718. Georgette Star

ended up on Awakening Process Facilitator, but even that doesn't sound true, but I'll take it for now. But when I really sat with, if I could choose a category, there would be no one else in that category, or maybe there would be, but it would be somewhat something like bowing down like a servant to the mystery.

Rick>> That's nice. Yeah, the reason we have categories is, you know, we have a categorical index on Bathgap and, you know, there's Buddhism and Hinduism and Judaism and psychedelics and therapists and creative artists and all kinds of different things. Obviously, a person could be in many categories. In fact, we did have people in three categories up until last year,

but times 700, that's over 2,000 listings on the page. It wasn't that helpful. So Irene went through the whole thing and tried to narrow them down to one category, and then I emailed everybody I had interviewed and said, "We had to choose just one, and would you like to change it? Let us know."

- I know, I was thinking, like, how could I, you know, if I could pick one category, okay, I am a teacher, I mean, that is a function, and there is spirituality embedded in what I teach, but to claim the title of spiritual teacher, that seems, at least for me, like bowing down to the mystery that nobody knows the deeper truth of ultimate reality.

Pete There's a great line toward the end of the Rig Veda, a rough paraphrase, something like, "From whence did this creation come?" He said, "The gods don't know because they were subsequent to creation." Perhaps Brahman or the highest god knows, or maybe he doesn't know. And if he doesn't know, maybe nobody knows. So, even the Rig Veda is saying this.

>>Rick: Yeah, that's cool. Well, I think it's a good attitude to have, don't you? Not to be cocksure of our beliefs and opinions and convictions and so on. >>Kate: Yeah, I like that symbol. I think it's called the orzo. >>Rick: Yeah, the snake biting its tail? >>Kate: Well, it's an open circle. >>Rick: Right. Oh yeah, the Zen thing with the brush stroke, yeah. >>Kate: I really love that symbol because it's like an invitation to always know there's

never a completion. It's always open to the mystery and open to, as we talked a little bit before we started our conversation recorded today, around the scientific method of just always looking at, I think you described it as everything is a working hypothesis. David That's right. Kirsten And the best of our knowledge are filtered through our most recent up-to-date conditioning that we're looking through.

David Some spiritual teacher, might have been Nisargadatta, I forget who said, "The bad news is you're always going to be in free fall, and the good news is there's no ground. You're never going to go splat."

It gets easier to trust that free fall, even though there's always going to be a biological response in the body to something that feels uncertain. I think fundamentalism of any sort is probably a reaction to the uncertainty and fear of the unknown. You know, you want certainty, and so you grasp onto something that somebody has told you,

and then as soon as you grasp onto some limited perspective and make it absolute, it clashes with every other perspective. So everybody else is wrong now, and I've got the best perspective here. They're all going to hell. I'm going to the special heaven. But it's obviously a very tenuous or indefensible position because it's not ultimate. And so, it's constantly going to be challenged. But if you take a God's eye view, what would God's perspective be? It would incorporate all perspectives.

Kirsten Yeah. Well, in the mapping system that my mom taught me that I'll share later, there's a perspective that looks at all these different realms of human development, and one of them is represented geometrically by the square or the number four, and that sense of becoming really stagnant within a structure, there's a certain point in the beginning where it can be helpful as a building block, but then when it becomes stagnant, we fall inside the square, and then

we're just looking at the walls, and there's no fresh air, there's no progress. - Yeah, I had a spiritual teacher who outlined what he called the fundamentals of progress, And they were stability, adaptability, integration, purification, and growth. And some of those qualities are kind of opposed to one another, like stability and adaptability. If something is stable, how can it change? How can it adapt? But then there's integration.

Perhaps its stability and adaptability can be integrated with one another. And then purification, you know, you need to continually purify the mirror or the vehicle through which this is experienced, and then all of that results in growth. I love that. I mean, when we talk about having to have concessions for language, it's like, language is so binary, right? It's like this or that, and that's not reality. So, all of those

things can be simultaneously true and work together as an integrated whole. And old systems eventually do have to crack open though, in order for transformation and evolution to happen. Rick Yeah, speaking of things can be simultaneously true, Nisargadatta again said that the ability to appreciate paradox and ambiguity is a sign of spiritual maturity. Julie Yes, absolutely. I feel that.

Rick Which means, paradox, things can be paradoxically opposed or incompatible with one another, but both can be true. Like search is a candy mint, search is a breath mint, that kind of thing, the search paradox. >> Yes, I heard of a t-shirt that was like a pair of ducks.

>> What do you think about what we're just talking about in light of what's happening in society today in which there seems to be greater polarity than perhaps in our nation's history and you know the tensions that that causes and how people seem to be seeing things from such diametrically opposed perspectives? I mean I think that anything that happens in society is symptomatic of something happening at a deeper level. So, what do you think this signifies?

Katie Well, once again, I'm bowing to the mystery here because it's beyond human comprehension, but I do believe there's like these compensatory counter-movements on the journey of evolution that you can only see from big, vast cycles of time, and there's something, in a sense, talking about the old structures, like they have to

get to the breaking point before a new possibility can come in. You know, I was reflecting upon why has my journey somewhat emphasized the sacred feminine as being that principle and humanity as being so important to strengthen. And I have always been drawn to the Baha'i metaphor of humanity as the great bird. The Baha'i metaphor describes one wing as being the masculine and

one wing being the feminine for men and women. And I don't see it quite so literally. I think of more like this vast cosmic bird flying through the universe and the masculine side, which is not a gender, it's one side of the polarity, right? It's the yang energy and Taoism. It's just been more strengthened. So, that wing is stronger than the feminine side, and so the bird is just

spiraling out of control. And that's kind of where we are right now. There's some upsurges of effort, right, with all these people on the path of spiritual awakening to connect to those more internal ways of connecting to self and others and compassion and empathy and all of that. we just haven't reached that point where we're coming back into some kind of balance.

Pete Yeah, some ancient traditions and even modern prognosticators feel like, you know, we really have to go through a almost catastrophic collapse of social structures and order and society in order to rise to a new, kind of a more enlightened world. Do you view it that way or do you think we can transition without too much cataclysm? I do have a hopeful, optimistic focus. I do believe in the soul of humanity as being

on the journey to wholeness and to more balance. I know it's sketchy and challenging, and right now we just happen to be in one of those really tense moments politically, right, with the elections coming up and we feel all of that tension. It reminds me a lot of the contraction process of the birthing, you know, the labor process where there's these incredible moments of tension and it's painful and then eventually there's a release and a relaxation and something

can open up. So I tend to feel more like we're in that birthing process. The soul of humanity is in of labor process, and that there's enough God-force in awakened humans to help us move ultimately to something better. I don't know what it's going to look like along the way, though, right now. It certainly isn't very pretty. Rick Yeah. So, you're thinking maybe we won't need

a cesarean. The birth is going to go successfully. Well, as you say, people will be watching this for years and they'll look back and they'll know what actually happened, but you and I at this point are like, "Oh my God, what's going to happen?" I know. You know, something I just thought was interesting, I'm going to talk later about my mom and her teachings in the Nine Pathways mapping system, but I took a look at the charts

of the two candidates. Interesting, okay. The numerology charts. Yes. Just a real brief look, but it was really fascinating to me just looking at Kamala's middle name. Do you know what her middle name is? No, I know her first name means "Lotus." In fact, I have a friend who has a t-shirt that says "Lotus for POTUS." Well, her middle name is "Davy." Oh, Davy. I heard that. Which means "Goddess."

Just saying. There's little signs, little sparks of life coming up in different places, in different ways, and I don't know what it all means, but I can't help but notice. I also know that it doesn't help the world for us to dwell on what is beyond our control. What helps the world, how we can contribute to the creation of a more balanced world, a healthier planet and human population is to do what we came here to do, which is exactly what you're doing.

You and Irene and all of your team, you're choosing to use your creative life force to contribute. I love that and I also really appreciate that you're a little farther down the road in your age.

But then at least another 30 years or so has been teaching meditation or doing spiritual stuff which was meaningful to me, or BATGAP which is meaningful, and it doesn't feel like work at all. Irene has to say, "Rick, it's Sunday. Get away from the computer. Stop working. something else. I think, "What working? This isn't working. This is like exciting. This is fun." That's just a real example or role model, right? Of like tapping into what, where the

world's need and our personal joy can meet. Our personal sense of fulfillment. And that's going to be really unique for everyone. And not everyone is going to have like an external sense of big purpose, but it will be small, in small ways every day. And the way they they show up and shine, and I think that's what we most need right now, to make it through these tumultuous times, is to stay focused on where the light is, where we can bring the light and be the light.

Rick Yeah, I'm reminded of Joseph Campbell saying, "Follow your bliss." I don't think he meant, "If it feels good, do it," which is what we went by in the 60s. It's more like, bliss is actually different than happiness or sensory gratification. a subtler value. And I think that the more in tune with the force of evolution we are,

the more bliss tends to resonate in our experience. Even if we're doing something that externally might not seem like a spiritual occupation or something, one can take the long view and be patient. Someone said, "All will be well in the end, and if all is not well, it's not the end." I was in the grocery store the other day and I saw this quintessential elderly woman who was decked out.

She had her little suit on, she had her makeup, she had her hair perfectly, and she came up to me and she said, "Excuse me, excuse me." She was very direct. She said, "How old are you?" I said, "I'm 66." And she said, "Well, I really like your coat and I love your braid. Don't ever stop putting your hair in a braid." And I'm like, "Okay." And then she says, "I have made it my life purpose to show up wherever I am every day

and say a good word to somebody."

It wasn't going to be easy, but I guess He resigned Himself to that fate being in kind of the divine order of things. Yeah, and the awakening process isn't always easy. And actually the aging process isn't always easy, especially in a world that is so programmed towards anti-aging. There's trailblazers out there who are giving us a new vision of possibility for what that can look like, and I want to be a part of that.

Well, this would be a good segue to talking about the Women's Right Documentary Project that you're working on. Let's talk about the evolutionary value of, let's say, the last quarter of one's life. people might think, "Well, it's all over. I'm not going to have the kind of fun I used to have," you know, or anything. "I'm too old for that." But this could be the best time of one's life,

couldn't it? - Oh, absolutely. You know, I think of like a rose that its petals are just glorious in its midlife, and then all the juice and the medicine goes into the hip, into the rose hip. And so, it's actually our most potent time because we've had all of these life experiences, and we process through so much and we have, if we have been processing through things, we do have some wisdom and the capacity to be a steady state of resilience and presence for those who are more

in the turbulence of their younger years and their awakening process. You know, my perspective is it's actually our time of ultimate power and our culture doesn't teach that, but there are cultures who do.

do and have and what might it look like if every child from the time they were born were given this impression through the media, through images, through stories, that the elder phase of their life is going to be a time of incredible well-being and vitality and opportunities because they will have more time. Hopefully, they'll have more time and more resources, they'll have more space because they've done a lifetime, to be able to become mentors, conscious mentors, to show up in new ways.

You know, I think of my mom again as an example of someone who even up to when she could no longer be, like she worked until she was 78 in the marketplace as a physical therapist and she continued her spiritual practice of awakening and she became rather luminous. And when she wasn't able to physically contribute in that way, she started collecting adult godchildren.

Anyone that she felt was missing, she called it the mother to the motherless, missing that really focused support and spiritual support. And even though she couldn't physically help them, she could talk with them and pray with them and that was her form of being able to contribute. she did that for people just talking on the phone all the way till her last week of her life.

Rick That's great. I'm thinking it's more blessed to give than to receive, but perhaps more blessed because it's actually more enjoyable if you can do something like what your mother was doing. Being on the giving end of a situation like that is very gratifying and evolutionary. You become a conduit for the force of evolution actually when you step into a role that is conducive to people's evolution. Yeah, absolutely. And also skills. She had some skills and they became very fine-tuned.

We all have that. We all have that ability. But not everyone becomes wise. Some people just get old. Yeah, it kind of depends on how you live your life, what you do during it. Yeah, so I can tell you a little bit more about how the project came to be. this lifetime has been informed by a series of visionary experiences and dreams and

This one came out of a vision But that vision started Around the time I turned 65 when I started getting all of these social security and the propaganda All these messages coming in. Okay, you're old now and I was so surprised I really didn't think I had those beliefs until I hit that age Until I started having to make those changes because I suddenly felt like my motivation dropped off and I just

Started thinking like oh don't buy anything new. You need to start giving away your things This is like a subconscious like thing going on in my mind and it was pulling me away from life actually and I remembered that when my mom was in her 70s and she told me once she was so afraid that people would find out how old she was because she was still working.

So she told me, and for some reason I had the presence of mind to say, "Mom, that doesn't sound right, and would you like to have a ceremony, a rite of passage?" And I only knew about this because I'd heard someone tell me a story about having a celebrated rite of passage when she began her elder cycle.

So my mom came up to Oregon, I gathered a bunch of friends, she didn't know any of them, and she told her story and she got the feedback and everybody gave her little gifts and we created what was called a grandmother bundle with all of these little objects to represent how we see her, how we want her to see herself. And I swear to God, it was like a 24-hour change. She went from being like, "Oh, I don't want anybody to know," and being ashamed,

to being very proud of it. And she like, you know, put a staff in the ground, "I'm an elder now." and she presided. And I watched that and I saw that and I wasn't thinking of that for myself, but I'm having those negative thoughts about myself. And I went to Hawaii for my birthday. I was very blessed to have that experience. I was meditating at a peace garden and I had this

luminous visionary experience. And this is hard to describe going back to words and all of that, the concessions of language, but there was a gathering of luminous beings around me that

somehow I knew they were called the pearls. And they were basically inviting me into a rite of passage to say yes to take on a rite of passage that would be documented for others to see as an example of how we can make it through that negativity into a new possibility through connecting with the deeper truth of who we are, which of course is the soul stream or the leg. I wasn't so sure I was up for that, but I felt the call and when I came out of the meditation

and I wandered out through the gift store, I saw a pearl. There was a pearl necklace and I just looked at the pearl and I knew if I took it home, it would mean I was saying yes. And I'm wearing it today. This is my pearl. I said yes to having that, to be the stand-in, to step in, to represent all women, all humans, because this is not a gender issue. The transition into empowerment at aging and have that documented in a film. And it started as an idea that just came through in spirit,

and I just started talking to a few people about it, and suddenly it started gaining momentum and people started coming in and a year later there was a film crew and a whole project has manifested out of that and we're just entering the post-production phase. I have found it really fascinating in this lifetime because I can see how many times this has happened over my life where when I'm listening and trusting and acting on that inner guidance and knowing something

happens in the outer world. So if you could summarize in a few sentences what the main purpose of this film is. The main purpose is to bring awareness to this topic and to contribute to the cultural narrative and to present another possibility of what it could look like and also what we need in order to make that transition in a positive way. And the thematic backdrop is actually a rite of passage ceremony, which includes some of the pieces that we all have

to face, kind of being symbolically enacted. We've all heard that more traditional Indigenous societies value older people. They don't just lock them away in homes where you can't see them, they become the spiritual guides for the community. I see your film as being a contribution to restoring that value. We were talking earlier about how society might go through a big tumultuous transition but might end up in a much better place after that. I think this will be one of

the characteristics of that much better place. Kind of the re-establishment of the value of older people and the critical role really that they have to play. You don't just put them out the pasture and out of sight, out of mind. They really have a critical role to play, which if they don't play, society is impoverished as a result.

- Absolutely. And these rites of passage are a way to stop, to pause, and to acknowledge and to be conscious about stepping into that role or into that phase in a way that feels empowered and having other people reflect that back and to confirm it. It's cool that you do a ceremony for it too, because you know, we have baptisms, we have graduations, we have weddings, we have ceremonies at various stages of our lives, but who does ceremonies for, you know, becoming an older person?

I guess they give you a gold watch if you've been working at the company long enough, but for the most part, there's no traditional society-wide ceremony when you turn a certain age, 65 or whatever. this is a good time for me to just kind of give you a little snapshot of what that was like. There was an elder who's farther down the road from me who was going to be the one to initiate me into elderhood. There was a community of men, women, boys, and girls that gathered.

The ceremony started, everyone had kind of passed through an arbor and added their touch to it. So they put flowers on the arbor and then they found their seats. And then the elder walked beside me to take my place and I found that really beautiful to not be alone on that walk like there was someone to show me what it could look like moving farther down the road There were a few other phases to this ceremony. So I found my spot

The first part of the ceremony was I held him. I called it looking in the mirror. And so a little boy Held a mirror. He kind of held it. It was a mirror that belonged to my mom

and he kind of held it right here at his chest. It's just how it worked out. He kneeled down in front of me and he held this mirror to me and my intention was to look in the mirror and look at all the wrinkles and look at all the things and call out what's challenging about this part of the journey and what I anticipate are the challenges about this part of the journey.

But actually what happened instead, Rick, is that right at that moment that he put the mirror there, the sun came up over the trees and a big burst of light went onto the mirror and it reflected back

into my face. And it was just like, "Okay, that's the deeper truth." All of those limiting ideas are something that I've been taught or I've seen role models and they're not really the truth. And so, I put that mirror down and that was one phase of the ceremony. And the next phase was recognizing that the journey through a lifetime we pass through different seasons and phases.

But in a sense, we never really lose connection with all of those different facets. So, for example, there was a girl who came up to represent the innocence and the enthusiasm of the child archetype, and she blew bubbles and all the children blew bubbles and there's bubbles everywhere. You know, we felt that. And then we hugged. And that was like to represent the merging and the reintegration of that. You know how they say you go back to where you started at the end of your life

if you're lucky. You know to reclaim that joyful present aliveness of just being here and now and excited about what creative opportunity there might be. And so there was an integration of the child. The next was a mother with two children that came up and she was to represent the season of our life that's and this is non-gendered really where it's all about the selfless service. And then we had an integration of that.

These are not the phases I'm in anymore, but they're still in me and they're in all of us as archetypes. And then the midlife person. This was a CEO, a woman who's a CEO of her company and she's in that phase of her life where she has to persevere. Persevere, keep going, keep at it. It's a time of strength and perseverance.

I remember that woman that I used to be where it was so motivated by the marketplace and work in the world and you know, we hugged and integrated and then the last one was the elder and so Just the acting out this opportunity. We have to become whole and complete As we age into that sage function Because when I really go deep into what's true about what it means to be an elder for me I don't really identify with it. Like I don't say I am an elder really

if I do, those words don't really ring true. It's more like, eldering is a function, it's a way of being that I can go in and out of when it's called for, but I choose to be available to be called for that and to respond to the call when life presents an opportunity or I create an opportunity. Pete Did you choreograph that whole ceremony? Kirsten It was created by a council of women who I formed when I first received this inspiration because I knew I couldn't create it on my own.

And in fact, that's one of the wisdom pearls that I have gathered in this lifetime. It's just no fun to do anything on one's own, really. Collaboration, at least for how I'm organized, is what brings the juice and the joy. So I just want to be a part of that process. And I was willing to be the one who stands in to represent that woman or that human. Yeah, it's more of a metaphor than a thing. So, I helped to collaborate on that, but there were others who designed the ceremony.

- Nice. Okay, let's turn on the Wayback Machine and talk about your childhood, your adolescence, your early life, and, you know, some of the things you've gone through. I get the impression that you're one of these people who had some pretty interesting stuff going on, even from an early age. - Well, you know, because I have the perspective of the soul map, which I'll talk about later, I see every human

being as being so unique in what they come in with and what they're here for. And I feel like I came in with a lot of development already in some areas. And I think I just woke up really early. So I just want to describe briefly that I had many ecstatic mystical experiences as a very young child, I would never have been able to talk about that or describe that to you, but I just remember laying on the cement in the summertime with water on the cement and the warmth of the sun and the

water and the body and this sense of just being part of everyone and everything. So undifferentiated well-being and many experiences like that, being underneath a tree and just smelling the sap and the senses seem to be gateways to this explosion of love and presence. And that went on

until I was around 10 and then I had a like a massive contraction and my dad had a major heart attack and you know we thought he was going to die. Fortunately he didn't die but he also was never well again, but my sense of being safe or secure, that freedom to feel safe enough to just blend with everyone and everything really shut down for me. But something else opened up, and this became my search for the divine, for God. I do remember so vividly in all the Bible school

classes and everything, the only thing that made sense to me was this idea that God is love. Like, that seems so true and so logical, but I didn't feel it in the church. I didn't feel it really very much from any of the people. I just didn't, there was no aliveness. So I asked my parents if they would take me to other people's churches. So at age 12, I began my search as a seeker. And, you know, they took me to Glide Memorial Church. That's a big church in San Francisco,

a Buddhist monastery. Somehow I got into a Mormon situation, I'm not sure how. Pete They showed up at your door. Kristin The one that really, really made a difference, changed my life. My mom took me to an Hindu guru in Berkeley, California, and I was 12 years old, and we took the bus. They were chanting, they were singing and chanting and the music, I'm like, "Wow, this is so cool!" You know, I love that part. And then they took me to see the master.

And he didn't speak English, but someone was translating, and he had a peacock feather, and he just hit my forehead with a peacock feather. They gave me a mantra, and the instruction was to go home and at night to put your attention right here and to say the mantra. And so I did. But But before we left, we had to wait for the bus and I was so filled with energy, I couldn't stand still. I was like running back and forth while my mom was waiting for the bus, just filled with life.

And that's when I knew there was something going on. There's something here. So I would get in my little bunk bed at night and I would concentrate here and I'd say the mantra and I'd get these like painful headaches. But for some reason, I persevered and sometimes that would pop open, and when it would pop open, that's just some way to describe this, I would just go back to that feeling of the waves of well-being and beyond the words to describe.

And this was going on in my little bunk bed for years.

Yeah, so throughout my whole childhood, but around 12 when I was old enough to really be paying attention. My mom was in the kitchen often with my godmother Jane, who was also quite a bit older than my mom so she was a mentor for my mom.

And Jane had taught my mom a numerologically based mapping system and they would be having conversations, they were reading charts of neighbors and friends and relatives and having these conversations about the metaphysical perspective on what a life is all about. both of my parents were metaphysically oriented. They were both Rosicrucians and they were both really compassionate human beings and I just was kind of born into that field.

Pete The Bhagavad Gita says what a good fortune it is to be born in a family of yogis. Kristi Yeah, well, I would say they were more like wounded healers. Pete But yeah, they were cool people to be raised by.

Kristi Yes, and I didn't know any different, right? so I never even thought I'd like to learn this. It was just a conversation going on in the background of my life and later it became more of something that came to the front. So that meditation you learned when you were 12 and you got a mantra, you kept doing that throughout your adolescence?

Yeah, and I also continued to have these visionary or intuitive impulses, knowings of things that just continued on and on, small things to big things, that I, for some reason, knew to listen to and trust and act on.

That was kind of my conclusion once I took drugs quite a bit for a year before I learned to meditate. But after I learned to meditate, I never did them again. But my feeling was, "Hey, I feel better all the time than drugs made me feel temporarily, So why would I do that anymore? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I see all these poor people taking fentanyl and all this stuff. You know, it's like, there's a better way.

Whatever chemicals these drugs are able to trigger in your brain, your brain can produce them on its own and much more enjoyably than introducing some artificial substance. Now, that's not to say that psychedelics don't have value under certain circumstances, but still, we're capable of tremendous bliss through our own neurophysiology. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I wonder why it is that we have, many of us have a resistance to that.

Even though we know that potential is there, we make other choices. I think to a great extent it might be due to lack of proper guidance. I mean, you had really good guidance as a child, given who your parents were, and their open-mindedness taking you to all these different things. The average kid doesn't get that. You know, I didn't have a clue that this kind of thing existed until I was 17, and it took me a while

to find something that I could really do. So I finally started when I was 18. But, you know, ideally, there should be an introduction to this in grammar school appropriate to the age level of the children. And there are some schools which do that, but it's pretty rare. And if there's ever any attempt to introduce it into the public schools, it usually gets shut down by religious fundamentalists. - It's really, really true. Well, I do feel really blessed. My godmother,

Jane also had a guru. His name was Charan Singh. I vaguely remember hearing about him. I was like 14 when I started going to these groups and I was just so drawn to anyone who was talking about spirituality that was a little different than the way that it was being portrayed to me in our family church. So I actually was initiated by that guru, which is,

I never saw him. He was like somewhere on the other side of the planet And also there were all these rules All the things that you had to not do in order to be pure enough, right?

And I was doing all that stuff, you know, it's like okay quit everything everything I mean some of it was just ridiculous like food restrictions like pour any honey you have in the house out You know celibacy was definitely on the you know like there were so many things to be pure and I just wanted to be pure enough to know God.

I'm afraid that happens pretty often. I will never know because I did have one of those visionary dreams where I was walking down the street and he was walking down the other side of the street and we just went like this. There was no contact. Interesting. A question came in from somebody. This is Paul Diaz in the United States. How does an older person work through

feelings of resignation when facing the physical challenges of aging. The pull to just sit on the couch seems to be intensifying as I age, but at a deeper level, I know it's not in my ultimate best interest." That is such an important, good question. Just asking the question, I feel like questions are like keys because it opens up the cosmic URL or whatever, the Google in the sky. It It just opens up the possibility that there is to ultimately become the answer to that question.

So, just asking it is like inviting an exploration of that feeling. That feeling of, "Well, I might as well just stop or give up and investigate to inquire to discover what that really is about." So I can give an example of one that came up for me recently. I used to love to dance and I would go to like group dancing like ecstatic dance things and this was years ago and I really Loved it And then kovat happened and none of that was possible. And then when I thought about going again

I I just found like resistance like i've been saying I want to do this now for years. It's like why am I not doing this? I just want to sit here. I don't want to go And when I really tuned in what I discovered is that there was a a belief under there that was i'm too old I'm too old like a woman my age should not be there's a certain way that you're supposed to look There's a certain way you're supposed to behave

And so I discovered there was a limiting belief that now I could question. Is that really true? And do I really have to hold that as true? So self-inquiry and Like going into the emotion and discovering what that might be. Yeah One thing I would say to paul is there's a saying Sitting is the new smoking. As I mentioned earlier, I'm 75. I'm pretty physically active and I really feel like, you know, I sit so much at the computer when I want to actually accomplish things that I

can only accomplish at the computer. And personally, I just get kind of stir crazy if I sit here too long. I got to do something. So I go and walk four or five miles in the woods every morning, and I'm usually listening to stuff or talking to people on the phone, but it's great exercise. It's hilly, you know, so I get a lot of exercise. Before that, I was playing pickleball for a few years before COVID struck. So I don't know what Paul's physical condition is or his age, but my

personal recommendation is get off the couch, do something. If you're bored by just walking, listen to a podcast, listen to Buddha at the Gas Pump while you're walking and find something you enjoy that doesn't have to be walking, it can be all kinds of things, and just build it up. It's so good for your health, it'll add years to your life. I think my resting heart rate is in the low

50s and my blood pressure is 100 over 60 or something like that. Wow, that's amazing. And maybe some of that is genetic, I don't know. But in any case, I'm not bragging, I just want to set an example to say that the oldest man to climb to the summit of Mount Everest was 81. And I saw an article about some lady in her 90s who was doing triathlons, which are these really intense physical things. So, yeah, use it or lose it, man.

the motivation to just try moving. And, you know, it is really true that movement is life, even if it's the smallest movement, it's possible. And there's so many resources online for like online yoga and just simple things that are designed for people who don't have as much mobility. So there's lots of resources. Sure, it all depends on what your condition is. I mean, you could join a square dancing group or you could play pickleball. Pickleball is great. A lot of

older people do it and it's fun. It makes you feel good. It actually creates endorphins and stuff in your system and helps with purification of the system. Anyway, we don't want to harp on that too much. But one thing I thought about though is, let's say a person just feels tired and they feel lethargic and all. You know how you said when you were 12 and you learned to meditate, all of a sudden

you had so much energy you were running back and forth at the bus stop. Sometimes people find if they do an effective meditation practice that they start to get a lot more energy and they find themselves becoming more dynamic. There's a verse in the Bhagavad Gita which is "Yoga is skill in action" and the whole teaching of that book was that going into the transcendent can actually be

a preparation for dynamic activity and can make you more dynamic. If you want to shoot an arrow You can't just hold it on the bow and let go of it, it's just going to flop to the ground. But if you pull it back on the bow, it'll shoot with great speed. And meditation can be like that, where you bring your mind to a state of silence, and then when you come back to activity, you just feel energized and you're more motivated to do stuff.

It's a good question though, and I'm glad that it was brought to our focus just a little bit today, because that is one of the perils and pitfalls of the programming around aging. And everything just gets smaller and smaller and smaller, and it just doesn't have to be that way. And we all have to find our own way. Yeah. Okay. Another one of your notes here was initiation of motherhood. Oh, okay. Going back again. We're reeling back to the earlier life.

I feel that the experience of conception and pregnancy and labor and birth and then responsibility for parenting and mothering was also a huge initiatory process for me because suddenly my life was no longer about me. It was about being of service and that started for me. I had my son when I was 18. So I started that really young of recognizing every choice I

made had an effect on someone else and always had to be taken into consideration. And so So I feel like it took me immediately onto the path of service and also the recognition of the miraculous experience of having a human body and having a female body and, you know, just the miracle of it all.

Yeah. Just as you're doing a whole thing about the evolutionary value of the older phase of one's life, whatever you want to call it, I imagine one could make a documentary and perhaps some have been made about the evolutionary value of the motherhood phase.

There's a lady I interviewed a couple times in New Zealand named Lucy Grace, and she had this young child, and the child was, you know, she was used to this nice meditative routine, you know, and all of a sudden she has this kid that won't let her sleep or do anything, and she's like, "Oh my God!" But she very clearly got the message, "This is your spiritual practice now. Get into it. Take advantage of it."

Yes I remember lucy and her daughter and just absolutely like if we keep rolling it back to earlier For a girl her first really big initiatory experience is with her first menstruation and that has been for some reason felt called to Acknowledge these rites of passage for women at these different ages and phases and in fact for more than 15 years of my life, I was dedicated to and created a program called Maiden Spirit

that was all about helping girls to experience the conscious and celebrated rite of passage at their first noon experience, but also to prepare them for becoming conscious young women in a way that gave them access to their wisdom source within. So it was a spirituality and rites of passage program for girls. And that started because I was working with women and they had daughters, and they kept asking me, "Would you do something like this for our girls?"

And at that time, I'm like, "Well, I'm not qualified for that. I don't have that experience.

I have a son, not a daughter. Thank you for trusting me with that, but I'm not going to do that and then I had another one of those visionary experiences again in Hawaii and this time I was camping at a ancient village site in Maui and I had another really profound experience of being a child, being a little girl and being chased into a cave and it was really scary and somehow I found my way out of the cave and I was hiding underneath a banyan tree and that person left and then I started

to hear the sound of like tinkling bells, thousands and thousands of bells. And out of that same cave came a light, a beautiful light. And then out of the light emerged this tall woman. And she's just kind of beckoned to me and I followed her into the cave and she took me down into the cave into a cavern and it was really beautiful. And I felt really safe. And she said, "This isn't the way it should be. And somehow I knew when she said that, not feeling safe, not feeling safe as a girl,

and not feeling good about myself as a girl. And then I don't remember what happened. It was like something went dark. I don't remember it, but I knew when I came out of it, when I woke up or my eyes opened up, I felt so empowered and so happy, so glad to be myself, so alive. And then she said to me, "Now, I want you to go out and bring the other girls back to me." And that was my instruction to create that program, to create a place where I could bring the girls to have that experience,

to support them in having that experience. And that became the visionary inspiration and instruction that turned into Maiden Spirit. That's cool. You have some pretty amazing visions. That was all just like in a meditative session? Amazing, wow. What do you think when you hear the statistics these days about all the kids, especially young girls, committing suicide and they're all addicted to social media and they're so concerned about what people are saying

about them on social media? There's an information overwhelm now that kids have that we didn't have when we were that age, and it's taking a toll. What would be your advice to young girls or to their parents or whatever about that particular thing? It's very concerning, you know, the dark

side of technology. In fact, I was just talking to a young school counselor and she was telling me that her girls that are like age 12 or so, they all do TikToks and they do like their morning routines And their morning routines involve 15 different products and they're asking their mothers for retinol and

other anti-aging products at the age of 12

And I'm like, wow, what is that all about? And she said well now because we're on you know, the social media is everything It's all about your face So there's like this incredible need to look a certain way and it is very concerning I think it's really up to the parents To recognize that they need to have limits but also to find alternative opportunities for their children To be in environments where they're having an alternative type of experience in education

And there are programs like that. I know maiden spirit was specifically designed for that And when I started that work, there was hardly anything For girls like that and now there's many many programs i'm not in touch with what they are at this moment but there are resources and I think it has to be really intentional. Yeah, maybe this would be hard for a 12-year-old or a 13-year-old, but eventually, if you're fortunate, you come to the realization that you are so much more than your body.

I don't mean to keep talking about myself, but I'm sometimes so oblivious to my body that, you know, Irene says, "Have you combed your hair this week?" or, you know, "Do you realize how ridiculous that outfit looks that you're wearing?" I think, "Oh, okay, I don't And I think when I was younger, I also was kind of a basket case, but I was very hyper concerned You know aware of it and how how nerdy I was or whether my hair looked good

Or you know whether I had zits on my face or stuff like that. I Hopefully you grow out of that stuff I know that there have been cases of you know Beautiful movie stars who just fall into a deep deep depression when they start to lose their beauty So, I think the normal spiritual development process, I think, should enable a person to realize the truth of the matter, which is that we are way more than our physical body.

The spiritual teachings all say that, you are so much more than your body, but it doesn't just have spiritual significance, it has kind of practical significance for the way one feels throughout life, our social interactions and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean the perennial questions like who am I, that deep question, that for me opened up when I was 12.

It began and because of that I began to access resources, right, that pointed back to that deeper truth that we are so much more than we appear to be and the body is an incredible blessed vessel, an instrument, but it's not who we are. But the world keeps telling you that it is. And so, it takes a tremendous amount of mental and spiritual strength to counteract those forces. Pete Yeah, the body is a vehicle, like your car. It's nice to have a car that works well, but you are not your car.

Kirsten Yeah, absolutely. So, somehow, so interesting, like we're going back and forth, like there's no linear flow, but I can see there's like this thread that runs through from the beginning of my life until now. And it's taken different forms of expression, but it always has that common thread of remember the deeper truth of who you are and what this life really is. And when we forget to reach out to someone who's established in that knowing to reconnect and re-stabilize again.

I think another thing about all this is the whole fear of death thing. I mean, speaking of aging as we get old. I don't know how it is for most older people. Maybe you would know because you've been studying this and making a movie about it, but does fear of death become more acute as most people get older? Obviously, it would seem that a spiritual orientation would help to ameliorate that. Katie Well, that has been, I haven't done a lot

of research, but that has been my experience so far. That yeah, those who have a direct connection have developed the resources and the skills and the capacities to be able to trust the

unknown, to be able to step into the unknown. And because we don't know what that's going to be, how that will be, cultivating that sense of trusting one's ability, like you said, to free fall, but there's no ground. It becomes much more of like an anticipatory, I can't wait, almost like I'm looking forward to that.

This is tough being here in the body and there are inevitable, there's just different kinds of challenges at each of these ages and stages, these different rites of passage in human development. There's just different challenges, but the same skills and capacities that we can develop will help us to meet those challenges. Meditation, just stilling, getting quiet and tapping in.

You know, that was something I felt was so important teach those children and the curriculum was the first thing we talked about, you know, the real you. And I would take them on a guided journey to meet their inner wisdom source. That's where I learned that the wise man, the wise woman, the wise one is an archetype because those children

actually know. They already know. So many of them, what now we might call the elder, the wise elder, they already have it inside and they can connect to it and they can get their own information and knowledge and be guided by that inner resource. And it doesn't, you know, that doesn't end. Pete Yeah, that's important too. I mean, on the death thing, there's that saying, "Die before you die," which I think means get to that level of life that is beyond the manifest,

which is eternal and immortal and so on. And most of the people I know who've had near-death experiences, I've interviewed a lot of them, and they're like, completely obliterates the fear of of death because they've had a glimpse of something that's so marvelous. Not that they're in a hurry to die, but when it happens, no big deal.

But this thing you just said about the young people finding this inner guidance, this relates to what we were just saying about social media, how people are so influenced by, they call them social influencers, you know, "I'm an influencer." But what kind of influence are a lot of these people exerting on young people?

I think the ability to have greater self-determination and autonomy and less, not only young people, but it seems like a huge swath of our society these days is easily brainwashable, and being able to be more centered in oneself and less permeable, less influenced by external stimuli is a critical need in our day and age. and agree more. You know, I talked a little bit about the nine pathways of the soul.

Those are realms of human development and this is one of the realms of human development is being able to withdraw from outer focus to discover all that is within. - Yeah. - And eventually that is often described as the scientist who is willing to ask the questions and explore to discover the answer. But then there's a point where the scientist can't find the answer by looking outside and asking anyone or anything and turns and faces the mystery and becomes a mystic.

Rick Nice. Did you have a guru other than Muktananda? There was a point here he said, "Leaving my guru." Julie That was the first one, Charan Singh. Rick Oh, right, that guy, yeah. Julie Yeah, leaving him was scary because I was still believing that God is out there. And like I said in the beginning, these progressive openings and shocks and awakenings, and then

I'd fall back into like God's out there and I'm separate. Right? Like a toggle switch, I'd have these expansions and I'd fall back to feeling like I'm separate and I'm in charge and going back and forth and back and forth. But there was one big opening that happened for me about five years ago, and I just want presence it because when we started our conversation, I talked about the mountain and having less people

to be able to talk with or communicate with, and this happened for me. I was on my way to a retreat with Shakti Katarina Magi, who I believe. Ricky Oh yeah, I know Shakti. I interviewed her. Debra Yes, she's a wonderful non-dual teacher. I really like her feminine expression of that. and I was following my GPS, right? I'm following my GPS, although my intuition is saying, "Don't do this. Don't go this way. Don't go this way." And I didn't listen. I have no idea. I feel like I was

on, you know, logging roads, kind of. It took me the fastest route. And over the Santa Cruz Mountains up to Mount Madonna, it's in Santa Cruz, it's a retreat center. I didn't realize I was this close but maybe it was like two or three miles and it's windy like this and there's no room for two cars and there's blind curves and I'm being careful but all of a sudden and there's a wall of mountain right here so there's nowhere to go and there was a truck coming right at me and it's right into me.

It hit you? Yeah it hit me. Wow. It was like my worst fears being like alone in a deserted area Being in a car accident by myself all these things that I've had in the past that were I was afraid of happened But what also happened is that? Okay, my car smashed into the mountain the guy stops. He comes out and

All I remember is he was Mexican and he had a Guadalupe gold charm right here. I'm looking at his charm I'm looking at this Guadalupe and he's talking to me and all the sudden It was like I suddenly lost my sense of individuation. I totally felt him completely as myself, the mountain, my car, the human sitting there, crunched and traumatized. It all happened all at once. And then, I don't know how this worked out, but somehow my car was somewhat drivable.

And the guy, I think he was high on pot and he didn't give me his real license. It was sketchy. somehow I drove my car shaking and rattling to the retreat center and I get there. Of course, my car had to be towed from there, but I never left that state. But my body was traumatized. And so I walk into my room, I have a roommate, I've never met her before. I just said, I was

just in a car accident. She goes, I'm a somatic trauma therapist, so let me help you. So she immediately put her hands on me and my body trembled and shook and did all this stuff. and then I went on with the retreat. I've never been the same. Really? That's interesting. I mean, so that was a watershed moment and things have never been the same since. Very interesting.

It's been difficult to express or communicate and for a few years I really needed things like Buddha at the gas pump and a few other people that I could talk to because my experience was so out of the ordinary. It was as if, like at night, I'd be laying in bed and I couldn't tell where I was. I couldn't tell where the ceiling was or the floor. I just felt like I was all of that. That sounds lovely, but it was really scary.

It took a while to reorient It was a little challenging and now it's like there's a silence and a stillness and an emptiness Like when I came out of that rite of passage my older rite of passage I thought people were going to be right there in front of me to give me a hug That's not what happened They all moved out into a big semi-circle and I walked down into empty space and that's how it is

It's like even now we're talking and we're having this flow of communication creative, beautiful, and I feel such an emptiness inside, a stillness, a silence. Pete And in this context, emptiness doesn't have a negative connotation. Like you said, stillness and silence. You might even be able to say fullness, but it's a stillness and silence. Julie Yeah, it's going back to the paradox. Pete Right. Julie Paradox. Pete Yeah. Julie Like, I'm here, I'm doing all the things,

I have to go through all the human stuff. The body's experiencing that, but it's also experiencing all of it.

and it is aging, but if that's your primary locus, then it's a problem. But it could be much more peripheral than that, and you could be primarily established in being, which is ageless. - Yeah, I love having this human. I find the senses, it's like going back to where I started as a child, but now there's more of like an individuated consciousness here, so it's not so diffuse. The senses are what bring me so much incredible happiness and just feeling the

aliveness. Sometimes I'll just look at something and I'll just really see it. It's so incomprehensibly beautiful. Rick You know, it's said that a progression after Self-Realization can very often be the refinement of the senses. That refinement needs the establishment the God realization is out of the question. He couldn't even telephone from a distance, you'd be crushed. So, you need that stability and then the senses can just really start to flourish.

Okay, we have about half an hour left. I want to make sure that we don't miss out on something important. You know, there are a few little tidbits from your younger years, but maybe we've covered that. You have alluded to this work you have done with young girls and also young boys. We might want to talk more about that. And then there's the Life Blessing Institute, and maybe there's more to say about the Women's Right Documentary Project.

And then there's Matthew Fox, who you studied with, Thomas Hubel you studied with. So what would you like to cover in the next half hour? I do want to just mention again, my filter, I guess, is always looking towards what's

working, what can feel better, how can it be improved, rather than what's wrong. One of my greatest teachers around this concept is Matthew Fox. And the way that I discovered Matthew was, I was at a Franciscan renewal center for just some contemplative time and I went into the library and I looked at the books and I saw this book and it just had the title of "Original Blessing" and I'd never heard of original blessing, I'd certainly heard of original sin.

So why don't we focus on how to bring more love and compassion and beauty and justice into the world, even if it's just like that woman in the grocery store who told me she liked my braids. The main tenet of creation spirituality is that life creation is a blessing. And I also really loved that woven into that philosophy is this idea that spirituality is lived both through

science as well as through spiritual practice or spiritual values. And I like that. I also like that Matthew really specifically talked about the feminine aspects of the divine and really

celebrated that and it resonated with me. I just found an organization and a community and a belief system that I could fit into somewhat, but life as original blessing is I think the main takeaway for me from that whole educational process because I got my master's through the Naropa Institute and and the creation spirituality track, and my doctoral project was to create a curriculum

to train mentors for the main spirit work. But I always appreciate and bow down to important mentors along the way, and Matthew Fox was one of them. Rick Yeah, he's a neat guy. I first saw him at the S.A.N.D. conference and liked him a lot and then interviewed him a little bit later. But you know, what you're saying here I think is really important because I know I've gone through phases in my life under the influence of certain spiritual teachings where I maligned

and belittled life. It was more like something to escape from. Let me get off the wheel, and kind of like life sucks, then you die kind of a thing. And you know, there are spiritual traditions which emphasize that, you know, this world is horrible, but then you'll go

to heaven if you're a good person. But to me, that kind of demeans God. It kind of makes God into some kind of sadist who would just set up this torture chamber for everybody, as opposed to seeing the beauty of life and the potential and the value of it as something to enjoy rather than to escape from. Katie - Yes. Yeah, we have so much power in our - we don't have much free will or choice, but we do have the choice of where we put our attention.

Pete - Yeah. Wiggle room, I always say, when the topic of free will comes up. It's like I can't play basketball like LeBron James, but I can do, you know, within my dharma,

within my field of possibilities, there's a window of freedom, and you can move it this way or that way. Greater freedom, greater bondage, depending on what you do with that window. Well, I say, "Let's do love." Yeah. What are these Soul Stream life map readings?

So Jane and my mom were practicing this life mapping system, and they eventually, when I entered into my first wave of career path was as a hands-on healer, and I did body work, and that quickly transformed into a body-centered coaching or counseling method called Hikomi.

And I'm working, yeah, with Hikomi, I'd be working with my clients and we'd, you know, come to a place where they're repeating patterns, they're stuck, and it's just recycling, and nothing that we're doing is helping to break through. And I would go consult with my mom, and she would give me some impressions from her looking at their soul map, that would be helpful for me to bring back into the session and would often help to catalyze a breakthrough.

So after years and years of consulting with my mom, it became obvious that I should take it on and learn. And so I did. And what I find really helpful, as we both know, as everyone knows, the map is not the territory. So it's like language. You know, it's a pointer, symbolic.

can help us to gain access to what we are own deeper knowing. But it is helpful and I find it really helpful for getting out of the self-criticism and judgments that so many people have around the places where they have fears and have limiting belief systems and as well as to step more powerfully into their gifts and

abilities. It's also really helpful when you have a kind of a basic understanding about how a human's operating system works, to be more compassionate and patient with the differences because everyone is organized really differently. And just like we have a genetic inheritance, it's not going to change tremendously. If I didn't know what my partner, my husband's soul code is, we might have more friction because I just understand. It's nothing personal.

There's some areas that we just don't understand each other or jive because he has different degree of development in that area, or he's more developed, like he's real analytical and I'm more mystical, and it's just helpful to have this understanding that is impersonal in a sense.

your full name at birth and birth date can be translated to numbers. So there's a mathematical sentence, it's like your cosmic URL, you put it up there and you click the button and it just kind of shows a basic framework, not for the truth of you as intelligence of light, that presence of the divine spark that is the real you, but it can elaborate or illuminate some of the framework for this lifetime. Your sense of purpose, the need for fulfillment,

personality structure of your human self, your greatest abilities. It also reveals what are called in this system the karmic learning pathways. And those are the areas that I've found most useful in working with clients is to see where there are areas in those nine pathways where there's something that's occluding that they were born with. And then it just gets layered on top.

I found it to be a really useful assessment tool for helping people move past those barriers, or move, actually consciously recognize them for what they are, and then have more compassion with the process of melting some of that. I guess in some systems you would call it a trauma reaction, or a samskara, or a vasana, depends on the system. I converted your book about the nine pathways to

audio and listen to the whole thing. And there was useful stuff in every chapter, I thought, that pertained to anybody in every chapter, but I imagine that there would be different classifications of people that it would pertain more to than the other ones would. Katie We all have to evolve on all of the nine pathways. Pete Right. Katie And we're learning and developing on all of them all the time. Pete Yeah.

Katie It's just there's specific ones. There's an archetypal energy that represents my purpose in this life and it's manifesting right here with you because my number is nine for that particular part of my map and that's all about selfless service. So, I'm willing to get past my forced bump like introversion and show up here and have this conversation because I know it might touch somebody and make a difference in their lives and if it does, that's fulfilling to my sense of purpose.

you know, I can't not do that. It's just there. And even when I've tried to have a different kind of lifestyle, it's like the desire to serve and contribute always overpowers that. So, yeah, that's an example of a specific archetype that affects me personally, but all human beings have to learn about selfless service and being connected to the greater good. Pete Yeah. And the actual mechanism of boiling it down to a number. I don't understand it. It seems kind of arbitrary to me. You know,

name you happen to be given. I could have been given a different name, but I don't know. It's not something we could resolve. But you know, there's a lot of things I don't understand. So that's just one of them. I can share with you what my mom told me about that. She said that the name, it's a vibration. It's a vibration. And in a way, the parent is tapping in or tuning in to that vibration and is being influenced by the incoming soul to choose that

name. Because it's - I was named after my father. That's just what she said. And this is where the logic and reason, like, my predisposition is to try things and see if they work and then if they do, I'll develop some faith in them. And because I was born into this system and I practiced and I discovered it to be so accurate, I just gained confidence and kind of gave up the need to totally understand all the logic and reason for how the

system works. I know that in the Vedic system, they use Jyotish or Vedic astrology to help to determine what a child should be named based upon their chart. In my niece's case, her name was supposed to have a "k" sound, start with a "k" sound, so they named her Camille, which fit with her jokish thing. And of course, if they named her Amy or something, I don't know what kind of effect that would have had on their life. Maybe nothing? Why not? Well, you know, if something's useful,

of course, we always have to have our own filters, right? And check everything with what really resonates. But I have found it to be a really joyful way of interacting with people. I love doing those readings, something happens. It's not just the map because there's an intuitive element to it. It's like something starts to come through that is beyond the map itself. Yeah, it's almost like a catalyst for you to just sit and interact and have the stuff come through. Exactly. So you

still do those I presume over Zoom or Skype or something. How's the film coming along? Do you have enough funding? Are you going to be able to finish it up on time? We were able to do an Indiegogo fundraiser and get enough money to pay for all the filming, so that part's done. Thank you, God. And now we go into post-production, which is a tremendous job to edit. Four and a half days of

film distilled down into probably a half hour film. And it's going to have poetic elements to it, and You know working with a director and an editor and that is a slow process Just even organizing all the files so all of that to say We're going to be in post-production for months and months and hopefully by the end of spring we'll have something to Actually bring forth to the world and we might need to do another fundraiser. I don't know most likely

That's a cool project. See you at the oscars Well, thank you, I so appreciate you recognizing the value of this topic of bringing light to empower that spiritual awakening even more so at this age and stage. Pete Yeah, you know, as we've been talking, I've been thinking about the spiritual significance of every age. Your single-digit years and your adolescence and your married years and business years and your retirement years, each one has

its own flavor and its own evolutionary potential. And none of them are better or worse than the others. And if you believe in reincarnation, we've probably been through thousands of such cycles. So you just take full advantage of each one as you go. - Yeah, I love metaphors and I love the nesting doll metaphor. - Right, the Russian dolls, yeah. - Yeah, like we just progressively like become more expansive, but we never really lose the core,

the spark at the center. It just develops and mature. You know, we're here to develop on all of these pathways as human beings. But we're also here through the ripple effects, through our interconnectivity to contribute to the creation of a more enlightened culture. So

there's two different levels of evolution going on at the same time. And who knows what the smallest thing, like I'm thinking of those mentors I had when I was in my early twenties that taught me about having this opportunity to live off the land and learning how to live off the grid and they didn't teach me like here's the book and here are the steps, they just lived it and I just watched them and all these years later I'm like wow I've recreated that

in my life so much. That opportunity to contribute through the ripple effect by just being more completely aligned with who we are here to be and to eventually become, I could describe it Another metaphor is the pearl, right? The pearls came to me, the pearl was given to me. What is a pearl? You know, how's a pearl formed? >> RICK: There's an irritant in the oyster. >> SONIA: Yes. So every age and stage, you know, of our development,

along with the fun and the creativity, there's also irritants. And they have to be worked. and then slowly in the fullness of time, if we stay with our process and don't become lost, we become living pearls. If you could imagine an ideal society in which children were raised in the ideal manner and each phase of life was lived in what you would conceive of as the ideal manner,

what would that look like? This is a big question, but what would that look like both individually and collectively, you know, what kind of world would it be?

Well, what kind of world would it be? I guess every child would be given that education from the beginning, like they would be directly invited into communion and connection with that wisdom source within and be mentored and guided in how to actualize their realizations or their feelings, their knowings into contribution to find their gift and then bring it into the world and be supported in being able to do that and be infused with a vision of possibility

that is inspiring rather than degrading, you know, about what it means to have a physical body, what it means to have a female body if you're a female, male body, whatever type of body you're given, what it means to be at these different ages and phases would all be described as desirable and good. So, I guess education from the beginning, spiritual education from the beginning.

Rick Yeah, I'll add to that if I may, and maybe you can elaborate more, but you know, you think of all the problems in the world with climate change and social unrest and wars and poverty and famine and disease and drug abuse and all these things, any one of which almost seems unsolvable. But ultimately, who's creating all that stuff? It's us. It's everybody in the world. It's just a reflection of our collective consciousness, our collective level of development or undevelopment.

And we're trying to tackle all these problems through political means and economic means and so on. I heard the other day someone said, "There isn't a poverty problem, there's an ethics problem." and you could kind of say that with all the different problems I just enumerated, it all comes back to the state of consciousness of each individual in the world, all eight billion of

them. I think that's important for people to contemplate because, as Einstein said, if you try to solve a problem with the same level of consciousness or understanding at which it was created, you're bound to fail. One of the themes of my life has always been... remember that radio show called New Dimensions, where Justine and Tom's, and I forget what her husband's name was, but their little intro was always to say, "It's only through a change of consciousness that the world will be changed."

I used to love that show. I think that's what it boils down to. We obviously need all the other stuff. We need education and technologies and food, all the different things that we need to make a world. If we don't have the consciousness piece in place, then the foundation is missing, and we're always going to have all these problems. I didn't mean to give such a speech, but I just wanted to make that point. Oh, that's beautiful.

I couldn't agree more, and I also love hearing you share your wisdom. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. I didn't dream any of this stuff up. the things I've come to believe over the years based on my experiences and observations. And it is also part of what makes what you do so unique and beautiful is that you do enter into the flow of communion with another soul and you share your side.

Yeah, it's also the biggest criticism I get. People say, "You talk too much. I just want to hear the guest." But people don't usually want to do a two-hour monologue. They want to have a conversation. Yes, because for me, speaking publicly

is one of my fears, right? So the gentleness of being able to flow back and forth has been really important for me and I knew it would be that way with you, which is why I said yes to this and also because I know that spirit has shown throughout my lifetime that there are important

ways that we can contribute to the creation of a better world through that shift in consciousness. and this project, the Women's Right, and it's like R-I-T-E, the right, but also behind that is all the women's rights that are being challenged, that are not well established on the planet. There's an awareness of how the real pragmatic side, how will that change if we don't have a change of consciousness? Yeah, there's some politicians now who are actually saying women shouldn't be allowed

to vote. If they want to take us back to the 1910s or something, there's a guy who has a political sign in his yard, we walked past it when we walked the dogs around the block, it says, "Take America Back." I'm thinking, where do you want to take it back to? The 1840s or something? Moving forward is a better idea. - Yeah. Look at his soul map, we'd probably see he has a karmic lesson and some really fundamental area of like marriage, home, and family or something, I don't know.

Coming out to the big picture also helps me to stay in that more neutral space, even though I have preferences. Exactly. I totally agree. There's the universal value of it all, God's eye view, and then, you know, we're individuals. We have preferences. Yes. So, how can people get in touch with you? Oh, well, you know, I know you're going to share my website. That's right. specific link to the Women's Right Project and also I love doing the life maps if anyone's

interested. I have trained some others to do that also. I am thinking about creating a monthly Zoom gathering for people who are interested in the topic of illuminated aging, vivacious aging, through the expansion of consciousness. I can give you more information about that. I'm going to see if just in my community if there's an interest there. And if there is also... Rick>> I bet you there will be just as a result of this interview. There will probably be a lot of inquiries.

Make sure you have some kind of email list people can sign up for. Katie>> Yeah, on my website there's a place to sign up for my newsletter and there's also a contact me. Rick>> Good. Yeah, so if somebody's watching this a few years from now who knows what you might be doing but go to your website and see what's going on. Katie>> I'm a baby elder. I just stepped through the portal, right, and I'm like out in the space, and it hasn't filled in yet.

It's just like, wow, I don't know what's next. And I'm open. I'm befriending the unknown. And showing up here today with you has been part of that. Nice. Well, thanks, Georgette. I've really enjoyed doing this. And if I ever get out to Oregon, I'll come and visit you. And I don't know, I've never been to Oregon. It's one of the few states I've never been to. I'd love to come visit and please give Irene a big hug for me too. Rick>> Will do.

Okay, so thank you everybody who has been watching this. If you happen to be watching the live one or watch this in the next few days, my next one will be with a fellow named Thomas LeGrand who has written a book called "The Politics of Being" about how a lot of things we talked about today, how spirituality is the ultimate

sauce which will make politics a much more wholesome instrument for the well-being of society. And I'm just listening to his book now. Interesting guy, he's been working with the United Nations for a couple of decades, doing all kinds of cool things, but he has been in Thich Nhat Hanh's community in Plum Village in France for a long time. Okay, good. Talk to you later. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Georgette. Thank you, Rick. Bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you. Bye.