Find Peace in Chaos with Udo Erasmus and Linda Kreter
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Welcome to Wise Health for Women Radio with Linda Prater. Women are pressed daily to give more, learn more, and be more, often at the expense of mind, body, or spirit. Each week with intriguing guests and topics, we'll bring you fresh ways to view your limited time, encouraging a shift to new, healthier perspectives. Wise Health for Women Radio, helping women thrive. And now here's your host, Linda Prater.

Good morning and welcome to Wise Health for Women Radio. I'm Linda Crater and we have a fascinating guest today who's going to talk to us about how to find or create peace in chaotic times.

And we are joined today by Udo Erasmus, who's a health, wellness, spiritual and human nature educator who has innate curiosity about health and well-being and how to find it. And of course, part of that is finding calm and peace when there really isn't a lot to find common peace with today.

or you can make choices to do so. So Udo, welcome to the program. Oh, thank you for having me on. This is going to be fun. It is going to be fun because I think that the tumultuous times we live in

are very difficult to manage. The last five years in particular have just brought us challenges, created divisions and fractures, and there are now wars everywhere. And it is just really a difficult time. How would you describe the times we're living in right now? Good luck with that. Yeah, well, you know,

I think there's a word missing here, and that's choice. Absolutely. Because you can look at everything that's going wrong in the world, but how about if we look at what's going right in the world? Like, for instance, your breathing. Right. Like, for instance, you can speak. Your brain is working. Your body is working. Life is working. Life on the planet everywhere is working. The trees are working. The trees are not having any wars.

The creatures are just going about their business. And only humans make choices to spend an enormous amount of money and time making weapons to kill each other. And one of the things that gets to me, I live in Canada. We spent $9.5 billion in Ukraine on the war. And we've spent $0 on peace at home.

It's similar here in America. I want to add to your things about choice. Your word choice is very, very important because one thing that people don't often realize that if you recognize something but don't make effort to change it, that too is a choice. Yep. Yep. Because you'll be doing something else instead. Right.

And so there's always something going on. What would it be like to practice peace? I don't know a single culture or a single nation that even asks that question. And frankly, what it takes is nothing. If 8 billion people right now just sat down and did nothing, there would be no war. That's true. But when in history has there been zero conflicts?

Not in my lifetime. Is it about time that we started cultivating it? We've never have for 200,000 years we've been living here. And we'll always, you know, and it's part of the design of human nature that your senses will always be attracted to change on the outside world. Because you have to assess it. You have to say, is this friend, is this foe? Do I run? Do I embrace it? Or do I ignore it because it's irrelevant to my survival? And we're doing that all the time.

But the peace that we wish would drift down on us without any effort is actually the core of our own existence, and it's the core of all existence, and it is the foundation on which the universe and each of us was created. That peace is everywhere.

So this seems to be the rarest commodity. It is actually the most massive commodity in the universe. It's like space. And the peace is not affected. The peace is not affected by change. That's its nature. And we each carry that peace within us. But we have to be willing to go there

in order to experience it. So now we have to bring our focus, instead of going out to change, we have to stop, bring our focus in, get good at bringing it in, because it takes practice to get good at that. And then we could literally at will go to the peace within us that is always there no matter what's going on on the outside. That's part of, it's built into human nature. Not only that, inside of that peace,

is an unconditional empowering love that is called life, that comes from the sun. It's actually life is a fraction of solar energy. And that energy loves the body unconditionally 24/7, 365 lifelong. And then the shine of that, I call it inspired purpose.

If your focus is inside, in the energy that is your life, that is unconditional love, you will radiate that into the world because that's what happens. Our state of being or our emotional state automatically comes to expression.

And so as you look at the people around you today, as I'm looking at the people around me or who I spent time with over the weekend, I

We can do this one person at a time and we can work on ourselves. But I think it's a well-known fact that we can't change other people except by our own example and that they find it then attractive. So I like to think... Right, other than by inspiring them or influencing them. Correct. And often people will say, well, I'm attracted to...

that person because they're lit from within. They have a light within them. And I firmly believe in that. It's just that we're hitting walls like shields when you try and engage with some people. And I blame some of this on the pandemic and the mandates and the masks and all of that. But I also think that people are scared and fear does not bring out the best in people.

Right. And right next to the fear that you have in your head, and then obviously the emotion in your bodies, right next to that is complete peace. And that's where the choice comes in. Exactly. The peace in you and the unconditional love in you are not affected by anything going on on the outside. Not even affected by anything going on in your head. Which is a very gnarly place. So draw me a picture of how you see...

Moving further into the peace and the love portion of life, because that just is phenomenal. The energy comes from the sun. I mean, all of this I agree with. I think it's not easy living in groups of people, but without people, we lack something too. So it's important to bring it in as much as we possibly can. Mm-hmm.

Paint a picture. Yeah, and you already painted it, right? Oh. So the other word, other than choice, is focus. Okay. Where your focus goes will determine what your life is like. You want a life of peace? Yes.

Focus on peace. It's within you. If you don't know how to bring your focus inside, well, let me go back. There was a time when you were in your mother's body and you didn't know that you had a mother. You didn't know there was an outside world. You were alive. You were growing. You were floating in a little tank. I call it the Buddha tank.

Right. You were literally, because there was nothing to do and there was nowhere to go and everything was taken care of and it was pretty safe in there. So your focus at that time, where was it? It wasn't outside because you didn't know there was an outside. It was at rest inside, in life and behind that in awareness.

And you spent nine months there. It was boring as hell, you know, considering the way we live now, right? It was the most boring place and you were not bored. You were in bliss. You were in light. You were in deep meditation. You were in a floating tank. You're right. Yeah. So you're, and yeah, you know, what do we, now we put, go into those tanks, you know, you know, why? Because

It actually, it's good. It's nice in there. It's inside of you. It's unbelievable magnificence. Unbelievable. Life is awesome. Being alive is awesome. It is. So then we got born. Okay. And then we had to get to know the world. And our focus went out into the world to monitor change through our senses because we need to do that for survival. And then we got in doing that, we went from being present inside us

absent outside, we gradually drifted to be being present outside and absent inside. And that's where heartache began. Our disconnection from ourselves that leads to discontent. And then out of that discontent comes, you know, it's a feeling, it's an uncomfortable feeling. Out of that come unpleasant thoughts and words and actions and consequences. And at the same time, we have a heartache

That heartache is actually a gift because it's our call to come home to the peace in the core of our being. Now, I have a question for you. Yeah. I've often heard people say, I just want peace. And my response often, because I sing in our praise team, is I search for harmony because then you still have different parts, but together you

they sound wonderful. It adds a richness to life. And oftentimes when people say, I want peace, they're warring with someone, some people, some group. And if you can seek harmony with recognition and awareness,

Sometimes that's easier for people to understand. Does that make sense to you, what I just said? Well, yeah. When I was six years old, I came out of a war. I was born during the Second World War. And I was a refugee kid when we were two years old. The communists were chasing us in tanks and trucks, and the allies were shooting at us from planes. They were using us refugees as target practice on dirt roads, in horse-drawn hay wagons, mothers with young children, no military presence.

So I and I was a very shy as a kid and and I never felt safe. And I became obsessed with at six years old when I listened to arguments and they were so they seemed really trivial, but they get so into it said, man, there must be a way that we can live in harmony. And I'm going to find out how.

And that's been my obsession with peace and love and life and all of that is part of, yeah, it is possible to live in harmony. But it has to begin not between us. It has to begin within us. Within us. Yeah. So the peace is within us. The love is within us. It's there. It's full fledged there. Our focus is not there. Our focus is in the world of change.

And we are often focused on the negative. The body does and the mind does tend to go toward the negative. That's the survival instinct in us. But when you watch people spiraling and ruminating, you don't spiral or ruminate in a positive fashion. It brings you in a downward spiral. We're disconnected from peace and love and we're discontent. Right. So out of discontent, you'll spread discontent. So where it starts...

is with heartache. Everybody knows what heartache is. I've got 10 pages of different words for heartache. That's the thing that happened when we disconnected from our core from inside after we were born. And now we have lots of triggers for it. A girlfriend dumps you, you feel blue. That's a word for heartache. Or your grandma dies and you were really close to her.

Now you call it sorrow or grief or sadness. Or you're addicted to actions. Always got to do, do, do something. Even though you're supposed to be a human being, we've become human beings. Matter of human doing. I love that. So then you're sitting just with nothing to do and you get really restless. Well, that's heartache too. It's the same place. It's an uncomfortable feeling in your chest.

And what that is, is the greatest gift that you've been given other than being alive, because it's your heart calling your focus to come back home inside to yourself. But what we do with heartache, because nobody tells us that this is a gift and we should sit with it and sit quietly with it and see if we can't slip like a hair's breadth behind it, where our peace and our love live.

So we think of it as, oh, no, I don't want to feel that. So we either distract ourselves from it or we ignore it or we deny it or we try to explain it away by some fuckabunga theory we pull over our head or we blame it on somebody.

There's a lot of that. But that heartache, it's a normal, natural, necessary thing in human life. So you don't want to judge it. But what you need to do with heartache is to sit with it and be quiet in it and accept it and feel it. And grow from it. And appreciate it. Because it takes you out of your head, makes you simple, grounds you,

That's a huge amount, how to get you out of your head. Well, heartache gets you out of your head. And then you sit with it, and less than the hair spreads behind that is your reconnection to yourself, to life, to peace, to love, to inspiration, to wisdom, to reality, the deep reality of existence.

to God, to nature. Right. I was just going to bring up nature because I think oftentimes when we are low or blue or have sorrow or grief, going outdoors and seeing this big, beautiful world we live in, whether it's pouring rain or there's sunshine on autumn leaves,

It's bigger than we are. And while I have a very strong faith foundation and I look up, not everyone does, but nature is there for all of us. And it makes a big difference. And you use the word grounding, but that's a real thing. Yeah, yeah. But I would say in terms of this, instead of going out to nature, we need to go in to nature.

Interesting. Okay. Because that's where our God lives. That's where our Christ lives. That's where our Buddha lives. That's where our Krishna lives. Life, the solar energy fraction that is life, is also Christ. True. Because God is love. So that being that Christians call Christ, that Buddhists call Buddha, that Hindus call Krishna or Ram, that being is life itself.

That would be the collective word. And life is that being in every human being. Life is the master of the body. It's even the master. Why? Because it weighs nothing. It runs everything. It is omnipresent in your body. It is omnipotent in your body. And it is omniscient in your body. That's a definition of God. Every human being is born with that inside of them.

And if you fail to go within, you will go without. Yeah, that's right. But it really is true. I mean, there are an awful lot of people who have had trauma, but these days the answer appears to be more medication as opposed to looking inward. Or if you're smart...

you know, taking advantage of holistic or whatever it is that you need to get back on track. But it's not as simple as it appeared to be, at least for me, years ago. You have trauma. Everyone has trauma of some sort. Yeah, everyone has trauma. There's no trauma-free childhood. No, you cannot avoid it. No, and the child is not...

It's not the child's fault that it had trauma, but it's the child's responsibility as they grow up or when they grow up to deal with it. And how do you deal with it? If you go deep enough inside, like out of your head and out of your memories, into the life energy, into the divine energy, if you go deep enough into that, the peace and the love,

We're never affected by any trauma. So there is a there is so because trauma only goes so far, you know, you can have it physical, it can be emotional, it can be sexual, physical, obviously, it could be mental, it could be social, and it could be environmental. Those are the realms of change.

But there is no trauma in peace. There is no trauma in the peace that is your universal essence. There is no trauma in the unconditional love called life that is your individual essence. There is no trauma in that. So the way to deal with trauma is, okay, you may have to deal with some things.

on a mental, emotional, social level. But ultimately you have to find your way back to your life and then live your life from life for life. That's the cure for trauma. So when people define themselves by their trauma, they're limiting themselves.

Yes. And I think there's a point where, you know, whatever the process is, could be grief or it could be, you know, cognitive, you know, considerations, you know, looking at the thinking and looking at the thoughts and, you know.

building better thoughts, all of that. But fundamentally, and in my view, the easiest way is when you feel the heartache, go into the heartache, get into the reality of the beauty of your own existence. And then from there, through insight, you will rebuild your life. And then trauma will be a memory rather than something that... I know that from the war. The war ended when I was two.

I was still complaining about it when I was 26. It's like, yeah, well, what do you expect? I was born in a war. And then one day I was sitting on a porch in the sun and it occurred to me that through all my dramas and all my traumas, life took perfect care of me. And I had never given it a moment's thought, an expression of gratitude. And I thought, oh, my God.

I've been perfectly cared for through all this stuff on the outside that, you know, should not ever happen, but did. Right. And maybe I ought to become friends.

With whatever that was that took perfect care of me. And it doesn't matter what you call it. You can call it Christ and you can call it life and you can call it God and you can call it anything. And you can call it whatever you call it. But there is something in you that takes perfect care of you. Even even the warriors, you know, on the battlefield. There's peace within them. There's peace between them. There's peace around them. There's peace above and below them.

but that's not where their focus is. Their focus is, you're my enemy, I'm going to kill you. And the other guy is saying, you're my enemy, I'm going to kill you. If they were in touch with the peace within them, they would put down their stupid

Weapons. And they would say, listen, how can we live together? Do you remember from... What do your kids need? How can we work together? Instead of spending our energy making life worse for each other, how can we spend our energy making life better for everybody?

And it's completely in the realm of possibility. The peace is already there. It is, but how do you foment that change? How do you foment that change for people? You can do it yourself. You can go inside. You can walk through the trauma. What do they say? If you're going through hell, keep on going to the other side. There's truth in that. And there's heaven and hell as well. Of course. Of course.

So you have to take heaven with you when you go through hell. You get both, exactly. And you keep your focus on heaven. You do what you need to do. Right. But don't let go. Well, I think what you're describing... Don't let go of your goal because your goal is to have the peace. Well, and we also are perhaps moving from...

what is seen by many as survival. But we need to move into thriving again. Yeah, well, we're not going to survive anyway. Well, no one's getting out of here alive. We know that. Yeah, exactly. So focusing on survival as our goal is a worthwhile but losing proposition. Exactly. So if you're going to die anyway, you might as well thrive while you're here.

Exactly. I mean, one of the things I repeat to myself frequently is if not now, when? This is when you're saving, I don't know, something for a special day. Well, isn't today a special day because you woke up?

And we were given another day. 100%. And when you say, well, how do we actually make, well, how do we make that a topic? Well, we're making it a topic. You and I are making it a topic right now. I don't know how many people will listen to this

So the point is, do you do what you can? But the most, most, most, most important thing always is like when I got up today, it's nine o'clock where I am. It was nine o'clock. It's 930. So I got up at seven in the morning because before I came on this on the show, I

And I do that not just because I'm on a show and we're talking about peace, but I do that every day. I will get up two hours. I will wake up two hours before I need to do something. And I will spend one hour in a practice of going inside. I joke about it. I say, look, when I wake up, I like to check in to see if I'm still there, because if I'm not there anymore, then there's no point in getting up.

But what I do is I actually go and I connect to the peace, to the love inside. It's a stillness practice. I do it every day. I've been doing it for over 50 years. And I'm telling you that when I say to you that peace is inside of you, I know that from my own experience. Every day that I go there, peace is there waiting for me. But peace won't chase me into the world.

You know, love won't chase me into the world. They're within me. I can connect to them. I feel unconditionally loved. So guess what? I feel cared for. So now I now say, OK, well, if I'm cared for, then what's left to do? Well, the only thing left to do is to help or to do, you know, or to do what needs to be done or to figure out how can I make the biggest splash for good that's possible in the time I have.

That's worthy.

It's the most powerful drive in every human being. And then if we don't know that we are taken care of and we don't connect to that, then we go to somewhere and say, well, he took that and I wanted that. And so because he took that and I wanted that, and I think if I had that, then I would feel better. And if he gets in the way, then if I can remove him, then I'll feel better.

And that's how we're running it. - That's how so many people live. And the other thing is waiting. If I get this promotion, I'll be happy. If I'm able to buy that car, I'll be happy. The time to be happy and at peace

is now. It is today. Again, if not now, when? There's an unreasonable happiness that is built into life. So you don't need a reason. So you go to that happiness when you're happy, then that happiness shines out of you. It's not based on, you can be completely poor

You know, some taxi driver was saying, well, you know, because you're rich, that's why you're happy. I said, no, I'm rich because I was happy when I was poor because I started off poor and I was still happy. And but that that doesn't resonate with some people. They just can't get it if they're not striving for the stuff.

And then there's also an awful lot here in America, don't know if it's the same in Canada, of so-and-so got that, why didn't I? And it's like listening to toddlers before they learn about sharing and caring.

And I'm not trying to make this trite, but there is an awful lot of envy and strife in the world that doesn't need to be there. Right. But if you, so if I take all of those things we do that we don't need to do and that are, that are stupid things to do, you always, if you can trace every one of them, I've used to watch the news like big time for every problem on the planet and

You can always trace that problem back to individual disconnection and discontent coming from that connection. That's true. So then the answer to all of them is like another story, right? I gave a talk on peace once, and there were about 200 people there. And at the end of it, a woman put up her hand, and she said, I hope with all this talk about peace, you're also against violence against women.

And I was like, well, what a beautiful question. So I said to her, you know, I have never seen or read about or heard about an act of violence perpetrated against a woman by anyone, man or woman or child, in a moment in which they felt peace.

That's a great answer. And if peace makes violence unnecessary or unthinkable or impossible, then shouldn't we maybe, if we want to address violence against women, shouldn't we maybe look at the big picture and work on the peace? Because when I'm content, I don't have a problem with anybody. Right. And when I'm discontent, I've got a problem with everybody. What did she say to that? She...

Nothing. Nothing. No, because it's so clear, right? Right. Exactly. But you notice how everything is in a special topic, a subset of a topic. There is peace, period. Not peace over here and peace over there, but

piece just just one whole piece I will I love what you're talking about and I think it's very important that we start with ourselves spread it outside as best we can light ourselves up from within and I want to make sure that people know where to find more information about you yeah

You want to give your website? Yeah, UdoErasmus.com. Can you spell that? Well, the short way to do it is TheUdo.com, T-H-E-U-D-O. Just TheUdo, not your last name also?

No, just theudo.com. Okay, that's certainly short and sweet. Also, I'm on Facebook and I'm on LinkedIn. If you go to Google and you punch in Udo, U-D-O, it's not even a four-letter word, I show up on the first page because there are not a lot of Udos on there. There are not a lot of Udos around. That's absolutely true. It was...

it was fun to look you up though, because you have such wonderful messages. And I, I love how you branch in between, you know, nutrition and, um, you've created amazing supplements that benefit life. Yeah. We can talk about that too. We can do another show, um, about harmony and peace, but thank you for sharing that today because we need to start working on that big time. We should never have stopped, but yeah,

It's more important than ever. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we end? Yeah, you know, life is a gift. It's filled with peace. It's filled with love. It's filled with inspiration. Your heart already aches for it. Talk to your heartache. And keep on walking. Thank you so much. Talk to your heartache and find your peace. There you go. Well, thank you for starting my day with some peace and some interesting discourse.

And don't forget to go to theudo.com. And we really are grateful for learning of your wisdom today and to the rest of you listening today. Find your peace. Go within and build it one person at a time, starting with yourself. We'll see you next week. And thanks so much for listening to us today. Make it a great week ahead.

Thank you for tuning in today. You can find more shows at wisehealthforwomenradio.com.