If I Had My Life To Live Over

Excerpted from Dharma Dialogues with Catherine Ingram. Recorded in Melbourne, Australia, in April 2018. From the opening talk: “I was walking with my friend back from the village of Toorak here in Melbourne town today on this beautiful autumn day. We’d just had this lovely jaunt into the village. Walking back, my attention careened into a story which I spoke out loud, and it began like this: If I had my life to live over…”

Transcript

Welcome to In the Deep.

I'm your host,

Katherine Ingram.

The following is excerpted from a session of Dharma Dialogues held in Melbourne,

Australia in April 2018.

It's called,

If I Had My Life to Live Over.

I was walking with my friend back from the village of Turack here in Melbourne town today on this beautiful day,

This beautiful autumn day.

Gorgeous weather and we just had this lovely little jaunt into the village,

Walking back.

And my attention careened off into a story,

Which I spoke out loud and it began like this.

If I had my life to live over,

If I had my life to live over,

I would have spent a lot more time in Italy.

I would have lived there for some period of time.

Just a little story that came out in the moment.

I don't even know if it's true,

If by some miraculous twist of the law of the universe that I could live my life over.

Even that I would choose it if I had the choice again.

But it reminded me of some old prose pieces that I had read long ago when I was a young woman that began,

If I Had My Life to Live Over.

There were two of them and I've kind of conflated the two and I'm probably not going to get them exactly right.

But one of them had to do with,

I wear more purple and a big red floppy hat that didn't go.

And another one I think said something about,

I'd go barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later into the fall.

I'd be more silly.

And so on.

Basically,

I'd loosen up.

I'm not recommending that we indulge a lot of thoughts about If I Had My Life to Live Over.

But the instruction of that line has to do with how I'm living my life now and going forward.

Because there are a few of those things one can tweak.

You can wear more purple and go barefoot and be more silly and not so locked down.

And if there is some delight in your awareness that you might let yourself have,

Why not,

If you can have it?

Because there's a great power in having joy in your life.

It turns out it's really good for you.

It's really good for you and it allows you to be more magnanimous.

And sometimes people misunderstand that,

In fact,

Get it backwards.

They feel that allowing themselves joy is somehow selfish or somehow not taking into account the suffering of the world.

And some people have been indoctrinated to be very suspicious of any kind of pleasure,

Of any kind of happiness.

I joke a lot with my Irish friends about this because they've been indoctrinated that way in their Catholicism,

Where pleasure is seen to be the work of the devil.

And so I tease them and we all laugh about it a lot because at some point they start to see through it and see how absurd.

Yet the conditioning is very strong.

And that's an extreme case.

Maybe some of us might have lesser kinds of conditioning in that same direction,

Whereby you don't quite let yourself have joy or pleasure or delight.

Some people fear that not only because of conditioning but because they don't want to love too deeply,

They don't want to feel too much.

But the proposal here,

The invitation,

Is to recognize that you're allowing yourself happiness,

Joy,

Peace,

General well-being actually spills over and is a great gift to others.

Sometimes when I am down,

I think about the people who I admire in this regard and who are joyous despite the difficulties.

Right?

They're not foolish.

They're awake.

They're smart.

They're paying attention and still joyous.

I find that so inspiring.

So that line,

If I had my life to live over,

Well,

You don't have that,

But you have the life now and going forward,

Whatever time is left.

What you said is fantastic,

And I recognize the truth of it and for me the truth of it.

And how do you,

I feel like I've lost that ability.

I feel like I've lost that ability to tap into that.

I feel worn down.

Yeah.

How do you,

Because I used to feel it.

I used to be able to tap into that and recognize it and I feel silly.

I feel silly in my seriousness.

Well,

You can start making experiments,

Right?

Just incrementally.

You can make a little few experiments at a time or even one now and again.

Do something out of character,

Right?

Do something silly or surprise yourself in some way when you have a certain kind of impulse that's just out of your normal treadmill route.

Right?

And again,

You kind of start to loosen it up a bit.

Practice.

Yeah.

Yes,

You could practice.

You could say practice.

I would say it another way,

Which is just do it.

And really understand this part is a precursor to the allowing yourself to do it.

That you're doing this not just for you.

You're doing it for everybody around you.

Because you know also when you're around someone who's kind of loose and gives themselves permission to enjoy.

See,

This is part of why I wanted to spend,

If I could have my other life,

Time in Italy,

Because they really know how to enjoy life.

It's a whole culture that understands that.

Right?

So you're swimming in that transmission all the time and everything you're looking at is signaling that.

And so when you're in that circumstance,

It becomes very,

Very habitual.

Right?

It's the beautiful life,

You know?

So that when you're taking that mantle yourself,

It's not only for you.

It's exuding,

It's transmitting all around you.

And as I said at the outset,

It makes you more magnanimous.

Some people fear that it seems selfish.

It's the opposite.

Right?

So to really unhook any kinds of thoughts that are inhibiting that and replace those thoughts with these reflections.

Right?

That my commitment to having more pleasure in my life,

Not suggesting become a hedonist.

Right?

But just having more pleasure,

Being more alive and joyful and delighted.

I like to have a sense that I'm being easily delighted.

Right?

Easily delighted.

And no matter what has gone before.

Right?

There's a line,

A famous spiritual line.

You know,

A darkened room,

Which has been darkened for a thousand years,

Is lit by a single candle.

Right?

As soon as the candle is lit in your heart,

It's light again.

Now,

Sometimes in life,

There's a pile up of losses,

A pile up of sorrows.

And in those phases,

We have to allow ourselves to grieve.

We allow ourselves to feel beaten down by it because that's the truth of it.

You know,

We watched a show the other night on this wonderful program here,

Insight.

It was called Good Grief.

And it was about all these people who were in various stages of grief and handling it in different ways and in different time phases.

And it was so instructive to watch,

Just to allow the heart to open into how some people,

Like one man who lost his son,

Who had been bullied and then committed suicide.

He made the statement,

He's never going to get over it.

And he felt sure about that.

And that may well be true,

Understandably.

A line I like,

Patti Smith,

The singer,

Performing artist,

Patti Smith said that her father said this line to her,

That time doesn't heal all wounds,

But time gives you the tools,

Gives you the wherewithal often to handle the sorrows.

And there was a lot of discussion in this show about that very point,

That the idea that time heals.

Well,

Maybe not entirely.

Maybe we get,

You know,

The losses become more and more and more as you go along.

You live long enough in the world and love enough.

You're subject to loss.

It's just inevitable.

And so there are times when choosing joy,

Choosing all that,

That I spoke about,

Pleasure and so on,

You feel far from it.

It's like it's it seems almost like something that was from a former part of your life.

But I would say that allow yourself some phase of,

You know,

The darkened room.

And but know that at some point it's time for the candlelight.

And you don't force it,

But just gently,

Gently,

Gently.

And even if it's simple little things in the day that you allow yourself to notice and feel heartened by.

Right.

And bit by bit by bit.

And there might come a time,

Surprisingly,

You know,

At a retreat in Oregon long,

Long ago,

A guy showed up.

I'd never met him.

He found out about the retreat.

He showed up.

It was a week long retreat.

And on the first day,

I think I think it was the very first day he told the group that he had just come to this retreat because his girlfriend,

Who he was planning to marry and who had left her husband,

Had been murdered.

And he's the one who found her.

And you can imagine this man was shattered,

Right?

Shattered and traumatized and in post-traumatic stress as well.

I mean,

Very,

Very anxious,

Of course.

And the whole thing was a nightmare.

And I,

You know,

I just recommended just rest.

Just rest your being.

You don't have to impose anything on yourself.

Anyway,

About the fourth day,

He got very quiet.

He just was doing his thing.

I left him alone in those sessions.

But on about the fourth day,

Somebody was saying something very funny in the group.

And I noticed he was laughing,

But wholeheartedly laughing.

And I saw that in that moment,

Just in that moment,

He was fully in joy,

Which I was surprised by.

I was so happy to see it.

And I was a little surprised in a good way because it seemed so impossible that that could happen so soon.

So sometimes you find yourself,

Despite all of it,

I mean,

In a way,

That's what we're all operating from,

Despite all of it.

Like this crazy world of incredible vulnerability that we live in,

The march toward death,

All of us like walking across a minefield arm in arm.

And despite all of that,

Despite all the crazy news we're subject to,

Despite all the cruelty that we see,

Despite all of it,

All of it that we're all subject to.

And yet this love of life,

This mercy that we all know,

The kindnesses,

The delicate.

.

.

We're such complex creatures,

The delicate sensitivities that we each have,

The capacity for noticing,

The capacity we each have for seeing nuances and noticing the color of the sky.

I was also telling Sri yesterday,

We were walking on a different street.

We heard somebody behind us and we turned around and there was this beautiful puppy border collie and his person.

And I glanced at this dog and I had love at first sight.

And I was reflecting on how to let yourself be susceptible to love at first sight.

You don't have to have a relationship.

I'm not going to be taking care of the dog.

But in those moments,

Walking down the block together,

I was just,

I was in love.

So it's like that.

You just start to be a little bit more susceptible to those kinds of moments.

And it doesn't mean that you don't honor the feelings of loss and honor the memories of the loved ones.

When there has been tremendous loss,

It gives a lot of value to what's left.

And these are the reflections that one starts to live in,

In a very habitual way.

So even though you have been interrupting what may have seemed a very strong habit from the past,

The new habit starts to form.

I always point out there's two reasons that it forms more quickly than you'd suspect.

And that is that you begin to see the truth of it.

And also it's highly pleasurable.

So the neurobiology starts to be your ally in this because it's highly pleasurable.

The attention will keep going back.

I used to live in,

I mean,

I would have to say a steady state of neurosis.

Just at the effect of my very difficult conditioning of childhood,

Understandably.

But it was just,

I was just bouncing from one negative thought to the next,

Or one worrying thought,

Or one railing at the heavens with my fist about the injustice.

And on and on.

I mean,

It was just a torture chamber.

And I became desperate to try to find some sort of meaning and make some sort of sense of it all and control my mind.

And,

You know,

I fell into Buddhist practice at a relatively young age.

Mindfulness practice did that for a really long time.

Just kind of clutching on like a drowning person at sea onto a piece of floating driftwood.

What I'm now recommending is easier than all that.

It's actually easier.

It's easier because it's more fun and more joyful and it's more at hand and it's more about all the things I'm speaking about tonight,

About allowing pleasure,

Allowing small delights,

Being in gratitude.

Not having to have a lot of mental homework about it,

But just experiencing a possibility,

Which you can make this experiment easily right now,

Of just experiencing well-being.

And that thoughts might go through and say,

But no,

But wait a minute,

But what about,

No,

I still have that problem.

OK,

Those thoughts are going through and yet you can just still sit here in well-being.

In ease.

And then it becomes the new habit.

I'm staying in this amazing place,

And this morning I came down for breakfast.

And so all the breakfast is laid out and there's this little basket and there's all these eggs in it.

And there's a little sign that says,

Eat me.

And in the middle is an egg with two little eyes and a little smiley face.

And I thought that is so simple,

But it's so beautiful.

Yeah,

I thought it's so easy to bring joy.

That just touched my heart.

Yeah,

So simple.

Yeah.

Yeah,

I mean,

It is true that we,

Another affliction,

And I think we in our privileged lives have it more than other people,

Is that we have a higher demand for pleasure and for things that give us a sense of abundance and well-being.

And really,

It's better to go the other way rather than expect more and more and more and not be happy unless this fabulous,

Fabulous thing ratcheted down.

A smiley face on an egg.

Those are easier to come by than a new car.

I was thinking,

We all possibly go through dark times and mine was possibly not the worst,

But bad enough for me to feel down.

I then got very lucky because a very lovely lady came into my life and was willing to listen and to let me talk through.

She also did one other thing.

She brought back a friend that I hadn't seen for 20,

30 years who has been going through some grief himself,

To a certain,

Some grief himself.

Sorry,

It was my throat.

To a certain extent.

But he's also the funniest man we know who can just think something funny and start laughing and put a smile on your face.

And I was thinking during the conversation that I felt at the time that I needed the time to be serious about the loss and couldn't get past that.

And really welcomed the fact that those two things happened where I could talk it through for one,

But secondly where somebody could allow me to smile again and see the pleasure in life again.

So I think they're both important,

But I think that there's timing is the way I feel.

Yes,

Yes,

Absolutely.

And everyone's timing is their own.

They're on their own journey,

Right?

So yes,

Of course.

The time,

It's like a season of grief.

And however long that season happens to be for you is unique.

And yet it is interesting.

I mean,

I have had a lot of loss in my life as well.

And it is interesting that,

You know,

It's sort of surprising that suddenly the clouds lift,

You know,

Even though you think that's never going to happen again.

You're never going to feel,

You're never going to have the unbridled joy,

You know,

The,

You know,

Just the silly,

Crazy laughter again.

And yet along comes an egg.

And not long comes a happy egg.

And so I had to spend today tidying up my house because I live in a rental property and we have inspections every six months and it has to be tidy.

But what I found today and what,

Just thinking about the egg,

Was that firstly I was tidying,

I started tidying and,

You know,

With this attitude of I have to do this for somebody else.

And then it turned into the,

I'm doing this for myself and really enjoyed it and spent probably five hours doing it rather than just the one I would have done.

And it really transformed my sort of appreciation that it's for me,

For my own pleasure to have this cleanliness and this beauty around me.

That's a really beautiful insight.

And the other thing that came across was,

Saying to Mike on the way,

I also realized that I enjoy much more getting rid of things and decluttering than actually buying things.

And that's the first time I've really sort of realized that today.

So,

Yeah,

It was just really beautiful to have this change of perspective that changed a lot of things about things I don't normally like.

Yes,

Beautiful.

Yes,

That can make a great shift in your life,

You know,

Simplifying,

Living in clear space,

Right?

Because where you live,

I recommend it should feel sacred to you,

However that is,

Whatever that means for you,

That when you go into your home,

That it's sacred space,

That it's a place that uplifts,

That it's a place that supports,

It's a place of peace,

Right?

And I would add beauty,

However,

Whatever beauty appeals to you.

But that doesn't typically,

And I can't say this for everyone,

But it doesn't typically include a lot of clutter and just,

You know,

Dust balls hanging around and all of those things.

Because what that's doing is signaling something has to be done,

Something needs to be cared for,

Right?

So it's a little bit of a drain,

It's like having a leak out of your attention.

Whereas when things are,

You know,

Just kept up,

Not that you have to be obsessive,

But just that you feel that you're living in clear space,

Your being can rest more.

Yeah,

I think that's what I felt today.

Yeah.

So my premise and my recommendation is to have nothing much on your mind.

Like to have like a kind of clear slate and that whatever arises,

If it's something you have to deal with and handle,

It comes up into this clear spaciousness.

You notice it,

Okay,

This one has to be dealt with.

A lot of the material comes up,

It's just nonsense,

It's spam,

It goes by,

Right?

But it's coming up in this clear opening,

This clear channel.

And that is very relaxing.

That's a very relaxing way to live,

To not have a lot of clutter and jumble and all this,

You know,

Like a bunch of wires that have been cut and now just straggling and dangling,

You know?

And so I love what you said and I love the inside of it and the understanding of simplicity.

And also the point about a job well done,

About doing something,

If you're going to be doing it,

Then do it well for you,

Right?

Even if no one else notices.

Even if there's no other kind of advantage.

Right?

And that also becomes a habit.

One of my friends,

He spent a lot of time in Zen centers over the years.

And when you,

In the phases that I hung out with him,

Of course he wasn't in the Zen center,

He wasn't in the Zen monastery,

He was back living in the world.

But he lived very much kind of like he was living in a Zen center.

I tend to do that too.

My girlfriends tell me it's more like a Zen princess center.

But anyway.

But he lived very,

Very impeccably.

And I would notice everything he would do if he was going to serve you a cup of coffee,

It was like it was this,

Like a coffee ceremony.

Right?

Or if he would give you a present,

Even a simple little present,

You know,

Next to your plate,

It would be presented like that.

And I just noticed everything about his life had that kind of sparkly quality of just clarity and of beauty,

You know,

And super simple,

Really,

Really simple,

Such that,

You know,

I mean,

I think that for me,

That's the highest aesthetic.

I went,

Well,

What do you know who the sculptor Noguchi is?

He's a famous Japanese sculptor,

And his pieces are just extraordinary.

And I once toured his property where he had his,

He was dead,

Of course.

But anyway,

His workspace was an old sake barn that was from the 1500s.

That was just,

It itself was a work of art.

And I mean,

Just incredible.

And his home was just this basically two rooms,

Stone and tatami mats and low table and low sort of futon bed.

And I forgot what else,

Maybe a couple of sculptures were in there.

But,

Oops,

My feeling in those spaces was,

I felt exalted by the spaces I was standing in.

I felt that it was triggering something.

I dare use this word holy,

You know,

Something exalted about the human spirit.

When you spoke at the start,

For me,

The idea of joy seems linked with claiming your freedom.

And I guess that's getting free from what you're tethered to.

Yeah,

I guess there's something about that where you're within your own reverie,

And it's a quality of freedom,

I think.

I like that.

And I guess for me,

There's tethered to family and it seems to be been a step to take to actually claim my own freedom and my own joy,

Which is seemingly not the same as being tethered to things that we think might make us happy too.

Right.

It's all,

You know,

It's your own examination of this with regard to your specific conditioning,

Whether cultural or familial or however it is,

Will be what reveals that truth to you.

You know,

Some people might be tethered in a different way.

But,

You know,

It's interesting what you're saying.

How you're equating it with some kind of liberation from something that's weighty.

Yeah.

But those small incremental steps that you're talking about,

You're open up that gateway.

Yeah.

Yes,

That's right.

You do.

Yeah.

Anyhow.

And you make experiments in your own case,

Right?

Yeah.

Anyhow.

Yeah.

Harry.

I can sort of relate to that because I know for me,

I was sort of brought up and there was quite a comfortable existence as a child and all the way through,

But still it was strongly ingrained that to really be happy,

You've got to have a certain amount of money,

Which I know is,

And it's never enough,

You know,

That horizon is always further and further away.

And the right friends and the right,

So,

And I can just see how it just takes me away from just being present.

And the other thing,

So it's one thing to kind of know about that,

But I think over some time I've really been examining the truth of that.

And it just doesn't stand up to reason.

And which is part of all the great traditions as well is that,

You know,

Happiness is not got from that,

But it's that illusion that,

You know,

Once we get this goal,

Money,

Whatever,

Then life's going to really turn out.

So it's kind of seeing through that,

I think,

Is really important.

And also this conditioning too of how difficult it is to be still.

I just noticed this tendency to want to look at my phone,

At the news and,

You know,

Facebook and just wanting to be entertained as well.

Yeah.

And yet,

And you get some sort of instant hit from it maybe,

But it doesn't lead to,

You know,

What we're really after.

And so that's been a process for me.

The last retreat I did with you on a Sunday,

I think last year,

Was just really fantastic in that the retreat was just about being present and especially walking around the streets here and just noticing,

You know,

The colours,

The,

It's such a beautiful area as well.

And that was just an eye opener to see how much pleasure you can get just from being present.

And it's a kind of an ongoing type of satisfaction as well.

It is,

Yes.

And then you get,

You know,

You get this entrainment whereby you allow yourself walking down any street,

Anywhere.

That's just,

You know,

You're still walking in that space,

You know,

Of just presence and noticing and enjoying.

But to your point about the little hits we get with our various media,

I think it really is becoming a massive addiction worldwide.

Right.

I mean,

I think we're all seeing that and experiencing it.

I mean,

I notice it too,

You know,

And I'm hyper aware of how powerful it is,

You know,

And I keep up with that information in terms of,

You know,

What it's doing to our,

I mean,

It's almost like it's creating new types of humans,

Right,

Whose attention is being used primarily for immediate immersion.

So many times I've been walking down the street,

Say in a city I don't know well,

And I want to ask somebody a direction.

And so many people are looking at their phones that you don't want to interrupt them while they're in the middle of something,

You know,

So you can't even find someone to talk with,

Even though there's plenty of people on the street,

You know.

And the expectation of this constant flood of information,

Right,

And as you say,

The entertainment factor that it brings with it.

But it's pretty,

It's like eating cotton candy,

You know,

There's no nutrient,

You know,

But you're sort of just gobbling it down.

You enjoy it while you do it,

But then you crash afterwards.

Yes,

Right.

And you actually haven't ingested any nutrient.

In fact,

You may have been ingesting something that's kind of toxic.

And it is to your point about the difference in a retreat where you're forced to be unplugged,

And you discover what it feels like to be alive again,

You know,

Is,

You know,

And you and I are of such a similar age,

And we know that we spent a lot of our life without that kind of media,

Right?

I mean,

Young people can hardly imagine it,

You know,

When we think about how slow life was,

Somehow we managed,

You know,

Somehow we all survived.

You played outside as a kid and you had a relationship with nature that I think a lot of young people don't have now.

And how powerful that was as an education.

So a lot of what happens in,

I think,

In a Dharma awakening is that you are going against the stream of the culture.

And it's just what's so.

And it's very,

The culture is so seductive and so powerful.

The media is so powerful,

The heaviest conditioning probably ever in history.

And so to be stepping out of it,

Right,

Out of this rush is,

You know,

It's not easy in terms of what I mean by not easy.

It's not easy in terms of how you don't get a lot of support to do that.

The only support that you really get is either with your Dharma friends or in making your own experiment and realizing,

This just feels better to me,

Right?

This just feels better.

And I'm feeling more magnanimous and I'm feeling healthier and I'm feeling more sane.

I think that's an important distinction,

Isn't it,

That we think there's different types of happiness.

And so as against this kind of pleasure high,

There's this kind of more peace and serenity,

Which is not really valued.

And yet if you're really investigators,

That's really what's worthwhile and ongoing.

Yes,

Absolutely.

I like what you said about addiction to media,

Etc.

,

Because with addiction,

The nature of it is that you need more and more to get the same hit.

And you can just see it,

That the PlayStations are more realistic.

Even the papers now,

They try and kind of suck you in with more clever headlines and all the rest.

And it's just getting more and more.

Yes.

And faster and faster,

The expectation of speed of information.

And all of it is signaling your brain.

They've done these studies.

When you have an expectation of some technological thing to happen in a certain amount of time,

And it's not happening in that amount of time,

It's slower,

A cortisol and anxiety hormones start kicking up in your being.

So,

For instance,

I mean,

You and I grew up in a time when you dialed a telephone and it's like,

Imagine,

You know,

Or even dial up Internet.

Which back in the day,

When that was how it was,

That was how it was.

Right?

So now people who have the expectation that it should be lightning fast,

All of those kinds of technologies are almost painful to experience.

The system starts to go into agitation because of these expectations of speed.

So it's all of these things we have to challenge.

Right?

And as you do,

As you challenge them one by one,

And your system starts to redress itself somehow,

You know,

Into just slower ways.

It was one of the most powerful things for me about all my early trips in India,

Because they,

At least in those days,

It may be different.

I haven't been there in a very long time.

But in the 70s,

There was no value placed on efficiency.

It didn't seem to be a priority of any sort.

And so when we would go there,

It would take me a while to kind of get with the program that efficiency isn't in the cards.

That's not going to be a rational conversation we're going to have about what is the most efficient way to do this.

And what would happen,

And what's so interesting too,

Is that everything would get slower.

I mean,

If you're going to mail a package,

In those days,

You first took your box to a tailor who would tie,

Who would sew it in fabric,

In kind of a canvas-like fabric.

The whole box would get sewn up.

And then you'd take it to the post office where you'd expect to spend about a day in line.

And life just had a really different rhythm.

You hardly got anything done,

But you lived all the while and you spent hours drinking tea and having conversations and having meals.

And what's ironic about all this is that the memories from those days for me,

Which are now from the 70s,

Are so vivid.

It's like every one of those days has been recorded in perfect fidelity in my awareness.

And it's so strange because,

You know,

Like I said,

It was not about speed,

That's for sure.

And it wasn't about a lot of experience jammed in.

It was about the richness of the moments.

And that's what we get in the retreats as well.

You get the richness of the moments.

This has been In the Deep.

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

Com,

Where you can also book a private session by phone or Skype and see my upcoming events.

Our Italy retreat of 2018 is now filled,

But we have space in the New Zealand retreat in May of 2019.

Till next time.

Reviews

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