Scrolling Transcript...

(SQP-Ep.003 ~ The No-Choice Continuum, w. Sandy Krot)
Editor Note: Minor edits have been made from the original audio recording for easier reading.

(opening intro music begins)

Intro Text: Welcome to the spiritual intelligence podcast, Awakening your inner power with Daniel Martinez Stahl, where we will explore, discover and integrate different aspects of our spiritual and human nature, so that we can all thrive and live life with more grace and ease, instead of struggle. 

(Intro music fades away)

Daniel: So, welcome once again to the spiritual intelligence podcast, with me is Sandra Krot. I will be referring to her as Sandy, I'm just comfortable with that. So, she is one of the, she doesn't, she just recently learned this herself, but she is one of the teachers within my own grounding and understanding of life that had a tremendous and powerful impact, which I will speak to later on in this conversation. I shared it with her just recently. But she is an amazing woman. 

One of the things that I also wanted to do by bringing her into this conversation early on into the podcast is that she also works primarily, if not exclusively, in business. So, with corporate executives and organizations. So, it's bringing the idea of spiritual intelligence into a corporate setting. They don't use those words, but it's fundamentally the same idea, and so that's something that I'm also going to want to explore with her as well. 

But I will let her introduce herself briefly. Sandy, it is an honor and a pleasure to have you join us, and I am really excited about what we end up sharing, and discussing, and exploring. So, if you could just start with a little bit of a background on you that would be fantastic.

Sandy: Sure. Thank you Daniel. Thank you for inviting me. I'm coming to you from a really small town in Northwest Washington. Although, Daniel and I were just sharing, I grew up on the East Coast, I grew up in New England, I went to college in New England. I had the good fortune of meeting Sydney Banks in 1981, and at the time I was about to leave the field of psychology. I'd been a therapist for about five years at that point and I was completely disillusioned and burned out. And met Syd and it was a, the turning point in my life. 

And so it's been 40 plus years, I've been sharing this understanding, and as Daniel said, primarily now, although I spent the first twenty years in a in clinical practice with families and individuals and couples, for the last 20 plus years I've been working with leaders in the corporate world, leaders, leadership teams, organizations, bringing this understanding of the human mind and understanding of the depths of our spiritual nature into, into the corporate world. Finding ways to translate it, so that it is palatable to corporate leaders, and wrote a book with two others, my two colleagues Ken Manning and Robin Charbit, our book is called Invisible Power, Insight Principles at Work.

Yeah. So that's, that's kind of what I do and I'm happy to see how, where we go from here because it's a topic that I love, and has been my life's work talking about. 

Daniel: Fabulous, fabulous. And, just so that the listeners are aware I will be putting information about her book, and links to the company that she works with, and also a short bio as well in the description of the episode so you can always get more information on that. So, in terms of a starting point Sandy, I would love to actually ask you about power. This idea of inner power, what does that mean to you? And without complicating the question, how do you communicate that to your clients?

Sandy: I was listening very recently to an old recording of Sydney Banks, I happen to own some unpublished old recordings, and what, what touched me about it, it was when Syd said, "The hardest thing in the world is to be yourself," and I thought, "Well, that's interesting, what does that mean?" and he kept, he went on to say "Who we really are, the, the depth of knowledge and wisdom and power that exists in us, who we really are, it's so, it's limitless." So I thought, "Well why is it hard to be that?" and, and on this recording Syd said, "Well, ego keeps us from experiencing that power." 

And I think that what I am trying to do with my clients is unveil for them or point them toward or encourage them to look at this — who they really are — this power that exists in us, this intelligence that exists in us, and, and help them come face-to-face with the the disguise, with the ego, with the thinking that we have done that keeps that power from being experienced.

It seems so ironic, doesn't it? That we have this perfect setup of the human mind, and perfect connection to the energy and the intelligence of life. We have it, it's perfect, and yet we mess it up. We, uh...

Daniel: (laughing) not on purpose... 

Sandy: Totally not on purpose...

Daniel: Innocently 

Sandy: ...innocently mess it up. And so, that's, that's a job that I embrace. Because, I so, for me to see over the years, what, what it means to have that power within, what it has meant for me to remember that, to realize it in the moment. It's, it's totally changed the trajectory of my life. So, I want to share that with, with my clients, as best I can. 

But it, but it's, it's a challenge, even though it shouldn't be. But it is, because we are very enamored of the thinking we do about ourselves.

Daniel: Just recently I had a conversation with a featured speaker in my membership group and we were talking about, we were actually having a conversation with Spirit. I'm going to be interviewing her for the podcast in a few weeks, but it's relevant to this conversation because what I learned from that session was, it became clear to me, why it is that we get so enamored so easily, with the content of our thinking. And the term that I really loved that was used in a description of, "what we're here for and why we're here" was the idea that if it didn't feel real to us, we wouldn't be invested in this journey. If we lived within the awareness that we are functioning in an environment that is fundamentally different than the way that it appears, we wouldn't be as invested in our in our lessons, in our process, in our experience, in what it feels like to be alive, what it feels like to relate with others, what it feels like to love and to be angry, etcetera, etc., etc. 

And what I love about the conversation that Sydney Banks introduced into the mix of things, is this deeper understanding of a language that removes the veil from the misunderstanding of life that we are designed to live inside of. And for many years I have wanted to get a deeper understanding of why that misunderstanding exists in the first place? Why is it that we’re designed to get caught up in our thinking? Why is it that we’re designed to lose ourselves in our emotions? And the short answer is, so that we can actually experience life. 

It's not a bad thing, it's, it's, it gives us a sense of, of investment and of tangibility, which is profound and beautiful to experience. And the other thing that it does, is that Sydney himself, if I remember the different things that I've read of him in his books, and in his audios and videos, he will regularly talk about, the, understanding this mechanism, and these are my words not his, understanding this mechanism gives us a ability to bounce back and forth between the perception of reality and reality, back and forth easily and seamlessly. 

And for me, that's the beauty of this is, when we understand the beauty of our, our true essence, our true nature, our higher self, our spiritual self, our whatever term we want to use, our innate wisdom, our infinite potential, when we recognize that aspect of ourselves and we understand the mechanisms that going to play that takes us away from that feeling, it just gives us more, more tools that we can use, and more understanding that allows us to be able to bounce back and forth more easily.

Sandy: That's why we got a free will...

Daniel: Exactly

Sandy: You know...you wonder, "What the heck's, what's free will got to do with it? Why is that in the system?" But it, it's, it is there so that we can experience anything, anything. The good, the bad, the ugly, the profoundly beautiful, the, the terrible, the disgusting, we can, we can, we get, we can get the full panorama as human beings. It's part of the gift we're given to, to be, to be alive. When you understand that it's, that free will is, is just, just really, just a mechanism to give us the opportunity to live in an illusion. But what a great, I think it's a, very much been a teacher for all of us, if you, if you can see it that way.

It's like when you travel to a third world country and you experience extreme poverty, you see what you have, you know...you get to remember, "Oh my God, look at it, look at how fortunate I am, look at how lucky I am to have the riches I have." Had you not experienced profound poverty, you walk around wanting more. So, I mean these contrasts that life gives us, sometimes it's hard to see the beauty in it, because really bad things happen and unfortunately sad, sad things, tragic things happen. So, it's hard to see the perfection in it, but if you can see it, that it's all a part of the opportunity to keep learning and growing and evolving, and moving in that direction toward who we really are. 

Without judging, you know, that's, that's, that's the key. To not judge, to not make it right or wrong or good or bad. 

Daniel: I would love for you to expand a little bit more on this idea of free will and choice because I'm sure people are going to be listening saying, "I didn't choose my life, I'm not choosing to feel depressed or I'm not choosing to be angry, I'm not choosing etcetera, etc. So, I would love for you to speak to that a little bit more, what you mean by, "that we have the free will to choose the life that we're living" and I'm paraphrasing what you said, but. 

Sandy: Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. The way I look at choice, let's use the work "choice" cuz it's a word a lot of people use. I see it on a continuum, and at one end of the continuum there's no choice, and you would think I'm going to stay at the other end of the continuum there's choice. But the way I look at it is, on one end of the continuum there's no choice, then choice is about in the middle, and at the far end you're back to no choice. 

Let me explain what I mean. In the no choice part of the continuum that, that's where our habits live, that's where our reactivity lives, that's where we don't see that thought has anything to do with our experience, so we're completely in a reality and it doesn't look like thinking had anything to do with it. It's completely what we talked about in our book, it's completely outside in illusion. That, "somebody did it to me, something happened to me, somebody said something to me and I had the experience I had, it had nothing to do with me."

When, when you're there, and I'm there sometimes, you know, there are times when I, like my, my partner will, will do something, and I immediately have a reaction and it looks in that moment like, his, whatever he just did, caused my reaction. So, I had no choice, in that moment. So, we're all there from time to time, just have that experience of reality coming at us and we have no say. 

When you begin to have some understanding about how your mind works and you begin to see the role that thought plays, you begin to see that you're a thinker, you begin to see that there's a capacity inside of you that forms ideas and opinions and images. That capacity is, is alive and happening in you, and it's creating your moment-to-moment reality. And when you start to see that — I mean, honestly see it, in real-time, see-it-insightfully see it — you get choice. 

So, if I have a reaction to something my partner does and it pisses me off, if I see in the next moment, "Ohhh, it's not, Peter didn't do that, that's my thinking," if I can see that in the moment, then that thinking dissipates and something new, some new, some new idea can show up. I get options, I get choices. Fabulous place to live your life. So much more power you have, so much more ease you have in your life. 

But then, you go to the other end of the continuum and, how I would say it is, you're back to no choice. And by that I mean, you're experiencing God in the moment, you are living God's will, if you want to say it that way. And there have been times in everybody's life, where you just knew what to do, you just knew what to say, you didn't go through an analytical thought process, you just showed up or what you needed showed up. And that's, that's a really delightful place to live and it doesn't matter what your circumstances are, because you can be listening to and getting fed knowledge when you are in the worst of circumstances. 

I remember I, um, my sister had her son, her oldest son, at the age of 31 went into full cardiac arrest. Just no, no warning, no reason, just something that sometimes happens, your heart just short circuits, and they put him on life support, and she had to make the decision to take him off life support, and I was there with her through all of this and it was a very very difficult time, it was excruciating. 

But I vividly remember, many moments of, I just knew exactly what to do, I knew exactly what to say, it's not like I had the experience, it's not like I was a veteran, this never happened to me before. And I remember thinking, "I was at the exact right place at the exact right time." I wasn't choosing my actions, I wasn't thinking about them really, I just knew what to do. And I think all of them, and that's a bit of an extreme, but I think all of us have had that experience of just knowing what to do.

So, this continuum of no choice, choice, no choice, is the journey. It's been my journey. I'm at every end of that continuum, sometimes in the same day. I don't know that that's ever going to stop. But I know that it's helped me to know where on the continuum I am, and when I'm in the no choice, and the no choice, like I'm in a reactive state, even to know that, is helpful. Even though I can't necessarily get out of it. Just to know, and to know that you have choice, really good, really great for the human need, to know that, to feel that empowerment. And then to have that experience of no choice but being taken care of, being fed, to know you're there, and to be grateful for it. I'm very glad that I have that, the little bit of awareness that I have.

Daniel: The being lived part of it, is the way that I like, I like using that word. 

Sandy: Yeah, yeah.

Daniel: So, I wanted to bring in something that a colleague of ours, Judy Sedgeman, mentioned in an article that I really loved of hers, where she was talking about — and this is going back to choice, the concept of choice, just to expand on this a little bit — what she said was, and I'm going to again paraphrase it, "We don't choose the thoughts that come to us, but we choose to thinking we have about those thoughts."

Sandy: hm

Daniel: And for me, that was one of the most powerful, empowering aspects of understanding this. Is that understanding, the role that my choice makes in the thoughts and thinking that I'm paying attention to and giving importance to, was profound in living a better quality life. And being able to see exactly, as you're saying, "Where am I on that continuum of no choice, choice and no choice," because my ability to recognize the thoughts that I'm having, like you said, and the role that I'm playing within that process, is going to be reflective of where I am on that continuum. My awareness of it. 

Sandy: Absolutely, absolutely, it's the critical piece. I don't know how to control my thinking. I don't know anybody who does, and we don't have to. Like we don't control the tide, we don't control the weather, but we have some understanding of it. We, and, I'm a kayaker, so I'll work with the tide, I'll let the tide help me, and I'll try not to work against it. Try not to fight it, and the same thing with my thinking, I want to work with it, I don't want to fight it. I don't want to judge it, I don't want to let it control me. So, the more awake we are to what is going on inside, the more choice we have and the more, as I said, the more ease we'll have in life. 

Daniel: Yeah, that's beautiful. (pause and big sigh) It brings to mind what I mentioned at the start of this conversation, the, and it's related to this idea of choice and understanding where we are within that continuum. Early on in my understanding of this conversation that we refer to more commonly as the Three Principles, which is what we're talking about primarily. Something that Sydney Banks introduced as a description of his experience, in a way to help others find their own truth within themselves.

So, in my earlier time within this conversation, I was getting a lot of insights around how things worked and I have metaphors that were very helpful to me when I first started, and I was in a conversation with you, as a group setting, you were speaking to the group, and at one point you said that it is more helpful to help a client understand how to forgive or what forgiveness means, then it is to tell him or her the importance of forgiveness, and later on I asked you what you meant by that. 

And you started speaking of a, recognizing the innocence in our actions, recognizing the innocence of us getting lost in our content, of our thinking, like we were talking about earlier in the conversation. And as you were speaking all of a sudden, all of these dots started connecting in my head saying, (in an animated voice) "Oh yeah, I knew that, I knew that, oh yeah, I knew that." But I hadn't connected them all together and it was the most amazing feeling and all of a sudden I went, "Oh my God, I know the meaning of forgiveness," and what I got from that was that forgiveness comes the moment when we realize that there is nothing that needs to be forgiven.

And I speak about that a little bit in one of my articles in the past. I don't remember if it's from my old website or my current website, but I would love for you to share a little bit about that. I know that I'm kind of dropping this on you from completely (begins laughing), completely from left field but, but this idea of forgiveness and the importance of forgiveness as a reflection of our true essence, as a reflection of our spiritual intelligence, I think is a very important role or a very important aspect of deepening and expanding and integrating our spiritual understanding into our current experience of life. So I would love to get your thoughts on that.

Sandy: Wow! Honestly, I think you said it, I just think you said it beautifully, I don't know what I can add. When you said real forgiveness is when we realize there is no need for forgiveness, that's very profound. You know, honestly, I had a client teach me that. He worked in a family company, his dad owned the company, and he worked for his dad, and they had a very contentious relationship. And, he just had a lot of, he's, he came and worked with me for a four-day intensive and he just had so many insights, and then towards the end, I just wanted to broach the subject of his father and I said, "Well, how are you seeing things about your dad? You think it's possible that you could forgive him?" 

And, he was the one to say to me, he got very quiet and then he said, "You know Sandy, I realize there's nothing to forgive," And I said, I mean if, that's the moment you know student become teacher becomes student (Daniel begins laughing), it was one of those moments, and I said to him, "What do you mean?" and he said, "Well, he was doing the best he could, given how he was thinking, if I was thinking what he was thinking, I would do what he was doing." He said, "How can I hold, how can I be upset with him? He doesn't know, he didn't know, he still doesn't know that he's creating this reality within, he's blaming it on me, he blames it on my mother, he blames it on the customers. He doesn't, he's innocent. So I don't have to forgive him," he said, "But I do have to find a way to work with him, but I have all kinds," he said, "all kinds of possibilities are coming to my mind now that were invisible to me. When I figured that the best I could possibly do was forgive him." He was like, "That was the top of the list, but that was going to take a miracle, I thought it would take a miracle for me to forgive him, and I thought that was what this whole program was about." He said, "So now I realize that, like, that's nothin'."

So, yeah, I think, and you know Daniel as well as I do, that the forgiveness piece is first and foremost something that we have to do for ourselves. That's all, all my years, including my own personal journey, to forgive ourselves, to see our own innocence, to realize that we were just lost or forgot, that's, that is so freeing.

I was actually listening to a podcast this morning, this local, I live, like I said in Washington state, so north of Seattle, and there's a podcast that's a local podcast, from the city of Seattle and this guy is running this program for youth who have, who break the law, and he, he said this line, it was great, I'm going to mess it up but it went something like, "I realized that grace changes behavior more than, far better than guilt."

And he went on to say that a lot of the programs for incarcerated youth are to get them to be accountable, you know, to get them to feel bad about themselves, and he said, "I understand the accountability piece, but what my program does is bring grace, and by grace I mean a community of people who have been where they are, who understand what happened to them, and understand that they made bad decisions, and understand why, and we offer them a hand." And he's getting tremendous results with the kids that his organization is working with. But it so touched me that you get better results with grace than with guilt. 

Daniel: Yeah that was, for me, my own journey, in my own process, came from recognizing how innocently I was reacting to life, how innocently I was getting caught up in my experience of life and responding in ways that I didn't intend. Like I didn't mean to come across as being angry or impatient or whatever, but I found myself kind of saying, "Huh, that just happened to me and if that happens to me, and then I lose my bearing or I lose my grounding or I lose my, my place, if you will, on that continuum, my awareness of where I am at continuum, and I get absorbed by the experience of, of whatever it is that I feel is affecting me, then that's what happens to you too. And if I don't mean to get lost in act like a dick for lack of a better way of saying it then it helped me understand that you don't mean to do that either. You don't mean to act difficult towards me or you don't mean to act aggressive or resistant towards me either, it's just what's happening because of the thinking that you're believing to be real in the moment." 

And we all innocently get caught up in that, and seeing that innocence in me and seeing the innocence and others, it fed my understanding. One fed the other. As I saw it more in myself, I saw it and others more, and as I saw it happen in others because I started being able to recognize it in others, I was like, "Oh look, they're just getting caught up, I can see them, it's got nothing to do with me, it's just them being caught up in their experience," and it started informing my own experience, it was, one fed the other as my understanding of it grew. 

Sandy: Beautiful

Daniel: And that's, being like you say, that aspect of self forgiveness and being kind and being graceful with our own journey, in our own experience, it opens up so many possibilities, so many possibilities. And, again, I just want to emphasize that if you're not feeling that right now, that's okay too, this isn't an aspect of "I need to be more kind to myself," almost like a, like a to-do or like an action item...

Sandy: Or a technique.

Daniel: Or a technique, you know, it's it's really about, just, the best I can say it is, the more that we're able to see our own innocence in action, our innocence in, in, our experience in action, the more we're going to be able to find that state of grace and find that state of self forgiveness, as an effortless process.

Sandy: Yes.

Daniel: It becomes effortless, which brings up a question, coming back to business and coming back to your clients, I mean this is something that's really, it must be very difficult to communicate. But I would love to to have you expand a little bit on, when you're working with clients that are dealing with, "I don't have time for this, I, you know, I work 70 hours a week, the last thing I want to do is spend time thinking about myself or learning about myself, because I just don't have the time for it." I'm sure you come across that all the time. 

Sandy: Oh yes, yes, yes. Well, what we have to do when, I mean, I think this is just respectful of where people are at, and where people are coming from, is, we have to connect what we're going to help them or bring to the table, with what they think they need. So, if they say, "What I need is more time," you know, "We can't give you another, there's only twenty-four hours, we don't have that kind of power. But, but what if we gave you, what if we helped you have the experience of having more time, would you like that?" So, we always have to connect what they want with what we have on offer, we have to make, build that report, that, what's the word I'm looking for, relevance, that relevance.

I just worked with a guy last week and he, interesting, interesting guy, he is a, I'm going to make up the details, but he essentially, he's a plant manager in a manufacturing plant and he inherited this, this job from this plant that had been, had years really, of poor performance. And primarily, the poor performance had to do with people on the team who no one, no one was ever holding accountable. And so this guy gets hired in and he, (Sandy begins to chuckle) he cleans house, but there was a lot of collateral damage. The good news was, he improved the performance of this manufacturing plant. So the company was thrilled.

But this company also has an ethic of very high standards for their leaders, and they need to score, there's a survey that goes out to your employees, and they need to score really high on things like respect and trust and all those things. And this guy did not, he scored very low, 30 percentile, 40 percentile, 50 percentile. And you know he got the results back, and it really surprised him. Because, as I think you mentioned, we don't, we don't realize we're being harsh, we don't hear often, hear ourselves. Because he had a goal and it was all hands on deck and he was just going to make that goal happen. And the means didn't necessarily matter to him. But when he got the results, he was like, it pinched. Because he's a nice guy, he's really actually a nice guy.

So, here he comes, the company sends him to me because they want him to be, to continue with this high performance but they can't have these low low scores. And as I listened to him and learned about him, I could see it was really clear that what informed him was this very complicated analytical process that he would do inside his head. He would make things work by pushing and yelling and demanding. It was very hard work and it took a toll on him. But, that was all he knew, and he considered himself just really strong and, and could handle any burden, and he was going to make it happen. 

And I had to help him see that there was a whole other resource available to him, that could get the job done without all the stress and strain. Well it took a while, because he was so attached to doing it the way he'd always done it. He's got two young daughters and you should hear the stories of him teaching them math, you know, it was just painful to listen to. The poor kids would be in tears and, and even he was going to make sure they learned, he wasn't violent at all. He was just really harsh and, and very demanding,  and he couldn't understand why his daughters would always be crying, "Why are you always crying?" 

So I had to help him see, I had to wake him up, to the feeling that he was walking around in, which he was completely oblivious to. And I had to help him see that that feeling was coming from the way he was thinking about his work. And that thinking, all that thinking he was doing was a very limited picture of the possibilities that are available to him. 

And that behind or beside or before all of that thinking he does, there's a whole other way of going about it, that involves letting your mind shut up, and allowing, and listening and taking people in, and hearing what they need, and allowing for the wisdom and common sense to come through him. He didn't have to push, he didn't have to make it all happen, he didn't have to do everything. 

And he slowly started to see, that, how much his ego, how much his self-image, was running him, and his need to be the best, and his need to improve performance. He woke up to it, he woke up to the feeling of it. So, I mean, we'll see, he's back to work now, I talked to him and he said, "Sandy, I'm calm," he said, "and things have gone haywire at the plant, because I wasn't here for a whole week," he says, "But I'm calm, and I'm just like asking questions, and I think people are kind of looking at me like 'what happened to him'." So we'll see, but I was able to make that, that translation between him wanting good performance, which, you know, that's his job and helping him see them inside all of us is...is premier performance. We just have to get all that unnecessary, old thinking out of the way and allow that deeper knowledge to start showing us the way.

Daniel: I would love for you to speak a little bit more about that, and let me give you a little bit of context that might help. The organization that you work with is Insight Principles...

Sandy: Insight Principles.

Daniel:  ...and a lot of what you do, at a simplistic way of describing it, is help people understand where their insights come from and how we can learn to, or how insights is a commonplace in our human experience, as opposed to the occasional circumstance that happens every once in awhile, in the perfect environment, you know, once every ten years. And so, a big part of what you do with, with organizations and leaders is to help them understand that insights are a day-to-day occurrence and a natural part of our humanness, a natural part of our, our innate wisdom, and so I would love for you to speak to about that a little bit more.

Sandy: yeah, we make a point, we really make two points when we're working with teams.The first point is that the human mind has a built-in design, we say, a built-in design for success, and by that we mean that built into the human mind are capacities, like the capacity for insight. It's built into the human mind, we've been having insight since the day we were born. In fact, when we were little, you know, that zero to five timeframe, we're pretty much learning virtually completely by insight. Because we don't have any experience to draw from. You know, when you're coming to the world you don't even know you have hands, you can't speak, can't walk, so you, you have no experience. 

So you, insight is this unbelievable capacity of the mind to bring us a thought, in the moment, exactly the one we need. Now sometimes it's a brand new one and that is just, it's thrilling to see something for the first time. But sometimes it's, it's a memory, "Oh, I remember now, and I'm going to say this cuz it fits." But it's exactly the right memory, and sometimes it's a synthesis of the knowledge or experience that we have, but it's perfect for the situation. 

Well, that capacity has been serving us, again, since the day we were born. But it's grossly underutilized and grossly under appreciated, and unnoticed. Well, what do we notice? We notice the hard work, we notice the time we're pushing, we notice the time we stayed up all night, we notice the times we yelled and screamed at our children or our employees. Those get all the attention, gets all the credit. 

But I know that any evolution that I have had in my life, or anybody's had, came by insight. So, this capacity, we, we just talk about it all the time, and we remind people "Have you looked for an insight?" We don't even look. We just go right into our memory and do what we've always done. Even brainstorming, what people say, "yeah that's the, that's the top-of-the-line innovative tool for companies." But brainstorming is not really insight, it tends to just be a lot of memory driven and, and people make associations, and so it's not the kind, that's not insight.

Daniel: So when you say, "Have you looked for insight?" What would that mean for someone to look for insight? 

Sandy: Often it means something as simple as asking questions, wondering. It always surprises me that people don't ask questions. 

Daniel: And without turning it into a "to do", asking questions, being open, can you speak a little bit more about what it means to be open? Because, the asking questions, I think people get. (begins to chuckle) I can ask questions, I can ask all the questions in the world, but if I'm not open it doesn't matter that I'm asking the questions.

Sandy: Well, if you're not listening. I mean if that's, that's another version of being open. It's listening, listening without your ideas, prominent in your mind. Listening to, listening to hear something new. 

I remember there was a gentleman, he had been with this corporation for like 30 plus years, and he was going to retire. But they hated the idea of losing him because he was just a fount of knowledge, and so they had him sit in on a lot of meetings. That was kind of his job the last year just before he retired, he just sat in on a lot of meetings. And, he was very well respected in this company, and so people wouldn't say anything at first, in the meetings, they would wait for him to start speaking, and "No no no, I'm not going to say anything, go ahead, and you guys, you guys talk," and so, and they'd say, "No no no, we want your input," he said, "Okay, well, I'll speak up if I have something to say." 

But he always was quiet. And then he'd let the meeting go on, and eventually somebody would say to him, "Well, Jack don't you have anything to say? Well, don't have anything to say or don't you have anything to add?" and he would always say, "Look, I'm I have lots of things to add but I'm waiting for something new. I'm listening, I'm sitting here listening and waiting for something new." And after a while, his presence in the meetings, everybody started waiting and listening for something new. 

So, the meetings went from everybody talking at once, throwing out a million ideas, sometimes the scriber, whoever it was scribing on the flip chart, couldn't keep up, to people sitting back and waiting. And somebody would throw out a question, "Well, I wonder what would happen if...? I wonder how come we don't...? I wonder if we've ever tried...?" 

And, the decibel level just, just went down in these meetings, and the amount of new ideas shut up. 

Daniel: So I am noticing that the hour is approaching, we have about 5 minutes left.

Sandy: Wow, that was fast.

Daniel: Yeah, very fast. I'm hoping that you'd be willing to come back again cuz I would love to continue exploring this with you. But I would love to open up the last few minutes to anything that you would like to add, either as a branch of something that we've shared or something completely different. But just leaving you the last few minutes to just share whatever for whatever comes to you.

Sandy: (long pause) Well, the only thing that comes to mind right now is, the word that came to my mind is simplicity. Sydney Banks used to say that all the time, "It's simple, it's simple," and I I think we try to make it complicated, innocently. "It can't be, it can't be that simple," but it truly is that simple. There, we are a part of the intelligent energy of life. We always will be, whether we know it or not, whether we believe it or not. We are a part, we are plugged in, we are the intelligent energy of life. I mean, it doesn't get any better than that. And, we're thinkers, and we got this free will, so we're going to think things. Some of which are not true, some of which are not helpful, but if you wake up, in the moment, to the fact that you're a thinker. To the fact that thought is happening in this moment and creating this reality that you're seeing right now, you can wake up. The intelligence that is who you are, will give you something new, it will show you the way.

It is, it seems too simple to be true but, that's how I see it. 

Oops, I lost your, I lost your...

Daniel: Am I back? So, I was just thanking you once again for everything that you shared. It's been a wonderful conversation and I really honestly hope that I can convince you to come back in the future.

Sandy: Absolutely, just shoot me an email and I look forward to listening to the rest of your podcasts.

Daniel: I really appreciate that. Thank you again.

Sandy: Take care Daniel, bye bye.

Daniel: Ok, bye bye. 

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Closing text: Thank you for listening. Hopefully, you've heard something new that invites you to reflect, to go within, and deepen your own understanding of life, and of our universal experience. If you enjoyed this conversation, please follow the podcast series on your favorite listening app, and share this episode with others that you feel would enjoy it as well. Until next time, may we all soar with inspiration, explore with passion and live with love. ❤️❤️❤️

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