Are You Ready to EAT~PRAY~LOVE with us? Let’s DO THIS together!

Transcript generated by AI:

Elizabeth Winkler: 0:25

Welcome to the Shadow and the Light podcast with internationally renowned meditation teacher, davidji.

davidji: 0:32

And heart healer and psychotherapist Elizabeth Winkler, as we guide you through our unique fusion of ancient wisdom and modern psychology.

Elizabeth Winkler: 0:41

Get ready to awaken your true essence, heal your wounds and transform your shadow into it’s.

Music 1: 0:51

I that will go to the deep to take us to new heights. The shadow and the light.

Elizabeth Winkler: 1:12

Hi davidji.

davidji: 1:14

Oh, hello there, Elizabeth. I’m here with Elizabeth Winkler, one of the great alchemists and transmuters of energy of our time. And transmuters of energy of our time, I’ve witnessed her taking people out of deep, deep states of anxiety, pain, suffering, and deliver them to their best versions, so I’m so thrilled to be here with her. We’re also here with our producer, summer Perry, rock star producer. Hi, summer, how are you doing?

Elizabeth Winkler: 1:47

I’m great Thanks for having me and davidji. You have written three books and are known as the most prolific guided meditation teacher in the world and led hundreds, including myself, through your Masters of Wisdom teacher training. I hope that some of our listeners will check out your Meditation Academy. It certainly will transform your life.

davidji: 2:12

Thank you, and so welcome everyone. We reference so frequently the people who have impacted us, our journeys, and we figured this would be the perfect episode. It’s our backstory and, as we were talking about it, elizabeth was saying she has a very, very distinct eat pray love journey and I also have a very powerful eat pray love story. Without the eating and the love, just a lot of suffering and prayer. But we figured this will provide some context to some of the things that we say. Elizabeth, why don’t you go first? Why don’t you share truly what has gotten you to this moment? Because I think what we were saying is neither of us would be here right now if it wasn’t for our little E-Pray Love Journeys.

Elizabeth Winkler: 3:01

That’s right, and I just came back from a retreat myself. I’m always looking at ways in which to be able to let go of the stories and challenges that I’ve held on to. But it began gosh. I went to Bali. That was the first journey I took in 2000.

davidji: 3:20

Before you go there. You’re such an accomplished therapist and you have worked with the elites as well as women in sororities and everyone in between. You have gone to Africa and you’ll fill in these details about. You know really what has brought you to this moment, but you know you’re seeing people on a daily basis in therapy. You are fully virtual, and so you have now really worked with tens of thousands of people over the course of these past couple of years to really help people take their lives to the next level. So I did want to give you your props, because you start in very, very humble seeker beginnings and have now helped so many people at the beginning of their own journeys as well.

Elizabeth Winkler: 4:18

Well, thank you, thank you. I think that the storms in my life brought me to want to discover that still place at the center of the storm, and I went through a lot of loss in my life. My mother died when I was 19. We share that in common right and that was really the initiation of me kind of wanting to find that or feeling a longing for something more. You know that spirit space, and so that took me to going to Bali and I actually met if in the book Eat, pray, love. She talks about Ketut Lear, who I met. This was before the book was written. I have his drawings in my house, so you could have written that book.

davidji: 5:03

Thank you, Elizabeth Gilbert.

Elizabeth Winkler: 5:25

So you could have written that book, and that was 23 years ago, and then a year later, I went to Tibet and that’s the story behind the golden thread, which is an amazing story. And if you notice our logo.

davidji: 5:42

And if you notice our logo, underneath the word, the shadow is what might look to many people like an ampersand, the and sign, but it’s actually a play. That’s my logo. Turned on its side, it’s the Tibetan infinity symbol.

Elizabeth Winkler: 6:07

And it’s this deep deep also thread that Elizabeth experienced so early in her journey. So I was in the Himalayas, literally climbing mountain, and went into a cave and there was a monk sitting in there who had been there for six months. People would bring him food, he wasn’t speaking, he was in silence, and I had the opportunity to sit with him and hold hands with him, and that experience is really too many things to explain in a podcast, but I became for lack of a better way of talking about it. I mean, there was a complete union with him and the earth and everything, and in that, many things were given to me, much wisdom was provided, and one of the things he gave me was this thread that starts if you look down at your hands.

Elizabeth Winkler: 6:55

Your left and right hand starts at the palm of your right hand. You can trace it, move up from the palm of your right hand up all the way to your shoulder, move up from the palm of your right hand up all the way to your shoulder, and then you make a loop down through the center of your chest all the way up to the left side of the shoulder and then over the head, the top of the head, you make another loop and then down to the top of the left shoulder and then down the left arm through that palm, and that golden thread is the thread that connects all beings, and so this was something that was given to me. We weren’t speaking, it was one of the many things I often say, the highest vibration always wins.

davidji: 7:33

So in that moment, either he was going to speak after never having spoken, or you were going to be brought into that stillness and silent place and in that moment, clearly, that was you just being infused into his energy, his deep, deep, silent energy.

Elizabeth Winkler: 7:51

Yeah, I was receiving wisdom. So many downloads of information were given, and so that was one of the many things that I saw and that I experienced and that I knew. It’s a knowing that you’re given.

davidji: 8:03

And how long were you sitting with him?

Elizabeth Winkler: 8:06

I have no idea because there was no time. It felt like days. I have images that were taken of me with him that I have, and I wrote about the whole experience after it happened. So this was 22 years ago. And then cut to. I’m doing my meditation teacher training with you and I have, over time, had this thing about threads, noticing threads. I’ll work with my therapy clients and sometimes I can see energy in people and I’ll see like a thread of energy.

davidji: 8:35

So wait, let’s back up here. So you’re, you’re hanging out with him in the cave and he guides you without, without speaking. To connect to this internally, for you to connect to this thread and see this vision, it’s one of the downloads that you’re experiencing up to your shoulder, down into your belly, back up, looping, totally, taking in your head to the other shoulder and then to the other palm. So this is all without uttering a word, and he wasn’t drawing this in the sand. This was a pure transmission.

Elizabeth Winkler: 9:20

It was a transmission, and there’s I mean there was more. There were so many things that were given.

davidji: 9:26

You know, I think this is so important. Just like in certain mantras, embedded in the mantra is so much meaning and lifetimes of context. The same way in this one little sweet image is embedded lifetimes of wisdom. It’s embodied inside of there. You just need that thread, and contained in that thread is this ocean. Ocean makes it too small. Galaxy of wisdom.

Elizabeth Winkler: 9:53

Well, we were in the galaxy. Actually, when this happened, we, our whole bodies, melted over the earth. We became one with the earth. We were literally in the galaxy when all of this was coming through, and so it was just overwhelming and beautiful and the waves of love that I experienced. I’ve never experienced anything like it, that kind of devotional love and beauty, and so I was taken through that experience.

Elizabeth Winkler: 10:22

But when I met with you at the beginning of our teacher training I bring up threads we talked a little bit about it and then I kept thinking about this monk and I went back to my writing and I saw in my journal, which I hadn’t looked at in years. I saw that drawing and I had forgotten about the actual drawing of it and I shared it with you. And I had forgotten about the actual drawing of it and I shared it with you. Maybe a year later I was on your website and I saw that your website has the exact same drawing on its side, right? So I think that there’s a connection here, yeah, right?

Elizabeth Winkler: 10:57

So one thing that I’ve shared with very few people and for those who are listening to us today, they can try this we get knotted in our thread. Our threads become coarse or maybe they become knotted up. They aren’t clear like this golden thread. So one offering that I have tried myself and offered to my clients is when you wake up in the morning, or maybe right now, as you’re listening, to trace the golden thread within your body as a remembrance of the thread that connects all beings.

davidji: 11:33

So walk me through it again, okay? Starts in the center of my palm.

Elizabeth Winkler: 11:36

So take your left pointer finger and place it in your right palm and go up your arm, slowly up all the way to the top of your right shoulder. Now you’re going to move to the center of your chest, at the top, and loop down through, make a loop down on the left side and then loop so that you’re coming up on the right side. You’re making a complete loop at the top, now at the chest. Then you’re going to create a loop on moving up the left side of the face all the way to the top of the head down on the right side, and then you move to the top of the left shoulder. Now I take my right finger, my right pointer finger, meet it there to complete down the left arm.

davidji: 12:24

Powerful. That’s a way for you to again embed the wisdom teachings deep within your flesh.

Elizabeth Winkler: 12:32

Right and what I’ve experienced when I do this. If you’re feeling anxiety or fear or stress, just take time, breathe and do that tracing of the thread and it allows your body to come into connection with the remembrance of your true being, that you are more than enough, that you are whole and complete within yourself. It’s deep.

davidji: 12:54

It’s great Love that. What do you think Summer?

Elizabeth Winkler: 12:58

Gives me goosebumps. Yeah, a lot of my clients have really found it to be very grounding. So so that was my tibet in a nutshell. That was in 2001, and then I went to bhutan recently, which was something I’d always wanted to experience. Bhutan for those of you who don’t know about it, because many people don’t it’s this tiny country near Tibet that is known as the king made it popular because he said that he would not judge his country by the GNP, by the gross national product, but rather by how happy his people were. So he called it the GNH the Gross National Happiness.

davidji: 13:45

And this is just less than 200 miles from Kathmandu. Why’d you pick Bhutan? There you were hanging out, we were having a conversation, and then you said to me oh yeah, by the way, I’m going to Bhutan in a couple of weeks, and so share what inspired that.

Elizabeth Winkler: 14:00

Both Tibet and Bhutan are not easy places to get to. You have to have a visa, you have to have a special guide, and Bhutan is very limited in how many people they allow. Actually, it was closed, I forget when they opened it up to was the last place to be protected, doesn’t?

davidji: 14:17

Bhutan have. For those of you who are paying attention to the greenness of various countries, doesn’t Bhutan actually have a negative carbon footprint? Yes, Actually, creating more trees are pumping oxygen out into the than humans are destroying it.

Elizabeth Winkler: 14:37

Yeah, when I was there I don’t know if you remember this when I talked to you, I was speaking to this little girl. We were at a festival, and she asked me what village are you from? And I said the village of Los Angeles, of course, and she wanted to know what I did. So I told her that I meditate, I’m a meditation teacher, and she obviously knew what that was. And then I asked her what she wanted to do?

davidji: 15:02

If you answered therapist, she would say why does anyone need a therapist? We’re all just happy here. Who needs a therapist? That’s probably like the number one loser job in Bhutan. It’s like when someone says I want to become a therapist and their parents are like, no, can’t you become a meditator? The exact opposite of our world here.

Elizabeth Winkler: 15:26

Yeah, so she told me she wants to be a protector of the forest, because that is something that they do and that’s why they’re carbon negative. Yeah, it’s beautiful, because they protect their forest. It’s amazing. You know, I just got back from there a few months ago. I’m still unpacking that. Tibet took me 20 years to unpack. You know, it’s like these experiences are embedded in your body, embedded in your bones.

davidji: 15:52

At the cellular level.

Elizabeth Winkler: 15:53

Truly and I think, actually doing the meditation, teacher training with you opened up so much of that. Teacher training with you opened up so much of that because Sanskrit is this energy that activates what’s in your body. So when I was exposed to more mantras, especially the Sanskrit mantras, I started to think more about my time in Tibet and think about the monk, which actually is why I opened up my journal. So the power of these vibrations of sound, primordial sound, brings forward this crystallization, or the soil is now fertile and you’re growing a new tree within yourself. That truly did happen when I started using Sanskrit.

davidji: 16:45

So for those of you that haven’t tried it, I recommend it A lot of people are not aware that it’s one of the most ancient languages that’s out there. It’s this Indo-Aryan language. The language of Sanskrit is going back at least 3,000 years. This transcends anything in the West and any other civilization that we’re aware of that goes back that far in terms of still being a language that is spoken right now, and there are vibrations in there, and this language specifically celebrated the vibrations of nature.

davidji: 17:23

What is the sound of the ocean crashing? What is that word in Sanskrit? What is that primordial sound of the owl’s wings flapping as it soars through the forest at night? What is the sound of a cloud? I was just watching the news a couple of days ago and a meteor actually passed the earth and they were picking up the sound. The meteor was so close to the earth, it didn’t hit here, it just passed in the sky and there was this like deep, deep rumble. So vibration is so important to our entire existence. Really, I’m such a deep fan of Pali, the language of the Buddha, and Sanskrit, these ancient languages. There are so many dialects, but they’re not spoken. Sanskrit has not been spoken as a communicating language for over 500 years.

Elizabeth Winkler: 18:16

Yeah, and what I was taught was that it’s a language of awakening, it’s preserved, it’s sacred and it has this technology of awakening and that it’s like an electrical socket. So every time you repeat a Sanskrit word, it’s like you’re plugging into that socket. You are connecting to anyone who’s ever repeated those sounds, those vibrational sounds, because they’ve never changed. It’s the only language that has never evolved, of any language.

davidji: 18:48

These are deep, deep, embedded vibrations and, if you figure, oh, us repeating just something like an OM, or us repeating something like a Moksha, which is the Sanskrit word for freedom or liberation, emotional freedom oh yeah, someone like 3,500 years ago was chanting that as well to achieve that same level of expansion or liberation or freedom from this cosmic cycle or just from something that was going on in their lives. So how beautiful is that.

Elizabeth Winkler: 19:19

Yeah, you’re connecting with them by repeating that. So I really felt that connecting with Sanskrit brought forward all of these deep experiences I had in Bali and Tibet so long ago that they brought them forward into a new way of understanding and transformation in my current life. So something that happened a very long time ago has a whole new way of elevating you by enriching it with meditation and sound. So it’s never one thing right. An experience you had 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago is not a static thing. It keeps evolving and changing as you evolve and change, and meditation is a wonderful way to help you shift that and shift yourself.

davidji: 20:09

Yeah, yeah. It’s so beautiful and so powerful and that’s why I’m a fan of mantra. Dr Herbert Benson said when you meditate you can use any kind of mantra. If you’re like deep into Christianity, go deep into a Christian mantra. If you’re deep into Islam, go deep in some type of Allah-based mantra, from Shalom to Ave Maria to Hamdallah. Just use it for its vibrational quality Just takes me so deep because it doesn’t spark thought, it doesn’t remind me of anything, it’s just pure vibration. Yeah, what mantra would you suggest someone start with oh.

Elizabeth Winkler: 20:47

Someone who’s never done any Sanskrit practice.

davidji: 20:52

I know what is percolating in you. I don’t know that you do. Do you want to say aham prema? She’s shaking her head? No, right now, Clearly.

Elizabeth Winkler: 21:01

Well, I do love that one. Yeah, I love that one, but I’ll tell you the first one that really transformed me, which was listening to your 40 Days of Transformation.

davidji: 21:09

That’s a course that I created 40 days, 40 different meditation techniques and meditations. So if you’re just starting a practice, you can Google davidji 40 Days of Transformation. We can put a link in the podcast deets. Yeah, exactly.

Elizabeth Winkler: 21:25

It changed my life. It’s the reason that I actually sought you out, and now we’re here, many years later. Okay, so do, tell, do tell Aham Brahmasmi, aham Brahmasmi, yeah, aham Brahmasmi and Tatvamasi for me is, I know you think, aham Prema, but Tatvamasi and Aham Brahmasmi, which are two of the most. What are they called? Tell me.

davidji: 21:50

They’re one of the Mahavakyas.

Elizabeth Winkler: 21:52

Mahavakyas.

davidji: 21:53

Maha means master, vakya means saying, and these are like four of the most powerful and ancient master sayings Aham Brahmasmi is one, tatva masi is another, and we’ll talk about more in an upcoming episode. Back to your origin story. You know, when we watch Marvel superhero movies and we watch Avengers, ultimately they come out with origins, the origin story. This is Elizabeth Winkler’s origin story about how she truly stepped onto this journey, innocently, curiously, following her heart and then bringing her here. A lot of times, these types of experiences where we go to another country and it sparks us, we’re really touched and then we can get on with our life, because lots of people go to these places and don’t necessarily integrate practices into their lives. What kept ever so gently, gently, the lapping of the waves on the shore? Just bringing you back to these teachings.

Elizabeth Winkler: 22:47

Well, the difference now is it’s less seeking. Okay, so there’s a different energy in me in Bhutan than there was in Bali and Tibet. When I went to Bali and Tibet, I was very much looking for something. My mother had died. I was somewhere in my 20s when I went to Bali and Tibet and I had a hole in my heart that shifted for me, and it wasn’t found in a cave in the Himalayas. That was an amazing experience. It was found by doing my own practices. It was found by really understanding that I am not my personal mind, I’m not the story in my head, and that was from so many teachers over all of the years.

Elizabeth Winkler: 23:31

But, as you know Michael Singer on Tethered Soul. I went and spent time with him after I had a full healing of my heart around my mother in 2015,. That was the biggest shift. So eight years ago, I worked with some energy and my body which is why I call mindfulness the bullet train to freedom and I was able to transmute fear into freedom and truly heal my heart. Freedom and truly heal my heart. And so now I went to Bhutan, but not from a seeking place, but more from.

davidji: 24:12

I mean, honestly, it was I don’t know. I want to see what it feels like. We call this the journey and the transformation from seeker to seer, and you even uttered that word right now. You said I went there to see as opposed to to seek. Oh wow.

Elizabeth Winkler: 24:27

I love that, right, I love that.

davidji: 24:29

Yeah, all of us are so curious as we take our steps on the journey. Then we’re seekers. You know we’re seekers in so many different ways and you know beginner’s mind and we’re innocents and you know we’re just like everything is. It’s like wow, wow, wow, you know Steve jobs kind of moment, and then suddenly there’s an integration or an embodiment of some deeper truths and then we show up as a seer. Doesn’t mean we’re still not journeying, it’s a different journey.

Elizabeth Winkler: 25:01

Yeah, and I just got back from Mickey Singer again and it was different. You know, these other times I had gone there wasn’t this like clinging of, like wanting a certain experience or or needing anything. I was like I’m just, I don’t know, here to see what happens. It literally was that, Because you realize that everything’s internal, it’s all internal, that it isn’t about finding something outside. If you find something outside it, you just got to get more of it.

davidji: 25:32

Yes, but it’s not like you suddenly, like his luster wore off, probably you’re deeper, more deeply connected with him at this stage, as opposed to, like you said, the neediness you know clinger like oh Michael Singer, oh Michael Singer, mr Singer, mr Singer.

Elizabeth Winkler: 25:56

Well, it reminds me of a story you told me with David Simon when you were asking him if he’d noticed. Right, right right.

davidji: 26:05

It’s a similar thing, and for those of you who don’t know, David Simon was Deepak Chopra’s partner for over 20 years. David Simon, born in Skokie, Illinois, went to University of Chicago, University of Chicago Medical School, and became one of the most respected neurologists on the planet, partners up with Deepak Chopra, who’s an endocrinologist, and together they merged to create I think it was originally known as the Institute for Mind-Body Medicine and then became the Chopra Center, and I got the privilege to apprentice under both of them for a decade. But my deep, deep connection was to David Simon. He sort of like took me under his wing and said I’m gonna expose you to Buddhism, Sikhism, Sufism, Hindu practices, Vedanta, Ayurveda, just like. Keep laying it on and pouring it over you and you will embrace what you love. So he really became one of my greatest teachers, one of the reasons that we melded together.

Elizabeth Winkler: 27:17

Beautiful.

davidji: 27:18

My office was right next door to Deepak’s and across the hall was David Simon, and I got to spend 10 years on a daily basis with both of those people, but David Simon took me on as like a special project. That was a very, very intense period of time for me and I don’t think I ever would have ended up there. In the wake of 9-11, as I was walking past a row of cardboard boxes that people were living in in Southern Manhattan, I had like one of these. I don’t know that it was the monk in the cave kind of moment that you had Elizabeth, but it was a man who was living in this cardboard box. As I walked past, he grabbed my pant leg and pulled me so tightly into his cardboard box and gazed up at me with these crystalline blue eyes and then he said what’s going to be on your tombstone? I don’t know how long that lasted Felt like it lasted several hours. It probably was a couple of minutes. We then had all these silent transmissions. I call these butterfly moments. All the noise of Manhattan stopped. There were no car noises, no taxi noises, no people talking or walking. There was only me and this guy gazing into each other’s eyes. Perhaps this was God speaking to me through this person. Perhaps this person was an enlightened being, I don’t know what it was. But in that moment we went back and forth with some of the deepest questions anyone could ever ask and I reached into my pocket to try to pull out. It was a conditioned response to reach into my pocket to pull out some cash to give this person living in a box. And as I was like reaching in, he like saw what was coming and took his hand and pressed it against my pocket and silently said it’s not about the money, the answer is in the stars. I mean, imagine this dude is like having this conversation in Manhattan Just a week after 9-11.

davidji: 29:19

And I’d been prior to that. I had been working in the World Trade Center, but just a few months before that I had left the 82nd floor of Tower 2 and gone up 17 blocks further north. So this was like a very, very critical moment for me, because everybody who was working on the 82nd floor of Tower 2 had died in that attack and here I was, someone asking me what’s going to be on my tombstone. So that was a very, very intense journey and from that my heart was palpitating, I was hyperventilating, tears were streaming down my face, my knees were weak. I had to stagger over to the steps of an apartment building 20 feet away and sit down and really reflect on what had just happened.

davidji: 30:05

And a few weeks later I’m in Oxford, england, at a Deepak Chopra retreat. There was supposed to be like 3000 people. There were 50 of us because no one was flying after 9-11, but I was on a mission I needed to like, find out, like what’s going to be on my tombstone. And so by the third day at that retreat I was all ready. I need to take this deeper and for the first time in probably 20 years, I felt joy. So I was joyless for 20 years and I tried meditating. Before that I’d meditated in college. On and off I’d meditated doing Vipassana and mantra and tantra candle gazing all sorts of different kinds of meditations, asana, mantra and tantra candle gazing all sorts of different kinds of meditations. But in this moment, suddenly it was all clear to me that I was being healed through meditation and so, after that retreat was over, I headed off to India. Of course, that’s what you need to do after you hang out for a week with Deepak, you know.

davidji: 31:01

The next step is go to India in search of the guru, and I traveled high and low. I also traveled into the Himalayas to spend some time with the Dalai Lama, but he wasn’t there that day. And I traveled south to the southern tip of India. I had a six-month visa. I was there for five months and 28 days swimming in the Ganges, meditating, practicing yoga, praying at the temples, burning incense, doing all that stuff, talking to roadside rishis, you know asking, you know deep, deep questions Where’s the guru? And then I was laying in a cashew forest in Kerala, in a hammock, with parrots were like squawking, shrieking. And I’m laying in this hammock reading the Bhagavad Gita, chapter two, verse 48, of course I’ve got it right here, got my Gita right here, course.

Speaker 1: 31:48

I’ve got it right here, got my Gita right here.

davidji: 31:50

But that one that hit me like begins with Yogastakuru Karmani hit me like a ton of bricks. In that moment, suddenly I realized everything in my life was going to be different. Bhagavad Gita is conversations with God. This guy’s talking to God. How am I supposed to live my life? What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to walk through the world? And Krishna, as God, replies Yogasthakuru Karmani, here’s how you’re supposed to walk through the world. Establish yourself in the present moment and then perform action.

davidji: 32:24

And it just was so clear to me, so so perfectly clear, and that was the beginning of my you know. I mean, I spent six months in India trying to eat. I mostly drank hot water. That was six months of. I got down to my thinnest, my starvation weight. I was about 127 pounds or something you know, during that period of time. So talk about like eat, pray, love, not a lot of eating and there was no love. It was just like me and I was just. I was in pure seeker mode, pure seeker. I didn’t have a moment for love. I didn’t even understand love. I was like I don’t understand anything. Fill me in here. I have to find out. You know who has this. Where is the guru who’s going to tell me how I’m supposed to live my life? And it was reading the Gita. Suddenly, like a lightning bolt hit me in the head and I was like, oh my God, that’s the answer to everything. Yokostaku Rukamani establish yourself in the present moment and then perform action. And or get still and then be brilliant, hashtag, chill, brill. And so suddenly I raced to the bus stop. A bus didn’t come until two days later, well, you know. Then I raced to Mumbai airport. It actually took about 40 hours, and then I raced to get on the plane. I actually had to sit around in the airport for about 30 other hours until a plane even was available, and then I raced home. Actually, the flight took over 28 hours to fly home, so it was actually like four days between that aha moment and then I landed and everything was clear to me.

davidji: 34:19

It was in that moment where all I wanted to do was meditate. That’s all I did. And ultimately it was my friends in New York who came to me like an intervention and said, like dude, all you do is sit around and meditate. And I was, like you know, in New York who came to me like an intervention and said like, dude, all you do is sit around and meditate. And I was like, I know, isn’t it amazing? It’s so perfect, it’s like the greatest. And they’re like, no, it’s a little dysfunctional and you actually need to do something else. And they were like, hey, why don’t you check out your friend Deepak? He’s got like a center in Cali. And I was like I’m a fairly obedient friend. I was like, all right, cool.

davidji: 34:50

And I went there and again I thought there’d be thousands of people at this teacher training thing. There were 30. And I was like, what’s going on here? And so we went around the room telling people, telling what they did, and I was like, oh, in a past life I was a mergers and acquisitions advisor. I helped companies that were struggling turn around. Suddenly, there was like a mini meeting and I was like, oh, my whole life changed in that moment. Yeah, they were offering me a job and I was like, yeah, okay, I’ll take it, locked in, zero barrier to entry. And that led to me becoming the COO and then the lead educator and then the dean of Chopra Center University, which I was for 10 years.

davidji: 35:38

And then, in 2012,. By that time, I had already written Secrets of Meditation, recorded over a thousand guided meditations. I had this gig at Hay House Radio for eight years. It’s amazing, that was my whole Eat, pray, love journey. That’s my origin story In 2012, left that nest to teach people to meditate, to train people, to teach other people to meditate, and since then I’ve written a few more books and recorded 500 more guided meditations. And here we are on this podcast, which is like a culmination of all of that work, all the work you did, all of your seeking, all of my seeking. And here we are Coming together in the thread yeah, coming together in the thread and perhaps as seers, and hopefully you’re finding value in this episode. The origin story, elizabeth Winkler and davidji Anything you’d like to share as we close it out.

Elizabeth Winkler: 36:39

I’m just grateful for the ways in which it all comes together and offer our listeners. Take a moment to connect to the gratitude that you feel in your current life and your looking back on your life and the challenges that maybe brought you to your knees. That’s certainly what was the beginning of the light that I found on the path. The shadow was first, and then it brought me to more light. It’s beautiful.

davidji: 37:13

It’s beautiful and in this moment of eat, pray love, this would be the perfect time for today’s takeaway Living the light. And today’s takeaway is create zero barriers to entry as you move in the direction of your dreams and desires. If you’re given that opportunity, step into it. Then you can sort of kind of figure out why am I here, why am I going here, what are all the ramifications of this moment? But at least you’ve taken that step. Now, if you’re a little timid, then dip a toe in and if you’re a little bolder, take a larger step. But always look around and see how can I create a lower barrier to entry for me to move into this next wave of my life, because we’re all on some kind of eat, pray love journey From the sweet spot of the universe. This is davidji, on behalf of Summer Perry, our rock star producer, and Elizabeth Winkler. This is the Shadow and the Light podcast. We’ll see you next episode.

Music 1: 38:28

The light is here to remove all my fears and to bring new sight. The light is the time that will go to the deep to take me to new heights. The shadow and the light’s hope out in rock bottom. You hold it as you’re holding me, but don’t rush past this moment. The darkness can become a friend. Love will come by your side and you’ll shine brighter than a million suns A million suns. You went through hell, but now you’re in Delight. It is here to remove all your fears and to bring new sight. Delight, delight. It is now that we’ll go to the deep To take you to new heights, to the shadow and the light has come because of love. The light has come because it loves us. The light has come to set us free. The shadow comes because it loves us. The shadow comes to set us free. The light is here to remove all our fears and to bring new life. The light is here to remove all our fears and to bring new life. The shadow and the light.