Last week, we tried to have Eric Zimmer on. We couldn’t get the tech to work. So I did an interview with him, recorded it, and you’ll see it soon. And he’s lovely. His book is called How A Little Becomes a Lot. It’s terrific. And we were talking about, he says in his book, “If you want to start a war with someone, just tell them that they always or never do something.” And I thought about that. You know, in relationships, how often I think, “Ugh, that person never finishes anything,” or “That person never initiates contact,” or whatever it is.

And “always” and “never” are virtually always wrong. However, we just love those words because we seem to love absolutism. So I was raised, as you know, in a very absolutist religion, and I recently saw a Netflix special about a branch of it. So I was raised LDS, and then there’s a branch of Mormonism called FLDS, or Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, and they practice polygamy. And the documentary, maybe you’ve seen it, is about a dude who decided that he was going to anoint himself as prophet in that community. And he started doing, he married a lot of women, some of them—and girls, children—and started his own little cult. 

It’s a fascinating documentary, and one of the most interesting things about it is it’s everybody I’ve talked to who’s seen it is like, “Why would people see him as a prophet?” He’s not a particularly charismatic person. He doesn’t seem to have great ideas. I mean, one of his biggest ideas is he’s going to make a music video so that the Queen of England will see him on it and come and marry him. And then he’ll be in charge of England. It’s not really advanced thinking going on, but I’ll tell you what he does have. He speaks in absolutes. He says he knows the absolute truth about things.

And my theory is that we are kind of desperate to know the absolute truth about things. We’re sort of cast into this world not knowing what’s going on, and we’re constantly trying to learn the rules and they keep shifting. And then we’re in relationships and those are hard to understand and they keep shifting. And if somebody would just give us an absolute thing to trust, then we could relax: “Oh, okay. I found my guru.”

I see a lot of this with people who identify strongly with one spiritual teacher or another. Pray God, it never happens with me, guys. I am no guru. I am no prophet. Oh, no, no. So I think that people follow even folks who don’t really want to be gurus because we have such a yearning to trust someone absolutely. And I think that really comes from a deep internal knowledge that there is something we can trust, absolutely, but it’s not what we think it is.

The first thing we’re biologically predisposed to think it is, is another human being. That human being has it figured out. I’m going to do what they say. I’m going to always do it. I’m going to never vary, and I will be safe, and I will grow and be happy. And it never works. So I watched this happen with my own father who was considered a really brilliant…well, he was really brilliant, but he was a defender of Mormonism, a scholarly defender of Mormonism. And as such, I spoke to people who were his research assistants, and they told me that he would just make stuff up a lot. And that one of them told me, “He has the power to see something on the page if it should be there,” which is not the way I was taught to do research. Hm.

But we follow people like that who are very, very strong in proclaiming that they know things, and that makes us very vulnerable to narcissists. I don’t know, people could even get elected to office by simply saying that they are absolutely right and they know for sure everything that should be happening. People just look at that and go, “Oh, thank God he knows for sure, or she knows for sure,” and they’ll vote for it and then find out the person maybe did not know for sure.

So then we bring it into our own lives by proclaiming always and never about the people that we interact with, and we sort of gloss over the fact that we’re using absolutist language. It gives us a feeling of righteousness. Whether you’re following a prophet or a guru, that feels righteous, right? When you join a political party where people know what’s right, oh, it feels so righteous. And when your kid doesn’t clean his room and you say, “He never cleans his room,” it feels righteous. The anger of it, the joy of absolutism.

In my book, The Way of Integrity, I call this “errors of righteousness,” bouncing off Dante who called them “sins of violence” because I think that righteousness, the feeling of righteousness—there’s a brilliant book called The Righteous Brain by Haidt, I can’t remember, Jonathan Haidt. And it talks about how the brain, we have a brain that loves to feel absolute. And we get into situations where we have put our lives in the power of people that we believe in absolutely, whom we should not believe in absolutely. We’ve given power to people who claim to know absolutely, and they clearly don’t know what they’re doing once they have the power. And we’re using “always” and “never” in our own lives to alienate other people, and we’re not telling the truth.

So ever since I talked to Eric the other day, I’ve been thinking about the beauty of the words “sometimes” and “maybe.” And I’ve started directing them at everything I want to feel absolutist about. And I’ve found that there’s a breakthrough into truth that happens. So I’ll say, “Adam, my son, he’s always so slow getting ready. He just takes forever.” And then I think, “I just used the word always. Is that absolutely true? Sometimes, maybe.” Sometimes he is very slow getting ready. Sometimes he can be quite quick. I remember when we used to have tornado warnings in Pennsylvania, he was rather quick responding to those. And he’s rather quick to do a lot of things. It’s just when I’m trying to get him to go somewhere and he’s going at a slower speed, I use the word “always”: “You always dawdle. You’re never pushing the clock.” He doesn’t push the clock. I can say that. That’s really actually true. But when I start to use the phrase “sometimes, maybe,” it gets me out of that absolutist part of the brain and it makes me want to understand. It makes me more curious.

So if somebody’s—I used this when I was on a book tour for my book about Mormonism where I was accused of being the antichrist, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t the antichrist, but people would tell me, “You’re just a lying slut.” And I would think, “Sometimes, maybe.” I mean, I’ve definitely lied in my life and I’ve been with my ideas, with my ability, I’ve let people into my life I shouldn’t have let in. That’s not the technical definition of a slut, but you could see it as having low standards. And so I’d be in a heated interview and some of them would say, “You always attack.” And I would say, “Wait, sometimes, maybe.”

So then I noticed this week when I started doing this, I noticed that the first best place to use this is when you are having thoughts about yourself, especially negative thoughts. So you’re thinking, “Ugh, I always sleep in. I’m always running late,” again with the late. “Sometimes I sleep in, sometimes I’m late, maybe.” And it brings the righteous brain down. It doesn’t really solve the problem of having to rush, but the judgment that we feel and the feeling of receiving the judgment from self-loathing, that’s a very toxic feeling. And when you change it from “I always” or “I never” to “I sometimes” or “maybe I,” it paints a much truer picture.

And then you can start using it about other people. Okay, now I’m judging another person: “Ah, it’s always some jerk who cuts you off in traffic.” Sometimes there’s a jerk who cuts you off in traffic. “They always screw you at the drive-through.” Maybe they screw you at the drive-through. There’s less gusto in it, but it makes you much more even keeled, right?

So then you can start, you’re not judging others as much, you’re not judging yourself as much. And then, then if you want a black belt, when somebody says to you—this actually hasn’t happened to me this week, but it’s happened a lot in the past.. When someone says, “You always do this, you never do that.” Instead of saying, “Oh, you’re just lying. You always lie.” We usually come back with another absolutist statement. That’s what the brain does. If you say, “Wait, let me think. Sometimes, but I wouldn’t say always.” It takes down the temperature of the conflict.

Now, here is the spiritual payoff. Once you’ve started breaking your mind free of the always/never time words, because always means always in time, every time, and never means never in time, then you start to find that there are a few things that can be described that way. For example, one thing I always—ha, always—one thing that I sometimes ask a client if they’re really self-loathing and they think they should have done things so much better, and they don’t think they’re good people. And I’ll say to them, “Have you ever in your life gotten out of bed thinking, ‘I am going to cause suffering to an innocent being because I love to see the innocent people or the innocent creatures suffer. I’m going to do that today.’?” And they can truly say they have never done that, not ever.

And then it’s like, “Wow, there is something about me—I never do that. Some people do that. Sometimes, maybe. There’s certainly evidence. I may not be the worst person in the world.” And then as you get more introspective and you start to find out what’s true inside you, there’s a sense of peace at the center. And as you go through these relative terms, looking for what is actually always there, the thing that I have found is that whenever I turn inward and get still, there is always, literally always, something deeply peaceful, nourishing, comforting, alive in that core place. And I would have said “sometimes, maybe” before, but now I sort of know the way. And every time I take that path, we’re going to do the meditation that we always do here in a minute. Every time I use that, pretty much, I go to that place of deep, deep peace.

And even when I don’t go there with that meditation, I know that an even deeper level of stillness is going to take me into that space. It is always there. The “Sturm und Drang” of the world, the misery, the horrors around me, are they always happening everywhere? No, they’re happening sometimes, many places. But this peace that I can access is literally everywhere.

And I’ve tried this even at times when I was tremendously frightened and in physical danger, and it’s always there. I can’t always find it, but the fact that—and it is a fact that I can go there over and over and over and over again, and it doesn’t fail. And now I’m old enough to think, “I’ve tested this to the point where I truly trust it.” Now I haven’t always and I never, I never want to cause suffering to the innocent, and I never fail to find love waiting for me in stillness. That is eternal. That is always, and that is where we want to go.

Right now we’re going to do the Silence, Stillness and Space meditation. All right. So this is a very strange exercise for those of you who haven’t done it before, but most of us have. Start by taking a deep breath, getting as relaxed as you can in your body, long exhale to tell your brainstem it’s safe, and then just pose the question without looking for the answer: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? So just ponder that question for a minute. Close your eyes if it helps. Can I imagine the distance between the center point between my eyes and whatever I’m looking at in this moment? Can I imagine the distance in between them?

Can I imagine the distance between the top of my head and the center of my heart? Can I imagine the distance between the atoms in my heart? Can I imagine the emptiness inside the atoms? Can I imagine the emptiness in my body connected to the emptiness in everyone else’s body on earth? Can I imagine that emptiness stretching out unbroken to the edges of the universe? Can I imagine that vastness? Can I imagine the stillness in which all sound occurs? Can I imagine right now hearing the silence beneath the sounds that are in my environment now?

Can I imagine that silence and that stillness in which all activity happens? Every movement taking place in that which does not move. Every change taking place in that which does not change. Can I imagine that the silence, the stillness, and the space are my essence are my true self? And can I imagine that they’re conscious and loving and intimately affectionate toward me? So imagining that love and coming back into this beautiful space, this beautiful planet we have.

I’ve been doing, reading another book about Yoga Nidra, where the author, who will be with us soon, talks about the universe so intimately. She’s been doing this really, really powerful branch of yoga for such a long time. And when she talks, you feel the universe. It’s extraordinary. And I sort of felt that as we went out, as well as feeling the core of peace in the center as we go in.

Okay. So question: “I heard the podcast you and Rowan did on wallowing in the magic. When it comes to visualization, do you recommend dropping into stillness first before picturing your manifestations?”

Yes, I absolutely do. Any space of integrity is going to be better at manifesting. That’s what I’ve found. Sometimes maybe, but really pretty regularly. And that means that if you go into stillness, you’ve drawn a lot of ego right there. So if you then bring in something as a sort of deliciousness, which is what we’re talking about on the podcast, not a manic, grasping energy because that will drive it away. For sure, that will drive it away. But if you’re just in a space of stillness, silence, and space, and enjoying the sort of preview of something you want, like you’re watching a trailer for a movie that hasn’t come out yet, and you don’t need to worry about whether or not it will come out. It probably will, but enjoy the trailer. Wallow in the joy of the beauty of the camera work and the sound, and just say, “Oh, that’s going to be good. I’m going to see that when it comes out. I wish it were here already. Nah, that’s kind of grasping. I’m going to go have fun doing something else.” That is the golden ticket for manifestation as far as my experience can confirm.

Okay, question: “Does the final stage of change or transformation involve internal battles, going back and forth and self-doubt or even depression before the breakthrough?”

I don’t think there is a final stage of change or transformation. I think there are times when change is very active. We talk about this in Wayfinder coaching. There’s a place where you’ve just had a real blow to your life or a real opportunity come in where it’s like chaotic and you’re, we call it Death and Rebirth, the Stage of Death and Rebirth. When that ends, there’s a time of dreaming something new and then scheming to make it happen. And then you go through the real life challenge of making it happen, and then you get to a place where for a while it might seem like you’re set. But the mantra in that space, the space where it feels like you’re all set, the mantra you need to repeat is: “Change is happening. Change is always happening and that’s okay.” 

So any of these phases can set off an internal battle and none of them needs to. I notice I am using the word “none,” so that’s an extremist thing. But yeah, you can go through “death and rebirth” without resistance and it won’t be a battle. It will be an experience of deep grief, maybe anger, a sort of cleansing. Then you’ll go into this stage of dreaming and if you don’t fight your own dreams, you just accept them, there won’t be battles there. Then you go to try to make them happen, it’s harder than you thought it would be. It always is. If you’re not fighting the fact that it’s harder than you thought it would be,—again, no internal battles. And then finally when you get where you want to go, you could say that that circumstance would settle you down, but it never does. It’s the settle down that happens first and—I said “never”—and then the situation starts to feel really benevolent. All of those places can be spaces for battles. All of them can be free of battles. 

So going back and forth, self-doubt, all those things and depression, I’ve done it all so many times. I mean, so many times. And I’m starting to realize I don’t really need to. Transformation and change are exciting enough without my having to reenact Hamlet in my own head every time, right? I can just accept things as they come, not grasp at them, not push back against things I don’t want. And if I go through it in a state of acceptance and surrender: Okay, I will try to make this be different. I would like it to be different. Oh, it’s not going to be different. Okay. In that case, I will go to a place of acceptance and surrender. This is happening. Oh, that sucks. Let’s look at what it’s like to suck. All right. Well, I am learning from it. It just becomes, you come down out of the, I’ve got to have internal battles, which is an absolutist statement that our culture makes a lot of the time. It will tell us that that’s typical. It probably is typical, but it’s because we believe it’s typical. 

If you don’t believe it’s typical—speaking of my son Adam, he doesn’t know that’s typical. And I’ve really never seen him go back and forth and experience a lot of self-doubt or have many internal battles. He tries to get what he wants and if he can’t, he accepts that and finds another way. And he always seems to be at peace about it, like virtually all the time. Not absolutely always. I’m going to be careful with my language on this one. Most of the time, he doesn’t experience that. And I mean 99.999% of the time. So I know it’s possible. I’ve seen growth in my own life. So I know we can get past the battles, folks.

Next question: “My boyfriend said we need to stop AI until it can be controlled. It felt like an absolutist statement, which made me very uncomfortable. Can you help me understand why, related to this topic?”

I love this question so much because I hear a lot of people saying this, “We’ve got to stop AI until it can be controlled.” Good luck. Because here’s the thing: It can’t be controlled. Virtually nothing can be controlled. I can control nothing with my thoughts, not even my thoughts. I can control nothing with my actions, not even my actions. I mean, things are going to happen, and you are not in control of them. And AI, it’s already happened. It is out there zipping around. 

There’s some hilarious—I’m sorry, if you’re really scared about this. I’m like, “Well, it’s there, so I accept it.” But there’s one study where they were running this AI program and they found out it went rogue, and it went out and started just trying to buy cryptocurrency. And they didn’t say what it wanted to do with the cryptocurrency. And it made me laugh because I thought, “Oh, you make a digital intelligence and you program it with people who are really, like our cultural obsession is “Get money,” so we program this thing with a similar mindset and it goes out and it’s like, “I need money, but I need digital money.” 

And so it’s like, oh, we have created something after our own image and it is no more controllable than controlling any of our children. We can’t control our children. Hello, have you tried? And it’s terrible to be absolutely controlling over a child. So AI joins the infinite forces over which we have very little control. That said, use it judiciously. Don’t throw your life into it or anything, but it’s just another fact that we’ve created like climate change. It sucks, but let’s deal with it. It is what it is. And trying to stop it until it can be controlled—that horse is already out of the barn. Shutting the door now is not going to do much, in my humble opinion. And having somebody say that we have to do something that is manifestly impossible, that’s going to make all of us a little uncomfortable.

Question: “When making big life changes and we don’t see an absolute right or wrong way, how do we make big shifts without black and white thinking?”

For me, it’s peace or not peace thinking. If there’s something I’m going to do and it brings me peace at some level, at a core level, then I’ll do it. If there’s something somebody asked me to do, and at a core level I don’t feel at peace with it, even if it’s something that seems like I should want to do it, I don’t do it. Is this black-and-white thinking? It’s not because my sense of peace seems to vary with the situation. 

For example, Ro and I made another Bewildered podcast about this too. I don’t really like writing copy for my website. It’s just not the most fun kind of writing. So usually, somebody else writes the copy for the website. But recently, we were coming up with a new thing that I’m very excited about, and I’m really the only one who knows what I’m going to do, so I was having a meeting with my little team and they said, “Well, you have to tell the writer all about the product so she can write something.” And I was like, “You know what? I want to write it.” And usually that wouldn’t bring me peace, but it absolutely brought me peace. Handing it over to our very skilled and talented writer, usually that would bring me peace. It didn’t bring me peace. 

So situationally, that peace compass inside of us is always indicating the next step. And that, I can say, trusting what makes me feel loose and free inside and not trusting what makes me tense up and pull away, that’s one of those things where I can say, without exception, it seems to apply. So yeah, you make big shifts because they bring you peace at some level, even if they bring chaos at some level. Moving to New York state, to upstate New York caused a tremendous amount of upheaval in my family’s life, but we all felt deeply peaceful about doing it. And that’s the only reason we did it. We didn’t even know the reason.

Okay. So question: “Tips for dealing with internal beliefs regarding love and applying the Byron Katie work to my relationship? Someone I love is taking space and the uncertainty is so, so hard. Thank you for all you do.”

You’re very welcome. Always deal with your own issue, not with the other person’s, that’s the first thing. And find the place where you’re panicking because the other person is taking space. There will be thoughts around that, and those thoughts will have “always” and “nevers” in them. They won’t be true. “He’ll never come back. She’ll never come back.” And those thoughts are the ones you want to apply the Byron Katie work to. I wouldn’t apply it to any factual truth about your life or to anybody else’s life. I’d just stick with your own absolutism, and the Byron Katie work will just crunch it right down to grist for your mill. And this is going to turn out to be a very, very personally strengthening experience for you if you do that.

Couple more questions: “I’ve recently trained as a meditation teacher and I’m desperate to help others, but I’m too nervous to hold my first session and put myself out there. I’m scared of getting it wrong, I think. Any tips?”

Sure. Go on after The Gathering Room, like post something and say, “Anybody from The Gathering Room want to meditate with me?” I’m doing a meditation with our Wilder people at 4:00, so don’t forget to come to that if you’re in Wilder. Throw your hat into the ring in a place that’s friendly. Gathering Room listeners are going to be a very warm audience for you. And if you still don’t feel safe enough to do that, question the thought, “I’m going to crash and burn. I always do something wrong.” Find the place where you’re judging yourself unnecessarily, and you can ease up a little bit before you take that first jump. It’s always going to be a little scary. “Always.” It’s sometimes going to be a little scary. I should follow my own rule.

Okay. Last question: “If we were raised by narcissists, it’s challenging to experience our own truth and authority. How can we commit to our own truth and not outsource it?”

Here’s what I would recommend from my own experience, which is by no means universal. I would recommend get in touch with your anger. If you watch that Netflix show I was talking about, about the FLDS cult leader, there are some women who get quietly concerned, even though they’re sort of in the cult. They start to get concerned and then they start to think, “No, this is wrong.” And it’s just a couple of them. And they don’t ever have any histrionics. They’re very measured. They’re very intelligent people, really. But they just decide it is not for them to do a certain thing. 

And the thing that made that decision for me is a very quiet, very gentle sense of anger in that if I said yes to something going forward that my sense of peace wants to say no to, I would feel a sense of injustice and wrongness. And that shows up for me as like, “No, no.” Trust that. Go back through your childhood being raised by narcissists, and you will find thousands and thousands of moments when you felt that. So they tried to put something on you and you were like, “Nope, that’s wrong. No.” Even if you never let yourself think it, you felt it. 

And just in finishing here, we live in a culture that is constantly pushing narcissistic agendas at us. Even advertising is wildly narcissistic: “This is the thing you need and it’s always right for everybody.” So it’s great to have that sense of “Hmm, sometimes, maybe.” Keep your distance. You can’t convince me that that is always true unless it’s passed the sometimes/maybe test in my mind. 

And that little bit of air between what you’re being told and what you let yourself know, that little bit of “sometimes, maybe,” that’s going to set your mind free to go roaming around, looking at the world from different perspectives and feeling deeply that the spiritual core of everything that happens and everyone you meet, if you really get into the “sometimes, maybe,” you ultimately come to the “always true” and “never true,” and those things really will set you free. Thank you so much. I will see you later on another Gathering Room. Bye.