Forgiveness

Dharma Dialogues session with Catherine on forgiveness. Recorded on Easter Sunday, 2017 in Byron Bay, Australia.

Transcript

Welcome to In the Deep.

I'm your host,

Catherine Ingram.

The following is excerpted from Dharma dialogues held in April 2017 in Lenox Head,

Australia.

It's called Forgiveness.

I've been reflecting on Jesus's line,

At least it was attributed to Jesus,

Forgive them for they know not what they do.

I love that line.

It's so true.

Forgive them for they know not what they do.

And as soon as you hear it and apply it to any particular situation or person,

It's like a healing balm comes over you.

So we're in a moment in time,

In history,

Where we have a lot of cause for that line to arise.

We look around and we see the destruction.

We hear the drums of war in the news.

We might have pictures of what that portends.

I was listening to the news yesterday in the car and they were talking about North Korea responding by possibly dropping a nuclear weapon into Seoul,

Which has 10 million people.

The madness of it all is breathtaking.

And the sorrow and the potential destruction and the actual destruction that is going on.

And if we view that as some sort of evil force,

It will drive us crazy.

If you view it as ignorance,

It's a different feeling.

The experience of it is quite different.

And underneath much of the destruction and the destructive impulse is simply fear.

That's what's underneath it.

You could also say sometimes it looks like greed is underneath it,

Like in the case of Adani,

Is it?

Is that his name?

Adani?

Is it Dan?

Yeah.

So it can look also like greed,

But underneath the greed is actually fear as well.

So we can see in our own case,

We can see in our own lives,

How easy it can be to move into a kind of fear-based aggression,

Right?

We can forgive ourselves for all those times when we kind of blew it in those ways,

Because we didn't know any better at the time.

And as many of you have heard me say,

It's unfair to apply retroactively your wisdom of today.

Your wisdom of today was hard won through all those missteps,

You could say,

Along the way.

I'm also reflecting and have been reflecting for quite some time on the extraordinary luck or privilege or I don't know even what to call it,

Of being interested in finding a deeper water and quiet within oneself,

Such that you're not so driven by fear and you're not so driven by greed and therefore you're not out harming anyone.

There's not any impulse for that.

You know,

Sometimes if I have a nightmare,

Occasionally I have a nightmare and I might be being chased or someone might grab me or something,

But I never hit back in my dream.

Sometimes I wake up and think,

Why didn't I fight back?

That there can be a habit,

A habit of just living in the quiet,

Living in the simplicity,

Living in the non-harming,

And when you see the harming not contributing to the violence by huge hatred and condemnation of these people who are on grant,

They can be very,

Very destructive.

Really looks like very,

Very thick ignorance.

And yet.

.

.

Anyway,

This came to me to say on this Easter Sunday,

I was thinking about forgiveness.

I said in here recently,

It's really,

Forgiveness really is just deep understanding,

Deep understanding of the laws of nature and how things work,

Right?

Deep understanding that people are acting out from their level of wisdom or ignorance of the moment,

Okay.

That's all that I had to say for the moment.

If anyone has anything you'd like to discuss,

Please feel free.

Where to begin?

I had a beautiful experience yesterday with lunch with really two very beautiful beings.

And one of them actually was telling me of her experience of actually offering a forgiveness in the way of saying to another,

Please forgive me if I have trespassed against you.

And it was to let this other person ultimately know that you're off the hook with me.

We don't need this between us.

And she didn't need to say that,

But it was clear for her to say it.

And it really spoke to me at such a deep level and it's reverberated through me in the last 24 hours.

And I recognise that this year,

Particularly,

I have had the,

I suppose,

The luxury of contemplation around the depth of where I've needed to forgive myself,

Really for my whole life.

And it's been a massive freeing revelation of recognising that it couldn't have been any other way with what I was born into,

The timeframe,

The conditioning,

The family,

The genetic line,

The whole lot.

And I thought,

Well,

It really couldn't actually have been any.

And so that's been really beautiful to recognise that.

And even this morning,

I was in this place,

Well,

This is Easter.

What do I want to offer up?

And I really got it.

And there was something that was a little bit,

When I left lunch,

There was something that wasn't really sitting with me quite right.

And I thought,

Well,

What the hell is that?

And I recognise that how my opinion,

Like if I don't like people,

I don't have a problem with that.

But do I need to actually share with other people that why I don't like people and the reason why.

And I actually found myself sending them a text saying,

I don't want to wrap that around.

I don't need to justify my pain in why I don't like.

And I should say,

I don't want to put that out there anymore.

And no,

Not justify,

It's another excuse for my own discomfort,

Level of discomfort,

Discomfort to even have to speak off why I don't like somebody that we mutually both know intimately well.

And I'm just so excited by that.

Because it's going to challenge the bajibis out of me to recognise that.

It's interesting how sometimes certain ways of being and even some relationships have to be in some sort of transition,

Because they were based on certain assumptions and agreements,

Especially there's a lot of relationships that are based on neurotic sharing,

Right?

Whether it's gossiping about somebody,

But just all kinds of neurotic conversation and ways of seeing things.

And as one deepens,

As one lives in a quieter and more simple place inside,

It's easy to lose interest in those kinds of ways of sharing.

And of course,

Many,

Many people do.

I've heard this hundreds of times over the years,

People will say the longer they're sort of steeping in Dharma perspective,

Often long time relationships will change or fall away altogether.

Not that the love necessarily has to fall away,

But that the engagement falls away.

Because there's no longer the shared agreement of fill in the blank of,

You know,

Crazy interests or shared complaints or railing against the universe.

And there's a certain way in which one has to be willing to go it alone if necessary,

You know,

They can get so quiet and so peaceful that you're not really willing to compromise.

So if you can't be with those who share on that level,

On that frequency,

You're happy to just walk alone.

I actually think I'm getting to an authentic place inside myself,

Catherine,

Where I'd actually really like to be that honest with people and just say,

Look,

I'm sorry,

But this really doesn't work for me.

Thank you,

But no,

Thank you.

Because there's also a level of accountability.

That needs to occur in relationship of what's really happening.

I guess in the cases of where you're going to continue to be engaged with a certain person,

You know,

That you're,

You have a life together in some fashion,

You have friendship or whatever,

Then cleaning up as you go is always nice.

And to use nonviolent communication,

Of course,

You know,

Kind of keep it in the I statements and but also,

You know,

The Buddha had a great line,

Allegedly,

Is to always speak the truth,

But only the truth that's skillful.

So sometimes certain things can actually be left unsaid,

You know,

And also sometimes your own silence is communicating loud and clear.

So I hear you and I agree that in a kind of judicious way,

One would say certain types of statements within relationship,

You know,

Kind of point out where things are going awry,

Going amiss.

But one has to be very careful in that domain as well,

In terms of the way that you share that and the if there's any sense of blame or pointing out that someone is doing something wrong and all those things,

What usually happens is just,

You know,

You're not going to be able to do that.

What usually happens is just a retraction on the other person's part,

You know,

That it can just cause more divisiveness.

So it's a fine line,

Isn't it?

Completely,

Completely.

And I do generally choose to be more quiet.

Yeah,

I don't really like to be,

You know,

Confrontive,

Upfront around because generally what I'm not liking,

It's not consciously even known by the person that I'm experiencing it with.

It's just,

You know,

Part of it,

Whatever that is and it's part of who they actually are.

That's their business.

Yes,

Yes.

And I also do appreciate,

As you're speaking,

Just then how the thought of,

Yeah,

The truth actually doesn't need defending.

Yeah,

That's beautiful.

It's already so much.

Barcasting loud and clear,

Yeah.

Yeah.

So my question is,

I'm aware that you were a Dharma practitioner very intensively practicing for 17 or something years and that you gave all of that up at some point in your life.

And I know a little bit about you,

But I also know that you're involved in social action on some level.

And I know for me,

My dilemma is often how do I keep my stillness and be in the world?

And I'm wondering whether,

You know,

What happened to you when you've stopped doing your practices?

And did you then start practicing again at some point in your life and do you have like a basic practice that you connect with that keeps you able to be in the world and be of service,

You know,

In an effective and conscious way?

Well,

The notion of practice fell away,

For one thing.

I began to realize really I was interested in a much more of a living meditation,

Right?

Just being aware in a simple way,

Just like any other animal,

Like a wake animal,

Right?

So the idea of having to do some particular thing with my mind in a particular position at a particular time of day began to be absurd to me.

So it's not that I gave anything up,

It fell away.

It just fell away,

The whole idea of it.

Now that was after a long time and also aided by meeting my teacher,

Poonjiji,

And other people who were influenced by him and in similar ways influenced.

So I had a great support system in that regard.

And I began making my own experiments with using my attention throughout the day and letting my attention use my own sensory experience as a kind of way to stay present.

So what began to happen is that I was starting to walk around really fully in my senses instead of in some sort of mental notation.

Instead of some kind of buffered existence of where I'm just noting things,

I'm actually experiencing it directly without any notation and in a choiceless way,

Whatever was arising predominantly.

You understand?

Okay,

So to your question about the activism,

In this kind of relaxation,

In that kind of just living in your free and clear senses and ease of being,

There's an organic,

Naturally arising connectedness,

A naturally occurring feeling of belonging here.

Poonjiji used to say that you become as an emperor.

He says when an emperor walks out into his kingdom,

He doesn't take a single farthing in his pocket because everything is his.

And he said,

In this waking up,

You walk out into this world and you feel this is yours,

Not that you own it,

But that you are part of it,

That this is your place,

This is your moment,

This is your breath,

Right?

That this is your intimate belonging,

Intimate immersion,

Right?

So instead of sort of walking around feeling that the world is out there and that you're in some sort of deprivation in here,

You're completely connected.

In that feeling of connectedness,

There naturally arises a love of this existence,

A love arises on its own.

You don't have to make yourself love.

You don't have to sit around and say,

May I be happy?

May they be happy?

May they,

And so on,

Like a mental practice.

You don't have to do that.

It's arising automatically in this feeling of connectedness.

And in that arising comes also the energy and the motivation to be of help wherever you can.

And that might be something simple,

Something it doesn't have to be,

It doesn't have to even be called social activism or any kind of activism per se.

It doesn't have to be named that.

Some people are incredibly helpful and spreading love in ways that wouldn't necessarily be defined as that.

So it's this process of,

It's a natural unfolding when your mind and heart are kind of lined up in a simplicity in this way of being.

I like to say that your well is being filled.

It's like filling your well.

And then when the world is out there,

You're filling your well.

And then when the well is full,

It spills over.

And it's really only when the well is filled that it spills over,

Isn't it?

Because a lot of times people move,

And fair enough,

They move from thinking they should do this or they should do that to help out.

But it's easy to get burned out when you're operating on a should and you're feeling drained and you're feeling a little resentful and you're feeling,

I'm always the one stuffing the envelopes and so on.

But when it's coming from that other place,

When it's coming from,

You just can't wait,

You're looking for a place to give yourself away,

Then it's a very different energy.

You're basically,

As the old saying goes,

You're giving it all over to God,

However it plays out.

The outcome is not so much your business,

Though you might have a preference,

Fair enough,

If you have a preference for things to go well,

Yes,

Of course,

But they may not.

And your motivation and your juice in terms of how you're offering it stays fairly topped up because it's what your heart wants.

It's what your heart is demanding when you're sitting in your sweet spot,

When you're sitting in the recognition of the truth of this situation,

That we're here for a blink of time.

And when you really get how amazing it is to be tasting this,

And how lucky to be tasting this,

And to be able to use your own attention,

As I said before,

It's a bit of a privilege to have that opportunity and to have that inclination to use your own attention to really understand it and experience it so fully.

It continuously fills up the well,

It's like a constant drip.

So every day,

You know,

Every day you're aware of just the preciousness of it all.

And that gives rise to tenderness,

You know,

Tenderness that's just natural,

And that is,

That just seems the most obvious thing.

And from that vantage point,

Not only are you into non-harming,

But you're into,

What can I do?

You know,

What can I do to help?

So for me,

Back in the day,

A long time ago,

I was a journalist specializing in issues of consciousness and activism.

I was always interested in the merger of those two,

The marriage of those two.

And eventually Dharma dialogues became much more,

I mean,

I only have so much energy in the day,

But much more the offering.

I really love sharing presence with people,

And if ever my presence can give them permission to really rest in their presence,

That really makes me happy.

I was just reminded of an analogy to what you were saying.

I once heard somebody say that that a rose flower,

When it blossoms,

Gives its beauty and fragrance,

Regardless of who's around,

You know?

And I've never forgotten that because it says,

It's kind of like what you were saying,

That it's full,

It's like an overflowing,

And it's there regardless of who's watching.

Yes.

And I love that actually.

And I also know of,

Apparently,

There's a particular flower that blooms in a desert once in a hundred years.

And I love the idea.

I mean,

Imagine sometimes it would bloom and no one saw it,

Right?

And then a hundred years later again,

You know?

And I just love that idea of,

We have to really allow for the giving away,

As you say,

With the rose for its own sake.

For its own sake.

We live in cultures that have become very mercenary,

Just as a conditioning,

It's just gone that way.

A lot of our Western cultural thrust is very mercenary.

And it's all about business dealings and how much things cost and what are you going to get from this?

And what is the.

.

.

And it's easy to slide into that habit because it's so predominant in our cultures.

It's easy to slide into that kind of way of seeing the world,

Cutting it up into product of different sorts,

Right?

Even the way people talk about animals and have for a long time,

Calling them livestock,

Right?

Livestock.

But there's a possibility again in this deep quiet,

In this simplicity of being,

It actually sort of changes your perception of,

Well,

It does change your perception of how you're seeing and experiencing this world.

And so even this what somebody I listen to and read calls the myth of human supremacy,

Right?

That even falls away,

Right?

Such that you're looking at these birds and these creatures and all the beings,

Also as little emperors as well,

It's their world too,

And just as much as they're looking at things.

So all of these perceptions actually come amazingly.

They come with just sitting in quiet.

It's been a tried and true portal to reality for a long,

Long time.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Something happened when you talked about the emperor before,

The emperor going out and knowing that,

How did you say it?

He goes out into the world without a single farthing in his pocket.

Knowing.

It's so funny,

Marianne,

Because when I heard that from Poonjiji,

Something happened to me too.

It was like something shifted about how I could see being in the world.

Yeah.

So what happened for me is I'm originally from Holland.

I've called Australia home for the last 18 years.

And I just saw that I've always kept something separate between Australia and myself.

I call it home and I don't call Holland home anymore.

There hasn't been a full surrender to the country here.

And wow.

Wow.

In a way,

It's always been them and me.

Yes.

And feeling a bit of an intruder somehow.

And I mean,

Energetically,

It's completely shifting at the moment.

Wow.

Nice.

Yeah.

And for practical reasons,

Still having a Dutch passport and not being an Australian citizen didn't help,

I don't think.

But even that,

I mean,

That's just.

.

.

Right.

That shouldn't matter.

Right.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Wow.

Thanks.

Watch this space.

Watch this space,

Yeah.

Literally.

Wow.

Nice.

Really nice.

Lovely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Great.

Something similar happened for me too,

All those years ago when he said that.

Yeah.

And it's been that way ever since.

Back before,

Long,

Long ago,

Whenever I'd say,

Be in a place like New York City,

For instance,

And I'd walk down the streets,

I felt really like a stranger in a strange land,

Just that I felt alien to everything I was seeing and not at all a part of it.

Just kind of at two with.

And even in New York City,

I can be walking down the street and just see it all as almost like dancing molecules.

And it is true that you look around,

Look around this room and those cars and everything you see has been made from the earth,

Has been taken and made and changed shape and smelted and all those things that are done to the resources of the world.

But if you take it into the realm of humans,

You realize we're just also stardust.

All of this is just infused with some mysterious thing,

But it's basically stardust and gas that all kind of formed all this stuff.

And so you start to live more and more in that understanding of their different shapes and different,

You go to a particular place and it's called Australia.

But I like to point out,

This is a Tibetan way of viewing the world,

That after a while you start to have the one taste,

They call it,

The one taste,

Just as the ocean has the taste of salt everywhere on earth.

You start to have the one taste of beingness that you see shining through everything,

Everything,

Everything.

It's just blazing on in all these forms and you're just blazing with it.

And it's all those forms are made of the same stuff as you are.

And so it's like that.

That's why you,

It's like you don't need the farthing in your pocket.

You don't have to own it.

You are it.

Right.

So I'm just curious,

How would you direct somebody towards that direct experience of self presence,

The truth of what you know yourself to be?

I always go for the simplest possible route.

I heard that you say that before.

So that kind of really resonated with me because I mean just simple,

Simple.

Yeah.

So here and now,

Let's make an experiment.

The actual reality that you're experiencing right now,

Just the,

Just let's stay with the word reality.

Right.

What's going on?

Well,

I feel very spacious and very alive.

Yeah,

I just feel very alive and aware of,

It feels everything.

Yeah.

It's very simple.

Can you imagine just checking in with that level of experience frequently or even spending quite a bit of time?

Yeah,

That's definitely possible for me.

And even if there are times when you're shaken off that,

Where fear is arising or agitation is arising or just even fantasy arising,

Right?

Okay,

So be it.

That will have its day.

Yeah.

Right.

And then the awareness,

The attention can just drift back in a very simple way to what you just described.

Spacious and clear awareness,

Not ever far away,

Always shining through.

And then even though the attention will sometimes jump away and go on to something else for a while,

Depending on how entertaining that is or how much suffering that is,

The attention will can just float back.

So my,

Always my recommendation is to get the habit going of what you just described.

Often we can't really use words to categorize it well,

But yeah,

Good enough.

And in the immersion,

In the habituation,

The attention will keep defaulting.

It'll become its set point,

Its default.

And you start to rely on that.

It starts to really guide your life intelligently.

You start to be guided from sitting in that quiet space.

I like to say it also wakes up a certain type of intelligence,

Even when other types of intelligence,

Especially with age,

Start to fade.

But wisdom intelligence can actually increase with age.

So you start to rely on all that.

You basically gain trust through confidence.

You know,

You keep making the experiment,

You get more and more confident.

And then you can sort of trust going forward based on knowing that this is how you've been playing it and it's been fine.

And it's,

It's especially useful in the hard times.

Yes.

You know,

The hard times do come.

And that's where that habit of the quiet,

You know,

The quiet surrender,

Not in apathy,

But surrender to what is so,

Holds you in good stead.

Okay.

I think I've been carrying a concept of wisdom intelligence,

I think I've been carrying a concept of what it's supposed to be like,

So to speak.

I think that's been a trap.

I think so too.

And I see that with so many people.

You know,

They think that it's some grand,

You know,

I sometimes have used the analogy of like,

You know,

In the old Star Wars films and various of these space films,

They'll show like they'll show the spaceship going along and then it hits warp speed.

And then it's like everything goes.

Yes,

Like that.

So I think people imagine some steady state that they're going to reach and it's going to be like warp speed,

Like it's just going to go perfectly peaceful and still.

That is not,

You know,

Wrong planet.

Yeah.

That's not how it is here.

Things get bumpy all the time,

You know,

Things only hold together for a short time and then they go all awry again,

You know,

As we all know from our own lives,

You know,

Even the luckiest of lives.

But yet there can be something that's pretty steady and quiet and peaceful,

Even in the hardest bumps,

You know,

There can be that.

So how that occurs is that the habit is strong.

Okay.

I feel also there is something there that has developed which is,

It's got a story around not trusting the mind,

You know,

Like the mind is going to trick me sort of thing.

So I think that's kind of been blocking things a bit,

Or not blocking this wrong way,

But you know what I mean?

That's been taking the attention.

Another popular misconception,

You know,

The mind is a perfectly useful tool,

Right?

And in the quiet,

Your own discernment is very,

Very clear.

Like I said,

A certain type of intelligence wakes up.

So you actually know when the mind is rolling down a crazy avenue,

Right?

It's up to no good.

And it's going,

You know,

It's about to go rabble rousing.

And you also know when you're having,

You know,

A clear insight or a beautiful creative impulse or,

You know,

When the functional and the creative and the relational and the smart content of the mind is arising.

So that discernment is just clear as can be.

I've often used the example,

I think we're just meeting tonight,

Today,

But I've often used the example of when I look at my emails in the morning,

I easily parse out what is spam and what is not.

I don't even,

Somehow the spam doesn't catch my attention.

It's like my eyes just flick down a long list of words and just pick out automatically the relevant ones.

It's the same with the stream of thought,

Much of which is spam.

But the attention can actually,

You know,

The impulses of genius actually pop.

And especially when there's this habit of quiet.

There's a quote that I heard decades ago that really touched me and that has stayed with me most of my life.

I was just very,

I never forgot it.

In fact,

I memorized this quote.

And it's by the So San,

Who's the third Chinese patriarch.

And it goes something like,

The great way is not difficult for those who have no preference.

When love and hate are absent,

All becomes clear and undisguised.

Slightest distinction,

However,

In heaven and earth are set immeasurably apart.

And I just love that.

Yet as the years have gone on,

And as I've done more psycho-spiritual work and have felt myself becoming clearer,

I seem to have more preferences.

I've actually got a lot of preference.

And I'm kind of inside of myself at odds with that quote just keeps ringing in my ears when I'm thinking,

No,

I don't drink alcohol.

I'm not going to go there and I'm not going to hang out with those kind of people.

I've got these preferences for a lot of things.

How I like my house to be.

I think that the,

First of all,

The translations of the Third Zen Patriarch,

There are varying ones.

The one that you've just said happens to be one that my boyfriend and I 40 years ago published in a little yellow booklet.

Is that where you ever saw it?

Because it went around the whole world.

We published it.

Anyway,

That was the same translation you just quoted,

But of course it goes on many verses.

The next part I love also,

The way is perfect,

Like,

I'm going to go to the third Zen Patriarch,

And I'm going to go to the love also.

The way is perfect,

Like vast space where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess.

Anyway,

I have come to having seen other translations,

I've come to reinterpret some of that about not having,

Not being attached to the preferences.

Preferences arise and preferences are human,

Right?

Sure.

But when a preference has arisen and it didn't go your way,

What then?

Then there can be a surrender.

Then there can be a relationship with reality that says,

Okay,

You win again.

You always win.

You know,

That there's a certain recognition of how long am I going to suffer battling reality.

So fair enough to have preferences if you like coffee and not tea,

If you wish this would happen and not that,

If you want a certain person to be elected,

The other one got in,

Etc.

It goes on and on.

Our preferences are myriad through the day.

We're human animals.

That's how it is.

It's the relationship after that.

Yeah,

It's the attachment to that preference.

Yes.

It's set in such a definite and definitive kind of way.

It is.

And it's beautiful.

Of course,

Many,

Many of those stanzas are just,

You know,

Incomparable.

They're amazing.

And I always did love that first stanza,

But I did sort of reinterpret it with time.

I have a lot of preferences.

Me too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So many.

Yes.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Yes.

You're welcome,

Dear.

I'm noticing that there's a fear and anxiety in this belly at the moment.

And it has to do with,

I actually teach nonviolent communication.

You mentioned it earlier and my ears picked up.

Oh,

That sounds familiar.

And I'm going for my assessment next weekend to be certified.

And there's this fear around assessment and putting myself out there into this world that sort of requires you to perform and to be able to show up in a particular way.

And something in me just goes,

I just don't want to live in that world.

I just don't want to,

I guess it's the fear is that I don't want to expose myself to the hurt of failure or rejection or whatever.

And then there's something deeper that's aware of it all.

And so there's this constant experience of both being aware of the fear at times and going,

Okay,

I can live with that.

I can bring that with me.

And then there's times where it just kind of sort of swamps the energy system.

And I kind of get caught in the sort of the absoluteness of the fear.

It seems like that's all there is.

And there's a deep longing to be free of that,

You know,

Obviously.

There's something we'd love to find its way through to a place of freedom and spaciousness.

So the fear is not so willing to step in and take over when it does.

And I'm just wondering if you're in your journey that you've,

If you had some insight into,

You know,

How to be with how to be with fear in a way that allows it but doesn't allow the swamping of it or the,

I don't know,

Just have some curiosity around that.

Of course,

It depends on the circumstance of the fear.

Some fears are grander than others,

Right?

In your case,

Right now,

You're dealing with the possibility of rejection.

They may say,

Hmm,

You don't quite cut the muster here for us,

Right?

And that would have a certain,

There could be a feeling of diminishment about your own worth,

About things like that arising.

Now,

What I would do in that particular circumstance,

What I've seen over the course of my life,

And you may resonate with this,

Is that when something rejects me,

It turns out it was a good idea that they did because I'm not quite a fit for their program anyway,

Right?

You know what I mean?

Like,

Whether it's about a spousal type relationship or whatever it happens to be,

It's almost like I saw a cartoon a long time ago,

And I'm not going to get it exactly perfect,

But something like the woman is standing in a card shop and she's saying,

Um,

Do you happen to have a thank you card for someone who left you long ago,

But now you're seeing the perfection of it?

And it's,

And it's kind of like that,

That I've come to trust that,

Okay,

So be it.

I want,

I want,

I want to get the certification.

I've gone to a lot of trouble to get it,

But if their system is such that they don't accept me,

Well,

We might as well know now,

Because I may not fit in other aspects of their system.

I may not want to be dotting all the eyes and crossing the T's that they want anyway,

And also to say,

Can I use any that I have,

Anything I have learned all this time in my own way as a freelancer,

And I'm not going to be right,

Which is what I've done with my scene,

You know,

Can I use that the way I want to use it?

So to really have that in your back pocket as,

You know,

As it as the alternative,

It's always helpful to say,

What's the worst that's going to happen and then face that face it and say,

Okay,

Am I going to be able to live with this?

And so as I say,

Certain fears are,

They're more momentous than others.

This one would just be not to diminish it as an important thing to you,

But this one will not radically change your life.

I don't think you could go on in another way,

Having the tools in your pocket and who knows,

Who knows how that might play out in another way,

Even if you didn't get the certification.

So to go into that test in that kind of also that frees up a tremendous amount of your clarity and peace basically,

Such that you will have the full complement of your own mind in the interview.

Yeah,

I can,

I can feel and resonate with that.

And I think the word that stood out for me and we were sharing there was the word trust,

Something there around just trusting the movement of life.

And yes,

You know,

This,

As you were saying before,

In response to Melinda,

You know,

This sort of sense of being aware and present here now is enough.

And yes,

In that experiencing,

So there's trust.

Yes,

Exactly.

You know,

It's like,

Right,

And that who you are,

Whether or not you have an NVC certification,

Right,

Is blazing along fine.

This has been In the Deep.

You can find the entire list of In the Deep podcasts at KatherineIngraham.

Com,

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Till next time.

Reviews

I feel really topped up by this talk. Reminded me of so many things I sort of know but forget to embody.

Great meditation. Will be using it again. Thank you and namaste.

Loved the thank you card in the gift shop idea 🙏💝

Wise counsel which resonates deeply. Listening to Catherine and others speak of their experiences and ask questions helps to soothe recurring fears & doubts about this life and how to live it well.
Namaste 🙏🏻