[00:00] Speaker 1: (music plays) Welcome to The Laughing Heart. This is Errol Strider.

[00:14] Speaker 2: And Rochelle Strider.

[00:16] Speaker 1: We're married. (laughs) 50 years.

[00:20] Speaker 2: This August 1st.

[00:22] Speaker 1: Yeah.

[00:23] Speaker 2: And we've been together 51 years.

[00:25] Speaker 1: Yeah. But that-

[00:26] Speaker 2: But who's counting?

[00:27] Speaker 1: But that first year was kind of practice.

[00:29] Speaker 2: (laughs)

[00:30] Speaker 1: It was a rehearsal.

[00:31] Speaker 2: But we did a good job.

[00:32] Speaker 1: Yeah. We're-

[00:32] Speaker 2: We got the part.

[00:33] Speaker 1: We're still here.

[00:34] Speaker 2: (laughs)

[00:36] Speaker 1: (laughs) Each week we're gonna cover a subject, and we're gonna start with what may be troubling or bothersome to you, and then, uh, hopefully, we're gonna wind our way to a, a perspective that might be relieving, releasing, inspiring. What do you call it, Rochelle? You've got some initials.

[00:56] Speaker 2: Oh. I call it the PPS Process. It's philosophical, it's psychological, and it's spiritual.

[01:04] Speaker 1: And at the beginning, it might be a little troublesome, so it's-

[01:08] Speaker 2: Well, that's when you-

[01:09] Speaker 1: ... TPPS.

[01:09] Speaker 2: ... start it. (laughs)

[01:11] Speaker 1: (laughs)

[01:11] Speaker 2: When you, when you're in trouble, you look for a solution. You can find it in psychology, you can find it in philosophy, and you certainly can find it in spirituality.

[01:21] Speaker 1: Today's focus is, "There's something wrong with me." (laughs)

[01:27] Speaker 2: Well, you do well with that one. (laughs)

[01:30] Speaker 1: (laughs) I, I live in that space often as not. Thank goodness I have a w- a partner who doesn't live in that space near as often as I do, but you can kinda tap into the...

[01:41] Speaker 2: I can empathize with it, for sure. I understand it mo- because I have experienced it and experience it still. I call it falling off the wagon. (laughs)

[01:51] Speaker 1: (laughs)

[01:51] Speaker 2: Or falling into a pothole.

[01:53] Speaker 1: I never knew which was falling off or on the wagon. I never knew which one (laughs) meant that you're sober.

[02:01] Speaker 2: (laughs) On the wagon.

[02:03] Speaker 1: On the wagon is sober.

[02:04] Speaker 2: You're sober. Off the wagon, you fell off.

[02:07] Speaker 1: For many years, I attended, uh, 12-step meetings, which was interesting and curious because at that time, which was in the late '60s, uh, I didn't have an alcohol problem, but I could really relate to the addictive nature. (laughs)

[02:23] Speaker 2: Yes. You could be addicted to anything, as you so aptly put it in Family Baggage.

[02:29] Speaker 1: Exactly. Family Baggage is a show about recovery and codependency that we toured for many years. One of the things I'd like to include each week is a perspective from he whom we call Yeshua, known in the world as Jesus. And for those of you who aren't aware of this, uh, Yeshua appeared before Glenda Green, literally appeared in 1991, and shared some, uh, profound and provocative perspectives that are kind of a updated and upgraded version of what Yeshua lived, taught, and embodied.

[03:11] Speaker 1: So one of the things he had to say was, "You are love dwelling as spirit eternally, exceeding your mind and all its attributes."

[03:27] Speaker 2: Well, that's a nice thing to be. It's pretty hard to feel sorry for yourself when you're living those things.

[03:32] Speaker 1: The way I like to put it is, "Hell is being stuck in a self that you can't laugh at."

[03:39] Speaker 2: I teach a, a course here, uh, called Laugh Your Self-Judgments Away, and it's been very helpful for me. When I get upset or angry, I see myself as a cartoon with smoke coming out of her ears, and I start to laugh. It's really hard to take ourselves seriously when we're laughing at ourselves.

[04:02] Speaker 1: When that smoke comes out of her ears, I take big inhales of it.

[04:06] Speaker 2: (laughs)

[04:07] Speaker 1: (laughs) I won't say it exactly gets me high, but it's distracting.

[04:14] Speaker 2: (laughs)

[04:14] Speaker 1: Keeps me from falling into that self-judgment. One of the things I have to say, I've been practicing spirituality for, well, since 1966, and I feel like I'm still on square one. (laughs)

[04:31] Speaker 2: I wouldn't say that. You, you recover faster than you think when you fall off the wagon, and the wagon, to me, is the center. We're centered. We are, um, neither negative or positive. We are right in the middle where reality is. We're in the now. And if you're truly in the now, it's really hard to get upset, because we get upset more from the past. You know, "I should've been like this. I should've done that. Why didn't I do that? What's wrong with me?" Regret, guilt, all those things, uh, come up from the past, and we bring 'em into the f- into the present. And if you stay in the present, it's really hard to be in those things.

[05:14] Speaker 1: Well, the way I like to put it succinctly is, "You don't have to fix the past in order to be fully in the present."

[05:25] Speaker 2: That's lovely. Did you write that?

[05:28] Speaker 1: I did write it. I did.

[05:29] Speaker 2: He's got a great brain. When he connects his brain to his higher mind, there's delight in the man. The 51 years we've been together, I can attest to, we have laughed almost all that time.

[05:42] Speaker 1: Not only that. Every day, there's some version of, "Rochelle, where's the... I couldn't find the..."

[05:49] Speaker 2: (laughs)

[05:49] Speaker 1: Even yesterday, I had a, a plug that I use to plug the system in, and-

[05:53] Speaker 2: (laughs)

[05:53] Speaker 1: ... I could've sworn, which is another way we talk about it. I could've sworn it was over here, and Rochelle always reminds me when I look over here and it's not there.

[06:03] Speaker 2: (laughs) If you can't find it, it's somewhere where you didn't think of. (laughs)

[06:07] Speaker 1: (laughs) Right. So then I think, "Wow, look at all the infinite possibilities (laughs) of where I didn't think of."

[06:13] Speaker 2: It's almost like you have to be directed. So if you just get very still and think, okay, go back in time just slightly and see yourself putting something somewhere.And at least that's what I do and I can find things pretty easily when I do that.

[06:29] Speaker 1: She's amazing because I am a, a, a loser. I, somebody told me that a long time ago. They handed me a note, and it said, "You're a loser." I won't say who did that and at the time I thought, "Hmm, I'm a loser." And then I realized, yes, I'm always losing things.

[06:48] Speaker 2: (laughs)

[06:49] Speaker 1: If that makes me a loser then I qualify. The other thing I like to think about myself, (laughs) since we're talking about me.

[06:57] Speaker 2: About yourself. (laughs)

[06:59] Speaker 1: (laughs) Is I think of myself as an idiot savant. (laughs)

[07:03] Speaker 2: Very descriptive, very personal.

[07:05] Speaker 1: But not, but not just-

[07:06] Speaker 2: Very true. (laughs)

[07:07] Speaker 1: But not just any sort of idiot. I have my unique idiocies. (laughs)

[07:12] Speaker 2: They're funny, they're always funny. I have to tell you a story. This is my story, I told several people about this. Okay, Errol was going to Europe. I took him to the airport and something in me said, "You should wait, wait a second," and I didn't feel like it. So I didn't listen to myself and I start taking off and the phone is ringing, my phone is ringing, I'm driving on the highway, I can't stop and answer the phone.

[07:38] Speaker 2: And I get all the way home and I look at the, the message and the message is from Errol, "Come back, I have the wrong passport." (laughs)

[07:48] Speaker 1: (laughs) I had some other buddy's passport.

[07:49] Speaker 2: No, you had your own but it was a little old one and I just started to laugh. I thought, "It's so like him." So I go all the way back to the airport and I take him home and he reserves his seat on the next day and someone said to me, "Well, didn't you want to throttle him? You all spent four hours in the car going back and forth." And I said, "You wanna know something? I was laughing too hard to think of throttling him 'cause it was so like him." (laughs)

[08:15] Speaker 1: Yeah, but she th- she throttled me anyway just for-

[08:17] Speaker 2: I did not, I did not.

[08:19] Speaker 1: ... for good measure.

[08:19] Speaker 2: I plead innocent. I did not.

[08:22] Speaker 1: It reminds me of a little miracle I had on that trip, and this is something we are learning to access and realize, is there are little miracles possible and we've had qu- some miracles in the sense that they're unexpected, positive intrusions into a life that doesn't allow for miracles. (laughs)

[08:46] Speaker 2: Wow, that's a lot of words.

[08:48] Speaker 1: Yeah, well you can take out some of them. (laughs)

[08:50] Speaker 2: (laughs)

[08:50] Speaker 1: Which ones do you want to keep?

[08:52] Speaker 2: I think, I mean, little miracles, I, I have little miracles all the time. Like I'm, especially on, with the computer. I'm looking at the computer and it's not doing what I want. I don't expect people to be perfect, therefore I don't have a problem with them. But I stupidly expect the computer to be perfect and when it doesn't do what I want, I get terribly frustrated and the smoke comes out of my ears. But if I stop and I get very still, I look at the computer, and somewhere on that computer is a little thing that tells me what to do and I think of that as a miracle. I mean, because I looked and looked and looked and I couldn't find it and then I got real still and there it was. And every time I get still and find something, whether it's a, a thought or an actual thing, I feel like it's a little miracle and I love little miracles. I love to have them every day.

[09:49] Speaker 1: We're gonna come back around to stillness but I want to tell you about this miracle I had when I was about to get on the plane to go to England on this trip, uh, the, this, the day after I forgot my passport. (laughs)

[10:03] Speaker 2: (laughs)

[10:03] Speaker 1: Well now, I didn't forget it, I brought the wrong one. I brought the expired one. So I'm standing in line there and there's this young woman, comes up and she thought she was late for her flight and she wanted to s- to jump ahead and make sure she caught her flight. Turns out she wasn't late, it was the same flight I was on and at first they gave her a hassle then they let her go through, uh, just ahead of me and then we went through and this young woman took care of me 'cause I was a little befuddled and confused and, and she got me to my, to my seat to take off and she was just so solicitous and helpful. The irony was is she had kind of squeaked into the line unexpectedly right in front of me and then she ended up being such a wonderful help to me.

[10:50] Speaker 2: That's, that's, that's a miracle. I like that. I think that is a miracle.

[10:52] Speaker 1: That qualifies as a miracle.

[10:54] Speaker 2: Yes.

[10:55] Speaker 1: Amazing, unexpected.

[10:57] Speaker 2: The unexpected and moves you forward or treats you well or... Miracles are always nice. I mean-

[11:06] Speaker 1: (laughs)

[11:06] Speaker 2: ... (laughs) you know what I mean? You don't have a miracle that's horrible. You have a, a beautiful miracle, so it's always something beautiful. I like that. I like to live in that space.

[11:15] Speaker 1: Yeah, I do too. Remember the time when we needed a car? I was starting a job-

[11:21] Speaker 2: Oh, right.

[11:21] Speaker 1: ... with a company called Career Track, this was back in Boulder in 1985 and we had one car at the time and I knew that I was gonna be coming back from the airport at all different times and we were sitting in the house and we said, "Well, if we need a car, we have a car." I know this is hard to believe, this probably sounds like something AI would invent. (laughs)

[11:45] Speaker 2: (laughs)

[11:45] Speaker 1: It actually happened.

[11:47] Speaker 2: Yes, so the phone rings and we have a friend, uh, that we know and he tells us that his girlfriend has given him a car and do we want his old car?

[11:58] Speaker 1: And I was actually out taking a walk and this is, so I said this just before I went for the walk and then I came back and Rochelle said...

[12:08] Speaker 2: "How long do you think it should take if you really want something to get it?" (laughs)

[12:14] Speaker 1: (laughs) I said, "I don't know. Tell me."

[12:15] Speaker 2: "You've got it." (laughs)

[12:17] Speaker 1: Yeah.

[12:17] Speaker 2: "We have another car." What's more, he said, "Pay me a dollar."

[12:22] Speaker 1: Our friend.

[12:23] Speaker 2: Yes, so that we can put it, make it a sales slip.

[12:27] Speaker 1: (laughs)

[12:27] Speaker 2: A dollar.

[12:28] Speaker 1: And, and yeah, not allowed for tax.

[12:29] Speaker 2: Right.

[12:31] Speaker 1: (laughs)

[12:31] Speaker 2: (laughs)

[12:32] Speaker 1: You talked about stillness before and, and getting still, and that's always a challenge for me and, I suspect, for anybody else, especially during the times when I'm s- supposed to being still, like in meditation. And I don't know about you, but I can stay in that centered space for about, mm, on a good day, two seconds. (laughs)

[12:57] Speaker 2: (laughs) Bring it up. Bring it up to 10. (laughs)

[12:59] Speaker 1: (laughs) It's a challenge. But when I go into that space, which is like an emptying... Someone s- uh, Yeshua actually talked about, to meditate, you surrender everything. In other words, let go of anything, your thoughts, your beliefs, your projections, your judgments, everything, and just be empty and then listen. And I practice-

[13:24] Speaker 2: So-

[13:24] Speaker 1: ... that every day. A- and when I listen, I hear, well, the news, uh-

[13:31] Speaker 2: (laughs) You do not. To me, all truth lies in the stillness of my mind.

[13:40] Speaker 1: Wow, that's a good one. All truth lies in the stillness of my mind. So take a minute, Jan listener-

[13:50] Speaker 2: (laughs)

[13:51] Speaker 1: ... (laughs) and see if that's something that you can use or apply and, and then let's kinda come back to the issue we're dealing with and see if we can maybe take it a little deeper and a little f- fuller. And that is, uh, our- our sense that w- we're not live up to our vision for ourselves. We judge ourselves. And I see the judgment as kind of like a lid that we put over ourselves, like (laughs) the image that comes to mind is a manhole cover on the street. It's this heavy thing that sits on top of us that we, uh, use to kinda cover up, uh, who we really are. And as A Course in Miracles says, uh, "Guilt is a- is fear in disguise." It's really a fear that's going on.

[14:43] Speaker 2: A fear that you're gonna lose yourself. I mean, 'cause we s- we define ourselves constantly. We are this, that, and this and this. What I've discovered is that when you're centered, when you're really centered, there is no definition. You just are. The I am that I am, you are. You just are.

[15:04] Speaker 1: I am that I am is not quite the same as, "I was, and therefore I was."

[15:09] Speaker 2: (laughs)

[15:09] Speaker 1: Or, "I will be and therefore I will be." And maybe that's the answer to the question, "To will be or not to will be."

[15:17] Speaker 2: See... You're on the wrong train, mister. (laughs)

[15:21] Speaker 1: (laughs)

[15:21] Speaker 2: You're on the train going nowhere. (laughs)

[15:23] Speaker 1: Speaking of train, when I was in Europe couple years ago, my first time by the way, I've always been attracted to Ireland and Scotland. On my birthday, I took a train ride from Edinburgh to Inverness. And on this ride there, I tried to practice my Scottish brghe, and I didn't get very far, as you can tell from this practice.

[15:47] Speaker 2: (laughs)

[15:48] Speaker 1: Anyway, but-

[15:49] Speaker 2: Just didn't drink enough Guinness.

[15:51] Speaker 1: Ri- (laughs) Right. I'd like to share a piece, uh, from our repertoire. We talked about getting still. And one of the things I've read, this is from the Urantia book, it says, "Religious living is devoted living, and devoted living is creative living, original and spontaneous." Having that in mind, this is a piece I wrote on being creative, which incidentally i- is, uh, on our, uh, website, thelaughingheart.org, and our YouTube channel, which is called Strider, which is our name, Innertainment. So Strider I-N-N-E-R-T-A-I-N. And if you go to see it, uh, th- it's beautiful pictures on it that I got from this artist in Boulder, and I put them on the screen. And anyway, so this is The Creator, and maybe it'll give you a hint of how you can live more creatively in your life. (instrumental music plays) I jumped aside a moment today and found, to my surprise, a glittering gem on the sidewalk, an unobserved creature trembling with brilliance and unquenchable insides.

[17:40] Speaker 1: I jumped outside time today and felt a vagabond image hovering in the air, waiting to be realized. I stood apart from space today, peering inside to the undercurrents of unrecognized conclusions, possible actuals that exist between the unseen and the underside of what is. I backed away from the traffic today of the sequence of events connecting one expectation-... with another and discovered a kernel embryo slinking in a crevice, dying for attention. So I pulled it out with my mind, noticed it, and gave it life. If I hadn't stepped aside today, little gems would go unnoticed, inventions unrealized, and poems never written. Well, there you have it. I hope you have the opportunity to recognize and actualize your creativity.

[19:47] Speaker 2: The one thing that I realize about God or wha- whatever you wanna call that which is beyond our under- true understanding, the whole.

[19:57] Speaker 1: All-being is one of the terms I like to use. All-being.

[20:02] Speaker 2: All-being, that's a fun one too.

[20:04] Speaker 1: Yeah, you're looking at me like, "Huh?"

[20:06] Speaker 2: I have a thing about religion. My thing about religion is that it tends to separate us. If you're not of this religion and you're of that religion, you're wrong and I'm right or y- you're, I'm wrong, right and you're wrong. And it creates separation. And I, I was recently in the hospital and they asked me what my religion was. And I said, "Love." And the woman who was writing it down didn't even blink. She just wrote love. Somehow to me, love brings us into union. We all understand something about love. Maybe not spiritual love, but we cert- understand passionate love for sure and we understand filial love, which is the love for our friends and our parents and our siblings and everything. We don't quite understand agape love, which is divine love, because we have to give up our definitions of ourselves to be in agape. So all these things that, that prevent us from being the total totality of who we are just fall away when we're in that state.

[21:13] Speaker 2: It, you can't hold onto it because you're in the wholeness, you're part of the wholeness, but you're in the wholeness. It's so huge, it's beyond definition.

[21:25] Speaker 1: But getting to that state (laughs) is a challenge.

[21:28] Speaker 2: Yes.

[21:28] Speaker 1: And, and I should actually reframe it. It's not getting to it. Uh, it's recognizing that it's already there.

[21:35] Speaker 2: Yes.

[21:35] Speaker 1: And releasing every thought or judgment or perception to the contrary. So that-

[21:42] Speaker 2: Amen to that.

[21:44] Speaker 1: Amen. Yes. (laughs)

[21:44] Speaker 2: (laughs) Some, some woman said to me once, "Why don't they say awoman-" (laughs)

[21:49] Speaker 1: I make cartoons, which I encourage you to go look at and wish we could feature on this show, but, uh, one of them is the word amen and he's sitting in a therapist office, as many of these words are, because the series is called If Words Could Speak. This is the word Amen and he's complaining (laughs) to the therapist and Amen says, "Why do they always put me at the end? Can't I be at the beginning?"

[22:17] Speaker 2: (laughs)

[22:19] Speaker 1: (laughs)

[22:21] Speaker 2: Let's start with Amen.

[22:22] Speaker 1: Yeah, Amen to begin with.

[22:24] Speaker 2: (laughs) And go from there. (laughs) That's pretty funny.

[22:28] Speaker 1: What I've done over the years is try to find metaphors that allow us to access and make a shift in our consciousness and awareness. Life is full of metaphors. If you look at language and perspective, it's, it's amazing how many things are metaphors. That's a key part of what, uh, my work has been about is finding metaphors 'cause metaphors allow you to contact more of a feeling, a living experience to hang on a concept. Boy, there's a concept for you.

[23:07] Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

[23:07] Speaker 1: (laughs) So...

[23:09] Speaker 2: I have to (laughs) discuss, it's funny. Our, our granddaughter, Ariel, was eating and talking, and she says, "Grandpa, don't talk with your mouth-"

[23:19] Speaker 1: Full.

[23:20] Speaker 2: "... full."

[23:20] Speaker 1: (laughs)

[23:20] Speaker 2: Right. And he said to her, "Don't eat with your mouth full."

[23:24] Speaker 1: (laughs)

[23:24] Speaker 2: And she stopped and it was this long silence and then she got it and she started to laugh. (laughs)

[23:30] Speaker 1: So the metaphor I use for that is a wedge.

[23:34] Speaker 2: Give me understanding of the m- wedge. I want that. (laughs)

[23:38] Speaker 1: It's like one plane of understanding, a plane in the sense like it's a two-dimensional sheet moving through your mind like a-

[23:45] Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

[23:46] Speaker 1: ... like a sheet, and then there's this other sheet coming into your mind, which is the, uh, um-

[23:52] Speaker 2: Higher mind?

[23:53] Speaker 1: No, just coming into your mind.

[23:55] Speaker 2: Uh-huh.

[23:56] Speaker 1: Uh, and the other sheet is, uh, the metaphor, like the train as a metaphor for a thought coming through the mind. And it creates like a wedge because these two things are not the same. So one is a little wider angle than the other. Boy, this is hard to... I need a metaphor for how difficult it is.

[24:19] Speaker 2: (laughs)

[24:19] Speaker 1: It's like-

[24:19] Speaker 2: You started it. (laughs)

[24:21] Speaker 1: I st-

[24:21] Speaker 2: You get out of it. (laughs)

[24:22] Speaker 1: It's like brushing your t- it's like brushing your teeth-

[24:24] Speaker 2: Oh, don't do anymore. I'm losing it. (laughs)

[24:26] Speaker 1: Wait a minute. One more. Just let... Brushing your teeth with your mouth closed.

[24:30] Speaker 2: (laughs)

[24:30] Speaker 1: Or...

[24:32] Speaker 2: (laughs) I have... I don't know what that has to do with anything, but I thought it was a funny image. (laughs)

[24:39] Speaker 1: As we wind up our time together, we started with looking at self-judgment, judging us- ourselves for mistakes.I'm not h- sure who said this, I'll look it up, but mistakes is, are what allows us to learn and grow. If we could reframe our judgment of, uh, looking at our mistakes, like, a lot of times I catch myself just piling up my mistakes as a way to inhibit and hold myself back, and my biggest challenge is let 'em go, they're gone. And here's the big one, you never did anything wrong.

[25:17] Speaker 2: And I believe that's true. Mistakes are our teachers. That's why I like sports so much, uh, what I feel about, uh, athletes is they learn this immediately. You might mess up on the first play, but y- you, what'd you learn from that? And they immediately make that shift, the good athletes. The next time they do the same play, they've already learned from the play that they messed up on and they do it right.

[25:43] Speaker 1: And they're really in the now, if you think about it. You just made a mistake, you can't dwell on it-

[25:47] Speaker 2: No way.

[25:47] Speaker 1: ... the game is going on.

[25:49] Speaker 2: Right.

[25:49] Speaker 1: You gotta jump into the next now.

[25:52] Speaker 2: Right.

[25:52] Speaker 1: And let it go, like, immediately.

[25:55] Speaker 2: I learned a lot from that. In fact, I remember hearing once, "Don't walk away from any of t- your teachers. Every moment in life is a teacher. But be open to learn and you'll discover who your teachers are." And I think once we learn that we are here to learn, to grow, then everything that we do is part and parcel of that education.

[26:20] Speaker 1: This is The Laughing Heart and each week we're gonna take one of the issues that challenges us and see how through changing our perspective, especially getting a more holistic perspective, in the sense that we're seeing this issue, this problem, from the point of view of the whole of it, the all of it, the, uh, transcendent universal being that pervades all life and all consciousness. You know that being, uh, you, you run into that being at the coffee shop or at the grocery market. In fact, we run into that being with every person we encounter. And you can go to our, uh, website, thelaughingheart.org, which I'm going to improve (laughs) 'cause it needs improvement, but I think it'll give you a gist of, actually, an immersion into the kind of journey Richele and I have been on together using theater and, and, and metaphor. And over that journey, we've discovered some amazing transformational tools, which we will get into more and more as we continue with this podcast.

[27:36] Speaker 1: Uh, thank you for joining us, and we hope you'll join us next week, or you can probably catch this at bbsradio.com, which is broadcasting this. If you wanna catch us in the moment, uh, we're on at Sundays, like tonight, 5:00 PM Pacific Time.

[27:56] Speaker 2: (clears throat)

[27:56] Speaker 1: Thank you for being with us, The Laughing Heart. This is Errol R- Strider-

[28:01] Speaker 2: And Richele Strider.

[28:03] Speaker 1: And-

[28:04] Speaker 2: Keep laughing.

[28:05] Speaker 1: Keep laughing and, uh, find somethin' to laugh at. As, uh, Charlie Chaplin, I think, said, "If you didn't laugh today, then you, then you wasted a day of your life."

[28:16] Speaker 2: And I say if we can laugh at ourselves, we'll have fun all day long. (instrumental music plays)