Mary Lemmer came on to share her emotional story of seemingly everything working against her; her body giving in, her relationship ending, her business coming apart, losing her dad's approval, all in a very short period of time. Physically and emotionally, these were painful experiences for Mary and yet, what if they were exactly what she needs? What if this is the moment she was waiting for?

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“There's no North Star. There's no right way. There's only your way, and that is terrifying and
liberating all at the same moment.”
Welcome to the Reboot Podcast.
I can play two songs on the guitar: one is a relic from my high school and college days, and that's
Crash by Dave Mathews; the other is much more meaningful, serves as a tribute to my mom, and
has also been a moving song for me at certain times in my life, and that's Blackbird by The
Beetles. It was written by Paul McCartney as a hopeful essay on the Civil Rights Movement and
ending segregation in America, but it's also had many other meanings and inspiration for me at
different times in my life. From the very moment my mom pulled away from me in my freshman
college dorm, to more recently, just watching my daughter work up to her first steps. "Take these
broken wings and learn to fly. All your life. You were only waiting for this moment to arise.
Blackbird, fly into the light of a dark, black night."To me, it has always symbolized that moment
when everything in our world, our life, our mind, our heart, our body are telling us, it is time to
trust, trust ourselves; take these broken wings and leap into the night.
Sometimes we are so caught up in this cycle that what we are going through is simply happening
to us, that we are helpless twigs in the stream of life, and all misfortune is just bad luck. But in
that view, we miss the greater opportunity. What if this is the moment we have been waiting for?
The clearing, the opening, the chance to truly let go of the choices and behaviors we have
outgrown; what if this is the moment to take the broken wings and be free?
Hey again, this is Dan Putt from Reboot.
When I heard Mary Lemmer's conversation with Jerry, which is today's podcast, I immediately
thought of Blackbird. Mary is a listener and she became a guest. She came on to share her
emotional story of seemingly everything working against her; her body giving in, her
relationship ending, her business coming apart, losing her dad's approval, all in a very short
period of time. Physically and emotionally, these were painful experiences for Mary and yet,
what if they were exactly what she needs? What if this is the moment she was waiting for?
**
A Reboot Circle is a hand-selected group of peers in matching roles, who meet in supportive,
Reboot coach facilitated sessions twice a month. We just recently started accepting applications
for new roles including Head of Product, CTO, People Ops and VP in Marketing groups, and this
is for the very first time. So, what are these groups really like? We asked a current member to
share his experience with Reboot coach and facilitator, Andy Crissinger.
"Hi, my name is Bobby Brannigan; I'm co-founder and CEO at Mercato. One of the biggest
challenges that I have faced as an entrepreneur is in navigating the waters of solving hard
problems while under extreme stress. You can't be open and honest with everyone about your
business because you don’t want to scare people away, you don’t want to get people nervous
because that is going to affect their ability to do what they have to do. At the same time, there are
not a lot of people that actually could relate to these situations. So, having a group that you could

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turn to is extremely beneficial, and allows you not only to spend more time thinking about these
issues and how to better solve them, but hearing yourself explain them out loud and getting
people to question different routes that you might think about taking and that kind of stuff is
invaluable. It's been great to have that group to really think, in a much deeper sense, with people
that are sharing the same challenge, and they are really trying to grow and really get out of that
comfort zone just as I am. That's been really excellent for me."
So, who do you turn to? What if you had a community of peers who are committed to supporting
you in solving your greatest business challenges? A group that knows intimately, the very
challenges you face every single day in your role, a group you knew you could always count on.
There is great power in knowing you are not alone. Learn more about Reboot Circles and apply
for a group in your role at reboot.io/circles.
**
"You do not have to be a fire for every mountain blocking you. You could be water and soft-river
your way to freedom too." – Nayirrah Waheed, a poet.
Jerry Colonna: Hey Mary, thank you so much for coming on and joining us on the
podcast here. Normally when we do this, I do this over Skype, and I'm working
with someone and I'm looking at them in the video, but today, we are in the same
room together. Enough of the programming, Mary, tell us who you are.
Mary Lemmer: Thanks Jerry, and thanks for having me, it's great to be here in person as
well and meet Reboot, the team who has been so instrumental in my life. So, I'm
Mary and my quick story is, I am labeled as an entrepreneur. Since I was 13 years
old, I started a gelato business and then got into more high-tech ventures, led me
to venture capital for a few years, and then later [Inaudible 0:06:06] and then
most recently, started a company called Foodscape, which helps people grow and
share food with their communities. I learned about Reboot from a friend, who
recommended I listen to it when I was going through a hard time, and listening to
the podcast really helps me through my own struggles. One of the guests inspired
me to reach out to Reboot, and that's what led me here today.
Jerry: And what guest was that?
Mary: Zoe Weintraub.
Jerry: Oh yeah, Zoe and her super power.
Mary: Yes. She's a super person.
Jerry: She is a super person. Zoe was also someone who was a listener who really – I
think she wrote in with a question which was, "What is my super power?" which
then lead to – I don’t know if you know of this connection because we were
talking before the recording began that Zoe introduced you to Kent.

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Mary: Yes.
Jerry: And Kent was also a guest and Kent's emailed question was, "Do I even have a
super power?" It's kind of sweet how the larger community that is now forming
around some of these topics really helping themselves, and that is really
important. So, you kind of found the podcast at a time when things were kind of
tough.
Mary: Yes.
Jerry: Would it be helpful to talk through that?
Mary: Yeah, I think it would be really helpful. Starting in July, on my birthday actually,
July 4th, I was on a hiking trip, and on the way back down, with five miles left to
go, I slipped on the trail and fell on a broken, redwood tree, and busted my knee. I
was in a lot of pain and felt myself about to pass out, and I told the person that I
was with that I was going to pass out. So, I sat there and the next thing I knew, I
wake up conscious and his finger is in my mouth. I was like, "What happened?
What's going on?" And he said, "You didn’t just pass out, you had a seizure."
Jerry: Oh my, so he had his fingers in your mouth to keep you from biting your tongue.
Mary: Exactly. I was convulsing and biting my tongue. So I lay there, drank some water
for a bit and then we walked slowly down the mountain. That was just the
beginning to summarize, like two days later, that guy who was with me, who was
my boyfriend at that time and I broke up –
Jerry: Two days later?
Mary: Two days later. We had been living together, we were in a serious relationship,
and then that same week, I broke my hand pretty significantly. I was borrowing a
friend's car that got hit while it was parked. Then the following week, I get a call
from my family that my grandmother has been having strokes and has been in an
out of the hospital. So at this point, I am kind of like a zombie, just all this stuff
happened in my life in a very short order. I went to Michigan to spend some time
with my family and things with my business, I really didn’t make much progress
because I was paralyzed.
Jerry: This was Foodscape at the time?
Mary: Foodscape at the time, and I just was in this holding pattern of – I didn’t really
feel like my mind was in any place to make any progress. I was really negative
about everything. I just was like, "What's the purpose of this? This isn’t working,
that's not working." Then I came back to San Francisco, and was invited to this
marketplace founder event that Greylog puts on, and off the record, they brought

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in one of the founders of Uber, Reid Hoffman was there, Peter Thiel and Joe
Gabby of Airbnb. I almost didn’t go to this event because I was really in a place
where I didn’t want to be around people, but I went. I'm really glad I did because
Joe of Airbnb read a letter to himself that he wished would have four years ago or
seven years ago whenever he started Airbnb. He was very vulnerable and shared
some of the struggles that helped me realize, at least temporarily, that these
struggles are real and I wasn’t alone. My feeling of loneliness started to lift a little
bit until the next month where I was having severe abdominal pain. I remember
being in San Jose for an urban farm happy hour, and at the Caltrain station
afterwards waiting for my Caltrain, doubled over in pain. I hadn’t been in this
much pain since I had my appendicitis several years ago. I knew my appendix
was already out, so it couldn’t be that. So, I'm on the Caltrain, in severe pain, and
trying to tell myself that I should probably go to the hospital, but also realizing
that I had very poor health insurance at the time. As many entrepreneurs probably
can relate to, there's not a ton of options and they are either very expensive or not
that great. I'm a very healthy person, so I wasn’t thinking I would need great
health insurance. So, I didn’t go to the hospital. I said, I'll just sleep it off, I'll be
fine in the morning, I'll go to a doctor in the morning and just pay the co-pay. So,
I went to the doctor the next day, I felt a little bit better and the doctor told me that
she thought that I had a ruptured cyst.
Jerry: Oh geez.
Mary: I had to immediately go get an exam for that, and sure enough, I did. The good
thing about that was that they were able to identify it, and it was something that
would just take care of itself. But the thing that wasn’t resolved was why did this
happen. That was tough. So, my health wasn’t in a good place, I was very
fatigued, I was feeling depressed, I had this business that I just didn’t really know
what to do with, and I had to almost force myself to get up in the morning to do
the things that I knew I needed to do. I decided in November, to put myself in
this, what I call, state of delusion and tell myself, okay, from November to this
date in January, I'm not going to worry about whether this business is going to
work or not, and whether the margins are right, or if I can raise a ton of money for
this or whatever. I'm just going to do the things that I need to do to get people to
sign up and execute this product that we needed to launch. I did that, and it went
pretty well. We had a great reception, we had great traction. I pulled myself out in
January and looked at the reality of the situation. I looked at my health, I looked
at where we were with the business, I looked at the potential of going forward and
made a tough decision to – what I compare to pulling a nail out of my head, and
deciding to not go raise more money for it. Even though we had unit profitability
and had people interested in this, the picture of what does this look like two years
from now or five years from now was never a place where the business model and
the margins could support actually making this profitable. I come from the world
of high-growth, high-tech, but also come from the world of building a gelato
business, that is profitable in year one.

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Jerry: Right, a sort of classic, bootstrap mid-western.
Mary: Yes.
Jerry: As a Brooklyn-ite, I'm starting to understand you mid-westerners which is you
know, there's a feet on the ground touching into reality that you guys have, which
is, "Hey, forget about what headlines we may be able to generate, or even how
much money we could raise, is this a business?" It sounds like you were coming
to the conclusion that it's not a business, or there wasn’t a business in that
incarnation.
Mary: Yeah. I've been grinding at that for 18 months and realizing that if I spent another
18 months at it, what would happen to my health? A lot of the health issues I was
having are related to stress. Stress is a really powerful force in our life and some
people's bodies handle stress differently. My stress has put me in a place where I
have stuff that I need to take care of, or ten years from now, I'm going to be in a
place that I'm not going to want to be.
Jerry: Did they ever find out the reason behind the cyst?
Mary: They had some theories about it. I had to wait to go to the doctor until I changed
my health insurance, because I paid for all those tests out of pocket so, I waited
till January, then my doctor left the practice. I had to find a new doctor and finally
was able to get the test done. They diagnosed me with hypothyroidism which
means my thyroid is low, which is what changed my metabolism, which caused
the depression, which caused the fatigue, which is related to hormonal imbalance.
My hormones aren’t at the right level, they are still trying to figure out what's
going on. I have some abnormal kidney level, so they are figuring this out. All
stuff that I can't just mentally think away, it's there and I have to deal with it. It's
hard to prioritize your health with you are trying to prioritize a company.
Jerry: Yeah, you know, a recent podcast with a British named Richard Hughes-Jones,
we were talking about his encounter with cancer, and there was a line in there that
I was particularly proud of which was, "You can't think your way out of a life-
threatening illness."
Mary: I remember that podcast because it aired the week that I found out about this. As I
was mentioning to Dan earlier, it's eerie to me, how the timing of the podcasts are
so aligned with whatever is going on in my own life.
Jerry: We do that purposefully.
Mary: He said there's planning on that. I'm like, you guys have ESP or something.

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Jerry: So, there is and you are feeling a direct relationship between the condition, the
hypothyroidism – let's call it the activation of the hypothyroidism and stress. Is
there a relationship between those two?
Mary: Yeah, they supposed that it could be that my adrenals were over producing, which
can affect – because your hormones have to over-produce for something and like
fight-or-flight that goes on inside of us. I'm the healthiest person I know, if you
ask any of my friends. Mary eats super healthy, she exercises –
Jerry: Gelato notwithstanding.
Mary: Yeah, I can't even eat gelato because I'm lactose intolerant and so – or I can, I just
would get sick. That really surprised me, that stress was – because I had this
underlying stress in my life, and with everything that happened, and everything I
was dealing with just added to that. You have a baseline stress when you are
starting a company; there's a ton of stuff that happens that you have to deal with,
and then life still goes on. I had all these things happen in my life, and I just really
didn’t know what to do with myself. For the first time, I let myself feel and feel
sad because I grew up in an environment where "Be tough, don’t cry, you'll be
okay." I was a competitive horseback rider; I was like, you fall off the horse, you
get back on. I found myself just wanting to cry for no apparent reason, and that
was frustrating to me because I was like, I’m fine, everything is fine, I'll be okay,
but yet I wanted to be crying all the time. I thought, what's wrong with me?
What's going on? Why can't I just push myself through this, like everything else
I've been able to push myself through in life? At some point, you have to let
yourself feel and feel sadness in order to heal. I felt like I had lost a little bit of my
identity, I think, during a lot of this because I lost someone who was really close
to me in my life, and then –
Jerry: Who was that?
Mary: My ex-boyfriend. Then I lost my feeling, and feeling like I was in control of my
health and that things were going really well, and then I lost what I thought was
going to be a great business because of facing reality. And I feel like I lost my
relationship with my dad through a lot of this.
Jerry: What happened there?
Mary: I went home in January after the holidays, after I had pulled myself out of my
state of delusion. I was home for three weeks, saw my dad a few times during that
time. And on one of those times, he told me that I was a disappointment to him
for basically not having the same beliefs that he does, when it comes to religion. I
was raised in a Catholic household, I went to a Catholic high school and I don’t
go to Mass every weekend. I am not living a life that my dad wants me to live. To
hear him verbally express that and tell me those words, "You are a
disappointment" it haunt me. I go through these mental cycles of feeling, like I'm

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disappointing people in my life and disappointed my investors. I disappoint my
friends every time I choose to do something work-related than hang out with them
and now I've disappointed my dad. That's a hard weight to carry.
Jerry: Yeah, it's a really hard weight to carry. It's been quite a year.
Mary: Yeah.
Jerry: Just take a deep breath and just feel what would be helpful for you, right now;
what would be helpful to spend some time with?
Mary: I feel like I have been floundering, and just over the past several months, have had
to make some big decisions, and now at a point where I have people look at me a
certain way and they label me as, you know, this entrepreneur and I'm like really
confused about what that means and what that means for me. In this position
where I have things in my life that are working, and you know, people are like,
"Why don’t you just go and do the gelato business? Do that, because that's
working." I think I'm struggling to find purpose again, because I had this purpose
when I started Foodscape, and I had this big vision, and I was so driven to work
on this because of the purpose that I believed in. Throughout all the hits that I
have gotten over the past 18 months, and especially with the mental part of it and
just feeling I can't – I feel like I've lost purpose. I had been going through a
process of trying to find that again, because I know when I have purpose, I can set
the world on fire. Right now, I'm struggling to find that. So, it would be helpful to
help find purpose again.
Jerry: So, before we end, we'll circle back to that question. I think it would be really
helpful to go back in time a little bit. I'm thinking back to falling off the mountain,
which, in the experience of telling this story, is kind of like a starting point if you
will. Does that resonate with you?
Mary: Definitely.
Jerry: I have a little story I would tell you. 2007 and 2008 were tough years for me.
Tough and interesting. Training to be a coach, I was doing a lot of exploration on
my own, had gone on a number of different retreats with different teachers. I was
also kind of crazy and I did this trip where I crossed the ice cap in Greenland, the
Polar ice cap in Greenland. 50 below 0 every night, camping, skiing and a couple
of days out, four of us were skiing across, in this sort of blinding snowstorm, and
I crossed what turned out to be an ice bridge, and it collapsed. I was pulling about
200 pounds behind me and I fell in a crevice. It took them about two hours to find
me and pull me out. I really busted up my hip, and I had to take an eight-hour
snowmobile trip to be air-lifted out to Iceland. Couple of months later, I found
myself in a retreat with a group called Animas Valley Institute. I had really felt
like the shit had been kicked out of me, and I couldn’t understand what was going
on – you are nodding, you know that feeling.

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Mary: Mm-hmm.
Jerry: One of the guides on that retreat said to me, "Remember when the earth pulled
you in?" And I said, "What?" "You know, when the earth got your attention by
dragging you into the crevice?" Yeah, now you're smiling.
Mary: Wow.
Jerry: Yeah. You know, sometimes life has this way of kind of slapping us up against
the head with a two by four. Another way, another expression of this, and those
listening to the podcast know, I often think of this quote from Parker Palmer's
book, Let Your Life Speak where Parker is talking about what his therapist said to
him when they were talking about his depression. Parker's therapist said to him,
"Parker, is it possible for you not to see that your depression is the hand of an
enemy, but the hand of a friend forcing you down to the ground?" Okay, now you
are smiling.
Mary: Yeah.
Jerry: Now, I'm not a Pollyanna, sugar-coating, see-the-silver-lining kind of person. In
fact, I'm probably a little too dark in life. But this last year, might also turn out to
be the year in which you really asked a much deer question of yourself, which is,
"Who the fuck am I?"
Mary: Yeah.
Jerry: Let's go back to that question around purpose for a moment. What was the phrase
you used when you have purpose? On fire, did you say?
Mary: Yeah. I can set the world on fire.
Jerry: Why? What does having purpose do for you?
Mary: Provides a North Star, a reason for running through walls, a reason for putting
200% into whatever I do.
Jerry: What does it do? What is a North Star?
Mary: It's a direction –
Jerry: Yeah, you are looking up.
Mary: Yeah, I'm looking up into the right.
Jerry: It's a direction.

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Mary: Yeah. It provides this – I'm doing this to get there.
Jerry: Yeah.
Mary: There's a –
Jerry: So you are pointing your chest and you are looking up.
Mary: Yeah.
Jerry: And you are pointing up. So it's a path for you to get to someplace else.
Mary: Yeah, a path forward.
Jerry: What was the purpose in the gelato store?
Mary: To bring gelato to Michigan, because I couldn’t get it there as a kid.
Jerry: Okay, what was the purpose for Foodscape?
Mary: To improve access to fresh and healthy food for people, help them grow nutritious
food.
Jerry: Why is it so painful to know that your father doesn’t approve of your choices in
life?
Mary: I just always wanted to make him proud.
Jerry: Right. It's an incredibly human and understanding feeling. His pride in you, it's
like the North Star, isn’t it? It drives you.
Mary: Yeah.
Jerry: And when you lose sight of that North Star, you feel lost.
Mary: Yeah.
Jerry: So, when the earth knocked you on your ass and send you tumbling down the
mountain, and you ended a relationship, which I can pretty much guess wasn’t
working; if it ended two days after an accident, it wasn’t really working; was it?
Mary: No.

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Jerry: No. So when the earth got your attention and said, "Mary, this life you are leading
is a little off," when your thyroid gripped you by the neck and said – or rather by
the gut, right?
Mary: Yeah.
Jerry: And said, "Mary, you are working so hard to get dad's approval" and it doesn’t
work, and here you are, what do I do? What do I do, Jerry? What if, what you are
looking for isn’t outside of you?
Mary: Then I have to find it on the inside.
Jerry: Yeah. What if this purpose isn’t about the people of Michigan? What if the
sadness that you feel, in your father's ill-judgment of you, is something to feel and
let go off? What if part of your purpose, is figuring out who Mary is, regardless of
those external North Stars?
Mary: Yeah.
Jerry: I could be wrong.
Mary: No, I think you are spot-on. I was listening to something recently which talked
about how, you know, we are not our body, but we still have our body. We are not
what we do, but we still do what we do. It's like, who are we and how do we
define ourselves? I think that there's like a lot of things that I would describe
myself as that don’t revolve around what I do.
Jerry: Right.
Mary: But yet, that's not always what people say.
Jerry: That's right. I was raised a Catholic as well. Like a lot of good Catholics, I
became an anti-Catholic because we always have a very complicated relationship,
and as I have gotten older and become a little bit more in touch with my innate
spirituality, I have come to appreciate so much of the beauty of Christianity,
which is different than the religions.
Mary: Agreed.
Jerry: One of the most troubling aspects of Buddhism for me – another quick story:
many people know that one of my earliest teachers is Ani Pema Chodron, who
just turned 80. When I first met Pema Chodron, I was at Lou Reid and Laurie
Anderson's apartment in Lower Manhattan, it's like this weird little vent for all
these sort of – the Buddhist mafia of New York was hanging out. I was at a
fundraiser, and Ani Pema comes in and she starts teaching on the nature of
groundlessness. I'm sort of sitting here and I'm like, "I got it, all things fall apart

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all the time everything is impermanent, everything is uncertain, I got it." And she
says, and some of you now are sitting there saying "I got it, I got it, I fully
understand it; except that your understanding of impermanence is itself
impermanent." And I blurt out, "Well, that's not fair." And she looks at me and
goes, "Catholic, right?"
Mary: Oh my gosh.
Jerry: What she knew that I was doing was I was looking for the catechism, I was
looking for the dogma, I was looking for the external source that was going to tie
it all together in a grand, unified theory of everything, so I didn’t have to worry
anymore. You are nodding; you know what I am talking about.
Mary: Yeah. You want the answers.
Jerry: Just get down to the answer!
Mary: Yeah.
Jerry: Because we did really well in school, didn’t we?
Mary: Yeah.
Jerry: Because we, very early on, usually day one, we figured out how to give the
teacher what the teacher wanted.
Mary: Yeah.
Jerry: Right?
Mary: Yes.
Jerry: And then we got our A, and then mom and dad were proud of us, and then we go
forward. Then I was confronted with a god all for reality Buddhism, which is also
known as the pathless path. What the fuck! You mean, I have to figure this out
myself?
Mary: There is no path.
Jerry: There is no path? There is no external path? There's no North Star? There's no
North Star. There's no right way. There's only your way. And that is terrifying and
liberating all at the same moment.
Mary: Things that are exciting and liberating are also terrifying.
Jerry: That's right. So, I could be wrong here, but I'm not.

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Mary: I don’t think you are.
Jerry: Right. When we build our companies for a purpose that's outside of us, when we
try to define our life and our self-worth for someone who is outside of us, we lead
to adrenal stress and collapse. I know from what I speak, my doctor did not like
my adrenal stress index last December. I know. Maybe this is your body saying,
"Mary, different way." Not that the way that you have been has been wrong, but
it's not your path. Not that Foodscape is wrong, but the 'why'; does that make
sense?
Mary: Yeah. I think it's, like you said, liberating and terrifying, because recognizing that
maybe that is not your path is one thing, but then feeling pathless is frightening. It
feels really uncomfortable and it's hard to feel uncomfortable. I definitely do
things to try to rid myself of the fear of the unknown and –
Jerry: You are such a human being.
Mary: Yeah, but it's hard. It's hard to not know, it's hard to have questions about yourself
and what path is right because there are so many different paths.
Jerry: Yeah.
Mary: At a point where you know, you've always been going down a certain path, and so
you know that path, and you know what's comfortable or not comfortable about
that path. Change is hard.
Jerry: Yeah, so the uncertainty is hard. The not knowing is hard. The fear that the path
that I choose might be the wrong path; does that resonate with you?
Mary: Yeah.
Jerry: What if I make mistake? What if I go down this path and it turns out to be
painful? What if I do down this path and it turns out that my father, someone
whose approval meant so much to me, disapproves? What if? What if? What if?
Let me then choose the path that seems the right path. And then the earth open up,
and grabs you and pulls you down. Or the hand of a friend rests on your head and
says, "Sit still. The choices you have made, made sense at the time, but no longer
make sense. It's time for new choices." Choices that come not from some
guidance of a star in a particular direction, but choices that come from within that
are guided by "Who are you?" There's this incredible woman with a broken-open
heart, who is wicked-smart, I can tell that, who is incredibly skilled, who finds
ways to gather people around her, whether it's Zoe or Kent or think of all the
people who – walk through walls for you; right? All those people that you worry
so much about disappointing, they don’t give a shit. Whether or not you
disappoint them, you give them an opportunity to show them their love for you.

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That's this woman who presents herself to me today, and she gathers all this
together, and she sits and she hangs out with the unknown. Another quick little
story?
Mary: Yeah.
Jerry: I loved Madmen and one of my favorite scenes in Madmen is towards the very
end, Peggy, who started off by working for Don, ends up being Don's boss. At
one point, towards the season finale, she is really upset about something and she
says, "Don, what do I do?" And he looks at her and he says, "Welcome to the not
knowing." Welcome to the not knowing. All those people out there who pretend
that they have it figured out, they are bullshitting.
Mary: They don’t know either.
Jerry: They don’t know either. As Sharon Salzberg and I talked about in one of the
podcast episodes, "Every single day, we make up the shit" and that is life. If you
go back and you read Jesus' teachings, that's what he is talking about. I'm not
talking about the people who interpreted His teachings; the frail, infallible
humans, or fallible humans. I'm talking about The Source. Nowhere in there do I
hear His words saying something like, "If ye shall disappoint by failing to launch
your startup, ye shall be cast into hell." Right?
Mary: Yeah.
Jerry: That's not the God of love. That's not the God of peace.
Mary: That's not the God that I would want to believe in.
Jerry: That's not the God that – that is just not The Divine. That is not what The Divine
says to us.
Mary: Right.
Jerry: I think the challenge is that you have the unenviable choice or task, to kind of
figure it out yourself. Having found myself in the same place many times, I
appreciate and empathize with the fact that it sucks, but I will tell you, as an older
person, the other side of that rocks.
Mary: Just getting there.
Jerry: Yeah, and finding the purpose isn’t a function of the thing and that's the thing and
that's it; for me, it's been a constant reinforcement of a way to be. I have
tremendous pressures in my life; I disappoint people all the time. I do and say
things around which I am embarrassed and ashamed, and I have learned that when
I pretend that I don’t do those things, I make my life worse. Sharon, who I

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mentioned before, I remember her giving me a tremendous gift in a moment of
struggle, just about a year ago. We were working together one day, and she said, I
want you to go back and re-read Loving Kindness. Loving Kindness is one of her
books and that is your homework assignment. Read Loving Kindness by Sharon
Salzberg. Very specifically, she said, "I want you to read the chapter, the section
on the difference between guilt and regret." Guilt is the trick of the Ego. Guilt
leads our focus back to ourselves. We tell ourselves that we worry about
disappointing and hurting the other, but really what is it that we are feeling? What
did you feel when your father said, "Mary, you are a disappointment"? Think
about the guilt.
Mary: Lots of guilt.
Jerry: Right.
Mary: A lot of shame.
Jerry: Shame. For another podcast, for another session, we'll work with his issue. But
leaving that aside for a moment, in that moment, when that sort of thing happens
to me, I start to tally up all the horrible things that I have done. When that shame
comes in – you are nodding, so you know.
Mary: Yeah.
Jerry: And you said, "Look what a horrible person I am." And so all of a sudden, the
focus becomes back on you. Now the more liberating path is the regret. Are there
things that I have done in my life that I regret? Absolutely. Regret is forward-
looking because I hold that as a teaching. Can I do better? Yeah, I can do better.
Guilt, with its attending shame, locks it away and disables me from learning from
the negative experience, from the painful experience. Regret allows me to grow
and every day, I try, just a little bit more, to be a better human, and sometimes I
fail. That process takes me out of the existential narcissistic trap that my
depression will direct me into.
Mary: Yeah.
Jerry: Does this resonate?
Mary: Yeah, it really does.
Jerry: The task that is before you may be hard, but the gold at the end of that rainbow is
you; a pure, authentic, broken-hearted human being, capable of joy, capable of
sadness, capable of anger, capable of great things and small things. That's what is
there.

15. Reboot039_New_Choices
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Mary: Yeah, I believe that. I definitely have been that before. It's just rediscovering and
not worrying so much about the guilt and the shame that I feel. Maybe I should
not act from a state of guilt and act from the state of understanding that it's
pathless. I am who I am.
Jerry: Yes. And who is the most famous person to say "I am who I am"? Popeye.
Mary: Popeye, that's right.
Jerry: I am what I am.
Mary: [Inaudible 0:47:51] so I do share that common as well, Popeye and I.
Jerry: So, maybe with Popeye in our heads –
Mary: That's right.
Jerry: – we'll keep that in mind. Thank you so much for sharing your story.
Mary: Thank you.
Jerry: It really was an honor to be here with you, with this.
Mary: Great to be here, I feel honored to be with you and be part of the podcast.
Jerry: Thank you.
**
So, that’s it for our conversation today. You know, a lot was covered in this episode from links,
to books, to quotes, to images; so we went ahead and compiled all that, and put it on our site at
Reboot.io/podcast. If you’d like to be a guest on the show, you can find out about that on our site
as well. I’m really grateful that you took the time to listen. If you enjoyed the show and you want
to get all the latest episodes as we release them, head over to iTunes and subscribe and while
you’re there, it would be great if you could leave us a review, letting us know how the show
affected you. So, thank you again for listening, and I really look forward to future conversations
together.
[Singing]
“How long till my soul gets it right?
Did any human being ever reach that kind of light?
I call on the resting soul of Galileo,
King of night-vision, King of insight.”
[End of audio 0:49:47]
[End of transcript]