So I had a massage because I was really locked up. And after the massage, I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience when somebody does body work with you or something and then goes, “Okay, I’m going to suggest something.” And you know you are like the worst case they’ve ever seen. “Yeah, your fascia is woo. Yeah.” So this amazing massage therapist was describing to me, she said, “Go right home and Google these fascia release exercises.” And she said, “The fascia is like this. If you took a sort of spiderweb of filaments and made the perfect shape of a human body with it, when you’re alive, your fascia is like what shapes you. When you’re dead, it stops moving. It stops having any power. So nobody’s really studied it because it can’t be studied in cadavers. It’s just dead tissue.” 

But she said, “If you start to visualize the fascia and then allow them to do what they want with your body,” she said, “It’s going to be very, very weird. And this is very difficult.” I’m sure some of it, you’re all writing to me, “I do this every day and I know exactly how.” Thank you. I will study it. But she said, “You start to move and your body will put itself in these weird undulations.” And she said, “You might find yourself crouching on the floor, thrashing your arms.” She said, “It almost might be like you’re having some kind of fit or a convulsion of some kind.” She’s like, “Don’t let it scare you. See if you can do it. And also it’s hard. It’s really hard because you have to let go of conscious control while at the same time following this very subtle influence from inside you.”

But she said, “If you can do it, and you get just a few seconds of clarity where you’re letting it happen, it can cause these huge releases and completely transform your body into something much more healthy.” And she’s like, “I mean, massage therapists, their bodies take a— I mean, it’s hard work massaging people all day long. It’s hard on your hands. It’s hard on your arms, hard on everything.” And so she was like, “This is how I stay healthy for the work I do.” So I was driving home thinking about how I have to— I haven’t done it yet because I came home to do this. But I was thinking about this whole thing of let your fascia go and let it thrash and it’ll let you, make you sometimes, guide you into things that are positions you never would’ve expected.

And I was thinking how recently I’ve had a rash of people that I know tell me the same thing in different words. They say, “I thought I would always be this,” or, “I thought I would always do this with my life.” Or, “The one thing I identified with as an identity was this.”

So there’s an actress and she’s like, “I worked my whole life to get the parts I’m getting. It’s amazing. I’m getting work. How many actors can say that, especially women?” And she’s like, “I don’t want to act. I’m middle aged. I finally made it and I don’t want to do it. I just don’t want to do it anymore.” And a person I know who started an NGO, they were very successful and they’ve always been like, “Rah rah.” This guy was like, “I think I have to turn it over to someone. I don’t know. I have to stop.”

And then there’s somebody I know who is like a CEO and she’s like, “No, corporate doesn’t work for me anymore.” So I’ve had a lifetime of people coming to me when they were ready to quit doing something. But this feels really like it’s happening in a wave. And it reminds me of something that I read in a book about how to plot a novel once. And it says something like, “There comes a point where the hero has to give up what he or she thinks he or she is, has to give up identity in order to get what he/she needs most.” So the idea of giving up the thing that identifies you to receive the thing you need most, and it was a little bit like giving up control, like conscious control of your body to this fascial tissue stuff. And I thought the interesting thing is that they’re not telling me, “I want to go do something else.” They’re just saying, “I have to stop. I just have to stop.”

One of the most common—and this is across many different professions and stuff, people who are very hard workers, the one thing they know they can do is work. And whatever, you can take every job away from them and they would go out into the forest and gather chestnuts and roast them and sell them on the street and somehow keep working, keep thinking, making things go. And they’re like, “I can’t do it.” It’s like it won’t happen. It’s this kind of floppiness. And the one thing I know is that I’m a hard worker and it’s nope, nope. And all these people, I ask them, “What are you going to do instead?” And they’re like, “I don’t know. I don’t have any plan. Nothing.”

And I think that this is in line with my personal obsession, which says that we are meant to live through a transformation of human consciousness and that we are meant to leave behind the architecture, the pyramid-shaped architecture of the whole money-based, power-based, all the power- and money- based systems that are now in control of human societies all over the world. We need to get past that in some way and become part of a fluid intelligence that incorporates instead of excluding and has no way to build up hierarchy or push anyone down.

Everything’s level, like water seeking its own level all the time. I’ve talked about this before, that I didn’t know for a long time what the transformation of consciousness would look like. But now I have this little metaphor of the pyramid and the pool that I go back to over and over.

But you may recall, I’ve probably said it 20 times on The Gathering Room, but I think it several times a day. So honestly, you’re lucky to only get it when you do. But I used to wander around my house when I lived in Phoenix 20 years ago, just going, “Okay, transformation of consciousness. Okay, I got it. That’s a thing. What are we becoming?”

And the only thing I would get in reply is inside my head, these lines from Thomas Eliot would repeat. And they go like this: “I said to my soul, be still and wait without love, for it would be love of the wrong thing. And wait without hope, for it would be hope for the wrong thing. There is yet faith, but the love and the hope and the faith are all in the waiting. Wait without thought for you are not ready for thought. So the darkness shall be the light and the stillness, the dancing.”

That was what I heard over and over and over and over again. Wait without thought. And because you’re not ready for thought. Because to shift human consciousness is to think in a completely different way so you’re not ready to think about it before it happens. What I really believe, and this is just me in my full woo-woo parade suit. I think the reason all these people that I’ve encountered who are going, “I just want to stop. I just can’t keep going.” I think we’re all at this moment collectively where we need to give up a lot of the things we thought identified us to get what we truly need. And what we truly need is something that we actually are not ready to think about, but we will be guided into them.

So this is when my massage therapist is saying, “It’s really weird and it’s a really difficult practice. And you may do it wrong 90% of the time, but that 10% of the time, the most amazing things can happen. You just have to not be afraid to look weird and go into contorted positions.”

And I thought, “Well, that’s how, if something is guiding us, we have to have that same kind of letting go in order to follow it.” It reminded me of trauma release exercises. If you’ve ever heard of that, TRE. It’s a way of doing therapy for people who’ve been traumatized, who’ve been through trauma. And it was created by a guy I love very much. His name is David Bercelli. And he’s a Catholic priest. He’s a mystical Catholic. And he was living in Lebanon many years ago when there were a lot of bombings and he was close by a lot of violence and a lot of explosions and scary, awful, horrible things. And he noticed that when he allowed himself to shake, to physically shake after he’d been near a catastrophe, he didn’t have nightmares. He didn’t have flashbacks as much. He didn’t have the dark moods and the depression and the anger. Everything seemed to process through his body. 

So he did some research and found out that animals shake when they’ve been through a trauma. And so he decided maybe that’s how we’re processing trauma. And he started teaching people to let go and shake. And I had some sessions with him because he also lived in Phoenix, even though we met in Africa. It was a strange thing. Anyway, he gave me some shaking lessons. It was really interesting. He just put you in a position that’s kind of, it’s kind of hard to hold. So you can look it up online. It’s really good. And then your legs are slightly bent and after a while they start to tremble from the sustained effort.

And the deal then is you’ve got to let them go. And if you really let your body shake, it does all kinds of weird things. I mean, I did a little shivering and I was like, “Boy, that was cool.” And he’s like, “Nope, you haven’t even started yet.” And people who’ve been like, he goes around the world dealing with people who’ve been in earthquakes and floods and tsunamis and things. And one of the interesting things is if a person has been trapped under rubble or something, if they’re in an earthquake and rubble falls on them and it takes them a while to be rescued, when they go into shaking, their bodies will go into exactly the same position they were in when they were trapped. And it will shake from that place. And it’s like it’s shaking free from its confines.

Well, I really think that the lives we have lived are so circumscribed by socialization and trauma that we’re locked into positions that aren’t natural for us.

And if we can find a way to give up the sense of control, which is the same— psychologically, it’s identity, physically it’s movement and posture. And I just keep hearing these things from people, “I feel like I need to stop controlling anything and stop identifying as anything and see what happens.”

And David Berceli, after I did some shaking for a long time, like two hours of shaking—and we still hadn’t even scratched the surface—we stopped and we had some lemonade. And he said, “Yeah, I follow everything.” He said, “I used to do shaking sessions and then I’d get back into my usual body and go do things.” And he said, “Now, I believe in the wisdom of my body, spirit, heart so completely that…” he picked up his lemonade and he took a sip and he put it back down and he said, “I didn’t do that. That was not something I chose to do. It was not something I decided to do. It happened. The body wanted a sip. It took a sip. I watched it happen. So the mind is watching the body, heart, spirit.” 

And he said, “Now, after years of doing this, if I were late for an international flight and I was in the airport and I maybe could make my flight by running and my body did not want to run, I would not run. I would miss the flight before I would force anything onto the body, mind, spirit.” Which is a pretty amazing thing. It’s an amazing thing for a Catholic priest to say, right? Because there’s kind of a lot of control in Catholicism, so I’ve heard. But there are all kinds of Catholics.

Anyway, we’re living in this incredible time at a crossing of all these influences. Our circumstances are changing radically all the time because society is changing radically all the time. Sociologists predict that AI will change society more than the industrial revolution changed it. And that was massive. It shifted everything in human life. And we’re in for a much bigger shift. We’re undergoing a much bigger shift. And in the middle of that, each of us is sort of tossed around by circumstance. And we have what’s going on out here to look at. And then we have the currents that are coming from in here to look at. And they’re integrated.

And this is what my massage therapist was going into all these funny positions. And she’s like, “It’s finding an engagement with the outside world.” I love that she said, “It.” That’s the same thing David Berceli said. He said, “I didn’t take a drink. It took a drink.” And it’s not a creepy, scary “it.” It’s the force. It’s the Tao. It’s God. It’s Source. However you want to see it, your higher self. It is the spirit of all things connected with the spirit in you that is moving your body as it moves itself.

So here’s what I think I’m going to try to do—and I think maybe it would be fun for all of us to try it—and that is to feel for the flow in our lives. Start by entertaining the thought—think of the thing you identify as most. So if you’re a writer, if you’re a parent, if you’re a teacher, if you’re a doctor, whatever it is you are, if you’re a good person, if you’re an activist, whatever it is, however you identify, just get quiet and ask yourself, “If I gave this, if I could get what I really need in this life only by giving up my sense of this identity, what would it be like to let it go?”

I’m not saying you have to do it. I want you to imagine. I want me to imagine what I would be if I let it all go. And then start to hold it really loosely. So hold what we do with a very gentle touch and trust that there’s something in us working with something around us to take us into something we’ve never been before. So we let go of everything. Don’t try to touch the sides of the river. Let it take us. And if it says to us, “Give up this little bit of the life you had planned.” 

This is what James Campbell, or sorry, Joseph Campbell says: “We must give up the lives we had planned in order to have the lives that are waiting for us.” And nobody knows what those lives will look like. But if you let go, imagine letting go of all your identity and allowing yourself to be guided by something peaceful and benevolent and compassionate and infinite, some interesting things can happen. You may do things tomorrow that you never thought you would do. I may get off this call. Is it a call? This meeting and do my fascial release exercises and find myself flopping all over the floor like a fish. I don’t know. Am I willing to go there if it happens? Yeah, I think I am. I’m willing to go if it happens.

So of the four parts of our being—body, heart, mind, spirit—here’s how I would suggest we orient things. Body first, because it is sacred. It’s always the opposite of what they told you, right? So they say the body is sinful and wicked and it will die, so you have to get rid of it. No, your body is a sacred animal. It knows the way. It’s like an old horse that knows its way home. So body first, spirit second. Because for me, if I find an impulse in the body and then I go into it, I dive into it, there’s always spirit at the core of it. Spirit and body are linked very, very tightly. Then heart. How does this make me feel emotionally? And finally, mind, which we’ve been told should govern everything we do. I don’t think it should govern everything we do. I think it should observe and be in awe of the things the body, spirit, heart wants to do.

I think it’s going to be very, very interesting if we can do this. And if you feel like, “Oh my God, I’m giving up what I thought I was,” be very, very pleased because you’re about to find the thing that you have never been able to think about because you were not ready for thought. And now maybe we’re ready.

So that is what I have to say about that. Let go and let yourself be guided. I want to do a little meditation. Ro is not here because the circumstances of our lives are that we are rather chaotic around here. So I’m going to try to answer questions off Instagram, but I’m not good at it. Okay? And so you have to write a really, like capital-letters question so that I can see it from where I sit. But in the meantime, while you’re thinking about that, let’s do a bit of a meditation. And I’m just going to change it up. I did this exact same meditation over and over, but I’m like, “That’s not me.” So I’m going to give up the thing I thought I was, and we’re just going to do a variation every time, if that’s okay with you.

So first take a deep breath, let it out. Shake out your attention. As I said, your body is the source of so much wisdom. So take a deep breath into it. Let it go. Let it relax as you exhale. Long exhale.

And now by turning inward toward the body, we find spirit. And it starts with that strange question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Just ask the question. There’s no answer. It’s meant to guide the mind into paradox. Can I imagine the empty space inside the atoms between my eyes? Can I imagine the empty space inside the whole volume of my head and neck and shoulders? Can I imagine the distance between the front of my chest and the back of my spine? Can I imagine the stillness in which my heart beats and my blood flows and my breath moves? The absolute stillness that supports every movement. Can I imagine it? Can I imagine the silence beneath every sound that ever is?

Can I imagine hearing that silence holding us all, everyone from around this huge planet? Can I imagine the distance between the spot on the earth where I am now sitting and the spot on the earth that is on the other side exactly? Can I imagine the empty space inside the earth holding all of us?

Can I imagine that that stillness, silence and space is conscious and that is playing in joy with everything that seems to move, that seems to make noise, that seems to have heft? Can I imagine it all a blooming, buzzing energy so fascinated and in love with the adventure of being alive? Can I imagine that that is my Self?

All right. Thank you so much. And look, I am getting questions. Oh yes. So Joanna says, “If we move away from the thing we have always wanted to be, is there a way to return to it more wholeheartedly?”

Yeah, but I don’t know it. Yes, there’s always everything. Nothing is lost. Everything is iterative and there is no time. So when people have near-death experiences, they say, “I looked at my entire life at the same moment because time is not real.” And when you lose all your conditioning and you lose the distortions of trauma and socialization, then everything you do becomes more wholehearted. 

But here’s the thing, you don’t go back because of the mind. Not ever. You go back because your body, spirit, heart, goes there. You’re writing, you’re the writer, you’re the passenger. And it’s just going to go back there.

And believe me, it will do it wholeheartedly. And it will have such a good time. I had this experience with teaching. I was teaching sociology or I was an assistant professor. Then I quit my job, didn’t have any income for a long time. And then the only job I could get was to go teach business school. And I was like, “I failed. I’ve failed. Academia is wrong for me and now I’m going back to it.” 

And the thing that really horrified me was I loved it. I freaking loved those business school students and their amazing, fabulous ideas and selves. It was an international business school and they were all like citizens of the planet. And I was just in love with them. And I was like, “Oh my God, now I effed up by quitting academia. It turns out I love it.” And then it was like, “Nope, you need to stop again.” But that was the basis of what became a life coaching career.

But when I went back to it because my life was guided to it, it had my whole heart. It was so joyful. I was just, it was effortless. It was delightful. I still keep in contact with some of my students from 30 years ago. It was amazing. So yeah, you’ll be guided, but you can’t do it from the mind.

So Bobby says, “Could the identity that I release be a negative one: I am weak, less than, damaged goods?”

Absolutely, Bobby. I had not thought of it that way, but you are so right. I mean, those are the things we know we have to get rid of. And one of the ways to let go, for me, is to remember this all the time, all the time, all the time: The opposite of my most painful thought is the next thing my soul is trying to learn.

So go to the thing that hurts the most. Take the opposite of that. That is your next step toward awakening. That is your next step toward a new consciousness. So “I am weak.” Turn it around. “I am strong.” Doing Byron Katie turnarounds here. “I am less than; I am more than.” Hmm. What could I be more than? Is that ego? I don’t know. Maybe you are. Who knows? “I’m damaged goods; I’m undamaged goods.”

It could be that the damage itself is like a damaged muscle from working out at the gym—heals stronger. A broken bone heals stronger. So, okay, “I’m a little bit more than like most people would want to be because I’ve been so damaged and then healed that I am really, really strong.” It starts to become a whole different identity. And thank you for asking so vividly there.

Matthew says, “What advice do you have for opening your heart after trauma? As a young gay in a small town, how do I trust finding the romantic partner I yearn for? Manifestation tips?”

Okay. I so identify with this. So opening the heart after trauma, first of all, find safe people. Like right here on The Gathering Room, I pretty much guarantee you, you’re among safe people. In my Wilder community, we have people with similar trauma who are like—the community Ro and I have online that’s called Wilder. A lot of it’s about creating safe places and soft spaces for people who’ve been badly damaged by culture. It’s about finding your nature and not your culture. Now about the romantic partner thing, I truly believe that our future selves, because I don’t believe in time, our future selves will drop pebbles into our lives now that tell us what we’re meant to be in the future. 

And the way we receive those messages is through the feeling we call yearning. If you yearn for something, there’s only two answers you’re ever going to get from the universe. First is yes, you get what you want. The second is you get something better. Those are the only two answers, even if it seems impossible. And I remember coaching someone, a dear, dear friend, this was many years ago, and she thought she would never find the right partner She had all these reasons why it really would be difficult for her.

She lived out in the middle of nowhere. She was super smart and brilliant and it’s kind of hard for women like that not to intimidate the kind of men, you know, so she just didn’t think she would find a partner. But the yearning was so strong. And then a few years later, after she’d found the love of her life and become a coach, she was helping me coach someone and she said to them, “Listen, if you were sitting on the top of Everest with a paper bag over your head, the person that’s meant to be with you would find you and identify you and know you were meant to be together.” 

And this is the thing, the opposite of your most frightening though is your next step toward awakening. That was her most painful thought. So having lived through that deep doubt, that deep almost despair, and then having it turn around and getting the things she had yearned for, that experience made her very strong in helping other people believe that they could do that.

She had to give up a lot of her identity as the sad, lonely person. And she had to give up a lot of things about—sometimes we feminists out there were like, “No, we’re not going to get married traditionally at all.” And she did. She has an incredible marriage. Anyway, so people are saying things about my haircut now, so I think we’re done with the discussion, but thank you. I had to give up the hair color I thought was mine in order to have the hair color that was meant to be. It’s part of my transformation. I’m going to do fashion next. No. Maybe, who knows? It could happen.

So I guess that’s it for today’s Gathering Room. Remember to practice letting go, to hold things loosely, and to expect things to get really exciting because we are about to be able to think about things that we were never ready to think about. And that is one of my favorite things about coming here to The Gathering Room.

Everybody who’s coming to the Wilder meditation, I’ll see you in half an hour. Rest of you, see you in the interwebs. Love you. Bye.