John Prendergast

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Jeff
Hey, welcome back to the Consciousness Explorers Podcast, the podcast that’s all about exploring the mind and body using different practices. We are your hosts. I’m Jeff Warren, and with me is Tasha Schumann. Hey, guys, we’re happy to have you along. So today we are talking to a fellow named John Prendergast, a spiritual teacher, he wrote three books, at least he wrote a book called The deep heart, a book called in touch. And then how I first came across some years ago, he wrote a book called The sacred mirror, he was an editor on it, actually, which was this anthology of writings that bridge psychotherapy with non duality. And that was really very much what we got into today, I, you know, find him to be just a really wicked dude. And he kind of puts me into this really interesting space. And I feel like this conversation that we had here, really did that, like I what I loved about it, as I ended up getting in touch with my heart. I know it sounds a bit cheesy, but it feels really good. And he has a really nice take on this. And that was my takeaway. What about you, Tasha?

Tasha
Yeah, totally. For me, it was that, you know, when you hear heart centered meditation, a term that gets tossed around a lot, you kind of don’t know what to expect, or how, you know, soft and fuzzy, it’s going to be this one was totally embodied. I found. John totally brought me into that place. And I think we went we went deep in this one.

Jeff
So here’s the conversation. John, welcome to the consciousness Explorers Club podcast.

Tasha
Yeah. Welcome.

John Prendergast
Oh, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Jeff
I am very curious about this practice, you’re going to lead us in and maybe by way of setting it up just saying a little bit about who you are your approach to, I guess, practice to these larger questions and what you’re going to guide us in?

John Prendergast
Okay. Well, the the question of who I am is interesting if we don’t take it in a superficial way. In other words, you know, I can give a biography, and I will, but I just want to accent just what a living question it is; to not take for granted, who we think we are, to be able to actually step back from our personal narrative and feel ourselves undefined. And as a consequence un-confined to any story. So, you know, the truth is, I don’t know who I am. And I’m quite happy to rest in that knowing and the discovery of that.

Now I’ll give a conventional response, which is, what is my conventional response? Well, you know, for many years, I’ve worked as a psychotherapist for decades. I’m a retired adjunct professor of psychology at the California Institute of integral studies where I supervised and trained psychotherapist on a graduate level for 23 years. I’ve been interested in the spiritual quest since my late teens. And as actually as a boy, as a preteen, I had a number of kind of confusing, pleasant, but confusing experiences of opening to a vast space, often when I would fall asleep and, and then when I began a meditation practice, that point it was a mantra meditation. When I was 20, I began to re-experience that. So really, for 50 years, this has been my great love to deepen into one’s true nature. And that’s taken many forms. Part of it is to become a psychotherapist to kind of deal with my own conditioning, and help others do that. But along that way, I’ve also studied with some wonderful teachers, including the European Advaita master, Jean Klein, and Adyashanti. And I’ve been co-teaching retreats beginning 12 years ago, and then teaching on my own for the last five years doing retreats and online events. So that’s a little bit about who I am.

And how I approach practice is, with love and tenderly. In other words, I used to approach it as a discipline, which has its has its value certainly kind of kept me in line for doing it regularly for 10 years. But I began to see that meditation was not just on the cushion and not just a particular practice but really was living moment to moment and that can sometimes be a cliche for abandoning a sitting practice which I’ve not, but it expanded it and in my whole understanding of you know, practice and living and inquiry have all blended together so I approach practices is really something that I love and something that really inspires as a way to deeply attune to deeply listen to who we really are, and to inquire, so it has two aspects one is just resting in and as awareness, which is a familiar practice in many contemplative traditions. But it also involves meditative inquiry, which is to the art sitting with an essential question. And that question can be, you know, the ones from we know, from Ramana Maharshi, such as Who Am I? Or who or what am I really, or say, from Korean Zen, what is this? Were variations, existential questions like What is my true ground, or what is what is the deepest nature of the heart. But I also use inquiry to work with psychological material, and particularly, with core limiting beliefs. And this is something that’s probably, I don’t know if it’s unique, but it’s uncommon, and reflects my interest in both domains that really aren’t separate that the psychological and spiritual, where we learn to recognize these often subconscious beliefs that really are running our lives, and accessing heartfelt presence, and then inquiring into what our deepest knowing is. So that will be the practice that I’ll be guiding you through and that we’ll be talking about today.

Tasha
Wow. Awesome. Thank you.

Jeff
Is there anything that you that listeners should kind of keep in mind before we get going with it any advice or just parked expectations and see what happens?

John Prendergast
I like that one. I like I like parking expectations. It’s there’s a couple of things maybe, I mean, one is the most important thing when we’re working with meditative inquiry, is our desire to know what’s true. Like, do we really want to know what’s true? And that’s, that’s on whatever level of relative or an absolute level. So as we, as we enter into this experiential investigation, that’s often the very first question to sit with? Do I really want to know what’s true? Do I really want to know what I know? And sometimes we don’t, we’re actually very ambivalent. We’re quite good at denial, and staying in our comfort zones. And so if we’re really dedicated to knowing what’s true, we’re opening up the field tremendously, to a whole different way of knowing and being. So, you know, to, to you and to your listeners, I would say sit, you know, sit quietly with that question first, to I really want to know, before we begin this inquiry.

Jeff
Right, well, I’ll let you take it from here. Okay.

Tasha
I really want to know, for the record, I do.

Jeff
For the record she does. I really do want to know, I don’t want to know.

John Prendergast
I like I like all the voices here. Because they’re all I mean, they’re honest, this is about being authentic, isn’t it? Yeah. And if we don’t want to know, not to judge that, to be curious about that, because that’s also a portal into knowing like part of us actually doesn’t want to know, part of this future is afraid of the unknown, of where want to

Tasha
How we want to confirm what we what we think we know.

John Prendergast
That’s right, we want to confirm. And so we’re opening into the unknown. A language is a little sounds contradictory, but it’s not, when we’re willing to know, deeply and in a different way. So good, good to be in touch with any ambivalence that may be there, because that’s authentic.

So let me give you an overall of this overall, kind of description of this approach. And then we’ll do it. The first step is in terms of getting in touch with a core limiting belief is to be able to recognize it. And there are different ways of doing that. One is to notice a chronic sense of contraction in the body, a somatic contraction that you tend to have way that you tighten up, often it’s in the torso, somewhere, it can be in the heart area, or the solar plexus, or the lower belly, throat, it can really be anywhere in the body. That’s often a kind of key signal of some kind of core limiting belief that’s at work. So that’s one way we can do a body scan or be aware of where we tend to tighten up. And another very similar ways when we have an emotional reaction when we get triggered in a fairly consistent way. That’s also a signal of a core limiting belief. And we can also just ask ourselves, you know, what are my kind of key core limiting beliefs? What’s my what are my top 10 or top five hits, if you speak of that way, and kind of let it come to you? So often, in my experience, most leaves constantly around two polls. One is a sense of lack, that I’m not enough. And the other is a sense of flaw that something’s wrong with me. And often they work in tandem. I’m lacking something essential important. And also something the way I am, something’s really wrong with it, I’m staying, I’m flawed, I’m really screwed up. And very often, the core limiting beliefs can be expressed very simply as the child would say them, that is say and you know, five words, like I’m really screwed up, or something’s wrong terribly wrong with me, or missing something, I’m not enough.

[Meditation begins]

Tasha

Thank you. That was awesome.

John Prendergast
Yeah, I’d love to hear what came up for you guys.

Tasha
Jeff, you want to hit it first?

Jeff
Powerful, as powerful for me. Okay. Let me just put myself back together here.

John Prendergast
Loosely, I hope.

Jeff
Loosely,

Tasha
Lightly recombobulate.

John Prendergast
There you go. Yes.

Jeff
Yeah. So okay. So the initial question about a core limiting belief, so I kind of dropped that in, of course, the mind right away when it wants to jump in with its ideas, but I tried to just sort of drop it in and just pretend I didn’t know what was going to come up. And what came up was something very familiar to me. Things are not okay. It’s like I got, I got to get things figured out. I gotta secure things. It’s the speedy, add hyper vigilant part of me. And I sort of thought, okay, so I know this, I kind of felt into it. And I could feel it as a kind of racy pneus in the upper chest, and maybe kind of spinning in the frontal lobes, kind of, you know, trying to like, strategize my way out of whatever latest conundrum I’m in. So I sat with that. And then your invitation to connect to this basic, deeper, knowing you’re connecting to the heart. So I did that. And I have some questions about that. Because, at first I was like, Oh, am I connected or not connected? Or am I just feeling the breathing into this, but when I just relaxed as per your excellent guidance, and just trusted it, and was patient, you know, all my cognitive critiques of this idea kind of dropped away. And what I noticed was a very simple, simple feeling in the heart, like this very quiet, simple feeling. And as soon as I noticed that, it started to spread out. Almost like a kind of walk. It was really nice.

And then, very surprisingly, a wave of very strong emotion of kind of gratitude, poignancy, wanna cry feeling? And I realized, oh, underneath that things are not okay, as some kind of thing around, I’m not okay. And it was like the heart. It was just this love. It was love. And I’m like, oh, gosh, this is happening. I’m going to talk about it. Oh, man, that’s okay. I’m gonna whatever, and I just sat in it. And it was things were very quiet then. And just still so quiet that I remember thinking, I have to remember to ask John, how does one know, to stay here? Because it’s so subtle. It’s so he could just slip right off of it. And I did slip off and I got into thinking about whatever the podcast, you know, or other things. And I it’s like, it’s the sort of easy window that’s always here. But that’s so subtle, you just slide right over it. And, and then especially that last step of Okay, now, can you trust it enough to just know, this is real, which is a huge thing. It seems like and then act? What will how would you act from this place? And that was very, it was very rich inquiry for me. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah. No, this is, this is authentic. This is you tapped in. It’s beautiful.

Tasha
Yeah, for me, it was like, I mean, similar at the beginning, I think, for a lot of us, that feeling is like, you know, I’m not okay, or something’s not okay. The words that kind of formed around it for me was, it has to be perfect. So it’s like this feeling of, you know, it not being okay. But I can make it okay, I can fix it, if I could just tweak hard enough or batten down the hatches or plan more whenever that kind of feeling of gathering and fixing. And I felt like as soon as I accessed that, it was really, really difficult to move into the heart and heart centered practices actually something I do quite often. But when I push that button, you know that like, that core limiting kind of button that it was like, No, don’t go down there stay in the head, the head is where we can fix things from kind of, like melting down into it. And my experience of coming down, consciously to the heart center was that my experience of merit center was almost too bright. It was like so alive and so like a gigantic, you know, like the kind of the energy that a child has, it’s just like, Nah, we can run all over the place and play and do all sorts of stuff. And I for me encountering that. I was like, oh, that’s what that’s about. It’s like, at my core I’m just like this rambunctious kid with so much joy and I want to play and nothing’s wrong. But then there’s this like, Okay, we got to harness that. We got to make it perfect. We got to get it together for that adult world, we got to make it all happen.

So there was just this, I found myself almost like bouncing off of the heart centering, like it was almost too much to stay in, just like nakedly. So I was like, dip my toe in and be like, okay, hmm. And you know, as you, your guidance was to kind of stay with it and have the truth of it kind of reveal itself to us rather than trying to think through it and put words to it. And the feeling that arose to me, as I, you know, slowly settled down into it was that I was afraid of it, that I have a core kind of fear of that power of that raw power. Like, what if I just let it do what it wants to do? Yeah, there’s fear of that. And sitting in that, and when you said, you know, when, if you took this out into your life, what would it be like to act from that. And there’s like, the simultaneous excitement and fear. And I realized that every cool thing that I’ve ever done, you know, if I’m like, performing on stage in front of like, a ton of people or, I don’t know, making music and putting out crazy songs, or whatever, every cool thing that I’ve done was from that place, and every, you know, over calculated thing was from that other place of planning and messing with it.

Unknown Speaker
Yes, so there’s a, there’s a related belief here at Tasha, that it’s not safe, really shine to bring this out and all the exuberant joy. That’s here. And so that’s another, you know, that’s another inquiry. Like, is it safe to be so open hearted? So joyful? Yeah. So loving in this world? Right?

Tasha
Yeah. And I feel like a lot of people have that feeling. And then the world kind of like, you know, slaps you on the nose like your little puppy. It’s like, calm down!

Unknown Speaker
At best. Yes. Yeah, thank you.

Tasha
Thank you.

Jeff
I was just thinking about what you were saying. And it’s so interesting. This process, you know, I guess, what I was wondering about is, if we think that you mentioned the beginning some of the core limiting beliefs, like, how do those sort of constantly and do you ever get rid of your core limiting beliefs? Or is it more like you learn how to like, see them with affection, and they’re just become less influential? Or can you really expunge those fuckers? Wait a second, maybe I’m using the wrong language?

Unknown Speaker
Well, actually, if you go in with that attitude, you’re in for a fight. Right? Yeah. And so that’s the interesting thing about this inquiry is we’re interested in what’s true, we’re not interested in getting rid of anything. So, you know, in a way, it’s kind of classic Vipassana, you know, it’s about seeing and seeing through, you know, it’s and that’s, that’s the process, it’s like, the more clearly that we see something is untrue, the less power it has. And gradually, my experiences, these just fall away, because these are imprints largely from childhood, Taha, as you were kind of, you know, suggesting, we kind of get you know, bopped on the nose if we’re too exuberant or too honest. And we learn, you know, and as a way of adapting not to do that. And then we bury our kind of intrinsic aliveness and authenticity and, and our deeper knowing.

Tasha
So patterns that at some point served us like they kept us alive, or

John Prendergast
Yeah, they were very, they were, as we know, they’re very adaptive, right. And now, they’re maladaptive. And so by just with this kind of curiosity and affection and a willingness to know the truth, and by seeing and seeing through, they tend to fall away, do they sometimes fall away? Completely? Yes. Do they tend to diminish? Absolutely. And that’s been my experience with people that I’ve worked with, they both, you know, they, at first, there’s a diminishing of frequency and intensity. And, and there’s also a change, and therefore a change in relationship to them. We just don’t buy them, you know, they become more conscious, we’re not as hooked. And of course, it’s our belief in them that gives them fuel. So the less we believe that the less powerful they become, and often they just kind of fall away or become peripheral. Like occasionally, I still get triggered occasionally. And I, I’m curious, oh, what’s that? You know? And then it’s like, Oh, yeah. All right. There you are,

Jeff
I guess, because this is why this is so valuable, because so much of our suffering and our maybe maladaptive behaviors, they’re sort of these secondary responses that are emerge out of these core limiting beliefs. I mean, they maybe speak to a moment for that, like, why this is so important to explore into,

John Prendergast
Yeah, well, you know, the description of core and limiting, core limiting beliefs is very intentional. Their core because we hold them very deeply. We identify with them, and they, they really radiate out in all areas of our life and relationships and work and as I was thinking esting our whole relationship to life itself, often as a kind of unseen driver, and they constrict us, they limit us they, they limit like Tasha in your case is kind of exuberant joy, or Jeff, they may drive you, you know, to be more frenetic than you need to be, you can be more peaceful and still get, you know, things done. In fact, things are done more peacefully and often more efficiently. But we feel more at ease in our relationship, we feel more at ease and ourself. And we feel more at ease with life regardless of what’s going on. So there’s a kind of tyranny of these beliefs that we’re unaware of, and that are kind of like, you know, a kid who’s got the driving wheel. And as we begin to see them, you know, that grip loosens, and lightens up. And what happens is we were just much more adult, more conscious. So that’s just on a personal level.

But there’s also a level a spiritual level, as well, which is, as we clear, these deep imprints of conditioning. And as I suggested, the beliefs are very intimately related with somatic contractions and emotional reactions. As all of that begins to harmonize, I would say and integrate, we’re much more available to our true nature, to this spacious loving awareness that is inherent in each of us. And so there’s just a lot less noise in the system. And we can attune with that signal and trust it. So in my case, for instance, I would get the signal, but I didn’t trust it. My mind, my critical mind would come in and say, Is that real? Are you just fooling yourself? You know, do you just want to make yourself feel better? And so the mind was just tyrannical that way until I began to see, you know, that this doubting was just another thought. And I could just identify from that. And that really shifted things because I could begin to trust. Now, Jeff, you were tapping into this and noticing a little struggle is like, can I Is this real? You know, can I really trust this. And that’s a very important shift. That happens as well as we fear ourselves from these core limiting beliefs.

Jeff
Yeah, it’s so interesting, because it is so subtle, and the mind is so loud. And it’s not only that it’s subtle. It’s also, how do I say this, it sounds like an ideal, it sounds sort of sentimental, or it sounds like almost too good to be true ish. It has the kind of first it smacks of that. William James, first born to type a kind of endless, optimistic kind of youthful spiritual attitude that, you know, life kind of beats you out. You know, and, and especially if you’re kind of in that more secular mode, you got to have a hard bitten humanistic view on things, to begin to trust, some subtle feeling in the heart seems like I can, you know, I can imagine, half of my friends would just shut that down for it even began, which is a tragedy.

Tasha
And so much of that, that has to do with language. Like, I think the same thing, you know, we call it the heart, but then also, culturally, we just associate the heart with like, soft and gooey and gushy and Tality. Yeah. So it’s almost like, you know, if you can get someone to tap into it, without using any language at all, it might bypass that somehow, you know?

Unknown Speaker
Yeah. And yet, we, you know, we do use language. And so I think it’s important to use language that says, naturalistic and authentic and attuned with people’s experience. So I find, you know, this kind of language, heart wisdom, and just kind of sensing and being quiet and letting it come to you and, and trusting a felt sense and recognizing that there’s a deeper wisdom, all of these, I find people relate to, like to well. So, yeah, I mean, there is a kind of, there is doubt, and there is cynicism, and it’s not as if life, you know, your life becomes a bed of roses or whatever. But what does happen is we, we really tap into something that is so just open, clear, and inherently loving. It’s like, it’s like coming home. This is a, this is a metaphor that people often spontaneously come to. It’s a sense of coming home. But as children, we did not know this consciously. You know, we kind of live from it, but not knowingly. And this is about coming home, leaving what we had to abandon that kind of native innocence, and then coming back to it knowingly, and it’s tempered. It’s tempered with wisdom, it’s tempered with experience. And here’s another point, I think it’s really important that it actually enhances our capacity or empathy for the suffering of others. We’re more open, we’re more vulnerable. You know, to our own experience and our own suffering, but as that resolves, and even those, it doesn’t resolve, we open really to a greater suffering and a capacity to be with that, as well. And I think this is what we want, you know, we want to come home, we want to be able to embrace our lives and the lives of our brothers and sisters, as openly and compassionately as possible.

Tasha
And something about the idea of coming home to it’s like, I was just thinking, I was talking to a friend of mine, who’s not a meditator, and she’s always trying to wrap her head around, why are you doing this all the time? And I said, have you tried, like, if you sit there, you know, with it, and she’s like, can’t you just tell me? Can’t you just tell me what I’m supposed to figure out at the end? And I’m, you know, trying to convey to her that that’s the whole point is that there, it’s not this external, we get so used to like finding the answers externally, or having someone tell us the answer, or finding it in a book or reading it in a science journal, you know, that there’s a whole different kind of answer that you get from arriving at home and yourself, there’s like a different kind of information.

Unknown Speaker
It’s a different knowing. Mm hmm. And I often in my teaching, I often kind of point to this importance of discerning the ordinary strategic mind. And Jeff, I mean, both of you are referring to this, you know, tendency to problem solve and, and gain control in order to master certain events. And of course, we do that naturally as human beings. But this kind of over control and overthinking really creates a lot of suffering at elite, we feel alienated from ourselves, driven, we feel alienated, we feel cut off and split. And, and it’s really, unless, and until we begin to slow down and listen and attune. We won’t tap in to this quieter, deeper level of knowing and, and kind of recognize the signal of and attune with it.

Jeff
The problem is, it has so much momentum, and it has so much authority. And so you how do you work with a momentum, I guess that’s why you need a capital P. Practice someplace where you’re intentionally choosing to do things in a different way, choosing to get curious about subtleties that you overlook in the everyday choosing to honor things that feel quite vague and unsure. But then to make a practice of it to practice, saying, pretending even okay, I’m just going to pretend that this is real, that there is this softness here or there is this, or this voice that saying, Hey, slow down is something to listen to, you know, it’s almost like some way of beginning to turn that momentum around.

Unknown Speaker
Well, certainly you’re you’re right, that, you know, experiences really what is transformative, and what gets us to, to begin to a tune can be very different for people the motivation, very often it’s suffering, you know, very often our lives are not working, you know, we’re we find ourselves in conflict internally and interpersonally. And, and we begin to question, you know, our way of approaching life, and we get interested in in a different kind of way, I find that this is the primary motivation, both, you know, and people who come into psychotherapy, because they’ve tried what they’ve learned, and it’s not working very well, or, and I think this is the minority, there are people who just feel there’s, they’re missing something, that there’s greater depth to life. And, and they really want to, you know, find out what that is…That was my path, actually, I was not that of, you know, suffering, but more of a deep kind of curiosity and spontaneous draw to that.

John Prendergast
And interestingly, whichever path whichever fuels are driving us, some people are motivated, and others are not. And it’s important, you know, that it be an authentic motivation, we will, we will never come to it as a should, at least not the deeper levels, you know, and here we can distinguish, and have different motives for beginning practices. You know, for me, it was kind of a mixture when I began, I was interested in these deeper dimensions, but I also wanted to feel less anxious. And I think a lot of people start with that, you know, wanting to feel calmer, you know, sleep better, be less depressed or anxious, and that’s fine. But the dimensions that are available, are so much deeper, the capacity for inner freedom is so much more than we realize. And once we get a taste of this, once we begin to get a feel for this, then then there’s a virtual kind of cycle that develops of what I call a kind of dialogue between the conscious mind and heart wisdom or a deeper, deeper way of knowing and being.

Tasha
Yeah, and on the topic of motivation to it’s something that you mentioned when you were I’m kind of talking about your background is that, you know, you came to this kind of quest in late adolescence, but can remember these moments from childhood? You know, I think you said pleasant but confusing. No. And I made a note to myself when you said that, because that’s actually, you know, Jeff and I have been friends for a long time. And so much of our conversation is like, sharing these like little quirky moments from throughout our lives that, you know, when we’re like five years old, I remember just like, finding a ray of sunshine in my house, and no one was around and just laying in it, you know, in some kind of somebody for how I don’t even know how. And so that’s, you know, basically, the kind of the motivation behind this podcast is to remind people that we’ve all had these experiences, all along the way, but we kind of whether you pay attention to them or not, is kind of your, you know, what motivates you or not. And also, there’s just like so much, I find the way that we talk about as a society, the way that we talk about meditation, is sold so much as like, it’ll help you sleep better, it’ll help you be more productive. And it’s missing that extra element of, you know, like, you can reconnect to this childlike magic, or, you know, the wonder of the universe or whatever that is.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, a sense of awe, that’s right, a sense of profound peace, a sense of profound communion.

Jeff
You know, I’m interested in teasing apart two little things here, John. On the one hand, there’s this idea that we can start to tap into this subtle, more intuitive kind of heart based knowing that can that essentially tells us that we’re loved or we’re safe? Or maybe curious to hear the kinds of seems like those are the kinds of things it tells us, but it has an answer. But then there’s this other piece, which you spoke at the very beginning, which is Who am I, when you ask that question to yourself, and I’ve done this practice a lot. I also come to a similar answer that it seems that you’ve come to, which is I don’t actually know. There’s this? I don’t know. So there’s a there’s on one hand, there’s I have no idea. And on the other hand, there’s, oh, there’s an answer. Can you speak to that kind of, is there a tension between those two modes? Or they want two parts? The same thing?

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, two parts of the same thing? And, yeah, it’s a it’s a beautiful question. Yeah, it’s like, the the response of I don’t know, is not a mistake. Like, it’s not a failure of your inquiry, it’s actually the truth. In other words, the mind conscious mind has limits, in terms of its capacity to understand who we fundamentally are. So if we’re really honest, in our inquiry about who or what am I really, we come to don’t know, and honest don’t know. And that becomes a portal. Like here in the I don’t know, we’re in a place of innocence, place of openness. And here we can rest. We rest in the not knowing, in the don’t know. And in resting in not knowing or don’t know, mind, hold dimensions begin to reveal themselves, you know, other than ordinary strategic mind. And that’s the quietude in the quiet, we wait. And in the waiting, there’s a spontaneous discovery process that happens and uncovering a discovering of a whole nother dimension of our being. And so in that sense, so really, it’s a gateway, the not knowing the don’t know, is a gateway to a different way of knowing a spontaneous and direct way. That’s not just heartfelt the heart is, I find, the reason I wrote the book, the deep heart is because I think it’s the most accessible portal to this.

John Prendergast
But there are several main portals and, and life itself offers endless portals are opportunities, gaps and openings, to discover what’s here inherently, and each of us all of the time. So occasionally, that will come into the foreground of awareness, as you were suggesting touches these little glimpses that we have as children or adolescents or adults, and almost everyone has had them moments of wonder and on openness, but it’s not. These are not altered states, we’re actually come out of the altered state of the conditioned awareness, conditioned body mind and we’re opening to something that’s always here quietly in the background of awareness. So this is this is interesting I think in the resting and not knowing that the Who am I what am I really and coming to not knowing again and again a whole nother dimension of experience of knowing and being emergence and I find this in my work with people on retreat and one on one mentoring if we just sit together in that silence, not knowing a whole nother level of discovery unfolds.

Tasha
As you saying that I just did a little quick experiment. I was like, what does it feel like if I add, if I say the statement, I don’t know from my head, from a centered from my head. And it, I felt really constricted and almost like panicky pan it feels scary to not know from your head, then I thought let what happens if I asked the same question from a heart centered, I was actually very relaxing, it’s kind of feels nice not to…

Jeff
That’s so awesome.

John Prendergast
That’s a great experiment. And it really illustrates a very important point, which is we use our head base knowing as an attempt to control and we attempt to control in order to be safe. So here is the survival mode, you know, in clear, clearly defined and explained, I mean, that kind of, I need to know, so I can be controlled so that I can be safe. This is such a deep program, and it creates anxiety, therefore, just as you experienced in your little, you know, little experiment, Tasha, you know, it creates anxiety, like, I don’t know what’s going on, something bad will happen, things will get out of control. But when the knowing is really from a deep place, you know, a deep, we can say from the heart, but it doesn’t have to localize in the heart. I think this is the point I didn’t fully clarify in my last remark that it doesn’t have to localize in the heart. It can localize in the gut, it can be non localized, it can just feel like it comes out of nowhere, which in a way is true. It’s not a local awareness, we can sense it through different portals through the mind through the heart, as the mind as a kind of clear, spacious freedom of awareness and a lot of meditative traditions, accent and emphasize that the heart as a deep, quiet, silent knowing of wholeness within ourselves and unity between ourselves and, and all beings are even deeper in the gut. This can come as just kind of a dark, luminous silence full of possibility. No words, no images, but a sense of profound ground or, or groundless ground. So we can, we can tap in through these different portals. And they’ll have different flavors, but they, they all point in that same direction to a knowing that is to not knowing that is a portal that’s extremely beneficent, nourishing, life giving. And just a word about that, I know I’m going on a bit, but in this opening, you know, to not knowing we actually open to a deeper ground, and a deeper current of life, we begin to feel something universal, moving through us not in an inflated or grandiose way, not in a way that makes us feel special, but in a way that that allows us to feel deeply connected with the rhythm of the pulse of life and are and and we find ourselves aligning with that increasingly, in our relationships in our work. And, and this is one of the delights of my work with people is to help uncover help them uncover and discover this.

Jeff
So beautiful. I feel like I should ask the practical question. Which is just, I mean, a lot of what you’re describing, it sounds so healing and wonderful. And who doesn’t want to come into relationship with the world where there’s more peace and patience and openness and humility and love? How does an end yet we have all this momentum of our bad habits if you want to call it so when you encounter people who are interested in this how what kind of program might you offer in terms of a practice or the way to think about the practice and to help to help go there? What are your thoughts on that?

Unknown Speaker
Well, I mean, they’re we are complex beings our way and highly conditioned and unique in our conditioning. So there’s no, you know, there’s no one program for all beings. And, you know, in my my books in touch and the deep heart, I try to offer an assortment of pathways and practices. And I think what’s important is to find a practice that’s really resonant for you something that feels real, something that you really love. And, and those are the ones that you’ll continue with, right. And so to find something that really speaks to you for so for some people, it’s going to be more, you know, maybe more mindfulness, body scanning and light focus concentrative meditation that helps them feel more peaceful and for others, it’s going to be resting in and as awareness, kind of noticing that whatever we’re experiencing, or thoughts or feelings our sensations, what’s common to them is awareness. And that to actually give our attention to awareness to let ourselves fall back into and be held by that and know ourselves as that.

John Prendergast
For some it’s going to be more working psychological work in our conditioning Looking, becoming more familiar with our bodies, and our breath and looking at our core limiting beliefs, main core limiting beliefs is a nice way in. Here’s why, you know, we’ve been accenting it in today’s juicy territory, yeah, it’s very juicy. And, you know, I would say just, you know, work without, you know, if you want to start somewhere, I find in my work with people, regardless of their contemplative practices and traditions, we always circle around to these core limiting beliefs, and to be able to apply this meditative awareness or contemplative awareness, to our deep psychological conditioning to welcome it, and to provide an optimal environment for to unfold. It has been powerful for everyone.

Tasha
Awesome.

Jeff
Wow, um, he kind of bring me into that place talking to you. I feel very connected to that more open, I guess, spacious, maybe Heart Base perspective. And this has been the rhythm of my life as a practitioner, is I’ll do a technique or go to retreat or do something, and I get very, feel very solidly in that. And then I go back to my, my life, the outside of that, you know, my, my busy schedule my parenting and, and of course, I get I kind of forget, or I think was that, is that real?

Unknown Speaker
Yeah. That’s inevitable. I mean, two points on that. One is, it’s interesting that as we talk about this, we kind of drop in together. It’s like, what’s interesting what’s going on there? You know. And I think what it is, it’s just a very simple phenomena of resonance. There’s something in us that recognizes authenticity, and resonates with it. We’re always resonating, we’re always transmitting. And resonating, and this is a particular kind of this conversation is on, you know, about a deep level of being, and of awareness. And so there’s a natural resonance, and we fall into together. And that’s really a value of, you know, being on retreat, or listening or reading to teachings. But the point is not to be dependent on that, but to bring it into our ordinary life.

John Prendergast
To your point, Jeff, you know, how to do that. And, and it is, it’s an inevitable process that we remember and forget. It’s not a mistake. I went through years, decades of remembering and forgetting and remembering and re forgetting and remembering. And, you know, just gradually, there was a shift in the system. You know, various pieces of conditioning, as I saw through them fell away, I unlearned, more and more of who I thought and felt myself to be. And there was a gradual shift, almost like a gravitational shift of identity, away from the conditioned kind of sense of being to an unconditioned sense of being. And I needed to go through that experience, I needed to test out, you know, what was true and what was not I needed to explore the dead ends, I needed to try my keep working on keep practicing my maladaptive way of being to discover what happened. It’s like how’s it working for, you know,

Tasha
It kind of feels like you need to, you need to do that forgetting and then seeing it again, from like, a slightly different practice. Yeah, a different angle, so that you can see from, you know, all the different sides,

Unknown Speaker
You see it from all the different sides. That’s right. And this is how we learn. And this is how we unlearn. You know, there’s so much of this is about unlearning. Because the learning takes care of itself, I find it so important just to, you know, if we can really if we love the truth, and we’re dedicated to that, if we’re willing to see what’s true, and what’s not, if we’re willing to follow this, and unfolding will happen and that unfolding will be quite natural.

Jeff
Well, I’m grateful that you came on to share it with us. And I guess I would just ask, is there anything else that feels asking that heart wisdom viewers, that feels like that might be a good thing to say or something that is coming up for you as a way to kind of finish off this, this exploration and conversation?

John Prendergast
No, actually, when you asked me that question, and I get quiet. What comes up is a feeling of gratitude. And I can I’m I’m feeling right now. I feel grateful. I mean, specifically for to be here to have this conversation, to feel a sense of resonance and attunement and to explore together. It’s touching to me to do so. So I have a specific gratitude. But I have a more generalized gratitude to I mean, I just feel so grateful to be alive and conscious to be here. And to be awake in this miracle of being of being human, regardless of how difficult it is. And you know, we’re in difficult times right now, no question about it. Regardless of that, regardless of the smoke from the fires in Northern California, regardless of the cancer diagnosis that I have, I feel, I feel so profoundly grateful.

Tasha
I love that you said that. I find myself feeling that way so often and not feeling like I can say that. There’s almost this like pressure, to not say how awesome it is just just be alive. Sometimes I feel like telling someone that I’m like, hanging out with them. I’m like this. All of this is just really amazing. But I will be they’ll laugh me out of here if I say that out loud, you know.

Unknown Speaker
Well there’s that fear isn’t there? Yeah.

Tasha
Yeah, so I was really, really happy that you said that in the feeling’s mutual.

John Prendergast
Mm.

Jeff
It’s such a perfect way to end it. I’m conscious, though, that our listeners that there’ll been a bomb that just dropped there when you mentioned the cancer diagnosis and just maybe give a little context around that. Everyone will be furiously worried googling you and emailing you hoping everything’s okay.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, well, everything’s okay. Just briefly, you know, as we spoke of before the program began, I’m 70 years now. 70, I was 69. And, and in excellent health. And in mid June, I received the unexpected diagnosis of early metastatic prostate cancer. So it spread very aggressive form of cancer and then spread beyond the prostate to a few local sites. And so I’ve been treated quite well by local doctors and hormone therapy and radiation. And I’ve been told by experts in the field that I have a good chance to be around for a long time. I’m not feeling any pain, I feel quite well, in fact, so. And it’s, you know, you hear this, but I feel gifted by this diagnosis, because even though I knew this before, it really sharpens the focus to every ordinary moment, and just how precious it is.

Tasha
It’s so inspiring to hear that as well. You know, I think it’s so easy to tighten around a diagnosis and have it completely throw whatever practice you had, or whatever insight you had, but it just, I don’t know, it’s inspiring, because it shows the proof of what practice can really do and what that inquiry can really do.

John Prendergast
It’s true. And it’s interesting. I haven’t felt any fear about this. So, you know, we’re all going to, we know about impermanence, don’t we? And these bodies will go in and yet, you know, in a very unaffected and natural way. I I feel quite peaceful about it. That’s beautiful.

Jeff
John, it’s been so good talking to you. Thank you.

Tasha
Thank you so much. Oh, it’s

John Prendergast
Oh it’s really been a pleasure.

Jeff
Wow that was really beautiful. And it was gonna be beautiful. You wish you could have like a little John in your room.

Tasha
Yeah, right.

Jeff
Yeah, open up the cover. There he is. He’s like, Hey, guys. Come on. Out. Give him some water.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah. Little John, Little Jenine, whatever, she’s in the core of our being, each of us.

Tasha
Wonderful.

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