But 50,000 people a year go on it. I know some of you have gone on it and it’s been going on for centuries. People have walked this dusty path from village to village in Spain to get to the place where the reliquary of St. James, that’s Santiago in Spanish, James and Diago. So anyway, I had a wonderful adventure. I said to Ro before I was leaving, to Ro and Karen, and I was like, “Why am I even doing this? I’m not going to go earn any money for our family. I’m going to learn wonderful things.” Because I went with a group of psychologists and coaches, and we were led by Dick Schwartz, who is the founder of IFS Therapy. And he is amazing. I’ll tell you more about him in a minute.

But it wasn’t a work trip. It was more for pleasure. And I felt guilty in the pleasure. And my beloveds, instead of saying, “Yeah, we could really use you at home,” which they really can because we’re still moving into our property in upstate New York. That’s a whole adventure, I’ll tell you about in a minute. Many things in a minute. But they said, “Go! Go have an adventure. You’re going for adventure’s sake.”

I hadn’t thought about going for adventure’s sake, but then I remembered that Tolstoy said there are only two stories that ever really happen in the world, two interesting stories you can tell: And one is that a stranger comes to town, and the other is someone goes on a journey. So I thought, all right, I’m going to, my life is made up of stories and the more meaningful my stories can be to me, the more meaning I can draw from whatever happens to me, the more I feel like my life has purpose, and everything feels delicious. So I decided, yes, I was going to just go. And as my friend Boyd Varty says, I was going to be the kind of person that adventures happen to because I was going to a place where adventures happen.

This is how I’d like to orient your thinking. If there’s anything that you have to do that you’re not pleased with or if there’s something that you feel guilty about, redefine it as an adventure and a pilgrimage, a thing you’re doing to feed your soul by giving it new stories.

So some of you have heard my favorite story from my walk through Spain. It’s a wonderful, wonderful experience. The people are amazing and everybody, because so many people walk this path, people greet each other. Even in the city, if they see you with a backpack on, they just say, “Buen camino, have a good walk.” And there’s a kind of solidarity and love. You feel very loved by the people as you’re going through their towns. It was beautiful.

But in one of the little towns that we stopped in for the night, Dick Schwartz and his wife Jean and I went out to dinner and we went to dinner in a place in a sort of a town square. It wasn’t a huge town. And we’d gone out very early for dinner, which is seven o’clock, which for me is late dinner but in Spain is lunchtime. They eat dinner at three in the morning. I don’t even know. No, actually 9:00 or 10:00.

Anyway, there were Dick and Jean and I, and we found one place that would serve us that early. And it was in the middle of this very ancient-looking town square, beautiful, beautiful buildings. Some of them very picturesque, some of them very grand, but old. And while we were talking, I was telling Dick that I have this occasional asthma that acts up and it closes my throat. You can hear how croaky my voice is, even on a good day, it’ll close my throat and I can’t breathe for a few seconds to a few minutes, not a few minutes, a few seconds, but it feels like about a day and a half. And Dick said, “Oh, do you want to work on that? I can help you work on that.” And I was like, “Wow, the creator of IFS offering me a free session?”

I was like, “I never thought of using parts work,” which is what Dick does on this issue. And he said, “Well, let’s do that.” And he sort of turned in his chair to face me. And he’s a very gentle, soft spoken man. But as he turned and sort of went into his therapy mode, which is, he calls it “Self presence,” connection with his deep self, I felt this huge sphere. It felt like a ball of energy coming out around him. And it, I was in the middle of it and it was very, very noticeable. It was like I’d suddenly been thrown into a pool of very warm water. It was an odd but beautiful sensation. 

And he’s very simple. He just said, “So go to the part of you that closes your throat,” and I was like, okay. And then I was astonished to find that the part of me that closes my throat really doesn’t—don’t take this the wrong way—it doesn’t really want to be alive in the human sense. It does not believe in death, but it does believe that human life is harder than some of the other forms it could take. So it just decides, “I’m not breathing,” which was really interesting.

And I said, “I can’t believe this, it feels like there’s like a 16-year-old in there and it’s an obsessively mystical part of me. It just wants the connection with the Divine and none of the other nonsense.” And so I thought, oh, that’s really interesting. But Dick wouldn’t move on. He said, “No, let’s stay and hear what she has to say.” 

So I went quiet. Nothing was coming to my mind. And then from all around us, as far as I could tell, I don’t know, it was on some kind of loudspeaker system, maybe. But we heard the call to prayer being broadcast for all the Islamic people. And if you’ve ever heard it, it’s haunting and beautiful. And I don’t speak Arabic, I don’t know what it means, but I know that it begins with the word “Allah.” And I know that it’s about the soul’s yearning toward God. And I also know that women aren’t supposed to sing it.

But in this case, I swear it was a woman’s voice and it was coming as far as I could tell, it was like the buildings were singing to me. It came from all around us. And I tried to focus on my psychology, but I couldn’t. All I could do was listen to the call to prayer. And then I opened my eyes and I said, “I was pretty distracted by…” and then Jean and Dick and I all said that was actually that part of me. That’s what it wanted to say.

And so I started to get all teary. And then across this little cafe from us, I saw a man with long gray hair and two pointy years like an elf. I think they were probably made of plastic, but they were very, very realistic looking. And so I went over and had a conversation with him and he was talking to me about how before the conquistadors and before the Romans, there were the druids and their magic was here on the Camino de Santiago. And it was one of those times where he was speaking Spanish, but I could really pretty well understand him, almost as if I’d shifted into a state where I didn’t need to know the words to understand what someone was saying. And I was so proud of myself for understanding the Spanish. And I turned to Dick and Gina and started to tell them what he’d said. And the elf Druid man goes, “Oh, you speak English? I’m from Texas.” So then I was disillusioned about my fabulous ability to transcend culture. 

But I was there when the story happened, and everything seemed to be about this part of me that wants another world, that doesn’t really believe in the boringness of the world we’ve been given, believes in the magic of the Druids, believes that the call to prayer can come through buildings to speak what your soul wants to say. And by the way, that relieves your asthma. And I know that I’d been walking for four days in the hot sun to experience that moment. And if I hadn’t flown all that way and taken all this time away from my family, I wouldn’t have had this small miracle. And at first I thought, “Really? I’m going to take 10 days away from my family for that?”

But as that story has lived in me, I’ve noticed something. It’s changing my life narrative. The journey of my life is becoming different because that story happened to me and then I’ve told it a few times. So I thought, You know what? Now I have to go. I’m just getting ready to go off on another trip, a speaking junket in the southern states, and I’m once again reluctant to leave my family. But what I realized is even the most onerous job, even the most difficult journey, if you’re going on a search for stories, becomes a pilgrimage.

And if you’re going on a search for stories about what your life really means, you’re going to get them. And they will not be what your parents taught you, what you learned at school, what your job wants you to know. They will be something far more deep and mysterious. You will get Druids coming to you and all these different faiths pouring into your own spirit in this human form.

So I’m sort of looking at trip that I have to take tomorrow. I’m like, “It’s another eight day trip.” I’m like, “Okay, well, I’m going on an adventure.” And because I was braced in this mental position, yesterday when Karen asked me to saw through a board in her new bedroom, I did so, and we got a new blade for our electric saw. So I’m the designated electric’saw lesbian.

So I got the electric saw, and I took it to the wall and I sawed it away at this board, and then water just started gushing from the wall. And I had obviously nicked a pipe that I didn’t even know was there. And it started spraying into the room and I started, I was getting things off the floor. I was like, “I don’t even know what happened! I’ve got to rip this board away. I don’t know!” Karen’s already running down to the basement because she knows that the water’s going to run down there and we have to catch it in buckets. And it was just absolute bedlam. Everybody’s running around.

Little five-year-old Lila came in and showed us that she knows, even though we’ve never heard her say it before, she does know the appropriate use of the F-word because she looked at what was going on and she said it. Oh! And it was like an hour and a half of trying to figure out where to turn off the water in a new place that we don’t know very well, and then going under the crawl space to try to catch water in buckets.

And we’re all cursing and screaming and running around, including Lila, and after we got it all calmed down—don’t worry, it’s all fixed. But Ro said to me, even while we were running around with the buckets and the towels and the screaming and the F-word, she was thinking, “This is going to be such a great story.”

And I was too. It was in the back of my mind. It wasn’t in the front of my mind, but it was there in the back. And it was because I really have my mind set in Adventure Mode. I really am on a pilgrimage. I really am walking the road to the mystery as much as I possibly can. And all we have to do to turn our lives into that is to tell our stories in that way to ourselves and to one another. Is it the correct interpretation? Who the hell knows? Just tell the versions of your stories that lift you up and fill your soul and connect you with other people. And every single ridiculous little mishap will become another incredible story happening on the pilgrimage of your life.

It so happened that we had just barely had someone come in to repair something in the basement who had covered everything with plastic as a vapor barrier. If that hadn’t been so, we would’ve been down there in the mud getting water all over us. And if I’d done that job a little sooner, we would’ve been in that situation. It would’ve been an absolute—like so much worse than it was. So in a weird way, I felt protected by that.

And then when they came to fix the pipe, they said, “Oh yeah, you really needed to have this aerated. This would’ve gotten moldy and made someone sick.” So, it all turned out to the good. And life is full of songs and Druids and walks and F-words and love, and I am so glad to be back here talking to you about it.

So the questions that I’ll answer now and then we’ll finish with our meditation. Someone said, “You were on the Camino with Dick Schwartz?”

Yes. In fact, I was. I had that great privilege, and I hope someday you do too.

Somebody else says, “A search for stories about what your life really means. Woo, love this. How do we do this? Say more, please.”

 What I would do is, and what I do, is I get up in the morning, I do my meditation, and then I say, “Show me the stories you want me to learn today. Show me the stories, show them the way you want me to see them.” And I don’t know if I’m talking to my higher self or the Divine or whatever, but if I position my mind to look for stories, the most important thing is to think about telling them. Because if you’re thinking about telling someone about something, the story forms itself much more meaningfully in your mind. So you just position your mind for that in the morning and then go. And then at the end of the day, you sit down with your beloved, or you write in your journal and you say, “Here’s the story of today. Here’s what happened on my pilgrimage today.” Again, the name of the person who did the parts work is Dick Schwartz, and he created Internal Family Systems Therapy, which is amazing.

Question: “I am navigating a long, serious health journey. Any tips or just general thoughts to get through this? I am not fighting it. I’m trying to learn and have been accepting, but sometimes it is so hard.”

I hear you. And I’m so sorry you’re going through this, and I know you’re not the only one listening who’s going through something really hard. So to help get through it, first of all, when you feel things like grief or anger, you don’t have to force acceptance. What you do is not accept the situation, necessarily—you accept the way you feel in any given moment. And the way you do that is by offering yourself compassion. So sometimes there will be a day of despair. And if you can hold the despair, if you can imagine a loving force holding you in your despair, if you can, as they would say in IFS, if you can un-blend from the part of you that’s undergoing the misery and find the part of you that is eternal and find the part of you that is always calm and clear and confident, it’s in there. And it can hold the pain, it can hold the uncertainty, it can hold the fear, the anger, the grief.

Yeah. I have a couple of friends right now who are going through really bad things like that. And you don’t have to keep it together. You just have to be able to love the part of you that can’t keep it together, because that aligns you with the Divine. And that turns every day’s events into a story that is about, not about being sick, but about your journey through the experience of suffering to get to a higher level of compassion and a higher level of joy, ultimately. So all my love to you, and give yourself a lot of love too, and take it slow. When you can’t walk the road, just take a break. It’s okay to just take tiny, tiny steps toward being perfect and fabulous.

All right, question: “Just finished Beyond Anxiety”—which is a book I wrote—”Love it so much.” Aw. “How do you recommend that we use Beyond Anxiety and The Way of Integrity together?”

Well, here’s the thing. When I wrote The Way of Integrity, it was just about making sure that your beliefs, if they hurt you, are recognized as just beliefs. If you believe something that is not true for you at the deepest level, you are out of integrity. Innocently, but you’re out of integrity. And that means that you feel this division, you feel this split, and there’s some kind of suffering. So I wrote that book and then people came to me and they said, “I’m in complete integrity, but I’m still really anxious. I’m still really scared.” And I thought, that’s wild, because for me, any thought that scares me, if I investigate it long enough, it turns out to be false. It turns out to fall apart. But I realized, talking to these people, that it’s very hard to get to that point. And so I went and researched anxiety for a few years and found that it has a lot to do with our brains and a lot to do with the culture around us.

So what I would do is get yourself in as much integrity as you can, and then if there is anything that scares you, anything at all, go and find the stories that are scaring you, the things that are frightening because you’re imagining a future that could be difficult or painful and use The Way of Integrity or what I wrote about in Beyond Anxiety, to see through your fear stories, to find a way to break through that scrim of fear so that you can see reality on the other side of it. There is a reality on the other side of it, and the non-scary version, the version that will take you to the opposite of your worst nightmare, that is what’s waiting for you if you’ll investigate those stories deeply. So thank you for asking and that’s a great question.

All right: “How do we stay in our high magical vibration when our specific life situation isn’t set up exactly how you imagine? Young kids, living on a farm, etc.?”

Oh my gosh, I so get this. I mean, we moved in August, and just between getting an older house with character and having to fix it up and just constant travel and trying to get a kid in school and all the things that we’ve been doing for work, it has been so chaotic. I still have to go to give speeches, and I can’t even find my earrings anymore. Like, really? It’s been months. So how do I stay in the high magical vibration? Same way that I sort of found a way to get excited about my pilgrimage on the Camino. I sit down and I say, “Oh, this isn’t something that’s supposed to be all done. This is a road I’m walking, and it’s meant to be super difficult.” That is the design of a pilgrimage where you send your soul through an experience so that it can have adventures. And those adventures invariably involved chaos and loss and mix-ups and foul-ups and accidents and conflict. It’s always—the story has to have something go wrong in order to be a great story.

None of us ever reads a book about a person who had a really nice life and then died peacefully in their sleep, and that’s the whole story. No, it’s all about the adventure. So you’re in the middle of young kids living on a farm. Imagine telling those stories 10, 20 years down the road. Imagine how hilarious it can be, how sad it might be, how epic it might be. I mean, you’re living a big adventure if you’re raising little kids on a farm. There’s a lot of story happening, and it can be so exciting once you’re not in the middle of it, in the middle, it’s kind of—your F-word will come in handy.

Next question: “What books for visualizing, mediating, or channeling would you recommend? Thanks for all.”

Thank you. What would I recommend for visualization? Gosh, there’s a book called What You Want Wants You by Barbara Eden, I think, which is not about channeling exactly, but it’s about manifesting things. And I believe she’s a really levelheaded, but also very magically minded person who gives really, really good advice. So that’s one that I would recommend. Suzanne. Oh, Suzanne Eder. Suzanne Eder. Thank you, Roey, the Gracious Badger.

Question: “Do you think that Dick Schwartz connects with source energy when he is working with someone? And do you think we can be healed through source?”

Big yes to both questions. Without doubt Dick is channeling some, I mean, speaking of channeling, he doesn’t show up as a medium, but you can feel the energy coming through him and it’s huge and it’s so compassionate and it’s so beautiful. And there’s no question when you feel that from anyone or anything, that that can heal us. Can it heal what we want healed? Can it heal the broken leg, the cancer, the heart problem? Yes, I believe it can. Will it always do that? No, because sometimes the heart problem or the cancer or the broken leg, those are the stories, those are the parts of the pilgrimage where we really have to dig deep, and our souls decide that they’re going to do this the difficult way. But we can always access that energy to heal our hearts in the middle of it, to take a position of peace, to find a place of peace and love and self-compassion so that our hearts are healed and our souls are healed, no matter what happens to the rest of us.

One last question, then we’ll do our meditation: “How do you move forward when you feel a deep calling for change, but you can’t yet see what you’re being called to toward, especially in your professional life?”

You know what? Make a move. Make any kind of move. You may not know why you’re going, what’s up ahead of you, and you may take a step that doesn’t look like it makes sense or that takes you to a place you never expected it to go. But if you have any opportunity to move forward, take the next steps, take the next steps. Just the whole thing about a pilgrimage is you just put one foot in front of the other. You just keep going. And sometimes you wander, and sometimes you get blisters. I did. Sometimes you get exhausted, sometimes you get heap frustration. Sometimes you do work that doesn’t seem to mean much or that doesn’t get paid, but you felt an impulse to put one foot in front of another and take that step. So take the next step and then free your imagination to allow the consequence to be much, much more than you ever anticipated.

That’s the idea. All you do on the Camino is walk. You put one foot in front of the other, but on some of those footsteps, you’re going to experience things that you would never have imagined, never expected, and could never have happened if you hadn’t set your sights on adventure and just gone out walking.

So let’s do a quick version of our usual meditation, which is about space, silence, and stillness. Start by taking a deep breath and letting it out easy, relaxing. Turn your attention inward toward your own heart and then just allow your mind to hold. The odd question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?

Think that in your head. Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Ask some more questions. Can I imagine the distance between the top of my head and the bottom of my chin? Can I imagine the distance between the crown of my head and the base of my spine? Can I imagine the space inside the atoms of my spine, which is much, much more volume than the actual matter? Can I imagine the space inside my torso? Can I imagine the space between me and my computer or my phone?

Can I listen for the silence in which all these sounds are occurring? As I listen for that silence, can I imagine the stillness that holds all the activity of the material world? Can I imagine us all suspended in that stillness, in that silence connected by the same space? Can I imagine that the stillness, the silence, and the space are alive and filled with compassion, filled with love, and creating the universe as it goes along?

Thank you. Thank you very much. I certainly feel things when I do that meditation with you. So thank you for staying an extra minute or two with me. And set your sights for the rest of the day or tomorrow on living life as an adventure, on being a pilgrim in every step of your way and of learning to tell the stories of your life in a way that fills it with joy and meaning, and laughter and connection. Thank you so much for joining me, everyone. Buen camino! Buen camino. Lots of love. Bye-bye.