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all right we are recording all right so please help me welcome dina miriam to the magic hour hi [Music] wonderful to be here thank you for having me yeah we’re so excited yeah absolutely and man your your bio which if you if you guys have not like heard of this woman this is going to be i think a new intro into a realm that a lot of our listeners maybe haven’t played with before so i think this is going to be really fun this conversation we’re excited about so dina it seems like you’ve lived a few lives simply in this

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lifetime so tell us about a few of the highs and lows that brought you to who you are today and to this work you’re doing today well it’s true i i have had a few lives within this one physical body as we all have because if you look back at your early years it seems like a different lifetime um so i i started meditating at the age of 20 i found my guru pomegranate and began a very serious meditation practice and a student of the sacred texts um and did that for about 20 years um i was married raised two sons got

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divorced and then after i’ve been meditating for about 20 years just really without my intending got involved with the interfaith movement and um began organizing um interfaith programs i i saw a lack of women’s involvement in the interfaith world and so i began trying to get more women involved and and balance to create more gender balance and so i created this organization the global peace initiative of women because the women wanted to be more active in peace building and so we did dialogues all around the world in

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many of the conflict areas and in the process of doing that i began to have very vivid recollections of my previous births i would it often it would be a place that i’d gone or a person that i met that would trigger something i wrote about this in my book my first book my journey through time um spiritual memoir of life death and rebirth so that that went on for quite a while before i actually ended up writing about it and the work evolved and developed we moved from peace building to environmental work to climate change to

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mentoring young people and then i wrote another book called the untold story of sita because of it some of a pilgrimage i took in india and then this book when the bright moon rises came to me just a few years ago also through travels when i began to have recollections of a totally different time i’ve always had an interest in history since i was young i had an interest in history but seeing beyond the external facts as we learned history really looking at at the evolution of human society and our own spiritual evolution because i’ve always

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assumed that i’ve been around for a long time that this wasn’t you know the beginning and end of it that that life keeps going on and life was long past and a long future that was just something i was born knowing um and so my interest has always been to understand how it works this law of cause and effect that guides us that directs us uh what are these spiritual laws that frame our life that’s always been a driving curiosity of mine and so that’s what led me to writing my books to sharing it publicly

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to share my experiences that’s fascinating so when you say that the book kind of came to you what was how has been the experience of kind of downloading this information well it’s um there are two parts to the book one takes part many many millennia ago in india and a love story that doesn’t find fulfillment and then it it resumes in china 9 000 years later where that where these two beings reconnect and the love finds fulfillment and um people always ask me this what’s the process for you i can’t say what the

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process is it is like a downloading it’s like i’m just carried into another realm and i’m experiencing the life of that being whether it’s my own past or whether i’m channeling somebody else i can’t tell but i experience it as my own past and i see many i see a lot of resonance with my current life i have seen that every life that i’ve seen there are certain personality traits that remain they may be subtle nobody else may notice them but for example in this book the second part where i talk about this

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life in china it’s a woman poet she’s an unknown poet but she’s married to a famous poet that’s the theme that has been with me for a long time interest in poetry and writing poetry as a child i used to write a lot but it’s not a predominant part of my life now it’s really a minor part but it’s it’s something that i was born with always drawn into poetry and and love to love to read and to write poetry so i can’t say whether this is really my past life experience or whether i’m downloading

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another for some reason um in my effort on in in my effort to show the karmic connections and how karma works and and how it’s an ongoing journey one life is a chapter in a long long book so to speak yeah and that’s something that we definitely want to hit on with you is how do we better understand the laws of karma um or cause and effect like you’re mentioning here where do we start with that work well i think it it the the first understanding is that we have history because everything that happens to us

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has had an earlier cause nothing is arbitrary out of the blue so it’s our relationships it’s our work it’s our health it’s financial life it’s where we live who our friends are everything comes together from an earlier cause and it could be not just your previous life it could be ten lifetimes ago because when the conditions are right that’s when uh the relationship will come back will emerge again so it’s as i’ve spent so many years studying this law of cause and effect i see it as an amazing weaving of so

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many factors and it’s like the logical mind can’t see it all it’s like this intuitive mandala with all these interconnections um but but we know that if you’re in a beautiful relationship it’s not likely not the first time you’ve come together you’ve worked on that in the past that’s what i was serious about you’re finding the yeah the fulfillment of that if you’re in a challenging relationship there’s a history to that and the choice is to resolve it or to face in the future

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so one thing that seeing my past has done for me is made me realize that there’s no judgment there’s no punishment we create our own situations and if the past creates our present then we are now creating our future so we can more consciously shape the future that we want so is it likely that in each reincarnation we’re reincarnating with the same like soul pod the same group of people yes i think that’s i mean it may not be the same group every single time but you’ve had uh you know there could be

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three or four people that you’ve been with in your past life there could be a few people from the life before that and some people you know how life is people come and go in your life some people are there for two three years i’ve had experiences where i’ve had an intense relationship work relationship three years later the person is out of my life and i know there was a karmic connection and it did what it needed to do yeah we’ve completed it yeah and then an intuitive recently told me that one of

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my close guy friends was a father in my past life and a brother in another past life and it you know it sounds so um like such a weird piece of information to get but when she said it it just it resonated right away but um i when we talk about karma though is it the case where um [Music] like each life we’re clearing it out clearing it out until we get to a place where it’s been um healed basically or um you know we’ve dealt with it and then in that life that is the life where maybe there’s more enlightenment or more

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we’re more a light body or um how does that play out or even is there a place where we’re headed like or yeah when does it stop is it this or is there not okay we do graduate one graduate maybe i rephrase the question as is it meant that each life gets easier because each life we heal a little bit more is that correct easier is not the right word i don’t think i think maybe more aware there’s definitely if you look over a period of time you definitely see an awakening process because you learn so you know if you hit your head

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knock your head in the wall and it hurts you might do it again because you don’t realize it but the third time you say i’m not going to do that anymore eat too much you get a stomach ache you might do it again but at a certain point you say i’m not going to do that anymore so we learn so there’s a growing awareness but some people have very challenging lives and either their work they’ve consciously decided to work out a lot of karma in that life or to work out very difficult karma to be free of it

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and so the easiness of a life doesn’t necessarily um resonate or doesn’t indicate a level of consciousness awareness i know someone um my family everything worked out for her she was healthy even though cutely terribly she had a beautiful marriage healthy children great finances everything worked bad for her but she was an unhappy person and a very awake awake person and so i say to myself she just had a vacation life you know she for some reason she had all those things in place but it didn’t it wasn’t challenging to

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her it didn’t serve her to ask questions i mean our challenges are there to help us grow to help us go deeper we want to know why you know um and yeah what’s the end and goal of this is to is to move into a higher state of being and which is what some may call heaven right like i think it was peter crone who told me that like in each life we do come closer and closer to that light body to the point where when we do reach that stage of enlightenment then that once we’ve you know completed a certain amount of enlightenment maybe we move

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into the celestial realms yes where that is pretty much heaven the connection like we’re one with source we become this one big light body all together i don’t know and then there’s a juxtaposition come in where it’s like but also don’t seek enlightenment also let go and surrender yourself so you’re not you know trying so hard because then we get into that suffering as well i think that um um the more we the more we live in for service to service the whole and to be here i mean at a certain point

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you’re not returning to fulfill your karma your unfulfilled desires your desire for relationships that are satisfied but you’re returning to be in service to the creation to help others i mean there are loved ones that are not there yet that you you don’t want to abandon so so at a certain point you’re taking birth to be of service and then there comes a time where you could also be a service in the celestial realms because there are many levels to that as well yeah beings who don’t reincarnate on

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earth but may go through different cycles within the higher celestial yeah and we want to go into that with you too what are the cosmic forces that are also called deities um so i know you were more talking about entities right is that what is i mean the the word in sanskrit for deity is deva or devi which means light body they’re light they’re light forms right so they don’t have physicality as we do um but they’re beautiful and they can change shapes and they can change there’s much more flexibility and

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fluidity in those worlds and they they can be of two types i mean there are beings who have not been human but who were born in that world and who provide service in that world and who help uh wherever in creation help is needed it’s not just earth i mean there are many planets with life forms the universe is huge right so there are many places to be of service right but then there are those of us who are going through the human experience and to reach a point where we graduate and when we don’t take rebirth

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uh and where we stay in those realms an hour of service in those realms wherever i mean all of life is about serving the collective awakening serving the collective good those realms which i’ve just peered into and i describe a little bit of my book because it’s also a place that we return to between births so we’re familiar with that but but there’s a great forgetting when we when we uh have to start over with the human body and so we lose we suppress the memory of our previous births and of the celestial

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realms but the celestial realms there are many beings there with which we’re familiar it’s not a foreign place to us you know and and they’re in service i mean they’re guiding us i’ve i’ve um been very aware of of relationships with beings in the celestial world at different times of my life that’s fascinating how can people i feel that i feel that people who may be sensitive that energy feel a bit of fear when they feel that energy of like another deity or being around how can they uh start to release

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that fear and and not worry so much about those other realms um maybe hurting them or uh being quote unquote yeah yeah yeah you know in the in the in the uh abrahamic terminology we might call them angels right doesn’t mean that they have wings but they’re they’re benevolent to higher beings when people feel fear and i and when i was younger i i i experienced a little bit of that um and and i think that you can um and i think that’s one of the reasons why we don’t have our memories or why we suppress our memories because it would

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be overwhelming you know if we we and we’re meant to focus on what we need to do in this life i think i do have my memory some of us [Laughter] um but it can be destabilizing it can be destabilizing uh uh and i think seeing seeing other beings can be destabilizing if you’re not very very grounded and rooted in a spiritual practice and very set on your spiritual path when you are set on your spiritual path things happen you know it’s it’s it’s a um an evolving uh and unfolding and so you do see

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things and you do become aware of things and uh you feel presences uh and it’s mostly benevolent i mean there there are um rascals out there too someone has to be careful of and stay away from uh but i think for people who feel feel fear uh should keep themselves grounded on earth and should just um not not go into the exploration uh because you know it’s it’s um it challenges the worldview or collective worldview that most of us live with which is this is all there is and unless you’re ready for that and

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really open to that um somebody might know what to make and not know what to make of it yeah but it can be such a beautiful experience to access the fifth dimension but it does mean that you’re opening yourself up it does and i and what happened to me and i think this i think this is where we are as a human community which completely changed my relationship with death right you know because most people have a fear of death right i think that’s sort of inborn in us so that we try to preserve our ourselves

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um but when you and and those celestial realms in scientific terms would be called other dimensions and i think science is beginning to acknowledge the existence of other dimensions you know our site is limited we only see on a certain spectrum our sound ability to hear is limited but if we could if we if we expanded our i mean what spiritual practice does is it it heightens your perceptions so you can’t see into those higher realms those other dimensions and you can hear things that are that are spoken there or

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music that comes and it is beautiful i mean why would you want to close yourself off it’s right i think like you said being grounded because being able to access that christ consciousness you know mary magdalene energy in the fifth dimension um if you don’t have that psychic hygiene and you’re not being embodied and grounded then you probably could pick up stuff from the fourth dimension or um maybe a deity or entity may sense your openness and ability and want to be you know channeled through you while you’re trying to you

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know channel the fifth so i think that um maybe two if there’s that fear just to um be even more diligent in your spiritual hygiene maybe right that’s a good way of putting it to be more diligent i think it’s a very good way of putting it and i i think if you have someone that you call upon whether it’s christ or you guru or whoever that’s your protection that’s your ultimate protection and so to to to to kind of enter into this realm into the openness of the universe one doesn’t need a one does need

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protection yeah do you think that it’s important to have an external protector or you know externals not the right word but something else beside your own inner warrior or your own authority to be able to like have you found that important in your life is having a higher power or something that you can lean on in that sense when you feel like you might be at the you know crux of i don’t know surrendering against something that i just always have this this is a this is just a conversation that seems always

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ongoing for probably all of us it’s very existential but this external force idea or this being like a crutch or something well no not a crutch just because i i mean hey if it works for you it works for you at the end of the day but i’m seeing the the sense of um external evil coming at you and the way that and maybe that’s death sometimes you know the fear of death might be really what that actually is at the core but that idea of this thing that’s going to get me becomes something that sometimes

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motivates people to seek some sort of higher power or dog it’s going to save them instead yeah and there’s a delicate balance there right but i was just wondering dana from your perspective and maybe even from your own life experience is that something that you ever kind of looked at or weighed out you know in your in your journey um i’m not formulating this question very well but just i understand what you’re saying okay i understand what you’re saying and it’s actually a very important

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question today because i i found my guru very young i was 20 and he wasn’t in the body he had already left the body but he left an organization and basically he gave me all the practices that i needed to deepen my spiritual life my meditation practices uh um at certain stages one needs a guide right and and and he explained a lot about the the laws of the universe i came to understand karma in a different way um at a certain point he became an internal presence and so what your question is do you need another or is it

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all within you it’s always in you it’s all within you i mean a guru helps awaken that uh awaken that remembrance of who you are and so it’s very helpful for some people but i see especially today that a lot of people are going through that because there’s so much available so much knowledge available um that a lot of people are going through that without the government i mean and for many you know the guru the guru is christ for many people right um so so i had a guru from india but christ i know people for whom christ is the gu

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is the living guru it doesn’t matter whether in the body or not but christ is inside it’s an eternal presence in an internal uh uh presence and so the guru is inside and and that was one thing that my my teacher always said the answers are within you you know you you people do use that as a crunch and if you need to use it as a crutch i’m not judging that but all of the answers are within and if you can access those on your own that’s wonderful do you think it’s just where we’re at on our journey depending on how we

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perceive that um that relationship between it being something external that you’re you’re holding on to and trying to protect yourself with or the internal um authority that you’re using to stand your ground where needed or stay grounded where needed um do you think it’s the it’s our journey as humans like you’re talking about with past lives and coming through almost like stations or levels of being able to integrate um that part of you so that you can finally be in your own inner authority do you

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think that that is just we’re just on different parts of that journey and that’s why it’s important not to judge others for where they’re at and why it’s important to not judge ourselves for where we’re at and that type of thing i think i think that’s true i think there’s also an element of the times in which we live when there’s so much accessible now you can learn practices of meditation you can find sanghas online i mean you can you there’s so much more available than

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there was say 50 years ago yeah where you had to seek out a spiritual teacher i mean for the past how many hundreds of thousands of years if you wanted if you wanted practices and if you wanted to learn about spiritual matters you had to seek someone out who could teach you right and so i think it’s a little bit of that and i think it’s also different places we’re on the on the journey but what what i what i have found through my spiritual mentors my guru and the others is that they awaken um they awaken a

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certain quality of love [Music] and that’s something that you can’t get online you can get meditation practices but it’s that quality of love which is mutual you know i have felt at different times in my life when i’ve had difficulties my guru’s presence just pouring love out to me and uh and i have i have a very very special quality of love for that being uh and so it’s the love relationship and at the bot at the the foundation of it all i mean what we learn as we move up the scale is that it’s all about love yeah there’s

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the notion of the universe and that brings up a good point too i know uh for me personally my guide is mary magdalene and through her i have received so much mothering so so much love um and for me that’s never been or it’s not been a crutch where i’m not having to mother myself but it’s taught me to mother myself it’s taught me how to be a mother to my inner child um and so um that that makes me wonder though because i i do um i have been told by an intuitive that i worked with mary magdalene in a past

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life like uh we work together um and now she’s my guide so i’m curious do we find our guides through our past lives like our our guides and you know from our past lives basically people that we worked with yes and mary magdalene is clearly very active today because there are others that i know um i don’t know if you know me or by star or sensibility bordeaux yeah both of them uh have been bringing forth that energy as well and so um definitely i think that there’s a past connection i mean what what draws us to

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one and not to the other it’s all our past yeah i think it’s you know in on this podcast we we talked to a lot of psychologists we really delve deeply into the the union psychology and shadow work and that type of thing and i find it so fascinating the the different modalities that as humans we use to get to integration you know that we get to finally embody or remember those lost parts of ourselves um and it’s it’s fascinating to understand the difference of this like you know maybe in science they might

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call it like almost generational or gene trauma that causes you to live a certain way and act that out in your life um and then when we’re talking about the work that you do and talking about generational um well past lifetimes and generational traumas that come through those lines um or even generational characteristics like you were saying you know whether it’s a a positive skill or uh a trauma or wound that you need to heal i just find it super fascinating to see the different systems that as humans we like can

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intellectually hold and then figure out how to experientially do that during our lifetimes like for me i’m i’m very prone you probably tell just by the way i talk but to that intellectual side and so that’s why union psychology is you know i guess is always interest me but when we get into that idea of the celestial realm we get into that idea of something that feels intangible i think for a lot of people and especially for me when before we begun began this this podcast years ago it was almost scary to

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kind of play in those realms that don’t have any black and white nature to them that have that are purely gray if you want to you know put it that way and i just wonder if that was ever part of your process or you always emotionally based you know had a really good emotional foundation that was you were able to kind of go into those places that seemed um you know non-scientific i don’t like to say it that way because i think science is uncovering a lot of that now but um that were in those realms that just

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didn’t have a black and white nature to them was that something that you had to move through oh boy my my past my first past life recall which was um i guess i was in my early 40s when it happened i had been married to a a psychiatrist for many years i was divorced this time a single mom raising my two kids working at a job and i started remembering my birth just previous to this which had a lot of trauma to it i was born in russia i was sent out during the revolution separated from my parents never saw them

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again ended up in europe and then had to deal with the nazi period i wasn’t in a camp or anything but i had a lover who was and so there were a lot of traumas that i was experiencing around that here i was as a single mom making taking care of my kids going to work thinking that i had flipped out here i am finding myself locked in another time round like it took me about a year to work this through and you know because i was married to a psychiatrist and because i’m a very grounded person i’d say to myself okay

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you know you’re holding a job you’re raising your kids you you’re doing it all so you’re not crazy but i was you know i would be in a meeting at work and be remembering germany in the 1930s wow and it was that’s why i don’t encourage people i say look if your memories come back they come back it can be intense you know because if you’ve had an intense life you know it’s one of the reasons we don’t remember is because it’s a distract huge distraction and so i actually had a bit of a

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scientific side to myself i went to the places that i saw i saw where i had died in prague in in the uh early 40s i went and found the street i went to saint petersburg to look for the street where i where i had seen as a child so i checked myself out in so many ways um universities that i that i didn’t know that suddenly i was hearing i would ask people is there such a place like they say recognize your re you’re remembering it yeah yeah and and um so i i then then after a period of time maybe it was a

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year maybe 18 months um that finished and i started remembering the life just before that and again i started checking things out so for the first few episodes i was very and i was i was still young and um you know unsure of my steps and wondering if i was imagining the whole thing you know and so after a while i began to have faith in what i was seeing because it was beginning to come together as a cohesive picture and it was beginning to make sense and so at the end of the day it does make sense it all makes i mean it’s the there are no real

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surprises in it yeah and i think that introspection you know there’s so many pieces to ourselves at the end after i had seen many many lifetimes i said to myself i’m i’m at all i’m that one in that one in that one yeah and then who am i i’m none of you i’m curious how many when when you talk about that like how far back in time can a soul go as far as their experience on earth how many lives could we have lived like i have one friend who said who was told his soul is as old as dirt like it’s

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just so so old and i’m just curious like how how many lives are possible how far back could we have gone very far back tens of thousands of years um tens of thousands of years i mean you know the earlier forms of of the human species neanderthals or whatever i mean we we are evolving and so we awaken with it all and i think that um i’m still on the journey i the in the book when the bright moon rises i go back to a life about about 8 000 bce um and it’s very vivid recollection in me and i i i relate to certain parts of it

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and i don’t know if there’ll be more i mean the journey is unending right i mean talk to me in five years and i may have a lot more to say both going back into history but what interests me more now is uh maybe it’s because of the stage of life that i’m that is seeing more into the other dimensions into the realms and understanding more the way things work in those higher realms because there does come a time when you’re where how many i mean how you don’t want to keep repeating and repeating and going through the birth

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again yeah so that’s another thing i’m curious about um i uh i’m able to see past lives i typically see them as a movie almost screen on the right of them um and then for me uh instead of seeing them it’s like i even with my eyes open it’s as if they’re closed and i’m experiencing them uh and i’ve maybe experienced uh five um all of them had very traumatic deaths um but the the one that i will share with you really briefly because i have a question about it um there was a life where um

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i there was a like a group of people a small group of of people who uh my gut feeling told me they weren’t safe but i wanted to help them so i went along and helped them and then they ended up robbing me slitting my throat and there was you know a ton of blood loss and then here a couple months ago my esophagus tore in three places and the way that that came about which i’ll share on another episode gets the long story but the way that it came about was i did not listen to my um my my inner wisdom like to my

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inner warrior i went against my own um intuition and i ended up in that situation so uh what when i came out of that and saw those two lives i saw that past life lining up with this my work was to promise myself and my soul and all future lives that i will never transgress myself like that again um and i’m curious how can how can someone open themselves up to their past life so that we can heal patterns like that and not repeat them in current or future lives and when i made that commitment to myself is that

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part of that work is that is that why absolutely okay absolutely i mean things do get repeated i mean that’s how you learn right and so making a commitment to to to to be alert and to be caring and to to to take care of yourself is it is a is that it’s as if you’re you’re you’re communicating now with your soul because it’s it’s the soul that that that guides you right and we often don’t listen because there’s a clutter of other things that get in the way but we have to the more we can clear out

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the clutter more we can get that direct intuitive uh guidance that we need so i definitely think that that your response to this most likely helped cleared away that pattern that that’s that’s the the the um we have so much conditioning repeating of behavior and patterns of thinking and people tend to think of karma as just relationships or health issues but it’s also patterns of thinking and patterns of behavior you know lack of self-confidence well that’s probably been with you for a long time

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if you difficulty finding your voice all those kinds of things and at some point you have to face it and challenge it and move beyond it and resolve it it sounds like you did that and how can others open themselves up to that maybe so that they can um i’m sure we all want a easier next life so we’re not easier like you said but um right and and to not be repeating the same patterns at least i think the first step is recognizing your challenges the patterns that are difficult um we all have we all have a difficult

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relation most of us i mean some people get vacation lives right they can’t think of anything that’s problematic but if you look more deeply there’s a pattern of behavior that you want to change it’s is either a difficult relationship um a difficult work situation where you just can’t get it right uh you know whatever you try you’re not you’re not successful at it takes an application of your will to surmount that to change to change a habit i mean you know how hard it is to change habits try try stopping to drink

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coffee if you’ve had coffee every day of your life to change your habit takes willpower so then you got to go through the withdrawals yeah yeah and then it’s like changing a pattern of behavior you know and so so introspection i mean even if you don’t see anything about your past if you introspect about your life the things that um that you know even if you don’t admit it but you really inside no are problematic for you or challenging and then you make a real effort to work on those areas so you know and you brought up the vacation

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lives and it makes me think of you know everyone goes oh i just wish i could sit on a beach and drink margaritas you go and you sit on a beach and drink margaritas for a day two days maybe even a week and then you’re like okay what else because challenge is life i mean that’s what makes it exciting in a you know of course having some some balance of take up some rest days you know to recoup and then go back out and do the challenges because i think that’s the service that you’re talking about is

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facing the challenge doing the work um essentially and so when we play in that realm i wonder in the realm of challenge and and introspective work i think is very challenging you know for for us all um does it take or do you believe you know you talked about the the person you knew i think it was your family member who was on a vacation live or you witnessed these people having this vacation like is there a like a like a tangible characteristic that you think that in this lifetime they aren’t experiencing almost like like intellect

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or like some sort of intelligence that’s a big word right but that they just aren’t embodying in this lifetime for some reason and so they just aren’t going to touch that stuff they aren’t going to dive inward that way well i found that it all depends what what your what your purpose is if you want to if you want to understand life and the universe then you’re going to dive in but if you don’t and a lot of people are happy just to be on the surface of things just let it be easy for me let me get have a nice

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marriage and you know enough money and and i’m content with that that’s all i need and so there are a lot more people like that who are just want to have a contented life but is that true happiness i mean there’s there’s at the the um the more awakened you you are the more capacity there is for joy and for love and so the beings that you see in these higher realms how would you describe them they’re beings that are filled with love and joy and so those who who aren’t content with just a little contentment

39:46

you know sitting in front of the tv and watching a good series um push forward to get more they want they want what they know is their true nature which is that intense love and joy i’ll tell you in the middle of some of these times where i feel like i am pushing i’m like why can’t i just relax and be super you know like i have gratitude for what is and i can get into a gratitude practice but it’s like what is that part of me that pushes anyway like it knows it could relax right now but it decides let me push let

40:20

me push let me i think i think that from what i’m sure you know of my experience it’s like you do that you do like i um my intuitive mary margaret have said that like i’ve i’ve healed or i’ve done three lifetimes of work in this one lifetime and i always choose the fastest not the easiest and now it’s time to choose the easiest so i think you get to this point where you’re like whoo this is no longer good for me and then you like you let the trauma unfold naturally instead of digging up the trauma you

40:52

know it’s what i in my experience i don’t know if you agree i do i think it’s true and i think we all need to take a break yeah i mean there’s as you said gratitude practice i mean there’s a lot just to just distinguish us yeah the sacred house and um you know and with this this this covert time has given all so many of us people have experienced it in different ways but for many of us it’s been a sacred pause of aha i don’t have to be rushing around i don’t have to be out i can be in absolutely yes

41:25

contemplation moment of contemplation on top of what mercedes asked um why do you think some people are so skeptical of past lives like there’s times when um and i i’ve gotten to where i don’t take it personal anymore because it’s like if you tell someone like you know if a christian were like yeah i speak in tongues i can speak in tongues and someone’s like well i don’t believe in that then you’re basically saying they’re playing make-believe or they’re a little crazy you know but um so if i

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tell someone you know maybe that i believe in past lives or that i can see past lives and they say that they don’t believe in that or there’s no way that’s true i’ve gotten to the point where it’s no longer i no longer feel they’re calling me crazy and it’s you know completely separate it’s just where they’re at where i’m at um and no one’s better than the other but i’m curious what causes that skepticism where it’s an immediate no i don’t believe in that is it do you

42:16

think um the obvious answer is probably a bit of um the religious programming in our culture but fear yeah yeah i think it’s fear i think it’s the program and i think also first of all they don’t have any memories or they push they so suppress the memories but isn’t easy to think that if you just you know show up at church uh that you’re going to end up in heaven forever and you’re going to be happy forever i mean isn’t that an easier thing well and it’s also you think they’re running from here in the one

42:43

situation but that to me is also fear-based because you’re trying to avoid hell you know totally fear-based i mean that’s how the institution uh survived basically by keeping people in fear you do abc you’re taking care of you don’t you’re in trouble and it’s going to be forever you’re in trouble yeah you know and how to de-program people that there is no judgment there’s nobody punishing us we we ourselves determine i know that part makes me so sad that that’s how god is viewed as

43:15

this judgmental yeah i can’t even use the word because it’s been so abused what do you use source i said i say source or the divine presence or the the cause the ultimate cause i mean you know uh there are sanskrit words that i use yes ever conscious uh uh ever new bliss um where there’s no concept of of punishment or judgment or any of that i mean that’s such an artifice and i think we’re at the evolutionary stage where we’re needing to outgrow all those um religious uh uh impositions that have

43:56

held people for the last few thousand years and i think slowly we are we see we see the decline in who people who go to church in america or the changing of the church yeah the church there are churches that are you know changing yeah yeah yeah and it is it is there’s proof of that we’ve had one of the pastors podcast and it was amazing one of our most awesome episodes all right so just i guess this is shifting just a little bit here but i wanted to know the importance of sound and mantra because i know this is something you

44:30

play with a lot um so yeah how can how can that serve our spiritual growth getting really uh uh i guess into the work of what sound how sound plays in our lives and the vibration of it and all that and and mantra which we know we talk about a lot on the show but i would love to hear your perspective on this dina so um in the higher ages you know when there was a more uh expansive uh understanding of spiritual laws mantra was used to create uh this there’s a lot of power in in in the use of vibration um but you need a focused mind and a and

45:15

a very um a a a um concentrated mind to be able to awaken the creative energies that exist okay so mantra would use was used to create things and uh even now every now and then you know you find somebody who can materialize things which is a kind of like a very it it’s it’s um people get impressed by that but it’s just a certain practice that can be learned so so mantras could also be used to destroy and there were times during the declining ages where mantras like the mahabharata war the great war in india

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um about a thousand bce where the weapons were modular weapons and so they had powerful missiles that were released with the use of mantras even in tibet tibet and there were mantra wars between the monasteries in the 15th 15th 16th century wow and so these spiritual beings used at the higher ages it was used to create it was used for beneficial purposes healing but in in uh it could also be abused mantras could be abused and used to curse people etc so um there’s a lot of power in in the word but even you know just

46:29

those of us who are doing practice the power of affirmation you know mantras awaken certain energies but we do that within ourselves when we do affirmations uh the power of the mind we have not yet tested like our subconscious doesn’t realize uh when we’re saying it whether it’s true or not so it just believes it right and then we’re training that’s the power you mean you look even just basic things like advertising we can see it in our political realm now if you say something enough again and again and again and again and

47:02

again people are good without even using their discriminative ability it goes into the subconscious and they just start believing that and so the power of repeating words penetrates that’s how advertising works right is it also something to do i i cut a store and i remembered hearing that it had something to do with how the way the tongue hits the roof of the mouth during certain mantras as well as the sounds like how room that sounds which is my magic trick today can calm anxiety like there’s certain ways certain sounds

47:34

and vibrations in this certain way that the tongue hits the roof of the mouth during certain words it causes a certain effect or that’s true the way that the tongue hits a certain part of the the the mouth uh activates certain parts of the brain and so there’s a connection because everything is connected there’s a connection between different parts of the brain and um uh uh and the mouth and so the the rishis the the spiritual masters knew how to activate certain parts of the brain through the use of

48:03

sound um so for example when you say um [Music] and that’s to remove obstacles yeah is that more where’s the power in that is that more that we’re asking ganesh to remove an obstacle and we’re just believing that it’s gonna happen or is that more the way that our tongue is moving when we say it or can you kind of break down that one for some people it’s it’s a praying to an external being for other people it’s awakening that power within yourself so agni agony which is the you know the

48:43

fire yagna right agni the uh the fire everything in the external world is a symbol of something internally agony represents the will so all prayers begin with agni you first you have to awaken your willpower the higher will power in order to achieve anything so all these prayers to deities are internal forces the vedic rishis knew that the deities were external and internal forces so you’re awakening that internal power within yourself that’s aligning with an external force to create a certain effect but all those

49:17

powers are within ourselves all the the energies of the deities are within ourselves and so back to the first you know the earlier question of do you need an external uh uh being well if you can tap those internal energies within yourself i mean a guru can help do that can help awaken that but if you can do that yourself then you then you’re at the source of everything because you know the soul is is is just the awakened consciousness part of the whole yeah wow so okay so i have a couple things one of the things since we’re talking about how

49:54

you know you using these mantras creates not just physically a vibration that can have an effect on us physically but also creates obviously a mental a mind-body relationship really it seems like it’s happening here and taps into that soul level my mom so so recently my little kitty mishka passed away and i have been grieving and one of the you know steps of grief that i’ve been stuck in is guilt and so my mom brings over this book that she uses a lot in her life it’s called the 72 names of god but it’s sanskrit

50:36

writing their little mantras that are to help you through obstacles or to affirm yourself and things like that but the core of the practice that the book recommends is focusing on the image of the mantra so the actual writing um and it’s in sanskrit so it’s it’s not like i don’t know how to read it right but um to just burn it into your kind of memory and that is supposed to release what you need to release or help you with whatever you’re you know you’re looking for there um is that something you’ve ever played

51:14

with is like this this burning in of mantra in that visual way as well i feel like it’s like another layer on top of using it absolutely i mean that’s the thing there’s so many practices there’s so many ways to approach this that’s one way to approach it i’ve had that with the sanskrit name of ram rom to me is my dt um the the the i mean he’s to me is like the that the cosmic reality uh but i’ve gone through periods where i’ve just been writing his name again and again and writing his name and

51:49

having that name resonate it’s a mantra one of them a mantra is repeat the name of ram and so it’s um it’s definitely i mean we it’s one practice one way of awakening those energies i mean it’s all about awakening the energies within yourself getting aligned with that that frequencies yeah okay can you also share um [Music] there’s i may be incorrect here but is it like do re mi fa um you say that and it works with the chakras is that correct i have heard that but i don’t know much about that in

52:32

but there are certainly sounds with the chakras yeah can you share one of those well uh one another spiritual practice is listening to the sounds of the of the different chakras so you close off your ears and you concentrate on the third eye and you listen and each chakra gives off a different some you can hear the sound of a bell internally um you hear the sound of krishna’s flute which i don’t know exactly i think that might be the heart chakra and then the om of course is the spiritual eye you could hear the ohm so

53:04

so these are different frequencies different levels of vibration that that you can hear and by tuning yourself in again you’re aligning yourself so if you want to focus on the heart chakra you just focus on that chakra people see things they see colors with the different chakras um my practice is queer yoga so it does work with the different chakras but but i don’t and i’m and i do sometimes do that the the um sound the chakras with the sounds um why do you merge with that sound so if you’re hearing the flute you improve your

53:43

energy with that sound and you can merge with that sound and then that chakra opens more so you could play essentially a a meditative music or something to align you to help you to align to those sounds as well okay so and i wanted to ask as well with that i don’t even know if it’s an ass so much but this this is something i found valuable in my life like incredibly valuable and maybe this is a much more overt way of doing some sort of sound practice but it’s definitely you know throat opening so i

54:15

i know any suppressed anger or um rage that i was shown throughout my younger life you know domesticated to kind of keep down and suppress i’ve now incorporated a practice where i literally yell as loud as i can if i want to yell out or i cuss or whatever it is that i need to get out and it’s just making sound sometimes and i do that in usually a car because you know i don’t have a forest to go yell in i don’t i don’t know somewhere that’s very private i don’t think it’s something you want to

54:44

put on anyone else’s shoulder so um but that like yelling in the car has become one of the most important practices of mine or singing sometimes and usually it turns from yelling if there’s some some emotion i need to really move through my body and i can’t do it just by walking or hiking or you know some other way i’ll begin with this this this making sounds or yelling or sometimes i’m in a goofy mood and i want to see what comes out so i’ll just start making the sounds whatever that means

55:12

and then it usually turns into singing and jade you’ve talked about here on the show that singing is you know in order to sing you have to have an open heart and of course that’s what we want to get to right like we don’t want to have a closed heart we don’t want to be angry and all these things so it i make sounds and sometimes yell and sometimes curse until i get to a place where i’m singing and sometimes doesn’t all happen in the same sitting sometimes i need to come back to the practice you

55:36

know over and over day after day or whatever but is that something that’s first of all i don’t know i kind of made that up um but i’m sure that it came naturally because it’s something that works you know for humans to do so is that something you’ve played with you know certainly um chanting yeah and and i do listen to careto a lot you know and especially in the car so i totally relate to that i mean i think um no matter what you’re experiencing what kind of mood you’re in um if you put on kirtan you know that

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just brings you into another dimension and opens the heart and if and if there’s frustration yelling or whatever it does to release that from your body i mean it’s not good to hold these things in your body yeah they produce ill effects so whatever uh uh problematic you know or uncomfortable energy you’re feeling it’s good just to release it yeah some people do it through running you know through exercise you know i know a lot of people who exercise just to release the tension in the body yeah i do yeah yeah for sure

56:41

but that yelling is a has been critical for me yeah there’s yelling ceremonies here in austin um but i’m cheering like yelling ceremonies in the forest later outdoors yeah yeah it is in the forest i’m curious you brought up seeing colors on chakras so i’ve always seen and seen it taught in shocker books that i’ve read that it’s the rainbow is how it’s organizing colors um from the root up it’s you know red orange you know up to the rainbow i’m curious why if you know why when i see chakras

57:17

they’re not in those colors i don’t know if it’s the same for everybody it may not be the same for everybody i mean you know so many things are meant you know manifest individually for us um and you know people see uh different numbers of petals you know i’ve never seen that but i know people who describe you know the first chakra has this number of petals and then the then of course there’s the thousand petals at the top i haven’t i haven’t seen that um and so everybody has a different experience i

57:48

mean i think whatever you see that’s that’s your particular experience of it and that’s that’s real that’s real but in your practice was it in the order of the rainbow that you guys saw the chakras or was everybody different i don’t see colors i don’t see them you know um you know people see the third eye differently you know when people see a star i just see a white light there so um i’ve not seen the star and yet a lot of people talk about a star that they see um and that’s something earlier i’m

58:21

serious about but i’ve always and i don’t see colors with the chakras i i’m um more sensitive to the sound i can hear the sounds in the chakras and i do there is a practice that i don’t do but i but i should do probably which more is into the visualizing the different how these chakras look but i don’t know i haven’t felt the need to do that okay i find this stuff fascinating because i don’t i’m not ever i don’t know i guess i don’t want to say i’ve never felt like i want to be able to see

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auras or chakras or or hear the sounds or all these things i think it’s fascinating i’m fascinating fascinated in all kinds of human systems and i wonder if it’s like a certain domestication you you know during your life that you go through or like it’s a past life that brings you to this particular work um or interest causes the interest in the particular work of being able to see or if you just start seeing and then you’re like what is this you know and it kind of catches you almost by surprise and then you start digging

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there or how did how does it come about i think i think some of it might be our past experiences um uh you know i know in terms of my past life recall that i’ve i’ve had past life root calls and past lives so it’s not something that’s new to me um you know and i and i’ve in past lives have have met different shamans and and and you know who have opened certain things and and so then it’s easier to access if something’s been opened before it’s easier to access uh and i think it’s everybody you know it’s like

1:00:03

everybody has their own history you know i mean where you are is accumulation of where you’ve been and so yeah i think it’s a good thing to bring up especially for our listeners because this is something i think early on i would have um like to have heard about or something um is that you know we all have our certain strengths and gifts and and then honing them is you know our chore here or our job really and maybe our pleasure as well um but it’s not you know the different gifts are so important for their own

1:00:41

individual way and like i certainly feel like i have my own gifts that are completely different but all are also about seeing into humans specifically that’s what they feel like they’re about and maybe maybe this is really just a delivery for the listener that if you’re interested in humans and connecting which i think we all pretty much are but figuring out what your gift is it doesn’t have to look like the person next to you you know it doesn’t like like i’ve been friends with jade forever and she’s been

1:01:15

experimenting with this stuff and really honing her own gifts in this realm forever and it’s always been so interesting to hear her story you know and as it is to hear your story today but i think maybe it’s important that we don’t let this this weird dragon of like oh i have to have this particular gift or be able to do this scale or trick yeah totally to be said out loud i guess is all i wanted to say no i mean i i i have i have friends and spiritual friends who you know who who want to remember their past births and

1:01:51

don’t and i say to them it’s not relevant for you if it if that’s not what’s given to you it’s not important for you you know some reason that i’m working through my own this is what’s come to me but i don’t i don’t have other experiences you know i have friends who all kinds of astral travel and find themselves in other places and all that and one one uh it’s a trap to actually look over and look at the gifts that another has because you don’t know what their history has been what they’re learning

1:02:17

needs to be for this what they had to go through to get them [Laughter] like i know a lot of people the veil is thin and they’re aura to access the other dimensions because they had trauma you know so that’s what caused the rip in the aura and and we each have a different gift to offer that’s the beauty of of of um of the whole thing is that we all were unique you know one person no two people are alike and so we have a different journey we have a different gift to offer uh and the key is to find your gifts is to find

1:02:49

what it is you want to contribute and so do you feel that that comes with like that slowing down and contemplating and like you said you found meditation and you guru early on and that is really what opened that up for you exactly i mean for me whatever your practice is it doesn’t have to be meditation for me it was meditation but whatever your time of reflection and looking more deeply into life however that works for you whether it’s prayer or just sitting still whatever it is i think that’s crucial

1:03:18

in order to know yourself in order to know how you can best use your time here in order to to um i love that part of it yeah i love it feels so magical um i brought up my past life with mary magdalene and her being my guide i strongly feel that mercedes um is very much isis energy and she’s always you know been so drawn to egypt as well and i know that mary magdalene and isis are very much partners in work and their work has been merging sexuality and spirituality which is very much mercedes and ice work before we even knew that

1:03:54

those were you know guides to work with so when you just step back and look at it it adds so much magic and without allowing it to take you out of the now and focus too much on the other lives it can add so much um appreciation and perspective yeah it gives you just another layer of being able to see it from a place that’s not you’re not drowning in it or overwhelmed by it you can go like oh okay i can see the goal and i can see how to get there gives you some alignment it to me it also adds excitement just like

1:04:25

you know magic is fun i mean there were times when i was doing a lot of traveling i’ve made many a number of trips to egypt and i remember meditating in the pyramids and then going down to the ancient isis temple and clearly i had a history there it’s not predominant in me now it’s not something that i have only vague memories of it not concrete and so it’s not an activating for an activated force right now in me my activating forces are all coming from india how do you feel what does that activated

1:05:00

force feel like like how do you feel the pool or what does that look like i find myself mentally there a lot uh tapping into the spiritual energies of the place um and they really pull up my heart like a yearning it’s like but there’s the yearning and all tremendous love okay india i see is not the indian of today it’s india of ancient times and um you know in in one of my books the untold story of sita i talk about life as a as a servant in the household of sita and um sita is the wife of ram that’s how she’s known as the wife of

1:05:36

mom she’s a she’s an avatar in her own right but um that has a very strong uh uh um living reality within me today and so i i feel that i’m in communion with those forces of sita and ram and more recently you know the book when the bright moon rises uh talks about three lives in china where i tapped into the taoist energy and so i’m i’m thinking about that now because china is an emerging force in the world right and it has an ancient spiritual culture that’s somewhere there but we’re not so aware of it today you

1:06:18

know because of all the other things that have that have kind of preoccupied us around around china so how to tap into that spiritual energy of the place i mean because i’m an activist in the outer field so i do a lot of you know activist kind of work i i i see my spiritual path and my activist roles as being connected it’s going hand in hand um and i see india as having a future role because the spiritual energy is intact there as having a future as having an important role in the world today on the spiritual plane

1:06:52

china is also uh an important player and so how does the awakening of these spiritual energies help guide the material reality that’s how i joined together my spiritual life and my outer activities and so physical places then you’re saying you know hold these energies and can kind of kind of hold them and wait for people to come to access better they’re like almost a vortex in a sense or absolutely a vortex i mean you know we know that about india i mean every time i’ve gone on a pilgrimage to one of the ancient

1:07:24

places in india and i’ve gone way up to the himalayas many times something happens something happens it’s like there’s a portal there and i’ve wanted to go to the sacred mountains in china i was scheduled to go before covert then covert hit and i think it’s important to tap into the spiritual energies of that place uh because i think you know this is more my external work is that how do we bond together on a spiritual realm yeah to ease some of the outer tensions so that we don’t end up killing each other

1:07:54

you know other friends that have worked with isis have had said that there’s a place in egypt i don’t know if it’s a temple yeah it is a temple um that when they’ve gone there it felt very much like what you’re describing the temple of isis yeah well place yeah and then that’s i really want to go to um the south of france the the cave that mary magdalene fled to and did all the healing so yeah so so awesome with mirror by stardoll no what about cynthia bergeau do you know her work around mary magdalene

1:08:30

uh i have her book um i’ve read her book uh it uh i’ve recently read four books on her and i’m trying to remember which one was hers um [Music] mary magdalene uh-huh was it um the meaning of mary magdalene or mary magdalene revealed one of those two not mary magdalene revealed that’s megan waterson yep it’s it’s um the meaning of mary magdalene it’s a purple cover yeah tom shadiak loves her he’s writing a script on mary magdalene um cool so and he’s got so much uh christ energy

1:09:02

too so um [Music] i i also wanted to we’ve got one more question before we go to our lightning round um i wanted to ask you about how the ancient vedic plans were ruled by women and i was curious if there was a message for a woman in this recent book of yours um because i know there are in the other two books of yours there’s definitely always a message for women yeah uh in the ancient in the in the in the vedic days i mean the vedas go back 10 000 years but with centuries it was millennia before they were actually compiled and

1:09:37

and so much has been lost in the process we have just a fraction of what was but there were women wishes their names are known there were women who wrote parts of the vaders vote some of the poems the hymns of the vedas and in the part of the story the early part of the story in the book talks about one of the time when um after the melting of the ice because 11 000 bc is when the ice began to melt the oceans rose 400 feet what interested me is that was another time where humanity faced melting of the ice and there were a lot of migrations

1:10:14

and so when melted then my the communities migrated from the sea into the forests and which were just beginning to bloom actually forests were growing and then there came a time when they were migrating toward the rivers and so this takes place during the sarasvati river civilization where the clans and the clan that i was part of was ruled by a woman i don’t know that all the clans were ruled by women but this clan was traditionally led by a woman and this woman had two daughters and three sons and both women were

1:10:49

unable to lead the clan and became a crisis um and and got later resolved but um the the the the character that i identify with sundari um is taken in in by a woman’s sage sage gayatri and taught many things about the uh spiritual realities although she didn’t understand them she wasn’t at the level where she could understand them but in the book it goes into the deeper meaning of the vedic teachings um as taught by the women so i think the message in all my books is that there was a time before recent history

1:11:31

when women and men were equally supporting each other doing the teaching doing their things and then with the declining times as we approach the kali yuga a patriarchal mindset or a mindset of domination i don’t even like to call patriarchal but domination because it was more than just gender domination it was it was you know people started taking slaves didn’t have that in the higher ages people started conquering other nations didn’t have that in higher ages people started dominating nature and didn’t have that

1:12:01

in the higher ages so it was this need to dominate dominate to to be to be better above the others and this is what we need to change this concept of domination of um and so you know where women are part of that of of moving beyond um the the mindset where uh where we can’t be an equal contributor [Music] yeah and when you said earlier about you know your mentors and gurus you could feel their love pouring into i feel like um this this time we’re in right now where we’re adjusting from that very dominating or domineering um

1:12:46

place is largely about softening and love i think is largely about softening you know about being able to kind of allow you know and literally soften literally receive and allow whatever whatever we need right now and uh there’s a gentleness there there’s a love there that is coming in in full force i feel that we’re part of the you know we’re all doing this especially as women i think we’re we’re we’re i i don’t know it’s just beautiful i think to be alive right now and see this the shift happening

1:13:21

exactly i love that word softening i think it is a softening um and the shift is happening i mean it’s it’s happening yeah right we’re in the middle of it yeah in the middle of it i also wanted to bring up and acknowledge that the profits from this book will be donated to the global peace initiative of women to empower people everywhere in their quest to make this a more peaceful world and i just wanted to um thank you for your work in that and thank you for all of your work with the global global

1:13:49

peace initiative of women um [Music] and uh just honor you for that yeah and thank you for having me it was wonderful talking to both of you okay we’ve got we’ve got a few more lightning round questions before we let you go mercedes you want to kick us off yeah so the first question is if you could hug your younger self right now what would you say if i could hug my younger self would say be happy if you could have the whole world read one book which would it be the untold story of sita sorry it’s my

1:14:29

book no eyes let me correct that autobiography autobiography autobiography of a yogi yeah all right um if you could whisper one phrase to everyone on the planet what would it be love is the foundation for all love is is the fabric of the universe tune in with that love feel that love thank you before we let you go where can people find you online well i have a public page facebook page so it’s dean of marion public page and i have a the global peace initiative of women has a facebook page and also the website gpiw.org

1:15:16

and so you can contact me at any one of those places awesome thank you so much conversation great it was wonderful meeting both of you and just continue on with your wonderful work yeah thank you appreciate that we appreciate you being a light in this world and we’re so glad to have gotten to pick your brain for a little bit so appreciate you yeah we’ll talk to you soon thank you bye i really i’m gonna push should we i’m gonna just push stop now because we’re gonna have to do the magic later because

1:15:50

i don’t have mine okay oh well we’re airing this monday so um let me let me pop uh john this is a note for you if you hear it um we are going to take a quick pause but obviously you won’t know that because let’s just stay back on the recording i’m gonna have to text them this anyways yeah uh we’re gonna put our intro outro and magic tricks all on the back part of this video after we come right back in just one second okay all right john we are going to do the outro portion and then we’ll do the intro after this

1:16:32

huh that was lovely yeah she really she i wanted to spend more time with her like off off off the record yeah i i need to spend more time with her books i think um she had a lot of really interesting perspectives of looking at it that i don’t feel like um i know much about so super fascinating stuff yeah and i already brought up my magic trick but yeah this is something that eric gotti taught me that like when i’m feeling my nervous system really um you know out of whack or hyped up or if i’m feeling anxiety if i’m feeling

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triggered to take a deep breath in and on the out say room and like i did that much shorter than i can if i’m doing it throughout the entire exhale but it’s v-r-o-o-m room and it’s funny because i my son you know has a bit of anxiety like i do and i told him this tool and so uh i think i’ve told you this story but like the first time he did it he ran up to his room stomping and then i told him you better not slam that door you do your room and so he slowly closed the door like where almost like the shining and he was going

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vroom [Music] [Laughter] go to your broom i know that’s funny um but yeah it works for him and it works for me and um that is definitely a sound and a mantra that that has helped when my nervous system needs calming okay i need to use that definitely need to use that um so my magic today just because dina talked about um you know a little bit about how she’s evolved her relationship with death through her work with i guess i can call them interdimensional beings like deities and entities and the like i thought it might be worthwhile to

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incorporate a magic trick that asks you to dance with how alive we actually are so my my magic actually comes today from um a woman named aaron bidlake who’s a yoga and meditation teacher she’s a community deaf care educator and a deaf doula so her idea is to turn the mundane into the sacred and the sacred into the mundane which i absolutely love she says the other day a meditation student asked me if i light a candle before i meditate no i said but i do light a candle before i watch netflix she said my meditation practice is already

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infused with care and intention but my netflix practice runs the risk of being unmindful without a reminder that i’m engaging in the important practice of rest and down time so i absolutely love any reminder we can give ourselves to not just you know continue scrolling and kind of make it sacred so that it’s intentional right so to this end she offers three practices for contemplating death in your daily life that actually allow you to awaken your life fully so the first portion of this practice is um just noting that death is all around

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you and that sounds scary but just think about it in the smallest senses so she says to spend a few minutes each day looking around and noticing everything that was once alive which is now dead so if you’re indoors you might notice wooden furniture fabric made of cotton and it could be like a leather belt you know fruit displayed in a bowl you could think about um if you’re outdoors you might think about the branches and the leaves scattered on the ground maybe there’s like a dead squirrel or something on the road that makes you

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notice a husk of a desiccated insect you know you see those all the time um and just acknowledge that that death is all around you and remind yourself that this is also your fate eventually you know and it’s happening for everything around us every one around us as well as ourselves and to ask yourself the question what will outlast you so to spend a few minutes each day looking around and noticing everything that will likely carry on after your death so you might notice the grand stately buildings that have

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been around for centuries that’s going to probably still be here the saplings and you know even the young children’s who children whose lifespans might i would assume go on hopefully beyond yours right um and also notice the plastic water bottles the teaspoons the ballpoint pens like these objects that are little they’re not significant at all but they will likely be here long after we’re gone um and then to contemplate death in times of illness which i thought was really interesting because i noticed this

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happens to me organically whenever i’m sick but it also i get this weird thing like i almost feel like it’s gonna affect me from not getting well if i think about death too much while i’m sick um i don’t think that’s probably a reasonable thought but i have it so she says though to seize the opportunity when you’re in times of illness um to contemplate your death and she says it’s a wonderful way to gain insight into the experience of dying so as you lie in bed listen to the world go

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on without you so listen to the cars passing outside your window the children on their bicycles um the parents pushing strollers meanwhile contemplate your waning strength or your poor appetite your your lethargy you know and if you’re someone who has built an identity around doing and accomplishing hello hello that’s me and you uh to experience the stripping away of that identity as you cancel meetings and appointments because you’re sick right and to mourn the small losses such as not being able to eat your favorite

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foods or taste your favorite foods for that matter um or you know because you can’t taste usually when you’re sick right um and missing out of course you could be missing out on fun plans and having fomo because you’re sick and so just to kind of let that sink in and feel what that’s like because what does that do whenever we contemplate the the the death of things and the not being able to play and all those things we really grow our gratitude for where and when we’re able to do those things

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and that is how we fully awaken to our life and how we fully awaken life generally is by living in gratitude more often of what is happening right now that we are alive and that we can experience the fun and taste the food and do all the things and if you liked that magic trick i would highly recommend you go listen to our episode with the death doula um it’s it was a while back so you’re gonna have to search for it but um it was really really good yeah all right magic moppers thank you so much for tuning in

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and taking this journey with us if this episode held some magic for you please share it with your friends and family that would mean so much to us and don’t forget to join us on our instagram page at the magic hour and let us know what your favorite episodes have been so far we appreciate all of your feedback and want to know what’s lighting you up yes guys and this is super important i’m gonna just highlight it because we don’t ask for much on this show we do this out of just loving being in this work ourselves

1:23:59

and wanting to bring this to everyone to be listening so the kindness that would be brought upon jade and i in being able to future this podcast is really brought through that just giving us the five-star uh rating on your podcast app right now and if if you want to be really super generous in the moment then please also leave us a review because that is what allows our podcast to get heard by others what allows us to get ads on it so that we can continue to support it and support our lives while we are creating it

1:24:35

so all of that helps love you so much for taking that extra energy and effort we really really do and we read every single one of them they light up our lives they keep us on this track of doing this work so thank you for that and of course you can go listen to another of our podcast episodes now in our library um and we hope you do let us know on social media what lights you up and until we see you next monday for another one of our episodes okay now let’s go to the intro okay john here’s the intro greetings boys and babes it’s the magic

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hour a place where we navigate through life’s peaks and valleys with all the vulnerability and shamelessness we can muster with the help of world-class guests from all walks of life we uncover new truths and valuable tools for manifesting our highest potential i’m your host mercedes tarot along with my partner in shine jade bryce hey you guys i am super excited for today’s guest when i looked her up online i just kept being more and more amazed at every single line in her bio because she’s just such an incredible human

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and her work is so amazing but also her work is very embedded in like past life work and um you know seeking you know soul-seeking in that area and that’s something that has always been um a part of my journey or has been a part of my journey here um you know since i’ve stepped onto the growth path is working with my past lives and i do you know sometimes see other people’s past lives and that’s something that um you know when you get to talk to someone else who has that ability it like really

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um just feels good it feels um it feels very comforting so i’m super stoked to have her on today um and i know mercedes we’ve talked about past lives in the um in the past of this life but uh yeah let’s get her on yeah i’m excited too this is something i’ve been it’s been cool to witness you do the work in jaiden also to have talked to so many people in this realm already but this is one who i feel like she’s really an expert in this realm and to just be able to dive deeper because

1:26:55

people have so many questions here so yeah let’s do it so our guest today is an author storyteller and the founder and convener of the global peace initiative of women bringing spiritual resources to address critical global challenges such as conflict social social justice and ecological scarring of the earth over the years she has worked to bring greater gender balance and balance between the abrahamic and dharma-based religion religious traditions for a more inclusive interfaith movement and among gpiw’s many programs is the organization

1:27:34

of a session on the inner dimensions of climate change and the annual un climate summits for over 40 years she has been a devotee of para mahansa yogananda a practitioner of kraya yoga meditation and a student of the great text of the vedic tradition she’s received her master’s degree from columbia university in sacred literature and she has since served on the boards of such prestigious organizations as the harvard center for the study of world religions she’s been on the interfaith center of new york’s um

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organization and the international center for religion and diplomacy the monetary foundation the all india movement for seva and the gross national happiness center in bhutan as well she was an advisor to the board of dharma drum mountain buddhist association and in 2014 she received the nawano peace prize for her interfaith peace efforts okay this woman is an activist to the t um her most recent best-selling books are my journey through time a spiritual memoir of life death and rebirth and the untold untold story of sita an

1:29:00

empowering tale of our time her most recent book when the bright moon rises the awakening of ancient memoirs is a rich and extensive story of her past lives this her third book is a love story between the sages and the cosmic forces known as the deities love of the sages and the people and love between individuals seeking to express this universal forth force of love that exists within us all it’s a study of karma which is the cosmic law of cause and effect um this is exciting stuff you guys if you’re not intrigued

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yet you must not be listening so please help me welcome nina miriam to the magic hour okay let’s do the um bio one more time you said memoirs it’s memories oh the awakening of ancient memories and then i deleted the last three of the prestigious organizations because it’s just it’s so long yeah um [Music] all right so if you just want to do her bio i’ll tell john to just use the second file john uses second bio he’s listening [Music] all right so let’s get into that so our guest today is an author storyteller and the founder

1:30:19

and convener of the global peace initiative of women bringing spiritual resources to address critical global challenges such as conflict social justice and ecological scarring of the earth over the years she has worked to bring greater gender balance and balance between the abrahamic and dharma-based religious traditions for a more inclusive interfaith movement among gpiw’s many programs is the organization of a session on the inner dimensions of climate change at the u at the annual un climate summits and for

1:30:52

over 40 years she has been a devotee of para mahansa yogananda a practitioner a cr i’m this up i think we should take out this the among the gwp’s thing with the climate summits because that’s kind of like not her thing it’s just that organization thing maybe what do you think um well because she’s the founder of it yeah i don’t know sure now just leave it let me just leave it i’m just trying to do it without stumbling sorry john all right so let’s get into it our guest today is an author storyteller

1:31:31

and the founder and convener of the global peace initiative of women bringing spiritual resources to address critical global challenges such as conflict social justice and ecological scarring of the earth over the years she has worked to bring greater gender balance and balance between the abrahamic and dharma-based religious traditions for a more inclusive interfaith movement among gpiw’s many programs is the organization of a session on the interdimensions of climate change at the annual un climate summits it’s a big deal

1:32:04

for over 40 years she’s been a devotee of para mahansa yogananda a pr and a practitioner of kraya yoga meditation as well as a student of the great text of the vedic tradition she received her master’s degree from columbia university in sacred literature and she has since served on the boards of such prestigious organizations as the harvard center for the study of world religions um as well as the interfaith center of new york and the international center for religion and diplomacy and actually there’s many more to list here

1:32:40

as well she was an advisor to the board of dharma drum mountain buddhist association in 2014 and received the niwani peace prize for her interfaith piece efforts her most recent best-selling books are my journey through time a spiritual memoir of life death and rebirth and the untold story of sita an empowering tale for our time her most recent book is called when the bright moon rises the awakening of ancient memories is her rich and extensive story of her past lives whoo fascinating stuff this this her third book is a love story between the

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sages and the cosmic forces known as the deities um also about love and the sages of and the love love in the sages and the damn love of the sages and the people and love between the individuals seeking to express this universal forth force of love that exists within us all it’s a study of karma which is the cosmic law of cause and effect so guys if you’re not intrigued yet you must not be listening to this extremely extraordinarily extensive bio please help me welcome dina miriam to the magic hour okay i’m just going to tell john to

1:34:06

clean up that stumble um