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.

Ted Strauss - Senior Waking Down Teacher

Well, no and yes. It’s not a downer in the sense that it’s depressing or that’s it’s all about darkness. But it is about coming down from an exclusive identification with mind and into the total ground of Being.

Picture an African savannah with a large tree in the middle. Imagine yourself being chased by some wild animal and climbing up into the tree for safety. Now picture how scary it would be to ever risk coming down from there. In this analogy, the ground is Totality — a dangerous place where imminent death is just as real as everlasting life. If you remain exclusively focused on your ideas of enlightenment, happiness, or perfect safety, you’ll never come down to the ground of true wholeness, where life is always a double-edged sword. Mind can provide temporary shelter, but it was never meant to be our exclusive residence. In fact, I’m hoping you may have noticed that living exclusively from mind is the real danger.

Many of us live in an unconscious disposition of eternal hopefulness. We hope to find a state of enlightenment that will vanquish our fears and render our petty human problems insignificant in the face of a great Light that outshines the darkness. Or perhaps we hope for a realization that will make us feel safe and happy. I’m not suggesting there’s nothing cosmic to realize, only that what there is to realize isn’t what we were expecting.

For centuries, spiritual schools, practices, and traditions have mistaken spiritual awakening with heightened (read: improved) states of consciousness. Problem is, consciousness is not a state; it’s a pre-existing condition. Therefore it can’t be heightened, developed, achieved, expanded, or attained. Realizing consciousness sometimes (but not always) propels the realizer into a temporary state of happiness or expansion, but that necessarily wears off because there’s always the other side of the coin. Even the coin of Freedom has Bondage on the tails side. Even enlightenment can’t change the fact that Being is both Absolute and Relative.

You can realize consciousness directly and claim it as part of your whole self, along with your body and mind. But, contrary to extremely popular opinion, recognizing and owning your own awareness is not going to make you permanently happy or solve all your problems. What it will do is relieve you of the stress, expense, and whole-life depletion that goes with the apparently endless search to realize consciousness. Realizing consciousness will then provide you with the safety to allow yourself to wake down into the uncomfortable truth of your divinely human reality.

Perhaps you’re wondering what I could mean by “the uncomfortable truth of your divinely human reality”. If it’s divine or spiritual, what could be so uncomfortable? The answer is that nothing is just “divine” or 100% “spiritual”; Being is One, and so everything is everything. Everything that exists is both spiritual and material, perfect and imperfect, happy and sad, Absolute and Relative, permanent and impermanent. Including, of course, You.

At the core of your Being, you are both free and in jail. You are the universe, and you’re just this flawed and mortal human being. You are both “higher self” and “lower self”. You cannot resolve this apparent paradox because it’s who you are. It only appears as a paradox and it only appears to need resolving because it’s the developmental stage you’ve been in, because you haven’t known how to relax into totality, and because you don’t like how it feels to be you. Perhaps you always assumed that being alive (and especially being enlightened) should feel good. Or at least better than this.

The search for “better than this” is the essence of the spiritual quest. It’s what has driven humanity since the beginning, and it’s what has driven you. I’m not suggesting that there’s nothing better than this, but I am suggesting that if there’s ever to be something better, it can only come through realizing this; the feeling of being you.

Waking Down is for people who are sick and tired of striving to be better or more spiritual, but can’t help yearning to awaken. It’s for people who have begun to realize that maybe it’s not just about waking up. The down in Waking Down means that real awakening must include realizing transcendence and imminence. If you want to realize wholeness, you must be prepared to allow your own wholeness, including the parts of yourself you don’t like. You’re not going to find cosmic wholeness if you won’t allow yourself to embrace the truth of all your parts.

Realizing wholeness was supposed to feel enlightening (and it does), but I’m here to say that it’s not at all what you thought it was going to feel like. In fact, it’s so different from what you were expecting that you’ve probably been assuming your experience is proof of your lack of enlightenment. You kept throwing your own experience away by comparing it with all the hopes, dreams, and ideals you’ve been clinging to in your tree of mind.

Here’s a secret: wholeness feels the way you feel you right now. That’s right, I’m suggesting that the feeling of being you right now is the feeling of living the ultimate paradox of Being. Perhaps you feel sometimes good and sometimes bad, sometimes trapped and sometimes free. It’s easy to feel the good parts. but what about feeling confused, disconnected, incomplete, banished, anxious, bad, wrong, tense, bewildered, or utterly disillusioned? Such feelings don’t match our ideas of feeling “enlightened”, but until you learn to recognize and fully embrace them at the core, you’ll be perplexed. How could your intuition of the Truth and Freedom of the Infinite resolve itself with the darkness and limits of this Earthly life?

You see, that’s the secret. There’s no need for resolution. You just wanted to resolve that feeling of paradox so you could feel better, free yourself of inner conflict, or so you could feel right with yourself and the universe. But you don’t have to resolve the apparent dilemma to feel right or at home. You can feel at home with life anyway.

Waking Down is a support group for people who are ready to come down into life, with all its pains and glories. It’s a place to learn how to relax into the truth of being You. If that sounds like a downer, Waking Down may not be for you. But if that sounds good, you may have just found what you’ve been looking for your whole life: You.

©2008 Ted Strauss

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)

by Sandra Glickman

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“Why didn’t you just go ahead and bust the guy?” asked my trusted friend Junelle. We were all sitting at a birthday party-ten of us, friends and intimates of many years now. My birthday friend was commenting how both I and a companion had each in turn been candid and respectful with him regarding a sensitive relationship change occurring amongst the three of us. I had wanted to blurt out that the only two people there not being candid were this guy and myself. My being was itching to be honest and set things straight between us. But something held me back!

I bit my tongue, held my breath and the moment passed. Then I began to feel bad about myself, cowardly. Why was I still “protecting” this guy? (Junelle’s question); and after the many ways in which I have felt wounded by his neglect and absence of honesty? The therapist in me continued to label myself “passive” and “co-dependent.” I finally muttered something to Junelle about the uselessness of confronting the guy and how things spoken to him seemed as if to disappear into a black hole.

Though I had justified myself, I still felt uneasy. Why can’t I, supposedly living now as the Embodied Self, just be this One? A few hours later in the middle of the night, my reliable discriminating mind awoke me with the answer: TRUST, the necessary foundation of EMBODIED Consciousness. My body has come to know more keenly than my thinking mind where I can and cannot trust another! On many an occasion I have been perfectly capable of free expression, confrontation, even raw blurting out of unpleasantries. But in that moment, my throat held back, throttled itself against those words flying out, relegated my words to internal echoes and reverberations, and sent them up to the convoluted channels of my ever-so-greedy mind patterns, where they came to be used against my poor dear vulnerable self. My body knew what my mind, habituated to “self-improvement” and striving, hadn’t yet got: the profound need for Trust. My body consciousness wouldn’t allow myself to be wounded again in a perceived hopeless project. Therefore I was required to feel instead the limits in my relationship with this person whom I love and deeply value.

At first I felt the Core Wound of pain and confusion. This then turned into the simple Wound of loving in a limited relationship. I found and find that I have no choice but to grieve and finally accept that here is a person who can only meet me so far. Because of this I can only grow so far with him. He doesn’t trust-at least not me, not now. So I must choke off my free expression, relinquish an opportunity to know myself more honestly, forego whatever I could learn or experience by exposing myself more deeply and vulnerably, and forego a deeper level of love and intimacy which could come out of a more mutually trusting relationship. My heart breaks over and over with similar incidents in many of the relationships in my life. It is excruciating in the ones I have come to love the most.

So do you see the beauty and glory for me of finding a group of Beloveds who are capable of Trust? Who have come to perceive the value of Conscious Embodiment? Who are willing to risk with me whatever it takes to bring forth themselves in Consciousness and honesty? Who have become capable of staying in the room and going through the hard places, hearing hard feedback, giving me themselves in all their freedom, in all their rawness?

Trust is the great gift which makes all this possible, which has made and continues to make possible the finding of all the parts of myself, with which I so long to connect. These parts I now know, can only arise in relationship and can only be fully claimed in mutual trust. This work cannot be done on one’s own. In the relationship I described above, I have had to struggle alone, because my Beloved does not go there with me. I can only bow to the mystery of why this is.

Still, what a gift to find I can no longer give myself out to everyone, even a dearly loved one. Though my mind might, my body will not participate in such a horrible punishment-to speak, shout, even whisper into a black hole where nothing returns to be resolved, or it returns “sideways.” Such a debilitating depletion of self! Yet I confess I had to override myself more than a number of times to get this lesson. My body’s inherent knowledge, as the Consciousness, now ferrets out who is and who is not available for mutual trust.

Trust. How could I have found myself as Consciousness, more and more Embodied, if this sweet nectar was not available here, first with Saniel and then with so many of You? I am profoundly grateful to Saniel for his capacity to trust me and tolerate all the dark and even glorious aspects of me, and for his capacity for first finding trust of himself. His teaching of mutual Love-Trust is truly the foundation of this realization process.

Through trust, we find we can eventually BE ourselves, all of ourselves, from low to high, simple to complex, in every dimension. We find we can survive and even transform into delicious divine food our darkest parts. Through trust we express and celebrate and magnify our Divine and human natures. Trust is big, vast. It is equivalent to Consciousness, to Love, to God. That is what it is. Nothing less. That is what I find.

Sandra Glickman, Senior Teacher of Waking Down in Mutuality
www.wakingdown.org/SandraGlickman

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

by Krishna Gauci

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Question:

What is the best way for further development after the second birth and what do you say about using other more traditional spiritual maps as well?

Reply:

 You asked: “What do you say about using other more traditional spiritual maps as well?”

Above all, Dare to trust your own Total Being.

Waking Down in Mutuality honors traditional Dharma maps even as it challenges the notion that we in the west can use them without taking into account our own unique twenty-first century post modern individuality. It suggests that the kind of human beings we are now are so different from those addressed by those maps that to confine ourselves to their vision is to leave entire aspects of ourselves unaddressed. Understanding this we can make great use of ancient dharma while remaining true to all of what and who we are.

None of the limitations of these maps need define us. As far as that goes, none of our own limits act as any sort of definition of what this school is or can become. We are at a unique juncture in history in which we have before us all the spiritual teachings of the world. I would suggest that we can use them all without harm only if we are careful to acknowledge all of who we are as individuals, divine and human.

You also asked: “What is the best way for further development after the second birth”

Your own mission will make itself know to you as you follow the impulses of Being. It’s important to recognize that your life is waiting to be discovered and that you have unique gifts to bring forth. In many ways Waking Down in Mutuality is NOT a school in the usual sense because it is ultimately you who shapes the direction of your explorations in the 2nd life.

This is very exciting as you alone bring to this process your experience and truth. There is a very real and living energy of mutual transformation in the process our being together in this deep honesty. There is an alchemical magic in mutuality. We end up functioning as channels of continuous revelation, transmission and Divine communion with one another. In these specially dedicated friendships the spirit of guidance can make itself felt to each of us personally. Invoking the inner guru through relationship with each other, rather than a single teacher, we are both the gift and the giver. There is the invitation to all by Saniel and the community to “change us and be changed by us”. I have found this to be delightfully true when I only half believed it, but I could only grasp the extent of it’s potential by taking risks and being willing to share who I was in my fragile human nature. The challenge of doing this in heart to heart meetings continues to be incredibly potent for me.

YOU are the Waking Down in Mutuality process and THIS conversation is part of the curriculum of this school. Saniel’s explorations may be a starting point, but you must both make and discover your own way. The key is that when you are honest you add to the richness of others as well as yourself. Mutuality gives you existential sounding boards, not just for the ideas of your mind, but for all of you. It gives us the space to witness ourselves share our ideas and feelings in a context bigger than our own experience and have them reflected back to us from multiple perspectives. Sometimes it isn’t comfortable or easy, but it is through daring to be yourself that you take your place in and as part of life. Taking the risk of not being understood or appreciated by sharing both how you agree with and differ from others is the way into fuller incarnation and the environment of mutuality is the container that makes it safe.

This is what comes next as much as anything else. It is the very individual and unique adventure of coming forth and incarnating in mutuality.

© 2004 Krishna Gauci, Senior Teacher of Waking Down in Mutuality
www.wakingdown.org/KrishnaGauci/
www.krishnasatsang.com

by Saniel Bonder

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My friends and I are often asked, “How does this work work?” Let me try to offer an explanation of the Waking Down process that speaks to you, whoever you may be.

Who does this work work for?

That’s really the first question. There are no special attributes that guarantee an individual’s readiness for this kind of awakening and transformative work. At least, none that stand out as credentials of experience or necessary styles of living or behaving. People who would identify themselves as “spiritual seekers” are not necessarily more prepared to Wake Down than other individuals. And people who have already achieved some kind of ultimate fulfillment of their search appear, most often, to be less prepared to Wake Down than others-if not because they are less qualified, then because they are less inclined.

Our process appears not to work very well for, and even not to speak very well to, anyone who is already enthusiastically pursuing one or another enterprise in their lives, whether spiritual or secular.

Who, then, does it work for? Who does it speak to? Those who are “Hungry.” Those who have tried much and, even if they succeeded, still feel somehow empty at the core. Those who have aspired with all their hearts and are beginning to despair. And those who have aspired and despaired so often and so conclusively that they are beginning to suspect nothing will ever really satisfy their primal Hunger for … for whatever; they may not even know what they yearn for.

Many people can identify themselves in such a description. You know who you are, or at least you suspect it. You may be doing practically any kind of work for a living, or none at all. You may be involved, or not, in any kind of intimate relationship. You may be male or female, young or old, with an extensive history of spiritual quest behind you, or little, or a lot, or none at all.

First Principle : Transmission

If you are Hungry, then … eat! Our process proceeds on the basis of direct imparting of the awakened condition from one individual to another. In the venerable traditions of spiritual and conscious awakening, the core of authentic work has almost invariably involved a living transmission of such a kind. What is transmitted is an energy or intelligence that simultaneously nurtures and challenges the receiver.

We call what we thus radiate and communicate, simply, “Being-force.” The primary way we communicate it is through direct personal meetings with people. But it comes through in all kinds of ways. You will find a variety of available books and other writings, as well as audiotapes, videos, photographs, and so on on this website, all of which naturally broadcast this awakening intensity to all. Happily, for everyone, there are now many teacher-transmitters of this work who, each in their own manner, are serving others in our Waking Down Community. Those aspirants who are open to any degree are affected by our transmission of Being-force in a variety of ways. Most fundamentally, they find a new energy, a new hope, a liveliness stirring at the core of their being. They notice that something is shifting in them, something perhaps quite indefinable, but also clearly having an impact on almost every aspect of their lives.

If you have had experiences of spiritual transmission with other teachers or schools, you’ll have to determine for yourself what differences there may be between those influences and what you receive here. But, whether you have experienced such things or not, reception of this transmission is the key that opens the lock on your own process of Waking Down in this work.

Second principle: Waking

The key to any authentic and profound path of awakening is the investigation and realization of Consciousness itself. This is certainly true in our school too. The conscious principle at the root and core of our very existence must be permitted to become self-aware and then made the basis of all life and action. This occurs through the exercise of discriminative intelligence, which, as one participant described it, is something like “whole-being common sense.”

As you continue to do the simple things that enhance your receptivity to Being-transmission, you will begin to notice, at some point, an increasingly self-sustaining intuition of your conscious nature. “Consciousness” is a word many seekers use today. But the actual, direct, untrammeled, and really effective investigation of consciousness is rare. We feel that we have developed a way to facilitate this in our work that really makes the desired results accessible for serious aspirants. You will hear a great deal of conversation about consciousness in our gatherings-and a great deal of conversation about the cultivation of discriminative intelligence as the extension, we might say, of consciousness into all the stresses and choices involved in daily living.

Third principle: Down

Along with the awakening of consciousness, this work naturally stimulates a kind of landing in your own ordinary, human personhood. That’s why we call it “Waking Down.” You literally gravitate into being yourself as you are. “Self-acceptance” does not do justice to this ongoing passage. I prefer the term “greenlighting”-you wind up getting so much permission from others here that you begin to give a green light to all of who you are as a person-the dark, difficult, shadow fears, self-negations, and reactivity, along with all your virtues, strengths, and brightness.

As it turns out, however, much of the catalytic magic of our work comes through our encounters with those dark, difficult zones in ourselves and others. The whole ambience of our meetings, workshops, and the very relationships we establish with one another, allows each serious participant to relax more and more deeply into these primitive places of wounding, betrayal, fear, and distress. By becoming conscious in these places, we liberate energy and attention for an increasingly integrated and awakened daily life.

Fourth principle: Mutuality

What really greases the wheels of the total Waking Down process is that we don’t try to accomplish these great passages in isolation. Learning to be vulnerable and communicative with others while we and they are going through these changes proves, in our work, to deliver a continual alchemical charge, and at the same time a calming balance, to the often tumultuous transitions we find ourselves enduring. Mutuality in the context of this path is being as true as you can to your own true and total Self while cooperating with others who are doing the same. Sounds simple and straightforward enough-but between and among men and women who are awakening and emerging as more and more profoundly integrated and consciously divine beings, such mutuality is a huge, and hugely empowering, undertaking.

One of the keys to this practice here is that no one is off the hook. Every teacher, including, even especially, myself, is on the line to stay accountable, accessible, and communicative in mutuality. How this actually works out in practice is sobering, humbling, and yet, again, empowering beyond everyone’s expectations.

Fifth principle: White Heat

Where does all this lead? We are a growing community of people who are finding ways to stay connected and be mutually supportive in the midst of ordinary life needs and activities. Over time, because this path of Mutual Waking Down does work so well for so many people, we anticipate a thriving community and that even a great international culture of awakened and free men and women will appear. The arts and sciences developed by such people will, we feel, contribute to a planetary renaissance on Earth.

But the ultimate goal or end of all this is not some paradise on Earth. Not to say that human and all life can’t be enormously improved upon-they certainly can, and they should! And divinely human awakeness liberates the genius of Being in every body to contribute immensely to just such improvements in human culture and life in general. I am just indicating that the wedding of Consciousness and Matter that our work provokes does not merely stimulate evolutionary shifts in human beings. It prompts such shifts, we sense, in all of life, and even all cosmic phenomena. The consummation, we might say, of this wedding produces a super-intensification in us that I call “the White Heat.” What I mean by this is an absolutely ecstatic intuition of the ultimate transformation of all existing beings and things. Once this kind of rapture begins to appear, body by body, we sense that even as we live our ordinary daily lives, we become something like evolutionary cooks for the whole cosmos, up and down, inside and out, physical and spiritual.

Who knows? That’s how it appears to a number of us. We are in no position to know if this is so. If it’s true, it means we are in for a very long haul here. That’s why I say that this path of Waking Down in Mutuality liberates you into life, not merely out of it. You then become an awakened servant of the ultimate liberation of everyone and everything, not merely your personal self.

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

by CC Leigh

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Introduction
The following is an outline of some of the stages people experience as they are unfolding in their process of spiritual awakening, especially as they show up in people who are moving in the direction of embodiment–the simultaneity of being both the free, unbound dimension of their nature and the very human emotional body/mind. Depending on the current focus of your own personal inquiry, you may or may not find this relevant to you right now. I present this because being aware of the general territory and trajectory of spiritual unfoldment can provide some confirmation and understanding of your personal process wherever you find yourself on this map. Plus, having a realistic framework of the larger process can help you continue to evolve in the most auspicious manner.

There are many different maps of awakening to the infinite, transcendent dimension of our human potential, and they do not all point to the same outcome. What I set forth below reflects my own experience and what I have observed in the students I have had the privilege of working with. My intention here is to put forth a working model of embodied awakening that neither is so esoteric that it is impossible to grasp nor so generalized as to render discrimination pointless. It could be called an expanded Waking Down map.

There is a great deal of confusion in the world of spiritual teachings due to insufficient discrimination of three important aspects of what we might call “Consciousness” (or the Absolute, or I AM). These three aspects are Awareness, Being, and Heart (which will be further described below). It is possible to experience an awakening to the infinite through any of these three aspects. While they are all quite valid and all reflect a significant departure from a narrow identification with self as a separate, discrete autonomous unit, the subjective experience of Awareness, Being, or Heart will differ significantly. There is often a tendency to assume that awakening to one aspect is total-the ultimate condition-thus overlooking further potentials for growth and discovery.

In this investigation I am drawing from a number of spiritual teachers, including Aziz Kristof who has a remarkable ability to discriminate subtle states and phases of awakening, and most significantly upon my own experiences with Waking Down in Mutuality (which was originated by Saniel Bonder). While I wish to give credit where credit is due, I take full responsibility for what I set forth here as this working model.

We do well to keep in mind that every type of awakening normally has three phases: first is the shift to the new state itself, sometimes called a glimpse (Illumination)-an enhanced or exalted condition which reveals something previously unknown to the experiencer and then sooner or later fades. Next is the subsequent stabilization of the new state which might better be called a stage shift-this is when the condition is always effortlessly so (Realization) . Within this stage we might distinguish three possible sub-categories: “transcendent” in which Consciousness is experienced to be witnessing or registering everything without identifying with the body-mind; “embodied feeling” in which Consciousness registers everything while being also fully present in and as the feelings of the body-mind; and “second birth” in which the embodied feeling Consciousness recognizes itself to be inherently seamless with and non-separate from everything else. Waking Down in Mutuality cultivates the embodied experience, while recognizing that a period of transcendent awakening is often a precursor to embodied awakening. Finally, there is further integration which follows upon stabilization as the whole being is reconfigured in light of the new condition (Actualization). The first shift is a sudden occurrence and the others are almost always gradual. There is a common tendency to mistake initial sudden shifts for a stabilized condition. In the Waking Down practice of evaluating awakenings there is often the caveat “let’s see how it shows up over time”-which allows for the possibility that an awakening might not yet be stabilized fully and still needs some further cultivation.

In Waking Down in Mutuality, the term “Consciousness” with a capital “C” is used rather generically to refer to that which is non-finite, unbound, unconditioned, Witness, Source, or Divine, and it may be used at times interchangeably with “Being” (though I’ll be using this term in a more specific way for the purposes of this discussion). It is that which appears to be separate from matter and manifestation but actually is inseparably interwoven, such that neither exists independently. This unity, or “Onlyness,” is described by Saniel as the “sacred marriage” of infinite Consciousness and finite matter. Much of the emphasis of the Waking Down work has been focused on the very human, personal experience of awakenings that are embodied-very much a “both/and” expression of this sacred marriage. This is a rather radical departure from classic or traditional descriptions of enlightenment (which typically focus more on states of consciousness than on the human experience and expression of the awakened condition). The Waking Down community is collectively bringing a strong new voice to a “divinely human” potential that quite possibly has never manifested on earth prior to this time.

(A note on capitalization: many special terms are used herein and the temptation is to capitalize all of them. To keep things somewhat simple, certain names will be capitalized: Waking Down in Mutuality, for instance, and the names of the various stages introduced below. In addition, I have capitalized words referring to the non-finite, unbound, empty, unchanging, unconditioned, free, or divine-essence dimension of what we are, in order to distinguish what’s being referred to from tangible, relative, changing reality. For instance, “Consciousness” with a capital “C” refers to the impersonal and universal dimension, whereas “consciousness” with a small “c” refers to one’s personal awareness. The use of capitals in this regard by no means indicates a preference for, or superiority, of one over the other, since both the essence and the manifestations of that essence, are divine. Ultimately there is no way to determine where one ends and the other begins since both are totally interpenetrating and inseparable.)

 Phases of Embodied Awakening
What follows is a broad, simplified overview of human spiritual development. Much like a fractal, were we to zoom in on any stage described below we would be able to distinguish many more subtleties and aspects than are here described. While there is a rough sort of linearity about the awakening process, the various elements will show up in different ways and timing for each different person-and some elements may not show up at all. Still, it is often useful to have a conceptual framework of what’s happening as a support for your own unique unfoldment into your divinely human potential.

First life.  This is the stage of life that spans our development through infancy and childhood into adulthood. It would include the learning of many skills and also the progression through puberty into sexual maturity. It includes being “socialized” such that one learns patterns of adaptive behavior that further survival and success in the social world. And it may include the development of a spiritual awareness through participation in organized religion or through independent study, inquiry, and practice-possibly carried to high levels of refinement. However, this stage of unfoldment is characterized by ignorance of our full nature and primary identification with the thinking mind and self-concept (ego).

The reason for this ignorance of our true nature is partially a result of a natural and inevitable process that occurs early in childhood called “loss of Being.” It results when some intrinsic, essential, and divine aspect of the child is not seen or reflected back by the parents (usually quite unintentionally and innocently). Because of that lack of mirroring, the quality never comes fully awake and available, and stays hidden in the background. The child subconsciously detects that “something’s missing, or something’s wrong about me” and begins to undertake strategies to try to get or earn what’s perceived to be missing. What drops out of awareness is one’s inherent, true, and perfect divine nature. What forms instead is a strategy of “trying” to be or get what appears to be lacking. This sense (which generally lies below the threshold of awareness) of “something’s wrong or inadequate about me and I need to do something about it” carries into our adult lives and fuels much of our human activities, including strategies to avoid feeling the discomfort or shame of it.

Illuminations. These experiences of heightened perception, illuminating insight, visitations by divine entities or essences, or blazes of consciousness can occur at any time along the way, sometimes as a result of cultivation and sometimes spontaneously without any prior effort, by grace or through the transmission of an awakened person. Illuminations give us the gift of a radical shift of perspective, or a direct experience of that which transcends our ordinary, familiar frameworks of understanding. A “glimpse” of the cosmic perspective will often seem so freeing and uplifting that, after it fades, the experiencer begins seeking ways to regain what was experienced and lost, and attempting to make that into a permanent condition. Illuminations, however, are states of consciousness that are by nature transient and ever changing, as opposed to stages of development, which are permanent, irreversible transformations. Much confusion exists over this distinction. Remember that a variety of states from the mundane to the mystical are available to all people (at least in theory) at any stage of their evolution. Stages, however, unfold in a more-or-less linear fashion, always proceeding toward greater evolutionary complexity and coherence.

Deconstruction. This is a phase, called “the rot” in Waking Down circles, wherein the strategies and systems of value that carried one through the first life to this point begin to prove somehow insufficient or inadequate to address the deeper issues of life that are now presenting themselves. It is as if the hidden, sleeping essence-nature or Being that had lain dormant since childhood begins to stir, causing ripples in one’s outer life. This may show up as an intuition that one is more than just one’s thoughts or personality, coupled with a longing to discover one’s true nature. And it may proceed into frustration or despair when one’s spiritual aspirations are not realized-perhaps after long years of dedicated practice. One begins to get a sense that the will-based techniques and strategies that worked in the past no longer work, or just don’t work for you in particular, or you begin to sense how powerless you are to control outcomes. Not just a time of life challenge, this is a profound spiritual passage where the patterned ways of thinking and acting formed in childhood are being loosened up by the evolutionary action of Being itself-creating the possibility of something new coming to life. Where most spiritual teachings recommend discipline and practice to free up energy and attention for deeper self-investigation, Waking Down has discovered that the natural and organic operation of this phase of deconstruction accomplishes a similar result with little overt effort.

What one rots into at this stage is the “core wound.” Although our sense of our unbounded divine essence may be beneath the threshold of our ordinary awareness, we still carry some intuition of it. As this subtle sense or intuition is juxtaposed against what we usually experience of ourselves as patterned, limited, finite human beings, there is a sort of “rub” or existential tension right at the core of our sense of who we are. A sense of “not okayness” often accompanies this core wound, and there may be feelings of confusion, separateness, and insufficiency as well. The source of these feelings is a complete mystery to most people, and has led to concepts like “original sin.” However, there is nothing sinful about this condition, as it is a natural and inevitable consequence of a unique human attribute: the inherent ability to be, or become, fully conscious of our divine essence as it is expressed in our human forms.

 Before that happens, there is only the subtle sense of distress at the core, and this feeling is instinctively resisted and avoided-that is until we rot out of that avoidance and into a dawning recognition that it cannot be avoided forever. Facing and falling into the core wound opens the door for the quantum shift of embodied awakening.

Realization. This is a transformative passage wherein the individuated person is beginning to demonstrate a greater capacity for experiencing their true nature as simultaneously infinite Consciousness and finite, human body-mind. Depending on their natural proclivities or perhaps because they have been directed in a particular way by a spiritual teacher, the avenue of access to the infinite may be through any of the following aspects of Consciousness:

Awareness or Presence. Awareness is where Consciousness touches the personal through the avenue of the personal mind (small “c” consciousness) and its thoughts. Awareness, which is centered in the head, makes the activity of the mind possible. Sometimes called the Witness, Awareness is without boundary, form, or content, and is continually registering everything which is arising as thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the field of perception, memory, and fantasy. Attention is one of its attributes, as is intelligence, and its primary quality is light-the light of clarity that permits anything to be experienced or known. Normally attention is completely absorbed with the objects it is focused upon, however it is possible for a relaxing of that absorption to occur, allowing Awareness to become self-evident and the sense of Presence to come awake. Awareness is accessed through active noticing and self-inquiry, and is generally the easiest aspect to awaken to.

Being. Being is where Consciousness touches the personal through the avenue of the body and its felt sense of aliveness or existence. Being is naturally more impersonal in nature-as the life-current it is the same for all beings, and is also without boundary, form, or content. It provides our sense of existence in space-time, and its attributes include instinctual knowing, the sense of “now,” stillness and peace, and the recognition of being non-separate from all of life and form which leads to deep trust in Being. Its primary quality is the feeling of life itself. Being is accessed passively, through resting, surrendering, or abiding in the deep Ground of Being.

 At its deepest, through the mechanism of surrender and grace, the experience of Being gives way to dissolving into Source itself (sometimes called the Absolute): our original home of bottomless peace.

Heart. Heart-essence is where Consciousness, as the Divine, the Mother, the Goddess, or the Beloved, touches the personal through the avenue of emotions and subtle feelings. Heart is multi-dimensional and its awakening may involve many steps to help it heal from the wounds it has sustained as a highly sensitive center of feeling. Its attributes include intuition, radiance, warmth, tenderness, gratitude, and compassion, and its primary qualities are unconditional love and grace. Heart can be accessed energetically through giving it attention, and through prayer and invocations which connect the individual with the Divine through the feeling of deep longing.

The Second Birth: Regardless of which aspect of Consciousness is awakened first, embodied realization is said to have occurred when the sense of being an isolated, separate individual identified solely with the thinking mind has been superceded by a sense of being paradoxically both infinite Consciousness and finite, here-now human being, and a recognition that one is non-separate from and of the same essence as all of creation. This is realized both experientially through various possible types of revelatory experience, and also tacitly, as a continual background knowing that co-exists with whatever else is in the foreground of one’s attention. This awareness of both levels simultaneously reflects a new capacity to experience paradox and, when combined with the recognition of the seamlessness of internal and external reality, inaugurates a stage (not a state) of evolution called the “second birth” in Waking Down terminology. Although this shift is permanent and irreversible, it is also just a birth, and requires integration for its full potential to be realized.

Further Evolution
It is only after awakening to our divinely human nature that we have our Self -an established center of feeling-awareness that can now more directly participate in the co-creation of our evolution and our experience in the manifest world of things and relationships. Before that, we are rather unconsciously identified in the more automatic functioning of our thinking and reacting mind, and we’re living more or less exclusively out of acquired, conditioned patterns rather than from our essential nature.

Actualization. For most people, Realization does not provide instant transformation such that one’s life becomes a perfect expression of what was recognized in the Awakening experience itself. The conditioned patterns of behavior are too subconscious and deep rooted for that to be the case for any but the extremely rare few. Instead, Realization is just the beginning of another, even more intensified period of re-configuration of the body-mind to allow greater freedom and range of expression. This has been colorfully labeled by Saniel as the “wakedown shakedown.” This phase continues for years after Realization. The initial years of repeatedly encountering (and being humbled by) the most limited, deeply shadowed areas of the body-mind give way gradually to a natural rhythm of investigating patterns as they surface, knowing that the goal isn’t to be completely rid of them but to live with increasing freedom and possibility in the face of them. Over time, the “human” self becomes more tenderized and permeable to the light or radiance of Consciousness-and more able to be an expression of the qualities of freedom, truth, self-expression, compassion, beauty, aliveness, creativity, etc., according to each individual’s inherent nature.

In addition to gaining an increased freedom in the midst of our basic human tendencies, the period of actualization is a time when the experience of Consciousness becomes more evident in our day-to-day lives as well. A useful analogy is that of a lamp with a dimmer switch: at the time of the second birth it is as if the lamp of Consciousness is switched on, but set on the low setting. While it never goes out, it can be overshadowed at times by strong thoughts or emotions. Over time with further cultivation and as more energy is freed up through the action of the wakedown shakedown, the light gets turned up ever brighter until it shines through all of our experiences and is no longer able to be significantly overshadowed by the ups and downs of our changing moods, thoughts, and emotions.

Most people will initially awaken through one, or sometimes a combination of two, aspects of Consciousness according to what is most natural to their nature. This initial awakening is a great achievement, no question, and may be the fulfillment of their Soul’s purpose for this lifetime. However, a more comprehensive awakening is possible for those who find themselves so moved. It involves exploring the other aspects of Awareness, Being, or Heart that weren’t initially clear in order to awaken those, as well.

Worth specific mention here are three avenues of further development in the second birth that provide opportunities for a more complete awakened experience. Development in any of these areas may be-and ideally is-undertaken prior to the second birth as well as following it, but development in these areas cannot and will not reach full potential until there is awakened Presence with which to engage these elements fully.

1. Awakened Heart. Although there may be an initial “fall” into the Heart as a part of the awakening process, the full awakening of radiant Heart-essence is a complex process that must evolve over time. Awakening cannot be complete without awakening the Heart, because the Heart is the seat of the Soul and also our connection to the Divine and to unconditional love. Some people awaken to the other aspects of Consciousness without awakening Heart-essence, but there is an aloofness or austerity with regard to the personal dimension of life if the Heart is not also included. Heart-awakening requires healing work that includes re-parenting by one’s self and also by others to help sooth and heal the wounds we acquired throughout life, especially in childhood. Only by facing and addressing the places where we closed off our tender hearts (and developed reactive patterns for self-protection) can we allow Heart to reopen to the receiving and giving of love, caring, and deep compassion for ourselves and for one another.

As we evolve and move through different layers and dimensions of our totality, we may find our center of identity shifting through ego, Presence, Ground of Being, or even the Absolute. We are all these. And within all that we are, we find the center of our unique personal identity dwelling in the Heart. It is our Soul, which can only fully recognize itself after the Realization of Presence and Being, and after the Heart center is opened along with its profound sensitivity. The Soul, as the meeting point between infinite Consciousness and finite matter, partakes of both-experiencing the Onlyness and the separation simultaneously in an endless Mystery of dynamic creation.

2. Awakened Mutuality. Once we have learned to gently be in Presence with our personal feelings, thoughts, emotions, impulses, and reactions, the next major phase of our evolution is to bring this self-awareness and compassionate Presence into all our relationships-not just to be nice to one another, but because other people are now seen to be intrinsically non-separate from one’s self. Therefore their pain is our pain, so to speak-and this becomes ever more evident as our hearts open in their capacity to sense and feel others. Mutuality is more than patience and understanding; it is a vivid encounter between Self and other in which there is a commitment to expressing one’s own truth as genuinely as one can, while also making room for the other to do the same. Mutuality is a practice where more and more aspects of ourselves-including our divinity-come alive through our interactions with one another. It involves risk and daring, and it requires courageous willingness to act from integrity, and stay present even in the face of discomfort, without any assurance of outcome. It is not some utopian ideal. It is very challenging, and also very enlivening, and it does create the possibility of a powerful sort of deep intimacy that is still rare on planet earth.

3. Awakened Purpose. After the second birth Realization, our most tender, innocent, genuine self is available to a greater degree than ever before. We may find that we are rather clueless about “who we are” at that point, and discover many new things about what works for us as we take risks and try out new ways of being and communicating that are more authentic. During the Actualization passage, we will inevitably find ourselves alternating between times of authentic self-expression and times of automatic response based upon prior conditioning. Sooner or later, the impulse of Being itself will move us to step up more fully to our Life, and to encounter our destiny. Saniel speaks of this as the “Avataric Ordeal” or the “Force of Destiny’-the manner in which our purpose lands upon us with finality that is inescapable. Our attempts to live small and avoid this encounter ultimately prove futile. And whether the outer appearance of our lives is grand or simple, what’s important at this stage is the fundamental encounter with issues of choice, meaning, and personal power.

Enlightenment? There are many degrees and subtleties of the Mystery that can be discovered by one who seeks to take their awakening as far as humanly possible. This map is not intended to be comprehensive so much as practical. The further we go in our collective love, investigation, and expression of awakened Being, the more we realize that idealized descriptions of “enlightenment” as some sort of a static, utopian state are more fantasy than reality. They represent the ever-receding ideal, and we’ve come to realize that as we are evolving collectively, our descriptions of enlightenment need to evolve with us and reflect what is real, tangible, and possible now without reducing the concept to something meaningless or hollow.

What we’ve been discovering through our collective practice of Waking Down in Mutuality are greater degrees of wholeness, trust, autonomy, and freedom of expression, profound compassion for the difficulties of being here as conscious beings, and relationships that are richer, more authentic, and more fulfilling than anything we had dreamed of. The second birth awakening is the beginning step of a genuine nondual realization that has far-reaching potentials we are just beginning to tap in our mutual explorations. It’s real, it’s compelling, and no one who really engages it seems to be willing to give it up (as if they could). Waking Down in Mutuality is a very practical and accessible path of awakening to our paradoxically divine-and-human nature in a culture of people who are doing the same. It may or may not look like the “enlightenment” you expected, but the more you look, the more beauty you will find. May this map of embodied awakening help guide you in the fulfillment of all that your heart deeply desires.

CC Leigh, Senior Teacher of Waking Down in Mutuality
www.wakingdown.org/CCLeigh

Jean Marchand - Waking Down Teacher

It was like waking up from sleep or recovering from amnesia. I could not have imagined ever getting something as abstract as what all the ancient and current philosophers describe as Enlightenment, Self Realization or Being in the Now, so easily. I was ecstatic. However, I was also afraid that I might lose this precious self-realization. It was blazing in its presence, yet delicate and tender. I did not want to ever lose it again. After a few months I became confident in the presence of I Am and lost the fear that I may lose this awareness. It, the awareness, was ever present as the observer to my every moment.

However, there was still something missing. This is where the Advaitans and I part company. They would say that there is nothing missing in this realization. I agree there is nothing missing because it includes everything. However, even in this realization of I AM the self, I still had (have) to deal with the mundane everyday problems of day-to- day life and relating to others. My buttons were and are still being pushed and I was (am) still triggered by others and events over which I have no control. I had a strong desire to withdraw and abide in the silence of the self, but who was going to look after my family and responsibilities? I still had feelings and desires that parts of me did not want to deny even though I Am Consciousness. This created a very real and uncomfortable dilemma for the human part of me. I was living in a paradox of being simultaneously infinite yet finite. It felt like something wasn’t right, and I didn’t know what it was or what to do about it. I felt frustrated and could not understand why after such a huge awakening I still had uncomfortable feelings which were difficult to ignore. I felt split.

Luckily for me, a friend whom I had led through the same advaitic process which I had learned to do, told me about Saniel Bonder and the Waking Down web site. Upon visiting the site on Feb. 23, 1999, I immediately felt that this teaching might provide the missing piece to my problem. I ordered Saniel’s book, Waking Down, and immediately entered into contact with one of Saniel’s teachers, Ted Strauss. Ted helped me to start feeling into what Saniel calls the Core Wound. This is the wound which every body on the planet carries, and I would venture to guess is the major cause of most problems that humans perpetrate on each other and the planet. Feeling into the Core Wound was very challenging, uncomfortable and frightening. I remember waking up in the middle of the night, shortly after starting to work with Ted on the phone, and I was sure I was going to die. I started hyperventilating and felt the starkness of Being here in a body. It was terrifying.

Two weeks after entering into contact with Saniel and Ted, I landed in San Francisco on March 12, 1999, to attend a Waking Down Weekend, a three-day intensive workshop. Just being with Saniel and the other teachers on Friday evening was very potent, but little did I know how potent. The next day as I gazed with Pascal, one of the teachers, I fell into a place that brought up an abundance of tears and sorrow. I didn’t know what was going on, but I could sure feel my existential pain.

That afternoon when we broke up into small groups we each took turns feeling into what was going on inside and sharing with the group. As I felt into my pain, it was as if a dam of sorrow broke wide open and engulfed my entire being. Ted asked me, “Do you want to be here?” As I felt into the question, in the midst of overwhelming sorrow I realized that part of me did not want to be here in a human body because it was just too painful and limiting. Ted asked me again, “Do you want to be here?” I again felt into the question and this time I surrendered into the excruciating pain of being here in a body. I fell into the Core Wound. It was unbelievable. There I was, infinite, feeling trapped in a limited, finite body. I felt as if Iwas being crucified. I have never, ever felt such an intense and devastating pain. Yet the bizarre paradox was that interspersed throughout the pain was a bittersweet Joy, the Bliss of Consciousness. My heart was blown wide open. The Love I felt for the others in the room was unlimited. I looked into each of their eyes and felt their pain. I felt their pain of being here in a body. As I looked at them waves of sobbing overcame me. Their pain was my pain. There was no feeling of separation. I stayed in that tender vulnerable place in the heart for the rest of the weekend and several days after. As a matter of fact, I have never left that place of vulnerability in the heart. I am just more selective about who I am vulnerable with. Now I am more discriminative about being wide open in Love with everyone.

Two days later on March 17, I awoke in the middle of the night to realize that Being had landed here in my body. The feeling of being separate from my body and the world was gone. I now had permission to show up here on this planet as Being in a body, not separate from the body. What a relief. I had entered what Saniel calls my Second Birth. It was okay to be here. It was okay to feel the wound of being here now in all of its limitations. The Core Wound had become the Conscious Wound. What a “Great Relief,” as Saniel calls it. I no longer want to escape to a cave in the Himalayas. Occasionally withdrawing into the silence of Being suffices. I am deeply grateful for the profound silence which always resides in my heart, my body and my mind. Life is more relaxed and enjoyable now than it’s ever been. The moments of being vulnerable and feeling my own pain and another’s pain are there more than ever, but I’m not trying to avoid it. Now my mission is to help my fellow humans to awaken to who they truly are, like I did, thus answering Excerpts from the Second Birth the question once and for all, “Qui es tu (Who are you)?” And by the way I did get the concept. “God is Everywhere.”

~ Jean Marchand (excepted from the book, Dancing in the Fire: Stories of Awakening within the Heart of Community by Bob Valine)