And she started working on my neck and she said, “So relaxing the neck.” She said very softly. And I’m like, “I am relaxing my neck.” She’s like, “So just see if you can relax that neck.” And I was like, “I’m doing everything I can to relax.” She said, “Could you just relax your neck?” “I’m trying.” That is the most relaxed my neck ever gets these days. And after a while, she just went into a sort of shocked silence and poked it for a while. It helped a lot.

But my point is, I thought I was relaxing and I wasn’t. So I’m sort of in this space where I know I can’t relax my neck. And I watched the Winter Olympics in that state. And I don’t know if anybody else saw Alysa Liu’s brilliant gold medal-winning performance. I actually, I hadn’t even watched anything that day. And for some reason it was like late at night. I was going to sleep and I thought, “You know what? I’m going to check the headlines.” And it said “Alysa Liu takes the gold” and I thought, “I’m just going to go watch that.”

And I watched her final skate. And if you haven’t watched it, go Google it. I just watched it again. It’s amazing. And if you watch her shoulders and her neck, this is what blew my mind because I’m in this state, and I’ve spent years with these things before. They are friends with me. I know how to live with them. But you watch her spine and her shoulders, Alysa Liu, and I have seen a lot of skaters be stiff in the shoulders at neck because when we’re tense, when we’re nervous, which all these people, like they’re skating in the Olympics, they’ve got to be nervous.

She is absolutely in flow. Her neck and her shoulders are like slinkies. They’re perfectly aligned, but they just flow like water. And I watched it with my stiff neck. I sat and watched her flowing across the ice and I was just like, “Okay, I think she’s enlightened. That’s what I need to learn how to do.”

So the other day I got, in addition to the stiff neck, I got food poisoning and it was bad. It was like the worst food poisoning I’ve ever had. It was one of those times… No, it was the first time in my life when I’ve been dealing with the food poisoning and I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, I have food poisoning.” I was like, “Oh, I have food poisoning. I have been poisoned and I am not sure I’m going to survive.” It was so bad that I couldn’t even lift my head. I was lying on the bathroom floor and I had to ask Ro and Karen to bring me a cookie sheet to, sorry, this is not what you need to hear on a Sunday, evening, afternoon, morning, wherever you are in the world. It’s a Monday. It’s a Monday. Yeah. Okay. So you can hear this. It’s Monday. Just take it. It’s Monday. Bad things happen.

So yeah, I was lying there going, blechhh, because I couldn’t lift up my head. And then I thought, “Okay, well, why don’t I just ask for help?” So I was like, “All right, Whatever,” which is my name for God, “Whatever, if I’m supposed to die now, be good to my family. And if I’m not supposed to die now, maybe this could feel better, please?” And I felt something come onto my head and then—we’ll do the Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation. I always talk about the top of your head to the base of your spine. Well, I felt this sweetness, this warm, lovely energy flowing down through my head and then down each of my vertebrae.

And as it went down my vertebrae, they relaxed. The little muscles around my vertebrae started to relax. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. And it went down through my neck and then it went down through my upper spine, bing, bing, bing. And I was like, oh. And I felt a presence because I often do, but I felt it so deeply. And I felt as if it were saying to me, “You’re finally letting me in. You’re finally letting me in. I’ve been waiting for this.” And it bing, bing, bing, went all the way down to my guts and it started to fix everything. And within a few minutes, I could sit up and I was crying and Ro and Karen were worried about me, but I said to Ro, “I’m just crying because I’m so moved.”

I was. I was deeply moved by this love that came in and went down my spine helping me relax what had not been relaxed. And I thought, um—I love this statement by Pema Chödrön. I’ve quoted it to you before and I’ll quote it again. In one of her recent books, she wrote, “I am awake. I will spend this lifetime taking off this armor.”

And I realized that part of my stiffness is this self-armoring against, I don’t know, against the world, and that because the world is difficult and things are hard, we all get a little tense and that the way to transcend that is to get to the place where you literally dissolve the tension in your muscles and your physical body. And I thought, “Oh, okay, new recipe for awakening: Find something that feels like crap and then deliberately relax into it.”

So if you’re in a good spot in your life, make it more challenging. Like if you are perfectly healthy and athletically vibrant, go learn figure skating, push yourself a little. I remember watching my little kids when they were toddlers, my older kids, I have a video of them jumping from a footstool onto the couch and then when they master a certain distance, they’ll pull it back and then they try to jump further and they just keep doing that, upping the ante over and over, these little kids, tiny kids.

And that is what we humans do. We want it to be harder, and then we want to try to master it. And when it gets to the level where it’s unbelievably hard, then somebody who can get into that and relax, I’m sure, I mean, Alysa Liu says she doesn’t get nervous in competition, but you don’t skate like that without ever doing anything that doesn’t feel good, right? She must have gotten up earlier than she wanted a million times, and she must have fallen on the ice a zillion times, and she must have like gone home with bruises. She must have… It can’t all have been fun, but she is able to relax into the difficulty of it.

So if you’re in a space where your life is perfect, make it harder. And then relax into the difficulty. But if, like most of us, your life is not perfect, find the places where it’s least perfect. So go to the place where you’re least comfortable, and instead of pushing it away or tensing against it—which is what I do, I know a lot of my clients do—instead of bracing against it, go to the hardest, worst thing in your life—maybe it’s your fear of death, maybe it’s that somebody you love is sick, maybe it’s that you’re out of a job, whatever it is, it’s terrifying, it’s hard, it’s scary. Go to that space, take some time, and then invite Whatever to come into your physical body and into the tension you feel around this issue. Relax directly into the hardest things you can find instead of pulling away from them and thinking, “Well, this feels better.”

So this goes against everything that we sort of were taught to do or that we inherently naturally do. Instead of flinching away from difficulty, we go into it. Instead of preserving a situation that feels good, we push ourselves harder a little bit, not to suffer and not even to achieve. To awaken. To find the place where we tense up because it’s too difficult, and then if it gets more difficult, when I had the food poisoning, the tension in my body got unbearable. So that’s why I was able to relax. If I had been—like during the massage, I couldn’t relax. I was being taken care of. Everything was soft and lovely and beautiful and I just couldn’t break through my natural armor.

But when I was taken down to the floor, literally, by this poisoning event, I decided to let go because I was so close to not being able to hold it together. That, it seems, is the place where I learn and grow. So damn it, my strategy is before anything really horrible, before I have to get food poisoning again, I thought I’ll just start interval training. I’ll like ride a stationary bike till I need to throw up. Let’s do something that doesn’t require being poisoned.

I know this is—usually I talk a lot about rest. And by the way, if you go to the hardest place in your life and you really relax into it, you will not get up and run around doing good in the world. You will relax into rest. Rest, rest, rest is very often what happens when we finally let go of our illusions. So you can go rest in the light of awakening. You can rest in difficulty to dissolve your illusions and find the part of you that is already awake, taking the armor off. And then maybe you will live life the way Alysa Liu can skate. It’s pretty amazing.

Shall we do the Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation? I would love you all to just find the space in your life, the place where it’s not feeling great, the place you wish it weren’t happening, something weren’t happening. And instead of flinching away from it, let it come in. I’ll pull you out before we finish the half hour, right?

So you’re already feeling it. You’re already feeling the difficulty of it, the sorrow of it, the anger, whatever it is that you’re experiencing, the fear. Find it. Move into it. Bring it up. Let it fill your body, let it fill your system, and then let it stay there while you go into the meditation and see if it can saturate the suffering, the pain. And when that happens, that is often the way the armor comes off, softening through relaxation into difficulty. So that’s what we’re going to do as we use our little strange prompts to get our brains to relax their left-hemisphere grip on things.

So let’s do it now. If you’ve never been here before, we do this strange trigger question that has been identified as something that puts the mind into soft focus, not because we answer it, but because the question is so strange. And the question is: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? So hold your area of difficulty, let it put pain and tension wherever it wants to. Don’t fight it and then send this question into your whole system: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Hold it all at once.

Can I imagine the distance between the top of my head and the bottom of my chin? Can I imagine? Can I imagine the space between my right shoulder and my left shoulder? Can I imagine the distance between the nape of my neck and the base of my spine? Can I imagine the space inside the atoms of my body? We are almost completely made of empty space. Can I imagine the silence of that space? The silence that holds every sound I hear? Can I imagine hearing the silence that holds all sound? Can I imagine the stillness underneath all the action in my body? The stillness underneath everything moving around me. The stillness that holds the earth and all of us, and which is permeated with knowing.

Can I imagine this space, silence, and stillness, filling whatever is difficult in my mind, in my body, in my heart, in my soul, in this world? Can I imagine everything else dissolving into the stillness, the silence, and the space?

Now that softening may just have taken the edge just a bit off the tension in your body around whatever the issue is, or maybe it just made you aware that the tension is still there, and you can love yourself for being able to bear it. But if you can begin to dissolve even a little bit of it, relaxing into the most difficult part of your life, you’ll realize that the difficulties are the opportunities. As they say, “The obstacles do not block the path; the obstacles are the path.”

And I think that’s how we wake up little bit by little bit. Also, a flock of wild turkeys just walked past my window in all their plumage, iridescent while we were doing that. And yeah, animals come right up to the door of my room when we do that meditation. It’s really cool. All right, let’s look at some questions, shall we?

Question: “I have a plane ticket for Saturday,” someone says, “to see a partner overseas and it’s kind of the make-or-break trip. Me: anxious attachment. Him: avoidant attachment. We’re in a hard spot. I truly think I’m in love with him. Advice to trust?”

Yeah, lean into that fear that somebody’s going to leave you and you’ll be all alone. Get to it before you ask anyone else to get to it, because that is an inside job. The belief that everyone’s going to leave? First of all, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because when you clutch at people, they tend to run away, even if they aren’t anxious/avoidant, right? But this is a great opportunity for you to say, “Let me get to this before he does. I’m afraid I’ll be abandoned by everyone. Hmm. Let’s go in. Let me relax while I’m afraid of that, right in it, without changing it, I will relax with it.” That’s what I’m saying in this Gathering Room. It’s not about relaxing out of suffering or distress or anxiety. It’s about just filling it with presence. “I will be fully relaxed with my terror that everyone’s abandoning me.” And if you can relax into it, even though it’s still there, you don’t grab at people and they don’t feel that the energy’s unbalanced and they don’t want to run as much, but that’s not why you’re doing it. You’re doing it because it’ll wake you up and because it will make you feel a lot better. Again, that is not the objective. The objective is just to be, but it has all kinds of benevolent side effects when we actually do it. So good luck with you, for you, to you. Yes, good luck.

Next question: “How can we apply this to channeling a new financial future when the pressure around it seems constant and endless?”

I hear you. I have been a micro-entrepreneur my whole life. If you think one makes money selling books, you are a close friend of Liz Gilbert, who’s the only person I know who’s ever done that because yeah, that’s not a way to any kind of financial stability. So my whole life, I’ve been in this place where, “Oh, I have to interface directly with the market.” I’ve never had a job. I’m just like, “What can I make up that people will find interesting?” And I’ve always found that relaxing with the fear of it, not wanting the fear of it to go away, but saying, “Oh, there’s that financial fear again. Might as well relax.” I think it enormously accelerates your ability to make money, for sure. But I also think that before you make money, you still will benefit from being relaxed. There is nothing that my neck tension is really doing for the world, right? Except giving me an opportunity to dissolve into it. So same with the financial fear. Yes, it probably will start to fix the problem, but in the meantime, it just feels better. So it lets in Whatever, the good force, and then the good force has all the money as it turns out. And once you let it give things to you, it will give it to you. That is my theory. Tell me what happens.

Okay, here’s a rough one: “I recently got diagnosed with an unpredictable, incurable liver disease. It is said to be like living with a ticking time bomb. How do I relax into that scary uncertainty?”

Well, I can tell you just by framing that question, most of the people I’ve coached, and there have been many, wouldn’t even be able to frame that question. They would just say like, “How do I get over the fear? How do I deal with it?” “How do I relax into that scary uncertainty?” is already showing me that you’re articulating what that would look like, that there’s this scary uncertainty, like get to know it, sit with it, and be terrified. “Oh, there’s a time bomb ticking in my body.” Well, come to think of it, all of us are mortal and any one of us could be carrying an aneurysm that’s about to happen. You’re just way more aware of it than you were before and than most of us are. And it is really scary. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be scared. But if we look, each and every one of us has some kind of relationship with our own impending death. So that’s a great place to sit. And they used to take monks in Asia to sit in the charnel houses where bodies were taken after they were deceased because they didn’t have embalming. And so they’d put the dead where it wouldn’t be too much of a “decorating flaw,” I don’t know. Anyway, these monks would go sit among the dead bodies that were in various stages of decomposition and meditate until they could feel peaceful.

And it doesn’t take away the awe and terror of death, but it makes the awe and terror of death the biggest receptacle we have for awakening. I’ve sat with people who were dying and couldn’t breathe very well, and I knew they were going to stop breathing soon. And it was an unnerving—if anybody out there, I’m sure many of you have gone through this,—and it’s a really, really intense, liminal place to sit. If you can relax into that and your fear of death starts to be filled with release, even though fear might still be there and uncertainty certainly is, that’s the only thing certain about it, is that it’s totally uncertain. That fear and uncertainty can be the ticket to awakening, to coming home in your own spirit, to transcending the fear of death. And the fear of everything. Once you’ve transcended the fear of death, it’s much easier to start transcending the fear of the many, many things that we face in life.

So I’m so terribly sorry you’re going through this, and I think it could be an incredible benefit to you because it looks to me like you are brave and smart and willing, and you’re going to wake up, you’re going to take off your armor because of this, or I will eat my hat. You can send me a note and I will eat my hat here on The Gathering Room. Anyway, in the meantime, much love to you.

Okay: “How do we deal with the anxiety-inducing current world situation? Every time I put fuel in my car, I hold my breath at the prices.”

Isn’t that something? Well, you’re showing us this wonderful opportunity when we go to put fuel in our cars and we’re like, “What?! It costs how much?” And like, where’s the rent money going to come from? What a brilliant opportunity to go into a panic. And then while the car is filling, because it takes a few minutes, see if you can send relaxation down into that shock, that anger, that fear. And immediately, from the price of gas, you can go out to so many other things that are messed up in the global situation and so many bad things that could happen. And it’s like, oh, more and more opportunities to relax into that. Okay. Again, the harder it gets, the better it is to suffuse that with relaxation and the more of your illusions it dissolves. It’s something that you feel. You can’t—I can’t describe it to you, except to say that when I was on the floor puking my guts out, the nausea was still there, and I was having seizure-y feelings, and it was all full of peace and it was fascinating. So yeah, when I fill up my car, I’m going to try that one. Thank you for the question.

Next: “How would you apply this to grief and something like weight gain in addition to pain? And also when to know when you’ve rested enough and it’s time to emerge?”

You know you’ve rested enough when you feel like playing, and that’s my only criterion on that one. If you’re applying it to grief, you can just use space, stillness—well, anything, anything you dislike. If you don’t like the way your body feels or looks, that’s a wonderful opportunity to suffuse that, including your resistance to it, with relaxed attention, ultimately with love. And if there’s a molecule of your body that you don’t love, that is not about you needing to change your body. That is about accepting the space, silence, and stillness inside the molecules. There’s nothing wrong with a molecule of you. Shape isn’t important, but social judgments about shape can be very, very painful. So let them in, relax into them, dissolve them, and use them as an escape hatch to get out of the system that is condemning you for no reason.

“Okay, lately,” says another person, “I am finding many elements of my job to be unbearable. I immediately feel stuck and sad that I don’t have an exit plan. Shall I try this in those moments and ask for help finding a new way forward?”

Yeah, I would actually not even be worried about the plan for the new way forward. You could take the fear of not having a plan and suffuse that with relaxation, but the point of this is you don’t have to change the pain at all. In fact, I’m asking you to sort of unmask the pain and let it be there in its whole raw presence, as ghoulish as it wants to be, the more goulie it is, the more enlightenment it brings us when we can relax into it. So yeah, it’s horrible to have a soul-murdering job and to sit there and go, “All right, this is unbearable.” And then to dissolve into that, what usually happens to people when they do that is that they leave. They don’t need an exit plan. I didn’t have an exit plan when I left academia, which was to be my career, last job I’ve ever had. The thing is, it’s not the plan that gets you forward, it’s the stillness, it’s the relaxation itself. It’s the magic that comes up when you sit in pain and don’t resist and drop and allow Whatever to come help. Like, “Give me some space to relax here. Could you please come help?” And then it’s not so much that a plan is delivered to you with bullet points and things. It’s that you leave and then you walk out going, “I wonder what I’m going to do now.” And then you end up doing things you didn’t expect to do. I’d go, “I’ll write a book now. I did not know that was going to happen.” So instead of planning with the mind, the entirety of your soul starts to move the body and really, really wonderful things happen and you don’t plan it.

Okay: “I’m a long distance triathlete and I’m in physical pain or fatigue in many of my training sessions. How do I relax into and fully embrace the pain when my body wants to fight back?”

Yeah, the “wants to fight back” is the problem. You can allow yourself to dissolve into the desire to fight back. So there’s pain, on one hand. You’re pushing yourself like I would, a crazy person, an extremely fit and determined person. And that’s another level of pain. And then there’s the, “I hate this and I want to stop.” So there’s level after level of pain, and you just start with what’s most available to you. In this case, the wanting to fight back? Just let it be. “I really want to fight back.” It’s usually a kind of rage or exhaustion. Let it be as it is. Relax with it on board and see if you can start to feel it dissolve. I think you can. I think you’ll have a really good time with this. You can go into a zone, I promise you.

All right, a few more: “Any tips when you identify too strongly with the suffering of other people and even feel their pain in your own body?”

Same thing. “Wow, there’s a lot of pain here and I’m sad and I’m worried and I love this person and it’s all a big soup of pain. Okay. I’m going to relax with that. Let’s see what’s in here if I relax.” Same thing.

And from Ro, finally, “If anybody wants to come play another meditation game, they’re not really games. If anybody wants to come play with meditation a little bit more, and you’re in the Wilder community, we have a group meditation today at 4:00 with me and that’s what we do.”

And all of this just to say that no matter where you are, no matter what you are doing, if you stop right now, find the most unpleasant thing in your life and relax into it, a little bit of your armor will come off and you will look in and say, “Oh, I’m awake. I will spend the rest of this day taking my armor off.”

I love you all. I’ll see you if you’re in Wilder, and in the meantime, have a wonderful, wonderful time until the next Gathering Room. Bye.