[Applause]
how many of you have ever had an
experience that was so intense and
abrupt that you knew from one
split-second to the next your life was
never gonna be the same again my moment
came October 7 2014 and that was the day
that ego caught up to and destroyed me
that day I got a phone call informing me
that a reporter had dug up my past he
had discovered that many years earlier I
had been involved in a green card
marriage for money and that was around
the same time that I had been involved
for a little while in a planned
marijuana growing operation now that
call wouldn’t have been so wildly
terrifying if it weren’t for the fact
that at the time I was a long-term
partner and fiancee to the governor of
Oregon who was running for re-election I
had made the terrible mistake of getting
into a high-profile public position
without being totally honest about my
past when the story dropped the media
went wild and not just here in the
Pacific Northwest all the way across the
country
I eventually wound up in the inglorious
pages of UK tabloids overnight I became
clickbait and the most humiliated person
in all the circles that I was running in
my mistake shredded the life of the
person I love most to the world I will
get this under control
it caused really a lot of damage to our
family destroyed my business led to IRS
and FBI investigations and created
mayhem across state government I could
not believe the enormity of it it was
surreal it seemed so much bigger than I
was and when I realized that it was
gonna be years not months but years
before we would be able to move through
it before the investigations would
conclude and my work would pick back up
it literally buckled my knees who was I
if I wasn’t a successful social activist
or a business owner or even a person
that other people liked in my lowest
moments I would find myself wondering if
maybe it were actually true maybe I
really just was that ugly valueless
caricature that the media had put
forward and when my mind would start
down that path I would literally
physically flinch from it I would never
have admitted it at the time but the
truth was up until that point in my life
I had so doubted my own value that I had
looked to others for validation and
suddenly and I’ve been able to run from
that pretty successfully but suddenly
everywhere I looked I was being
invalidated not just the media stories
my career which seemed central to my
worth gone 90% of the people I had
considered friends or colleagues gone my
beautiful loving tenure relationship
with John was fractured I felt totally
rudderless and it took many painful dark
months for me to begin to see the
glimmers of the gift that this was going
to become the experience has allowed me
to see that up until that point of my
life I had been fighting like hell to
keep myself safe in a house made of
glass and that house was constructed of
my put together personality my
accomplishments my work it’s this thing
ego and I don’t mean ego and just the
Freudian or superficial psychological
frame but the deeper research that
describes ego as a construct a created
identity a set of stories that we tell
ourselves about ourselves and unlike
what I used to believe it’s not the
thing that makes us feel puffed up and
bigger and badder it is the thing that
tells us we’re not enough it’s that
thing that when you have just knocked it
out of the park at work the only thing
you can think about is the one thing
that did not get done or when you put
out a social media post they’ll only
comment you remember is the negative
snarky one have you ever felt driven to
do something that you really didn’t want
to do because you were concerned about
someone liking you that’s ego my
nervousness about what you all are
thinking of me is ego ego is also a
comparison machine I mean I have caught
myself comparing myself to someone I
didn’t know feeling inferior realizing
that that photograph and probably that
story had been airbrushed and I’m seeing
some nodding heads it’s kind of it’s
kind of crazy
early on I was at a really low point in
all of this totally overwhelmed I had
spent several days on the couch binge
watching TV drinking too much beer being
careful to keep the door locked and the
shades drawn because reporters and
photographers were constantly lurking
around my little 900 square a 60 square
foot house I literally several times saw
them come up and try to look in the
front window which is right where I was
laying on the couch I could see him
behind the shade the third or fourth
morning determined to break out of that
clearly unhealthy pattern I dragged
myself out to my little back deck and I
slumped down into my tiny little hot tub
and I was so shell-shocked and exhausted
that I think my mind got to the point
where it just could not race anymore
and something in me shifted and I became
deeply intense
aware of the present moment now that
morning was really cold like
single-digit Central Oregon cold and I
had probably been in that tub in similar
cold mornings hundreds of times when the
steam is billowing up off the hot water
I’ve never seen it before I’d never
really seen this team or the light
behind it or the ice crystal on every
little pine needle I started to become
aware of these intense rich layers of
sound and the silence beneath each one
all fear dropped away I was so present
in the moment that in that instant I
lost track of my old familiar identity
even of the sense of physical boundaries
around my body and I reached this place
where I disconnected my inner state of
being with the swirl of stuff going on
in my outer life I hadn’t known that was
possible all I did know afterwards is
that I wanted more of it
and that’s what put me on what has now
been a three and a half year deep dive
into this crafty thing known as ego I’ve
studied I’ve researched I’ve met with
teachers and ministers and therapists a
few of whom are in this room god bless
you thank you
I studied the mental and emotional
habits of people who were having big
positive impacts but also seemed to be
genuinely peaceful living really dialed
in lives and I will tell you it was
painful it was painful to be honest with
myself about how ego driven I had been
up to that point in my life and it was
painful also a little bit still to
realize how much peace and effectiveness
I had allowed ego to take from me up
until that point but I stuck with it
because I could sense power in it I
could sense a liberation from Chains I
did not even know I was wearing one of
the first
big AHA was around fear when this first
broke in my life the fear was so intense
that it was like a living Beast
you know when you have that moment where
or one of those nights where you’re
having a terrible dream and you wake up
and it’s like oh thank god that was just
a nightmare I cannot count the number of
times during that period of my life that
I would wake up and start to remember
everything that was happening and it was
like waking into a nightmare what was
the latest round of media stories what
were the next death and rape threats
going to look like what was gonna happen
to my work how on earth was I gonna
survive it financially was a person that
I loved most going to leave me was he
going to be able to survive and recover
at times it was so intense that my sweat
smelled different
I smelled rancor than normal and guess
what none of it happened yes it was
horrific and yes we’re still rebuilding
but my career was not completely
he’s here today our family is healthier
than ever and to this day I have not had
a single person be ugly to my face it’s
all been anonymous or behind the shield
of a computer screen or a media
institution the thing that I’ve come to
realize from this is that unless you’re
an honest-to-god survival like a war
zone or a shooting scene as we heard
about earlier or like oh that’s a
rattlesnake unless were there most of
our fear is unnecessary and a whole lot
of it is driven by a desire for people
to approve of us or see us a certain way
Mark Twain said I am an old man and I
have seen many troubles but most of them
never happened
so I’ve learned it’s just useful to kind
of think what fears are spiking my guts
right now keeping me awake at night and
are they really necessary and what’s it
keeping me from doing now I want to
point out that I’m not saying I have a
lock on this ego thing because I am in
this glamorous leg and footwear because
a couple of months ago I let my desire
for someone’s approval override my good
sense I let the horse keep galloping
even though he didn’t feel settled the
next thing I know I’m on the ground the
horse is on top of me the person I was
trying to impress is calling the
ambulance I literally let ego take the
reins that was not the kind of
impressiveness that I was after I can I
can tell you that much but what I do
know is that it is much better to get a
handle on what it is that’s really
driving our decisions and our reactions
before we break our leg or our lives how
do you go about that well you could
orchestrate a catastrophic public
shaming
I can tell you it can be effective it’s
a little extreme and I don’t recommend
it and I am learning that there are much
gentler ways to take back the reins from
egos smallness and fear the thing that
was most important and useful to me at
first was just becoming more aware
training myself to be more aware I
recognized more quickly when I’ve gone
into comparison mode or that little stab
of guilty delight when the latest
celebrity falls off their shiny platform
or noticing the tapes running like I’m
not good enough to do that or someone
like me can’t or what’s the Ted crowd
gonna do to me today just in that moment
or in that in that practice I feel like
I’ve begun turning ego into a friend
it’s a teacher showing me where I am
still practicing habits of not enough
‘no second thing that was really useful
it was just a gentle redirect when i
find myself starting to get caught up in
those habits I just say choose again
choose again sometimes I have to choose
again 300 times a day
but eventually it shifts the second are
the the third piece that’s been
incredibly helpful in that I just really
have to give a shout out to is
meditation and mindfulness every single
person that I studied who seemed to be
living a dialed-in life of peace and
purpose has some sort of meditation
practice on board I believe it’s one of
a handful of things literally that may
have saved my life
it is definitely not the first thing
that falls off my plate anymore related
to that and a little newer is just the
practice of becoming aware of the
present moment and I’m realizing I’m
actually doing that for the first time
since I got up here because I’ve been
nervous this practice of just noticing
the present moment is the single most
important and useful thing that I have
found to be able to release unnecessary
fear when I start to get spun around the
axle of how am I gonna pay that bill
what’s she gonna think of me when she
finds out dot dot dot
coming back to present moment helps me
to cipher which is completely out of my
control and I might as well just quit
waste and energy on and what actually
merits some action and the final tool
that I will share here today
it’s a huge topic all by itself but it’s
just really getting down to the nitty
gritty of what our core beliefs are I’ll
give you one example I fairly recently
realized that I’ve had a lifelong belief
that life is hard but by god I’m not
gonna let it beat me
I am tough and I am resilient because
that’s what daddy prided me on being and
guess what I have created a life it’s a
beautiful life that I’m grateful for but
it’s a life where I have had to be tough
and resilient and I don’t want to
anymore I don’t want to have to fight my
way through life I want to be able to
love my way through life I’m flipping
I think in our culture it is incredibly
easy to just be saturated with a
pervasive sense of not enough miss and
fear this is what drives us to
distraction it’s what costs us our peace
it’s what prevents us from doing perhaps
our greatest acts of good and
contribution it’s also what drives war
and the destruction of our planet and
then tells us we’re too small to do
anything about it
I now genuinely believe that we will not
be our most effective in our outer work
with our families in our careers and the
causes that we care about until we clean
up our inner work our inner environment
by becoming much more consciously aware
of what’s what’s driving our decisions
and our reactions I have seen the magic
in this over and over and over in my own
life in my relationships in the work I
do with my clients there is nothing to
lose by losing identification with ego I
started out this talk saying that ego
had destroyed me that’s not completely
true
it was my lack of awareness that
destroyed me and the me it destroyed
wasn’t real it was a construct an image
and identity that I had created and it
hurt like hell when it blew up I’m not
saying it didn’t and John and I are
still massively rebuilding legally
financially occasionally from media
challenges but here I stand my life is
immeasurably richer more magical my
heart is opened so much wider and I
never could have imagined how good that
would feel and I’m so much better able
to stay peaceful no matter what is
swirling around in my life as that
started to take hold John would
sometimes go who are you anyway in like
a good way
I used to believe that that shiny
carefully put together exterior was
protecting me it was actually robbing me
Eckhart Tolle a has said that
identification with ego is a monstrous
act of reductionism in this human part
of our existence we have a chance to
live two lives there’s the one spent
getting up to the point where we deeply
question who and what we really are and
there is the beautiful ones spent
expanding and opening beyond that and we get to choose
how many of you have ever had an
experience that was so intense and
abrupt that you knew from one
split-second to the next your life was
never gonna be the same again my moment
came October 7 2014 and that was the day
that ego caught up to and destroyed me
that day I got a phone call informing me
that a reporter had dug up my past he
had discovered that many years earlier I
had been involved in a green card
marriage for money and that was around
the same time that I had been involved
for a little while in a planned
marijuana growing operation now that
call wouldn’t have been so wildly
terrifying if it weren’t for the fact
that at the time I was a long-term
partner and fiancee to the governor of
Oregon who was running for re-election I
had made the terrible mistake of getting
into a high-profile public position
without being totally honest about my
past when the story dropped the media
went wild and not just here in the
Pacific Northwest all the way across the
country
I eventually wound up in the inglorious
pages of UK tabloids overnight I became
clickbait and the most humiliated person
in all the circles that I was running in
my mistake shredded the life of the
person I love most to the world I will
get this under control
it caused really a lot of damage to our
family destroyed my business led to IRS
and FBI investigations and created
mayhem across state government I could
not believe the enormity of it it was
surreal it seemed so much bigger than I
was and when I realized that it was
gonna be years not months but years
before we would be able to move through
it before the investigations would
conclude and my work would pick back up
it literally buckled my knees who was I
if I wasn’t a successful social activist
or a business owner or even a person
that other people liked in my lowest
moments I would find myself wondering if
maybe it were actually true maybe I
really just was that ugly valueless
caricature that the media had put
forward and when my mind would start
down that path I would literally
physically flinch from it I would never
have admitted it at the time but the
truth was up until that point in my life
I had so doubted my own value that I had
looked to others for validation and
suddenly and I’ve been able to run from
that pretty successfully but suddenly
everywhere I looked I was being
invalidated not just the media stories
my career which seemed central to my
worth gone 90% of the people I had
considered friends or colleagues gone my
beautiful loving tenure relationship
with John was fractured I felt totally
rudderless and it took many painful dark
months for me to begin to see the
glimmers of the gift that this was going
to become the experience has allowed me
to see that up until that point of my
life I had been fighting like hell to
keep myself safe in a house made of
glass and that house was constructed of
my put together personality my
accomplishments my work it’s this thing
ego and I don’t mean ego and just the
Freudian or superficial psychological
frame but the deeper research that
describes ego as a construct a created
identity a set of stories that we tell
ourselves about ourselves and unlike
what I used to believe it’s not the
thing that makes us feel puffed up and
bigger and badder it is the thing that
tells us we’re not enough it’s that
thing that when you have just knocked it
out of the park at work the only thing
you can think about is the one thing
that did not get done or when you put
out a social media post they’ll only
comment you remember is the negative
snarky one have you ever felt driven to
do something that you really didn’t want
to do because you were concerned about
someone liking you that’s ego my
nervousness about what you all are
thinking of me is ego ego is also a
comparison machine I mean I have caught
myself comparing myself to someone I
didn’t know feeling inferior realizing
that that photograph and probably that
story had been airbrushed and I’m seeing
some nodding heads it’s kind of it’s
kind of crazy
early on I was at a really low point in
all of this totally overwhelmed I had
spent several days on the couch binge
watching TV drinking too much beer being
careful to keep the door locked and the
shades drawn because reporters and
photographers were constantly lurking
around my little 900 square a 60 square
foot house I literally several times saw
them come up and try to look in the
front window which is right where I was
laying on the couch I could see him
behind the shade the third or fourth
morning determined to break out of that
clearly unhealthy pattern I dragged
myself out to my little back deck and I
slumped down into my tiny little hot tub
and I was so shell-shocked and exhausted
that I think my mind got to the point
where it just could not race anymore
and something in me shifted and I became
deeply intense
aware of the present moment now that
morning was really cold like
single-digit Central Oregon cold and I
had probably been in that tub in similar
cold mornings hundreds of times when the
steam is billowing up off the hot water
I’ve never seen it before I’d never
really seen this team or the light
behind it or the ice crystal on every
little pine needle I started to become
aware of these intense rich layers of
sound and the silence beneath each one
all fear dropped away I was so present
in the moment that in that instant I
lost track of my old familiar identity
even of the sense of physical boundaries
around my body and I reached this place
where I disconnected my inner state of
being with the swirl of stuff going on
in my outer life I hadn’t known that was
possible all I did know afterwards is
that I wanted more of it
and that’s what put me on what has now
been a three and a half year deep dive
into this crafty thing known as ego I’ve
studied I’ve researched I’ve met with
teachers and ministers and therapists a
few of whom are in this room god bless
you thank you
I studied the mental and emotional
habits of people who were having big
positive impacts but also seemed to be
genuinely peaceful living really dialed
in lives and I will tell you it was
painful it was painful to be honest with
myself about how ego driven I had been
up to that point in my life and it was
painful also a little bit still to
realize how much peace and effectiveness
I had allowed ego to take from me up
until that point but I stuck with it
because I could sense power in it I
could sense a liberation from Chains I
did not even know I was wearing one of
the first
big AHA was around fear when this first
broke in my life the fear was so intense
that it was like a living Beast
you know when you have that moment where
or one of those nights where you’re
having a terrible dream and you wake up
and it’s like oh thank god that was just
a nightmare I cannot count the number of
times during that period of my life that
I would wake up and start to remember
everything that was happening and it was
like waking into a nightmare what was
the latest round of media stories what
were the next death and rape threats
going to look like what was gonna happen
to my work how on earth was I gonna
survive it financially was a person that
I loved most going to leave me was he
going to be able to survive and recover
at times it was so intense that my sweat
smelled different
I smelled rancor than normal and guess
what none of it happened yes it was
horrific and yes we’re still rebuilding
but my career was not completely
he’s here today our family is healthier
than ever and to this day I have not had
a single person be ugly to my face it’s
all been anonymous or behind the shield
of a computer screen or a media
institution the thing that I’ve come to
realize from this is that unless you’re
an honest-to-god survival like a war
zone or a shooting scene as we heard
about earlier or like oh that’s a
rattlesnake unless were there most of
our fear is unnecessary and a whole lot
of it is driven by a desire for people
to approve of us or see us a certain way
Mark Twain said I am an old man and I
have seen many troubles but most of them
never happened
so I’ve learned it’s just useful to kind
of think what fears are spiking my guts
right now keeping me awake at night and
are they really necessary and what’s it
keeping me from doing now I want to
point out that I’m not saying I have a
lock on this ego thing because I am in
this glamorous leg and footwear because
a couple of months ago I let my desire
for someone’s approval override my good
sense I let the horse keep galloping
even though he didn’t feel settled the
next thing I know I’m on the ground the
horse is on top of me the person I was
trying to impress is calling the
ambulance I literally let ego take the
reins that was not the kind of
impressiveness that I was after I can I
can tell you that much but what I do
know is that it is much better to get a
handle on what it is that’s really
driving our decisions and our reactions
before we break our leg or our lives how
do you go about that well you could
orchestrate a catastrophic public
shaming
I can tell you it can be effective it’s
a little extreme and I don’t recommend
it and I am learning that there are much
gentler ways to take back the reins from
egos smallness and fear the thing that
was most important and useful to me at
first was just becoming more aware
training myself to be more aware I
recognized more quickly when I’ve gone
into comparison mode or that little stab
of guilty delight when the latest
celebrity falls off their shiny platform
or noticing the tapes running like I’m
not good enough to do that or someone
like me can’t or what’s the Ted crowd
gonna do to me today just in that moment
or in that in that practice I feel like
I’ve begun turning ego into a friend
it’s a teacher showing me where I am
still practicing habits of not enough
‘no second thing that was really useful
it was just a gentle redirect when i
find myself starting to get caught up in
those habits I just say choose again
choose again sometimes I have to choose
again 300 times a day
but eventually it shifts the second are
the the third piece that’s been
incredibly helpful in that I just really
have to give a shout out to is
meditation and mindfulness every single
person that I studied who seemed to be
living a dialed-in life of peace and
purpose has some sort of meditation
practice on board I believe it’s one of
a handful of things literally that may
have saved my life
it is definitely not the first thing
that falls off my plate anymore related
to that and a little newer is just the
practice of becoming aware of the
present moment and I’m realizing I’m
actually doing that for the first time
since I got up here because I’ve been
nervous this practice of just noticing
the present moment is the single most
important and useful thing that I have
found to be able to release unnecessary
fear when I start to get spun around the
axle of how am I gonna pay that bill
what’s she gonna think of me when she
finds out dot dot dot
coming back to present moment helps me
to cipher which is completely out of my
control and I might as well just quit
waste and energy on and what actually
merits some action and the final tool
that I will share here today
it’s a huge topic all by itself but it’s
just really getting down to the nitty
gritty of what our core beliefs are I’ll
give you one example I fairly recently
realized that I’ve had a lifelong belief
that life is hard but by god I’m not
gonna let it beat me
I am tough and I am resilient because
that’s what daddy prided me on being and
guess what I have created a life it’s a
beautiful life that I’m grateful for but
it’s a life where I have had to be tough
and resilient and I don’t want to
anymore I don’t want to have to fight my
way through life I want to be able to
love my way through life I’m flipping
I think in our culture it is incredibly
easy to just be saturated with a
pervasive sense of not enough miss and
fear this is what drives us to
distraction it’s what costs us our peace
it’s what prevents us from doing perhaps
our greatest acts of good and
contribution it’s also what drives war
and the destruction of our planet and
then tells us we’re too small to do
anything about it
I now genuinely believe that we will not
be our most effective in our outer work
with our families in our careers and the
causes that we care about until we clean
up our inner work our inner environment
by becoming much more consciously aware
of what’s what’s driving our decisions
and our reactions I have seen the magic
in this over and over and over in my own
life in my relationships in the work I
do with my clients there is nothing to
lose by losing identification with ego I
started out this talk saying that ego
had destroyed me that’s not completely
true
it was my lack of awareness that
destroyed me and the me it destroyed
wasn’t real it was a construct an image
and identity that I had created and it
hurt like hell when it blew up I’m not
saying it didn’t and John and I are
still massively rebuilding legally
financially occasionally from media
challenges but here I stand my life is
immeasurably richer more magical my
heart is opened so much wider and I
never could have imagined how good that
would feel and I’m so much better able
to stay peaceful no matter what is
swirling around in my life as that
started to take hold John would
sometimes go who are you anyway in like
a good way
I used to believe that that shiny
carefully put together exterior was
protecting me it was actually robbing me
Eckhart Tolle a has said that
identification with ego is a monstrous
act of reductionism in this human part
of our existence we have a chance to
live two lives there’s the one spent
getting up to the point where we deeply
question who and what we really are and
there is the beautiful ones spent
expanding and opening beyond that and we get to choose
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