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Explore your curiosity - Interesting people with fascinating stories.
Life consists of three things:
-The stories we tell others
-The stories others tell us
-The stories we tell ourselves.
Michael, welcome back to the show. So happy to have you back.
Speaker 2:Thanks. I'm glad to be here. I've had a lot of thoughts since last time we spoke,
Speaker 1:so ready to dive in whenever you are. So the last thing we, and for anybody who has not watched the previous episode, highly recommend to go and do so. We we talked about really difficult moments. I'm really grateful, Michael, that you shared with your you know, with the audience and with myself the journey. Today we're gonna talk about the growth part.
Speaker 1:The last thing we discussed was meditation. What I'm wondering right, you came from this point where you were broken and you were rebuilding yourself. Keep me honest if that's a fair description. Are I'll
Speaker 2:pull you out when you're wrong.
Speaker 1:What biggest are changes that you have worked on yourself since that breaking point where you're like, woah, women are more than their body parts? What are the kind of elements that you had to work?
Speaker 2:Great question. Thank you. It's a good place to launch from. In no particular order, just random answers. Feeling safe and grounded in my body, becoming caring, like actual caring about other people besides myself, but even the bigger version of that, caring about people that I have nothing to do with, meaning random people in other parts of the world that are having struggles that are different than what I experience.
Speaker 2:Empathy, compassion, self respect, kindness, thoughtfulness, loving kindness, learning how to have fun without somebody being the consequence of it. Intimacy, intimacy, intimacy, connection, vulnerability.
Speaker 1:So that's, that's a long list.
Speaker 2:Yes. Well, that's right. It's just a random list based on that thing.
Speaker 1:But, but, okay. So these are hard things to work on. I'll be honest, like all of us, I feel to a certain degree are working on these items. What are, and we talked a little bit about meditation, what are the tools and techniques that helped you make actual progress on this journey?
Speaker 2:So, as I mentioned in our last conversation, it really started with the basics of being part of a community, you know, a fellowship and being in therapy, then meditation joined the party. Then the next leg after that, then the next thing was in January '95, I got trained in Reiki. And that was a big turning point for me because it gave me like a, a tangible way to turn this spiritual thing that I was doing this energetic process. And it gave it some structure. It gave it some direction.
Speaker 2:It gave it purpose. Reiki was great for me and it was great for the people in my life. Becoming a social worker and a counselor was huge because you have to put aside your stuff. You know, like I was taught from the beginning, you got to leave your ego at the door and you got to leave your needs at the door beyond your physical safety. You just have to show up for people.
Speaker 2:And I worked with really hardcore people in the beginning. I mean, these days it's, it's tamer what I do. But, you know, back in the day in the nineties, I was working with kids on juvenile probation. Some of them had committed murder, others had committed sexual assault. Some had beaten people with baseball bats and shot people.
Speaker 2:And some have been the survivors and victims of that. I was working with families in home family, family preservation with families in crisis. Really getting really learning how to be contained in myself and safe in myself in situations that actually weren't safe. And I'm not laughing at it like, oh, I could have been shot. That's funny.
Speaker 2:But I mean it more in the spirit of bad things could have happened. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1:I I'm Samurai in a way that, you know, I'll smile when I'm uncomfortable or when I'm thinking about a difficult time. There's no judgment here. So I appreciate that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm not being insensitive, at least I'm not trying to be. So those were parts of my next group of influences and things that impacted my life. A couple of bigger things is, I actually backpacked across The United States for most of the states and it took me a good six, eight months to do it. And that was really impactful.
Speaker 2:Spent a lot of time on the Appalachian Trail and then headed west from there and had no real destination, but ended up in New Mexico, which was pretty wild. I have also spent, right around the turn of the century in 1999, I spent ten days with the Dalai Lama.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow. All right. Well, I'm not going to let you get away without telling that
Speaker 2:No, I should hope not.
Speaker 1:So I probably would make a guess that most of our audience doesn't know the history behind the Dalai Lama. There is a, how would you say, a discord between China and Tibet. Yes. The Dalai Lama has and Discord is probably a very light way of saying this, you can't even say something in Tibet without, you know, danger to yourself politically. And and the Dalai Lama has basically escaped to India.
Speaker 1:So so and the Dalai Lama is basically the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. That's kind of the backdrop, but take take it from here, share with us a little bit more. And how did it even come to be that you met with the Dalai Lama? That is crazy.
Speaker 2:Well, since you went to that part, I'm going to even go further back in a personal connection to me in that process. And I'm going to speak a little bit more about the Dalai Lama after that. But my first introduction to Buddhism was in the early mid nineties. I was living in New Jersey at the time and in the Hills Of New Jersey, almost in Pennsylvania, there was a Tibetan Buddhist learning center and it's still there. And it was founded by the Dalai Lama, but he's not part of it, obviously.
Speaker 2:So I'm at this, I'm at this new year's retreat, three day retreat. My girlfriend at the time, my partner at the time, her and I went to this three day retreat there. And I'm noticing this guy, like all of the other monks are wearing the burgundy and gold that Tibetan monks wear. And there's this one guy, older gentleman, that's sitting with the monks, but he's dressed in gray slacks and gray shirt, gray button down shirt. He looked like an American janitor.
Speaker 2:And this guy was a trip, Ari. Like, I can still talk about it with the same excitement and enthusiasm. So I'm noticing him at lunchtime and somebody would spill something. He'd have his head in the other direction. Somebody would spill something and somehow he would be over there cleaning it up.
Speaker 2:Like the salad bowl would almost be empty. He'd be eating. He just knew when the salad this guy was just like, he was it was just incredible. And I'm watching him. So there's this young man sitting across from me at the table.
Speaker 2:I said, I didn't know how to ask this. Do you know what I mean? So I said, is that janitor like some kind of special guy? And the dude breaks out hysterically laughing, this young man. And he said to me, he goes, yes, he's actually one of the men that led the Dalai Lama out of Tibet safely.
Speaker 2:And he figured since he got the Dalai Lama to somewhere safety in Dharmasala, you know, which became the temple that the Tibetans had in India. He said he figured he didn't want to have to wear a robe anymore and he could wear pants because he didn't like wearing a robe, but he is absolutely still a monk and he is special and he is extraordinary. It's funny that you started with his escape. I happened to meet the guy that stood in the front of the line, like a quarter mile ahead. He was the guy that would put his life on the line, that if there was going to be trouble, he was going to be the one that was going to get killed.
Speaker 2:And that was random. Just, it worked out that way. So, so then let's move forward a bunch of years. I was living in Bloomington, Indiana, and his older brother lives in Bloomington, Indiana, and his nephews live there. So every few years he goes out there and he does some kind of public talk like, you know, at Indiana University with like fifteen eighteen thousand people, you know, just the Dalai Lama being the Dalai Lama, you know, and he's an amazing guy.
Speaker 2:And I just want to clarify one thing in what you said. He's the leader. He's the spiritual leader of Tibet, but he's also one of the segments of the spiritual Tibetan Buddhism is its own segment of Buddhism. And he's the leader of that as well. Can appreciate that.
Speaker 2:So anyway, I am living in an intentional community on the outskirts of Hoosier National Forest. And I had heard the Dalai Lama was going to be doing this thing, this ten day thing called the Kalachakra and that you could do it and you could go to it. And I wrote to the Tibetan center there in Bloomington. I said, Hey, you know, I'm a Buddhist practitioner. I don't participate in anything Buddhist.
Speaker 2:I've never been to your temple or your center, but I'm a Buddhist practitioner. I've been meditating daily for a really long time at this point. And I've read a lot of Buddhist stuff for giving me values and directions and understanding. But I live in intentional community. I work at a homeless shelter.
Speaker 2:I don't have any money. They said, well, it's really expensive to get them here and all of that. We're not going to be able to help you. I called, spoke to the guy that wrote me the letter, sorry, we can't help you. Thank you.
Speaker 2:And I was a little bit more personal with him. He said, I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do. About a week later, I get a phone call from him and he said somebody, and I'm not going to mention the celebrity's name because then it becomes about him. But there was a handful of celebrities that had signed up to come to this training. And one of them had said, if there's any local people that want to come that don't have the money, I'd like to pay for them.
Speaker 2:So somebody who's world renowned at this point paid for me to be there. Wow. Yeah. So that's how I ended up there. I got invited because there's no real reason I got invited, but I got invited.
Speaker 2:And to answer the question I would ask you, if I was you, did you meet the Dalai Lama? No, he didn't do an audience with anybody, including the five nationally known celebrities. He was very clear. It was in the very second thing he said, like in ten minutes into the training is he said, I am not gonna be taking a private audience with anybody. So don't request it because they're just gonna have to say no to you.
Speaker 2:And it's just adding more work to our support staff. I'm not meeting with anybody, and he looked at the three of them in the front row and he goes, and he kind of made a joke, goes, especially not the three of you, you know. And how
Speaker 1:was the experience? What did you do there? What did you learn?
Speaker 2:It was 1999, meaning it's twenty five plus years ago, and I'm still learning lessons from what he said, but I'd love to share with you one very specific thing that he did that at the time, I sort of got it, but I get it today because of what's happening in our world. We were about four days in and right before lunch, he said, you know, we're really ahead of schedule. We're doing great. Everybody's doing great, keeping it up. And I'm sitting there with my pen and I'm like, I'm still trying to figure out what he said on day one, but sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're doing great. You know, that's what I'm going with. Because a lot of these people have been doing that work for decades. They traveled from all over the world to this event and there was a private invitation mostly. So he said, my translator, because he would go between speaking Tibetan when he was doing things that were really complicated, he would speak in Tibetan and let the translator do it.
Speaker 2:Things that were simpler, he would do in English. And then the translator would translate to Tibetan for the people that were there that were Tibetan. And basically the gist of what he said is my translator over there has these big index cards. If you'd have a question you'd like me to read tomorrow and answer before lunch, you can get an index card from him, fill it out and hand it back to him. I'm going to read them through them all tonight, and I'm going to read and answer three of them tomorrow at lunch.
Speaker 2:So he does that. Next day he reads three of them answered. They were all about Buddhism and how do you sit like this? And if on Tuesdays you breathe this way, just, you know, technical stuff that people was like really deep. He said, and he puts his cards down and he pulls out of his robe another card.
Speaker 2:And he says, there's one of them that kept me up all night in the best way possible. And I'm paraphrasing, and I've told this story probably 150 times. I have no idea if I'm telling it anything like the truth at this point, but the spirit of the story is accurate. Okay. So the emotional and spiritual is factual, but I don't know if the story is exactly the way it happened.
Speaker 2:But in essence, read this card from a woman who was in the group. And he said, I don't want to know who you are. He said, and this is basically what it was. The woman's he's reading it and he's saying, I'm a Buddhist practitioner. I'm a wife and I'm a mother.
Speaker 2:I've been practicing Buddhism for twenty five years. I've gotten up every morning for the last twenty something years before my whole family gets up and I meditate in a room by myself. I still get up and make everybody breakfast. I got the kids ready for school, got them bathed, brushed their teeth. I always made sure that my meditation practice did not affect our family or our community or the work that I did in the community or on the school board.
Speaker 2:I always made sure that I could do my work and nobody lost because of it. And over the years, I've shared some of the Buddhist teachings and stuff with my husband, and he's never been interested in meditation or Buddhism or any of this stuff ever. And that's not been a problem for us, he said. But in the last year and a half, one of his best friends at his job has gone to promotions that my husband went for. And my husband took his friend out to lunch a few months ago and said, I want to know what's going on.
Speaker 2:How did you, how are you getting this promotions when theoretically I was ahead of you in the line? He said, I started doing a daily meditation practice and it's changed my life. And he went on, the guy went on and, you know, all of the ways that changed his life, you know? So woman says he's been meditating now for a few months and he wants to go do a ninety day solo retreat in the woods by himself. I want to support my husband, his spirituality and his practice, but I've been doing this for almost twenty five years and my family hasn't even missed one slice of toast because of it.
Speaker 2:And I don't know what to do. So he puts the card down and he says, I have a feeling. I don't know which one of the women that's here, because there's a lot of you. He says, I have a feeling you all have your version of this story. So I'm speaking to all of you.
Speaker 2:Remember, this is 1999, a Tibetan monk. He says, tell your, this is what you should do when you get home tonight. Tell your husband to make dinner for you and your family, to clean it, to take out the garbage. If your kids, I don't know how old your kids are, if they need to be helped with the better, help with their homework, whatever they need, tell them to do all of that. Rub your feet.
Speaker 2:You go take a bath while he's taking care of everything and then have him make love to you and thank you for the last twenty five years of service. That's what he should do. And he stopped. That was his advice. And it has come in and out of my dreams and meditations so many times over the years, and there's so many teachings in there.
Speaker 2:So the whole audience went like silent. Nobody could speak. And he said, there are the monks, the 25 monks that are here with me traveling with me. Monks and nuns, their job are in monasteries. Rest of us at this time, we do our work in the world.
Speaker 2:We can't hide any longer. We are needed in the world. So that's the biggest thing I took from the Dalai Lama is we're needed here in the world. Spirituality isn't something separate. It's a daily thing.
Speaker 2:And it includes loving your family, your friends, and your partners, your boyfriends, your girlfriends, your kids. It gets really simple. That's such a
Speaker 1:core insight. I've explained to people that meditation is great, but really meditation is a state of mind and what you really want to get to is meditation in motion, which is being in a state of meditation every single moment of your day. It's actually easy to well, it's not easy, but it you can learn how to meditate. It's actually really hard at the beginning. I taught tai chi and and kung fu for for almost ten years.
Speaker 1:Studied and taught. And, know, at the beginning, it's really difficult, right? You're sitting there, you're bored out of your mind, you're trying to you know not think of anything and yet you're thinking about a million things more than ever so people get super frustrated. But I would argue you know that's a brilliant point, right? It's the meditation in motion, it's being in that state of meditation in the day to day, that's really what it's about, that's the target, not just, you know, that practice meditation.
Speaker 1:So that's a brilliant point, absolutely love it. What's the, how does it manifest itself, right? The, the aspect of your learnings and insights from the meditation and from Riki, how does it manifest itself on a day to day basis outside of the practice?
Speaker 2:Today, you mean, not literally today, but today current, mean? Yes. So, you know, I have my private practice of doing counseling and coaching and Reiki and meditation with people. And, you know, there's lots of counselors and therapists, and this is not false humility. It's real life that are very well trained, much more so than I am.
Speaker 2:They are more skilled than I am. But what, where it shows up for me Ari, is it doesn't matter dark and deep and in pain or how violent and how much hate people have. I can sit with them partially because of my past, because I've been in all of those things. And partially because it's now been almost thirty five years of daily meditation. I don't get spooked a lot.
Speaker 2:I just don't get spooked a lot. I am able to be with people's pain, their sadness, their hate, their shame, their violence, their aggression, their anger. I can be with it.
Speaker 1:Want to drill this part, drill this point through. Why is that important? What does that? Cause I think that's incredibly important. Why does that have such an important effect?
Speaker 2:Can I answer it in reverse of when that's not true, what happens?
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Cause a lot, and there's no judgment here. I mean, people are who we are. We all have our different skills. There's a lot of counselors and therapists and psychologists and social workers that they get spooked and it's not a judgment. They're human, you know, and they get spooked and the client is sitting there in, I did this awful thing when I was 22 to my best friend or to my neighbor or to so and so, or I, I robbed my mom and then she had to move out whatever this awful thing they've done or has been done to them.
Speaker 2:They go decades with holding onto this and it ripping their lives apart. And they finally find somebody they trust and they share it. And the person isn't there for them. They lose trust in the system of mental health and support and counseling and coach and therapy and psychology.
Speaker 1:When you say isn't there for them, that's because of their natural uncontrollable response that you know, that the person picks up on and no longer feels like they're safe. They feel they're being judged. Is that the fair understanding of it?
Speaker 2:It's not judged. It's overwhelmed. Part of the job of being a counselor or a therapist is holding a safe space for people that whatever they do or say, you get to be whatever you get to be. And when that safe space isn't being held for you, like if the therapist themselves breaks into tears or the therapist themselves starts shaking and trembling, or the therapist themselves can't speak. Client loses their trust in the person, but they sort of lose their trust in the whole It's like if this person went to school for six years, has been practicing for eight years, and they can't handle my mess, how is my husband, my wife, my mother, my father, my best friend, how are they going to be able to hear this?
Speaker 2:Because it's sacred space. It really is. And I don't mean that in the way of religious. Working with people and their hearts, their souls, their spirits, and their bodies, it's sacred space. And it has to be treated that way.
Speaker 2:That doesn't mean that in gosh, I've been doing this since '93. There hasn't been times I've cried with clients. I've gotten pissed with clients, but it's been in joining with them. This is painful, which you're going through. Nobody should have to go through it.
Speaker 2:Hold their hand and cry with them is different than I'm crying because I can't handle it. Do you hear the distinction? Absolutely. So for me, that's one of my gifts. The other gift is because what I was trained as a kid and what I was trained as a mobster, I understand people really well.
Speaker 2:And I'm really hard to lie to consciously or unconsciously. And it's really helpful to somebody that's even people that have been in therapy for years and done all the courses and you know, all the different systems, we all still lie to ourselves. It's just part of being human. I don't know. I don't remember what being human was like two thousand five hundred years ago, but being human now, we, our subconscious has a field day with us.
Speaker 2:Being able to say to somebody, I know you think that's why you did this. Let's take a minute here and I'm going to offer you another thing and invite you to close your eyes, listen to your body and see if it agrees with what I say. And if not, we'll let it go and we'll move on. And I'll share with them what I'm picking up from their energetic system, their emotional body, their physical body, what I'm picking up and I'll share with them. I know you think you did this because they hurt you, but that's not what happened.
Speaker 2:There's this wound here you've been carrying for twenty years. This is that wound showing itself. Let's see what we can do to work on that wound. So it becomes safe for you. The, I mean,
Speaker 1:if somebody's lying to you, you know, maybe you can understand that, but how do you pick up on somebody lying to themselves?
Speaker 2:I wish I could tell you how. I don't know Ari. Like I said, I was trained for those who weren't here for part one of this. I was trained to be a liar, manipulator, and exploiter. That's what I was trained by my father, my uncle, and my older brother.
Speaker 2:And they taught me well, I'm really smart. And I became a great liar. Because of it, I knew how to manipulate and exploit people, find their weaknesses, find their, what you would call in like gambling, find their tell. I got trained how to do this. I couldn't train anybody else how to do it because I was a teenager and I don't, I don't know what they taught me.
Speaker 2:They just taught me. And I got really good at it. And then at some point, I think I shared this last time we talked, I had a counselor that encouraged me someday you're going to want to take these skills and put them to work. I don't know how I got the skills. I mean it genuinely.
Speaker 2:I don't know how I got the I mean, I know how I got the skills, but I don't know how to describe what I do.
Speaker 1:Is it just a feeling that this doesn't feel right?
Speaker 2:It's just, yeah, I just, you know, this is where all these things come together. There's all the quote unquote negative things that help me understand. But again, five years of daily meditation. I've also practiced Reiki now for thirty years, every single day, intentionally. My system is really attuned to the truth, or you can flip it upside down.
Speaker 2:My system notices what's out of alignment in me, in you, in us. It notices what's out of alignment. And my system has trained me through Reiki to know what to do with this. So one thing to you just give me thirty seconds more? Sure.
Speaker 2:Thanks. So it's one thing to know, call out, this doesn't feel true. It's another thing to say, this doesn't feel true, and this is where it's coming from. Because then they can do something with it. We can do something with it.
Speaker 2:Okay. So now I can answer your question. You started to ask about Reiki.
Speaker 1:We talked about Reiki a few times, but I don't think it's very popularly known about it. Give us a little bit of a high level. What is Reiki? How did you get into it? How does it even help you?
Speaker 2:So I'm going tell you what Reiki in its translation to English is. And I have two Reiki masters, one here in the state, and she was my primary teacher of everything for about twenty years. And there's a secular monk who's the longest in the Reiki lineage who lives in Japan and Kyoto, who I also did some training with. So when you think about things like Tai Chi and Qigong and prana, we're talking about universal life force energy, which is really hard to describe if you haven't experienced it. But my words, not anybody else's words, is that magic that we feel in certain situations that could show itself as love, could show it as compassion, could show it as wisdom.
Speaker 2:Shows up in different shapes and forms. So there's that thing. But that's the key part of Rei Ki. The Rei, R E I, spelling in English, R E I is spiritually guided. So what makes Reiki different, not better, but different is there's this energy that we have access to, and it guides you on what to do with that energy.
Speaker 2:Sometimes it's simply putting your hands on somebody so they can get some rest and relaxation and peace. Sometimes it's after an operation or a surgery or a car crash to get some systems back in alignment. Sometimes it's a memory from childhood that needs some balancing and needs some nourishing and needs some care. Sometimes, and this is a lot of what I do, which is Reiki counseling is sometimes me and somebody else I'll extend my Reiki alignment so that we're both in Reiki and we do counseling within that Reiki bubble. So people experience a lot of different things with Reiki.
Speaker 2:You know, it's kind of hard to describe it on some level. It's like saying, so what is water? Well, water is, you know, one part oxygen, two part and it's liquid, but you know, but that doesn't really tell what water is. Reiki is another thing. Just like love, you could give a definition of love, but it doesn't even get in the neighborhood of what love is.
Speaker 2:Reiki has a degree of that as well. It's like, literally could talk for forty five minutes without you speaking once, without taking a drink, going to the bathroom and tell what Reiki is. And I still haven't touched the surface. Does that give us something, do you think, to work with?
Speaker 1:You know what, I've done tai chi for, as I said, for ten years and I was also teaching, I was the senpai, which is Japanese for teacher's assistant basically, so I wasn't the sensei, but I was the assistant and I'm not sure that after ten years of learning and teaching I can explain what qi is. Qi is the Chinese pronunciation, think, if you keep me honest here. Yes. Qi, Qi, different versions of it. So, I mean, attempt is as good as mine, my friend.
Speaker 1:I will say that meditation was very difficult for me and Tai Chi was very difficult for me initially, but it did change my life in many ways. And I would, you know, if you're out there and you're looking to start a journey of self awareness, that is as good as any place to start. So I would highly recommend it. Me make little of a
Speaker 2:pitch in here as well?
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 2:In parallel to what you just shared, we have so many options through technology on how to learn and get trained in meditation these days and the hundreds of different forms of sitting, lying down, walking and movement meditation. If you're new and you keep trying different things and none of them feel right, literally just pick one of them. It sort of almost doesn't matter and do it every day for ninety days for some set amount of time, whether it be three minutes or seven minutes or ten minutes, and just do it regardless and dive, dive in and try it. Give it enough time to go through your discomfort. Give it enough time for your system to understand we're sitting still right now.
Speaker 2:Give it enough time for your brain to say, this is different than at 10:00 in the morning when I gotta do this and I have to do this. And I, it takes a little bit for our brains and our bodies and our spirits to slow down and say, you're doing something new here. Okay. And it takes a little while. Just have patience with yourself.
Speaker 2:Everybody sucks at meditation in the beginning. We do in varying degrees. It's part of it and it's natural and don't fight it. I tried to fight it because I didn't have a teacher. There wasn't any apps.
Speaker 2:There wasn't any of this. I just kind of read a book and it said, do it. And I'm like, okay, I'll do it. You know, I'm exaggerating, but sort of. And I did it all wrong.
Speaker 2:And I eventually my system months later taught me how to do it right in spite of myself. But what I did, I did wrong and it still got me where I needed to eventually.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the beauty of your advice is that you know, don't have to be perfect right away, you don't have to get it right on day one, all you need to do is take a tiny little step forward and by giving you that ninety days of persistence, then you'll take tiny little steps forward over those ninety days and you will get there. You know my advice is exactly that, it's totally okay to fail. You don't need to get to some you know, amazing state of zen that your your friend who may be full of shit describes that they're in or not in. All you need to do is take one baby step forward. And if that one baby step forward for you was, you know, meditating for extra minute.
Speaker 1:That's all you need. Be kind with yourself. Don't judge yourself. Remember it's a journey, it's not an outcome and just take one step forward. That's all.
Speaker 1:And then the other, if I may, even though I'm not the guest today, the other piece of advice I would give is don't set yourself up for a target, oh I need to meditate for thirty minutes and if I didn't do that I've failed. Put yourself to just one task and one task only. I need to sit down to meditate, that's it. The second you've sat down to meditate, whether it's for a minute or five minutes or ten minutes, that's success. Just make sure you're doing, you know, creating that habit day in, day out.
Speaker 1:All you need to do is start. And this is really based on a lot of research around how to create habits in a meaningful lasting way. So these are at least some tips that have helped me because I felt like, at least at the beginning of my journey, every time that I every time I felt like every time was a failure and that doesn't help you persist, does it?
Speaker 2:No, it doesn't. And I just like to add some ridiculousness to all of this. Somewhere along the way, it doesn't matter because then it won't get too far back in my story. Somebody had given me a specific meditation to do for ninety days. And about two weeks into it, he asked me, how's it going?
Speaker 2:Oh, well, I'm working on it. I'm trying my best and I, you know, feeding him a lot of shit, you know? And he reaches, he puts his hand on my shoulder. He says, Michael, if you're anything like me at this point, your two weeks of meditation has been cursing at me under your breath in meditation.
Speaker 1:And I
Speaker 2:go, well, that's happened to a few times. And you said a few times I go, okay. It's happened almost every time because you didn't realize it, but you've picked a subject to meditate on. He goes, you're doing your job well. So of course, me being the rebel I am, I'm like, okay, well now I'm not gonna think about him and I'm not gonna curse him out, and I'm gonna do something else.
Speaker 2:And I'm gonna do the read the parts, the things he told me to read and reflect on. I'm gonna read them, and I'm gonna memorize them, and to give him the finger one way. Then we made it to give him the finger the other way. And that's sort of how I learned how to meditate.
Speaker 1:Michael, what an absolute pleasure. Believe it or not, we are way over time. We usually stop after thirty minutes.
Speaker 2:That seems to This be my the
Speaker 1:theme. This has been so much fun. You know, I asked you the normal question of what would you advise yourself at your hardest point? We're on the second show so I need to ask you a new question. What would you advise somebody who's on their journey and it's this journey of I call it self awareness, right?
Speaker 1:It's a dangerous thing to embark on because sometimes you find things that you don't want to find out and it can be painful. But if somebody in our audience is committed down this journey of self awareness, what would you advise could be a possible first step?
Speaker 2:Opposition. One, have some patience and compassion for yourself because you're new at this and new could mean one or two years into it. And this is my teacher, Betsy Reiki Master. This comes from her. And don't give yourself a note from home, getting out of doing your work.
Speaker 2:If you've committed to doing yoga every day, do your yoga every day. Don't give yourself, oh, well, back in 1972, I ate too much last night and my stomach's Do your yoga. If you can't do it in the morning, it the afternoon. You can't do it the afternoon, do it at night. Or if it's walking meditation, or if it's breathing, or if it's Tai Chi, whatever it is that you're doing, give yourself compassion and empathy and patience around your process, but don't give yourself notes from home so that you don't have to do your work.
Speaker 1:That is the easiest way to break a habit.
Speaker 2:Can I leave us all with a great quote that I heard and the guy I heard it from isn't who wrote it, but I still never figured out who wrote it? Absolutely. To me, this is about the spiritual journey, less about us as individuals. We can't do it alone and nobody can do it for us. We can't do it alone and nobody can do it for us.
Speaker 2:I have made such a reversal and whole thing in my life. And it's miracles on top of miracle, on top of a miracle. And yes, I worked really hard and yes, I was consistent. And yes, I stayed to the commitment. At no point was I ever doing this by myself.
Speaker 2:Not one minute of it.
Speaker 1:Michael, what an absolute pleasure. Thank you for coming on the show. Enjoyed this tremendously.
Speaker 2:For having me.