And they’re so tiny, little songbirds, they weigh like a fifth of an ounce. They weigh a few millimeters, no milligrams. And so they’d land very softly, but they were just falling. And I realized that flight is just a continued fall. Just like walking is a continuous fall forward, which we catch with our forward leg over and over and over. So really we’re all kind of falling forward all the time, whether we’re birds or whether we’re people. And I tend to run with people—and maybe y’all are like this and I think you probably are—I tend to hang out with people who do a lot of falling, and that is because they do a lot of jumping. In many of these cases, the person doing the jumping just calls it knowing what to do: “I just know in my heart what to do.”

And so one of my dear friends, when he was, I think in his thirties, he just knew that the right thing for him to do was to go to a tent in Canada in the wilderness and do a 100-day meditation. So that’s like four months, almost, where he slept four hours a night and meditated the other 20 hours a day. And he did this for a hundred days. And he would walk down, do a meditation walk down to a trailhead where people would leave him some food, some Quaker Oats in a box and some clean water and honey and fruit and nuts. I don’t know what all, probably vegetarian. But then he would truck it back up once a week to his tent and he would just keep meditating. 

And he got so sleep deprived and so crazy with the solitude and the meditation of it that just not doing anything but trying to still his mind 20 hours a day for a hundred days in the wilderness. And at one point he would get up every day and he would do a walking meditation where he’d walk around the tent, but it’s this very slow, very intentional, meditation-style walking. And one day he got so completely out of his mind that he was doing his morning sit and he looked at the Quaker Oats box. Now for those of you who aren’t in the US, Quaker Oats are just these oats that you cook up for breakfast or put in cookies or whatever. But the box has a picture of a Quaker gentleman, like an old timey, 19th-century, American colonial gentleman and a smiling beaming face. And Steve, oops, I just told you who he is, my friend Steven on, I don’t know, the 75th day of his endless meditation was meditating and he looked at the Quaker Oats box and he thought, “The Quaker Oats man is enlightened, like is my guru or something.” He just felt this huge connection with the Quaker Oats man. And that day when he went for his walking meditation, he picked up the box of oats and he walked around his tent weeping with joy and giving his eternal faith to the guru, which was the Quaker Oats box.

And he doesn’t maintain that religious position at this point. It passed fairly quickly, but I love that he did that. And then he came out of it and went back and talked to his meditation master who said, “No, you’re not quite done yet.” So he went back and did it again! He did it twice. I can’t even conceive of that.

More recently, I have another dear friend—and you’ll probably read or hear about this in some other places soon, but I will just not say her name—but she saw something online about a place where you can go to a cave in the mountains where some people have constructed a room into a mountainside so that you can close double doors and block out all light and all sound and people go there and they do these meditations that last four or five days. So my friend saw this on the internet, and of course, who wouldn’t? said, “Oh, that’s for me.” So she sent in her money, she paid for it, she went up and she went into the darkness and the silence for the five days and four nights—a hundred hours. And I think she got tremendous amounts of enlightenment out of it, but she also told me, “There’s a reason that the UN considers that torture.” Yeah, it was not the easiest thing she’s ever done.

So I was thinking about why do I hang out with people like this? But then it occurred to me, I have spent a lifetime doing dramatic, drastic things myself that people didn’t understand and I didn’t understand. I just felt like I knew to do it. And that’s why I was meditating in the forest for six years. I just knew to do it. And I’ve been doing things, every day I do little things that I just know I need to do, but there are a few landmark things that I—all of which I write books about. I chose to have my son despite his Down’s diagnosis. I left academia to be a life coach (because who wouldn’t?) after going to—you can drink now—Harvard, three times, and leaving my home religion, but then writing a book about leaving it so that everyone wanted to kill me, deciding that I wanted to run my retreats in South Africa because it’s so conveniently located, turning gay in the middle of my life and shacking up with a woman, and then a couple decades later adding another woman.

So basically just doing things that look weird to the world for no apparent reason. And the most recent of these is that we decided to move. We’ve been living in Pennsylvania. I love it. The forest is incredible. I love our house. I love everything. I love our neighbors. Everything is great, except that like six months ago we thought, well we just all sat up—the three of us who are now in this relationship, Karen, Ro, and myself— and we said, “No, we should totally move.”

Why? We don’t know, but that’s what we’re doing. And we knew where we wanted to move, so we started checking out—and it’s like a four-hour drive from our house. So we’ve spent six months driving back and forth between this area and our house now and looking at houses we didn’t want and then finally finding a house we did want and then buying that house and then selling this house. And right now I’m sitting in a house that has been 90% packed up. All our stuff is in boxes. And we were supposed to move into another house on Friday except something has happened, and documents are flying about and people are arguing about who owes whom a document, different sellers and buyers and attorneys and bankers and everything. It didn’t happen. And I’m in this place where, “Oh, okay, we have no house.” And I keep packing up my things. I don’t know, I jump. We jump. That’s what we do.

We jump. We go into the five days of darkness. We go into—getting a new house is hardly five days of darkness, but it does kind of feel that way when you have no reason to do it and then you’re packing boxes to move nowhere. So we’ve been in a kind of hellish limbo for a while, and I’ve been thinking about as we pack boxes to move nowhere, I’ve been thinking about how all those other jumps, because I talk about them endlessly, they make a kind of retroactive sense. Like, “That’s why I did that because then this followed.” You can always make a story out of it, and it always looks like there’s a causal link. But if you’re looking at it forward before you know the consequence, which then later will become the reason, the post hoc reason for what you did, I’ve been thinking a lot about how Douglas Adams defined flying in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Do you remember that? Does anybody out there know it? He said, “Here is how you fly. You throw yourself to the ground and miss.” So fling yourself but don’t hit the ground—you’re flying.

So how do you throw yourself at the ground and miss? You do it when you jump into the mystery. It’s funny, it’s a hilarious line: “Throw yourself at the ground and miss—that’s flying.” But y’all, here’s the thing, I think we can actually do that. I think I’ve done it. I think you’ve done it. I know my friends who’ve gone off and done these odd meditations have done it. You throw yourself at the ground, you know this is not going to be easy. You know t’s really inconvenient. You know there’s a high risk of something going wrong. You know that there are unknowns and that it’s terrifying.

And I’ve coached so many people who say, “Wow, I wish I had whatever, I wish I had the certainty to change my life.” But you never have the certainty. You’re always jumping off a cliff, you’re always throwing yourself at the ground, and very often it looks like you’re about to hit the ground, like almost all the time. You go into these crazy spaces. My friend in her five days of darkness, on the third day, I think she told me, got completely disoriented and she’s in this little room. She said, “It felt like I’d been walking for miles and then there was no wall. And then I thought I was going somewhere else, and I hit the wall so hard I have a head injury now.”

Like there are these times when you hit, it feels like you’ve hit the ground, but then you’re still alive. So when you jump into the mystery, you hit the ground your ego expects to hit. Often you do. You get divorced, and it really hurts and you’re alone just like you thought you’d be. You’ve hit the ground. But there’s a part of you that’s still going. And you realize only the ego self that thought it was going to die is dead, and there’s another part of you and it’s still going. And you start to, the more times you do that, the more you start to suspect that the ground you saw rushing up to meet you was actually just a projection of the ego self that was about to die.

And that ego self hit its own projection, wham! And yep, it died. And it’s painful, and you grieve, and you ache, and you do all those things, and the ache itself is the death of the ego. And then there you still are. This is what happened to both my friends in their meditation retreats. Many, many ego death experiences and then realizing, “But there’s someone still here.” And you find yourself then moving with less fear in the world, through a world where things are possible that you did not think were possible.

Oh, the miracles that have happened to me in South Africa when I do those retreats. And the things that have happened to me in that I am blessed in these incredible relationships. I didn’t know that could happen. I was not a polyamory know-anything. I didn’t realize that it could work and work so well. Then you start to think, “Maybe I can’t die at all. Maybe the death of my physical body is just another one of these throw-yourself-at-the-ground, and the physical body dies and you go, “Yep, there it happened.” And boom, you’re still alive somehow. I actually believe that.

I’ve just been reading and talking to some people who have a lot of mystical experiences that involve people who are dead, supposedly, who show up for their relatives or whatever. And I was thinking about this, getting ready to do The Gathering Room, and I had this speaker that Ro got for me because I’ve been listening to a lot of music, and I didn’t know she was setting up this area, this shot for me. I didn’t know it was linked. All I knew is that as I was sitting there putting on mascara, the speaker, which was silent and I hadn’t touched it, suddenly said, “Well, I look pretty good for a dead woman, but I have died. And I’m talking to you from,” I don’t even remember what it said, but I was literally thinking, “Maybe we can’t die at all.” Maybe if we even literally threw ourselves to the ground, the only part of us that would die would be the part that is projecting the thing that kills it.

And the more I go with that, the more I think consciousness is not mortal. It doesn’t come from physical causality. So what I want to invite you to do is feel around for the places in your life where something is saying, “Jump!” and you say, “No, no, no, I’m terrified. I don’t want to jump.” And it’s that old saying, “Come to the edge.” “No, we’ll fall.” “Come to the edge.” “No, we’ll fall.” “Come to the edge.” They came to the edge, he pushed them, and they flew. Okay, but first they fell, and maybe they even died, but then they flew.

So let’s right now go to a different dimension of our own existence with our Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation because I want you to notice that no matter how you throw yourself to the ground, and I’d love you to just say—think about anything where you feel like it’s right to jump: “Don’t jump before you’re ready, but jump because it’s the only way you’re going to learn to fly.” So if your heart wants to jump, if your soul wants to jump, even if your mind is terrified, try it. Do it. And just to get a preview. Let’s go to a place nothing can harm: space, silence and stillness. The essence of our being, none of which are harmable.

Let’s start and do our little meditation now and then I’ll pick some questions. Deep breath in, long breath out. Get relaxed, put everything else aside and ask yourself really focus on the question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?Can I imagine the distance between the center of my forehead and the center of my heart? Can I imagine the distance between the center of my heart and the outside of my rib cage? Can I imagine the space inside each atom that makes up my whole body? Can I imagine that space extending unbroken in every direction to the edges of the universe? That is a factual truth. Can I imagine the stillness in which all matter oscillates, in which everything moves? That stillness cannot be disturbed when everything stops, it’s still just the way it was. Can I imagine the silence under every sound?

Can I imagine space, silence, and stillness as the truest identity I have? Wildly alive, passionately loving, excited, tenderhearted, compassionate, gentle, fearless. Can I imagine that that is all I am and the rest is always falling away? Because it is. Everything’s falling away all the time in this environment. Everything’s falling, everything’s hitting the ground. This moment, this moment, this moment, they all just died. But look, here we are, still here. With that reality gone, the reality of five seconds ago, five minutes ago, gone forever, and here we are: flying. Flying into the future.

Okay, let’s do some questions here. First one says, “I’m starting a new business as a creator, artist, entrepreneur, and it’s terrifying.” I hear you, honey. “Mainly to invest the amount of money it takes to start something well during this unknown time in history. Help?”

First of all, I would say be very, very skeptical when someone tells you how much money it’s going to take. I know people who start things “the right way.” You know, they get seed money, they get venture capitalists, they start a company, they incorporate, they put in the first year’s savings and they build… I started my entrepreneurial business with a $150 website template, selling four things, and it sold something the next day and went into the black and has been pretty healthy ever since. I believe that if you want to start as a creative, as an artist, you start with the creation itself. Put as much of your focus there as you can because the other things, when you say “invest” and “money” and “starting something well at this time in history,” these are all concepts. They’re all in the left hemisphere of the brain. You might want to read—oh, I just found a copy of this while I was packing—Beyond Anxiety, my latest book. It talks about how when you’re in that left-hemisphere mode, it’s the dominant way of thinking that our culture teaches us to use. And it’s the opposite of creativity. It’s the antithesis of creativity. It’s very anxious, it’s very tight, and it actually cuts off our creative passion.

So take some time every day where you are just the creator. Take an hour to just create and the rest of the time you’re going to be anxious, you’re going to be scared. If you want to do it the old way, you go! I am a hundred percent behind you. But I’ve never found that it works that way for me, it always works if I just sit down and start making something. Start writing that book, start drawing, painting that picture, start recording the thing, start building the wilderness retreat event, or whatever it is. Start making something. I do it to keep my anxiety at bay and then it turns out to be a living as well. So good luck, and I believe in you.

Next question: “How can I train my flying muscles when I believe it’s so worth it because of love, beauty, etc.?”

I’m not sure exactly what this question means. I think if you believe it’s so worth it that you don’t feel like you’re falling, it may not stretch you to flying. Be more extreme. Some people have low thresholds of willingness to fall, and some have very high levels of willingness to fall. Jump into an event or an experience that’s just a little bit edgy for you. Don’t jump off a thousand-foot cliff, but if adopting a puppy is a pretty big fall but not too far and you really want to do it, maybe that’s a jump you want to take. Always take a jump that’s a bit of a risk, but doesn’t actually leave you like—well, I can’t say that. The risks I’ve taken, I was literally puking with fear. These things happen. I haven’t been there with the housing thing yet because of my history of missing the ground.

Anyway, someone says, “Love your work.” Thank you, sweetheart. “How do you connect with that part of yourself?”

We just did it. Stillness, silence, space. I woke up this morning and I was really tired, and we didn’t know where we live, and I didn’t want to get up and pack all my stuff to go nowhere. And then I thought, “Oh, but I get to sit and do absolutely nothing for an hour—I’m getting up.” And I sat in my little meditation chair and found the space, the silence, and the stillness inside me, and it’s very safe there. That’s what you find. It’s a place you can always retreat to.

And I think I’ve had the feeling of flying almost when I’ve gone snorkeling because you can snorkel along a coral reef, and you’re swimming along and then you pass basically the edge of a cliff and everything drops away into the deep blue sea and you’re just hovering above it. And that feeling of like, “Whoa, I’m going to fall. Oh, I’m supported. I can navigate through this.” That feeling of being, “Oh, I’m supported. I can navigate.” That’s how I feel when I find the place where I am, stillness, silence, and space and nothing can fight it. It sounds completely absent and it’s so present, it’s so solid. And in that space, I can do things that I think may be worth putting into the world. So that’s how I do that. Thank you.

Someone else says, “When you’re throwing yourself to the ground over something you believe you’re supposed to do, how do you keep yourself hopeful in the things you’re wanting to manifest?”

Return, return, return again to the feeling in your heart that says what you’re meant to do. That feeling, if you can find it again, that will be in the space, stillness, and silence. Unless it’s something based on maybe not your authentic self, those things are much more wobbly. But when it’s something that comes from your true essence, from your core of self, go back, go back, go back.

I felt this way during my pregnancy with my son. The stories I kept hearing about what it would be like to have a child with Down syndrome. People gave me papers and studies and books , they were all pretty grim, and—this was a long time ago—and I had to push everything away and go and sit down and think what was the feeling that said, “No, this is the way you want to do this. It’s not the way everyone should do it, but you want to go ahead with this.” That part of me was relatively fearless and it made me really, really curious, which is the beginning of creativity. So I go back and I find myself until I get curious, and then the hope sort of springs eternal.

Question: “What if you’re scared to die and also scared of being eternal?”

Well, join the club with me. That’s how I’ve always felt. No, actually I’m not scared of being eternal at all anymore. And I’m not scared of being dead. I’m scared of dying. And that’s just part of the package. When that cliff comes and I jump off it, I’m sure I’ll be terrified. It’s an animal. It doesn’t want to die. It’s not programmed to die. But if you’re afraid of being eternal, you probably have some judgments about what you think is going to happen to you as an eternal presence.

I would strongly suggest you inquire into your beliefs to see if your fears feel accurate at the deepest level because if you keep driving inward to the point that is stillness, silence, and space—ah. One thing my friend said in the cave, she was going into the cave and she said to the man running the thing, “I’m afraid I’ll be bored.” And he said, “No, no, you can feel your emotions, and only people who don’t feel their emotions get bored in there. Emotions are in that cave state. They’re fascinating.” And she had a lot of, someday she will write and speak about the amazing experiences she had there and in all the other places she’s jumped to. But you go through the fear of being eternal and you get to a place where there is the pure joy of being. Sat-Chit-Ānanda in Sanskrit, I believe, is “the bliss of being this,” which is how I believe all animals live. And if we get to feel that way for eternity, I’m telling you, it’s pretty delicious.

So: “How do you overcome the urge to try to plan 10 steps down the road instead of following the first weird longing to jump?”

Oh, I don’t. I plan and plan. I research. I go back and forth and back and forth. But if the feeling is insistent, even if the logic looks bad. My family and the people who work with me, we have a saying. We really try to do things logically. And I work with a bunch of really smart people and my partners are very, very smart, educated people. But in the end our saying goes, “It’s never by logic. It’s always by magic that good things happen to us.” It’s always magical. So yeah, question yourself all you want, but stick with the weird longing.

Okay. “Part of me,” someone says, “feels exhausted that consciousness isn’t mortal. I thought I would rest when I’m dead. When will we rest?”

Oh honey, I strongly suggest that your next jump is to rest heavily for the next few days to weeks. You need rest now, not when you’re dead. I thought the same thing. And then I had my near-death experience thing, and I encountered this light and the thing it told me was, “You’re not supposed to wait until you’re dead to feel good. This is the way you’re meant to feel all the time. This kind of bliss, this kind of joy, this kind of laughter, this kind of delight, this kind of love, love, love, love.” If you’re tired, rest now, honey. Take the risk. Take the risk. Rest. The culture will tell you no. Do it anyway.

We have four more questions. “Even in meditation,” someone says, “when I reach a different level of consciousness, I become scared and retreat. I want this to change. Any suggestions? I know it’s my ego, but I don’t know what to do about it.”

When it happens, just feel the fear and then imagine that it’s in a room that you could look into it. It can’t really look out. It’s a beautiful room. Make it in your mind a beautiful room and put the terrified part of yourself in there. And then stand there with anyone like God or your dead Aunt Posey or your cat who died when you were six, or somebody who’s a spirit being in your imagination and look at the frightened self and say, “Oh, that poor, they’re terrified, aren’t they? Oh, so terrified.” And give lots of love and attention to the terrified part of yourself, but don’t leave. Feel the ache, the tremor, the anguish. Use that. Those experiences, emotional experiences, are opening the channel between you and your ability to fly. I promise you this. This is something I’ve been downloading very heavily lately in meditation. Negative emotion, if you hold it with compassion, is the channel to a dimension where love is all that’s real, and you can fly anytime you want. So hang with it, watch it, but don’t leave.

Three more questions. This one: “I suffer from a lot of heavy, life-ending thoughts and have been in a seven-year long depression. Any tips?”

Get help. Get help. Get help. Get help. Do not try to do this on your own. Do not try to do a spiritual bypass. Go to a psychiatrist, not just a psychologist. Get every kind of medication that they will try on you. Talk to your friends about helping you help yourself. I was depressed from the time I was six till the time I was 18. I’m never going back there. And the way I’ve never gone back there is that when I’m really sad, I leave no stone unturned now. I’m not going back to depression. I want you to get out of it. And I’ll tell you, you can’t get out of it alone. Reach out, reach out, reach out. I don’t know who you are or how you can do that, but I know there’s a way, and I beg you to do that. Life can be good, I promise you. It can be very, very good.

All right, second to the last question: “I have this deep feeling that I should move house too.” Yay! Moving with us to nowhere. “My partner doesn’t have the feeling yet, nor do I know where I want to move. Does this sound like the beginning of flying?”

It does. It always starts like, “Hm, maybe.” And then you start to see synchronicities, and then the feeling gets stronger. And then if—this is the biggest miracle of all to me, that when I go flying, my loved ones come with me. Not because I pushed them, because they’ve got a place they want to fly too. And it’s not exactly the same place because we all have our own lives and our own missions, but we all jump together and that’s one of the biggest miracles. Oh my God, we’re doing this together. It’s happening at the same time. And lately, I think I’ve talked about it on The Gathering Room. I’ve been having a lot of odd experiences with very, very intense meditations, with lots of electrical sensation in my body and sound tones in my ears. And I talk about it in our Wilder community when we do hangs there or shindigs or whatever it is we’re doing. I’ve talked about it in my life coach training courses. And everybody’s having similar experiences. It’s really, really interesting. I don’t know what’s happening. I have no idea, but I’m jumping. Whatever it is.

There are a ton of questions here, and my trusty helper here has been sending, just finally sent one that said, “We have so many more questions, but we don’t have time for them.” So tell you what, if you have time, I think I’ll be doing this next week. I don’t know where I’ll be living. I think I will be living. If I’m not, someone will tell you about it. But even if they say I’m dead, I promise you I will show up on your boombox in your bathroom going, “I look pretty good for a dead woman.”

Because I’m not sure that even that is going to make us hit the ground. So let’s talk about it again more next time we meet. And until then, let’s all just fly around enjoying the life we share together all the time, even between the times that we’re here together on The Gathering Room. I love you. Talk to you soon. Fly on!