Practising Not Being Perfect

Whether we feel that we personally are a perfectionist or not, there is a prevailing idea that anything less than perfect is just not okay. What is this perfect? Is it even real? When is perfection a worthy goal? Let's look at our truest soul's path of never being "perfect".

Transcript

So, Today's talk is all about practicing not being perfect. And the reason I want to talk about this is because perfection, The desire for perfection is like an illness. It's something that it's an idea that gets inside of us and it tortures us. And there's a few reasons that it tortures us. One, It's a complete fabrication. It's not actually real. It's like placing a poison inside of you that your body cannot digest. Your body will never, Ever, Ever digest this thing and it's just going to continue going through your body, Never allowing you to rest. This is the idea of perfection. It's literally like a virus that cannot be kicked out until we realize it isn't real. But as long as we believe it's real, There's like no inner peace ever. You know, In the yogic path, In the eight limbs, One of the eight limbs, One of the niyamas is santosha, Contentment. And this is on the yogic path because it's something we're meant to focus on and dive into. Lots of things on the yogic path like the yamas, Okay, Don't do this, Don't do this, That kind of thing. But this is one that we're supposed to focus on. So imagine sitting and actually feeling fully content and then diving deeper into that contentment because that's where the real spiritual growth and expansion is. And I don't mean healing from the past. If we have a broken leg, The leg has to heal. That's a thing. If we're traumatized, We need to heal the trauma. That's a thing. But we can still experience contentment inside of that. But if I say to you, Okay, Right now, Let's be completely content with your life. Most of us can maybe give that lip service. We can maybe say, Right, Oh yeah, I accept me. I love me. I look in the mirror. I love who I am. I honor my journey. We can give this lip service like nobody's business. But on a bad day, How do we really feel? And that's when this little guy sneaks up again and says, Yeah, Yeah, But there's that thing. Yeah, You're not really perfect. No, You're too fat, You're too short, You're too broke. You're not educated enough. You're not good looking enough. You're not this la la la la la la la la. What if none of that is true? Like, None of it. It's funny, I remember people who would go and we're reading a story and this was a really common thing. There was this guy who would do boudoir shots for women and these women who kind of had issues, You know, Self-worth issues and they would go and do these boudoir shots to really make them feel good about themselves. That's not the only reason to do boudoir shots, But that was the nature of this story. So then the women would have all these really sexy, Maybe who were moms, Maybe they kind of had issues with their body, But they really, Really had these beautiful shots. And then he would Photoshop them a little bit. Just take out the imperfections, Just smooth them out a little. What's the big deal? And the women would give them to their husbands or partners and the number of partners that would say, Why did they get rid of that dimple on your butt? Why did they get rid of that mole on your face? Why did they get rid of your stretch marks? I think that's beautiful. And they really meant it. The only thing that can be perfect in this world, Perfect, Is something that a man makes. And I don't mean men, I mean humans. What we make, We can make a pie. We can make a car. We can make a bridge. These things aren't alive. These are, Well, We can argue indigenous ideas around things that all things have life, But let's just imagine sentient life for now. These things don't change. They aren't alive. They can be perfect. A car can be perfect because you made it. You know all the parts. It's 100% limited and this is what it does. And if it has a dent in it, It is now imperfect. If you have a chair and it rips the top, It is now imperfect. But these are man-made things. They aren't humans. They aren't animals. They aren't trees. They aren't live things. They're just things. And this is where we get really confused. And who knows, Maybe it's because we've been treated like things. Maybe we've been oppressed our whole life. We've been treated as chattel. We've been treated as objects for our parents to mold into perfect beings. We've been treated as objects by our employers. Maybe we actually think we're objects. Maybe that's the foundational catch that makes us think that there's even such a thing as perfection. I'm not sure why it's so easily believed by all of us. It easily could come out of our education system where you're tested. Here are the things you have to know and then you get a mark. You get a grade. Maybe that was deeply embedded into us that, Oh, I'm just a 60% student. And then you become a 60% student for 13, 14 years and maybe you just start to think you're a 60% human. Maybe I'll never really achieve perfection because I'm just kind of a middle of the road kind of person. Who knows where this training comes from? But regardless of where it comes from, It's pure nonsense. I remember when, It was back in 1999, I was sick. And I know lots of you guys have heard this story. I'm not going to tell the whole story. But I have breast lumps. My mama just died of breast cancer. And when I got sick, And all the women had died of cancer in my family. So not doing medicine wasn't a particularly brave thing to do. It was actually kind of the easiest thing to do because I was 29 years old at the time. And I was one of the oldest women in my family because everyone had already died. So that just wasn't our path. And a teacher, A guru appeared in my life, Who helped me heal. And in the end, I had a miraculous healing, Which I wrote about in What If You Could Skip the Cancer, My first book. But what was really interesting is when I started researching that book, I wanted to understand why some people heal and other people don't. These lumps in my breasts, Literally by the end of this journey, Literally came right out the side of my breasts. There's no sign of it now 20 years later, You would never know anything had ever happened. And I wanted to understand why I wanted to understand how this could possibly happen. How could my body heal? So absolutely perfectly, How could that happen? So I started doing a lot of research about why some people heal and why other people don't heal and all this kind of thing. And one of the things I realized was that a lot of the science that we learn in school, Physics, Things like that, Even biology and chemistry, They're very mathematically based in that not that true mathematics is a philosophy, But mathematically based in that here's the limited understanding within that limited understanding, We can make this and this and this happen. And if there's anything outside that understanding, And it doesn't fit, We're just going to ignore it. So we're just going to create an experiment with these controls. And within these experiments, This experiment, This is true, Even though all that other stuff isn't true, That's okay. And the interesting thing is a lot of the things that are in this box that we understand are things that man makes. We understand a car, If you push it, There's a certain amount of air pressure, There's gravity, There's air resistance, There's all these kinds of things, There's speed, We can imagine, If you take a ball, You can throw it, And you can figure out the trajectory and you can figure out where it's going to land. You can calculate all these things because it's a man made thing. If you grab a chicken, And you throw a live chicken, You have no idea what's going to happen with that live chicken. I apologize for the live chicken. But you know what I mean? If you take a sparrow, And you throw it, It's just going to fly away. It's alive. It has choice. It has purpose. You can't decide what it's going to do. But if you take a Lego block, You can throw that and now we're back to knowing what we can do. So within this limited thing, Within all the man made things, I can imagine where things will land if I throw them. But anything alive, These Newtonian physics, This Newtonian idea that Sir Isaac Newton is kind of blamed for this sort of idea, This mechanistic view of reality. So what's interesting is when I was doing my research, I realized that this Newtonian model of the world doesn't map humans. We are not a car. This body, First of all, You can't even count all the bits that fit in this body. You can't actually count everything that goes into it. Can you imagine having a car and you can't count the pieces that go into it? You can't do it. On a car you can say, Oh, Well, The drive shaft moves this and it goes into the axles and it moves the wheels and it does this. You know all the relationships. Within this body, If you took like four cubic inches of our body anywhere in our body, You couldn't trace everything that's going on inside of it, Let alone the whole thing. If you took one system inside the body, If you took our nervous system, We don't really know what's going on. And this is legit. Like when you think of your nervous system, Your nerves are basically your brain. So your brain, All this gray matter that we consider up here in our skull, This is gray matter. And all that gray matter is all this, It's the same stuff as all the nerves that go all the way down that make us able to do this and feel stuff. It's all just nerves. Sure, Sometimes they myelinate and make them white matter and all that good stuff. But to understand that as much as we say, Oh my brain, We have never seen a memory. We've never seen a thought. We've never seen an emotion. We've never seen a hope. We've never seen a bit of data of knowledge. Ever. Not a single neuroscientist in the world has ever seen any of the things that literally drive our life. They actually don't have any idea where they exist in the body. Or do they even exist in the body? Do they exist in another dimension that we're accessing? Do they exist in another timeline? Is there a collective consciousness that we're all a part of? We have no idea. And yet every single one of us has thoughts all the time and emotions and dreams and fears and all that. And we have no idea where they are. Nobody does. So now to actually even think, If you actually even look at your physical body, Even our physical body is infinite. You cannot count the cells in our body. And then you certainly can't count the atoms. It's not possible. And that's the stuff that we can touch and see under an electron microscope. So now we can't begin to understand the body in its infinite parts. And then there's all the interrelations of all the infinite things. How many relationships are there? How are our eyes connected to our nervous system, Connected to our brain, Connected to out there, Connected to our blood supply, Connected to our lymphatic system? How are our eyes connected to the Chinese system of meridians? Or the yogic ideas of nadis and the chakras? How are they connected? We can't even begin to understand the relationships between stress, Love, Joy, Everything and on our physical body. I remember there was a guy, I don't remember who it was, It was someone I read when I was doing the research for that book. And he was talking about, He was talking to a group of doctors. And he said, If you don't believe that the mind is directly connected to the body here, And he read some really juicy, Sexy passage from some book. I don't know what it was, Whether it was Lady Chatterley's Lover or something. And he read this really juicy passage. And he looked out at the audience and he said, After he said, So did that affect anybody physically here? And he's like, So if anybody wonders if what's going on in this mind that we have absolutely no ability to understand, We can't even find where the thoughts are happening. And yet, They can affect your body so completely. The illusion that we have any idea what in the world is going on here is hilarious. So when I was doing the research instead, So what a car, A bridge, A piece of Lego, Things like that, Those are what they would call a linear system. If you were to imagine I can say, A plus B equals C, Car plus this kind of push equals 10 feet of distance. Easy peasy, Easy equation, No problem. Then they say, So there's all these things in the world that can be mapped according to a linear system, All the things that man makes. Then there are all the nonlinear systems. That's us. That's nature. That's the weather. That's all these things. So, For example, One of my favorite stories about nonlinear systems. So there was this guy, Edward Lorenz, Back in the 50s, Maybe, Maybe the 60s, I don't know. And he was a meteorologist. And back then they were trying to create computer systems to anticipate weather systems. They wanted to know, All right, If the barometric pressure is this, If the temperature is this, If the wind speed is this, If the altitude is this, And this happens, What are the chances that that turns into a tornado or a hurricane or a tsunami? What are the elements that we can track so that we know that we can predict really brutal weather? So they created this program. And they had these six variables, Which are escaping me right now, What all the variables are. But they would be like temperature, Barometric pressure, Wind speed, That kind of thing. And so they inputted the six starting values. And then they ran the algorithm. They ran, You know, And this is happening, And the altitude is this, And the wind's going over the mountains or whatever, Right? So they run this program. And then he goes away to have a coffee or something. He comes back, And there's been a hurricane. And he's like, Whoa, We figured something out. Okay, This is really good. Let's back up to a few minutes before the hurricane happened and take the measurements of all those things. Oh, The temperature was this and the barometric pressure was this and this and this and this. Aha. Okay, So let's plug those numbers back into the program and see if we're right. We'll see if we can get this hurricane to happen. Have we figured out the equation to predict this hurricane? So of course they put in the values and the hurricane didn't happen. And of course this is back in the 60s or I don't know when it was, 50s, 60s, 70s, When they were still using cards in the computer. So they went in and they had to literally look for bugs in the cards. And they're figuring out like, Have they screwed something up? What's going on? Well, What they found out was the ticker tape that sort of was telling them what the values were, Were giving them the value to six digits, To six decimal places. But the computer was storing the values to 10 decimal places. Because they were only entering the values to six decimal places, It didn't work. It would have worked if they could have done it to 10 decimal places. So to really get what that means, Six decimal places is one over a million. One over. 1 is one tenth, . 01, One over 100, . 001, One over 1000, . 0001, One over 10, 000, 100, 000, A million. Changing the temperature by one millionth of a degree is the difference between something, Between a hurricane happening and not. That is how complex a nonlinear system is. That's how complex we are. That's how much of an effect making the smallest change in our life, That's how much of an effect it can have. So let's pull us back to this strange desire for perfection. So here we are, This interesting human being. We have no idea why we're here. We have no idea what the point is. We don't know why we were born to the parents we were born to. We don't know why we were born to the country we were born to, The religion we were born to. We don't know why we were born to the gender, The orientation, The race, The everything. We don't have no idea, But we were. So that's the first massive curiosity. When we think of the playing cards each of us were dealt, That's weird. Of everybody that's here, If you looked at all of our hands, How incredibly unique and different every single person here is. The initial playing cards that each of us were dealt at birth are so unique I'm not sure we'd even recognize us as being the same species. That's how incredibly unique we are. Then we go through life and we start having all these interesting experiences, All shaping us and changing us and we're growing and we're learning and we're doing all these interesting things. How are we not perfect at every step of this game? Every step. How could you possibly look at this incredibly unique, Intricate human and say, Well, This would be a perfect version of you. Based on what? What is a perfect version of you? What is that based on? Comparing yourself to that person over there? Wishing that you wished your body looked like that person? Wishing that what? But that person over there is so incredibly intricately designed as well. We're not even in the same ballpark. By design, We're not even in the same ballpark. If you even imagine, Let's say we go with the whole karma samskara idea. And I don't mean karma like punishment and all that nonsense, That's a whole other lot of nonsense that I could talk about for a long time. But imagine karma samskara, Things like that simply as patterns that we need to live through to grow through and expand unfinished business, Something that we just need to work out somehow. How could anyone ever imagine the perfect place you should be in right now to work out this deep and important soul's journey? Every single one of us right now is living a deep, Multi-dimensional, Multi-lifetime experience right now. Every one of us. How could we ever imagine what the perfect version of this moment would be? We don't even understand the simple things sometimes about our lives. We don't even understand sometimes why we make certain choices in relationships or with our jobs or with money or why we just want to eat chocolate all the time. We don't even that's hard to understand. Let alone how deep and interesting we actually are. Who in the world could look in on our life and say, Well you know what you could improve that a little you know if you lost five pounds. What the hell would losing five pounds do on a massive multi-dimensional spiritual journey? How is that suddenly making us more perfect? Well you know if you got that university degree then that would be perfect. Uh no not really not based on what I actually signed up to do when I came here. I always think of my friend Norma who I've talked about a lot to lots of you guys. Norma is this amazing woman. I think she's 87 now and when she was 56 her husband died and she started channeling paintings. Epic sacred geometry paintings. She'd never painted before and they are like five six feet tall wide epic paintings that literally transport you into another dimension. You walk into her house and you have like you've just walked into the twilight zone or the fifth dimension or a doctor who reality like it is an incredible thing. Well what's really interesting about Norma is she was born Mennonite and I don't know if you have Mennonites in the country you live in but Mennonites here in Canada they live with horses and buggies and no electricity depending on the order they don't use zippers they just live kind of way back before the industrial effect on people. Super religious women don't get educated women have babies and or they care for others or you're the spinster that takes care of the other people's kids or whatever but women don't get educated. So Norma only went to grade nine and then she was taken out of school because what does a woman need education for and she just was put to work and then she you know she married and she had the babies and she did all that and she was the good little wife and as she should be and all that kind of thing but she was never educated and she always felt like maybe she was a little less than other people because of that. But what's interesting is now 87 years later she says it was the greatest thing that I wasn't educated because I'm so clear about the work as it comes through. When she first started painting she just painted she didn't know anything about chakras or anything but here she is painting the chakra systems and all these incredible combinations and it wasn't until a couple years later that she looked it up and she went oh is that what those colors are? Is that what I'm painting? She's painting these incredible geometric shapes and then someone gives her a book about sacred geometry and she's like oh is that what I'm painting? But she was so clear. It's interesting if for her for a lot of people who don't get educated like that formally you kind of don't necessarily seek it out either if you're going to do something. I love education. I'm the eldest of two teachers. I dig it. It's the way my head works. So every single thing I do I'm going to research it like crazy. It's just my training since I was two years old but for someone who isn't educated like that they might just go well I don't really know anything about that and just go and enjoy life in a different way and that's Norma. But what a blessing. How perfect is that? How perfect is her life? And now she has this collection of over 400 paintings in her house that map the evolution of the universe right up to the ascension that we're going through right now. Who would have ever known that she had to go through a difficult marriage and children and grandchildren and great grandchildren and everything she went through because that was the grist for the mill. That was the part of the journey that gave her the bits to do the painting. So then sometimes we look at the times of our life that are difficult and we think that but right now my life is not perfect. I'll tell you that right now. My life sucks. My life is horrible right now. You've no idea what you're talking about. This can't be perfect where I am right now. It cannot be perfect. There's no way I can sit and believe that inside this I am perfect. But what if the only way through to really learn the deeper lesson and again even that came out weird but it's like to actually expand in the way that we are so people wants to expand what if life has to get a bit messy. In North America we had the magic school bus and Miss Frizzle and Miss Frizzle would say come on kids let's get messy because you have to get messy to learn something. What if that's just periods of our life that it is perfect where we are right now that everything that's gone through that's happened is actually perfect for a reason we don't understand. Maybe we just don't have the big picture. Steve Jobs used to say that you can only connect the dots in hindsight. So it's a really interesting thing to imagine. Again I was born to two teachers. School was very very easy for me because I learned to read when I was like two years old. I went to university got a degree in math blah blah blah. I was a computer programmer. And I was a mad idealist. I literally lived in my head and in philosophy and all that kind of thing. And lo and behold my best friend in university lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere and she had a hot brother and I married him. And I moved to the farm and became a farm wife. And I spent the next 17 years with babies on my back milking cows driving tractors being a farmer. Where all of my lovely education and everything that I'd ever been lauded for was so irrelevant because we worked 17 hours a day. And you just lived you just absolutely lived worked. It was so messy. These were the most depressed years of my life. My mom died shortly after I got married. A million people died before that. I was alone. I was isolated. The work was hard. Having the babies was hard. I like to raise them but I'm not particularly designed to carry them or birth them. They were hard hard times. It was then that I got sick that I hit my crisis in 1999. I was married in 1993. Six years later I hit that big crisis and got really really sick. But it had to get really messy for that change to happen. And I wouldn't change a single thing. Yeah sure I could look back and say oh well if I knew then what I know now. But if I had changed anything we wouldn't be here right now. Like it's perfect. So it's very this word perfect is very interesting when you actually imagine yourself as a soul. That your soul is on. It sounds so cliche but our soul really is having an experience here. It really is on a journey and that journey is perfect. All this other stuff out there like whatever who cares. Yeah this and that and that person and this circumstance and yep just walking through my days figuring it out having experiences good bad ugly. But it's really important. The messy times holy mackerel do we learn stuff. Like we actually learn what it is to be human. That's where we dig deep and we really find our spirituality. That's where we find God. That's where we really go. You know what? I am more than this body. I am more than my circumstances. I'm more than what happened to me when I was a child. I literally am this incredibly divine being. Like it's in those dark times that we really really get it. And then all of a sudden things get better and you kind of integrate. And then a tough time comes and you kind of look at the tough time and you go hmm really. So in mathematics the true mathematics is a philosophy right. It's not about arithmetic it's about philosophy. So if you were to imagine something that's perfect in mathematics the first thing I would think of is a circle. That a circle is perfect. And when you imagine your life we come in, We live, We have experiences, We do all these things and we return to wherever it is we came from. Our lives are a perfect circle. What happens along the circle well that's just like a charm bracelet. You know what I mean? Like you've got we have this perfect circle of a life and then we have all of these interesting bits all the way along. It doesn't change the perfection of the circle. You know what's on the circle. We are absolutely incredible no matter that this it's even no it's not even like no matter what your life's like everything is fine. We may not get it. We may not understand it. We may not understand the big picture. I always like to think of life like the story arc of a book. A good writer, A good fictional writer or maybe even a non-fictional writer but really a good fictional writer. You know when you read a book and the first chapter kind of introduces these people and then the second chapter kind of introduces these people. Third chapter kind of does something with those first people and you've got to have these little chapters happening like this but a good author has a big story arc that's going over the whole thing that by the end this is where he wants everyone to end up. That's what's interesting to me. We may have all these interesting chapters of our life but there's a bigger story arc happening whether that story arc is happening all in this lifetime or whether it's happening in the eternity of our soul I have no idea but all we can do right now is look at wherever we are and say hmm well that's interesting how perfect is this. Another really important thing about things that are alive like us is that we are always changing. Everything that's alive is always changing a forest is different every time you walk into the forest. A river is always different an ocean is always different. We are always different every single cell in our body is changing right now. Our minds are different we've had aha moments we've been hurt we've been angry we've read something and gone whoa that changes everything. We had an experience with that person now my relationship with that person's changed. We are constantly changing because we're alive. Heraclitus and stuff like some of these amazing Greek philosophers they would say like if you really want to test how alive something is how much is it changing how much is this expanding if you went into a forest today and you walked in and you looked around is that forest perfect today and then a week from now you went into the forest is that forest now perfect or is it perfect in a month what about in the winter time when all the leaves have fallen snows on the ground here in Canada is the forest perfect now. Things that are growing things that are alive are always in a state of perfection they're always changing they are always flexing in and out of the quantum field we are always shifting we are always changing. There's no such thing as okay now it's all perfect hold on right it's like working your butt off trying to lose weight or getting to that perfect oh I would be perfect if I was a hundred and sixty pounds perfect. I remember when I was in high school I was bulimic and I discovered that this was awesome I could eat I could throw up my food and I would lose weight because obviously the fact that I was fat must be why I'm not popular like I want to be one I wasn't fat I was like 15 and I just wasn't a size zero and two I lost all the weight I became a bone rack and I was no more popular my life didn't change one iota. Now what's interesting about perfect is there is such a thing as really expanding in who we really are like if I was to imagine myself and say you know am I perfect right now in a lot of our past classes in the chakra 2. 0 series for sure especially specifically that series we talked a lot about how our chakras are actually perfect like we're actually perfect within but there's this very strange world we're living in that's very dark and it really is filled with cruelty and it's not just some reflection of your psyche and all this other nonsense it really is dark bad things happen out there people are mean people are abused people are oppressed repressed it's horrible it's a really dark dark world and here we are these fascinating perfect divine beings hanging out here so we have created a certain interface to interact with this world depending on our childhood depending on our experiences we have created an interface and in that interface there are things that probably limit our ability to enjoy our life if we learned from our first family that people can't be trusted we're going to have a little program in our interface that says people can't be trusted inside we're great and we have this program and even in that we are in a state of perfection because this once you become aware of that program that's the breadcrumb for the journey once we're aware that whoa i really adopted the belief that people aren't safe instead of maybe thinking that some people aren't safe as a young child i believe that all people aren't safe i need to look at that this isn't an imperfection it's a breadcrumb it's something to look at that's how we know where to go so our journey becomes sort of unraveling the interface between our divine self in this curious world we live in that's awesome this is still perfect this is still great and one of the most important things about really shifting our perception of us being perfect right now is that this is an extremely empowered state as it should be why in the world wouldn't we be empowered like why in the world here we are we're born on the planet we're given breath we're given life we're given a brain we're given a mission why in the world wouldn't we walk out that mission so to be empowered is the right way to be well knowing that where we are is perfect it's extremely empowering as soon as we think oh no no if i had have made a different choice then that would be different now like it's so shame and guilt and uh and all that and now we're never going to even take the journey we're never even going to take a step we're just going to stay home and watch netflix i have nothing against netflix but you know what i'm saying so to really really ponder this to really go within and say why do i think i'm here and it's a really important question and not to get obsessed with the whole what's the meaning of life stuff like not that but to really ask ourselves is this really why i'm here am i really here to fit into size five jeans or something like is that really why i'm here am i here to experience life on earth am i here to experience being human we don't even know what we are maybe we're like intergalactic energy experiencing earth in whatever way we do that like we have no idea what you really think about it what if the whole point of being here what if we're on holidays what if we're what if we're on holidays from the serious star system well if you were on holidays right now what would the point of your holidays be chilling enjoying the scenery having cool experiences what we aren't here that long i actually truly believe that immortality is in the future but that's a whole other discussion so what do we really want to do here it's a real question and i'll tell you that none of it has to do with achieving some external version of perfection that we saw in hollywood or or that gyms want to sell you or whatever clothes manufacturers want to sell you or car dealerships one none of this it's all nonsense all right i'm gonna put my glasses on and if anyone has any questions or comments i'd be happy to read them how can we deal with the fear of starting a project versus procrastinating so i have a couple thoughts about that one sometimes we procrastinate because the time isn't right it's not a negative it's just not time for that yet so one of my passions is teaching about the masculine feminine the union of the masculine and feminine i've been teaching it for 10 years probably and one of the great challenges in it is that as humans we struggle to actually be close enough to merge in the masculine and feminine because we're just so afraid of each other right we're just we just have a hard time opening like that and so i kind of realized even back when i started teaching it that we aren't quite ready for what i'm talking about but i have a manuscript this thick of everything that i want to write in a book about it and so i have online courses about the masculine feminine i have i love to i've talked about it on here i've got all kinds of videos about it and what's really interesting is a few weeks ago i sat down with this monster manuscript and i thought okay you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna get at this i'm gonna stop procrastinating and i realized that as i was reading it that my consciousness has shifted so much since i wrote it i would actually write it very differently today like over the last year i've really been fascinated with this idea of the dark and the light and this interface because i really do believe that we're shifting into a very different time where all the talk of the darkness will be irrelevant and i feel like i'm actually writing this book for a new time so there's so much in there that it's sort of like oh well and here's some of the dysfunction and the masculine feminine dynamic and every time i read it i go i don't think that needs to be in there it might have needed to be in there 10 years ago but it doesn't need to be in there for when i want to write this book so i'm kind of intrigued at the idea that i wasn't supposed to write the book yet it has to just sit there on the shelf a little longer and so i can catch up to where i need to be mentally emotionally spiritually to actually write the book properly so and i and i find that a lot like as i have i always have at least like 10 12 projects going at any time like they're literally always sitting in the shelves of my consciousness or literally my shelves and it's fascinating if i sit you know when i go what am i working on today oh i'm working on this like for example i was working on that book i'm also writing a book called healing from a sociopathic world and i've also got my massive gift of books that people donated to me and i've got all these crazy things going on and a million other projects and things and yoga teacher trainings coming up in the fall and you know lots of things and then i'm chatting with my friend and he was talking about he was doing kundalini yoga and he got really angry and because kundalini yoga does that right because it brings up all your stuff so you can heal and all of a sudden this program downloaded into my head called let's get angry a course for really nice people so right now my great passion is actually writing this whole new course called all about learning how to get angry and everything else has gotten shelved because now i have to do this because this is the time for this the energy is behind this so it's always a question when you're procrastinating if there's no energy behind it why is there no energy behind it what's going on there the other thing on the flip side is if it is time to do it and you have fears around it again it comes back to this perfection thing what if you just dive into it for fun what if you just play with it what if you just do it as an exploration like of the way a five-year-old would paint right remember one time i used to have this train station that i had renovated into a wellness center and i used to have summer camps for kids and one time i had an artist come and she was teaching painting and the idea was it was that for kids whose families were on vacation because where we live is a really kind of touristy town in the summer that they could paint little postcards to take home of memories of being in godridge so my husband decided to take this course because he wanted to expand his painting and the artist was really an amazing artist like she was just one of those really cool chicks right so here he is and the kids so he's sitting there and he's like you know 45 and all the kids are like 12 and they're like whipping off postcards like this like they're just like and then i saw the dog then i saw a bird and they're just like whipping off these postcards like crazy and wayne he's like painting it's really perfect he gets it he finishes and he's got nothing because we think everything has to be perfect when i write a book i literally vomit on the page i just like i just throw it all out there all of it and then later i edit it well there was some writer i don't know if it was po or whitman or i don't know who it was but they said to he was he also drank a lot but he said that he would write drunk and edit sober i don't get drunk but that's basically how i write i just get it all out every single random bit of thought i just get it all out and i don't even care and then sometimes i don't look at it for five years but how juicy is it five years later when i look at it so just to get rid of any of this perfectionist stuff about starting and just see where it goes maybe just do a little bit you know it's all good i'm afraid to finish a project because i want it to be perfect i'm afraid of judgment by putting my writing out there totally i really get that a friend of mine was just tim actually when we were on our hike he asked me he said when did you really start writing and being passionate about it and it actually started when i was on the farm and i was at a neighboring farm and it was this guy and he was just this really interesting swiss guy just really forthright and oh he was just one of those really interesting people anyway and he started talking to me and i was on a rant i was just oh i was just ranting about something and he's looking at me and he's listening to me and he says katrina people need to hear what you have to say like this had to have been 20 years ago he says yeah it would have been 20 years ago it was shortly after i had the breast lumps because i was very empowered after that it was a real turning point for me and he says people need to hear what you have to say and i'm like literally farm wife babies at home brain addled by i don't know shoveling manure and hormones like i was not i was not in my intellectual space by a long shot pretty disconnected from the world you know and he says i have a friend he's the editor of the rural voice which is this little magazine in a small town close to here and he said i'm gonna call him right now and i'm gonna get you as a guest writer in this magazine he gets the phone off the wall because this is like 19 or maybe 2000 gets on the phone says keith i've got a woman here she needs to be a guest columnist for you blah blah and he says all right tell her to send me a couple of samples of her writing and we'll get at it he says all right it's all set just send him some samples i'm like the samples of what my you want me to just write my journals out or something so i went home and i heard a song on the way home and there was a line in the song and i went oh and i wrote an article and then i wrote another article and i was terrified to submit them because this was a magazine that my in-laws read everybody read it all the farmers read it and the idea that my in-laws and all their friends were going to sit around and read my philosophical thoughts and discuss it and disagree with it and think maybe i'm a big loser maybe i should like oh i can't even tell you how terrifying it was to be judged by them and my community anyway i kind of had to get over it and then even when i wrote what if you could skip the cancer it didn't come out till 2009 but it was like if people don't like it they don't have to read it and if they do like it awesome and that's it and it was a huge deal because i'm a mess massive people pleaser i really care what all the other people think so that fear is a big deal is the ego really just trying to run us with useless thoughts i mean half the time i didn't even want the thoughts pop into my head okay you want to my honest thought in this moment right now about that and this is based on very little it's not based on nothing but it's based on very little so in our brain we have all of these interesting areas like the sides of our brain this is the temporal lobes and they kind of govern speech and hearing and all that kind of thing and the back governs movement then we have this very curious frontal cortex now the frontal cortex is designed to be able to imagine something it allows us to imagine a time and space continuum it allows us to think ahead we don't develop this until we're like 10 or 11 12 so before that a child is just doing what they're doing in the moment they can't they're not planning for tomorrow they're not planning for a year from now they're just living in the moment the frontal cortex allows us to imagine a time and space where we aren't right now and this can be really valuable it allows us to dream it allows us to create it allows us you know that that kind of tesla ability to sit and ponder and create things in our brain and invent things and get them really really good before we start cutting the wood i used to have this professor in university and he would ask us a question and we like and we're so afraid we weren't going to have the right answer and he'd say gun to your head what's the answer and so i got this thing like gun to my head what's my answer right now what's my truth i think that's the part of our brain that got hacked and i really mean that because when i went to university well so i went to university the first time i studied mathematics and then 10 years later after i'd had the breast lumps and all that i started doing healing work with people and i found myself doing a lot of counseling and i realized i wasn't really educated for that so i went back to university to study psychology and then i found out that 70 percent of all psychological experiments are done for marketing companies you know why to hack your brain to make you want things that you don't need how do we say things to plant ideas in people's minds so that they want something that they don't need and i was so disturbed by that like i can't tell you how disturbed i was because i was going to university to figure out how to help us heal our minds anyway that's my absolute truth so i actually think that our frontal cortexes have been hacked like a computer and these ideas like this idea of perfection like the idea that there's something wrong with having wrinkles or pimples or cellulite or stretch marks or whatever nothing in the human condition animal spiritual whatever would ever tell us there's anything wrong with any of this unless the idea had been planted in our minds so this is why even meditation is very interesting to consciously allow the mind to clear to consciously release it and again i don't get all like psycho about this and get all like the world sucks like me sometimes i might but just to be very aware that hmm my computer might have been hacked because i'm with you i sit there some days and i think where did that thought come from i don't even remotely want to think about that so just we just got to keep our wits about us i need to be like a child again to just do things and not think about whether it's a good idea or not well and even like to be as a child to me being like a child one of my students recently said to me he's doing a year-long program with me and about tantra and things and he says he says you know it's so weird the more i apply this stuff my experiences expand so much i realize i don't know anything and this guy's really interesting like he's very um left-brained very mathematically minded kind of thing very structure oriented so he's the way he said it was when i started studying tantra with you i figured i knew about 20 percent of what there was to know then i went i started having experiences and now i seem to feel like i know about 15 percent because the heat that like because it opens up what's possible and now he says and then i kind of felt like i maybe knew 10 and it seems to be going down this is to me what happens when we really are having experiences in life the expansiveness of life the expansiveness of what's possible as a human because our playing field keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger so the percentage of what's possible to be known becomes smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and this is where the wise men say or wise women but where the wise people say i now know that i know nothing and i'm so blissful that humility that realization that the world is infinite there is no way i can actually know all that there is to know is the most childlike beautiful innocent place to be because suddenly we just know that you know what i'm just gonna travel traverse this i'm just gonna travel life is an adventure and i am that adventurer and that's to me that childlike joy of just let's give it a go let's write the paper let's write the book let's do the thing let's jump off the pier let's just go let's try it the truth is i have no idea how it's gonna turn out awesome let's do it dad took a picture of me in my painting suit pictures pictures are so funny right because pictures are literally a two-dimensional capture of a multi-dimensional being isn't that crazy i think that's why we take like 40 selfies because we're trying to find something that might begin to capture a multi-dimensional being in two dimensions it's impossible and most of what a person is doesn't appear in a photo totally totally like not even not even remote it was actually interesting i was doing a course and it was all about experiencing it's all about quantum physics or quantum reality and that kind of thing and they asked the question of the group what effect do you think photography has had on our psyche the very idea that we've been capturing the world around us in two dimensions has that affected our brain in any way has it affected our perception of ourselves so if you take a picture of yourself and it's two-dimensional do we start looking at that two-dimensional version of ourselves and try to improve it do we start to think that that two-dimensional sharp two-dimensional self is more real than my multi-dimensional self do we start focusing too much on that on what can be captured in a photo hence our obsession with what our body looks like or our skin or our muscles or our boobs or whatever has the photography or has photographs actually created this monster don't get me wrong i love photography but it's just an interesting question how much the capturing of us in two dimensions has altered even how our mind perceives us because you can take a picture and photoshop it and make it air quote perfect but it has nothing to do with reality so thank you so much for being here i hope you have a wonderful day you

Reviews

Forever interesting

So many take away in this. Thank you Katrina for asking the big questions & getting us to open ourselves to do much more than we have been programmed to 🙏💖🙏💖