Re-Release: Mary O'Malley on Practical Awakening

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. Our guest on this episode is Mary O'Malley, an author, teacher, and counselor whose work awakens others to the joy of being fully alive.

Her inspired and transformative approach to compulsions offers a way to replace fear, hopelessness, and struggle with ease, well being, and joy through her individual counseling and coaching books, classes, retreats and ongoing groups. Mary invites people to experience the miracle of awakening. Mary clearly sees both the big picture

and the details of human patterns and conditioning. She possesses an extraordinary ability to understand and connect with people, and she is skilled in empowering people to work with difficult mind states, resulting in greater inner awareness and presence and greater capacity for joy. Her latest book is called What's in the Way Is the Way? Hi, Mary, Welcome to the show. I'm so glad to be here here. I am very excited to get you on. Your book is

called What's in the Way Is the Way? Which the minute I heard the title, I was like, I think I want to talk to her, and after having read the book, I want to even more so I'm looking forward to getting into your book. You cover a lot of topics that we spend time on talking on the show a lot, and you've got some interesting perspectives on all of it. So we will get to that in a minute. But we're gonna start like we always do,

with the parable. There is a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter 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 granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second, and she looks up at her grandmother and she says, well, grandmother,

which one wins? And the grandmother quietly says, the one you fee. 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, it's been around for many years, and it comes from what I call duality. You know, there's a good part of us and then there's a bad part of us. And I think if we look at history, uh, we will see

that actually fighting the bad always empowers the bad. And if you look at the you know, to me, one of the most uh important symbols that have ever been on this planet is the yin and yang symbol. And here is the dark and the light that they aren't on opposite sides of a line, that they're actually intertwined. And in the dark is a point of light, and in light is a point of dark. So in my experience. I tried to get rid of the bad, you know. And I'm a Taurus, so I have a very very

strong will. And a great example out of my life is that I learned how to take care of the heartache of my childhood through eating. I started. The first memories is when I was around ten, and then I dieted and ate and dieted and ate, and and then being a Taurus. Uh, you know, I once went one month without food, and two more times, two more times for two weeks without food, and a number of one week periods without food, because by God, I was gonna

get rid of this urge to overeat. And it eventually brought me to the place where I gained ninety seven pounds in a year. And it was only when I began to realize that, yes, there are are these two parts of me. But rather than trying to starve the so called bad, I like to use the word dark, uh, you know, much more than bad or evil. Rather than trying to starve it or make it bad or wrong. Uh,

my work is about creating a relationship with it. And it's very interesting that the statistic that I want to bring into this conversation is that the U. S. Surgeon General's report is ninety eight percent of every pound that is lost in America is gain back plus some within a year and a half. And that's what I think. We're beginning to take another step beyond that parable and

realize that what we fight, we actually in power. And it was when I learned how to be in relationship with this so called bad part of me that you know, just eat absolutely everything uh under the sun, that it began to calm down. And now you know, I lost the extra weight, and now a body stays the same weight, you know, and and I can eat whatever I want

and have for years. So that's my offering to this conversation is that it is in creating a relationship with the so called dark side that you actually uh heal excellent and your book at its heart really says that most of our life, the challenges that we face and the trouble that we face are a result of the fact that we basically are struggling with the way everything is.

You basically use an analogy of we are always in what you call a peaceful meadow, but that we are surrounded by clouds of struggle, and those clouds of struggle are largely self invented it, and I think it's really important to I wouldn't quite use the words self invented that when we were young there, when we first showed up here, we were like dry sponges and there wasn't a thought in our head and we just absorbed the

uh energy of the people around us. I'd like to say, if our parents were arguing in a soundproof room down the basement, we were up in the attic, we could feel it. So it is, it's like we send it down from generation to generation. We absorbed what I called the conditions of or what Eckart Tote calls the mind made me. That our mind actually makes this me that talks all day long. And if you had a little door on your forehead and you could open it up

and watch what it's doing. It's mainly struggling with life, usually little struggles, you know, like the length of the stop light or how you're here looks on a particular day, but it can struggle. It can go all the way into you know, life of death struggles. Just because your UH boyfriend didn't call you when he said he was going to call you, And so we are I like to say, we're addicted to struggle, and yet that's not who we are. That's something that was conditioned into us.

There are so many lines from the book that I love. I could probably just read them over and over to the audience and they would do well. But I'm going to read one right now because this, I think describes me very well. One of the mind's favorite ways of staying distracted and far away from what you're experiencing is to create problems and then try to figure out how to fix them. In fact, it could be said that your mind is a problem factory, churning out problems all

day long. It is astounding to recognize that once it solves one problem, there is usually only a very short period of time before it comes up with another problem. And we keep on feeling that if we just solve this, if we change our husband, or if we lose ten pounds, or if we win the lottery, then everything would be okay. But we don't see that that puts these clouds between us and the living experience of life. That really what we long for is not the uh joy of the

fancy new car. That's that's you know, kind of a fake joy. We long for the joy of coming back to life, to actually be here for life, and most people are not. They think their way through their lives. You talk a lot about sort of like a low grade suffering that permeates us, and I definitely have that problem mind. I've gotten a lot better at learning not to listen to it so much. But one of the things that you talk about is that the problem mind

is largely driven by what you call the storyteller. And we we talk on the show all the time about the stories that we tell ourselves. And so my question for you is, and I'm going to see if I can articulate this well, because largely what you're what you're suggesting is that we turned towards the things in our life that seem problematic and we experience what those emotions are. And that makes total sense. And again it's something that we talk a lot on this show about. We also

talk about not believing the thoughts that you have. And so I'm curious about Let's just take an example of I am telling myself a story about how nobody likes me because for whatever reason, nobody was friendly to me today. So there's there's two options that I can go to their One would be I could go into what that feeling feels like and turn towards it. The other option is to recognize that what I'm telling myself there is probably not true, and so I'm not going into the

feeling and experience in it. In that case, I'm actually trying to, you know, more of a cognitive behavioral therapy way. I'm trying to sort of recognize the untruth of that thought. And I'm curious, from your perspective, are those both just different tools that we use to get to the same place, or help me understand how you balance those two things, beautiful question. So down towards the end of the book, there's what you call the four lets add. The first

let is uh let life. There are challenges that each one of us have that bring up such deep feelings, you know, like the illness of a loved one, or our own illness, or or a foreclosure on our house, or you know, we're involved in a robbery. You know that they come into our house and there's just so much they get stirred up that we have very little option until we have awakened for a long time to actually stand with these feelings and let them move through us.

And that's where we use the art of living in questions, we actually turn it over to life. Then the next is let it be, And that's a big chunk of this work of where you learn how to actually bring your attention into your immediate experience. And you can do that in your body, with the emotions, with the stories, and you begin to realize the power of focused human attention to heal what I call bound up energy. A lot of people call and feelings, they're really bound up energy.

It's all it is. And we're discovering that when our energy and our immediate experience come together, then these ancient feelings they move through us. That's when you begin to move. You move to the next let, which is let it go. And the more you do that that there's something about not just overriding a feeling, you will see that you know, uh, let's say the boyfriend doesn't call. He said he was gonna call it ten and he doesn't call it at all until the next day, and we have all sorts

of feelings about that. But if we follow it back, you'll see it's rooted in something very young. And so if we just say, you know, that's not true, that's not true. Uh, we don't go in and and get down to the root of it and with our attention set it free. But the more you do that, the more you come to that place you're talking about, something arises and you see that's not that's not the truth, and you just let it go. And then that brings well, actually, the better way to say it is it let's go.

But it didn't work in my four lets. So but then that brings us to the final let go, that you actually begin to open to life, not as you want it to be, not as you think it should be, but you're actually here for life, and feelings and thoughts and sensations are dancing through you, but you are the awareness that is present for it all. The warmth of the sun, the uh, sadness into your chest, the wonderful taste of the morning coffee, whatever. That's who we are.

And those four lets really help you to see how we can move into let go. You say that learning to see what your mind is really doing, rather than being lost in it, is an important step towards unhooking from the game of struggle. Right. The first step is understanding that there is something that talks to your head all day long and it's very, very busy, and it has an opinion about everything, and then beginning to think of the possibility maybe this is not who I really am,

and my job is to make you fascinate. I use the word curiosity a lot, ability to be curious. So it's the difference between saying, you know, you have a meeting at work, you know, and you have to do a presentation, and you know, you're sitting in your office before the presentation and your heart is pounding wildly and you know, sweat as driving down your face. Add what most of us would say, Oh my god, I'm so I'm so afraid. I'm so afraid. You know what, what

did I learn that class the other day? You know? How can I manage this fear? What awakening is about is the discovering the ability to say, ah, fear is here, rather than I am afraid. And the more you can do that, the more you can see these different stories that most of them are rooted in the first six years of their your life, you know, that's when the

foundations of this storyteller were created. And so you get familiar with how your anxiousness talks, how your terror talks, how your despair talks, your hopelessness talks, how your self judgment talks, how you're not enoughness talks. And you get to know them enough that they arise and you say, oh hi, and they pass right on. And so this is the sort of thing that is traditionally very easy

to say and much harder to actually do. And so let's talk a little bit about the path from I am identified with my thoughts and my emotions to a place that I am relatively um open and spacious around those things. It's it's not, at least my experience has not been in the experience of a lot of people I know, is you don't go from one one of those extremes to the other in you know, a couple

of days. So so what what would you say to people who are just starting on that process about how you work with those things because you're maybe not And I know the word successful is not really we're not trying to be successful, right, but but we're not getting much space around our thoughts, were not becoming more spacious or more open or more welcoming. It's it's a hard process, is what I'm saying. But it's the only game in town, you know, and uh. And my main mentor, Stephen Levine,

was once asked, how long does this take? This the mind of how's all the stake, you know? And he said, it's the work of a lifetime. And what I say to that is that, uh, it really is the way out too. It's almost like we've been caught in a

prison of this separate, conditioned self. And this mind has only been around about a million years, you know, you know, give or take a few years, so that's a very short, you know, segment of time, you know, in universal time, and so we're very young as a species, and we have been totally identified with this struggling self. And all you have to do is look at history or the

evening news to see what that is like. So the first step is beginning to contemplate the possibility that maybe whatever talks in your head all day long is just a condition self. That's the first step that begins to intrigue us. And I would say, well, I I in the book, there's uh, at the end of each of the ten chapters, there's what's called the remembering section. And I really started just by laying a very basic foundation, you know what we're doing is different than anything we've

ever done before. And this is not something you can do and you can do it right. But what you can do is start cultivating curiosity. You can start doing things like, h uh, you're saying that. For five minutes every morning, I'm going to sit on the porch and my intention is to have my attention with the sound of the birds and the Christmas of the air, or the smell of my tea. And you'll find that most

of the time you'll be gone, you'll slip away. That's the first step to really see there's a huge difference between being here for life and being in a conversation about life in this struggling self. When you begin to see that, there's a huge difference and you begin to see what you're missing, you're missing life, the the experience like we knew when we were very young, that there was no separation between us and this living adventure of life. That's when you begin to feel the passion that you

don't want to get rid of this storyteller. You need it from maneuvering through reality. You don't want to make it that or wrong. It's all about becoming curious and to give yourself. The gift of just five minutes a day where you choose one thing that you're curious about and bring your attention back to it. Now a really

important point. I was a part time meditator for ten years and then Stephen Yep, yep, and then Stephen told me, he said, you know, if you sit for one hour and bring your attention back to your focus one time in that hour, that's time well spent. It totally changed my experience because before, in those ten years, I was trying to sit to get some place. Now and I sit every day and half for decades. Now now I am sitting, and I try even not to use the

word meditation. I Sundays call it a returning practice, or I call it a listening practice. I'm sitting because I want to be curious about what sits here. And the more I'm curious about what sits here, and the more I can see how it all operates, the more I see through it, and here I am back in life. Yeah, the term curiosity seems to just keep coming up for me in I mean, I read a lot of stuff, right, I'm talking to somebody every week, and that just seems

to be a theme that keeps coming back. This, this attitude of being curious about what's happening with ourselves seems to be such a powerful thing. If we can, we can engage in it. Why is that because anything else beyond curiosity is still this fix it problem solving mind, And oh my god, it wanted to problem solve. I felt like such a failure. I can remember the first

long meditation retreat I went to it. I would open my eyes and oh my god, I knew everybody else was in nirvana, and that wasn't And now I know that World War one, two and three, Vietnam War. You know, maybe a little of the rack war was going on in everybody's hand, you know, but it sure didn't look like it. But when I became curious, that's when things began to open again. And that brings us to the

second skill. And I used to call it compassion, but I now call it spaciousness, and compassion is is an attribute of spaciousness. Also kindness and allowing and forgiveness and acceptance, all of those. But the more you're curious, and the more you can begin to see how young this strug link self is. You know, in your head, let's go back to the boyfriend not calling, you know, And now it's an hour later and he hasn't called, and there's a voice inside of you that says, I'm never going

to speak to him again ever ever. You know, of course you tomorrow. But if you listen, you'll hear how young that voices. And the more you see that, the more you just begin to have space. Oh that's the sad one or the rejected one. And the more that you bring spaciousness to what's going on inside of you, which naturally arises from curiosity, the more all of this stuff can just pass right through you. So you talk about that, there are I think it's eight core spells.

You call them that basically we cast over ourselves, or you know, we're cast over us as part of our upbringing. Can you explain what you mean by spell and maybe give us an example of one or two of them. I love the word spells, and and this has come out of I've worked with people over thirty years now, and I've gotten to see into the minds of hearts

of thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And Stephen Levine once said, the very first time I saw him, he said, you know, I want to create a hat and when you put it on your head, it instantaneously broadcast over a loud speaker all of your thoughts, and everybody in the room groaned. There was really a collective groan that moved through the room. And you know, it's it's not only that we don't want other people to see what's going on in our storyteller, but we don't

want to see what's going on in our storyteller. And as I began to listen and you know, and I create a safe place where people can begin to be real and then explore the storyteller, I began to see there was eight core spells. And I love the word spells because it's something that's laid over the top of this. It's not true, and it can be lifted. And let's just do the basic thing of let's say your mother was very afraid of spiders, so you became afraid of spiders.

So the eight core spells, the first two are the basic, you know, the real core basic foundational spells. You know, I'm separate from life and life is not safe. Then there's the three you know, operating spells. You know, I gotta do life. I gotta do it right, and I'm not doing it right enough. And if you watch, you'll basically, you know, if you had that little door on your forehead and you could watch, you'll see that's what the storyteller.

It's really trying really hard to get this all together so then it would be happy. And that's the fix it mode. That that you know. The sad thing about the fix it mode is one and a hundred times it works, So it's the carrot in front of the dog. The problem is that it occasionally works, or it works for a very short amount of time, which makes it so much harder to see through. It's easy to see through something that never works. But that occasional challenge, yep,

it just keeps us sucked into it. But what we don't see is all of that operating all of that. I gotta do life, and I gotta do life right, and I'm not quite doing it right enough, and I got to adjust this and lose weight and make more money and whatever. Is all trying to take care of

what I call the three hidden spells. And before I say them, you know, I've worked with people all all the way from CEOs of major corporations to uh, to you know, developmentally disabled teenagers, to you know, housewives, to therapists, and we all have these hidden spells. Eric, And the first is because I'm not doing it right, I am wrong. And because I'm wrong, I'm unlovable. And because I'm unlovable,

I am all alone. And if your listeners would take a moment and think about those middle of the night things, you know, when you're woken up and the mind is just going crazy, you know, and you'll see these spells, but you'll see it all comes to the real core spell of this separate self. I am all alone. So you ask for an example, I think that the thing that comes to mind is that I really, truly I might try to kill myself three times because I was

completely unlovable. I mean not only was I unlovable, I was bad and wrong to my core. And even at one time I've been drinking, it was mad at myself. And I hit the bad too, you know, just I was just so frustrated. And there was a board, you know, across the end of the bed under the Dubai cover, and I just kept on hitting it and hitting it until I passed out and then woke up the next morning with a broken arm. So I know those hidden

spells very well. And I tried therapy, and I tried you know, uh, psychologist, psychiatrist, medication, group therapy, hypnotherapy, you name it, mental hospitals. And it wasn't until I began to become curious, and especially about this judging quality in my head that I swear went to law school and was president of the debate club, and it could convince me of anything. And once I started being curious about it, and I actually carried a notebook around because I really

wanted to see this operating. And I started looking. Yeah, I said, I never judge you that voice, did you know? So I carried a notebook around and and I went and and drew a wheel on a piece of paper, huge piece of paper in my bedroom, and on the spokes. I began to put all of these different things my judger would say. And the more I could see it, the more I unhooked from it. I call it look to unhooked. So here I am. I now travel the world. I write books. You know, never ever had any vision

of that whatsoever. And every once in a while, that judge you will come up when I'm I'm you know, very very close family member has been very ill and uh, it's very heartbreaking and uh and you know, I work full time and try to be there for this family member and at times I just am stretched, and when I am, the judger will come, but I say, oh, hi, are you having a bad day. So that's the power of beginning to see. That's why I did the spells. It's it's all about learning how to see how this

storyteller operates. And in the seeing is the movement. We don't need to fix it, we don't need to judge it, we don't need to rearrange it, rise above it, get rid of it. In the seeing is the movement, and that's what we're discovering the power of human attention to heal. Yeah, and I think that's one of those things that we were talking a little bit earlier about how this isn't

easy and it doesn't happen immediately. I think there's a tendency to do this for a couple hours and go, well, you know, I don't feel any better, whereas really, this is a process that we need to keep doing it. It's part of the reason I started the show, honestly, was to be reminded consistently like that that thing that's carrying on all the time in my head is not the truth because left to my own devices, I I

identify pretty strongly with it. And so you know, getting that sort of constant reminder to like, Okay, you know that's not you take it, take a step back. Yes, that is why I do groups and phone counseling and retreats and all of that, so we can gather together and be real about it. And we discovered that everybody else is doing the same thing. It's just so wonderful. So a really nifty thing to add into our lives, you know, is to become what I call a tightness detective.

That you begin to realize. You look out in nature and you see that everything flows in nature. You know, water flows, light flows, day flows into night, winter into spring, sap flows, for Heaven's sakes, and you begin to realize if you're around a baby, you see that everything flows through it, you know, madness, sadness, gladness, you know. And

then you see us as adults. There was a study done once of children that all of them were breathing their natural breath, you like dogs and cats breathe the whole trunk before they went to preschool. Not one was breathing their natural breath by the time they went to first grade. So we've all learned how to tighten. And it's when we begin to use this tightening as our bio feedback mechanism that you begin to see that any thought that tightens you is not the truth. It's from

the conditioned self. And it's almost like we have to have that because some of these spells are spells. They are very strong. I mean, you know, if I could break my own arm through the spell of I am unlovable and broken and bad and wrong, you know, that's how strong they can be. But you begin to see you begin to have these moments where you relax back into life, life, and your belly let's go, and you your chest begins to open, and you feel this aliveness

and you're just here. And then somebody hawks their horn, you know, and then you know, and then you begin to notice, oh, and that helps people immensely, you know. And here's a thought in the middle of the night and it's just you know, and all of a sudden awareness kicks in and says, wow, I really think that thought is true. But it makes me tight, so it can't be the truth. So I had the little statement,

if it makes you tight, it's of the fight. One of the things I really liked in the book that you did was sort of very consistently every couple of pages was was, you know, invitation to drop back into the current moment in a very concrete way, And I thought that was really in addition to the practices that you did at the end of the chapter, which are very well structured. And I think what I like about it is one of the things we talk on this

show all the time about is start really small. If you start small with something, you can build into something really great. But most of us start with you know, I'm going to meditate an hour a day, and that's just doesn't work. And so you're you're, you're, you call them remembering practices build very slowly from a very small which is great, and and then just these very small invitations,

like I said, to come back. And I find one of the things that helps me more than just about anything a lot of the time is just to come back to recognize like what where am I What's happening? Like what do I see? What do I hear? What do I smell? What do I feel? Just like? It sounds so simple, and it is so simple. But getting in the habit of doing that, you know, three times a day, really makes at least for me, makes a big difference. Yeah, me too, because that's what we long for.

I love that quote by Alan Watts, the very beloved Zen philosopher. He said, you know, no matter how many times you say the word water, it will never be wet. And we long we we got this idea that enlightenment was oh coming to this unending state of orgasmic bliss. You know. Add really it's about opening right here, right now everything we long for, Everything we truly are, is right here, and we longed for it, but we long

for this version of the now. Oh I want the now, but the now includes loss, death, pain, and so much of this work is what's in the way is the way that the more we begin to become curious and we notice there's something pretty spectacular we're missing. Yes, it it has suffering in it, but you know, it's pretty wonderful, this thing called life. And then we notice how much we are away from it. Then we begin to become fascinated by what takes us away. We're not trying to

get to the now. I can't tell you how many people have told me I don't do go being in the now? Very well, well, we can't be try to be in the now, that's our natural state. All we need to do is learn how to see with our attention all of this conditioning that we've taken on, and it's just when we step back from it, it begins to become as ephemeral as a cloud, and you begin to understand that the light of your attention is like the sun on the morning fog. It literally dissipates it.

And then here we are now. I just watched the clip from Andrea Levine, Stephen Levine's wife, and Stephen just died, you know, a few months ago. And to me, Stephen Levine is one of the most aware hearts that we have on this planet. And she talks in this clip about that they really have been able to, you know, have a life where they really are practicing all of this, and yet in the last couple of years in his life it was challenging, of course, and can we you know,

Stephen would say, die before you die. Can we learn how to be here not only for the joys, but for the headache, for the heartache when the boyfriend doesn't call, for the stomach cramps, or for the anxiousness at the light when it's taking too long because now you're going to be late to work. Can we learn how to be curious about these and bring them spaciousness so that when we die, and it's true that all of us are going to have that, and as we get older,

this whole system begins to break down. Can we have that breaking down and opening into the next phase be a process that enlivens us rather than a process that contracts us. And that is the, as you say, the only game in town. And you know, the reason that I sort of keep coming back to these small steps is that it is a path towards, you know, of of going from complete identification with our brain to that spaciousness. And I think I know I did, and you know

you talked about it with the meditation. You know, I I finally started to get a daily meditation practice when I stopped expecting anything to happen from it exactly, you know, when I when I just finally went, oh okay, I did it. And I think that so many times this idea of being able to work with our thoughts, of being able to get some distance, of being able to see the storyteller. For me, is the sort of thing that it just took a lot of reps. And I'm not saying I mean I am in no way, shape

or form like done with that. You know, it's it's still happens a lot, and I still get entangled. But I think it's so important when we talk about these things too, to talk about that that this stuff you do it over and over. It's not instant results. It's not you know, it's not like taking a drug, absolutely, and the ego expects a drug. The ego wants a drug,

and that's not the path back home again. And in my book, The Gift of Our Compulsions, I put the uh when I self published it, before my publisher picked it up, I put the story of the tortoise and the hair in there three times, and of course when they edited it they took it out all except for once, because it is the plot and that's not how the

ego works. The ego wants it results right now, you know, Oh, you know, actually tasting my morning coffee is going to make a difference in my life, says the ego, you know, and I say, yeah, it is. And I've got a little uh analogy that I used is like drops of water in a bucket and you look down and the bucket is not even the bottom isn't even covered, and you say, oh, you know, I'm not gonna do this anymore.

But if you keep on with it, you know, you looked on one day and oh my god, the buckets half full, and then one day your foot is wet. So it's just that that it's it's not a half to it's a something that begins to happen when you really see. There's a difference between this story about life and actual life. And the strange thing is we really want this, but we're also terrified of it because the

last time we were fully open, we got scared. So we need to be so kind with ourselves and we need to as you are so beautifully saying, go slowly. And we also need to realize that most people at this time on the planet still go to their deathbed identified with this condition. Self and a lot of people in power are totally identified with it, but there's more and more people. I'm working with engineers and I'm working

with it. Just you know, it's really exciting to see how I'm working with people at Amazon and at Microsoft. You know, there this is beginning to uh come into seep into the cracks in so many places. And I think people want to make a difference in the world, and they don't realize that one of the most powerful ways they can help the healing of our planet is to heal the war inside of them. So we're nearing

the end of our time. I want to visit one area of the book that I found challenging for me, like that that sort of I went, I don't know about that, and so I'm really curious about it because it's an area that that I often um, well, that

just it raises interesting questions for me. And you talk about the fact that there is an underline intelligence under everything, which actually the way you describe it made so much sense, like, oh, of course there is, like because I'm this creature, and you know, how did I go from a single cell thing into this creature? How did I How does my

heart beat? How does my digestion that there's this that there is this intelligence driving everything and that there's this underline beauty And you talk about life being for us, And I'm good with the intelligent peace up until there's almost like a conscious design for me that's out there. Like I believe, like what you say that the what's in the way is the way. I absolutely believe it is those things. It is the barriers and the challenges and the things of our life that are the grist

for the mill um. But I'm curious about UM. I guess I'm just curious what you think about you know what I'm saying that there's a I have that challenge with their being sort of a UM like that for example, that my girlfriend breaks up with me because that's a way for me to um experience challenge in life that seems I don't know, I I wrestle with that. So I'm just kind of curious. I'm not even sure that's what you were saying, but I just thought it'd be

a fun thing to talk about. First of all, I don't think any of us know really what's going on here, and I think it is very helpful to to have a set of beliefs understanding that we can never really know if they're true, right, but a set of beliefs that engage you more with life. Rather than cause you to struggle with life if we don't know, we should choose stories that give us power versus stories that take

our power away exactly. And that my experience is is the more that I've come out of the clouds and the more I see this spectacular thing. I mean, I'm looking out this window to this this magnolia tree that I'm looking right over the top of it, and it's all these bare twigs and it's just filled with these purple and pink flowers. I mean, and all of that was made out of stardust. And what is it that took startust and created the DNA molecule. I don't know

what it is. I mean, I think we've given it the name God, and we've created all sorts of religion around it, which is really mostly the human ego. But when I quiet down, I see there is an intelligence here. And when I begin to realize that this this came all in one fell swoop when I was writing the book, that life is set up to bring up what has been bound up so we can open up to be freedom,

so we can show up for life. And when I began to get out of that idea that this is happening because I did something wrong, or they did something wrong, or God whatever God is, fell asleep on the job. All of a sudden, I was not the victim anymore. Now I am being fascinated and it just really uh amazes me sometime to watch how with myself and with people that I work with, when you begin to realize how much this dance is for you. Now, truth is

always paradoxical, you know. So you know it's is there a divine you know, thing underneath it that has everything you know set you know in stone? And well, no, there's free will and you know and all this, well it's kind of like a combination to both of them. And what it is is you begin to be fascinated by what is showing up, and you know, whether it's my mind decide, you know, oh it's more peaceful if

it sees this, or you know whatever. When I begin to notice what any particular situation brings up inside of me, and I begin to do what I call in the book the you turn, the y ou turn, and you begin to notice what is going on. You begin to put the pieces of the puzzle together. And the best way I can describe it is I describe it sometimes like we're in the wind tunnel, great analogy, Yes, picture puzzle,

you know, and everyone's around the wind tunnel. You can just get it right and you're just, oh, man, got this flying is wonderful. That we're slammed against the wall or clothes are ripped off, and you know, a puzzle goes into our eye and and all that. And what we're doing in this work is we're stepping out and we're becoming curious. And that's the place where life is for you. And you just take a piece out and when you look at it, you're not the victim to

it anymore. And then you put it down on the table, and more and more that puzzle begins to fill out. And you see by these situations that life is putting you in that help you to bring up what has been bound up. You can see it, you see through it, and you're not hooked anymore, and you're not a victim to anything. You're now more and more fully engaged. And I'm like you, I get hooked. And and Andrea shared

it so beautifully on the video. You know, you know she said, we've done all this practice, and you know it was challenging at times. But she said, we had this ability to come back to the heart, which is our main brain, back to this which which is this brain is dualistic, like this doesn't like that. I think this is good. That is bad, this is right, that is wrong. Look at history. This brain is in gay aged,

it is sensitive to what is it. It is inclusive rather than exclusive, and as far as I can see, it's the only way to live. And and by this brain, you meant your heart, heart brain. Yes, and we found that out. Now it's a brain. Yeah, there's a lot of great stuff in your book about that topic. To um it. It really is a wonderful, wonderful book. Um I really enjoyed it. I love what you just had

to say there. I mean, for me, I'm a I'm a member of twelve step programs right where there's an idea of you turn your life over to the care of God. And I'm like, well, I don't know what that is. And what I finally recognized for me was it didn't really matter. It was the It was the letting go of it, you know, taking out of my clutched bad hands that I'm not sure what the mechanism is, but everything works better when I do that, right, It's like, you know, that's that seems to be the the evidence

that I can see is like me letting go works. Yeah. So you just imagine, you know, you're you're at your family, you know, for Easter or whatever, and you know, Uncle Bobby is having a an argument with Aunt Josephine, you know, or something like that, and and somebody else's doing something else, and you can just feel yourself tightening, and then you go, no, wait, life is for me that there's something here for me to see all of a sudden. It's not happening to

you all of a sudden. You are engaged with it. And my experience is every single experience has something to show you, uh, not only about this condition self, but also about how it is safe to open and engage with life. And then life becomes an adventure. And that's what we long for, you know, when we buy the fancy car or have the LiPo section or whatever, what we really really long for is to be here. I couldn't agree more. Well, Mary, thank you so much. This

has been a very fun converse nation. Like I said, I really enjoyed the book. I got an email today from um your publisher who said, uh, really, I mean I rarely see gushing like that over a book, and so it was very it's a special one. So thank you, thank you, thank you. It's my joy. You can learn more about Mary O'Malley and this podcast at one you Feed dot net slash Mary