How To BREAK Your Negative Patterns To Achieve INNER PEACE | Sadhvi Saraswati & Lewis Howes

It's endless because there is an endless number of people, companies, very, very eager to sell us their solution to the not-enoughness. So we are just mired internally from our childhoods. And the only ends...

I think you gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness.

Really?

Fuck yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes.

Why do you think that so many people don't know how to love themselves or believe that they are whole? And they need outside validation or they need to harm themselves or they need to do something externally to fill themselves up with this lack of wholeness.

Beautiful. And interestingly, it goes right into my story in terms of, for me to give you something that isn't just theoretical in terms of what I know and how I know this. We are Tragically, in this culture, it's universal, and yet it's much more in the Western culture than it is in the East. I've lived in India now almost 26 years, and while they have a lot of other issues, the inability to see themselves as worthy, as full, as complete, is not nearly as epidemic as it is here. And I think one of the reasons is that culturally here, we are really raised from early childhood to believe that who we are is based on what we do. And it's very innocuously seeming in the beginning. So for example, how many parents say to their kids, Oh, you're such a good boy. You cleaned up your room.

You did your homework.

You did your homework. You got an A on an exam. You did something that has made you a good boy. You didn't do it. Your room is a mess. You are a bad boy. Or even if it's not quite so verbal. You come home with an A on the exam. What do you get? Oh, come here, give Mama a big hug and kiss. You get hugged, you sit on the lap, you're given milk and cookies or whatever. You know, food as love might, however that might manifest in your house. But you're given all of this love, all of this embrace, all of this sense of you are worthy as a being. And then you come home with an F on an exam or an F on a report card. And even if you're fortunate enough not to live in a home where you get beaten or punished severely, you certainly don't get told, oh, come here, sit on Mama's lap, you are wonderful. And so what we learn at a very, very young age, and then it just continues, is My value, my worthiness, my deservingness of love is based on what I do. And when I do it right, I do it well, I succeed by whatever the standards are, I am worthy, worthy of love, worthy of occupying my place on mom's lap, becomes planet Earth.

Right.

I don't. I'm not worthy. So this ends up becoming this real dilemma that we face throughout our entire lives. And of course, then you bring in media, and you bring in marketing, and you bring in consumerism, where it's entirely rooted in convincing you that who you are in the present moment is not enough. And if you just owned the handbags that I produced, you too could feel and be whole and complete and worthy and see the way that this man or woman in my advertisement so fully embodies the fullness and completeness. And if you just had that handbag, that car, you two could have that experience. But I first have to make you feel like you're not whole.

You're not enough. You're lacking.

You're lacking. Otherwise, why in the world would you spend your precious financial resources on yet another pair of jeans, car, handbag, mobile? So first we get told, sometimes very subtly, sometimes not so subtly, that We don't look right. We're not smart enough. We don't own the right things. We're not happy enough. Our relationships aren't good enough. We're not thin enough. We're not beautiful enough. We're not funny enough. We're not popular enough. We don't have enough followers on Facebook. It's endless because there is an endless number of people, companies, very, very eager to sell us their solution to the not-enoughness. So we are just mired from internally, from our childhoods, and then in this constant barrage from outside in not-enoughness. And the only answer is to dive deeply. this is the only thing that I found. I mean, when I came to India, and obviously we'll get more into the story later on, but when I came to India at the age of 25, I absolutely felt I was not enough that there was something inherently wrong with me. Well, I had experienced sexual abuse as a child and then abandonment both by my biological father. And then severe eating disorders. So it's all rooted in, for me, there's something wrong with me. I was abused, therefore I must have deserved it. It was sexual abuse, therefore my entire worthiness as a human being is rooted in this physical body. I was then abandoned by the same person, meaning not right, not enough. And then the eating disorder is all about every minute, this physical body experience, sense of fullness or emptiness depending on the moment, is not right and needs to be changed. It's empty, we need to fill it. Then it's full, we need to empty it.

Right, not the right way though.

Obviously not the right way. Nobody would say binging and purging is.

The right way to experience anything. -I think it's the natural processing of food.

-Absolutely not.

-Emptying of, yeah, the other way.

But it was the only way as a very privileged in so many ways, very blessed in so many ways, and deeply struggling in so many ways, adolescent. that I was. And by the time I went to India at 25, I had learned to manage this. So I had gotten to a point where I was managing my pain, managing the addiction, managing that. But it felt like I had to have a very tight grip on it all. There was never a sense that I could trust myself, trust the universe. And so that was all rooted in this idea that who I was wasn't right and that the universe wasn't right. Not only was I not right, it wasn't that there was this full hole.

Everything's messed up, yeah.

Everything was messed up. The universe is not a place I can trust, not a safe place, not a divine place. I am not right, physically, emotionally, psychologically, on any level, I'm not right. And then I had this experience.

Of.

Such powerful divine presence that was not separate from me, but that was everywhere outside of me and in me and as me, and there was no distinction between me and the outer world. And so, It gave me in that moment and then over 25 years of.

Continuing to experience it.

Experience it and do the work and deepen it, that awareness that the universe is perfect, is divine, and I am not separate from that. And I think barring sitting around waiting for that type of spiritual experience, The only way for people to really have the awareness of how full they are is to stop identifying as the physical body in the story.

What should we identify as?

All of that which is not constantly changing. So the physical body is constantly changing. Every minute, every moment, I mean, I'm sloughing skin cells all over your chair, your floor, your table. I mean, my body is just regenerating and re-regenerating in every moment. My thoughts, my emotions, my feelings, which are just chemistry and electricity patterns of chemical and electrical activity in my physical brain and the physical white and gray matter constantly changing. So if you say, well, what is it that's not changing? If I say, well, Who I am cannot be that which is constantly changing. I cannot be the skin cells that have just dropped off onto your floor. I cannot be the thought of anger or frustration that I had earlier today or a week ago because see, it's gone and I'm still here. What is it that Isn't changing. And that's where we get to what is called soul, spirit, consciousness, love, truth, divinity, it doesn't matter what you call it, self. But the experience of that, which isn't changing. There's a beautiful meditative practice called Nithi Nithi. which literally means not this, not this. And it's a practice where you literally close your eyes and you say, I am not the clothes that I'm wearing. Now of course everybody agrees with that. Obviously we change our clothes, we don't change who we are. And then you go deeper, I'm not the skin beneath my clothes. Well, okay, I mean we've all been sunburned and peeled and understood that who we are doesn't change when our skin peels. Well, I'm not the blood flowing beneath my skin because our blood cells regenerate, we donate blood, we get blood transfusions and you just go deeper and deeper. I'm not my organs. again, the cells of the organs regenerate not every three minutes, but every seven, eight years. And then you get into, so you go through all the physical things that seem very clearly physical. And as you go step by step, you don't let yourself go to the next step until fully there is a sense of yeah with every statement. So it's not just you say it. because you watched this interview and I said that it's true. You wait until in you, you know it is true. And then you go to the next level. And then you go deeper. And then you get into what we think of as not physical, but actually is, which again are our thoughts, our emotions. And you say, well, I'm not my anger because see, I still exist when I'm not angry. I'm not my thoughts because if I were my thoughts, then I would cease to exist at the end of each thought. And if I ceased to exist, then who would be the one having the next thought? I'm not my feeling state. We now know neurologically. I mean, they've done all kinds of fun experiments. I was a neuropsych student, so I love all the neuropsych research. They've done all of these studies where the brain doesn't actually have any pain sensors. So while you wouldn't remove someone's skull just for the fun of it, if people are having their skull removed for some other purpose, having brain surgery or whatever, exactly, they can do things where they literally, with metal rods, stimulate different parts of the brain. And you can make people happy, sad, sexually excited, crying, angry, and we even know it chemically. I mean, why is it that you feel differently when you are drunk or on drugs than you do when you're not? All that you've done is added chemicals. You haven't changed who you are. You've simply changed the chemistry of your brain. But your feeling state, your thoughts, change because the chemistry has changed. And all of that simply means, well, I'm not the chemistry in my brain. I mean, I am not the serotonin and norepinephrine and dopamine sitting in vesicles at the end of each neuron waiting to get ejected into a synapse, obviously. So if I'm not those, then I'm not my thoughts. or my feelings or my emotions. And you simply like peeling back the layers of an onion. I am not this, not this. And you finally reach a state.

Where.

There is nothing left to not be. And it's a state that the Hindus refer to as everythingness. The Buddhists refer to as nothingness, but it's ultimately the same experience. You could think about it as in, let's say that I had a glass jar of air, and then that glass jar broke. What do you have?

Everything or nothing.

Exactly, right? So some people would say, well, oh my God, now I have nothing because I had this glass jar of air. It broke. Now I don't even have that. Or you could say, well, you know, I used to only have the air in the jar.

I have all of it, yeah.

Now I've got it all either way. But you practice this and it's such a powerful meditation because it reminds you I'm not these things. Meaning, if I'm not my body, obviously I'm not my color, size, shape, age, gray hair, wrinkles, bank account, career, relationships. I'm not any of that. And I think from my own personal experience and from what I've learned immersed in spiritual India for 26 years, that that's actually the only way to really.

Know.

How worthy and full and whole you are is by realizing that there is no place that you end and the world begins. By recognizing that you are not separate from creation, that you are not separate from the universe. I mean, I can tell you things, but that's not actually going to benefit you. unless you experience it yourself. It's like me reading off a menu or a recipe or telling you about lunch. It's not gonna benefit you till you eat it. So we have to have the actual experience of knowing and the only way to really know that without judgment. I mean, otherwise if I say, well, I'm worthy, you're like, well, I don't know. I'm not necessarily in agreement with that. The only way to really know it's true is when you realize that you are one with the universe, with the divine, by whatever that means to you, however you conceive of the divine, by any religion, any spiritual tradition, path, concept, the divine has to be infinite. I mean, if God lives in a box, then it's not God. It's something else that lives in a box.

Right.

To realize that you are not separate from that which is infinite. You know, the core mantra that's given so frequently to meditators is just so hum. So on the in-breath, hum on the out-breath. And it means I am that. Capital T that, I am that. I am the creator, I am the creation, I am the universe, I am perfection, I am whole, I am that.

That's beautiful. I think it's hard for people to quiet themselves enough to even think that process, to practice that process of I'm not my hair, I'm not my skin, I'm not this. I think most people are so concerned with the pressure or the stress of life or the responsibilities that a lot of people don't take that time, at least in the in this part of the world. So what is something people can do if they don't live in India, if they have these stresses, to consistently remind themselves that they are infinite, that they are infinite love, life, truth?

You've got to give it time. I mean, I'll give you also some practices throughout the day, but those only work when you've got a foundation. And it takes some time, but here's the thing, Lois, you know, we're all busy, but we are, we're running in the wrong direction. Mahatma Gandhi said so beautifully, he said, what is the point of running so fast when you're running in the wrong direction? We've got all of this speed, but we have no direction. I mean, it's like saying, I know I've got this broken leg, but I don't have time to go to the hospital and actually get it set because I've got all these errands I have to do. You'd be like, well, you know, ultimately in the long run, it's gonna be so much easier to run your errands when you can walk rather than be on crutches or with a walker or in a wheelchair. I mean, in the not so long term, not even talking about next life, talking about next month. If you give it a few days now, you actually go to the hospital and you actually let them set the leg and you actually deal with maybe having a plaster on it for a little while or whatever it may be. What you're gonna find is that as you move through the rest of your life, Everything is easier. But if you work yourself up into this illusion that you are too busy now to set that leg, you're just gonna suffer forever.

Right.

So we've gotta devote some time, but it doesn't have to be, I'm not talking, I'm not saying you have to move to the caves or move to the Himalayas or go for a three-month silent retreat. I'm talking 15 minutes a day.

Yeah.

I mean, really, 15 minutes a day. Obviously, if you've got more, great. But it doesn't take that long. And the moment that you get a foundation, you know, when you build a house, it takes a long time to wire it. But once the house is wired, you don't have to rewire it. You just plug something in.

Plug it on, yeah.

Exactly. and that's what ends up happening. So I would say make a commitment that you're gonna dedicate 15 minutes a day. If you can do it 15 minutes twice a day, nothing like it. And don't think of it as something that's really super complex, 'cause I think that also scares people. They're like, well, until I've got time to go and to go to some meditation retreat for two weeks or three months, and really learn, I'm not gonna start. Meditation is an undoing of that which is not true. And it's really just a being with you. And it is so it's not complex, it's not esoteric, it's just being with you. But you who is not your thoughts, you who is not the constant fluctuation of what we call the mind stuff. And so, I mean, there's a million ways to do it, but the simplest and easiest way is just to watch the breath.

Yeah.

Just sit. Just Allow yourself to merge with your breath. Don't try to change it, don't judge it, don't analyze it. Just become one with this flow of life force. And what happens that's so beautiful when you do that is you begin by realizing, okay, I am inhaling, I'm breathing in from outside into inside. exhaling from inside to outside. But as you do it, slowly, slowly, that border and boundary between inside and outside dissolves. And there is no inner and there is no outer. And there just becomes breathing. And you've got this experience of that. oneness with the world. And it may simply begin as losing the awareness of where your thigh ends and the pillow begins. You know, it's not like you're gonna necessarily have that full experience on the first time, but simply being able to be present with the breath and then using, for example, a mantra of just so hum, I am that. Or it can be anything. Doesn't matter. Whatever works for you. It can be one, two. Nobody should feel like, well, I'm, you know, anti-religion, I'm anti-sanscrit, I'm anti-everything. No problem. One, two. In, out. I mean, whatever you want to do. But just something to give the mind, something other than what's for breakfast? What am I gonna wear? Who said what about whom? and you just do it. And what it does is it connects you to a place within that isn't constantly changing. And then you do it again at the end of the day. And I like to think of it actually as a putting on of a wetsuit, because then of course the question becomes, well, okay, so then, but then how do I live that through the day? So, you know, say you've got this deep, beautiful experience of meditation in the morning, but then you've got to go and you've got to be the CEO of a company, or you've got to be the mail clerk, or you've got to be the window washer, or you've got to be someone's wife or mother or daughter-in-law or whatever it may be. you gotta play the role. And so I have a practice, a personal practice, and when I share, I could call it the wetsuit practice. And it really is, it's a practice of putting on a wetsuit. Because what I love about wetsuits is they don't keep you dry.

Yeah, you're wet.

You're wet. It allows in a tiny little bit of water. that your body warms up such that when you dive into the cold ocean, you stay warm. Not because you are dry and disconnected from the ocean, but because your energy has been able to not necessarily warm the entire ocean, but warm enough of it, that part which is inside your wetsuit, to enable you to stay warm in a cold ocean. And so I think about putting on a wetsuit in which your energetic being transmits love and peace into this wetsuit and on days that you're feeling energized, you know, not so full of energy, you may think of the wetsuit as really, really close to your body. On days that you're just feeling full of love and joy and peace and just this channel, well you may think of the wetsuit as being, you know, 10 feet outside your body or 100 feet outside your body. But whatever it is, you move through the world with that such that You've got a role that you're playing. You can think of it painted on the outside of your wetsuit. The CEO wetsuit, the policewoman wetsuit, the whatever it is wetsuit costume that you're wearing. And then at the end of the day, you take it off. Because you don't wanna forget about who you are and what are the roles that you play. that you're not the CEO. You're not the window washer. It's a role you're playing. It's the particular role that has been given to you at this particular season of life. Exactly, exactly. This act in the play.

Yes. So it's not who you are, it's the role you're playing.

Exactly, exactly. But you hold who you are in this wetsuit experience. so that there is a costume, a role, recognize that you play it, but you don't forget who you are. And, you know, as far, well, first when you come home at night, then you take it off, you reconnect. But throughout the day, I love moments to remember. And so, for example, Before you eat anything, before you drink anything, before you go to the bathroom, before you do whatever it is that you may do a lot of times a day. Are you a chauffeur? Well, before you turn the key in the ignition, whatever you do, right before you do that, just take 30 seconds and reconnect. And whether you say it's a reconnection to gratitude, To love, to spirit, to the divine, whatever concept works for you. Just reconnect. Tie it into things that you do all day long. And then just keep reconnecting. Reconnect. Set an alarm on your phone to buzz every half an hour, whatever it may be. But use the world To remind you.

Yes, reminders. It sounds like the first 25 years of your life there was a lot of challenge, suffering, pain, adversity, masking to try to relieve the pain and not deal with the pain and suppressing of emotions, which turns into depression of emotions. Sounds like it. Yes. When was the moment you realized you didn't have to suffer anymore. And how long did that last for until you suffered again?

Hmm. What a great question.

So.

I'll never forget being 19 years old and coming out of a hospital actually, it was on Olympic Boulevard. And it was the second hospital I was in for bulimia. But I've never been someone who does anything half-heartedly.

You were all in on it.

So exactly, so if I was gonna do three meals a day, you were.

The champion of bulimics.

It was not about, I mean, it began as about just you would eat and throw up, but it became for me actually about simply having something to throw up. And so I got to the point where I was literally drinking gallons of water a day just to have something to throw up. Really?

Yeah.

Wow. A lot of people think of bulimia as just sort of a, I eat and then I feel guilty or there's some complex about it and I don't wanna gain weight and so I purge. For me, it was all about the getting out that which was inside. The idea that I somehow could get out pain and anger and fear and not enoughness. Interesting. On the ice cream or the cookies or whatever it was that I was throwing up. And so I was in my second hospital. I ended up in three of them, but this was the second one. And it was actually an eating disorders. Unit. And I checked myself out after five, six days. And the director of the unit was adamant that I not leave. And he, I remember sitting there, I can still picture being there with him and my psychiatrist who agreed to let me out because the psychiatrist was a great guy who I just, I'm so grateful for. And so he enabled me to leave. I hated the place for a whole variety of reasons, but the head of the center says to me as I'm signing myself out and literally saying things like, I realize this is against my best interests and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he says, you will come crawling back here on your hands and knees. You are sick. You need help. and you will come crawling back on your hands and knees.

Wow.

And I walked out 19 years old onto Olympic Boulevard knowing that there was no way in a million years I was ever gonna crawl back there on my hands and knees, but also realizing I really needed help.

It wasn't gonna be there, but you needed help somewhere.

Needed help deeply. And so over the next, six years through a whole bunch of different therapists, psychologists, an additional hospital, etc., etc. I had gotten to a point that I alluded to earlier where I was managing the situation. I no longer was drinking gallons of water to have something to throw up. I had learned to keep my food down, but it was all about management. It was about planning, planning meals. I mean, there were whole systems of how you did this thing.

Wow.

Because what I was told was, this is always going to be on your shoulder. And this will be your thing. Always on your shoulder. You can learn to manage it, but you will always have this. And so I really believed that managing it was the very best that I was going to get to. And the truth was, everybody I knew was managing their lives. Not everyone was bulimic, but everyone had things that they were just managing. Whatever it was, people were just managing their lives. Some were managing better than others. But the idea that you could actually be free, that that suffering could actually and not simply be managed was something that never occurred to me.

Interesting.

Yes, with a death grip on my food, my relationships, my schoolwork, my mind, I could manage. But freedom?

Right.

Obsessive control of all, yeah.

I mean, there was no way in my mind that I actually could be free. Yeah, life had to be controlled. I mean, it had to be controlled, and whether it was, you know, driving back home from halfway to my PhD program to make sure I had turned off the coffee pot, or whether it was my meals, or whether it was my relationship. Life had to be controlled and managed because the universe couldn't be trusted. Because I couldn't be trusted.

My parents couldn't be trusted, my friend, whatever.

Whatever it was, what I had learned was from the abuse, from the abandonment. because it had happened at such a young, impressionable age. You know, my beloved friend, Dr. Bruce Lipton always talks about the first seven years of life being, you know, that the brain waves are really that as though you were under hypnosis. You are neurologically the most suggestible.

Of course.

Yeah.

So, In those years, I had been told both indirectly as well as directly. I mean, when my father called and said he never wanted to see me again, he spoke those words. I do not want to see you again. I never want to see you again. I had just turned eight. So what you learn from that is, I'm not right and the universe can't be trusted. I mean, parents are those. who are God, they're the universe.

To that child, of course.

And so when they can't be trusted, they harm you, they abandon you, well the universe couldn't be trusted. So to me, prior to going to India, suffering was just what life was and you learned- How to manage it. How to manage it. When I got to India, and landed up in Rishikesh as the very first place we actually went. And I was standing on the banks of this river, the Ganga River, what here we call the Ganges, but the Ganga River. And I didn't even know that the river was holy. I didn't know anything. It was September 1996. There was no internet. I mean, we had email, but there was no Google. We had a 500-page Lonely Planet guidebook that I opened in Delhi and said, Rishikesh, I can still picture it. I finally found a place that served actual filter coffee rather than Nescafe, for which I was feeling deeply excited. And sitting over a cup of filter coffee, open a 500-page book and say, Rishikesh, we get there. And after putting bags down in the hotel, I said, I'm gonna go put my feet in the river. I was always a nature person. Mountains, forests, trees, I mean, I was never religious. I was never one of those who even say, well, I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual. I was raised in a reformed Jewish family. I was bat mitzvahed. But it was much more about the culture, like it was about making my grandparents happy. It was never about God. Right. It was about the ancestry, the history, my family.

The rituals, yeah.

Exactly. So I get down to this, river because I wanted to freshen up. I was hot, I was tired, we.

Had.

Traveled, it was hot, it was sweaty, we had had to carry all of our bags across the bridge because the driver had not told us there was a boat. He had just said, you cross bridge. Not mentioning, oh, there's this motorboat that actually will take you across, there's coolies, nothing. So we had carried our luggage all across the footbridge over the river and I said, I'm gonna go put my feet in the river. Just be with the river, be with the mountains. They had always been for me my place of spiritual refuge. And again, I never would have used those words because I never would have said I was a spiritual person. But when I was in the Bay Area, when I was at Stanford, when I was in Palo Alto, Mirror Woods, the Redwoods, the whole sort of span from Big Sur up to the Mendocino Coast was the only place you would find me on weekends, holidays. All I wanted to do was be in the forest. So I come down to the river and I get to the banks of this river. Thinking, I'm just going to take off my shoes and freshen up. And suddenly it was like a veil was pulled off. Not only my eyes, but pulled off of every way of seeing and knowing that I had. I could see, not just visually, but with every way of seeing and knowing that I had, the presence of the divine. Everything I saw was divine. It began with the sacred river, but then it stayed as I moved my head, and now I'm looking at steps, and I'm looking at children, and I'm looking at a telephone pole, and it didn't matter what I was looking at, the background kept changing, but the foreground of just this divine presence It wasn't everything. And I was not separate from that. And I burst into tears. I mean just sobbing, sobbing. Not tears of sadness, but also not tears of happiness. It wasn't like, oh my God, I'm so happy I'm crying. It was just tears of the truth. I would say that was the first moment that I realized experientially and intellectually, even though at the moment my entire intellect had been just turned to cream cheese. I mean, there was no intellect. I was nonverbal. I couldn't put together a sentence for weeks. Nonetheless, I was aware. in whatever cognitive capacity that I had at that time, that I was free. And then you ask, and when did suffering again begin? In earnest. I mean, there were moments, but in earnest it began about I don't know, eight, nine, 12 months-ish later, I had already moved to India.

You went home to a US, then came back.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. And I mean, I knew from that moment on the banks of the Ganga.

That that was your home.

That was meant to stay. That was meant to be there. Why, how, where, I mean, I didn't even know I was gonna live at Parmarth Nikkathan Ashram, where I now live. I had not even been in the Ashram. I only discovered the Ashram About a few days later, when I found it as a much nicer pathway to get from the hotel to the banks of the river, they had sent me, originally the guys at the hotel desk had sent me down this alleyway, which, you know, it's an Indian alleyway. It's not very beautiful. It was an Indian temple.

Yeah, yeah.

Exactly. So I discovered one day that there was this parallel path. which was full of gardens and temples and it was exquisite and it was clean. And so ParMarth NikE-A-Thon became simply my pathway. And as I was walking through it one day, I heard a voice and the voice said, you, must stay here. Now, I was not a mystic. I was a scientist. I was an academic. I did not hear voices. The only people in my entire frame of reference who heard voices other than Joan of Arc were schizophrenics.

Right.

And since I knew I wasn't Joan of Arc and I really hoped I was not schizophrenic, I did what any self-respecting scientist would do, which was I ignored the voice. And I kept walking, and about 30 seconds later I heard it again. And again I turned. And if there was a voice, somebody must have spoken. And there was no one. Whole pathway, no one. And I was just about to ignore it for the second time when I remembered a vow that I had taken on the airplane. As we flew, Somewhere over Southeast Asia between San Francisco and Delhi over the Pacific, I had a moment in which I said to myself, this makes no sense. I was on an airplane to India, to a place I knew nothing about. I had no interest in going. My husband was on a spiritual quest, I was not. The only redeemable factor in my mind about India, the only thing I knew about India was that it made great vegetarian food. I was a staunch, ardent, what my friends called, vegetarianist. And so, I knew that eating in India was going to be really easy. And so, I had agreed to go. But somewhere over, somewhere in Southeast Asia, I had this moment of this makes no sense. I was never a wanderer. When I was a straight-A student, I had gone through Stanford undergrad in three years instead of four years. I was taking 21 units a quarter instead of 15 in my PhD program.

I was acing it all.

I was not an aimless wanderer. And so the idea that here I was going to a country that I had no interest in going to simply because I could get good vegetarian food when I could get it on my corner. I mean, I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Every corner has good Indian vegetarian. And so I said to myself, okay, there's a reason you're going and you just don't know what it is. And even though I wasn't religious or spiritual, I always had had this very deep belief in what I used to call just the capital P Planner. It seemed to me that the universe itself, the simply scientific workings of the universe, seeds becoming trees and caterpillars becoming butterflies and just everything doing its thing. our bodies, the way that we digest, the way that we breathe. I mean, it just, it seemed to me too perfect to be random. So I always had believed in a capital P planner, and therefore a capital P plan, like somebody, something new, how to make this whole digestive system thing work and knew how to make seeds become trees that then give us apples. And so on the plane, I took this vow that I was just going to keep my heart open. That there was a reason I was going. I didn't know what it was. The capital P planner knew, and if I just kept my heart open, it would reveal itself. So in that moment when I had heard the voice for the second time, and I was just about to ignore it, I remembered my vow.

Keep your heart open.

Keep my heart open. I thought, all right, so be it. So I went in and said, I want to stay. And it's a long story. I tell all of it in the book. But basically, I needed to wait a week. I needed to wait for Swamiji, the president of the ashram, to return and grant me permission to stay at the ashram. And a lot of things have changed in 25 years. Now you just send an email and you get a room. Literally. Now you just fill out a form online and you get a room. But at that time, because it's a very traditional Vedic lineage, you didn't just wander in off the streets as a single foreign female and say, I want a room. I end up finally staying. And I went back three months in. There's so much. We're doing the story in a very fun way. But I had all of these incredible experiences there of just ecstasy and expansion. But going back to the question of suffering, on the third or fourth day of being there?

After you came home, then come back.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Third or fourth day of being there, in the very beginning. I wait a week. Swamiji, the president, who I didn't know at the time, was this very renowned, very revered, majorly famous spiritual leader, master. He comes back and he, of course, gives me permission to stay. But when I meet him, I was palpably aware that I was in the presence of a being who was.

Different.

Sure.

Energetically different than any being I'd ever been in their presence before. and I knew that that was where I was meant to stay. I mean, I had earlier known a week earlier that I was meant to be on the banks of the Ganga, but where, how, I didn't know any of it. Once I met him, I realized, oh, okay, it's here, it's in this ashram, it's with him that I'm meant to be. So I stay, my husband ends up traveling, all over. He was not interested, much to my dismay actually, I thought I had found the right ashram and guru for him, but he was not interested in anything that I had found.

Sure.

So he needed to forge his own path. So he was off traveling and after a few days, I asked Swamiji about fear. Simply because it was the time of Darshan where he met people and I was not, thankfully at that time, full of questions. I mean, I was still in this ecstasy. But here we were one day where there was still time left on his hour and people were done and had gone. And he turns to me and he says, Yes. And so I asked him about fear and he said, you, fear because you don't trust. And I then gave him my story. It's a good story. Here's why I don't trust. I was abused. I was abandoned. Here's what happened to me.

People let me down. This is, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, how can I possibly trust when this is the very foundation? of what I had experienced. And it was a story that had always gotten me a lot of sympathy. Oh, you poor thing. You know, God, it's amazing that you're doing so well anyway.

You're managing it so well.

You're managing. Exactly, exactly. You're managing. You're doing so great. You're managing. And he looks at me and he says, Are you going to take this to the grave?

This pain, this story.

Yeah, the whole thing. Are you gonna take it to the grave? And I was like, no. He says, Are you gonna let it go on your deathbed? Now remember, I was 25. I said, God, no. He said, How about a week before you die? How about a month before you die? And I said, God, no, Swamiji. I mean, I'm in therapy, I'm in process, I'm learning to Heal. And he looks at me and he says, you,'re waiting for someone to draw the line for you. You're waiting for someone to come in and say, you, can be done. He said, no one will. He said, it's up to you.

Wow.

You can take this pain to the grave. You can let it go on your deathbed. You can let it go a month or a week before you die, or you can let it go tonight. And I was like, tonight? And he said, yeah, we have this beautiful lighting ceremony on the banks of the river. It's called the Aarti. He said, I'll have them give you one of the oil lamps. You wave the oil lamp. And then he said, after the ceremony, I want you to go and stand in Ganga, stand in the river, hold water in your hands and offer all of your pain into the water and then offer that water back into the river. And I spent that entire afternoon.

In.

This, I mean, it's so embarrassing to admit it almost 26 years later, but in this deeply arrogant, condescending, Western-centric, over-educated, over-indoctrinated mindset of, Oh, just give it to the river, sure, sure. You know, just as though it were an apple core rather than 25 years.

Of trauma, pain, suffering.

Exactly. I'll just simply let it all go.

Could I just simply let it all go?

Give it to the river, sure. Isn't that quaint? Isn't that sweet?

Yeah.

And I just, I mean, and I used to keep a journal, so I've actually got journal entries that are just mortifying to read because I was so mired in this arrogance. And around sunset time, I had a moment that I will be so grateful for forever in which I said, all right, look, obviously it's not gonna work. Obviously rivers do not sweep away people's problems. But you've got this whole network back at home. You've got people who understand process. You'll go back to it. Right now you're here and simply out of respect for the being who gave you the instruction, a being who is revered.

Yeah.

Give it a try.

Just do it seriously.

Yeah.

Sincerely was, you know, my adverb. It was, it's not gonna work, but I'm just gonna do it sincerely. I will not mock it. I don't do things half-heartedly anyway. I'm just gonna try it. And so I do. And I stand in that river, and I pray, and I cry, and I pray and I cry and I pull up every memory that I had of pain, of trauma, and I offered it into the water that was in my hands until I could see my biological father's face in front of me. and forgive him.

Wow.

And see him as a haunted man rather than a monster. And I walked out of the river. I have no idea how long I stood there. It was a very, very, very long time. And what I didn't realize at the time, because it had not been part of the explicit instructions, although obviously Swamiji knew it, I just didn't realize it, was not only had I given the pain to the river, but I had given the whole identification. You had used the word identification earlier. He hadn't said that. I hadn't thought that. But that was exactly what happened.

The old identity.

The whole idea of I am a victim of or survivor of This is my story that ended up being given as well.

And?

What happens when we hold on to the victim pain trauma story versus when we let the identity of victim pain trauma go?

Well, that's the difference between being free and being stuck.

Yeah.

If I've got an identity, as one who was harmed. Even if I say I'm no longer living in the emotional reality of pain and anger, but nonetheless, I've got the story of it. Well, then I can never be free. I mean, those are then the boundaries and the borders of what is possible in my life. I am the one who was harmed, betrayed, lied, cheated, got the short end of the stick, whatever our story may be.

So how do you tell your story now so that it doesn't become something that you were identified as, but this was an older identity? Like how do you phrase it? Because language is powerful for the mind and the heart. How do you do that?

So that's really interesting because-- so obviously.

You tell your story in the book and you're sharing a story now.

It's been 25 years. I mean, that's why people who know me were so shocked to read the book, because people were like, oh my God, I had no idea. And there were people who felt as though I had been less than honest.

We're telling the full story.

That I hadn't for 25 years said, oh, and by the way, This is what I had experienced.

And.

The reason that I had not was it no longer was my story. Now, I have to just go back for a moment, which was I spent many, many, many months after that happened trying to find it again because in the really interesting workings of my own brain and psyche, I was just convinced that there was no way that had happened and that I had simply repressed it, suppressed it, locked it off into some corner of my dissociating mind and that it was still there.

You mean after you let it go in the river? Yeah. Yeah.

And I walked out in this experience of such freedom and such joy, and over the next several months, I found myself trying to evoke feelings of-- Sadness and pain, anger. Pain and anger, and could I get myself to want to binge and purge? Purge. Could I feel like a victim? And I couldn't do it. But it took months for me to finally stop trying to. To prove to my lowercase self that I hadn't just locked away this pain because, you know, we're so indoctrinated.

Yeah.

So indoctrinated into this is how it is. You are. you are a victim, you are an addict, you are suffering. The idea of freedom was so inconceivable to me that I couldn't, you know, my lowercase s self couldn't easily accept that it had happened. And my capital S self was just full of such love and compassion.

Peace and harmony.

And I remember these internal experiences I've sort of the uppercase S self in me being like, Sure, no problem. Yeah, you want to remember that. Sure, sure you will go there again. No problem. Because if you need to do that to prove to yourself that it doesn't trigger you. Okay.

So how do we tell our story?

So I hadn't told the story for 25 years. I finally told it. through the book in a way in which it's a telling of a story. I did try to get back in touch with the emotion. Because see, even though it's no longer on a deep level my emotion, empathically, I can still connect to the young girl to whom that happened. It's not like she has ceased to exist. It's just she's not me.

Right, you've outgrown her. And so-- But is she still inside of you? Is there a young five, seven, eight, ten-year-old inside of you that had an experience?

Inside is such an interesting question because when you say inside, can I connect with her empathically, deeply in a way that enables me to write a book full of what she was feeling? Absolutely. Can I tap in, tune in, reconnect? Absolutely. It has not become unavailable to me. But it no longer is the way that I self-identify, the way I move through the world. It no longer is part of my experience of either lowercase s self or capital S self. So I tell the story as her, but then as her, as she who has morphed Has evolved. Into me.

Yeah.

Exactly. And the reason that I did tell the story finally was because I, and I did it very consciously because I realized, I mean to me, if you had asked me 15 years ago, I would have said, or yeah, even 10 years ago before I started writing it, are you ever gonna share this? I would have said, well, if someone ever specifically asked me, I've never lied about it. I would never lie. If someone were going through it and said, have you ever, I certainly would open up and share. But because it's not how I identify, it's just not how I move through the world, and so it's not, hi, nice to meet you. I'm Sadvi Bhagwati Saraswati. Oh, and by the way, this is what happened in the first 10 years of my life. Yeah, yeah. But I realized something really deep and important, which was that there seemed to be this divide. between spirituality and humanity. And that those who are spiritual seemed to be expected to be not human. As in, Thou shalt not be hungry, thirsty, tired, upset, frustrated, sexually aroused, whatever it may be angry, and that those who are any of those things.

Are.

Not yet really spiritual or worse disqualified from being spiritual. And that yes, we have beings, my guru is one of them, who really came out of the womb like this. So there are beings like this. And their stories, and of course before I wrote my memoir, I actually wrote his biography 10 years ago. And it's inspiring and it's beautiful, but yet what it doesn't do is make us feel like, oh, I can do that. He did it so I can do it. It's awe inspiring. It makes you want to bow at his feet and ask for blessings. But it doesn't make you feel like, oh yeah, all right. All right, I can do that.

Sure.

And that it started to seem like we were in a place where I was having so many people preface their questions to me. I lead something called Satsang, which is a-- it literally means in the presence of truth.

Okay.

But it manifests more as a spiritual question and answer session. People ask questions and I serve as a vehicle, a channel through which answers come. I'm acutely aware it's not my knowledge or my wisdom, but it's coming through me. And people started to preface questions with, well, I know that you would never think like this, but Or, I know I could never be as pure as you are, but... And I realized, oh my God, not only is this horribly incorrect, factually not true, but it's really detrimental to their spiritual paths. That as long as they can keep me on a pedestal and feel like I'm cut from some different cloth, It prevents them from having to step up to the plate of their own spirituality.

Their higher self, yeah.

Exactly. And that I had a story that was not someone who came out of the womb enlightened. That was not someone who was not interested in boys or girls or sports or parties or alcohol or drugs or sex or anything. And I realized that All of these people really had this vision of me as this sort of angel virgin who descended from the Stanford clouds onto the banks of Ganga. And that not only wasn't it true, but it was detrimental to their spiritual path because they needed to know that if I did it, so could they. And that really became the whole point of the book is, Hollywood to the Himalayas is physically my journey. But for all of the people reading it, it's not about you having to move from Hollywood to the Himalayas. It's about a shift in how you think from what I call the Hollywood way of thinking, which is you are a body. And this is the answer to the question of how do we let go of our stories. Our stories are this Hollywood way of thinking. You are your body. It's size, it's shape, it's color, it's age, it's race, it's religion, it's socioeconomic status, it's ethnic background, it's gender identity, it's sexual orientation, what's in its bank account. I mean, the whole shebang. You are that is the Hollywood way of thinking. which leads to suffering because then we are never enough. There is always some way in which we are not rich, successful, happy, funny, thin, healthy enough compared to the visions we're being given on social media or marketing or those we see around us. So it's a constant sense of not enoughness, a constant sense of grabbing, I want more, I'm yearning, I'm never satisfied, or pushing away. What in Sanskrit we speak about as rog and dwesha, the likes and dislikes that which I'm pulling toward me, that which I'm pushing away, the yearnings and aversions. You could say, in which we suffer. That's the Hollywood way of thinking. You are this story. And then there's the Himalayan way of thinking which says, you've got a body. And it's a temple. We say, Shri Rudra Ekam Deva. It means your body is a temple. Take care of it. love it, honor it, respect it, but you're not it. It's a vehicle. And so when we shift that mindset, and that's what I, through telling my story and how I learn all of the lessons, 'cause of course, after the moment of ecstasy, There's a lot of lessons left to learn. I actually stopped halfway through a story earlier somewhere on when the suffering had come back where someone had said something that hurt my feelings. And I went into Swamiji all wrapped up in, I've been insulted and I've been hurt and, you know, who I am isn't right. And he looks at me and he says, you, are the stupidest smart person I know.

Wow.

Stupidest smart person I know. He says, you know, how is it that someone as smart, as in you've been so educated, you've got these degrees from-- Sure. the best institutions. How can you be so stupid? And he didn't mean it in a derogatory, the core of who you are is wrong. And I had been there long enough to know him and to take it as the slap awake rather than the slap of you are wrong. It was literally just a slap awake. Wait, like wake up, come back to self. Who is it who's hurt? Who is it who has forgotten who you are that suddenly what this person in their ego, in their arrogance, in their karmic drama has said about you, suddenly that's your story? you stood in Ganga and you let.

Go.

The anger and the pain of what had been done to you by your father's anger and ego and ignorance and karmic drama. And now here you are allowing yourself to get wrapped up in someone else's karmic drama. Here you are ready to sacrifice your freedom, your joy, your truth on the altar of someone else's karmic drama. They're angry, they're frustrated, they're jealous, they're in the midst of whatever Karmic drama throws they are working through.

You don't even take it on, yeah.

Why would you take that on? Why would you offer your most precious thing, your freedom, your truth, on this altar of their suffering? Because of course, people only bring suffering to others when they're suffering themselves.

Right.

So how do you manage I don't know if manage is the right word, but how do you navigate someone else's victim suffering state of being or whatever drama, whatever you want to call it. They're in a state of suffering or in a lack of higher self-ness and they're allowing the stresses of the world to consume them. How can we as individuals not take it on while also be present and have compassion and protect our energy, I guess, or our knowingness of who we are.

Beautiful. Well, it depends really on your relationship with that person. Because we have different duties, what we would call dharma. We have different dharmaic responsibilities. to different people. So let's just take two different categories.

A stranger, maybe.

Exactly. We'll call them those. Well, exactly.

Those that we know, those we don't know.

Those, I would say, we have a choice about those. We don't have a choice. And when I say don't have a choice, I mean we've already made a higher choice, which is I want to be married to you. or I want to stay your friend. I've already made a higher choice that now renders me without a choice in the present moment because I'm not going.

To derive this relationship. Ruining this relationship, yes.

Compared to those we really do have a choice over, which is the person shouting on the other side of the road and I can just cross and walk on the other street. So for those with whom we do have a choice. The equivalent of those who are just shouting. Send them love and compassion from afar. Protect your energy. Protect yourself. Say a prayer for them. Send them love from your heart. May they no longer suffer. May they find joy, may they find peace, may they find health. But recognizing that in each of our individual very human capacities, we don't actually have the ability to take on the suffering of every single human being on the planet. And therefore we have to make choices. And so those about whom you have a choice, just let it go. You just let it go. You're not gonna take it home with you. The guy on the road who clearly was drunk on drugs, suffering a mental breakdown, screamed something at you, it's not gonna ruin your dinner.

Yeah, don't take it personally, let it go.

You're not gonna need therapy about it. Sure. Then it comes to those who are close to us and depending on the relationship several things happen. First of all we tend to take it very personally. We believe it and so we get into a very defensive stance of I need to prove to you that what you have said is not true. We start arguing on merit. When merit has actually very little to do with it. We can only share that which we have. And if what I'm sharing is anger, misery, pain, suffering, and you know that because if in my presence you are feeling pain and suffering, it means I'm sharing that with you in the moment. You need to realize that that's what that person's experiencing and not take it on as though it were an actual merit-based analysis of someone who had your highest being as their singular agenda in the moment? I mean, when someone is yelling and screaming at you or metaphorically vomiting their current state of dis-ease onto you, they're not doing it because they've got your highest good as their highest goal in the moment. They're doing it because they are in a state of dis-ease in that moment. It's like, how do you deal with a loved one who's got COVID? Well, you don't divorce them. But you also don't crawl into bed with them. And you take care of them as fully as you possibly can. while maintaining your social distance, while having a mask or doing whatever it is that you need to do.

Protect your peace too, yeah.

To realize, well, it's not going to serve anybody if I end up sick also.

If I end up carrying what you're carrying emotionally, physically, whatever it might be, right?

Exactly. So we develop the equivalent of sort of metaphoric spiritual masks, which is an ability to be in your presence, to recognize that the coughing, the metaphoric coughing, sneezing, vomiting you're doing is not because of me, it's because in this moment there is a dis-ease inside of you. So COVID we could call an actual disease. You know, you could look at it molecularly. But my anger, my pain, my ego, my arrogance, my fear, my story, This is a sense of dis-ease. And when I am living in that, suffering with that, I'm going to leak it onto all of those around me the same way that someone who's sick is going to sneeze and cough, not because you're a bad person, but because they're sick.

Yes.

And so the first thing you do is realize this isn't about you. Not about you. You have as much love and compassion for the person as you can. You do whatever you can to help ease them out of that moment without being the person who jumps into a raging river to save someone who's drowning when you can't really swim. And all that's going to happen is you're both going to drown. Yeah. you figure out a more effective, efficient way how to send that person a lifeline that isn't going to drag you down. And you create what I call spiritual masks, which is not I'm separate from you, but it's my meditation, it's my prayer, it's my yoga, it's my way of anchoring and grounding in who I am. That even when you you are leaking your dis-ease on me.

It doesn't penetrate me.

It doesn't penetrate. I don't take it personally and I'm able to just be with you in love and compassion.

Yeah.

I feel like I could talk for another three hours with you on these topics and dive in deeper, but I want to give people this to start with and also to get your book, Hollywood to the Himalayas, a journey of healing and transformation. And I think if anyone is feeling like they are disconnected to peace, they're disconnected to relief, to their own spiritual truth. And this could be a powerful journey for them to go on and get this book. So make sure you guys get a copy or give it to a friend who might be struggling that could be inspired by this message and by your story. I think a lot of people can be inspired by your story, by you sharing an older identity stories of an over identity that are no longer you, but by sharing the things that you had overcome.

Well, thank you so much. It also, as it shares the last 26 years now in India, it shares the challenges that I've been through in India. So, yes, there is the aspect of the healing and transformation from the trauma and the addiction and the story into a being of freedom and joy. But that's only a part of the book. The rest of the book is the agony and the ecstasy of living in an ashram in a spiritual world and all of the incredible spiritual, ecstatic experiences. I try to Give words to those experiences that are so wordless and what that really feels like. And also to walk people through the challenges that I faced, for example, in taking vows of celibacy. Like, what does that look like of being a woman in really a man's world? of having to make life choices like the biology of my body is screaming baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, and yet here I am a monastic renunciate. And how do you look at life path and life being not, as I say, a buffet where it's all about Oh, I'd like this and this and this and that. And I'd like to just mush up everything.

Sure.

But actually having to make conscious decisions about the package deals that we're gonna live in. Right. And so, I try to really walk people through both the agony of the decision-making fork in the road. How do you make these decisions? How do you deal with it when you are faced with these sorts of questions and traumas and new challenges? Like here you are in a woman's body and oh my god it's a man's world. As people struggle with decisions in their life, challenges in their life, things that seem insurmountable, or package deals they're trying to figure out how to merge and what to do. I really walk people through all of these decisions and challenges of how do you do it in a way that honors spirit, honors truth, honors love, and also honors the very unique and beautiful role that you are here to play in this particular incarnation with your gender and your ethnicity and your story and all of that. How do you honor both of those? So I'm really excited for people to be helped by that aspect of it as well because I've certainly had my share of challenges. Big challenges, yes.

Sure, that's great. I'm excited for people to get the book, hollywoodtothehimalayas.com, and where do you spend time on social media? Where should we follow you or connect with you the best?

So, I did also just want to say quickly, you and I have been saying Himalayas because that is the current--.

That'S the way I heard you say it, so I've been saying it that way.

I'm glad to say it for those of you who have not yet been initiated into the Sanskrit pronunciation of things. People call it the Himalayas, of course. Actually, in India they say the Himalayas in the same way that we say Ganga instead of the Ganges. But it also is Hollywood to the Himalayas, so either way is fine. But yeah, the website for the book is HollywoodtotheHimalayas.com. where you can learn more about it, download some free chapters, but also even easier is just to go straight to Amazon or wherever you get your books and order it. On social media, I am @SadhviJ. That's S-A-D-H-V-I-J-I @SadhviJ on YouTube and also on Instagram.

Okay, cool.

And my website is sadvi.bugwiththese.org, so that's super easy. And on Facebook, I'm the full name @SadviBugwiththeSaraswati.

Okay, perfect. We'll have it all linked up as well. Fantastic. And I want to acknowledge you, Sadvi, for your journey, for your journey of showing up for yourself, for your higher truth, for your mission to serve, and to go on this experience, which was challenging, but also extremely powerful for you. So I really acknowledge you for everything you've been up to and the things that you've had to overcome and the people you've been able to serve because of this mission.

Thank you.

You're welcome. You're welcome.

I feel so blessed to be able to be a vehicle, a vessel, channel of healing for others. It's been so beautiful to heal, but to be able to have that experience be one that brings healing and transformation to others is just such a double.

Triple, quadruple, yeah, it's beautiful. This is a question I ask everyone at the end. It's a hypothetical scenario. So imagine it's your last day on this physical world, Earth, many years away. You get to live as long as you want to live, but eventually it's that last day. And imagine you get to be, see, do, be the channel for everything you want to do in your life, right? You accomplish things you want to accomplish, you're living your life the way you want to, you're of service, all the things, they all happen. But for whatever reason, you got to take all of your messages with you to the next place. Hypothetical. The book is gone, this conversation, it goes somewhere else, right? But you have three things you get to share with the world. Three lessons from all the life that you've experienced, all the life you're going to experience until that day. And these are the only lessons you could share and leave behind.

Mm.

Hypothetical. What would be those three truths for you that you would share?

Wow.

You should send these in advance.

I know. We'd like to get you on the spot, though. We like to get you on the spot. It doesn't have to be perfect. You gotta let go of perfectionism here, too, you know?

No problem with perfectionism as long as your audience is good with a few moments of silence.

Of course.

The first is that grace does not discriminate. That whoever you are, whatever you've experienced, whatever has happened to you, whatever you've.

Done.

Grace is available for you, there for you, ready for you, waiting for you, flowing to you through you. and all you've got to do is open yourself. If you think about faucet, it's funny it happens to me sometimes. I'm so used to speaking Hindi, I'm like, the null.

Null, null, null.

Null is Hindi, English, faucet. You think about the faucet being on, but you've got a bucket. In India, everybody bathes with a bucket, so you turn on the faucet and the bucket fills with water. You think you've got the faucet on, but the bucket's upside down. Well, that water is flowing, but you're not able to benefit from it because your bucket's upside down. Grace is flowing. It's there. No one doesn't have a bucket. There's no buckets with holes in them. All we've got to do is turn our bucket right side up. which doesn't require some very complex set of skills and abilities or training. It just requires an open heart and a willingness to let yourself be filled.

Yeah.

Okay.

And the second message would be just love. Just love. Love is the highest truth, the deepest truth, the most powerful infinite presence on Earth. And don't lose your ability to love. because of the nonsense games of your own mind. So don't wrap love up in stories and expectations and dramas. And don't relegate love only to the very select few with whom you've actually chosen to spend your life. Love everyone. See that soul, that spirit, that being, that divine in all. Love trees, love the flowers as they open their petals to the sun. Just love. Just allow your internal love manufacturing plant to be on 24/7. And the third message is recognize that you are here as an instrument.

An.

Instrument in the hands of the divine. It's like Saint Francis of Assisi says, oh Lord, make me an instrument of Thy mercy. Where there is darkness, let me bring light. We are instruments. And that's critical for two reasons. Number one, because with an instrument, what matters is not how beautiful it is or how covered in gold it is, but actually how effective it is. If I say to you, oh my God, I've got this beautiful new hammer for you. You're just gonna love it. It's covered with diamonds and gold. But every time you try to hammer something in, it squishes because it's made not of metal but of something else. Well, it doesn't matter how beautiful it is. It doesn't actually work. You need that hammer to be able to hammer in the nails. And as instruments, we need to realize that we are here to be, not diamond bedecked. I mean, if you want to be, do it. There's certainly no problem with being covered in diamonds. But remember that that's not actually the highest goal. The highest goal is to be an effective instrument. of the divine flow here on Earth. And there is nothing small, there is nothing big, there is nothing more important or less important. It's not about the what you do, it's about how you do it. And to realize that we are here to be Instruments, channels of love, of truth, of healing for the planet. And whether it's a smile, a hug, a sandwich, or a new school, or a whole new NGO, or whatever your way of serving the being, near you in that moment, maybe, instead of asking yourself, what for me? Ask what through me. Because that's actually the path to the greatest joy, to the greatest meaning, to the greatest peace. It's not about what I can acquire and accumulate on my shelf. It's actually about my connection to myself as that exquisite, extraordinary, unique, divine instrument. In the hands of the divine by however you conceive of Yeah. Infinite perfection.

This is beautiful. I've got one final question for you. What is your definition of greatness? Ah.

You, the fullest, most connected, courageous, creative, you. Each of us is going to manifest greatness differently. The sun, if you put out 8 billion containers, and there are different sizes and different shapes and different colors, and some have water and some don't have water, each of them is going to reflect the rays of the sun in a different way. You're going to have 8 billion different reflections of that light of the sun. Greatness is each of us as our vehicle, vessel, instrument in our unique size, shape, incarnation. being the reflection of the manifestation of that light. And it's going to manifest differently for every single being, but in order to manifest it, all we have to do is be connected to our true self. And in that connection, We develop courage because when I'm connected, then I know. You know, it's like the tree. I think about nature all the time and you think, okay, well, so if you say, what is greatness in a tree? Well, in some trees, greatness is to grow 600 feet up. But in some trees, greatness is to grow sideways because that tree knows My light is not up, even though the light of every other tree around me is straight up. My light is over here. And by some amazing, amazing plan of the capital P planner, even though trees are supposed to grow up, that tree knows how to grow horizontal to the ground. Until she finds her light. And so...

Yes.

Having that connection to yourself, to your truth, to have the courage to grow and to become and to be.

Who.

You are in your light. And then all of the exquisite creativity that that then gives us of how to share that with the world.

Beautiful, Salve, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it.

Well, thank you, Louis, and thank you so much for bringing this greatness to the world because out of all of your viewers and all of your community, every one of them is gonna have a different way to manifest that greatness and so beautiful that you dedicate your life to making sure that regardless of what language they speak, regardless of what walk of life life they're from, regardless of what their characteristics or their inclinations may be, that you're gonna provide something for everyone. You know, we say frequently when we talk about the infinite nature of the divine that it's like a mother who really only has the interest of her children eating their spinach. And for one child, she's got to bread it and then fry it. For another child, he likes it raw in a ranch-like dip and a third child likes it just steamed. And she's gonna actually cook that spinach in five different ways for five different children with five different taste buds. Because all she cares about is they've got to eat their spinach.

Sure.

And it's like you're doing that. You're providing all of these different speakers and different teachings and different teachers and different channels of the same truth. for all of your different people so that each of them can get it in the way that's most digestible and enjoyable for them.

I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Doing my best. I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

For the success of this situation, you need the cooperation of all these people. But for my body, for my mind, for my emotion and my energy, is to feel pleasant. I don't need anybody's cooperation. This is 100% my business. So right now to experience love within you, you are asking.