Sacred Space with India.Arie

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India.Arie is a prolific singer-songwriter and the winner of 4 Grammy awards, but today on the show we talk about a different dimension of her life that has always been quietly present — her spirituality. What turns a simple object into a meangingful heirloom? How can we tap into the power of ritual to create transcendent art? Check out India.Arie's new music video, shot right here at Commune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWsfL2eI5ns

India: I have a album that I've put out last February called, Worthy and the first single from that album was called, That Magic. There was That Magic, Steady Love, Crazy and Sacred Space. We had the idea of just telling the story of a relationship arc. In That Magic, they meet and that's when everything's all sparkly and fresh and sparks and everything. Then Steady Love, they move in together and you see them fight and makeup and work on their relationship and get engaged and stuff. It's not exactly linear because I had different leading men and stuff, but the arc. Then we had Crazy, which if you listen to the lyrics of the song, it's really about how it really feels to be in a relationship like the every day, every day.

India: Then Sacred Space, I added this song to the Crazy video because it's my favorite one on the album. It's all of my friends who are musicians and spiritual people is their favorite one. It was like a special moment in every concert so I had to find a way to get what I felt my music deserves. I worked with a wonderful company called BMG and so they gave me a budget and a half if I could add Sacred Space. I was a little bit nervous about that because we were trying to find a way to put visuals to something that's really ethereal. For me, Sacred Space, the song is very ethereal. But I think what I have learned about images is that, sometimes it's not about what you see on the screen but how you see it on the screen. Crazy is very colorful and bright with a lot of light beams and you see the couple inside of spaces and being together and laying in the hammock and nature.

India: Sacred Space looks like you're in a dream. It has like a sheen over it, light beams coming off of the skin and fog and dreaminess and glowing white clothes and all this stuff. It looks like a dream. For me, Crazy and Sacred Spaces is the continuation of that story where it's like, even though you found some place where you want to be, what else is there? Sometimes questions come up. Also, for me, in my own journey, I think I'm talking about like, I think this is very common. In fact, I think this is the point of relationships actually. There are things that you never know about yourself until you discover them in a relationship of course. That's kind of what Sacred Space represents as well and there's a lot of symbolism and people are telling me things that they see because it's a little bit open, which I love.

India: Also, we have Reverend Michael Beckwith. In the beginning we were making two music videos but I saw how they could be combined into a short film and Reverend Michael, we went back to him, he was on set of course, we went back to him to ask him to just speak. I have the pleasure of editing his words in my Pro Tools. I chose a segment where he says at the end, "Welcome home and from here you shall not move." That's why I named the short film, Welcome Home and (Crazy/Sacred Space). I had a heavy hand in editing the visuals. I did Reverend Michael's spoken word, I did all of his.

India: In the end the outcome is a vision a little bit different than what we had when we were on set and a little bit different than the director had, which is why I had to stick my hand in because I was like, this is not what I envisioned and you didn't ask me this, but I'm wondering if this could possibly be my last videos or something. I don't know but I'm not in that conventional music business album cycle thing anymore. I don't know and so I put everything I had into these because I wanted them to, for once truly capture my energy. We did real yoga Asana on camera and real meditation on camera. I picked men who looked like the kind of men I would look at twice on the street, not models.

Jeff: I looked at them twice too. Just, if that means everything. They were beautiful men.

India: They were some handsome men. They are. I asked, "Let your gray... let your silver hair show," and they were like, "Okay."

Jeff: Yeah. No, I mean, it shows the heart and the soul shines through and I can see why you might consider not doing another video. I mean, I hope you do and I know that your fans hope you do.

India: Thank you.

Jeff: But I can also understand why this might represent some form of like alluring or a culmination of a lot of different parts of your life. Obviously the musician, the poet, the writer, the creative, the editor, I guess in this particular case or co-editor, but also very much the spiritual side of you that I know because we've gotten to know each other a bit and that you've always projected that. But I think now it's coming to like full culmination or full manifestation. I feel it. I mean you're... it's not oblique. I mean, the first shot of the video, you're sitting in front of a Buddha meditating so you're right out there now.

India: Yeah, I think that I... over these last years, I would consider the music to be the sugar that makes the medicine go down because I would hide a lot of my spirituality in the music and literally just hide it.

India: The more I mature, the less tolerance I have for hiding anything. Many are things that are private, but that's different from hiding. With this video, I just wanted to continue the process of coming out even further about who I am and how I live and what I believe. I went through that process with my songwriting starting in 2009 where I just was like, not... I trained myself to stop being afraid to say certain things on my song writing. Now I'm training myself to not be afraid of certain things in my public persona and how I am in the world. I just want to be all of it.

Jeff: Yeah. Can I share with you my first spiritual connection with your music?

India: Yes.

Jeff: Because I've always been a fan and-

India: Thank you.

Jeff: ... driving with the windows down, pumping the tunes and that level of a fan. But, I think it was in 2016, I was going through some really significant personal change in my life. We were in LA and it was live. I think it was at Oprah hosts the Super Soul sessions and you gave a solo live performance on the campus at UCLA. I was cowering in the back. I was not in like a great place to be honest with you and you sang, I Am Light, just you with your guitar. Those lyrics, I'm trying to remember like, "I'm not the things my family did." I have some of them written, "I'm not the voices in my head."

India: Yeah. "I'm not the pieces of the brokenness inside. I am light."

Jeff: Yeah. I was going through this moment where I was just changing courses in life, but I was so highly identified through my job, the approval of others, what other people thought of me. I just had a moment there connecting with your music that I was able to separate the divine part of me, my divine nature from my ego and say, no, no, I'm not all these other things. On some level I intellectually knew that, but I felt it for the first time there in that theater.

Jeff: When you wrote that song, because in a lot of ways I feel like that song has become incredibly emblematic of your music and I think people's relationship with that song is so deep. Even just, I was reading the YouTube comments on the video and it's like, it's heavy, there's some real emotional stuff. Did you have any sense for the impact that that song would have on people when you wrote it?

India: No. I'm even surprised to hear your story. For me, songwriting is a spiritual work, an actual spiritual work. I pray for my songs, I meditate over them, I pray intentions into them, like literally out loud. The day that I wrote I Am Light it was 12/21/12, which everybody was waiting for. I just thought, I should write something today and I prayed a really big prayer over it that was... almost seemed like ridiculous to ask for. I was just like, "I want this to touch anybody." I don't remember exactly, but it was... I remember feeling like, should I say this? "I want it to touch anybody who has felt any kind of pain that they thought they couldn't make it through or anything that felt so heavy, they didn't know what to do with their..." Things I've always often felt.

India: I don't ever know that those things are answered because I also say, "May God's perfect will be done." I might be asking for something that's not needed or necessary or whatever. Also, when I wrote the song, I thought the words I Am Light were kind of corny. I Am Light, it sounds like a stereotype of a spiritual person in a movie. But, when I get myself into that place where I am allowing the music to emerge and I'm not trying to force it out, I trust what I hear. That's why I get myself, like I pray and meditate first and get myself into a place where I'm not judging anything.

India: I trust what I hear and so I'm like, this is what I hear. I wrote a song around it and when it was done... so often, songs are not done the same day often, but this one took a few hours and when it was done, I just thought it was really beautiful and special and I thought that it captured in a simple way the heaviness of what it feels like to be human, because it's easy to write a song with a lot of words and a lot of verses, it's hard to write a song that's a simple truth. For me, I felt I had captured that because I have a lot of... you heard my... because what I call it is my SongVersation, that's what I did at UCLA that day, where I speak and sing. In that, I talked about the domestic violence in my family life and my history of abuse but I don't say that in I Am light, but I do say I'm not the things my family did to be able to crystallize it.

India: In the simple way, that is what song writing is. I felt when it was done that I had achieved that, like a good song and it also told my perfect truth. But, I also had this training from being in the music industry that was like, if it's not a single, it's not valuable. Because I knew this song was never going to get played on the radio, it's not that kind of song. But what I always forget and what I Am Light has taught me, is that there are so many other places that music lives other than the radio, which is people's hearts. I Am Light surprised me because I accidentally made an album that was too long. Well, the album was called SongVersation, it had too many songs because somebody at the label told me we needed extra songs for target and dah, dah, dah. But they didn't tell me I had to put them all on every album so I couldn't get them off. It made me mad because I worked on the album so hard and then it's not what I meant.

India: It was accidentally too long, but even inside of that, I Am Light still rose to the top and people kept sending messages about that song and it was the last song on the album so they listened. It all surprised me. I did not think it was going to be this way. I thought it was corny in the beginning, but it is the only song of mine that I listen to often. I don't ever listen to my music, it'll be so long. I think, look how my voice was, I was so young and I don't listen to myself, but I listen to I Am Light, all the time. I listened to it today.

Jeff: Yeah. Well, there's obviously kind of a meditative component, just even how the song starts, that your shoulders just drop and your breathing just becomes easy. It's interesting that you say that your first impression of your own work was, maybe a little bit corny but I think it's the distillation of all of these complicated conceptual and intellectual thoughts into something so simple that can be delivered by a messenger like you. That's the rare piece because I would say like Eckhart Tolle, I think he was actually there the same day at UCLA.

India: Yes, he was. I forgot about that.

Jeff: He just sat down in... his stage set up is very Spartan. He just has a chair in the middle and he'll walk on stage and sit in the middle of the chair and say nothing for a good 10 minutes. Just saying nothing is a resting enough until everybody quiets down. He will also just say, "I am." But when he says it, it lands. I suppose that is the hallmark of a transcendent messenger is that you can distill these ideas into something so simple and have them resonate so deeply. I think that's what you did.

India: Thank you. Thank you.

BREAK

Jeff: I think that there is a general way of living in modernity, if you will, that feels very separate from the sacred. It feels very separate from the divine. I think that has its roots in Abrahamic religions and the agricultural revolution and all these other kinds of things. But essentially, God moved up into the sky and here we live in the material physical plain, really separate from all that stuff. Because we don't have great regard for the objects in our life, we treat them as if they're disposable and dispensable, plastic bottles, BIC lighters, and it's no wonder that there's global warming and climate catastrophe because we don't value anything here because it's not sacred.

Jeff: I think that this is why it is so important to have these sacred spaces. You mentioned the photos of your grandmother and your great grandmother, that those aren't just disposable physical items that are devoid of the divine. In fact, that is the divine. We're so used to standardized products. You walk into a Marshalls and there's a dress that looks like just like 900 other dresses or whatever, but it's finding... not that I spend a ton of time in Marshalls to be honest, but I do a three daughters, but to find the parts of life that are unique and interrelated and connected and I think that can connect us more to a life of divinity.

Jeff: Even if we have to go out and toil in what my dad calls [inaudible 00:25:23] or the world of the 10,000 things or whatever, just the sidewalk, the gum infested sidewalks. But it's interesting. Did you minimalize and simplify on purpose in this... where you're living now? Was that a purposeful choice of like, oh, I can just not have too much externality in my life and live more like a monk?

India: You said so many things I want to say [crosstalk 00:26:00].

Jeff: Sorry.

India: I love talking with you. No, I was not thinking about simplifying. I don't know that I even have. Part of that is because I have... you and I were texting about this and we were trying to figure out like this is such a big thing to text about.

Jeff: Yeah, I know.

India: But I have a relationship with a lot of the objects in my life and they are sacred to me. This picture of my grandmother, my great grandmother, my great, great grandmother, my great, great aunt, this photograph, I could photocopy it and it already is a photocopy because my great aunt sent it to me, but like you said, it's not just a thing, it's what the energy it carries for you. I have a lot of things that carry special energy for me, things, actual objects.

India: A big portion of my apartment is a lot of crystals and jewelry and things I've collected, books, first printing of a Maya Angelou book and handmade dolls and just things, objects that are special to me. I don't know that I... maybe some point I will downsize those things, but I'm not living simply, I just downsized. I also wanted to say, because you texted me and asked if I was comfortable sharing the story and I finally just decided if it comes up, I'll tell it. If it doesn't come, I won't tell it.

India: But it's coming up now because we're talking about the sacredness of things. One of the things that... I mean, I guess there's no point in mincing words, one of the things that really bothers me about our contemporary culture is that, it feels like more people than not live a life where there's nothing that they hold sacred. There's nothing that they have reverence for or they're irreverent at the wrong times. It just feels... and it bothers me because I come from a music industry lens so there's a lot of that in the music industry as you know.

India: What you asked me about on the text was something that happened when I held Maya Angelou's, one of her canes. I love Seattle, I lived there for several years but when I was honored to go to Maya's funeral, I met her best friend at the funeral. Her and her best friend were same age, born exactly one month apart. Maya was April 4, Dr. Maxine Mimms is March 4. There was the big funeral, then there was like a small after thing and at the small after thing she got on stage and said, we were best friends and told us all about their birthdays.

India: Dr. Maxine Mimms is this very dynamic woman. She's the Founder of Evergreen State College. She's 92 now, so Maya would have been 92 as well. She's stylish and fun to talk to very wise and beautiful hair, like she's fly. I love her. When she was walking from the stage after she spoke, I put myself in her way and I was like, "I live in Seattle." She said, "Who lives in Seattle?" I was like, "Me." We kept in touch and I finally got to go out to her house. She lives outside of Seattle, like an hour drive. I finally got to go out there and was it 2018? 2017, 2017. It's my first time getting to go out there and she is 92 and has had a really dynamic life so she has all these sacred objects all over her house and she lives right on the water.

India: She has a really old, old tree that her deck is built around like it's sacred space. She has all these stuff and she said going back there and see Maya's canes. She had them all in a two or three cane holder, like the umbrella holder type things. She was like, "Go ahead and check them out, touch them, whatever you want to do." I was looking at all of them, touching all of them, holding them, everything, everything and there was one that I loved that was metal, it had like polished gemstones all over it, like the tumbled kind that you see at the health food store or whatever and just all over this metal, super intricate silver metal cane. That ended up being my favorite one.

India: I took it to the mirror that she had in her living room and I stood there and actually I had on this dress and I had a white wrap. The wrap was tied different, which is the way that I never tied my wrap, I don't know why I tied it that way that day, I guess things, how they go, life. I've been wrapping my hair since I was 15, so to inadvertently just randomly wrap my hair a whole new way is a thing for me. I take the cane, I stand in the mirror and I jumped and I went, "Whoa." Dr. Mimms said, "What do you see?" I said, "I see... I feel like I'm one of you all. When I look at myself in the mirror, I see that I'm one of you all."

India: To me you all is like the women who, as they get into their elder status, become the wisdom keepers but in their younger years, they're the artist and the thinkers and the ones who travel around the world and collect stories and create things and teach people, our artists. Then they take all of that learning into their wisdom years and they become our wisdom keepers and our teachers and our Maya's and our Dr. Mimms. I looked in the mirror and I yelled out, "Whoa," then, "What do you see?" I said, "I see that I'm one of you all." But what I couldn't explain to her was I looked like I was 80. I looked in the mirror... I have a photograph of it, I'm going to send it to you when you get off the phone.

Jeff: [crosstalk 00:32:02]. You showed it to me once.

India: I did show it to you.

Jeff: It is so startling. Your whole face is-

India: I look-

Jeff: ... blind and wizard and you're just thicker and you're old-

India: Holding the cane.

Jeff: Yeah. You're just... yeah, you look like-

India: I forgot I showed you the picture.

Jeff: Yeah, and it is so startling because when you first told me the story, it's such a compelling story, just as you told it again. But there's like a little woo, woo detector in me going off and I'm like, really? Then you showed me the photo and I'm like, oh my, Jeff, never doubt there's a God because that is... yeah, it was startling to see that photo.

India: It was an Important moment for me too because my songwriting partner passed away that night. I was in Seattle to do the show at the Langston Hughes Community Center for Dr. Mimms. There's some people when they ask you to do stuff, you say yes and you go. She asked me to do the show and my songwriting partner also was my guitar player for a long time on the road. Not my whole career but much of it, but we were songwriting partners.

India: He wasn't with me because he was already having health issues. Then I got a call that night that he passed away. I haven't really assessed all of that and what it all meant all put together, but there's something important about that day and what I saw in myself and that he left that day too. There's just something about it.

Jeff: That story from-

India: The idea of the sacred object, I fully believe that if I did not have that cane in my hand, that I don't know that I would have seen into that portal in that moment like the sacredness. Also, I just wanted to say too that Dr. Mimms said she had all the canes because it was a joke between her and Maya, because Dr. Mimms still wears high heels and Maya told her, "You better stop wearing them high heels, you're going to mess up your knees and your feet," you know because they were [inaudible 00:34:13] they were in their 80s when Maya passed and so she said as a joke or as a final playful nod, she left her all the walking sticks.

Jeff: Well don't take umbrage if I send you a cane for Christmas or something.

India: I will not. It will be special to me.

BREAK

Jeff: I hope that this doesn't put you on the spot and you can just tell me to screw off if it does. But, I mean, there you are holding Maya Angelou's cane, seeing yourself as a wizard old wisdom keeper, doing something at the Langston Hughes Center, which I didn't even know. To me, that sort of conjures this question, is that, do you feel that it is sort of incumbent upon you in some way to step into the role of the wisdom keeper?

Jeff: I mean, what Ralph Ellison, James [inaudible 00:35:34], Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, I mean, I can go on, especially in the African American tradition where it's been, oh God, so palpable and so precious and important that work. I mean, you've won Grammy's and put out records and you've had a life of incredible achievement. Then, where are you along that road, that legacy road in your mind right now?

India: When you use the word incumbent, does that mean that you are the natural next person to walk into the-

Jeff: Yeah.

India: Incumbent means just naturally inherited?

Jeff: Yeah. It's almost your... I don't want to say it's your responsibility, but do you feel that that is the natural in that really original meaning of the word natural, next step for your life?

India: That's why I wanted to specify the words because we use words but sometimes we mean different things when we use them because I don't see it as a responsibility necessarily, although we can use incumbent that way. But I do see it as a natural next step. I'm trying to explain. For me, I feel that if I continue to be honest with myself about what my next steps are, that that is naturally where I will be and become. These last two years is the first time I've seen people see me anything like that way. Because I feel like when I'm speaking, that I'm talking about regular things but then there are people who are much younger than me or younger than me on a spiritual path and they're like drinking it up.

India: But so much of that are things that I didn't know when I was in my 20s, I was learning that stuff in my 20s and 30s. Now, things that are normal to me are wisdom for other people. It's just now becoming that and I feel like as long as I continue to be honest and continue to learn, continue to go where my heart and soul tell me to go, that I think it is just natural for me. But I also think there's a part of me that feels that even if I didn't want that, that it would be hard to stop it because of the lineage I come from, which is why I keep that picture on my desk all the time because the more I learn about myself, the more I realize I naturally do things that are of my lineage.

India: I come from some very strong wise, interesting women and female lineage, male too but I'm especially connected to my female lineage. I feel like if I just keep being me, that I'm going to be like my aunts and then eventually I'm going to be like my grandmother and then eventually I'll be like my great grandmother. But as we know, freewill can always mess things up, but I've always been a person who... That's really how I started my spiritual path because I wanted to know from a higher power what I was supposed to be doing with my life as a whole. When I was 19 and 20, I started really asking like, what do I do and how do I make the most out of this life?

India: At that time, what I discovered, which I think was the right thing at that time, was that music is also a generational thing in our family, but it wasn't just about making music, it was about what I was going to make music for and what the intention was and what stories I was going to tell and how I was going to add to the world and to myself. I think that that's, I know that that is why I write the kind of music I write and the subject matter and the stories I tell because that's why it is a spiritual work for me because back then it was something that I felt was presented to me as an option that I said yes to.

India: Now, where I am now, I'm looking at my options and what I have the opportunity to say yes to, but it's a little bit harder to see because I have this whole developed life. Is this supposed to be big? Am I supposed to write a bestseller or am I supposed to just write? Am I supposed to go all around the world and talk to everyone or do I just talk to the kids at the school on the corner? I'm trying to understand who I am in this time, but what I do know is that it still comes from that place of listening and wanting to learn and give. I haven't thought about it that way. Thank you for asking that question.

Jeff: Yeah. It's funny, I'm having like, right now just in the world, the where it is with COVID and people are in a great place of need and have a lot of fear and anxiety and man, it's heavy and we're all trying to serve every way we can. Every week I write an email that goes out to a lot of people, like a million people. I pour my soul into it and I put my email, my personal email at the bottom of it, which is probably crazy. Then I spend two or three days answering every single one of those emails that I get in, personally.

Jeff: I don't know really how long I can do that for because right now maybe it's like 500 emails or something but they're not like, hey, how are you doing? That was great. They're like, here's my life. By Tuesday, I'm sort of spontaneously bursting into tears, like a lot of time. Thank God it's Friday that we're doing this because otherwise I'd be a total wreck. I didn't-

India: I've been spontaneously bursting into tears today. [crosstalk 00:41:46].

Jeff: Well if it happens, we're in good company. Misery loves company, as they say. I didn't really understand what I was going through physiologically and then I got on a call with a friend of mine, Marie Forleo, you might know her and she-

India: I met Marie at Super Soul.

Jeff: Oh, yeah. All right. She's like, "Jeff, you have compassion fatigue." She's like, "This is what first responders have and other folks." I'm like, "Huh?" I'm like, "Oh, right." She's like, "You've got to just... you have to take care of yourself first. This is why first responders burn out in a couple of years because it's coming in, they're taking so much in." Believe me, I realize my place of privilege in this equation. I'm hardly on the front line. I'm just doing what I can where I am right now.

Jeff: But I guess that was leading me to a question or an observation because I think as you said, whether you actively step into that role of teacher of like, I'm going to write the great next American novel or personal development book or whatever, people already see... they're already projecting their own spiritual journey onto you. That's already happening. I wonder what your experience is like with that. Does that feed you or drain you or some form of combination of both? Just holding that much space for people.

India: I am shaking my head as you're speaking because I don't get to have this conversation a lot with people, because I don't think unless you are a person who has like that, for lack of better words, invisible interaction with millions of people, unless you have it, you don't know anything, you don't even know it exists. You don't even know that there's an energy that exists. When I became the public eye, I didn't know what I was getting into, I didn't know that that was a thing, that the invisible exchange. I also didn't know that it was going to be this big or that there would be millions of people who listen to my music and had emotional responses and projections. I didn't know at all.

India: For like, I feel like the first 10 years, there was this... the way that it affected me physiologically that I just never knew what to attribute it to because I would think, why am I always so tired? Everybody else gets up and goes to breakfast and they talk and they're dressed at breakfast time and to me it was just confounding how people could have that type of energy. I mean, I also learned that I'm also just a very sensitive person and so not only was I having that invisible relationship, but I'm also very sensitive to everything anyway. I didn't know either of these things about myself.

India: This last 10 years from around 2009 was a really pivotal moment in my life. From 2009 till today, a big part of my spiritual practice has become how to continue to nourish myself given everything that I take on and everything that I give.

Jeff: Yeah. It's funny, my girls... 

India: They just came in?

Jeff: They just came in. I'll tell you about... this is actually a great little funny segue and they're looking at me, a stance for like, dad, when are you going to be finished up?

Jeff: My girls aren't in school and they're bouncing off the walls a little bit. My middle child, Lolly, is a devoted dancer. She loves to dance. My little pipsqueak, Micah, has become her student and every day in this room, Lolly, becomes the task master and for two hours without fail, they never miss a day, she teaches my little one how to dance and they just are religiously devoted to it. It has just been the most precious thing to watch.

India: Love it. So they are like, get out of our studio?

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah, they're looking at me like, dad, come on, hurry it up here. Yeah, I guess the last thing I would say is, I was sick for a chunk of this quarantine, which was uncomfortable just from an anxiety perspective, if nothing else. I started getting into this dude, Moogi. I don't know if you know this guy, M-O-O-G-I.

India: I do. I do. Yeah.

Jeff: He's just become my go to thing. When I was really very sick, I was doing maybe like two hours a day with Moogi, just on YouTube but it like blew me to a whole another place. Sometimes, there are these times in life that seem really uncomfortable but that turn out to be these inflection points of tremendous growth. I've heard you talk about that too and it's just always a reminder that when we're there, when we're at rock bottom, there is a brighter day ahead.

India: I think that's also a wonderful way to regard this stillness because a lot of people have issue being still because when you get still, you start to feel your stuff, but it's like as soon as you do, the fear of the stuff you've been hiding from doesn't last long. For me, I can say. Some of the hardest things I've been through and I had to just stop and look at my shadow, my dark stuff and it lasts a week, literally. Then I'm like, okay, what am I doing next? Who do I call? Okay, so I need to call this person to talk to... it's never as scary as you think and once you have that first experience of facing that darkness inside of yourself, then you realize you can do it again in other areas of your life.

India: I don't fear stillness. My prayer is that there are people in this world who had to go through this time of forced monasticism, like you call it, but that they come out realizing that their shadow is nowhere near as scary as they thought it was. Because people like that, are more potent in the world because you are able to say no to things and yes to things and try things and love bigger because you're not afraid of the darkness, as afraid. I just, I-

Jeff: That's beautiful.

India: That's been the favorite thing about my life and I hope more people can get that too.

Jeff: That's beautiful. It's so funny. Anytime I ever sense any reluctance from you to become that wisdom holder, I just realize you are already there.

India: Thank you.

Jeff: I was listening to a message that you sent me. I think I told you when I was walking through the hills here in Topanga and it was the resonance of your voice as much as anything you said. I disappeared, it was only the world and of course that's the goal of any spiritual practice is to find that sense of self-transcendence, what you found on mountain tops in Hawaii. Sometimes we just get a glimpse of it and that's all we get but it's beautiful. I'm very grateful for my burgeoning relationship with you and you've inspired me and given me a lot to live for so thank you.

India: Thank you.