#74 Be Love Now (with Ram Dass)
Kelly shares a book that's recently touched her heart: Be Love Now by Ram Dass.
Part memoir, part spiritual transmission, this book tells the extraordinary story of how Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert became the beloved spiritual teacher Ram Dass - and how his journey of surrender, devotion, and service to love continues to inspire generations.
Kelly opens up about her own relationship with reading, why this book felt like the perfect return to something more soul-nourishing after a period of reading only fiction, and how deeply it spoke to her heart.
This episode includes heartfelt excerpts from the book, including the teaching on how to love our mothers, and the importance of finding your satsang - a community of truth seekers who uplift and inspire.
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Read the Transcript for this Episode below:
Episode 74 of the Project Me Podcast. Hi guys. It's been several months since I've recorded a new episode. All is very good in my world. I traveled back to Minnesota for the first time in 14 years to visit family and friends. I still have there. I shared an Airbnb with my oldest friend Amy, and we had such a great time together, reminiscing over old funny memories from high school and university and creating several more funny stories.
I know we'll still be laughing about in the decades to come, including me singing my Old Girl Scout song to the Canadian guy next to me at the Minnesota Twins baseball game. Make new friends, but keep the old one is silver and the other's gold. And I do believe those words to be true. I enjoy making those new silver friendships and I really treasure my old gold friends so much too.
And I also love and appreciate my friends in spirit, including of course Prince. If you followed that story in past episodes, Minneapolis also happens to be the hometown of Prince and hashtag no coincidences. It was Prince Night at the Minnesota Twins baseball game. While I was there, I got to wear my purple cape and sing print songs.
And Amy and I also took a tour of Prince's, incredible Paisley Park studios too. It was all just wonderful. Well, without going through the whole rest of my summer and all I've gotten up to, you can see that on Facebook and Instagram. I always put a lot of pictures there, so if you wanna see the Prince pictures or anything else.
I went to, to, um, Copenhagen. I've been to Sweden and yeah, I've had a great summer. I just, I think that it's because I've had such an enjoyable few months, that's why it's taken me so long to record another episode. But here I am now and I'd like to share about a wonderful book I read recently. I love reading, but I'll admit that unless it's summer by the pool or on the beach, I only read in bed each night before turning off the light.
It's my bedtime ritual. I have this no 10 after 10 rule for myself on weeknights so that I don't mindlessly scroll my entire evening away or watch just that one more episode of a series. Does that happen to you? And that No Tech after 10 rule means I read books. I always like to climb into bed with a good book and read until my eyes can't focus.
It's important that I don't read anything disturbing before bed. No crime thrillers for me, please. I want sweet dreams for a very long time. I rarely read fiction. I had such an insatiable appetite for personal and spiritual growth. It felt like a trivial waste of my precious reading time just to read a fiction that I wouldn't like maybe even remember.
It wouldn't serve my growth or expansion. I'd climb into bed with my book and I'd have my post-it notes, or I'd be writing an underlining right in the book that I'd close my eyes and I'd dream so much that night that as soon as I woke up in the morning, I'd fill pages of my dream journal and then I'd meditate on what further messages wanted to come through.
It was a whole thing. And I say it was a whole thing because I'm realizing now that earlier this year I started reading fiction again and I have barely written in my dream journal and my growth does feel a bit flatlined. But at the same time, it almost feels like a sweet reprieve from all the searching and exploring and pondering and questioning that does accompany the spiritual journey.
It's been a season of just being with who I am now without seeking anything more. Yeah, and a period of really appreciating just how far I've come. All of those books I've poured my energy into reading and chewing on have been powerfully instrumental in shaping who I am today. I feel an embodied understanding now of so much of what I was once grappling with or trying to get better at all that I'm just feeling like, oh yeah, I can see that I am calmer, wiser, kinder, more present.
More peaceful, loving, accepting. Because of the investments I've made in my growth and I'm starting to dip back into my old favorites, I can pick up one of these books, blow the dust off the cover, and turn to any one of the dog-eared pages and rediscover a real gem. It inspired me last week to create a little gift for all my lovely newsletter subscribers.
It's called 17 Books to Light Your Path. These are the books that have most shaped my life and lit my path. This PDF guide shows the cover of each book and a little bit about why it made the cut. I've categorized them from the books that kickstarted my journey. Then onto the ones that helped me to live with more presence and understand how to create more inner freedom.
Then the ones that opened me up to things like manifesting and magic and synchronicities, and then it goes on to share ones with kind of deeper universal wisdom. And on the final page, I ended up adding two more very fun, easy reads with spiritual insights weaved into engaging stories. I sent this PDF guide to my subscribers last week, and right away I heard from the lovely Paola who's done my programs and memberships, and she's heard me rave about many of these books already over the years.
Out of my list of 17 books, she's read 15 of them, and she's on a real spiritual journey with an appetite for learning and growing. So it doesn't surprise me. If you'd like to receive my 17 books to light your path, go to my website, kelly petran.com and you'll see at the very bottom of the homepage. It's also in my link in bio on Instagram.
My handle there is Kelly Project Me, and I'm gonna put a link to it in the show notes of this episode too. Now I've already done podcast episodes around some of these life-changing books. The whole podcast kicked off with episode one about all that happened around me reading the Celestial Prophecy when I was 27.
Listened to that one, or even re-listened to it from my take on the nine insights. I re-listened to it again recently and kind of got new insights from even re-listening to it again. Then in episode eight, I shared about The Secret and the Magic and how those books really woke me up to how my thoughts create my reality and the magic that happens when I live my life with deep gratitude each and every day.
In episode nine, I shared about The Power Of Now by Eckhart Toley. And in episode 14, the Surrender Experiment by Michael, a singer, and so many more. I'm sure I've touched on other books in different episodes, but now for this episode, I'm sharing a book I read much more recently. It's called Be Love Now by M das.
I so enjoyed this book because I've been into fiction and giving my soul searching a little rest. I wasn't feeling drawn towards anything too deep. But at the same time, I kind of wanted to read something before a bed that was more soul nourishing than fiction. Well, this was it. It's a delightfully true story of how a very respected American Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert traveled to India in the early 1970s and ended up becoming the devoted spiritual teacher known as Ram das.
He came back from that trip, a transformed man, and from that point forward, he devoted his life to spiritual service and to the message of unconditional love. He remained a teacher until his death in 2019. I mean, he's still a teacher, you know, he, he may have died, but his legacy lives on in so many beautiful ways.
I have adored the words of Ram Ds for so many years, but without really knowing his story. One of my all time favorite Ramdas quotes, and maybe you've heard this one too, it's if you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family. Isn't that just the truth? I can feel like I've come so far with accepting others as they are and seeing them through the eyes of love, and I'm feeling like, oh, I'm so close to enlightenment, and then I just go and spend a week with my mother and I realize I've got a long way to go.
Now if you're rushing off already to order this book, don't get it confused with this other book with a similarly named title. I used to have his original book. That one was called Be Here Now, super famous book. The book I'm talking about today is called Be Love Now. For some reason be here now. Didn't survive one of my big book calls back in 2016, and I kind of regret that now.
I remember it being quite unique. It was filled with psychedelic style illustrations, but I think it wasn't a real straightforward read and obviously it didn't land with me, um, firm enough for me to keep it like I have so many of my others, but be love now and find it much more accessible and in many ways, maybe even more powerful.
It's part memoir, part spiritual transmission. I gained so much by reading it. The thread running through this book is love, not as a concept, but as a state of being. It's gentle, humorous, deeply moving, and ultimately reminds us that love is not something we go out and find. It's something we become. I opened it again this morning to see what I might wanna share from the book, and it automatically opened to a page.
I'm like, okay, what is this? And it was a page about our relationship with our mothers. And it's not even one of the pages I dogeared, nor did I particularly remember it so clearly, it was what I needed to hear. So I'm gonna share a bit of it, uh, with you. He writes, we westerners have our share of relationship complexities with our mothers.
The view of the mother in India is different. The country is called Mother India. A Western devotee once told Maharaji he hated his mother, and nobody understood what he was saying. The concept didn't make it across the cultural barrier In India, the mother is so deeply respected and revered. There was no way that statement could even be understood.
There is an Indian saying that there may be bad children, but there are no bad mothers. And he goes on to get us to see the world as the mother, seeing everything as her manifestation, creating a real shift in perception. Every experience is a mirror reflecting where we are in our consciousness and what our work is in that moment.
So we raise our consciousness when we can bring awareness to where we're not coming from a place of love. Yeah, be love. Now over in my Soul Explorers membership, we are in the heart chakra module, the Rainbow Journey, and learning to live with open hearts and it's not always easy and it's the people we find the hardest to love who are here to challenge us to open our hearts and love.
Anyway, I'm seeing now that the very next page, so that bit about the mother, I do have the very next page here, dogeared. And it says, one way of remembering to stay in the heart is to hang out with other people who are on the same journey. Sat sang is a community of seekers after truth. Sat means truth, and Sangha is a meeting of the ways a spiritual community set saying is the company of a family or fellow travelers on this path of the heart.
Each devotee feeds and inspires the others. At the most basic level, associating or surrounding yourself with friends who are working on themselves, who are on the path creates a supportive atmosphere for your own Han or spiritual work. Similarly, hanging out with people who are drinking beer and watching TV all the time is probably a distraction.
Being in a set saying doesn't mean you've gone to heaven or are full of love and light. If a set saying seems too pure, it probably is. The people in your set saying aren't too busy pretending to be. If the people in your set saying aren't too busy, pretending to be pure or spiritual and are truthful about where they are on their path, they'll help you to keep your perspective.
Ah, yes. If you sing and do service together, you'll create a real heart space says set. Saying is a lot like family, albeit a spiritual one. There's always a crazy relative and relationships have their ups and downs. Mahachi SAT saying is about as diverse as you could imagine. Without Maharaji as our focus.
Many of us probably would've never known each other. It's been said that Maharaji took on the difficult and nearly hopeless cases. I used to call it the mark of madness. At times Maharaji. Maharaji, by the way, is his guru. It's the one that he, that he met in India that you know changed his life. He writes, at Time Maharaji seemed like a doctor at the back ward of a mental hospital.
Many in the Western set. S saying, our rascals. Loving but crazy. I love that. Like, calling them rascals. Like instead of like, you know, have you ever been with a group where there's just somebody there and you're like, oh my goodness. It's like I just, I wanna think of them from now on as just like, ah, they're being rascals.
Um, it's so intimate because we've all known each other so long and he's brought out all of our stuff. We love each other, but we don't always like each other. Now I see us all as souls, and I love all of us. Uh, I love all of that, and I agree with the great value of surrounding ourselves with others on the path who are working on themselves rather than just getting together with friends to drink and be merry all the time.
And I agree that I wouldn't wanna be in a group where we're all busy pretending to be pure and spiritual. In my Soul Explorers group, we are real and truthful about the everyday stuff, about the people we find very challenging to love, and we create a real heart space around whoever needs it just to lift each other higher.
At the end of the day, love really is what it's all about. I mean life. I mean, there's that whole, you know, all the, all we need is love and all there is is love and all those kind of, you know, sayings. But really, um, everything we go through, everything we strive for, at the heart of it all is love. We are here to learn how to embody love and really seeing that so much of everything else can be just a distraction, really.
We can be putting our focus on so many things and really just comes back down to love. If this resonates with you, I highly recommend checking out the Netflix documentary Ram Das. I think it's called Ram Das Fierce Grace. It's such a moving portrayal of his life and message. It's really gentle. It's quite slow, it's all recorded.
Um, mostly later in life after his stroke. He was still so full of peace and presence. Um, yeah, I found that a really gentle watch. I watched it a few years ago and if you stream music, if you use Spotify or Apple Music or any of those, search for Ram das and East Forest. East Forest is a musician. He's a composer.
He blends ramdas's spoken words with beautiful ambient music. It's honestly one of my favorite soul nourishes. I can just press play on any one of those and it's just the combination of Ramdas's words of wisdom with this East Forest music. It's, it's amazing. If you've been on any one of my retreats, you'll have heard me play some of these tracks and, um.
Yeah, you can hear how Ramdas's voice changes as he gets older, so deep and slow and wise in his later years. So really that's today's book Spotlight. I'm not gonna give away too much more, but if it sounds like something you might like, if you're craving a heart expanding, read, if you like the idea of like what goes on in India and kind of the Indian teachings, it's got a lot of that in there.
Be love now. Might be just what you need. And if you want more inspiration, don't forget to download my 17 books to light your Path. It's in the show notes. It's at the bottom of my website, kelly hanley.com. It's in my Instagram link in my bio. Kelly project me. And if you're already a subscriber and you haven't noticed it already, check your inbox.
'cause I've already sent it to you. And I'm gonna continue to put it in my newsletters at the bottom for a while just to make sure you've seen it. I will love to hear if you've read, be here now. Be Love now, I should say, or be here now. Um, or if you read it after this, tell me what you think. And I'm, I'm gonna open up a post on Instagram and Facebook where we can all share our personal favorites.
Like if there's a book that's been like, oh, that was the book that kind of shined a light on my path. Like, share that with us. I'm gonna, I'm gonna create a post about that. Let's keep the inspiration flowing. And do consider joining my set San, it's called Soul Explorers. And we are a group of women from all over the world who are supporting each other on the path.
It's not religious focused. Um, there are members who are also religious, but because I'm not, it's not led from that place. It's just about surrounding yourself with others so you feel inspired and supported and supportive. It's important to have that reciprocal, you know, energy going on where you are supported when you need it, but also that opportunity where when someone else is sharing about something, you can come in, you know, there's like a little tidbit of wisdom you've got that you can share and yeah, that's what makes it all work.
It's a really great group and you are very welcome to join us. There's information on Soul Explorers on my website. Until next time, open your mind, open your heart, and stay curious. We all need some space in our lives for the magical and unknown.