid who didn’t sleep and wouldn’t have even brushed my teeth. I’d hardly made it there. And I’d be like, Oh, they’re all perfect. And I’m just this awful mess of a mother. And it didn’t come naturally to me. I was very selfish back then. I had lived 35 years just doing what I wanted. So there was a real giving up having to give over and bow to this other being you know, having to be in service to this other being was really hard for me. For some people that comes naturally. It didn’t for me at that time. So two years of yeah, just blackness. And anyway, she never ever slept, she had severe reflux, she was in and out of hospital. I couldn’t really leave the house very often because she also couldn’t feed. It would take her two hours to breastfeed two to three hours instead of 10 minutes. So I would have to stay in the house all day by myself feeding this child. And I basically lived like there was no day and there was no night it was all one thing. And she would never nap. I had to walk her everywhere. And I had bleeding feet. And I used to cry behind my sunglass. I mean, I was really, and I had this, you know, my close family, but they wanted me to leave her to cry by herself. They said just put her in the crib and leave her. And I just basically that’s how you guys were all raised.
RICK: The old Dr. Spock thing which has been refuted. Yeah.
LUCY: Yeah. And I couldn’t. I didn’t know about any of the theory. I just knew I can’t leave this baby. She needs me. And so there was a complete, I was tempted. Everybody wants to I want to be clear. Like everybody was telling me to do that everybody, the people I loved. And I and I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. So I had to go to her every hour at night to rock her to sleep. It was the only way she would sleep because she had the reflux, the vomiting, she had to be upright. And I want to I want you to really get a feel for this because it was awful. There wasn’t any night. There wasn’t any day. It was constant. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t shower when I wanted. I mean whole periods of three days would go by and I’d hardly showered. And that was really breaking me down, you know, breaking down the personality. Anyway, at eight months old. She was about eight or nine months. And all this time I kept saying, Why are you doing this to me? God, why why? And I talked to God and I got nothing back. One time I called God a cunt. I mean, this is how terrible it was. I actually and you can edit this out if you want to. But I actually was so lost and so angry. Like, why are you doing this the suffering just never ends. I had all the curtains closed mostly to rock her in the day because it was the only way. I was crazy. And it was crazy. The whole thing my husband was off at work. And he was a brilliant father but he had to work. And I said ‘You’re a cunt’ one day like I just got so angry. And this is the rage that was in me. I would punch walls. I would lock myself in the car and scream and I just felt like everything had been broken open. Just more completely out of control. And so I asked this particular day, it was another moment of rocking her all the time. And this time I asked in a way that didn’t care. She was eight or nine months old and I said, ‘why are you doing this to me’ and I heard finally I heard. And what was said, now looks to me really cliched. And I’m a bit embarrassed to actually say it because it seems really silly and cliched but what I heard and I just have to own this as true is ‘to give you the opportunity to transcend your ego’. And I had no idea what that meant. I didn’t know what ego meant. And it just annoyed me. I had this baby, big baby nine months, and I said, ‘What do you mean?’ I remember just being in her nursery ‘what do you mean? If you’re gonna tell me something, make it in language I can understand. I’m not arrogant’. Because I equated ego with arrogance. And then I said, ‘Oh just go away’. And, and they went, they really felt this. Any guidance that had come was just gone again. She was only nine months then. And I still had another year. And I’m glad I didn’t know this. But I still had over a year
RICK: Of going through that stuff?
LUCY: Yeah, of going through that stuff. And just the hardship of trundling through with this baby that just didn’t sleep, was ill, really being alone again. And then the Big Bang happened. So I had this conscious parenting book that I was reading by Shefali Tsabary, and it said follow your breath. Just if you need to calm down, just listen to your breath and shut your eyes. So I had started doing that I had started, I didn’t think it was meditation, I just started closing my eyes. And after a couple of days of going into that space, I had this urge to go and sit facing the sun and do that. And I did it. And I felt God. And this is massive because I hadn’t. And I felt deep, deep shame. I mean, I’d called him a cunt. So I was sitting in this room with my being open, listening to my breath, and felt God and my whole being felt so shameful. Um, and then another thing came where it was okay. And it wasn’t God making me okay, it was me making me okay, I had this inner feeling of I’m loved, it’s fine. You know, this is what it is. And I almost atoned myself if that makes any sense. And then a few days later, Rosie was over 2 now running around. And we had this horrendous day she kept falling and crying and spilling milk and screaming and it was just constant and I was exhausted. And up until this point, my whole journey of motherhood had been to say no, no. Every time I had to go to her at night I was like ‘why?’ and it was always ‘no’. And then it’s a really simple moment but she fell again and started crying and I felt this ‘Ah no. Can I not just be free? I just want to be me and I have to serve this other being and ah’ I feel quite moved talking about it. I looked at her little face and I don’t know what happened but everything in me folded in on itself. And I just gave it wasn’t conscious. It was just happening. I just gave over, I just gave in 37 years of fighting. I don’t know, just absolute complete surrender, and anyone looking at it from the outside wouldn’t see a thing. They would see a baby crying and a mother turning toward that baby. And she held out her little arms to me and I picked her up. And my whole being engulfed her. I just fell into her. And I don’t know if this will translate in words but I heard her scream go into this high, high pitch that I had never heard and I’m a mum, I know every cry. This high frequency. It was something it was a dance we were in together. Giving over to each other and. I sat after that she was better. I’d held her and you know nursed her back And there was such a tenderness in me, there was such a visceral bodily, you know, she kind of broke me bodily, like the heart was just the half of it. And I sat in nature and I felt odd, exhausted, and completely open. And I can still remember, it was October 2018. And over the next few weeks, everything changed. I mean, everything changed. When I talked about that opening I had at 19 I was still a person having a section shift. This was completely different. I became everything and everyone …
KNOCKING AT LUCY’S DOOR
LUCY: Sorry I’ve just got this lovely old man who has just visited. He doesn’t know I’m …
RICK: We can, we can take a break and we can cut this out.
LUCY: Yeah, I’ll just tell him I can’t talk right now.
RICK: Okay
LUCY TO NEIGHBOUR: Hiya Tory
TORY: Are you still in bed?
LUCY: I’m not in bed, I’m on a call. How are ya?
TORY: Are you still in bed? It’s half-past ten.
LUCY: No of course not. I can’t talk because I’m on a very important Skype call. I’m really sorry I can’t see you right now.
TORY: It’s all right. It’s ok. I’ll be a martyr and just cry quietly.
LUCY: Love ya Tory. Thanks for visiting. See ya soon.
LUCY TO RICK: Sorry about that.
RICK: That’s ok. You told me about that guy.
LUCY: Yeah, he’s 93. He’s on his and so yeah he visits. He lives a few streets away. Sometimes I take him on dates. Ok so, where were we?
RICK: Yeah, where were we Irene? So you were talking about this big shift that happened and it was different than when you were 19.
LUCY: It happened over a period of a few weeks but essentially life and light just poured in. It was as if, I kind of, oh god, how do I kind of explain it. It’s as if I had this feeling I remember what I am. And how could I have forgotten? And it’s always been here, and how did I not see it just seems so clear. And I had been in such darkness that the parallel that was so different. But I recognized it as all that I’d had in childhood and everything that had been in me and the kind of whisper was now really booming, you know, it was just opened and really loud. And I was so sensitive, I could hardly interact, like the interface of the personality almost wasn’t there. And I didn’t know how to almost be a person. Sounds really, really odd. But you know, and maybe I’ll bring it back to two experiences, I would look out the window, I remember looking out the window of my suburban home baby was playing and I thought I’ve never seen my garden. Because the whole thing looked completely different. How alive the trees were and the light, I could see the light inside the leaves. And it was just, it feels unexplainable. I suddenly could see the language, that life speaks to us all the time as if this curtain had been pulled up. And I could see, nature is always speaking to us. And I don’t mean that in a poetic, metaphorical way. I mean that in a very literal and solid way. Life actually communicates with us and suddenly I can see it. So when this happened, for example, I had 14 rose bushes that I loved and planted on Rosie’s first birthday. And when this first happened, I looked out one morning they had been beautiful, healthy plants. They were all dead, all of them. And right beside it was a bird’s nest with five dead baby birds and I went for a walk and there was a dead rabbit. And this is all in one day. This is just an example of how nature speaks to us. And I knew I am dying
RICK: Did somebody spray chemicals in the area or something?
LUCY: No. The rose plants had pink mold and we hadn’t noticed. It but there was horrific to look out and see all of them like brown and dead. But it really um, you know, that’s an obvious example. But life is subtle, and it’s subtly speaking to us every day. So I’ve also had that as a teacher. So when this kind of curtain was lifted, I could see it’s almost like reading the runes, or divination of some sort. I can see what’s being said and the reflection of what’s happening and everything has the meaning of …
RICK: So the dead rabbit and the dead rose bushes and the dead baby birds that had, that was a message.
LUCY: Absolutely. It’s just a reflection. In a way. It’s a reflection that I was dying because there’s this part of
RICK: The ego was dying. Yeah.
LUCY: Yeah, yeah. And there are always messages like that in nature. And so all of the stuff was happening at this time, I was kind of non-localized, I was kind of, and yet I had to, I had to find a way of functioning. And I was working, and everyone kept saying at work ‘What are you doing? You’re floating’ And I was in this other space. I was really just, yeah, nothing hurt, everything bounced. And it was kind of a state that was a state for a period of time. Anyway, I got the sense I have to leave my job.
RICK: Yeah I mean, were you getting anything accomplished anymore at your job? Or were you just a space cadet?
LUCY: I was I was, but I, there was a knowing that it wasn’t true for me. There was a deep knowing that I’ve come to the end of this now and it really only took two months, I as soon as this happened. I knew I had to go. And I handed in my notice. And because I was in leadership, that was a long period. But um, and then the guidance started coming in really thick and fast and really loud. So for example, this is a sweet story about guidance and how we’re always supported. The day that I was leaving my job. I was sad because I loved that job. I’d been there six years, they were my family. I didn’t want it like I loved it. But I knew I had to. Again, that choice of are you going to align with what’s true or are you going to align with feelings or whatever. So I had to leave. So I’m there in the morning, sitting quietly before this last day, and I hear I hear ‘Have a look at what the meaning of your name is’. And I thought, all right, so I had a look. And I had a vague idea, but I’d kind of hadn’t thought about it for years. And it means light, Lucy means light. And then I heard a kind of sweet chuckling. And I thought, what’s this about? And I went into my job. And I was halfway through the day, I’m tapping around my computer, and I look up. And the whole organization of 40, people had done a circle around me. And then my boss stepped forward and said, ‘I don’t know if any of you know what Lucy’s name means but it means light’. And then they all stepped forward to tell a story about how I had been light in different ways. So
RICK: This is because they knew you’re leaving. They did this right.
LUCY: Yeah, it was like a leap. Right. But so the guidance, the guidance now was getting really specific and really, really strong. Like, look up the meaning of your name. And I could, I could ask questions. When things would happen, I could ask questions and get really strong answers. And I and I still have that. So when I say I’ve had no teacher, in a way, I’ve had a teacher, it’s just come in this form. So I left my job and I spent a period of maybe a year and a half about up to that just mothering very quietly, I was really lucky in that I was supported. My husband had a good job. I would take her to the playground and I would just when she was sleeping for a nap or having a bit of TV I would really just sit in the garden and our house was such a mess at this time. My husband used to come home from work. And everything was in disarray because there was nothing in me that could do. I really the motherhood was it, like making sure Rosie was really well supported and thriving, was it and then I would sit and watch the leaves and just be overjoyed at the magic of you know, some rain dripping down or just the majesty and it was all coming thick and fast and it was settling and um …
RICK: You mentioned you were just sitting with your eyes closed for hours, you know, just staring at the garden and you said that everything was so sensitive. You had to learn or relearn how to be.
LUCY: Yeah, I had to relearn how to be in that. I would go to the playground with my daughter. And here are all the mothers at the playground and as they were speaking I could now see, I don’t know why, but all of the wounding of the personality and how it was informing their behavior say?
RICK: Are you seeing the wounding of their personality?
LUCY: Yeah, if I was at the playground, I’ll try and give a specific example. Say one mother was kind of leaving out another mother, I could see somehow, oh, she’s had a childhood where her siblings left her out a lot. And now she has it – she’s dancing with exclusion and belonging, and she’s excluding others. And it was far too intense, all of this kind of information. I mean, I can’t explain how open I was, all of my cells. And I didn’t understand that I was learning to dance with what would I call it like, the All and the personality. I was learning at that time but I didn’t know this. I can see it looking back. But now I’m back in the personality really strong. I can do that. It’s this dance. Right. And I hadn’t got that I was kind of blown open and blown into. Often I didn’t feel the borders of my body. I didn’t. I was the tree. I mean, really. And I was just learning to juggle all the answers. And I hadn’t, I didn’t really know what was happening. I would Google ‘becoming the fig tree’. When you become a tree, but then I was mothering. And any spare time I got I just sat, and yeah, like you said, I would sit with my eyes shut. And one day a friend said to me, you’re meditating a lot. And I said, “I’m not meditating. I’m just sitting with my eyes closed and listening to my breathing”. And they’re like, well, that’s meditation.
RICK: You know, it sounds like one way of phrasing what you just described is you were learning to integrate unbounded awareness with the ability to focus. Right? Universality with individuality?
LUCY: Yeah, that sounds like it. And that’s good language for it. Unbounded awareness is a beautiful language for it. And the personality was the smallest part of what I was. And actually, also at the same time, and this is important. All of the pieces, and the personality were almost thrown up like rocks, right? And I and I had drawn a picture, like, in my journal of all the pieces of me, and it’s like, I had to look at every individual piece of this person, of the structure and decide, like, is that true? Is that real? And, and the personality could sometimes still do and often still act from patterns, you know, like I was in this place of deep, pure kind of awareness and truth and love. But I would see myself snap at my daughter in a moment, or, and so I went through this whole period, this whole year and a half was a kind of, oh, that’s just happening. Is that true now? No, it’s not. So I need to look at what is driving that and really undo all these knots. And it was a deep period of going into patterning and seeing, seeing things that were sometimes really hard to see about the personality. And when I say the personality, I mean, this kind of structure of learned behaviors and, and I was faced with parts of myself I really didn’t like, and, you know, it had to be so honest with yourself and, and yet, and yet, at the same time, I was not that. I was everything and but all at once. If that makes sense.
RICK: Yeah. It’s interesting. I don’t get the impression that this was an intentional project. And you would think to yourself, Okay, well, now I’ve got to work this out. But it’s more like you’re just being put through it, you know, and hanging on for dear life as you went through all these phases.
LUCY: Absolutely. And it was hard and fast, it was hard and fast. And it was very much alone. I didn’t …
RICK: You didn’t have teachers and guides or this or that?
LUCY: No, I my husband, even my friends. I kind of shared a little bit with my husband, but he didn’t understand. I remember trying to tell my aunt and she was kind of like what? I came across a book by Bonnie Greenwell that was kind of googling around like what’s going on? And I could see ok there’s this whole world. There are people called Eckhart Tolle. There are teachers and they’re all saying different things. And I really couldn’t read much. I would buy the books and I just it was all too heady. It was kind of in the mind. And for me that what the experience of that was really a kind of crunching down. If I tried to read, it would kind of crunch it all down. And it was really unpleasant. And I just was like, I could read it, like a half a page or a sentence, and it would take three or four months to get through. There were a couple of books I managed to get through. But it took a really, really long time. And Bonnie Greenwell’s When Spirit Leaps somehow found me. And that’s explaining awakening, essentially. it was exactly kind of what I knew. And I was, so that gave me enough to kind of go, Okay, I think I think this is all normal. And I can see there were these things online, but I was very much alone. I was mothering. And just doing my thing.
RICK: I’ll tell Bonnie about this interview, she’ll appreciate hearing that.
LUCY: Yeah, her book was a huge support to me, I can’t even remember how I found it. I think I had googled something like energy blasting out of my body and found some video with her online talking about it and then I wondered if she’s got any books. At this time, something happened that I often find amusing. Really early on when this was all blowing open. One day I was walking along, and I just, this will sound dramatic and I’m sorry, but it’s true, I fell down to my knees and I heard myself say out loud ‘I have to clean my light body’. And I heard those words come out. But I thought, what’s that? What’s the light body? And I googled light body. And I found out and I think that is what started this period of cleansing. I heard myself say I have to clean my light body. And I heard ‘Yes’. And then it started really small it started with, you have to contact you know, this, I had this feeling this wasn’t the hearing, this was just me feeling. I have to contact the boyfriend whose heart I broke when I was 15 You know, silly little things, I have to contact that friend that I had an argument. And so I started that way. And then at all, it’s as if there was this innate intelligence to what was happening to life. And it was moving through me. And it was it knew the timing, really had that sense. I really felt like that trust. What’s happening here? And looking back, I can see there’s a very clear pathway, you know, of unknotting this thing or looking at this one particular wounding, or sometimes I was shown past lives. I would be doing my meditation, and that only happened twice, but I was in they were boring lives, but they showed me some deep patterning. And they would always be polite, they would ask me would you like to see a past life? And I would agree. And then I would see…
RICK: That voice will actually come to you saying, Hey, would you like to see a past life?
LUCY: Yeah.
RICK: Interesting.
LUCY: When I was in meditation and I would hear ‘Would you like to see a past life?’ That happened twice in the same week. And yeah, and I saw simple lives that showed me some deep patterning. So I was going through all of this unraveling, undoing and it was major it was major, but I just can’t give word enough to that. I would see you know, deep-rooted patterns in the personality. Like if you wanted an example, like an embarrassing example, like a need to be special was here. Somehow the personality had taken on really early in life, this need to be special in order to feel safe, because I had three dads leave me. I was in a place that I didn’t belong, surrounded by violence and complete unsafety. And I would watch my mom at the table, I grew up watching her and it was just the two of us and she would cry, weep. I watched her abandoned. Our family often ridiculed her as being the black sheep. And don’t be like your mother, you’re better than your mother, you know, things like that. So I would watch her and think I cannot be like her. I have to be I felt deeply inadequate, because we are our parents. When people criticize our parents, they criticize us and that deep sense of I’ve been abandoned and I’m in this place I don’t belong. There was a belief that the personality took on that in order to not be abandoned, I had to be special. I had to be more than what I was because of a deep sense of lack and this deep sense of inadequacy within the personality structure. So I could then look back and see, Oh my God, my whole life has been run by this simultaneous feeling of deep inadequacy, and the need to be special. So then I had to see that which is very painful. See how that had created behaviors and dynamics with people. Hustling to be special. hustling for love, hustling for approval. And I was, I was the cool girl at school, I got the boys. I went to the parties, I, you know, all those things, but always felt deeply alone and never seen and never met, because I was never really me. Because if you need to be special, you’re always putting on a front right? And so then in that sense, you’re never real. And so I traded in being real, for being special. And I have such compassion for that. That the way the personality was trying to keep me safe. I was really just trying to stay safe. I had this belief that if I’m not special, I’ll be left. And I’ll be …
RICK: Irene just sent in a question a while ago that I think this would be a good time to ask it based on what you just said. She said. ‘When shifts began you felt joyful and safe and trusted the process. You had no fear, for the most part when things went down. Many people who awakened report a phase of great fear of the process of losing personal identity, any reason why you felt so safe?’
LUCY: I have no idea. I felt, do you know, actually, as I’m saying that what comes to mind is this nurtured deep connection with Spirit and God from childhood, I trusted. And really not in the mind. The body felt like the Being felt completely safe. And I’ve, I’ve always felt that I’ve always felt for some reason that I have these angels, I have these. I mean, angels is such a silly word, it doesn’t describe the feeling or the knowing and I am that they are me. But I felt trusting I’ve always had the sense that the universe is benevolent. I’ve always had this feeling that what is happening is good and right and fair and okay. You know, except when I called God a cunt, then I was very far from it. But no, I did, I opened and there was a real, because of the surrender with Rosie that day. I mean, I can’t describe the sense of just giving over my being to this. And because I’ve been in hell, suddenly, it was, I felt …
RICK: I keep thinking of the story of Joab. God just sort of breaking him down with all these trials and tribulations. It’s kind of I mean, it’s in the Bible, it’s told as a story of, you know, God’s trying to prove something to the devil, that Joab won’t renounce him, you know, no matter how he torments him. But I also always thought of it as a sort of an ego smashing project, you know, so that Joab could be more open to a much higher level of realization
LUCY: I really felt like I really felt brought to my knees, that I had broken open. And so when the light flooded in, I was relieved. And actually, there was a memory of it. I recognized it, I recognize this place, and my being from childhood, I had always had this place. I mean, I was so joyful as a child, and the light was always there. I used to we used to have, you know, I used to snuggle down and feel deep contentment. And I shouldn’t have, like, the place that I remember having this like, as a kid, like, Ah, so happy and content, and I shouldn’t have felt it. And people talk about anxiety in teenage years and things. And that wasn’t my experience, you know, and so something in my being felt like, Oh, thank God. I’m me again. This is what I’ve always been. And it was much deeper and much more expansive and a completely different thing to that, but I knew it. And I trusted it. And I was deeply grateful. I was deeply grateful. And also it was just all happening so fast. I almost had no time to, I was mothering. I felt like initiations happening over and over and over and over and I was leaping and leaping and leaping and Yeah, and so one night I wanted I really I was it was a while it was a year something like that. I was doing it on my own because so much was coming through. I just didn’t have the sense of being able to read much or do much and one night I kind of had to say look, there’s so much information that was making me anxious the information there was I could see the energy current and the anxiety coming through the body. And I thought I can’t keep doing it this way. So before bed with a really open heart. I just said, ‘Can you please help me cut through this noise?’ I, you know, and I don’t know, for some reason they didn’t just tell me then or they didn’t just tell me in the day like they do sometimes. This hearing isn’t in my control. It’s I can ask. And sometimes I’m given answers. And sometimes it’s like, you got to find this out on your own. And I went to sleep, and I woke up and before I had even opened my eyes or figured out what day it was, I heard. And this was different. It wasn’t a hearing, like in the body, it dropped down from the head down. And it was like ‘Buddha at the Gas Pump’. And I just heard it and it was ‘Buddha at the Gas Pump’. What day is it? Oh, yeah, I had that prayer. Okay, buddha at the gas pump and I kind of lay there going, I don’t get the petrol from the petrol station. My husband does that. I’ve never got petrol. What do you mean? I’m supposed to be, you know, what I went through these things. And then I just googled it. And I found it. And, and to be honest, I looked at it and I thought, Oh, two hours, I don’t have that kind of time, you know. And then after listening to a couple, now, I can’t listen to podcasts. Like, it’s not, when it’s only half an hour, I’m like, this isn’t juicy enough, give me a Buddha. Like you really get to go into someone with the two hours, which I love. So I discovered it and, you know, I could go for walks, I couldn’t listen to many, you know, I didn’t have huge, and it would take me sometimes two weeks to get through one. And then I’d want to listen to it over again. So I’m just going back to the beginning. But I could hoover you know, I could go for walks, I could pick up toys, I could do you know, while listening to it and a lot of it spoke to my experience, you know. The experience had been what had taught me and I was amazed. I would have these moments of someone would say something, I would say that’s what happened to me. I understand that that happened to me. This is a thing, this is a thing people have this’. It was amazing. It was amazing. And it gave me a language, it really gave me a language for things and the way to talk about it. And sometimes after that, I would try and broach it with people in my community, you know, I’d meet a friend for coffee and I’d say, ‘have you ever had?’ And they’d say ‘no’. So I never really had anyone to talk to about it. And during so during this period, it was a lead-up to another big blast and listening to Buddha at the Gas Pump. And I think, you know, you were saying the celestial realm knows about you, I would say absolutely. And I would say they know about many things, and that there’s an ability, you know, this brain, it kind of shrinks our, it’s like a reduction valve in a way for the consciousness. So without that, I think, I think they are me, I don’t see them as higher beings, we are all that. It’s just that I’ve chosen to be reduced in this form for the purpose of learning and growing. And that’s a beautiful privilege. I think they suggested Buddha at the Gas Pump because on reflection, they could canvas all the options and they could see this as the thing that is going to give her the most help and the most growth. I don’t think it’s necessarily the thing that will give everybody the most help and the most growth but I love it. And it’s a deep part of my life. I just think they had the ability from that space to know what I needed. Specifically, want …
RICK: Irene says “or you were meant to share your story”.
LUCY: Yeah, that’s like a cosmic joke that I’m sitting here with you. It’s just it’s hilarious, it’s absolutely hilarious. That yeah, so. So then another year went by and huge amounts of processing and clearing and things going on, I went to and I went to a Qi Gong class. So this is the start of the next big bang. And this was a huge one. Up until now, I’ve been kind of so out of the body, and I almost wasn’t functioning. I was getting by but I, the personality there’s such space between these two places. And I went to a Qi Gong class, someone invited me and I thought I’d have no idea what this is and I’m doing this class and at one point, the lady said, ‘Put your hand on your heart and say, I love you my heart’, and I went to do it and I couldn’t there was this block. So life would always bring me this is the thing and it’s infinite intelligence life brings us what we need in experience. We don’t need books. They’re wonderful and they nourish us and if that’s what we’re drawn to, that’s beautiful and we’ve got to follow that. But I found life was always bringing me the thing that I needed to see where I was blocked to see where I was cut off, if I was willing to see it, if I was really willing to honestly look at what I was, and that’s not easy. So really, we’re being asked to give up our delusions in a way, you know, and, and it’s painful. And you see how you’ve hurt people in certain ways of being, whatever, but it’s the only way to release them. Anyway, so anyway I’m at Qi Gong and I, I can’t say I love you my heart. And this was curious to me. And I went home, and I decided every day to say, ‘I love you, my heart’ and I would get block, block. And then one day, I saw just, yeah, huge memories of trauma, memories of things. And really, really, it lifted in that moment of seeing and I felt this blackness lifted off me. It sounds so dramatic, but it really was that. And then lots of tears. And this clearing went on for such a long time, such a long time. And then during this time, a friend sent me some kirtan music, kirtan music. I had never heard of it, but I would put it on. And it’s like I would go to another place. It would just cut through all separation, any elements of separation. And I would just go in and my whole being it was some kind of woo woo magic, there was like the heart coherence or something happened. And so I was going I was being led through this path of going into my heart and having lots of painful memories and things associated with the heart abandonments and these very tender things that we all go through, you know, and the ways that we are deeply hurt as humans and we hide, we hide because it’s so tender to really be here and really be seen with another. And I was being asked to drop the masks and drop the delusions and drop the hustle to be special or and drop all the fears of really being seen and all of these things that all of us humans go through. Anyway, I got into NDE’s at this time, near-death experiences, I couldn’t really read much. I was listening to Buddha and I started watching near death experiences. And I saw this biker guy and his jacket, and he said in this one video on YouTube. He said, ‘God loves all of us so so much’ And he is so passionate. And I thought I knew all this right? I’d really in this space I’m like, and I meant when I say I was really dancing between human and the All and it was kind of all molding together. I went to my bedroom, and I lay on the bed. And a very innocent question came through. Not from the mind from the being. I didn’t decide to think it just came up. ‘Does God love me that way?’ And immediately I felt this huge, beautiful energy come on my body and stay there and engulf me and it permeated everything that I was and here was burning. My kind of third eye region was burning, which again, sounds so cheesy, but it was and eventually, this energy left and I knew yes. God loves me. You know, absolutely. And I thought I already knew that. And for days, this area was tingling, and I had changed. I had changed after that. There was something that happened in that. At that same time, I would always ask for guidance around what I should do like my teacher was nature speaking and form speaking, experience would speak to me. Someone would say something like things like that. But I was thinking of doing a course and I said to my guides, should I or shouldn’t I do this? And this was a profound experience that really changed my being at this time. I went to meditation I asked the question and I often will ask a question, set an intention and then go in to see if I get an answer. Boy did I get an answer? I? I was in meditation and I became, I went into, I don’t know the words to call it, all that I am or my higher self maybe is a good word. And I was shown that that being was me. Because I was it and I was jumping between the two, I was jumping between this being who had no gender, but it was like gushing waterfalls of power energy. It was like standing under a waterfall of love and fire almost an overwhelming amount of pure energy just flowing through. Yet I was that I was that. And I would flick between that being and into Lucy the body. And when I was that being, I would look at Lucy sitting on the bed and I would have utter compassion. It was like, ah, she doesn’t really get it. She’s not she’s struggling a bit with this. She’s not quite landing. And that was the complete love and compassion of this higher being. That was me. And when I flicked. because I was flicking back and forth quite fast. When I flicked into me, the person, it was fear, it was like, what’s happening? Am I going to be am I going to stay like this? What’s going on? And I’m just rapidly I went back and forth between the two this higher being and then the person. And I knew I had this imprint over that experience that yes if I do this work, it’s feeding into that being. Now, I can’t claim to understand any of this. I have senses of it. These are things that happen to me as surely as if I walked down on the street and the truck came, you know, I, I don’t control them. It just happens. And I don’t know what that means. But what I do know is that after that, after I had inhabited her, I will call her ‘her’ she was genderless. That, that myself, I’ve been carried. Gosh, I’ve never said this stuff out loud. It’s so funny to hear myself saying. I’ve never really said it, funny. I’ve then carried that energy loose in the body and then it kind of permeated everything. So I had these expanding. Yeah, there was a time when I heard I was laying on my bed. And I heard ‘the angels are here’, I just heard ‘the angels are here’ and I had that thing when the energy lands, but it did it three times 123 And then went. So I was having all of these deep, it felt like healings. Every time these things would happen there was a shift in me – it as a more open and more open and more open. And it feels like a co-creation. It feels like my job as a person, if I’m that the personality is to kind of let it happen. It feels like things falling away. And the lighter I get, the more kind of scar tissue I see through and release. Or the more patterning in truth I’m willing to see and let go of and forgive myself for you know with compassion so necessary. The clearer the space within the vessel is to carry the consciousness. It’s like it’s all part of the same thing. And I think getting sick helped clean the body because I had to be so strict with nutrition and the body got to this point of being so clean. Really, really not eating. I didn’t I haven’t had a drink for eight years and things like that. I was forced into that. But the body looking after the body, it’s a deep spiritual practice and then cleaning the light body. I feel uncomfortable even using the word light body because I don’t really know that you know, that’s what I said. And all of these experiences of these kinds of healings. Now the thing where I said, ‘Does God love me like that?’ ended up being really important. So another year is going by and going through all this and I’m cleaning. And one morning my daughter’s watching cartoons on a Saturday morning and this is big. This is the last really big thing that has happened. It was 2020 I think it was May. My daughter was watching cartoons and I was journaling. I was going through so much I used to just journal it all out. It’s really my outlet. And I wrote Oh, and I dug it out to read the entry for this because I wanted to remember how long had it been. It had been six months since the God coming on me and the third eye buzzing. And my third eye still does that by the way I get, it’s been a year and a half or two years and it still just tingles and goes crazy and open. I can feel it on the actual physical body. So I’m writing about this, I’d forgotten to write about it. So much was happening. I didn’t really, I just let it happen and then go on the day making dinner or lunch boxes. So I’m writing in my journal six months later, and I said, about six months ago, the most curious thing happened. I asked if God loved me and then this happened. And then suddenly, as I’m writing this, my whole body went into paralysis. I hope this doesn’t sound too dramatic. I almost feel embarrassed talking about it, because I haven’t spoken about it. But it is what it is. I dropped my pen, like I really was in paralysis. And it lasted about 30 to 40 minutes I hadn’t even gotten the sentence out was like, just by thinking of God coming down on me like that, or whatever that was. It invokes the most powerful energy and it went all the way through my body and it went out my heart. Um, yeah, which sounds cheesy. I feel like it sounds cheesy.
RICK: It’s your favorite adjective.
LUCY: I know.
RICK: Nothing sounds cheesy.
LUCY: I know. I never say this stuff. I’m watching this embarrassment come up in me. And we’ll just let it be there. Yeah.
RICK: That sounds great.
LUCY: The truth is my heart was open and this energy. It was like rivers of energy, just rivers of energy. And thank God Rosie was happy with her cartoons because I couldn’t speak I couldn’t move. I mean, seriously, if you take the height of orgasm, like the height of orgasm, 40 minutes of that 30 to 40 minutes of that. And I’m not saying that this is what spirituality is that we just have these big, blissful blow ups. And that’s it. No, I have done huge amounts of like facing into wounding and clearing and all sorts of crazy stuff. But yeah, so I lay there and I was laughing at one point. I was like, ‘What is this? This is madness , what’s happening to me?’ you know. The mind is kind of chitter chattering. But actually, I’m in the Being. And you almost let the mind chitter chatter and do its thing. And I just let it happen. I just opened to it. And I heard the words. And it was the only words and it was the first time this new voice came in, which is quite masculine and quite stern. And I’ve only had it a few times since this. It’s usually quite a soft, feminine kind of voice that I hear. People are gonna think I have schizophrenia. And I heard ‘You must leave your husband’. And it was very stern. And I knew that I knew that already. I had a couple of years of knowing that. And I said, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, leave me alone this is amazing just leave me to my bliss’ kind of thing. ‘Let me enjoy what’s happening’. And I kind of shooed it away.
LUCY: Yeah. So eventually, I had to pee and Rosie was saying, ‘Mum can I have a sandwich’ and I had to start moving my body and trying to and I was giggling to myself like, what the hell just happened? And I’ve had little inklings of this – little glimpse of leading up to it where I’d be baking a cake for Rosie and the kind of honey lava would come down or whatever but it will always only last 30 seconds to a minute and this one was unbelievable. Now that …
RICK: Audio listeners, you just took your hands and ran them down your head as if some honey were dripping down from the top of your head of honey, blissful honey kind of thing.
LUCY: Yeah, so that was happening. These kind of glimpses were happening a lot in the lead up to this. I was in meditation, and I felt like someone really felt a hand on my, the top of my head pushing and things like this. And I would look up and there’s nothing there. But pressure and energy and things were moving, but I just kind of went on. You know, when baking a cake, Rosie was always there, Rosie would say ‘mumma, mumma, mumma’. And that’s part of this journey. I think none of this happened until I had her because she really kept me in the world.
RICK: Yeah, as a matter of fact, someone from Ireland Dara from Ireland sent in a question saying, ‘How does motherhood assist you in your experience of life now?’
LUCY: Dara that’s such a beautiful question. And Rosie is half Irish and her dad is Irish. I would like to speak to the whole five years since she was born and blowing open in these ways. Having her I think this is an absolute strategy if we’re, if we’re talking the Christian Sundberg we plan it, which lines up with how I feel how I sense. I just know. I can’t know, so I hold it all, you know, but I suspect I’ve had many lives doing this. And I find it really easy to be God, to go to God to be in deep silence. I’m so happy being alone for 8 days, you know, it’s almost dysfunctional, how much I can be alone. And I think I this only blew open for me when I had Rosie and a particularly demanding child. She would climb back in my womb if she could she. You’ve seen her on our skypes where she’s hanging off me and she just, she loves me. She loves life, she’s so sensitive. And she’s not one of those kids that will just play on her own for hours. So I’ve never had the luxury of that silence. So every time I was baking and drifting into bliss I mean literally she would be I be like, Mama, Mama, Mama Mama. Trying to float away and she kept pulling me back. That’s been her job Dara is to can I hold this energy in the world?
LUCY: You know, I used to get up earlier and earlier to meditate, I decided, Okay, I’m going to meditate, I’m going to be spiritual. This is like, I’m going to meditate. Here I am. And she would wake up earlier and earlier and earlier. So I would get up at 4am and 3:30am. And just trying to get this hour and one morning I said to God, ‘Man, I’m trying to meditate, right? Come on, help me out here. She just keeps waking up’. And I heard clear, very clear guidance, they said, ‘This is your work. Turn toward her’. And I wasn’t happy to hear that, to be honest. It’s like, Ah, you mean I’ve just got to love and just be patient. And but that is the job here. And this is what my daughter has, I can’t speak for everyone but being gifted to me for is I can go to God and be God, but can I hold this energy and move this energy through the body into life here? Can I move as this? That’s harder for me that’s harder than going sky high, you know, in going to expensiveness um, and that was going back to what we were talking about this heart opening this paralysis. It wasn’t the experience of that that was so significant. I mean, it was fun. But it was what happened afterwards. it meant, it was as if, for about a week, I was so tender in the body, everything changed, I could feel every blood vessel on my lip. I remember jumping on the trampoline with Rosie and feeling like I was on every drug that had ever been made. And spirituality isn’t like the accumulation. None of this is about the accumulation of good feelings, right? This is just an interesting thing to observe. And there would be things I think, Am I falling in love? What is this? I just felt so full, like I could burst. And I looked around for an object to place the love on or a reason, you know, what’s the reason, and I found nothing. And so I just turned it back to myself. And then I would blow up again. So things like this were going on. But after that heart thing, God knows what that was. But everything changed in the way that I felt myself and experienced my way of being. Before I’ve been so out here and a little bit like in disarray, sometimes like trying to interface with a human and not really and working through the stuff and once the heart thing happens there was a deep coming into the body for me after that there was a deep deep settling. And it’s a felt thing. And I felt in such balance, I felt completely different. You know, and yeah, I felt I was really walking as this and as if it had all come together in this beautiful way. I’m not saying this as an ending. I presume it continues on and on and on. This is just the last – this is May 2020. I’ve had lots of well …
RICK: May 2020. So we’re a year and a half after that now.
LUCY: Yes, yeah, but I’ve had lots of little things. But these two were the big ones, the 2019, the surrender and then this coming in. And there’s been a beautiful transformation from this heart stuff where I can really be seen and I can really be with another. A lot of these walls and these protections, you know, that I had put up, to stay safe have really fallen away. And it’s taken work. It has not been some things fell instantly at certain points. But many, many others have taken me seeing them in the moment as they arise. Oh, there’s the need to be special again, and release. Seeing I’m afraid right now so I’m doing this particular behavior and release. And in this way, with the energy really coming through the body and releasing all of the stuff in the way of the energy expressing there’s such a deep being here that I can’t give words to a deep intimacy with absolutely everything, the tenderness, and a I am that in a care and a gentleness, and an ability to be with other human beings completely. And because I’ve received myself so completely, because and sometimes I work on it, it’s not all packaged up nicely. And darn, it’s an ongoing thing, but because I’ve been willing to see what’s true here to release the ways I deluded myself and things like this. Because I’ve met myself in these ways. Now I can really meet another in that way. And it’s such a gift. You know, it’s real connection, and I’m really finding that so beautiful. That being so yeah, that was like a year and a half ago, May 2020, whatever that is. And since then, everything’s changed, You know the inner world over those few years was rearranging, clearing, emptying. And of course, the outer had to follow because there isn’t any difference, since all the same thing. So I, my husband and I split. And it was the most bizarre thing. You know, I love that man. We were together 16 years and still best friends. But we were just completely different now. We’re just completely different. And it’s almost as if we got to the end of each other. And when I said like, we need to do this, I thought I would cry. And it would be awful. And it was the big one. And it was the thing I was most terrified of. He had been my safety. And I had not had that, right. And I had to take all my courage, all of my courage. I was praying and saying, I know you said this, and I know it’s true. But I’m afraid I’m so afraid of leaving this home that I love my first stable home. And my family and I didn’t know what would happen. Would I lose would he want my daughter half the time and I’d lose her. Would you know I wasn’t working at that time. What would I do? It was big. It was huge. I had no financial security of my own. Would I have to rent a house we live on a tropical island where people come for holidays. And rentals are really unpredictable, you get kicked out all the time. But I got to this place in myself, again surrender and I just have to do what’s true. Five years before I had been a completely different person. Like I look at myself in 2015 I was just a completely different person I was hiding in so many ways. And I just got to this place and I said I’ve got to do this. The most important thing is I have to be real and I have to honor this because for some reason I don’t know I’ve been gifted with this beautiful, beautiful way of being and that too but it’s so precious and I have to nurture it and I know that. I knew that I had to align with what was true was the feeling. So I said it I said I think we need to break up. And I thought I would be devastated. Leading up to it was horrendous. But this rush the minute I did it, this rush and rightness and truth and this elation. And it wasn’t an elation, like a high, it was something that has stayed with me this whole time. I am true, I am finally being true. The truth of my being had always been more but the way of my being had not lined up. You know, this time in London or what I knew to be true, I wasn’t acting in form. And there was this mismatch between what I was doing and what I knew I really was. And for the first time, I left him, that was June, we left each other in June 2020. For the first time, I knew how it feels to be true completely true. And that was an incredible thing. And I felt like I was standing on the edge of the cliff and I just walked over. So now I’m in my own home and actually over the last year and a half, I’ve left my know everything over the last few years my career’s gone. Um, my husband and I are still really good friends and I see him all the time. Many friends fell. I had a very very close friend it was painful sometimes where they would just there was just a mismatch and they just fell away and I actually asked about it I said there was this one particular really close friend who when I moved into my home she I thought she would be some safety and she dropped away and she just and I said to them ‘this is so painful. Tell me what I need to do. Do I need to do something to fix this?’ And they said ‘shedding shedding’ they said she …
RICK: Shedding?: Well New Zealanders pronounce that a little differently.
LUCY: Yeah.
RICK: Sounds like a bodily function but you said shedding. The interview was turning scatological here.
LUCY: Shedding, so letting go. So I just went ahead. And but it’s not I don’t want to paint this rosy picture like being loved like bliss. It’s all of it all at once. It’s hard sometimes. It’s really scary sometimes. But that is all held. That’s yeah, the personality is the smallest part of me. So that is all there and held in a feeling of deep okayness in all is wellness is the feeling. So I have been able to jump. Actually, it’s been miraculous. It’s been magic. It’s been utterly magic. Somehow I bought my own house in a time when we had COVID refugees flooding into New Zealand because we were this great country right? And the house prices were skyrocketing. And I’m watching this, somehow I bought a house. I was the first to see it. It didn’t go on the market. They sold it to me for a couple of 100 grand less than they could have got. All this magic happened. And I found myself just landing over and over and over in this beautiful space. And yeah, now I’m really me. And Rosie’s with me five nights a week and with her daddy. And it’s actually been so much easier and so much more beautiful than I could have thought and all of my needs have been met. It has been astounding, astounding, every need from small to big. It’s almost as if I just have to think something and it is absolute magic. And I’m just in awe and gratitude for everything that’s unfolded really.
RICK: Well, you’ve been living a blessed life. And I think that hearing your story will inspire people to realize that, you know, there is a divine dimension, you know, which guides our life. And, you know, maybe many people’s lives are kind of like that two-year period where you didn’t feel the divine guidance. In many people’s lives, that period is much longer if not their whole life. But even hearing the possibility of the kinds of blessings you’ve been experiencing, I think can give people hope, that it’s really not that far away. And, and I hope that they realize that, you know, all the things you’re mentioning, are not – they don’t make you special or remarkable or anything. It’s that close to all of us. I mean, there’s, you know, I mean there’s poets that say, you know, ‘God is as close as your own jugular vein’ and, and things like that. And before we wrap it up too much, I just want to read a comment that came in during the interview because it was so sweet. This is from Trishul Tunga Reddi must be an Indian man Reddi is an Indian name, he said, Rick, don’t cut out the old man knocking on the door when you were interviewing Lucy Grace, that was so cute and the best part of the interview’. And these wonderful oddities are what make your interviews natural and authentic perfection in imperfection. And then he went on about he’s loving the interview. And so many things about your life are similar to his and especially the parts about growing up poor in rough neighborhoods and chronic fatigue and taking care of a young daughter with severe chronic fatigue. And then he said, ‘I feel like she is a female version of myself, I have a seven-year energetic daughter as well. Thank you for this interview with Lucy Grace, it gave me so much comfort and compassion toward myself, I don’t feel guilty for being so insensitive towards my young daughter anymore’.
LUCY: Yeah, and this is a really key piece that I’ve somehow I seem to have known within me, this compassion for self, I’ve entered into the few spiritual things I’ve touched into them, just in the last six months/year kind of thing. Maybe I’ve gone to a festival or a couple of workshops. And I see a lot of guilt in people it’s not given by any teacher or anything, it’s just seems to be there with where we really because we’re conscious, we really want to do the right thing, right? We really want to be okay, and, you know, living from this place that we all know this beauty that we all feel into. But it’s having that compassion for the for the human because as long as we are in a body, we are human. And these, these structures have been built over our lifetimes, in order to keep us safe in order to so that we’re not vulnerable with others so that those tender parts of our souls aren’t showing. And we armor ourselves up to the hilt, not because we’re bad, but just because we’re wounded. And we’re afraid. It’s like …
RICK: it’s like a callus that get that builds up, you know, when something gets enough friction on your on some part of your body. You know, it’s protective, but it also perhaps numbs that part of the body.
LUCY: That’s right. And the thing about it is what’s unconscious, it governs us, right. And so these moments when we snap at our children as he so beautifully described, or we aren’t the most graceful version of ourselves, they are actually it’s the infinite compassion of the universe, showing us to ourselves, ‘Oh, I just hid in that moment, that person sent me a beautiful text and I, I couldn’t meet them there. I hid’. And so that’s an opportunity for me to look at. Okay, let’s get really, really real. And for me, that’s what’s opened me and opened me and opened me. Has been this kind of robust dedication to truth. This robust willingness to see what’s really here, and it can be bloody hard. Like, really, I am in all these beautiful spaces, and I’m really in the, but I still turned away from that person when they were being loving to me. And so I have to first be willing to see the ugliness, which is also beauty because it’s all there. And then I have to be willing to be able to be enough to hold that version of myself. And then I have to be willing to meet it. And to see it when it’s coming up again and again. And the more of this kind of junk that I’ve cleared out, my experience has been and with love and compassion. If I’m judging myself and cruel to myself, that just creates more tense energy in more contraction more, and then it turns into a spiral. So there’s no going down those rabbit holes, I see the behavior. I think huh! surely I’m a bit more far along than that. And then I go, Okay, well, this is what I’m being shown. So this is here still. And, you know, the further along you go, it just gets more subtle and subtle and subtle. You just seem more like deeply buried there and never seems to end. But yet we can only be free and in so far as we’re conscious. So looking at these things, and really owning them and saying it’s okay, this is I’m human to human as well. I’m more than just human, but I’m human too. And it’s all it’s all at letting it be there and just doing your best with it just meeting it in the best way you know that you can today?
RICK: Well you have so much natural wisdom you know, it’s I could you know, talk to you for hours and I have been actually but we probably better wrap it up. I mean it’s you’re not a teacher. I wouldn’t be surprised if you became a teacher at some point. I mean, this, today’s whole conversation has been a teaching, which I think will, more than many teachers, you know, ‘and most’ Irene says, and I think it’ll really benefit a lot of people just to hear your story. And you don’t have a website, you do have a Facebook page, I’ll link to that on your BatGap page. And you told me earlier that, you know, you want me to put your email address on there, so people can contact you if they want to. And we should perhaps say that, you know, you might get overwhelmed with emails, and you might not be able to respond to them all. And at some point, you might ask me to take the email address off of the web page, which I could do. But you know, for the time being, if somebody gets in touch, they may or may not get a response, or it might have to be a brief one. Because, you know, it could be a little bit of a flood with everything else you’ve got going on with your daughter and everything.
LUCY: Yeah, no, I’m very …
RICK: Maybe she can respond to the emails.
LUCY: Thank you Rick. It’s just such a joy. And you and Irene have become really like friends. And it’s been so nice to speak it. I never speak this stuff. It’s really been a gift to just to just be naked with it and be this is what it is and say …
RICK: Well, considering that you have never really spoken or much of it. You’ve been really eloquent, you know, in expressing I mean, your, your, the way you phrase things and everything is just really clear and really easy to understand and to take to heart. So it’s been great.
LUCY: Thank you. It’s been lovely. And we will talk then we’re gonna do a roadie. I want to do a roadie with you, Irene and Harri Aalto when all this COVID stuff is over. I love. I only discovered Harri one a month ago and so much of what …
RICK: He has some zoom calls and stuff that you can get on to in fact, others who are listening to this if you go to Harri Aalto’s website, which is linked to from his pages on BatGap, there’s a way of finding out about these zoom conversations that he has with people.
IRENE: Rick, I just want to read one that came in from Amelia Pukar.
RICK: Okay, let me put the mic over here so people can hear better,
IRENE: It says ‘Thank you, Lucy, hands down this was one of my favorite BatGap interviews. I deeply appreciate your light, authenticity and vulnerability. I resonated with everything you said. This was a great blessing to see. Thank you.
RICK: Good. And I want to thank that Celestial Being who said ‘Buddha at the Gas Pump’ as you were waking up. Thanks to the Archangel Gabriel, whoever that was. Really appreciate it. We’ve come full circle. All right. So we’ll be in touch and thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. It’s been a long interview, but I didn’t want to cut it short because, you know, it just had its own timing and you just kept coming out with all this good stuff.
IRENE: Maybe we’ll do a part two.
RICK: Yeah, maybe we’ll do part two.
LUCY: Much love to you both
RICK: Love to you and Rosie and stay in touch. We’ll see you soon. Thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching and we’ll see you next week.