So we are reading.
From the Bhagavad Gita.
And I read from the Stephen Mitchell version.
I also like the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi version.
And I also like the Paramahansa Yogananda version.
But there are hundreds and hundreds,
Maybe thousands of interpretations of the Gita.
So it's not that you need to have one of these or something to go along,
Or even if you don't need any at all.
But sometimes it's nice,
Some people like to have a Gita that they can follow along.
And it's often really interesting to hear the different interpretations,
Because Sanskrit is very,
Very rich.
Yeah,
Depending on the interpreter's context,
It can sound very differently.
Resonate with each of us in very different ways.
So this is a conversation between Arjuna and Krishna.
And Arjuna.
Is our hero.
He is all of us.
Krishna is God,
Is your highest self,
Your guides,
Your I don't know,
Your purest being,
Perhaps.
And it's a conversation between the two.
And Arjuna is very distraught.
He is at a place,
He's having a dark night of his soul.
And my favorite definition of a Dark Knight of the Soul is that It's that place where you come to in life where Everything you ever thought was true is no longer true.
You know,
For me,
Probably the darkest night I have ever had.
Was when I was 29.
I had sort of done all the quote right things,
Everything that everyone told me was right.
You know,
I went to university and I became a computer programmer and I married a good man and I had two children and we bought the farm Literally,
I married a dairy farmer and we bought the farm and we did.
And I baked the cookies for the video.
Church sales because my husband's family was super religious and I was nice to my in-laws and I I did everything I was supposed to do.
And yet at 29,
I found myself with breast lumps growing and my mom had just died of breast cancer and her mom had died of cancer.
And suddenly I had this deep,
Deep depression hit me that I was like,
This isn't even my life.
All the things anyone ever taught me.
There's nothing to do with me.
My life on the surface looks perfect.
It's sort of that Hallmark movie perfect.
And yet deep down,
And it was something that my teacher,
Who showed up serendipitously at that time,
Took a long time to try to convince me that I was actually seriously depressed.
You know,
Kind of high-functioning depressed.
Getting through all the things,
Showing up for the parties,
Doing the thing,
But actually deep down.
I wasn't living my life at all.
I was living some version of a life.
That everyone said I should be.
And not just everybody else,
Me too.
The life I was living.
Was the life that I had idealized,
That I thought I wanted to live.
End.
All of a sudden it all comes crashing down on you and you realize This isn't my life.
I don't know whose life this is.
But it's not my soul's path.
And you just hit this wall.
And you realize that you don't know if anything you've ever been taught is true.
Anything,
Any people you ever respected because they lived a certain way or did a certain thing.
Is that real?
Is that meant for me?
And you just get completely blindsided.
But of course this is when we've had one of these dark nights that we actually start creating.
The world according to you.
To our soul.
Michael Thomas Moore.
He wrote a book once,
I can't remember which one it was,
But instead of calling ourselves self-centered.
He called it soul-centered.
And it's very interesting to live a life that's soul-centered.
Like,
Imagine today.
You did things based on being soul-centered.
That,
I think,
Is the blessing of a dark night,
That we stop playing to the crowd,
We stop believing everything that we were ever told,
And now it's time.
To live our own actual true life.
So at this point,
Arjuna is in this place.
Everything he's ever known is not helping him in this moment.
And he is asking Krishna for help.
And Krishna is sharing a different way of looking at the world.
Because that's what we need when we have a dark night.
We can't,
We're no longer.
Just changing.
We're no longer just adapting our old life to a new life.
We actually need an entirely new perception.
And I was very,
Very blessed at that time that there was a man that was helping us transition our farm to organic.
Who is actually a great healer.
So this man that I met at that time,
Lived an entirely different way.
He saw the world entirely different.
Than anyone I've ever known.
That I had hit rock bottom.
And I was wide open.
Wide open to whatever he had to teach.
And this is what Arjuna needs,
And that's what Krishna is offering him.
So he's had all kinds of messages so far.
I'm going to back up a little bit.
Arjuna,
At this point,
Isn't arguing.
He actually is like,
Okay.
So people who are enlightened,
So this is a possibility.
He's basically saying,
Okay,
So but practically.
What does this look like?
So Arjuna said.
How would you describe the man whose wisdom is steadfast,
Krishna?
How does the wise man speak?
How does he sit,
Stand,
And walk?
Krishna says,
When a man gives up all desires that emerge from the mind,
And rests contented in the self,
By the self.
He is called a man of firm wisdom.
He whose mind is untroubled by any misfortune.
Whose craving for pleasures has disappeared.
Who is free from greed,
Fear,
And anger.
Who is unattached to all things.
Who neither grieves nor rejoices if good or if bad things happen.
That man is a man of firm wisdom.
Having drawn back all his senses from the objects of sense.
As a tortoise draws back into his shell.
That man is a man of firm wisdom.
So we've already had discussions about all of those topics.
So if you're new,
You can go back and listen to those.
Today,
This is what we're looking at.
Sense objects fade for the abstinent.
Yet the craving for them continues.
But even the craving vanishes for someone who has seen the truth.
Sense objects fade for the abstinent.
Yet the craving for them continues.
But even the craving vanishes for someone who has seen the truth.
What do you take away from that?
Have you experienced that in your life?
I'll read Maharishi's version.
The objects of sense turn away from him who does not feed upon them.
But the taste for them persists.
On seeing the Supreme.
Even this taste seizes.
This is what Paramahansa says.
The man who physically fasts from sense objects.
Finds that the sense objects fall away for a little while.
Leaving behind.
Only the longing for them.
But he who beholds the Supreme.
Is freed even from the longings.
I'm going to read one more paragraph that Paramahansa,
He sort of summarized it in a different way.
An abstinent man,
Unguided by wisdom,
Is not delivered from the dark mental forest of lurking longings.
He only outwardly shuts his eyes to the sense objects,
While the specters of sense longings continue to haunt him inwardly.
But the wise man who opens his eyes of wisdom and sees the supreme light everywhere.
Perceives no lingering shadows of sensory desire.
So there's a lot of,
There's actually a lot going on in this little passage.
And one of the big ones is.
Abstinence isn't enough.
You know,
If you've ever tried to stop a habit.
Simply saying,
No,
I'm not going to do it anymore.
I'm going to go cold turkey.
It doesn't necessarily take away the longing,
And we often can only do it for a little while.
And so the key is you actually need another place to.
To land.
Everything I need is already within me.
Exactly.
How to reach unshakable inner stability is my takeaway.
No need to crave anything.
At all once you're whole.
But experience is still desired.
And I think that's the difference,
Right?
There's a difference between,
Like this isn't saying to not be a part of the world.
It's the things we crave.
Craving is different than pain.
Wanting something.
That's different.
It's like you might be single,
And really love to have a relationship.
There's a big difference between saying,
You know what,
That would be really lovely.
And it being a craving.
Or an obsession.
You know,
It's one thing to say,
You know,
Once in a while I love to have a bit of chocolate.
And it's another thing to say,
Don't you dare take away my chocolate.
Don't you dare!
You know,
Or someone saying,
You know,
Once in a while,
I like to have a cigarette versus smoking all day long,
Like,
Well,
I could quit if I wanted,
But I didn't want to.
There's a big difference between being driven by an unconscious craving that we actually cannot give up.
And it doesn't go away.
And simply enjoying life.
It's interesting that most people don't get addicted to broccoli.
Or we don't get addicted to.
Positive affirmations.
But we get addicted to negative thoughts.
Drama.
Gossip.
Bad food?
Toxic relationships.
These ones,
For some reason,
Drive us from our unconscious.
Why do we keep going into these situations that are so hard on us?
Those are the ones that are interesting.
Most people don't have to cut back on how much broccoli they're eating.
But there's a lot of other things that we do.
And so a big part of this teaching that Krishna's been talking about is every one of us.
Is a divine being.
And Every one of us is a physical personality.
I am Katrina Boss.
This is my vehicle for my journey here on Earth in Maya.
However,
We want to understand it.
But even under an electron microscope.
I am.
Just wait.
I am protons and neutrons and electrons flying around.
Darkness.
Or nothingness,
Or whatever they want to call it,
The unknown,
Really,
That is don't know.
The truth is my physical self needs food.
And my physical self knows that sweet food means in nature that it's good for me.
But we live in a funny world over here that says,
Ooh,
We can capitalize on that.
Let's take all the sweetness out and just feed them pure sugar.
And instead of it simply being a healthy fruit,
Now we're addicted to sugar.
It's completely wreaking havoc on our bodies.
So now all of a sudden we have a weird addiction.
You know,
There's something different there.
Is my soul addicted to sugar?
My physical body is.
My physical body.
Has some struggles with this.
When we live a life.
Where everything is about the physical world.
Everything we think about is about how much money do I have or what do I look like?
Do I look young?
Do I look thin?
Do I look strong?
Do I look sexy?
Do I look whatever?
If everything is about who's around me,
What are the people,
What do I look like,
What is my success,
What's my social credit,
If that is my.
.
.
Whole life.
We're kind of sunk.
Imagine that so imagine you're like a hundred percent.
All about the physical world.
And someone says,
You have to quit smoking.
You have to change your diet.
You need to stop gossiping.
You need to stop gambling.
You need to quit drinking.
You're just like.
.
.
Okay,
You know willpower,
Man.
I can do it.
I'm just gonna stop.
It's just going to come back.
But what if instead?
We start to shift the continuum.
That maybe Maybe we have a realization,
An aha moment,
We realize,
You know.
There's so much more to life than this.
And all of a sudden,
A little window opens.
And we start to look for other things.
And we start to enjoy the sunset.
And we start to enjoy the quiet.
Maybe we discover yoga or meditation.
And as we start sitting quietly in meditation,
We start to realize that I've got a whole world inside of me.
And it's rich and it's interesting.
Every single one of us.
Every single one of us is interesting.
That whole roomy quote that you are not a drop in the ocean,
You are the ocean in a drop.
Every single one of us is an ocean.
The whole world lives within you.
So when we close our eyes,
And look within.
If we can quiet the outer world long enough.
We discover this wonderful place in science.
So now imagine you continue your spiritual practice.
Whatever it is.
Maybe it's daily journaling.
Maybe it's writing or maybe it's meditation.
Maybe it's a yoga kriya.
Maybe it's.
.
.
Who knows what it is?
Maybe it's going and helping at a local food bank.
Maybe you're a karma yogi.
Maybe you go and volunteer and take walk dogs at a shelter.
Who knows what you do?
What's your spiritual practices?
Or maybe you read to seniors.
And then what happens is,
It's almost like if you have all your eggs in this basket.
This basket is really valuable.
But slowly you start taking an egg out and putting it over here in the eternal basket.
The connection to you as an eternal soul.
And this isn't an intellectual thing.
This is why we actually have to do practice.
Yoga and meditation have sort of been simplified so that they can be accepted by the masses?
Which is good.
Yoga has become a household word.
It's pretty normalized now.
But unfortunately,
It's made us think that it really is just about becoming flexible.
Or it's a boat.
I don't know,
Making us young or even just simply calming our nerves or making us more peaceful.
But yoga.
When we practice the kind of yoga that we personally need,
Which is different for everybody.
It will change us.
We will have.
Deep moments,
Like deep experiences inside that move those eggs into the other basket.
Not intellectually,
But because we've had an experience there.
And those experiences of the divine,
The experiences of inner happiness and inner joy.
Slowly.
Things of the sensual world,
The things of the sense objects,
The pleasure,
The pain,
And all that.
They simply become less interesting.
And we've all experienced this.
When you think of the difference between kind of white knuckling to give something up.
Versus something you just grew out of.
Maybe there was something 20 years ago that you were sure you couldn't live without.
And then you start doing all this interesting spiritual work,
Or you do the inner work that we would say,
Right?
That in the spiritual community,
It's like you start to notice that,
Oh wow,
I keep saying this and I keep finding myself in this position.
I want to look at that.
Suddenly everybody else isn't the problem because we start to realize that,
Hey,
I seem to be repeating a pattern here.
I wonder what's going on inside of me.
And who knows,
Maybe we do regression work or maybe we do deep,
Who knows what we do,
But somehow we unearth something.
It releases from us.
And whatever that old habit is,
It's just gone.
And you can't even imagine doing it anymore.
So this isn't necessarily so kind of out there.
And crazy.
It's also interesting when you think of spiritual practice that it doesn't have to be meditation and yoga.
The great teachers always say that this world we live in is a cosmic school.
Everything that happens.
Is happening for us.
So then all of a sudden.
.
.
We can learn from life.
So like,
Let's say,
For example.
Let's say one of your issues is gossip.
You always find yourself gossiping.
And maybe your friend's group is always gossiping.
And you know,
You don't think there's anything wrong with it.
We don't really think any of our addictions are wrong until something happens.
But like,
Let's say you're gossiping about someone.
And you find out that the person heard what you guys were saying.
And maybe it really hurt their feelings.
And then maybe you got to know that person.
And you found out their story.
Their life story.
And something inside of you's light.
Wow.
I so would not have spent two hours.
Dissing this person if I had known.
What they were dealing with.
Or maybe you found out that people were gossiping about you.
And you realize how hurtful that is.
And then all of a sudden,
Something changes.
The watershed shifts.
And as soon as someone comes to you and they start gossiping,
You kind of just look at them and say,
You know,
We don't really know their story.
I don't really want to talk about this.
Taste for it is even gone.
You know,
I remember years ago,
When I was a teenager,
I loved smoking.
I just love smoking.
I think it gave me,
I was very,
Very shy.
It gave me something to do when I was around other people.
And then my uncle died of lung cancer.
And we watched him in the hospital.
Wow,
Did something flip inside of me.
I actually became a crazy non-smoker after that.
There is something that life changed it.
Life changed us.
But what's really interesting to me is that while abstinence doesn't work alone,
Like you actually do have to also have spiritual practice along the way.
We do have to abstain.
From whatever the habit is.
Like,
Let's say you're an alcoholic.
And we're drinking all the time.
And we really want to stop or we really want to somehow lessen the pull of that.
Well,
As long as we keep drinking.
We're never going to have the shift of consciousness,
As long as we're inebriated.
We're not going to have an aha moment.
So we actually do have to stop.
You don't really have to stop long enough.
To experience.
A sober mind,
A mind that we can connect to something bigger with.
But it's just that we can't only do that.
We have to also have a practice.
For me recently.
So I'm a real foodie.
I don't have a lot of addictions in the world.
But don't mess with my food.
I've had naturopaths and healers tell me for years,
Well,
Katrina,
The dairy's really hard on you,
And you really should probably,
The sugar's really bothering you,
And the bread's really hard on your system and stuff,
And I was always like,
Do not mess with my food.
Like I just couldn't.
It just wasn't a possibility.
And then I recently went to a really interesting healer.
Because I was having all this jaw trauma from dental work and stuff.
So she had me on the table and she was chit-chatting and looking.
She's a clairvoyant kind of cool chick.
Anyway,
She had linked,
She had found this old life back in medieval times that had bad,
Bad,
Bad things had happened.
And she says,
I don't know why.
But somehow.
This past life is connected to you eating.
Gluten and dairy in this lifetime.
She said,
Would you be willing to give up gluten and dairy for 10 days so that your body can go out of this weird traumatic experience?
And at this point,
I was having enough jaw pain and difficulties at the dentist that I was willing to do anything.
And so for 10 days.
Around day five.
Something weird happened inside of me.
I was like.
.
.
Why do I eat this?
It was like this,
Honestly,
For the first time in 57 years,
Something clicked inside of me and I just thought,
This is weird.
It's not even food.
It's not,
It's just filler.
That's funny.
And I also gave up sugar.
I just,
I knew it was like the dairy,
The gluten,
The sugar,
And I'm not recommending this to anyone.
I don't want to get in trouble with the Insight Timer folks.
I'm not a doctor.
I don't know anything about any of this.
So just.
This is just the world of Katrina.
I don't recommend it to anyone.
It was really,
Really interesting.
Held by the end of the 10 days.
I had zero desire for it.
And then,
Of course,
The universe kept you know,
Sending me messages.
You know,
All of a sudden I'm watching videos of how Matt Damon gave up gluten when he turned 50 and how he feels so different.
And then suddenly all these podcasts are coming into my world about how inflammation causes so many issues in the body and the mind and everything.
It's like they're all just like click,
Click,
Click,
Click,
Click,
Click,
Click,
Click,
Click inside of me.
And the crazy thing is.
.
.
Whatever hold these things once had on me.
It's like a zero.
I couldn't care less about them.
I actually really want to eat.
Vegetables and fruit and healthy things all the time now.
But I'm not extreme about it,
Like it's kind of a 90-10 sort of situation where most of the time.
.
.
I don't have any of it,
And I'm learning how to bake with gluten-free flour,
And I'm just changing how I eat and drink and do everything.
And it's really easy.
But I had to give it up.
To realize that Wow,
When I don't eat this,
My knees don't hurt.
Wow,
When I don't eat this,
I sleep better.
Wow,
When I don't need this,
I can think clearer.
You know what I mean?
So it's not that we can just simply be self-indulgent of these things because There's something weird about the things we crave.
It's like the things we crave.
Actually dysregulate us.
The things that we can't give up,
The things that if someone said,
You need to give this up,
And you're like,
Absolutely not,
Or that's stupid,
Or whatever.
That's interesting.
It's like a buried trauma.
It's like an unconscious something that owns us.
So it's not just enough to say,
I'm just not going to do it.
I'm just not going to do it.
It's just not.
It's not like that.
So it's a very interesting paradox.
Of wanting to shift between the difference between enforcing self-discipline and not just indulging in everything because our subconscious wants it.
Because if we just simply do what we've always done,
It's just going to continue.
Because this is the other big part of this particular reading.
Is when we do a spiritual practice,
When we realize something,
When we have an aha moment,
That aha moment,
That.
Experience.
Become sweeter.
Than the addiction.
So for me right now.
If someone said,
Yeah,
But don't you miss bread?
I'd be like.
.
.
Well,
I don't miss how it makes me feel.
I don't miss the chronic pain all over my body.
I don't miss,
You know,
Well,
What about sugar?
Don't you miss sugar?
And it's like.
.
.
No,
Because I've actually come to the realization that,
I mean,
I was raised on Froot Loops and Pop Tarts in the 70s and pasta and bread and I don't even know.
What it would feel like to not have information in my body.
I've lived with inflammation in my body since I was probably as soon as I was weaned off breast milk.
And put on formula.
I've had inflammation in my body and mind.
So now what's sweeter to me?
Is my intrigue.
To feel like.
What?
With my body?
Feel like.
Without this.
It's like so intriguing to me.
I'm just like,
That is sweeter.
Than any of the old sensory.
Experiences.
It's very interesting.
A lot of these things are expensive and out of people's range,
Like gluten-free products.
Yeah,
You can't do it like that.
You actually have to just eat real food.
You don't want to go process foods.
You don't want to go process gluten-free.
You just want to eat rice and vegetables and meat.
You just have to kind of go old school and eat.
You just have to eat regular food.
But anyway,
That's not our,
That's not our point this time.
So basically what they say is that having restraint clears the physical body.
It's sort of like Shankara.
When he would talk about this particular idea.
He would say that,
Imagine you have a mirror.
OK,
So let's say imagine.
You're in a house and there's a mirror.
And the mirror is pointing out the window.
And it could be reflecting the sun on you.
But the mirror is covered in mud.
The mirror is covered in mud.
So it can't reflect the sun.
So the mud,
Of course,
Is all of these habits,
These things that mess us up,
That make us feel terrible in the body and mind and all of these things.
Well,
We can clean the mud off.
We can clean the mud.
We can polish the mirror.
But that's not enough.
For us to keep the mud off the mirror.
It's the moment that the sun reflects on that clean mirror.
And we bathe in the sun and we feel what it feels like to feel that sunshine.
On us.
And we think,
You know what?
I would rather have the sun.
I would rather have the sun.
Then we're happy to keep that mirror polished.
But we can't just take stuff away.
We have to have that other.
And what's fascinating is.
.
.
Here on Insight Timer,
We tend to talk mostly within the the yoga meditation space,
Right?
And that's certainly my.
.
.
Tendency,
Right?
I teach Kundalini Yoga.
I teach meditation.
It's kind of my jam.
But you know,
When you think of someone like Abraham Hicks,
She would just say,
Get into the vortex!
Go do what you love.
If you love painting and you haven't had time for painting and you're lost in life,
Paint.
Drop everything and paint.
And in that space,
You will access your true intelligence.
And every time you access that space,
You realize,
No,
I like it here better.
I would rather experience the vortex than all that drama.
I would rather experience,
Yeah,
Stay on your high-flying disc,
Exactly.
That can be your yoga.
What is it?
Is it horseback riding?
Is it walking along the beach with your feet in the water?
Is it reading with a cup of tea?
Is it playing with children?
What is it?
The more time we spend in joy,
A true genuine joy.
All of these sensory pleasures that are addictive.
They don't seem to be so much fun anymore.
So true,
I've been painting all weekend.
Yesterday I played with my paintbrush.
Played with my fingers.
I was thrilled.
That's so awesome.
This is touching where I find myself today.
I'm not craving anything today.
I'm not in yearning or longing of any kind.
Somehow I find myself in contentedness for life,
Just as it is right now,
Happy to experience what naturally or authentically feels right moment to moment.
After having lived decades in yearning,
This feels like the beginning of a new interstate.
So beautiful.
Wholly.
I always think of the story you told once about how they added extra gluten to the genetically modified wheat so it would grow in the dead soil.
What about sex and eroticism?
There is an art to the erotic and can be a beautiful expression.
But so much talk about sex being bad.
I feel like in a lot of ways.
Because sex was made to be wrong.
Original sin and all that kind of thing.
And it was meant to be buried,
Right?
And if you had a sexual thought,
You've already sinned.
Even if you don't do anything about it,
You've already sinned,
Like it's bad.
That teaching twisted sex and eroticism into something unnatural.
It did something very strange to him.
And because it got driven,
It's almost like it got driven into our subconscious.
And once something is in the subconscious,
It's almost like.
.
.
Our conscious mind is no longer in control of it.
So it starts coming out in all kinds of really bizarre ways.
It also becomes oversimplified.
Remember what Russell Brand?
Someone was asking him once about porn.
And he said,
The problem with porn isn't that it shows too much.
It's that it doesn't show enough.
And it's like when we take a beat.
Like a beat,
Like a.
.
.
The vegetable.
And you eat a beet.
There's all kinds of sugars in the beet.
There's all kinds of vitamins and fiber and deliciousness in the beet.
You don't get addicted to beets.
But then they discovered that they can actually take beets and extract the sugars out of it.
Like sugar beets,
Right?
And make pure sugar.
That actually completely dysregulates you.
Even though it comes from the same root.
The beats.
Sex and eroticisms like that too.
If you just extract.
One aspect of it.
If you extract the sweetest part that just completely sends you high as a kite.
It actually dysregulates us.
It sets us up for addiction.
It sets us up for an unhealthy thing.
It's almost like.
.
.
It's almost this masculine,
Not men,
Masculine,
It's this masculine addictive quality that's completely,
There's no feminine,
There's no emotion,
There's no reality,
There's no physicality,
There's no nothing.
So for example,
I teach a lot of Tantra.
And Tantra,
They often will say that the way of Tantra is through Shakti.
The way of Tantra is through the feminine,
And that's in all people.
But it's not.
Through being Aphrodite.
It's about being in our bodies.
It's about everybody connecting with their emotions.
We have a deep,
Deep human need for connection.
A deep need for true love and community and connection with other people.
When sex and eroticism is separate from relationship and it's separate from community and it's separate from our own physical reality and we use it for bypassing and we use it to rebel and we use it for shock value and all that.
That's not the healing aspect of it.
It's like.
.
.
They love to do this with drugs.
I don't have an example right now,
But if you take all the drugs that people love,
Right?
They're often.
Concentrated versions of something.
Even something like,
Is it aspirin or acetaminophen?
That is actually like white willow bark.
But if they take the white willow bark and they extract the psychoactive properties out of it,
You get.
.
.
Aspirin or Ciminifin or something.
But the white willow bark had other properties that were important.
And so.
That's where sex and eroticism is interesting.
Even in intimate relationships,
Even in marriages,
People try to insert stuff in.
Without.
Being real about it.
I could talk about sex and neuroticism all day.
Tantra and healing and spirituality,
But again It's about looking at it,
And if someone said,
Well,
Could you go without sex for a year?
Could you go without erotic art or whatever it is that is your jam?
Could you go without it for a year?
And you were like,
Why would I have to do that?
It's a question,
Right?
Why wouldn't you?
You know,
It's just interesting to watch when something is a choice.
Versus an addiction.
Than the addiction tells us.
Maybe it's a little.
In the subconscious.
Maybe this is a samskara.
Maybe this is something else driving us.
And then that's interesting.
Again,
It's a cosmic school of life.
We look at it,
We say,
Why is this before me?
What is going on here?
It's a great question.
That one of the things I think I love about Tantra.
Is that you're meant to blend your spiritual path with your life.
You can't.
Surrender.
To inner guidance if you don't believe in what you're surrendering to.
Like this probably is my number one understanding about Tantra.
Is that Well,
If we actually go all the way back.
To when I was talking earlier about my great dark night of the soul when I was 29.
And I bottomed out,
Right?
I was just like,
My life is not my own.
The number one thing my teacher taught me.
Was to listen to my intuition.
And he told me,
You have to shut off your brain.
Which was a massive deal for me because my brain,
I figured that was my ace in the hole.
The only thing I really had going for me was that I was smart.
And he said,
No,
That's not the greatest part of you.
The biggest part of you is actually something else and I had to learn.
And of course,
You know,
I had little kids,
My mom had just died of the same disease.
There's something about,
You're kind of willing to open when you're afraid of dying,
You know.
I thought,
Okay,
Then I'll shut my brain off.
Listen to my heart.
And trust what happened.
Trust what I hear there.
And that's what I started doing.
The random stuff.
Someone would ask me a question and I'd close my eyes and the question would be asked,
Does my heart lift or does it drop?
If it lifts,
The answer is yes.
If it drops,
The answer is no.
If I wasn't sure what I wanted to do next,
I would ask myself,
Would you like to do this?
You know,
Kind of dowsing with my heart.
It's like,
The answer is yes.
The answer is no.
Yes,
No.
Yes,
No.
Yes,
No.
And what happened was my life started taking brand new roads.
Opportunities started opening up that I never could have imagined.
Ever could have imagined.
Miracles if you would just call them and nothing crazy like nothing like I'm not talking about burning bushes and stuff I just mean we're sitting on the farm and I say wouldn't it be cool if this happened And 20 minutes later,
A truck drives in the yard,
And whatever that thing is,
Is now happening.
To the point that my kids just started joking about it,
Like,
Oh well,
That's just mom's world.
You know,
If mom says it,
It's just gonna happen.
Was I doing anything interesting?
Am I an interesting?
No,
I just simply started listening within.
Now all of a sudden my addiction to my brain?
He's gone.
To this day.
My brain can do the math and it can do web design and it can write emails and it can learn how to drive a car and it can do all kinds of amazing things.
But all my choices come from my heart.
All my choices come from intuition,
Because when I follow intuition,
Brand new things happen that I never could have fathomed.
That is much sweeter.
Than anything my brain can come up with.
And so.
That's where for me it's like.
.
.
Getting to access that however you want to say it.
It's just you.
You know,
Someone say,
Well,
Wouldn't you rather just do a pros and cons list?
No.
Living closer to the heart.
Well played,
Lady.
For anyone who doesn't know,
I'm a Rush fanatic,
And that is one of their greatest songs.
Okay,
So I'm just gonna reread our verse today.
I would love to know.
What your takeaway is.
Personally.
Sense objects fade for the abstinent.
Yet the craving for them continues.
But even the craving vanishes for someone who has seen.
If you were to write something on a sticky note on your fridge.
What would it be?
For me,
What really helps is spending.
Some time with my soul every day.
Even if it's five minutes.
Just sometime with my soul.
Sitting on the front porch.
Staring off into the distance.
It's like it brings me back to me.
Listen to your heart,
Right?
Spend time in pure joy.
Get on that high-flying disc.
Well,
I hope you guys have a great day and a great week.
And I will see you next Monday.
If not before.
