The Lesson Hidden In Every Person You'll Ever Meet

What if every person you've ever met has been trying to teach you something — and the only thing standing between you and that lesson is whether you were willing to look? Romona Koehler is a yoga teacher and spiritual seeker who walked out of a strict religious upbringing at sixteen, joined the Marine Corps, and spent the next few decades slowly unlearning everything she'd been told to believe. What she found on the other side was something much simpler — and much harder — than any doctrine: get quiet, strip away the stories, and pay attention to the people in front of you.

In this episode, Romona talks about what it really means to be a teacher, why the best ones never try to teach anything, and what happened when she sat alone with her dying mother and became, in her own words, someone she didn't recognize. If you've ever felt like you're searching for meaning in all the wrong places, this one's for you.

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Music Credits:

Hearts Ease by Roie Shipigler

Sea Level by Buddha Kid

Like a Bird by Letra

Floating by DaniHaDani

Dream Life by DJ Taz Rashid

Venus by Alton Peretz

Eternal Recluse by Kyle Preston

Contemplative Question by Tennessee Pistols

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Think about the best teacher you've ever had. Not the one who knew the most. Not the one with the most impressive resume. The one who changed something in you. Who saw something in you before you could even see it in yourself. Now here's the question. Did they even know they were doing it? Probably not. And that's the thing about teachers. The real ones, the ones that actually matter. They're usually not standing in the front of a classroom. They're the person across from you at dinner. The one who showed up when no one else did. It's the drill instructor who looked you in the eye and said, You're gonna be me someday. And sometimes it's the friend who was dying and just decided to believe, even a little bit to leave you a sign. We spend a lot of time looking for teachers, looking for somebody to show us the way. And what if that whole search is actually part of the problem? What if every single person you've ever met has already been trying to teach you something? And what if the only thing standing between you and that lesson is whether or not you're willing to look? Because information is always available to us, but we're not always available to the information.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

I love being a yoga teacher for that one reason, and I think you do it as a calling. It's definitely a calling like a teacher or a pastor or anybody that serves in that capacity. You don't do it for the fame, the recognition, or definitely not the money.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

That's Ramona Kalar. She's a yoga teacher and a Marine Corps veteran, and one of those rare people who's managed to unlearn almost everything she was taught. Through her story, we're going to take a look at how we interact with other people in our lives, what those people have to teach us, and how we can use it on our own journey. Welcome to Better Beliefs. What if the only thing standing in your way is what you believe about yourself, your life, or what's possible? Thousands of people have faced that same question and discovered the power to shift reality itself. I'm Brent Kokel, and on Better Beliefs, I tell the stories of real people who changed everything by first changing their minds. Ramona Kaler grew up in Southern California, Huntingdon Beach to be exact. If you haven't been, there's a reason they call it Surf City, USA. Sun sand teenagers out of their minds. Who knows what would have happened if Ramona spent all of her teenage years there, but something shifted really early. When she was very young, there was a knock at the door of the house she lived in with her parents that changed everything for her. Jehovah's Witnesses were at her door on a recruiting mission. And unlike most people who either don't answer or shut the door in their face, her father let them in. And then he left. As in, left her mother, left Southern California, and found a new woman at the church. And he took Ramona with him from kind of a teenage paradise in Huntington Beach to the middle of Missouri. And to a version of the Jehovah's Witness faith that answered every question before you could even think to ask it. To give you an idea of what I mean by that, she was told that higher education was unnecessary because everything she needed was already within the church. Now, that didn't sit well with her, and she started asking questions, which were dismissed by the church elders almost immediately. Here's the thing about being told not to question something, though. If whatever we're being told to believe is real, it should be able to survive whatever questions we throw at it. Ramona knew that before she even really had the words for it.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

When you work through that practice, it really does take a while to sink in. It's like anything, because we've been taught at such a young age the beliefs of your parents, or your parents, or your grandparents, or any place around you, right? But I don't think that that's necessarily we're brought up to be that way. We kind of grow up and just figure out who we are.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

I want to pause here because what she just described is something almost all of us carry. We're born into a set of beliefs we didn't really choose: a religion, a political lean, an idea of what success looks like, an idea of what kind of person we're supposed to become. And for most of us, it takes decades to figure out which one of those things we actually line up with and which ones we just inherited. Ramona started figuring them out at about 16 when she moved out from her dad's house and moved in with three gay men who owned a hair salon. It was a little rougher than she thought it would be. She lived in a trailer behind their house and she went to manicuring school. She already knew that wasn't going to be something she'd be doing long term, kind of like most kids when they're starting out in life.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

Saw a big poster that said looking for a few good men, and my joke is, haha, so am I. Um, let's go. And they have the best youth-looking uniforms. Come on.

SPEAKER_00 5:36

The Marines did something for Ramona that probably surprised her, that gave her a frame, structure, predictability, a unit, things she never really had before, moving through different houses in different states with different belief systems growing up. In the Marines, she did what they taught her to do, but she also observed what was going on and she figured out the system. And the drill instructors, the ones who were hardest on her, would look her in the eye and tell her that she was one of them.

SPEAKER_01 6:08

You can withstand anything. I know you can't. You can get through anything, and you can thrive if you really want to.

SPEAKER_00 6:15

Out of the Marines, she got married quickly, the way everything happens in the military. She was pregnant within three months, and then they were out. Out to civilian life in Stockton, California, which, for anyone who knows Stockton, is a long way from the structure of Paris Island. True, there are still lots of people with guns, they're just not all on your side. Now, she said it was scary, and she didn't just mean the dangers of the town. She meant that the world outside the core felt enormous and formless at the same time. And somewhere in there, woven in and out across the years, yoga showed up in her life. Not the yoga you see on Instagram, not the Lululemon and the perfectly aligned poses. The other kind of yoga, the kind that takes about 15 years to sink in. Here's where a contrast shows up. Most people who practice yoga think they're doing it for their body. And for the first several years, that's exactly what Ramona thought too. But yoga was designed for something else entirely. The ancient text, those are called Yoga Sutras, describe the physical practice of the poses and the movements, those are just preparation, not the destination. And there's a paradox here, because through yoga, you move the body just so the body can get still. And when the body gets still, something else opens up. A deeper understanding of ourselves and the way we show up in the world, not just on the mat.

SPEAKER_01 7:51

I'm just the instrument. Um, so yeah, I like that. Um, but I do think a lot of people don't have that connection with spirit or community or or anything of that sort. So I think when they step into a yoga studio, I am a teacher that's gonna bring a little bit more than the poses. So poses are are fine, they're okay, I'll tell you if you're doing something horribly wrong. Um, but other than that, I I want you to connect with that spirit because I think God is in all of us, and to see that in people when they find when they finally get that. It may take one year, it may take 10 years, it may take 15. When they make that connection, oh, this is it. This is the space I'm supposed to be in. Hmm. Good. Yes, holy.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

What she's describing here is something the Dao Tshing, one of the oldest spiritual texts, speaks to directly. It says that the sage, the sages are the wisest of us, act without acting and teach without teaching. The work gets done, but the worker herself disappears, which I realize can be difficult to grasp. And Ramona didn't learn it in a book or hearing it this way. She learned it on a map, by getting out of her own way.

SPEAKER_01 9:17

If you try to teach, it goes south real fast.

SPEAKER_00 9:21

And that's because when we're trying to teach, we're often making the assumption that the other person is ready to learn. And through not teaching, people come up to her after class in tears, saying it was the most soulful experience they've ever had. And that was on a day she thought she had the worst class of her life.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

After class, oh, great class, great class. I'm glad you had a great class. I'm glad you had a great experience. As long as you had a great experience.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

Now, I want to put a pin in Ramona's story for just a second because we need to talk about something. We live in a time that has made us really good at closing people off. We make snap judgments all the time. We see three or four posts or comments from a person, and we think we know who they are. And then we think, based off of this small amount of information we know, that will either open up or be closed off to anything else they have to say. And let's be real, most of the time we take the closed-off route. But what we miss in that is the lesson. Ramona talks about what happens when she walks into a yoga room. She doesn't know if you pick up garbage or if you're a doctor. She doesn't know your politics. She doesn't know your story. And in that blank space, that's where the teaching happens.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

I try to really step back and see all sides of everything. I really do. And I think that we all should. And I think it's really hard for some people because they stick their heels in and think they're right. Um I'm just curious. I'm curious. I think we make a judgment and make our assumption. But why can't we keep it open and open for discussion? You might, you're gonna have a different perspective than than I am. And I'm like, I didn't think I could see it. But if I'm not gonna give you the ch the chance to talk and tell me, then I'm not gonna learn anything from that. We all wanna be seen, heard, and loved. We wanna be valued, we wanna be accepted. Um, it's it's just basic, as old as time.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

I would actually argue that it's as old as consciousness. But here's the thing about that sentence: it doesn't matter what your life looks like from the outside, it doesn't matter how much you have, how much you've achieved. Every person you will ever meet is running the same program underneath all of it. See me, hear me, love me. I want to step into this story for a second. I've been coming to Ramona's class for a while now, and I don't go often enough, but every time I do, she ends the class the same way. She says, we're more alike than we are different, and we're all just walking each other home. Now I heard that for the first time, and I thought, yeah, that's nice to say that at the end of a yoga class. But then I heard it again, and in it, something started to shift. Because I realized that I'd been operating under the assumption that I was mostly doing all of this alone, that the walking was mine to do. And what Ramona is saying, and what I've now come to believe, is that the people around you aren't obstacles on the path. They are the path, every one of them, even the ones who frustrate you, even the ones who have a completely different set of worldviews and beliefs, especially those ones.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

The lessons that I share getting quiet, figuring out what your gift is, stripping down those stories that we tell ourselves, and really figure out at the bottom of it of how we are to show up and how we're to be of service in the world to others. That's that's that's it. Getting quiet. You have to get quiet. And yoga, we move our body in a lot of the vinyasas, but we move our body, it was it was designed to move our body so we can move into the stillness, and when you're in the stillness, that's when you connect to spirit.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

And what do you find there? What lives in that stillness? For Ramona, it's something that showed up in a place she never thought it would. Her mother's death. Her mom was 88 years old, so it's not like it was sudden or unexpected. Ramona had been going down to Pasarobles, about a six-hour drive from where she lived, spending 10 days a month taking shifts with her siblings as the end got closer. She'd just gotten back home after one of her 10-day stretches, and her half-brother called and said that it was time. So Ramona drove back down there, and what happened over the next three days, she describes as the most intimate experience of her life.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

She would um come in and out of being lucid and talking to people. So she talked to all these people in the three days that were sitting there while this was happening. And um, that was very interesting. My siblings weren't handling well, and I don't handle those situations well either, but it's something came over me when I walked in the door. I I tell this story, and I was like, it's like I turned into Buddha himself. I was like, it's not me. I was so calm.

SPEAKER_00 15:06

I want to pause on that. Did you hear what she said? That's not me. There's no ego in that statement. She just became exactly what the room needed. Her siblings were frantic, so she sent them out to run errands. She just sat on her mom's bed. She had a playlist they listened to, she read her a book, and she watched and waited.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

And then I looked at her and go, Oh, it's time, it's so time. So I just petted her a little head and I just talked to her. And I said, Don't scare me. Don't scare me. And um, yeah, she went super peacefully at the most experience in my life.

SPEAKER_00 15:54

Ramona sat with that experience, and then she did it again. A close friend of hers was also terminal. A woman who didn't really believe in anything about her soul's experience after it leaves our bodies. But through their conversations, she made Ramona a promise. She said that after she died, she didn't try. I didn't try to give Ramona sign that she still existed and would communicate with her if she did.

SPEAKER_01 16:18

And boy, when she passed it the first two weeks, I got so many signs, it was ridiculous. She was very good with lights. Um so she talked about it. She was very I have, oh, I have a set of personal um samples. Um I have them in my um living room because they're too pretty to keep away. And I have lights in them that you have to physically pick up and turn on and do do something. Um my husband and I were sitting right after she had somewhere talking. She liked one of them.

SPEAKER_00 16:59

Look, I know some of you just raised an eyebrow. And believe me, I did too the first time I heard something like this. And I'm not here to tell you what to believe about lights and signs and what happens after we die. What I am here to tell you is that a woman who described herself as believing in nothing promised a friend she would try, and something happened. Now, maybe that was a coincidence. Maybe it was something else. But here's what I think is true either way. The promise was real. The love behind that promise was real. And for Ramona, that was enough. She says there's no greater teacher than death. And I think what she means by that is that death strips away everything else. All the things we think are important, all the noise of our lives, the effort we put in, all the stories you've been telling yourself about who you are and what you need and where you're going. When you're in that room with somebody who's dying, none of that matters. Only the person in front of you matters. And maybe that's the lesson we're supposed to learn all along.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

We all will meet God. We'll all meet spirit. I mean, we're not gonna get away from that. And we're all like beggars sitting on a box, and we're too distracted to look into the box of gold that we just didn't open.

SPEAKER_00 18:29

Here's where I want to land this. We started this episode asking about teachers, and what Ramona showed me is that the search for a teacher and the search for meaning, those are the same thing. And that search, it doesn't require a classroom or a church or even a yoga mat. It actually requires something a lot harder. It requires you to stay open. Open to the person at the coffee shop who thinks differently than you. Open to the child who shows you patience by running out of it themselves. Open to the friend who promises to leave you signs after they die, and then they deliver. It requires you to stay open to the quiet, especially the quiet, because it's in there where you find out what you actually believe, not what you were told to believe, not what the group around you believes, what you believe. I mentioned the Tao to Ching a little earlier in this episode. One of the things it says is that knowing others, that's wisdom. Knowing yourself, that's enlightenment. And I think Ramona knows that. But she didn't learn that from a book. She learned it from moving out at 16, by joining the Marines because the alternative was so much worse. By putting a playlist together for walking her mom home and sitting still in that moment with her, while everyone else panicked. You heard her say in this episode that we're all beggars sitting on a box of gold we haven't opened. And what I take that to mean is that we look for answers outside of ourselves, when most of them, they're already inside of us. Other people, our teachers, they can see it, but we have a tough time seeing it ourselves. So the people in our lives, they're just trying to show us where the latch is that opens the box of gold. We just have to be willing to look. So the question I want to leave you with today is just this. Who's trying to teach you something right now that you might be too closed off to hear? Now just sit with that. Get quiet. And see for yourself what comes up. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. It's always a joy to put these things together. Certainly a passion project for me, and so I am grateful for every moment that anybody who listens or watches spends in this. And I hope you always get something out of this that it opens up maybe something different for you that you hadn't considered before. If you know somebody in your life right now who you feel like could benefit from what we just went through in this episode, maybe they're closed off to somebody in their lives or lots of people in their lives, and they're really missing out on a lot of the lessons and enlightenment that they could be getting. I'd be very grateful if you'd share this episode with them on whatever platform you're listening to it on right now. Just send them a text with the link. Every platform has its own unique way of doing that. So I greatly appreciate that. Also, please leave this show a review on whatever platform you're listening to it on. It certainly helps get more people to listen, which is really the only goal of this show. It's to get more people to open their minds to the possibility of a new belief. That's it for this episode. I'll see you on the next one. Better Beliefs is owned by 6350 Ventures. It is produced, written, edited, and recorded by me, Brent Kokel. Yes, I do all the things. Original cover art for the show is by Jenny H. Designs, and original music that you hear at the beginning of Every Better Beliefs podcast is by the Lonely Ramblers. All other music credits are in the show notes.