Tree Wiseblood 2nd Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done over 700 of them now. And if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, you can do so on YouTube. But you might also want to go to their PayPal buttons on every page of the website. and a page discussing index and various search tools and links to an AI chat bot that you can use to interact with the knowledge brought out in interviews and all kinds of things. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the website and a page discussing alternatives to PayPal and we’re going to do a major website upgrade soon. We’re hiring a web designer and so on so expenses are a little high and cash flow is a little low so if you feel like supporting it this would be a good time. My guest today is Tree Wiseblood. Tree was on BatGap about six years ago and recently reached out to us and said that you know she feels like she has a a pretty fresh batch of information or knowledge to express that we didn’t cover thoroughly in the first interview. So if you have seen that interview, this shouldn’t be redundant. And if you haven’t seen it, you might want to watch that even before watching this, or afterwards, if you prefer. Tree works as a spiritual mentor in Kundalini support. She’s a certified global TRE instructor, which she’ll remind us what that means. a transformational body worker and a healer from the shamanic tradition. She believes healing trauma can precipitate spiritual awakening, and it is from this precept that she works. She works with the body, releasing contraction, and with the nervous system, establishing balance, with the understanding that a dysregulated nervous system can hold the beingness hostage. She believes enlightenment is achieved not by bypassing the body, but by going into the body by addressing and releasing trauma bound in the flesh and stored in the nervous system. This is true freedom and the result is presence embodied. Tree has been a devotee of Meher Baba since she was 21, whose pictures you see behind her on the wall there. She and her husband are establishing a retreat center on the far south coast of New South Wales, Australia, called Meher Farm Healing and Awakening Center. She is the author of “Hot Flush, Dark Cave,” describing her healing and awakening journey through the portal of menopause. She’s a devoted mother, grandmother, and healer. Her favorite pastime, other than being on Buddha at the gas pump, is swimming in the river and the ocean and chanting to God. So good. I love your emphasis on the nervous system because a lot of spiritual teachers don’t talk about it too much, or other people might go a lot into, you know, the body and health and physical stuff without talking about awakening too much, but as Jesus said, the body is the temple of the soul, and many spiritual teachers have spoken about the body as a vehicle without which we couldn’t achieve enlightenment. And there is clearly a correlation in everyday life between our subjective experience and our neurophysiology, and it stands to reason that if the neurophysiology is gunked up, you know, if it’s full of stress and tension and physical and structural abnormalities and impurities and so on that is going to reflect in our conscious experience. I would surmise that someone with a radically different state of consciousness, such as Meher Baba or Ramana Maharshi or any great sage, actually also had a radically different style of neurophysiological functioning, which could have been measured. And these days scientists are trying to measure that sort of thing. They’re trying to correlate higher states of consciousness with brain activity and so on. And I think it’s a field that is pretty much in its infancy still, but as time goes on I think it’ll be better and better understood. In any case, that should get you going. I think your emphasis is in the right place. And there are, again, spiritual teachers and teachings which kind of bypass that altogether. It might dismiss the body as an illusion and so on and not give any consideration to it. And I think that’s a partial understanding or approach.

Tree: Yeah, well, Rick, as far as I see it, ultimately, no, we’re not the body. We’re consciousness having, you know…

Rick: Sure.

Tree: through a body, but at the same time the body is the vehicle to work through samskaras in this life. And I feel like a lot of people dismiss this life condition, even the person’s sort of destiny, where to live out, what we have to live through, what our destiny is and a way of working through the samskaras. So yeah, ultimately not the body, and yet the body, from what I can fathom, sometimes we are triggered into an awakening experience, which was my own case, through trauma. So trauma can actually give you a pure consciousness, a state of just being pure awareness because the ego has been shattered at some point. At the same time, we can have awakening experiences through other mediums, and there’s so many that we could mention, but we probably don’t need to. But even when people have had profound awakenings, what generally happens is the personhood gets triggered in life, and so we contract back and person arises again. So we have to work through, I feel, we have to work through the trauma, which is bound in the flesh, and which is really active in the nervous system. You know, what is the awake state, but being here and generally want to be in a peace. I mean, we don’t always want a calm nervous system, but what we want is a resilient one. Most of humanity is, and myself was included, until I did a lot of trauma work, trapped in a nervous system that initially was working for us. So we need to be able to go into fight or flight, or freeze, or fawn to protect ourselves. So if someone came in here now, you know, a robber, I might fight them, or, you know, I might run out the other door, or I might go into a freeze, no one here, take what you want, or I might fawn and say, oh, all the gold and diamonds, which I don’t have, but in the cabinet in my room, help yourself, whatever you need. So it can be really helpful to preserve our organism. Fantastic, and yet what tends to happen is we get stuck in this loop that is stuck on. Now, my nervous system, I feel like, was like that from in utero until about 50 when I started to take on a really significant healing journey and yeah, so life was a dread and the ego identity is really quite loud and noisy when the nervous system’s activated. Yeah, totally. So there’s no inner peace whatsoever. There’s no chance to be able to sink down further into the beingness that always exists here, that’s always here in all of us, but with the noise and traffic of an activated nervous system we can’t even feel into it.

Rick: Sure.

Tree: Let alone begin to dissolve into it.

Rick: Yeah, so you said we’re not the body, true, and we’re not our car either, But if you want to take a cross-country trip and you have never changed the oil and you put cheap gas in the car and you just don’t upkeep it, then your car might break down. And it’s not going to be a very smooth journey. So, we need to make sure that the nervous system, the body is functioning optimally in order for it to serve us well. That kind of dawned on me when I was about 18 and had been doing a lot of drugs and in a very kind of confused, foggy state, it dawned on me that if I keep carrying on as I was, I’m going to damage my body and then I’ll be stuck in a damaged body for the rest of my life. As a matter of fact, I have hep C antibodies in my system because I exposed myself to it, but my doctor said that, “Oh, well, actually you’re more immune to it than anybody now because your body beat it on its own successfully, so don’t worry about it.” But that’s how things were going. And just one more comment on what you said, and then you can bounce back from that. When you talk about an agitated nervous system or over-activated, it doesn’t mean that we have to sort of be placid in life. You talk to some great athletes who are in the midst of the most dynamic activity, and what they report subjectively is an inner quietness and silence, and their mind is just clear, and they’re able to totally engage in what they’re doing without a lot of inappropriate and distracting inner commotion. So I think one’s whole life can be like that, whether one’s an athlete or whatever one is doing. in the midst of dynamic activity, and yet there’s an inner silence that supports and underlies that. And there’s actually a neurophysiological component to that, which I don’t want to talk at too great a length, but very briefly, at least in the Indian tradition, it’s understood that there are two nervous systems which kind of take turns being active, and there’s always one and if the nervous system is properly developed there’s always one which is sort of maintaining the silent aspect of our awareness and the other which is maintaining the dynamic aspect of our activity and the alternation of those nervous systems actually corresponds to a subtle predominance of breath through one or the other nostril so there’s a whole science to that but um okay enough said.

Tree: Yeah, athletes can get into that beautiful flow state and people too in general can be in that beautiful flow state where there’s not the doer, there is really just the doing happening. And I think athletes sort of tap into that or can tap into that.

Rick: Yeah, the greatest ones, you know, they consider it to be their kind of secret to success in a way. They’re able to function in that way and be so focused and still, and you can see it in their faces sometimes. You watch somebody like Coco Gauff playing tennis and there’s just this sort of laser-like focus and even the crowds are screaming and stuff, but there’s just no, the mind is just, you know, zeroed in on the task at hand without a lot of inner turbulence.

Tree: Oh, beautiful.

Rick: Yeah.

Tree: Yeah, I feel, Rick, about the whole general healing trauma as an absolute path for beginning this awakening process. I feel like, you know, ego is formed up out of samskaras, so impressions we bring with us from past life, conditioning, and trauma. So the trauma is somewhere where the person can actively work. Often we need God’s grace to assist us on this involution process. But healing the trauma is where the person can be really quite active and take an active role to release it from the body and really tend this nervous system so that we can be present, or even better, be present, so that we’re not living out of past activated nervous system states. And when I look at humanity, the majority of humanity is living out of really activated states. And so there is no inner peace, there’s no world peace. And yeah, it’s exciting because we can do, we can do this hero’s healing journey for ourself and our nervous system. So that sort of really does excite me. And I would share that, yeah, that sense of inner peace, that sense of being grounded and being able to have the consciousness exist in the body. So to have that embodied sense of consciousness. Previously, my nervous system was so dysregulated before I did healing, that I couldn’t be in my body. I was always dissociated, so I was always living out here ’cause the body didn’t feel safe to exist in. It was just full of a soup of sensations and trauma. And by trauma, I suppose at this point I would give a definition that any time that the system’s overwhelmed and stores it in the flesh, in the muscle, in the fascia, and has a really strong imprint into our nervous system. So obviously, hard trauma is easy to recognize, but also, you know, softer traumas. Every time we have had that overwhelm and that contraction is stored. So yeah, there’s lots of beautiful things that we can do to help release that and settle everything.

Rick: And would you say that, I mean you mentioned samskaras in past lives and also, would you say that even a newborn baby has samskaras and some impressions, and we’re not just talking about the gross flesh and blood nervous system, are we? We’re also talking about the subtle body, the subtle nervous system. We’d have to be, otherwise how could it be that samskaras could be carried over from life to life, because obviously between lives we don’t have any kind of gross body. And would you also agree that, you know, even if somebody had an idyllic upbringing and a very good family and everything was smooth and comfortable and all that, you know, the very fact that we are a human being means that there are some buried traumas, some impressions. I mean, maybe one way of putting it is, if we’re not enlightened, there must be something yet to resolve in the mind-body system.

Tree: Yeah, absolutely. That’s why we’re still here. Most of us, some people become fully God-realized and I’m excited to sort of talk about the levels of consciousness and they choose to come back and help humanity. So how wonderful.

Rick: That’s pretty rare. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tree: But yeah, what was I wanting to say about that? Yeah, and also too, Rick, trauma is not just what happened to us but it’s what didn’t happen for us as mammals. Right. So often as babies, you know, as you know as wonderful or not as our parents were but even when they tried really hard particularly in our age group, you know, we weren’t fed on demand. We weren’t scooped up every time we cried. Now as mammals if you look at, you know, the monkey world or whatever, where the baby’s continuously hanging off the mother, fed on demand, always held, regulating its nervous system and being cared for. Often, particularly in the West, we were put in a cot away from our mother or caregiver and left to cry. And that is an enormous, it doesn’t sound like it to some people, but that’s a big trauma for a little mammalian organism that just needs skin contact reassurance. So often our childhood, just not having those oral and mammalian needs met create a lot of contraction in our system.

Rick: – Yeah.

Tree: Yeah, a lot of trauma. So yeah, it’s sort of fantastic now that there’s all this information about conscious parenting. And I don’t think that they realize the impact that has on the mother and child. Less medical intervention, so that there’s, you know, often there’s medical intervention. And look, when it’s needed, how wonderful, you know, mom and baby are safe, you know. That is fantastic when it’s an emergency or needed. But I feel even with birthing, people are getting down medical corridors when it’s not necessary. I don’t think that they realize the impact that has on the mother and child. You know, that whole birthing process sets the baby and the mother up, natural birthing if possible. And if the mother’s not taking drugs, she’s actually present and there. She’s not off with the fairies on drugs. So that first connection where the baby meets the mother’s eyes is a really profound moment, a welcome to the planet, I’ve got you, you’re safe, sense that just embeds in the nervous system. If that doesn’t happen and you’re looking up at a white ceiling in a hospital, it’s…

Rick: Being spanked. Yeah.

Tree: Yeah, yeah, or being spanked, or yeah, you know, being spanked, and yeah. It’s so, there’s, you know, so much that we can do for babies and young children now, and there’s a lot of information about that, conscious parenting, which is, I think, is brilliant. I’ve got grandkids now, so I’ve been sort of studying all that to do a better job of my grandkids, activated nervous system. I thought this was life and although they were fed on demand and home births and they got a pretty good go but where they didn’t get a good go was my nervous system was dysregulated. I would have absorbed my parents nervous system and and you know didn’t know anything other than I I thought this was life, this sense of having an activated nervous system. I thought this was life, and I was stuck in my ego identity, my person, and I was in fight and flight, and I regret that. I see this beautiful conscious parenting now, but unless the parents do the work on their nervous system, it’s just a script. So to have that embodied sense of conscious parenting, The parent’s nervous system needs healing. They need a resilient nervous system. Because children, even before verbal, they absorb the sense of the parent, the sense of safety, the sense of how they are in the world.

Rick: Sure. Even in the womb, the child must be absorbing the traumas of the parents, both the parents. If the mother and father are having a fight or something and the child is in the womb, that influences the child. Absolutely. Yeah, but I mean you shouldn’t blame yourself for what you didn’t do 30 years ago or something, you know, you did the best you could.

Tree: I feel like all parents do the best they can from where they’re at and where their nervous systems are and how they are in life. Like, yeah, absolutely no blame, but now that there’s this knowledge, if they combined it with healing their own trauma before they have children, tending their own nervous system, and then they’ve got a nervous system that’s beautiful to regulate off. And then we could have a whole incoming humanity that aren’t as traumatized.

Rick: Yeah, that’s great. I was born by cesarean myself a few years after World War II, which my father had fought in and been very traumatized by, and became an alcoholic. He was, and all that. And, you know, so, but I remember at one point I had the opportunity to say to my mother that don’t feel bad about anything you did, you know, bringing me up. You did the best you could and I’m really happy with the way my life is turning out now. This is after I’ve been meditating for a while and things were going really well. So, you know, don’t worry about it. And that really kind of relieved her to have that said to her. But the point you’re making about the world, I think, is really significant. You know, we look at the world and we look at various wars and, you know famines and all kinds of terrible things happening all over the place, drug, drug, the drug crisis and you know we could spend all night just picking off all the problems that plague the world. I think you’re saying and I would agree with you that all of these problems are symptoms or manifestations of large numbers of traumatized people, basically universal, universally traumatized people just behaving naturally from a foundation of trauma. And it takes a collective form, just as it does an individual form. I mean, a traumatized individual is going to screw up their life in certain ways. A collection of traumatized people in a country is going to screw… the country is going to have problems as manifestations of the millions of traumatized people in its populace.

Tree: Absolutely and the beauty of it is yes, you said before we are human, we will experience trauma. It’s part of our existence. But the beauty is we can heal it. We don’t have stuck in concrete. We can move.

Rick: Yeah, and this should be a national priority. I mean, we do need to take care of the economy and the environment and all the things that governments are supposed to do, but education, in my opinion, should include methods to de-traumatize the kids. You teach them factual information, but at the same time you help them culture their nervous systems to be trauma-free by the time they graduate from college or whatever.

Tree: Yeah, yeah. I have quite a few parents say, “Oh, I’d love you to teach TRE to my child.” And I say, “Yeah, I’d love to. And it would be great if we started with you.”

Rick: Yeah, very good. Yeah.

Tree: So the parents and then the kids, yeah, like it can be profoundly different in that when we heal the trauma and the nervous system is regulated, You know, we can experience that sense of presence that exists here because we’re not depressed, in freeze, you know, we’re not in fight, we’re not, you know, we’re just here, really just here. And that really excites me that humans can come to that quiet mind by doing trauma healing.

Rick: Yeah, it’s our natural state. It’s not something exotic, you know.

Tree: No, no.

Rick: It’s the state that one would naturally be in if one were free of accumulated trauma.

Tree: Yeah, I feel, yeah, absolutely. The trouble is, and myself was included, I thought the natural state was being really bound up in a highly activated ego identity.

Rick: Yeah, because that’s what everybody seems to be, and so you look around and you think, well, this is what’s natural, but it’s not. It’s abnormal, it’s just common.

Tree: Yes, yes, and I say to people that come here for retreats or body work, you know, if they have a spiritual slant, and that tends to be my clients, but I say to them, have a look at the countenance of the great masters. Have a look at their sense of, you know, You know, even, well I think of Ramana Maharshi’s body, who was quite sort of deformed, is the only one that I can think of, because of his body’s quite held, and yet his countenance and his nervous system and everything else is so relaxed, even around the body that’s a little held. But everyone else, like, you know, I think of them and I see them, and the grace and the groundedness, they’re not passive, they’re active, but in a graceful way.

Rick: In a graceful way, yeah. Did you ever see that movie Koyaanisqatsi?

Tree: No.

Rick: It’s, I don’t know the derivation of the word, it’s some native tongue, perhaps Native American, but it means world out of balance. And it’s quite a harrowing movie to watch because it just sort of comes at you a mile a minute with just all these images of, you know, people rushing down the street in New York City and forest fires and bombs and this is all this crazy stuff for the whole length of the movie. And it means world out of balance and that I think they made one later on and I forget the name for that one, but it was more like world in balance and it was just this more all this beautiful serene kind of stuff. Anyway, I guess the principle we’re making, and it bears repeating, is that it’s theoretically possible for the world to be populated by saintly people. And in fact, in my last interview, or the one before that, I read this quote from Yogananda that someone had sent me about how we need everyone, stockbrokers and street sweepers and this and that, to all be living Buddhas, you know, or Christs, or people in an enlightened state, and then we would have an ideal world.

Tree: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah.

Tree: I think it’s in progress, you know. I feel like it’s in progress.

Rick: Yes.

Tree: This involution, yeah. But I just do really feel that the trauma healing can really speed up the process. It can quite quickly make significant changes, yeah.

Rick: Yeah. So, usually at the end we say, “Okay, what can people do practically?” But we also say it now, a handful of them possibly could fly to Australia and hang out with you at your retreat center for a while, and maybe some people will do that. It would be a cool thing to do. I’d like to do it. But practically speaking, people who are in Europe or the US or elsewhere, what can they they do without having to fly around the other side of the world.

Tree: I tend to share what worked in my own journey of healing because for me they were really quite pinpoint. Now, they mightn’t be for everyone and again, you know, discernment and feel into it yourself. for me, going to a TRE instructor and learning TRE, which is trauma release exercises. And that was devised by David Bercelli. And it’s really about invoking our natural healing mechanism, which is to shake out contraction held in the system.

Rick: So somehow when you practice TRE, you physically shake.

Tree: Yeah. and now say to my body, “Would you like to tremor?”

Rick: Uh-huh, and it just starts to go.

Tree: It goes, yeah. So, pulling apart the fascia, releasing the muscles, and in doing so, after continued practice, the nervous system comes down to a more baseline state, which is that inner peace. So, I would say, yeah, learn TRE. It’s quite quick. It’s incredibly quick, you know. in its processing, like I think for me, three months my body was pain-free and because I was so dysregulated I feel like it probably took a year for the nervous system to shift, but even still a year of practice. So there’s, you know, a lot of instructors worldwide. I feel like yes, it’s good to go to talk therapy and talk about it, but at the end of the day, it’s in the body, it’s in the tissue, it’s in the nervous system. So doing this body work, this fantastic TRE process, is life-changing. Some people, after their first shake, will come out, they’ll sit up and they’ll look around the room and they’ll be in the awake state. They will be there just as people are. mind is stilled and they say, “Oh my God, look at everything. “Ah, it’s all like three-dimensional.” So after one shake, they’re getting a little taste of what it’s like to be, not everyone of course, but some, you know, this is the capacity that TRE has as a path to spiritual awakening, just quieting everything down. It relaxes the body. Also, I would suggest I do something called Transformational Bodywork, which was devised by Deva Daricha, an Australian man. He went over and studied Postural Integration, which is John Painter’s work, Ida Rolf’s work, which is Rolfing. So these are deep tissue bodywork. So again, tremoring is shaking out of the armor, this armor that we have in our body and forming up these character structures. That’s another thing I’d love to mention too, is the Reichian character structures. But also the body work is working into the flesh and moving the armor off the body. So the body is freer, the psyche – Peace, freer. The body work works on in utero, early childhood, past life, all of this life, intergenerational trauma. I’ve been on the table and experienced some of my mother’s trauma. And also you get beautiful infill from transpersonal experiences. So it’s both releasing and you’re getting some nourishment into the system. So I would say TRE and deep tissue body work. I would say probably the most important thing as well as releasing the armor or having it sort of help to work through is making sure that practitioner, that you feel really comfortable with your practitioner. And I think the greatest gift a practitioner can give is being fully present. And that’s, for me, I feel really happy about my work because after having a series of awakenings, which I’d love to discuss too, Rick, not just awakening, yeah, is being able to be literally like presence for the body on the table. So not thinking about, as I would before awakenings, about what’s for dinner or the fight I’d had with my husband but literally being there for that body to release. So yeah, check in with, try a few practitioners. You know when they’re with you or when they’re in their mind away. So you really want someone present and grounded and for your nervous system to have the power to be able to heal and release, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, and of course, you know, you can have various tools in your toolkit. I mean, you know, an effective meditation practice or yoga practice or various other things. They’re not contradictory. You can, you know, do a number of things that work for you. In my case, you know, I’ve been meditating for a couple years and I started to shake, you know, just not, I mean, you know, the first time it was after a one-month meditation course that I was on and I went and got a job driving an ice cream truck and when I was meditating, you know, it’s kind of shake as things were releasing. Even while driving the truck, if I stopped at a stop sign or a red light, you know, because I was sitting still, it would start to happen. But I suppose it could freak somebody out if that started to happen to them. I think there’s something neurologically wrong with them, but I kind of had an understanding of what was going on, so I just went with it. And then you see groups, meditation groups, sometimes people are doing all these wild kriyas and making noises and I think sometimes it becomes a contest of who can do the wildest kriyas, but some of it is also genuine. So perhaps the attitude should be, you know, don’t milk it, you know, don’t use it as a way of showing off, but don’t try to suppress it either.

Tree: Absolutely, don’t let, you know, if Kundalini awakens, it’s, it’s, you know, an evolutionary human process. So don’t let the ego run with it, but allow the Kundalini to clear, clear what it has to clear. Yeah, beautifully said Rick.

Rick: Yeah.

Tree: Oh, there was a few thoughts through there. Absolutely. There’s so many techniques of working with the body, you know, yoga, meditation, craniosacral, There’s many, many techniques to help you through this.

Rick: What’s your attitude towards psychedelics?

Tree: I’m not keen, yeah. I know a lot of people have had success, particularly they’re looking now at depression and trauma. So I think as a medicinal sort of approach, I think there’s probably worth to it. But as far as quick fix for awakening, I’m not keen. No.

Rick: Yeah, I’m kind of with you there. I mean, I appreciate the work being done at Johns Hopkins and NYU and places like that, and in many cases, alcoholics or PTSD sufferers and terminal cancer patients who are terrified of death and all have wonderful transformational experiences which have long-lasting benefits. But I don’t know if I’ve ever talked to anybody or met anybody who through long-term use of psychedelics has achieved what I would consider to be abiding spiritual awakening. You know, I think it was, oh, I forget who it was, it’ll come to me, but with regard to this, he said, “When you get the message, hang up the phone.” So it can give you a sort of a kick and a realization that there’s so much more to life than you had known, but it’s not a healthy long-term strategy, I think, for most people. Alan Watts, that’s who said that.

Tree: Yeah, I think it can also, if it’s not sort of evolving on your trajectory. So I do a bit of Kundalini support, and I get a lot of clients, particularly young men, have had an opening through psychedelics and they just, it hasn’t grown, you know, steadily through meditation or spiritual practice, but they’ve just had a, you know, some sort of experience, an experience. And then their everyday life seems useless, futile, unpleasant. And so it caused a lot of havoc.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve been contacted by such people also. They can’t hold down a job, they’re living in their parents’ basement or whatever. They’ve just been thrown out of balance by it. And then there’s also this sort of syndrome of, you know, “Okay, maybe the next trip this weekend is going to, you know, do it for me permanently.” It’s more, you know, there’s that saying, I guess it was the fable of the tortoise and the hare, “Slow and steady wins the race.”

Tree: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I say to these people that, you know, we have this jivatma, we have this lifetime where we have to work through our impressions. So you know, sure, a sense of oneness, beautiful, and beautiful when it’s more sustained, but perhaps that can come through spiritual practice, you know, and loving the guru, service, meditation, know, I think more profound long-term builds of this process, because we do have to have this life on planet Earth in this body to work out those samskaras. So I tell them the importance of, you know, even the personal life, the person’s life. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, and I’m wondering if psychedelics can work out samskaras. I somehow have the feeling that if you’re full of samskaras, these neurophysiological gross and subtle abnormalities we’ve been talking about, can you really resolve them just by taking some mushrooms or something? Or are you just sort of adding a psychedelic experience to a traumatized nervous system? Well, again, you know, there is research that it helps people with PTSD to overcome it, so So maybe if done properly, it can have that benefit, but I think a lot of times it’s done rather recreationally and might have the reverse effect.

Tree: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, I think, you know, there have been really good results and in the proper conditions by people that know what they’re doing. But I also think, yeah, just recreationally or, you know, to have these awakenings now, My instinct is, I don’t know, it doesn’t sit with me. So I discourage it.

Rick: Have you ever done them yourself?

Tree: No, no. But you know, you can tone, you can sit under the moon in the night and tone and have transpersonal experiences. People on the body work table, working into the flesh deeply, have transpersonal experiences. So we can understand that there is more than the gross experience. So I spoke to other ways.

Rick: And as I implied earlier, I certainly did them back in the 60s, but I can confidently say now that I feel better all the time now than any drug ever made me feel temporarily. So there’s absolutely no incentive to do anything like that because again, it’s like, I don’t think it would enhance my state. What did you want to say about awakenings as opposed to awakening?

Tree: Okay, yeah, I wanted to talk about, you know, I feel like some people, you know, have an awakening experience and I feel it’s over. You know, we’re all cooked and we’re enlightened and you know, there’s seven planes of consciousness and possibly my…

Rick: Meher Baba’s model, right? I just listened to that article today that you sent me.

Tree: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah.

Tree: There’s seven planes of consciousness to God realization and I feel a lot of us that having these awakenings, as the planet is awakening, you know, maybe having that first turning towards an involution, the involutionary process. So, we evolve and then we go into this involutionary process which…

Rick: Define involution so we make sure everybody understands what you mean by the word.

Tree: Okay, so you know we evolve from rock to plant to fish to animal, the soul’s evolvement, this is Barber’s cosmology, to humans and then I wrote down the figure because I had to have a laugh, you know, around 8,400,000 human lives is in Baba’s cosmology. So, you know, that sort of, that makes me laugh. Yeah, that’s a lot of human lifetimes.

Rick: And not just his cosmology, other Hindu and Buddhist teachers have said similar things.

Tree: Okay, yeah. So, when we come to that point of going, whether the samskaras are light enough at some point, whether it’s God’s grace, I’m not sure what occurs, but we go, “Hmm, this isn’t it. This gross world, this outer, this person, ego identity isn’t it.” So we start to inquire within, we start to go within. So that is what I would call the beginning of the involution and I would say we’re heading maybe you know maybe towards the first plane away from that gross dense plane. Can I read you something Rick? Sure. Around okay I put my glasses on. This is Meher Baba’s you know a little paragraph so it’s not too long on the seven planes of higher consciousness. So the first plane, when the pilgrim arrives at the first plane, he experiences his first merging, which consists of the minor annihilation of the ego. The pilgrim is temporarily lost to his limited individuality and experiences bliss. And I feel like, you know, maybe a lot of us maybe have had this occur and our person’s fallen away and for for nine months, somebody would have to feed us, but it’d be more peaceful. At the floor with no thoughts at all.

Rick: Yeah, you were dramatic. You went through all these dramatic, incapacitating phases.

Tree: And I feel like, oh, you know, maybe we’re heading towards this, you know, this first plane.

Rick: Yeah, it probably wouldn’t hurt the world for us all to stare at the floor for nine months. Somebody would have to feed us, but a more peaceful place.

Tree: Yeah. Okay, so this is a really interesting part for me. Many pilgrims who thus get merged in the first plane think that they have realized God and get stuck in the first plane. But if the pilgrim keeps himself free from self-delusion or comes to realize that his attainment is really a transitional phase in his journey, he advances further on the spiritual path and arises at the second plane. And yeah, I feel that, you know, people, particularly with just non-dual speak, where it’s an intellectual understanding, and Baba is the non-dual avatar, where he says we are not we, but one, but how much are we really experiencing that divinity? You know, what level? And I feel like, and it’s wonderful, because when you have that first ego annihilation and person falls away and there is just a sense of pure consciousness, and I feel like a lot of us have experienced that, and a lot of Western spiritual teachers and beings have experienced that, and yet it’s the beginning of the involution.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a Tibetan saying, “Don’t mistake understanding for realization.” And you know, just to comment very briefly on what you just said, I think it would be a good thing for all of us to have drilled into our heads that, you know, growth is going to be a continuous process and if you feel you’re done, you know, question that. There’s teachings like that in many traditions where it’s, the tradition warns against the sense of jumping to the conclusion that one is finished, you know? It can be a trap, and it can be dangerous if one presumes to be a teacher at that point. In fact, in the Zen tradition, they apparently advocate waiting 10 years after your realization, see how it goes, before you start teaching. I’ve quoted St. Teresa of Avila many times. She says it appears that God himself is on the journey. So if that’s true, then certainly we are. Which is not to say that we’re going to be forever chasing the dangling carrot, you know, hoping for some kind of fulfillment to somehow, you know, come to us. The goal can be all along the path, you know, at every stage, like you said, even at stage one there can be a great bliss and release from the binding influence of the ego and so on. And you know, beautiful, every stage, I think you’re going to outline seven stages, has very beautiful characteristics that one can enjoy, but one shouldn’t just rest on one’s laurels at any one of these stages.

Tree: Or assume it’s done, and I feel like a lot of people do. I feel like, I’m glad I’ve got Baba in these seven stages of realization because it feels so complete, you know? When you’ve been trapped in that crystallized ego identity shell and person has that first falling away, it is blissful, you know, that person’s not there trying to run the show in that contracted form. It does feel so complete. And so it is beautiful to perhaps mentor and share that first shift in consciousness because other people are still struggling in their contracted form. So I think it’s all okay, but I have the suspicion that maybe some people, the person or the ego takes it and they run with it. And I think, “Oh, be careful.”

Rick: Yeah, yeah. I mean, there’s so many… You’ve heard of the Association for Spiritual Integrity. you’re a member, you know, there’s so many examples of spiritual teachers using their supposed status to excuse sexual, you know, abuse and other misbehaviors with their students. So, and that’s a great danger for them. In fact, stage four, which you’ll probably describe, can be a stage which, you know, one can be gifted with tremendous powers and if those are misused, you can be back to square one as a result.

Tree: Just don’t, yeah. Yeah, that’s why I say to people that come here for healing work or interested in awakening, and I say to them, you know, if you have the, what’s the word?

Rick: Propensity.

Tree: Propensity, thanks Rick. The propensity to have a guru or a teacher, I would choose an avatar, because they’re not gonna have the underlying lack of, what world, what formation, they’re not going to have that integrity, that purity, that integrity. So, I say, you know, there’s plenty of avatars, you know, Jesus, Buddha…

Rick: Yeah, there are plenty of, there have been plenty of people who have said they were avatars and probably were. I can also think of people living now who say they are avatars and I’m a little skeptical of some of them. So, you know, don’t yeah, don’t just jump at the first avatar who puts out a shingle.

Tree: Yeah, absolutely. I think there are well ones that I feel totally confident in our Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Zoroaster, Muhammad, and Meher Baba I feel is the latest form of that first realized soul So there’s plenty to choose from there and yet looks, you know spiritual teachers can possibly Help you with that You know first one, but why not cut to the chase, you know, why not? Head head to the creme de la creme is my suggestion

Rick: Yeah, we talked about this a little bit in our first interview, but then you know, some people say well I want a living teacher I you know I want somebody that I can actually talk to and interact with and I’m not so good at just sort of You know kind of like relating to an, you know an abstract being living on some other plane.

Tree: And again, I would say they’re not abstract just because they’re you know Not here in the physical body. They’re very very real. They’re very palatable, you know, you can smell them and feel them and they can actually, you know guide the person’s life very profoundly and pinpoint. Yeah, so I wouldn’t say that they are abstract even though they’re not, well, you know.

Rick: So, would you actually, I mean, you know, you are not claiming to be a spiritual teacher per se, you mainly do TRE and body work and stuff like that, but would you discourage people from associating with a so-called, oh, you’ve been to Mooji, you’re really into Mooji. He doesn’t claim to be an avatar, but definitely alive.

Tree: Yeah, no I wouldn’t discourage anyone from anything and Mooji was profoundly influential in my own awakening journey as Meher Baba has been. I wouldn’t dissuade but I would probably more, you know, everyone has got their own path and if that’s where they’re drawn that’s where they’re drawn. But I would say if you can go to the top, why not? Because they can take you through the seven planes of consciousness. The spiritual teachers can probably help you understand the ego identity and you know I can perhaps talk about that, what ego is and how to relax the person and how to relax the character structures through trauma healing and you can have experience of being, the beingness more and more. So I wouldn’t dissuade anyone, but I would probably encourage them go to the top because to get through the last phases, you know, in our 8,400,000 lifetimes, you know, you need God’s grace and you do need the guide of an Avatar or a perfect master.

Rick: I’ll tell you a story. I interviewed a guy about a month ago named Philip Weber, who had actually remembered a past life in which he was with Yogananda, and he was really pretty much into Yogananda’s movement in this life, although also a bit of a free agent doing different things and checking out different things. But he went into this deep state at one point, which was this, he was in some kind of Samadhi state where he wasn’t even conscious of his body, and Meher Baba appeared. And so, there he is in the presence of Meher Baba, and there was this little bump on his side in this vision or this experience, and Meher Baba took this little knife and cut bump off, and this kind of worm-like creature emerged from it and was kind of like, wrrr, writhing around, and you know, and Phillip said, “Get it away from me, get it out,” you know, and Baba actually, you know, completely extricated it. And then, but then he said, “Hey, how come you did this? I thought Yogananda was my guru.” And Baba said to him, “Well, on this level, we’re all the same.”

Tree: Yeah, yeah, beautiful, beautiful.

Rick: So it’s just sort of this astral exorcism or something.

Tree: Yeah, yeah, gosh, yeah. Yeah, they occur often in healings. I had a client on the table the other day and she’s on her third round of body work and Meher Baba appeared to her and at the same time she was chanting ‘Ma’ and her body was going into spontaneous sacred dance gestures while she was having body work. So it was all happening in the healing room there too. So, yeah, I don’t feel because they’re not in the body that they’re not totally available. I feel they really are.

Rick: And just to pursue that line of thought a little bit more, and a question just came in from a listener which I’ll read to you in a minute, but how do you protect against sort of imagination or wishful thinking? You know, what if a person just sort of gets lost in sort of fantasies about, you know, disembodied masters and stuff? Is there any kind of safety measure to assure one that one is actually connecting with the real deal and perhaps not connecting with some malevolent entity, you know, that might be posing as a master?

Tree: Yeah, I don’t sort of tend to worry about that. I feel if you’re calling out to God with your whole heart and being, then God’s going to be there in an instant, you know, much as I think Baba says it too, you know, one or more gather in my name, I will be there.

Rick: Jesus said it, yeah.

Tree: I don’t feel that anything benevolent could get through there.

Rick: Malevolent.

Tree: Benevolent. What did I say?

Rick: You said benevolent, but you mean malevolent.

Tree: Yeah, thank you. Sorry. in England could appear, but also too, if you’re in a bit of a spiritual emergence and things are going a bit rocky, I would say that, you know, the God element won’t tell you to do harmful things to yourself or to anyone else.

Rick: So that’s for sure. I mean, that would be a good litmus test, you know, for ascertaining the legitimacy and the beneficial nature of anything you’re connecting with, living or ascended.

Tree: Yeah, if you’re connecting someone and it’s going a bit skew-whiff, then you need a bit of help there.

Rick: Yeah.

Tree: Yeah. In the trajectory, yeah.

Rick: All right, let me ask this question that came in. I think it’ll be relevant to our conversation. This is from Santiago Gomez in Colombia, asking, “What role do you think Kundalini plays in the releasing of trauma?”

Tree: I think it plays a big role, yeah. Yeah, I think Kundalini refines the whole system, enlightens the whole load. I think it’s, you know, human evolutionary, involutionary system that clears our vessel, clears out everything. Why I say to people, do body work and TRE, because if you’re on a spiritual path and you’re already clearing out the system. When Kundalini comes, there’s maybe less to clear because you’ve done the gross bodily ones, so that can be helpful, but I feel Kundalini is a profound process in clearing everything and enlightening us.

Rick: Yes. I think that’s a good point that bears emphasis, which is that I think people who have trouble with Kundalini, you know, who have traumatic experiences when Kundalini awakens or aren’t able to function well and stuff like that, it’s because Kundalini is encountering so many obstacles. There’s so much to clear and it’s hitting blockages and perhaps being diverted off to side channels and stuff. So, I think that, you know, what you’re saying is very true that the more we can clear that stuff out, the smoother the Kundalini process will be.

Tree: Yeah, yeah, and then you get to the beautiful, you know, the mudras and the sacred dances and the beautiful, enlightening, enlivening parts of kundalini as opposed to the more difficult parts, yeah, which are still wonderful, really. But yeah, if you do the trauma healing, Rick, first, you’ve cleared the system a lot, ready for when it’s… Yeah.

Rick: You think that everybody goes through some kind of kundalini awakening in the process of evolution? Is that like just a necessary component of it?

Tree: I don’t have a definitive answer. My suspicion is probably.

Rick: yeah, I mean if the whole Kundalini Vidya whole knowledge of Kundalini is is valid then it would seem that what the Kundalini has to be involved. It’s just one way of explaining what awakening process is but it needs to do its thing.

Tree: Yeah and it’s described across so many traditions in so many different, you know, we’re using the term Kundalini, but you know, it’s described as in Christianity as being holy spirit perhaps. Some people have the traditions, which I don’t know, someone would know about, someone would come from a tradition, perhaps listening to this, and they would use another word for it. So it does seem to be an evolutionary process of the human being. So I guess, Rick, I don’t know, that it’s probably someone in one of these 8,400,000 human lifetimes when it’s time.

Rick: Some people say that the caduceus, that symbol of the modern medicine with the snake coiling around a staff is symbolic of Kundalini.

Tree: Yeah, yeah. You can see because we’re mentioning her, she’s having a little bit of a run in my body.

Rick: Yeah.

Tree: So, it’s getting a bit busy, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, but I guess it’s worth mentioning that, you know, Kundalini, it shouldn’t be a scary thing. It doesn’t, it’s not necessarily going to, you know, cause your loved ones to lock you up. You know, it can be smooth and something good is happening and, you know, it should just be dealt with. For one thing, it shouldn’t be forced. I mean there shouldn’t be some kind of great effort made to awaken it, you know, doing fast pranayama for two hours or something could get you in big trouble.

Tree: No, you know, when it’s time it will happen and again it’s this sort of perhaps the Western mind that wants, you know, awakening now or kundalini now again when it’s time. I think that’s fantastic. It can be, my own process was quite tricky, Rick, the Kundalini process, you know, it had a lot of blocks even though I had done a lot of trauma healing. So mine was pretty dramatic and intense and quite funny at times because, you know, you can be burst into spontaneous yoga poses and… Yeah, you’re doing that in restaurants and stuff as I recall. Yeah, and I don’t do yoga, so one night here I ran out onto the, you know, had a heavy breathing pattern that came on spontaneously. I ran out onto the front lawn and launched into a, I don’t even know what they are, a backwards something or other, you know.

Rick: Back bend or something.

Tree: Yeah, thank you. You know, my body’s not up for that, but it managed it at the time. So it was, you know, in hindsight, quite funny because I’m not that physically fit.

Rick: Yeah.

Tree: But it did it, you know, my consciousness, you know, blew out through into the galaxies and it was, you know, magnificent. But yeah, sometimes it can be quite busy and overwhelming and particularly if you haven’t dealt with your trauma in the system beforehand. Yeah. But again, if you can just relax around it, know that it’s a human process, breathe. I can say to Kundalini clients, perhaps learn TRE because that will not only help release the trauma, but you will get used to and begin to enjoy spontaneous movement as part of being a human being. Yeah. And in TRE you can control it, you can stop and start the spontaneous movement and so that gives you a sense of, ah yes, my body knows what to do, my body knows how to heal itself. I think, you know, in tribes I can remember seeing two things on television as a kid that stuck with me and one was a tribe dancing around a fire and they danced and danced and danced until the spontaneous movement came. And I remember thinking, “God, that’s incredible. These people are really living.” I was very excited by the fire, the elements and the human beings and their bodies doing these incredible spontaneous releases. Now, they would have done that every month, probably around the full moon, or other acknowledgements that this shaking, this unwinding is a natural process for bodies. As we have trauma, we also have a counterpart which is releasing trauma. So, even just understanding that, putting it in, this is a helpful thing.

Rick: And it’s worth mentioning, I suppose, that trauma release might be accompanied not only by physical movements, but by emotional upwellings and, you know, various things like that, right?

Tree: Absolutely, yeah. I feel like even when people have profound awakenings, they will be called back to the person, the ego identity, because they’ll be triggered in life. So, we have to work through the wounds, the emotional wounding, we have to deal with it. To be freer and freer, yeah.

Rick: Sometimes when people have profound awakenings, all hell breaks loose. That happened to that fellow Phil Weber I was just talking about. He had this really beautiful awakening, and next thing you know he was swearing like a sailor and just going through all this gunk, just purging himself of all this negativity.

Tree: It seems that everything that’s left in the system will come out to be dealt with. And that’s hard work, yeah.

Rick: You mentioned you studied with Bonnie Greenwell. I had the privilege of interviewing her a couple of times before she passed away and meeting her in person. And so, you included that in your notes. Is there anything you wanted to say about Bonnie?

Tree: Yeah, I just loved being in her class, in her energy field. Just a really beautiful, grounded, wonderful human being. Yeah, glorious, glorious. yeah, to do that study with her just to assist people to be comfortable with the process was, yeah, it was really enjoyable study. And I did it after I had had big Kundalini awakenings and years and years of Kundalini doing its thing. And then I saw Bonnie Greenwell doing a course and she at the time knew that she was dying of cancer and she wanted to teach a few people around the world to sort of carry on her thread of work to help people.

Rick: Yeah, there’s another one I’ve interviewed named Joan Shivarpita Harrigan who has written a massive book about Kundalini. Everything you always wanted to ever wanted to know about Kundalini you might learn in that book. And she had a facility in Tennessee where you could go for a couple of weeks with a small, you know, just four people or something and work intensively with her or with her Indian guru. And she stopped doing that, but she’s also trained some people to carry on that work. So if you look up my interview with Joan Harrigan, you’ll see a link to that, to her website and stuff.

Tree: Yes, she’s extremely, extremely knowledgeable. I suppose what I offer is a grounded nervous system to, like I don’t have the knowledge of the woman you were just speaking about, I’ve forgotten her name.

Rick: Joan, yeah.

Tree: She’s extremely knowledgeable about every aspect of the, you know, the history. I don’t have that. What I offer is a grounded nervous system to just reassure people that, and then I try and encourage them to learn TRE.

Rick: Yeah. No, that’s great. I mean, no, you don’t have, people don’t have to get overly intellectual about it. I never read her whole book. I just read some of it and thought, wow, this is really a treasure trove of knowledge. Yeah.

Tree: It’s too much for my brain. It wasn’t that fascinating, but incredible work. Yeah. And if you want to really understand it, then you would do, I just, I just enjoyed the experience.

Rick: Yes, sure.

Tree: the experience, yeah.

Rick: So, let’s see, we were going through those seven stages. Yeah, no, as you wish. We were, I kind of, we got sidetracked. I think we didn’t get much past the first plane. So, we can talk about that and some other cool things in your notes here that we want to be sure to cover.

Tree: Okay, I’ll go through the planes. The second plane, the merging, Merging into the second plane is called the annihilation of the false. The pilgrim is now absorbed in bliss and infinite light. Some think that they have attained the goal and get stranded in the second plane. But others who keep themselves free from self-delusion march onwards and enter the third plane. The third plane. The merging into the third plane is called the annihilation of the apparent. Here the pilgrim loses for days all consciousness of the body or the world and experiences infinite power. But since he has no consciousness of the world, he has no occasion for the expression of his power. This is the state of divine coma. Consciousness is now completely withdrawn from the entire world. The fourth plane. If the pilgrim advances still further, he arrives at the fourth plane. The merging into the fourth plane is called the annihilation, leading toward freedom. The pilgrim experiences a peculiar state of consciousness at the fourth plane, since he now not only feels infinite power, but has plenty of occasions for the expression of that power. He can now, he can know everything. He can, for example, know what anyone situated in any part of the globe is thinking or doing. Further, he has not only occasions for the use of his power, but has a definite incantation to express them. If he falls prey to this temptation, he goes on expressing powers and gets caught up in the alluring possibilities of the fourth plane. The fourth plane is for this reason one of the most difficult and dangerous planes to cross. The pilgrim is never spiritually safe and has always the possibility of a reversion until he has successfully crossed the fourth plane and arrived at the fifth plane. That’s what you were talking about, Rick, where we can return to stone, you know, a bit like Monopoly but a bit more serious. Yeah. The fifth plane, emerging into the fifth plane is called the annihilation of all desires. Here the incessant activity of the lower intellect comes to a standstill. It does not think in the ordinary way, yet he is indirectly a source of many thoughts inspired in others. He sees, but not with the physical eyes. Mind speaks with mind and there is neither worry nor doubt. He is now spiritually safe and beyond the possibility of a downfall. And yet many a pilgrim on this exalted plane find it difficult to resist the delusion that they have attained godhood. In his delusion he thinks and says, I am God and believes himself to have arrived at the end of the spiritual path. But if he moves on, he perceives his mistake and advances to the sixth plane. The sixth plane. The merging into the sixth plane is called the annihilation of the self in the beloved. Now the pilgrim sees God directly and clearly as an ordinary person sees the different things of this world. This continued perception and enjoyment of God does not suffer a break even for an instant, yet he does not become one with God the infinite. The seventh plane. If the pilgrim ascends to the seventh plane he experiences the last merging which is called the final annihilation of the self in God. Through his merging the pilgrim loses his separate existence and becomes permanently united with God. He is now one with God and experiences himself as being none other than God himself. The seventh plane is the terminus of the spiritual path, the goal of all search and endeavour. It is conscious Godhood. It is the only real awakening. The pilgrim has now reached the other shore of the vast ocean of imagination and realizes that this last truth is the only truth and that all other stages on the path are entirely illusory. He has arrived at the final destination.

Rick: You probably don’t want to answer this, but do you have any idea what plane you’re on?

Tree: I think I might be heading maybe towards the first one.

Rick: That’s a good honest answer. Yeah, I mean, all these planes sound a little bit fantastical, you know, like, beyond our – not too many people have reached these planes. In fact, there’s this whole teaching called the Law of One, and it outlines similar strata, and you can only get so far as a human being, actually, and then after that, you’re on some other level of existence proceeding through various planes and strata. So, I don’t even, I mean, is it implied that all these seven planes are human experiences or kind of superhuman? Perhaps?

Tree: I know he talks about the first three stages being the subtle, you still have a human body, the subtle, and then four is a little bit subtle and mental, and then five and six are the mental planes. And it’s beyond my perception.

Rick: Yeah.

Tree: I just had a few little awakenings. So I often think when I see people teaching and I think, yeah, it’s nice. I hate to sound so critical, but I’ve actually heard of teachers claiming to be. Perhaps our role, you know, but to think that we are God realized is, you know.

Rick: Yeah, it’s presumptuous.

Tree: Very presumptuous, yeah. And probably trapping a lot of Western spiritual teachers in one very small mode of heading towards the first plane. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, I hate to sound so critical, but I’ve actually heard of teachers claiming to be God realized and then, you know, like, seducing a lot of their women students and blaming it on God. “Oh, I’m not doing it, God is doing it.” You know, that kind of thing. So that…

Tree: It’s not going to… It’s not going to…

Rick: No, it’s going to have repercussions on your spiritual evolution if you do that kind of thing.

Tree: Absolutely. So, I think, yeah, it’s nice to mentor people and I probably go from Baba’s incredible cosmology where we don’t know where we are in our human lives, but, you know, some of us have had openings and tastes and awakenings. And I suppose what I would like to share is what I said before, Rick, when most of us have had, some of us have had heart awakenings, so unity consciousness, the heart’s open, head awakenings where you have that, what Baba describes as that person falling away, the ego identity falling away, to become vast and spacious and dry. And in my case, I became very dysfunctional. And if you recall our first interview eight years ago, I was pretty ungrounded and didn’t have a lot to say. And I had only come back to the body maybe four days before our interview.

Rick: Wow.

Tree: Yeah.

Rick: You did pretty good. I listened to it this past week and, you know, I talked a lot because it was a little hard to get you going.

Tree: But I’m… I didn’t have any…

Rick: You were good.

Tree: And at that time I didn’t feel like I was four days into realizing that I was a person. Like I felt like the vast spaciousness and if you, I was having conversations with Irene about is there a person and I would have said then no there is not.

Rick: Which is what a lot of spiritual teachers emphasize these days.

Tree: And I would now say that I am, you know, like attempting to open and be the hollow bone for God to come through me and not be the doer, but I can only do that to the extent that I have realized. So I feel a lot of people get stuck and, you know, I was in the vast spacious of the first awakening, the head awakening for nine months with no thoughts and I would see my body waking up in the night, “Oh my body’s waking up,” you know, or my husband would be laying next to me and I’d be, “Who’s he?” I don’t think human life meant anything for a long time. But four days before the interview with you, I did have that, God gave me that That beautiful night of a slideshow was all night, and I experienced, saw and experienced myself as everything, like the rocks, the, all the creatures, and then myriad human life, like it seemed like quite a few of those millions of human lives. And not only did I see them, but I experienced them. And in experiencing them, I experienced the great beauty of our human existence and also the great suffering. And particularly the suffering in each one of those souls, I feel that my gut awakened and I came back into the body. And so there was an embodiment and a realization that there’s this Jivatma that has to experience this life and you know there is a personal life as such. However I try and just leave it to Baba to do not claim that personal existence. But there is obviously samskaras to still play out in this destiny, in this life. So that was lovely and it’s really sort of nice being embodied on the planet. So I would say that is another awakening. And I feel a lot of teachers are stuck in that vast, dry, spacious, non-dual speak awareness. And it’s a stage, and it’s a beautiful stage. It’s lovely, you know, and nothing touches you there.

Rick: Yeah. But it’s not tremendously helpful to their students. You know, you hear examples of students, like, listening to that stuff for hours on end, And then losing all interest in their family or their job or, you know, even becoming nihilistic and suicidal even, you know, life loses its luster.

Tree: And when you have that vast, dry, spacious awakening and you are just pure awareness, you know, it’s wonderful and it is a stage, but it’s not the end. And I feel like a lot of teachers get stuck there just sort of doing a lot. And you can see it, you can see it in their body. You can see it in the energy field, it’s very intellectual. And they’re speaking. So, you know, that return back to the body, the embodiment. And then it’s like, well, for me, then there was an enormous Kundalini awakening. So that can be another awakening, which then clears out more and more of the system, lightens the load, and, you know, makes you to whatever extent, And again, there’s seven planes of consciousness, so it’s minuscule, but to whatever extent, more of the hollow bone to do the service when you’re grounded and embodied.

Rick: I think you said to me, I don’t know if it was in an email recently, or maybe it was someone, I listened to all your talks that you have on your website this past week, so I’m not sure where you said this, but I think you said that according to Baba in this outline of states that you just read to us, one always has a sense of self or ego up until the seventh state. Is that correct?

Tree: Yeah, he says that ego, you know, an extent of ego remains until the God realization on the seventh plane.

Rick: Right.

Tree: Yeah.

Rick: So, in light of that, what would you say to, of these teachers who, you know, the fact, emphasize, it seems to be their main teaching, that you don’t exist, you’re not a person, stuff like that.

Tree: Well, ultimately, no, we’re not. We are God, but how much of that Godhood are we realizing?

Rick: Yeah, and if they’re saying that to people who haven’t even reached the first stage, and if people listen to that for hours on end, what effect does that have?

Tree: For some people, perhaps they have the vast awakening and it could be helpful, but for it could be detrimental to them living their life and working through their Samskaric in this human life. Like, we only have these awakenings, you know, these awakenings on Earth in a human body, so this human life is profoundly special as well.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Tree: So, I’m sorry, I’ll keep going. No, I’m looking.

Rick: Go ahead. Yes, keep going.

Tree: And then just a sense of grace, so a sense of grace into the system from outside. So kundalini from, in my case, from the legs up through the body clearing out, and then this sense of grace coming into the body. Like informing, and it feels like I’ve just spent 10 days up at Meher Baba’s place in Queensland, Australia, is one of his three places of pilgrimage in the world. So, for some reason, we’re lucky enough in Australia to have a place called Avatar’s Abode. In America, you’re lucky enough to have a place of pilgrimage called Myrtle Beach Baba Center.

Rick: I interviewed Daniel Stone a while back who’s there.

Tree: I’ve never been to Myrtle Beach, but of course I have been to Barber’s in Queensland, and his tomb shrine is in Avanlaga, India. So there’s three places of pilgrimage. And I feel like these influxes that you can get from sacred sites, you can feel the whole physical nervous system and the whole body, physical body, as well as the energetic bodies, all realigning and moving and shifting.

Rick: You wanted me to show this picture can you see it?

Tree: Yeah. Yeah. What is this? This is Meher Baba’s bedroom at Avatar’s Abode, which is

Rick: in Queensland,

Tree: Queensland, Australia, which is a place of pilgrimage and Barber’s room is open from six in the morning until nine at night and I recently took a group of people up there that wanted to know more about Meher Baba and the people that run the Abode put on a really beautiful program for them. So there’s community with Baba and there’s also just Baba. My whole life I have just done Baba. My husband is more, he’s done the Baba community and Baba. So depending on what you like to do, I now am open to the community because my nervous system is settled enough to sit with people and enjoy people. But I’m also glad that I just pursued Baba Holas Bolas. And so every morning while I was staying there, just sitting in Baba’s room. Yeah, so those are probably the awakenings that I have experienced and with the Kundalini, you know, that Amrita, that beautiful flow of sacred fluids.

Rick: Yeah, just kind of elaborate on that a bit. Don’t, you know, don’t presume that people understand what that means.

Tree: during the Kundalini process, which you know, Kundalini is still active, I don’t know if it ever stops, but it definitely settles from more vigorous and rigorous sort of training for the body and nervous system. But during that process, and I think it was around the time of the descents of grace when God seems to enter the body from the outside and fills the body. Yeah, I did experience this magnificent fluid coming down the back of my throat, which was sort of like spicy, warm honey. And I don’t really know what that does, but it obviously informs something of the restructuring of the system, yeah.

Rick: Yeah.

Tree: Yeah.

Rick: I wonder if that’s what is meant by Soma. That’s often described in Indian tradition, in that, using that word and their whole scripture is devoted to it.

Tree: Okay. I don’t know much about it, Rick. I’ve only like this system’s experienced it. And I could have used the wrong word. Perhaps Soma is the-

Rick: No, Amrita, I think is also a valid word in that context. Yeah.

Tree: Yeah. So, yeah, I feel like those are some of the awakenings. And then there’s probably how many more of those [laughter] For more to come. But the beautiful thing about the first awakenings is there’s not really that psychological suffering that was in this person. So it is a beautiful shift. So we realize we’re not the body, the body so that existential fear of death subsides, there’s a relaxation in the system, and I feel that we can just empty out and experience more of the fullness of the human existence at the same time.

Rick: You might be on lifetime number 8,399,999.

Tree: I don’t think so. I think of people like Rudolf Steiner who was purported to be on the fifth plane, or where was Ramana Maharshi in great sacred armor, or these different beings. What levels of consciousness are they on?

Rick: It’s entertainment in a way to talk about this, but I went through a phase decades ago where I really wanted this to be my last life. It was like, “Get me out of here.” it’s like whatever, you know, having fun.

Tree: Relaxation with it and, you know, people say there’s no, you know, non-dual speakers say, and I am into non-duality, but more embodied non-duality. They say, you know, we are, you know, we’re all God. Well, yes, that’s true. And they say there’s no hierarchy, we are all God. Well, the experiential reality of our experience of God, to me, I can see a hierarchy. I can feel the energy of the different beings and there is a hierarchy.

Rick: Of course. I mean, I interviewed a woman who, we had a little disagreement. She was saying, you know, there’s no hierarchy, all beings are God. And I said, okay, so let’s say that in Africa, kids are dying of malaria and we want to do something to get rid of the mosquitoes so they don’t give the kids malaria. Is the life of a mosquito equal in value to the life of a child?” And she was saying yes and I was saying no. I mean, there’s definitely a hierarchy and any mother would swat the mosquito rather than have her child die. And there’s nothing really unspiritual about looking at it that way. Yeah, I think it’s just, to me it’s just factual. It’s an evolutionary, involutionary process and you know, and we’re all on the journey. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. Okay. You have one bit in your note here about meditation and disassociation. Are you suggesting that meditation causes disassociation? Why did you write that down?

Tree: Yeah, I feel that a lot of people, And I feel like meditation can be great for some on their journey. Like it really works for some, but I’ve found it at retreats, a lot of people are, you know, seemingly peaceful on the mat, and then they’ll get up, and even if we’re at a silent retreat, the noise emanating off their person is big, you know? And it’s like, for me, I can enjoy meditation because it’s like just, you know, wallowing in the beauty of the depths of the self to whatever level it’s discovered. And it’s lovely, but it’s sort of no different than walking around or working, or, you know, working with clients or grandparenting. It’s all the same. But what I did notice was there’s a sense of peace on the mat, and yet, you know, people have described maybe for 30 years, I’ve been meditating and it hasn’t really made any progress in the way I am in the world. So for some people I got the suspicion that perhaps they’re just dissociating.

Rick: Yeah, you may be right. I mean if they haven’t made any progress in 30 years there’s something wrong either with their meditation or something else they’re doing in life or not doing.

Tree: Or their nervous system, you know, like I feel like sometimes too meditation isn’t right for everyone first. Right. Agreed. Yeah, they’re often sitting and it’s uncomfortable, there’s too much trauma, there’s too much sensation and they’re sitting in the soup and it just doesn’t work. So, for me, working in TRE and releasing the system so that we can sit, it just seems a bit easier.

Rick: Yeah. It also depends on the proportions. I mean, you know, maybe you doing too much of it? Like you know you need water but drinking too much water can kill you.

Tree: That’s it. Yeah, yeah. So for some people I can see it’s brilliant and it is their path, it is their path and but for some people I have noticed not a lot of shift when they get off the mat. They’re still really contracted in their ego identity and even at silent retreats they can be quite noisy and I think, “Hmm, okay, let’s look at that.” So the meditations we’ve been doing here on retreat and I bring into what I did, I was told by spirit guides because I couldn’t just sit, it was too dysregulated, unpleasant for me, so I was guided to tone and do vocal toning. So I had something to do while I was sitting And of course we realize now, years later, with all the nervous system work, that toning, vocal toning, tones the vagus nerve, which settles the nervous system. So it was a double-edged thing. So an active meditation like that for some people is really, really helpful until they settle their nervous system.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good. There’s some people, friends of mine, whom I’ve tried to get into doing, you know, the kind of meditation I do. And they’ve said just what you were saying, which is that it’s just, it’s not for me just sitting silently like that. I need something more engaged. And that’s great. I mean, whatever floats your boat, as they say.

Tree: It can be a beginning and it can help settle the system. So you can just sit quietly as you see fit. Another one that I encourage people to do is, it’s probably more lovely out in nature, but And just, you know, we go on the property to the circle and it’s open-eyed meditation because dissociators will often, the minute the eyes are closed, they’re gone. They’re out of the body.

Rick: Yeah.

Tree: So we do an open-eyed and we just look around and we look and before the mind can name the object, we start looking at leaves on the floor and we come up to the tree trunk, up to the leaves, to the sky and we just cycle our head around before brain will name, “Oh, that’s a black-spotted something-or-other,” you know, as the mind does to interrupt just a steady state. And then when you’re quiet, you can just stop the swiveling and just sit. And the minute mind takes off again, Don’t worry, but just keep moving. So open-eyed, simple meditations can be a really good in as well. And from there we go… I do one called Body, Breath and God, where people from different traditions come here, and so they’ve all got different names of God. But on the in-breath we say one syllable, sitting, and on the out-breath we say the second syllable. So for me it’s Meher Baba. We relax the body and it becomes a whole body thing. Other people say Jesus Christ, whatever your God name is. Some people it’s pure consciousness. They don’t have a person, they have the vast sky or whatever they have, they use that name. And we relax the body and the body becomes involved and it starts to unwind. So, it’s quite an active meditation, breath, name of God, and body releasing. So, that’s a win-win too. That’s one of my favorites.

Rick: A question came in from Ahmad Toyyib in South Africa. The question is, “I experience mental releases all day. I can be in the middle of a conversation with someone and experience neurological releases which look weird. Although there is much peace and silence, I see how futile my spiritual efforts are, since a wave of intense emotions can rise up and drag me right back into a contracted and noisy state. Is this normal at this stage? I feel I will never get through this.”

Tree: Yeah, I think it is normal. You know, those tastes of the wholeness, when we get a little taste of that wholeness, we can then start to tinker with the person and it’s not so drastic. So I feel like don’t lose hope. Often we’re triggered back into person and our emotional states will arise when we haven’t resolved something that’s deeply set in our tissue and nervous system. So again, I come back to healing trauma, so that the system clears and clears and you’re not triggered. One day something will say something. I can think of triggers in my life, and you know when you can speak about the situation and it’s not stuck in your throat or your body contracts that you’ve resolved it and you’re over it. And I’m also too not one for bypassing the emotions. It’s like the emotions have to be felt so that they can be released. So if we’ve got anger and sadness in our system, amongst other emotions, you know, we have to tend them, we have to tend ourselves, we have to feel the sadness, we have to feel and express the anger in a, you know, acceptable way. I’ve smashed quite a bit of cutlery, one of my best teapots went one day and I thought…

Rick: Pottery. Cutlery is knives. You don’t want to throw those around.

Tree: So, knives. And again, like, you know, allow these things to release. And if little grandkids were here, I obviously wouldn’t smash a teapot. But in the right time and the right place, and you, you know, for me, teapot smashing, fantastic.

Rick: As long as someone’s head is not involved as the target.

Tree: Yeah. You have to have the awareness to release in intelligent fashions. You know, for anger you can push on the wall, you know, to help release that. Just acknowledge, wow, I’ve got anger in my system.

Rick: Yeah. There’s a verse in the Bhagavad Gita which goes, “No effort is lost and no obstacle exists.” And then it goes on from there. But I would say to Ahmad, don’t feel that you’ll never get through anything. There’s no obstacle, ultimately. And it might seem at times that it’s hopeless or that we’re stuck or we’ll never get… But there’s, you know, if you have the sincere intention and desire to progress, and if you just take advantage of opportunities that present themselves as a result of your having that desire, and they will present themselves, then you’ll find a way. You’ll clear through this, that, and the other thing. And you know, you look back at your life as having been very well spent, having, you know, cleared through tons of stuff.

Tree: That’s it. That’s it. And it’s a journey, you know, be patient, be patient with yourself, you know, be patient with your person because…

Rick: You may be young and, you know, young people can be very impetuous and impatient and so on. Yeah, it’ll, I mean, if I look back at my life a decade at a time, there’s huge shifts every decade if I’m going in that large increments. And it’s just, but they may not be so noticeable from day to day, but if you just keep at it, you’re just gonna, your whole life will blossom.

Tree: Yeah, nothing is really still, is it? It’s all in movement, except the stillness itself. So, It will be shifts and I also use the technique too. I was teaching my grandson the other day. You know, if you’re feeling stuck, I recite God’s name. So whatever your name of God is, you know, you can use it like a blanket around you.

Rick: Yeah, they call that japa in India, you know, you can have a mantra or name of God or something and just chant it as you wash the dishes or whatever.

Tree: Yeah, absolutely. It can, you know, it can soothe you, you’re calling God, perhaps you’ll get some help, you know? But it’ll…

Rick: Yeah. But you know, one thing we were talking about in the very beginning about, in reference to Baba, is the presence of benign and caring intelligences, we could say. And for some people it’s Jesus, for some people it’s Baba, for some people it might be Ramana Maharshi or whatever, but there’s just so many examples of people receiving blessings from some dimension that is not obvious to the naked eye, and it’s very palpable and, you know, sometimes life-saving. So that could sound like a matter of belief and you don’t have to believe it, but, you know, you may end up believing it if you experience enough of it. But I suppose the way to do that is just to have this sincere desire to continue progressing and, you know, have an attitude of innocence and maybe surrender to some extent, and, you know, why don’t you elaborate on what I was just saying there, Tree? What more can you say about that?

Tree: Yeah, I think probably ultimately it is surrender as well. It’s God’s grace, you know, at the right time.

Rick: Yeah. We’re not alone.

Tree: No, we’re not alone.

Rick: And I’m not just talking about space aliens.

Tree: Me too. That’s another figure I wrote down which I sort of got excited about. Baba says 18,000 worlds of, you know, human life.

Rick: Throughout the universe or something?

Tree: Universe, yeah.

Rick: Yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are even more than that. Trillions. But who knows. Yeah, it was amazing. I mean, people might not remember this about him, but he didn’t speak for most of his life. And all these voluminous writings were just done by a little signboard where he’d point to different letters, right? And someone would write it down. And that alone is amazing. I mean, imagine writing even a sentence and keeping the whole structure of the sentence in mind as you point to letters on a signboard. you know, what to say of an entire large book, and having it be a coherent unfolding of thought is kind of remarkable.

Tree: Yeah, it was remarkable. Baba kept 44 years of silence, and he said, and it’s not a direct quote, but I’ll sort of say what I can about what I remember. He said, you know, I’ve had enough of words, but we have a main room where we time to live them. And so he kept his silence and that was part of his universal work for humanity.

Rick: Yeah. So this, how developed is this Meher Farm Healing and Awakening Center? I mean, are you up and running? Can come there and, or is it still a work in progress or what?

Tree: Oh, it’s always a work in progress. But we have a main room where we have retreats. We’re on 17 acres and it’s magnificently surrounded by mountains. I have a healing room here where I do the body work. Yeah, We have dining over here. We all work in here and I set up two big bell tents to do extra work in. We have retreats, Rick, which is fantastic. You know, at five o’clock in the morning, we start with the universal prayer, and we meditate for an hour ’til six, and then at six, we’re down at the river, getting into the river in the dark, and the sun comes up while we’re in the river. And so we do a lot of work in nature out of our comfort zone a little bit. And we do TRE, we do community shamanic healing ceremonies. We do readings from the masters. So obviously I’m Meher Baba centric, but we include other masters as well in their readings. We have great retreats, yeah. We have really wonderful.

Rick: Yeah. Do mostly people come from nearby in Australia? Have you had people come from overseas yet?

Tree: No, I’ve only had Australians so far, yeah.

Rick: Okay. Maybe after this interview you’ll have some Yankees and Brits and whatnot flying down there. I mean, they could like combine it with a little tour of Australia or something if they want to do that, you know?

Tree: That’s it, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we’re looking to develop accommodation. There’s only two bedrooms here. John and I move into a tent when people come, so, and the rest of the people camp at the moment. So, a lot of it’s camping, and we would love to build accommodation. Yeah. It’s a little bit rustic, but it sounds like a beautiful experience. Yeah, there’s something about, you know, the immensity of the night sky. So even if you’re camping, you’re nicking out for a wee, and you’re seeing the stars, and you’re being part of nature, and it’s very opening. Like nature is another magnificent teacher, so we do partake of a lot of the natural world here to sort of help surface that natural part of ourselves.

Rick: That’s nice, yeah. I love camping. many months of it, if you add it all up. Irene and I used to go out west every summer for a month and just go to Colorado or Wyoming or Utah or one of these places and just camp and day hike every day for a month. It really resets the nervous system being out in nature like that.

Tree: Yeah, yeah, absolutely Rick. Like it can take a bit of time for people to settle, you know, from their busy lives, but yeah, everything slows down.

Rick: It does, I remember coming back from one of those one month camping trips and I was in line at a local restaurant and someone standing next to me that I don’t think I really even knew, said, “Wow, you look like you’ve been doing something beautiful.” You know?

Tree: Oh great, yeah. Yeah, it does, like we reflect ourselves in nature, the beauty of nature, the beauty of ourself and you know, there’s no distance, we submerge into it, we become one with it and how incredible is that? What an incredible supportive thing nature is for our systems.

Rick: It really is. Well is there anything that you’d like to cover that we haven’t thought about or talked about?

Tree: I do just want to share one thing about my healing work and working on Meher Farm.

Rick: Sure.

Tree: Part of the training Rick that I did, we had to do a breathwork journey. I had never done one before, and I did do a breathwork journey. And in the journey, I journeyed up through the galaxies and found myself in the void. So I was in the black void. It was very comfortable. It was beautiful. It was sort of like vacuum sealed and quiet. And I was in there, and in this vision, in came two of Meher Baba’s perfect masters, Babajan, Hazrat Babajan, a female perfect master and a Upasni Maharaj. And they were like carrying a lit diamond between them. And they handed the diamond to me. I didn’t, I don’t know what it signifies really, but it was very beautiful. And they said to me, they were quite curt, “Enough of this, you know, traveling to the galaxies. So I have, yeah, I didn’t choose to do the breath work, it was very enjoyable, but they were like, ‘Enough of this, you’ve done enough of this, you know, other sphere stuff. Get down there and get on with the work with the humans, with the people.’ Yeah, and I thought, OK, yeah. So I’m really sort of quite obedient to intuition. So, yeah, that was lovely. And I get on with it. So I am getting on with it. And in Baba’s bedroom, where I spent quite a bit of my time at his abode in Queensland, I got “Ring Irene and Rick and speak to Rick.”

Rick: Oh, okay, hey.

Tree: I got an interview and I went, “Okay.” So I got onto you and it was so funny because you scheduled me for the 11th of the 11th. So I thought, “Oh, how lovely, that’s the awakening number.” Again, it was sort of like this speeding up in my life. Like I’m 61, I think, and you know, there’s only this much left. So it’s like I can work on the bodies, you know? So come on people, it’s like, come on, come down. It’s like I’ve got a bit of time to help people work through their trauma. So that’s sort of exciting. And I also got told in Baba’s bedroom to buy these magnificent drawings behind me, which I’ve got six and I’m going to buy more the retreat centre, and they are by an artist called Diana Lepage, and she actually lives on Avatar’s Abode, and she was married to Bill Lepage, who was one of the Australian close disciples who helped set up that place. And she’s painted Baba and drawn Baba for most of her life, and, you know, I didn’t have the money, of course, but And Baba said, “Get those drawings. Get them sent.” And I’m obedient, “Yes, okay.” So yeah, so it seems like there’s a hastening here. Yeah.

Rick: Nice. Well, 61 isn’t that old. That’s about how old I was when I started Batgap. I think I had just turned 60 or something, and that was 15 years ago. So you’ve got some life left in you.

Tree: Got some work in me yet. Yeah. So it’s sort of exciting, like we’ve had it on a level, but Diana’s drawing’s coming, and it was like, get on to Irene and Rick.

Rick: We just had a cancellation too, and so it’s hard to get people at the last minute, but then we thought, oh, Tree, great, she’ll be flexible, so we can put her in.

Tree: And that was the rest of the story. I forgot that bit, Rick. Thank you. It’s like, Bob, I know, forget the 11th. It’s too far away now.

Rick: Yeah, maybe he made this other person cancel.

Tree: Baba Probably, yes, yes, like no, too long next week. Okay, let’s go. So that was good. Yeah.

Rick: That’s a teaching in itself is, I strongly have the feeling that, I mean, I don’t read too much into it, but I strongly have the feeling that everything is divinely orchestrated, and so I kind of like, I’m a little bit observant as to how things unfold, and if things happen a certain way, then I kind of read some significance into it. Like, okay, this is the way it’s unfolding, and so I should go with this. It’s more like, it’s kind of like life is this divine play in which I have, there’s a kind of the divine script and yet I also have a little bit of improvisational latitude within the script, you know, to sort of like play my role as best I see it fit as the things unfold.

Tree: Yeah, and it does become an unfolding, like I feel like you just follow the synchronicities, you just follow the flow.

Rick: Yeah.

Tree: A bit like going back to the athletes in flow, life, you know, is in flow, and so you think on the 11th of the 11th, how lovely, that’s nice. And it’s like, no, it’s next week. Oh, okay.

Rick: Yeah.

Tree: Yeah.

Rick: And it’s cool. I mean, you meet some person and it turns out that person is just who you needed to meet in order to like learn something or do something or whatever. I mean, this kind of stuff happens all the time.

Tree: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it’s sort of having that, if you can relax yourself down enough to read it to come. And then the person that made the question, you know, I hope a little bit of flow and ease comes their way too, the person that asked the question before.

Rick: The guy from South Africa, Ahmad.

Tree: Yeah. Yeah, get into a bit of the synchronicity if you just relax a little, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, I remember what Jesus said there, he said, “Seek and ye shall find, knock and the door shall be opened.”

Tree: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, and so it’s that fine line between, you know, putting in and relaxing.

Rick: Yeah, so really for the guy in South Africa, there’s a teacher named Brad Loughlin that I interviewed maybe a year ago, and he has a kind of a retreat center out in the bush with, you know, wild zebras walking around and stuff like that. So, you know, you might want to get in touch with him. You’ll find him on BatGap. Yeah. All right, Tree, well, thanks so much. I’ve really enjoyed connecting with you again. I feel like we’ve somehow been in touch frequently all these years, even though I don’t know if we have been, but it kind of seems like we have been, doesn’t it?

Tree: We’ve penned a few notes, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, it’s like you’re one of these soul sisters that I’ve gotten to know through BatGap and it’s a joy to know.

Tree: Yeah, you too, Rick, and Irene too. Lots of love to you both.

Rick: Yeah, already. Well, thank you for doing this and thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. And my next guest is a young fellow. We’ve got a couple really young guys lined up that, you know, usually I’m interviewing older people, and my audience is largely older. If I look at the YouTube analytics, it’s like, you know, most people are like in their 50s or 60s or something like that, but you know, it would be good to relate to a younger crowd too. So a couple of people came our way, were brought to our attention who just seemed like really gifted young people and with a great deal of spiritual maturity already, and they’re probably going to have quite an impact in life. So there’s an upcoming interviews page on batgap.com where you can check out what’s been scheduled and you’ll see who I’m referring to. And also on BatGap if you go there you can sign up to be notified by email every time there’s a new interview and I hope that if you haven’t already done so you’ll subscribe on YouTube. It helps the more people subscribe the more Google’s, or YouTube’s algorithm works to make the interviews visible to other people. Yeah. All right, Tree, thank you very much.

Tree: Great work, Rick and Irene, thank you.

Rick: Yeah, we’ll be in touch for the next 15 years or more. *laughter* (laughing) (upbeat music) Thank you.