Kamla Kapur on Transformative Powers in Life

just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf y. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Kamla Kapoor, an award winning Indian born American author, poet, and playwright. She holds a master's degree in literature from Kent State University in Ohio and studied creative writing at

the University of Iowa. Kamla was on the faculty of Grossmont College in San Diego for eighteen years, and her stories, poems and plays have been published in prestigious American and Indian journals. Her new book is Roomy Tales of the Spirit, A Journey to Healing the Heart. Hi Kamla, welcome to the show. Thanks Eric, good to talk with you. Yes, I am looking forward to it. Also, your latest book is called Roomy Tales of the Spirit, A Journey to

Healing the Heart. And we will get into that book and a lot of your wisdom here in a minute. But let's are like we always do with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her grandson and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he

thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandmother. He says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well. I think that that parable is um if you had to summarize how to go about living and how to go about thinking in a way that enhances the quality of your life. Then that parable is a little nutshell of wisdom. And I think that for

a couple of reasons. The the obvious one is that there is a battle going on between us, between almost every individual, between what the West might call the good and the evil forces, and that we can have a say in who wins in that battle. There's obviously a wolf that is fearful and not very kind, and not very nice, not very aware. And then there is the wolf that if we feed, it becomes the opposite of the bad wolf. I want to say two things about it.

The first one is that the Powable places the responsibility for living with the good wolf squarely in our laps, in the lap of the individual. It's up to you which one you're going to feed in order to help it to grow, because when you feed something, it grows, So that is very important. And the other part that I think is very important is that there are always these two wolves. You can't kill off one wolf. The grandmother doesn't advise her grandson to kill off one wolf

because you can't. These are the two forces of life, if you want to call them En and yang or good and evil. And I would also like to add another point to this is that the bad wolf that is fearful and doubtful and not very kind and is you know, has a lot of vices, is absolutely necessary for the good wolf to become what the good wolf becomes if we feed it. So it's like Roomie would say, he would say, you know, we have to harness the power of the demons inside us so that they can

use stones for our palace. Now that's a very complicated idea, but what it basically says is that it is a negative side. It is our bad and fearful and vulnerable and very human side that has a role to play in what we become. Right And I like that part about the Parable two where it doesn't really say anything about having to harm the bad wolf for harness the bad wolf for anything. I think it it's sort of just says, hey, like, you know, you're going to need

to put a little more attention over here, exactly. And it's attention, it's awareness, it's consciousness. If you're not even aware that this is going on inside you, then you can't even begin to remedy it, because most of us go through our lives with a sort of a default mode of thinking, just being unawarily caught up in our passions and our emotions without reflecting upon them. Right, So let's start off by you telling us who Roomy is. I think a lot of people have probably heard the name.

A lot of people know him as a poet, but he was more than a poet. But give us a little sketch of who he is. Roomy was born in the thirteenth century in in Persia what is not a now called Iran. And then he moved to Turkey, where he spent most of his life. And he was just an ordinary human being, uh till he just like you and me and going about business as usual, till he met a wandering ministry called sham shut In or Shums for for short, and who really ignited the spiritual spark

in him. But a few years after they met Shums was was killed. And some people say, you know, he was killed by his jealous disciples because there was such a love between them, or some say it was his son who killed him. But the the effect of Chumps's death was delivered a deep wound two. Roomis heart and a transformative wound, a wound that he was in the

long run. So um it has said that he when somebody asked him to write down the poetry that he was reciting or the stories he was telling, that he wrote the mut Nami, which is which is six volumes, very dense volumes, not only of poetry, but prose and lectures and parables and discourses on the right way of thinking. This is what has endured his writing. I believe it just poured out of him, and so we are left with this wonderful work of art and spirituality combined, which

helps us to navigate our day to day lives. So I hope that gives you some idea of who Roomie was before he became a poet. He was, you know, studying law, he was into jurisprudence, and just a teacher. He was just going about his life till this particular event. And that's why I say in my book as well, that our suffering can be greatest tutor and our greatest guide,

because it's like, you know, it's like plants. If you if you prune a plant in one direction, I'm sure a tree hurts, but it teaches the tree which direction to grow in, is like teaching us to feed the good wolf. Right, And so with Rumi, what religion would he be considered to be? What tradition would he be considered to be part of? Well, this is a very

interesting question. Rumi is very obviously from the Sufi tradition of Islam, and the Sufi tradition of Islam is like the mystical version of Islam, just like in Christianity we have the Bible and then we have the Nastic Gospels, which are far more mystical. But I also want to qualify that even though he comes from the Islamic tradition, the guides and the Guru, those that are admire say the same thing over and over and over again that we're all made after the same light. We are all

made of the same stuff. And the current divisions and probably even ancient divisions political religious divisions in our times and in history are deeply flawed because they're thinking behind them are deeply flawed in the sense that you know, a Jewish person will think of God as Jewish, Hindu person will think of God as Hindu, and an Islamic person is Islamic, but really if we're all creatures and brothers and sisters of the of the One God, then

we are co sanguine. We share the same blood, we share the same spirit, And so even though it comes from the Islamic tradition, the message is not confined just to Islam or to Sufi mysticism. Right, you know my experiences, You read any of these traditions deeply enough and you start to say, well, boy, this all sounds pretty pretty similar, doesn't It sort of sounds like the same message just

delivered in slightly different cultural contexts. And you know, the slight sort of um, what would be the word for it, the slight warping that happens by filtering through it to human lens. But but when you boil it all down, there's an awful lot of similarity. It's the root, you know, if you think about the roots of all religion are the same, and it's the human urge to connect with something higher than us, which not just higher and beyond us,

but something that is within us. It's not just out there, it's it's something we can connect with through our journey inward. And that's another thing that is similar to almost all traditions and It doesn't mean that God is only inside us, but is pervasive inside and outside us. You know, we're If you're all made of the same stuff, then the same thing is filtering through all of us, no matter which religion you turn to. But you have to really

go to the root of it and practice what you learn. Yes, you say in the book that the thesis, or rather the hope of this book is that we can and must turn from being closed to being open, from contraction to expansion, from isolation to connection, taking the first steps towards wisdom, happiness, and joy. And I love that. I have been thinking an awful lot lately about that very

idea of expansion versus contraction. Right. We've had a spiritual teacher on Audi Ashanti who said to me once, ego is just a contraction, right, And I've been thinking about this idea a lot, this contraction to expansion that James Hollis the psychotherapist often just to ask a question when trying to evaluate a decision, is this going to expand your life or contracted? So I love that idea so much.

Tell me a little bit more about it from your perspective. Well, you know, um, we could characterize the bad wolf as the contracted wolf, because you know, to in order to be greedy or unkind or fearful, you're basically, you know, thinking from a very egocentric and a very personal point of view, and it's not an aware point of view. So when you open out, and this opening out, by

the way, happens a great deal. You know, say, when your heartbreaks, for example, I mean, what happens to your heart when it breaks, It cracks open, and it's hurts, of course it hurts, but it also opens out. It opens out to receive others, to receive love, to receive kindness, to give it and to receive it. So to live in an open ways, to live in a vulnerable way, to take away that ego skin that separates us from others.

It's like King Lear, you know, when he's really is down and out, and here's this really autocratic king whose nose has been rubbed to the ground. When he finally gets there, his heart is open. He can live in a hovel with a crazy madman and love him. It's like in roomy stories. You know, all these stories are about characters who begin off being very closed and then by living through the experience, you see how suffering opens them up to being more aware and connecting with the

higher selves. What I see with suffering is for some people, suffering opens them up. They transform it in beautiful ways, right, and and they grow from it. And then there are other people who seem to be embittered or broken by suffering. And I'm kind of curious. I asked this to a lot of guests, but I'm curious, from your perspective, what is the difference in the people who are able to use suffering to turn it into something beautiful versus the

people that sort of implodes upon. First of all, I want to begin with the assumption that I think that all people are capable of transformation. But you're very right that some people, a lot of people get very embittered

by their experiences and stay in that bitterness. Now, you know, I think the different between the two is either you're happy being unhappy, or you want to do everything in your power to get out of it, you know, to not realize that there is a different way of being, in a different way of thinking around about the same issue.

You know, that horrible thing happened to me, and and now I don't want to trust anybody anymore, or that horrible thing happened to me, and I'm going to learn from that experience and move on and not live without trusting people, because to live without trust and hope is not a good life. So I would also qualify that, you know, if we didn't have people who were embittered by their experiences, we would have no room in us

for compassion. So those of us who can transform, those of us who can you know, transcend negative experiences and and and learn from them, must have compassion. Because if there is hope for the people who are embittered, it is compassion for them. Although you can't always reach them, but those that we can reach in our lives, the only truly transformative power in life is love, and Roomy says that over and over again. You know, and it's very sad that there are so many people who don't

know how to live with hope and joy. And I think ultimately the answer is unknowable. The Hindu philosophy might say it's karma, it's how you lived in your previous life, but we don't know that maybe in your previous life you feed the dark wolf more and now it's time

for you to learn what to feed in yourself. But I don't really have the answer for that, Eric, And it is one of the greatest mysteries of life, because you know, there are people who can transcend, and there are people who live happily, joyful lives, and there are people who can't do that, and all I can do is hope that something will turn them. Certain people have tried to study resilience, and resilience is what we might say, is the ability to take a really bad experience and

and come through it stronger and better. They often talk about that that the idea of being able to find a coherent narrative out of it. And that's why I think the work that Roumi does that you're continuing of telling stories, stories that show, hey, look how this person took suffering and transformed it. Look how this person did it, and it it sets up a narrative that allows us to try and I think frame our own experience in

that way. I know in my own life being able to turn a lot of the things that have happened to me, having a coherent narrative that shows those as growth experiences, shows those as things that propelled me forward versus things that brought me down. Really transforms my relationship to them, and so I think story is a really

powerful way to do that right on. And and all the stories of roomy stories that I've retold in this book and the other one that I wrote before that I sectioned off in a group stories under different titles, like you know, one of the one of the ones in this book is Embraced Suffering, and and there are there are four stories under that about characters who embraced their suffering, who saw the good in their suffering, and how they did it. It's exactly what you were saying.

And stories are also more powerful because when you're reading a story, you you relive it. You enter the story, and you go through these experiences with the character and then come out hopefully on the other side with with a nuggete of gold with a gem. Okay ah ha, I can do this too. I can apply this to my own life. And then the second section is prey. And I deeply believe in the power of prey because um, a prayer. What is prayer but a dialogue with our

higher selves? And the dialogue is productive in itself because by you know, having like just exploring the other side, and you can come to a conclusion that well, if I am this way, then I'm not going to be a happy person. But if I'm another way, there is another way of thinking. It's and it all boils down to perspective. You know. The perspective we have is how our life ends up being. So if it's a contracted perspective,

then you're going to live a contracted life. And and the third part of this book is surrendered to the cosmic will and that which is you know, a lot of us get stuck with our bad experiences because we don't know how to accept that which has already happened, in that which we cannot change, that we can only change through our thinking by finding what you call a coherent narrative in it, you know, by looking back, looking back and saying, okay, did anything good come off that?

And making a list to it, you know, practical things. Do you have a story you could summarize from the book that might talk about suffering? Yes, several. Actually there is the very first story, um called We Never Know Why, is about this guy who gets you know, he's sleeping peacefully and suddenly he's woken up very rudely by by somebody who's whipping him and beating him and punching him, and he doesn't know what's going on this The stranger just keeps hitting him and saying run, run, and and

and this guy is running. He said, what the hell is life all about? You know? Why am I suffering? Like? What have I done to this guy? And then the stranger makes him eat all these apples, stuff his mouth with apples, and then he makes him drink at a fountain and you drinks, and you drinks, and he vomits up ultimately, and what does he see in his vomit but a black snake breathing in it. So he's really shocked, and he looks at the stranger, who says, you know,

I was walking by you. I saw you sleeping with your mouth open. I saw the black snake slithering into your mouth, and I wanted to save you. So he said, why didn't you just tell me that there was a black snake? And mean, you're trying to get it out and I would have borne my suffering better. But the stranger says, if I had told you, you would have

died of fright. So in this story, the last sentences Emma, who's the central character, felt at the feet of the stranger and said, oh, blessed is the hour you saw me. Blessed is the suffering you inflicted to awaken me? And all suffering has a power to awaken us. And all four of the stories under this section talk about the transformative power of suffering. And you know, it's very important to remember this, and it's not always possible to remember it.

If you're human, we forget sometimes the black wolf predominates in us, you know. I don't think you ever get to the point where the black wolf is anguished, um and just the good wolf lives you. And the trick is to remember when you're suffering, for example, which is not always possible to do that. This suffering, like all

my other sufferings, will will bear good fruit, right. I think the thing that's so interesting when we have these discussions about suffering and how it can be transformed and how it can bring all these beautiful things forward, all that is true, and yet when you're suffering, you are suffering. That's the part of the story that gets lost, is that, like the suffering is really you're going to be through that. It's I often think about that idea people say, like, well,

when one door closes, another opens, you know. And I often joke yes, but nobody mentions the long dark hallway in between. And and that's kind of what the what the suffering is. And I think we can use it to transforms, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt like hell exactly. And I think that the two go hand and and that's what these stories about, the very human people who suffer, you know, and when they're suffering.

There's a wonderful story room is under the praise section about this musician called Alamaldine who's a who's depressive, you know. And he goes to his priest who tells him to pray, and and he doesn't believe the priest because he feels that, you know, the devil comes to him and says, you know, what are you mumbling in your beard for? Is there anybody who says, here I am when you pray to Allah, you know? And he's poor Jelamo. He says, no, I never heard him reply to any of my prayers to him.

But towards the end of the story, and he has to go through horrific experiences to realize that hints crying out to God and God saying here I am is the same thing, you know, and from my own life, I know that if I remember to pray when I'm really suffering intensely, because what prayer does is it reminds

you that there is another way to think. For example, whenever I'm going through really hard times, and that's what the third section is about, I remind myself, or try to remind myself, or to try to remind myself most of the time that this is the cosmic will, this is what is happening now. I can't change it. All I can do is accepted, and the accepting of it transforms it. Yeah, I was sort of touched in the book when you were talking about this acceptance and the

challenge of this. You mentioned that it's challenging to get old, that accepting getting old is challenging. It's very challenging. I turned seventy one this here, and you know, my health is not what it used to be. My stamina, my intellectual acuity is not what it used to be. But you know, as soon as I find myself worrying about it, a bitching about it, it just gets worse. But like I was diagnosed with, you know, peripheral neuropathy, and there's really no cure to it. I just have to accept it.

And you know, sometimes my legs burn and and like today they're burning, and I just like, oh, you got you gotta just put up with it and do what you can, you know, spray them with all the sprays you've got and rub them or whatever. But you've gotta live with it. If you don't live with it, There's a wonderful story another Roomie stories about a woman whom you know, who doesn't like getting older at all, and

how she tries. It's called the Witch of Kabul, and she tries to lure this young man you know, does the tremendous suffering that causes her inability to realize and Roomys quote from that is that when the candle of your youth dims, you have to light the candle of

the spirit. You say in the book, if I don't actively assent to my aging, I am surrendering to despair and constant complaining to being an unhappy and an old hag, which which that the hag part makes me laugh, but but it's so true, Like if I don't surrender to this, then I'm surrendering to like you said, despair and constant complain. I thought that was just a beautiful way to say it. Yes, you know, you surrender to one thing or the other, you know, So which one are you're going to surrender to?

Which one are you going to feed? I keep coming back to your parable and and and to a cent to your life. The way it is, exactly the way it is, exactly the way it turned out, exactly the arc of your story. What didn't happen, what happened the dreams unfulfilled or the ambitions unfulfilled, or how much you achieved or did not achieve. You know, unless you say yes to it and embrace it fully, you're going to be unhappy. Yeah, I want to go back to something

you said just a couple of minutes ago. And and I may not get this exactly right, but you said that that one of the characters in the story really lies, that crying out to God was the same as hearing God. You're crying out to God, and God saying here I am is the same thing. You know that, you know,

let me give you my own example. You know, if I'm suffering intensely and I remember to pray, and I remember to just turn toward this higher power and myself and say could you help me please, you know, or say could you help me accept this because I can't change it? Or if I can't change it, could you help me to change it? Please? The process of here I am to help you start. You know, I firmly believe in the power of prayer, like I said earlier, because as soon as you start praying, you've got a

different perspective. You're not mired in your suffering. You're doing something about it. You're asking for help. You have recourse so to turn towards that which helps us to overcome are suffering, which we fall into periodically. Because you know, our lives are not linear. We never get to the point where where we are totally enlightened. Our life is circular,

and it's it's like a spiral. And and and if you want to think of, you know, the access of the spiral as suffering or as God, then you're always moving either close to or moving further away from it. You're revolving around it all the time. And some some of these things are periodic. Some of these are tied to you know, the the atmosphere or the environment or the you know, the way the stars are aligned or whatever. We're connected to the vaster life that we inhabit. We're

not just isolated creatures living our own little lives. We connect to do everything there is. We're connected to nature, were connected to the sky. We are connected to God if you want to call that energy, God or nature. Our love roomies other words for God is love. So that's why I said to remember to remember. That is the trick, because we know when we're suffering, we forget. Yeah, you say, at one point in the book, I thought

this was a was a great way to say it. Briefly, the examined life means that we not only think, but we also think about our thinking. And that's a little bit of what you're describing here. It's remembering to sort of look at our thoughts from a different perspective. Yes, it's first of all, realizing that you're in a bad place right now. You know you're not doing well, and and you you know, if you've lived the Examined life, you've developed techniques by now, like breathing or meditation, or

stretching or going out for a war. All of these are very important because you know the physical and the mental and the psychic are on a continuum. You know. Then you remember that you have to do all these things. And the first step is recognition you're not in a good place, and the and the second step is to watch what you're doing to not be in that good place.

You know. Sometimes you're either not accepting what's going on, or you're not embracing it, or you want something else instead of what you're getting, or you're you know, mired and your desires for this or that, this that and the other. And so, yes, what you said is true. So I think we're nearing the end of our time here. But I want to hit on something that you say in the book. I just I'll just read this paragraph

because I think it ties us back to the wolves. Also, and you say, the ultimate Mary, the holy Union, we are told repeatedly by our guides, especially the pre eminent psychologist Carl Young, takes place in the Temple of our souls. It is the marriage between our lower and higher selves, between human and God. The goal of this marriage is not perfection, but wholeness. The human and the divine together

form a whole. Well, that kind of says it. Uh and uh, And I don't think I could add to that, and perhaps just to say that this you know, just like when you love somebody, you stay connected to them, uh, and you make the effort to stay connected. So this is the love between the higher and the lower selves that keeps that connection and ends up in the marriage where you know the ultimate All our guides say is to live beyond pleasure and pain, is to live beyond

suffering and and joy. It's it's it's to be in a place where you expect to do both and yet have cultivated the perspective where you know that this is going to pass, and everything, whether it's good or bad, is going to pass, and um, you will arrive at that axis around which you've been revolving all your life. You know, to have hope for this marriage is a wonderful hope to have and to strive towards the marriage is something we can do. The responsibility for it is

ours right. I love that idea of the marriage between our higher and lower selves, between human and God. I've often heard people describe humans or a spiritual description is like we're part animal, we're part God, right, and and we're sort of in the middle. We're sort of stuck in the middle there, and we try and live out both those to the best of our ability. Yes, and we're not stuck in the middle. We sort of joined by these two if you if you'd like, yes, and

to live at this node where we are joined. And there's something else in between animals and God, and that is human. And the human is the one that examines and changes his or her thinking. The human is the one that has the power to evolve, because it's ultimately all about our own personal evolution, which by the way, I firmly believe raises the evolution and consciousness of the planet. That's our responsibility is as human beings all the stages.

Socrates says, know thyself, and the unexamined life is not worth living. And the other elements that we haven't even touched on is all you know, I mean, just think about the world you live, and think about the mystery. It's not just you look outside in the garden, look at the plants, look at the sky, look at the sun. And it's like Einstein says, you know, the person who doesn't feel all at this existence that we are here at this point in this time, and this body is

like a snuffed out candle. So we don't want to be snuffed out candles. We want to do everything in our power to stay connected to the wonder of existence. Yes, I find that another great way to approach the divine is through just looking at the mystery that life is and just how tremendous it is. Like what's going on inside my body right now is so unbelievably complex. I mean, there is so much happening every second boom boom, I mean,

trillions of chemical reactions. It's just staggering what all is going on right as I sit here and talk to you, that I'm not even doing any of it. It's just happening. And the fact that we have all our limbs, we've

got fingers, you know. I mean, really, if you start counting your blessings from your toe upwards and how many things are working, That's one of the ways I think when I worry about, or think about or suffer about getting older, you know, look at how many things are working for Christ, you know, I mean, give thanks, give, you know, that's another very very important message that all the guides and the groups give us. Gratitude is the ultimate alchemy. As soon as you say Hey, thank you

that I'm alive today. You know that I'm breathing at the very basic level and then count all all the other blessings. And that's one way it is not stay stuck in bitterness and and the suffering and in the contracted state. Yes, gratefulness is an expanding state for sure. If we can get ourselves there, it's the outflowing. Well, thank you Comla so much for coming on the show. I've really enjoyed this conversation. And we'll have links in the show notes to your book and um how people

can find you online. So again, thanks so much. I really enjoyed the book and I really enjoyed getting to talk with you. Thanks Eric, I was happy to be interviewed by you. I'm looking forward to hearing both of us talk. Yes, okay, wonderful. Thank you, Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider are making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to one you feed dot net slash support.

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