“Waking down” is a form of awakening that is very different from trying to rise out of this world and into some other state or dimension. In this process, you directly realize and bring the infinite divine reality to life.

Saniel Bonder, founder of Waking Down in Mutuality

Eduardo Sierra  Interviewer

Juliet Amoroso

Eduardo: Hi Juliet, how are you?

Juliet: Hi Eduardo, I’m well.

Eduardo: Good.  I understand you recently had an awakening.  How would you describe it?

Juliet: Well, the event was a feeling of ‘I’m here.’  A sense of I’m fully here.

Eduardo: Was it a thing that slowly crept up on you, this sense, or was it something that was just dramatically, BOOM and there it was.

Juliet: I’m guessing that it was slowly creeping up for a while.  There was definitely a moment when I experienced it.

Eduardo: Was it unlike you to have ever felt that way before?

Juliet: Yes, that was definitely new for me.  It was a palpable moment and it was nice because there was an audience for it, which I like.

Eduardo: How do you mean?

Juliet: I was at the Transfiguration Retreat, and we were in a group of ten students, two teachers, and a mentor.  We were going around the room, and Ted Strauss asked me about my 2^nd birth, and I listed a number of things that demonstrated to me that I had not had not had my 2^nd birth.  The last thing I mentioned was that I didn’t want to say something that made me sound like I was further along than I am.  He said, “well that’s fine, it’s okay to say something that has you be less than you are.” That’s pretty much my MO – saying I’m not as farn along, and less than I am.  I felt busted and kind of freed and that was the moment that I felt fully here.

Eduardo: Wow.  Right in front of everybody and everything.

Juliet: Right in front of everybody, which I loved.

Eduardo: Was it apparent to folks?  Could they pretty much tell?

Juliet: I don’t know.  It was apparent to me.

Eduardo: So your sense was in the sense of feeling present?

Juliet: Yes.

Eduardo: In that moment what did that feel like?  How was that different from ever before?

Juliet: I felt connected to the earth, connected to my body, it felt like I inhabited my body for the first time.

Eduardo: Are there other differences from what’s been usual for you?

Juliet: The last couple of months I’ve been happy — which is much different than how I usually feel.  I do feel like there’s a foundation under me, that trustable universe in a big picture kind of way.

Eduardo: That must be a source of some relief?

Juliet: Yes, it’s a huge relief.

Eduardo: When you say happy, can you explain a little and I know that’s an obvious word, but in your particular case, how does that look?

Juliet: I feel like my whole life I’ve felt kind of dark and heavy.  I feel light and I also feel open to receive what’s available. Like, delightful things available.  I feel like this new boyfriend is a result of that – feeling open to receive what are actually wonderful parts of the universe – for us in the material world anyway.

Eduardo: In a way you seem to be saying that by being present, and being awake in the here & now, you’re both more grounded and more open to manifest into your life things you might wish.

Juliet: Yes.

Eduardo: That’s very cool.

Juliet: It is very cool.

Eduardo: Do you feel like at this point you’re done, or are you just beginning?

Juliet: I feel like actually both.  I don’t feel a compulsion to fix myself or to find an answer.  I feel settled into the answer and at the same time it definitely feels like a very wonderful starting place.  The world seems new and crisp and different.  It also definitely seems like a starting place for being with myself and being with all that is and being with other people.  It feels like a little bit of a fog has been lifted.

Eduardo: How do you see the effect of that fog lifting in terms of your work day, your relationships or anything like that?

Juliet: So far it seems less serious and less heavy and dark.  It’s more meaningful.

Eduardo: Has your daughter noticed anything?

Juliet: I don’t know.  I’ve talked to her on the phone a few times, she’s in Los Angeles.  I don’t know.

Eduardo: How about your close friends that you see more frequently?

Juliet: Waking Down people say they sort of notice, other people don’t know what I’m talking about, so no.

Eduardo: Speaking of Waking Down, what role do you see that it played in this transition?

Juliet: It played the whole role.

Eduardo: It played the whole role.

Juliet: Yeah, the whole role of giving me the idea of what an awakening even is, because I didn’t even know before…. and providing the container.  The Transfiguration Retreat is a very safe container.  And all the teacher and mentor conversations I’ve had, opening me up and guiding me.  It wasn’t possible without Waking Down for me.

Eduardo: I wonder it you could dig out an example of how that worked from your own personal experience.

Juliet: Especially the question that Ted asked in the Transfiguration Retreat meeting, something, just showing a light on a shadow aspect of my whole modus operandi.  His question woke up who I was my whole life and made it like, oh!  It seemed like it was not really working anymore.  I think without the safety of the Transformation Retreat container, that question would have gone unnoticed.  It wouldn’t have had the impact that it did.

Eduardo: So, several circumstances were converging there at that moment.

Juliet: Right, the transmission and the safety.  It had me more open and vulnerable, and clearer than I am ordinarily.

Eduardo: Seems like that clarity lets you look at your foggy self or shadowy self with a new perspective it seems like.

Juliet: Yes.

Eduardo: You used the word transmission, can you explain just a little of what you mean by transmission.

Juliet: My idea of transmission is a mystical, magical, palpable experience of oneness.  That comes from awakened teachers.  It’s a gift.

Eduardo: From the place you are now, what do you feel grateful about?

Juliet: Conversations with teacher and mentors.

Eduardo: What did they do for you – those conversations?

Juliet: They gave me a clear sense of myself.  They probed consciousness with me. That was something that I struggled with on my own.

Eduardo: So here you are now, perhaps the answer to this isn’t any different than before, but maybe so.  What are your passions today?  What excites you as you experience your life in this new way?.

Juliet: I think…  I’m not sure.  I think there’s way more delight being in a physical body than there was.  There’s more appreciation with my connections with people.  My connections with people feel deeper and more delightful.

Eduardo: You find that surprising or is that what you expected?

Juliet: It was all surprising.  I had no idea what to expect.

Eduardo: In relation to your work, what do you notice?

Juliet: It’s actually made me a better worker.  I’m more able to focus on what I’m doing.

Eduardo: Would you mind elaborating a little on that?

Juliet: In my work, I’m a bookkeeper.  Before I kind of had a harder time attending to one task.  I feel more able to sit still.  Also, I’ve stopped drinking alcohol, which feels really great.  That’s a big upgrade for me, physically and more mental clarity and more ease in the world.

What I had was an embodied awakening and it made me rest from seeking to find more answers.

Eduardo: Please elaborate on that.

Juliet: I feel like my whole life I’ve been a big inquirer, like, wanting to know, wanting to get to the bottom of what it means to be human.  I feel like I’m taking a rest from that.  It’s not driving me.  I’m still interested.  I feel, for now anyway, like a spectator, like an observer, but all the while being a human being watching it with a little bit more distance than I had, more distance and more closeness, more tenderness towards myself and other people.  Not so tangled up and upset about watching many of the things that we do, many of which don’t work.

Eduardo: What attracted you to Waking Down in Mutuality?

Juliet: The thing that attracted me was a friend I had, that I had done a number of these other things with over the years, who had a 2^nd birth awakening and was widely soft and vulnerable, like measurably, obviously, clearly, very different.  That attracted me.

Eduardo: It was in seeing people themselves who were going through a process of awakening that was a turn-on, then.

Juliet: Yes.  The softness and gentleness of the teachers and the approach, it seemed to have a very deep and powerful way of transforming me and others around me.  I felt like other things that I did also were transformative.  The other things that I did were invasive, so I would have to take a long time to integrate.  With Waking Down it’s all, kind of, real time, it just sort of happens.  Integration comes with the transformation because of the seeing and the gentleness.

Eduardo: This is fascinating, Juliet.

Juliet: Right.  That’s another difference for me.  I don’t feel like I’ve been given instructions to do things that I can’t do.  If I’m told to do something, no matter how great it is and I can’t do it then it really doesn’t make much of a difference. Waking Down is, in my sense, more of an invitation, and a really sweet invitation to me, where I am. It comes closer and deeper there.

Eduardo: I like how you’re languaging this.  I’m curious what you’ve seen in Waking Down that is so helpful in awakening people?

Juliet: First of all the transmission of the teachers, and also their training to listen to who you are, and where you are, and be with you there.  It’s not like I felt like I was getting away with anything, like, just to sit around and sort of wallow in some stupid place where I am, but more that where I am is honored and appreciated.  Honored and appreciated where I am and the teachers also have some gift to take me where I am to the next deeper place.

Eduardo: So it’s being held; that is, you’re being held as a student in this work with certain tenderness, and certain carefulness, and a respect to your uniqueness as an individual.  It seems like some of that’s what you’re saying.

Juliet: Exactly.

Eduardo: What do you see as your role here in the greater Waking Down community? Perhaps it’s the same, perhaps it’s something new emerging for you?

Juliet: I think it’s the same.  Actually, wait a minute – I do have an impulse to create a community in Portland where I am more than I did before.  I feel like before I actually had made efforts to make a community here and I feel like the way I was doing it was too harsh or something.  It had to be done my way, or none at all.  I feel like I have more ability to have it be more open, have it be what it wants to be and that I have more acceptance for that.  It can actually include other people instead of just me.

Eduardo: That’s really interesting to hear Juliet.  Oftentimes when I’m talking to people about awakening – especially in their own personal experience that it seems to have come as part of a package deal that includes this impulse, not only to share it, but also to share in a community where that is the common ground.  In the Buddhist terms they go Buddha, Dharma and then Sangha, which is one of the three jewels.  I noticed that there seems to be a built in impulse in awakening to share it and to join with others to celebrate it and live it.  It seems like that’s what you’re saying there with your last comment.

Juliet: Yes, I would agree.

Eduardo: Thank you very much Juliet, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today and and answering these questions.

Juliet: I feel like you asked all the right questions.

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

Eduardo Sierra

Waking Down in Mutuality offers powerful skillful means to help us awaken to our true nature. Yet that doesn’t displace at all whatever natural affinities we have or practices we’re involved with; rather, it gives a bright light to view their value clearly.

Waking Down is a process of Divine Conscious Embodiment. It’s not that the mind is excluded but Awakening to your identity as Consciousness and then Consciousness embracing and awakening your body and the contents and workings of your mind is incredible indeed. For example, you get to experience why you’re frightened in certain situations  – not because of some psychological concept, but because there is real, visceral, existential fear to be felt in our bodies about being alive on this planet. Every BODY knows it is going to die some day. There is real threat out there, real violence. We have every reason to be frequently frightened. There is no shame in this. The endless denials of the world are seen for what they are.

Gill Smith via Ted Strauss’ website – www.tedstrauss.com

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.

Ted Strauss – Senior Waking Down in Mutuality Teacher – www.tedstraus.com

Though its lineage flows from ancient traditions, Waking Down is grounded in modern Western experience and culture. Its process leads to an ongoing Whole Being integration, a grounding of Consciousness in matter, spirit and body in a seamless onlyness of Being that includes all the joys and challenges of being human.

Bob Valine – from the book, Dancing in the Fire: Stories of Awakening Within the Heart of Community

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 physical existence. 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.

Ted Strauss – Senior Waking Down in Mutuality Teacher
www.tedstrauss.com

Waking Down in Mutuality (WDM) exists for our mutual awakening and embodying of Infinite Consciousness. We have found that the direct route to this type of awakening lies not in striving to rise above our human tendencies, but in falling totally into them with conscious awareness. This, along with an investigation of Consciousness, and transmission of Being, catalyzes a quantum shift in identity. We find that we are no longer exclusively identified with our finite human self, but have shifted to a profound, unshakable, paradoxical knowing of ourselves as unbounded Consciousness and finite matter simultaneously. Continued deepening in mutuality with others leads to an ever-increasing ability to live a compassionate and skillful divinely human life.

June Konopka
Waking Down in Mutuality Teacher.

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