Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Cynthia, thank you for joining me today.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
[00:00:04] Speaker A: For sure.
So getting this thing started, would you be able to give us a little bit about who you are and what you do? Exactly.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Yeah, sure.
So I'm an author, I'm an educator, I'm a yoga teacher and yoga therapist, and I teach the divine feminine and the Goddess traditions and texts and the sacred text associated with those traditions.
That's where my passion is.
[00:00:31] Speaker A: Cool.
Now your channel or your brand is called embodying the Goddess.
What does that mean exactly? What does it mean to embody the Goddess? I know that's kind of a big question, but I think that'll lead us down a good route.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Yeah, it's the title of a book because there's a whole book to explain it.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: What does it mean? It means that I. I'm basically challenging what I see as the spiritual narrative out there in the world and asking some pretty big questions about it. Like why are we, why are we following these belief systems? Are they true? Do they apply?
Is there a historic reason that we're doing this?
And so embodying the Goddess looks at history and it looks at the body and how. So many of our transcendence based religions and spiritualities follow what I call the patriarchy of spirituality, which is like up and out to leave the body to be saved from, to be kind of like, I don't know, to overcome this great horrible illusion called form.
And so embodying the Goddess does two things. It talks about embodiment, the importance of coming back down into form.
And why use the term the Goddess? Well, because that's what she historically represented. And when we erased that figure, that representation, that we could say metaphor, but we could say more than metaphor. Right. Like that spiritual call, it's had consequences. So what are the consequences to that? And then how do we correct it?
[00:02:27] Speaker A: Okay, so what lineages, what specific belief systems or paths do you critique?
[00:02:37] Speaker B: What do I critique?
[00:02:38] Speaker A: Yeah, what exactly do you critique? Is it like. Yeah, could you get into that?
[00:02:44] Speaker B: I look at the bias more than the system.
The bias that says that we should let it go, that stillness is better than movement.
Right. So I'm interested in all of the subtle ways that we ignore or subordinate form. Pulsation.
And that's a lot of systems, to be honest.
That is like, as somebody who studies the history, it's a lot of systems. It's the Greco, Abrahamic map, of course it's the Abrahamic systems.
It's Buddhism, it's yoga.
Right. Like these are transcendent Systems. And they say so they say this is a map that shows you what your, you know, what the ground of your being is. What is the ground of your being?
And there's a liberation pathway. But the liberation pathway necessitates releasing our attachments to form, our attachments to everything. It's this let it go model. It's the let it go spirituality. So you're not your thoughts, you're not your emotions, you're not your sensations, you're not your perceptions, you're not your memories, you're none of that. You're the ground of being.
And I don't have a problem with the transcendence model per se. What I have a problem with is that none of these traditions ever give us pathways and tools to come back into form. It's like we learned how to climb the ladder out, but we're never taught how to climb the ladder back down and in.
Yeah, right, yeah, yeah. So like we have all these different religions and traditions and tools for like how to, how to leave, how to die, but very few on how to.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: Live, how to be reborn.
[00:04:50] Speaker B: Yeah. Born and integrated.
Because unless embodiment is exactly as sacred as non embodiment, we have a half picture of spirituality.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: Uh huh. Yeah. Essentially what you're describing is the middle way. The true middle way.
[00:05:08] Speaker B: The true middle way, yes. True middle way.
Yeah.
Yeah. The string is not too tight and the string is not too loose.
So where is it in us that we.
It's not out there in the world, it's within ourselves. Like where is it within us that we're trying to fuss out of the trouble to just launch out of form?
And then what are the tools? And there are tools and pathways to come back in. And speaking to perhaps the opposite question that you ask, like what are the traditions I'm talking about that confirm the transcendence bias? You know, what are the traditions that don't.
What are the traditions in history and the sacred texts connected to those traditions that teach us how to come back down into sacred life, sacred form, sacred pulsation as the integrated divine. And those are the traditions that I think are really worthy of talking about right now. And people are interested in some of them, but then they, they get some of the very core, like tantra for example. Tantra it many tantras, because there's a lot of different tantras, but many tantras are technologies to come down into form, especially the goddess based ones. Right. But then even that gets kind of like squeezed into this up and out model and the language just is, is stuck in this other way. So my book is a lot about language. What's the language we're using?
[00:06:52] Speaker A: Okay, well, yeah. What is that process like then after the ascent, how do we come back to Earth?
[00:07:00] Speaker B: Have you ever had a transcendent experience?
[00:07:03] Speaker A: I've had a few.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: You've had a few when you come back from a transcendent experience and you have that moment of like, oh my God, I'm Gary again.
Like, oh my God, I have to go to the grocery store. Right? Like that. I'm small again.
Yeah, yeah.
If we don't have a built in structure around that, then it's what I call a transcendence hangover.
Where it hurts to come back. It can hurt.
[00:07:40] Speaker A: I know.
[00:07:40] Speaker B: You're saying it can hurt, it can suck, it can be like, oh, here I am again. I'm little. I was, I was the movement of the whole universe a moment ago and now I'm stuck in this little bodysuit.
Right.
But the framework that I use is tracking that process again and again and again. We can track that process every morning when we wake up because we go from the unformed to the formed every single time we wake up.
We go from the unformed to the formed a thousand times a day. We just happen to not be trained to notice that the more we can track that process of coming into form, the less different transcendence is from embodiment.
And then eventually transcendence can simply be the body, the form.
There's no preference.
I'm either up and out being God or I'm down and in being God. Like it's, it's, it's.
That's how we need to track it. We need to track the comeback from, from the, the cool experience.
We have so many technologies to create the cool experience.
So many.
[00:09:10] Speaker A: Yeah, but you're saying the path ultimately leads to the cool experience being actually the mundane.
Right. The futility of the human condition is actually a cool experience.
[00:09:26] Speaker B: Oh yeah. I don't see this as a futility project.
You know the traditions that I study, the, the non dual goddess based tantras that I study, there's a frame story around the divine masculine and the divine feminine where she embodiment, form, pulsation, is so in love with infinity, with the transcendent ground of being, that she creates herself out of that infinite so that she can give the infinite the one thing the infinite doesn't have, which is limitation, boundary and form.
So I don't see being human as futile. Actually. I think almost the Opposite. Where not only are we the infinite, but we get to be both. We get to be limited and pulsed at the same time as being infinite. And to me, that's maximal power.
[00:10:32] Speaker A: Yeah, well spoken. Yeah.
Oof. This one's powerful. And we are only 10 minutes in. This is good stuff.
Yeah. That is the dance that Shiva and Shakti. Right. That's so beautiful, though.
You just described it where. Oh, man. I was gonna try and, like, reiterate it, but you did it so well that I don't even. I'm just gonna leave that in the past. How the feminine gave.
Maybe you can say it again. The feminine gave the masculine something to enamor.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:04] Speaker A: Right. It gave the infinite something to fall in love with.
[00:11:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Out of her love. So she is so in love with the infinite, which is her own being too. But she is so in love with her infinite that she emerges. That is shakti. That's what shakti is. Shakti is the emergence of the infinite ground of being into form that then simultaneously comes out of infinity, but then shines back to infinity at all times because she's so in love.
And when we see that as this sacred marriage between Shiva, Shakti. Right. As Shiva is the ground of being, Shiva is usually portrayed. If we're going down that path.
Shiva is usually portrayed as, like, lying on the ground, sleep or dead. Right. And she is dancing on him.
So that image represents this kind of dance of life, of stillness, pulsation.
They are two expressions of the infinite.
And really, she is coming out of that so that she can then vibrate back into that in a certain way. The implications of this are kind of huge because the more limited we are and the more stuck we are, the more logically impossible we are. Right. The infinite can't be limited.
So the more limited we are, the more potentiality for that power we're carrying.
[00:12:45] Speaker A: Yeah, this is good. Okay. Yeah. That's exactly what the spiritual path is missing. It's the embodiment, 100%. I've always felt, because this is where I come from, given my story a little bit. I come from that realm of the ascent of the transcendent. People can look at it in my previous talks, really, where I came from and where my inquiry was, but I always felt like there was something off because I'm like, all right, you're saying all this nice stuff. You're using all this beautiful lingo of the transcendence, and it sounds nice, and maybe it makes you feel a little bit at peace while you're hearing it. But then I go back into the life of Gary, you know, and I got the stuff of Gary. I got the actual.
The karma, you could say that one has to reap. And how does that, how does that play into the life, you know, how does that. It doesn't actually really. If you just keep it at the level of the transcendent, it doesn't really compute. Like it doesn't make any sense. And as of late, I've been diving into the left hand path. We could say tantra, the feminine. And it makes the most sense now, right? When you have that marriage of the ultimate masculine and the ultimate feminine, there is this power that is endowed, that is the true sage is the.
It's somewhere between form and formless, somewhere between the light and the dark, somewhere between heaven and hell, you could say. And it just makes sense, I guess, is what I'm trying to say here. And it's an honor to be able to speak to you about this stuff because it's just like, oh, of course, this is where the path goes. You know, it's obvious that you're. You're supposed to be somewhere between an angel and an animal, you know, somewhere in the middle, in between it all in between Shiva and shakti, essentially. Like, that's what we are, is we are the dance, you know what I mean? We are that image that you just described. Like, that is what you are in some way, you are that dance between these two forces. And yeah, that's all I gotta say. It's. It's a powerful thing to really come into being.
[00:14:59] Speaker B: It is a powerful thing.
And you know, the image that comes to mind as you're describing, that is a healthy muscle.
A healthy muscle is one that's kind of in the middle, right. But it has access to its full stretch capacity and it has access to its full strength capacity. Like it can go all the way into.
Into its end and it can also squeeze all the way back again. It's not like locked in the middle, right?
[00:15:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:31] Speaker B: So y being in the middle. But then also what the divine feminine represents is the ability to hold opposites.
And when we get big enough in the middle, by the way, you know, the middle, this word, the middle in Sanskrit, the word is madhya.
And that's another term that is used to describe the goddess.
So pulsation, breath, the middle.
But the middle in the sense of being able to hold two opposites, for example, my heart knows how to hold two opposites at the same time. Like, I know how to be joyful and very full. Of grief or full of anger simultaneously. And I know how to be kind of insecure, but also really confident. Simon. Right. We can play opposites against each other, and when we sit in the heart, we realize, oh, my heart knows how to hold both of these at the same time. My mind doesn't.
My mind is saying it's one or the other, but all along my heart's been telling me, hey, you've been breathing. Hey, this heart's been beating. It's kind of like the pulsations happening anyway.
And the mind just doesn't want to pay attention, doesn't want to notice that. And it wants to go into these binaries of, like, it has to be this way or it has to be that way, but it can't be both.
Right. So what the divine feminine represents, really, is the ability to get complex.
Like, I'm. I'm a. It's. Here we are.
It's not even that I'm allowed to be complex. It's that, like, look around at life. It's already complex. Right. Like, it's a very complex thing. Here we are doing a bunch of complex things all at the same time.
So how do we honor that in a way that doesn't just show that it's okay, but that's like this is the sacred expressing itself in the timeless, spaceless dance of absolute pulsation, which is called the middle. And the heart and being.
[00:17:46] Speaker A: Wonderfully spoken. Mm. The heart of being. Yeah. And just think about where the heart is located in our being. It's literally in the middle, in the middle of all the chakras. Not a coincidence. As above, so below.
That's how it works.
Yeah. In the heart intelligence, I feel as though, is just stronger than the mind intelligence, than the linear way of thinking. The heart intelligence is just.
It knows. It knows things the mind doesn't know.
And yeah, there is this flow, right. There is this flow state that comes from the heart intelligence that doesn't negate the mind intelligence. It just is a little bit quicker. It's like a precursor, we could say, to the mind. And, yeah, it allows one to be fluid. That's the thing, to remain fluid in all of our interactions and goings on.
[00:18:39] Speaker B: This poor mind just wants to protect the heart.
It's like the heart builds these. Like, the heart is just moving along.
And the mind, even the ego. Right. If we're going to say mind ego, it's almost a trauma response.
Like, hey, I've experienced something and it hurts. So I'm going to. I'm going to scan reality from now on to make sure that thing doesn't happen again.
And as I'm doing that, I'm going to build barriers around the heart, and, like, I'll be the century at the gate. I'm gonna. I'm gonna, like, stand at the gate with my armoring, and I'm gonna make sure that thing doesn't happen again. That's. That's almost like. That's the role of the mind. That's the role of the ego. There's like. There's nothing wrong with the poor ego. It's like blaming the soldier.
Right? We can't blame the soldier for. For the fortress.
So, like, the ego just is doing its best to protect the heart. And here we are, like, holding our breaths and tightening our body.
And life is giving us how many opportunities to take a look at the pain and the pattering and the armoring? That's what life is. Life is one huge mirror pulsating at us all the time. It's like, you know, patterns. If you have a reaction or a pain pattern, you better believe it's going to come up. It's going to come up in your personal life, in driving down the street, like, it's going to happen. Right.
So. So now what? Now what is spirituality? Is spirituality like, just getting better to disassociate? Like, getting better to ride above it all?
Like, building more soldiers to man the walls? Right.
Or is our spirituality the ability to say, hey, let's look at these walls in the first place and see if they're still necessary. Let's see if they're helping or not helping.
And, you know, it's going to take time, but time I've got.
Time I've got, because all that's here is the heart.
So that's all I'm doing here, right?
[00:20:58] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, is that what we're.
How do I put this? Is that where the path leads us? Ultimately, like, what we're all doing this for is to come back into the heart. Intelligence. Is that the ultimate goal of the embodiment?
[00:21:13] Speaker B: What do you think?
[00:21:14] Speaker A: I think it is.
[00:21:17] Speaker B: I think it is, too. Yeah.
[00:21:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: The deeper I go into the body, the deeper I go into the heart, the more innocent it is, the more honest it is.
And as I've been feeling lately, it's an instrument kind of like, I don't know, something like a drum or a stringed instrument.
But I almost get this sense that all of the practices I've ever done have been me just trying to clean the instrument.
Like the instrument is this beautiful thing, and it's vibrating into reality. Like, reality is not out there. It's vibrating from my being out and then being reflected back again.
And so, you know, here I am just taking on practices that are like, I don't know, getting a dish rag and cleaning the instrument over and over and over again.
And if I do it just right, then all of a sudden you hear that tone, and that tone comes through, and it's like, oh, that's reality.
[00:22:39] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's the thing. Once you hear it, you don't unhear it.
Once you know what reality is from the heart center, it's like, oh, of course.
Yes, this is it.
[00:22:56] Speaker B: And then all of life gets to be a retuning of the instrument. It's like, I have these roles that I get to tune my instrument against. I'm a mother, I'm a wife. Like, I teach. I do these things in society and in community. And, like, what an honor. I get to tune my instrument. It's not always pretty.
What life throws at me isn't always like, yay.
But it's an opportunity for me to say, okay, now what.
What do I do with this? This. This dust, this, you know, and we have so much pain out there. Collective. We have ancestral pain. Like, there's. There's stuff that we gotta deal with.
[00:23:42] Speaker A: Mm.
Mm.
Yeah. It's a beautiful way to look at it, that everything is an opportunity to tune our instrument.
I feel you on that.
Yeah. It's the Bhagavad Gita, you know, it's the song of God, and you're either playing along or you're playing your own tune.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: That's true.
And it says in the Bhagavad Gita that great beings want to be embodied.
The great divine beings want to come into form.
What a great honor it is to come into form.
Like, line up at the gates.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:30] Speaker B: To come and do that work. Because that work happens here.
[00:24:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
That's a rather esoteric query.
Right. To say, okay, so what's this whole human incarnation about? Well, we said it's to come into the heart, really. It's to refine our heart, to play along.
And the heart of being, the song of the heart, we could say. Right.
And that begs the question to me, is it possible to do that in any other form than the human form?
Maybe not. Maybe we're the only things that can love, that have the potential and capacity to find out what love is, to love and be loved. You know, if these great beings want to be Human. Why do they want to be human so bad?
It's probably to learn love.
Right? I know that's a rather out there, and that's a big thing to like. How do we really know? But if that is the case and it's in the Gita, and I feel that right now, I think it's because our souls are being. Our deepest being wanted to know what it was to love. And that might sound a little corny, a little cliche, but I really think that is the truth. That is really what's going on here. Despite what the news wants to tell you or what your TikTok feed wants to tell you, we're all incarnated here as human beings. To remember how to love. That might be a better way to phrase it. To remember how to love. And.
Yeah, and on we go. That's the path.
It's quite beautiful when you look at it that way. And also quite simple, too.
[00:26:11] Speaker B: The Bhagavad Gita.
If we're just going to, like, pull on the thread for a second.
[00:26:17] Speaker A: Mm.
[00:26:17] Speaker B: It's a powerful text.
Did you know it's the most purchased text in history? More than the Bible.
[00:26:27] Speaker A: Didn't know that.
[00:26:28] Speaker B: It's a very popular text.
It starts off in the middle of a story, and it starts off in the middle of a dialogue. And it starts off in the. It starts off in the middle. Like, you can't just. I teach this in teacher training, this text every single year. And every year I have to warn people.
You're starting this text in the middle of a thing.
Like, you don't just pick up this text and read it like a book. Right? You're starting in the middle of almost. You're starting in the middle of a.
[00:26:57] Speaker A: Thought of a battle.
[00:26:59] Speaker B: Where are we starting? We're starting on a battlefield.
We're starting on a battlefield, which is one field.
Kurukshetra Dharma.
Like the field of Dharma. The field, the field of righteousness. Everything is already on the field. You've got these two opposing armies made up of, like, family members, teachers, friends, and they're about to kill each other.
And what happens to our great hero? Like, he rides out to the middle of the field, and he takes a look at what's about to happen.
And when it says he drops his bow.
Dropping the bow isn't just like dropping the weapon. It's dropping your whole inner being. It's dropping your capacity to be a human. Dropping the bow is like dropping the spine. It's like, I've lost my meditation. I've lost my ability to even exist. Like I've lost my ability to even meet this situation. Dropping the bow is like I've dropped my practice and yet we're still on the field.
Like, the field is still there. The heart is still there. So, like, whether it's a human experiencing love or any sentient or non sentient being, it's all pulsation. It's all already on the field. Like the field is the field of pulsation.
And here we are right in the middle of the field, like having a conversation with God, looking, staring down two sides.
Like impossible two sides. Neither one of them is a good outcome. They're both going to lead to devastation and really utter devastation.
And so when we drop the bow, which we do all the time, we're dropping the capacity to stand in ourselves and in our heart.
But the heart is still there. So whether we're human or not, the heart is still there.
It's yes, I have a heart because I have a body. And that body happens to be, you know, a complex body with a thing called a heart.
But the heart is a metaphor because what else pulsates, right? It's not just the heart that pulsates. The heart pulsates, but even Mother Earth has a heartbeat. She has an electromagnetic frequency that pulsates, which means rocks and mineral are part of that frequency.
The universe itself expands and contracts.
[00:29:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:59] Speaker B: So we're just echoes on echoes on echoes. It's one continuous field. The field is one continuous field. Once you're. We're already on the field is what I'm saying.
[00:30:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay. It's gotta take a second.
[00:30:20] Speaker B: Hold on.
[00:30:25] Speaker A: I've never heard it put that way. That's so good.
Yeah.
So it's like what?
We're already on the field.
Pulsation is already there. The heart is already there. Without the heart, without the physical heart.
[00:30:42] Speaker B: We could say capital H, Heart.
[00:30:44] Speaker A: The capital H. The heart. Yeah.
What is this incarnation of the human being? It seems to me, at least this is just in the moment. It seems like another variation of that pulsation that is much more novel than the pulsation of Earth, than the pulsation of the cosmos. We could say, I think there's something going on that same note of the beings that want to be human. I think there's something very special about being human that no other potter of the cosmos can touch. In terms of the pulsation, what that is has to do with love. And I think it has to do with unconditional love.
There's A special essence to humanity, I think, that is here to further the creation of the pulsation. You know, it's like. It's like to.
We're a grand addition, you could say, to the pulsation. Yeah, we're already here. For sure. It's already here. But that doesn't mean, because we're already here, that we can't.
We can't seemingly build the experience, build the pulsation to be even more beautiful than it already is.
You know what I'm getting at?
[00:32:01] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I hear you saying that you really like being here.
[00:32:09] Speaker A: Yeah, it's cool.
I like being alive.
[00:32:12] Speaker B: I really like being here, too. Like, I think this is so cool and so impossible. Like, it is so wild that I am here. I don't even know what this is. Like, I'm not sure. But I do know that there is something in the instrument that's coming through my body. Like, my body gets to be part of this instrument. And it does have an impact on the whole.
It does have an impact. You know, I was reading something, and I know this is a really old study, and people kind of know about this one. Maybe. I'm not sure. It was new to me, that many decades ago, somebody was conducting science experiments and measuring the electromagnetic field of a plant.
And they happened to just, I think, in their lunch break, hook up the plant to the stress meter.
And then they had this thought come through them, and they realized, oh, my gosh, the plant just responded to my thought. Like, its stress level just went up.
And then they decided, okay, I'm going to test this out a little bit more now. Like, I'm going to think something like, I'm going to kill you to the plant. Right.
Or I'm going. I think it was something like, I'm going to burn your leaf. It was something like that.
And the plant stress response shot up.
It's like the plant was somehow listening in on our thought, on. On the thought of the person connected to it.
And if I recall correctly, they then took the experiment, like, outside of the room. Like, how far away do I have to be from the plant for the plant to respond?
And the plant still responded even when the person was not in its immediate vicinity.
What does that say? It says that the instrument is always connected. Like, we're on the field. The field is the field.
And that does give us a lot of power, and it does give us a lot of negotiation.
And it makes.
It makes an open invitation. Like, we don't want to start getting anxiety around, like, Am I now responsible for, you know, the whole. Right. We don't want to go down those pathways. What we want to do is look at the interconnectedness of life and say, hey, so when I do my work, when I take a look at those patterns around my heart, it doesn't just help me. Right. It helps everybody around me.
And I don't know if you've had that experience, but I have. When I've done trauma work, all of a sudden I'm like. I'm a little less cranky with the people in my life. Right. Like, and that's. That's on me. Like, that's a me problem to do that.
But we can get to that subtle level that is so powerful, that is so subtle that we can feel, oh, what a privilege it is to be me. And, oh, I really can ripple this thing forth in this way that is. It's pretty.
A lot bigger than I thought.
Pretty big.
And I think that that's the level of spiritual, I don't know, adept.
It's like an.
A deep level of being more of an adept where we don't need to shout so much anymore. We can just kind of, like, whisper. Because it has a big ripple.
[00:36:19] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the subtle power of the heart right there.
The ripples are potentially unseen to the naked eye, but nevertheless, there is this undercurrent of power that runs throughout all our interminglings with each other, you know, And I feel that, yeah, 100%. Like, whenever I approach somebody with that heart intelligence in that heart space, I know they can feel it because they're treating me differently based upon how I present myself, and I see the difference in them. And it might not even be like, obviously it's not like this. It's not like I'm overly affectionate in that way, or I say, oh, I love you, or it's not even like, at a surface level, loving it is in the. In the energy. It's all in the resonance that makes the difference. It's kind of like you're. They're a secret agent of the heart. You're a secret agent of love in that way.
And the power of that, too, is that ripple. It's, like, contagious.
That ripple, that wave goes to that person, and then they feel the love and they transfer that to the other person. That other person. Transfer it to the other person and so forth, you know? The power of love really knows no bounds. I know that sounds really corny, but I had to say it. The power of love really knows no Bounds. And that's the thing too is like, you don't even have to be on the spiritual path. That's what I'm coming to realize about the whole embodiment. Really where spirituality is going ironically so is you don't even have to read the Bhagavad Gita or anything of that nature.
Just kind of have to be loving. I, I guess it's like, be patient. I think a lot of it comes from patience in our dealings with each other. Just be patient.
[00:38:12] Speaker B: At least for me, sometimes I think spirituality is the biggest thing that gets.
[00:38:18] Speaker A: In our way ironically.
[00:38:20] Speaker B: So, yeah, because in spirituality we have all this history and the history isn't always a pretty history.
I think that got for me this principle, this pulsation principle. I call it the Goddess, right? But it's just life. It's just embodiment.
I'm using the metaphor.
For me, that principle of coming back into form and finding kindness and finding the heart is, Is certainly more present in our therapy work than it is in spirituality.
It's like our therapy work is. Is far, far more, I guess integrated is the word.
And that's where, honestly, that's why I wrote the book is because I was like, what is going on in our spirituality? Because there is this bias here and it's leading to pain and injury. And like, you know, we're suppressing and subordinating embodiment and then disassociating and then that, that's having this like, effect of violence on the earth. You know, what is that? And where is that even coming from?
And then you start to peel it open a little bit and it's like, oh my gosh, like, this has a history.
There's a history here.
There's. There's a reckoning here where the body, I mean, read, read your favorite spiritual text and see what it has to say about the body.
Even the ones that claim to be like.
I don't know if you use the term non duality, but even the ones that claim to be totally non dual, that is to say that claim to. That everything is God, right? Everything is the divine. Not two. There's not two things here. There's only one thing.
Even the texts that claim to be non dual more frequently than you would like to see are going to say something like, see that you're not your body. Your body is just like a sack of disease that's leading to pain and get over it and move beyond it. And you're not that.
Now in the traditions I study, they talk about this and they say, oh, those half non dualists.
That's not true. That's not real.
That's. That's a cherry picking of the data.
[00:40:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:58] Speaker B: You know, like that's you basically saying, get me out of here. Because this place is hard. This place is terrible.
Walk me a pathway out.
Save me.
Give me salvation. Save me.
[00:41:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yep. It's a half salvation.
[00:41:17] Speaker B: Salvation is a half path.
[00:41:20] Speaker A: Mm.
Yeah.
[00:41:22] Speaker B: It might apply at the moment of death. At the moment of death, to have the skill set to transcend is a very useful skill set to have.
What about the rest of life?
[00:41:38] Speaker A: Hmm.
Well, that's an interesting one.
Well, I mean, maybe you could say the rest of life is preparing us for the moment of death. And you can't just like, you know, in. You can't like when you're on your deathbed, just all of a sudden start reading non dual text and it clicks. Maybe our whole life is the preparation, ideally for that. It's the entire thing. You know, it's like you're supposed to live life while you're here and then you're supposed to die when you die. But it's the whole. They're one and one.
You know what I'm getting at here?
[00:42:10] Speaker B: I do. And that is why those texts and those traditions are useful in that context.
In the context of death and dying practices and principles. What do you think Buddhism is?
It's a, it's a death and dying practice.
[00:42:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:32] Speaker B: It tells you that from the beginning. It's not like hiding this information from you. You. Right.
It's the same thing with so many of these traditions. They are death and dying practices.
And what I have to say about that is that's great and that's beautiful. And we can also climb up and down the ladder. Why not make use of breaking, breaking into life? Why not make use of life also?
Not just death. Why not make use of life?
[00:43:07] Speaker A: It's. And it's being able to hold simultaneously. That's the true non dual. It's always and it's all. And yeah, it's being able to hold those two seemingly contradictory points of view in your being. That's the sage. That's the integrated embodiment there. And it's not easy for the mind to do, that's for sure. The logical and linear way that we've been brought, brought up and conditioned into. It's not easy to do that. But I think that is the path ultimately is be able to hold those two poles of our being being and non being and live from that Live and die from that.
[00:43:44] Speaker B: I agree.
And when I hear teachers speak from that place, they carry a certain essence in them.
They carry a certain, like non preferential everything is holy here attitude.
And it feels good to be around that.
It's like, ah, this is included. This is the whole.
This is the whole. Like nothing's, nothing's broken here. This is whole and complete.
[00:44:24] Speaker A: There's a quote that I want to look up. Let me see if I can find it. It's.
It's something along the lines of maybe, you know, it's like the.
I'll see if I can find it. One second. Oh, okay. This. I got it right here. First one.
The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.
Let go of wanting and avoiding and everything will be perfectly clear. But make the slightest distinction and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.
I love that. It's so beautiful.
It's a great way. It's not difficult for those who have no preferences.
[00:45:02] Speaker B: That sounds like Taoism.
[00:45:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I think so.
[00:45:06] Speaker B: Taoism is one of these traditions that holds both principles equally.
Taoism is one of the few, few philosophical religious traditions out there that holds two truths simultaneously.
Can you be.
Can you be the heaven?
Can you be that that stands at heaven's gate?
Can you be soft as a baby's breath?
Can you be in power, but know that power is in being lower than is is like the river holds less power than the ocean. It looks intense. The river looks intense, but it holds less power than the ocean. Why? Because the ocean is lower than the river.
And because it's lower than the river, it's bigger, it's more powerful.
[00:46:11] Speaker A: I like that. That's good.
It's powerful stuff. Cynthia, I really like this conversation.
Yeah, Taoism is very special in that regard.
In the Dao Te Ching, it has that flavor of no preferences. Zen is also very special in that regard of having the mind leading the mind toward a way of no attachment, toward the true middle age, toward really what Buddhism is talking about. Buddhism has, from what I've understood, become very dogmatic. And they do get caught up in they. I like to say they get attached to being non attached, which leads to more attachment, more karma, ironically. So. So I do feel like the true middle way is, as we spoke, it's to, hmm, it's to, yes, prepare for the moment of death of our, you know, going into the Bardo state, as they say in Buddhism. But that doesn't mean negating your life.
That doesn't mean giving it all up and becoming ascetic. It means actually embracing your life while you're here. It's embracing the goings on, the karma, and turning that into Dharma. And then thus, that is how we. We could say escape Samsara. It's not like you.
Yeah. It's not the idea of being a monk in the cave, maybe for some people. Right, That's a good image for some people for sure. To be the ascetic.
[00:47:50] Speaker B: But that's the patriarchy of spirituality. To leave.
[00:47:56] Speaker A: Never heard it put that way.
[00:47:57] Speaker B: Who has access to leaving anyway?
[00:48:02] Speaker A: No one, really. I mean, I don't know.
[00:48:04] Speaker B: Nowadays, very few people, but historically speaking, you know. Yeah, these are radical paths. The Buddha left his wife and kids. Who knows what they felt about that.
And it worked for him.
So.
So then other people fetishized the path that worked for him, and they assumed that that was the way.
But yeah, there's. There's so many different ways we can, we can talk about that.
And so many different versions of a single religion that's been going on for 3,000 years. Right. Like 2500 years. And so there's so many different forms, and then they change. And here we are in this time where there's another change happening. There's. All of the religions are going through a turn right now.
Some people like that and some people don't like that.
Some people are like, well, hold on a second. This isn't traditional. But what is traditional? Like, I study the history of religion. What do you think religion is?
Religion is one appropriation after another. That's what religion is. That's what religious tradition is.
It's a series of, like, borrowings and synthesizing and working of that into this time period.
And here we are in this time period and we look out at the earth, and the earth, like our soil isn't good.
And we have to figure out why.
Well, we know why.
We know why because we haven't been treating the body of earth as body.
Like when you've been. When you've spent as much time as we humans have spent modern humans, especially in the west, negating the body. What do you think we're going to negate the earth?
Of course we are. We're extracting away from the body. We're going to extract away from the earth. We're going to make use of it.
And like, it's, it's disposable.
It doesn't exist anyway.
Right. And now people from a very deep place are asking these questions. Is that true that it doesn't matter that the soil doesn't matter. Is that true? Like, it's not.
It's not true.
So give me a model that works.
[00:50:43] Speaker A: Yeah, in. The model that works is not borrowing from the past. In the patriarchy, it's embracing the feminine. It's embracing more of the matriarchy.
[00:50:54] Speaker B: And it's both. Right. It's the divine union between the two, where one's not better than the other, where they're both.
Yeah. The balance. It's more the balance because, you know, the feminine can go too far. That pulsation can be like tornadoes and. Right. Like, can do destruction. So it's both. It's like. It's like the two held together and within ourselves as well as out there in the world. It's. It's really like both.
Both the ability to die and the ability to live.
[00:51:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
Wow.
I think that's a good note to wrap it up at. I want to talk to you more, though, but that's like. That's a perfect full circle moment. I feel like, you know, that's a mic drop moment right there.
I guess moral of the story, too, is this is all an internal thing. It's being reflected, we could say on the external as above, so below, but it's also internal as well. And it's. It's all up to us. Like, we save.
We save ourselves to save the world. You know, that's the thing, is it's that pulsation. The more that you are, the more that you are in tune with these energies within yourself. Right? The masculine and the feminine. And the more you bring balance within yourself, the more it is reflected onto the world and on earth.
That's the beauty of it. That's the power that we all have. It doesn't have to be grandiose, right? That's the thing. You don't have to write a book. You don't have to have a podcast. You don't have to do any sermons or anything to that degree. You can for sure. That's some people's path. But the beauty of the path, right, is there is power in the small, simple ways, in the subtle ways, as we spoke of before. The subtle power of the heart has that ripple effect to truly change the world.
So that's all I got to say to that, is don't over complicate it. Keep it simple.
Yeah.
Well, hey, Cynthia, I think that's a good note to wrap this up at, but do you have anything else that you want to get off your chest before we stop recording?
[00:53:17] Speaker B: No, I think that that's. I think that that's well put.
[00:53:21] Speaker A: Thank you.
Well, I appreciate your time. This was a very powerful conversation. You have a way with words, and I appreciate you coming on here. Seriously, thank you.
[00:53:35] Speaker B: I appreciate your time.
[00:53:36] Speaker A: Thank you. Keep up the awesome work.
And that's it. Peace and love, everybody.
Goodbye.
