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Rick Archer: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is Mary O’Malley. This is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually Awakening people. For more information or to help support our efforts, please visit us@batgap.com. Mary is an author, a counselor and an awakening mentor and who lives in Kirkland, Washington. In the early 1970s. A powerful awakening set Mary on the path to changing her whole relationship with the challenges of her life, freeing yourself from a lifelong struggle struggle with darkness. Since that time, Mary has taught extensively throughout the US, Canada and Denmark. She is an inspirational speaker who leads retreats that transform people’s lives, including week long retreats in beautiful places like Costa Rica and Hawaii. She also provides individual counseling and offers ongoing groups where people can come together to experience the miracle of awakening. Mary’s new book, which I’ve been reading is called what’s in the way is the way and it’s been endorsed by a number of luminaries, Dr. Christiane Northrup, Jack Kornfield, Neale Donald Walsch, Steven Levine. And as usual, I’ll be linking to Mary’s website and her books from her page on batgap.com. So welcome, Mary.
Mary O’Malley: So glad to be here, Rick.
Rick Archer: So we can start in any number of places with your personal story with your book. But just for kicks, I had the thought to start with the question, you know, the title of your book, what’s in the way, is the way. And the question arose the way to what?
Mary O’Malley: To openness to connectedness, most of us live in a dream, we live in an afterthought about life. I like what Alan Watts, the wonderful Zen philosopher said, no matter how many times you say the word water, it will never be wet. And we long for the wetness of life. And not even aware that were cut off from that.
Rick Archer: And so the wetness in this metaphor represents
Mary O’Malley: the living moment, being fully here, open, connected, opening to the great flow of life. So life flows through you, as you rather than you actually trying to do life, which is what where most people now
Rick Archer: one thing I was thinking about while I was reading your book is that I’d like to talk with you about kind of the fundamental assumptions, the underpinnings of the points you make. So for instance, one fundamental assumption that you’re kind of alluding to right now is that there’s kind of an inherent, fulfilling newness to life, if we can be open to it. And another is that we haven’t gotten into this quite as much yet as we will. But that also there’s an intelligence that yes, that is kind of permeating everything and orchestrating everything.
Mary O’Malley: Right. Right. And that hopefully, we’ll be able to explore that more deeply as we go on. But that is, the more that you wake up out of the, what I call the storyteller in this book, which its main game is struggle, it’s a little problem factory. And mostly its problems are little ones, it doesn’t like how its hair is today, or the length of the stoplight. But life can throw us in pretty big challenges. And what we do is we struggle with those challenges, rather than staying open. And the more that you open, the more you see that, you know, at one time, you were just one cell that was so tiny, you couldn’t even see it with the naked eye. And this cell knew how to divide and develop all of the different systems inside of us, the circulatory system, the nervous system, the reproductive system. And now we are made of 70 trillion cells. When was the last time that you were in charge of your body? The intelligence of life is in charge of life. And that’s what we don’t see when we’re caught in the game of struggle.
Rick Archer: Yeah, it’s interesting to note that most of those cells aren’t human. You know, about 90% of them, or 95% of them are various kinds of bacteria and things,
Mary O’Malley: right. In a symbiotic relationship,
Rick Archer: right, we’d die without them. Well, the reason I think fundamental assumptions are important is that, you know, I don’t know, if he did some kind of statistical sociological survey, but it seems to me that most people in the world just kind of don’t go through their day, assuming or appreciating that they are immersed in an ocean of intelligence, and you know, that there’s some kind of evolutionary impulse, trying to guide their destiny. And so, I mean, most people sort of were kind of locked into the gross material perception of things. And maybe they believe there’s a God off someplace, and that they’re gonna go to heaven or something like that. But it doesn’t really, you know, kind of sink into the neck.
Mary O’Malley: Yes, yes. And to me, the word God is a verb. You know, it’s not a thing. It’s a verb, this is a living, a live, intelligent, mysterious process. And each one of us had been brought forth out of mystery, because life wanted to express itself as us. And it is the suffering that we create for ourselves by thinking that we’re in charge of it, and we’re in control. And we’re always trying to do do it good enough or right enough, and then believe that we don’t do it good enough or right enough, I had a image that came the other day, imagine a snow globe, you know, one of those little globes that, you know, you shake it, and you’re there’s little people in there, and the snow, you know, falls down. It’s almost as if we’re all caught in a snow globe, a snow globe of the unconscious mind. And the glass of the globe is made out of fear. And it’s glued together with judgment. Well, so much of awakening is discovering how to step out of the snowglobe. And learn how to observe to, to relate to what’s passing through you thoughts, feelings, sensations, rather than identifying with them. As soon as you identify with them, you’re back in the snowglobe. Again, and what we long for is this spaciousness, this awareness that we really truly are, that can see what’s happening in the snowglobe, but not identify with it.
Rick Archer: So babies seem pretty spacious, you know, some people think babies are enlightened. And I would, I would, I would dispute that. But, you know, they seem pretty spacious. But obviously, as we go through the first few years of our life, and we get more and more and more kind of locked in and identified and all so and by the time we’re teenagers are usually a total mess. But how would you describe the mechanics are of the this progressive identification that takes place as we mature? And, you know, which most people never said about reversing? Exactly, you know? Exactly. So let’s talk about how that identification, and perhaps it has an upside it perhaps it’s necessary for us to get more and more identified at a certain stage of our growth, and then eventually, it becomes appropriate to turn it around. So let’s talk about that.
Mary O’Malley: Yeah. So there’s two pieces of what you’re asking, you know, to me, it seems kind of crazy, that we, we come out of mystery. And we arrived here, and we’re wide open to life. And we have no separate identity. There was a time when there was no thoughts in our head. And slowly and surely, we begin to take on Oh, I am separate. I am a girl, I am a boy. My name is John or my name is Mary. And slowly and surely we crawl into what I call the storyteller in this book, and and then we go to school in school is a very cruel place. You know, I say that you come across the red pencil syndrome, the excellent good, fair and poor syndrome. And then all of a sudden, now you’ve got to do life, and you’ve got to do life, right? But you’re not feeling that you’re doing good enough or right enough. We all carry this spell. That’s a word I use in this new book, this spell of not enoughness. And so you can see what happens in teenagehood. We are, we all of a sudden are trying to be what we think we should be. And we’re looking around and making sure that we’re doing what everybody else is doing. Or if that doesn’t work, we turn into the rebel and we crawl into this separate self and we have 65,000 thoughts a day, and 95% of them are repeats from the day before. That’s where most people live. They think that they are their thoughts. And the older you get, the tighter that gets the more suffering you experience. Because thought does not create reality thought cannot control reality, although there’s just enough of illusion of that, that you can stay caught in this world of, of this separate self. But then, like in my life, you’re really blessed if you’re given something you can’t control. Because that is maybe the first inkling that just maybe, maybe I am more than I thought I am. Maybe just maybe I am not this struggling self. Now, the other part of your question is, oh, my god, maybe we’re supposed to do that. I mean, it seems kind of insane. If you really think about it, we arrive out of mystery. We are we are connected. We’re not consciously aware, but we are at one with everything. And then we take on this separate self, you know, why is that? And the only way that I can make sense of that is that when you look at the world, you see that it is a dualistic in nature. You know, there’s hot, there’s cold, there’s day, there’s night, there’s male, there’s female, there’s winter, there’s summer. And if there was no such thing as night, you wouldn’t recognize day, it is recognized in relationship. So the only thing that makes sense to me is we are supposed to take on what we’re not get lost in it. And then something very spectacular is beginning to happen. The people that that have come before us are that have seen through this game of struggle and become the fullness of who they are. We’re usually people that lived in caves or monasteries are your they remove themselves from life so they could get quiet enough to really observe this whole stream of thought, this stream of sensations, this stream of feelings, that is moving through who we really are? Well, at least in my world, awakening is happening everywhere. I mean, you can see it in the movies, you can see it, you know, in television programs, there’s we are in what I think is an evolutionary shift. And that, to me, is why there’s so much fear on this planet, ISIS, Ebola, you know, poverty, greed, you know, all this craziness is not here. Because we’ve done something wrong. In my world, it is the contraction of the old that is calling our attention to it. So that like Ebola, we can begin to get to know fear, rather than being lost in it. And more and more people are beginning to wake up out of the dream of this separate, struggling, fear based, very judgmental self that we thought was who we are.
Rick Archer: Now, from my perspective, there’s this global awakening to I mean, I wouldn’t be doing this show if there weren’t, we wouldn’t be able to do it. I mean, the guys in caves don’t have very good internet connections, right. But you know, I mean, there are people who say less, you just said that, well, it seems like all this stuff is hitting us now a bold on ISIS and all these things. But you know, I mean, nearly 100 years ago, there was World War One. And then there was a global flu pandemic that killed 25 million people or something. And, and then there was the Great Depression, and you know, and then there was World War Two. So there have always been some pretty heavy things happening.
Mary O’Malley: Yeah, difference is that now we’re connected to the internet so we can see it more clearly. Just like when a great challenge comes in our life. What’s in the way is the way the challenges in our life are not here because we’ve done something wrong. We are being punished God fell asleep on the job. The challenges are here in order to help you see this condition, separate, struggling conversation in your head. And in that my very first teacher taught me this in the seeing is the movement. If you feel that you have to fix this separate self or make it a better self. I mean, sometimes that helps make it easier life. But that’s not where true healing is. true healing is discovering how to relate To all the fear, the despair, the loneliness, the shame, all of these energies that contract us and keep us from being open to life.
Rick Archer: And that kind of gets us back to fundamental assumptions. You know, you’re saying that all these things are, you know, not capricious or arbitrary or, or mean spirited or anything, right on the part of some creator that there’s, I’m putting words in your mouth, but that there’s a kind of an divine benevolent intelligence that actually wants things to wants us to evolve and grow and become enlightened. And that, you know, we do live in, as you were saying, a world of polarities and opposites. So if you’re going to have hot, you have to have cold. And if you’re going to have healthy, you have to have sick. But But what you’re saying, if I’m correct, is that the sick phase is not just to counterbalance the healthy phase, there’s evolutionary potential in it.
Mary O’Malley: Absolutely. Absolutely. You and that’s what we’re beginning to see that what we learned in this condition self was to try to get to what we think would bring us happiness, and resist or get away from what we think doesn’t bring us happiness. Now, can you see how unbalanced that is?
Rick Archer: Yeah, you’re leaning over there.
Mary O’Malley: I know, it wasn’t you can’t see the camera, this head is really reaching out there. And this hand down here is a no, no, no, no, no. And if you begin to observe the conversation that moves through you all day, and how it affects the this chronic holding in your body, you will see that is suffering. Right there. That’s suffering.
Rick Archer: Okay, So case in point, so you had shoulder surgery recently, and we had to, we had to postpone our interview, because you were going through a painful recovery. So that was something that might be perceived as being in the way you know, it was in the way of doing the interview. And it was probably in the way of you getting a good night’s sleep or being comfortable or anything like that. Oh, yeah. And so in what way was that pain conducive to your growth?
Mary O’Malley: Well, let me tell you a story about surgery that that, you know, will highlight this. So I you don’t eat or drink, you know, since the night before. And I’m supposed to show up at 1230. And they call and say, Please show up at 130. And so I show up at 130. And they get me undressed and put me in a little room, but nothing’s happening. So finally, at 330, my mind started getting very upset. In the meantime, I was just spacious. And I could watch all the conversations going through me, I could watch the body start to contract and discomfort because I was thirsty, and I was hungry. But I didn’t get caught in it. I could see it, and it would just pass through. But it 330 The mind took over it’s it’s started, Hey, is anybody out there? You know, they came back, and they said, Oh, it’ll be a half an hour more? Well, it was an hour more. And this is great fuel, because the unconscious separate self wants everything to be okay. And it it sees discomfort as something that takes away okayness. What is really true is that our resistance and wanting to get someplace and get away from something is what covers the natural okayness that is always here, no matter what is happening in your life. And I was so spacious. When the doctor finally walked in. She the first thing she said was how you doing? And I said how are you doing? Because my heart was wide open. Because I knew the reason why it was happening was because the surgery for me was a turned out to be a much more complicated surgery. If I had stayed in that separate self, you know, I would have grumbled I would have and this is somebody who is going to be cutting into my body for heaven’s sakes, you know, and so we just connected because I kept on connecting with discomfort with holding on with resistance. And I kept on opening around it. And that’s what I did, you know, the whole time. In the recovery. Were there times that the contraction took over just like it did at 330 for a bit, you know, and I began to move out of the contraction. But as soon as the nurse left, curiosity kicked in and said okay, who’s here? Oh, okay. The one that I understand this is very uncomfortable, but this just passing she Show, we’re creating more suffering by resisting it, let’s stay open to it. And it’s so wonderful, Rick, when you know how to recognize the Unconscious Self, the resistant, unconscious self, the grasping unconscious self, and bring it space, that’s what we long for.
Rick Archer: So even in your recovery period, over the last couple of weeks, in the midst of the pain that you’re experiencing, you’re able to pretty much do that.
Mary O’Malley: Yes, and I’ve done this for years, and I will have the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful grace, of meeting and hanging out with Stephen Devine for many years, who wrote many books on death and dying, but they really were about being fully alive. And when he would, every year he came to Seattle, I brought all my groups to Seattle, and, and, you know, there would be, like, 600 of us, you know, in this huge room, and he would talk for a little bit on Saturday morning, and then he would open it up and somebody this meeting at edge, you know, come to the microphone, will people would come to the microphone, Rick that were dying, or their loved one, just the or their child just died, or, or, or they were in chronic horrible pain. And because he had walked through the dying process with 1000s of people, and because he had discovered how to meet his own pain, it was phenomenal to watch these people being met, right? Where they were, and you could just feel the energy opening up. And his definition of healing, I think is one of the most powerful dictionary definitions of healing I’ve ever come across. And maybe this is just one of his definitions, he may have others, healing is bringing awareness and mercy into that, which we have held in judgment. And in fear. That’s the game of struggle. And so much of awakening is learning how to slowly and surely open your eyes and actually experience what you’re experiencing, without judging it with great compassion. So, even the great discomfort begins to just move through you. And, you know, I still get caught at times, you know, my had a family member that was almost died in ICU, you know, last March, you know, and, and sitting in that room for six days, you know, all the states of mind, the, the fear, the dread, the anxiousness, the the judgment, you know, what did I do wrong, you know, these states would come and my job over and over again, I would watch myself starting to contract into unconsciousness, and then I would get curious. Healing is bringing awareness and mercy into that which we’ve held in judgment and in fear, and to be absolutely able to be spacious around fear or spacious around despair. This is one of the core gifts that we can be given by life.
Rick Archer: Several points come to mind as you’re speaking one is you remember, you remember Dale Borglum? You know, Dale, no, I don’t I interviewed him just three weeks ago, he and ROM das and Steven, and was it Steven Lavon, is it started the death and dying project in Santa Fe many years ago and Dale still doing that also in the Bay Area. But in any case, that’s just a little aside, I was reminded of this analogy that’s used in sort of Indian teachings, which is has to do with the ability of things to make deep impressions and for those impressions to stick and be tenacious. And the analogy is that, you know, if you take like a, make a line in stone with some tool, then the line first of all, you can’t make it very deep, because the stone is hard, but also it stays long time. And then let’s say you make a line in sand, you know, you can make it deeper, doesn’t stay so long. And then let’s say you make a line in water, you can make it even deeper more easily, but it stays even less time and then line and air, you know, you can make it and you ended up then it doesn’t stay. So, what the analogy tells us is firstly, regarding the you know, the tenacity of the impressions that that we incur, according to the spaciousness of our awareness, but secondly, also, it implies that with a more spacious awareness experiences are not going to be exact muted. They’re going to be actually more vivid and rich. Yes, yeah. Yes. But
Mary O’Malley: but all as an invitation to relate to, rather than from them. And I love to say, you know, I talked about this a lot in my book The gift of our compulsions, which is premise is our core compulsion is struggle. And all of the other compulsions are an attempt to numb out from that unease of struggle. And, and I also talk about it in what’s in the way is the way is the what we don’t recognize. And if you look at nature closely, you’ll see it. Everything flows, water flows, sound flows, air flows, day flows into night, SAP flows up the tree, and then down the tree. Okay? We are that flow, when we were first born, energy just flowed through us. And then slowly and surely, we learn how to contract around this and it’s not Oh, it’s not okay to be angry, or it’s not okay to be exuberant, or I’m a sissy if I’m cry, or whatever. And it looks like what we do is bound up bind up feelings. But really what we do is we bind up our energy, and whether you call it fear, or loneliness, or despair, or dread, or shame or guilt, really, what those are, is your bound up joy. And as you learn how to be spacious, then, and relate to these bound up places inside of you, they pass through you, just like your hand, passing through water.
Rick Archer: There’s a sense good saying that says contact with Brahman is infinite joy, and Brahman means total totality unboundedness Yes. So one thing that I experienced when I began to kind of get more into the groove of flowing rather than controlling, and I think is that there was this balancing act between kind of passivity in which I would just sort of like, well, whatever, you know, just to kind of like, go with the flow, even if maybe the flow wasn’t the best way to go. Between that and controlling. And it was kind of a mini year process, and it’s probably still going on of learning where to find that balance point.
Mary O’Malley: Right? Yeah, because both are necessary. I love to say that the body has bones. And if it didn’t have bones, what would it be like?
Rick Archer: Okay, pile of mush,
Mary O’Malley: a pile of mush, the body has muscles. What would it be like, if it was all muscle, it wouldn’t work. And so, we’ve lived so long in the doing place, that it takes a while to begin to really connect with what being is all about, we think being is all about sitting down by the side of the road, and just letting life happen. I am much more engaged with life now that I am grounded here. And that that my, my, my ground is openness to what life is offering right now. And out of that openness, comes doing, you know, like writing a book, you know, sure, you know, it out of that comes doing but I’m not doing it. Life is doing it. And that when when we come to that place, it’s such joy. There is a deep, deep, deep, even to say it’s cellular is is not even good enough. There’s a deep trust of life. And I love to say that the ego is all about getting happiness, and that you know, that’s okay. And you can grab happiness, you know, you can find a mate that is your dream mate. And then six months later, you find a squeeze the toothpaste tube from the middle, you know, but joy is the ability to be with what is Yeah.
Rick Archer: That’s good points. For some reason the other day I was thinking of that Bible verse where Christ said something like, you know, come to me all those who are heavy, heavily laden burdened or something and I will give you rest and then he said, from my ear Vak is easy and my burden is light. And it’s interesting because the word yogo relates to it comes from the word meaning yoke to you tonight, and then what you were just saying a minute ago that reminded me a point in the Gita where it says established in being perform action. Yes. So if it wasn’t like established and being sitting by the side of the road and just vegetate it was perform action. In fact, in that specific instance, it was go out and fight a battle or Krishna was saying it to our Juna, right. So there’s this kind of simultaneous coexistence of Yes, of complete opposites. But they, they they mess up nicely, don’t they?
Mary O’Malley: Yeah. And Steven talked a lot about soft belly. Had I sent these cards out. In fact, if their viewer, your viewers are interested, they can email at awakened at Mary O’Malley dot com. And I’ll send them three beautiful cards. And the first is just a question mark. Because that’s the first aspect of consciousness, the ability to be curious about what is the second is a heart. That’s the second aspect of consciousness, the ability to be spacious, or meet in our heart, what is, well, the third card is soft belly. Because we have this such this amazing biofeedback mechanism inside of us that it is a guarantee that you learned when you were very young to hold your breath. And when you held your breath, you tightened your belly. And we all ran away to this separate self thinking we are it. And as you’re returning as you are becoming embodied again, as you are becoming the dance of life, rather than doing the dance, the belly can help you immensely. Because it will tell you long before you get in your head, that you’re lost in the unconscious self again. And over and over again, to soften your belly. We long for our breath to move down fully. I mean, Watch Dogs and cats breathe, babies breathe, they all breathe, you know, with their whole will actually their whole body. But you can see it the most in the trunk. And yet most of us by the time we go to school are holding our breath. So if your listeners are interested, I will have sent to them those three cards. They’re so beautiful. The question mark. Remember, Stephen said healing is bringing awareness and mercy I call it curiosity and compassion. That question mark the heart, and then the soft belly.
Rick Archer: And my belly is pretty soft, but not in the good sense.
Mary O’Malley: Yeah, it’s an inner, inner openness to life.
Rick Archer: What was the email address again to get those cards
Mary O’Malley: awaken the word? Aw, a k e n at Mary O’Malley dot com? And aryomalley.com
Rick Archer: Okay, I imagine you’ll get a bunch of emails.
Mary O’Malley: I would love to spread. I figure I’m Johnny Appleseed, you know, that would love to spread this. We will not make it as a species if more and more of us don’t come into consciousness.
Rick Archer: Right. Yeah, that’s a whole topic for discussion to is the societal implications of this. And the reason for all the kind of serious problems that beset us, you know, being exactly being rooted in ultimately. unconsciousness or and a deficiency of conscious Exactly,
Mary O’Malley: exactly in a belief in struggle, and a belief in fear, and a belief in shame. You know, it’s just, most people don’t want anybody to know, let alone themselves know how deeply they have put themselves out of their own heart.
Rick Archer: But you know, the word belief. I often hear teachers use that word. And I also often hear them use the word willingness, like, you just have to be willing to kind of open up and this and that. And, in a way, it kind of implies that one can just turn on a dime, you know, whereas in fact, they’re layer after layer after layer after layer of conditioning that could take decades to accumulate. Yes. And so you don’t want to give people the impression that they’re kind of like lame or something if they can’t just open up and be all breathing from the belly and I’ll do all this stuff on the spot. It’s gonna be a process.
Mary O’Malley: It’s a process. Somebody asked him how long does this take? And he said is the work of a lifetime? Yeah, but what I will Add to it, Rick, is it’s the only game in town, right? I mean, when you begin to hear about consciousness or awakening, I mean, that is truly a gift from life. And I love metaphors. And so I have one metaphor that comes to mind right now is everybody lives in the, in the middle of the deep, dark forest, in a prison. And this person has multiplex theaters, and, you know, car races, and, you know, wonderful restaurants and all that. And all the way around the perimeter is a fence. It’s not even a very high fence. But on each fence posts is a sign that says, Do not cross this fence, or you will die. That’s the separate self that is terrified of opening to life. Yes, we longed to open to life more than you can possibly imagine. But we’re also terrified at it. But the people that listen to you, and the people that I work with, they’ve crossed the fence, maybe not even because they wanted to, they were just compelled. And for a long time, it looks like you’re wandering in the forest. And but the the more you wake up, and the more the trees then and the more you come to this bluff, you can see forever, and you become big enough that you can look back at your journey. And you can see every step of the way, was absolutely necessary. And that’s why I do retreats, and do phone groups and phone counseling and all that because we need to gather together, we need to, it’s almost like learning a language. Yeah, you can read about let’s say you want to learn Spanish, and you can read and you can start saying or la mia more. But it isn’t until you start conversing with somebody that it actually begins to integrate inside of you. And so I believe very strongly, we need to have interview shows like this. And we need to have retreats like I do, or groups, because we need to gather together in these small groups of people that begin to grok the language of consciousness.
Rick Archer: As a really, I liked the Spanish analogy because I mean, I was really I took Spanish many times when I was in grammar school in high school, and I was always lousy at it. And you know, I sit in a class struggle through it, go home and speak English and just forget it, forget about probably not probably not even do my homework because it wasn’t interesting. And then I’d go back to the class next day and be looking at the clock waiting for this to end. So you know, imagine that compared to becoming an exchange student and going to Spain, you know, living with a family in Spain and immerse for Yeah, being immersed. Yeah, so this spirituality stuff. I mean, you know, you can stick your toe in, read a book, you know, like, listen to an excerpt totally tape or something, or you can kind of like really make it your primary focus or as much as your life will allow, and you’re gonna get very different results.
Mary O’Malley: Yes, yes. And one of the most powerful things about coming into a group of people that are also exploring consciousness is that you discover we’re all Nadis fruitcakes, you begin to discover that all those places you didn’t want anybody else to know that you thought, the jealousy that you feel the arrogance that you feel the judgment of other people that you feel the judgment towards yourself that you feel the pickiness that you get lost into something, the irritation, you begin to discover that we’re all caught in the same place. It’s so freeing. Yeah, when you begin to see that because you let go of the war. Oh, a good person never feels judgment. Well, per Hui, you gotta know, this separate self is glued together with judgment. Awakening isn’t stopping that awakening is having enough space around it, that you don’t identify with it. In fact, I love to say, Oh, hi. Oh, you’re here today. Oh, you having a bad day? Can you say that to a part of yourself that, that formerly you didn’t even want yourself to know, that was there inside of you? Because we have it all.
Rick Archer: It’s funny that Nadis fruitcakes thing you said because I often wonder have wondered, you know, does spirituality make it naughty? Or does it attract nutty people? I think maybe a little bit of both.
Mary O’Malley: A little bit of both. But you know, I like what Jack Kornfield said once on the journey of going sane. It looks at times like you’re going insane. Because what you’re doing is you’re lifting the veil and the heart is opening Yes, I was taught when I was 27, how to be curious. But it didn’t really come on full board. And still until I met Stephen when I was 39. Because he taught me how to be curious with great heart. And so as you lift this veil, you kind of see, well, there’s a lot of stuff inside there that we could call grody. But we see, it’s just the unconscious system that all human beings have. And most people are run by it, and you begin to decide, I don’t want to be run by that anymore.
Rick Archer: Yeah. So what would you say to someone who said to you, you know, I just want to live a normal, happy life, I don’t care so much about Enlightenment and all that, all that stuff, I just want to sort of be comfortable not go through all kinds of turmoil and angst and everything, and that so many spiritual people spend seem to spend years doing, you know, I just want to kind of, like, be peaceful and simple and ordinary, you know, I mean, does spirituality have to be a long drawn out or deal of catharsis and, you know, change our and, you know, answer the question,
Mary O’Malley: everybody’s journey is different. And for some, it is a very fierce process, it’s a birth, if you’ve ever watched a birth, this is a fierce process, we are being born back into life. But just like with birth, what do they do with women, they teach them breathing. And breathing is, you know, I think it’s in all four of my books, you know, the power of breath, because it’s so powerful. And I did a class for years at our local hospital, you know, on the power of breath. And so if somebody comes to me and says, you know, I really don’t want to explore at all, but I just want to have an easier life, I would connect them with their breath, breath is is your best friend, as you go through life, and most of us just hold on to it. And so we’re just half alive.
Rick Archer: So would you say that? I don’t know, some people don’t seem to have a choice. Like it really kind of right grips you by the collar and drags you along. And, and other people seem to be able to modulate it and, you know, ramp it up or amp it down to, to the extent that they can remain comfortable. I mean, I have, I’ve interviewed people and I have friends who were just minding their own business, and all of a sudden this huge awakening took place and they, you know, well, Eckhart Tolle is a good example. He right, obviously, he was depressed. But you know, and he’s happy he had that awakening, but he couldn’t do much more than sit in a park bench for a couple tours.
Mary O’Malley: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And again, everybody’s journey is different. And it’s just the storyteller, this unconscious self that relates to this birthing process as something is painful. My first child, I both both of my children, I had completely natural childbirth, and the first child 18 hours, probably for the last three or four, I resisted every single contraction. I had no good coach there. You know, I was living out in the woods, and we came into nature paths office, you know, it was just very painful. Three years later, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve grown a lot. My son came in five hours, and this room was filled with light. And it was it there was only one contraction. I wasn’t open to there’s only one contraction that I type started to contract around. So my life is a good example. I was one of those people that was just crushed by life. I mean, I tried to
Rick Archer: Yeah, tell us your story. You have quite a story. And sometimes I start with that, you know, but yeah, let’s go into it now. Yeah.
Mary O’Malley: Well, and I will say this, Rick, I was gifted with great darkness. And I am not being facetious. I’m not being pollyannish. I was gifted with great darkness. I had the kind of childhood you wouldn’t wish on anybody. And I discovered the joy of numbing through food when I was about 10. And then I discovered alcohol when I went away to college, you know, and then I discovered street drugs. And when I was 23, I gained 97 pounds in a year while I was washing a lot of it down with alcohol and getting every single drug both prescription and non prescription I could because I didn’t know how to be with what I was experiencing. And they started me on psychotic Bruce when I was 10. And so everybody tried to fix me psychiatrists, psychologists, group therapy, hypnotherapy, hospitals, you know, all of this. There was something wrong with Mary. And she needed to be fixed. All I heard was there something wrong with me. So when I was 24, I tried to kill myself three times. And the last time was slitting my wrists. Okay, well, I did pills I did, which, which it’s hard for me to say this. But I was unconscious enough that I got really drunk, got in my car, and made a decision of which overpass I was going to drive into, didn’t even think about the other people that I could have hurt. But that was the level of contraction that I was living in. And something I headed toward it. And something pulled the wheel right at the last minute. And I wasn’t relieved, I was angry, you know. And then when I slipped my wrist, thank God, I didn’t know that you slit up. But I just kept on, you know, doing the razor blade over and over again. And I can remember exactly where I was. I was sitting on the floor, and I was sobbing. And I was filled with so much self hate, because I was even a failure at suicide. Then, when I was 27. My mother I had moved back from Europe, and I was living in this basement apartment with my mother upstairs and and she was going to go to a yoga weekend and couldn’t go and said, Do you want to go? And it’s kind of like, oh, well, okay, you know. And so I went and this man was one of the first people that really brought yoga to the United States, Joe Kramer. And what he really taught was Yana yoga. And it was like I stepped out of a B grade black and white horror movie, and into a Dolby Surround Sound Technicolor panna vision movie. And I couldn’t tell you what he said, I couldn’t tell you, all I, I read at least recognize that there was something here that was true and real. And so the third time he came up from California, I drug it or a reel to reel tape deck that dates me a bit recorded the whole thing, transcribe the whole thing. And when my house in store burned to the ground, I lost everything. But it’s that notebook I grieved, because I could go back into that notebook, I was still caught a lot in this struggling self. But I could go back to that notebook. And it was like a beacon of light. And so the last time he came, I went to him and said, I want to tell you, what I am, what I am getting from these times I spent with you. And he said, Okay, and I said that there’s two parts to the symptoms. The first is in the seeing is the move. And he said yes. And what he’s basically saying is that we feel so strongly that all of this darkness that we’ve taken on we have to fix change rearrange is bad and wrong. And it’s an endless game of struggle. It’s when you can bring your attention fully to what you’re experiencing right now. That literally, that’s where alchemy happens, literally the power of your own attention to be fully with whatever is there. It opens it up, and it passes through. But as I said earlier, he didn’t teach it with the heart in the heart, as far as I’m concerned is our main brain and the heart is where all lasting healing happened. happens. And when I started hanging out with Steven, when I was 39. That was when I began to be able to truly have space around all of this darkness that I took on that I almost died.
Rick Archer: That’s interesting what you just said about the heart. I was reading something that looks like I don’t have it on my computer handy. But it was this whole kind of intelligent discussion about the chakras and and the kind of the main point of it was that the heart chakra is really the master chakra. Yeah. Can’t do justice to it off the cuff. But that’s basically what you’re saying.
Mary O’Malley: That’s it. And let me tell a quick story. You know, that I was interviewed for a book called M brainy multiple Braining a number of years ago, and they took 600 of the leading edge research papers on the fact that we have three brains. So of course we have many other brains soon as we call them chakras or whatever. But there’s three core centers of intelligence The head, the heart, and the abdominal brain. And the abdominal brain is the only place in the body that has the same kind of cells as our up in our brain. And this is that knowing that gut knowing that the abdominal brain is connected to the wisdom at the heart of life, the heart brain is the main brain. And at the Heart Math Institute, they did these amazing studies, and one was that they hooked people up to body sensors, heart sensors, and brain sensors in front of a computer. And the computer randomly chose either horrific, neutral, or beautiful pictures. ad for every single person, the heart always responded first. But for many of them, the heart responded, six to eight seconds before the computer even shows the picture. Why? Because this brain is a tool for maneuvering through reality. But it is not connected. This is connected to everything. And this is our home. And this is what we long for so deeply is to come home to the wisdom of our heart.
Rick Archer: Nice, very well put your eloquent, I’ll say that. You know, audio Shanti spiritual teacher. Oh, yes. Yeah. He always talks about, you know, head awakening, heart awakening, gut awakening that they’re actually distinct degrees of awakening. People undergo? Yeah. Yeah. Just, you know, one thing that’s kicking around in my mind, as as you’ve been speaking, is the issue of capacity and or ability to do what you’re saying. And I’ll elaborate just a little bit, like 20 minutes ago, when we were talking about experiencing a lot of pain and being able to kind of be open in the midst of that pain. I was thinking, I think it was St. Teresa Lee, so who who died of tuberculosis of the bone, which is supposed to be excruciatingly painful. But she, you know, she didn’t even let on the people, the nuns in the monastery, didn’t even realize she was going through it. And she was doing her tasks and all and finally, they noticed her limping. And, you know, but she had the sort of radiant beatific, spiritual, you know, vibe about her. So there’s, there’s an example of someone with immense capacity, oceanic openness, you know, who could who could sort of dissolve or sustain that degree of pain within that oceanic openness. Now, most of us don’t have that capacity. And some people it’s not, it’s not even a drop, barely the, the awareness is so constricted, you know, so, so tight. And so when you ask them to do these things, it’s like the they don’t necessarily have the capacity to do that, right, that others are going to. So I think a key question is how to how to become more oceanic, and you know how to, like, simple analogy, and then I’ll flip it back to you, if you take a glass of water and throw a bunch of mud in, it doesn’t dissolve very well. It’s only a glass. But if you could throw the same amount of money in a swimming pool or in an ocean, you know, boom, it’s gone. So how do you become more oceanic?
Mary O’Malley: Yeah, which is awakening? Right, you know, and I think that, that, it’s good to go back to the child, you know, if the child thought it had to figure out how to walk, you know, and then it had this adult brain that every time it fell down and said, Oh, my God, you know, look, I’m not doing this good enough or right enough, but what the child does is it stands up and then it falls down, and then it stands up. And then it falls down and stands up and takes a couple of steps and falls down. And so awakening is a little bit like that, we need to understand you I do this finger thing. Oftentimes there’s the Okay, take your finger and follow it with every l your whole body. That’s the 65,000 thoughts a day awareness, who we really are, is attached to the stories in our head. But if you begin to choose a focus, and pull yourself out of the stories, then every time you do you actually strengthen the muscle of your attention. And so, here you are, and you’re wandering, you’re wandering, wandering, and then all of a sudden you come back to the breath, you come back to the sounds and Stephen said once if you sit for an hour and bring your attention back to your focus one time in that hour, it is time well spent. People need to hear that because they sit down and they want to you know met attain and their mind wanders the whole time they do it for three days and think phooey, I can’t do this. But if they really understand that one moment, I call it drops of water in the bucket. And you know, after, you know, a year, the bucket is hardly even, you know, water is hardly even covering the bottom of the bucket. But those moments count. And then one day without even noticing it, the bucket overflows with water. So what I did, and what’s in the way is the way that at the end of each chapter is a called the remembering section. And it’s a 10 week process, you can read the book and not do the process. But we start very small, we start with five minutes a day, and people are opened up to this in the way that this isn’t about trying to get anything to happen. This isn’t about trying to stay on the breath, or that’s not a good meditation, you know, there’s no such thing as a good or bad meditation, you know, it’s an end, I say, five minutes is too much, you start with two minutes, because that consistency, which strengthens the muscle of your attention, so that you can come to the place where that woman is so spacious, that excruciating pain can move through her. And it’s like a handful of mud in the ocean. How do you get there by strengthening the muscle of your attention? And so in a way, we could say, it’s a really good thing that you wander off in meditation? Because every time you do, then you will come back?
Rick Archer: Yeah, maybe that means maybe that’s what Christ meant when he said, even if you have faith as much as a grain of a mustard, mustard seed, you know, it’s like, if even if you don’t have very much to start with, it will grow, you know, if you persist and do something, yeah,
Mary O’Malley: yeah. And, and it that’s why we need to gather together because we need to hear there really is truly another way to live. You know, I give a metaphor, sometimes of this most gorgeous house with you know, soaring windows and wonderful gardens. And we live in a windowless basement bedroom with a big screen TV. And we watch our thoughts all day long, we think we our thoughts will then life brings a sledgehammer, it brings something you can’t control, that’s a very great gift, like you’re losing a mage or, or financial distress or difficult health diagnoses or something like that. And so life is, is taking a sledgehammer to the outer walls of the windowless bedroom, and we get our spackle and we just spackle it up as fast as we can. But then one day, the sledge hammer creates an opening. And you look through the opening, and you begin to see there’s a whole nother world happening here. Other than this very separate, controlling, conditioned mind. And in that time, Rick, you know, a team of wild horses are not going to be able to keep you away from giving yourself the gift of presence. Throughout the day.
Rick Archer: This whole issue of control is interesting might be worth coming back to a little bit I want I once heard humility defined as the quality of not insisting that things happen any particular way. And, you know, it seems like there’s this sort of individual in the driver’s seat that’s actually controlling things, but as you’ve said, and as many have said, that’s kind of not the reality of the situation. Not at all, yet. We do have that perception. You know, people say well, hey, I can either raise my arm or not raise my arm, I have a choice. You know, I seem to have free will. And so maybe it comes back again to finding the balance point between exercising what appears to be your volition appears to be your volition, and you exercise it to whatever extent you you can based upon what you present, you know, how you perceive it. And, and then there’s this funny, Geico commercial these days where you know, you know, they say, did you know that that 15 minutes can save you 15% or more on car insurance and then and then the other guy says, duh, so did you know that getting playing cards with Kenny Rogers gets old really fast? And then you see Kenny Rogers sitting there playing cards with these guys who said, You got to know when to hold him and know the folder. I’m gonna keep saying that over and over and over again. So it’s like, there’s this balance point, is the point I’m getting to between actually applying some sort of individual will or building So yes. And then, you know, just surrendering to, to the, to the larger cosmic intelligence,
Mary O’Malley: very much so in and in the end of the book, Michael Beckwith Yeah, he has these four stages of consciousness. And I added two in the middle, but we probably don’t have time to go into those. So I’m just gonna give him give his four. And it’s so very interesting to to see this in relationship to what we’ve been talking about. So for most people, they believe life is happening to them. Yeah. And in the end, they’ve got a fight with is very much of the MC victim mode. And there’s no judgment. I mean, sometimes I go into that state for a short period of time, but the contraction always wakes me up. And so that’s where most people live, then what has been happening for the last 100 years, and especially when the secret came out, in the last, you know, 10 years or so, now life happens by me, you know, the I like what Steven says, this is a half truth swallowed hole. And now you can create your reality. And, and it’s a very important phase, because it gives you a sense of a power, when you’ve been living in a power of helplessness in the face of life is happening to me. And so it’s a really aphrodisiac. But if you live it very long, you’ll see two things. Number one, it causes you to be afraid of your thoughts. And number two, it causes you to feel ashamed because of course, everybody else can create their reality, but they but I can’t. Carolyn mace in the 90s was in Seattle, I wasn’t I didn’t go see her, but a friend of mine did and, and she was shifting from this, you create your reality to show up for reality. And she asked 600 People who’s been able to create their reality that they want, not one person open, lifted their hand. So then you begin to move into life is happening through me. And then eventually, as me, and I think most people really won’t know that, you know, until they leave their bodies. But that it is a I think it’s more of a just like the sun, you know, the light comes gradually, you know, in the morning, you it is this gradual? You know, here’s the dirty word to the ego surrender. You know, I like the word openness. There is, you know, yes, when you’re in the, in the to meet my God, you know, I got free will, and I’m in charge, and by me, yes. But then you begin to see that that never brings you the real deep healing you longed for. And you begin to relax. And you begin to see be life. And you become less and less interested in free will. And more and more interested in grounding right here. And Father, Thomas Keating has a quote I have on my bathroom that I absolutely love. And I won’t be able to say all of it, but he said the Chief act of will, is not effort. Its concern consent. And as you move up the interior ladder of freedom, you become less and less interested in trying to control it. And more and more interested in tried to stay open to it. He used different words than that. But that that, you know, that’s the gist of the quote. So yeah, it’s a slow, gradual, you know that you see that life lifts your hand, thought me think it lifts your hand. But where does thought come from, you know, life lifts your hand, and then you become the dance. And that’s what we long for?
Rick Archer: Well, that was very beautiful. I loved all that. The whole thing about we’ve created our own reality. Obviously, if we took that to its logical conclusion, the world would be complete chaos, because we’d all be creating different realities. You know, it’d be like,
Mary O’Malley: That’s a good one.
Rick Archer: Yeah. I mean, how would we agree on whether whether there’s a stoplight or whether it’s red or green? Or you know, I’m seeing a turtle, you’ve seen a stoplight. That’s so so obviously, there’s a larger reality that’s, that’s independent of what we individually create. And the whole thing about the secret I think, was brilliant too, because I mean, that whole thing, I didn’t like it very much. But the whole emphasis seemed to be Oh, look at this beautiful diamond necklace in the window and look at this beautiful sports car and I can have these things. Well, who’s to say you should have those things? You know, I mean, is that really in the larger interest of of the evolution of of consciousness for both your own and on the planet? So it’s, I’m just reiterating what you said because you said it very beautifully. But you know what, it really comes down to Alton mately is how can I be of service? And you know, how can I be an instrument of the Divine, you know, a sense organ of the infinite. And how can I fulfill its prerogatives rather than some much more narrow ones that I think are good, but may not be?
Mary O’Malley: Yeah, beautiful, you know, it we’ve all been brainwashed into, if we just get the diamond necklace, or the Mazda Rati, or whatever, then we’ll be happy. And for a moment, you may be happy, but then, you know, somebody bangs their door into the, you know, side of your Mazda Rati, or somebody steals the necklace or something like that, that what we long for is the joy that comes from the ability to be with what is and the such important point that you made, that the ego is all about getting who we are, is all about giving, in the extent of allowing life to dance us. And to me, there’s no greater joy, no greater joy.
Rick Archer: It’s, let’s let’s just for kicks, let’s take a couple of concrete examples that people run into in everyday life. So let’s say for instance, I don’t know your your boyfriend breaks up with you or something, and you’re really heartbroken. And you, you feel like this is a terrible thing that has happened. So how would you kind of like speak to such a person in terms of how this dramatic event could actually be in their best interest in the bigger picture,
Mary O’Malley: write it when I was writing what’s in the way, this came all in one fell swoop, life is set up, to bring up what has been bound up. So we can open up to be freed up. So you can show up for life.
Rick Archer: Say that again, it would mean or you can even say it again, and then elaborate on each little piece of it, if you want
Mary O’Malley: it life is set up. Life is an intelligent process. Life is for life. And to me, it brought forth human beings. I mean, you know, why is a human being even here, my goodness, you know, bees are more important to the function of it, you know, that it looks like with human beings. But you know, when I get very quiet, it really seems to me that life has brought itself together into this frontal lobe. So it can celebrate itself. So it can be here. So it can write poetry, so it can look at others through the eyes of the heart. And when you begin to understand that we all have to take on what we’re not, then there comes a time in your life. Hopefully younger and younger people will get this, that you begin to realize that you put on a fractured pair of glasses when you were young. And you’re looking at life through this fractured pair of glasses, you’re actually experiencing them. So if you’re experiencing life through the fractured pair of glasses, so if you have a alcoholic and abusive father, you may marry somebody that doesn’t even look remotely like it but eventually ends up being really very cruel. So we live these spells, and I love the word spells, because it’s something that’s laid over the top of you, it’s not true, and it can be lifted. So we just absorbed the spells that our parents absorbed. And life wants us to digest this, to see it, and to see through it so we can come back to life. So life is set up to bring up what has been bound up. So I want to tell a story. And yo, this is by somebody that I have a few people that I work with give me permission to share their stories. And this happened a long time ago, so Well, four years ago. And so it’s a young couple had a young child and we’re in a city visiting. And so they split up one night because the wife had someplace to go and the husband had someplace to go and they were going to meet at this place where they were going to stay the night and they were going to meet at the baby’s bedtime, like eight o’clock. And so as the wife was leaving the place that she was and called the husband to let him know that she was coming. Her SIM card broke.
Rick Archer: So what’s the SIM card in the phone? Okay,
Mary O’Malley: so her cell phone didn’t work. And of course, there’s no payphones around anymore. So she gets to the house where the husband is supposed to be And it’s locked in, nobody’s there. And she has a crying baby. And finally, after 45 minutes, she thinks, well, maybe I can find a window that is unlocked, and she finds a door and she goes in and she puts the baby to bed, yo, it’s about 830. Now, okay, then he doesn’t show up until 1145. When he walks into the bedroom, she is all nails and teeth and spitting fire, and so on and so forth. And he is all defending this is what we do in relationship, we attack and we defend, and we try to justify, and they came to me because they were ready to get divorced, because she just did not understand how he could possibly do something like that, because he said he was going to be back at 830. And he had his reasons and or eight o’clock, and he had his reasons and, and all of that. So they came to talk with me. And and I said, well tell me about what your experience was. And they asked the woman first. And she, as she started sharing it, she started crying. And she said, I felt so alone. I felt so abandonment, abandoned, which is one of the core spells that we all experience. And then and she got hurt, she got really hurt. And you could see that nobody had listened to that. The husband hadn’t listened to it because he was trying to defend his actions. And, and she was trying to defend against her attack. So then I turned to the husband, and he started defending. And then I said, what, what what are you really feeling right now. And it went into this agony of I’m bad and I’m wrong. And I did it bad and wrong. Both of them in that situation was we’re finally able to hear the other person. And it cleared out this contraction that had come between them. How we learn how to do that, because the woman said, but, you know, when he does something that, you know, like that, I just I can’t stop myself I just erupt, you know? And I said, Of course you do. But you can learn after the fact, to begin to be curious about what did this situation bring up inside of me, and I call it in the book, The U turn, you know, where you actually, you know, stop talking about whatever brought this up inside of you. And you begin to take responsibility for what you’re experiencing, which don’t hear the word responsibility from the ego is our gotta take responsibility. It’s the ability to respond. And as we learn how to do that, we begin to understand like his setup, to bring up what has been bound up, so it can open up. For the first time, this couple really understood that one of the core heartaches that she has experienced her whole life is the experience of being abandoned. And we freed it up in that moment. So they and they looked at one another at the end of this conversation, there was just such love in their eyes. And once you begin to see the magic of this, you turn of turning towards of really being curious about when you are contracted I call it becoming a tightness detective, then you begin to understand that the challenges of your life are not there. Because as we said earlier, you did something wrong, or they did something wrong, or my parents did something wrong, or God fell asleep on the job or whatever, or I’m being punished. They are actually there to bring up inside of you what has been bound up so you with consciousness, which is the ability to be curious and spacious. And that’s why we do the the 10 week process in the book, you can learn how to be curious and spacious. So in the future, when this deep abandonment comes, you know, when the husband promises that he’ll repair the roof or something like that, and he doesn’t, he doesn’t. And they get into horrible argument, the chances are far greater that after the fact one or the other of them is going to start to get curious now. And then they come in and they say wow, never guess what was brought up inside of me. This is what I’m seeing. This is what I’m doing with it. So that is really the journey of digesting unconsciousness with consciousness and you learn it by doing it inside of you.
Rick Archer: Interesting. There’s a kind of an interesting context for everything we’re talking about right now, which is that there are some spiritual teachers, some of whom I’ve interviewed, who really emphasize on the absolute view. And they emphasize that there really ultimately is no person, no individual, right. And that all this kind of stuff that you and I are talking about is sort of like dressing up a dream character, you know and fussing over a dream character, where whereas what you really should be doing is is waking up from the dream and not worrying about the dreams character. And I just came across a quote from Adyashanti, in which he said, it can be very difficult for any spiritual teacher to get through to students who are fixating on the absolute view as an unkind as an unconscious way of avoiding their humaneness. Exactly, to get them to stop holding on to their absolute view. This is one of the dangers of awakening, the tendency to grasp at a lopsided view, we grasp at the absolute view of awakening, and we deny anything else, it actually is actually the ego that fix fixates on the absolute view. And this way, using it as an excuse for dismissing on enlightened behavior, thought patterns and divided emotional states. As soon as we have grasped on to any one view of things, we have gone blind to everything else.
Mary O’Malley: Exactly. And we’ve gone blind to what life is, in this moment, life is an intelligent process. But to see how strong that urge to deny is, just think, for the past couple of 1000 years, I would say 95% of the Guru’s or meditation teachers, were all about going to Enlightenment. And I mean, this is how I woke up in the early 60s, you know, oh, my God, we were going to kill thought. And I used to feel such a failure at it, I do, I’d be at a meditation retreat, I opened my eyes, and I knew everybody else was in Nirvana, I was paired with, you know, struggling with this cesspool, so to speak. But then I began to realize what a gift I was given, because I couldn’t do the spiritual bypass. Life said, show up for what I am offering you, and you begin to trust it with you even the deepest and darkest and most uncomfortable places. You know, that that’s where the doorway? Yeah,
Rick Archer: yeah. And I suspect that all those people whom you thought were in Nirvana probably weren’t anyway, but, but if they were, it’d be interesting to know where they are today. Because at some point, they would have had to work through this kind of stuff.
Mary O’Malley: Yeah, and you can have many wonderful spiritual experiences without really awakening. Yeah.
Rick Archer: Yeah, that’s a whole interesting point, too. I don’t know. Probably won’t go into that right now. But
Mary O’Malley: maybe we should talk for a couple more hours.
Rick Archer: Yeah, sure. We have to take a bathroom break. And I know you have to go in about 10 minutes. But in and incidentally, next week, I’m going to be talking to a fella named Craig Holliday, who’s written a book called fully human fully divine, which kind of touches on the same theme. So it would be nice one two punch in terms of, you know, the compatibility and in fact that the necessary symbiosis between humanity and divinity, how the two are mutually enriching and complimentary. Not yet Not exclusive in any way.
Mary O’Malley: Yin and yang symbol,
Rick Archer: yeah, exactly.
Mary O’Malley: Right there, right there. And we just, we think the hidden yang symbol is light is on one side of a line and dark is on the other side of the line. And it’s not they are nestled together. And in the light is a point of dark and in the dark is a point of light. I think that to me, that is the richest symbol I’ve ever come across. Yeah, it’s cool. Yeah, life.
Rick Archer: So in our remaining time, What haven’t we covered that you’d like to cover? What are some highlights of your book? What are some highlights of your other books? What are some activities that you do that you’d like people to be aware of? You know, what would you like to leave people with?
Mary O’Malley: Well, it one of my favorite chapters in the book is chapter 11. And it’s called bankruptcy. Right? No, this is different. Okay. It’s called this song of the heart. And it’s the shortest chapter in the book. And I think the best way to get to the essence of that is just imagine you’re sitting on the moon, I have a couple of lazy boy recliners up on the moon, I love to hang out on the moon, because it gives me a broader perspective. And you look across at this blue, green, white jewel of our planet, and you are just stunned with the creativity of it. And if you doubt that look over at Mars, you know, beautiful in its own right, but basically red and rock and look at the moon and it’s, you know, brown and dust, you know, but here, Chegg wires, aardvarks, you know, orchids draping off of trees. Uh, Baby porpoises, you know, little sea and enemies, icebergs. I mean, it’s endless. Brian swim, the mathematician that I spent a lot of time with said that life was able to slip between that crack right between the opposites. And it’s celebrates itself in all of this beauty. And we’re asleep. So if you’re on the planet on the moon, and you look back, and you’ll see that there’s these two legged creatures all over the planet, and they all have clouds around their head. And because they have clouds around their head, that cloud bank is made out of fear. And it’s glued together with judgment. And it causes so much heartache, not only for the person that is lost in the cloud bank of struggle, but also how they act in the world. They can’t see the sacredness of life. And, to me, one of the greatest gifts we can be given by life is the process of awakening. But also one of the greatest gifts we can give life is the process of awakening. Because you enter the dance differently, you live from the AWARE heart, you see the sacredness of everything. And in my world, there’s a lot of cloud banks that are being cleared, you know, when they come and they go, but more and more, they’re being cleared. And again, just like we talked about the other drops of water in the bucket, you know, a person here a person there, you know, it’s the 100th Monkey principle, it doesn’t take everybody to wake up, we are in an evolutionary shift. And, and everybody that is listening to this is a part of that awakening, if you really want to make a difference with inside of yourself, in your family, with your neighbors, with your community with the world heal the war inside of you. And so I feel a very deep passionate about that. And that’s why I also do retreats, i Li, I invite people to lift themselves up out of their everyday world and come to really beautiful places. I’ll be in Costa Rica in February, and I’ll be at Hawaii, the next February 2016. And when you when you come into a very connected, heart felt quiet flow of life. That is that there’s beauty everywhere, it becomes so much easier to do what I call look to unhook, look, be curious about what the storyteller is doing. Be curious relate to it, rather than from it, so that you can become a part of the healing of our planet. And if running away, does it work for you or running towards I would say that’s running towards I do phone groups, they do phone counseling, you know, all of that. It’s,
Rick Archer: it’s beautiful. I’m glad you brought in that theme. I’m trying to set up an interview with Vandana Shiva, you know, the Indian environmentalist and be feel it’d be relevant to this show. Because as I was saying, in the early part of the interview, I feel like there’s a direct connection and important connection between the awakening spirituality in the world and the environmental and other problems that beset that are critical. And somebody’s telling me the other night that if you took all the water and all the world’s oceans and formed it into a ball, it would just be a ball sitting on pretty much would sit on France and cover up that much of the world. But otherwise, the world would be without water so that we don’t have like an infinite ocean in which to dump everything. And in similarly, I mean, the air is this really this very thin, diaphanous layer. If you went straight up the same distance as it might take you to go to the corner store, you’d be dead, you know, just a few miles. And so this and yet we dumped tons and tons and tons and tons of carbon dioxide and all kinds of other crap into it all the time. So it would seem to me that I think that spiritual awakening is going to sensitize people to exactly yeah, to the sort of the preciousness, like you were saying with the sacredness launcher on the moon. Yeah, the sacred is the preciousness and, and that will really sort of enable us to bring about the kinds of changes that will be needed to absolutely circumvent the kind of destruction that we’re headed toward,
Mary O’Malley: and without judgment, you know, we have we took on this world of unconsciousness that seems to be a part of the dance, and now more and more of us are digesting it. What we’ve done environmentally before oftentimes, is we go again, That’s something now we’re learning how to go for something and not judge all of the, you know, so called unskillful actions. The unskillful actions are a part of life and they have brought us here to this moment all my unskillful actions brought me to a place that I was so last life said, now get curious. So it’s a much different way to enter this healing that is happening on our planet, and it happens one person at a time. And if people are really interested, they can also email me and I will be glad to send him the foreword, and the introduction Neale Donald Walsch wrote the foreword, beautiful foreword to the book and the introduction to the book so they can get a sense of what it’s about if they want to know.
Rick Archer: And again, that’s awakening at Mary O’Malley, awaken, awaken at Mary, Mary O’Malley dot com. Great. All right, well, no, you have to go. So let me make some wrap up points. And then we’ll conclude. I’ve been speaking with Mary O’Malley, and she’ll have her own page on batgap.com, where I’ll be linking to her website and her books and have a bio of her and all that. So you can check her out and bounce from there to her website and explore all kinds of things that are there. This interview is part of an ongoing series, there are over 260 of them now. And so@batgap.com, you will see menus where you can find all the interviews categorized in various ways alphabetical topically, and so on. Check that out. You can subscribe to an audio podcast so that you can listen to this as you commute or something and you’ll see a link for that. There’s a Donate button, which I appreciate people clicking and rely on people clicking in order to be able to do this. As much as I do it. There’s a place to be to sign up to be notified each time a new interview is posted, which means you’ll get an email about once a week and a few other things poke around in the menus. You’ll see it all. So that’s bat gap.com. So thanks a lot for listening or watching. We’ll see you next week with Craig Holliday and thank you. Thank you again, Mary. It’s been really a pleasure to talk to you. Such a joy Rick, such a joy. All right, have a good day and maybe we’ll meet in person one of these days.
Mary O’Malley: Oh, that would be wonderful.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Okay, thanks. Bye.
