Spiritual Support & Guidance
Your body is trying to awaken to your true nature, right now. That is its deepest, most natural movement. It wants to return to itself, and it is moving there in each moment.
Our challenge is to begin to recognize and trust its movement. Our challenge is to stop moving, so that we can see that we are already unfolding into peace.
It’s hard to talk about awakening without saying the same old things, and raising the same old images in someone’s mind, of something other-worldly, mysterious, exalted, or out of reach.
Of course awakening is none of those things.
Most of us are looking for fireworks and bliss. But awakening peacefully waits for us to recognize its pervasiveness. Its constancy. Its gentle emptiness. Its utter simplicity.
I know I might sound esoteric and mysterious myself, but I want to get across that awakening is simply about seeing Reality, as it is, without the filters of the ego. When the mind relaxes completely, what's left is what we call enlightenment.
It's one thing to do this for a moment, and quite another to sustain it. Thus, after our first taste, we begin the process of embodying what we've seen so that it can live through us.
Through the practice of learning to listen to and follow our system’s deepest movements, we begin to unravel. Through inquiry and meditation, we uncover more and more of who and what we are. We examine the construction of our mind and begin to deconstruct all of its constructions. Love awakens and flows from our deepest nature, living through us in the way it wants to, embodying as power or gentleness, compassion or fierceness. The awakened perspective begins to include the relative perspective and utilize it as needed, without conflict.
Everything is included.
Life becomes eminently simple as we become big enough to hold its paradoxical complexity, and our choices become about practicality, about what works, instead of feeling fraught. Our life is given over to something ancient and wise - the incredible intelligence of the body, of Life.
If we truly want peace, this is the pathless path we must choose.
It is my own deepest joy to support my clients in turning towards and learning to trust their true nature, in embodying the Life that wants to live through them in the way only they can. Like a magnet, we are always being drawn towards the end of our suffering.
Trust your True Nature.
In case it's helpful, I will list a few of the teachers and spiritual persons I have been most influenced by: Adyshanti, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach, Joseph Goldstein, Erin Treat, Brian Lesage, Chas DiCapua, Sera Beak, Andrew Harvey, Mukti, Susanne Marie, Reggie Ray, John Welwood, Marion Woodman, Bill Plotkin, and Ajahn Sucitto, and many more.
*Integrity is incredibly important to me both as an individual and as a therapist and spiritual teacher. I am a proud member of the Association for Spiritual Integrity, an organization committed to holding spirtual teachers accountable to standards of behavior in order to limit harm to spiritual seekers. Feel free to talk to me about this commitment and what it means in my life and work.
Here is a useful article to support you in discerning whether a spiritual teacher or healer is integrous and truly has your best interest at heart:
8 Red Flags to Help to Discern if a "Healer" is Real and for You
Book Recommendations:
Awakening, Rodney Smith
Falling Into Grace, The End of Your World, Emptiness Dancing, Adyashanti (really, all the books. All the Adya books, tbh)
Touching Enlightenment, Reginald A. Ray
The Experience of No-Self, Bernadette Roberts
After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, A Wise Heart, Jack Kornfield
I am That, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Love and Awakening, John Welwood
Mindfulness, Joseph Goldstein
True Refuge, Tara Brach
Self-Compassion, Kristin Neff
Awakening, Rodney Smith
Falling Into Grace, The End of Your World, Emptiness Dancing, Adyashanti (really, all the books. All the Adya books, tbh)
Touching Enlightenment, Reginald A. Ray
The Experience of No-Self, Bernadette Roberts
After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, A Wise Heart, Jack Kornfield
I am That, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Love and Awakening, John Welwood
Mindfulness, Joseph Goldstein
True Refuge, Tara Brach
Self-Compassion, Kristin Neff
The new generation of spirituality |
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Photo by Katherine Savage
"To the extent that the fire of truth wipes out all fixated points of view, it wipes out inner contradictions as well, and we begin to move in a whole different way. The Way is the flow that comes from a place of non-contradiction—not from good and bad. Much less damage tends to be done from that place. Once we have reached the phase where there is no fixed self-concept, we tend to lead a selfless life. The only way to be selfless is to be self less—without a self. No matter what it does, a self isn’t going to be selfless. It can pretend. It can approximate selflessness, but a self is never going to be selfless because there is always an identified personal self at the root of it.
Being selfless isn’t a good, holy, or noble activity. It’s simply that when there is no self, selflessness happens. This selflessness is very different from having a moralistic standpoint. When action is selfless, it tends to do no harm. It tends to be the salvation, the secret alchemy that awakens and removes conflict. It’s a byproduct of not having a self. It just so happens that reality is overflowing with goodness and love.
This is radical emptiness—where everything is arising spontaneously. There is no more need to discriminate with the mind between what seems to be the right thing or the wrong thing to do. In ego-land it’s helpful to have an ego that can discriminate between right and wrong, but at a certain point, that’s not what you are operating by. You are operating by the flow of the Tao, which is a higher order of intelligence. You don’t need to intellectually discriminate anymore because the Tao discriminates without discriminating; it knows without knowing; it moves without moving. There is no sense of being enlightened or unenlightened. Since there is no self, there is nothing to be enlightened or unenlightened.
We can talk about enlightened beings and non-enlightened beings, and conceptually that has a use. But when there is no self, when there is radical emptiness, the whole enlightenment thing is sort of irrelevant because reality has become conscious of itself, which is enlightenment. That’s what is often missed. People believe that enlightenment is an improvement on reality, like becoming a super human being or God-knows-what. But enlightenment is when reality is awake to itself as itself within itself."
~ Adyashanti
Being selfless isn’t a good, holy, or noble activity. It’s simply that when there is no self, selflessness happens. This selflessness is very different from having a moralistic standpoint. When action is selfless, it tends to do no harm. It tends to be the salvation, the secret alchemy that awakens and removes conflict. It’s a byproduct of not having a self. It just so happens that reality is overflowing with goodness and love.
This is radical emptiness—where everything is arising spontaneously. There is no more need to discriminate with the mind between what seems to be the right thing or the wrong thing to do. In ego-land it’s helpful to have an ego that can discriminate between right and wrong, but at a certain point, that’s not what you are operating by. You are operating by the flow of the Tao, which is a higher order of intelligence. You don’t need to intellectually discriminate anymore because the Tao discriminates without discriminating; it knows without knowing; it moves without moving. There is no sense of being enlightened or unenlightened. Since there is no self, there is nothing to be enlightened or unenlightened.
We can talk about enlightened beings and non-enlightened beings, and conceptually that has a use. But when there is no self, when there is radical emptiness, the whole enlightenment thing is sort of irrelevant because reality has become conscious of itself, which is enlightenment. That’s what is often missed. People believe that enlightenment is an improvement on reality, like becoming a super human being or God-knows-what. But enlightenment is when reality is awake to itself as itself within itself."
~ Adyashanti
