Mary O'Malley on How to Fall in Love with You

We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not 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. Thanks for joining us on this episode. We

have a return guest, Mary O'Malley. She's the author of many books and a speaker, and has studied with Patricia's son Stephen Levine, Jack Cornfield, Pema, Children, Audio Shanty, and more. Since the early nineties, she has been writing books, speaking to groups, leading retreats, and working with people all over the world. Hi, Mary, welcome to the show. I'm so glad to be here. I am so happy to have

you back on. I was looking and it has been six years since we talked, Oh my goodness, and yet your book What's in the Way is the Way, and our conversation has stuck with me as much as any other I've had over the time. I was ellen you beforehand about one idea of yours that has really stuck with me that we'll get to in a minute. But

let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always a 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 grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparents, says, well, which one wins, and the grandparents 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. It's a very well known parable. It points to a very important skill on our journey. But it only works to

a point. I can remember the moment when I realized that every single atom, every single atom that makes up every single thing, has a positive a negative charge. And in my own journey, I have discovered that there came a point where, rather than turning away from the negative wolf, you know, and not giving it any power, it didn't fully heal. But it's when I turned towards it, when I befriended it. You know that famous you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar, you know.

And I am now dealing with cancer, a kind of cancer that I'll have the rest of my life, and I have to take chemo every day, which my body doesn't like. So I'm right at that edge where it really feeds the negative a lot. My mind doesn't like this, my body doesn't like this, And it has taught me that the ability to bring space around the difficult, to act, bow to the difficult, to say you are welcome here, then, then,

is when it loses its power over me. So yes, to a point very important, But there is a point beyond which we need to become that place that includes both the easy and the difficult, the joyous and the sorrowful. Well, I am sorry to hear about your cancer diagnosis. Yeah, I call it my benevolent teacher. I fierce but benevolent teacher, And most of the time I am opening to what it is bringing me. It has brought me so many gifts.

I think that we crawled into our minds when we're very young, and we became human doings rather than human beings, and we think our way through our lives. That's why I love that Alan Watts, the famous Zen philosopher, his quote so much. No matter how many times that you say the word water, it will never be wet. And so I think to loosen our grip on our minds control.

It's addiction to try to control life. It's very helpful to come across a really big challenge because it highlights that urge to contract and resist, But it also highlights the power of soppening, opening and showing up for it most of the time, not all the time, but most

of the time. I am very grateful for this. If it's okay, I'd like to talk a little bit more about that is that okay, And the reason I want to talk about it is that you're a beautiful writer and you've got lots of great things in your books, and we talk about lots of things on this podcast, but it's very easy for listeners to sort of go, well, yeah, you know, like that's easy when things are going well, And that's true, and so I love when we can

talk to someone when they're actually sort of really in the really difficult moment months of life. And so i'd love to start with asking you. You said most of the time you're grateful for it. Some of the time you're not. So I'm assuming you're a human like the rest of us exactly, and you have your moments where you're like, I don't want this, I don't like this, this hurts, it sucks. Go away. Yes, yes, especially in the middle of the night when I'm woken up again,

you know. But it happens so much contraction opening, contraction opening that when the contraction comes and in a way, the contractions are coming even more deeply. But I'm really realizing these are the core contractions I took on that cut me off from my essence, cut me off from who I truly am cut me off from the joy of being alive, cut me off from the ability to enter the great river of creation and be it rather

than do it. Especially in the middle of the night when it ms, when I'm woken up again and I just wake up into just really not feeling well and my bodies and pain and so on and so forth. That reaction is so strong that it wakes me up. And one of the questions that I asked that it just comes without changing anything, Notice what is here? And that takes me directly into pure awareness. Now I am that which can see what is going on rather than being identified with it. And the more I do this,

the more my heart just opens too. How much my mind learned how to struggle, how much I absorb the collective belief that life is I'm separate from life, which is so untrue, that life is not safe, that I must control it, and believing that I've never really quite controlled it right enough. It's so painful to be back in that world, which I call the secondary world. But that ability to come so strongly, then awareness kicks in.

Usually I have to ask without changing anything. Because we're addicted to struggle, we're trained to follow struggle wherever it goes. And when I asked that question, all of a sudden I step back. I am the awareness that can see what is going on. And the more I do it, the more my heart opens. And that is what this poor little, separate, struggling mind that we've all taken on that has created so much heartache on this planet. I mean, all you have to do is look at history or

the evening news to see where that brings us. But our minds are this wonderful tool we've been given for maneuvering through reality, but they're not reality. And how you connect with reality is through your heart. Science now is shown. It's a brain, our heart is our brain. Size is now shown what arivating medicine has known, you know down through thousands of years that it is the emperor. It is our main brain. And cancer has deepened that pathway

back home to my heart. It's deep in the reactions so I can see them. But used to be a very faint, dear trail from my mind to my heart, but now it's an eight lane freeway, and sometimes it's shut down because the ice and snow of my struggling mind. You know, now I can't drive on this freeway, but slowly and surely that freeway becomes more and more available. When I talked to you six years ago, I remember one thing that you said, and you just referenced it

in what you were saying a minute ago. And it had to do with saying that life is safe. And I struggled, slash struggle with that idea. And when someone say to me life is safe, I would point out exactly what's happening to you as an example example of life needs being safe. So talk to me about how those two things reconcile with each other. So there was a time when there was not a thought in our head, not a thought. We were very tiny and slowly and

Shirley ram Das calls it somebody training. I love that we all took on this somebody training. And if you watch it, this condition mind that talks in our head all day long, you'll see it's dualistic in nature. It likes this, it doesn't like that. I think this is good, this is bad, this is right, this is wrong. And we can literally spend our lives going back and forth. Oh I get it, I lost it, I get Oh my god, it lost it. No now I've got to

try to get it again. You know, Stephen Levine tells a story about a woman who was ninety three and she was under death man and she said, it can't end now because it hasn't started yet. When you begin to step back and begin to watch, and that's a huge part of everything I offered, my books, my courses, you know all this. When you be able to strengthen the muscle of your awareness so you can begin to watch this conversation that happens in your head all day long,

you realize how dualistic it is. And something came to me. There was this great quote Lynn Andrews, who wrote all those books about you know, Agnes whistling Elk, the Manitoba Indian medicine woman she went to study with. They were very famous in the eighties. And I won't remember the quote exactly right, but she says something like this, everything begins with a circle of motion. Without positive and negative polls, there would be no movement, there would be no creation.

Without your dark side, your beauty would not exist. And then I had the very wonderful grace to spend many, many years hanging out with Stephen Levine, who wrote many books on death and dying. He had the Hahneman Project for a number of years where you could call his house twenty four hours a day if you were dying, a love one was dying, you know, your child was kidnapped and raped, and he would be there for you.

And so he has walked with tens of thousands of people through this dying process, and he was the one that really showed me the beauty of the dark, that the dark is fertile. In fact, my first book there's a whole chapter, chapter eight, called the Fertility of the Dark. And so we have been trained to try to fight the dark, and we don't know how to pay attention to it. We don't know it's for us. We don't know that it always comes bearing gifts. I wrote a parable.

I seemed to like writing parables. I'm in the middle of writing a new one about a journey through the valley of forgetful us into the mountain of being. But years ago I wrote a parable about somebody hearing about these treasures. They were high up in the mountain and they had to go and do training and climbing classes and go to ri I to get all their back and they go up and they find it in the cave.

They find there's diamonds, roomies, and emeralds, and they fill their back back with it and they bring it down, and for the next twenty years they just feel more and more empty, and then they hear a voice that says the treasure is still up in the cave. And then they eventually get up in the cave and they find there's nothing there except this old, rusty thing. And when she picks it up, she realizes it's a key, and it's the key to showing up for life, which

is what we long for more than anything. We say we long for a maide or more money, or light bobs section or whatever, but what we long for is a pure connection with life exactly as it is. And our challenges will be our teachers if we learn how to listen. We don't have to like it. We don't have to like it. I'd like to say it's trustable, always likable. We don't have to like it. Makes me think of one of the four Bodhisata vows in Zen, which translated different ways, but you know, one way of

saying it is darmigates are countless. You know, I vowed awake to them. All. Everything treated in the right way is a da everything. As you were talking that, you were talking about the contraction, and I realized as you were saying that, I was thinking, you know, there's the big contraction, which is you're dealing with one of the bigger things you can contract around. And then there's the thousands of tency little ones, this constant that makes me now as I'm saying that, I got the bodhy Sutta

vows on my mind. But greed and hatred and delusion rise endlessly. You know. The greed is I want this. The aversion is I don't want that, I don't want this, And the delusion is how confused we are about this is my tran This is my interpretation, how confused we are about what that grasping and pushing away does to us. And that's what you're saying. It's that grasping and pushing

away which cuts us off from life. And thus the further we are cut off from life, the more we feel like we need to grasp exactly, and if we begin to pay attention, the more it wakes us up that it is all for us. I wrote this when I first started awakening decades ago, and it's taken me all these decades to really live into it. And I calligorified it. And it's still behind my toilet. Very profound

place to have it in my bathroom. No, and silently respect the perfection of everyone and everything in every situation, especially when it's not at all apparent. There is an intelligence. I was saying to a friend the other day that was struggling with life and is beginning to open to life, which is opening to trusting the flow, which includes the dark and the light. And he said, but it's not trustable, you know, And I said, well, I said, just try

this on for size. Whatever that is the breathes that keeps the planet spinning as they do, that heals the cuts on your skin, took stardust and created the DNA molecule, you know. I mean, it's just mind boggling when you recognize it. And then I said, you arose out of mystery and you were once one cell and it developed it as seventy trillion cells. I mean, what is it that knows how to do that? And they all work together without a thought from you. Silently respect, Our poor

minds will never ever agree with that our minds are dualistic. No, that's not true, because all of this bad stuff is happening. But to begin to shift your relationship with the soap called bad, with the so called negative, you know, it's like Agnes whistling Elk said, without your dark side, your beauty would not exist. Honor all as a part of the great spirit. It does take a while to learn how to begin to notice this addiction, to struggle, to begin to step back, to begin to watch it, to

begin to allow your heart to open. And then you come more here and it is so evident there is something far more intelligent than you in charge. And then you let go all the more right. And I think the only way for me to get to life is trustable, or to relating to that innate intelligence, is I have to be willing to let go of my beliefs about what's good and bad, what's right and wrong, what I want,

what I don't want. From a very personal perspective, my small mind, life is not trustable, life is not safe life. To that perspective, it's in these moments of deeper connection, right, these moments of really not just intellectually knowing we're interdependent, but feeling it, seen, recognizing it that like I'm not separate from all this. Then all of a sudden that makes sense. It's like, oh, I get it, you know. And when we talked six years ago, I don't think

I've had enough of that happening to me. Intellectually, I went, well, okay, I guess maybe what she's saying, but I hadn't had those experiences where I went, oh, as you say, I am life, yes, yes, yes, and everything is we Yes, we have gotten caught in in me. And you know, life is evolution. It's a constant evolving, just like once two feet talk, you know, and you have evolved into who you are today. And in every single shift in evolution, as the old way is dying. In the news being born,

there's all he's been chaos. That's the chaos of birth, and we are living in that time. We are moving from a me oriented consciousness. And you can see it in the response to COVID. You know, the people that are me, me, me me, and the other people that are we we weak, We we I am here for the good of the whole. There's one thing I would shift as a time bit, and what you said it isn't so much that you let go of these old

beliefs that come from the me kind of consciousness. It's that, under the light of your accepting attention, they let go. When I got that, it just made everything so much easier, because there's nothing really I have to do except follow this call to pay attention, follow this call to ground. Every morning, at the end of every single meditation, I bow and say, let me open to whatever you bring me today. Let me listen. When we try to fix it, even to get it to let go, it brings up

a resistance in that. That's how it's built, you know, just like if you touch us, see an enemy, you know it goes, you know. But the heart, it is the heart that when you meet whatever darkness you are, experience, whatever struggle, even those death by a million cuts, those tiny struggles, all day long, they are here to wake us up and over and over again we learn how to soften our belly, allow a deeper breath, open our hearts, and show up. There's a line that you have I

think sums up a lot of your work. I guess it's two lines and two handy sentences. You say, lasting healing comes from being curious rather than controlling, from mercy, rather than manipulation, from responding rather than reacting. It is about opening what has been closed, reclaiming what has been hidden, and remembering what has been forgotten. God whoever wrote that that was really good. And it's a it's a journey.

It is a journey. The mind is used to quick fixes, and when you really kind of settle into the journey and know you're right where you need to be on the journey. Byron Katie, you know well known teacher has a quote, life is simple. It doesn't happen to you, It happens for you. And everything happens in the right time and in the right way, neither too soon nor too late. You don't have to like this, but it's easier if you do. Now I disagree with that last one,

because I do not have to like that. I have cancer. So I say, it's easier if you trust it. You don't have to trust it, but it's easier if you do. But again, it's not our minds that can trust. Our job is to get to know it, to bring it awareness, to bring it mercy, and slowly and surely, this amazing, amazing brain called our heart the armoring begins to fall around it because you're not ashamed or afraid of anything

in that struggling mind anymore. And then the heart begins to speak, and you realize the heart is connected to everything, and it includes rather than excludes. That's where the doorway to freedom lies, as far as I can see. So you've got a new course called falling in love with you? Do I have that right? Yes? Right? You say that the person we most deeply long to receive love from is ourselves. Sale more about that, Well, there's that great quote from Buddha, and again I won't maybe get all

the words right. You can search the world over and you will find no being more deserving of love than you. So this whole process, I mean, I would say, you know, I took on a hell of a lot of trauma when I was young, and I went as far away as you could and still survive. In my twenties, I tried to kill myself three times. I was not even worthy of existing, you know, And then life began to bring it back. And it is a journey from our

minds to our hearts. Who had have said the longest eighteen inches in the world is from our minds to our hearts, and so slowly and the armoring of my heart began to fall away. And it wasn't, you know, like it would go he you know, you know, the mind would take oh, you know, and then the heart would is softened again and surely learned how to trust the heart. So a couple of years ago I gathered quotes from my own work and from other people all of the world, and I created a little book and

it's just, oh, it's such a nifty little book. And it's a Neil Donald Walsh does the introduction, and it's just a series of quotes that lead you from You start with this premise that falling in love with you is the most essential thing you can do. If you want to heal the planet, if you want to heal your family, if you want to heal yourself, fall in love with you, and then it has quotes that shows how we got our hearts so closed, and then it shows quotes about what is the journey back. And people

were so touched by that. I spent the last year creating a course and so we're just finishing it. We'll be doing it in the fall again, where it's an eight week course and you get something every so that little book is fleshed out and you really see that your home is your heart, and you really see that there's absolutely nothing inside of you to be ashamed of,

our afraid of. You've always been doing the best that you knew how with the condition you have been given, And slowly and surely you moved beyond those ideas of falling in love with you is selfish, or falling in love will make you a namby Pamby. You know, falling in love with you, being kind to you is giving yourself permission to, you know, be unskillful in the world.

None of those are true, and slowly and surely we make it through all of those and then cultivate how to be curious, how to do what we're talking about earlier, about how to step back and really see the mind for what it is, and how to help open your heart. And then the last week, every week I say, well, this is my favorite week. But it's about that you are being given the gift of opening your heart again for the world. It's not just for your own healing

for the world. It's for the world. And they talk about how that makes such a difference because when you move from your heart mind rather than your head mind. You interchange with the world in a much different way. And you know the importance of being present for the grocery store clerk who's been snyed, you know, and you have met that enough inside of you. They said, oh, just like me, and your heart opens to them and she can't hold on to that. She can't when she

is you. You just have that presence of meeting her exactly the way she is. That is what's going to heal our world, one interchange at a time, and it starts with falling in love with you. I mean, everybody says, oh, you'll be kind, be kind, and we leave ourselves out of the equation. And yet that's where true kindness comes from, is with ourselves. So let's assume that people buy into

that idea. And I would suspect we've talked about self compassion on this show often enough that listeners of this show, if they've listened to it for a while, are bought into this idea. And let's assume that we've done a little bit of work and we kind of know why our hearts are closed, right, We know a little bit about what we went through and we were younger, and

yet it still feels hard to do. What are a couple of the pathways back to our own heart, to falling in love with ourselves, to realize that everybody in your life is gone and drag, especially the people that drive you crazy. They are specifically there to highlight the

parts of you that are closed to you. And so you begin to rather than immediately reacting to somebody you know, maybe it's your mother in law, maybe it's your brother, maybe it's your sixteen year old son, rather than getting caught in reaction, you catch your reaction and you maybe need to leave the room for a moment or something like that, but you learn more how to respond. So

that's what comes to mind first. But really it is as simple as giving yourself the gift of a few minutes every day that you breathe in and out through

your heart. This is an energy center in the middle of our chest, and when you bring your attention there and you breathe in and out through your heart, it's literally like there's a small little glowing ball in the center of your chest, and as you breathe in and out, it begins to grow, it begins to amplify and you begin to be able to feel when your heart is open. There is a difference in energy, especially in your chest. It goes all over your body, but you can notice

the most in your chest. So you begin to be compelled to I mean, every week in the course, there are you know, seven or eight invitations to bring the week's lesson into your life, and I say to people, choose at least one. And one of those core ones are breath thing in and out through your heart or

placing your hand over your heart. You know, you're watching TV and your favorite character gets hurt, you know, and you can just feel everything inside of you contracting, and then you just bring your hand over your heart and you breathe in and out for your heart. And then maybe you come up with a little mantra, the mantra that your mind most needs, like everything is okay, we're okay,

it's safe to be here. Something along that line. You say that our core addiction is to struggle, and that all of the other addictions are an attempt to numb out from the heartache and stress that come hand in hand with struggle. So you're basically saying, if we've got other addictions, or you've got a book called Compulsions. We've got these compulsions. They are an attempt to deal with the strain and the exhaustion and heartache of our core addiction,

which is that we're trying to struggle. Yeah, yeah, and it's it's full of fear, doubt, confusion, shame, rage, helplessness, despair. But those are all the energy constructs of the separate self. And this is why when I self published my book The Gift of Our Compulsions, its title was healing and being healed by our compulsions. I mean, where have you ever heard that? You know? But yet in the heartache that I took on that, uh, I learned how to

over eat, you know. And then I went away to college and I learned how to drink, and then I learned how to take street drugs, and all of that was an attempt to manage this, you know. For me, the kind of fear I experienced was dread, that horrible feeling of something really bad is going to happen. It's going to happen because I did something wrong. And when all that didn't work, I tried to kill myself three times. It kept somewhat of a lid on the pain that

we all carry. All of us carry this pain of being separate from life and the pain that has come from trying to do life rather than be life. But that was not my destiny to stay caught in that world. Life began to show me step by step out of it. And that's when the compulsions fell away, Because I mean when I was trying to control the eater, which was my main compulsion. I once went a month without food

and I was so hey, I got this right. What you try to control controls do And that next year I gained ninety seven pounds in a year because I was trying to contain it. And there is a real dramatic shift in working with compulsions when you realize that they are a finely crafted survival system that is created inside of you in order to manage all of your pain. And now, if you listen, they will become your guide

out of that world of struggle. Because when you're compulsive, that's when the pain that is the deepest is close to the surface and it so needs your attention. Do we start right there? No, you need to strengthen the muscle of your attention to be able to stand with what you have run away from your whole life. And that's been my journey, really slowly and surely learning how to strengthen the muscle my attention. You know, I get caught and then I ask, oh, okay, what's going on

here right now? You know? And then as my mind would quiet, my heart would open, and slowly and surely the to overeat went away. It's come back a little now that I'm dealing with cancer. I'm also a COVID long hauler from the vaccine, and so I'm dealing with a lot right now. And I have these little moments where I always keep a chocolate bar in my house, and you know, for decades, you know, I have a piece or two, and I have these moments where I want to inhale the whole bar and I start, but

then I become aware. And most of the time now not in the beginning, but most of the time now that that doesn't last very long. It's not like I try to stop it. It just starts becoming uninteresting. The more interested I become in, oh, what is the compulsion trying to take care of? And then if I can, if I have time, I can go sit with it and meet what the compulsion is trying to take care of.

And years ago, before eckart Toley was well known at all, I interviewed him and there's this wonderful quote that came out of the interview, and I won't it's a long quote. I won't remember at all, but the beginning of it is to welcome what is is the ultimate spiritual practice. If you learn this, you will not need to read any more books or go to any other teachers. And that's taken a long time to learn that. I get it,

and then I go into the resistance. But it's like if you've ever watched a child being born, you know, the head comes and then they head goes back into the head cause out they head goes back in. And it just reminds me of Roumi's poem The Guesthouse. And Roomy is probably most well known poet in the world, and the Guest House this is his most well poem. Well, people only know the first half of it, and the second half of it is Roomy at his most obtuse,

except for one line, learn the alchemy that true human beings. No, as soon as you accept the difficulties, you've been given a door. No. The door opens, and I said a door for many years until I went back and read it, the door, the door out of struggle. Our challenges are tailor made for us, and more and more of us are learning how to be conscious human beings by learning how to not fight the process and instead show up for it. And we need to gather together. That's why

I have groups. We need to support one another because the collective mind, you can see it on the evening news, it's going through its death throws of this dualistic mind that I'm better than you because the color of my skin, or my religion or my sexual preference, or I'm going to stop you from voting because I want to have all the power of Oh my god, that's so crazy

if you look at it from the mind. But if you look at it from the heart, you see that we're being woken up out of the world of struggle and back into an intimate, alive, trust filled connection with life. Egart has another quote, Life will give you the exact set of experiences you need in order to become a conscious human being. How do we know they're the right set because you're having them. I think that's just brilliant.

Thank you. Egard Toty. I love that you referenced that that desire to overeat is coming back as you struggle, because again, it's sort of humanizes this process that isn't human. The other thing that I was struck by going back through some of your work is I looked at the gift of our compulsions. In particular, was it wasn't like you went, oh, I am overeating because of the pain that I had as a child, and if I just become curious about what this is asking for me, I

won't ever over eat again. Exactly. It was not like that, right. It was a long process of becoming incrementally more conscious, and as you became more conscious and you healed more and more, it began to fall away. And I think that's a really important piece of this whole puzzle is, particularly in the quick fixed world we live in, there's a real tendency to be like, well, I was feeling like over eating last night, and I remembered what Mary said, and I thought about, why is it that I want

to overeat? And I realized I am feeling kind of sad, And now, okay, I recognize I'm feeling sad, and then I go eat, it must not work right exactly. It's a very incremental process of awareness, growing and growing and growing and growing and growing, and a heart opening. When I self published The Gifts of Our Compulsions, I put the tortoise in the hair in three times the story, you know, and I think they took it out except for once. Hopefully they left it in. I can't remember.

But it's the tortoise that plods along. It's the hair that runs around that wants to fix anything. One of our core addictions is to fixing, and it comes from the seed thought that I am not okay as I am, and that just sucks us into the world of struggle yea, And the tortoise just plods along and it's okay, that's okay, I'm right where I need to be. I love that three times. There's something you talk about in that book

that I love to unpack a little bit. And you said, you're describing working with feelings, and you say, what I was doing with these feelings was probably different than anything I had tried before. I wasn't so much feeling these feelings as I was meeting them. Talk to me about the difference between those two things. For most people feeling is being identified with them. So let's say a wave of anger comes, you know, and you say, I am angry, and now I must do something about this. I get

into it, I stuff it whatever. That's an endless game. Feelings will keep on coming and going the rest of our lives. But meeting is the ability to relate to them rather than from them. The easiest way to do that at the beginning is in your body. Every single feeling you've ever had has a commensurate energy pattern in your body. And the energy pattern of grief is different, and the energy pattern of anger, which is different than

the energy pattern of shame. And it is so magical when you begin to strengthen the muscle of your attention of that, you can begin to wake up. You're ready to stomp into work and tell your coworker off, and you know, and and give your resignation and you know, and so on and so forth, and then all of a sudden you can, oh, wait, okay, who's here, And you could eventually get to the place where you actually can dialogue and have a healing conversation with let's say

it's anger. But at the beginning, this is oceanic for most people, fear can come, Oh my god, in tsunami waves, anger can come, rage can come, despair can come. But when you find the patterns in your body and you just bring your attention and you feel that rage is this hot ball of fire in your stomach area, and for a moment you actually bring your attention there, the attention heals. And I'll get back to that in a moment, but that's a really important point to get attention heels.

And just like if you're having a bad day and you go to a friend and that friend after oh my god, I've heard this so many times, you know we'll get off of it or all poor you. But if that friend just listens to you and you can feel the intensity of their listening, that energy won't be able to hold on inside of you. You'll express it and it will move through. We can learn how to

do that with ourselves. And so you bring it to that hot ball of fire, and at the beginning you just notice how big it is, or does it move around or is it on the surface, or that's bringing your attention and your immediate experience together. We're talking about feelings,

but really it's energy trapped and that attention. If you can really learn how to pay attention without trying to make something happen, and that takes a while to learn, then that energy will let go and then you may walk into work and you may still need to say something, but it comes from such a different place. It doesn't come from reaction. It comes from response. Well, my experience is, and having had the kind of childhood I did, there was all sorts of stuff stuffed inside of me, and

I used to think of them as monsters. I just you know, ninety seven pounds a year, that's a lot of weight gain. But I began to realize they're just children in monster costumes. It's just frozen energy that wants to be set free. And as I learned how to bring my attention to it, and slowly I don't need to ask how big it is or whatever. I'm really there with it, and slowly and surely you can feel

Anger's world and it gets acknowledge. I see you, I understand while you're feeling this way, and that energy can't hold on, it just moves right on through you. That's the alchemy of attention attention heels. I like that. As we talk about compulsions, you talk about an idea of managing our compulsions, which is similar to controlling right right. And yet, particularly if we're dealing with destructive addictions, we don't want to just be like, well, just whatever happens happens.

So you talk about moving from management to engagement. Can you share a little bit about what that means. Okay, this management that hand my left hand. My right hand is engagement. Okay, this is what it was like when we were young. Engagement hand is way up in the air. You can't even see the management hand. Right. Happen When we grew up, slowly and surely, the engagement hand comes down. Were more start thinking our way through our lives, and

the management hand comes up. And that's where most people live from trying to manage their experience, trying to control their experience, trying to get to what they want and get rid of what they don't want, and that just brings suffering and what all the while we're longing for engagement, we're longing to come back to life again. This work isn't about knocking management. It isn't trying to manage management.

It's just adding engagement. And you will find that management slowly comes back down again, never goes away, because as adults we need management. But it's engagement that heals, whether it's engaging in this moment and your heart just blooms with the joy of being alive, or whether it's engagement with your compulsions. The U s Surgeon General nineties seven per cent of every pound that is lost in the US is gained back plus some within a year and a half n of it. And that is because what

we try to manage manages us. What we try to control controls us. So you know, oftentimes I'll work with somebody that they will be in the twelve step programs, or there will be in narconon, or they'll be you know, an o A or a A, and I absolutely honor that, but more and more that becomes less supportive of what

the true healing you want. As you begin to learn engagement, you know, and you still may go back there and because the community so wonderful, but you're no longer seeing yourself as wrong and need to be fixed because you are an addict of whatever you are addicted to. I don't want to overly manage this interview, but accasionally, when you're hitting the table that's coming through very loud in the microphone. Okay, sorry, dog on it. You're getting excited.

I like it all right. Yeah, you say that letting go of controlling compulsions is not the same as giving yourself permission to be compulsive exactly. You know, I got sober, you know, the first time in Columbus, Ohio, and in a twelve step program, and there was not a lot of recognition that my addiction was an attempt to cover over these certain things. But I think that the addiction treatment world is becoming more inclusive, more aware, more awake,

which is a good thing. It is your your friend of mine has a whole new system mindfulness, alternatives about how to bring what we're talking about into any works with addicts, and he's just getting really wonderful results because, as we said earlier, what you resist persists, and yet what you engage with it loses its power over you. And that's come the world of struggle, this addiction to struggle that we have been trained in, that humanity has been trained in for eons, and now we're learning a

new way. And in fairness to twelve step programs, they actually start from the very beginning with admitting powerlessness and surrendering the material itself is actually right in line with this, it's just the way some of the people engage with it. You talk a lot about curiosity being sort of a superpower. Talk to me about why curiosity is so important to all of this work. The kind of curiosity I'm talking about is not what most people think of its curiosity.

I wonder what that is, you know, it's it's curiosity in the head, you know, and that that has its place. But this is the kind of curiosity where your attention is here with your immediate experience, where you begin to become fascinated with what is, rather than being caught or reacting or trying to get away from what is. And I think, I mean, you look at children, Oh my god. You know, they're a bundle of curiosity. And we can know that absolute joy of being alive again, we can

feel at one with that. That's when our curiosity has been engaged, when we learn use it to see what has caused us to shut down, so that it can let go and we can open again. And no, it is okay to be here, that this river of life is for you. And then it all becomes fascinating a friend of mine in the conversation it is, okay, I gotta go into the daily grind. And I said, wow,

that's just such a hard way to live. I said, what about unfolding into the great adventure of your day, knowing that life will bring you exactly what you need. And he said, you just changed my day. And then he started laughing and he said, I think you changed my life. And that's curiosity, is that fascination with this highly intelligent, very benevolent although if you don't trust artists they won't see it that way. Process that is for

us working with our thoughts and our emotions. Internally, it's a very slippery place in there. Things are hard to kind of get ahold of, and you try and be aware and you get called all over. And so I find it's often really helpful to have some fairly concrete approaches to this. And to that end, you have some questions that I think are really helpful frame works for doing some of this. And so I thought maybe we'd start and we could talk through the four check in questions, right,

and let's say this first. You know, it is so true they say we have sixty thoughts a day, good God, and I add that the repeats from the day before, and we just tumble from one thought to another to another, and we're happy when it's kind of calm, and we're really upset. And so it can be very helpful to give yourself five minutes a day, five minutes a day, and if five minutes is too much, you give yourself two minutes a day where you choose to focus in life.

It could be your breath, could be the sensations in your body, it could be the music of life, the sounds around you. I had to start with the sounds because too intimate. I had moved so far away from my body and from being present for myself. And the first time I really started coming back to life was it was like, oh wow, there's light, all these sounds. There's the bird, there's the car, there's the dog, there's

the eater turning on. And the key to that is knowing that most of the time in those five minutes, you're going to be gone. Your attention is going to be up in the stream of thought, because that's what we've been conditioned into. That's where the collective mind of humanity is right now. But to choose a focus and

then bring your attention back to that focus. If even if you only do that once in that whole time, that's time really well spent because you have strengthened the muscle of your tension, and more and more you will see the difference between having your attention in your stream of thought and having your attention here in life as you move throughout your day. It can be very helpful. The four questions is one of the ways that I've framed it my first book is there's two statements. What

is right now? And this to my new statement, I'm working with with the cancer without changing anything. Notice what is here? And so the four questions you're talking about is in the Gift of our compulsions. Compulsions and the first one in this moment, what am I experiencing? I mean, that is the same thing I'm trying to say with what is in this too? And I'm trying to remember how did I say it? Um, what's in the way?

But I did a whole radio show on how this theme has been all my book showed hip this way, the first one I showed him this way. You know, the four questions in the Gift of Our compulsions and just that question, in this moment, what am I experiencing? But I found that some people got a little okay, well what am I experiencing? You know? So that's why I changed it to in this moment, notice what is here?

And that became more um pointed. You can notice that you have heartburn, you can notice the rising and falling of your breath, you can notice the air back aches. You know, it's just noticing something that is real, something in the living moment. Now, the more you move into this kind of way of working with life, you're gonna come across the challenges when everything inside of you wants to go away. And so the second question for this moment,

can I allow this to be here? And that if you really feel the heart of that that unhooks you from this becoming doing mine? Oh okay, it's the quote from Byron Katie we talked about earlier, Eckhart totally, you know that life is for us for this moment, I can allow this to be here. If I was writing the four questions, I would actually add another one. You know, for this moment, can I give it my full attention?

You know that's the key. Then that automatically brings you the third question for this moment, can I bring this compassion? I can't remember exactly how I phrased it, but open your heart to it. You begin to see how much you've been trained to struggle. You begin to see how how much fear there is inside of you, how much of a feeling of not being enough. I've worked with people for thirty seven years. Everybody has it. Stephen Levine has this wonderful quote. Let's see if I can remember.

When you finally see how much fear there is inside of you, you will turn to it like a mother turns toward a frightened child. And that's that third question. Your heart begins to open to it. For a Oh, You'll just ask that question and nothing will happen, But just keep on asking that question. And then the last one is, in this moment, what do I truly need? And that's listening. It's not asking our head. You're really listening.

Maybe we need to go laid down, Maybe we need to, you know, talk to a friend you, maybe we need to go take a bath, and maybe we just need to sit there and breathe. You begin to listen from the inside out so that you move with life from the inside out rather than from the top. Yeah. I love those four questions because I think they give us a way of working through interior experience, which is, as I said, the word I use as slippery or it's confusing, or it's very easy to get busy. Yeah, it's very

easy to get lost in. And I think having some structured approaches can be really helpful, and you'll find the five minutes will automatically start going longer. You know, I meditate every day and I have no timing, but it just is, you know, it's probably three five minutes. It's just you know, it has a beginning, middle, and end, and no one's done, you know, because it's it's the art of listening. That's what meditation is. It's not the

art of trying to get to a better place. It's the art of listening to what is right now, and slowly and surely that will come to the forefront, and struggle will go to the background, and then with cancer it will come to the forefront again. But then you learn, you learn from it. And I just have learned so deeply to bow to the living process. I've given to not fight with it, even though I have my moments, but they don't last very long like you. Sound for

me was the door opener for meditation. I've been meditating on again, off again for a long time. And I started meditating in a day and age when there was not an internet, and all you had were booked, and there weren't teachers that you could easily get. I mean, at least you know. I was living in Ohio and every book seemed to talk about breath practice. So that's what I tried to do, but it just never clicked. And then I started doing sound, and I was like, oh,

now I see why people say this is enjoyable. You know, Now I get why this is actually not torture. Yes, life is saying, hey, you in there, I'm here, Come be with me. I'm a dog barking, I'm the wind in the trees. You know. It helps me, especially as

I'm maneuver throughout the day. If I'm very tired and I'm waiting and going to lots of doctor's appointment and I'm waiting in the waiting room, I just closed my eyes and just listen to the sounds, and you know, my heart opens, you know, just you know, all these other people that are, you know, seeing the doctors for challenges and the nurses that are overwhelmed, and then I just feel so connected. And then I'm just so grateful if the doctor's really eight, because I get all this

time to just really sink into being well. Mary, we are out of time for the main interview. We're going to continue in the post show conversation for a couple of minutes, and you and I are going to talk about the five great teachers you talk about in What's in the Way is the Way? Listeners, if you'd like access to post show conversations, add free episodes, and all kinds of other things, you can become part of our community by going to one you feed, dot net, slash join. Mary.

Thank you so much. I hope it's not six years till we do this again me because this has been just enjoyable to dance with you and to bring this message to the world, because I think humanity we're really collectively waking up, just like I am with the cancer and waking up even more. We are collectively waking up with all the challenges, and I feel great possibility or humanity now, So thank you for letting me share this.

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