Pernilla Lillarose Interview

Summary

The conversation explores how spiritual opening can coexist with vulnerability, poor boundaries, and susceptibility to manipulation. It also examines embodied awakening, trusting inner signals, choosing supportive company, and meeting shame without rejecting parts of oneself.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can spiritual surrender be balanced with discernment and personal boundaries?
• How can I learn to trust my body's inner knowing?
• Why are supportive relationships and spiritual community important during awakening?
• How can shame be met and integrated rather than hidden or resisted?
• What does it mean to embody spiritual awakening in everyday life?

Key takeaways

• Surrender without discernment can leave a person vulnerable to manipulation.
• A clear inner “no” deserves attention, even when spiritual beliefs urge openness.
• Awakening needs embodiment, not escape from difficult feelings or ordinary life.
• Supportive company can protect and strengthen fragile inner changes.
• Shame loosens when hidden parts are met with presence, honesty, and self-love.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve passed the 400 mark in terms of the number of ones done, and if this is new to you and you’d like to watch other ones, go to batgap.com, where you’ll see all the previous ones archived in various ways.

This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and you feel like supporting it, there’s a donate button on every page of the site.

My guest today is Pernilla Lillarose, which she tells me was not her birth name, but she had kind of adopted it at a certain point, and I think it’s a very poetic and beautiful name. In Sanskrit, they always say that there’s a correlation between name and form, that the name for an apple, for instance, the vibratory quality of the sound for “apple” is the same vibratory quality as an apple itself. So maybe that is true of your name as well.

Pernilla: I’ve never thought of that.

Discovering Joel Goldsmith

Rick: So, Pernilla, you sent me a little bio with some of the more significant steps in your journey, and it looks like the first one was connecting with Joel Goldsmith’s teachings. Mine has spoken highly of him, and I think I’ve even listened to some recordings. But how did you stumble onto him, and why was that significant?

Pernilla: Oh, that’s an interesting entry into this. Yeah, that was one of those things that I could not have made up or created. It’s a long time ago. I had been in New Zealand in 1987, I believe it was, and I’ve been doing something called WWOOFing. WWOOF, which stands for Working Weekends on Organic Farms, because I was studying agriculture in Denmark at that time.

So I took a year off and I was WWOOFing. That means I was working on different organic and biodynamic farms, and I was spending, I think, two weeks with one man. His name was Clive. He was an older man, and he was doing these bizarre experiments, making annual plants into perennials. He was using the sun and homeopathic remedies. He was just kind of an alchemist of some type, and we had a good connection.

I was playing around with him with these plants, and at that time, since I still was at the university in Denmark studying agriculture, he suggested I take some of the seeds back and do some research in the lab, just for an experiment. So I did, but that kind of fizzled out. There wasn’t a whole lot that I found out or learned.

But I decided, instead of continuing with agriculture, I wanted to work with people more. I was considering becoming a nurse or something, a nurse’s aide. So I wrote to him—I always want to say “emailed” in those days, but there was no email, so I wrote to him—and said, “You know, I’m not coming back, because you wanted me to come back. I’m planning on staying here.” So that was kind of the end.

Then I got a letter from another WWOOFer who was with him, and he wrote something like, “You know, I’ve talked to Clive about you, and I’ve been meditating, and it’s very important—I have to laugh at what I’m going to say now, because it sounded so out there—it’s very important that you come back to New Zealand to help raise the Christ consciousness.”

And I was like, “Really? And who are you to tell me?” So I wrote a letter back, which may not have been so nice. I kind of said, “Who are you?” and whatever else I wrote. It’s so long ago. I got a letter back saying, “Boy, you have a lot of fire under the roof.” He was right. And he said, “But you know, I have been meditating on it, and it’s important that you come. And I would suggest you read this book called Practicing the Presence by Joel Goldsmith.”

So this whole event was so bizarre. It came out of nowhere. I went to the library in Denmark and looked for this book. They didn’t have it. I put in a note asking if they could find it for me, and I think a few months later I got a note from the library saying that they had found the book in Norway—that’s a different country—and I could come and pick it up.

So this was a big deal. I picked it up, started reading it, and it did nothing for me. But because it had been such a big ordeal, I thought, “I’m going to make a Xerox copy of this book for later, maybe.” So I did, returned the book, put the Xerox copy in my bookshelf, and forgot all about it.

Meditation as Soul Food

Then, maybe six or twelve months later, something in me went and picked up this book. I started reading it, and I started meditating like Joel said, and I could not get enough. It was one of those things like soul food you’ve been starving for your whole life.

So I started meditating, and it didn’t—I think it was only a few weeks into it, you know—that’s when I had that big experience. I don’t know if I wrote about it, but it was…

Rick: You should tell us about it.

Pernilla: Yeah. So I was sitting meditating and doing what Joel said: “Go inside and say, ‘I and my Father are one.’” So I did, and that’s a Bible quote. Joel was a Christian mystic and…

Rick: Goldsmith sounds Jewish.

Pernilla: Yes, he was Jewish, and he used to be a reader at the Christian Science Church. Then he left that and started his own movement called The Infinite Way.

So anyway, I sat down and meditated, and I did it every day. Then one day it was just like the heavens opened up, and this unbelievable love came through. It was just so profound. I was completely flooded with love, and just thinking about it, I got down on my knees and I was just like, “Please do not ever let me go away from this. Lead me not astray again. Let me always stay with this.”

So anyway, I sat down and meditated, and I did it every day. Then one day it was just like the heavens opened up, and this unbelievable love came through. It was just so profound. I was completely flooded with love, and just thinking about it, I got down on my knees and I was just like, “Please do not ever let me go away from this. Lead me not astray again. Let me always stay with this.”

It was one of those openings that lasted for several months, and I walked around in love, as love.

There was basically just love, and I couldn’t do anything but just accept. I remember I was even kind of holding myself—the little Pernilla—and I was just holding her. It was just love, love, love. It was so beautiful.

Then it all changed, as these things often do, right? So in those days I was dancing. I was doing this dance every week, and after my dance class I would go down to the café right underneath, have a cappuccino, and read one of Joel’s books. I was just so pulled in.

I was sitting there and looking around and just seeing God, love, everywhere. Then this man came up. This was still in Denmark, right? This man came up to me, a Black man from California, and asked me for directions in English, of course. So I told him, and then he came back later and said, “Can I sit and join you here?” I said, “Sure.”

I kind of put the book under the table. I didn’t want to announce my God thing—I think it was called God Consciousness. So he sat down with his wine and said, “So, what are you reading?” Good luck. I showed him, and then we started talking about God, basically.

He knew the Bible inside out, upside down, and backward. So we were talking. It was kind of an interesting conversation. Then, at a certain point, I said, “You know, I want to go home now.” And he said, “You know, I don’t have a place to stay. Can I stay at your place tonight?”

Inside of me there was a big no. I didn’t know the guy from squat, right? So I said, “No, you know, I don’t feel comfortable with that.” That’s when everything started turning for me.

Then he said, “Well, it’s not your house; it’s God’s.” And I knew that was true in my state. He started coming up with things, maybe Biblical things, that were just twisted enough to make them work in his favor. I was just not in a space to discern. I was too open and maybe too innocent in that space, and I really didn’t have discernment.

So eventually I said, “Well, okay, then.” He took the bus back, I took my bike back, and then I entered into the five worst months of hell of my life.

Rick: Yeah, because you couldn’t get rid of this guy, right?

Pernilla: I couldn’t get rid of him. Looking back, it wasn’t my fault, but it was because of my lack of discernment. I mean, I was not blaming myself, but I was just confused, and I was in such deep surrender to the divine that everything that came, I couldn’t quite think. I couldn’t discern.

His name was Yul—Y-U-L—which was so close to Joel. There were just things that were confusing in my state. Then one day or one evening, maybe the first or second evening, he said, “God has sent me to straighten you out,” or something like that.

I still had a lot of insecurity and the things that we all carry with us. So I really believed that. I knew I wasn’t pure inside; I had my old stuff. So there was a part of me that believed it. You can see it was just so confusing, so confusing.

I thought, “Okay, anyway.” It was absolute hell for five months. During that time, I was just in surrender, and I said, “Thy will be done, thy will be done, thy will be done.” I just wanted to surrender.

I knew, for some reason, that there was something right about what happened, about him being there. There was something right about it, and I couldn’t understand it, but I just knew that. So it wasn’t right just to kick him out, which I couldn’t really do anyway. He was a big guy.

Rick: Couldn’t you call the police and say, “This guy’s in my house”?

Pernilla: No, because I let him in, you see.

Rick: Well, so you want him out, right? It’s your house. So you couldn’t tell the police, “I want this guy out of here”?

Pernilla: But I wasn’t in that state, Rick. I was in a very confused state where I wanted to surrender to God. I kind of felt that there was something going on here that was part of my opening, and so I cut off my connection with most of my friends.

He allowed me to stay connected with one friend who had just become a born-again Christian, and I could connect with my mom. That was about it.

Rick: So when you say he allowed you, did it turn into a controlling kind of situation?

Pernilla: Totally, totally, totally. Yeah, it was pretty bad. Looking back, it’s like, “Oh, sweetheart, how could that ever happen?” But it was because I just grew up with a father who was an angry, controlling man.

So there was that part inside. I call it the collapse. I’ve written about that quite a bit too. There was something in me that collapsed inside. I couldn’t just stand up in my truth because it wasn’t embodied. I mean, the experience was not embodied. It was just this openness.

Rick: What finally got him out of there?

Pernilla: I got in touch with a… Finally, he let me go to a Christian Science church, and I talked to one of the practitioners. I think little by little I got my bearings back and started seeing that something was just not right here. But it took a while to come all the way back and ask, “What is going on here?”

She said to me, “This is not good,” so she worked with me. Then I called—oh, yeah, then I found the phone number for the copyright holder of Joel Goldsmith’s books, called Divorce. I called them from Denmark and asked if there were any people who knew or worked like Joel. They gave me the name of a woman called Barbara Moll, who used to be a student of Joel’s and who was teaching.

I wrote her a letter, and she wrote me a letter back. She said, “Get him out of the house.” So little by little, I got that… I started to grow a backbone.

Rick: Exactly, yeah.

Pernilla: And then after a few months I got him out. While he was gone, I had somebody change the locks so he couldn’t come back in. Little by little, I got my spine back. Then I went to America in 1988, I believe—1987 or 1988.

Trusting inner wisdom

Rick: Before we jump ahead to that, I think there’s a general principle here that would be worth discussing for a moment, because I can almost hear people saying, “Well, that was pretty stupid and naive. I would never do a thing like that.” But look at how many people come under the control of dominant cult leaders and spiritual leaders and suspend their judgment and discrimination, and end up giving them all their money or their bodies, or doing all kinds of crazy stuff because they get into this go-with-the-flow mode: “Well, it’s all divine, and I should just let this play out.”

So I think there’s really an important lesson to be learned in terms of finding the balance between surrender and self-determination. There’s a kind of balance point between those two qualities. God helps those who help themselves, but that implies a certain proactiveness.

Pernilla: Well, I couldn’t agree with you more that I’m not the only one who’s gone through a situation like that.

Rick: Thousands have.

Learning to Trust the Body’s Initial No

Pernilla: Yeah, and because I went through it myself, I know what it was in me that made me do that. The first sign was in this café, when I felt this no. I didn’t trust it. I didn’t go with that. When I look back years later, after I started understanding what happened, it was that initial no that my heart—or my body—just said. I didn’t know how to trust that.

We have not really lived in a society or in a world where we were encouraged to trust our hearts and to trust our wisdom.

I think that has become a very big part of my life, of the work I do, and of my message, specifically to help women. I work with men too, but specifically for women, because we have not really lived in a society or in a world where we were encouraged to trust our hearts and to trust our wisdom.

It’s a process. It was a long process for me to learn to trust that, because now it’s much easier. But out in the world, I would still say it’s not really supported. If I say to you, “I know I’m not going because I can’t feel it,” which is how I function today, somebody may go, “Well, what is that supposed to mean? Are you crazy?” There’s not that normal feedback or understanding that this is how I function.

So I think we have a lot to learn in the world. We have a lot to learn about ourselves in a world where it’s not accepted to live from that inner knowing and that inner wisdom. I think it’s immensely important to be surrounded by people who understand that, so we feel stronger in taking back our divine power.

Rick: Yeah, I think that’s really important. The various scriptures—I don’t know about Christianity or whatnot, but I know that in the Vedic literature it really encourages you to keep the company of the wise and keep the company of the holy, and so on. That’s considered important. They might even use the analogy—or I’ll make it up at the moment, if they don’t—that you’re like a little, delicate shoot or plant, and you need a kind of protective environment at that stage.

These subtle impulses within are especially subtle at the outset, and the world is gross. The world is in your face, and it’s so easy for them to get squashed.

Pernilla: Yeah, I think isn’t that also from the Bible? When Christ was born, they took him away, right? They took him away until he was bigger and stronger. There’s something like that. When that first opening happens, you’re just like a very, very vulnerable little sprout, and it’s very easy to get squashed. I speak from experience. I think it’s easier today than it was back then. I mean, this was 30 years ago.

Rick: Sure. I mean, this whole kind of stuff that we’re into is becoming more widespread.

Pernilla: Yeah, and when I was in Denmark, I didn’t know anybody. I could go to the Christian Science Church, but that was about it. People didn’t know about awakening or these experiences. It made no sense, so it was hard to find somebody to go to for help.

Rick: I know when I first learned to meditate back in the ’60s, all my friends were taking drugs. I learned to meditate, and within a very short amount of time I realized, “I can’t hang around with these people anymore.” But I hadn’t gained new friends, and so for quite a few months I just hung out with the dog and walked to the beach every day with my dog. I went to school and started doing things on my own, and then naturally, gradually, I picked up a whole new circle of friends.

But if I had tried to hold on to those friends in those circumstances, I probably would have fallen away from meditation and gone back into those habits.

Pernilla: Yeah, absolutely.

Rick: I think we’re discussing this because it’s a valuable general principle, which is that there’s some importance to the company you keep. If people are finding it really hard to get onto a spiritual path, stick to it, or anything like that, they might want to look at who they surround themselves with.

Pernilla: Yeah, absolutely.

Rick: Not to sound preachy, but it’s a practical consideration.

Pernilla: Yeah. I think a lot of it has to do with the whole neural pathways, the brain wiring. It’s the same: if it’s not strong enough inside, we fall back on the default wiring, which is usually not in our favor. I mean, it’s not awakening wiring, we could say.

So it is important to keep repeating and repeating and repeating, so that sprout, or that neural wiring, gets stronger. Eventually, that’s why I found my spine again, so I could stand up straight without falling over if somebody disagreed with me.

I think there is just a process to this whole embodiment. I’m very much about embodiment. That’s a big part of it: that we bring it into our living experience and into life, that we live it. It’s not just something we bypass in life. It’s very much about bringing it in, and it’s a lot of work.

🕊️ Embodiment instead of spiritual bypassing

Rick: You know, on that note, I don’t know about you, but I know people who have been meditating for decades who are still trying to kind of play fiddler crab in the shell. It’s like, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly watch the news, or I couldn’t possibly go to this restaurant, or do something so gross as go to a concert.”

I mean, this is a bit of an exaggeration, but there are some people who are in a state of such delicacy that they continually try to shelter themselves. I think there’s some need for getting out there and integrating more, and being able to do normal things and not be so impressionable.

Pernilla: Yeah, I think there are different ways of looking at that. I mean, I’m very much a hermit in one way. I just love being on my own with my cats in the woods where I live, and I’m also out there a lot. I have to find a good balance between the two.

I think in the beginning it is important to just shut out everything and be with all that stuff that normally drives you out and away from yourself: to get experiences, to not feel lonely, to be loved and liked, to find safety, whatever it is. I think there is a very important phase in learning to sit with all that energy that usually drives you out.

I think it’s very valid, and then there is a point where there might be more of a naturalness to coming out, because you get more in touch with who you truly are. If it’s not coming—if you’re trying to live in a shell because you’re afraid of the world—then there is obviously some fear that needs to be met. It’s quite obvious, and it’s easy to do the spiritual bypass. I think a lot of people have done that.

That’s certainly not my way, not my path, or the way I work with people. I think being able to bring in all the feelings, all the fears, all the things we are afraid of and ashamed of—can we bring those in and learn how to be present with them? That, again, is a skill.

I’m trained as a Hakomi practitioner, and Hakomi is body-centered therapy, so it’s really very much about coming into the body and learning to listen to the body.

When I look at the world, and when I go to retreats and different things, I notice how difficult it is for people to actually be present in their bodies and learn to listen to their bodies from the body, not from the mind. Don’t think, “Oh, I think it is this,” or, “It’s probably…” It’s like, no: what is the body actually saying?

That’s where we enter into the body, and that’s where real transformation can happen, so that who we are becomes embodied and not just something that’s out there that we need to shield from the rest.

So, yeah, I think you’re right that probably happens a lot. I think there’s a place for that, but if it’s hiding from meeting something in yourself, you just won’t get embodied. I’m sure it’s all good in the big picture, but you won’t get the benefits of actually starting to feel and live the presence, the love, and the oneness in your life.

Rick: Since you mentioned the word shame, I think I’ll ask you a question now that someone sent in. Raymond from Washington read some of your website, and we’ve rewritten the question slightly to hopefully make it more clear. Hopefully we haven’t misinterpreted what he was asking, but he asks about people feeling shame having an evolutionary purpose in humanity, to make people introspect about their actions, particularly when the actions impact others negatively. What do you think about that?

Pernilla: You know, I just wrote four articles about shame, actually, because I encountered some shame in myself a few months ago about just being myself, basically. It was just a real deep layer. I just keep going deeper and opening, and you see these things. So for me, shame—I don’t know. I have never thought of that. I don’t think I can answer whether it’s for the evolutionary process.

Rick: You just wrote four articles about it. What were they about?

Pernilla: Well, it’s about the way I see it. There is this quote from my book where I talk about how we live, basically, in resistance to who we are because we believe that the part of us that we resist is who we are. As long as we still have parts of ourselves that we want to hide, that we are ashamed or embarrassed of, it’s because there is a belief that we are that. That’s where there’s duality.

When you wake up, in my experience, I bring everything in. I’m also a self-love mentor, and I can’t disown any part of myself. I can’t exclude anything about myself, because then I live in duality. My movement is to live in oneness with myself, and when I live in oneness with myself, then of course I experience it on the outside, too.

When I found this place in me where I felt—actually, I felt ashamed just to be me, to be Pernilla—it made no sense to the mind. I really had to go and be with that, and then I could see that there was a part of me that felt ashamed to even share that I was ashamed to be myself.

But the beautiful thing, Rick, was that I learned so much about shame. I can see that shame builds on itself and keeps that shell you talked about. It keeps us separate from the love and the oneness that’s everywhere.

I’m ashamed of being myself. No, because that’s about as unloving as I can be to myself: to push this part of myself away.

So I think it’s really important to meet the shame. Whether it’s for the evolutionary process, I have no idea. Those things, I don’t quite know how to answer. I can only answer from the experience from the inside out. What it meant to me was that when I’m able to share, “I’m ashamed of being myself”—even here on your show, there was a piece of me that wanted to hide that—it’s like, no, because that’s about as unloving as I can be to myself: to push this part of myself away. That’s not really the path I’m on.

So I started writing a few articles about it, and it was actually very liberating and very sweet to see that. The funny thing is, when things unfold in myself, I also start seeing them around me more clearly. I think, “Oh, yeah, that’s because we’re actually all ashamed of being who we are.” No, we’re ashamed of being who we think we are. That’s what I think it comes down to.

Rick: Yeah. Because when you really know who you are, you’re not who you think you were.

Pernilla: Exactly. And what is there to be ashamed of? Okay, so there are areas that have been traumatized in the past that are not fully on board in the oneness. I don’t need to be ashamed of those. I need to love them. So then it’s really bringing every part into the fold. I don’t know if that’s a satisfying answer for that question.

Rick: Hopefully so. If he’d like to ask a follow-up question, he can post that. Okay, so you were about to say that you went to the U.S., you were studying Joel Goldsmith, and then you came to the U.S., and then I kind of cut you off to ask you another question. Do you want to pick it up from there?

Pernilla: Yeah. So then I came to be with this student who had been a student of Goldsmith, and she was a teacher herself. I was with her for a couple of years. I basically moved in on her ranch, which was a little north of L.A.—east of L.A., no, a little north of L.A., I think—and I was working for her. I was her bookkeeper. I was clean. It was just anything to start with, you know; I came to a new country.

So I was with her teaching for a couple of years, and lo and behold, I felt moved to move on and became a massage therapist. One day I told her, “I’m going to move on. I’m going to stop working for you, but take your time to find a replacement. I’m not in a rush.”

So I waited and waited and waited several months, and I said, “So…” It was so interesting. I’ve had a number of these things in my life where she would say, “Well, this is about your ego. You’re not doing Divine God’s will,” and all that. It’s like here I got another opportunity: self-doubt. Am I doing the wrong thing?

I did some therapy, and for me it’s been a slow process. I keep getting these opportunities from the divine to just grow deeper and release any more prisoners of doubt or fear in myself. So here was another one, and it took me, again, a while to feel like, “Okay, God is not going to punish you.” Even with that awakening and all that, there was still that in there.

So I moved on, and then I’ve been with many wonderful other teachers over my lifetime. There’s a lot of help and love out there.

Rick: Yeah, you mentioned Barry Long. He was in Australia, wasn’t he?

Pernilla: Yeah.

Rick: There’s some controversy around him, but I don’t remember what it was. Anyway, what was your experience with Barry Long?

Pernilla: It was great. It was very much about supporting the woman to be a woman and teaching the man how to actually treat a woman with respect, not seeing her as a sexual object, and respecting what she felt and said. It was about not projecting all that stuff onto her. So it was very, very important for me to be with him, and I even became the U.S. coordinator for his work for seven years or something. I got pretty involved, and it was very, very helpful.

Rick: What would you say were your main takeaways from the whole Barry Long thing? What main benefits did you derive from it?

Pernilla: Well, he would also always take us into meditation. He’d say, “Okay, now let’s go into me, me being—”

Rick: The self.

Pernilla: Yeah. So we did a lot of that. When I was in Australia, I remember I started getting memories from my past, when I was a child, where I would suddenly have a shift in consciousness. This was when I was, I don’t know, four, five, six, seven, or eight years old. Suddenly things would shift, and I was just the observer.

It would happen once in a while. I didn’t understand it. It was like, suddenly I was just observing what was going on around me, and then it would go back to Pernilla. That started happening more there, but now I understood what it was. It felt like the pieces started coming together.

So that was one thing. I started realizing more of who I am, that this is actually who I am, and really feeling more and more like a woman, honoring myself as a woman, trusting myself, trusting myself and the female qualities in me.

Rick: Yeah, it’s interesting. A lot of people—well, some people, anyway—if they were listening to this, they might say, “There’s so much about the person and the personality and yada yada, but Ramana said, or so-and-so said, that that’s all an illusion. We’re just sort of—I don’t know—rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic or something, indulging in something that’s not ultimately real, and we should just cut to the quick, go straight to the source, realize our true nature, and all this other stuff will kind of work itself out.”

But then there’s a whole other stream of spiritual enterprise which feels that you can’t, as you said, engage in spiritual bypassing. If you just brush this stuff off as illusory or superficial or of secondary importance, it’s going to come back to bite you, and it really actually needs to be dealt with.

So what would you advise in terms of a balance between those two perspectives?

Pernilla: Yeah, it’s a very nondual question, really, isn’t it? Even though I’ve been with many nondual teachers, it’s never been my thing to say, you know, it doesn’t really exist, or whatever. However they say that, it’s just never been my thing. It’s never given me any juice.

For me, it’s all about embodiment, and I think I also had to come to terms with the fact that I was not like everybody else in those communities. You know what, Rick? I’m just being myself.

Rick: That’s great.

Pernilla: I don’t know what that means. Maybe I’m completely asleep at the wheel; maybe I’m completely awake. I don’t think—it’s not something I think about. I’m just being myself. I’m just allowing the unfolding to unfold.

I’m receiving the downloads a lot. When I write, it just comes, and I know who I am in all of that. There’s just this presence that I am. I never feel separate from that, and I can see that there are still some past conditionings, maybe some universal conditionings, that are playing themselves out. Some of them can still pull my presence, my consciousness, in sometimes and make me believe them, but I can always come back here.

For me, it’s not right to say all that stuff doesn’t matter. It feels like… it’s just not my truth. But there is something, and I think this is part of how my unfolding happened, where there is a place where I really allow every part that has been left outside the fold to come back in, and I love it back in.

When that happens, there’s a melting of what was not loved before. There’s a separation, and it can come back in, and then there’s a flow of oneness, a flow of love, and peace. Then it’s easier just to rest in it when there aren’t all these parts knocking on your door, wanting in, and you’re saying, “No, you can’t come in. No, you certainly can’t. I’m ashamed of you; stay out,” or, “You don’t even exist. What do you want?”

That has never worked for me. However, there is a place where it feels like, when these parts have been integrated enough in me, there might be some thoughts coming and knocking at the door, wanting to tempt me to go back out. There is a point where I’m like, “You know what? I’m sorry, I’m done with you.” It just feels like it has completed itself. It feels like the truth of it has embodied itself. There’s no duality, and I’m just done.

So again, it’s just the natural unfolding of, “Okay, I don’t even want to start loving that part. No, we’re done.” There is actually a separation, the way I see it, between the thought that comes in with some negativity about myself or the world, or some belief, whatever, and the impact that has on my emotional body.

I always include the emotional body and help that come into oneness, into peace, into love. Once it is included, incorporated, and integrated, that’s when this thought knocking on the door has no power and no bearing anymore. There’s nothing biting back or wanting to engage. But as long as I leave these parts out, then I will go out there and believe it all the time.

I always include the emotional body and help that come into oneness, into peace, into love. Once it is included, incorporated, and integrated, that’s when this thought knocking on the door has no power and no bearing anymore. There’s nothing biting back or wanting to engage. But as long as I leave these parts out, then I will go out there and believe it all the time.

I don’t know if it makes sense the way I’m saying it, but a lot of people have asked me that question: When do you love it, and when do you leave it? There is a flow to it. Then maybe the next layer comes up, and maybe that needs to be loved, met, and listened to.

When you listen to your body—if I’d listened to that “No” back then, I would have saved myself a lot of suffering. Learning to listen to that is important. If something comes knocking on the door and says, “Pernilla, you can’t trust yourself,” I’m like, “Please, come on. That’s over.” So it’s more about integrating it. For me, it’s not about what you just… I don’t remember the question, because I can’t really relate to those questions, but no.

Rick: Yeah, well, it sounds like what you’re saying is that there’s a balance that you’ve learned to live with. If you were to try to push away and exclude this kind of stuff, then you would only make it stronger. On the other hand, at the other extreme, you say you just relax, and by relaxing and accepting it, you automatically circumvent an inner battle that might otherwise take place. A lot of stuff ends up getting resolved and rectified, but at a certain point, in contradiction to the sort of “whatever goes” principle, there can be a, “No, I’m done with you. We don’t need to deal with this anymore. Goodbye,” kind of thing.

I’m just reinterpreting what I heard you say. There’s a balance that you’ve learned to establish, and it seems to help you progress, work through, and resolve this stuff once and for all.

Pernilla: I think also, when you say it’s kind of like resisting, there’s an energy of resistance: “No, no, no.”

Rick: It creates a strain.

Pernilla: Yes, and that’s not here when you’re done, when it’s integrated. It’s like whatever—you can move through. It’s all one, but there’s not that sense of duality. I think the energy of latching on or grasping onto something is gone. Yeah, that’s good.

Rick: All right. In the list in the bio you sent me, you listed a number of your primary influences. So far, we’ve covered Joel Goldsmith and Barry Long. Then you mentioned ayahuasca. Did you go to Peru to do ayahuasca?

Pernilla: No, I did it here in California. There was a shaman who came and did it. That was another big—actually, that was another big turning point in my life.

I don’t know, maybe it was the fifth or sixth journey. I just experienced myself beating myself up emotionally, judging myself and hating myself. It was just this old conditioning. When you’re in that space, in a journey space, you’re much more the observer, so there’s a gap that happens. I could just watch myself doing it.

It was excruciatingly painful, and I felt it in a way I had never felt it before. I was like, “Oh, my God.” I cried and cried and cried because it was so horrendous that I was treating myself that way.

Rick: So you’re saying this is something you had actually been doing routinely but had been unaware of, and the ayahuasca made you aware of it?

Pernilla: Yes, exactly. I can see, when I work with people, how it’s just this underlying thing that most people do. It’s just in our culture, I think.

So I vowed never to treat myself like that again, and it was a very beautiful turnaround. It still took a while to fully incorporate that, of course, but that was also the beginning of the work I do now as a self-love mentor, helping people not to judge, criticize, doubt, or shame themselves and stay in duality.

Even people who have had beautiful awakenings usually still have that underlying current. I don’t know if it’s there more in women than in men. I know for sure it’s there in women: the self-doubt, comparing and competing with other women, trying to be different from who we are. It’s very, very painful and very dualistic.

Here again, there was another piece that opened up, to start really treating myself with a lot more love. That in itself is probably one of the most important things. It brings oneness to yourself when you don’t create that division. Judging and criticizing yourself—there’s such duality in that, right? If we’re talking about nondual teachings or awakenings, where does that really fit in? We need to deal with that.

That’s why I eventually wrote the book called Imagine Being Kind to Yourself. It was like, “Imagine that—being kind to yourself.” What?

What was so interesting when I wrote that book, though, was that in those days I went to satsang a lot, and this was never talked about. Nobody talked about loving yourself. It wasn’t real; it was something to deal with. I was in that environment, and there was this thing that arose in me because I saw that my clients were just so hard on themselves.

I said, “There’s something missing here.” They would come in and say, “Whatever teacher we were with said, ‘You just have to accept everything as it is.’” So they were trying to accept everything as it is, but I said, “What about all the feelings you have? Are they not part of what is?” That’s what developed and unraveled and eventually became the book: learning how to be kind to yourself so you’re not living in that duality.

Integrating Nondual and Psychological Approaches

Rick: I think it’s an important point, and maybe we’ll be coming back to it several times during this interview. There are different pieces to this puzzle. Some of the nondual satsang teachers who are really radical in that way have a piece—an important piece—and the more psychological, emotionally oriented people have a piece. Somehow, all the pieces together make the whole puzzle, I think. Maybe not for everybody, but for most people.

You just can’t bypass or sidestep certain things and advaita them away.

Pernilla: It’s true, yeah. It’s true. Or meditate them away: “I’m going to meditate it away.” Where is it going to go if it’s not included in the oneness? It’s a funny concept, but that’s part of the spirituality we grew up in.

Rick: You can always play devil’s advocate, because meditation can clear away a great deal of stuff that you don’t necessarily need to dwell on. It can actually just be cleared away. You can clear away stuff you don’t even know you had, and you don’t even know it cleared, but next thing you know, you’re feeling so much better and not behaving in a certain way anymore.

On the other hand, it doesn’t seem that meditation in and of itself is able to resolve everything for most people. Usually, other tools are necessary as well.

Pernilla: It seems to be, yeah.

Rick: Realistically speaking.

Pernilla: Realistically speaking.

Rick: Realistically speaking, it’s like if we actually get real about it and see what kind of results people get, and see what’s going on in the lives of some satsang teachers, it kind of reinforces the notion of a multipronged approach.

Pernilla: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it’s important. Like you say, there are all the pieces, right? We need to put them all together. You may just have to jump from one piece to the other: “I just need some therapy right now, so I’m just going to do that.” It doesn’t mean I’m not going to meditate. I’m going to stay grounded, because when you have the ground, things go much more easily.

We have to find the ground of our being. We have to wake up to who we are; otherwise, we’ll just be out there doing therapy and rearranging the deck chairs.

Absolutely, there is a place for that too, I believe—to do that first if there’s too much trauma, too much identification, or if the grip is too tight. I don’t know if you can just let it go and go do this. There might be some work that needs to be done before you can even start meditating and benefit from it.

But again, we’re all different. I don’t see one recipe for all of us. We have to create our own recipe and use it.

Rick: Yeah, I was just reading something—maybe it was in your book, or some other thing I came across in the last day or two—where somebody was saying that they couldn’t sit still for five minutes to meditate. They just weren’t wired that way; it was too difficult for them.

That could be partially due to the meditation technique they’re trying to do, but some people just aren’t able to sit easily. There are other things they can do. Maybe five years from now, sitting will come naturally to them, but maybe right now it’s really not the right thing for them.

Pernilla: Right, and are we supposed to all meditate? I mean, is that the rule? I don’t know what we all came here for. I’m finding out more and more what I came here for, but somebody else may have come down here to experience a whole different aspect of life, which does not include meditation. So why not allow that to unfold in its own way too?

I mean, on your show here, most people are very interested, of course, in the awakening aspect because that’s what you bring in here. So that is important here, and meditation is a big part of awakening, I think. I don’t know how you can connect to that place if you’re not taking the time to go there and focus only on that. So, of course, we want that here, but I think there is a lot more than that, and it’s available to us.

Rick: Yeah, that analogy comes to mind. They say, “Dig one deep well rather than digging ten shallow wells,” and then you’ll hit water. But you can twist that analogy a little bit to say, “Well, how about using ten different tools to dig one deep well?”

Yes, that’s a good idea. Maybe you want a shovel and a pickax and a jackhammer and a bunch of different things.

✨ Different kinds of awakening

Pernilla: Yeah, absolutely. There was another thing that just came to my mind, too, when you talked about something that I wrote in another article the other day, or recently, about what are we really awake to? What are we? It’s such a funny concept.

A few years ago, I ran into a friend who I know is not awake in the way we talk about being awake, and she said, “You know, I just woke up, and now I can see how I have lived my life with my partner.” She had woken up to some unconscious or asleep part of how she had lived her life. She had woken up to that, and this was years ago.

It made me think, “Oh, for me, I always thought it was about the spiritual awakening,” which is only part of it. Because look what we’re waking up to today. We’re waking up to eating healthier, how we treat each other, the government, the finances, and all the things going on in the world.

Rick: The environment.

Pernilla: The environment, all these things we’re waking up to. How we eat is a big part of it. Do we eat animals that have been treated terribly and take that in, instead of taking a stand for maybe creating a better world?

We are waking up to the possibility that we may have a purpose in life—God forbid, right? In nonduality, you can’t have a purpose. But I think we do, because that’s part of it. I can’t exclude anything, really. I can just see that we are more and more waking up to things that we have been completely asleep to.

Some of them are a little hard to wake up to and see what we have actually been participating in in the world. But we didn’t know, because we were asleep. So there’s a lot more to awakening than just your true nature, although that is a huge and very important piece of it if you are actually drawn in that direction.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a really interesting point. I think that one can be profoundly awake to one’s true nature and yet still have relative awakenings that need to happen. They can still have blind spots and be misogynistic, insensitive, negligent, or deficient in other ways.

Awakening as a Multifaceted Process

So it seems to me that awakening maybe has a foundation in true nature, but at the same time it’s a multifaceted thing. When someone says, “So-and-so is awake,” I say, “Yeah, I guess so, to a degree. They’ve had an awakening. I suspect there are other ways, or other degrees, to which they could awaken, but it’s all good.”

So it seems to me that awakening maybe has a foundation in true nature, but at the same time it’s a multifaceted thing. When someone says, “So-and-so is awake,” I say, “Yeah, I guess so, to a degree. They’ve had an awakening. I suspect there are other ways, or other degrees, to which they could awaken, but it’s all good.”

Pernilla: Yeah, and again, what are they awake to? If you say that person is awake, I would ask, “Well, what are they awake to? And what are they not awake to?”

For me, it’s more like the awakeness—the more I spend time resting in and as that, it just kind of expands. In the expansion, I start seeing things that I didn’t see before, whether it’s outside or inside. So it’s an expansion of the light of the awakeness seeing itself in and as everything where it didn’t see itself before.

Rick: It brings up an interesting analogy that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi used to use. He would say that if you think of life as a territory, and in the territory there are different things you could explore—diamond mines, silver mines, and interesting things like that—you could go and start going after those. But the problem is, you don’t own the territory. You need to first capture the fort that commands the territory. Having captured the fort, you can then more safely and legitimately explore all these things at your leisure.

So maybe this is a good analogy for the idea of different kinds of awakenings. The true-nature awakening would be the fort. If you’re just going after this little mine here or that little mine there without having captured it, you’re on somewhat tenuous ground.

On the other hand, you could capture the fort and then not bother to explore the territory, leaving all kinds of other things undeveloped, and be a real SOB who happens to be in tune with true nature.

Pernilla: Exactly. Yeah, there are plenty of those, I think.

📚 Learning from many teachers

Rick: Yeah, interesting. All righty. We referred to satsang teachers, and I noticed that you’ve engaged with several: Gangaji, Adyashanti, I don’t know much about Joe Dispenza, and then Sat Shree. Did you find out about Sat Shree through Buddha at the Gas Pump, or did you already know about him?

Pernilla: I had a friend here in Felton, where I live in the Santa Cruz Mountains, who had invited him to come and give a satsang. She sent a little email out to a small group of people she knew, and it was right in town, so I went.

Rick: Was that in the last couple of years?

Pernilla: A year and a half ago, I think. It was not too long after he’d been on your show. I went to a retreat right afterward, which was absolutely wonderful.

I do love going to retreats and steeping in the silence, and Sat Shree has a very strong transmission. It really helps expand that. In the expansion, I may see more here and may see more there. That’s kind of how it works.

I just got back two months ago from spending two months in Tiruvannamalai with him in India, and it was absolutely wonderful. It’s amazing to take two months out of your life and focus only on the truth, in the place where the truth is beaming and the energy is so strong. Have you been?

Rick: No, never have.

Pernilla: Oh, okay. It’s just so beautiful. I’ve been there before, and it’s just so beautiful. I had two absolutely wonderful months of deepening inside, clearing out more stuff, and expanding more. It was just lovely.

Rick: That’s great. Elaborate a little bit more on all these people that you’ve interacted with: Gangaji, Adyashanti, Joe Dispenza—I don’t know anything about him—and Sat Shree. Let’s take five or ten minutes and talk about some of the tidbits that you’ve managed to glean, how each one has their own flavor perhaps, and how different teachers are like different flowers in the garden. They each have their own aroma, and the bee goes from flower to flower.

In fact, Mirabai Starr gave a nice talk one time that I saw called “Bees in the Garden.” It was about multiculturalism, or picking up knowledge here and there, like a bee would go from flower to flower. That’s kind of what I do with this show. For me, I’m like a big bee, just sniffing a different flower every week.

Anyway, talk about that a little bit—about how your life has been going with these different teachers and what you’ve gleaned from different ones.

Pernilla: Yeah, Gangaji was just a short period. There wasn’t a lot that I went to. But Adya was part of my life for many years. I was very involved with his teachings, and I did a lot of retreats. I was also managing his retreats for a couple of years, so I was basically on almost every retreat he did.

I have a deep, deep love for Adya. I was with him for so many years, and I really felt that I got much more grounded in the awakening and started realizing that this is actually who I am. It was not just an experience that came and went. I started grounding in it more, and it was just lovely.

I will always feel a deep love for him, and probably for all of them. Well, you’ve met Adya, so you know him, yeah.

Rick: And who was the other one? Oh, you mentioned—well, you’ve talked about Sat Shree a little bit. You could elaborate more on his thing. You’ve also mentioned Hakomi and Deeksha, which is the Oneness University thing.

Pernilla: Yeah, I have been a bee, just going all over the world and nibbling. I really like that, because here’s the thing: I just follow, I just follow, I just follow. Something moves me. This deeper place in me moves me, and I have just learned to trust that.

The Oneness University was also something that suddenly arose as a movement inside me. It was just, “I’m going.” Sometimes it surprises me when there’s a strong movement to do something, but I just do it.

So I did that years ago, and I had weekly Deeksha at my house with a group of people who came every week. I thought it was wonderful. I felt there was a big chunk of Pernilla that disappeared during that time.

And who was the other one? Oh, I’ll tell you about Sat Shree. Again, with Sat Shree, it was so amazing. With the India trip, I knew it was happening, but there was nothing in me that wanted to go. It hadn’t even been a thought—it was just a possibility.

Then I talked to a friend who was going to go, and I said, “Oh, that’s so great. I’m so happy for you.” I hung up the phone, and then this energy started moving in me. It was like, “Okay, let me sit down and listen.”

So I sat down, and I was like, “My God, go to India for two months and just leave everything behind?” Then all the attachments came up: What about my cat? What about my mom? She’s in Denmark, but she’s ninety-one. What about my clients? What about my students? What about my garden?

All these attachments arose, and I just looked at them. I was like, “Really, Pernilla? Really? Is that more important?” Then I got up from my meditation, and I knew I was going to India.

That’s kind of how things happen for me. It’s never really a choice. It’s more like the choice is made for me. So, yeah, he has such a strong transmission. There’s really a nice expansion and burning that happens there, and that’s what I’m more moved to now. Instead of learning more, it’s like, “Nah, let’s just steep in it and let it do its thing.”

Rick: Yeah, of course you’re a little bit footloose and fancy-free. You don’t have a husband or children or anything. I mean, it’s one thing to have cats and a garden, but another thing if you had a family. It might be a little harder to just take off.

In deference to those who are in a more encumbered situation, if we want to use that word, they shouldn’t feel guilty about not being able to bop around the world.

Pernilla: But you know, there’s something about it. When the movement comes, it will do what needs to happen for you to get there or to do it. So, to compare yourself with somebody else, that’s neither here nor there.

Rick: It’s your movement, your circumstances, your life.

Pernilla: Exactly, and we all have that, and this movement is in every one of us. It’s learning to tune into it enough that we can trust it and then move with it instead of using the mind to block it or go back and not do it, right, to let fear stop us. So it’s learning more and more just to trust that and go, like, yeah, free as a bird, of course, and just fly with it.

Sometimes it may mean that you need to leave something behind or change things, because that’s how it works, right? When you allow the Divine to take over your life, things are going to fall away, things are going to change, and that can be scary. I mean, I left Denmark behind. I left everything behind.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve done a lot of that too, just dropping everything on a moment’s notice and going around the world. But on the other hand, you have different phases of life, and different people have different dharmas, you know? I think it’s important to understand that one can evolve most effectively within one’s dharma. There’s even a verse in the Gita which says this:

Though lesser in merit, one’s own dharma is better than another; the dharma of another brings danger.

So you have to be true to yourself and true to your circumstances.

Pernilla: You know, I usually use the metaphor that we need to surf our own wave and not try to get on somebody else’s wave, because we’re going to fall off. But when you surf your own wave, it’s going to take you home. We don’t know how, but it’s going to take you home, and you’re going to have a lot of experiences on the way that may be good or may be hard. We don’t know.

But it’s finding that self-love thing that I use. It’s helped me to just come home to love everything, so I can fully trust the deeper dharma, or that thing that lives as us, to come home to that. Then it is really like you’re just surfing, and you learn to surf with it. You learn to, you know, left, right, yes, no, right? It is a flow. It really is a flow, and you need to learn to flow with it. That’s a skill that I didn’t learn overnight. I’m still learning. I’m learning every day.

Rick: Yeah, and you watch a really good surfer and they make it look so easy, because they’re not fighting the wave or the force of gravity or anything else. They’re just doing it in the most efficient, effortless way possible, and that’s the best way.

Pernilla: Yeah.

✨ Living as a self-love mystic

Rick: So you call yourself a self-love mystic, and I guess you’ve sort of touched upon what that means. But is there anything—you call yourself a self-love mystic and mentor, and you like to support your clients in bridging the gap between who they truly are and who they think they are or should be. Do you want to riff on that a little bit more?

Pernilla: Well, the mystic and mentor—I kind of like the flow, but there is truth to it. When you live in and as that self-love, I feel I’m in the mystery. I mean, what is the mystery? That’s when you really don’t know, right? The mystery is outside the known, and the known is trying to make things look a certain way or go a certain way. But when I just am in this flow of loving myself, I really don’t know where I’m going from moment to moment.

I may have a sense like, oh, we’re going to the right, and then, oh, we turn to the left. But it feels like I’m in that mystery because I don’t know. It can be scary to live in the not-knowing in the beginning. So there is also a lot of love and compassion in just learning to surf, learning to find out: Well, what does this mean? What does that mean? Does that mean I have to go right when I feel that movement?

So it’s getting to know how to live in the mystery. Then the mentoring part is maybe being the surf teacher who’s showing them how to do that. It’s all done through allowing and allowing and allowing everything that comes up—everything. There’s a space for everything that we are, and if we can just include it and listen to it, learn from it, and love it, then sometimes it means, okay, I need to let this go, or I just need to go and talk to that person, or I need to leave that job, or I need to stand up for myself more—whatever it is.

There’s a space for everything that we are, and if we can just include it and listen to it, learn from it, and love it, then sometimes it means, okay, I need to let this go.

See, again, I’m really in the human. I’m in the body. I’m not out there; I’m in here. That’s where my dharma is. It’s in the body, and that’s how everything goes, because I cannot allow division in oneness. It’s just like—I mean, I say I allow everything. If there is division, we allow the experience of division. Everything is allowed to be felt and experienced.

In the allowing, things always change. Always, always, always. There’s always, like, oh, and then there’s more expansion, more understanding, more vision, more clarity. But when we are resisting, it’s a lot of it is between resisting what is and allowing what is, no matter what it is.

In the allowing, things always change. Always, always, always. There’s always, like, oh, and then there’s more expansion, more understanding, more vision, more clarity. But when we are resisting, it’s a lot of it is between resisting what is and allowing what is, no matter what it is.

The more we allow, I feel I’m just in the ocean—the ocean of allowing—where every little fish, every shark, every undercurrent, every tsunami, everything is allowed, because the ocean does not exclude anything. In that, I feel I am that ocean of allowing, and then change can happen, for sure.

Rick: Yeah, and also saying no is allowed. If you had had that more clearly back when that guy moved into your house, you were sort of thinking that everything is allowed, but not your saying no. That wasn’t allowed.

Pernilla: Exactly, yeah. How often do we not allow a feeling of no to be spoken because we want to fit in, right?

I actually think that when you’re in spiritual circles, there is a tendency to need to be spiritually correct or something. I mean, such nonsense.

Rick: Give me an example.

Pernilla: You might appear more loving than you are, or if you’re angry, you suppress it. Or if everybody agrees to a certain thing and then you feel it’s different, you don’t want to say it because it’s not spiritually correct or something. There’s a lot of that.

I think I’m a little bit of a rebel in that way, and I had to maybe tone that down a little bit too, so it’s not coming from a rebel place, but just from, like, you know, it’s not my truth. I kind of had to fight my way to get to that place where I can just say it from a place of, “I just can’t feel it,” or, “It’s not my truth,” even if everybody else, maybe in a nondual circle, says, “Oh, self-love is not real because there’s nobody to love.”

I had some of that in the beginning. Actually, I’ll just share this, because when I had published my book—which I should be happy and grateful for, which I was—I felt a little ashamed that I had written such an unspiritual book. This was ten years ago, right?

Rick: This is the one, Imagine Being Kind to Yourself? That one? It didn’t seem unspiritual to me. I was reading it.

Pernilla: Well, back then nobody talked about that. It wasn’t part of the satsang circles. That was not what we were doing there.

Rick: It was too psychological or emotional or personal.

Pernilla: Yeah, exactly. But I’m over that, and I see it almost everywhere now. A lot of people are becoming coaches, and a lot of teachers who are out there—spiritual teachers who have different flavors than satsang—I see almost everybody talking about how important self-love is, because that is the vision that we have overlooked.

✨ Ethics, awakening, and unresolved conditioning

Rick: Yeah, and if you talk to somebody like Mariana Kaplan, for instance, who is a psychologist and who actually consults with a lot of spiritual teachers, she’ll tell you—without naming names—that it’s quite remarkable, or almost shocking, how many well-known and maybe not-so-well-known spiritual teachers have all kinds of issues that they’re dealing with in their private lives.

Of course, some of that stuff ends up going public too and creating a big disruption. But, as I said earlier, you just can’t Advaita away certain things. They need to somehow be dealt with and resolved.

Pernilla: Yep, that’s right, and I think it’s very common. We’ve heard so many examples of the spiritual male teachers from the past, the big ones, and how they had sexual interactions with younger boys. So there is definitely a blind spot there.

When we talked about shame, I think these people have shame around it, because if they weren’t ashamed of it, why would they hide it?

Rick: Yeah, this actually brings up a point. I’m glad you mentioned that. At the Science and Non-Duality Conference in October, I’m going to give a talk on the ethics of enlightenment. Not that I’m some great paragon of morality or that I have some profound wisdom or insight into this, but it’s just such a troubling and common issue.

Awakening, Ethics, and Spiritual Teachers

Things happen with spiritual teachers that end up really shaking up their sanghas or disillusioning people from spirituality altogether, and people scratch their heads afterward: “What is going on?” Why is it that these instances are so common? Is there actually a correlation between spiritual awakening and ethical behavior?

Some people actually argue that there isn’t. Some say behavior is all just conditioning and genetics, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with your state of consciousness. I tend to disagree with them and say that there should be a correlation. If there are a lot of problems in that area, something has not been integrated; something has not been resolved.

So we’ve talked about this a bit in this conversation, but let’s dwell on it a bit more in light of what I just said. Maybe you could say some things.

Pernilla: Well, I’ve had a close encounter with that in a relationship I was in quite a few years ago now, so I don’t want to go into a lot of—

Rick: With a spiritual teacher?

Pernilla: Not a teacher, but somebody who definitely claimed that he was enlightened, awake, or whatever. I don’t really doubt that he’d gone through that experience, but there was just a lot that had never been dealt with, and boy, does that come out in an intimate relationship. Like, wow, yeah.

I know a lot of spiritual teachers, some more closely than others, but I have seen and heard things that make me go, “Oh, really?” It doesn’t match. But then again, it doesn’t match my view or my idea about how enlightenment is supposed to look, right?

Rick: How is enlightenment supposed to look?

Pernilla: Yeah, I mean, in my eyes.

Rick: What is your view? How should it look?

Pernilla: Well, again, I can only speak about how I want it to look for me, because of the movement inside of me. I want to include everything. I want to show up in and as love and bring that to where it’s needed. Let’s say, bring light to where there is a lack of light, or bring love when people are not feeling loved. It’s bringing that out, and again, it’s because that is how it moves here in me.

I don’t know if that’s how it’s supposed to look, but if I compare it with what’s here, then that certainly doesn’t match certain things I’ve seen over there. In my experience, it certainly is true that the more I sink in, the more peace and presence there is. I think presence is my strongest flavor of expression. I just feel I’m oozing that presence all the time.

For some other people, it may be stillness or love, but I feel it just comes out. The more I clear the windows, the windshield, the more it can shine out. When I know the qualities of this place, when I go inside, I do not encounter shame or anger or selfishness—not in the core of who I am. I can certainly find those things as dirt on the windshield, so I want to clean that.

Again, the movement here is, as you have probably heard in this interview, that I’m all about embodiment and clearing up what is not love, what is not presence, and what is not peace. That’s how it is for me.

I don’t know if it’s like that for others. It doesn’t sound like it is, but maybe there are some blind spots that they don’t even know about. Maybe they have done the bypass, which has been used by many as a way to avoid dealing with this stuff, because it’s not always fun to deal with.

I don’t like dealing with it when it’s really heavy-duty stuff, but it feels good when I do, because as soon as you go into that place that you don’t want—the place that you’re ashamed of or afraid of or whatever—and you go in there without resistance, it opens up.

And here I am again, right? Oh, here I am again. So it’s also a way of discovering yourself in everything that you thought was not you. There is a sweetness to it also.

Rick: Nice. I’m hesitant to use the word “enlightenment” myself because it has such a static, superlative connotation. But if I were to use it, I would really want to apply it to someone who exudes the qualities of saintliness, really. I mean, not only awake in terms of their inner consciousness, but that consciousness has so permeated every facet of their personality and behavior that they’re utterly compassionate and loving and ethically sound, and so on and so forth. Do you hold that ideal also, or what?

Pernilla: I think I do, yeah. I like the way you describe it. Can you think of somebody that you see like that?

Rick: Well, I don’t know. I don’t want to necessarily name present characters. I can think of plenty who haven’t lived up to that ideal. There are so many situations, like the one you alluded to a little bit ago about some famous teacher messing with young boys.

But some of the historical figures, like Jesus and Buddha and people like that—and Ramana seems to be up there—which is not to say that Jesus would necessarily fit some idyllic conception of being nicey-nicey and goody-goody all the time. Jesus got angry and turned over the money changers’ tables in the temple and did this and that. So there could be all kinds of a range of emotions.

But I guess if I could find a bottom line, it would be not harming people in any way. If he’s angry, it’s for their good. But I can think of many situations where teachers have been harmful to the lives of others through their misbehavior, and that I can’t associate with enlightenment.

Pernilla: I agree. Yeah, but if I think of current people, there are a few I would think of. Maybe Ammaji. I see you have her picture behind you. When I’ve been to her, just coming into the room exudes love and passion.

She has her critics, and she’s been accused of getting really angry and even hitting people with a stick and things like that, which, of course, the Zen masters used to do. I don’t want to just pretend that kind of stuff doesn’t happen, but I always get the sense with her that there really is the highest ideal in mind in terms of how she deals with people, even if it’s being a disciplinarian or something.

But then again, is there something wrong with being angry sometimes? Anger is an energy that wants to upset something.

Rick: I’m not saying there is. I mean, the example of Jesus, for instance, getting angry.

Pernilla: Absolutely, yeah, sure. If I look at myself, I can get angry, but it’s usually very short-lived. For instance, I had to deal with some phone companies not too long ago. Oh, my God. I think I spent about 15 hours total trying to change something and do whatever I needed to do. I got so angry because I got cut off, and there was this feeling of, “I’m so angry.”

But it was very short-lived. It was like, boom, and then a moment later it was gone. I just noticed, “Yeah, this is frustrating, and there’s a reaction to that,” and I’m okay with that.

Rick: Yeah, but on the other hand, you’re talking on the phone with somebody and tending to get angry, and that can also be an opportunity to learn patience and tolerance. You’re talking to some poor character who’s making $12 an hour and doing their best. There’s no point in getting angry at them; it just makes their job miserable.

Pernilla: Well, I usually say, “I know I’m angry. I’m not angry at you. I know it’s not your fault, but I’m angry.” I kind of do that. But I have noticed, like you say, that it’s actually happening less when these things happen. It’s just like, “Oh, well, whatever.” So it’s lessening because I don’t want to be angry.

Sometimes there is an anger that just comes out for a moment like that, and it’s nothing big. But I think the lights just start shining through more and more, and then there isn’t so much room for these other things.

Rick: Speaking of Amma, she uses the analogy of anger being like a knife that doesn’t have a handle and is sharp on both ends. You can wound a person with it, but you’re wounding yourself at the same time.

Pernilla: Well, you know, perfection—I’m not perfect.

Rick: Yeah, well, it’s a high bar, too. I know. A question came in from Frank in Norway. Frank asked a question about traumas. He said—it’s a little bit long, so bear with me:

Traumas come in all sizes, and we all experience some, especially when we’re young. We normally get through them and leave them behind, believing we are done with them, but there are very often remnants that we are not aware of, manifesting as anxiety or depression whose source we don’t understand. The traumas are not forgotten; we just don’t make the connection anymore. They’re hiding in plain sight. I believe it’s a widespread problem. How do you suggest we deal with it?

Pernilla: Well, I absolutely agree. I think even though the event is over, the impact still lives in us; it lives in our bodies. Because of the work I do as a Hakomi practitioner, which is all about the body, the body, the body, I know the body tells us what’s going on. It tells us why it has anxiety.

Instead of taking medication—unless you really need it, if it’s that bad—take some time to breathe into that place. Let’s say you have anxiety in your chest. Put your hands on your chest and breathe consciously into it. I usually say, do it with a kind hello instead of “Go away.” We usually want to get rid of these painful feelings, and we resist them.

For me, it’s very much about making room. Instead of trying to get rid of these feelings, move right into them with kindness and a willingness to learn what this anxiety is so anxious about. When you do that, you can be sure it’s going to start talking to you.

There might be tears, there might be something, but something is going to come up. Then at least there is an opportunity to liberate it, love it, or give it what it needs—to hold its hand and walk through that landscape with love.

I have not been able to do all that on my own. I had a lot of Hakomi therapy and Hakomi supervision for years when I learned this. We talked about Hakomi earlier; it has been my magic bullet for years because it really helped me walk through the body and move into areas that I didn’t know how to enter on my own.

One first step is to make space. Allow the feeling of this anxiety or whatever trauma this person is talking about. Maybe it’s just conceptual, but make some space for it, breathe into it with kindness, and then see what happens.

How does that place respond to somebody who cares, instead of somebody who just wants to get rid of it or bypass it? What is this anxiety so scared about? There might be shame, fear of not being good enough, or the feeling that nobody cares about me—all the things that happen. Then you start integrating and talking to it and giving it what it needs.

I’m very much for filling up with love, because that’s really all it needs. That’s all we want at the bottom, at the core: love.

So I’m very much for filling up with love, because that’s really all it needs. That’s all we want at the bottom, at the core: love.

Rick: Well, I hope that helps, Frank. If you have a follow-up question, feel free to submit it.

I want to add an addendum to something I just said about Amma. It’s sort of like she’s not going to deal with a person in a strict way, and maybe be angry and stuff, unless they’ve really submitted themselves to a close relationship, a close discipleship.

I remember one time, early on, when my wife and I first started seeing her, we were at some gathering of fairly close people because we were giving somebody a ride home who was in her inner circle. She was coming in there while they were having dinner, and she stormed into the room. She was really upset about something, and everybody was like, “[expression of shock].”

Then she saw my wife and me sitting there, and she just settled down: “Okay, I’m not going to behave that way in front of these people. They’re new; they didn’t sign up for this. We’ll deal with these other people later.”

Pernilla: Well, it’s that Zen sword, right? I think it’s a good thing to have if you know how to use it.

Rick: And if you’re qualified.

Pernilla: Yes, absolutely, because you can cut through things. Sometimes I think that’s very necessary. If somebody is completely lost in something, you know, maybe not smacking them, but perhaps clapping your hands or doing something that brings them out of a trance, and it’s like, “Oh, where was I?”

I think there’s absolute value in it, but it has to be done in a skilled manner.

Rick: Yeah, I think there are examples of unqualified people trying to behave that way, having heard that gurus behave that way, who do a lot of damage. For instance, Andrew Cohen, whom I’ll name since his whole thing has gone public and he has been consciously expressing contrition for the way he behaved for so many years, just blasting people with anger and abusing them and so on, and really not being in a place from which he could do that with complete integrity and wisdom, thereby hurting a lot of people.

Pernilla: Absolutely, yeah. And that just tells me about this man that he’s done a bypass. There is absolutely some unresolved stuff in him that even makes him want to do that.

Like there’s a power thing or whatever, and these things always lead back to trauma, where somebody overpowered him, probably, and that’s the only way he knew how to deal with whatever happened. Then you can do the bypass to get rid of it all, but here it is.

Rick: Yeah, he’s been trying to resolve it recently. He has even been doing ayahuasca trips and stuff to work through it.

👁️ A new dream for the world

Okay, so there’s a nice section from your book where I started extracting little quotes because I like this theme you were bringing up. You say, “There’s a new dream that wants to be dreamed, and it is beginning to manifest in the many changes that are already happening in the world. It looks like we’re at a point in history where two dreams are meeting. The old one is on the way out and the new one is on the way in. Right where the two currents meet, there is a lot of turmoil. If you fight it and hang on to the old dream, you will go under with that dissipating current, not because you are bad, but simply because you’re holding on to a current that has ended and is going under.”

So I found that interesting. I’m definitely an observer of the world situation and always trying to think about what’s really happening underneath the latest headline. I do feel that there’s a big shift taking place in society and in the world, and we’d be quite surprised to see where the world will be if things go in a positive direction. I don’t know if that’s a done deal, but it’s interesting to consider what the undercurrents may be.

If it’s true that consciousness is awakening and that we’re moving into a more enlightened society, then that trend, or that undercurrent of consciousness getting enlivened, must be having a major impact on world events, even though it may not be obvious to the ordinary observer. So what do you have to say about all that?

Pernilla: First I want to say, wow, did I write that?

Rick: You did, actually, yeah.

Pernilla: That’s how often I write. I go, “Oh, wow, where did that come from?” But it is true, because it is my experience that there is this new energy arising. I call it a new paradigm. I say it lives in our hearts.

I have yet to meet anybody who is not on some kind of awakening path, who does not have some kind of vision of what is possible that inspires them, but they don’t know what to do with it. That’s been my own process again, right? It all comes back to how we live that, because there was this thing that’s been pushing me to move forward more and get out there more, and self-love is a big piece of the energy that moves here, as well as creating community.

Community, Permaculture, and Women’s Empowerment

I’m doing a lot to create community, too. I have community gardens, I’ve grown a lot of my food, and people have gotten involved in that. I have a meetup group called Young Women Empowerment Circle, because I see this new energy. I sense that in my clients, or the women who come to my groups, there is this new energy living in them, and they don’t know what to do with it. Most people in the world are not attuned to that yet, or they can’t really help them because they haven’t gotten in touch with their own.

I’m very much in touch with my own, and it actually happened years ago when I saw this so clearly. I had been watching a DVD from a friend called From Freedom to Fascism, and at the same time I was reading the books—I don’t know if you read the books—the Ringing Cedars series.

Rick: You referred to them, and I’m aware of them, but I’ve never actually sat down and read them.

Pernilla: I think I may have written that even in my book, where she talked about there being kind of a hierarchy that’s controlling the world, and it’s even controlling how we dream or what we want. I can’t remember; it was years ago. But it sparked something in me, just seeing that DVD as well as reading those books.

I was sitting there and I was just like, “Oh, I’m here to help people get back in touch with the dream that lives in their heart.” It was one of those moments, and that’s when I started going out there more and doing something. That was mine. That was what lived in here.

You have yours by the work that you do here, right? There is something you want to bring—this awakening awareness—to the world. I think we all have something. For me, it’s very much also about permaculture and community living and growing our own food.

There are many, many different things that people are experiencing, and I love helping them get in touch with that because that inspires me, right? That’s part of my dream. So if I can help you get in touch with your dream, that’s part of my dream, right? Because that’s what I love to do, and I see it so much.

I think the issue is that people don’t really know what to do with it. What happens to me—again, referring back to myself—is that I’ve had to move through a lot of fear to go out there again and be seen. I’ve had some past-life regression sessions where I could see why I’m so afraid. I’ve been disemboweled and burned and all these things, like, “Yikes, do I really want to do that again?”

So I’ve had a lot of fear of living this more publicly. When I was invited onto your show, it brought up that fear again, so I had to be with that and say, “You know, it really is time,” because this is a message. It’s not my message; it’s part of that new wave that wants to come out.

I’m not going to go back on the old wave of fear, trying to hold things together and do things in ways that don’t resonate with me. So that’s what I see. I think there’s a big need to help people get in touch with that and find the courage to live that because, Rick, it’s so new, it’s so different. It’s so different.

For me to call myself a self-love mystic and mentor—there’s no school for that. You don’t go—you just create out of nothing. You create out of your heart. And when there’s nobody around you saying, “Yeah, go on,” you go, “Oh no, this is too weird. I better go back to my regular job, and at least I pay my bills or something.”

But this thing is pushing you. You need to be out there. You need to teach people this thing, or you need to build this new green building thing. I’m really excited about this because I can feel it. This energy is so rich and exciting, and I want to do my part to really bring it out.

It’s happening. I mean, there are thousands and thousands of people who are stepping out, doing the absolutely unusual, stepping out and being different.

Rick: Yeah, that’s great. There’s an old Bengali saying: “If no one comes when you call, then go ahead alone.” But these days nobody’s alone, because, as you say, there’s just such a groundswell of interest in this sort of thing. Maybe some people feel alone because they haven’t connected with the others, but it’s getting easier and easier to connect.

Pernilla: Yeah, and that’s why community, I think, is so, so essential, because it’s part of the new energy. The new paradigm is living more in community.

It doesn’t mean we live ten people in one house, but it means we live in a way where we know each other, we support each other, maybe we eat together sometimes. There’s some kind of support from each other, so that we are not alone anymore.

Being alone is part of the old paradigm in that way. It’s not that we can’t be on our own, but there is this new energy, and, man, it’s exciting.

There’s a word that comes to my mind, because in a way we’re being weird. We are standing out as weird. I heard years ago that the word “weird” comes from an English root or something, spelled W-Y-R-D, and it means what is meant to be, or fate.

Again, that’s exciting, right? It’s like, “Oh, so when I’m weird, it just means I’m not part of the gray mass. I’m standing out, doing what I came here for. I’m living my purpose.” Yeah, so be weird.

In Santa Cruz, we have stickers that say something like, “It’s okay to be weird,” or something. There’s something about being weird in Santa Cruz that’s—that’s…

Rick: Yeah, weird is the new normal, or something. There’s another nice little tidbit I picked up from your book. This is just a bumper sticker you were quoting. I’ve seen this one, too. It says, “If you’re not in awe, you’re not paying attention.”

Pernilla: Yeah, there’s the opposite one that says, “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention,” right? Have you seen that one?

Rick: Yeah. I guess that’s the standard one, isn’t it? Yeah.

Pernilla: So this is whatever we are focusing on, right? If you’re focusing on a new unfolding and your consciousness, you will be in awe. But if you’re focusing on the old way, you might get a little angry.

Rick: Yeah. Maybe there’s a place for both, but I kind of have the feeling that if the scales would completely fall from our eyes and we were to see the world as deeply as it can possibly be seen, our jaws would be hanging open. We would definitely be in awe.

Pernilla: Yeah, yeah.

Closing and resources

Rick: Nice. All righty, so divinefeminineflow.com is your website. What would people find if they go there?

Pernilla: Well, there’s a little free book they can get called Five Steps to Dive into the Divine Feminine Flow. That’s my little introduction to the work. There’s a lot of old radio shows. I used to have a radio show.

Rick: Yeah, I listened to five or ten of those last week. They’re good.

Pernilla: Thank you. So they can listen to a lot of that for free. There’s some smaller books.

Rick: Yeah, “Women Standing for Love,” right? “Women Standing”—that was something I started. Again, it’s like, if we as women stand for love and do it together, we get our spine back. We can stand up, and when you stand for love, you’re actually saying no to what is not love, right?

Or, if you can’t do anything about it, you can at least focus on what you want. So that’s part of the new paradigm: You just start creating a new world. A friend of mine once said, “If you have to put new electric wire in the house, you just put a new one. You don’t try to fix the old one, right?” You just put the new one in.

So that’s what we’re doing here. We just start creating—creating community gardens, creating things—and eventually, when the old does collapse, which I’m assuming it will—I can’t see how it’s sustainable—there is something else that can start taking over and growing.

So that’s why “Women Standing for Love” felt like a good thing. It never really took off, but it was one of those downloads, and I just went for it.

Then I have one called Allow Yourself to Be You. It’s just little booklets you can download, and you have my regular book, Imagine Being Kind to Yourself.

In a week or two, I’m going to offer a six-week class. It’s not on my website, and it’s called “The Global Impact of Self-Love.” It will be a six-week class on how to live that—how to live the love—and how you will actually make an impact in the world if you’re really being yourself.

When you’re being yourself, you are a different frequency, and that in itself—I’m sure you know this—already changes the world by us lifting our own frequency. That’s why self-love helps you live your deeper dharma, your truth. You’re already making a difference, and then, if there’s something else from there that wants to go out and express itself in a certain way, go for it.

Rick: But if it’s not on your website, how can people sign up for it?

Pernilla: Oh, that’s a good question. I’m on my email list, and I send a newsletter out, so make sure you sign up. You’ll get the free booklet, and if you don’t like it, you can always opt out at any time. But if you’re on my newsletter list, you’ll probably get the information next week about how to sign up for it.

Rick: So they should sign up for your newsletter if they want that. You mentioned that you do individual consultations, presumably over Skype and stuff, right?

Pernilla: Skype, or in person if you live in Santa Cruz. But yeah, I do Skype sessions.

Rick: Great. And they can read all about that on your website and find out how to sign up for it.

Right, good. Well, thanks. This has been a lot of fun. I enjoyed speaking with you.

Pernilla: Likewise. It was fun; it wasn’t so scary.

Rick: No, we’re not into disemboweling people on BatGap or burning them at the stake or anything like that. That’s so Middle Ages, you know.

Pernilla: I appreciate that.

Rick: Which is actually kind of a good point, because we live in an age where something like this higher-consciousness thing can really blossom without people being persecuted for stepping forward. I mean, there was a time when women were burned at the stake for being herbalists and doing basic stuff like that, which is common nowadays.

Pernilla: I mean, it’s not so strange that we still have that fear in our cells. It’s still in there. Absolutely. So again, be kind to yourself if you’re one of those people who has some fear around that. Be really kind to yourself, and take the time for that cellular memory to be released.

Rick: Yeah, the world is growing; I think it’s evolving. There was this Italian monk named Giordano Bruno who was burned at the stake for suggesting that the stars might actually be suns like our own, and that there might actually be other civilizations living around those stars. He really had some kind of mystical insight into this, and he wouldn’t let it go. The Church killed him for it. So we live in a better time, I think.

Pernilla: I think we do, too.

Rick: Yeah. Well, that’s a bit of a morbid note to end on, but I think we’ve covered a lot here. I think people will enjoy having heard from you, and many people will be getting in touch.

Pernilla: Great. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me, and thank you to everybody listening in. It’s been wonderful. I’ve enjoyed myself.

Rick: Good, me too. Let me just make a couple of quick wrap-up points. I’ve been speaking with Pernilla Lillarose, and this is an ongoing series of interviews. Next week will be Jeanne Zandi; the week after that, Suzanne Giesemann, who is a repeat; and the week after that, Lakota John, who will be my first Native American guest on the show. He’ll be talking about Native American spirituality.

Of course, you may be listening to this two years from now, and all these things will already have passed, but there will be new ones.

So thanks for listening or watching. If you’d like to support the show, there’s a donate button on every page. If you’d like to be notified of new interviews or check out previous ones, go to batgap.com and check out the menus. It’s all pretty obvious and not too complicated.

There’s also an audio podcast of the show if you like to listen to this sort of thing while you’re commuting. So thanks, and thank you again, Pernilla. We’ll see you all next time.

Pernilla: Thank you. Thank you, everyone.