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Tracee Stanley on Authenticity, Power and Practice
267 Plays29 days ago
In this deep and luminous conversation, Scott Schwenk welcomes yoga nidra teacher, author, and spiritual guide Tracee Stanley for a heartfelt dialogue on what it means to grow—not by force, but by surrender. From samskaras (stored subtle energies that shape a person's personality, perspective and motivations) and sacred pauses to the profound practice of remembering, Tracee shares tools and stories to help us soften into life’s transitions and reawaken our innate worth. A conversation rich in wisdom, practice, and radical presence.
Tracee Stanley - Spiritual teacher, guide, mentor, author
Tracee Stanley is the author of the bestselling book Radiant Rest: Yoga Nidra for Deep Relaxation and Awakened Clarity and The Luminous Self: Sacred Yogic Practices & Rituals to Remember Who You Are (Shambhala Publications) and a forthcoming book Living Ritual (Sounds True). Tracee is the founder of Empowered Life Circle, a sacred community and portal of practices, rituals, and Tantric teachings inspired by more than 28 years of studentship in Sri Vidya Tantra and the teachings of the Himalayan Masters. As a post-lineage teacher, Tracee is devoted to sharing the wisdom of yoga nidra, rest, meditation, self-inquiry, nature as a teacher, and ancestor reverence. Tracee holds certificates from Pacifica Graduate Institute in Advanced Eco-Therapy, New Thinking, Best Practices, and Emerging Modalities and a certificate in Advanced Ecopsychology. Tracee is gifted in illuminating the magic and power found in liminal space and weaving devotion and practice into daily life. Learn more at traceestanley.com.
Scott Schwenk - Master coach, spiritual teacher, culture architect
Scott Schwenk’s teachings, courses and private mentoring guide leaders, seekers and creatives to explore their deepest selves in service of thriving on all levels of being, both individually and relationally.
Host and creator of the podcast The Choice To Grow, Scott is known for his hugely popular courses and workshops with OneCommune.com, Younity.com, Wanderlust Festivals, and Unplug Meditation, Scott has been catalyzing the inner evolution of others for decades: helping them to grow, transform obstacles into opportunities, and find Love within.
Scott spent several years living and studying in a meditation monastery which introduced him to the core body of Tantric meditation traditions which continue to flow through each of his teachings. Scott continues to study and teach from two key Tantric lineage streams.
Apprenticeships in leadership development, meditation and philosophy training, shadow work/shadow resolution and spiritual awakening are all part of Scott’s development into the thought-leader that he is today. He continues to refine his offerings studying and practicing with key innovators at the leading edges of human development.
Scott’s teachings support the entire person to not only progressively recognize, stabilize and embody our inextricable oneness with the source of creation (Waking Up), but also to resolve the wounds of the past (Cleaning Up), continually expand our capacities for wider and more inclusive perspectives on any moment (Growing Up) and creatively and joyfully participate and collaborate with all of life as a loving thriving human being (Showing Up).
You can explore Scott’s courses, workshops, retreats, training and master coaching at https://scottschwenk.com and can find him on Instagram @thescottschwenk.
"Scott Schwenk is a deeply skilled teacher and healer, with a rare and authentic gift for helping people create positive inner change in their lives."
~Sally Kempton (aka Swami Durgananda),
Master meditation teacher and author of Meditation for the Love of It and Awakening Shakti.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'The Choice to Grow'
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to The Choice to Grow. I'm Scott Schwenk. Through these dialogues, we'll explore fresh perspectives and discover practical tools for navigating a thriving life that adds value wherever we are.
00:00:14
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I'll introduce you to innovators and creators from across our world who embody what it means to cultivate growing as a way of life.
Relaxation and Perspective Shift
00:00:23
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Let's prepare together.
00:00:24
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Take a deep breath in.
00:00:28
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Hold breath briefly as you soften your shoulders and soften the soles of your feet and palms of your hands. Then exhale like you're releasing tension and setting down a heavy burden from every cell.
00:00:41
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Ah. Now let's dive in.
00:00:48
Speaker
Welcome everybody. Welcome to The Choice to Grow. My name is Scott Schwenk and I'm delighted to host you for these incredible dialogues that I feel so privileged to share with you, to explore together, what is the choice to grow?
Introduction of Tracy Stanley
00:01:02
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What does it really look like, feel like?
00:01:04
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Instead of orienting in the old paradigm of scratching and chasing after something that seems to be missing or trying to fix what's wrong how can the choice to grow as ah as a as an ongoing presence, transform life not only for ourselves, but for all beings as well as the earth.
00:01:25
Speaker
So I'm delighted to welcome my next dialogue partner, Tracy Stanley. We've known each other for a very, very long time. We first met years ago when I was working at Creative Artists Agency and she was still in the entertainment business as well i was sitting on jimmy darmody's desk in the motion picture talent department.
00:01:43
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And I remember a couple of Tracy's phone calls with some projects with interest in our clients.
Tracy Stanley's Background and Teachings
00:01:48
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I'd like to tell you a little bit more about Tracy. Tracy Stanley is a noted and lineage teacher.
00:01:55
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So lineage is a really big deal. Lineage means somebody sitting in an unbroken pattern of beings who've realized something of great value but can be passed along unseen and unsaid and transformed life thousands of years later.
00:02:11
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So to be a lineage teacher means to be able to access and share this wisdom stream beyond just sharing information, actually being able to deliver an experience.
00:02:23
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So Tracy's lineages are among nidra, meditation, self-inquiry practices, and so much more. She's the co-founder of the Empowered Wisdom Yoga Nidra School and created the Empowered Life Self-Inquiry Oracle Deck.
00:02:38
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Tracy teaches internationally, is based in New Mexico, God bless her, so beautiful there, in the land of magic, has online classes all over the world, has classes on commune, yoga journal, unplugged meditation, wanderlust TV, and so much more.
00:02:55
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she's the author of two books the first one that came out during quarantine is called radi rest and this is a really really helpful book for students and teachers and then the next one luminous self we go a little bit deeper with practices that can transform life for ourselves and others.
00:03:13
Speaker
One of the things that I noticed about Tracy's work and reading and rereading these books is, and I don't think you've used this term, Tracy, open source, meaning these are available for anybody who wants to use them, like the work of Theory U out of MIT with Otto Scharmer.
00:03:31
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You don't have to pay any money or sign up for something to be able to share these teachings. You're really left to the integrity of do I have the embodiment?
00:03:44
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Have I worked with these things enough sufficiently to be able to understand how they work, how to troubleshoot them and how to help guide people through them? And they're right there, right there, like these beautiful, beautiful recipes. So without further ado, welcome with all of my heart and big love, Tracy Stanley.
00:04:01
Speaker
So stoked for this, been waiting months. Thank you so much, Scott. It's so wonderful to be here. i love that you gave me that like old samskara of CAA and our dear Jimmy Darmody. Just say, really quick, just say, what is samskara? Because many of our listeners are not going to know Sanskrit, even though you and I have a lot of those beautiful words. What is a samskara?
00:04:26
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Well, my understanding of samskara is that a samskara is an impression. It's an impression of a moment that something that happens that leaves its mark on you.
00:04:39
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And so in this case, you mentioned CAA and the samskara that I have with CAA is first in a visual samskara of visualizing what we used to call the Death Star at the ah when they moved locations.
00:04:54
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And just my my love for Jimmy Darmody back in those days. And so that's a good samskara that I happen
The Role of Samskara and Co-creation
00:05:03
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to have. And thinking about you sitting on his desk at that time.
00:05:07
Speaker
Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful. And, you know, I'll just say a little something as we're all flowing together in this dialogue. One is I'd like to remind us all that you even though you are listening to this at a so-called later now moment, you as the listener are co-creating how the energy and the information and the exchange of this dialogue flows.
00:05:29
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Time flows differently in different dimensional realities. So I'm inviting you to just soften your body and listen like anything is possible. And there may be some gold here for you or another.
00:05:42
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It may pop up in great clarity now or down the road. And I'm wondering, Tracy, if you might just guide us into a version of a practice that's appropriate for now.
Embracing Grace Through Breathing and Reflection
00:05:54
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to really set up our nervous system for grace. Absolutely. Well, what I would love for anyone who's listening to do, and if you're in a place to do so, you can close your eyes or soften your gaze.
00:06:10
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And if you're in a place where you can't close your eyes, just allow the gaze to soften in a way where you're not directly looking at anything. You're just kind of staring maybe just three fourths to the ground down.
00:06:27
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Just let yourself become aware that your body is breathing and that there is nothing that you need to do or to be to be worthy of this breath.
00:06:42
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So perhaps you become just a little more interested in the space that is the opening of your nostrils.
00:06:51
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And you feel and sense the moment that the breath is received in the nostrils.
00:06:59
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and the moment that the breath is released.
00:07:04
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So just feel as though all of your attention is at the opening of the nostrils, where you just notice the sensation of breath as it touches the inside of the nostrils and as it leaves.
00:07:25
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So maybe you notice a sense of coolness on the inhale
00:07:32
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and a sense of warmth on exhale.
00:07:37
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And just continue to notice breath moving in and out for the next five breaths.
00:08:12
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And then as you continue to notice the breath, begin to let your attention just shift to the space between the breaths.
00:08:24
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So the space between the inhale and the exhale.
00:08:31
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And the space between the exhale and the inhale.
00:08:42
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And in fact, just feel as though you can soften into the space in between.
00:08:54
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Each time you encounter a gap, a transition between breaths, allow yourself to soften,
00:09:08
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to melt into that space.
00:09:44
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And for the next two or three breaths, just recognize that this space of the in-between is the space of grace.
00:09:55
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It is the space of allowing, the space of the unknown, of surrender.
00:10:23
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Notice without judgment your relationship with this space of the unknown.
00:10:32
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The same space that contains infinite potential.
00:10:48
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And as we begin to slowly come back for now,
00:10:54
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Just carry the intention or the contemplation throughout perhaps the rest of the podcast and maybe even the rest of your day to just notice those spaces of transition, the spaces of the threshold,
00:11:15
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the spaces between.
00:11:23
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When you feel ready, you can slowly begin to deepen your breath and maybe even briskly rub your hands together until you feel them getting warm.
00:11:37
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And then slowly you can place the hands, if it feels okay for you, you can place them over the eyes, just cupping the eyes and slowly opening the eyes under the cupped hands, allowing the light to filter in.
00:11:55
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On your next breath in, just feel the warmth from your hands moving into the eyes and into the brain. Maybe you sense or feel it or just trust that warmth as a blue-gray healing light that comes into the brain on the inhale and on the exhale, it maps out through the entire nervous system.
00:12:19
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Just bringing this cooling, healing,
00:12:23
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frequency throughout the whole body.
00:12:30
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Notice if the color of
Transformative Practices in Daily Life
00:12:31
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the light changes to calibrate uniquely for your own healing.
00:12:38
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And one more time, inhale deeply, exhale, and then slowly bring your hands away from the eyes and maybe you can let them rest somewhere on the body.
00:12:53
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Somewhere where you would like to give yourself a blessing and honoring or remembering. And then when you feel ready, just come back.
00:13:13
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I love continuing to notice the impact of simple practice.
00:13:22
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And how valuable it is for ourself, myself, and the people and beings I interact with to choose these micro practices throughout the day.
00:13:37
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As you were beginning to guide us in, well, throughout several things really just blossomed. One was in the very beginning when you cued us, there's nothing we need to do. There's nothing I need to do to be worthy of the breath.
00:13:53
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I heard the words, they entered, there's a feeling in the center of my chest and spontaneously the body took a deeper breath without me organizing It's just immediate feedback.
00:14:07
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And I feel like it's worth highlighting for all of us that the essential qualities of life are already and always here.
00:14:17
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That's right. Thank you for that. We're constantly looking out over here. in the wrong direction for the external. going to say the other second thing first and come back to what we were just saying because it's such a lower open now.
00:14:33
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yeah The second thing that really struck me is the softening into the transitions. I've been practicing and teaching various versions of noticing the gap between the breasts as a doorway into the gap between butts and so on.
00:14:47
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I don't think until this moment I quite heard it that way. that this practice in seated or laying down practice, whether it's yoga nidra, meditation, just following breath, softening into the gaps and the transition, oh what if I and we made an intention to be clear about even whether it's passing between one room or another, between one meeting or another, between a moment of clarity and a moment of not knowing,
00:15:19
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like what if my first seeing was to soften and breathe into the transitional space. Yeah, that's my whole practice all long.
00:15:34
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Yes. And so many times I forget or I'm distracted and I come back. But it's the thread that I use to weave my practice through 24 hours.
00:15:47
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Because I wish, I mean, I am living on a mountain. But I don't have anyone bringing me chai and food so that I can practice, you know, five hours a day. I'm a householder.
00:16:00
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And for the householder, I feel like bringing in those micro practices is really a way to enliven our life as being sacred.
00:16:13
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Tracy and I both come from what you could call under the general umbrella, which is an enormous umbrella of time travel. Some of our practices and teachings are mingled with Tantra and are not their just Tantra like Sri Vidya.
00:16:31
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But Tantra, one of the things we both expressed in our teachings is that it can translate into English as weaving. yeah And as you're talking right there, I freshly feel the weave of form and formlessness of so-called formal practice and so-called ordinary life.
00:16:53
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Until it no longer seems like distinct threads, but it's just the natural inner penetration of all of existence.
00:17:02
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Exactly. I mean, for me, life is the practice. It wasn't always like that because, you know, many, many years ago, being a yoga asana practitioner, it felt like, oh, this is my yoga asana practice. And once I roll up my mat, then i go home and i don't do yoga, quote unquote.
00:17:23
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again until I show up to the next class. And then at some point I started to realize, and this was really after reading the Yoga Sutras translation, the first one that I ever read 20 something years ago, that really yoga is either in the room or yoga is not.
00:17:43
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It doesn't matter if the yoga mat is ruled out.
00:17:49
Speaker
When you hear the word grace, What does that evoke for you currently?
00:17:58
Speaker
Well, it's funny because I shared with you before we started recording that I'm actually sitting in the middle of a windstorm that's about, don't know, 50 70 mile an winds.
00:18:10
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And so i I look at the element of wind right now and I just see this element of grace. It's this element of clearing, of purifying, of descending, of bringing in what's needed, right? um And so I think for me, grace is in every moment. It's about being aware and being present to it.
00:18:34
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Grace, as for me, doesn't feel like it ever goes away. It's just a matter of, am I distracted or am I paying attention? And if I pay attention- is it though?
00:18:47
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What is this thing we call grace that's here all the time? Yeah, I don't know if grace wants to be named. I don't know if grace wants to be captured in that way. But I do know that what I sense in my body as a felt sense,
00:19:07
Speaker
tells me that grace is present and that I am paying attention. It is that Bob that you feel after or during an incredible Kirtan with someone who's really connected.
00:19:20
Speaker
It's just pause for a sec. So Kirtan is singing often in Sanskrit names, different names for expressions of divine energy flow. And Bob is a mood or a feeling tone that gets a vote like the feeling tone where you might be experiencing now or you experienced during the the practice that Tracy led us through.
00:19:40
Speaker
Go on. Thank you for that. um And it can also be the awe that you feel when you are in a beautiful place and you're at the top of a mountain and you're looking down and,
Attention Economy and Abundance Perspective
00:19:52
Speaker
or you see a beautiful raven flying, you know, ahead of you or above you and you call out and to try to mimic the raven and the mi the raven mimics back to you, right? It's like all of those things are grace.
00:20:07
Speaker
It's the a baby smiling for the first time, right? It's holding someone's hand as they're taking their last breath. Our whole life is full of grace. The problem that I see is that there's this attention economy.
00:20:22
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Our attention is worth a lot of money. And there's so many forces at play that want us to look in a different direction so that we can buy the next thing that's going to make us feel worthy.
00:20:33
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And when that happens, we lose our connection to grace.
00:20:43
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I have been, I just finished a gorgeous book last night, listening actually to it on Audible of a woman I met in Lake Como a couple of months ago at a seminar, a Donnie Epstein seminar, small thing, and it's called The End of Scarcity. And she comes from the world of money management, big money management.
00:21:03
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And for a number of years, she was going around the world, interviewing and going to seminars with major economists and whatnot to really track What she has recognized is the difference between the debt money system or the debt economy and the abundance economy.
00:21:23
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And maybe I've heard this and I didn't remember it, or you have, or many of you listeners might already know this and I'm just kind of late to the table. I didn't realize that every dollar of our, that we have represents a dollar of somebody else's debt in most countries with rare exceptions.
00:21:41
Speaker
And so in order for there to be money, there has to be debt. And that creates a particular energetic, I'm tying this back to the breath and being worthy of a breath. All the things that I see, and my students are or friends can feel unworthy of how much of that was socially programmed in because we live in a debt money system. If we lived in a world of plenty that was reflected back to us from birth to coffin,
00:22:11
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Would we have these questions about being worthy of love, of breath, of rest, of joy, of making art instead of like grinding away at something? What are your thoughts and feelings?
00:22:23
Speaker
Yeah, i mean, this is what I see all the time. i think that you know you have this beautiful Srividya yantra behind you. And what Srividya reminds me of and um is this idea of being able to dissolve inner poverty.
00:22:44
Speaker
and to welcome inner abundance, which is already here. And so we can think about this idea of inner poverty as a samskara, as a construct, as a thought construct, as a belief system, as something that has been fed to us, which it has. And you just talked about it. It's been fed to us intentionally because it's a way to keep things growing in the economy. It's a way to market. It's a way to sell things.
00:23:11
Speaker
And so You know, what I would say is, I think that, and first of love the title of this book, The End of Scarcity, because the delusion is is that there's not enough, right? So I have to compete against you because there's not enough.
00:23:33
Speaker
There's not enough space for two teachers to teach Tantra in the world. So I have to compete against Scott. Or I have to you know something has to happen.
00:23:46
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And I start to feel a sense of lack because you're thriving or vice versa. Right. And that sense of lack doesn't allow me to connect to my clarity.
00:23:59
Speaker
It doesn't allow me to connect to grace. Right. And that is not to say that there are not people who are suffering in the world because there are and systems are in place, as you just illustrated with this person's idea for her book to keep people at the bottom so that other people can have more than what is needed to survive.
00:24:23
Speaker
Right. And I think that we're starting to hopefully see, and I think we did see a little bit of this coming during the pandemic, where there was real scarcity.
00:24:37
Speaker
There was a lack of food. There was a lack of you know X, Y and Z. And what happened in neighborhoods where people didn't know their neighbors or hadn't spoken to their neighbors is neighborhoods started to band together. They were growing food in certain places. They were sharing food. They were sharing they were canning.
00:24:56
Speaker
They were sharing recipes. They were, you know, the person who was the nurse on the block was coming and seeing people. These were the things that were happening because and people started to realize that there was actually abundance, that we all have a gift. And if we can all show up with our gift, then everything can be in the right order.
00:25:17
Speaker
And the last part of what I'll share about this is that Until we start to realize that we and the earth are the same consciousness as Thich Nhat Hanh talked about,
00:25:30
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And as you realize, perhaps, when you are on that walk or and you are feeling grace, that maybe it is that you're feeling the connection between yourself and the earth and that you are earth.
Community and Collaboration in Growth
00:25:44
Speaker
Once that connection has been reestablished in a really real way, then i believe we can know what true abundance is, even if it means this life cycle is ending.
00:25:59
Speaker
Mm hmm. I love what that evokes for me as I listen to you. What it evokes for me is the sense of seeing you as though I'm a witness kind of in the sky, watching you sit in nature, simply quieting enough softening enough to be available to recognize how everything in the biosphere is collaborating with everything without having to have thought in the middle to figure anything out. It's just a natural collaborative flow.
00:26:35
Speaker
And so what I hear is the invitation to re-recognize that for us, that the that the poverty, the suffering is is getting lost in this attentional mechanism of something's missing and something's wrong And all the research I'm coming across from whether it's Humankind, that book, or can't remember the earlier one that was similar, Sapiens.
00:26:59
Speaker
they've deep They've debunked these theories like that we are actually... competitive out to get each other. In fact, at the end of Kristen's book, the end of scarcity, she talks about how darn darn was misquoted. He only in two small places mentioned survival of the fittest, but what he's really teaching about is the fitness to collaborate the fitness of all truths and the fitness that we have that we naturally like pandemic.
00:27:27
Speaker
We come together. We want to collaborate. It's just part of the nature of nature moving through us. Absolutely. And unfortunately, right now, we only see it in catastrophe for the most part, unless someone is creating an intentional community.
00:27:44
Speaker
You see it, you you know we saw it in nine eleven we saw We see it every time there's a tornado or there's a you know some sort of catastrophe that's happening. um and you know whatever is happening right now with the climate, we're going to see this more and more.
00:28:04
Speaker
And so the time is really now to start to recognize this. Because I really do think that community is what is going to save us. Being in community, being in collaboration, being in conversation with people, no matter if you agree with them politically or don't agree with them politically, but bringing humanity back into the equation.
00:28:34
Speaker
It seems, and i'm i I've watched this in my own life, I've watched it in others' lives who I work with, and definitely had the articulation in my more recent deep studies with Donnie Epstein that most of us have required unconsciously pain to crack us open to our gifts and what we're here for and the nature of reality.
00:28:56
Speaker
And he's been very clear about articulating that that's ah what he calls first tear energetic and so In next tier energetics, we don't require pain to continue to grow or to realign.
00:29:11
Speaker
And I feel like that's what I notice in consistent long-term practice.
00:29:18
Speaker
And I mean transformative practice and not, it doesn't have to be Sri Vidya or Tantra. It could be some other practice. It could be a Western esoteric tradition, so many options, but that the real transformative practice dissolves the veils, dissolves the illusions of separation.
00:29:40
Speaker
And then we're naturally all about everyone thriving as opposed to what do I need to do to get what I need for my people? Exactly.
00:29:52
Speaker
um I definitely feel like pain is a portal, discomfort is a portal. ah goodness knows that I have been very hardheaded in my life and had to have had pain in order to grow more times than I care to admit.
00:30:10
Speaker
But, you know, at some point, um if you're paying attention, you become attuned to when the pain is coming, when the discomfort is coming, right?
00:30:22
Speaker
And you allow yourself to begin to make changes before it's I don't want to say too late, but before the pain gets so dis uncomfortable that the pain of changing is actually more, ah you know, kind of ah it's it's just the thing that you want to do rather than than the pain of staying the same.
Imaginal Cells and Personal Transformation
00:30:48
Speaker
Right. So the pain of staying the same is just like, okay, I have to do something now. I can't stay the same because this is too painful. So I'm willing to go through the threshold to change. And I feel like the more and more you practice, the more and more aware you become The more you remember, the more you remember, which I think, you know, yoga in itself and practices like meditation and yoga nidra are smirty practices. And this word smirty means memory or retention, but it's not memory in the way that we think about memory or retention, like, oh I'm memorizing information.
00:31:23
Speaker
It's the remembrance of the true self. Right. So if I can remember the last time I had a painful lesson and I learned from that lesson, then I can actually take that lesson forward and continue the transformation instead of going back and being like, oh, I thought I learned that lesson five years ago, but here I am again, learning it one more time.
00:31:47
Speaker
And this goes back to the idea of distraction. When we are distracted by all the apps and all the shows and all the things, and it's not to say, you know don't go on Instagram, don't watch Netflix, but when you are distracted by that,
00:32:02
Speaker
and you can't pull your distraction away to be attentive and present to something else, it causes you to forget about the pain that happened.
00:32:13
Speaker
So it becomes more difficult to see the pain that's coming and avoid the pain that's coming. You know, and it's not to say that we can always avoid pain because there's always going to be pain, but the self-imposed pain the things that we do to create pain for ourselves, we can definitely start to avoid with practice and just presence.
00:32:40
Speaker
I recently heard, and I want to do some looking around about the research of it, that we have imaginal cells, the same imaginal cells of a butterfly in our physical heart. Have you heard that?
00:32:52
Speaker
I have heard that. One of my teachers, Akadama, uh, talked about that many years ago about these imaginal cells. Yeah. I remember that. Huh?
00:33:04
Speaker
That's fantastically evocative. Like I've been fascinated by and considered for couple of decades, the butterfly, particularly the blue morpho butterfly to be the mascot of my work.
00:33:17
Speaker
It's the only creature, the butterfly that I know of that goes from one Beingness, one concrete beingness, a caterpillar melts down in a hot goo and becomes something entirely different.
00:33:35
Speaker
But the entirely different was already there in cellular form, just waiting for the right conditions, causes and nourishment to burst forth. Absolutely.
00:33:48
Speaker
I mean, I think we're all we're all waiting for the right conditions. But the thing is, we have to create help create the conditions. Bam, that right there. Triple click.
00:34:00
Speaker
There's got to be a place where the where the butterfly decides to rest.
00:34:06
Speaker
Right. In order to go into the cocoon, if the butterfly decides to just keep on flying through the the winter, it's going to die. Somehow there's something encoded in that in that butterfly's DNA, I'm supposing right now, that it knows and it's connected to the seasons.
00:34:26
Speaker
It's connected to the atmosphere. So it knows, oh, it's time. We don't listen to the seasons. We don't listen to the light. We don't listen to what the earth is telling us.
00:34:38
Speaker
We just keep marching along and doing our thing and not caring about what the signs are. So how can we create the conditions if we're not listening, if we're not present?
00:34:51
Speaker
What that evokes for me is that we've lost touch with the profound nourishment of intimacy.
00:35:03
Speaker
And when we're nourished by intimacy, whether that's with a tree in my back against a giant redwood, whether that's holding my friend's dog on the street yesterday in my arms, whether that's being with a chosen beloved, like the fulfillment of that intimacy
00:35:26
Speaker
seems to transform how we view any moment.
00:35:31
Speaker
Yeah. And I think the reframe, and I'm grateful for um just remembering, because I think that a lot of times when people hear the word intimacy, they think it means that it's an intimacy with another person.
00:35:45
Speaker
um It may be even in a sexual way. Right. And there are many beings that are more than human that want us to be intimate with them.
00:36:00
Speaker
you know And what you can what you can learn is part of what the butterfly knows.
00:36:14
Speaker
Something wants to ask more about the beings that are more than human that want us to be intimate with them. What more is wanting to be said about that?
00:36:27
Speaker
Oh, I think that it's something... that needs to be experienced and can be experienced just by walking slowly, let's say through the forest and watching and listening.
00:36:43
Speaker
And are you actually walking through the forest? Are you looking at the trees or are the trees looking at you?
The Importance of Love and Intimacy
00:36:53
Speaker
What would it be like to let the creative power of life freely walk my body instead of my historical condition ways of making shapes and gestures awkwardly move my form and like the freedom to just like how the limbs let go it's like a i don't know if this is skillful to say or not but like a moving yoga nidra i love that as best i can describe yeah
00:37:22
Speaker
Teresa, there's a question I ask every guest. and You may have heard this quote. It's based on a famous quote from Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, who opened the Zen Center of San Francisco in the 60s.
00:37:34
Speaker
Very, very awake being, very loving being. And he said, death is certain, the time is not. What is the most important thing?
00:37:45
Speaker
What does that evoke for you? Love.
00:37:54
Speaker
Love is the most important thing. um, one of the practices that I love to do, there's really two practices that I love to do. I do one generally every birthday, um, which is writing my own eulogy.
00:38:12
Speaker
Every birthday, every birthday, writing my own eulogy. Does it change year year? It does change. It does change year to year.
00:38:23
Speaker
Um, and kind of looking at the things that I left undone that I wanted to do,
00:38:34
Speaker
amongst other things. And then there's a practice that I received from my friend who's a former Buddhist monk named Charlie Morley. And it really is a practice around impermanence.
00:38:47
Speaker
And it's in the luminous self. It's called the do and do not do practice. And it really asks you to kind of look at what would happen if you found out that you had just a few months to live and it brings you through this meditation and it becomes very clear very quickly what's important and it's a really great practice to do because it allows you to also see all the distractions that are not life-affirming because that list of things that you come up with is a life-affirming life-enhancing legacy list
00:39:24
Speaker
And what you decide to not do are all the things that we could actually stop doing right now instead of waiting until later in life. That is a mic drop right there. and Let's just take a moment and breathe, everybody.
00:39:38
Speaker
There's the list of things that we could stop doing. We could stop doing right now. and how much energy would that but the things we really want to be touched by in the ordinary Well, love that you just asked that question because it takes us back to the beginning meditation of the space between.
00:39:59
Speaker
Right. Is that that spaciousness that is created by letting go of the distractions and releasing things that are depleting to us and relationships also that are depleting to us.
00:40:10
Speaker
It allows more space for grace. And in that space of grace, there is creativity, there is joy, there is intimacy. There are all these things that bring an aliveness to us that can't be bought.
00:40:24
Speaker
It cannot be sold to us. It's already here. We just need to create the space for it.
Urgency, Simplification, and Clarity
00:40:39
Speaker
Another thing that's evoked right now is how urgency like tremendous urgency can open a doorway in consciousness. I am here in Los Angeles and was here during the most recent set of fires. And Tracy, you were here formerly living in Topanga Canyon where you had to deal with it I was next in the set, get set to evacuate for the Hollywood fire. It was terrifying. I could see it from my my building.
00:41:06
Speaker
um And it was so clarifying. Like i actually wouldn't miss out on having had that experience. It's terrifying that my nervous system was in high fight or flight for a few days.
00:41:19
Speaker
And, you know, I got help around that. But like I learned so much about what you're saying about what's really important, what actually matters. Yeah. I mean, you you know, I lived in Topanga for like 14 years and we were evacuated of for fires probably four or five times the whole time that we lived there.
00:41:43
Speaker
Wow. I know the candle to you. And so, you know, you learn very quickly, especially if you don't have what's called a go bag. I think everybody pretty much at this point knows what a go bag is.
00:41:56
Speaker
But if you don't have a go bag, you learn very quickly, as you just pointed out, what's important for me to take with me? Am i really going to take this closet full of clothes and shoes?
00:42:07
Speaker
And I don't think so. Well, girl, I'm going to say it was really hard to look at all the certain things like the leather coat, the da-da-da-da-da-da, go, what if it all goes away?
00:42:19
Speaker
Just being honest. As a practice, when you when you live through that a couple of times, And then you you create your go bag, right? You make your go bag and you say, okay, here's my go bag.
00:42:31
Speaker
These are the things, these are the pictures. These are the the license, the passport, the special thing that my teacher gave me 25 years ago.
00:42:42
Speaker
so that These are the things that if I have to start over with absolutely no possessions, this is what's important to me. And when you go through that exercise, or at least in my experience, when I went through that exercise of creating the go bag, it was like, oh, it might be time to give away a third of my possessions because I really don't need all of these sweaters and I'm never going to walk back into CAA again. So I definitely don't need these cute shoes and boots because, ah you know, I'm holding my old work wardrobe.
00:43:17
Speaker
Let it go. And that also created space.
00:43:25
Speaker
So listeners, what could you consider? Not like a should, and certainly not like a transaction, like you put your money in a vending machine and you get a blessing, but like what what might be ready to be moved on into the hands of somebody who could make benefit of that thing or be kept warm with that thing or nourished and fed by that thing? Like what could be offered as an offering?
00:43:50
Speaker
back to life itself by putting it in other hands that could make good use of it.
00:43:57
Speaker
I love that you are posing this, uh, inquiry because this is really talking back to what we talked about earlier is our collective abundance.
00:44:13
Speaker
Kristen talks in the book about the abundance world that's possible for us.
Wealth, Poverty, and Abundance Perception
00:44:20
Speaker
And she says, and this is my experience too, if we just think about and a neighborhood of people, the huge amount of wealth, of abilities, gifts, capacities, tools, so many, but if we're measuring everything,
00:44:37
Speaker
wealth by debt dollars, you know, the currency of the country, you know, euros or dollars, then we think we're poor.
00:44:48
Speaker
If we don't have a so certain amount of those dollars in our bank account, when the reality is we are profoundly wealthy and in the sharing of our wealth, we find out just how wealthy we are
00:45:02
Speaker
Yes, yes. I mean, i can relate this um to my time in Hollywood. and And I really appreciate the fact and I'm grateful for the fact that I found yoga the year I decided to become an intern at a production company, because I think if I didn't have yoga,
00:45:23
Speaker
And the philosophies of yoga, the philosophies of yoga, specifically Sutra 136, that tells us that there's a place inside of us that is effulgent, luminous, and beyond all sorrow.
00:45:39
Speaker
And that that was the thing that took me deeper into my studies, specifically finding a teacher that could lead me to this place. What I realized in being in Hollywood and working with all these A-list movie stars, because I was like the action movie producer, it was,
00:45:59
Speaker
oh this enormous amount of wealth. And there's still this inner poverty. There's still this I'm not enoughness.
00:46:12
Speaker
There's still this I'm not going to be good enough until this movie hits this amount of money. there's still this scarcity. There's still this, I'm going to surround myself with a bunch of people who are only extracting from me because I have such a deep need to be seen and adulated.
00:46:38
Speaker
And that was a really key moment in my spiritual practice and life of realizing this Hollywood life is not where it's at.
00:46:52
Speaker
So I accumulate all these titles and movies and producer and blah, blah, blah, blah. blah And I'm still buying into the same system that tells me I'm not good enough.
00:47:05
Speaker
I still don't have enough.
00:47:12
Speaker
And so the people that know and have known And I think living in Africa, living in South Africa was also a mirror to this.
00:47:24
Speaker
The people I knew who had the least, who we would consider to be quote unquote poor, in so many ways were the most joyful, the most giving.
00:47:37
Speaker
you know i told a story on my substack a couple of months ago about being in South Africa, being invited to the village of Umtata by a friend, which is a very small village. It happens to be the birthplace of Nelson Mandela.
00:47:53
Speaker
And I got on the plane from Cape Town um you know as an American with all all the things. And i had a bottle of water and it was a sweltering day. And I got on the plane and it was so hot, had the bottle of water in my hand.
00:48:10
Speaker
And i quickly realized because all the ah kind of announcements were in Afrikaans that the the program was you let all the elders go first, all the elders go and they sit down.
00:48:23
Speaker
And it was interesting because you know how in America we're like kicking each other to try to get to the seat and can't wait to our turn. and an elder man, he at the time I kind of thought maybe he was in his eighty s he took the water bottle out of my hand unscrewed the top, took a swig, and somebody else took the bottle from him. And maybe three or four, five people took a swig.
00:48:48
Speaker
And then eventually I got the bottle back. And at first I was horrified. I was like, who is this person taking my bottle of water? And by the time I got the water back, which had just enough for me to have sip of water, I realized, oh, if I have water, everybody on this plane has water.
00:49:08
Speaker
That's how it works here. I have something or somebody else has something that we need. Everybody has it. And everybody takes just enough for them to get their one sip and everybody gets their sip and then the water comes back and I have my sip.
Personal Growth and Collective Contribution
00:49:28
Speaker
And it's enough.
00:49:34
Speaker
just wanna invite us all into it a pause here, just to breathe, maybe soften the body and just notice what you're feeling and how you're feeling about what you're feeling here in this story.
00:49:50
Speaker
And how you're being moved right now
00:49:56
Speaker
and the hours after listening to this, that something wants to come through you in a new and fresh way. with the recognition of the wholeness and divinity of all of life.
00:50:13
Speaker
Something, Tracy, I know from reading your books and just from the power of what comes through you is that you, like many of us, have been cracked open at an early age. There's a story that Tracy shares about being, I was heavily bullied as a child from kindergarten nonor
00:50:34
Speaker
Mostly because I think I was like a puppy who had huge legs and did something and how they worked means like my energy was just kind of like all over the place. And my parents didn't know how to, you know, co-regulate nervous systems. Tracy tells a story about getting on the bus with these mean girls cracking an egg on her head and then taking herself later in life through a ritual to release that.
00:50:58
Speaker
And why I'm teasing this story out in a little bit more detail is I recognize one of the primary forms of pain and limitation most of us experience are we we get fixated the event that cracked us open rather than that we got cracked open to grace and what what we can now live, embody, and share and this is in no way to diminish the intensity of trauma that any of us experience but we tend to fixate on memory in words which is not even entirely accurate
00:51:34
Speaker
what have you noticed in your own life in in the reckoning through your nervous system your body and your relationships of your experience of your past with the real
00:51:49
Speaker
all
00:51:53
Speaker
That's such a deep question, yeah which I love. And I want to take us a little bit back to the beginning where you asked about samskara, because this is a perfect way to illustrate the samskara. So getting on the bus, having these ah mean girl bullies who didn't like the way I wore my hair decide to jump me on the bus and crack eggs in my hair, left me with the samskara, the impression, the imprint.
00:52:24
Speaker
that it wasn't safe to be seen. It wasn't safe to be different. It wasn't safe to be good at school and successful. And then in fact, it was safer to become invisible.
00:52:40
Speaker
So that's the samskara that I was walking around with is, you know what? It's much safer to be invisible. And I really would even say that I chose um a career by working in Hollywood as a producer behind the scenes because it was safe not to be seen.
00:53:01
Speaker
And I would go to my own premieres at the Chinese man's or wherever whatever restaurant the party was happening and I would sit in the corner. I would literally sit in the corner.
00:53:15
Speaker
And the other you know assistant producers, associate producers were all like, hey, my movie. ah And I was completely happy to sit and not be seen.
00:53:29
Speaker
And so at some point in um having to learn lessons over and over and feeling the pain I decided i needed to sit and really figure out what is the source of some of this pain that I'm experiencing.
00:53:48
Speaker
And through a series of practices, and some of those practices are in the Luminous Self, I did ah kind of a timeline rewind where I went back to this source of pain of being rejected by my peers,
00:54:06
Speaker
rejected, hurt, bullied. And oh, well, this is why it feels tight in my body and constricted in my body.
00:54:18
Speaker
Every time I think of going big and doing something that my heart is calling me to. So it's this, you know, kind of dichotomy of being in deep practice and experiencing grace and having the clarity of oh, here's this gift that you have, and here's this message that is coming through of what you need to share and how you need to be fully yourself and how you can be fully at yourself.
00:54:45
Speaker
But then the constriction of, well, well no, I can't be fully myself because it's not safe for me to be fully myself. And so it kind of descended in a moment of clarity, you need to do a ritual where you go back in time and you reclaim that moment of having that egg smashed on your head as a moment of initiating yourself into power. You need to take the power that you gave to these girls, which was the power of, you know, I can't remember how old I was at the time. I'm going to say that would have been like maybe 20 something years, 27 years of being invisible.
00:55:29
Speaker
You gave them that power and that was, you know, you were in seventh grade and they're still holding that power because you gave it to them. It's time for you to take and reclaim that power back.
00:55:44
Speaker
And so that was how that ritual came to be. And then at the same time, what I realized later is that I actually was gifted a city in that experience.
00:56:02
Speaker
What's a city? oh we could say a city is is a special power. it's one It's one of the powers that come from practicing yoga.
00:56:13
Speaker
And there's this, there's a power, two powers that are called anima and manima. The power to make yourself absolutely huge, huger than the world, huger than the earth, and this power to make yourself smaller than an atom.
00:56:31
Speaker
Well, I had already learned how to make myself smaller than an atom because I could disappear at my own film premiere. And I was ready to make myself big and to be seen.
00:56:44
Speaker
And so what I would say is if it wasn't for the realization of samskara and the download of how it needed to be eradicated, not only with the the ritual, but with moment to moment awareness as much as I could muster to notice every single time that it started to creep back in.
00:57:09
Speaker
That I wouldn't have been able to step up and be on a stage at, let's say, Wanderlust with a thousand people in front of me. Because shortly after I did that ritual, I got a call from Wanderlust, the wellness company at the time,
00:57:29
Speaker
to come and teach to a thousand people. I got a call to go on with Oprah and Gail and teach in front of 2,500 people. That never would have happened.
00:57:40
Speaker
And it's not that I wouldn't have gotten the offer. I wouldn't have accepted. in i would not have accepted. There's not a chance.
00:57:57
Speaker
So that being said, I think this this life is all about looking at ways in which we're stuck, right? and And letting the distractions release so that we can find the grace to find the answers, to find the the person, to find the therapist, to find the teacher, to find the right place to sit, to find the right partner that is going to hold the space for us to be able to be intimate with ourselves first.
00:58:31
Speaker
And then that can expand out into all parts of our life.
Closing and Gratitude
00:58:38
Speaker
A thousand percent yes. thousand percent yes.
00:58:44
Speaker
There's so many things I would love to dialogue with you about. I'm feeling like we're coming to a natural completion of this particular dialogue. and i just want to and won't normally say this in these dialogues but here it feels appropriate given what we've been discussing when i say i'm sensing the natural end it's not like simply because the clock looks a certain way or or i want to go eat some toast or something like that it's more like just this noticing There's an awareness of how much I'm loving being with you, Tracy, right? Like that's so filling. This is just such a nourishing shared space.
00:59:21
Speaker
And there's just the subtle knowing it's time to move towards completion and to not push against that, to not fight that, to not grasp for some idea or illusion of more.
00:59:36
Speaker
So good. Yeah. I mean, this is observing the spaces in between. right It's like your ability to be able to drop into the spaces in between and pause and sit there is masterful.
00:59:52
Speaker
It's what you practice. We don't have to fill it with something. And I think if you if if you look at the sound waves of this know talk that we've had, there's a lot of silence.
01:00:07
Speaker
It's not an awkward silence. Awkward silence is only when you feel like you need to fill something. So thank you so much for not needing to fill the space.
01:00:20
Speaker
Yeah, this this is a love fest that is ongoing. And i I invite you listeners to put your deepest questions in the comments.
01:00:34
Speaker
And that will likely draw us into a next meeting together. where we can explore those questions together. Tracy, I treasure interacting with you. a treasure that you're one of my sacred peers and what a gift it is to have a peer.
01:00:52
Speaker
Yeah. That's so true. Thank you so much. i really appreciate you and all that you bring to the world.
01:01:02
Speaker
To be continued.
01:01:06
Speaker
Loving the episode? Click to follow, like, and share it as widely as possible. Want to go deeper with the choice to grow? Explore the show notes. You'll find links there for going deeper with our guests, as well as how to work with me in the work of waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up.
01:01:27
Speaker
Thanks for listening. Can't wait to join you in the next episode.