Scott Kiloby Transcript: Trauma, Addiction Recovery, and Wisdom in Times of Crisis

Scott Kiloby (Wisdom In Times Of Crisis) Interview

Summary

Scott Kiloby discusses how trauma-informed inquiry can help people address addiction and the pain driving it. He also explores responding to crisis by working with fear while taking practical steps in everyday life.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can unresolved trauma contribute to addiction, and how can it be addressed?
• What is harm reduction, and how can it support addiction recovery?
• How can mindfulness and inquiry help someone work with fear and anxiety?
• How can spiritual awareness be balanced with practical action during a crisis?

Key takeaways

• Addiction can numb pain temporarily, but recovery requires addressing the trauma and distress behind it.
• Working through traumatic memories gently and in manageable stages can reduce the risk of overwhelming someone.
• Harm reduction can save lives and create a path toward less harmful substance use.
• As underlying pain eases, the desire to use substances may lessen without relying only on willpower.
• Spiritual awareness should not replace practical steps such as seeking support or taking reasonable precautions.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done over 550 of them now, and if you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to www.batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the Past Interviews menu. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site.

The interview you’re about to see was done in the context of a webinar offered in May by the Science and Non-Duality Conference, entitled “Wisdom in Times of Crisis.” In addition to this interview, there were dozens of others—interviews and presentations with people like Vandana Shiva, Peter Levine, Gabor Maté, Deepak Chopra, Rupert Spira, and many others. Although the webinar is over now, it is archived online. There’s a link to the archive in the description beneath this video and on the page for this interview on www.batgap.com. So, enjoy the talk.

Welcome, everyone, to the “Wisdom in Times of Crisis” online event. The general theme of the event is exploring and reflecting on the challenges and opportunities that this unique time we’re going through—the COVID-19 epidemic—is offering us. My name is Rick Archer, and I will be speaking with Scott Kiloby today, whom I’ll introduce in a moment.

My day job is doing something very similar to this. I do the Buddha at the Gas Pump interview show. I’ve been doing that for about 10 years, and it consists now of about 550 interviews, which you can find at www.batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, including two with today’s guest, Scott Kiloby. So, I listened to those this week.

Scott is the co-founder of the first addiction treatment center in the U.S. to use mindfulness and inquiry as its primary modalities. His work focuses on healing addiction through resolving trauma. He also works with a number of different issues, including people needing support on the non-dual path. When I first interviewed Scott, he was a practicing lawyer in southern Indiana, and he explained that he himself had had a fairly serious addiction for many years and had overcome it. He was very much in the non-dual world, although, as we discussed, he and I both shared a much more nuanced understanding of non-duality than was sometimes in vogue back then, incorporating many practical aspects of real life, not dismissing them as illusory or meaningless or insignificant or anything.

Anyway, I’m talking too much right from the outset, so I’d like to nip that in the bud. Scott, I read that little bio. Is there anything you’d like to embellish it with or elaborate on from what I just said?

Scott: Well, we do have the Kiloby Center for Recovery, and I am a co-owner of that. That’s in Palm Springs. I think you mentioned that it’s an outpatient center. We treat primarily addiction, but we also work with trauma, anxiety, depression, just about anything else. And then we have a residential and detox center in La Quinta, California, called the Natural Rest House, and I’m a co-owner of that. That’s for people who need to detox or need 24-hour care.

Rick: So would detox be a sort of a step to what the Kiloby Center does? Like, you first get yourself detoxed, and then you go and get down to the root of the problem so you don’t get toxed again?

Scott: Exactly, yeah. That’s what it is. They step down—basically, step-down levels of care—to outpatient, and then we let them go.

And then, strangely, right before COVID-19 started, we began to form what we call the Kiloby Cooperative, which is going to be a virtual online center, like 24/7 support for people. The big issue for me today is to make this kind of work accessible and affordable, because I’m seeing that people are spending a lot of money going to retreats and doing sessions. So what we’re trying to do is build something new that’s more affordable and accessible to more people.

There’s a lot to say about the Kiloby Cooperative because it’s truly a collaborative effort. There’s no one person in charge. I don’t have the right to run it. I have one vote among five people. We’re trying to decentralize the guru, the teacher, so that he doesn’t have so much power. And we’re trying to empower other people to learn how to inquire on their own so that they don’t have to be so reliant on the teachers or the gurus.

There’s a lot going on with the Kiloby Cooperative, but we’re forming that, and then COVID-19 happened. So what we did is respond to that by offering services through the Kiloby Cooperative, free webinars, and free meditations every day for people on Facebook who are stressing out about a number of things right now.

Rick: That’s good. Do Medicaid and Medicare and health insurance and all that kind of stuff help to defray the cost of this stuff?

Scott: Yeah. I mean, one of the good things, if you want to call it the good thing about COVID-19, is that the treatment centers can now do telehealth with people. You don’t have to physically come to our center. We can do it all online, including drug testing remotely if we need to.

So that’s a real advance here in this world, because it’s kind of archaic, in a way, since we have this technology, to not allow us to help people online, you see? Some people don’t need to come to a physical center. They can be helped online, and so that’s a good thing. Now you could actually be a patient at the Kiloby Center but never come here, strangely. For detox, you can’t do that because you have to come and, you know—

Rick: Yeah, you have to get away from the usual temptations and so on.

Scott: Right.

Rick: Yeah. Do you find—this thought just popped into my head—I know that AA has a very spiritual component to it, and the guy who founded it, it was almost like a spiritual epiphany that he had that led to his founding of it. I forget the guy’s name, Bill somebody. Do you find that there’s kind of a strong spiritual streak in people who end up getting involved in addiction?

Scott: Addiction recovery or addiction?

Addiction as a Search for the Divine

Rick: Well, addiction itself. I mean, you know, it’s like everybody’s looking for something. And I know in my own case, I probably could have gotten addicted if I hadn’t learned to meditate when I did, but I was pretty heavily into drugs for about a year. Even though I was really screwing around and messing myself up more and more, I had this sort of spiritual motivation. I felt like there’s more to life than meets the eye, and maybe these drugs are going to help me discover it. It finally dawned on me after a year that they weren’t being so helpful.

But, you know, is there any validity to that notion that there’s a kind of deep spiritual yearning that underlies addictive behavior?

Scott: I think so, and I think it just gets sort of misdirected. I feel like what we are doing now—the cooperative, everything related to this work—is becoming really trauma-informed. And understanding how, during the child development years, that’s what really shapes you, what happens. So that’s what we’re focusing on a lot, mainly. What was the other part of your question, so I don’t miss it?

Rick: Well, just that I think that ultimately everything is a search for the divine. Everything anybody does. But perhaps it somehow gets intensified in the life of a person who is using drugs. There’s a certain desperation that has come in, you know?

Scott: Yeah, and there’s pain.

Rick: Yeah.

Scott: And so the drugs and the alcohol numb the pain, and so it works. It gives you kind of a false sense of presence. It’s not the presence that we talk about in non-duality, but for a while you get to forget about your problems. You’re intoxicated, you’re living in your own little world. But it doesn’t work because it’s only short-term, and it doesn’t deal with the issues.

Rick: And it makes it worse in the long term.

Scott: Yeah, it makes it worse in the long run. But at least it is something that keeps people surviving until they get to the place where they’re ready to drop that and then finally deal with the pain, or whatever it is that’s driving that search. And then I think a lot of people who get into recovery end up becoming spiritual seekers because they were always spiritual seekers.

Rick: Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m getting at. Yeah, it was like just this sort of misdirected quest or something, you know, and you get it on the right track, and then they just take off, perhaps.

Scott: Yeah, that’s what happened for me.

Rick: Yeah, me too. It’s like, you know, I knew there was something more, but I was just so muddled in my quest for it.

Scott: Totally.

Rick: Interesting. I’d say that part of the pain, from my observation, especially with the opiates, is this sort of meaninglessness of life, you know—that there must be a feeling like, “Life means nothing. I just want to blot it out.” And that’s kind of tragic in a way, because life can be so rich with meaning and so profoundly alive and meaningful if one could just sort of wake up, snap out of that dullness that clouds the beauty of it.

Scott: Yeah, and that’s the goal of what we’re trying to do. But when you’re talking about people who have experienced trauma, it’s not that easy for them just to drop that and then just be present, you know, because there’s pain there from the past that they’re carrying over. So they’re self-medicating in a way to survive.

Addressing Trauma to Prevent Relapse

When you start taking away their drugs, you have to be very careful because what’s left is the pain and the trauma. And then if that’s not resolved, they’re going to be at risk of resuming use.

Rick: Yeah, you probably have to, I’m guessing, enable them to process the trauma in bite-sized pieces, you know, in manageable chunks.

Scott: Yeah, surgical.

Rick: Otherwise they’ll retreat back into the drugs if it comes on too fast.

Scott: Yeah. In fact, the trauma work that we’re doing now is almost surgical in the sense that it goes through every memory of a traumatic event and disconnects the emotional charge with that particular memory. We move chronologically through all traumas to clear the emotional charge through all memories and through ideas and beliefs and programming that came from the traumatic event.

So we map out all their traumas and go through them systematically, very surgically, but in a way from awareness, like looking and inquiring into it. That’s what we’ve been focusing on.

It’s been working in the sense that it’s a different model, because, like in the 12-step program, the idea is, “Okay, today I’m clean. I’m going to stop using drugs and alcohol, and I’m going to count the days and the months that I’m sober.” We don’t really do that. We buy in more to the idea that if somebody wants to try the abstinence approach, we do that. But we also believe the harm reduction model is a smart model, because if someone’s on heroin, they risk losing their life. But if they go down to marijuana or Suboxone, they can save their life.

We find that to be a success. So we can then inquire with them, while they’re still on that lower drug, into the drivers that are keeping them hooked on that lower drug. Then that will let them get off that drug, and they can go down until they’re not using much of anything, or they’re really not creating harm by what they’re using.

Harm reduction is a new thing that I want people to know about and get on board with, because this epidemic of heroin is not being won, I think, because we’re focusing too much on pure abstinence and not thinking outside the box.

🩺 Trauma-informed recovery and harm reduction

Rick: Heroin and fentanyl, we should add, are even more deadly. Yeah. I know in my… Do you teach them a spiritual practice so that, you know, again, I can only relate to my own experience, which is that I picked up a spiritual practice, and it was very gratifying. Within a short while, I began to feel better all the time than drugs had made me feel temporarily. So it’s kind of like I didn’t have to fight the desire to take drugs; it just sort of disappeared because I was feeling better.

Scott: That’s it. That’s what we call the new model right there. You don’t necessarily make a decision with a rational mind to quit—you can—but instead you can work on the pain and the drivers that drive the addiction. Then, when your body gets clear of that emotional stuff, it naturally doesn’t want the drugs as much, or the alcohol. It’s a natural kind of letting go of something.

Rick: And if you actually did one of the drugs, perhaps after having gotten clean and done a lot better for a while, and maybe regularly practicing some spiritual technique or something, you would think, “Ugh, get this out of me. I hate it. It doesn’t—you know, I don’t like it anymore.”

Scott: Well, let me tell you a story. I told you that two years ago I had a bone spur in my spinal cord, which caused excruciating pain, and I’ve been in pain for two years. Painkillers were my drug of choice, and I can’t take them now. I mean, I can’t even take one. If I take one, I spend the day waiting for the drug to get out of my system.

Rick: Because you just don’t like the influence of it.

No, I don’t like it. My body actually rejects it. We call it the somatic no. It’s a somatic no, which is different from the mind saying, “I’m not going to use.” When the body rejects the drug, it’s a much more powerful way of recovery because your body’s not going to let you use it, abuse it.

Scott: No, I don’t like it. My body actually rejects it. We call it the somatic no. It’s a somatic no, which is different from the mind saying, “I’m not going to use.” When the body rejects the drug, it’s a much more powerful way of recovery because your body’s not going to let you use it, abuse it.

Rick: Interesting. Wow. So what would you do if you had something—I mean, this has been painful enough, your bone spur—but what would you do if you had something that was really chronic and very, very, very painful? What would you do?

Scott: Yeah, I mean, you have to find other things. I’ve been looking for other things. There are medical devices that are good out there. There’s surgery, which is a last resort. There are exercises for the spine. There are other medications that are not as harmful. So you have to look for other things if your body starts rejecting the opiates. I mean, you have to, to survive. So I’ve kind of just been experimenting to try to find the least harm-producing way of managing it.

Rick: Well, I hope that continues to work out well.

Scott: Yeah, I’ve been working out and eating right because, again, the spinal thing changed all my habits.

Rick: Yeah.

Scott: Yeah.

Rick: You mentioned a couple of minutes ago helping people work through all the various levels of trauma. What are the mechanics of that? I could sit here and think about things that happened with my alcoholic father or things that happened to me in high school or whatever. But those things don’t really—I don’t think about that stuff much anymore. I think maybe they’ve been worked out, but I don’t know. Maybe I have some latent stuff that’s still lingering there. How does it work psychologically and emotionally, and even physiologically? What is your process for actually resolving these things once and for all? And is there any risk of exacerbating some trauma that is better left sort of buried for the time being?

Mapping Trauma, Beliefs, and Stories

Scott: There’s always a risk of re-traumatizing somebody. Let me answer that second. The process is that, first of all, we have to understand what the traumas are. We’re a treatment center here, so we assess people. There are full assessments. We actually map out their entire history, their trauma, so that we understand the root of everything. We also map out the beliefs, stories, and programming that got started from the trauma.

Then we take them into our inquiries, and we have ways of gently triggering and inducing certain memories to come up to find out whether there’s an emotional charge with that memory. When you say that things happened to you that you think are no longer an issue, we have a way of testing that. We gently induce that memory in a way that lets you see whether your body is responding to it, as if it’s still storing pain. When it is, we undo that connection between the memory and the pain through our inquiry process.

Rick: Is it possible to discuss, in an interview context like this, what the inquiry process is that could actually undo the memory or the trauma?

Scott: Sure. Using my own experience, I was bullied in sixth grade. That was the beginning of my drug use because of the bullying. If I were going to look at the bullying as trauma, and somebody were going to facilitate me, they might have me use what we call reverse inquiry. They might have me say, “I’m not afraid of my bully,” as I’m looking at my bully in awareness.

When you say a reverse inquiry like that, your system will object to it. Your system will tell you the truth. Your body will tell you the truth. If you say, “I’m not afraid of my bully,” your system is going to pull up the words and the pictures that tell you that you are afraid, and that you’re carrying around that trauma with you, even today.

Once we have it up, we have them observe those traumatic words and pictures, but we have interventions that come in and unhook them from it so that they don’t become re-traumatized. That’s a big part of our work: to never re-traumatize someone, to make it gentle. When the trauma comes up, we have ways of unhooking them from the thoughts first and then bringing them down into the body without the thoughts there. That’s a much more gentle way of dealing with trauma. When you try to deal with trauma while you’ve got the thoughts and the feelings there, you can get overwhelmed very easily. So we deal with them part by part: the mind first, and then the body, all looking from awareness. It’s a gentler process that way.

Rick: How’d you come up with all this?

Scott: Just from my own suffering.

Rick: Yeah, you just kind of devised it as you went along, probably applied it to yourself and fine-tuned it.

Scott: Yeah. It started when I heard Eckhart Tolle say, “Come down and feel a feeling.”

Rick: Yeah.

Scott: Without putting… I thought, “Okay, I’ll try that.” I tried that, and then from there I started to notice—I started to read non-dual teachings, and I would extract certain things, like watching thoughts. But then through the years, I started to notice that not everybody can watch thoughts. There’s a subset of the population that can’t just come and witness thoughts. I learned that by opening up the Kiloby Center, because we work with a different population of people. These are not spiritual seekers. A lot of them don’t know how to witness thoughts.

So we had to invent some inquiries to help them if they can’t witness thoughts, and that’s part of it too. I don’t know if that answered your question, but that’s what came up.

Responding to fear and uncertainty during COVID-19

Rick: Good enough. So right now, we’re in the throes of this pandemic, and it almost seems a little unreal to me because there are only nine cases in the county I live in. Even though people are walking around town with masks and all, I don’t know anybody personally who has gotten sick. But I see it on the news all the time, and I know it’s out there, and it’s real enough, and we’ve modified our lifestyles.

I interviewed a guy a while back, and then he wanted me to be in a webinar in which we discussed our dread and our grief and our fear and all this stuff. I said, “I really can’t do it. I would feel disingenuous because I’m not feeling any of that stuff.”

Scott: I’m not either.

Rick: Yeah, but I have compassion for people who are, and I don’t deny that they are. Perhaps you are in more contact with people who are feeling those things than I am because you’re…

Scott: Every week.

Rick: Yeah, every week, all the time. I don’t really interact with people like that. So what’s going on out there, Scott, and how are you helping people cope with the situation that we’re going through?

Scott: So the Kiloby Cooperative, again, does a free webinar every Wednesday night at 5:15 Pacific on the Scott Kiloby page. That’s a place to come, and then we can show you some inquiries to deal with whatever’s going on.

The main issue that I’m seeing now in private sessions is that people are afraid about money, even more than health, because it’s really affecting our economy and people’s pocketbooks. And money, as you know, carries with it anxiety, right? So there are a lot of sessions around, “What’s going to happen to me? Am I going to be homeless?” A lot of that. People are scared.

Second to that, there are some people who believe that we’re at the beginning of the world kind of starting to collapse. They’re catastrophizing this. We don’t know the future. It could be happening; we don’t know. So a lot of those inquiries are happening around, “The world is going to end now,” and they’re petrified of that. And then I do inquiries, of course, on the fear of death and the fear of illness, of contracting the illness. Those are the things that I’m seeing mostly now around COVID.

Rick: Yeah, well, let’s go into each of those points a little bit. I know that with the money thing, there have been times in my life when I’ve had, like, $20 or $30 to my name, but I told myself, “Okay, you’re not going to starve to death, and somehow you’ll have a roof over your head, and then things will change. All things must pass,” as George Harrison said. So that turned out to be true, but I don’t want to sound glib because obviously there are a lot of homeless people, and there are people who have kids and they’ve lost their jobs. They might have their electricity turned off or something like that, or actually be evicted if they don’t come up with some money. So if you’re talking to a person like that, let’s say, what can you do to give them some solace and change their perspective?

Well, the first thing that I do is make sure that they’re not trying to hide out in the absolute, because that happens sometimes. There’s a practical aspect of life that you spoke to in the beginning. I always kind of talk about the middle way, which is that you wake up, but you don’t dismiss relativity, and you don’t dismiss reasonable precautionary measures like wearing a mask and social distancing. All those things are practical.

Scott: Well, the first thing that I do is make sure that they’re not trying to hide out in the absolute, because that happens sometimes. There’s a practical aspect of life that you spoke to in the beginning. I always kind of talk about the middle way, which is that you wake up, but you don’t dismiss relativity, and you don’t dismiss reasonable precautionary measures like wearing a mask and social distancing. All those things are practical.

What I work on is the interior experience—the fear, the sense of lack, the stories, the programming. The interior stuff is what I do. I don’t really coach people on the practical stuff because the rest of the world is doing such a good job of that. But I tell people that you really need to include that. It’s not just about taking care of yourself and feeling no anxiety or being present; it’s also about taking practical steps in the real world that are necessary.

Rick: Okay, well, the second thing you mentioned was maybe the world’s coming to an end. Obviously, throughout the ages, there have been people who thought the world was coming to an end, and there have been much worse pandemics than this in times when there wasn’t any kind of medical care that was worth a damn.

Scott: Right.

Rick: There have been world wars, and in many cases, millions of people actually experienced wars taking place where they lived, which we’ve never experienced. So there’s been some heavy stuff down through the ages. I think, in a way, we should count our blessings because it has been a lot worse for people. But again, that’s not to dismiss this. It’s a serious situation, and it’s tough for many people.

My sense—and we don’t have to dwell on this too long because it’s somewhat speculative—is that, yeah, the world is coming to an end, but not in the literal sense. The way things have been is coming to an end, and things are going to change quite significantly. In five or ten years from now, we’ll see quite a different structure of things than we’ve seen, I think. And we’ll think, “Well, it was a rough transition, but I’m glad we made it.”

Scott: Yeah, that’s how I feel, actually. I don’t know the future, and you don’t either, but it feels like this is the beginning of a transition that we’re going to have to work through.

Rick: Yeah, a lot of spiritual people feel that and have been saying it for years. And, of course, some have been very conspiratorial in their prognostications: 144,000 of us are going to be pulled up to heaven, and everybody else is going to be dying on Earth, that kind of stuff. An “us and them” kind of mentality. But I think it’ll be a much more global transformation that will include people of all faiths and orientations.

Scott: Yeah. You know what I think is—I don’t want to say a good thing about COVID-19—but I think it shook people up. I think it woke people up in a way, okay? Because there’s complacency around human life, right? We go to work every day, we get to escape from our spouse and come back. We have our luxuries; we can go anywhere we want, some of us, right? And now, all of a sudden, that’s changed. We can’t do that. We can’t go places. We can’t leave our spouse.

So it’s bringing people closer, but then it’s also bringing up triggers because you have to spend more time with people. That’s an interesting point of view. But how it’s going to transition our world, I don’t quite know yet. But I feel that. I’ve been feeling that since the beginning of it.

Rick: Yeah, me too. I also feel that. There have been various people—you can find videos online from five or ten years ago—predicting that there will eventually be a pandemic and we’d better get ready for it. And there’s all kinds of evidence now that we weren’t getting ready. We should have been stockpiling certain things, medical supplies, and all that stuff.

But a much bigger monster, I think—and I don’t want to go too far on a tangent here, but I think it’s relevant—is climate change, which is moving much more slowly. People use the term “climate alarmists” because the pace of climate change is almost imperceptible unless you happen to be in a hurricane or have your town flooded out. But I think the so-called alarmists have a right to be alarmed, because if the predictions of the scientists pan out, we’re going to be in deep shit. Perhaps this COVID thing will serve as a wake-up call to make us ask what else might be coming down the pike that we should take more seriously and do something about.

Scott: Yeah, and that’s what I mean by the middle way. You can do this inner spiritual work, and it’s great to do, but there’s a relative world out there that we have to pay attention to. That’s what you’re really saying.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s easy to talk about all this stuff in the abstract. But if you worked in a hospital ER room in New York City—if you’ve been there doing that for the last couple of months—I mean, I’ve seen these people interviewed, and they say it’s just bedlam, the amount of death they’ve been seeing.

You have to sort of feel that and realize that for the people impacted—the workers, the people who are sick and dying, and the family members of those people—this is really serious business. You have to, I don’t know, keep your compassion alive, I think.

Scott: Yeah, and I think that’s why we’ve offered so much free stuff during this period: compassion. This is not a time to drain people of their money when they’re already in financial difficulty. This is a time, if we’re able to, for those of us who are facilitators, if we have the resources to pay our own expenses, to give some stuff for free to people who need it, so everybody can have access if they need it. There’s no barrier to that. That’s really important for us.

Rick: So, just as you’re saying this, remind us: What is some of this free stuff, or paid stuff if you’re able to pay for it? Is there anything you’re doing right now that you’re doing more of, or even that you weren’t doing before the pandemic, but that you find yourself needing to do in light of this circumstance?

Scott: Yeah, I’m doing Facebook Live events, two or three almost every day, just to connect with people and kind of keep them on track and to talk about—

Rick: Individually or in groups?

Scott: Facebook Live events.

Rick: A group thing.

Scott: So anybody can come in and listen to me. That’s one thing I’m doing, and those are all free. I think you’re asking about what free services exactly we’re offering.

Rick: Yeah, and not even necessarily free, but things that are especially germane to the pandemic situation and the fear and difficulties that it’s stirring up in people. How are you helping to address that?

Scott: Well, we do that through the Kiloby Inquiries, which is a set of tools we developed when we opened the Kiloby Center. We developed those tools because we were dealing with a different population of people than you see in the non-dual world. Those are people who were chased by a serial killer for two days, or people who have been on heroin for 20 years. So we had to adjust and create tools that could meet them where they are.

Using Inquiry to Uncover Unconscious Stories

We developed those tools, and we simplified inquiry. We feel like we’ve simplified it and made it much more about the relative world, too—being able to look at specific stories that you’re still believing that are causing suffering. If you don’t know how the Kiloby Inquiries work, it’s hard to explain. But we have a way of, sort of, if things are hiding in your unconscious, bringing them up. We have ways of bringing them up.

By bringing them up, we can have them in awareness, rest with them, and then come down and feel what we’ve been trying to avoid feeling. Once you get down in your body and really do good somatic work, where you’re reducing the resistance to the feelings or sensations, that’s when you start seeing changes in people in terms of their anxiety level, their feelings of lack, and everything.

It’s hard to explain the work because it’s a whole robust set of tools. There’s no way I could even explain it. But essentially, if you want to boil it down, we’re still undoing that connection between the thoughts and the negative feelings or contractions in the body, because it’s that connection that causes—or makes—the experience of suffering real for people.

Rick: Yeah, and if a person doesn’t exactly get what you’re saying here, it sounds like it’s easy enough to find out because they can sit in on your Facebook Lives or join a variety of things that you’re offering. I’m sure you need to charge some money; you need to support yourselves. But money is not an insurmountable barrier. So if people’s curiosity is piqued by this conversation, they should explore what you’re doing. Give it a try.

Scott: Yeah, one of the main things I’m doing now is training people in the Kiloby Inquiries because we want to bring more people in. So we’re offering discounts and payment plans. We’re really trying to help people financially, for sure. I mean, we can’t do training for free because it’s such a drain on resources and time for all of us to train people. We can’t give that away for free, but we can really help people financially with that.

Training is one of the richest resources that we have because once you start training, you become part of this private sort of family of facilitators that has a group, and you have free sessions for the rest of your life. You have to pay a fee to get into the training to be trained and certified, but then from then on, if the Kiloby Inquiries are your path, you have free sessions until you die. So you’re going to save money instead of just paying session after session after session with whoever.

Rick: Yeah, that’s great. And speaking of dying, you mentioned three things that were really weighing on people. There was the financial thing, the job loss; there was the “world is coming to an end” piece; and the third was dying. So maybe we should talk about that a little bit: the fear of death. Is that something that comes up a lot in your work with people?

Scott: At least three sessions a week are around that, partly, at least. But I’ll tell you what: people are more afraid of the financial thing than they are of the death thing. I think the financial thing feels like a death to people. It sort of taps into that fear of death. But, yeah, clearly I’m doing inquiries around the fear of death, too. That’s happening a lot, but I’m seeing more around money.

Rick: I wonder if that’s because, if you’re having financial problems, you have to remain alive and deal with them. If you die, then either you don’t exist anymore, if that’s what you believe, or you go to some heavenly world, if that’s what you believe. But in any case, you’re out of the realm of money; you don’t have to think about it. But the money kind of has you trapped.

Scott: Exactly, exactly. Very good point.

Rick: Yeah.

Scott: Yeah.

Rick: Huh.

Scott: Well, I mean, yeah, that’s the thing I want to tell people: I understand the anxiety around money because I’ve had it before. I understand it completely. Even when I opened the Kiloby Center, I had some anxiety about whether the Kiloby Center was going to survive. So I had to inquire into that. I had to look at that. I had some anxiety around, “Are we going to bring revenue in just to be able to help people?”

Just doing those inquiries cleared that so well for me that I haven’t really worried about money around the Kiloby Center. That’s so helpful for people. They can still take action, go to work, do whatever, but you don’t have to be anxious all the time around money. That’s what I’m trying to tell people. That’s possible.

I think a lot of humans are really used to the idea that living a fear-based life is just what human life is like—that you’re run on fear, and that’s what drives you, or lack, or whatever. And so what we do with the inquiries is we challenge that.

Rick: Yeah.

We challenge that conditioning that makes you run on fear and lack. I think that’s why it’s helping people so much, because a lot of what happens in the world, I see, is driven by a sense of deficiency or lack or fear or shame. Those are the things that we focus on because it’s driving people to seek. It’s driving people to be in pain. It’s making them depressed. It’s making them do drugs. It’s making them really afraid right now. And so we’re here for that, to help them with that.

Scott: We challenge that conditioning that makes you run on fear and lack. I think that’s why it’s helping people so much, because a lot of what happens in the world, I see, is driven by a sense of deficiency or lack or fear or shame. Those are the things that we focus on because it’s driving people to seek. It’s driving people to be in pain. It’s making them depressed. It’s making them do drugs. It’s making them really afraid right now. And so we’re here for that, to help them with that.

✨ Awareness, non-duality, and living fully in the world

Rick: A friend of mine always used to say, “Fear is an acronym that stands for false evidence appearing real.”

Scott: I’ve never heard that one before.

Rick: Yeah.

Scott: I like it.

Rick: Yeah. Well, it’s kind of interesting. I mean, it seems to me that if one has an outer-oriented orientation to life and is oblivious to the inner reservoir of energy and creativity that we all possess, then there is no secure foundation. And naturally, one feels fear and lack and all the other things you mentioned.

The Inner Potential of Awareness

But I firmly believe that we each have within us what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven and what various other saints and sages have called other things. But the basic idea is that deep within there is an unlimited field of potential, and that if we can tap into that, then all these other things just start to dissipate automatically. It’s like if you had a dark room and you turned on even a candle, you didn’t do anything to get rid of the darkness. You didn’t try to push it out the window or fight against it or anything else.

Scott: Yeah.

Rick: But it just disappears with the introduction of a second element.

There you go. And that’s what we do, and that element is awareness. And so, we’re not pushing things away. In fact, we’re welcoming, loving them: “Thank you for being here. I love you. Stay.” And that’s what reduces resistance right there. And so, yeah, that’s a big part of the work: not to push things away, but to welcome them, to go towards them instead of trying to bypass them or avoid them.

Scott: There you go. And that’s what we do, and that element is awareness. And so, we’re not pushing things away. In fact, we’re welcoming, loving them: “Thank you for being here. I love you. Stay.” And that’s what reduces resistance right there. And so, yeah, that’s a big part of the work: not to push things away, but to welcome them, to go towards them instead of trying to bypass them or avoid them.

Rick: Yeah. And I might add…

Scott: But…

Rick: Go ahead. Yes, continue.

Scott: But at the same time, it’s like that candle, because it’s not an effortful thing. It’s just that a candle was lit, and that’s the awareness. So, from the awareness, then we explore. And then those things, the dark things, naturally fall away because the light of awareness is there. And I think that’s what you’re referring to.

Rick: Yeah, and it grows. Maybe at first it’s a candle, and then it’s a flashlight, and then it’s a 100-watt bulb, and then it’s a floodlight, and the next thing you know, the whole room is really illuminated.

Scott: That’s right. I like that. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. And when you said, you know, you go toward these things rather than trying to avoid them, you don’t go toward them—I mean, I don’t mean to put words in your mouth—but you don’t go toward them without the resources to face them. Because I think what you’re doing is, first priority is—it’s like, to use another analogy, if you wanted to shoot an arrow at a target, you don’t just sort of hold it on the bow and let go. It would just drop. You pull it back first and then let it go, and boom, it goes and hits the target.

So, I think what you’re probably doing, and you can elaborate, is you’re equipping people with the inner resources to then turn around and face things, which might have been very difficult to face before, but in the light of that inner resource—or, to use our light analogy, greater light—this stuff is, you know, kind of a piece of cake compared to what it used to be.

Scott: Yeah, and you said it better than I can. We’re trying to empower people to be able to look skillfully at their own experience. That’s the key word: skillfully.

Rick: Yeah.

Scott: Because there’s a way of doing it that has skill, and there’s a way that’s not very skillful, because—and we’ve learned that from 15 years of doing this—what we’re doing is teaching people to be skillful with how they relate to their experience. So, we don’t go towards things by having them just sit there and think or tell the story of something, right? Because that might reinforce it. We’re going towards it from awareness, from gentle awareness, welcoming awareness, integrating it, allowing it to be there. And if it’s going to fall away, it’s going to fall away, just because of awareness. It’s gentle that way.

Rick: That’s great. There’s actually a verse in the Vedic literature which says, “Yoga karma sukoshalam,” which means, “Yoga is skill in action.” And by yoga, they don’t mean physical asanas or exercises. They mean getting in touch with that inner oneness, that innermost—your innermost nature, true nature, whatever—and then engaging in activity on that foundation. And then skillfulness is the outcome.

Scott: Yeah, yeah, skillfulness. And also creativity. You mentioned potentiality. Creativity can come alive when presence starts to show up more, you know, because the blocks, the fear, are not there as much. Fear stops people.

Rick: Yeah.

The feeling of lack, deficiency, sabotages people. Once that’s clear and there’s presence, it feels like there’s a potentiality there for something else.

Scott: The feeling of lack, deficiency, sabotages people. Once that’s clear and there’s presence, it feels like there’s a potentiality there for something else.

Rick: Yeah.

Scott: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, I very much feel enthusiastic about what you’re saying. It’s good stuff. And it’s not like we’re all going to become Mozarts or, you know—

Scott: Or Superman.

Rick: Einsteins or anything else, that kind of creativity. But within the context of our own lives, we all have tremendous potential, and a lot of us are like eight-cylinder cars running on one cylinder or something. You get all the other cylinders to kick in and boom, you know, so much more is possible in one’s life.

Scott: Right, and it’s not just about creativity. Some people—that’s not their thing. Their thing is they like, I mean, I have people who work for me whose thing is that they love organized things and administrative stuff. And that inquiry can help you with that, too. It can open up that potentiality, because when you do that kind of work, the same kind of blocks come in: fear, lack, deficiency, shame, whatever. So by clearing those, it’s not just about being creative. It’s about really, like—I don’t know how to say it; it’s a funny thing to say—but it’s like finally being what you are and living that.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good. They call it “dharma” in Sanskrit, that we each have a sort of a pattern or a template for our lives that is unique to us, even though there are similarities between different people. But you don’t try to follow somebody else’s dharma; you follow what you’re cut out to do. And within any one person’s life, there’s a huge range of possibilities for how well or how poorly they can do it, depending upon the extent to which they tap their inner resources.

Scott: Yup, and that’s what we’re doing with people. I mean, it is a non-dual method at the foundation, but we’re really working with human issues, I mean, real human issues.

Rick: Yeah.

Living in the World Without Escaping It

Scott: And that’s what makes my heart swell, because the part of non-duality that you and I used to talk about that we didn’t like was this sort of pure absolutistic view of things, and that is not a place that I want to be in, because it has its own problems and issues. And so this is my passion: Can you be in the world and not try to escape it, like be in the world in a different way?

Rick: Yeah, yeah, we did talk about that in our earlier interviews, and there is, or at least used to be, a certain sort of segment of people who tried to use non-duality as a way of dismissing or avoiding or negating the world or something. And I think I’ve gone through phases like that myself at times, but I kind of think you and I are in agreement here that it’s actually a way of marshaling tremendous inner resources for living in the world.

It’s like, you know, my old teacher used to talk about living 200% of life: 100% inner value and 100% outer material value, and the two actually are complementary to one another and in no way in conflict.

Scott: Beautiful, love that. Couldn’t have said it better myself, so I won’t try.

Rick: Well, you’re saying some good stuff. All right, so we have about maybe five or eight minutes left. What should we be sure to cover that we may not have covered yet, that you want to be sure people get to hear?

Scott: I mean, I think maybe—I don’t know—maybe an openness to, like, if you’re struggling out there, you’re listening to this interview and you don’t know anything about inquiry or non-duality, maybe just have an open mind to listen to these interviews and find out that there are some different ways of dealing with suffering that you might not be aware of. And so we’re trying to make you aware of these different tools. And that’s what I want people to know: there’s not just therapy or counseling. There are other ways of dealing with things. And for me, this has been the way that’s helped me the most, so that’s where my heart lies. So my message is just to share that with other people.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good. I mean, one word that came to mind as you said that is hopelessness. Some people—there’s the suicide epidemic, you know, especially among veterans and so on. There must be people who take that route who are feeling very hopeless. And that’s sad because there is hope, and it’s not just imaginative, imaginary hope. There are very real steps that anybody can take to transform life.

Scott: This is my passion, Rick, because my partner is a former military person. And so I know what happens in the military. I also know there’s a lot of trauma happening in that organization.

Rick: Big time.

Scott: And so then these people leave the military and try to go out into real life, and they have no skill of inquiry or any inner resource. And so depression comes in, addiction, anxiety, PTSD. And then because we’re not capable yet of truly—like, some of these organizations don’t know how to do it other than give people meds, right? So here we are, like, we have to figure this out. Otherwise, more people are going to fall through the cracks of the healthcare system. We’re going to have more people homeless and more suicides unless we figure this out.

Rick: Yeah, maybe that’s somehow or other going to be one of the things that gets addressed as a result of COVID. I mean, a lot of things are being brought into sharper focus: wealth inequity and homelessness and the situation with veterans, and so on and so forth. Maybe we’ll get more serious about really addressing these things in an effective way.

Scott: I can tell you that in the six years of being in the addiction treatment and mental health world, I see a lot of issues that we have to correct. And I won’t get into it because I’ve talked about it publicly already. But if we don’t fix these issues, we’ve got a lot of shit coming our way.

Rick: Yeah.

Scott: Because the world isn’t like—people, I mean, like right now, my partner is 23 years old; he’s younger than me. He’s tapped into the younger generation. In the younger generation, it’s normal to be on antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication. It’s like everybody’s on it. That’s just what you do. That’s the world we’re turning into right now.

Rick: But you feel like a zombie when you take those things.

Scott: Exactly. So we have to figure out something in addition to or other than medication that really helps people. That’s the point.

Rick: You only have to change one letter, I think—one or two—and turn it to meditation.

Scott: There you go.

Rick: Yeah. Well, it bears re-emphasizing, but the solutions are there. It’s not like, “Oh, what are we going to do? There are all these problems and no one knows how to fix them.” The solutions are there. It’s just a matter of recognizing them and applying them and funding them. But we fund so many things that are a complete waste of money, and all of a sudden, when we have a COVID pandemic, suddenly we can cough up trillions of dollars to help bail out the airlines or whatever. So it seems to me that a lot of these problems could be properly addressed and funded, and there could be a real transformative wave that sweeps the world.

Scott: Yeah, but look where we’re focused. We’re not focused on that yet. We’re focused on countries fighting each other, religions fighting each other. We’re focused on that.

Rick: Yeah, look how much money is spent on that. I mean, the military budget and what we’ve spent in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last couple of decades.

Scott: Right. Instead of healing and helping our own people.

Rick: Yeah. Or even healing and helping other people. I mean, what if we had gone—I don’t know, maybe I’m naive—but what if we had gone into Afghanistan and said, “Here, we’re just gonna help you. We’re not gonna bomb you or do this or that. We’re gonna help you with education and health and various social programs or whatever.” We might be seen in a very different light.

Scott: Yeah, but we don’t go at it that way right now.

Rick: Yeah.

Scott: Yeah, so that’s good. We’re gonna have to have a president that has a much more sort of integral, open view of the world. A more compassionate, diplomatic, and thinking-outside-of-the-box approach.

Rick: That would be good.

Scott: Yeah.

Rick: And also a populace that is in league with, or in tune with, such a president. Because a leader can only reflect the mentality of the populace, or at least the mentality of a certain large segment of it. So again, maybe this will be a wake-up call for a lot of people. We’ll have better leadership, better policies.

Scott: But I hope that that is what happens. I hope that’s what happens.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, hope so.

Scott: Yeah.

Rick: Well, we’re both a couple of dreamers, as John Lennon said, but we’re not the only ones.

Scott: That’s two Beatles quotes in one interview. That’s good.

Rick: What was the first one?

Scott: George Harrison.

Rick: Right, yeah, okay. Well, yeah, I know Beatles lyrics better than any other song lyrics.

Scott: I’m good at—I know them all, too.

Rick: We’ll have to get together and sing sometime. I know you’re a musician.

Scott: Mm-hm.

Rick: Yeah, I know all the harmonies and everything.

Scott: Yeah.

Rick: Except my voice is not that great anymore, but we’ll do it.

Scott: Yeah, love the Beatles.

Rick: Okay, Scott, yeah, well, thank you so much. Enjoyed spending this time with you, and thanks to those who’ve been watching this little episode of the Wisdom in Times of Crisis seminar or webinar. I hope you’ve been enjoying that, and the whole thing, I believe, is archived, so if you missed some of the sessions, you can get in there later on and watch them.

Scott: I want to thank Sand and you for interviewing me. I appreciate that.

Rick: Oh, sure. I think Sand chose you because this is a traumatic time, and you are an expert in helping people deal with trauma, so it was very relevant, and I really enjoyed the stuff you had to say.

Scott: Thank you. All right, well, good luck in your other interviews, and I hope people benefit from all of this in some way.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Scott.