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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge, today my guest is Dr. Lissa Rankin. Lissa Rankin is a New York Times bestselling author of Mind Over Medicine, The Fear Cure, and Anatomy of a Calling as well as a physician, speaker, and founder of the Whole Health Medicine Institute, and a mystic.
She’s passionate about what makes people optimally healthy and what predisposes them to illness, and she’s on a mission to merge science and spirituality in a way that not only facilitates the health of the individual, but also uplifts the health of the collective. She’s released a new book with Sounds True called The Daily Flame: 365 Love Letters from Your Inner Pilot Light. And in this conversation we talk about how she started writing these love letters from her Inner Pilot Light. What is the Inner Pilot Light anyway, and how can we learn to tap into our own source of fiery guidance? These letters bring us into a huge ocean. I’m just going to say, of unconditional love.
Let’s go! Here’s my conversation with Lissa Rankin. Lissa, it’s great to have this chance to connect with you and talk about your new book, The Daily Flame: 365 Love Letters from Your Inner Pilot Light. Welcome.
Lissa Rankin: Thank you, Tami. I’m so happy to be here.
TS: Now. These 365 letters, one for each day of the year, are written from a certain vantage point. And I want to start there. You address each letter: dearest beloved, or dearest darling, precious, glorious angel. You write, sweet firecracker. So you’re coming from a certain perspective, looking at yourself, looking at the reader. Help me understand this particular very loving vantage point.
LR: Well, when I write these letters, I’m actually writing, in the beginning, at least, what my inner beloved or my inner lover or my inner divine, my divine spark, whatever you want to call my soul. This part, well, it’s the part that’s not a part, that is the essence of my core, of my center, kind of the consciousness that came in uniquely in the signature that I call “Lissa.” And it’s that part that’s communicating with, I don’t know, the parts that others might call your ego or your wounded child or your insecurities or your intensely painful emotions, or whatever the aspects of ourselves that are not fully aligned with that deeper knowing, that get anxious and scared and insecure and doubting. So this Inner Pilot Light that is writing these love letters, is speaking in a particular way that is extremely loving, and often very effusively begins with these terms of endearment. As if you are the child of the infinitely and unconditionally loving consciousness that you might call god, or goddess, or the force of love, or the universe, or whatever it is that you might connect to in the transcendent aspect of the love that is also inside of you.
TS: Now, you referred to this as an Inner Pilot Light. Can you help me understand that metaphor?
LR: That’s how it first came to me and I’ve had people challenge that because they say, “Wait a minute. Pilot lights go out,” and the way that I use it, they don’t. That’s the way that I conceptualize this metaphor. It’s as if before we come into a body, we are a part of an eternal flame, a great fire of consciousness if you want to think of it that way. And then when we become, when we come into form, a spark of that eternal flame animates us as the life force and we could argue theologically and biologically about when that spark become alive. But that life force that animates you in a body until it leaves the body and the body is left without that spark. And then we can talk the theology of what happens to that spark. Perhaps going back into the eternal fame, on the other side of this human life. So another metaphor you could use would be to say that we were once the ocean and then we become a drop, while still being connected to the ocean. And then we merge back into the ocean.
So the reason I used “Inner Pilot Light” is because I think people sometimes feel like, well, “My flame has gone out,” or, “I don’t have access to that flame. Maybe that spark is alive in you, but I’m having a dark night of the soul and I’m depressed and suicidal. I’m sick, I’m in despair. I’ve lost my faith. I can’t remember who I am. I feel completely out of touch with that essence of my life force. I’m not getting communication from that part of myself. There’s nobody writing me love letters inside of me. My pilot light has gone out.” And I always see it as this permanent pilot light that it may… In my wood stove that’s right next to me right now there is a little pilot light and the stove is a mountain. So I can see it. It’s just a tiny little blue and orange flame.
But if I give attention to it and I turn the heat up, then the flame turns into this big woodstove. And so that’s what I think of, is that we may have forgotten, if you look at my woodstove right now, it looks like it’s turned off, but it’s not. There’s a tiny little spark that is inside of all of us and part of why I started writing The Daily Flame emails 10 years ago was because I had this intuition or guidance from my own Inner Pilot Light if I started sharing with other people the love letters that were coming through me every morning as part of my daily practice to connect to my Inner Pilot Light, might in some sort of a contagious way, begin to ignite this Inner Pilot Light into the bonfire of consciousness in each of us individuals and then collectively, as part of this evolution of consciousness. It’s really intensified in recent years.
TS: Now Lissa, just to give our listeners a real taste of what these love letters are like, why don’t you go ahead and read one? Any one that comes up for you as you go through the book, just whatever randomly comes up for you.
LR: OK. I’m going to actually just right now, close my eyes and see which one my Inner Pilot Light wants me to read. OK? Wow. It picked a long one. This is number 180. My great love, love wears so many faces that it can be confusing to define. There’s family love, the kind of love you have for your mother or father or child. There’s romantic love, the love of your soul mate or lover. There’s love for animals, the kind of pure devotional love you might feel for your pet. There’s the love you have for your best friends. These kinds of love tend to fit nicely into boxes, but then there are confusing, mystical kinds of love, like the love you feel when you gaze at a waterfall and then wham, your heart explodes with a cloud of fairy dust and suddenly you are the waterfall and you feel like you’ve just fallen in love with that waterfall.
Next thing you know, tears are spilling down your cheeks and you’re wondering what the hell is going on? Or maybe you see a gorgeous wild animal out in nature and you feel like your chest gets cracked open as if you’ve just had heart surgery. Love bursts out of you and through you, and you love those whales or that cheetah or that owl more than you’ve ever loved anything in your whole life. Your whole body buzzes with love of vibrating tenderness, emerging from the sanctuary of your bursting heart. This same kind of mystical love can happen with humans. You meet a stranger, maybe even someone you’d never had any iota of interest in, someone with whom you share nothing in common. You happen to gaze into his or her eyes and bam, your heart gets zapped and blown open. It’s confusing to your adorable mind. Maybe you’re with someone you don’t know that well, and you accidentally bump into this plane of love, or maybe you’re with your lover or your child when it happens.
Your heart bursts open and your chest is filled with butterflies, and you feel this rush of tenderness so exquisite that you feel almost uncomfortably exposed and vulnerable. Love is hemorrhaging out of you, but it’s not going to hurt you, because even more love is flooding into you from some invisible source. You know you’re never going to run out of this kind of love. There’s an infinite supply, and it fills you like a waterfall that spurts out of you so fast you can barely breathe. As this happens, the borders between you and the being you love start to dissolve. The membrane that separates you vanishes, and you feel as if you are that person or animal or mountain, as if there’s no boundary between you.
You lose yourself in this love, but lose yourself into what? Into oneness? It’s hard to describe. It’s simultaneously terrifying and wondrous, filling you with awe and light. The mind drops away at some point and all you feel is an indescribable beauty, an openness, a sweetness that bubbles up through you and rushes through your body like warm honey. If you lean all the way into it, you’ll feel as if you’ll get lost in it, as if you will never come back. But if you can resist the temptation to guard against it, you can feel deep connection and intimacy. Every sense is heightened, colors are Technicolor, the wind on your skin gives you goose bumps. There’s a lot of charge in the sensuality of this present moment and everything feels alive. Know where this kind of love comes from? It’s all me, baby. I love you, Your Inner Pilot Light. Well, that was a surprise, that was a bomb.
TS: That was a love-bomb love letter, and all of the love letters, I think, have this unconditional sense of loving acceptance that they carry with them. And of course there are all different kinds of teachings that are interlaced in the different letters. But one of the things you write in the introduction is that it’s this unconditional, loving core of our being that helps us navigate the in-between spaces in our spiritual life. And I wanted to talk some about navigating these in-between spaces and how connecting with our Inner Pilot Light can help us. Can you talk some about that?
LR: Yes, well, my friend Charles Eisenstein talks about what he calls “the space between stories.” So we talk about that in some of these love letters. The space between stories, when one story is ending and another story has not yet begun, and we’re in that space of deep uncertainty. And this can be a very frightening time for humans in a body to be in that place of not knowing. And I think sometimes that’s a really pregnant place of great possibility, and if we can learn to comfort the part that’s afraid, then this Inner Pilot Light that is in us can help us navigate this space in a way that can be very comforting and it can actually… I wrote a book in the past called The Fear Cure and so this is really, in some ways, it is the way to work with fear. So that fear can become our trailhead into this space between stories, where we can connect to this deeper knowing, that does make it at least more peaceful and potentially, actually, quite ecstatic to be in that place of not knowing. Because when you don’t know what the future holds, then anything is possible.
But what I have discovered and what I’ve watched other people go through over the 10 years of working with this Inner Pilot Light in me and in others, is that if we can rest in that space, if we can resist the temptation to rush the space between stories and we can pause and create enough space to just identify, “OK, now we are in uncertainty.” And if we can be humble and acknowledge that we are not in control and that things are now, they might feel totally out of control. And we can look at this on a cultural level right now, things feel pretty out of control right now. And that can be either terrifying, or it can be a portal into an entirely new dimension of possibility.
And so if we can pause and trust and relax and then be humble in the face of our not knowing, and from that place of sincerity make this plea to your Inner Pilot Light, as a kind of gateway into perhaps a collective consciousness or a deeper knowing that is beyond just the individual human self. Then what I had experienced at a very deep and mystical level, but also at a very human and practical level, is that help is available in those spaces between, where what feels uncertain can become more knowable in a way that doesn’t lose the humility of the not knowing. But there is guidance in that space if we are willing to—instead of grasping for what we want and resisting what we don’t want and trying to control life—if we are instead willing to humble ourselves and surrender ourselves into this other way of being and sort of surrendering to divine will, if you will, or surrendering to your Inner Pilot Light as the portal to that greater will.
Then there is a way to kind of navigate into the flow of life, such that it can feel miraculous, at its extreme. Or like I said, peaceful at its less-extreme depth and it can look, like I said, very practical. I was talking to you before we started recording, Tami, about the decision when my husband proposed to me and asked me to marry him and we had not known each other very long. So my mind said, “This is a very, very bad idea.” So if I were making a decision about whether to marry my husband from just my mind, then I might’ve said no. But instead I was in this in-between space of not knowing what is aligned for me, what is aligned for him, what is aligned for my daughter, what is aligned for the planet, what is aligned with the cosmos regarding this union, and to surrender myself to the not knowing and ask for guidance, yes or no, I need help, I don’t know. And that is, like I said, very actionable and very practical and what it looked like, it was a miraculous series of synchronicities supporting my yes. And I’m now married to my husband.
So it’s not just this mystical idea, it’s actually a very practical way of starting to make decisions on a moment-to-moment basis, in present time, through this connection that can help guide us to a deeper, more enriched, more aligned and often more flowing, and more mystical, more magical, and more joyful life. That’s to me… I don’t know what’s more worth studying than that?
TS: Now. How is it that you work with your Inner Pilot Light as a source of guidance? How do you actually go about that, Lissa?
LR: Well, when this journey began, which the whole story of that is in my last book, The Anatomy of a Calling. When this journey began, when I was pregnant with my daughter who just turned 13, so 13 years ago it began as a daily practice for me. Since I’m a writer and I’ve always been a writer, writing is like an easy access point for me. So it was literally sitting down in the morning and asking my Inner Pilot Light, “What do you want me to know today?” And then just clearing my mind and doing a kind of automatic writing where I would just put my fingers on the keyboard of my computer and something would come out. And at first it felt like it was very personal. It was just for me, it was from me to me. But I started realizing over time that wow, the stuff that was coming through might not be just for me and it might be helpful to other people.
And that’s when in 2009, I started publishing those daily, that daily practice as the daily email, The Daily Flame, which people have been signing up for this at innerpilotlight.com, the whole… for 10 years. So it began as just a writing practice. But then I uncovered, I could say I was guided to a whole bunch of other practices. So for example, some of the people that I work with are very somatically attuned, and so they can learn because they’re so sensitive in their body. For me, it’s harder to use my body as a compass because of the trauma around my relationship to my body through my medical training, because I went to medical school and had all of that. I kind of learned how to be a walking cerebrum who wasn’t connected to how physically tired my body was, how hungry my body was, how much I needed to pee when I was in surgery, like retracting in really uncomfortable positions.
So I had a trauma around disembodiment, but some people are dancers. They’re very embodied. Their whole life and work is about being in their body. And so they can literally learn how to connect to their Inner Pilot Light in their bodies such that they can ask the body any binary question, any yes/no question, and they can feel the sensation in their body and they learn what their yes is and they learn what their no is. And I’m so envious of those people because it’s so practical, and you have that tool on tap anytime. And so it’s one of the practices that I teach is the body compass practice, for those, that really works. But I think because we have different gifts and we have different traumas. For me, for example, one of the ways that my Inner Pilot Light guides me, and I love this because for me it’s very playful, is I get guided through synchronicity. And it feels quite magical because it feels like it’s outside of me.
So if I’m using my body compass or if I’m doing an automatic writing practice with my Inner Pilot Light, it kind of feels like it’s coming from inside of me. But there’s a part of me that likes it better when the answer to what I’m seeking guidance around comes from a billboard, and then an email that shows up in my inbox, and then a stranger on the street stops me and gives me an answer. And then a song comes on the radio that has… and it’s all validating the same thing. And I feel, often it moves me to tears. I feel like, “Oh my God. I asked for help and somebody is listening.” And the answers are coming in from the outside, so the part of me that doubts my inner world feels validated with it’s on the outside, so synchronicity is the one of my favorite ways of connecting, but I have about 30 of these different tools and practices that I use to try to navigate those in-between spaces and when no guidance is coming, I interpret that as wait not yet. Not time to make a decision. Sometimes there’s that pregnant time of gestation when we’re in this space between stories, when the most appropriate action is nothing. Silence and rest and gestation. Something is not finished yet, and then at the time for action, you will know. You’ll feel this impulse. Now here’s the guidance.
TS: Now, you mentioned a little while ago that when we are in these in-between times if we’re feeling afraid or fear could actually be, I think to use the word a “trailhead” as in the beginning of somewhere we’re going to go. And I think a lot of times when people are in an in-between space, they turn on themselves in some kind of negative way. The fear that they feel is not seen as a trailhead, it’s seen as some type of terrible ditch that they’re in. And there’s this attitude towards oneself of, “You screwed up, you created this divorce,” or loneliness or career failure or whatever. And one of the things that I found so moving in reading the 365 love letters was this tone that you took towards yourself when you felt afraid or a sense of instead of self-judgment, it was a holding and a caring. I mean, you refer to yourself as “sweet pea” and so I’m wondering if you can talk to that person who has this tendency to turn against themselves when something goes awry and they find themselves in this in-between world.
LR: Yes. Well, let me give the mind a concept first and then I’ll talk directly to that person. So I had been using this kind of language like trailheads, and hearing this Inner Pilot Light so lovingly holding these scared parts or doubtful parts or angry parts or addict parts or sabotage parts, or whatever. And so when I first met one of your other authors, Richard Schwartz, he’s a psychologist who created Internal Family Systems, or IFS, and actually took a workshop with Dick at Esalen. And I was so happy to be introduced to the IFS model, because it gave language to what I had been experiencing directly and then kind of teaching without having a frame for it. And so Dick also uses the word “trailhead.” So I had already written The Fear Cure before I met Dick Schwartz.
When I was talking about The Fear Cure, I said the title is sort of a misnomer. It’s not about curing fear, it’s about letting fear cure you. In other words, if you have a scared part, then this is a trailhead to something that is calling for your attention. It’s calling for more love. It’s calling for more consciousness, for more awareness, for more curiosity. And if we can approach that frightened part, not with judgment or bullying or a desire to exile it to cut it out like cancer, but to see it as a protective part, to use Dick’s language. A part that probably got its job when we were quite young, when our survival might have actually been at risk, we might have been at risk of getting rejected or abandoned or having love withdrawn from our parents. So we learned to have these protective parts that are always scared and they’re sort of catastrophizing and worst-case scenarioing and trying to protect us from maybe taking risks that we might think are going to have a bad outcome.
And instead of a resisting those parts, if we can actually open this loving consciousness to those parts to say, “Sweetheart, I hear you, I hear that you’re scared. Tell me what you want me to know. Tell me what you’re frightened of. I’m here with you and you’re not alone.” And then often those parts, those scared parts will start to reveal what’s underneath that. And if you ask them things like, “Why are you here? What do you want me to know? When did you first get your job protecting me from danger? What are you afraid would happen if you quit being so scared, trying to protect us with all of your fearful stories?” Then often we’ll uncover something that’s very young and very vulnerable or what Dick would call an “exile part”, and so these protector parts are protecting these exiled parts and if we can reveal, if these exile parts can get seen and loved and witnessed by what I call Your Inner Pilot Light, which Dick calls your Self, we’ve hashed it out and discovered that there’s nothing different, they are exactly the same thing, and that that Inner Pilot Light or that Self is the healer that can give that wounded part exactly what it needs to heal.
So this Inner Pilot Light is your best doctor. It’s your best therapist. It’s your best mentor. It’s the mother, father you never had. It’s your connection to source, to god, goddess. It’s… this lives right inside of you. So if we resist or bully or try to exile our fear, for example, then we further sever the tie. It’s the opposite of becoming intimate with it. And so to somebody who’s got a story like that, and maybe you have parts that you don’t like, then what my Inner Pilot Light tells me, and I assume it’s relevant for everyone, is that is just a call for more intimacy with that part, more curiosity about that part.
And if you stay with it, especially if you have somebody to sit with you and hold space to bear witness to that exploration, then those parts that you might think you need to get rid of because you think there’s something wrong with you, like the inner critic or the self-sabotage or the addict or maybe even a physical symptom that you want to cut out and get rid of. If you show up with curiosity, with the assumption that, “OK, these parts are here because they think they’re helping me and if I show up with curiosity or if I can even find compassion or at the extreme gratitude, ‘Thank you, fear, for keeping me safe for 49 years.’ You know what? My Inner Pilot Light is going to keep me safe now, and do a really good job keeping me safe. So is there another job you would like to have, so that you can stay in the family system, and stop having to do such a good job protecting? And maybe there’s something else that you want to do.” And those parts will start to reveal to you what they would rather do, and they actually are sort of stuck in the past, so it’s a deep level of healing, and a form of “soul retrieval” to use a shamanic term or “integration” to use a psychological term that leads to miraculous kinds of healings, not just psychological and spiritual healing, but physical healing, which is another reason that Dick Schwartz and I got interested in exploring together.
TS: OK, Lissa, let’s hear another love letter. How about number 181.
LR: All right. Sweet pea, when one new creation is born, something else must go. Every birth is a death. Just as the caterpillar must dissolve to become the butterfly, you must give up who you are to become who you must. This doesn’t mean you’ll lose everything you cherish, but it does mean that transformation requires letting go. Just as you clean your closet to make room for a beautiful new garments, becoming who you must requires releasing that which no longer resonates at your current vibration. When your destiny awaits you, you must feel, reckon with, heal, befriend, accept and then let go of your past. Grieve it, cry it out, hug it, mourn its loss, say goodbye.
Express gratitude for how much you’ve learned and grown. Then in a burst of my flame, burn it to ashes in the phoenix process that is your life. Call in whatever is next. Stand curiously in the space between stories and make peace with uncertainty. Wonder what the divine has in store for you. Open yourself to receiving the mystery of what’s next. Not sure how to navigate this transformation? Take my hand, sweetheart. You’re not alone. I’ll lead you there. This way, darling. Your Inner Pilot Light.
TS: Now, Lissa, there’s a lot of themes that run throughout these 365 love letters, but I’ve pulled out just a couple that I want to make sure to talk to you about. And one of them has to do with longing. And you write it’s your longing that throws lighter fluid on your Inner Pilot Light. And I thought that’s interesting because I think a lot of people see their longing as some kind of melancholic problem. I think something’s missing. Maybe I should go out for a run, or “What’s wrong with me? Why do I have so much longing inside of me?” You seem to see it much differently.
LR: I do, I do. And I’ll speak to the paradox of it because if you look at a lot of spiritual teachings, you will see that teachers have a tendency to teach only one side of the paradox. So for example, in many Buddhist teachings, there’s a teaching that we need to let go of our desires, and release any attachment to our desires, in order to free ourselves from the suffering of our longing.
And if you look at other sort of New Age teachings, you’ll see that there’s kind of the law of attraction teachings, where you’re supposed to get in touch with your desires and make your vision boards and make your affirmations. And now you’re supposed to exercise your spiritual power to bring your desires into being. And I’m not demonizing either of those teachings or dismissing the validity of them, but in my guidance from my own Inner Pilot Light what I, and again, I don’t know how the mystery works. I certainly cannot begin to say that I can control the co-creative process, but my understanding through my own direct experience is that, for example, if you have a desire to connect more deeply with your Inner Pilot Light so that you can have this loving, compassionate, wise, courageous, calming, unconditionally loving presence inside of you that is helping you navigate the space between stories, for example, that desire is not a bad thing.
It’s a beautiful thing to have that longing for connection to source. And if you read Rumi, for example, if you read the Sufis, the 14th-century Sufi poets, they write so exquisitely about longing. And that longing, if you lean into it, it’s painful, yes? It’s painful to want something that you feel like you don’t have yet. Like if you’re… I was an OB-GYN. I worked with so many women for a decade who were longing to become mothers, and they were infertile.
And so that longing is super painful, right? If you’re… But, so, then we have a tendency to either deny the longing. We either have a tendency to say, “Well, actually I only want what’s aligned for me. I just want what… I’m going to surrender to divine will and if it’s not aligned for me than I don’t want it.” But then deep down we’re actually denying some… We do have a part that really wants to be a mother. And that part now feels like we’ve abandoned it. So we have a tendency to not be intimate with our longings. But if we can, rather than grasping for what we want and trying to make it happen, which might be the law of attraction point of view, and rather than turning away from it and pretending we don’t care about it and detaching from it, which really isn’t possible, I don’t think, because we’re human in a body.
Instead, if we can lean into the longing and feel the discomfort, and actually allow us to go into a space that might be particularly uncomfortable, which is to actually allow ourselves to feel what it might feel like, to feel the fulfillment of that desire to give ourselves permission to actually feel as if that thing we desire, like connection with your Inner Pilot Light. If you allow yourself to just imagine, “What does it feel like if that longing is fulfilled and the thing that I want comes into being? If I’m longing to be pregnant, I now I’m looking at my pregnancy test and it’s positive. What does that feel like?” And to let yourself sit with the tension, the tension. So here’s the paradox. You’re feeling the feeling as if it’s already here and you’re also feeling the discomfort of knowing in your mind, it’s not actually here yet, and in that tension I, my understanding is, that that is a co-creative space that creates kind of quantum vacuum.
And if we can hold the tension without trying to resolve it, as either we detach from our desires, or we try to control them and make it happen. We can sit in the tension. Something magical happens in there that is quite mysterious that I can’t explain. But it is that tension that draws every spiritual seeker onto the path, is that longing to connect with love, with source, with the divine, with your Inner Pilot Light, whatever you want to call it. That longing is the activation onto the path that then becomes its own journey. And again, that longing is the portal, I believe, to all kinds of things including spiritual healing, physical healing, connection with the muse and the creative process. Calling in your beloved, attracting your soul tribe, preparing yourself to be able to receive abundance. All kinds of things that we think we want, but we don’t know how to get there. So again, I’m not saying we can control it, but I’m also saying it’s not an accident. That we do participate in this co-creative process and I believe, and I could completely be wrong, that this longing is a portal.
TS: OK. And let’s take a step further. I think one of the questions that emerges for people, is, I long to trust the Inner Pilot Light inside. That I have the kind of clarity that Lissa seems to have, that the messages I’m getting, the automatic writing I’m doing, that it’s really coming from my Inner Pilot Light and I know you have a series of discernment questions. You write about them in Love Letter Number 103. That might be helpful to people in answering this desire they have, which is to know their own Inner Pilot Light is guiding them in their life.
LR: Yes, sure. Let me read that. Dearest beloved, do you feel like you’re guided to do something but you’re not sure whether it’s me talking or some other less trustworthy part disguising itself as me? Here are some discernment tools that can help you tell the difference between me and my adorably sneaky imposters. Consider this thing you feel guided to do. Then ask yourself these questions, so if you’re listening I’ll just ask you to call upon something that maybe you think you’re being guided to do so that you can actually do this for yourself. Is it kind? Does it feel like shackles on or shackles off? Is there aliveness here? Does it nourish or deplete me? Does it feel natural, efficient, easeful, peaceful, and graceful? Does it make sense? Does it exhaust me or fill me with dread? Will it hurt anyone? Would love do this? How does this feel in my body? Am I feeling pressured or rushed? Is it coercive or controlling? Is it ethical and aligned with my core values?
Will this cultivate the stillness in me? What’s true and not true about this? The Buddha said, “Just as the great ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, so also this teaching and discipline has one taste, the taste of liberation.” I may not be the Buddha, but I dig the guy. If you think I’m guiding you, check to see if what I’m asking of you tastes of liberation, which also feels like love. If it doesn’t, get serious, keep inquiring, ask for confirmation and clarity, listen deeply, and ask your trusted mentors for feedback if you need help interpreting my guidance. Here with the keys to your jailbreak, Your Inner Pilot Light.
TS: Now, Lissa, is it fair to say that you experience your Inner Pilot Light as an inner teacher for you? I mean you talked about it as the inner healer. I mean, there’s outside spiritual teachers. Would you say that you relate to your own inner source of guidance as your inner teacher, and if so, how do know that it’s challenging you, and not just reflecting and confirming what you want?
LR: Well, that’s a great question. First of all, it often is quite challenging. So although, and this book, if you read it, you’ll see it can be quite challenging because any part of what I’ve come to recognize about love is that love is, it’s holding this kind of razor’s edge between offering you comfort and nurture and reassurance and affection, but not in a way that’s coddling you or enabling the parts of you that need healing. So some people or teachers can be they’re just like your “yes man.” They just make you feel good and other people or teachers can be pure scalpel, right? They’re just like, “I’m here to slice away everything that isn’t love and I’m going to cut away all the parts of your ego to liberate you” in a way that is fierce, and confronting, and quite challenging, and sometimes abusive. As we’re seeing with a lot of the fallen gurus these days,
And so my relationship with my Inner Pilot Light feels like it swings back and forth between the maternal kind of earth mother, holding, nurturing, loving with softness, kind of the divine feminine. And then sometimes it will come in as the scalpel, as Kali, as cutting away everything that isn’t love, and confronting me with my own ignorance or my blind spots. Showing me something that I hadn’t seen before. This just happened two nights ago when I was having this episode of pain in the middle of the night and I was using it as a trailhead to inquire with my Inner Pilot Light what’s happening here. And I started seeing some pictures, like scenes of things that were uncomfortable to see about myself. And for me, those are often things that I then don’t necessarily … I don’t just stay with my Inner Pilot Light showing me that, I then take it to my therapist.
So it’s not that I don’t also seek guidance from other people. In fact, I personally don’t trust any teacher or therapist or self-help author or whatever, who isn’t regularly seeing their own teacher or therapist or mentor. Because I am fully aware that we are all vulnerable. And in teaching IFS, for example, Dick Schwartz says that many people have what he calls a Self-like part or an Inner Pilot Light -like part. In other words, it’s a part that is pretending to be your inner mentor or your inner healer or your inner teacher. But it actually has an agenda. And it’s trying to promote its agenda. And the Inner Pilot Light never has an agenda.
So it doesn’t actually… My Inner Pilot Light doesn’t even care whether I ever heal certain patterns that I’m working on. Like for example, my tendency towards symbiotic relationships or codependent relationships. My Inner Pilot Light does not give a flip about whether I’m ever free from that in this life. It is here to support me, but there’s no way to win. Like, there’s no right or wrong in that realm. I’m entitled to my own journey. It’s happening in divine timing. I have free will, so my Inner Pilot Light’s here to support and guide me. But it doesn’t have an agenda like, “You need to be liberated from this pattern so that you can be enlightened.” Like that. My Inner Pilot Light never even talks to me about enlightenment, not even on the radar.
So I hear the question, which is many people go to a spiritual teacher, for example, or a therapist because we’re looking for challenge, we’re looking for confrontation. We’re wanting to have somebody outside of us reveal to us that which we may not be able to see for ourselves because of our own wounding. And for me, my experience is that I go to both. My Inner Pilot Light will often give me the insight into the thing that needs healing, but then I will need to go to somebody outside of me in order to do the healing work. Because as I teach in my mind over medicine work, it’s a paradox. You can heal yourself, and you can’t do it alone. So even Dick Schwartz, who’s been teaching IFS for 30 years, says that when he encounters one of his exile parts, for example, he goes to another IFS therapist to do the unburdening, healing of the exile. So maybe some people can fully rely on their Inner Pilot Light, and they don’t need anybody external to support their journey, but I have not gotten to that point.
TS: My own experience, Lissa, in reading the 365 love letters, The Daily Flame, it was like diving into a pool. Each one as I read them one after another, this is just my own experience, of very spacious love. It was like page after page of, I would just say unconditional acceptance. And I’m curious to know if that was part of the medicine you wanted to offer people, and what you think about the medicine of spacious love.
LR: I feel emotional as you ask that question because I read this book while I was sitting next to my dying mother, who died last year. And so I was with my mom caregiving her, and we were in hospice, and I was taking her to Africa to go on safari for her for her bucket list last adventure. And my mom was pretty sick so she was sleeping most of the time and so I would be lying next to my mother and really grateful to have been her daughter and preparing myself to lose her. And so it’s really in the space of feeling the highs and the lows of love, like the ecstasy of loving my mother that much and also the heartbreak of knowing I was going to lose her soon. And so I… writing the book was a kind of medicine for myself, but I had the sense and as you know, Tami, I didn’t intend to really sell this book to Sounds True and have it become something that might be on a Barnes & Noble bookshelf. And I felt quite shy when you offered me this book deal, to make this something more public than I had intended it to be, because it felt so intimate.
And I was meaning to just make it as kind of a little pet project, love gift to my Daily Flame readers on my email list who have been relating to the Inner Pilot Light this whole time. But that spaciousness, of that kind of unconditional loving was part of the medicine that I needed for my grief. But I also sensed when you said, “No, I think actually, life is hard and people are love-deficient. And a book of love letters might actually be the medicine that the culture needs right now. And this might be deeply healing for many other people.” And I could feel the truth of that as well. And when I checked in with my own Inner Pilot Light, it was a yes. So I do think that love is the ultimate medicine. I think it’s… in many spiritual teachings, for example, I think people have a bullying part, maybe because they were bullied in childhood or they’ve developed this inner bully that thinks that in order to grow and become more, to let our Inner Pilot Light take over and lead more of our lives, that it has to be hard, it has to be fierce. It has to be the scalpel. It needs to be… You need to be faced with your demons and cut away your ego, and demonize your ego. And all of this language that we hear in spiritual teaching and I actually think it’s quite the opposite.
I think that that doesn’t work for me. I actually really turn away from that approach. But if I’m getting love-bombed while somebody is telling me the truth about how I’m creating my own suffering or how I’m unintentionally causing harm to others, then it’s like the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. I can stomach it and not go into a shame spiral that clamps me down and makes, takes me out so that I can’t even receive the medicine because it’s too shaming. It’s too scary or too painful. So it may not be the medicine that works for everybody.
And that’s part of what I think people need to learn about spiritual teachings is that my medicine may be very different than your medicine, and the way that this book is written might not work at all. Some people might hear all these terms of endearment and gushing love and go, “Oh my God, it’s so sickly sweet. I feel like I want to vomit.” That’s perfectly fine. I don’t need it to be for everyone, but this is how the medicine has worked for me. And if it’s appropriate, Tami, I would like to read 319—a segue—about that.
TS: Sure.
LR: This is another love letter. My love, spiritual teachings are like medicine. When the right treatment is applied to just the right circumstance, healing happens. I think of spiritual teachings like tools in the medicine bag. Because I am your best healer, I will pull them out when needed and deliver them with discernment and tender care, if you come to me to ask for help. Yet, as with medical treatments, the treatment must be individuated to every unique situation. One medicine does not fit all. If you’re listening only to spiritual teachers and not to me, you could get hurt. Many spiritual teachers do not understand that the tool they teach is only one tool in a vast medicine bag. They try to apply one teaching to every life circumstance, and this can be as damaging as if a doctor prescribed one drug for every illness.
While spiritual teachers can do a great service helping you unveil that which comes between you and me, resist giving your power away. Trust me, I’ll help you take in what serves and toss out the rest. If you need spiritual medicine, come to me. I have access to every teaching ever offered in the entire cosmos and I’ll deliver just what you need in every circumstance customized to your unique vibration in that particular moment, at just the right dose. Your most reliable spiritual healer, Your Inner Pilot Light.
TS: You know, Lissa, in the spirit of the loving space, that is the medicine I think of this book, The Daily Flame, would you read 328 for us?
LR: OK. Beloved, you know how sometimes you feel inferior to others and other times you feel superior. Sometimes you judge yourself as less than, finding yourself lacking, and feeling like you want to go eat worms. Other times you see yourself as better than, getting self-righteous and holier-than-thou. This is such a naturally adorable human tendency, my love, but there’s another way to live that feels much yummier. When you feel separate from others, separate from nature, separate from the cosmos, separate from me, separate from source, you’ll naturally try to assess your place in the hierarchy of things. But when you tune into me, I can help you remember that humans are all cells in one cosmic body, and one cell cannot be better than or lesser than another. Sure, from one limited point of view, you are in a separate body having a separate experience, living in a realm of duality where it’s easy to forget your interconnectedness.
It’s true that if you jump in front of a train, the consciousness you call “you” may go nonphysical, while the consciousness you call your mother or sister or spouse may not. But the aftermath of the loss of you, in a body, still ripples out and affects the cosmic body at large. Through my magical star glasses, you’ll see that deep in your roots, you are like an aspen grove— appearing as one tree, but dependent on all others for your very beingness. Everything changes when you tune into this consciousness. Suddenly you see all humans as adorable children learning how to love, some with more maturity, some with less, all just trying to come back home for a love reunion. Can’t find a way to see the world this way? Tune into me. I’ll help. Gushing with love for you all, Your Inner Pilot Light.
TS: Lissa, just to finish, I want to bring forward something you write about in the acknowledgements of this new book of love letters, The Daily Flame. In the acknowledgements, you mentioned someone who’s been a mentor for you, the author of the book, Kitchen Table Wisdom, Rachel Naomi Remen. And you talk about what it was like when you first met. And you write that she recognized the Inner Pilot Light in you. She recognized you, your soul. But what she said to you was that, at the time, she felt that perhaps that part of you had about 28 percent stock. 28 percent stock in the company called Lissa Rankin, and this comment that perhaps if the two of you spent time together, that part would increase, and eventually it would have 51 percent stock. And that, if, you know, when you have 51 percent stock in a company, you get to make all the decisions.
And here it is: the Inner Pilot Light in each of us could at least have 51 percent stock in the company that each one of us is. And I noticed when I heard this, it was a way it all sort of seemed achievable, suddenly. Like it’s not this 100 percent thing that I need to be in touch with my Inner Pilot Light all the time in every situation, but if I can get even to this 51 percent-ness that I might start having my center of gravity in a different place. I wonder if you can comment on that.
LR: I can well, first of all, the whole way that I met Rachel was its own kind of Inner Pilot Light-led magic story, because I was living in Monterey after quitting my job as a doctor in San Diego, and moving through some strange guidance that told me I should be living near Big Sur. And I was driving down Highway One and I kept hearing this voice that said you have to go to Esalen you’re going to meet somebody there. And I didn’t know anything about Esalen and I had no idea what to expect of it. And I looked it up on the Internet and I thought, “Oh, this is where crazy people go. This is not for me. I’m a nice, good, rational conventional doctor. I don’t… This is where like, crazy new age people go, and I’m not one of those crazy new age people.”
But it was so persistent and I could recognize it by this point as the guidance of my Inner Pilot Light. And so I did end up going and taking a writing workshop at Esalen. And the first day that I was there, I was sitting in the hot springs next to this woman that I didn’t know. And she said, “Why are you here?” And I said, “I don’t know. I’m supposed to meet somebody here.” And she looked me square in the eye and she said, “You’re supposed to meet Rachel Naomi Remen.” And I said, “Who’s that? And is she here?” And she said, “Oh no, she’s not here, but she was here.” And I’m thinking, “Who’s this crazy woman?” So I end up looking up Rachel on the Internet. I order Kitchen Table Wisdom. I spend all night long reading this book. I discovered that she’s teaching a workshop in Mill Valley, several weeks later. I have no money at the time. So I put the workshop on a credit card.
I show up at the workshop and meet Rachel, and this was when she says, “I’ve been waiting for you,” and I’m so shocked at this point I have… There’s no way she could have possibly known me in this life. I did not have a blog. She had never seen me in a professional setting. I had not written any books. I was this retired doctor, feeling really in this space between stories and lost. And so when she made that comment about, she said, “I’ve been waiting for you.” I’m like, “What do you mean you’ve been waiting for me?” And she’s like, “Yes,” and she’s giving me this, kind of like, rolling her eyes look. That was hilarious, but also had this presence of great love. I’ve been waiting for you, but the part I’ve been waiting for only has about 28 percent stock in the company of Lissa, and maybe if we hang out I can get you to 51 percent.
And she invited me to start coming to a monthly meeting of doctors that were meeting at her house. So I was going to her house once a month in the beginning, and then we wound up teaching together, and becoming quite close. And so, that was really my prayer for this book. When I started putting this book together thinking it was just for my list, my people, it was, “Maybe if I put this book together, maybe something in here…” And much of what you will read in this book, it comes from Rachel because her imprint on me is so strong. She’s been my greatest mentor. And so perhaps I don’t know what percentage of Lissa has stock in the company, what percentage has stock in the company now, but perhaps, her influence on me that helped me to get in touch with my own Inner Pilot Light would have the same effect on the people that read it, through a kind of transmission that would help to put together this part of you.
And I love what you’re saying, Tami because, yes, we don’t have to have 100 percent stock. And like I said, I personally don’t believe in enlightenment. I’ve given up any even fantasy of human perfection. I don’t think it’s possible. And I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s my point of view, and I find that actually quite comforting, because it takes all the pressure off. But maybe if our Inner Pilot Light can have 51 percent stock and guide our decisions, imagine what would happen if even 10 percent of the people on the planet, if even 10 percent of the 7 billion people on the planet, we’re being guided by their Inner Pilot Lights. What might be possible on a global scale, not to mention what would be possible for you as an individual in your own life. And that to me is something worth teaching.
TS: Truth be told, Lissa, I’m not one for saccharine-sweet kinds of things, but I could actually hear you read these Inner Pilot Light love letters one after another, after another, after another, but instead I’m going to direct people to thedailyflamebook.com. If you’re interested, there are tools that help you access your Inner Pilot Light and free gifts from Lissa Rankin. That’s, again, thedailyflamebook.com. Lissa is the author both of this new book, The Daily Flame: 365 Love Letters from Your Inner Pilot Light and an audio series with Sounds True called Your Inner Pilot Light: Connecting with the Infinite Source of Love, Guidance, and Healing. So people can go for themselves and immerse themselves in the spacious, loving writing that you’re offering, which I think is upping, upping our love lights in so many ways. Lissa, thank you so much.
LR: Oh, it’s such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me here, Tami, and for everything that you’ve done to support bringing all of the people that care about all the different ways that we can connect to our Inner Pilot Light through everything that Sounds True doing and through your own vision and courage. I’m really, really grateful to be with you all, and to be midwifing this work into the world in spite of my resistant part that I’m loving, that I’m love-bombing my resistance part.
TS: Very good.
LR: Thank you.
TS: SoundsTrue.com, waking up the world. Thanks for listening.
