History of Waking Down in Mutuality

The Institute of Awakened Mutuality provides courses and retreats to awaken, embrace and empower all that we are… together. These events are based on the core teachings of Waking Down in Mutuality.

Waking Down in Mutuality was founded by Saniel Bonder in 1992. Saniel was born in New York City in 1950 into a second generation Jewish-American family. When he was 7, his family moved to North Carolina, where he became a dedicated student and an avid swimmer. Later, he attended a demanding prep school in Tennessee.

His hard work and brilliance were acknowledged with an honorary scholarship to Harvard, awarded annually to a handful of the best students from across the nation. At Harvard, he studied psychology, sociology, and anthropology. He devoted himself to political activism and spiritual enlightenment, which became the focus of his life’s work. During this period, he was exposed to both Eastern and Western spiritual philosophies, teachers, and practices.

In 1972, Saniel graduated Harvard with a BA in Social Relations. Toward the end of his time there, he was attracted to the Heart-transmission and teachings of the famous Indian sage Ramana Maharshi, and then in 1973 to that same Heart-essence in the American spiritual adept Bubba Free John, later known as Adi Da. In early 1974 he joined Adi Da’s new community, where he quickly became a principal writer, editor, and educator. In 1990, he published a full-length biography of Adi Da, and went on tour promoting the book and his teacher’s spiritual work. During his years with Adi Da, he also met and became friendly with Ken Wilber, another rising star in the Western spiritual world, who later warmly endorsed Saniel’s Waking Down work.

In 1992, after 18 years of study and leadership in Adi Da’s community, Saniel was in crisis. He realized he no longer had faith he could awaken in that setting to the enlightenment he’d been seeking. Despite extreme pressure to stay and warnings of “hellish karmas for lifetimes” if he dared to leave, his impulse to regain his essential personal integrity and find his own way forced him to separate from his teacher’s work, whatever the cost. He was determined to penetrate the mysteries of the awakening process for himself, though he had no idea if that was even possible in this lifetime.

Through this very act of courage, Saniel found himself propelled into the ultimate revelation that had eluded him all those years. He soon realized his own infinite nature and then awoke to non-separateness with everything. He later called this shift the second birth, because his experience of the deep unity of spirit and matter was a profound rebirth and renewal of his entire being.

Within days of that awakening, Saniel recognized that a powerful transmission process had been activated in him that could help others duplicate his realization.. He began holding open sittings in his small apartment in Marin County, California, where he dedicated himself to helping as many as possible awaken, and to finding company of like-minded beings. He wrote his first book (Waking Down: Beyond Hypermasculine Dharmas : A Breakthrough Way of Self-Realization in the Sanctuary of Mutuality), named his work (“The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart”), and established a nonprofit organization chartered to bring his work into the world (Ma-Tam Temple of Being). Students came and spoke about their lives and their awakening process, and Saniel offered them supportive counseling and spiritual transmission, which simply refers to the communication of awakened Being through gazing meditation, open conversation, and simply being together.

Having experienced the limits of the traditional roles of guru and aspirant, Saniel was determined to find a new approach. He made sure his students understood that they were at the center of their own awakening process, and that he was “riding shotgun” in the role of a spiritual friend and guide along the path. This approach, along with many other breakthrough ideas, turned out to be uniquely empowering. Relatively quickly, first one, and then several students experienced profound awakenings. As more and more had life-changing shifts, the groups became larger. By the late 90’s, profound shifts became ordinary, expectable events.

But no matter how profound these awakenings, and no matter how much relief they brought to each realizer, it was not all happily ever after from there. In many ways, awakening to unity provided the core fundamental wellness we need to endure the tremendous amount of healing yet to be undergone. For many years, those of us who were part of the early experiments chose to slog through a virtual holocaust of unhealed wounds in ourselves, our relationships, our family systems, and in our dispositions toward work, service, and humanity.

Through all of these trials and tribulations, Saniel continued to teach that mutuality means staying true to ourselves while supporting others who are doing the same. As one participant famously said, “If I’m just being myself, somebody’s going to get hurt.” To which Saniel added, “Yes, and if we all keep being ourselves, we’re all going to get healed.” This has actually turned out to be true, and the key has been our willingness to stand in the discomfort of the differences. The name Waking Down in Mutuality is a mouthful, but we’ve never found a better phrase to express what it is we’re doing here together.

Still, Saniel was not satisfied with profound awakenings or even with deep healings in mutuality. He was intent on creating a whole new template for spiritual society. He knew that the traditional structure of spiritual organizations, with the guru at the top, was antithetical to the democratic spirit of mutuality he had birthed. He also wanted to make the awakening process so accessible that the work needn’t rely on any single individual to flourish. And so the same generosity of heart that inspired him to empower each individual to take the reins of his or her own awakening process moved him to empower each of us to take our own rightful place in the ongoing management and leadership of the work he had birthed, which gradually evolved into shared ownership.

Saniel’s empowerment inspired Ted Strauss to become the primary instigator to create the first weekend and weeklong courses in our work, as well as to create the mentor and teacher training programs. In subsequent years, the work matured and this potent spiritual transmission awoke in dozens of teachers and mentors. Throughout those early years, many teachers and participants took leadership roles and made great personal commitments to support this work, including Van Nguyen, Sandra Glickman, Saniel’s wife Linda Groves-Bonder, Hillary Davis, Al Porter, the late Barbara Mueller, and others, some of whom now serve outside the Waking Down community.

As with any revolutionary endeavor, the early days of the work were rife with joys, challenges, crises, and new discoveries. The need to coordinate the creative energies of so many powerful awakened and awakening people caused us to reconfigure ourselves many times over in several different ways. By 2004, we were all prompted to create a foundational change in our organizational structure to better embody the spirit of mutuality that made our work possible.

In 2005, by unanimous, mutual consent, Saniel ended operations of the Temple, and CC Leigh, Krishna Gauci, and Ron Ambes stepped forward to act as a team of Interim Advisors. This team created the legal foundations for three new organizations along with all the necessary bylaws and policies. These organizations are:

1.    The Waking Down Teachers Association, a 501(c)(6) professional association dedicated to mutual support in our professional awakening work;

2.    The Institute of Awakened Mutuality, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to educating those aspiring to awaken and those wishing to become mentors or teachers of this work;

3.    The Waking Down Community Network, whose mission is to support and empower local, regional, and online communities of practice.

In the wake of their accomplishments, CC Leigh was elected founding President of the Waking Down Teachers Association, while Ron Ambes and Krishna Gauci joined forces with Waking Down senior teachers Hillary Davis and Deborah Boyar to found the Institute of Awakened Mutuality.

More recently, Michael Sanborn stepped forward as Coordinator of the Community Network and developed Mutuality.net, the first online forum for the exchange of ideas within the Waking Down community. The heroic efforts and enormous number of hours donated by all of these individuals has placed the entire work on a firm footing of democracy and diversity, allowing it to flourish.

You can see from this history that Waking Down in Mutuality is not merely a teaching and a path to awakening, but also a uniquely unprecedented democratic spiritual culture that places an equally high value on mutuality as on consciousness and embodiment. While Saniel was the founder and original teacher/transmitter who birthed Waking Down in Mutuality, it has since grown into a multi-faceted movement, inspired and managed by a growing community of approximately 25 teachers, 20 mentors, and hundreds of participants. Saniel and his wife Linda remain actively engaged, along with many others who take active leadership roles in guiding the growth of this work and providing new vision and articulation for the ongoing evolution of the teachings.

This work was originally a narrow path that Saniel personally hacked out of the jungle; it wasn’t clear how reliably it would work for anyone involved. But over the years, through the dedicated involvement of teachers, mentors, students, and supporters, the path has grown into a two-lane country highway. Today, students continue to move quite directly through the basic shifts, but they now pass through the core healing with more grace and ease, and through it all, experience the remarkable blessings of this work. We are here to make that possible for you.