Eduardo Sierra  Interviewer

Peggy Tobin

Eduardo: Hello, I’m talking with Peggy Tobin about her experiences in life and in Waking Down in Mutuality. Peggy, how are you doing this evening?

Peggy: I’m good! I’m glad to talk to you.

Eduardo: I really want to thank you for taking the time and being with me on this interview today, I really appreciate it.

Peggy: My pleasure.

Eduardo: Could tell us about your background, Peggy, where you grew up, your education, cultural background, anything along that line, briefly.

Peggy: Sure, so I grew up in Fort Lauderdale, FL. I was one of five children and I went to Catholic school through high school and went to Loyola University in New Orleans for three years. I had this very Irish-Catholic background. We had nuns and priests from Ireland come over to our parish. I don’t know why, I don’t know how they found us, we got them straight out of Ireland and they were kind of mean.

Eduardo: A little rough around the edges, huh?

Peggy: Mean and strict. And my mother was a true believer, so one of the impacts of my life has been having a very heavy Catholic imprint early. My mother was very into it and she started us early praying and being “good” children.

Eduardo: I’m familiar with Catholic upbringing.

Peggy: Yes, it’s something to be in recovery from.

Eduardo: How have you handled that? Have you completed your Catholic 12 step program?

Peggy: You know, I think I have! I think it’s taken me all of my adult life. When I was at Loyola I had a wonderful teacher who taught Chinese and Japanese history, world history and Zen. He was really interesting. It was in a world history class where we were learning the myths of other cultures that I got outside of my Catholic culture. The Chinese have a myth that their king was a god and born of a virgin and there was a bird somehow involved also, like the Holy Spirit. Just learning that about the other cultures was really the first time I could get outside of my own culture and say, “oh, well I see that’s a myth so what about all the stuff I was taught? That’s a myth too”.

Eduardo: It starts to unravel?

Peggy: It starts to unravel, but then some of the deep stuff, the deep things took a while.

Eduardo: What’s been your experience of faith in terms of that Catholic upbringing?

Peggy: Well, when I got to Seattle to go to the University of Washington that was the first time I was really in a non- Catholic environment. And what I noticed about the people who were not raised Catholic, they recognized me as Catholic somehow. They would ask me “Are you Catholic?” and I didn’t know if I had it stamped on my forehead or something. I didn’t question the existence of God, I questioned the interpretation of what that meant, and the beliefs I still had about that. The fact that I knew people who hadn’t studied any kind of religion, had no religious background, was very foreign to me. It was very foreign that they did not appreciate some sort of sacredness about life.

Eduardo: Moving through that, moving out of the nest, realizing there are other paths, and other cultures in the world; how was that transition for you?

Peggy: Well in retrospect, I can see how challenging it was in a particular way – I did feel lost. But I don’t know that I would’ve used that word then. Some of what I’ve read recently in the Integral literature has been helpful in this regard. They will talk about it in terms of development. It’s like you get to a level of (cognitive) development and then suddenly you have to abandon your spiritual path because it’s not rational. They (the Church) offer you nothing else. They’re only offering you “Well you have to believe this because this is what the church says.” And then you don’t have any other options; there was no where else to go. Now, I didn’t think all of that at the time. I just knew that this was the 70’s, and before that there was the whole civil rights and women’s rights movements, and I was done being told by men in robes how I should behave and what I should do and how I should think.

Eduardo: Patriarchy no longer had a sway over you?

Peggy: Right. I was in rebellion against that and left and never looked back. But it still lived in me – in terms of a spiritual longing or knowing, or something that resonated. But I didn’t have a different way; it took me years and years and years to find a different way to express or interpret that.

Eduardo:Peggy, would you share some of your spiritual journey prior to finding Waking Down?

Peggy: Well, let’s see, I had done a lot of meditation off and on through the 80’s and that was the only sort of spiritual path that I explored. I did a lot of psychological work too. But for a spiritual path I was only exploring simple meditation because I didn’t want any “extra” spirituality around it. The Tibetans had too many bells and whistles and I thought they were like the Catholics of the East. And I didn’t want to take on somebody else’s belief system. So I did simple Vipassana meditation off and on for many years. As we got towards the late 90’s, and we were heading towards the millennium, I was actually pretty unhappy with my life. And I realized I really wanted to focus on a spiritual path. I had sort of dabbled but I hadn’t focused on anything in particular, and so I found something called the Diamond Approach. I started that work in 1999 and did that for six years and it was wonderful. I got a lot out of that. I started to have these experiences of Being. You begin to oscillate into them. You work with an individual teacher and in large and small group sessions. The method is very slow and involves a lot of self-inquiry. They give you questions to ask. It’s not just “Who am I?” They give you a teaching about a topic and then they have you do monologues and ask each other questions where you have 15 minutes to just explore what your own experience with whatever the topic is.

Eduardo: Ahh, I see.

Peggy: And after being in that for the six years, I felt done. Something was missing for me, and at the time I would’ve languaged it as community. That’s what I thought, but really we were this group – we were a group of about 30 to 35 people, and all of the work we did was individual. It was all internal work on ourselves. So you’d be in a group, a triad of three people and you’d take turns asking each other questions but there was nothing inter-relational about it.

There’d be a deep presence when the group was together, but there was no group really outside of that work. And I did get to know some of the people, and I’m still friends with some of the people I met there, and I feel like I have really deep friendships with them. But there was something about it that stopped. It’s like I wanted more. Plus there was a very hierarchical structure and our particular teacher had some limitations that were difficult to deal with.

And so I was mostly feeling like I wanted something more in terms of relationship. I couldn’t really articulate what I was looking for but I was really feeling that need. I had read a book – I think it was about the same time I found the Diamond Approach. It was an interview book, “Dialogues With Emerging Spiritual Teachers”, and Saniel was one of them. In fact, his interview was the longest one. Byron Katie was in there, Eckhart Tolle was in there, and I really liked what Saniel said. It was a lot about his journey and his whole thing about treating people as equals – not as equals exactly, but with respect and mutuality. Teachers listening to what the students have to say, and not just saying ,“well, that’s just your stuff and you go deal with it”, that kind of thing.

But at the time I first read the book it was clear that he was in California and I was in Seattle, and so that didn’t seem like an option to me. But in 2005 when I started looking again, I found Krishna Gauci online. He was doing a one day event in Portland. And I asked if this was appropriate for someone who had never been to anything; he said yes, so I went. And the thing that was – well there were many things that surprised me about that day – but what I remember so clearly, how he was so welcoming to each individual. The Waking Down teachers really want to hear who you are, where you’re from, and what’s going on with you. And there were about 11 or 12 of us there, and some people were down, some people were fine, some people were really good. There was a variety of people and I was really struck by how genuinely welcoming he was to each person.

Eduardo: Sounds like this felt authentic and real to you.

Peggy: Totally. And in those days when I had to speak in public, I would just cry and shake – my whole body would shake. And when it got to me, I was really happy to be there, but I was also really kind of shocked by how welcoming he was. That was a very new experience for me. And then he said some other things during that day that were very surprising for me, and that just kind of drew me in. And it just was very clear that I wanted more of this. And I could feel the transmission.

Eduardo: At the time were you conscious of it as a transmission?

Peggy: I would have just felt it as energy. And I could feel the vibration of something very different in this room and how it was affecting me. So, I mean, he talked about it as transmission so I assumed that’s what it was. Maybe that’s not what it was.

Eduardo: How much time went by between that first meeting and when you awakened?

Peggy: I went to the first meeting with Krishna in September 2005. And then a 4-day event in Portland in December 2005. That’s where I met Hillary. and June, Ron, and Krishna were also teaching there. I was in Hillary’s group that weekend, and I just felt completely drawn to her from the beginning, because she sits there and looks at you with such immense compassion. I had my second birth in February of 2006.

Eduardo: Right.

Peggy: I had realized through a lot of the psychological work that I’d done, that I had significant mother issues; mother recognition/abandonment issues. So when I met Hillary I was very drawn to her. We were in a small group, and as she worked with each person – she’d say to them, “Well, what do you want? This is your time, what do you need?”. And then she’s ask, “Well, do you need anything physical? Do you want to be held? Do you want a blanket? Do you want me to rub your feet?”. And then I watched that first day in our small group, and I was like “oh… she means it.” You know? But nobody was taking her up on this.

So when it came to my turn, I was like “yes.” I do. I want you to hold me, thank you. I’ll take that. And I think it’s mostly because I had worked in a Hakomi training where they did do a lot of physical touch with permission. They would hold people or do different kinds of experiments with people. And based on that year and a half training I had seen how important that can be. So I asked Hillary to hold me and she did and I cried and cried and cried and cried. Probably for the first six months every time I worked with her I just kind of laid in her lap and sobbed. It felt very primal and very early pre-verbal childhood stuff – letting go of whatever.

Eduardo: Sounds like there was some big healing going on,

Peggy: Totally. And then it was done. It was kind of amazing.

Eduardo: That almost sounds like a fever broke or something.

Peggy: Mm-hmm. Yes.

Eduardo: You know, in some Eastern spiritual traditions they refer to a path of devotion – devotion for example to your guru. Can you speak to any of that in your own personal experience?

Peggy: I wouldn’t use the word devotion. I’m one of those westerners that doesn’t relate to that. I mean, I would like to know how to do that, but I don’t really know. I guess I’m too wary of authority to let myself be devoted to somebody.

Eduardo: But it sounds like there was a lot of heart between you two.

Peggy: Totally. Completely. She handled it so beautifully. So clearly. There was so much love. And I felt – you know, it’s kind of like what Saniel says: Come in and drink from us. Just drink in the transmission. That’s what I felt like I was doing. So I was taking her in. it’s not like I was feeling devoted back to her. It was like I needed her and she was giving to me, and I was taking it in. I would ask her all the time if she was sure this was OK. Like, am I too much for you? Because that was a big deal. I think my energy was too much for my mother. She thought I was hyperactive and just couldn’t be around me. She needed me to be away from her. And Hillary would always say that she loved this work, and she loved working with me, and she loved working with all of her students. And there was no “drained” factor. And now that I’m a mentor, I understand. I don’t think I totally believed her at the time.

Eduardo: Beautiful… Can you speak about the shift you went through?

Peggy: Well in my experience, the language I would use was that I did feel myself unwinding and unraveling. So physically I was starting to relax, and mentally I was starting to relax. And I started to not be able to push myself to do things, (like meditating) that I had just been doing out of discipline. It also felt like I could feel shifts in my brain. I would have used the language “it felt like things were falling out of my brain, out of my head”. It was like seeing belief structures and getting that, “Oh, that’s not real. That’s a structure. Those are beliefs.” And it would just dissolve and I was sort of dumbfounded. And then my brain was quiet. And that happened a lot. Seeing through a lot of beliefs. Mostly about who I was and who I thought I was.

Eduardo: Can you say more about this transition you were going through?

Peggy: Oh, yes, it was a very interesting transition. I took a year off from work, and in that year I had a lot of shake-down – there was a lot of emotional processing and letting go of more stuff. When I went back to work I think I was more in my body, more relaxed, and I definitely had a confidence in being that I didn’t have before.

Eduardo: Was it noticeable? Did folks notice and comment?

Peggy: Yes, but of course they thought it was because I had been off for a year. Everybody noticed. Truly. So when I went back to work, because I was in the same department- my job wasn’t the same but I was in the same department- it was so much easier to see the way that I stressed myself out. And so all of the pressure that I put on myself to perform at work – I could notice how I was doing it to myself.

So I came back to work and I got back into my habits kind of quickly because my conditioning was sitting there waiting for me. So slowly- I’d say within the first six months- I got more and more space between my habitual responses and being able to just hold them – to just feel.

For instance there would be things I would have to do as a project manager that I didn’t like doing. And I would react. And I would sort of feel myself whining and complaining in the same way I used to whine about things I didn’t like at work before I took time off. And then suddenly I would recognize this as a habit. And I’d think “What is so terrible about this thing that you have to do? You’re going to go sit in a meeting with people you don’t particularly like, and you’re going to get some work out of it, and you’re going to go back to your desk and you’re going to do it, and there’s nothing horrible that was going to have to be done.” And I did that, and I started to see more and more clearly where my reactivity was and how unnecessary it was, really, because it didn’t change anything.

And as I noticed it and let myself feel it, it would just dissolve away. Over time I noticed myself being happier at work, flowing more, and being more at ease. That was a really big change.

The other thing I noticed was that since I was so much more comfortable with myself I would just say things that popped into my head, and people paid attention. So I wasn’t as held back. A lot of the fear I’d feel about speaking in public diminished slowly over the months. And I would just watch that change. Also, when speaking to my new boss – or other authority figures – I would just watch myself say the truth and not feel intimidated. We have a culture of “nice” here in the northwest, and we have it where I work. People will be nice to each other in meetings, and then they go away and complain after the fact. We had a new boss who was inviting direct feedback, so I just decided to give it to her. I wasn’t “not nice”, but I was really direct. And she heard me. So I noticed that I had this way of giving people really direct feedback that they could hear.

Eduardo: Sounds like you were pretty clear, huh?.

Peggy: Exactly. I didn’t have any reactivity around it. It was just “Well this is what I see.” Another example – one of my new bosses – her job is to say no when people ask to do certain kinds of research where I work. And she wasn’t saying no! So, because I had worked in this department for so long, I knew what she should be doing more than she did, really. So I just found a way to say “You really just have to say ‘no’. You’re not good at this and you have to learn.” And she heard me. But I never would have done that before, or if I had done it I would have had a lot of edginess around it, so she wouldn’t have heard it.

Eduardo: It would have put them off and they wouldn’t have heard the message.

Peggy: Right. So my whole edginess, my crankiness, my sort of habitual conditioning around authority has changed. I’m more willing to say what’s on my mind. When things come up I can try to just feel them. And then see what I want to do or say. I have a choice.

Eduardo: You wouldn’t really have the chance to make that observation if you weren’t in a situation like at work where certain buttons get pushed.

Peggy: Exactly. Exactly. So it’s really quite different. Also, I used to feel like I was in a particular style or way of being while I was at work, and when I came home I was somebody else. I felt very split in that way. And that’s completely changed.

Eduardo: So you feel more whole?

Peggy: Exactly. I felt that was a lot of what happened in my second birth. I felt it the first day with Krishna. I had a feeling of integration.

Eduardo: You were able to be more happy, then? Is that one of the fruits of being present and observing as you were working?

Peggy: Yes. Definitely. And it’s because I can be more present so I worry less about the next meeting I have to do. Also, there’s something about not living in my mind so much as well. I’m using my mind to do things that I need to do but I’m not spinning in my mind about personal stuff, or worried about what that person is going to do or say, or what they think of me, or how this should be, or that should be, that kind of thing. So being in the moment is way less stressful.

Eduardo: What can you relate in terms of the changes in your personal life?

Peggy: I’ve noticed that I’m friendlier and I don’t hate people anymore.

Eduardo: Well that’s a notable difference, I’d say.

Peggy: It’s a big difference. And again, a lot of it is about being present in the moment. Now, instead of being in the elevator totally absorbed in my mind, I’ll be there feeling and looking at who else is in the elevator with me and striking up a conversation. I feel more open. I’m more resting in Being and much more open. Resting in the openness, rather than my contracted self. I sort of spontaneously behave differently. That’s a big change, because not only was I shy, I sort of didn’t realize I was very contracted. It really was through Waking Down and the second birth and all the Shake-Down took me through, that my life changed. I eventually came to see how much resistance was running my life. I think resistance was my method to survive my childhood – to resist everything that was coming in at me. And then I was hating everything and everybody too. It was my strategy to keep people away from me. Life just seemed too painful.

Eduardo: Sounds like it was pretty hard just to be in the world.

Peggy: Totally. It felt like I didn’t want to be here, alive, on the Earth. Somehow it felt like it wasn’t my choice. That’s what I would say in my mind. That piece slowly unwound energetically. Self-hatred was really wound up tight in me.

One of the things that Sandra talked about, at one of the retreats I was at, was how you can have a second birth in your mind, and then in your heart, and in your belly- not in that order – but it has to happen in all of those centers.

Eduardo: But not necessarily all at once?

Peggy: Exactly. And it feels to me like my mind got it first. And that the belly and the heart are sort of following. I feel it much more now in my body in terms of feeling the wholeness, in terms of feeling the openness.

Eduardo: Perhaps this is what “consciousness descending into the body”, relates to.

Peggy: Yeah. It does. It feels like the whole Being.

Eduardo: Well Peggy, this has been good. We’re getting toward the end of our time, and I wonder before we end if there is anything else that you want to mention?

Peggy: Let me think. There is something. One of the things that I very much appreciate about Waking Down is the whole welcoming aspect of it – the mothering, the welcoming of all parts of yourself. One of the reasons I was drawn to Hillary was that I could tell she wasn’t afraid of my feelings. I was afraid of my feelings and I was all backed up in myself. But she wasn’t and I got that about her.

Eduardo: That helped you to move through there, eh?

Peggy: Exactly. The way the teachers work, allows – well it allowed me to go to the deepest pain that I was carrying and feel it and notice that I didn’t die by feeling it. And then it would come up and go away, and come up and go away, so that it finally, on the deepest level kind of resolved. But the welcoming, the holding, the mothering, the deep, deep holding seems very unique to this path. And I really think it contributes to a very fast unwinding. The Diamond Approach does that but it does it in a much slower way. The depth of the holding isn’t the same. It’s a different kind of holding, and so you don’t unwind in the same way. They don’t have people unraveling in that way.

Eduardo: Thank you, Peggy. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this with me now. I’ve got a hunch we’ve got some pearls in there.

Peggy: Yeah. Well thank you, Edwardo, this was a lot more fun than I thought it would be.

Eduardo Sierra  Interviewer

Barbara Witney

July 24, 2009

Eduardo: Hi Barbara, how did you learn about Waking Down?

Barbara: I went to a conference a few years ago at John F. Kennedy University called Non-Dual Wisdom and Psychotherapy.  Saniel Bonder was one of the presenters.  I met him and he did a transmission with each of us in the room that were attending his presentation.   Linda was there as well.  I got some information on them and ordered a bunch of books and started reading them. As I was reading the book “Waking Down”, there was a part where Saniel was talking about students tithing, and I threw the book across the room.  I didn’t touch the stuff anymore for about maybe a year and then I got an email in January from Saniel.  I felt like I was looking for a different spiritual teacher than the teachers who I was attending satsang with at the time. Something about what they were teaching was really feeling incomplete for me, and insufficient, and just kind of dead. About that time, I got the e-mail from Saniel and Linda—which eventually led me to have a couple of phone sessions with Saniel and it just really fit for me.

Eduardo: What was motivating you even buy that book in the first place before you threw it across the room?

Barbara: I guess when Saniel did his presentation, I was curious more about his teaching and what he was offering, and what his particular kind of focus was.  I don’t now how else to describe it.  I was wondering what his realization was.  What I generally do when something really starts to catch my interest, I’ll get books on it and start to read and see if this is a good way for me to go, or is there something here.

Eduardo: Sounds like you were searching for something.

Barbara: Yeah, I was.

Eduardo: Did you have any sense of what it was?

Barbara: Some of it was from the retreats and teachings I’d been to with a teacher who asserts to be a non-dual teacher though the emphasis is still on the absolute.

Eduardo: A little much in that direction, and not much in bringing consciousness down to your toes.

Barbara: Right, exactly. So in the end, because I still had the idea that what I was supposed to stay anchored in, for lack of a better word, is the absolute; and I hadn’t succeeded at that yet.  I had this idea that maybe Saniel’s work would help me do that.  At the time, again, I didn’t have a solid enough grasp about what Saniel’s teaching was.  I didn’t really get what he meant by Waking Down in Mutuality.

Eduardo: So after those two calls, what changed? What aroused your interest again?

Barbara: There were some things, like, when Saniel talked about healing the spirit-matter split, because I had said, well my sense or experience was that I could tune into consciousness outside of me, but not in me.  In terms of like, I could experience consciousness or I could just experience being completely the absolute in meditation, kind of like all matter would fall away.  I would even lose awareness of my body.  I would just be that absolute, all I was that absolute unlimited spaciousness presence.  I could often sense just in the middle of the day, or in the middle of doing something, I could experience consciousnesses around me, like the silently present presence, this alive presence all around me, but I couldn’t feel inside of me.  It was out of me, but not in me, so I could feel that split.  There was something, somehow, that this absolute thing wasn’t complete.  It wasn’t right, it was just resting in the absolute and there were just these questions that started coming up for me. I ran some of that stuff by Saniel, as well as trying to get a hold of this whole thing about manifesting and this new age thinking, the law of attraction. Saniel’s responses to me were just real supportive,  “I like the way you’re thinking about that.” Or he says, “You know, you make some really good discernments and discriminations.” Things like that, so there was this sense of support with sort of my own assessment or things that I was coming to.  I just wanted to talk to somebody about some of this down to earth stuff.

Barbara: I didn’t feel like I was getting that with any of the spiritual teachers, and everything that they did was kind of impersonal.  They’re in a group, a large group of people and you’re sitting there and you’re asking questions directly, and there’s not really much one-on-one teaching, and any question was always just asked back, “who’s the asker?  Look into the asker.” I could just ask these questions to Saniel and he’d answer. He didn’t go into this BS – who’s the asker, you know, look into the experience-er, from whom are those questions arising?  You know, and I was getting sick of that.

Eduardo: I hear you. What happened from there?

Barbara: What I did was I went up and had a sitting with Saniel, an in-person sitting, where he did the transmission stuff, which I thought was pretty cool.  I had then the beginning of a sense of some of what was already available to me.  There were times when I could experience the connectedness with everything.  Connectedness like with Saniel and me, and that even though I could see that he was different there was still the sense of connectedness at the same time, this oneness.  I had that in the session with him.  Then I came back and did a sitting and I even did a couple of sessions with Linda, in-person sessions.  Then when I came to a session, it was around the time of Saniel’s birthday, so I guess that was the end of April?  Anyway, there were a bunch of the others. Van had been at some of the sittings and he was talking about how you don’t have to be perfect to wake down.  You don’t have to have every one of your issues worked out.  Then I was at Saniel’s birthday celebration—Ted and Hilary were there, as well as Van, Michael Grossman, and Jen (other Waking Down Teachers).

So these teachers were talking about “when all this emotion comes up and you’re in the dark places, then you believe it means you’ve done something wrong.”  And I go, that’s exactly it, because, again, this thing about everything is always just favoring the absolute, so then when all this human stuff would come up again, I would think that because of all the stuff that I’ve been taught or read, that I was failing still.  Then when they were saying, well, wait a minute, you don’t have to have everything worked through and it isn’t necessary, and all that.  I don’t know; it was just a feeling sense that this was the place for me to be.

I went to a sitting with Deborah Boyar and it was just this feeling kind of like craving.  Every time we would do the sittings my heart would just pound like it was going to come out of my chest, you know.  It just felt right.  I don’t know how else to – it was more of a feeling sense to rightness to it.

In the sittings and when we would do the gazing with the teachers and then we would also do the mutual gazing where everybody in the room was gazing with each other and all that stuff and my heart would just be going.  All that was going on and then I just had this feeling that I just had to do more.  I felt like I really needed to immerse myself and do something pretty intense.  Then I had learned about the waking down retreat and I was going back and forth and back and forth on it and finally read some of Ted’s essays and said, yeah, I’m doing it.  This seems like this is the thing that I need to do.  This is the thing that I want to do, this feels like the right thing to do.

Eduardo: You began working with Ted?

Barbara: Well, Ted was my teacher at the Transfiguration Retreat (TR), and so I think it was even our first session.  He was the teacher in the afternoon and so he was like my main teacher as far as a person I spent the most time with in those small groups with about three or four other people.  Plus, Sylvia Woods, from Seattle, she was a mentor in our group.  Anyway, so Ted started sharing some personal stuff, and started asking me, “what’s your relationship with consciousness,” or something like that, and I just said, well, it’s always here where I can tap into that pretty easily.  It just feels like it’s outside of me. He suggested that I fall into it.  He said, “fall into it.” I went, really? I thought I had to just wait for it to come to me or something like that.  He said, “no, fall into it,” so I did.  He asked me what it was like, and I can’t remember my discussion, but he suggested that I say to myself, “this is me”. So I did and then I just started giggling and laughing and feeling all this joy, and exuberance and stuff.  I just played with that.  Then what started coming, “this is me, too”.  It was like this is me, and also this humanness is me.  In our next session, I believe it was, we did some more with that, about me feeling it more and more in my body, and I described this kind of continuum. that I could experience from my real human form, that my sense of me was this continuum.  Then, I believe it was Tuesday night, during the TR, Ted was giving an evening talk for anybody who wanted to come, and I was just at the talk listening and stuff.  Suddenly it was like, suddenly I was awake.

Eduardo: Well, how could you tell?  What was different?

Barbara: Everything was like – first of all, there was almost like this sense of waking up.  I don’t even know how to say it.  Almost like what people do when they’re waking up from being asleep.  There was this sudden, like, shift.  I could feel this, like, I was awake in my toes, I was awake in my legs, I was awake in my hands, I was awake everywhere.  There was no more separation.  The feeling, I called it, I fell into me.  Me being more like my humanity.

Eduardo: Do you mean more like consciousness?

Barbara: Yeah; in that sense, that’s the way I described it; I fell into me.  It was literally, I don’t know how to describe it, but there was no separation.  I was just looking around at everything and noticing everything.

Eduardo: Was it noticeable to the folks in the circle there as you experiencing that?

Barbara: No, probably not.  I was very quiet about it, too.  I wasn’t saying anything, I was just in awe and curious and kind of like, what is this, and oh my God! I’m trying to put language to it.  Then I was, throughout the night, even after I went to bed, I would like keep waking up and experiencing myself.

Then all day Wednesday, because it was a day off, I just didn’t want to go anywhere, I jut wanted to just be.  Just walk and sit outside and be in the breeze and everything was, you know, my experienced ranged from what I could notice was my humanness, to my sense of everything arising within me, to me actually either being no boundaries between me and the tree and the lake and the birds.

Eduardo: .  Were you ready for that?

Barbara: Well, I had had some experiences like that before.  What was different was that there was, I don’t know how to describe it because I could…  Often in nature I could sense that there was no separation between me and everything in nature.  It was an outward separation.  I could sense it outwardly.  I could sense it inwardly if that makes any sense, there was still, like, this sense of a boundary.  This time there was no boundary.

I didn’t feel freaked out by it at all.  I didn’t feel scared.  It was like, just with-it, you know, just being with what – almost like just being with one recognition or realization after another, after another, after another.  It was more sensory first, in a sense and then I would put words to it, if that makes any sense.

Eduardo: The whole thing that you’re speaking to about non-separation really seems to sum it up for me as you’re speaking. about just being in awe at everything and feeling no separation, no compulsion to speak out about it or identify yourself in it, just experiencing it and relishing the experience of it.

Barbara: Yeah; so then I just kept doing that.  That night I joined Ted and Linda and Saniel and one of the other students and we went out to dinner and watched the American Idol finale.  I had a beer and all that kind of stuff and the question that kept coming up, sort of like, am I still here, where am I?  Then every time I asked the question then I would sense who I was, and who I was, wasn’t that old sense of who I was. 

Eduardo: So you were making a sort of an ongoing inquiry as this was happening and continuing to consider, what is it?

Barbara: Yeah, because I had some other kinds of openings before, like I remember this period, I don’t know, it was a few years back, where I felt like Barbara fell away.  There was no Barbara, there was just presence and I was moving through life as that.  There was this incredible intimacy with everything, but then it’s like, all my other stuff, all my other human stuff came back again.  Of course, the contrast was dramatic.  It was kind of like, okay, is that what this is again?  I had to keep checking because it was like, is this just a state or is this different than a state?

Eduardo: Did you come to a conclusion on that question?

Barbara: I don’t believe it’s a state because I still sense that even though my experience day to day is not as dramatic as that time was.  I have this ongoing sense of wellbeing all the time now.

Eduardo: How long has it been Barbara?

Barbara: A couple of months.

Eduardo: You’re looking back on it now from here.  What noticeable differences do you discern, aside from this introspection or this self inquiry that you were engaged with?  What were you seeing that was different, what did you feel was different?

Barbara: What I feel is different is I feel really comfortable in my own skin, so I have this ease of wellbeing.  I still have emotional stuff, you know, like, I’m really aware and I’m noticing lots and lots and lots of fear.  I’m feeling lots of fear along with this wonderful sense of wellbeing.  I don’t feel compelled to get rid of the fear like I used to.  Ted said just so that I feel more into it, you know, feel it more, really feel it in my body and stay with that more, but I don’t have this compulsion to get rid of it or try to figure it out or anything about where is it coming from, so that’s very different.  I would say I lost an interest, other than the Waking Down stuff with spiritual inquiry per se.  I’m not interested in doing that anymore.

Eduardo: What role did the Waking Down teachers play?

Barbara: I definitely feel that the transmission part was really important.

Eduardo: Can you explain that a little bit?

Barbara: Just that spending their time doing the gazing and transmission of being and I just feel like that was an instrumental piece.  It being very personal and yet I use the word impersonal at the same time.  Maybe that’s not the word I mean, maybe I mean transpersonal, that’s a better word for it.  In that sense of being to being experience I feel like was very important.  I think it still is.  I love that stuff.  The other part, again, I feel is just this being around the Waking Down teachers, first of all and seeing how down-to-earth everybody is.  People are really alive embodied, people are really embodied and I could sense that.  People aren’t dissociated.  There isn’t all this holier-than-thou, airy-fairy, spacey quality that is so prevalent in so many of the non-dual teachers.

Eduardo: Favoring the transcendental over the worldly and the body and all that?

Barbara: Yeah, yeah, exactly, then just experiencing people just really being disconnected.  Whereas the Waking Down people feel very connected to me, so that was a piece of it.  Also, just these levels of equality that people communicate.  Even though they’re teachers and they’re superior in the teaching that they have, and its really special, there still wasn’t this kind of like, superiority thing about who we are that they communicated, so that was really important.  I feel like the TR was really instrumental in Ted’s being directive. I feel like was really helpful.

Eduardo: Can you explain directive in this context?

Barbara: Directive like fall into consciousness, claim it, say this is me.  I had these ideas that somehow I was supposed to just sit there and it would happen or it wouldn’t and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.  While that’s true, it’s also not true.  I can’t declare this is when it will be, but I could certainly be more active.  Again, I had come from these non-dual teachers who were favoring the transcendental, so everything would always be, well, eventually what will happen is the ego will relax and you’ll get who you really are.  Somehow that will just happen to you, how it’s all a mystery, but that it would happen.

Eduardo: Then you were just noting a minute ago that you weren’t good with the sitting and waiting sort-of approach, that there was a place to be played in your active or yang side. Could you elaborate a little on that, Barbara?  I’m fascinated with those two areas, the yin and they yang as sort of parts of our being, ya know?

Barbara: I don’t know how much I can elaborate on it.  All I know is that Ted was really emphasizing, or his mode was, to me, that it had a yang quality to it.  He was being directive in a sense; do this, try this and calling me to be yang.  I loved it.  I don’t know how to elaborate, but yeah, he was it and was calling me to be it, and I didn’t know that was possible.  For me it was really important because I think I had been doing the yin for years.  Sitting and waiting just trying to be and let everything be as it is.  Of course and feeling like I was failing, but the idea that I could actually engage actively beyond the actual meditating.  Be active of like just having this experience again of falling into consciousness and claiming it as me.  I was going, I can do that…?  Almost as if that was sacrilegious or something.  I was like, what, little ol’ me?  That’s okay?  Like he gave me permission. Ted’s style seems to have that.  His way of teaching really does emphasize the yang, for me.  They have a theme, like, trust in being, or something like that will be the theme of their retreat.  I like that because there’s some direction as opposed to floating around or something and being carried by a current without any guide.  I appreciate his guidance.

Eduardo: Saniel said,  ”dare to grasp the means to your own realization”.

Barbara: I even said it at the TR when I spoke, they had everybody speak at the very beginning and introduce ourselves, I said I’m here to wake up and if that happens, so be it.  I even declared it then.  I remember even saying it one time before going to one of Deborah’s sittings, I just said I want to wake up, I want this now.  I was stamping my feet and everything, in the privacy of my home.  Of course Saniel said you can probably do that out on a park bench on Pacific and nobody would even notice.  People are always shouting and talking to the sky and stuff there, or to someone.

And there’s just a sense in me that I’m just beginning. It’s a sense that I feel in my body. I feel around my heart that I’m just beginning something here. This is not the end; it’s the beginning of something else, something different. And there’s this real curiousity, like I wonder what’s going to evolve here. I wonder what’s going to unfold. I wonder what new I’m going to learn. I wonder more like what this whole deepening is going to be. It’s all unknown to me. I think I probably have some ideas about it just from little pieces that I’ve picked up from other people.

Eduardo: Thank you so much Barbara, I appreciate your time today. Delightful to be with you.

Presenter: Krishna Gauci
Waking Down Teacher

Pointing Out Consciousness – Part 2 | July 2009

Date: July 2009
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Presenter: Krishna Gauci
Waking Down Teacher

Understanding Onlyness – Part 1 | July 2009

Date: July 2009
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Cielle Backstrom - Waking Down Teacher

As I worked with these teachers both in person and by phone for six months, Consciousness continued to drop more and more into my body, and my experiences seemed to match what Saniel described as a Second Birth Awakening, the birth of awakening to a new level of self awareness where Pure Consciousness or Witness Consciousness is body-centered. I asked for a Second Birth interview to check the progress of my deepening into this realization.

After talking for a few minutes, Sandra Glickman, the teacher that was interviewing me, asked, “Who are you?”

I thought for a moment in silence. “I am dual, both limitless and limited.”

“Tell me more,” she prodded.

To describe my unlimited nature was easy. I had been aware of it for many years. “I am unbounded, eternal, omnipresent. At the base of my existence is fundamental non-separateness, fundamental wellness, seamlessness. There is an “is-ness” or in “am-ness” that I am always identified with. It transcends, stands apart from all relative change and yet is the basis of all creation. I am that non-separate basis of all relative existence, all fields of change. I am That.”

“Tell me about your limited nature,” she commanded

That answer also seemed easy. My hands patted my thighs, “My limited nature is my body, my ego, my mind, intellect, emotions and feelings.” Something whispered inside that there was more to my limited nature. I wasn’t sure what that more was. I paused to see what would arise. My gaze was fixed on hers. I sank deep into her eyes. Words formed around a thought in a whisper. The thought was pure blasphemy, yet True. This Truth had to be spoken, and yet it seemed so unbelievable that I could only speak in a whisper.

“When speaking of my limited nature,” I paused, tears welling in my eyes, choking back the words. Then I dared to speak the Truth so new and tender, “I am also you.”

“Say that again,” she insisted.

“I am also you.”

The tears flowed now. My body shook with this recognition. The denial that had separated me from that Truth was like a thin pane of glass. I had dared to crack it.

Kali, the very thing I had feared the most in her, sprang into action. Sandra’s words became like hammers (or maybe they were skulls) to shatter that pane of glass, already weakened, “That is the Second Birth! That is the Second Birth!” She showed no mercy. I was sobbing, hyperventilating, transfixed by her gaze. She continued to wield her hammers, “Nothing else you have spoken of up until this time is the Second Birth. This Is!”

As the shards of the glass that had separated me from this reality fell around me, I exploded like a supernova. Suddenly I found my limited nature simultaneously centered in all things. I was all things. It was awesome, unbelievable, yet True. Namaste took on a new meaning. My eternal nature bows to itself as found in you (who?). I continued to shake, cry and hyperventilate. I grounded myself in her gaze.

“Yes, yes,” her voice softened, “this is who you are.”

I started to relax into this expanded state. I had often heard the expression “holding the space” for someone going through a “process.” I needed someone as big and powerful as she to hold the space I was now experiencing while I integrated this new level of Reality. After a short time, I realized that my unmanifest, limitless ground of Being could hold this new realization for and with me.

I felt the exhaustion of both having just given birth and having just been born. I realized that the Second Birth was more than just an embodied feeling-witness consciousness. It was a true and awesome knowing that I was not just the unmanifest basis of all creation, but also that I was centered in all manifest creation, all things simultaneously. Non-separateness was experienced on the level of the unmanifest, but also on the level of manifest creation.

—Cielle Backstrom (excepted from the book, Dancing in the Fire: Stories of Awakening within the Heart of Community by Bob Valine)

Presenter: Sandra Glickman
Senior Waking Down Teacher

“Intimate Inquiry” talk and exploration, from 2009 Transfiguration Retreat in Excelsior Springs, MO.

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Date: 2009
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Presenter: Sandra Glickman
Senior Waking Down Teacher

“Toward Deepening & Awakening” talk / exploration, from 2008 Transfiguration Retreat in Excelsior Springs, MO.

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Presenter: Sandra Glickman
Senior Waking Down Teacher

“Embodiment” talk and exploration, from 2008 Transfiguration Retreat in Excelsior Springs, MO.

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Date: 2008
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by Krishna Gauci

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Often people wonder about or ask questions that are a variation of this basic theme:

“How can I trust that this is really the highest form of enlightenment? What if I’m barking up the wrong tree here? What if the experience that you offer is not it? Sometimes I’m incredibly frustrated with the mistakes I’ve made spiritually. I’ve wasted my time following paths that did not leave me with the restful satisfied life that was promised. I feel foolish because I’ve been deceived in the past, how can I be sure that I won’t be disappointed again?”

Do you ever wonder about this yourself?

It’s a good question.

There are three related issues here: The notion of “full enlightenment”, the limits of what a teacher or teachings can give you and most importantly the ultimate nature of disappointment itself. Because of all of the ideas and assumptions we have around all this I will be repeating myself a lot here, saying the same thing from a number of different angles to flush everything out.

The way I see it, any form of awakening is just a beginning, and “full awakening” is an ever-receding horizon. This awakened life and every human life is filled with disappointment, but we still walk on. Through embrace of this situation, an embrace that cannot be forced or willed; surrender happens, despite us. Deep Trust and the unraveling of resistance happens through our disappointments. All that I actually have is a Deep Trust In Being and that’s all that I’m pointing to.

By doing your own Self-inquiry and examining the difference between that which changes and that which does not, one can discover oneself as Consciousness which is free of all concepts including notions of failure or success. Looking and finding your non-locatable existence (or is it locatable non-existence?) is the essential core and foundation of awakening. This can be an ongoing experiential exploration producing ever-deepening confidence in your freedom as Consciousness. We are all already free as the infinite, and totally at rest as That. This is my nature as it is yours, even if you do not have full trust that this is so.

On the other hand as the finite body/mind/soul personality (regardless of how transient and unreal that ultimately is) I appear as a limited being, who is deepening trust by both embracing and surrendering as that limited reality. Trust and surrender happen through my efforts to make life better, which bring about either failure or success, both of which eventually uncover the sense that “this is not enough”. The kind of surrendering that I’m speaking of here is not the result of attaining something, but of losing illusions about life through actually living it with a willingness to be at the effect of it’s limits.

Usually when folks hear me speak about Deep Trust they think in terms of letting go rather than holding on, surrendering rather than resisting, trusting rather than doubting, no-effort rather than effort. There’s a subtle but important difference here. I’m talking about a sort of “tantric” trust, one that includes its opposite. “Deep Trust” trusts the entire process of both surrendering and resisting, both trusting and doubting, both letting go and embracing. To my friends who speak the language of “letting go” I would say this: after you’ve let go of whatever you can let go of, you will probably notice that you still have something in your hands. If you feel you don’t have any desire at all then I suggest that you look more closely. Whatever that is, embrace it and live it.

I’m not suggesting that pursuing your desire will not ultimately end in something less than satisfaction, of course it will, but who said that you would escape this most human of situations? Awakening and deepening trust happens in the midst of the human situation for those of us who have hopes and fears. If you can let go of hope and fear in all of your life, by all means let go of all hope and fear. But if you find that you still hope for something and fear something else, even after all your efforts of “letting go,” just embrace it and go with it rather than being in denial about it. Live it out; it’s yours to live.

Trust continues to be developed through the disappointments that arise from both failure and success, and an often-difficult honesty with ourselves. This frees energy and attention that was stuck trying to avoid experience and releases it into a profound feeling of deep connection to life and a simple unconditioned awareness of it. This connectedness is often experienced as a current running through existence that can be a source of nurturance and well-being, but it can also be felt as a fire and it doesn’t necessarily make life any easier.

So yes, it can be a disappointment. That’s all I can “promise” and I really can’t even promise that. I certainly can’t say that this is not a “wrong tree” for you, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything here for you. You may be ready for more honesty than you thought you were.

Being “Really Enlightened”

“How can I trust that this is really the highest form of enlightenment?”

I remember the first of my teachers with whom I experienced Transmission. It was about twenty-five years ago; I was living in New York City and just getting by, living hand to mouth driving a taxi at night.

My teacher at the time was someone who studied with several teachers from both eastern and western traditions, but his appearance and manner were anything but the typical spiritual stereotype. He was a tall stocky white guy with a Jewish background who spoke with a refined but obvious Brooklyn accent. And while he went to an Ivy League school he still had a New York attitude and understood working class sensibilities. Fritz Perls himself had trained him in Gestalt Therapy; he had lived in India for five years and had been on the faculty at a well-known Tibetan meditation center in Berkley.

I came to him mostly to work on “my psychological stuff”, but I was also attracted to working with him because of his spiritual background as well. While he required me to meditate and read a couple of books, during our weekly sessions we hardly ever spoke about consciousness. Mostly we talked about daily life, my mother, and my anger.

During what was the second or third session something strange happened. While sitting there talking about my day at work I noticed that I could quite literally see him more clearly than anything else. It was like the pixels that made up his physical body were more densely packed and more clearly defined. I shifted how I was sitting and moved my head slowly from side to side, blinking my eyes to clear away this visual distortion. It continued unabated. Not only that but it got worse and I began to see something else. On hot summer days sometimes you can see “waves” that radiate off of the streets, a kind of “mirage” and now I was seeing them radiating from his body. “This is weird” I said out loud, “well, I’m a weird guy” he said calmly, “let’s get back to your work day”. At this point the room seemed filled and I began to feel something, “I’m seeing energy coming off of you” I told him. He said, “Energy is just a thing, an object; like the couch or the chair, just get back to the conversation about work”.

The whole thing was absurd; this was the first time that I experienced such a thing without any intent or trying on my part, and apparently no trying on his either. No drugs, no meditating, no chanting, no breathing exercises, no nothing. I was having a totally mundane conversation with him. As I tried in vain to ignore what was happening and talk about getting stiffed by another taxi fare, I noticed that I was changing. My breathing slowed down, my voice became deeper and more deliberate and I felt a warm sense of well-being. While I could feel everything, I was somehow watching myself unaffected. I was seeing myself in exactly the same way I was seeing everything and (I later noticed) everyone else, through an “objective”, quiet, equal seeing; an equal vision. This was no therapy session and it was more than I had dreamed possible. I had read about such things, but this was the first time I had ever experienced them myself in my own body, right here in New York, with a Brooklyn Jew no less.

I couldn’t help myself, I blurted out ” Are you enlightened?”

While the exact language eludes me, the heart of his answer has never left me.

He said something like this:

“Listen to you: ‘Am I enlightened?’ How would you know?

If I believe that I’m enlightened even if I’m actually not, I could say, ‘I am enlightened’, and you wouldn’t know if I was or wasn’t.

If I truly am enlightened and for some reason I think it’s important for you to think that I’m not enlightened then I could say to you ‘No, I’m not enlightened’ and you wouldn’t know.

And If I am enlightened and I say to you ‘Yes, I am enlightened’ then you still wouldn’t know just because I say so.

So why go there? Pay attention to your own process, that’s all that you can know about. All that you can possibly know about is your own enlightenment. Even if I were the Buddha himself, if you are not getting anything from being here with me then this is not where you should be. On the other hand, if you are receiving something for yourself, if you have some benefit from being here then that is all that is important and this is where you should be. ”

We’ve long ago gone our own ways, I’ve studied with many other teachers and now I also teach, but I’ll always remember those words.

I like to tell this story often, I repeat this because it’s very important; it’s a kind of key.

You are The Guru

Don’t overlook the obvious. You cannot give over responsibility for yourself to anyone else. Make good use of your teachers and respect the guidance that you allow yourself to make use of. Also remember that no one can relieve you of your responsibility for your life so be careful of those who imply that they can.

Today we live in a world in which we are exposed to many traditions of spiritual awakening. There are obviously many examples in world history of great spiritual realizations. The understanding of enlightenment is different in different schools and traditions. Even when someone is a realizer in his or her school there is no guarantee that that particular form of enlightenment is THE form of enlightenment. You know: “The Super-duper bestest of the best, Highest of the high, really truly enlightenest enlightened twelfth stage supreme state of the really truly truest awakening”.

I remember when I lived in New York that there used to be something written on most of the boxes of pizza-to-go: “You’ve tried the rest, now try the best”. Of course everyone says and may very well believe that their brand is the best. Just saying it doesn’t mean it’s true, and how would anyone check such a claim?

Can you be at peace with the possibility that you don’t have the means to validate what the highest form of enlightenment is? That it may be more important to be yourself than to be the Buddha?

Coming to terms with our past without sugar coating it ultimately means trusting Life while still being honest about how hard and confusing it can be.

Again: “Sometimes I’m incredibly frustrated with the mistakes I’ve made spiritually. I’ve wasted my time following paths that did not leave me with the restful satisfied life that was promised. I feel foolish because I’ve been deceived in the past, how can I be sure that I won’t be disappointed again?”

Making use of the guidance we receive and respecting it does not mean we always agree with everything that we’ve learned. Even when we find the need to leave a teacher or school, I feel it’s in our best interest to honor that we were led there to learn what we did. Being clear about how we differ with something we previously were involved in is not the same as dishonoring it. It’s important to honor our own past and our own inner source of guidance. Regretting how we’ve lived our lives is easy enough to do, but it’s helpful to consider that we were only always doing the best we could with what we knew at the time.

That said; let me be clear here, it’s true that sometimes we can find ourselves rightfully angry. It’s certainly helpful to be honest about wrongs that were done to others and ourselves in the name of spirituality. There are things in life that are not as they should be, to not admit this is to lie to ourselves and candy coat some real suffering. We and others may have experienced pain in the face of exaggerated claims made and promises not kept. And yet, if nothing else our bitter experiences lead us to listen more deeply to our own needs and intuition.

It is often just this honesty about what is painful, disappointing and terrible that makes life worth living in the midst of it’s suffering. The honesty about how false it all is is its truth. When we look at the world and say, “Where is life’s heart? How can life be so cruel?” THAT is life’s heart, it is Life’s Heart that is expressing this pain and outrage through your body and you are that Heart. So speak it loudly and clearly and allow yourself to be sobered by what you know.

Not just with spiritual teachers but throughout all of life there are grave disappointments and let downs. I’d like to suggest that at the same time that this discontent has been happening, events themselves have always been conspiring to point us to that which is trustable underneath everything that isn’t.

So this is the paradox that I’m always having to come to terms with: I find myself trusting life through and in the midst of circumstances that are un-trustable.

Life is the Goddess of Creativity through Limits

“What if I’m barking up the wrong tree here?”

How it looks to me:

Life can be a disappointment, but it’s just you and Her, and it seems that She only offers sub-standard imperfect trees, one after the other. For me the question is not: “Is this the right tree?” but rather: “Is this tree you find yourself with now yours to bark up right now?” Of course it’s natural that as soon as we discover that it’s the wrong tree we run to the next apparently better one… even as we begin to have the sneaking suspicion that they’re all not-quite-right. So although we move on to next “better” tree we know that it will not be enough. Do we then stop barking? Well, yes and no.

We no longer bark thinking we’ve found the big “IT”. But you know, dogs…they just love to bark, it’s just in their nature to bark. Dogs just can’t help but want the prize that they imagine must be hiding up in that tree, they can smell it…almost taste it.

This tree is honest in a way that many others are not, and that makes all the difference in the world. This tree has a sign on it that reads, “This tree and all others are a disappointment, so you can relax as you bark, because ‘IT’ isn’t here either”. Relaxing as you bark, you find YOURSELF, not “IT”. But even then you find that it’s your nature to bark. Life is by nature not perfectible, it will never be “right” except for a moment, and then it changes. Knowing this does not take away the urge in life (or us) towards perfection. This is the nature of evolution.

Whether we want a better car or we have a burning fire for deeper surrender to The Source of existence, life in form is always about going beyond… It’s never enough. When you find that everything lines up perfectly, you can be sure of one thing… it won’t last.

All of life is the continuous result of this untrustworthy process, isn’t that reason enough to trust it? The truth seems to be that we only trust life when we have no other option. I don’t find that I have a choice here; I end up trusting life more than I trust my ability to track if life is trustworthy.

It seems to me that Life is a living Goddess. Like any living being she shows up in ways that I often don’t anticipate, but no matter what choice I make, no matter what road I take, she is always my only partner.

Of course, it must be said (even if this late in the essay) that while fulfilling any particular desire is ultimately not satisfying, who can deny the amazing beauty in all of this? The awe inspiring unfolding evolution of nature not to mention all the achievements of humanity that have arisen through desire and our futile attempts at lasting satisfaction is an astonishing fountain of creativity. Life uses unfulfillable yearning to create the whole thing!

Just suppose the government funded a huge project to invent a time machine. Suppose that it failed in that endeavor, but along the way discovered the cure for cancer and invented thousands of new forms of technology. Who would call that a failure? Only those who wanted a time machine and were focused on that desire being fulfilled. Everyone else would be in gratitude for the accidental side benefits.

Every desire leads to the next thing to do, even if it ends up being “the wrong tree” in terms of our original intent. The benefit of pursuing our desire and getting disappointed is not the life we wanted (but did not get) but rather it’s this life that has actually unfolded. As John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Appreciating and even loving this life for the fireworks display it is, for the vulnerable flower it actually is (despite what we wished it would be); is devotion to Her (as She is).

Disappointment: the door to What Is

So by all means if you think you see a better tree, go for it! This path is not one that demands exclusivity. There is really no need to limit yourself, bark wherever you are moved to.

Expecting anyone to be able to tell you that you are not barking up the wrong tree is only trying to avoid the facts and makes you susceptible to exploitation. Of course you’re barking up the wrong tree! That’s all we ever do, it’s all we can do. The limited nature of manifest existence is made up entirely of wrong trees. As Suzuki Roshi once said: “Life is one mistake after another”. The biggest mistake is to think otherwise.

Our Infinite nature as Freedom, Consciousness, Buddha nature, Atman or the Self is free of all this. We are free of fulfillment and nonfulfillment, pleasure and pain, loss and gain. When attention or awareness is unconditioned by thought and simply dissolves into The Context of what is, our sense of separateness is gone and we are equally distributed everywhere. This knowing of our freedom can remain even when the sense of separateness returns and the thinking mind is back telling us “what is what”. The more we return to bath in the waters of unconditioned awareness where nothing is a success and nothing is a problem the more we become aware of ourselves where none of this is an issue.

At the same time, even by hearing such a statement we (in our sense of limitation) may find that we will not be able to help but make this freedom a goal, and the barking begins. Pursuing that goal may seem to improve our lives, as we get “closer and closer” to being “completely at peace”…or not.

Whenever we do refine our lives it is in the relative finite realm of human limitation that all improvements are made (spiritual or otherwise), and the sense of progress will be followed by another sense of limits.

As the Infinite no improvement is ever necessary.

In the realm of change and improvement nothing lasts. Every improvement is made on shifting sand. The limited will never reach the unlimited so it will always end in “not quite good enough”. Disappointment wears away hope and fear and leaves us simply here. Being simply here without hope or fear, we once again find we are always free.

Disappointment is not a wall but a door.

The more that we pursue our desires and dreams the more we feel the way “it’s not enough,” even if we fulfill our dreams. The more we become disenchanted with our plans the more we relax into what “just is”, even as we’re cooking up the next plan. The more we relax into what “just is” the more our nature as unconditioned freedom seeps through our life and we find ourselves simply Being, even in the midst of doing.

We can’t rush this; it takes it’s own time and it’s pace can be trusted. Besides, we have no choice.

We cannot “make a decision” to “not do doing” unless we’re willing to do “not doing”. If we decide to “not seek improvement” and think we are better off for it, then we would do well to notice that we are once again doing something (doing “not doing” and making an effort at not making effort) to improve our situation. Nothing wrong in doing this but there is a new danger of slipping back into failure/success mode. Now it’s failure/success at “not-doing”. So we could get stuck yet again failing at doing “not doing”….

The so-called alternative that I’m suggesting here is to simply see the dilemma and live it. We cannot help but to do what we feel will improve our situation, even though we know that ultimately it will fail to satisfy us altogether. This recognition relieves us of the burden of having to find (or pretend to find) fulfillment in life or to get things perfectly right according to some notion of perfection. Ironically, it frees us to just live.

We notice how we pursue our sense of what is most auspicious and pay attention to how we feel, and notice our expectations and how they are met and how they are not.

And something happens…

We embrace the activity of our human nature where there is failure and success.

And something else also happens…

We find ourselves falling into the silence of being where there is no idea of failure or success.

In other words…

We relax into the whole enchilada and it unfolds through us and as us in a way that is beyond us.

And that’s it.

This “Way”

I am not suggesting that this is the true path.

I am also not suggesting that it isn’t the true Path.

I’m suggesting that for many of us it is our truth.

For many of us this is the only thing we find we can do.

We have given up on finding the right tree and have come to feel that there are only wrong trees. Actually it’s not that they are wrong trees (or right trees), it’s just that they are always a disappointment if we expect fulfillment from the outcome. Every endeavor to improve our situation never quite meets the mark. This is the nature of things and there’s nothing wrong in all this, including the feeling that there is.

We don’t give up living; we don’t stop the effort to improve our lives in whatever form we feel is most useful. We find that we have no choice but to bark, because that’s what dogs (and people) do. We may know that we will never reach perfection and full satisfaction with any of our efforts, but we continue our activity as long as we still have any hope (or fear) related to what we are doing. If we find that life itself has exhausted our hope and fear around what we were doing, we find we no longer have energy to pursue that desire, so we don’t. Can you call that an attainment or “letting go”? Well, yes and no. It’s not the kind that you necessarily claim as a point of pride, unless you want to…

We get better and better at a hopeless task. We come to a brokenhearted humility and a Deep Trust in being through barking up so-called wrong trees, and that makes this the right tree for those who are drawn to it.

Making efforts to improve your life takes on a very different quality as you realize that nothing in life is enough, whether it is a “worldly effort” or “spiritual effort” that you use, even the effort of “giving up the effort” will not be enough.

For many people, realizing that all paths or non-paths lead to this is both a great disappointment and a great relief.

It’s not that we’ve been doing it wrong; this is just the nature of existence.

To the degree that this teaching is a path of attainment, it will disappoint.

To the degree that this teaching is a way to sober-up out of dreams, both worldly and spiritual, it is simply an honest pointing to our condition and situation and a way through.

There is paradox here that is very hard to put to language. Underlying all of this is a deep acceptance of the entire process of your own unfolding, including all of your non-acceptance.

It is deep trust in Life itself, including all of your mistrust and doubt.

Another angle at this is an understanding of three things:

1) That none of your effort at a better life can give you freedom, so it will not be enough.

2) That trust in Being (as life is) is freedom now.

And (here’s the paradox)…

3) Trust in Being includes trusting that your effort to improve yourself will play it’s part in the unfolding of Being, so don’t cut yourself in half by denying your desire to make your life be better or your awakening deeper.

Maybe another way saying this is the there is no salvation through works, salvation only comes through faith, but faith without works is dead….

There it is

So no, as a teacher I will not and I cannot guarantee anything about this. I just share my experience, that’s all.

Even when we are awake to our unlimited nature, which is absolute completeness, we are also simultaneously awake to our limited nature and that human limitation longs to be fully lived out as well.

Whether we live a life of spiritual desire or worldly desire there is nothing wrong with the innate preference to make things better. Making things better is the intelligent, healthy and natural thing that body/minds do.

Certainly it is sane and healthy to pursue better relationships, a healthier body, a more secure financial situation and a more authentic integrated experience of being in the world. There’s nothing wrong in this.

Certainly refinement of the ability to “let go”, “accept’, “be detached”, “be present”, “drop the mind”, “be vigilant” or “be aware” are sane and healthy habits to cultivate. Yet they are also forms of effort; the desire to change things and make them better, even though they are more subtle “spiritual” things. There’s nothing wrong in this.

When there is effort there is the potential to attain or fail, everything is temporary and every attainment will be lost. There is nothing wrong in this.

Even “letting go of attainment” is in this category; it is an effort to improve things by not improving things. The path of “no path” is a path and “not seeking” can become a form of “seeking” that is sneaking into the back door. Rather than kidding ourselves and creating complications in the mind it is better to just understand all this.

This life of limits is never enough, it can always be better and our heart yearns to change it and bring us closer to freedom, peace and contentment. As we look to change our conditions and make them “just right” we are looking in the dimension of change where things will never be enough. In our nature as conditioned beings we cannot help but make these efforts, which can bring us closer, but never close enough. There is nothing wrong in this.

Freedom, peace and contentment are not the result of efforts; they are simply the truth of our nature as unconditioned awareness that is present despite (and in the midst of) our efforts.

Is this really a dilemma?

How sobering

What a paradox

What a relief

There it is…

Disappointed?

© 2009 Krishna Gauci, Senior Teacher of Waking Down in Mutuality
www.wakingdown.org/KrishnaGauci/
www.krishnasatsang.com

by Saniel Bonder

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The idea of waking up is a part of many spiritual teachings. It is associated with the endeavor to get spiritual, conscious, awake, enlightened, free, or somehow escape the perceived prison of the phenomenal world of body, emotion, and mind as you experience it. There are innumerable methods to achieve such changes. In general, waking down, as we live and offer it, is different in that you “fall” into your fundamental transcendent nature and your bodily, human personhood simultaneously. Instead of trying to get out of life, you realize more and more that you are infinite transcendental Being concretizing, crystallizing, and incarnating as a divinely human person. The phrase waking down signals that this is very different from trying to rise out of this world and all your karmas here into some other state or dimension. In this process, you directly realize and bring the infinite divine reality to life.

And, if you bring that infinite or unconditioned quality of Being to life in real, authentic ways, you wind up becoming deeply receptive to others, and profoundly communicative about this, especially with others who are doing the same themselves. This is what we call mutuality. Because life is not just about the self, or even the great Self. Here’s a huge part of the mystery: many of us are under the impression that upon getting fundamentally enlightened in that non-finite Self or Truth, we will then somehow be free of all the impositions and challenges of relating to others. After all, they would just be part of our real Self, right? But it’s not that way. In the relative plane, otherness leaps forward to claim its dues from anyone who is deeply, authentically bringing the infinite identity to life. And it requires you to relate to others as a relative self who does not know them in any perfect sense, not just as a big infinite Self who is supposedly free of such mundane obligations. Mutuality, especially with people who are living at the same evolutionary depth you are, becomes a huge commitment and undertaking.

Thus, we speak of waking down in mutuality as a singular, multi-faceted process, path, and life-work.

Saniel Bonder, Founding Teacher of Waking Down in Mutuality
www.wakingdown.org/SanielBonder/
www.sanielandlinda.com