Melinda Edwards Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done over 700 of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com and look under the interviews menu, where you’ll see them organized in several different ways. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the website and a page explaining alternatives to PayPal.

My guest today is Melinda Edwards. I’m going to read her bio as I usually do. Melinda is a doctor, a psychiatrist, a mother, writer, and physician in Charleston, South Carolina, providing psychiatric care to under-deserved adults. She completed her residency in psychiatry at Stanford Medical Center. She has studied complementary and alternative medicine with Andrew Weill, MD, researched the effects of MDMA on PTSD, and is a columnist for Autism Parenting magazine. Dr. Edwards is the author of “Psyche and Spirit, How a Psychiatrist Found Divinity Through Her Lifelong Search for Truth and Her Daughter’s Autism.”

As a child of medical missionaries, Melinda grew up in a Mayan village, a Mayan Indian village in Guatemala. Early in life, she experienced an inner pull to a deeper truth. Her journey has taken her through various spiritual practices, including meditation retreats, guidance from spiritual teachers, travel to India, and living in spiritual communities. And her quest led to the ongoing discovery of the sacred in all. And I’m very familiar with all that because I listened to her whole book and really enjoyed it. So, inspired by her daughter, her journey with her daughter, Saatchi, which we’ll be talking about, Dr. Edwards founded the 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, Living Darshan, to foster a deeper understanding of autism in the world.

Just to give you a few highlights from her book, as I was reading it, I thought of a saying that a spiritual teacher once said, that when the postman knows you’re going to move, he tries to deliver all your mail. He was saying that with regard to karma. And she grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family and had this morbid fear of eternal damnation in hell because she didn’t feel like she had been saved and couldn’t quite figure out how to pull that off. She was overtaken by profound silence as a child, which is not necessarily a traumatic thing but maybe it was. Yeah, I think it was. We’ll talk about that. She was struck by lightning. And Mindy, did you know that in South America, they have what they call lightning shamans, who are people who are struck by lightning, and then it bestows them with shamanic abilities?

Melinda: I had no idea.

Rick: There is such a thing, yeah. She had tuberculosis. Her family car went off the road and nearly went down a steep cliff which would have killed everybody in the car, but it was saved by a couple of trees that just happened to be in the right place. She had near-lethal anorexia, requiring hospitalization and institutionalization, and then she went to medical school and had this grueling routine which would have killed me many times over. Eventually, she had a daughter who has autism. That has been a challenging journey, but as she will say, a very evolutionary one. So, I feel like you are packing a lot into this life.

Melinda: Yeah, either the mailman wanted to deliver a lot of mail or I required a lot of hard knocks to break through with my contractions. One of the two.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. And if one believes, as I believe you do, that life is not capricious and arbitrary and meaningless and accidental, then there is some evolutionary significance to all this stuff.

Melinda: Yeah, and, as I remember during my teenage years, when that tremendous terror shifted or opened into this intense longing for truth, the longing was so intense, I would just call out to the universe and say, “Whatever it takes, whatever it takes.” Now, in the thick of the traumas I would experience and all the suffering, I would regret having said that, but I kept saying it. I kept saying it and watch out what you ask for.

Rick: Yeah, and that’s a perennial theme. I have heard that in so many interviews I’ve done, where a person just has this ardent desire for truth and they say something like whatever it takes and it sometimes takes a lot. But as Jesus said, “Seek and ye shall find.” Once that epistle is put out there, once that request or demand is voiced, the universe responds.

Melinda: Yes, it does.

Rick: Yeah. So, I think that is a key point that we are starting with, and I’ve heard many spiritual teachers say this, both Eastern and Western, including well-known gurus in India. There’s a saying in India that sometimes is attributed to God and sometimes it is a thing gurus say, “take one step toward me and I’ll take a thousand steps toward you.” And in the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali talks about degrees of ardency or intensity in one’s spiritual path. He basically correlates greater intensity with greater rapidity of realization.

Melinda: And the longing itself emanates from that which I’m seeking or that which we are seeking, that which we’re longing for. So, it can’t help but bring us back to that. It can’t help but respond because it is born out of that very thing. Well, it’s not a thing, but it is born out of what we are longing for.

Rick: Yeah. There are nice quotes by Meister Eckhart and Rumi and people like that about how that which you are seeking is essentially that which you are, and it is the divine seeking itself.

Melinda: Yes, it is. That is the beautiful dance of existing as a separate individual, is getting to dance back into the love that we all are.

Rick: Yeah. So, going a little bit chronologically, you were in Guatemala because your parents were doctors and they were medical missionaries and you lived in this little village way out in the boonies. And your parents were fundamentalist Christians and you were routinely exposed to a lot of fire and brimstone, which instilled a fear in you of eternal damnation. I have always taken exception to that teaching. I think, what a horrible thing to impose upon people, striking that kind of fear into little kids. If we juxtapose that with a more love-based or divinely appreciative view of God and of God’s mercy and compassion and desire for all beings to be happy and so on, it is quite stark, the contrast.

Melinda: It is, yeah. And for me, while growing up, my parents obviously dedicated their entire lives to their belief system. They were both physicians and they chose to live in a little primitive Indian village in Guatemala and spread the word and save people from hell. So, I was instilled in that belief system and in that terror, that fear of going to hell. I write in the book about trying desperately to receive the Lord into my heart, because that is the solution. That is all you have to do is receive the Lord into your heart. And I never felt anything different when I would do that. And so, as children do, I assumed that something was terribly wrong with me, that Jesus would not come into my heart. In retrospect, it was an intuitive knowing that something was out of alignment with truth. But at the time, my mind interpreted it as something terribly wrong with me. And so, it wasn’t just fear, there were tons of shame wrapped around it. I didn’t tell anybody until later on about me not being saved, even though I tried to be saved. So, there were a lot of layers that I had to meet and allow to unwind. It was quite intense, because these were things deeply ingrained in my whole system, in my nervous system, in my energetic system, contractions, if you will. And so, ultimately the development of anorexia as part of that, there are a lot, there were a lot of layers to that. But, then through therapy first, that helped to open me to these aspects that I hadn’t been able to meet when I was younger. Yeah, so I’ll leave it there.

Rick: Yeah, a spiritual teacher once said that God may be omnipotent, but there is one thing he cannot do, which is remove himself from your heart. And the reason for that is he is also omnipresent and all-pervading. And I’m saying “He” for convenience sake, obviously. So, you can’t bring Jesus into your heart because he is already there.

Melinda: Beautiful. Yes, very true. Sometimes we have to go around the world or around the universe to get back to that.

Rick: Yeah. There was a beautiful little story, I’ll try to tell it quickly. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s teacher’s teacher, who, when he was a young boy in the Himalayas having left home at the age of nine to find a guru and having found one after about five years or eight years of searching, his guru sent him away to some caves nearby to do long meditation. And also, because, I think the guru felt as if, “Well, this guy is a lot more advanced than these other dimwits I’ve got around me here, so he’s going to get some special treatment.” So anyway, he went off to the caves. After a while, the teacher sent an emissary over there to ask if there was any space available for him to come to those caves. And the boy said, “No, sorry. I know you are just in the capacity of a messenger here, but tell him that there is no space available.” So, the guy goes back and there is this big uproar in the ashram. “How dare that young upstart say a thing like that? No space available.” It means he doesn’t understand the way you’re supposed to treat a master with great respect and so on and so forth. So finally, the master realized there was a buzz in the ashram, so he sent for the boy, who came into the presence of everybody and he asked him to explain why there was no space available. And he said, “After I surrendered to you, there was nothing but complete fullness. Had I realized you wanted to come a second time, I could have reserved some space. But as it was, there was absolutely no space for you to come a second time because you totally fill my heart and my environment with your presence.

Melinda: Beautiful. I love that.

Rick: Yeah.

Melinda: And Rick, circling back, we were talking in more general terms about fear-based religions. In one sense, yes, it’s a barrier to love, to opening to what we really are, both just as an individual but also collectively. But it also is an opportunity, as everything is in life, but it’s also a doorway into what we really are because everything is born out of that. So, everything is a doorway back to that. And just to weave the psychological in here too, in my experience, being present with these different emotions or contractions or issues, whatever we want to call them, it’s almost like layers unwinding or dissolving as we meet each layer.

So, a lot of times, the most superficial layer might be anger. That is when we are really projecting everything outwards or blame or criticism. And then, speaking about myself, if I sit with that and don’t discharge it through action or through thought and just am present with it in this body, the energy of that can open to other layers. Sometimes, it might be fear. These are all labels that the mind attaches to the energy, but nevertheless it is an opening and an unwinding fear. And then, nearly always in my experience, getting down to the bottom layers, there is this pain or sadness or grief. And while there might be an individual story or circumstance that our mind attaches to it, the core of that is the pain of separation, in my experience. When I open to that pain, whether the story is present or not in my mind, there is tenderness and just this tenderness. Tenderness and when you open to that, it’s just love. Non-separation, just love. So, again, just weaving in the psychological, my psychological and spiritual process are ongoing.

Rick: So, you are saying that there is a strata of various ‘sleeping elephants’ that we have to tiptoe through to get to the other side, so to speak. And as you tiptoe through them, elephants start waking up and you feel, “Oh, this elephant is making a fuss over here and that one’s making a fuss over there. But you are saying that the ultimate, the last elephant guarding the threshold is pain.

Melinda: In my experience, typically. Now, sometimes, the fear will open straight to love, but oftentimes it is that grief of separation.

Rick: Yeah.

Melinda: Yeah.

Rick: How does it go? There is some line in the Upanishads, “all fear is born of duality” or something like that. There is this thought that, at the very inception of manifestation, we step into duality from unity. And so, I think it was Sanyal Bander of the Waking Down group, who called it the core wound and perhaps Eckhart refers to it as the pain body. But there is some core thing that is at the root of everything else. I’ve spoken to a lot of people who feel as if it is a very scary threshold to cross when they finally encounter that. There is great fear and the ego is recoiling against having to go through that.

Melinda: Yeah, and I think there is also, I’m not exactly sure how to put this in words, but just how everything is a microcosm of the macrocosm, that we go through this deepening and as we move through these levels, it is also an opening to more and more subtle aspects of being. But we go through some of these at one level that brings us into compassion, maybe for another person and then other times we are opened even more deeply into the sense of total unity and love, a connection with absolutely everything and no separation.

Rick: Oh, so I guess what we are laying out here is that there is a range of levels in our subtle mind-body system, which we are ordinarily unaware of, and we have to traverse that range in the process of spiritual evolution. We have to deal skillfully in one way or another with what we encounter.

Melinda: Yes, and open. And I am sure it is much less so for the people who come to BatGap, but most of our lives are spent running from the pain of separation, whether that is through addiction or food, alcohol, the internet, social media, whatever. But we’re running from what we really are. So, and then we can experience this directly, this point I’m making, that truth, that everything is born out of love, out of truth. It is not just a philosophy or the Upanishads or whatever. You can, you and I get to experience that directly by turning towards and opening to these contractions within our system or these things that otherwise the individual ‘me’ might want to turn away from.

Rick: Yeah.

Melinda: Because everything will lead us back to love because it is born from love. Everything is born from love. So, we get to experience that firsthand.

Rick: Yeah, so I got two things out of what you just said. One is that everything we are talking about here and everything in the whole world of spirituality is not merely a philosophy or something that is interesting to think about. The whole point of it is to have the direct, visceral, concrete living experience.

Melinda: Yes. To realize it, real-ize it through our whole system. And it is useful for the mind to have paradigms and its list of stages, whatever paradigm it wants to take, because the mind can get agitated if it doesn’t have something to rest with. But that is not the ultimate realization or experiencing. It is fine to talk about it, but in my experience, the opening to what is really here is where it’s really at.

Rick: Yes, but I also think that intellectual understanding is not just entertainment. First of all, it can inspire you, you can have an understanding of what is possible. And secondly, as you go along, it is really easy to misinterpret various states and stages that you might be going through. With adequate understanding, you can turn what might have been a cause of fear into a cause for celebration or something nice. Or you can also manage to not over inflate yourself and think that you have reached some pinnacle of human realization when you are basically just starting out.

Melinda: Yes. And I’m glad you are pointing that out, because my path has been more experiential. But of course, the mind is a wonderful tool on the spiritual journey and can be a wonderful guide on the spiritual journey.

Rick: Yeah. So, and it’s a faculty, such as we have all these different faculties and each one has its place. If one of them tries to usurp the others and take over, then we are out of balance. But, obviously, one can get too heady with all this stuff, so in proper proportions, then the path is more safeguarded.

Melinda: Yes.

Rick: Okay, so let’s loop back a little bit more to your past again, going the way back machine. So did your anorexia start when you were still in Guatemala or was that after you left and came to the States?

Melinda: It started in Guatemala, but it really took a nosedive once we got to the US. Again, there are so many layers to that. From the psychological perspective, there were a lot of family dynamics, which I won’t get into. I did outline them in the book, but another dynamic, I was the sensitive one in the family, so I absorbed not all, but a lot of the family pain and terror, the energy of all of this. Ultimately, my system could not contain any more. And so, at one level, the anorexia was an attempt to try to control that. So, just externally I was trying to control what I was eating, but it was really an attempt to control these intense energies that were in my system, if that makes sense.

Rick: It does. And we are going to be talking a little bit later about the spiritual implications of autism. As you speak, I am wondering whether there are some spiritual implications of anorexia, and you are saying there are, and it’s …, but rather than speculating, I’ll let you pick up from there.

Melinda: I haven’t really thought about this in those terms. I think that there are levels that we can look at everything from, and there is the psychological which would include the family dynamics, my own personality patterns, the type A, control type thing. And then it is hard for me to differentiate between psychological and spiritual these days. But with the spiritual, in terms of energy, that is how I experience spirit, as energy. Just what I alluded to, that there was this intense energy within my system and I wasn’t equipped to know how to be present with it or manage it and so it needed some sort of outlet. And so, for me, that outlet was the anorexia. There are so many ways, I don’t even know which way to go with this, but one interesting aspect of it was this terror and fear that I had been living with was killing these other aspects of being in myself. And as a mirror of that, the anorexia reflected that, because the anorexia was actually killing my body. So, at an emotional or energetic level, what was happening internally was being mirrored with what was happening with my body.

Rick: Yeah. It’s interesting. I was fantasizing the other day about if I could get into a time machine or something and go back to 1964 where I was hanging out with my friends at the beach. I was 14 years old and would just sit down and talk with myself and perhaps my friends also and tell them some things about what would help them get through the teenage years that they were starting to get heavily into. I doubt that many 14, 15-year-old girls are watching this interview, but, if you were to counsel, or maybe you have counselled such girls as a psychiatrist, what would you say to them as someone who went through it also and who has ended up in a very nice place and didn’t kill herself or starve to death or whatever.

Melinda: You know, Rick, what comes to me is not specific to anorexia. My experience with myself and with the people I work with is that we all are longing to be received and fully, deeply heard, not just our words, but deeply received. And so, if I could offer anything, what I would offer would be just a deep listening and a deep receiving. And then, also using words to support, encourage, and frame things in a way that the mind can use in a healthy way.

Rick: To me, life is such a precious opportunity and whenever I hear of someone committing suicide or somehow throwing this opportunity away, I think, “Oh, I wish I could have spoken to them. I wish they could have known.” Because, there is so much potential in life and it is open to everybody no matter how dark things seem.

Melinda: Yes. I’ve experienced the same with friends who, well, one in particular who committed suicide and the regret afterwards was there. That is just this natural process to grief, but the regret came up, wondering “was there anything else I could have done to love her more?”

Rick: Yeah.

Melinda: Yeah.

Rick: There was this guy in town who I knew pretty well, a very nice guy who committed suicide recently. And my sister told me that he had a sign up at the local store saying, “I’m lonely. If anyone would like to hang out with me, let me know.” And I wish I had seen the sign. He could have taken walks with me in the woods, it could have made a difference.

Melinda: What a poignant cry for help.

Rick: Yeah, really. Okay. I guess what we are sort of evidencing here is that compassion is part of the spiritual path and a component of spiritual development. We could be just sitting here saying, “Oh, life is an illusion and it doesn’t matter what happens because nothing ever really happened and there is no person, so nobody dies and yada, yada, yada.” But that is not the way I choose to see it.

Melinda: Yeah, well, all true, but here we are. Here we are. And I noticed too, on my path, the more I open or the more my system opens to all aspects of being, of course, the more the heart opens and the more compassion comes forward naturally.

Rick: Yeah.

Melinda: And this is probably a bit trite for the people who are listening in because they all are further along, but it is impossible to be really present with somebody else’s pain or trauma or anger or anxiety or depression until we have been fully present with that in ourselves.

Rick: Yeah, good point. I mean, because if we haven’t been, then to the extent we haven’t been, we are numb. And if we are numb, we cannot really commiserate or tune in with other people.

Melinda: Yeah, or receive. And so, then we might try to come up with solutions or problem solve. And that can be useful, but first of all, we all really need to be heard. That is my experience.

Rick: That is probably largely what you do as a psychiatrist, is enable people to be heard.

Melinda: Yeah, yeah. And it is interesting, because I work in a really traditional setting with underserved people, many who are suffering deeply. Some are homeless, some are chronically suicidal or psychotic, some have killed other people, so they experience deep, deep suffering. But it is all the same. It is just that everybody is longing to be heard, and it is such a privilege to witness another human being begin to bloom and open when they are heard and when they begin to be able to open to those aspects of themselves and listen to those aspects of themselves.

Rick: Yeah. Now, I guess there are different ways we can understand being heard, being heard by others, but then, some would say, well, the ultimate thing is you really need to know who you are. You need to know the self and perhaps you could tie those two together in some way. Can you really be heard if you haven’t tapped into who and what you are ultimately?

Melinda: So, in my experience, when there has been great trauma and very little of actually having been loved or heard previously, what is perhaps necessary, is having somebody externally not just model that but expose you to that, expose your heart to that. And then we internalize that. Like my patients or myself, when I was a patient as an adolescent, my therapist transmitted that to me, that love. And so, then it is almost like a virus, although that is not the right word because that is a negative connotation, but love is like a virus, it spreads.

Rick: Right.

Melinda: And so, when that is shared with someone, we really aren’t separate. It’s an energy that we absorb and then internalize. Is that responding to your question?

Rick: I think so. Yeah. As we speak, I’m thinking about how external aids of various types are essential for most people, the vast majority of people on the spiritual path. The vast majority of people couldn’t just go sit in a cave and close their eyes. They would go batty. So, call it a crutch if you like, but if you have a broken leg, you need a crutch. And, we are all broken to some extent, and that is the whole reason we have spiritual teachers. And one topic you and I are going to get onto here today is what a shame it is when spiritual teachers violate their role and abuse or take advantage of students who are in such dire need of a trustworthy guide.

Melinda: Yeah. You want to dive into that now?

Rick: We could. We can always loop back to other things, but we can dive right into that. Why not?

Melinda: Okay. Yeah, I was with many spiritual teachers on my journey and some were cleaner than others, but there is one in particular whom I want to speak about. When I first heard that person speak, I felt this enormity of truth energy, for lack of a better word. There was just this intense energy and it resonated deeply with me. I just was overwhelmed and tremendously grateful. That moved very quickly into devotion. The longing had been there throughout my life, but then the longing shifted into this intense devotion. Along with that was this projection onto the teacher, idealization of the teacher that he was truth and that I had to get there. So, and projection is part of our human condition. But with the spiritual teacher, it can get heightened. Now, I’m not sure exactly where to go with this, Rick, with the story, but I don’t know that I need to give all the details of the story.

Rick: And it’s all my fault, because you found him on BatGap. [Laughter]

Melinda: I wasn’t going to say that, but…

Rick: I’ve got some very mixed karma here.

Melinda: Jumping to the end here, I’m actually really grateful for the intensity of my experience with this teacher because, here I am. So, I want to just highlight some red flags that perhaps people might be able to hear, red flags with spiritual teachers. Now, when we are in the throes of devotion, the mind gets overridden. I cannot tell you how many times I thought, “Wow, if my colleagues or my friends heard what this person is saying, they would think he is grandiose or off the rails or he is the Avatar, the only one.” And my mind would jump in and say, “But they aren’t here, they aren’t experiencing the intensity of this truth force,” which he also claimed was truth force.

Now, it was intense energy, that is absolutely true. And many spiritual teachers have this intense energy or charismatic energy. The truth is, any of us can cultivate that. And particularly when someone is sitting up there and students are projecting all of this onto them, that energy intensifies. So, it feeds itself because we are projecting our energy onto them. And so, the energy gets more intense.

Back to the devotion thing, devotion can override all common sense, but perhaps if we just highlight a few red flags, maybe for some people it will allow the mind to step in and prevent some unnecessary suffering. Although, of course, at one level, we know that whatever suffering we come into is necessary, as it was in my case. So, one of the red flags is if the teacher says that basically they are the only one, that they are the only path to enlightenment, that they are the most realized person on the planet, the avatar. If you encounter that, I would say just hightail it out of there, run the other way. There are as many pathways home to love, to truth, as there are people on the planet. So, you want to jump in.

Rick: And there are a lot of teachers out there saying they are the only ones.

Melinda: Yeah. So, and along with that is just a lack of humility. What I have come to realize is that humility is actually a sign of spiritual maturity. Even better is if a teacher shares their own humanness, their own struggles, and not just from the distant past, but their ongoing current struggles. That keeps us all humble. And the other point here is, just coming back to what I said, we cannot just assess what they say with our minds. We have to use our intuitive discrimination because…

Rick: Our bullshit meter.

Melinda: Exactly, you got it. Even better said because they can really use the spiritual lingo. This particular teacher was saying that the student, who I knew well, had deceived him and manipulated him and all this and he shrouded it in, “I’m just too gullible. I’m too open. I didn’t see that.” But still blaming her as if, for whatever he was saying was an issue. So, spiritual teachers are really adept. We all are adept. Our minds are smart, they are wily and mischievous and they like to cloak things in ways that may not be completely true. So, we really have to sense into the bullshit meter.

So, I would say another red flag is if there is fear of leaving the community or leaving the teacher, that is a huge red flag. There certainly was this fear in the community I was in. And if there is pressure to stay or if there is criticism of others when they leave. This teacher would say things, he would pressure people to stay and then tell them they were losing their opportunity for enlightenment, realization, if they were going to leave. And then, when they would leave, the few who did escape sometimes left in the middle of the night. That is a red flag, if people feel they have to leave, sneak out. This person, this teacher would say, “Oh, not everyone is ready. They just didn’t have it. They were not ready.” So, if you are staying out of fear that you won’t get there if you leave or that you won’t get enlightened if you leave, that is a red flag. And another one would be any form of emotional or verbal abuse or consistent harshness. Now, sometimes teachers use Kali to try to break through some egoic structures, but emotional or verbal abuse is just never in alignment with love or truth. Jump in any time, Rick, I’m just…

Rick: Yeah, those are all good points. And it is a pattern, because I have seen the same thing happen with various teachers. They all say the same thing, I am the greatest and this is your opportunity for enlightenment. If you leave, you are not going to get enlightened in this lifetime or perhaps many lifetimes and all that stuff. So, it is a syndrome and I just want to put in a little context here because, as you said, there was a lot of positive, powerful energy around this guy and to a certain extent, I think that is just a function of the group dynamics, the group consciousness. You can get that at a rock concert, but still, teachers can actually be in a state where they can radiate a lot of Shakti, a lot of energy, and you feel it. It is palpable in their presence.

Melinda: Yes.

Rick: Yeah, so that can be very confusing because you think, “Well, how could this guy be a phony or nuts if he is radiating this kind of energy? I feel so good in his presence.” But there is a thing that you and I have talked about before, sort of deflected Kundalini rising, in which the Kundalini rises to a certain degree but then gets off on a side channel. But the degree to which it has risen confers upon you eloquence, charisma, energetic radiation, energy, Shakti, and other gifts, even Siddhis. Very often, it convinces you and the people around you, that you are enlightened. But what it ends up doing, and I have seen this many times, it ends up aggrandizing one’s ego or one’s sense of self. So, you become this spiritualized ego, and you become a megalomaniac in some cases. You just think you are the greatest thing since sliced toast. And you are headed for a fall, it is not going to last forever, but before that happens, you can mess up a lot of people.

Melinda: Yes, and the areas that are contracted within the spiritual teacher or walled off or not being met, whatever we want to call that, they get played out in the community or with their devotees because they are not being present. Just as in our lives, our shit gets played out if we are not being present with it. We act it out because that energy has to have somewhere to go. So that’s where the harm comes in. And just to provide a little balance here too, in my experience, there was a lot of wisdom that came through this person’s teachings and love. There also was tremendous trauma that others experienced as a result of his inability to be present with aspects of himself.

Rick: Yeah, and that has happened with a lot of teachers. Chogrim Trumpa or Adida or Osho and many of them, they arguably had some real gifts and were brilliant in many respects, but they had these blind spots that they themselves were blind to. In the Association for Spiritual Integrity, we are going to have a webinar, I think possibly on Monday, about the importance of being yourself as a spiritual teacher, not trying to build a facade to impress people. Because such facades are always shaky. And, if your students are the types who are going to leave if you exhibit some flaws, let them leave. You don’t want that kind of students anyway. It is just better to be yourself. And some of them, Adyashanti comes to mind as someone who was always “what you see is what you get.” And if he had a problem, like Bell’s palsy, which he was bothered by, he would talk about it. And no one thought the less of him. In fact, I would say it made him much more popular with a rather mature breed of spiritual seekers, people who did not want to be bamboozled and did not need to be impressed by someone who feigned perfection.

Melinda: Yes, the importance of being real is for all of us. But talking about spiritual teachers, just being real, I notice in myself, I can sense when there is projection. It can come with the MD or it can come now that the book is out, “an author” or even this Batgap interview. When a couple people found out, “Oh, you’re going to be on Batgap?” and then one person, someone else who had been interviewed even, said, “Welcome to the Batgap club!” I reacted, “Oh!” And then I started to feel some anxiety about it actually, but that is another story. But you can feel the projection and I always just have this urge to pop that bubble and the urge to just share my humanness.

Rick: Yeah.

Melinda: Because something about that projection, again it is the nature of this whole world. That is what creates “other.” But when it comes in my sphere, when I can feel that, my urge is just to prick it. The way to prick it is to share my humanness in this moment, just to be real.

Rick: Yeah. The Dalai Lama, the current Pope, and Gandhi all come to mind as examples of people who have a great huge fuss made around them or it was made around them, and yet they managed to keep it simple, keep it real.

Melinda: Yes. Ram Dass is another great example.

Rick: Great example, yeah.

Melinda: He would share what was going on. I remember when I was in my 20s. Ram Dass was, and still is, such a dear teacher to me. And I remember in my early 20s with that burning longing for truth and to go all the way, no matter what, “bring it on universe,” whatever. And I remember him saying once, “as we go along on the spiritual journey, my issues are issues, they don’t go away. They just get less intense and less frequent.” And at the time, I thought, no, I am going all the way. And well, I am there now, where that is the truth. He spoke truth and it took me a while to come to that because the Rajas and the longing were so intense.

If it is okay, I want to keep on with some of the red flags.

Rick: Of course, yes.

Melinda: One that really gets my goat.

Rick: Got a real book bite going here. At least it has flags. [Laughter]

Melinda: Yeah. One that really gets my goat is giving instructions or advice that they are not qualified to give, whether medical or psychological or psychiatric. And I can give a couple of examples of this teacher I was with. One of his students or devotees was in India and had chest pain. I knew that this person had also had high blood pressure. This guru or teacher told him it was just energy that he did not need to worry about it. That was deeply concerning to me, because we need to be present with the biological aspects of existence too, even while we are on the spiritual journey. Another devotee had a history of what is called schizoaffective disorder, which is kind of like bipolar disorder with some psychosis. But he was on medication when he came to the community and was doing well from a psychiatric perspective. He ultimately decided he wanted to go off of his medications and this teacher supported him in doing that. Well, he got manic and he got psychotic and this teacher then seemed kind of proud. He interpreted it as a manifestation of this teacher’s own force, and it overwhelmed this guy. No, this person has a biochemical imbalance. Just as, if you have diabetes, you need medication. If you have high blood pressure, you need medication. There are biological components to our existence that we need to honor and attend to. And when teachers start giving you advice about things that they are not trained in, that is a red flag.

Rick: Yeah. Well, if this guy really believed his own words that he was an avatar and was the greatest teacher to bless the earth, then he probably believed that he had the power or ability to offer such medical advice. Of course, it is very self-deluded because he was not qualified. I happen to know that the same teacher divested at least a few of his students of very large sums of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars. And in one case, some guy told him he had gotten an inheritance of about $900,000 dollars and he said, “Oh, you should have told me! This money has Asuric energies attached to it and you need to give it to me so I can purify the money for you, otherwise it would have been very bad for your evolution.” And the guy signed it over to him. The last I heard, he was still trying to get it back. I do not know whether he did or not. But is this teacher so cynical and so insincere that he is actually just using that as a line to get money, or does he really believe …

Melinda: He believes it.

Rick: … the stuff that he fabricates, yeah.

Melinda: In my experience, this particular teacher believes it.

Rick: Yeah.

Melinda: Yeah.

Rick: So, what does that say, if you believe that you are the greatest and that everything you say is the truth and that no one can, …

Melinda: Yeah.

Rick: … you alone can solve all the problems of the country or of your students or whatever.

Melinda: And even using it as justification for bad behavior, as this teacher. I don’t necessarily want to just get into criticizing this particular teacher, but just to use it as a demonstration.

Okay, I lost my train of thought, Rick. Where were we going with this?

Rick: Whether this teacher in particular, or teachers like him, since we are just using him as a template, actually believe all this stuff that they say.

Melinda: Yeah. So, using this “I am the avatar” or “the one” to justify bad behavior. This teacher would say, “Well, because I am this vessel of truth,” and he also believed he was Krishna incarnate.

Rick: Ha! Yikes.

Melinda: “Because I am this vessel of truth, everything that I do is used to further truth in this world to further your spiritual growth.” So again, just used as a justification, and it is such a primitive defense that it is hard to understand. This is my mind critiquing it, of course, because it is, yeah. But…

Rick: It reminds me of Richard Nixon telling David Frost, “Well, if the president does it, then it is not a crime.”

Melinda: Yeah. So, then another red flag is when a teacher fosters dependence on their wisdom or their teachings or themselves instead of turning you back to your own. That does not mean they don’t offer support. Teachings are so useful and so are transmissions of energy, but using that to foster dependence on them is just another egoic maneuver to keep them as “teacher” and you as “student.” It is one of the things that bothers me about “teacher.” I don’t even like that term. I remember when I was filling out the form you asked me to fill out for BatGap, I had to check a box, what category will this be in? And I just had this aversion to “teacher.” I reluctantly checked it, because nothing else matched up. But I really feel as if I am just a friend and we are all walking arm in arm together. And I just want to serve and love and offer my heart and offer my humanness because we are all human. So, anyways, I think trying to foster dependence keeps that whole projection thing going, keeps a spiritual teacher really identified as being a spiritual teacher, and really, underneath everything, is going to need students for there to be a teacher. Does that make sense?

Rick: Yeah, sure. That is his bread and butter. But obviously, you would not want to have stayed in medical school for the 30, 40 years. At a certain point, you graduate and you become a doctor. No teacher and no medical school would succeed if it tried to keep its students there forever. So, obviously, it wants to graduate them and have them go on and perhaps even train other doctors and so on. So, it should be that way with spiritual teachers, obviously. And as a mother, there is a stage at which one’s child is dependent, but you don’t want them living in the basement when they are 40.

Melinda: Right. The whole intention as a mother bird or a parent bird is that they fly the coop, right?

Rick: Yeah. [Laughter]

Melinda: That is the whole thing of it. So, and along with the humility thing is just entitlement and lack of gratitude. I witnessed that and was always just baffled by it. There was never an expression of gratitude or a sense of it. It was just this entitlement, I gave money and it is not that I cared personally, if there was a thank you or something like that, but there just was not a heartfelt sense of gratitude.

Rick: Yeah.

Melinda: Okay, and the last red flag is just if we are overriding our common sense.

Rick: Mm hmm.

Melinda: But I am sure you know of a lot more red flags if you want to keep this part of it going.

Rick: Oh, I will see if I think of any. But yes, common sense is an important thing and, with regard to the Association for Spiritual Integrity, one thing I often say is that we hope to raise awareness of what is and is not appropriate in a spiritual community or with a spiritual teacher. And one thing I have seen happen many times, including through my own eyes and with my own former teacher, is that, you sit there and things are getting weirder and weirder. But then you think, “well, this guy is so impressive and has had such an impact on my life and he is apparently enlightened and I do not think I am, therefore I guess I’ll just keep sitting here.” So, we have seen the extent to which cults can go off the rails, Jonestown being an extreme example. But there are many others with that kind of mentality among most of the students, and it is incremental. If you just walked into that scene, you would say, “Oh, my God, this is weird. I’m leaving. Bye.” But if you have been there since the start, it is like the frog in the slowly heating water. You do not notice that it is heating.

Melinda: Yes, exactly. I love that analogy. And I think this is another example of where the mind can really be useful. Recognize, each of us, when we are with a spiritual teacher that the nature of this is projection, that “they have it and I do not,” that that is not true. But that is the game we are playing as we move along on our journey, and sometimes we need to see it out there before we can realize it here. So, if your mind can hold that framework and you recognize that, I think that can be really useful in terms of not completely buying into that “they have it and you don’t.”

Rick: Yeah, it is a balancing act, because obviously they have something that we don’t have or we would not go there to get it. The same with the school analogy, they know stuff in medical school that you don’t know yet, so you want to be there to learn it. But on the other hand, well, actually medical school is an interesting example. As you described it, so many of the doctors teaching were egomaniacs and were just extremely cruel to the students and abusive and full of themselves. So, maybe there is a corollary here between that and the spiritual teaching scene.

Melinda: Maybe so. Yeah. It is on a different level. The medical is more the mental, that the physical aspect of existence and spiritual teachers are hopefully operating at a different level. But along those lines, just shifting into the medical system, it is very fear-based. The training is and so is the medical environment. I go into that more in the book. Is it okay to go in this direction, Rick?

Rick: Yeah, I just want to say quickly, I’m reminded of my friend Miranda McPherson, who is a spiritual teacher and has been on BatGap a couple times. She is in her 50s, I guess, and she has been a spiritual teacher since she was in her 20s. Through going through various phases of it, she makes a point of going to therapy periodically, maybe once a month or something, I don’t know how often. But she is going to sit with other teachers or going on other teachers’ retreats and stuff like that, just to get feedback and keep it real and have a little bit of self-scrutiny. And it is a good example.

Melinda: Yeah, and in my experience, therapy can be such a support for a spiritual journey. Of course, they are not really separate. It also can, everything can be its opposite, right? But the support is, just as we were talking about before, with therapy, I learned how to open to aspects of myself and open to my emotions, open to and become aware of my thought patterns, become aware of my tendencies. What I found late in my teens was after I’d been in intensive therapy for a long time. I felt hopeless at some point because I realized I was just moving the furniture around in the house, but I would be doing that forever. I realized somehow this isn’t it, this is not what I’m longing for, this is not what I’m seeking, this inner child work, this cognitive work, all this.

Rick: Right. It did not go deep enough.

Melinda: It did not go deep enough. Yeah, and I’m sure there are some therapists who can take it deeper than others. But the nature of what we call the spiritual journey, and again, there is really truly no differentiation but it is useful to have these concepts. The nature of the spiritual journey is the dissolution of the individual me, right? Like dropping into this place of love that we all are. So, I think they can go hand in hand, and the other piece is that psychological maturity can really support our spiritual journey. When that is not there, we still have to meet those aspects on our spiritual journey, meet the contractions or psychological issues or trauma or whatever. Those are going to come up for sure with the intensity of the spiritual journey.

Rick: Yeah, now some spiritual teachers say that there is a tight correlation between development of consciousness and then the development of all the other aspects of your makeup, your psychology, your health, your behavior, and so on. And others say, like Ken Wilber says, for instance, that the correlation can be very loose. He has what he calls a model of lines of development, where consciousness can be very developed and yet your emotional maturity could be very undeveloped. They can be way out of sync. And I think of it as a big stretchy rubber band. There is a correlation, they do pull each other along, but they can get really out of sync.

Melinda: To your point, with spiritual teachers.

Rick: Yeah.

Melinda: Right? They can be very advanced spiritually or have had profound insights and realizations and still have left a lot behind. It is not integrated.

Rick: Which is why somehow or other, you need to pay attention to all this stuff and maybe therapy is only one tool and there could be others, but your development really needs to be holistic. And in fact, the word enlightenment, I hesitate to use it because it is sometimes attributed to people who, as we are saying, are very out of sync. They have a lot of consciousness development but are pretty messed up in other areas. If I were to use it at all, I would reserve that word for someone who is holistically developed in all areas and there is no end to that.

Melinda: Right. Enlightenment does not exist and it is what we all are. And sometimes our minds like to put it onto somebody out there. But I would agree that the more an individual human being has opened to all these different aspects of being and their personal stuff, the more awake that person is to being themself, and I mean that literally, not just in the spiritual terms awake, but literally.

Rick: Yeah, as you say that, I’m thinking of some so-called spiritual teachers who, if they were to hear this conversation would say, “You guys are crazy. You are just wallowing around in all this Maya, all this illusory stuff. Can you not just realize that you are already enlightened and yet, it is not that you are already enlightened, because you don’t even exist and that alone is and there is only this. You don’t need practices, you don’t need teachings, you don’t need therapies, just wake up.”

Melinda: Yeah, and when I was, I guess I’ll call it just coming up, I’m still coming up, we all are, but early on when I moved to the Bay Area to do my residency in order to be around spiritual teachers, the non-dual teachers back then were teaching all of that. I don’t know about now because I don’t have much opportunity to listen in on podcasts and stuff, but back then that was what was being taught. This all, none of this is real, and this truth and wisdom coming through them that resonated so deeply in me, seems that it is true, that there is no other. Instead of saying none of this is real, I prefer to say there really is not any other, but here we are, I have this body, here it is. But going a little deeper with that too, and I’ll just talk about myself, this happened when I was parting ways with that spiritual teacher. For this I will ever be grateful, not to the teacher, but just to that whole situation. The realization of what I call “Aloneness” with a capital “A,” some people might call emptiness, with a capital E, to realize that there is no other. I know everybody that has this realization experiences it differently, but for me, it was utterly devastating. It was so stark, so devastating. It was almost as if a nuclear bomb went off. It was so enormous that it blew up the whole world and the whole universe. So, nothing was left. So stark. The realization still reverberates through here, and it was much more real than anything I had ever experienced. It was not just a mental philosophy, or like a philosophy. So, we can come to that and it is the ego’s worst nightmare. If I had known that at the beginning of my spiritual search, that this is where it would culminate, I would have run the other way. But Rick, I totally forgot why I got on this tangent. It is not exactly a tangent, but what were we talking about so I can come back to the context of it?

Rick: We were talking about the Neo-Advaita philosophy.

Melinda: Oh, yeah.

Rick: You know, nothing is real.

Melinda: Yeah, but there is truth there.

Rick: Yeah.

Melinda: But in my experience, this time of utter, utter devastation being alone, and there was nothing anybody could say, no teacher could say anything, because all of that was recognized to be unreal, just another thought, so you truly are alone in that. There is nobody to depend upon, nobody to turn to, nobody, nothing. There is nothing. Now, my experience was gradual. Here other people have different experiences. There was just this very gradual change, after a long period of that engagement in the world, little by little, and it wasn’t that I wasn’t active. I was going through my motions and doing what I needed to do to take care of my daughter, to work, all of that. But I’m talking about more of a human engagement in the world and this recognition or experience of it more as a dance. And this wonder that goes with this miracle of being able to be this human being, this individual point of consciousness, here in this body and to be able to identify as this. So, yeah, there is a profound truth to what those teachers were saying back then when I was resonating deeply with what they said. And now, for me, there is also, just this …

Rick: There is a larger truth.

Melinda: Life.

Rick: Yes.

Melinda: Yes, yes.

Rick: There is a line in the Briharanika Upanishad where a student is espousing the “nothing is real” philosophy that you were just mentioning and the teacher says to him, “This Brahman of yours is one-footed.” So, it is partial. I am reading this, I do not have it memorized, but there is a famous line from Shankara who wrote, “Brahma Satyam Jagat Mithya Jivro Brahmaiva Napara,” which is typically translated as, “Brahman is the only truth, the world is unreal, and therefore ultimately there is no difference between Brahman and individual self. But mithya does not mean the world is unreal. It means it is existing and non-existing simultaneously, or neither existing nor not existing. And one classic metaphor that is used is, if you go into a pottery shop and see a bunch of pots, you could truthfully say that there is nothing here but clay. That’s it, clay. But that is not entirely true, because there are pots, even though they are made of clay. It is equally true to say there are pots here in this room and you can do things with them. So, the world is both real and unreal. It exists and it doesn’t. It’s paradoxical.

Melinda: Yes, it is. And, to come back to that profound realization, the nature of realizing that nothing is real is not having access to this other leg, if you will. As you said, this is all there is. So, yeah, I just wanted to speak to that part of the journey, partly in case other people are experiencing that. And there are different levels of that experience of aloneness too. You know, there is the human level of loneliness. Everything we experience is an emanation from a quality of being that is right next to truth or love or the core essence of our being. So, sometimes it gets further and further out on the branches, the experience of it, but that is why we can follow everything back to what we really are.

Rick: And that is where integration comes in.

Melinda: Yes.

Rick: Stabilization, integration.

Melinda: Yes.

Rick: And it does not have to be either / or. You don’t have to swing back and forth from this extreme to that extreme. Both can be lived simultaneously.

Melinda: Yes.

Rick: Yeah. And that takes time, as you said. At first you were blasted with this and there was not much integration and then the integration gradually happened.

Melinda: Yeah. And now my experience of life is just this river flowing through, but to pop any bubble, so to speak, of course there is stuff that comes up. I get impatient with my daughter and I’m overwhelmed a lot of times with everything that my mind thinks that I need to get done. And sometimes I have reactions that come up, to be something that is like a pain body that is coming up in my patient. I had anxiety that came up about this interview. So, it is not as if you get to a place where there is just, “Oh, it’s all joy and wonder.” But there is this underlying sense of this wonder and miracle and this experience of life as energy and as a dance.

Rick: Yeah, I was not going to use those very same words, but I was actually going to use the word “underlying.” I was going to ask you, is there, despite all these human things that we all experience, is there an underlying something, that is abiding, continuous, and that is foundational to all the relative experiences in your life.

Melinda: Yes. And, moving into the mind with that, it is as before when stuff came up, it was as if I was working on “me” all the time. This project of me, I call it. That disappeared after that period of aloneness and emptiness. This is the gift of that “nothing.” It wiped out everything, all longing, all spiritual endeavors, all thoughts that I needed to get somewhere, trying to get anywhere spiritually. There was nothing left. There was nothing left. So, that is where it still is, where there is nothing left to get. So, there is a freedom in that, but there is still stuff that comes up. But, it’s a little hard to put into words.

Rick: I know what you mean.

Melinda: You get it, yeah. So, the project of “me” dissolved. It does not mean that when something comes up, I don’t sometimes use a tool. I sit with it. I sit with the energy, open to it. I might use a cognitive technique or something, but it comes up in the moment as opposed to, “I’m trying to get somewhere.”

Rick: There’s a line in the Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras in the Niyama’s section where he says, “From contentment, one attains unparalleled happiness.” And, you know, Papaji famously said, “Give up the search.” I think a lot of people interpreted that as, “okay, I’m done.” But I think what happens is, at a certain stage, one naturally does give up the search in the sense of the yearning, nagging, “oh, God, I can’t be happy until I find this thing,” quality that often rules the lives of spiritual seekers, and a contentment dawns. And so, you no longer feel that way.

Melinda: Yes.

Rick: But it does not mean you are done. To me, that shift happened, I don’t know when, it just, snuck up, as Jesus said, “like a thief in the night.” And I am still as enthusiastic about all this stuff as I ever was, but it is more of an adventure and an exploration rather than a desperate yearning, searching kind of thing.

Melinda: Yeah, it is like this. In my experience, I didn’t give it up. It just disappeared.

Rick: Yeah.

Melinda: That search seeking.

Rick: Right. Well, to use an analogy, the sun began to rise and you were no longer stumbling around in the dark, looking for something because there is some illumination that had come. And, so you are no longer stubbing your toes and you are enjoying life with some degree of sunshine.

Melinda: Yeah, beautifully put.

Rick: Yeah, and I am sure you don’t feel as if you have lost interest in spiritual stuff or anything like that. You would not be doing this interview if you had, I don’t suppose.

Melinda: Right, yeah. Again, it is as if I experience life as a river moving through and I am curious about what appears. And whatever appears, I take the next step and there is a joy and a wonder and love and compassion that arise. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, well, speaking of life as a river, ponder the spiritual implications of these words, “row, row, row your boat gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.”

Melinda: I love it. Yeah.

Rick: You are still rowing.

Melinda: Still rowing.

Rick: But mainly, the river is doing it. You are just tweaking it a little bit here and there, the way you do with your steering wheel on the road, micro adjustments. And since you are not thrashing against the current anymore, you are merry and life is a dream.

Melinda: Even as life is a dream. Yeah.

Rick: Right.

Melinda: Beautiful.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, what else do we have? So, we have a lot of interesting points here to talk about.

Melinda: Okay, I think we talked a little bit about therapy. I would love to just bring up the issue or topic of psychiatric medication on a spiritual journey. And I bring it up because I remember, back in my twenties, hearing some very prominent teachers speaking about psychiatric medication, advising not to take it because it is an avoidance of being present with what is.

Rick: And some of them, of course, like Thorazine, are going to really dull you out totally, but right, but there are certain ones that …

Melinda: Yeah, I mean, there are certain ones that I would not prescribe because they are addictive and because they do just cloud the mind. But the point being, is psychiatric medication really an avoidance of being present with what is arising or what is coming up? Or can it be a support for further deepening? And I think each of us needs to first assess motivation for wanting or not wanting medication. And you have to sense into that. Am I avoiding something? Or in my case, I had been sitting with this heavy energy of depression and opening to it for years. And I did not want medication because I had the idea that it would be closing off my doorway to truth. I suffered tremendously as a result. Finally, extremely depressed and suicidal, I agreed to take medication because it was life or death at that point.

Rick: Was this in your anorexic phase or later?

Melinda: Um, no, it was later, during medical school.

Rick: During medical school. Yeah, operating on three hours sleep.

Melinda: Right or less. Yeah. So, I was astounded when I took an antidepressant for the first time, it takes a while, three or four weeks, for them to actually kick in. It did not make me high. I just felt as if I was myself and it really allowed me to feel that it was breaking my neuronal pathways out of these tracks they had been going down over and over again all those years. And it opened up my mind and my whole self to the possibility of further deepening. So, there is such a thing as a biochemical imbalance and I think, one way to attune to the question, if it is right for me or not, is to ask, have I been sitting with something or opening to or working with something? And we all have to be really honest with ourselves. When I am working with it, am I really resisting it or avoiding it? Or am I really genuinely opening to this, or is it just going around and around with no transformation, no shift? In that case, it is likely to be a biochemical imbalance. And I will add that, in terms of antidepressants, research shows us that when they are given to people who are depressed and who have a biochemical imbalance, those people improve, typically. When they are given to people who are not depressed, nothing happens. It is not as if they get high. They just experience the side effects of the medication, but they do not get high. So, if you take certain kinds of medications, it is not as if you are going to get a high and be able to run from something that needs to be experienced.

Rick: Yeah, all right. I have a few questions on that. One is, in most cases, does a person take such medications for a long, long time or continually, or do they just get you through a phase and then you can stop them again? That is question number one.

Melinda: Each person is different. Of course, from the medical level, there are guidelines with that. If it is a first episode of depression, research backs up all this, it is best to be on the antidepressant for at least a year to try to make sure you don’t default back into those grooves. If you have had more than a couple episodes, it would be longer term. And it is different for each sort of mental health issue. Bipolar disorder typically needs medication long-term. That is truly a biochemical imbalance, as is schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. Now, there are all these caveats though. There are people I know, whom I work with, another psychiatrist who would see them would chalk them up as psychotic, but they are having a spiritual opening. So, there are all these caveats, but there is also just true psychosis, where there is an imbalance of chemicals in the mind, and thank goodness we have medications that can help set that straight.

Rick: Yeah, I have another question, but before I forget, I am going to send you a link to an organization that contacted me recently that includes Daniel Ingram and a bunch of other people whom I’ve interviewed. He is a doctor, and then there is also Cheetah House in Willoughby, Britain, which deals with people who have had psychotic or other such episodes as a result of spiritual practice. I forgot the name of it, but this first group is recognizing that there is an epidemic of spiritual awakenings taking place and they are trying to raise awareness of that, so that it is not misdiagnosed. And so, I have been contacted by people who themselves, they don’t feel as if they are mentally ill, but they feel as if there is something powerful going on. They do not know what it is, and they think there might be something wrong with them. A little bit of reassurance might be all they need.

Melinda: Yes.

Rick: But other people get destabilized by such things and might need some medications.

Melinda: Yes. And I can speak from my own experience as well, about just having these wild experiences. After I went on my first Goenka Vipassana retreat, which many of you may know are quite intense and a lot of people get cracked open with those, I returned to medical school after taking a break from that school. And I would find myself in all kinds of states. Something cracked wide open where there was no me, there was no ability to differentiate objects, suddenly I’d be in somebody else’s body.

Rick: You were seeing auras, I remember.

Melinda: Auras. I don’t even know that my mind believes in past lives. I do not care whether they exist or not, to tell you the truth, but I remember one time clearly walking behind a woman and all of her past lives just flipping through. So, all these experiences that can happen when we are cracked open and thank goodness, I knew that I was not psychotic. I knew this was some kind of opening and nature or the universe or whatever we want to call it would have it that I got somehow linked up with a psychiatrist who was open to this, which is extremely rare. So, I got support.

Rick: Yeah.

Melinda: Back in those days, that was hard to come by. There wasn’t the internet or anything like that.

Rick: And I remember you saying that some guy who gave you a ride home from that retreat, if it was that same retreat, was really bonkers after it.

Melinda: Yes. He was, and he was giving me a ride to the airport from the retreat and he was just weeping. I was concerned for our safety in that car, because he was weeping so profoundly while he was driving. It had opened up a memory of old sexual trauma that he had not had access to. And Goenka retreats, at least when I used to go to them, they are very Eastern and not supportive of our Western psychological understanding. And so, it is just technique, technique. Other places, the reason I ended up shifting over more to Spirit Rock was because they did have the space for these types of things as well, the emotional, the psychological.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, so that brings up an interesting point, which is the whole point of the necessity of proper support and care and caution in an intensive meditation retreat. Generally speaking, I would not advise throwing newbies into a 10-hour-a-day meditation routine or whatever the routine is. It is just too much, too soon, too fast. And I know there have been many casualties from such things. And do you want to comment on that?

Melinda: I think in general I would agree. In my case, I had tried meditating, an hour here or there or whatever. And I had such a monkey mind that I could not get anywhere with it. And my nature is also to dive in all the way. So, I just was determined, I’m going all the way with this 10-day retreat and so, it was precarious. It was very precarious. And if you can imagine going through the intensity of medical school while experiencing these states, where I did not know time or space, just did not know. I’m here, I am supposed to be asking patients, what is the date. I did not even know the year, the nothing, what a date is, you know? So, and then juggling all the left-brain stuff, having to study all night and this and that. And it was very intense, but in retrospect, my sense is that the intensity of medical school kept me grounded in the world and balanced that out. But boy, whew, it was a pressure cooker.

Rick: I can imagine. Yeah. Another question I had is, let’s say that there existed facilities where people could go if they were depressed or having difficulties, but they were also a spiritual seeker. And five minutes ago, you were talking about the value of medications as a supplement to spiritual practice, to help get you through rough periods. Do you think that under such care, medication could be forgone and that there could be actual spiritual practices or some kind of methodologies to get you through depression or these other difficulties without chemical aids? Or do you think that even there, medications would be an important part of the protocol?

Melinda: It depends on the person. If the depression is deeply ingrained in the nervous system, then medication can be a real support for further deepening. It is not a bad thing. It is not as if we need to try to avoid medication at all costs. But there are many people who shift, that their energy shifts with meditation or even just with therapy, just by addressing the psychological aspects. So, I do not think there is a hard and fast rule about it. I think each person is unique in their biochemistry and their genetic predisposition and their history of trauma, all of that.

Rick: Yeah, I guess a related question is, obviously we want to change the biochemistry or we want to change whatever is going on in the brain that is causing depression, change it to a healthy state where we no longer have the depression. Spiritual practices I think can do that, they do change the brain, there has been a lot of research on that. But do you think that medication can also do that, so that if you take it for a while it resets the biochemistry and you can taper off the medication, but you will have a different brain chemistry going forward.

Melinda: I think that would be a great study.

Rick: Yeah.

Melinda: Just to see. What we do know from research in general, but this is without necessarily testing somebody who is utilizing spiritual practices, is that if someone goes off of medication too soon, they typically get depressed again. But as you are saying, if there were these extra supports in place that were actually transforming the biochemistry or the neurobiology, I can’t see why not use them for some people, again, depending on how deeply ingrained this is.

Rick: Yeah. There are all kinds of different methodologies out there. There are bioneural beats, or whatever they are called, and there is Ayurveda, and there are a million different things. You can imagine something that would just be able to custom tailor a protocol for each individual, using whichever of these methodologies would be helpful. It would be really cool.

Melinda: Yes, polytrophic breathwork.

Rick: Yeah, there you go.

Melinda: Even recently, some studies a friend of mine spearheaded using MDMA to treat PTSD. The lingo we use is treatment-resistant PTSD, where everything else had been tried, medication, therapy, everything. And one was not just throwing MDMA at them and off you go, but using it in somewhat of a breathwork type session, a holotrophic breathwork type session. Significant improvement in the depression was found with one or two, I don’t know what the protocol was, but it was a limited number of sessions. And it was long term with these studies. So, to your point, they were not on medication long-term. It was not depression, it was PTSD, but the symptoms shifted dramatically with those interventions.

Rick: Yeah, you are probably well aware of the research at Johns Hopkins and places like that, where stage 4 cancer patients who are terrified of death have the most profound experience of their lives on psilocybin or something. They were not afraid of death anymore, or alcoholics who just lose the desire. And, so, all this stuff is valuable and needs to be better understood and studied. And while we are still on this topic, I just want to mention that Adyashanti announced when he retired, that he had been through a lot of traumatic experiences, particularly regarding his health situation. I think he had a lot of pain, and that he was actually taking some anti-anxiety medication to help him through that phase, which is one thing I always liked about Adya. He just tells you the truth. And that could be very helpful to people when someone, a role model like him would admit to doing that.

Melinda: Yes, absolutely.

Rick: All right, a question came in. So here it is. This is from Corin Turgaman in Israel. “I’m going through Kundalini awakening the past five years and also am diagnosed with ADD. Attention deficit disorder? That’s ADD. All right. I’m currently in my first year of academic studies and I wonder if I should take medication for ADD, such as Ritalin. I don’t know how it may affect the energetic phenomena of Kundalini.” Good question. Thanks for sending it in, Corin.

Melinda: Wow, that is a really good question. I guess I don’t feel really comfortable giving medication advice without being able to talk to you a little bit more, Corin, but there are different medications for ADD. There are the stimulants, they are more potent. As you mentioned Ritalin, Adderall, but there are a few that are gentler and are not stimulants. Stratera is one of them, one of the oldies but goodies. So, I would just tune into having compassion for yourself. If you are going into this academic setting and experiencing this kundalini energy at the same time, that is really intense. If you feel it is best for you to try to navigate that without medication, then go for it. But if you start feeling as if it is just too intense, or you need extra support with the ADD, just so that the academics aren’t terribly problematic, then you might want to try medication. It does not mean you have to take it forever. And I do not know, I’m not knowledgeable enough to know whether medication interrupts Kundalini. In my experience, when I took medication, it was for depression, so ADD, is a different thing. My spiritual journey deepened as a direct result of being able to get off the train tracks of these loops that my mind was taking. So, I wish I could be more specific. I don’t know if ADHD medication would interrupt the Kundalini process. I do not think it would, but I don’t know that for sure.

Rick: Okay. Would you be open to having paid sessions with people like that around the world, who would like to speak to a psychiatrist who has a spiritual orientation? And I don’t know what the legalities of that would be or anything, but are you maxed out and would not really be interested?

Melinda: No, right now, life is sort of shifting in a different direction with the book out and stuff. So, I’m opening to different work in the world, if you will, or different ways of being in the world. I am limited, unfortunately, because of the MD. I am only able to work with individuals who reside in the states where I am licensed, which is South Carolina and California, and I’m not yet set up to do that right now. But I am opening to that and certainly groups. I have just started working with some groups, so that would be another possibility where we could engage in a conversation like that.

Rick: I’ve interviewed some psychologists. I better not name them. I don’t want to get them in trouble, but they do online sessions with people all over the place. How do they do that? Are they breaking the law?

Melinda: You mentioned psychologists. That is different from a psychiatrist.

Rick: I see.

Melinda: Unfortunately, the MD is limiting in terms of who we can see.

Rick: You have too much education.

Melinda: I guess. I don’t know. I guess the mentality behind these laws is that if there is a bad outcome and a patient needs or wants to sue, they cannot really sue us in a place where we are not licensed. I don’t know.

Rick: Okay. Okay, good. So, what else? I’ve got a list of points here. What pops into your mind?

Melinda: Well, sort of the medical world or autism or whichever.

Rick: Oh yeah, we haven’t talked about your daughter yet. Let’s talk about that subject. So, tell us about your daughter.

Melinda: Well, my daughter, her name is Saachi. She is 15 years old and she was diagnosed with autism really young, at 16 months of age. And I will just give a little background so you all can understand how I came to my sense of her. I always sensed that she was this exquisitely sensitive being and it certainly manifested physically for her. She was exquisitely sensitive to sounds and lights and just from the time she was born, screaming and when we would go into a grocery store, she was sensitive to other people, just crying and not able to sleep. She was just real sensitive to sensory input. And when she was diagnosed, I fully bought into the traditional medical disease paradigm. Nothing wrong with it, but that means I was very limited in how I saw it, out of fear. It triggered a lot of fear in me, and I would mention a couple of fears. I’m a single mom and her biological father is an anonymous sperm donor, so it is not as if there is another person in the picture, and she doesn’t have any siblings. So, one fear is, who is going to be there for her when I’m gone? So, it triggered that, if she is not able to be fully independent.

And then the other fear that it triggered was, “Will she be able to love or be loved?” because the core symptom from the medical paradigm of autism is a lack of social-emotional connection. Now, that is actually false. It looks that way, but it is quite the opposite. These beings are so deeply connected, there is very little or no separation. But at any rate, I got thrown into the fear mode with the diagnosis and threw myself into therapies and all kinds of interventions. And it still pains me to say I wanted to try to help her be more normal so that she could function in this world, so that she could love and be loved. That was always my motivation.

Over time, it was as if these curtains would part and I would see these different aspects of her. The fear would blind me to it, but then it just would come through. She just would speak my thoughts and I kept denying it and saying, “I must have said that,” but finally I saw, okay she is really saying it. I did not say that, I just thought that.” And she was fully aware and would feel whoever came in the house, their emotions. She was just psychic. I will tell one story really quickly. We went to see Shyam Das chant. He came to Charleston and we both love chanting. We had never heard of him or seen him before, but we went and we both enjoyed it. She was probably three or four at the time. We came home, went on with our lives, didn’t mention it again, but about a year later, she couldn’t talk yet, but she could try to formulate words. She started saying, “Shada, shada, shada,” and I couldn’t understand her. And she kept saying it over and over again. And this went on many times a day to the point where I was getting so frustrated with it, I didn’t know what she was saying. I was trying to understand, tried everything to get her to not say it, you name it. I told the therapists about it, they were involved, everybody was involved in trying to get this thing to go away. Well, it didn’t work. And then finally, one day I understood what she was saying. She was saying Shyam Das and I said, “Well, Sachi, he is back in India. We can’t go see him now.” And she kept on. And so I thought, “Okay, I’ll just look and see maybe he is somewhere in the United States and I’ll just take her to get this over with. I’ll take her wherever.” And so, I looked it up. She had been doing this for about a month, literally a month before he had died. And so, you know, she had received that somehow.

Rick: Yeah, in a motorcycle accident, right?

Melinda: Yeah, yeah. And so, once I understood, we went down into the yard and got a flower and brought it and I said, “Oh, I get it now.” You know, after we were with that, she didn’t say it anymore. So, that’s just one example of this openness, where this energy and this … accessibility is the wrong word, it’s just this porousness to energy, information, all of that. And so, my paradigm or my way of thinking about autism expanded or deepened. I think there is value in the medical disease paradigm, because we identify what we call symptoms. But, by the way, the symptoms are a manifestation of this deeper openness, porousness, sensitivity.

I have friends on the spectrum and I’ll give you one example, a direct example of how a symptom can be a manifestation of this deeper sensitivity. So, again, my friend Tony tells me one of the core symptoms of autism is lack of eye contact, that is what we call it. My friend Tony tells me she can’t look people in the eye because she sees their whole soul, their whole being, and it is just too much for her. So, she has found a way to compensate. She looks at people on the forehead. So, people who can verbalize this openness or, she doesn’t call it openness, but I do, they are able to speak to that, but most of these beings cannot.

And my experience of my daughter and the patients whom I work with who are on the spectrum and just in general neurodiverse people who don’t fall on the normal curve, we can call them brain disordered, no problem, that is the medical paradigm. We can do that from this neurotypical state, or even underneath the normal curve, because there are more of us. But watch out, because more of these beings are coming into the world and that normal curve is going to get broader and broader. So anyways, what I recognize about my daughter and other beings on the spectrum is that there is this profound openness and porousness. And so, she is a perfect mirror for me because she is so pure and innocent and open. That does not mean she is not a kid. She is a teenager and we are really going through it with the teenage years. I get hollered at and all the other good stuff. But that is my deeper understanding and recognition of these beings. And so, I founded this non-profit Living Darshan to help usher in this deeper understanding of these beings. Yeah.

Rick: Nice. I’ll link to that from your Batgap page. I want to ask you about some of the spiritual implications, but first I just wanted to ask you, as a doctor, what you make of the allegation that vaccines cause autism. There was that study by Andrew Wakefield that was published in The Lancet and was later retracted due to ethical concerns and fraudulent data. But, if you want to call it that, the conspiracy theory lingers.

Melinda: Yeah, it is a polarizing issue. I am in the medical field and I value research studies and the left brain. Research has not shown that vaccines cause autism. Having said that, there are two kinds of autism, the progressive and the regressive. I have a couple of friends who are mothers and who say that right after their child got a vaccine, the regression developed. But there have been many studies done now that don’t show the correlation.

Rick: As you know, there is a difference between correlation and causation. People have heart attacks all the time and sometimes after getting a COVID vaccine, somebody has a heart attack. Now, was it caused by the COVID vaccine or were they just due to have one?

Melinda: Yeah, yeah. Now there might be other factors involved. My daughter has a genetic issue, and so along with that is the autism, but also immunosuppression. So, she can’t get live vaccines. There may be other factors involved that affect vaccines, but that is my medical take on it. And again, I acknowledge my medical left brain bias with that, but still.

Rick: Yeah, well I did not want to spend a lot of time on that, but I just wanted to see what you thought. So, this is interesting. You say there are more of these kids coming in. Is that a statistical fact?

Melinda: Some people are still trying to chalk it up as, “Oh, it’s just being diagnosed now.” But I can tell you that several years ago, I remember when it was 1 in 96 children or 90-something children, at least it was 1 in 88. Now it’s 1 in 36. This is not just because it is being recognized. More and more beings who are on the spectrum are coming in, there’s no doubt. The term people are using now to broaden the definition is neurodiverse, for people who think differently, who process things differently. And I have a friend who is really into human design, which I don’t know a whole lot about, but he tells me that the guy who started that way back in the 70s or early 80s foresaw that these beings would be coming in. He did not call it autism then. And I have another friend who is very psychic and communicates with non-verbal people on the spectrum, in verbal, but they tell her they are here to shift the consciousness, the human collective consciousness.

And as we touched on yesterday, Rick, the symptoms make sense if we think in terms of these exquisitely sensitive beings who are vibrating at a frequency that is much faster. None of this is better or worse. I’m not saying that, but they are vibrating at a higher frequency than our collective consciousness on this planet.

So, they come in, in these bodies, in this kind of grosser realm. And of course, it is hard to function. Of course, it really is as if they are coming from another realm. I mean, my daughter, there are so many things, such as how they do not understand social etiquette. And you can teach it over and over, but they just cannot learn it. And my daughter too, I will just share this. She just doesn’t understand the need for clothing. And we all didn’t understand the need for clothing. She runs around naked and doesn’t understand that when there are people here, we need to keep our clothes on. And so, the way I try to explain it to her is that we live in a culture, a society, where there are certain rules and we have to live by them. So, my job, one of my jobs as her mom, is to help her learn how to live in this realm. But so, it is not as if I am necessarily changing what I did when I was driven by fear, right? Because I am still supporting her towards independence. This is my take on the subject, I see it as a paradigm. But what she is doing, even though she is not verbalizing it, her role here, along with others on the spectrum, is that they are here to shift the collective energy of the planet. And I am open to anything, also to critique of that perspective as well. When the download for the vision of the non-profit organization Living Darshan came through, I did, I really searched deeply. I asked myself, is this just a compensation for grief about her condition? Am I just trying to make her and others on the spectrum into some …

Rick: special people?

Melinda: yes, special. And I really searched that, I’m not finding that anywhere. I didn’t find that anywhere, any need for her to be special in that way. And also, I don’t feel attached to that being the reality. So anyways, it can be an ongoing reflection.

Rick: Yeah, that is interesting. I am totally open to the idea that there could be groups of souls who come in at certain times in greater numbers to have a certain influence and so on, like soul families. And I am also very open to the idea that there are other realms or lokas as they are called in Sanskrit where life is very different than it is here. And they are not necessarily on some planet someplace, but just in other dimensions, and that we move from dimension to dimension as we go through various lifetimes.

Melinda: Uh-huh.

Rick: Yeah. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what I believe, but anyway, I do.

A couple more questions came in. Let’s see. Okay, since we’re on the topic of autism, this is from Bhavani Kondamundi in California. “I would like to know your thoughts on autism.” We have already expressed some of your thoughts, but she has a “17-year-old son on the autism spectrum who has speech delays to no speech, but he uses vocalizations of sounds. He seems very free-spirited without wanting to take any responsibilities as people typically do, and he seems very present in the moment. He loves nature, music, hikes. Any advice for me to work with my son?”

Melinda: Those of us who are parents of folks on the spectrum, we really chose what I would like to call an advanced curriculum of the soul.

Rick: Yeah. [Laughter]

Melinda: Because it is intense. What you are describing is this freedom of spirit that he is and this inability to fit into our world, into this realm the way we would expect someone to. I think you said her name is Bhavani?

Rick: Bhavani, right.

Melinda: Yeah. What I do, Bhavani, is I recognize my role in supporting Saatchi in learning how to be in the world. And I do that. And it is a lot of work, and it is hard, because it takes a million times more teaching. Things that would come easily to others just do not come naturally to these beings. So, it’s hard. But I just keep doing that. I just keep doing that in my role as her mother. At the same time, realizing and recognizing this depth of her being. And that recognition, that really seeing her, allows her to bloom even more. I don’t really know how to put that into words, but I can see her spirit expanding.

Rick: That is what you were saying in the beginning. You were saying people have this need to be seen.

Melinda: Yes, it is universal. So, when I recognize that in her and mirror that back to her, not necessarily through my words, but just the awareness of it gets transmitted. Our recognition of who they are, just as when we are with anybody. It is just that everything is amped up exponentially with folks on the spectrum, because of the intensity of their energy. But, maybe just really keeping in mind and recognizing with your heart your son’s beauty and that, while we want our kids to function in this world, there is a greater intention. I have realized, there is a deeper intention for my daughter. She has her purpose in this world and what we are trying to do, by making them more functional in the world, is superficial. It is necessary, but it is on the surface. It is necessary and intense and hard, but holding the space for this deeper understanding, even as you are working with your son, and I am sure it is frustrating. He is not taking responsibility. You want him to be independent.

So, allowing for that, too, then everything my daughter brings up in me is a doorway, an opportunity. I don’t always take the doorway, but it always is there. Whenever we are given an opportunity in life, whether it is with our autistic kids or otherwise, if we don’t take it, if there is a doorway, something that arises in me that is uncomfortable or creates suffering in me and I don’t open it and go through that, I guarantee it is going to come up and bite me in the bottom later in a bigger way. Life is going to have us walk through these doors ultimately and to open ourselves to these aspects that are hard to be with. So, I got off on a tangent there.

Rick: That was a good tangent.

Melinda: Yeah, but Bhavani, you know, my heart is with you. It’s hard. It is really hard. And there is no solution. Just know that you are partaking in an intense soul’s curriculum here.

Rick: Nice, that’s good. Okay, here is a question unrelated to autism from Hamad Lachman in South Africa. His question is, “I am going through a Kundalini awakening during the past five years and battling with sexual transmutation.” I don’t know quite what he means by transmutation, but maybe you do.

Irene Archer: Change.

Rick: Oh

Irene Archer: spiritual.

Rick: Changing spiritually. “Can you chat of the importance of celibacy during Kundalini awakening?”

Melinda: Ooo. Can you tell me what Irene said about the sexual transmutation? How she clarified that?

Rick: How did you clarify that, Irene? What? Mindy wants to know what you just said. Yeah.

Irene Archer: Oh, just, I looked it up. What transmutation?

Rick: Oh, she looked it up. What does it mean?

Irene Archer: It means the energy is shifting, you know, from…

Rick: So, it doesn’t mean the person is becoming transgender, it means, okay, I got it. Yeah, let me quickly comment because I know now what it means and then you can elaborate. So, it is said that when you go through a Kundalini awakening, the energy is rising, right? And it is said that if sexual desires are not fulfilled externally, the energy gets sublimated and rises up and is transmuted into higher energy and enlivens the higher chakras. And that if one is going through such a transformation and is not so, that it can sometimes feel very draining. I think that is what he means.

Melinda: Okay. I will start by saying I am not a Kundalini expert. I mean, I certainly went through what I did not know was Kundalini energies and arisings. But what I do know is that when we are able to refrain from discharging any type of energy, whether it is sexual, whether it is anger, when we are able to refrain and hold it, yes, it can transmute into other energy. But there are times when it is too much and we need to rein it in. I know I experienced that where the energy was so intense at one point and I talked to my teacher. I could feel that it was as if I was going to go nuts. My whole brain, the circuitry was going to go wacko because it was so intense and I had been trying to stabilize it. I don’t eat meat but I was trying to eat meat. I was running, I was doing all that stuff, I was not going to satsangs. I was afraid for my daughter.

Rick: You were trying to ground yourself.

Melinda: Yes, ground myself, because I was afraid I would become permanently non-functional, because it was beginning to damage my nervous system. So, in that case, I was discharging energy. Now that’s extreme, but I think we each have to really listen to, or get guidance from someone. Hopefully, that is someone you can work with closely when you are experiencing that. And listen deeply. If your natural tendency is to discharge the sexual energy, well, it might be useful to really hold that and see what happens with that. If it becomes too intense or dangerous on any level, then, you need to take a little break from that. Now, Kundalini teachers might say otherwise. They might say, “No, just hold it, hold it, hold it.” I don’t know. Again, I’m not an expert in Kundalini, but I know in my own life I have had to. Even against my will, because I was so one-pointed about truth, I had to. So that this human vessel could continue to survive, for safety’s sake, I had to back off a few times.

Rick: Yeah, safety first.

Melinda: Mm hmm.

Rick: There are a couple of spiritual teachers in South Africa. There is a fellow named Brad Laughlin who I interviewed about a year ago or so and his wife, Leslie Temple Thurston, although she’s not teaching anymore, but you might want to get in touch with Brad. You will find him on BatGap. Maybe he could help. And, of course, in this day and age you can talk to people all over the world. But something good is happening. You can be assured of that. Just as Mindy was saying, you just need to pace yourself and do things that are stabilizing and integrating. You don’t necessarily need to ground yourself by doing things like, if you don’t eat meat you don’t necessarily need to start eating steaks every night. But, you can swim. And hike in the woods and do yoga or various things that will have a grounding influence.

Melinda: And part of it, too, Rick, depends on our life circumstances. I have a responsibility to be able to parent my daughter. And, if you need to work, you need to try to make sure that you are functional to do that. So, there are a lot of things that can play into our decisions about how we work with energy.

Rick: Yeah. But I am sure you have seen this, Mindy, and you have talked about it today, and I have seen it over the years. The spiritual path is a marathon and not a sprint. So, it bears repeating, safety first. You want to stabilize and integrate and make sure that everything is in order and not push yourself so hard that you do crack, because people do crack.

Melinda: Yes, yeah.

Rick: And if you read Gopi Krishna for instance, he will describe this in detail but the nervous system can actually become damaged as a result of not handling this properly. Another good resource is Joan Shiva Pitta Harrigan, who is on BatGap, who has written a massive book all about Kundalini in great detail. Everything you have always wanted to know about Kundalini, but were afraid to ask. In fact, we have a whole category, I think, of Kundalini in the categorical index page on BatGap. So, educate yourself and find good resources.

Melinda: Great.

Rick: Okay, so is there anything else? We are getting near the end. Is there anything else that you want to say? Oh, one thing I just wanted to say is that I got an overriding sentiment from reading your book, just regarding the power of a mother’s love. It made me just love the feeling that it gave me. It is the most powerful thing in the world in some respects, and it amazes me. In a way, it is what saves the world, and is the hope of the world, just the devotion and incredible force of a mother’s love. And you have been such a beautiful example of that. You did not have a choice, I don’t think, because you are who you are, but I commend you for that.

Melinda: Thank you, Rick. Thank you for saying that. What comes to my mind too, as you say that is, it is not limited to mothers, of course. The energy of that love, obviously it resonates with you, so it is in you too, whether we have a male body or female body.

Rick: Yeah, my mother, I often think of her that way. I mean, she went through a lot of difficulty with my alcoholic father and three suicide attempts and all kinds of things. But boy, she just she hung in there and ended up having some really nice spiritual turnaround later in life. That was very gratifying to me. Still a little nutty to her dying day, but she definitely shifted to a higher phase. Yeah.

Melinda: I love the part about “still a little nutty.” You know, our quirks are so beautiful.

Rick: Yeah,

Melinda: It is what makes us human. So, the mental criticism and “I’ve got to get rid of this, got to get rid of that.” Take delight in it. You can go down that mental track. But I just love my quirks. And I love quirks. And that is why I chose to be a psychiatrist, of course, because I love quirks, quirks, quirky people.

Rick: You’re a quirk junky.

Melinda: Yeah, but we can embrace what we would otherwise criticize in ourselves and others.

Rick: Yeah, I’m full of all kinds of nutty sayings and songs that I got from my mother. Irene and I sort of joke about it. I even sometimes occasionally think of a new one that I haven’t told her.

All right, Mindy, so this has been great. I really have enjoyed getting to know you, reading your book, talking to you, and we’ll see where it goes from here. You will have a page on BatGap. Did you want me to put your email address on there for people to get in touch with? They can do that through…

Melinda: They can do it through my website.

Rick: Through your website.

Melinda: I’m at edwardsmd.com.

Rick: Right, and you also have your Living Darshan website, so I’ll put links to both of those up and there is contact info on those, a contact page or something.

Melinda: Perfect.

Rick: Great. So, thanks a lot and thanks to our mutual friend Muffy for having recommended you and set this up.

Melinda: Yes, Muffy, thank you Rick. Thank you so much and thank you all of you for being present here with us. We are all in this together for sure.

Rick: You’re welcome.