by Krishna Gauci

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This was originally a letter written to some folks involved in the Waking Down in Mutuality Process, but could be useful to anyone wondering about the role of techniques and methods in the process of an organic spiritual unfolding:

What exactly is “Skill In Means” or “Skillful Means” about? I think it’s important to know that the ideal of Skill In Means (in the context of how it originally arose in Mahayana Buddhism) is not essentially about learning techniques or methods to help others, but is rather something very different. It is about the innate capacity of someone with an Awakening Consciousness (Bodhichitta) to GENERATE whatever very specific and different ways of expression and teaching are needed for every specific student. That is something very different than learning techniques and methods that can be applied to all students. It is actually the opposite of having methods transform students; it is having students transform methods.

Skill in Means is not any of the techniques themselves, nor is it all of the techniques taken together. It is acting from The Heart Of Compassion where the teaching is a response to a student’s needs, rather than acting from a pre-existing therapeutic, psychological or spiritual structure that is being used to diagnose and treat them.

It is an organic aspect of Bodhichitta (Awakening Consciousness) that is the integrating factor among all the grab bag of techniques and ways of teaching, rather than simply a name for the grab bag itself. Skill in Means is not a product of the thinking, planning, preparing, discursive and constructing mind, rather it is teaching as a response to the other, dependent on the other, not on techniques of a psychological or spiritual school of thought.

I am not suggesting that there is anything wrong with learning and including techniques and methods from various sources.

Nor am I advocating that we exile all systems of therapeutic (or spiritual) diagnosis. But I am suggesting that we recognize that while they may be helpful in specific cases, they are not the thing in itself and they come with their own conceptual baggage.

Waking Down in itself is not a therapeutic paradigm even if and when we use techniques from therapeutic sources.

When this is not understood, there can be a danger of “laying the trip” of a therapeutic (or other) paradigm, and subtly pathologizing each other’s human patterns. I feel this is so even with the more humanistic, new age (or channeled) categorizations, thought systems and maps.

Skillful means, and good WDM teaching does not consist in getting training in as many therapeutic modalities and personality maps as possible and then diagnosing and curing students…. That’s therapy.

“The teaching gets pulled out of the teacher by the hunger of the student” is the real essence of WDM teaching (and real skillful means). What this amounts to is an interdependent relationship in non-separateness giving birth to unique teaching in accordance with the unique situation. Another way to say this is that the Divine (The Divine Other that includes self and other) does the teaching, in non-separation through us.

One of the things that struck me with Saniel Bonder’s early teaching work was not that he had a tool kit of techniques, but rather that he was in relationship with everyone. The teaching that happened with people was generated in his experience of self and other realization as the Goddess… and his promise to awaken Her one soul at a time.

There is in this an arduous and deep trust in ourselves (and Life) that is needed to be able to access that kind of connection. And this is the real import, (which is often unrecognized and unseen by students) in the process and training that goes into becoming a WDM teacher. That is the deepest ability that is passed on and taught to teachers. There is a good argument to be made that it takes more to do that than to become skillful at a number of techniques or therapeutic modalities.

Confidence in our connection to the Divine, a deep trust in the transmission, and an ability to hear the other in non-separateness is the essence of this work…and it can’t exactly be taught as techniques or methods can. It’s leaning into the source from which dharma is generated.

It seems to me that learning to lean into this is harder to quantify, more mysterious and not cut and dry. It means establishing, developing and relying on a more intuitive sense of Onlyness, however we personally experience that, and continually deepening it.

Remember how untamed and inconvenient this work is. It is Living Spirit. 

While I welcome the desire to include methods and techniques into the work to help others (I have been doing this in my own way), This teaching is not techniques or systems but rather it is Living Being/Spirit/Transmission and (in That) Living Relationships.

My sense is that it is only this connection to the living Transmission that can become the organic (rather than constructed) integration of all these methods, modalities and techniques. This Transmission of the Goddess does not pathologize through diagnosis, and This Transmission has seen fit to awaken very imperfect messy human beings and does so quite perfectly.

As we include methods from outside This Transmission let us remember that the transmission of this Goddess awoke us in our messiness when techniques and respectable psychology (and traditions) did not. She did not turn us away in our imperfections, She awoke us in them and She is wild and messy Herself.

And while we bring the masculine into this work if we saddle her with an overly tame civilized male she will either die of boredom or will eat him for lunch. The only husband who can meet Her is Shiva… a wild, messy and smelly dude himself!

© 2007 Krishna Gauci, Senior Teacher of Waking Down in Mutuality
www.wakingdown.org/KrishnaGauci/
www.krishnasatsang.com

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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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 

Waking Down is both a community and a teaching.

It is an amazingly effective set of teachings on human development and spiritual awakening with proven results of among hundreds of people. The genius of this teaching is its minimalism. It is lean and requires very little in terms of beliefs or practices and emphasizes a trust in the uniqueness of your own person and contribution. Inseparable from the teaching itself is the powerful energetic transmission that teachers of this process transmit, and the nurturing connection with its  community of practitioners. These three combined are the circumstance in which a person finds themselves falling into a deep trust in themselves and life itself.

Krishna Gauci – Senior Waking Down in Mutuality Teacher – www.krishnasatsang.com