Our life has all the ingredients to be our biggest and truest teacher! Trudy Goodman.

Intimacy with the world

Trudy Goodman tells us how she came to meditation because although she had done everything right in life, exactly as was expected of a young woman, she still felt that something wasn't quite right, and she didn't understand why.

• She also tells us about some big spiritual openings that she didn't understand, and hoped that maybe some spiritual teacher might be able to put into context.
• Just keeping life together was challenging as a young single parent
• The world of psychedelics, why do I have to be stoned to see the sacredness of the world, and she sought out a spiritual teacher together with her friend Jon Kabat-Zinn.
• When we sit down with ourselves, we encounter the whole of who we are, if we dare to sit with it.
• She tells us about two of her spiritual openings, one at childbirth and one when her daughter was very ill.
• How we have to be aware that, even if we all have the same human heart and capabilities, every persons experience is so different, and how trauma f.ex. will inform how we experience meditation, or dropping into the body.
• The importance of deep listening to other's experiences, and then learning from that.
• Being sensitive and respectful to all those different identities in the world.
• Trudy tells us about her shift from Zen to vipassana.
• The pain of her divorce from a zen teacher was the catalyst for her change into the insight tradition.
• Trudy speaks about how she and her husband, Jack Kornfield teach in very different ways.
• The difference between zen and insight is like poetry and prose.
• Trudy and I jump in to some pithy short zen- teachings.
• Do whatever you do fully and completely.
• I ask Trudy how mindfulness grows in someone who has practised for so many years.
• Nobody is mindful 24/7, not even the greatest teachers, but the ability increases as we practice.
• Slowly there is a shift, where being present and aware is most of the time, and you notice when you are lost.
• When we can't accept ourselves, we are in conflict with ourselves.
• Awareness is a light, that can shine on anything, even the darkest thing.
• IFS internal family systems talks about the exiled parts of ourselves, to also accept them.
• We speak about the term Loving awareness, coined by Ram Das.
• Trudy tells us about how to acquire wisdom even at a young age.
• Gratitude is a big part of wisdom!
• Our life has all the ingredients to be our biggest and truest teacher!
• In mindfulness we don't change what is happening, but rather we develop a loving wise relationship to whatever is happening.
• The importance of trust, the trust that everything that happens to you, has some kind of meaning.
• How a painful divorce taught Trudy to expand her window of tolerance and her compassion.
• A huge part of our meditation practice is developing a heart that is open enough to hold opposite experiences
• Trudy tells us about her memoir writing - her dharmemoir!
• Trudy's website: www.trudygoodman.com
• My website: www.duritaholm.com