Tami Simon: You’re Listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, My Guest Is Mary O’Malley. Mary Is an author, counselor, and Acknowledged Leader in the Field of Spiritual awakening. Through Her Writing and Teachi

Jack Kornfield—and I did I think thousands of lovingkindness meditations and forgiveness meditations—I didn’t feel a lot of a shift. I think that I was planting seeds. I think they were very important. But, I began to see that when you begin to learn how to be present for your experience and you begin to see this storyteller in your head, you begin to see how young it is, how hard it’s been trying your whole life. And that’s when you begin to discover the phenomenal power of the second skill, which I call “compassion.”

But, sometimes I call it “spaciousness.” It’s the ability to say, “I see you,” and to actually be with that despair or that anger or that fear or that ache in your back or that mind that just wants to explode—that you are that capacity to see what is going on inside of you. As you begin to discover how to open around it—how to give it space—these parts so respond to our hearts. They’re just like you and I. When we’re heard and listened to and honored, we begin to let go—and so do these very ancient parts that we learned how to hold onto when we were very young. It is just so delightful.

I was somebody that really, really lived extreme self-hate. I’ve carved up my body with razor blades. This was my early twenties and I broke my own arm once—

TS: Oh, wow.

MO: —because I was drunk and hit the end of a bed. I was trying to hit the bed and had a duvet cover over the four-poster bed, and I just kept on hitting it.

How do you heal that kind of deep, deep self-revulsion? It’s beyond self-hatred. It’s self-revulsion. It’s by learning how to see it, to be with it, and slowly have your heart open to it.

Does the judger still come at times? Yes. But, I say, “Oh, hi! You having a bad day?” [Laughs.] It just gets heard and it passes right through me. So, this to me is where really true, lasting healing happens.

They’ve done these studies now. I was interviewed for a book like four or five years ago called mBraining—the “m” is for the word “multiple.” They took 600 of the leading-edge research papers on our three brains—the abdominal brain, the heart brain, and our head brain—and all the studies have shown that the heart brain is our main brain.

Yet, for most of us, it had to be shut down. It’s too sensitive. When we’re young, it had to shut down. So, we become an object in our minds rather than the subject of our hearts.

So, there is a huge thread through the book that is [about] how to really begin to be with yourself through kindness and care and compassion. That’s how I came out of being a highly compulsive person to one who is very normal around food.

So, then the third skill—and it’s so helpful—I call it “living in questions.” What I want to say about it is that when the hero goes out and he’s trying to get to the Holy Grail or the magic wand, he’s just meeting all of these heartaches and hardships—like we all do in our lives. He comes across the White Witch of the North. She gives him a talisman, and she says, “Just wear it around your neck, and whenever you need help, just rub this talisman.”

Well, we have this most amazing talisman that is always with us and we’re only beginning to discover: the power of living in questions without looking for an answer. It’s so important to get that when you really start waking back up into life, your mind thinks you are the one that is awakening. It takes a while to see that enough that that begins to relax. Then you begin to realize there is an intelligence with you always. When you ask a question, the answer will be lived through you. It really helps you to see that you are not alone in this process.

So, when you put those three really basic skills together, you begin to be able to see and see through the clouds of conditioning and come back to our real home—this living moment that is this constantly unfolding adventure [laughs] of the great mystery of life.

TS: Mary, you have such a simple, grounded, practical, helpful way of talking about—really—some of the greatest mysteries of life. I don’t exactly know how old you are—and it’s not important—but you’re an older woman, you’re a counselor and a spiritual teacher. But, some part of me feels that you’re sort of one of these hidden, wise mystics that’s now coming out—but in a way just so ordinary too. I mean, counseling, teaching, working one-on-one and in small groups. And yet, here you’ve written a book that is just so right on the mark, in my opinion.

MO: Yes. Yes. And the gift I was given was to be given so much heartache that I couldn’t get rid of it. I couldn’t even kill myself! I was a failure at suicide. And then life began to say, “Pay attention.”

The exciting thing is that mostly people have woken up out of this dream of separation—this conditioned self—back into life—they’ve had to remove themselves from life. A monastery, a cave, whatever. And thank God for those people, because they have been our way-showers.

But now, more and more of us are waking up right smack dab in the middle of rush-hour traffic and raising kids and illnesses and financial difficulties. That’s why I love this title. I like to joke. I say, “You don’t even need to read the book. Just live the title.” What’s in the Way Is the Way—that the great challenges of your life are embedded with gifts. We don’t need to get out of life. We need to get into it and gather the gifts that are always embedded in every great challenge of our lives.

TS: Now, Mary, before I met you, I hosted a series called Waking Up: What Does It Really Mean? I interviewed 30-some-odd people about spiritual awakening and what spiritual awakening means to them. So, I want to now envelop you, if you will, into that question and that inquiry—because one of the things I discovered was that people use this term—“waking up,” “spiritual awakening”—but they mean different things by it. So, I want to be really clear what you mean by “spiritual awakening.”

MO: Yes. Do you have your mind, your body, and your heart all in the same place at the same time—to be here for life? To actually experience not an idea about it, but the living mystery of it.

And I have an armchair on the moon. Well, I have a lot of armchairs on the moon. I invite people constantly to come up. It is so amazing to have that kind of broader kind of perspective. You look over at this blue-green jewel of our planet and your heart just opens to it. You see over to Mars and it’s brown and is beautiful in its own right. You look at the moon and it’s kind of brown and dusty.

Then you look at the Earth and here are the blues of the ocean and the whites and the grays of the clouds. And here, all the different variations of colors of flowers. My God, there’s aardvarks and zebras and giraffes and there’s baby spinner dolphins and there’s tiny mountain wildflowers and there’s majestic icebergs. Oh my God! I think it was Robin Williams [who] said, “Boy, we did not move into the fixer-upper. We got the prime real estate.”

If you look at this Earth, you will see all with its exquisite creativity—but you’ll see that there’s seven billion people wandering around on this planet that have clouds around their heads. Alan Watts, the wonderful Zen philosopher, once said, “No matter how many times you say the word ‘water,’ it will never be wet.” People have clouds because they have forgotten how to really connect with life—to be open, to actually experience life, to become a part of this great flow of life.

When I sit up there, I see that there’s more and more people that—with their own attention—are clearing their clouds. And then they are then present for other people. Then those people turn and they are present for other people. I see this movement all around the Earth—that humanity is waking up out of the dream of separation [and] out of the dream of fear.

Where this will take us, I don’t know. But, I see that movement everywhere in my life. We begin to understand that we can make a difference. We really, truly can. By healing the war inside of us, we can become a part of the healing of our world.

So, that’s what resonates with me when I hear “waking up.”

TS: Now, you mention this very interesting idea—which no one else of the 30-some-odd people mentioned—about [all three centers of] the belly, the heart, and the mind being in the same place. So, what I’m imagining is, my head says one thing and my heart says another. So, what do I do in those situations? I’m not all in the same place. In fact, there’s a lot of different things going on inside me.

MO: Yes! And, we have really made a god of this conditioned self. In one moment, it says, “I want an ice cream cone,” and you go get an ice cream cone. You’re eating the ice cream cone and it says, “You shouldn’t have done that.” That’s what we use to guide our life.

But, underneath all of that holding that has taken over our belly brain, all of that contraction and judgment that has taken over our heart brain, and all of that busyness and trying that has taken over this head brain—which I’m not putting down at all. It’s an exquisite tool. It only took 13.8 billion years to figure out how to make it. But, it’s a wonderful tool for maneuvering through reality—it’s not reality.

But, underneath all of that is our essence. Our essence—it’s almost like you begin to dance with life. Or, maybe a better way to say it is you begin to follow the currents of life and you begin to feel your way through life. You begin to trust this deep knowing inside of you.

Now, are we always there when we’re first starting to awaken? No. And it can be very confusing at times. You have all these conflicting parts. But, that’s where we come back to this first skill: be curious. What’s here? And we couple it to the last skill.

You don’t have to see something. You just have to notice, and then you can ask life, “Show me what you’re showing me here.”

You’re in the car and the dog is yapping, and you’re just finding yourself feeling tight. There’s no way you can go exploring. But, you say, “OK, life. I notice that you are showing me something here.” And you’re signaling life. At the right time and in the right way, life will show you. And you begin to trust life again. You begin to trust this place that is underneath all of this busyness and holding that we have lived our whole lives.

TS: Now, I want to circle back just for a moment for a very powerful statement you made. You were talking about the eight spells, which is where we started our conversation. And you said that, “They’re created out of fear and held together by judgment.” So, I thought this was an important thing to pull out and talk about. What do you mean, they’re created out of fear?

MO: Well, go back to [how] we really were little, tiny people in a land of unconscious giants. They pretty well say that this conditioned self—all of its foundations are pretty well formed by the time we’re six years old. You can remodel them a bit over the years, but the core foundations of it—these core beliefs. That’s another word you could use for “spells.” These core beliefs are—we kind of absorb them inside of us in those first six years of our life.

Most of us had unconscious parents. They may have loved us. But, life was a wounding process. Here we are, this little tiny person—now we’re a separate person, because here I am and life is there—out there. And I’ve got to do something to make a connection here, or I’m going to die. Then the mind starts off on its merry chase.

So, the foundations of this conditioned mind happen within the framework of fear. If you watch it very carefully and watch it with kindness, you’ll see that most of the time it’s scared. It’s not big fears. It’s the fear that the stop light won’t be long enough to put your makeup on. Or, the stoplight will be too long and you may be two minutes late to work.

There is this kind of grinding [growls] that goes on inside of us all day long. If you watch it carefully, you’ll see that its foundations [are] all about fear.

But, you’ll see that it tries to manage all of that through judgment. It’s constantly judging and looking about how we’re doing. Are we doing good enough? Are we right enough? So on and so forth.

And then we judge other people. Then we judge that we judge other people, not understanding that our judgment of people is just like the safety release valve for all of this judgment that we took on when we were young.

That’s the heartache. Oh, that’s the heartache! A really, truly whole person has every single part of them woven into their heart. We’re all nutty as fruitcakes—even that!

It’s so wonderful to discover that everybody else thinks that way too. But, we don’t have to be at the beck and call of this storyteller in our heads. That’s what life has had me offer to the world.

TS: Mary, you’ve written such a beautiful, helpful, practical, grounded book. In my view, it’s like gritty spirituality for everyone. It’s right there. It’s called What’s in the Way Is the Way: A Practical Guide to Waking Up to Life. I wonder if, to end our conversation—you teach so many different meditation practices that people can do as part of these “rememberings” that you offer. I wonder if you could leave us just with one breathing practice here that we could do as a way to conclude our conversation.

MO: Yes. So, we learn how to hold our breath—and tighten our body and run away to our minds. So, we become human doings rather than human beings. And our breath can be the most exquisite biofeedback mechanism. Also, it can calm what is agitated, it can open what has been closed, and it can ground what has flown off into the ethers.

So, one of the most powerful breath practices—and it’s so simple, and I just love this—is that, as you breathe out, you say the sound, “Aaah.” This is the sound—the vibration—of the heart chakra. It is no accident that it is in most of the words that we use to point to God. “God.” “Allah.” “Jehovah.” “Yahweh.”

And when you breath out and say the word, “Aaah,” you begin to lengthen your out-breath—to begin to be able to bring more open breathing, which, oh my God—it’s so exhilarating.

It is not in [inhales], I’m going to take in this deep in-breath—which really causes more stress and you’re only using the top part of your lungs. This long, slow, “Aaah,” begins to relax what has been holding. It calms. It reminds us everything is OK right now.

And if we’re in a place where we can’t say it out loud, we say it silently inside of ourselves. “Aaah.”

TS: Aaah. That’s a beautiful note to end on.

Mary O’Malley, the author of the new book, What’s in the Way Is the Way: A Practical Guide to Waking Up to Life. Thank you, Mary. Thank you so much for your life of wisdom. Thank you.

MO: It’s my joy.

TS: SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey.