Embodying the Passionate Presence with Catherine Ingram

Welcome to Mama Goddess. I'm your host, Alexandra J. Johnson. This podcast is all about rocking your goddess life, creating vibrant health, and celebrating motherhood and family life. It's about living an authentically awesome life. Let's have some fun. Welcome. I'm Alexandra J. Johnson, and today we have a wonderful guest, Katherine Ingram. Catherine is an author, and she's also an international dharma teacher. She leads silent retreats, meditation retreats, and she is fantastic. And I love her book, which I have right here, passionate presence. And I just gotta say, I. Every time I open this book, I read it a couple years ago, and every time I open the book and look at my underlines and my notes, I feel like there is, like, a sacred transmission like this book. I just love it every time I open up the book. I think Kathryn is a really fantastic human being, and I really love her work. So welcome, Catherine.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Yeah, I'm so happy. This is our first time meeting, but every time I read this and go through it, I'm like, she's an amazing human being. She definitely. I don't know, I just find your book very sacred.

That's lovely. You know, I have a sense that the reason that it makes sense to you and that you have that experience is because that's already written in your own heart. So there's a resonance, because some people could read it and just think, I don't get it. But others who are kind of on that channel, you know, on that channel of. Of, you know, kindness and wisdom and the basic things we value, they get.

It, and I think it's great because it just. It brings us back. For me, it brings me back to me. Like you said, like, there's a feeling of coming home, of, Ah, yes, that's exactly. Even if I couldn't articulate it, you articulate it so beautifully that I'm like, yes, that's it. Beautiful. Fantastic. So I would love to start off with meditation for those people who don't know what meditation is and your Dharma dialogues and just kind of a little bit background on your work and why you do what you do and what you do.

Okay. I was a seeker for much of my youth, really starting when I was 12 years old. And, you know, this was, of course, born of suffering, as many of the searches are. And so eventually that led me to Buddhist meditation. By the time I was maybe 21, 22 years old, I had discovered basically Asian philosophy and, in particular, Buddhist meditation. And I began that practice and was involved with a whole community, a worldwide community of Buddhist practitioners who remain to this day, many of whom are my oldest, closest friends. So I was involved in that for maybe 17 years and this one of the managers of many of the retreats. I would spend my life between managing the retreats and then sitting the retreats, and then in between we would do these exotic trips to Asia and various places. So it was a grand old life in a fantastic community. There came a point when the striving, at least as I interpreted it in my own self, began to be questioned. And I also began to question just a lot of the beliefs inherent in Buddhism, especially in those days. Now there's a lot more flexibility about the beliefs and there's Stephen Bachelor's fine Buddhism without beliefs. But in any case, between the intensity of the practice and it laden with certain types of beliefs, all of this kind of fell away. And I went through a real dark night of the soul that lasted a couple of years. And then I began hearing about this teacher in India named Punjaji, and I went there to meet him. I was a journalist in those days, kind of a consciousness journalist, which I only adopted as a career so that I could have access to anyone I wanted and so picked my own mentors. So I went to meet Khunjaji with my old trick of being a journalist and doing an interview which we published in Yoga Journal. And in that meeting I began to open to the possibility of a kind of perspective or an experiential way to hold my attention really as a way of life, not just as a meditation practice per se, but as a lived, ongoing experience. And that perspective is the understanding that in this very now that you and I are having this conversation, none of these words are sticking, none of our thoughts are stuck. Everything is a free flow through our awareness. And that was an incredibly exhilarating recognition. I know it seems simple and obvious, but it was very, very fantastic to experience in his presence. And he was such a powerful transmitter of that experience that you couldn't help but, I mean, you literally could not hold a thought. And so you got used to being in this company. You got used to this sense of truly a very powerful, passionate presence and a great aliveness. So that experience with him was very formative. It's not that I landed in some big enlightenment, which I don't even believe in. It's not like I landed in some kind of consistent state of that passionate presence. But the entrainment began whereby even to this day, 20 years later, it's continually deepening in that and that it just becomes more habituated. And I like to say in my sessions, you know, it doesn't have to be all the time. It can just be a lot of the time to really transform your life. If a lot of the time you're flowing this understanding or in this perspective, or in this rather ease of being, you don't even have to think about it as your habit of mind, of attention, your life will be gently transformed.

Hmm.

So that's the thumbnail sketch.

That's fantastic. I love that. I love the, you know, because we live in such a fast paced, intellectual, mind racing culture, it's like revolutionary to imagine, like you said, you can't hold on to a thought or it's just like awareness flowing through you. That sounds pretty pleasurable and delicious.

Yes, absolutely it is. And even in the hard times, even in the difficult moments, because you have this flow habit whereby your awareness is constantly flowing like water over rocks, you handle the difficulties in a very graceful way. And it's not that they don't hurt or that they're not in some cases grief ridden like that. You're, you're experiencing it through a quietness of heart with no resistance and no big battle with reality.

So you said that you don't have to do it all the time or you don't have to be, because I think there's this idea that we need to be in this state of oneness every single moment. So I love that you said that. Just most of the time. A lot of the time.

A lot of the time is good enough. A lot of the time is fine. Yeah. And sometimes you're in neurosis or in old fears or in regrets or worries or whatever. Okay. That's part of being human and that's allowed. Freedom can handle it.

And do you find that in order to allow this awareness to flow through us, is meditation? How does meditation help with that? And what is meditation?

Let's consider a new way to talk about meditation. And that is simply that you, you are directing your attention. Now a lot of times people hear the word meditation and they picture the classic sitting on the cushion, right? Legs crossed, eyes closed, etc. And that may be a perfectly fine way to spend some time for some people. They may love that. I don't find spending a whole lot of time in that position necessarily useful for myself. And I've done a lot of it in the past. I do it some in my residential retreats. We do have a few short periods through the day, like maybe altogether, maybe three half hour sittings altogether in the day. But there's an emphasis on living in this awake, alive presence. And in our retreats, they're silent, with the exception of a few conversations in the group setting, but otherwise silent. So you're really in your own stream of awareness, experiencing sights and sounds and smells and so on as what I like to call an awake animal. Just simply that. And you start to get used to that, just roaming around, prowling around as creature who's very, very awake and who is just being caressed by existence through the day. And that's my idea of a living meditation. Not something you do occasionally on a cushion, but rather a way of life, a perspective, a way that you're using your own attention. Right.

Yeah. That's amazing. I love that. Because, like you said, it's not for everyone. You know, I've done the silent meditation retreats for 10 days, you know, meditating, I don't know, 12 hours a day or whatever it is. And I found I loved it. And it was challenging. And I could get into that flow of awareness about day five or six. But I felt like I wanted more like, movement. Like, I felt like I could connect to myself and to that awareness through movement and to not have the movement and certain things like that. I felt it was restricting.

I agree. And actually now there's quite a lot of evidence to show that that kind of sedentary sitting is incredibly unhealthy for your body. And I kind of knew that when I was going through all those years. I knew that this wasn't so good. Fortunately, I was young and my body was strong, but I would not recommend doing that now. So, yeah, at our retreats, there's quite a bit of walking and there's two yoga sessions a day. And, you know, there's plenty of. Plenty of movement because I recognize that you can be just as clear and open. People have profound insights as they're walking in nature. You know, just profound and incredible interconnectedness as well. You know, feelings of belonging.

Right. And I love that you add silence, you know, that you not add. But that is a component of it, that silence is so crucial.

Yeah, it's an empty. It allows this emptying out. Really what it does, you just empty out. Because when you're not having to sort of be somebody and engage the personality and, you know, have conversation in which there's a sort of. I mean, the ego material inevitably arises often, you know. So with all of that off the table, you know, you really can just get down to basics. You know, there's a great line in my book, you've probably read it. But someone at one of my retreats, at a nine day retreat on about day seven, he said, he said in the session, he said, this morning I got up to shave. And he said, I looked in the mirror and I didn't recognize the face, but I shaved it anyway.

That's awesome.

You kind of lose your story about who you are and what you think and what you believe and all your opinions and what happened to you and what might happen. It all just drops away and there you are in this kind of freshness whereby you're kind of a mystery to your own self and you start looking at the world through innocent eyes.

Yeah, I love that. So what if you know somebody who's watching this and me included, what do you recommend to get into this meditation as a way of life, to be immersed in this awareness? Do you have like daily practices or some guidance around tapping into that?

Well, it's a perspective that you can recognize just here and now and that you can then decide to adapt. And now there are all kinds of ways to be reminded in that adaptation. And you can. There are plenty of wonderful teachers who are very onto this particular way of seeing it. Eckhart Tolle comes to mind. There's a guy, Rupert Spira, I hear is incredible. My friend Gangaji, many people, my retreats as well. And we all have plenty of materials, CDs and so on. I don't want to be trying to sell a bunch of stuff, but I'm just saying there are supportive materials for people to kind of get on the wavelength enough watch stuff online to get just tuned into this channel such that then you find yourself, you know, sitting on a bus, let's just say as an example. And suddenly you realize you're just there, you're just hanging out, watching the scenery. Goodbye. Or you're taking a shower and you just realize that for the last few hours, perhaps you've just been hanging out in your own delicious taste of existence and you begin to realize, hey, this is becoming a bit more habitual. And if you feel supported by say taking a walk in nature or doing a sitting practice, then by all means do. If that's how you access, if that's how you get yourself more reminded. But the goal, I would say, if there is a goal, is to have it translate into your everyday existence, your so called ordinary life, and to let that sparkle with this kind of perspective, this kind of attention and intention.

Yeah. Beautiful. I just love talking to you. Of course, it would be like so great to talk to you, because I love your book so much, but you're just. I can feel that you have that, you know, like you are. You've been practicing it for what, 30 years?

40?

Some.

Yeah. More close to 40, I guess.

That's so inspiring. Very inspiring. So I'd love to talk about. Well, what's just coming up for me too is you're just talking about the delicious and being on the bus. There's this idea of pleasure, you know, just pleasure in our daily lives. And for most of us, we think of pleasure and it's going out and doing something, going to dinner, having some wine, some chocolate, or going to see a show and all these things. But just as you're talking, I feel like there's like this pleasure within. Can you talk a little bit about tapping into the pleasure within that? All the other stuff is great if you want to go do those things. But how do we truly connect to that pleasure within and just be pleasured by our existence?

Yes. Yes. The Sanskrit word sakshitananda comes to mind as you were speaking, which is the truth of the bliss of being, the truth of just the kind of the joy, the causeless joy, as it's sometimes called. Because one of the things that many of us maybe don't recognize or admit until the end is how much we actually do love life, right? We really secretly kind of love our life, you know, and sometimes people don't know that until they're threatened with losing it or something happens, you know, some illness or they're dying, you know, and then suddenly the world has this brightness to it that they had been overlooking, had. So this is a recognition of the ongoing. Basically the ongoing appreciation of your lived existence and that it's a privilege to be here. It's a privilege to be able to see and hear and have everything working and walk. And for those who don't have one of those or happening, they find other ways perhaps to be grateful and to love their own existence as it is. But often our minds are very busy on problems. And usually the problems are almost always entirely in imagination. Right? We're very good at dreaming up problems. Maybe there was some adaptive reason for evolution to have us go in that direction. But it seems to me now contraindicated for our health to be constantly gnawing on problems and fears of future or going over stories about the past. And as you pointed out earlier in this conversation, the speed up of our culture and of our lives is intensifying the swirl within the mind in so many different ways. And we're also hyper mediated. So we're not only dealing with our own imagery, we're dealing with a lot of imagery from elsewhere. So all of this is creating, I think, a lot more tension, anxiety and stress and madness in the culture will psychosis. We have to be very, very watchful of that to not drink in all of that negativity without any kind of interruption and instead really be intentional in what one person calls taking in the good. Rick Hanson, who I think is on the same. Yeah, he gets his phrase, taking in the good, you know, or another way to say it is being grateful, which is an instantaneous switch into happiness. And all of us have an incredible list of things that we could be grateful for in the here and now. You won't have to go far afield to look for it. You can be right now, you know, be so grateful for all the riches in one's life, all of the love and the kindnesses and the tender mercies and the beauty and on and on and on. So it's an ongoing recognition. Part of this perspective or this streaming awareness is that it inclines itself to noticing the good, noticing the sweetnesses. It inclines itself in that direction. It does incline, deny. It's not Pollyannish in this regard, in that it doesn't deny difficulties or sorrows in the world. It allows those into the heart as well, but it doesn't collapse around them and freak out. You know, it just sees it much more as a whole picture.

Right. And like you said, there's the, as you were saying earlier, the reality of death, you know, and to really.

Like.

You said, we're gonna lose our lives. You know, you're faced with death and you're like, wow, there's like a tenderness, which I know is one of your qualities of just like heart opening. Oh my gosh, are these mental imaginations worth it?

Exactly. And you know, was it worth it to spend my whole life worrying about things that some happened, most didn't? I mean, just, you know, going over things that happened. What can you do? I mean. Yeah, so another, you know, I speak in my book about an awakened intelligence. Not just awakened awareness, but an intelligence that comes along with this relaxation into being. There's a kind of discernment that comes that is incredibly razor sharp and notices right away when you're obsessing about something that is useless to be obsessing about, that there's no good that's going to come about the succession. So it kind of cuts that easily and redirects the attention into Reality. Reality is always here, waiting to have.

The intention because I know, you know, we all. This sounds great and it's fantastic, but, you know, we can tend to get into those stories like we get into it. And do you just recommend being intentional and choosing to step out of the story consistently? And then it becomes. I know for me, it's become easier to step out the more that I step out.

Exactly. That's exactly what I recommend. I recommend interrupting that story any way you can. First try just going to present awareness, Feel your body, allow your senses to be awake, and start focusing on. On your actual lived experience in the moment. If the story is too strong and is trumping that, then move gently into gratitude. Like, just start distracting yourself off the negative story with delight in the things that delight you. If that also doesn't work, interrupt it. Any way you can turn on a movie, call a friend, go for a brisk walk, go for a run, interrupt it. The reason I suggest that you do that is that we now know in neuroscience there's a phrase that goes, the neurons that fire together wire together. So when you're having a deep experience of, say, negativity or depression or worry, and you're swirling a lot of thoughts on that subject and they're coming and you're interested in them, you're actually creating neural grooves that have with them chemical responses that then attract similar kinds of thoughts. So it's really good to interrupt that patterning. And the more you interrupt it, the more and create a different patterning, the stronger that more healthy patterning becomes. So as you just said, the more you do it, the more easy it becomes. But you can see with people, for instance, who are deeply and profoundly depressed and have been for years, you can sense that it's almost like their brain has got these tracks that it just keeps running on. You might have had the experience, experience, as I have had, whereby you're with a friend who tends to depression, and no matter how you get the conversation away from depressing thoughts and stories, somehow they keep drifting it back there as though it's almost like a magnet. And so it is very important to understand the brain physiology in this regard and the chemistry and to. And to work with that. Interrupt the patterning.

I love that. I love it. I love the steps that you gave us to do and then just interrupt it. So what are your thoughts on? Because there's a lot of ideas on allowing your feelings and kind of, what's the difference of allowing that your feelings and then knowing when you're allowing it or Being stuck in a story again.

With this discerning awareness, your discerning awareness will start to know, okay, this is enough. Right. It'll start to say, enough already. We've gone over this. So of course you don't want to repress feelings as they arise. Everything can be welcome as long as you have a sense that it's basically swishing through and it doesn't have to switch through immediately. Some things take a while to process. And you know that your psychological awareness is having to process something. Right. Let's say you found out a friend has betrayed you in some way. Right. There's the sting of hearing that news and then there's an organic sting, psychological process of working with that news and looking over what happened and how did it go and why might they have needed to do this, etc. These are all human ways of processing, and that's okay. But there comes a point, right, whereby, okay, that stories don't. You've mined it for every tiny bit of gem of insight you can find, and then there's a kind of bowing to the truth of it and letting it be. Letting it go or letting it goes anyway. It's not as if you have to let it go. You can move your attention elsewhere.

Right, Right. I love that too. The gem. You said the gem.

Gems of insight.

Gems of insight, you know, and really looking for that. Because I know if I'm looking for that, then I'm looking at the problem or the issue in a totally different way. If I'm not looking for the insight, I get locked in and critical and judgmental and this shouldn't have happened and all of that.

The injustice of it and on and on. Yes, Right. Yeah.

That's a great reminder. Like, okay, we're looking for insight. We're looking for deeper wisdom. We're not looking for petty criticisms.

Yeah, yeah. Even if, you know, I mean, even if part of the process is that you felt, you know, you felt some condemnation of someone, but you will probably move through it. You'll probably move through it in terms of how you see it. And there are circumstances with certain people whereby you can recognize. I love this line from Ken Keys. It's one of my favorite quotes. He said love is not necessarily. Love is not always necessarily a basis for involvement.

Right.

So sometimes we can love someone or even just have some kind of relationship with them, perhaps based in the past, but our paths have diverted for whatever reason. And sometimes it's because you find this person slightly dangerous in certain ways. There's a recognition that you have no more actual in person business. But there can be a softness in your heart around that recognition. It can be a kind of well wishing. Yeah.

And that takes some major mastery in my experience to really. I mean, I've had moments of it. But you know, there's definitely. It takes a certain level of awareness and intention to hold that space.

Yeah, it does. And it's also the understanding that, believe it or not, they were doing the best they could with what they knew at the time. And when you really know that, and you know that from your own experience actually, because, you know, the times you look back, wish you could have a play over, a do over, you know that you wouldn't do it that way now, you wouldn't have done it that way if you knew then what you now know. So having that in mind, one can, you know, soften around the heart and understanding.

In regards to the relationships. I know you talk about in your book, the heart language. What are ways that we can or what are your thoughts on connecting? Connecting like heart to heart more in our relationships. And not that the mind's bad, but letting go of our criticisms and our judgments and our opinions about someone and just really connecting.

I always feel that the more one sits in one's own kind of grandeur of being, like in your own relaxed aliveness, the more you sit in that, the more tender are your eyes as you look out and see whatever you see. Whether it's a deer, like here in the Hamptons, there are a lot of deer. Most of my neighbors don't like the deer because they eat all their gardens up and they carry Lyme disease in the ticks, so they're kind of hated by the neighbors. But every time I see one, and I see them all the time in my yard with their little babies as well, my heart just goes out to them, you know, I know they're struggling because there's a big deer population and there's not a lot of food and sometimes they look skinny and, you know, I just see a being who's hungry and who's just trying to live. From the deer's point of view, it might be we who are sinning of the herd. So when you sit in that quietness, you have an inherent feeling of interconnectedness. It just comes with the view. Yeah, you can't help but feel empathy. You can't help but feel another aspect of manifestation of self. We're all pretty connected in the DNA. Yeah, really connected, definitely. And so every creature you see is somewhat of an ancestor line. You know?

Yeah.

And it's in the quietness of the heart. All of this is understood without even any study. Yeah.

You just sit with it and it's like a knowing.

It's a knowing.

And then just coming back to. That's my practice as well, to coming back to that place. Just keep coming back over and over. And even if we want to move in the future and the stories and all of that, to just come back. Okay, come back.

Absolutely. And also with that knowing, when you've seen something very, very clearly, there might be moments when you forget. But because you've seen it clearly, you can almost induce that awareness. You can almost just say to yourself, wait a minute, I know there's a deeper way to see this. And the more one has that experience of that deeper seeing, the more easy it is to kind of remember.

Beautiful. One of your qualities is embodiment as well. And I have a great quote from your book that I want to read. Whatever sacredness, love, dignity or pleasure she would ever know, she would experience through her body and this earth. I love that. Can you talk about that and embodiment and how. How important that is?

Yes. Because so many people on the spiritual path are looking for transcendent experience. It's something the way off in the sky, you know, they're looking for experiences really in their head, you know, and like I sometimes say, like being a head on a stick, a big experience in your head. My position is the opposite, that we're actually having the experience of divinity through our bodies and through the earth. That's really where it is, you know, like the Tracy Chapman song Heaven's Here on Earth, you know, it's really here and you can dream about something else, but there's no knowing. You do know that you're here. So the sacredness is in the understanding of how amazing it is that we live on this rock in space. And that as far as we know, we're the only ones for. As far as we know for sure. I don't particularly biological the alien stories. And that it's pretty lucky. It's a pretty lucky coincidence that this particular gorgeous green earth and blue oceans sustains the amount of life that it does. And here we are at the top of the food chain, unfortunately, disposal, destroying a lot of that life. But if we could just see clearly, and those of us who do tune into this quieter channel do see clearly. There's an incredible reverence for this embodiment of this world that when I turn on the water at the tap, I don't take that for granted. I've been in places, many places where you couldn't turn, turn on water at a tap. We had to get a bucket from down the street. And you would hope that that water isn't too dirty. Make sure you have the boilers and all those things. So I understand about water and I know that there's so many of our resources we really take for granted. But the more quieter where you are any of these resources. So this is all part of embodiment. It's the recognition of the fact that you're experiencing your own pleasures through your senses, through the doorways of senses. And you're using the resources of this fabulous earth that have sustained all of your ancestors all this time in this appreciation, in this kind of awe. This is all part of the understanding of embodiment. Is my thing turning on and off?

It was just a little bit, but it's fine now.

Perfect. So embodiment, it's one of my favorite perspectives. It's what I emphasize a lot in retreats. I really enjoin people to feel themselves, really feel yourself, feel, really get into your senses.

Yeah. And it's again, we keep coming back to it, but it's like a practice because we get so locked in into our head. I know every time I get in my head I stop breathing. Not stop breathing, but shallow breathing. I'm tense. And every time I come back to my body I'm like, where did I go?

Amazing. I know, it's like you become disembodied.

Yeah. And I love that you said that, that you know, divinity is in our body, in our earth, like it is, that's where it is. Because we can get into these fantasies of mystical revelations.

Also in my book, as you probably know, a lot of the transcendent perspective that is rampant, it was handed down from people who lived in super hard times and they dreamed of escape from their very hard, short, brutal lives. And so they made up a lot of stories in my opinion. And they dreamed of other realms and other worlds and other states of being, etc. Because otherwise they just die young and struggle the whole while for basic existence and could just die of a hideous infection just any old day. So we can understand how those folks in the way back times wanted to think of some other possibilities. But I think as we get more grounded in truth and reality and in evidence based understandings, we can celebrate more the mystery of this life. But understand that really all we know for sure is this.

Yes, this body for sure. So what are your thoughts on Imagination and visualization. Does that have a place in your work at all, or what are your thoughts on it? I'm very curious.

I don't tend to use visualization much, though, I have to say, just the other night, I did my first night of dharma dialogues here in the Hamptons, and we were having this intense heat wave that had been five days running over 90 degrees, thanks to climate change. We're in a room, a nice big open room with lots of windows, but it didn't have air conditioning, and there was no breeze. And we were at the end of a day that had been over 90 degrees, so the room was like an oven. And in the sitting part, because I sit for some minutes while people are arriving, I sit quietly. And in that sitting part of the evening, in that silent part, I did allow myself to visualize. I'd been that day in the ocean. That very day. I'd been swimming, and the ocean was this perfect, cool temperature. And I visualized myself earlier in the day immersed in that water. So my recommendation is you can use your own attention. Think of it as having, like, a toolbox that you use different things for different purposes. You know, I was finding that just sitting there in present awareness, which I could do, but it was really hot. I was sweat. And so I used my attention, just temporarily, to kind of give it a little like an ice cube, to just. In terms of using visualization for getting things, which is. Which is what it's very popularly used for. The secret and so on. I don't have much interest in that or much interest in promoting any of that.

Yep. Yeah, that's very cool. I love that, too, because what you're just talking about, like, directing your attention, you know, and it's directing your attention in different ways and being conscious of what you're directing your attention to. And. And I align with you on that. You know, I don't spend a lot of time earlier in my days. I probably spent a fair amount of time visualizing and wanting and desiring, but I didn't find that. I found contentment in that.

That's right. It's opposite. It's the opposite. It's like an induction of hunger, basically.

Totally. And you just never have enough. So one of the reasons I love you book so much is because it's like, we have enough. Like you said, we have water. You know, if you're watching this, you have potentially water and, you know, safety and security and food. And that's amazing.

Brilliant. Absolutely, yes. If you're watching this, assuming that, you know you're one would make the decision to have water before an Internet connects. But maybe some people make a different decision. But anyway, yes, let's assume that almost everyone watching this has those basics and that's pretty amazing.

Yes.

And you know, I talk a lot about contentment and I feel it's given very short shrift in our world that it is really the bottom line kind of happiness. And it's an amazing political stance to take to. I have enough. I have more than enough. I mean, it's the thing that if we could understand that as a culture, it would reverse the rampage and the rape of the resources that is going on. It's the constant hunger for more that is really killing the planet or killing a lot of life on the planet, including us.

Right. I mean the stress and the.

Yeah, well, also we're, you know, we're destroying our resource base and that's not going to bode well for survival. Yeah, we're going to have to get a different habit going and part of that habit will have to be contentment with less. And it's amazing how, you know, when you, when you go from a circumstance, say where you have a whole bunch of stuff and then suddenly you find yourself you have less. It's amazing. As long as you have the basics.

Right.

Often there's a tremendous freedom, you know.

Well, it's like you, I always think, you know, when I get kind of attached to all my stuff or whatever. It's like when we go on vacation, you only take like a suitcase and you have like so much freedom and wonder and spontaneity and you feel connected and it's fun and it's fantastic. Like, do we really need all of this stuff?

Absolutely. No, I know. I just, I just moved my stuff. My so called stuff had been in storage in Hawaii for two and a half years. I haven't seen it and now it's all back here with me. Right. But I have such a kind of detached feeling about it. I mean, I've been living perfectly fine and actually very free, like you just said, without it. So I see that there's, you know, it's a real, you know, it's a real wash as to which way I would want. You know, if it all goes up in a fire, I don't think it would be all that bad.

Yes, I love that. It just reminded me something in your book. You said you quoted somebody. But if you could lose it in a shipwreck, it's not yours.

That's right. It's a Sufi Saying, yeah, shipwreck, it ain't yours. That's right.

That's always a good reminder of like, we spend so much time on our stuff, buying stuff, what we're gonna buy. And it's just, I am in the process of just simplifying, like really what do I need? What's important to me? What do I want to do with this life? You know, it's not consume stuff.

Absolutely. And the possessions possess us. In other words, we have to constantly take care of them and maintain them and fix them, not to mention pay for them. And all of that is actually for most of us, unless you just have inherited a ton of money, each of those possessions represent some amount of your effort of time, of your working to get the money and then your effort to get the thing and then maintaining it. So it's. Yes, it's a very cool insight to really come to a love of simplicity, you know, a love of contentment. These are the open secrets to happiness. And the greatest have always told us this.

Yeah. Why do you think that we resist that? I mean, that's been literally, contentment has been kind of one of my words recently. Just like contentment, you know, and why do you think that it even the.

Healing word kind of washes the peace over your body totally.

But some people have it with contentment. Like it's passive and you're just not engaged and you're kind of giving up.

Like giving up possibilities, like resignation or something. I think that's a very American conditioning. You know, I notice my European friends and my Australian friends, places where I've spent quite a lot of time, they don't have that kind of belief system. They're happy to kind of loll about more, be content and have, you know, three hour dinners and, you know, get up late on their days off and all of those things. You know, it's a bit different. It's very conditioned in our culture in particular.

That's fantastic. So maybe Europeans in Australia won't enjoy this conference as much because it's hollow.

Some other bits out.

It's like taming the American way. And I'm very American.

Yeah, well, it's also a cautionary tale.

Absolutely. So I love to talk about delight and wonder too. Those are two of your qualities. And I love the words that you chose for your seven qualities. They literally just kind of give you a. Just saying the word, you get it. So I just love to hear more on why you chose delight and wonder and what those are and how we can access those more.

So one of my premises is that as we kind of immerse ourselves in our own delight, it's kind of contagious, you know, when you're around someone and they're not just sort of a giddy fool, you know, sort of, you know, but you can sense that they're tuned into, well, being. That's very inspiring and it's very comforting and it's very. It allows for a bit of strength, spring in your own step. And so I say in the book in one place that it's. You know, sometimes it's important to do that, to let your own light shine a little brightly around others, a little more brightly even, just in case their light is a little dim. So you kind of crank it up even a little bit more. But it also goes to the. The premise of the whole book, which is that certain qualities just arise organically. They arise naturally. In our relaxed ease of being. That all we have to do is tune into that and have that become your habit more and more. And these other qualities just sort of surface. They just sort of become stronger without your having to think about them. And one of those qualities is delight. You become more easily delighted when you're relaxed. I mean, we all know this. But when you're relaxed and at ease and you're just grooving on things, you know, you see a little grasshopper on your deck and, you know it looks funny, you know, it's fun, you know, you just start. There's more bubble and joy. And I propose that that's an important ingredient for our world. More joy again, it goes to more easily content, more easily delighted. And I also, for instance, sometimes when I get concerned about something I've read in the news, which. Which anything practical you read in the news is concerning. If I've had sort of an onslaught of bad news, I'll have to sometimes use my attention to just remind myself of different people in my life who I feel inspired by and who I feel comforted by their stableness in the face of all this bad news. I picture their beautiful, radiant faces, which can still laugh and smile and see things from a much bigger perspective. So it's important for us, not only for our own sakes. It's always nice to feel a lot of delight to have that as almost a kind of, like Rick Hanson says, welcoming of the good. But it's also important for our offering to others to be steady and to have a twinkle in your eye.

Yeah, and I love that too, that you said the relaxed state. You know, just like a restful Place that, that just naturally bubbles up, up.

That's right. It does. All of these qualities in the book, every one of them, you know, tenderness, genuineness, discernment, love, wonder, embodiment and silence. They all are inherent. When we're in our right minds and hearts, when we're basically at neutral in our being.

Yeah.

Where we're just being. Or we're just being, those qualities come. And that is, I find something that is so encouraging that I see, for instance, in retreats consistently, people can come. People will arrive in retreats in all kinds of conditions. Some of them have been working for months and they're stressed or they're agitated or whatever, they're exhausted. They come crawling into the virtual, I'd.

Imagine, I can only imagine.

But within really hardly any time, a couple of days, they're soaring. And these qualities are coming out in their conversation within our groups without me giving any direction about these. That's why I actually wrote the book. It was based on seeing this over and over again in the trouble how given half a chance in restful, in ease, in conditions of just calm, most people will begin experiencing these beautiful qualities that are healing for themselves and for the planet.

And then what do you find in your work? Because, you know, they go to the retreat and then they have this and then they go back to their lives. Like, how do people stay connected to that and allow that to be their way of life? Because I know. Yeah.

What I have found over the years is that people who tune to this and become interested in this and using their attention this way, it normalizes. It normalizes like the, the difference between being in retreat and out of retreat becomes less over time. And that is the intention that I have, is that this is to give you a sense of how life can be. And it's a big strong immersion. And of course your usual life has a lot more busyness in it than the retreat. The retreat is kind of like a refresher course, but. But for its purpose is to see, ah, I can just flow, you know, like the water over the rocks. I can just flow in my work, in my marriage, in my relationships, in my friendships, with my children, with my parents, etc. In my own self, that this is not something complicated. It's not some big attention at all. It's something you get used to and then you're conditioning those neural pathways in that regard.

So then coming to the retreats, we're kind of like going to the well of well being and then we fill up and then we go and then before you know it, we're just full all the time.

Exactly.

That is exactly full or empty, whatever way you want to look at it.

Yeah, that's exactly right. It's like going to the wall. Yeah. And just topping up.

I love that because I know for me, I'd go to retreats and I'd feel it, and then I'd go back, and then I'm like, what's wrong? Why can't I hold on to that? So it's a great reminder that we just need to keep creating those new neural pathways.

That's right. And have this be a way of life for as much as possible. Doesn't have to be perfect. And that also is very freeing, isn't it? One of the things that my teacher, Bunjaji once said that I found so liberating. His attendant told me this, that he had said to her, sometimes I'm not in satsang. And that was so beautiful to hear. And here he was pushing 80 by the time he said this, or maybe already. And, you know, he. Being around him, you would think he's mostly there. But to know that, you know, even for him, after all those years and in that incredible big presence, still insults. I'm not in truth community, not in truth clarity. I loved hearing that. I loved, loved hearing that. And it just takes the pressure off of this, some sort of holy roller project that people are on, that they're looking for some big bang of enlightenment. Then they got it, Then they're there forever. I don't buy it. I've never seen it.

Yeah, that's a great reminder that we are human, you know, and that we.

Have biological conditioning, we have psychological conditioning, you know? Yeah.

And I love that, too, because for me, when you say that, it just. It gives me permission, you know? Because I think a lot of times we can look up to people and we think, oh, they've got it figured out, and they are enlightened, they're perfect all the time. And they've. They're tapped in all the time. And it's great to just remind us when we're off or we're disconnected, like, so what? Plug back in.

Exactly. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Yes.

Very good.

It's a much generous view of what it is to be human.

Yeah. Because then we, you know, we talked about so many times, and we tend to get into stories and, like, I'm a bad person, you know, all these bad stuff.

And people really get in trouble when they think they're enlightened. And then their old habits of mind Start kind of pushing through. Then they start getting into all kinds of dissembling. They start having to justify and deny and repress and actually lie. I mean, it just creates nothing but trouble. But I like to, I'm a big fan of Alan Watts phrase getting into one's divine rascality. And that's much more honest to me, you know, And I much more prefer actually divine rascals than Hollywellers.

That's great. So embracing all of it. Our divine rascal.

All of it. Absolutely, absolutely. Absolutely, yes.

Fantastic. So do you have any other closing thoughts on. I just popped in my head one of the phrases that you said or things that you said in your book that I really loved was mystical poetry and how we can experience more mystical poetry in our daily lives. Do you have any closing thoughts?

Well, it is interesting. Again, with the relaxed presence. The relaxed, passionate presence. Your insights do start to sound like mystical poetry. And not only your insights, but people who are on that wavelength. Again from the retreats. I would be surprised at how many times someone that I might have known, let's say, who'd been coming to Dharma dialogues and so I would have seen them or interacted with them in a public event, and maybe in those events they hadn't been very articulate or been able to express themselves very clearly. They come to retreat and after a day or two of this immersion, suddenly they're speaking in a way that sounds to me it could be Rumi, it could be Hafiz, you know, it could be any of the grapes. It could be, you know, Yeats or, you know, it's astonishing how clear and how beautiful the words will come out. When you're on that wavelength, you, even as you're saying them yourself, you're kind of surprised, you know. And that is another delightful aspect of this relaxation whereby you experience a. You feel like you've gotten out of your own way and that the mind self referencing has stopped so that the kind of clear truth coming from your deepest place, your straight talk from your heart is not impeded.

Beautiful.

Sometimes, I mean, it's kind of like pillow talk, you know, where. Where you're just in that, in that free flow.

Again a lot. You talk about authenticity in the book too, you know, just like this. Just pure authentic.

Yeah, you. Yes, exactly. That's right. Yeah.

And it's so much easier. Easier when we're just connected to our authenticity.

Yeah, absolutely, yes. Otherwise you're in a straitjacket. Fun to dance.

That's a great image. That's true. Wow. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for your incredible wisdom and your passionate presence.

You and I so appreciate your deep understanding of this. I can tell, having been interviewed a few times in my life.

Well, thank you. I'm a student, but a committed student, so I appreciate it. Can you share where people can learn more about you and your books and your work?

Well, my website, Katherine Ingles.

Fantastic.

Yeah, it's pretty much all there. Yeah.

Beautiful.

Thank you for the good work you're doing.

Oh, thank you so much. And thank you for your freight work. And I'm going to buy your novel as well.

Oh, good. Let me know when you read it.

I'm so excited because normally novels, I don't really read that many novels because I just don't want some of the media and, you know, I just, I'm not interested in some of that stuff. But I'm like, oh, this is great. So I'm thrilled about experience.

Yeah.

Okay. Wonderful. Thank you so much.

Have a great day.

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