You have permission to wake up tomorrow and do anything! (talk 3 of 4)
In this live, interactive session Mary Schiller expands on the core insight of her "You Have Permission" series: that feelings and thoughts are not caused by external circumstances but arise internally, and therefore we have the freedom to choose how to respond. She recounts her personal history of trauma, chronic anxiety, and countless self‑help attempts, then describes a series of informal experiments (at work meetings, on the subway, during movies) that demonstrated that the same external situation can produce wildly different internal states, confirming that the source is internal. This realization led her to stop trying to control thoughts, to stop judging feelings, and to shift her focus toward exploring her true self and listening to deeper inspiration. She encourages participants to give themselves permission to act on whatever inspires them, emphasizing that resources and possibilities are always available. The talk also includes a Q&A segment where Mary answers audience questions about the nature of the experiments, the role of inspiration, and practical steps. Finally, she promotes her upcoming "Three Principles at Warp Speed" training program, describing its structure, commitment level, and cost, and invites listeners to join.
Chapters
Hi, how are you? This is Mary Schiller, author and coach of MarySchiller.com, coming to you live right now from Paris, France. It is September 17th, 2018. It's currently 8 PM here. Hi Robin, hi Lou. I'm assuming you can all hear me okay. If so, please say yes. Yes. If you are watching live, that's awesome. Thank you. If you are watching the replay, thank you so much for joining me for the replay. Your presence is really appreciated in either case. Hi, Doug. Hi, Clifford. Such nice friends here, Verena. I always feel like I'm just at a nice party with all my favorite people. Oh, great. No lipstick on my teeth. Yeah. Well, the night is young. It may show up later. Yeah. Whenever I host one of these calls, I just feel like I've just invited a bunch of my friends over to my apartment and you guys are all just hanging out with me. But the best thing is, is you can actually all fit into this room because it's sort of an infinite space, whereas 300 square feet would be a little packed if you were all in here in person. Hi, just follow. Good to see you. Thanks for joining. So I wanted to start first of all by welcoming you. Hi Erna, and thank you so much again for joining. If this is the first of the presentations on You Have Permission that you have attended, that's great. I'm gonna do just a really quick recap of things, and just to let you know, you can— hi Sue— you can post a comment in the chat at any time. I have one eye over there all the time. Hi, Andrea. And I will ask some questions periodically as well. I also have a little poll. Yeah, you would make a big mess in here, Clifford. It wouldn't take long. I have a little poll you can participate in if you would like to click on that and answer the fun question. I will look at that in just a bit. I also have a little green button here that is a link to a program that I am running for the final time that starts next week. Week, and I will talk a little bit about that as well. Hi Mia, nice, nice to have you here. Thanks so much for joining from all over the world, everybody. That is just the coolest thing. Uh, hi Anne. Uh, can't see the video stream. Hmm, I'm not sure what that's about. Maybe try refreshing this page, um, and see if, if it comes on. It should be, uh, there. Uh, so, uh, let's see if I can— can you hear me, Anne? Let me say try refreshing the page and there we go. So let me start by saying that I have thoroughly enjoyed all of these conversations we've been having on this topic of You Have Permission and in fact, it has actually spurred a lot of new ideas in me. Some of you who are on my email list or on my Facebook page saw a big post that I made there over the weekend and if you missed it, I will put the link to it at the end of this talk, but it really has sparked a lot of new ideas in me, just this whole conversation that you and I have been having over the past few days. So I wanted to start by recapping something that I think is important. One other housekeeping thing. If you want to ask a question, you can click on Ask a Question and post it in there. And then this is really cool. When I answer it, I click a little button And on the replay, you can see the question and you can jump right to the answer. So another way for you to interact with me. So one of the things that occurred to me that I should do at the beginning of this talk was share a little bit with you about what came before I realized that I had permission to, as the title of this talk suggests, get up tomorrow and do anything I want. Oh, thanks for that, and Ali, I appreciate it. And so one of the first things that I realized that was really key to unlocking this whole permission thing for me was, was recognizing— hi, Francis— that, that nothing out there, nothing out there in the world was actually causing any feeling that I was having. And it's hard to overstate the importance of that realization because, as many of you know if you've heard me and you can relate to this in your own ways, I know, you know, for my entire adult life, I had this idea that that— oh, and still having some trouble. Okay, one second. And trying again. Okay, I had this idea that some events of my early years in my 20s and 30s and then even into my 40s, that those events, which in my case happened to be some rather traumatic ones dealing with abuse and domestic violence and things like that, that all of those events set in motion something within me that couldn't be undone, that I was, you know, basically stuck with this experience that I was having, which was— hi, Christa— which was Every day I was living in a high state of alert, every single day from age 22 when all that abuse started to age 52 when I came across a new way of seeing myself. So I want you to imagine, and I hope that this hasn't happened to you, but I'd like you to imagine what it would be like to wake up every day and walk through the day in a constant state of high alert, meaning always on the lookout for somebody who was going to hurt you, or always feeling like you had to look over your shoulder, always wondering if the person who had done the abuse to you was going to show up at your doorstep, or, you know, always feeling like people were a threat to me in some way. I never ever, not for one second, feeling safe no matter what the environment was that I was in, no matter if I was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on an island or I was at home, you know, with locks on the doors. Never for one minute did I feel safe, relaxed, nothing. So did I paint a good picture there of what that's like? Lisa says, "That's how you are with anxiety." I couldn't relax. It was not possible in that high state of constant alertness. And my, my sense of it was that that was simply how my life was going to be. Because I have— I had tried so many different things to help myself. I had done things on my own to try to help myself. You name it, I tried it. I had seen many, many professionals over those years in all different kinds of capacities and situations, and I still felt like that. I saw— the final therapist I saw was in 2011 and 2012. And after I finished that process, I felt better than I had in a long time. I still wasn't completely relaxed, but I had at least some moments where I could sort of see relaxation, even if I couldn't totally experience it. I could sort of see that it was there, and it was like, okay, you know, that's sort of within my grasp. And I was having a little bit better time. But then not very long after that, I started to feel that same 24/7 kind of anxiety. Even in my dreams, I used to be absolutely plagued by nightmares, plagued by nightmares. I would wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, and just, it was just terrible. So I literally didn't have a moment's peace. And my impression was, okay, well, clearly something has been permanently broken in me. And that's why I feel this way. And that brokenness happened because this person did all these horrible things, you know, was extraordinarily abusive. And, and, you know, over many years I was told that because the abuse happened during a critical sort of developmental period in people's lives, particularly your 20s, that that was a sign that for sure this was never going to go away. And, you know, it looked to me like unless I could, you know, undo all of that, go into a time machine and marry a different person that first time, then I was stuck with this as my lot in life. And the best that I could do was figure out some way to continue coping with it, which was essentially what I was trying to do all that time. I was trying to find, different ways of mitigating these feelings and trying to make them less intense, if that was possible. And so it was a very challenging way to live. So I wonder if you could just tell me, maybe your sense of things isn't quite as extreme as that, but do you find yourself often trying to mitigate or change or make better your daily life experience? Are you kind of— do you kind of work on that? Do you find yourself, you know, revisiting the same, you know, not so nice feelings all the time and you're wondering how you can change them? Anybody, uh, can relate to that at all? Is there something that— I know Elisa just mentioned anxiety You know, do you find yourself in sort of an endless circle of, you know, coming up against the same things? Mimi says all the time. Excuse me, let me just get a sip of water here. It's very— was very warm here today. It still is. Still feels like summer. So, you know, I really thought— I really, really thought— Lisa says definitely— that the only way that I could fix this was to somehow change that circumstance and since that wasn't possible because it happened, you know, it was already over, it looked like an impossibility that I was ever going to feel any better than I already was. I mean, I got so frustrated because I thought, you know, I've done all this work on myself, I've tried to live a good life anyway, I've tried to be a kind person and, you know, I've got remarried and I tried to have a good relationship with my husband and, you know, all these different things, and yet even that didn't seem to make a difference. Francis talks about physical pain. Yeah, it's kind of the same. It's all in that same bucket, I'll say that. Whether it's emotional, physical, it's all in that same— we keep, you know, having the same sensations over and over and over again, and it seems like something that is completely out of our control is causing these things to happen. Hi, Diana. Habits seem like an endless circle I revisit permanently and can't get out of. Thank you for that. Kathy, yes, no matter what, this human is completely broken, incapable of taking care of herself. I don't see a way to change this. I'm doing it all wrong. I can't fix it. I'm in a huge grumpy pants today. I love your sense of humor, Kathy. You always make me smile. But yeah, so we can kind of be caught in this endless loop. We can see ourselves as being I hate to use this word, but I'm going to use it anyway. A victim of circumstances, whether we cause those circumstances or not, doesn't really matter. We see— Doug, does insomnia fall into that loop? Yeah, I would say so. I would say any kind of suffering really falls into this category of feeling like we— there is some kind of circumstance that looks like it needs to shift in order for us to have a different experience. So, you know, in my case, it was stuff that happened to me in the past, which I couldn't do anything about. In some people's case, you know, it's some kind of physical ailment needs to either go away or be abated before they can have a better experience or insomnia. You know, whatever it is, it's something that looks like it's, it's out there and isn't really within our ability to change at all. Uh, hi Andrea. Yes, I used to have a daily to-do list that was 20 items long trying to manage physical and emotional pain. I can really relate to that. I had a whole laundry list of tools, you know, in my head, uh, that I would do when I would start to feel anxious. You know, I would do these breathing exercises, or for a while I did a tapping, you know, emotional freedom technique, I think EFT. And I did meditation. I tried and it was a miserable failure at that, you know. I did all kinds of things. I had all kinds of mental games I would try to play with myself to not feel anxious and, you know, just all— you name it, literally I tried basically everything. Kathy, I can't seem to change me. I know I'm responsible for creating this shit show, but how do I change me? All right, so I'm getting to that, Kathy. So So that was in very brief terms, but you get the picture. That was how I was experiencing life up until I came across something new in 2014. And I was literally probably the most cynical person on the planet when it came to looking at anything in the— what you would call the self-help realm or even the spiritual realm or anything like that. Nothing looked like an answer to me. I felt like I had tried everything and there was nothing left. And so when I came across Michael Neill's book, The Inside Out Revolution, in 2014, I was very, very skeptical. I looked at this book and I was like, you know, well, I've read everything else, so I might as well read this, you know. And many of you have heard me talk about this where I listened to the book on my commute back and forth to work when I was living in New York City. After listening to it a few times, I heard something really powerful in there, which was that— it took me a while to see this, even a little bit— which was that no feeling or experience that I was having, meaning zero, never, this was never true, it was never true that that was coming from anything that looked like it was out there. So it wasn't coming from the traumatic events that happened to me. My feelings were not coming from there. They were not coming from a person. They were not coming from an event. And they weren't— and I took that also to mean, um, let's see, uh, Francis, uh, and others who are having physical things, I also took that to mean that my feelings, my emotional experience of something, was not coming from a physical thing either. And I— when I— when that sort of clicked, I was like, oh my goodness, that is so major. Like, I can't even wrap my head around what that's actually telling me. Because every single thing that you and I are taught supports this misunderstanding that things out there and circumstances and people and money and whatever else it looks like, physical stuff, is what is causing us to feel a certain way. That's what the entire typical conversation is saying. And Michael in his book was telling me that that was wrong. That in fact everything that I was experiencing was coming from within myself in some way, shape, or form. And so that was like monumentally huge for me. Now, if some of you have heard this before, uh, I would encourage you to kind of put what you already know about it off to the side while you're listening. And if this is new for you, this may take a while to sink in. But what I can tell you was really helpful to me was I started to conduct experiments. And you may have heard me talk about this, but I highly recommend doing it. I would say to myself, okay, well, if Michael's telling me the truth, which it sounds like he's trying to, let's test it. Let's see, is it really true that nothing out there, nothing, is causing me to feel something? And for it to be truth with a capital T, that means there can't be any exceptions, zero exceptions. So I tested it and I tested it and I tested it. I tested it at work. I, you know, I would go into work and see one day everything was kind of okay. Next day I'd walk into the door and I'd feel terrible, and I'd be like, okay, wait a second, like nothing in this office space has changed. It's all the same people sitting there. No one's even talked to me yet, and I'm already feeling terrible. Like, what's that about? That's got to be coming from me. You may have heard me talk about all my experiments on the subway where I used to feel tremendous stress, and I used to think it was coming from the people who were too close to me or just the environment. And I noticed how some days that wasn't true. Some days I was actually perfectly fine and I could sit there and knit and not really notice anything. And other days I would be just wracked with stress and that high alert feeling. And I thought, well, now how can that be? It's the same situation. I would test it with kind of funny things like my husband and I would go to a movie We're both sitting in front of the same screen watching the same movie, and we would come out of the film and he would have had one experience and I would have had a totally different one. You know, one of us liked it, one of us didn't. One of us got very emotional, the other didn't. And I thought, now it can't be the movie then that's, you know, somehow sending feeling signals out from it, because if that were true then we would all be feeling the same thing, and that isn't what happens. And I did this over and over for weeks and weeks, months, literally months. And I actually still do this today, believe it or not. And I suddenly was like, oh my gosh, this is really a fact that nothing out there is causing me to feel something, that it's all coming from within myself. It seems to be related to maybe some kind of random thinking I'm having at the time that I don't have any control over, because if I could control it, I would have. I tried for many years to control my thinking and couldn't do it. And I also started looking at, well, what, what's happening when I'm feeling good? You know, if I have moments where I'm feeling some kind of okayness, which started to become actually more frequent, which was a lovely thing to experience. Where is that coming from? Well, that has to be coming from me too. So that means that there isn't anything I need to adjust in my environment or in my money situation or my job situation. Like, nothing like that has to change for me to even have a good feeling because that's coming from me too. So, uh, all this to say, this was one of the biggest moments of my entire life. Perhaps the biggest moment of my entire life was realizing that whatever I was experiencing was simply occurring in that moment because of maybe some kind of random thought that was going through me or if I wasn't really paying attention to my thinking and I happened to have a really nice feeling, that that was coming from me too, that that wasn't coming from some sort of practice I had to do, or I don't know, you name it, that there was nothing that I had to do in order to feel okay and to feel at peace and to feel good. That was really sort of the second piece of it, was recognizing that not only was I never broken, I had seen myself for so many years. I can get kind of emotional about this because I saw myself for so many years as being somebody who had made an error in judgment at age 22 and gotten married to the wrong person. And because of that I had been broken, never to be fixed again, never to be whole again, never to be okay again, and what I saw when I let all of this sink in over a period of several weeks and months was that nothing had actually happened to me, to big me. Yeah, some stuff had happened to the the bodily form of me, but nothing had happened to me, the me that is larger than these thoughts that I'm having, that's larger than this body that I'm in. And the same is true for you, that you are never broken. You can't possibly be because you're not contained in all of this. You're much larger than this. You are limitless. And nothing can ever break you. Nothing can ever even chip you. So you, like me, are perfectly whole and healthy all the time, and you don't have to do anything to fix yourself. You don't have to do anything about your circumstances. In order to bring about a good feeling, because that good feeling is what you are made of. So that, in very brief, is what set the stage for me starting to live differently. So I'd like to pause there before I go into this next portion that has to do with this whole permission topic and see what you think about what I said. And if you have a specific question, please feel free again to put it in that Ask the Question, and I can give an answer and record that. Hi Mimi, listening to you, it's like God is talking to me. Oh my goodness, that is amazing, Mimi. Well, I'm hoping that at least I am, I am speaking the truth Truth with a capital T as it now appears to me and for me to even be talking to you in this way, I wish you guys knew me like before, before 2014, before 4 years ago because the way you can see a glimpse of that is if you read my memoir which read at your own risk. It's not a very easy read called I Am Just a Woman because because I wrote that before I came across all of this. And then I just recently, a year or two ago, added an addendum to it, you know, talking about what happened after. But, you know, that would, that would give you a glimpse into how I was experiencing life before. It was a very dark place. Oh, thank you, Robin. Hi, just fall. Can you try typing that again? You know, it was, uh, oh, thanks, Mimi. I appreciate that so much. Uh, you know, really, life looked very bleak to me. I tried to create a happiness somehow, but I couldn't do it. I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know, you know, I felt like I had done everything I could do to make myself happy, and none of, none of it worked. You know, I, I raised a beautiful, intelligent daughter. She and I are incredibly close. I married again a much kinder, nicer man, and I had some good jobs and things and made a lot of friends. None of it really made any difference in how I felt. Let me ask— answer Diana's question. Diana asked, what would an experiment exactly look like for you when you conducted them? Can you describe maybe one that stood out? Yeah. So, uh, I did a lot of experiments at that time at my job because I really disliked the job that I was in at that time, Diana and everybody. And so we would have these meetings that I just found to be like torture. And so after I came across this, I tried to kind of just observe myself So I would go into the meeting and I would go, yeah, Mary's feeling really like kind of angry right now. She's having a lot of angry thoughts and feelings right now as she's listening to her boss speak. You know, that's pretty interesting. And I kind of wouldn't like get all upset about it. I just would notice, wow, she's got a lot of anger going on. That's pretty interesting. It's sort of like outside myself watching myself have this experience. And then, you know, I would notice that and kind of go, hmm, interesting. Nobody else around here seems to be angry. So where could that anger be coming from? It's got to be coming from her own— some thinking she's having, and she's kind of looking at that and agreeing with it or something. And then we would have another meeting in a couple of days, same people, maybe even the same topic, and I noticed, wow, she doesn't even care. About anything right now. She's just listening and kind of being a sponge and absorbing what are— what people are saying, listening, kind of neutral. Well, isn't that interesting? You know, all the same players, maybe even the same topic, and today Mary's not really having much of any kind of experience. So yeah, I would just do that over and over again. I would test it under the same circumstances, the same the same everything, you know, or even just in the mornings, I would go, how do I feel this morning? Hmm, feeling kind of anxious this morning. That's interesting. Next morning I'd wake up and I'd go, hmm, not feeling really anything right now. I'm kind of neutral. Well, that's interesting. I had the same, I woke up in the same place, same person next to me, nothing's different. And yet one day I feel one way and the next day I feel another way. So what's responsible for that? So those are the kinds of experiments I did. I hope that's helpful, Diana. Uh, let me go up here. Uh, oh, thank you. Um, Verena says she could read my memoir because she knew it had a happy ending. Yeah. Hi Mia, if you had this understanding in your first marriage, can you explain what you would do differently in that situation? Uh, you know, I, I think that, um, it's really, really hard for me to answer that, but because I would have had to have had this understanding all through my growing up years because I got married really young at 21. And I think I just would have lived a different life basically if I had known this before. So who knows if I would have even gone into that marriage. It's really, really hard for me to say. Yeah, I don't really know. I wish I could could give you a better answer. Um, hi, just follow. Does one have to do the experiment many times before you see any lasting changes? Um, I had to do them for a long time, just while— I mean, all day, every day, for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. And like I said, I still do them sometimes if, if it looks to me like I'm kind of not seeing something clearly. I'll just sort of pay attention to, to it and go, okay, I'm having some kind of uncomfortable feelings and it seems to be about this topic. That's kind of interesting. I wonder if that's an area that still kind of looks fuzzy to me, you know. And yeah, so I had to do it for a long time, and I was really diligent about it. This is when I wrote that, that post on my Facebook page, which I'll link to, about, you know, really committing. I mean, I was all in committed. I was 100% like, I am never going to look at the other way I was living ever again. I want to see what this is about. And when I say committed, like, I really threw myself into this with everything to see if I could see this truth for myself, to see if it actually was real. And so that was part of that commitment, was just this constant checking and experimenting and looking and looking and looking. And not in, like, a way that sounds like hard work. It wasn't like that. It was more like, wow, this is really interesting. I've never looked at life from angle before. Oh, good, Diana. I'm glad that was helpful. Trevor has a question. Could you say more about— he went from realizing you couldn't control your thinking to understanding how the experiments helped you to let go of old thinking habits. Okay. Yeah, I think that— I think what happened with the thoughts was I just started realizing that I had no idea why I thought certain things. Period. And I realized again from experimenting— honestly, it sounds funny, I sound like some kind of mad scientist or something, uh, but I really just experimented. I was like, do I know what I'm going to be thinking in 10 seconds? I don't think so. No. Uh, can I control what thought comes to me? No. You know, and, and I would just experiment like that and go, okay, well you know, can I control any sort of feeling that I have? Which, you know, thinking and feeling are like two sides of the same coin. And I started realizing I couldn't. I had no control over any of that. I couldn't choose what thoughts I had and didn't have. Ideas pop into our minds. We have no idea why. They simply do. It can look like maybe they're sparked by something, I don't know, but it doesn't matter because we can't control when or how things occur to us. It simply doesn't work like that. And so I wouldn't say that I had to work to let go of old thinking habits. It was more like I started to see what the truth was, and the truth was I couldn't control any of my thoughts or feelings. Therefore, I didn't have to worry about them. They, they were no longer a concern to me. I knew that that they were simply coming into me for whatever reason, and they were doing the same for everyone else. Everyone else was having the same thing happen to them, that human beings are designed to have thoughts and feelings, and that I didn't have to worry about that anymore. Whatever they were was whatever they were. And this is kind of getting on to the second part of this talk, that because they were simply whatever they happened to be, that there was something else I could be paying attention to. There was something else I could be exploring. And so I no longer cared. Literally, I started to no longer care what I was thinking or feeling from any, at any given moment, because it no longer looked significant to me. It just didn't. It looked like the same thing that all of us go through. We all have these feelings and thoughts and, and all of that. And I wanted to know what else there was. So it wasn't so much letting go of those as going, okay, well, what else is there? Let me go back up here. See, Robin, Mary, this is something that I really want to know. If it's not things outside us that cause us to feel things, then what is it that changes our moods? I have no idea, and I no longer care, Robin. That was really a major discovery for me, was why do I need to care what I'm feeling from moment to moment? It doesn't have anything to do with anything. Human beings have feelings. We have feelings from A to Z. If we weren't designed to have them, we wouldn't have them. So bring them on. I wanna have all of them. I wanna have them all and I wanna have them all intensely and I wanna feel everything. I wanna feel everything because that is not the sum total of our experience. There's more to us than whatever those feelings and thoughts are. And, um, and that's what I saw kind of in the next phase of this for me, was that if that isn't all there is to me, this kind of running stream of thoughts slash feelings that I no longer have to really concern myself with, then what else can I explore? And that was sort of the next phase. Uh, Trevor, that's the key, I think. Oh good, thanks. I see what you're saying, Robin. It says it really doesn't matter anyways. We don't need to worry about it. Yeah, we don't need to worry about whatever that kind of surface-level experience is. It doesn't have anything to do with anything. It doesn't indicate anything is right or wrong with us. It's simply a way for us to have an experience of being human. That's what thoughts and feelings are designed for. That is their purpose. Beyond that, like, we don't need to go in and examine them or try to fix them or, or anything. Another big breakthrough was realizing that I no longer had to try to manage my experience, that it could be anything. I didn't have to judge it as good or bad or better or worse. So just a lot of things came together for me after doing these experiments with it. And what started to occur to me was, okay, so if my circumstances don't cause me to feel stuff, you know, if that's kind of irrelevant, and I have these thoughts and feelings that come and go as they please, and, and that's all fine, I can experience all that, then what else can I be doing with my time? What else can I be exploring what else is there. And what that looked like to me was my true self. My true self, not the one that I used to think I was by watching a movie of, of Little Mary. Who is Little Mary? If I'm not watching that movie anymore, then what am I? And who am I? And that's what I started to explore. And with that exploration process that I'm still in and will be in forever, because, as I mentioned in that post, it is the only thing that I do. It is the only thing that I do with my time. Does that seem shocking to you? It's okay if you want to say yes, that that is what I do with my time all day, every day. I explore who I am and what I am. I don't worry about whatever is going on on the surface human surface level of my life anymore. I don't care. I don't care if I have any money in the bank. I have a lot of money in the bank. I don't care where I'm living. I don't care. What is important to me is this process of self-discovery. And part of that process of self-discovery is allowing myself every day to wake up and say, what do I want to do today? What would I really love to do today? And answering that, not just asking the question, what is inspiring to me today, but what do I want to do? Oh, thank you so much, Robin and Diana. And this may sound shocking because this, I mean, when I'm talking, if people out there in the apartment building could understand me because I'm speaking English, maybe some of them can, they'd probably think I was nuts. They probably would. But what I know, as Oprah would say, what I know for sure is that ever since I gave myself over 100% entirely towards living from this new way of seeing myself, and I gave myself over to this self-exploration, listening to something beyond this surface thinking that, you know, that feeling of inspiration we all have, of intuition, of something calling to us, of, um, you know, just anything like that is what I'm talking about. When I started listening to that and answering that, not surprisingly but interestingly, a lot of my circumstances, circumstances started to change too without my even doing anything, you know, or doing like the tiniest little bit of effort. So that's been an interesting consequence that I had no idea would happen. Uh, Francis, I'm going to ask you how you explore. I know there are no techniques, but yeah, it's about— to me, it's really about, um, two things. It's about listening to that deeper voice, however that sounds or comes to you. We all have a different experience of that. So I don't want to say that my way is the way. There isn't really. We all have different ways of hearing that. In fact, I ran a course a couple of years ago with another coach where we talked about that, or we talked about how each person seems to have an individual way of hearing that, of connecting to it, of even, uh, going to certain places and somehow having some— even though it's not coming from there, there's something that's going on. And I have confessed this before, so I might as well do it again. I, I— again, I'm going to sound like a nut, but I often have this sensation that there is something about classical music, because I'm such a classical music person, and especially Beethoven's music, that feels so physical to me. Like, when I listen to it, it's like my cells are changing, and I, I end up like getting completely like this surge of inspiration and like almost like an electrical charge in moments like that. I have the same thing occur sometimes when I go— I have a— I'm so lucky I have an annual pass to the Louvre. And so I'll go to the specific place that I like, and I will look at these specific pieces of art, and I will literally just have like an electrical charge come through me and ideas just boom, boom, boom, boom. And so everybody has their own way of experiencing that. They often come out of the blue, new things, but it always comes from listening to something that is deeper than this, this kind of intellectual thought stuff. And the second piece is not just listening to that, but acting on that. Realizing that you actually do have permission to act on that inspiration. So I want to go to this poll really quick. So if you could do anything tomorrow, money were no object, what would it be? What I always do— one person said take a trip to a spectacular place. Let's look at that. Do you realize that if you are inspired tomorrow morning or today as since you said this today, to go to a spectacular place tomorrow, that you could do that? Do you know that you are free to do that? Yes or no? Be curious to hear your answers. Do whatever comes to you spontaneously. Yes. Quit your job. Yes. Something you haven't listed, Mary, but I'll share during the talk. Okay. So I'm wondering If you could ignore the chatter, Terry says. Um, oh, Robin, sorry, I missed your comment. If for anyone else reading, I've experienced this too. Looking in the direction seems to open doors with little to no effort. Do you know that you are absolutely free to do what you want to do tomorrow, no matter what it looks like? If you want to take a trip to a spectacular place You can do that. You can do that. You might hear thoughts like, oh, I don't have the money. Oh, I have to, you know, my job. As Terry just said, ignore the chatter. Listen to inspiration. It will tell you how to do it. You don't even have to know the how right away. All you have to do is go, okay, what is the first thing I could do? For that? I don't know, you know, let's see. So, um, so if we have these feelings of, of inspiration, if we have these desires to do something, it means that we have what it takes to do it, that we can go in that direction. And who knows what will actually occur? It doesn't even matter because, as I started this conversation with, Our circumstances do not create our feelings and our experiences. So if you look at this whole spectrum, it means we are free to do what is calling to us at all times. There is never anything, anything stopping us from that. Uh, let's see. Malta is calling, Ali says. That sounds like a fun place. Diana, the superficial stuff clouds the deeper stuff, right? So until we do not manage to leave the chatter behind, we'll not find the deepness inside. That's an interesting question, Diana. I would say that the— well, of course the depth is always there because that's our true self, but our experience of that can certainly become more of a daily experience. And, and, you know, in the past way before all of this, if I had a day where I even felt slightly okay, I thought it was because I had lined up all my circumstances perfectly that day, you know. And now I see that that's not true. That was what was simply happening was for a little while I was ignoring the noise, the chatter in my mind, and I was experiencing my true self. So it's always there, but it's really fun and it can be an incredibly amazing life experience to now be consciously aware of this. So yeah, um, Kathy, of course I'm free, but I have no means to make it happen. Well, Kathy, I'm going to tell you this bluntly, but you are absolutely and totally wrong. Totally wrong. Uh, you have all the money you could ever want. It's everywhere. It's just like air. It's every— we have every resource available to us at all times just by virtue of being human. We have been given everything. If you wanted to wake up tomorrow, Kathy, or anybody, and completely upend your current living situation, take a cruise, whatever, you would have the means to do it because you have access to limitless creative ideas and options. You could make a few phone calls or whatever, you could— there would be solutions that would come to you instantly. How many of you have had that happen before where you've looked at a situation that was like an intractable problem that you— maybe you'd been looking at it for months or even years, and suddenly an idea came to you, a new idea came to you, and you went, wow, could I really do that? Maybe I could, let me try. That's kind of what happened with me with this whole move to Paris. You know, I was in, you know, a financial situation that looked maybe like what Kathy is seeing in her mind. And I just said, I don't care. I'm gonna make this move. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna just take one step and the next one and the next one and the next one and just see what occurs. And guess what happened? Here I am. And that looked absolutely impossible to me. It looked impossible, but I didn't care because I wasn't listening to that chatter that said, "That's impossible." I was listening to inspiration. I was listening to what the next step was telling me to do. I was ignoring the old story about, "You're broke. You can't do it. You have nothing in the bank. You've got credit card debt up to your eyeballs. What are you doing?" I ignored it all. I ignored it all and I said, I'm not listening to you anymore. I'm all in over here and I'm gonna look this way and I'm not gonna listen to that old stuff. I don't care about that anymore. I'm looking this way and I'm gonna see where I end up if I keep giving myself permission to listen to this and act from here instead of from the old stuff in my head. So that's my tough love. Keep telling me I'm wrong, Mary. Yeah, I know it's, It's easy to say, Elizabeth says, it's harder to achieve it. I keep following inspiration and falling flat. It seems to make my daily life harder when I take time out and follow what seems inspiring. Well, it may be, Kathy, that you're not all in. Reread my Facebook post and see if you're really all in, because when we're all in here, when we are really committed, to living from this new place, the truth really of who we are, there's no going back. We can't listen to those old stories and buy into them anymore. They don't, they don't hold water. They have no foundation anymore. You know, we do some experiments like I did, and suddenly they've got no legs. They don't, they can't stand up. The, the idea of us having limitations starts to look ridiculous. And it comes from being all in and saying, I'm not going back there. I'm not going back to those old stories. I'm just not. So, uh, yeah. So Mimi says, I know intellectually I can do that, but there's a big but because I have stuff to do that seems more important. That too. I really appreciate all your comments, by the way. I so appreciate all your honesty. So let me just say that, um, That too is how— is the old way. It's the old way. It's looking at a movie in our minds and thinking that that's more important to watch than to explore what we actually really are. And to me, there's no comparison. I don't care about the movies anymore. I love having this human experience. I love talking to you. I love all of the I love eating food here and seeing beautiful things here and meeting new people and having feelings. I love all of that. That is not my priority in life anymore, ever. My only priority now is living more and more and more from what I see now as our true nature—this endless creativity, this endless well of new ideas, of inspiration, of intuition, of all these amazing things. And I have I have no desire whatsoever to see anything else as more important than that because I can't think of anything else that is. And I think in the framework of giving myself permission, I think that was probably the biggest one of my life. Let me see if I can get a few more comments here. Let's see. Allie, I have tons of them when I look back at things that seemed impossible and now I can barely remember them. Somehow I got past them. Yeah, Allie, isn't that something when you look back back. Mimi says, I feel like I need more proof. Well, you're looking for proof in the wrong place, I think, Mimi, and maybe some other people. I think that we're looking for proof on the surface level of our experience. We're looking for proof that our— in this because our circumstances change somehow. That's not where proof is. You know, when I first came across this, my circumstances in terms of how I was living, what I was doing, they didn't change at all. For a long time, didn't change at all. But what did change? Experience. That was the quote unquote proof when I did all those experiments and I started to see that this stuff was actually true. My experience of life, capital L, started to change. Then I didn't even care about my circumstances anymore. I was like, what the hell? I don't care. I'll just, I'll live in a cabin someplace with no electricity. I don't care. I'm having a great life. So I think that you're looking for proof in the wrong place, if that makes sense. Let me know. Jodi, I'd love to move to the mountains, but my husband isn't interested. Well, it's not impossible. It's still not impossible. Let me just answer Kathy's question really quick. Seems like my inspirations are huge— move into an RV, hit the road, open a retreat center. What do you do when the inspirations are so huge? Well, first of all, Kathy, Stop saying that they're huge. Stop putting a measurement on anything. There is no such thing as measurement. There simply is. There simply is. There's no judgment of big, small, good, bad, possible, impossible. That is not real. That is a figment of thought. And so put that off to the side and go, this is what's calling to me to do, so I'm going to do that. I have permission to do that. And that's what I'm going to go do and explore. And anything else that comes in that tries to tell you otherwise, you're free to ignore it. You have permission to ignore that. So that was my quick answer since we're kind of running out of time. I hope that was helpful, Kathy. So I wanted to, to kind of close out this segment by saying that, you know, my hope is that you will come away from all of these talks seeing something new about yourself, seeing that, you know, the, the human experience you're having is amazing and wonderful, and we can totally appreciate that. And I do every moment of every day. I appreciate every single thing that is created by a thought for me to experience in this physical form. Along with that, there is so much more for us to experience. That has nothing to do with what life looks like on the surface. And so that's really what I would hope you would, you would at least partially get from these talks. Thank you so much, everybody. I really appreciate it. I also wanted to mention, if it's okay with you, that I still have a couple of spots left for the training program that starts next Tuesday and Wednesday. It's called The Three Principles at Warp Speed. Let's get out there and start helping people already. And this is the final time I'm going to be offering it. It starts with a small group over Zoom for two days. We meet for about 4-ish hours each day with some breaks in there, and then includes some one-to-one support from me through email and through a couple of calls and some additional group calls. And the main purpose of this program is is kind of twofold. It's really to— if you have been impacted by what are called the 3 principles yourself and you'd really like to share this in some way with people, that's really what the program is about. I will say that this last group, this final one that I'm going to be doing starting next week, is going to be different from the first 2 that I've run in that it's really going to focus quite a bit on this idea of commitment, of, of, you know, really giving yourself over to this new way of seeing things, and not just on an intellectual level anymore. You know, it's not about understanding, it's about saying, I am taking this leap and I'm going for it, and this is all there is. And so that's going to be a major, major focus of the conversations that we're going to have during that live 2-day workshop. So if you are interested in that, I do invite you to take a look by clicking on the green button on the page. And of course, if you have any questions about it, you can email me. And the investment for that is $3,000, and that includes 6 months of me being basically available to you 24/7. So it's quite a lot of commitment from me, and that's intentional because I really do want to to support you in any way that I can. And, you know, if you're not even sure that you want to share this, but you simply want to take a deeper dive into these principles, you may find this program beneficial simply for that, because a lot of people have responded to me that it's been amazing for them just for that, which is lovely for me to hear. So any other comments? Oh, thank you so much. This is so nice. I'm just looking at the comments now. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh gosh, I really appreciate all of those comments. That's so nice. So I guess I will close this out by saying that, you know, I've just appreciated all of your honesty and your contributions to this conversation. I can't do this by myself. So it's just lovely to have you all here. And, um, oh, thanks, Terry and Gispa. Thank you, Jesus. And I will be back here tomorrow at the same time with the final one in this series, which I have called You Have Permission to Follow the Fun. And that has a lot to do with what we were talking about sort of at the end of this, of how do we experience this, how do we live this way. If this is the way that we really commit ourselves to living, what does that look like really on a day-to-day basis, moment-to-moment basis? And so that's what tomorrow's talk is going to focus on quite extensively. So thank you, Francis, so glad you were joining. Ah, Adama, Robin, thank you so much. All right, everybody, feel free to email me anytime if you have questions about anything that I've talked about. If you have questions about the training program that starts next week, questions about anything, please don't hesitate to email me, mary@marieschiller.com. And I'm really excited, just as since I've got a few seconds left here, I'm really excited because I am coming up with some more new things for you towards the end of September into October, and I'm really excited to share those with you as well. I would love to have you for this final Warp Speed 3 Principles training. If that's of interest, email me and let me know if you have any questions about that. Thanks everybody, I will see you tomorrow hopefully. If you've joined on the replay, thank you so much for watching and I'll talk to you again soon. Bye for now everybody.
