You Have Permission to Love Your Life

UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session. 

 

Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name is Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform.  It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others.  You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.

 I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at soundstruefoundation.org. And in advance, thank you for your support. 

In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Michael Neill. Michael Neill is an internationally renowned wisdom teacher, catalyst and coach, author and speaker. He helps us realize our full human potential and he challenges the cultural mythology that stress and struggle are a prerequisite for creativity and success. Michael has written six bestselling books including The Inside-Out Revolution and The Space Within. He created a TED Talk called “Why Aren’t We Awesomer?” And he’s also the creator of a successful blog and podcast called Caffeine for the Soul. He’s been inspiring and entertaining audiences with caffeine for the soul now for more than 20 years. I’m meeting Michael here for the very first time, and I’m excited to do so. Michael, welcome.

 

Michael Neill: Thank you very much for having me.

 

TS: A friend of mine who works with you, who I’ve been receiving coaching from said, oh, I want to share something with you that I learned from my coach. And I was like, who’s your coach? And she said, Michael Neill. And I was like, I got to find out who this person is. I need to learn more. So I’ve been watching many of your videos and reading some of your blog posts, and I’m impressed and interested in your journey and I’m so excited now to share it with the Sounds True audience. And to begin, you talk about how for many years of your life you describe yourself as a high functioning depressive, but then you had a breakthrough of some kind. And I want to start, if you would, there with what happened that led to this breakthrough? What occurred?

 

MN: Well, I feel the need to point out that before I was a high functioning depressive, I was a dysfunctional depressive. So there was already progress. So I was working in the field, most people are familiar with NLP Neurolinguistic programming and I was teaching alongside Richard Bandler, who was one of the co-founders. And it seemed to me that what we were doing was as good as I had seen on offer, but it wasn’t quite what we said because if it worked as well as we kind of intimated that it did, we should have been the happiest people in every room we walked into. And we weren’t the happiest people in every room we walked into. And I kind of made my peace with it. Nobody was the happiest person in any room I walked into. So it didn’t feel disingenuous, it just felt like, yeah, okay.

And then I read a book at the, so my wife and I, we’ve been together, this is going to be our 35th anniversary this year. And every year we would have what I used to call our annual flight, which is we’d find something we disagreed on and we’d get into it. And it was the rest of the time we were great. And so we were in the middle of it. And my coach at the time said, you’ve got to read this book called The Relationship Handbook. And I used to work as a bookseller for many years in London, one called the Mystic Trader, one called Changes, which was the big psychology bookshop. So I intimately familiar with the book world for a long time, and the one category of book I never had any time for were relationship books. And they just seemed disconnected from my experience of relationships.

So I very grudgingly was like, fine, I’ll read it. And to my surprise, it was filled with things I’d never considered before. One of them being, and this was the one I really remembered, that the purpose of a relationship was to enjoy each other’s company. And in my mind I was like, no, the purpose of a relationship is to learn and grow and we come together for growth, not for, I had all the lines, but there was something so simple about that and it appealed to me. And the bit that struck me though was when I had my next session with my coach and he said, how’s it going? And I said, great. And he said, how’s it going with Nina? And I said, great. And he said, what about the fight? And I said, what fight? And it took him about two minutes to remind me, we’d been in the middle of our annual fight.

And I was like, what happened? I hadn’t noticed, but literally I had amnesia for it. And so I assumed there was some secret technique that they did to me in the book, and I was interested. So I reached out to find out more about this field that was known as, I found a lot of names for it. There was health realization, there was neurocognitive therapy, there was psychology of mind. And then there was this, the three principles were different phrases I heard, and there was very little that I could find about it. But I tracked down the author of the book. I flew up to where he was to spend four days in an intensive with him. And on the second day he asked me to watch a video of his teacher, a guy named Sidney Banks. And I was bored, was the truth of it.

I found it all very slow and very deep and not my rhythm, but I figured I’ll have my dinner and I’ll watch this video and then I’ll watch the baseball one. It’ll be fine. And within five minutes of the video, I heard him say, every human being is sitting in the middle of mental health. They just don’t know it. And I literally, beer snorted like I was drinking a beer and it came out my nose because that just seemed obviously true to me in that moment. I’d never had that thought. Maybe people had said things like that before, but it’s a terrible story because I can’t explain what happened except that everything was different afterwards. There was no trace of depression. There was no sense of, okay, let me apply this. Let me take this and see how I can put it into practice. The world just looked different afterwards and I found that I couldn’t go back and do the work that I’d been doing.

It made no sense anymore. It was built on the premise that even though you’re messed up, and even though you might have all sorts of mental health conditions and traumas and that we can make it better. And to look at it, seeing the way Sid talked about his story is that he had struggled with insecurity his whole life. And a therapist said to him, you’re not insecure, Sid. You just think you are. And he heard not something dismissive, but he heard, oh, all insecurity is thought. It exists in the human mind, which means it’s not fixed, it’s not permanent, it’s not character trait. And in many ways I dove deeper into the field to figure out what had happened to me. And along the way my life just really got sweeter, would be the way that I would put it.

 

TS: When you snorted out the beer, what was going on? Were you thinking, wait, I’m in the middle. I’m okay the way I am. Was there a cascade of other kind of connections? What happened?

 

MN: What it really was was it was a Homer Simpson moment where it was like, how did I miss that? How did I not see that I was okay? In fact, the first thought I had was, babies don’t need therapy. I didn’t know it, but I had thought I was born this way. I hadn’t realized it. Somewhere along the way, I picked up an unhelpful habit of thinking and particularly an unhelpful habit of thinking about myself that just kind of built on itself and got heavier and heavier and heavier. And then the rest of my time was spent trying to cope with it or hide from it. And so suddenly just, it was like somebody pulled the rug out and everything that had been there wasn’t standing anymore.

 

MN: Well, one thing I discovered is that our reality, and especially I’m assuming to this audience as a statement isn’t radical, but that our reality is constructed, that our personal reality is created in “Why Aren’t We Awesomer?” which you mentioned, I talk about how the mind works more like a projector than a camera. So it’s not that we’re having different points of view about something literally they exist in our mind and then get projected out onto objects. And so the reason that, in fact, I asked one of my measures, the guy who wrote the book, Dr. George Pransky, I asked him how it was that these things that had seemed so part of the fabric of reality could just disappear. And he told me about a businessman he’d worked with that got very angry at him for saying, are you saying that all my problems are just a mirage? And George said to him, well, yes, but they’re a real mirage. It really does look like that you’d pass a lie detector test. There’s no question about it, but that doesn’t mean that it has a reality outside your own mind. And so the radical bit isn’t the statement that we live in a thought created reality. It’s that no, really it’s actually true.

 

TS: Now, I think many people are familiar with this notion. You can question your thoughts. You can say, is that really true? Is that thought true or is that just something I’ve made up? That’s a narrative, that’s a projection. That’s just one perspective. But it can take us often a long time I’m thinking this thing and I’m believing it and it feels very solid. Then I kind of pop out. And I think another thing for a long time, and I’m curious how it works for you when a narrative comes along and there’s a sense of like, oh, I’m getting really involved in this whole perspective and I’m feeling uncomfortable perhaps, or I’m starting to worry, or what do you do?

 

MN: Well, this is where it is different to how I had understood thought before. So I had understood through my background in NLP, oh, well change your thinking, change your life kind of a thing. Or you don’t have to think it like this. You could think it like that and reframing and oh, you can argue with your thoughts and all that. What I hadn’t seen was that what I was thinking about was made of thought. So the simplest example that I have was, I was teaching a class years later with George, and there was a man in the class whose job was, he was a grief counselor for parents who had just found out that their children had terminal illness and he got very upset at this notion,

 

TS: I’m sure.

 

MN: And he stood up and he said, are you telling me that I’m supposed to tell these people who’ve just out, found out that their child is dying, that it’s just their thinking? And George said, no, I’m not telling you that. What I’m telling you is that by the time you’ve turned dying into dying, it’s too late. You’ve already created it in a certain way and trying to change your opinion about it won’t make a damn bit of difference. So it’s not saying the physical form doesn’t die, but what we think of as dying, however we think about it, that’s already a construct that’s already made of thought. But where we try to intervene usually is our opinion about it.

 

TS: Okay, so let me understand, just in your experience, do you ever have the experience where something happens and it’s not what you want to have happen in that moment? I do not want this to be happening. This is not what I want to be happening. And then yes. And then you have thoughts about how you don’t want this to be happening. What do you do in those moments?

 

MN: Well, after sulking, pouting, complaining or whatever else I do, I get quiet as best I can. I just drop thought. I don’t try to get a better thought. I don’t try to have a different thought. I just tap back to the space before thought or underneath thought. Sometimes I experience it that way. And when it comes back into form, when it starts looking like something again, it’s invariably kinder, it’s invariably gentler. And if there is something to do about it, I invariably know what to do.

 

TS: How do you do that? How do you drop thinking?

 

MN: Well, interestingly, we do it all the time. So it sounds like a big deal, but it’s not a special skill, it’s just that we don’t realize we can just do it because we to don’t have to be distracted in order to drop thought. And one of the things that I find is very helpful for me personally, it doesn’t work the same for everyone, is I love listening to sound, just even background noise, does it? I have found that I can’t really listen and think at the same time. And so that’s one of the things that kind of quickly gets me there. I’m very familiar with the feeling of quiet, and so it doesn’t usually take long for me to find my way back to that feeling. But there isn’t a singular practice I have, it’s more I just kind of know that away my bread is buttered that away, not in trying to figure it out, but in dropping underneath it.

 

TS: I know you’re saying it’s not a special skill, and yet a lot of people find even people who have said, I’m going to start a meditation practice so I can discover how to drop thought. Oh, I’m thinking all the time. It’s not necessarily intuitively obvious to everybody how to do that.

 

MN: And I know for me, when I tried for many years to maintain a meditation practice, and in fact I first heard of you through Peter Fenner, who is one of my early teachers, I struggled tremendously because the very way it was set up in my mind was me versus thinking and thinking one most of the time. Whereas there’s something, and it’s interesting, I don’t think of it that much, so I don’t have a pat answer for you, but for me, I’m very aware that quiet is natural. It’s not an achievement, it’s where I am until I start talking to myself or daydreaming or doing things with my mind. And so there’s somehow when it stopped looking like I was trying to get somewhere and just started feeling like, just stop noising yourself up. It just was different for me after that.

 

TS: And one of the things you said that I thought was really interesting is that when you drop whatever narrative has occurred, that’s your, I’m going to complain and pout and et cetera, the things that we humans do. When you drop it and you find that natural quiet that when you emerge from that space, you emerge different resourceful. What happens when you emerge and you just pick it back up? I’m just going to pick that story right back up. It was a good story and it’s still me and it we’re going to keep going here.

 

MN: Well, then I make a mess that I have to clean up later. That happens too sometimes, but it’s no big deal to me that that happens sometimes. My whole life was a sort of a quest for perfection mastery, and I did. I, I loved all of it, but it also kept me continually discontented and continually kind of striving for something other than this. And what I came to realize is this is great, just this is everything I’ve always been looking for. And the rest is interesting. The rest is sometimes fun, sometimes miserable, but this is the constant that’s the variable.

 

TS: It’s interesting to me that you brought up being with someone who was a grief counselor and was talking to parents who had lost their children because it doesn’t get in my mind much heavier and more grief filled and more emotionally tragic and terrible than something like that. And the question that comes up for me is how you relate now to tragedy when you experience it in the world, because I think a lot of people are experiencing the current times we’re in as being filled with so much grief and loss and tragedy, and they’re feeling a lot of pain. It’s not like, this is awesome, awesomer today, awesomer now, this is horrible now. And the words people are using to describe the time that we’re in, I’m wondering how you relate to the time we’re in at an emotional level, given the way you relate to thinking.

 

MN: Variably would be the honest answer. There are things that deeply affect me, that it surprises me that it deeply affects me. There are things that, for whatever reason, don’t deeply affect me, that I’d have expected myself to be deeply affected by, and I remember it used to drive my wife nuts. She’d get angry that I wouldn’t get angrier about that.

 

TS: Yeah, I’m with your wife. There you go. Go. You go. That’s right.

 

MN: Well, and I could never really explain it to her until one night I did, and something had come up and she was outraged that I wasn’t more outraged and I got quiet. I wasn’t even on purpose, but I didn’t know what else to do. And then when I spoke again, I just got it. And I was like, I don’t do well. When I get all upset and worked up, I’m not effective. I turn in on myself. I tend to shut down. I cease to make any difference in the actual world. I get into coping mode. So if it happens organically, I don’t stop it or fight it, but I’m not going to deliberately make myself upset if it doesn’t happen. And one of the things that was really kind of comforting to me is I was listening to an old Sid Banks’s audio, the Scottish mystic that I referenced earlier, and he talked about how a lot of people would complain that he didn’t take things seriously enough. And he said, what they don’t understand is I’m serious too, but without the feeling. And what I heard when I heard that was, oh yeah, taking something seriously and feeling heavy are not intricately linked, but we conflate them all the time. We conflate heaviness with taking something seriously. I can give something my full attention and commitment without heaviness or with heaviness. And I found for me, and it seems true in a lot of the people I work with, we’re a lot more effective when we do it without the heaviness.

 

TS: What does it mean to you to take something seriously? How do you do that?

 

MN: It means to throw myself into it fully and just make myself about it as best I can. And that’s going to look very different with different things. But the way I wrote about it in The Inside-Out Revolution is it’s throwing yourself into something is if your life depended on it, knowing full well that it doesn’t,

 

TS: Okay, I’m going to keep going here if that’s okay, just a little bit more. That heaviness quality. What I wonder, and it’s a question is is it making me less effective? Yes. But is it also informing me in some important way, telling me that I care being the birthplace of a type of empathy and connection and concern, and is there some wisdom and intelligence in the heaviness that I might be missing out on? Question.

 

MN: So I can’t answer for you. For me, no, because I don’t need to feel heavy to know that I care. It’s very clear to me what I care about and what I do. And so it often can accompany it and habitually and culturally, that’s what we expect, but caring and heaviness don’t correlate. They coexist, but they’re not cause effect. And hopefully never have said to anybody, you shouldn’t be upset about that. You could be upset about anything you want. I’ve gotten upset about things that I’ve been told I shouldn’t be upset about, and it didn’t bring forth a lot of loving kindness for me and response. But by the same token, if somebody doesn’t want to feel that way all the time, it’s really nice to know that they don’t have to. And it’s not a choice between not caring and feeling good or caring and feeling miserable, that you can actually care deeply and feel wonderful. And I didn’t know that was an option until I began to experience it.

 

TS: This metaphor that you gave of our mental process functioning like a projector when we think it’s a camera. So we think we’re taking this photograph of how things are, but we’re really projecting something. What is creating the projection? What goes into that?

 

MN: Well, so in the language that I tend to use is in terms of fundamental principles or fundamental elements that effectively there are three things or three facets of one spiritual energy that everything is being created from. And I kind of prefer the three facets of one energy. So when we talk about the oneness of life, the one energy, the spirit, the formless, one aspect of it is that it has an intelligent aliveness. So in form, we see the way nature takes care of itself. We see the way the body takes care of itself. Many of the things that we call illness are the body healing itself, returning to balance. I remember one of the most extraordinary exhibits I ever saw was on forest fires. We were holidaying up in the sequoias, and they showed a little film that for 10 years in the middle 20th century, they actually eliminated forest fires and the forest started dying. And it turned out that fire is a part of how nature, the intelligence of nature takes care of itself. And so they switched over to learning, to control, burn as a way of trying to work with nature instead of against it. So that intelligent energy, which you can call God, you can call the divine mind or the universal, or I don’t really have one word I prefer for it, but that’s one aspect of it’s sort of the power behind the throne. It’s the plugging into the mains that the juice,

 

TS: Okay, I’m with you, I’m with you. And I think people, it’s palpable. I think for people, this intelligent aliveness flowing through us, I think they can feel it.

 

MN: So then a second aspect of it is what we could call consciousness, universal consciousness as opposed to personal consciousness. But it’s the capacity of this energy to experience, to know itself, to be aware of itself. And then there’s a creative aspect to this energy, which is what I’m calling thought as opposed to thinking, which is a use of thought. And so metaphorically, the projector of mind projects, the film of thought onto the screen of consciousness. And then we experience the movie as if it’s really happening, and we react to it sensorially as if it’s really happening. And one of the things that lets us enjoy movies is knowing their movies. There are some pretty horrible things we see in a movie that if it was actually happening physically around us, we wouldn’t be paying money to go see, but we will happily go and do it because at some level, we know it’s temporary. And so for me, the goal seeing this is not to sit there and go, it’s just a movie. It’s just a movie. None of this is real. It’s not really happening to recognize that we are safe enough in our being to give ourselves over to the movie. And that allows us to really fully live life without suffering.

 

TS: This notion of feeling safe in our body, safe in the moment right now to enjoy what’s happening. It’s a really, really, really big idea in my mind, Michael, because the more I talk to people, the more I sense, not so much the people I’m interviewing, but our audience and people in my life. The more I sense, especially as the world is going through so much accelerated change and chaos right now. And with everything that’s happening with climate change and natural disasters, there’s this chronic sense of I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel safe right now. I don’t feel safe. And with that comes all of the, you mentioned the mental health that’s possible, but what we’re seeing is chronic non-health of our mental condition because people don’t feel safe. So anxiety, the whole thing. So what would you say to people who are like, I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel safe.

 

MN: One of the distinctions that seems to be very helpful to a lot of people’s between physical safety and psychological safety, so physical safety, that yes, there are people all over the world right now who are not physically safe. That’s a physical issue, requires a physical solution. But what most people suffer from in our country, I think you’re in America with me, is our issues of psychological safety. We don’t feel safe because the thought created world we live in is dangerous, but that’s not the same as the physical world being dangerous as our physical environment being dangerous, but because of the power of mind and consciousness and thought to make it seem real, we don’t make a distinction between it very often. And when we begin to be able to, we realize that our psychological safety is something we can handle inside ourselves. Physical safety, not necessarily

 

TS: One of the topics that you teach on has to do with how we can and use the word love. We can love uncertainty. I think most people would be like, I would just like to tolerate it. I’d be okay with uncertainty, but love uncertainty. So help us understand this relates directly to this notion of feeling psychologically safe, how we can love uncertainty right now.

 

MN: Well, one of the things that people, again, just culturally conflate is uncertainty and insecurity. And if things are very uncertain, they say, oh, this is very insecure, but they’re not the same thing at all. Insecurity is a feeling. Uncertainty is a fiscal reality. So actually most people love uncertainty as long as they don’t think it’s going to get them. So most people don’t go to the end of a book first. They don’t look up what happened at the end of the movie and then go see it. They like the uncertainty they enjoy. One of the reasons people enjoy dating is because they don’t know what’s going to happen. They haven’t yet learned the person. And so the uncertainty is part of the fun. It’s part of the excitement. But when we start to think that there’s danger in the uncertainty, then we’re responding to this sense of danger, not to the uncertainty itself. And so when you start to, again, a lot of these distinctions might seem fairly small, but they’re huge in their impact. And when we can separate out the physical reality from the felt sense, there’s a lot more fluidity in our ability to respond and enjoy what we’re playing with. And that’s true in the world. That’s true in business, that’s true in our personal lives. And again, in my world, I have found that when we don’t have to fear our experience, we just do a lot better as humans

 

TS: Do you have a bias towards happiness and contentment and this is the way this is better and I want to get there. So I do these things because what I like, and that’s what my sort of approach focuses on,

 

MN: Except for the word better, a hundred percent. I don’t think it’s better in some abstract existential sense, but there is no question that I prefer happy to miserable. I did miserable for a long time. I did suicidal ideation. I did depression. I have a wealth of experience of being in the world in that feeling. And there’s no comparison. So absolutely I’ll own the bias, but no, do I think it’s morally better that we should feel that way? No, absolutely not.

 

TS: But tell me, what is the bias? How would you name it for yourself?

 

MN: Well, when I look at now, I spend a fair bit of time, not constantly, but regularly checking in to see what am I talking about? If there is a message, what’s the message? And one of the things that I’ve seen is most people would love to be happy. They just don’t think they can or they don’t think it’s responsible. Most people would love to love their life. They just think their life has to look very specifically in a set of ways in order for them to love their life. So what I’ve just come to see is for anyone who would like to be really happy and love their life, I can absolutely support them in that and show them how it is that the kind of our cultural misunderstanding of where our experience comes from makes it seem like we’re at the mercy of what happens. But I’m not on a mission. I’m absolutely not somebody who thinks the world needs to lighten up. The world can do what it does. It always has. That’s not my domain.

 

TS: What do you mean? That people think it wouldn’t be responsible if they loved their life, meaning I can’t love my life until my closet’s clean or until I’ve written these things or until X amount of money in the bank. 

 

MN: Well, or until all the wars end or until there’s a different government in power or until. Until.

 

TS: Right.

 

MN: Yeah. And so I’ll give you a very specific experience that I had. I was teaching in Estonia and I was sitting in a coffee shop, which apparently is the oldest coffee shop in Estonia in Talon. And the street where the coffee shop is, is they had dedicated to anti-war protest. And there was a fence opposite me where I was sitting in the window and the fence was just covered with posters and photographs of the horrors of the war on the Ukraine. And as it happened, I was just in a really nice feeling that day. I was very quiet, I was very connected. I was very in tune with the infinite. And I started to feel guilty that I was feeling that way given what I was looking at.

And I just kind of checked in to see, is there anything that I am doing to support the world by feeling less connected to life right now than I am? And I couldn’t find it. And what was interesting, and this could be coincidence, I don’t read too much meaning into it, but I do read a little bit of meaning into it in that moment of clarity of no, that my adding in heaviness on me, my dampening my spirits, is not making anybody’s life better. A woman came in off the street and she asked for money and I offered to buy her lunch, and I bought her lunch and then left the cafe. Now, I don’t if that’s connected, but it felt connected. It felt like that my willingness to just be invited, something I actually could do into my world, instead of leaving me stuck stewing in something that I really couldn’t do anything about, which in that instance was a war in another country.

 

TS: You teach lots of people and work with people as a coach to help them on this journey. If they’re interested, I realize you don’t have an agenda about it, but if they want to love their life, even in the midst of the shit show we’re in just to use everyday language, you can help them. And I’m curious to know, so I don’t have to try to bring forward what are all the objections? Why do people not want to love their, what you have found as the major obstacles are common for people?

 

MN: You’ve touched on a few of the big ones that if I loved my life, it would be disrespectful of those that are suffering. If I loved my life, it will never change. That’s a big one. If I love my life as it is, I’ll never have what I really want. That’s a fear that a lot of people carry. If I love my life, people will judge me. If I love my life, all the good things in my life will be taken away from me and I’ll be punished. That’s a popular one. Those are some of the greatest hits I would say.

 

TS: What about the notion that if I loved my life, maybe I would be disobeying the rule book of my family lineage that has lots of reasons to say, come on, really. Come on.

 

MN: Yeah, that does come up. But for me, that’s more where it comes from. But it’s kind of the same thing. I would be doing a disservice. I would be breaking a rule. I would be setting myself up for being laughed at or punished. It’s just specifically by my family instead of the world at large or a vengeful God, or we’ve all got our favorite villains

 

TS: As part of loving my life. You help people as part of their opening to loving their life, become themselves. What do you mean by that? You get to become more yourself?

 

MN: Well, I’ve never loved any language I’ve come up with for it, but that’s the latest language that I’ve come up with for it. There is a deeper nature to people that I think is universal, I think goes beyond our individuality. And it is that spiritual aliveness, that spiritual presence, that intelligent energy in form. And the individual expression of that is what I would call myself or you being yourself. And then on top of that is the character, the ego as self-image, the idea of ourselves, how we would like to be seen, how we don’t want to be seen, how we would like to see ourselves, how we don’t want to see ourselves. And so it’s not really that we aren’t always ourselves because underneath it all, who else would we be? But it’s so buried for many of us under just so much unhelpful, habitual thinking and ideas that it rarely makes it even to our eyes, let alone into our hands and into the world. And so when we are able to bring even a modicum of our attention back to that essential nature, the feeling of who we are, the presence that we are, I love the line from William Blake. I see through my eyes, not with them.

Everything benefits from that and for myself. But then also just feedback from students and clients over the years. People often describe it as like, oh, I’m back, or Oh, oh God, yeah, I know this. Yeah. Oh, this is me. And so being myself, becoming myself is language that most people can connect with, even though strictly speaking, it’s not true.

 

TS: Now, I mentioned, Michael, that this recording together, this conversation is the first time I’m meeting you. And I am trying on what you’re saying, and I’m considering calling this conversation something like, we could love our life. You could love your life. We could love our life. And I’m imagining that person who is tuning in and is suffering in some way right now, and they’re like, okay, I’m going to listen to this because insights at the edge says we could love our life, but this really horrible thing has happened, and I can’t just disentangle the thinking, whatever. I feel terrible about it. And maybe it didn’t even happen to me. Maybe the house burned down of my friend and they’re really suffering, and it’s the empathy I feel for them that has me. How am I really going to love my life when my friend is suffering so much right now? And I wonder if you could speak directly to that person and what you would say.

 

MN: Well, so I will, but let me pray you it. That’s a great example of that. It would be irresponsible for me to love my life. It would be disrespectful for me to love my life. People often ask me variants of that question.

 

TS: I imagine.

 

MN: And generally speaking, I wouldn’t. What I do is listen to them. What I do is be with them. What I do, if it was appropriate is hug them what I do. If there was something to do, because there’s a time to explore the mysteries of life, and there’s a time to just be human and compassionate. There’s no, okay, be happy. Go. When you are in it, you’re in it and there’s no rush. But when somebody feels psychologically safe enough to actually explore it as opposed to prove it kind of a thing, then there is a conversation to have about the nature of the human experience where our experience comes from. And we start to recognize, oh yeah, people’s experience can change on a dime. We can be incredibly happy. One moment, incredibly sad, the next scared, one moment, laughing the next. The first time I actually had to put it to the test, I had been studying this, but I didn’t feel comfortable incorporating it into my work yet.

And one of my clients who’s a professional golfer asked if I could speak to his wife because they just lost a baby. And she was very upset and he was very stoic. And I said to him, I said, I’d be very happy to, and maybe you could listen in. And he said, okay, yes, that would be fine. And while I was in the conversation with him, I was really present and I didn’t think about it. And it just came out. And then afterwards, I went right up into my head and got, oh my God, what am I going to do? What am I going to say? What am I going to do? What am I going to say? And I called my mentor at the time and I asked her about it. And the bid I remember from our conversation is she said, you can feel complete compassion for somebody’s experience without agreeing with them about the cause. And that clarified it for me because I realized I can’t imagine anything. I got three kids and I can’t imagine anything that would rip my heart out more than something happening to one of them. And yet I do know that fundamentally that feeling is created by thought, not by what happened.

In the end, I was able to go into the conversation and we cried together for five minutes, and then within 10 minutes we were laughing. And then in 15 we were crying. And at the beginning, she had swore she would never put herself through that again, and they would never have any more children. By the end, she was saying, I’m not there, but maybe, and they now have three lovely kids and a lovely family. They got there. But in the actual conversation, it went where it went. There was no sense of it having to be up or it having to be down or it having to be this or it having to be that. It’s just a conversation about real life. And real life includes everything that can happen in real life, not just the nice things.

 

TS: So we’ve talked a lot about how you view thought and going quiet. How do you view emotions? What are emotions in your mapping?

 

MN: Well, so I make a distinction between emotion and for lack of a better word, language, deeper feeling. And so emotion, the way I talk about it is a direct, we feel the emotion of our thinking. So if we’re thinking dark, we feel the emotion of dark. If we thinking sad, we feel the emotion of sad. I trained originally as an actor, and that was literally how they taught you to emote, is you would think of something that made you sad, and then your character would seem to be crying about whatever they were crying about. You’d think of something that made you laugh, and then your character would seem to laugh. That’s just how it emotion works psychologically. But it’s not to say that all feeling is just following thought. There is that feeling of being being alive. There’s a sort of a felt sense that helps us distinguish between our inclinations, what we’re drawn to, what we’re not drawn to, what we’re put off by. So not all feelings are emotions, but all emotions are thought.

 

TS: You’re teaching an advanced training coming up, and one of the themes that you’re focusing on is the feeling of life. I was really curious about that, what you mean by that and how that relates to this conversation about deeper feelings. What’s the feeling of life to you? 

 

MN: Feeling of life? For me, I almost hate to put words to it, and I will, but because it diminishes it a little, but I experience it often as a tingle and a twinkle. I can feel energetically tingling throughout my body. I can feel a sort of a light behind my eyes. One of the most beautiful ways I’ve heard talk about one of my mentors, I forced her to write a book finally, she’s 85 now, and she shares a story about a little kid who was in care and the counselor who was working with him. It finally just got a little frustrated and said, what do you want? And the kid didn’t hesitate. He said, shining eyes, I want shining eyes. And that evokes the feeling for me of life. It’s an expensive quiet, it’s a presence more than being present. It’s a fullness sometimes to the point where it’s overwhelming.

It does at times for me have a bit of a flavor that I could call sadness or I could call compassion for the suffering of the world. But it’s not the dominant flavor. It’s just a flavor that’s there sometimes for me. But sometimes it’s boundless joy, but it’s unmistakable in my world. And when I talk to people, I’ll often initially at the beginning of a group, ask people, are you feeling that? And some people will say yes. Some people will say no. And a large number of people will say, what are you talking about? But I found by the end of the first day, nobody is asking what I’m talking about. It’s something we all have access to. And in fact, once we know that it’s worthy of our attention, we recognize it.

 

TS: How could you point that out right now to the people who are joining this conversation so that they can access it more? Just some pointers?

 

MN: Sure. So one thing is I’d be surprised if simply in hearing me describe it, people didn’t begin to notice it because it really isn’t noticing. It’s drawing our attention in a way place that we don’t normally put it unless we’re meditating or we’re doing something spiritual. But in fact, it’s ever present because it is the feeling of life. So for me, one of the things that helps me presence it is looking to see the formless in the form, looking for what’s filling the space between this object and objects out there. One of my favorite quotes about it, Carl Young, apparently this was above his office and on his tombstone in Latin, but the translation of his favorite quote was invoked or not invoked. God is present. And so it’s that constant presence underneath the noise and variability of our experience. It’s the animating spirit. So we’re just used to paying attention to the form, but if we shift our attention ever so slightly, we notice that the form exists in space and that the form in fact is made up of space. And so while space is still form, it’s not quite the same, it’s sort of an access point to the formless to spirit.

 

TS: You mentioned young having a quote above his door. You have a quote right behind you that’s really big genius is infinite. What does that mean? And we’ll end on this note, Michael,

 

MN: I have a sort of an unofficial mission.

TS: Oh, good. Please.

 

MN: Which is normalizing spirit.

 

TS: Oh, yeah.

 

MN: I think we make way too big a deal of spirit in the sense of, oh, no, no, that’s special. That’s different. It is everywhere and everything. And so genius is one of the words that I like for it. So it’s because it’s a word that people can connect to a little bit more easily. I could say God is infinite. I could say spirit is infinite, but genius is infinite. This incredible living intelligence, this real time responsive, intelligent energy that animates everything is everywhere. Always nothing happened before and nothing happened after. It’s not a long time. It’s outside of time. And so that’s what it means for me, and it’s just something I like to remind myself of as much as anyone else

 

TS: I’ve been talking with, Michael Neill. He is helping us love life. That’s how I would put it. Love life. Thank you so much, Michael. Thank you for the conversation.

 

MN: Thank you.

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