[Music]
Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people.
We've done over 700 of them now. If this is new to you and you'd like to check out previous ones, go to bathgap.com and look under the interviews menu.
Where you'll see them organized in several different ways.
This program is in South Carolina. I'm repeating myself here.
providing psychiatric care to under-
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My guest today is
Melinda Edwards. I'm going to
read her bio as I usually do.
Melinda is a doctor,
a psychiatrist, a mother,
writer, and physician in
Charleston, South Carolina.
I'm repeating myself here. Providing psychiatric
care to under-deserved adults.
She completed her residency in psychiatry at Stanford Medical Center.
She has studied complementary and alternative medicine with Andrew Weill, MD,
researched the effects of MDMA on PTSD,
and is a columnist for Autism Parenting magazine.
Dr. Edrudes is the author of "Psyche and Spirit, How a Psychiatrist Found Divinity
Through Her Lifelong Search for Truth and Her Daughter's Autism."
As a child of medical missionaries, Melinda grew up in a Mayan village, a Mayan Indian village in Guatemala.
Early in life, she experienced an inner pull to a deeper truth.
Her journey has taken her through various spiritual practices, including meditation retreats, guidance from spiritual teachers, travel to India, and living in spiritual communities.
And her quest led to the ongoing discovery of the sacred in all.
And I'm very familiar with all that because I listened to her whole book and really enjoyed it.
So, inspired by her daughter, her journey with her daughter, Saatchi, which we'll be talking about,
Dr. Edwards founded the 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, Living Darshan,
to foster a deeper understanding of autism in the world.
And just to give you a few highlights from her book, as I was reading it,
I thought of a saying that a spiritual teacher once said,
said that when the postman knows you're going to move, he tries to deliver all your mail.
He was saying that with regard to karma.
And you know, she grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family and had this morbid fear
of eternal damnation in hell because she didn't feel like she had been saved and couldn't
quite figure out how to pull that off.
She was overtaken by profound silence as a child, which is not necessarily a traumatic
thing but maybe it was.
Yeah, I think it kind of was. We'll talk about that. She was struck by lightning. And Mindy,
did you know that in South America, they have what they call lightning shamans,
who are people who are struck by lightning, and then it bestows them with shamanic abilities?
- I had no idea.
- There is such a thing, yeah. She had tuberculosis. Her family car went off the road and nearly went
down a steep cliff which would have killed everybody in the car, but it was saved by a
couple of trees that just happened to be in the right place. She had near-lethal anorexia,
requiring hospitalization and institutionalization, and then she went to medical school and had this
grueling routine which would have killed me many times over, and eventually had a daughter who has
autism and that has been a challenging journey, but as she'll say a very evolutionary one. So,
You know, I kind of feel like you're packing a lot into this life.
Yeah, either the mailman wanted to deliver a lot of mail or I required a lot of hard knocks to
kind of break through with my contractions. One of the two.
Yeah, yeah. And if one believes, as I believe you do, that life is not capricious and arbitrary
and meaningless and accidental, then there is some evolutionary significance to all this stuff.
Yeah, and you know, as I remember during my teenage years, when that tremendous terror
shifted or opened into this intense longing for truth, the longing was so intense, I would just
call out to the universe and say, "Whatever it takes, whatever it takes." Now, in the thick of,
you know, the traumas I would experience and all the suffering, I would regret having said that,
but I kept saying it. I kept saying it and watch out what you ask for.
Pete: Yeah, and you know, that's a perennial theme. I've heard that in so many interviews I've done
where a person just has this ardent desire for truth and they say something like whatever it
takes and it sometimes takes a lot, but as Jesus said, you know, "Seek and ye shall find." Once
Once that epistle is put out there, once that request or demand is voiced, the universe
responds.
Sandra: Yes, it does.
Pete: Yeah.
So, I think that's a key point that we're kind of starting with, which is that, and I've
heard many spiritual teachers, both Eastern and Western, say this, including, you know,
well-known gurus in India.
There's a saying in India that sometimes attributed to God and sometimes it's things gurus say,
one step toward me and I'll take a thousand steps toward you.
And Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras talks about degrees of ardency or intensity in one's spiritual
path and he basically correlates greater intensity with greater rapidity of realization.
And you know the longing itself emanates from that which I'm seeking or that which we are
seeking, that which we're longing for. So, it can't help but bring us back to that. It can't help but
respond because it's born out of that very, it's not a thing, but it's born out of what we're
longing for. Pete: Yeah. There are nice quotes by Meister Eckhart and Rumi and people like that
about, you know, that which you're seeking is, I don't know, it's essentially that which you are,
are, and it's kind of the divine seeking itself, you know?
Yes, yeah, it is. I mean, that's the beautiful dance of existing as a separate individual
is getting to dance back into the love that we all are.
Yeah. So, you know, going a little bit chronologically, you were in Guatemala because your parents
were doctors and they were medical missionaries and you lived in this little village way out
in the boonies.
And yeah, you know, your parents were fundamentalist Christians and you were routinely exposed
to a lot of fire and brimstone, which instilled a fear in you of eternal damnation, which
I think, you know, I've always taken exception to that teaching.
think, what a horrible thing to impose upon people, you know, striking that kind of fear into little
kids. And, you know, if we juxtapose that with a more love-based or divinely, you know, appreciative
view of God and of God's mercy and compassion and desire for all beings to be happy and so on,
it's quite stark, the contrast.
[Kathryn] It is, yeah. And you know, for me, growing up, my parents dedicated obviously their entire
lives to their belief system. They were both physicians and they chose to live in a little
primitive Indian village in Guatemala and kind of spread the word and save people from hell.
So, I was instilled in that belief system and in that terror, that fear of going to hell. And,
you know, I write in the book about trying desperately to receive the Lord into my heart,
because that's the solution. That's all you have to do is receive the Lord into your heart.
And I never felt anything different when I would do that. And so, I assumed that something was
terrible, as children do, that there was something terribly wrong with me that Jesus would not come
into my heart. In retrospect, it was an intuitive knowing that something was out of alignment
with truth. But at the time, my mind interpreted it as, you know, something terribly wrong with me.
And so, it wasn't just fear, there was tons of shame wrapped around it. I didn't tell anybody
until later on about me not being saved, even though I tried to be saved. So, there were a lot
of layers that I had to meet and allow to unwind and it was quite intense because these were
things deeply ingrained in my whole system, in my nervous system, in my energetic system
contractions, if you will. And so, you know, ultimately the development of anorexia as part
of that, there's a lot, there were a lot of layers to that. But, and then through therapy first,
that helped to open me to these aspects that I hadn't been able to meet when I was younger.
Yeah, so I'll leave it there.
Pete Yeah, a spiritual teacher once said that
God may be omnipotent, but there's one thing he can't do, which is remove himself from your heart.
And the reason for that is he's also omnipresent. And I'm saying he for convenience sake, obviously,
but all-pervading. So, you know, you can't bring Jesus into your heart because he's already there.
- Beautiful. Yes. Yeah, very true. Sometimes we kind of have to go around the world or around
the universe to get back to that, but. - Yeah. There was a beautiful little story,
I'll try to tell it quickly. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's teacher's teacher, who when he was a young
boy in the Himalayas having left home at the age of nine to find a guru and having found
one after about five years or eight years of searching, his guru sent him away to some
caves nearby to do long meditation.
And also because he felt like, I think the guru felt like, "Well, this guy's a lot
more advanced than these other dimwits I've got around me here, so he's going to get
some social."
So anyway, he went off to the caves.
And after a while the teacher sent an emissary over there to ask if there was any space available
for him to come to those caves.
And the boy said, "No, sorry.
I know you're just in the capacity of a messenger here, but tell him that there's no space available."
So the guy goes back and there's this big uproar in the ashram.
How dare that young upstart say a thing like that?
"No space available."
It doesn't mean you understand the way you're supposed to treat a master with great respect
and so on and so forth.
So finally, you know, the master realized there was a buzz in the ashram, so he sent for the
boy and he came into the presence of everybody and he asked him to explain why there was
no space available.
And he said, "After I surrendered to you, there was nothing but complete fullness.
And had I realized you wanted to come a second time, I could have reserved some space.
But as it was, there was absolutely no space for you to come a second time because you
totally fill my heart and my environment with your presence.
Beautiful.
I love that.
Yeah.
You know, and Rick, circling back to, we were talking sort of in more general terms about
fear-based religions. In one sense, yes, it's a barrier to love, to opening to what we really are,
both just as an individual but also collectively. But it also is an opportunity,
as everything is in life, but it's also a doorway into what we really are because it comes,
everything is born out of that. So everything is a doorway back to that. And just to kind of weave
the psychological in here too, in my experience, being present with these different emotions or
contractions or issues, whatever we want to call them, it's almost like layers kind of unwinding
or dissolving as we meet each layer. So, a lot of times, you know, oftentimes the most superficial
layer might be anger. That's when we're really projecting everything outwards or blame or
criticism. And then if I, I'll speak about myself, if I sit with that and just and don't discharge it
through action or through thought and just in present with it in this body, the energy of that,
it can open to other layers. Sometimes it, you know, it might be fear. These are all labels that
the mind attaches to the energy, but nevertheless it's an opening and an unwinding fear. And then
nearly always in my experience, getting down to the bottom layers, there's this pain
or sadness or grief. And while there might be an individual story or circumstance that our mind
attaches to it, the core of that is the pain of separation in my experience. And when I
open to that pain, whether the story is present or not in my mind, there's tenderness and
just this tenderness. Tenderness and tenderness is, you know, you open to that, it's just
love. Non-separation, just love. So, just sort of, again, just weaving in the psychological,
psychological and spiritual process ongoing. Yeah, so you're saying that there's a kind
of a strata of various sleeping elephants that we have to tiptoe through to kind of
get to the other side, so to speak, and as you tiptoe through them, elephants start waking
up and you feel, "Oh, this elephant is making a fuss over here and that one's making a fuss
over there. But the ultimate kind of like the last elephant is guarding the threshold is pain,
you're saying.
Jennifer In my experience, typically. Now, sometimes,
you know, the fear will open straight to love, but oftentimes it's that grief of separation.
Pete Yeah.
Jennifer Yeah.
Pete There's, how does it go? There's some line in the
Upanishads, all fear is born of duality or something like that. There's this thought that at the very
kind of inception of manifestation, we step into duality from unity. And so, there's a kind of,
I think, Sanyal Bander of the Waking Dawn group called it the core wound and perhaps
Eckhart refers to it as, you know, the pain body. But there's some kind of core thing that is the
most that's at the root of everything else. And I've spoken to a lot of people who feel like it's
a very scary threshold to cross when they finally encounter that. There's great fear that the ego is
recoiling against having to go through that. >> Yeah, and I think there's also, not exactly
sure how to put this in words, but just how everything is sort of a microcosm of the macrocosm
that we go through this deepening or and it's also an opening to more and more subtle aspects of
being as we move through these levels. But we go through some of these at one level that brings us
into compassion maybe for another person and then other times we're opened even more deeply into the
sense of total unity and love, a connection with absolutely everything and no separation.
I forget where I was going with that.
Pete: [Laughter]
Oh, nice in and of itself. Yeah, so I guess what we're laying out here is that there's a
range of levels in our subtle mind-body system, which we're ordinarily unaware of,
and we have to traverse that range in the process of spiritual evolution and we have to
deal skillfully in one way or another with what we encounter.
Kitty: Yes, and open. Because most of our lives, and I'm sure much less so the people who come to
BatGap, but most of our lives are spent running from the pain of separation, whether that's through,
you know, addiction or, you know, food, alcohol, the internet, social media, whatever, we're kind
of running from what we really are. So, and then, you know, this to the point I'm kind of making too,
the truth that everything is born out of love, out of truth, we can experience that directly.
it's not just a philosophy or the Upanishads or whatever. You can, you and I get to experience
that directly by turning towards and opening to these contractions within our system or these
things that otherwise the individual me might want to turn away from.
Pete: Yeah.
Kirsten: Because they, everything will lead us back to love because it's born from love. Everything
is born from love. So, we get to experience that firsthand.
Pete Yeah, so I got two things out of what you
just said. One is that everything we're talking about here and everything in the whole world
of spirituality is, it's not merely a philosophy or something that's interesting to think about.
The whole point of it is to have the direct, visceral, concrete living experience.
Karen: Yes. To realize it, realize it through our whole system. And it's useful for the mind to have
paradigms and, you know, its list of stages, whatever, you know, paradigm it wants to take,
because the mind can get agitated if it doesn't have, you know, something to kind of rest with.
But that's not the ultimate realization or experiencing. It's fine to talk about it,
but the opening to what's really here is, in my experience, where it's really at.
Pete Yes, but I also think that, you know,
intellectual understanding is not just entertainment. First of all, it can inspire you, you can have an
understanding of what's possible, and secondly, as you go along, it's really easy to misinterpret
various states and stages that you might be going through, and with adequate understanding,
you can turn what might have been a cause of fear into a cause for celebration or, you know,
something nice. Or you can also manage to not over inflate yourself and think that you have
reached some pinnacle of human realization when you're basically just starting out.
Jennifer Yes, yeah. And I'm glad you're pointing
that out because my path has been more experiential. But of course, the mind is a wonderful tool on the
spiritual journey and a wonderful guide can be a wonderful guide on the spiritual journey.
Pete: Yeah. So, and it's a faculty, you know, like we have all these different faculties
and each one has its place and, you know, if one of them tries to usurp the others and take over,
then we're out of balance. But, and so, obviously, one can get too heady with all this stuff,
so, but in proper proportions, then the path is more safeguarded.
>> Yes. >> Yeah.
>> Yeah. >> Okay, so let's loop back a little bit
more to your past again, going the way back machine. So did your anorexia start when you
were still in Guatemala or was that after you left and came to the States?
>> It started in Guatemala, but it really kind of took a nosedive once we got to the US.
And again, there's so many layers to that. There were, you know, from the psychological perspective,
there were a lot of family dynamics, which I won't get into. I did kind of outline them in the book,
but another dynamic was I was the sensitive one in the family, so I absorbed all the family,
not all, but a lot of the family pain and the terror, you know, the energy of all of this.
ultimately my system could not contain anymore. And so, the anorexia at one level was an attempt to
try to control that. So, you know, just sort of externally trying to control what I'm eating,
but it was really an attempt to control these intense energies that were in my system,
if that makes sense. No, it does. And we're going to be talking a little bit later about the
spiritual implications of autism. I'm wondering as you speak whether there are some spiritual
implications of anorexia, and you're kind of saying there are, and it's more like a, well,
I'll let you pick up from there rather than speculating. You know, I haven't really thought
about this in those terms. I think that there's levels that we can look at everything from,
and you know there's the psychological which would include the family dynamics, my own
personality patterns, sort of the type A, you know, control type thing. And then it's hard
for me to differentiate between psychological and spiritual these days, but with the spiritual
in terms of energy, that's how I experience spirit is energy. Just kind of what I alluded to that
there was this intense energy within my system and I wasn't equipped to know how to be present
with it or manage it and so it needed some sort of outlet and so that outlet for me was the anorexia
and I mean there's so many I don't even know which way to go with this there's so many ways to go but
one kind of interesting aspect of it was this terror and fear that I had been living with was
sort of killing these other aspects of being in myself. And sort of as a mirror of that,
the anorexia reflected that because the anorexia was actually killing my body. So, what was happening
internally at an emotional or energetic level was being mirrored with what was happening with my
body. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I was fantasizing the other day about if I could get
in a time machine or something and go back to like 1964 where I was hanging out with my friends at the
beach, you know, I was 14 years old and just sit down and talk with myself and perhaps my friends
also and tell them some things about that would help them get through the teenage years that
they were starting to get heavily into.
And I doubt that too many 14, 15 year old girls are watching this interview, but you know,
if you were to, maybe you have counseled such girls as a psychiatrist, you know, what would
you say to them as someone who went through it also and who has ended up in a very nice
place and didn't kill herself or starve to death or, you know, whatever.
Yeah. You know, Rick, what comes to me is not specific to anorexia. My experience with
myself and with the people that I work with is that we all are longing to be received
and fully, deeply heard, not just our words, but deeply received. And so, if I could offer
anything, that's what I would offer would be just a deep listening and deep receiving.
And then, you know, also using words to support, encourage, frame things in a way that the
mind can use in a healthy way.
Yeah, because, you know, to me, life is such a precious opportunity and whenever I hear
of someone committing suicide or, you know, somehow throwing this opportunity away, I
think, "Oh, I wish I could have spoken to them.
I wish, you know, they could have known."
Because, you know, it's just there's so much potential in life and it's open to everybody
no matter how dark things seem.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've experienced the same with friends who, well, one in particular who committed
suicide and the regret afterwards of was there, you know, that's just this natural process
to a grief, but the regret, you know, was there anything else I could have done to love
her more to?
Yeah.
Yeah, there's this guy in town who I kind of knew pretty well, very nice guy and committed
suicide recently.
And my sister told me that there he had a sign up at the local store saying, I'm lonely.
anyone would like to hang out with me, let me know. And I wish I had seen the sign. He could
have taken walks with me in the woods, you know, it could have made a difference.
- What a poignant cry for help.
- Yeah, really. Okay. I guess what we're sort of evidencing here is that, you know,
compassion is part of the spiritual path and a component of spiritual development. We could be
just sitting here saying, "Oh, life is an illusion and it doesn't matter what happens because nothing
ever really happened and there is no person, so nobody dies and yada, yada, yada." But that's not
the way I choose to see it. Yeah, well, all true, but here we are. Here we are. And I noticed too,
on my path, the more I open or the more my system opens to all aspects of being,
of course, the more the heart opens and the more compassion comes forward naturally.
Pete: Yeah.
Kirsten Yeah. And we, you know,
probably a bit trite for the people that are listening in because you all are, you know,
further along, but it's impossible to be really present with somebody else's pain or trauma or
anger or anxiety or depression until we've been fully present with that in ourselves.
Pete Yeah, good point. I mean, because if we haven't been, then to the extent we haven't been,
we're numb. And if we're numb, we can't really commiserate or tune in with other people.
Jennifer Yeah, or receive. And so, then we might try to
come up with solutions or, you know, problem solve. And that can be useful. But first of all,
we all really need to be heard. That's my experience.
- That's probably largely what you do as a psychiatrist is enable people to be heard.
- Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting, you know, because I work in a really traditional setting
with underserved people, many who are suffering deeply. Some are homeless, some are chronically
suicidal or psychotic, some have killed other people, you know, so deep, deep suffering.
But it's all the same. It's just everybody's longing to be heard, and it is such a privilege
to witness another human being begin to bloom and open when they are heard and when they begin to
be able to open to those aspects of themselves and listen to those aspects of themselves.
Pete: Yeah. Now, I guess there's different ways we can understand being heard,
being heard by others, but then, you know, some would say, well, the ultimate thing is you really
need to know who you are. You know, you need to know the self and perhaps you could tie those
two together in some way. Can you really be her if you haven't sort of tapped into who and what
you are ultimately? So, in my experience, when there's been great trauma and very little of
actually having been loved or heard previously, what is necessary or perhaps necessary is having
somebody externally not just model that but expose you to that, expose your heart to that.
And then we internalize that or the person like my patients or when I was a patient as an adolescent,
my therapist transmitted that to me, that love. And so, then it's almost like a virus isn't the
right word because that's a negative connotation, but love is like a virus, you know, it spreads.
Pete Right.
Mary And so, when that is shared
with someone, we really aren't separate. It's an energy that then we absorb and then internalize.
Is that responding to your question?
Pete I think so. Yeah. I'm sort of thinking about,
as we speak, I'm thinking about how external aids of various types are essential for most people,
vast majority of people, on the spiritual path. The vast majority of people couldn't just go sit
in a cave and close their eyes. They'd go batty, you know. So, call it a crutch if you like,
but if you have a broken leg, you need a crutch. And, you know, we're all broken to some extent,
and that's the whole reason we have spiritual teachers. And one topic you and I are going to
to get onto here today is what a shame it is when spiritual teachers violate their role,
you know, and abuse or take advantage of students who are in such dire need of a trustworthy guide.
- Yeah, yeah. You wanna dive into that now?
- We could. We can always loop back to other things, but we can dive right into that.
that one. Okay. Yeah, this, you know, I was with many spiritual teachers on my journey
and some cleaner than others, but one in particular that I'll speak to when I first heard that
person speak, I felt this enormity of truth energy, for lack of a better word. There was
just this intense energy and it resonated deeply with me and I just I was just overwhelmed
and tremendously grateful that moved very quickly into devotion and the longing had
been there throughout my life but then the longing kind of shifted into this intense
devotion and along with that, this projection onto the teacher, idealization of the teacher
that he was truth and, you know, that I had to get there. So, and that's, you know, projection is
part of our human condition. So, but with the spiritual teacher, it kind of can, it can get
heightened. Now, I'm not sure exactly where to go with this, Rick, with the story, but
I don't know that I need to give all the details of the story. But what I guess what I want to…
Rick>> And it's all my fault, because you found them on BatGap.
[Laughter]
Dina>> I wasn't going to say that, but…
Rick>> I've got some very mixed karma here.
Dina>> Jumping to the end here, I'm actually really grateful for
intensity of my experience with this teacher because, you know, here I am. So, but there,
I want to kind of just highlight some red flags that perhaps people might be able to hear,
red flags of spiritual teachers. Now, when we're in the throes of devotion,
there's just, you know, it's the mind gets overridden. I can't tell you how many times I
thought, "Wow, you know, if my colleagues or my friends heard what this person is
saying, they would think he's grandiose or off the rails or, you know, he's the
Avatar, the only one." And my mind would jump in and say, "But they aren't
here, they aren't experiencing the intensity of this truth force," which he
also claimed was truth force. Now, it was intense energy, that's absolutely
true. And many spiritual teachers have this intense energy or charismatic energy. The truth is any of
us can cultivate that. And particularly when someone's sitting up there and students are
projecting all of this onto them, that energy intensifies. So, it kind of feeds itself because
we're projecting our energy onto them. And so, the energy gets more intense.
So, back to the devotion thing, devotion can override all common sense, but perhaps
if we just highlight a few red flags, maybe for some people it will allow the mind to step in
and prevent some unnecessary suffering. Although, of course, at one level, we know that whatever
suffering we come into is necessary, as it was in my case. So, one of them is, one of the red flags
is if the teacher says that basically they're the only one, that they're the only path to
enlightenment, that they're the most realized person on the planet, they're the avatar,
you know, if you encounter that, I would say just hightail it out of there, run the other way.
There are as many pathways home to love, to truth, as there are people on the planet.
So, you want to jump in.
Pete: And there are a lot of teachers out there saying they're the only ones, so.
Jennifer: Yeah. So, and along with that is just a lack of humility. What I've come to realize
is that humility is actually a sign of spiritual maturity. Even, like, better is if a teacher
shares their own humanness, their own struggles, and not just from, like, the distant past, but
their ongoing current struggles. That keeps us all humble. And the other point here is,
just kind of coming back to what I said, we can't just assess what they say with our minds. We have
to use sort of our intuitive discrimination because... Our bullshit meter. Exactly, you got it.
even better said because they can really, you know, use the spiritual lingo. Like this particular
teacher was saying that the student who I knew well had deceived him and manipulated him and
all this and he sort of shrouded it in, "I'm just too gullible. I'm too open. I didn't see that."
but still blaming her as if for whatever he was, you know, saying was an issue.
So, spiritual teachers are really adept. We all are adept. Our minds are smart, you know,
they're wily and mischievous and they like to cloak things in ways that may not be completely
true. So, we really have to sense into, you know, the bullshit meter. So, another red flag I would
say is if there's fear of leaving the community or leaving the teacher, that's a huge red flag.
There certainly was in the community I was in. And if there's pressure to stay or if there's
criticizing others when they leave, this teacher would say things like, would pressure people to
stay and then tell them they were losing their opportunity for enlightenment, realization,
if they were going to leave. And then when they would leave, the few who did escape, sometimes in
the middle of the night, that's a red flag. If people feel they have to leave, sneak out.
This person, this teacher would say, "Oh, not everyone is ready. You know, they just didn't
have it. They weren't ready." So if you're staying out of fear that you won't get there if you leave
or if you won't get enlightened if you leave, that's a red flag. And another one would be any
form of emotional or verbal abuse or consistent harshness. Now, sometimes teachers use, you know,
Kali to, you know, try to break through some egoic structures, but emotional or verbal abuse,
it's just never in alignment with love or truth. Jump in any time, Rick, you know, I'm just…
Rick: Yeah, no, those are all good points. And it's a pattern because I've, you know,
seen the same thing happen with various teachers. They all say the same thing, you know, I'm the
greatest and this is your opportunity for enlightenment. If you leave, you're not going
to get enlightened in this lifetime or perhaps many lifetimes and all that stuff. So, it's a
sort of a syndrome and I just want to put in a little context here because, you know, like you
said, there was a lot of positive, powerful energy around this guy and I think that to a certain
extent is just a function of the group dynamics, the group consciousness. You know, you can get
that at a rock concert, but still, you know, teachers can actually be in a state where they
can radiate a lot of Shakti, a lot of energy, and you feel it. It's palpable in their presence.
- Yes.
- Yeah, and so that can be very confusing because you think, "Well, how could this guy be a phony
or nuts if he's radiating this kind of energy? I feel so good in his presence." But there's a thing
that you and I have talked about before, sort of deflected Kundalini rising in which the
Kundalini rises to a certain degree but then gets off on a side channel, but you know,
the degree to which it has risen confers upon you eloquence, charisma, you know, energetic
radiation, you know, energy, Shakti, and other gifts, even Siddhis, and very often, you know,
convinces you and the people around you that you are enlightened.
But what it ends up doing, and I've seen it many times, is it ends up aggrandizing one's
ego or one's sense of self.
So you become like this spiritualized ego, and you become a megalomaniac in some cases.
You just think you're the greatest thing since sliced toast.
you're headed for a fall, it's not gonna last forever, but you can kind of mess up a lot
of people before that happens.
Jennifer Yes. Yeah, and the areas that are contracted
within the spiritual teacher or walled off or not being met, whatever we want to call
that, they get played out in the community or with their devotees because they're not
being present, just like in our lives, you know, our shit gets played out if we aren't
being present with it.
We act it out because that energy has to have somewhere to go.
So that's where the harm comes in.
And just to kind of provide a little balance here too, in my experience, you know, there
was a lot of wisdom that came through this person's teachings and love.
there was tremendous trauma also that others experienced as a result of his inability to
be present with aspects of himself.
Yeah, and that's happened with a lot of teachers. I mean, Chogrim Trumpa or Adida or Osho and
many of them, you know, they arguably had some real gifts and were brilliant in many
respects, but they had these blind spots that, you know, they were blind to themselves. You know,
if you have, if you exhibit some flaws, let them leave. You don't want those kind of stuff to be
Monday about the importance of, you know, being yourself as a spiritual teacher, not trying to
build a facade to impress people. Because such facades are always shaky. And, you know, if your
students are the types that are going to leave if you have, if you exhibit some flaws, let them
leave. You don't want those kind of students anyway. You know, it's just better to be yourself.
And you know, some of them, you know, Adyashanti comes.
- Yes, yeah, just the importance of being real for all of us. But, you know,
talking about -
Had a problem like Bell's palsy, which he was bothered by, and he would talk about it. And,
and no one thought the less of him. In fact, it made him much more popular with, I would
say, a rather mature breed of spiritual seekers, you know, people who didn't want to be bamboozled
and didn't need to be impressed by someone who feigned perfection.
Yes, yeah, just the importance of being real for all of us, but you know, talking about
spiritual teachers, just being real. I notice in myself, I can sense when there's projection,
It can come with the MD or it can come with now that the book is out, an author or even
this backup interview when a couple people found out, "Oh, you're going to be on backup?"
And then one person even said, "Welcome to the backup club."
Someone else who was interviewing, I'm like, "Oh!"
And then I started to feel some anxiety about it actually, but that's another story.
But you can kind of feel the projection and I always just have this urge to pop that bubble
and the urge to just, you know, share my humanness.
Yeah.
Because something about that is, I mean, projection again is the nature of this whole world.
That's what creates other, you know, but when it comes in my sphere, when I can feel that,
My urge is just to prick it.
The way to prick it is to share my humanness in this moment, just to be real.
Just to be real.
Yeah.
The Dalai Lama, the current Pope, and Gandhi all come to mind as examples of people that
a great huge fuss is made around them or was made around them, and yet they managed to
kind of keep it simple, keep it real.
Yes.
Ram Dass is another great example.
Great example, yeah.
share what was going on. I remember when I was in my 20s, you know, Ram Dass was,
and still is, such a dear teacher to me. And I remember in my early 20s with that,
oh, just that burning longing for truth and all the way no matter what, bring it on universe,
whatever. And I remember him saying once, you know, as we go along on the spiritual journey,
my issues are issues don't go away. They just get less intense and less frequent. And at the time,
I was like, no, I am going all the way. And well, I'm there now, you know, where it's,
it's that is the truth. He spoke truth and took me a while to come to that because,
because you know, the Rajas and the longing was so intense. I want to if it's okay,
I want to keep on with some of the red flags. Of course, yes. One that really gets my goat.
Pete: Got a real book bite going here.
Lisa has bags.
[Laughter]
Lisa: Yeah. One that really gets my goat is giving instructions or advice that they are
not qualified to give, like medical or psychological or psychiatric. And I can give a couple of examples
of this teacher that I was with, one of his students or devotees was in India and had
chest pain and I knew that this person had also had high blood pressure and this guru
or teacher told him it was just energy that he didn't need to worry about it and that
was deeply concerning to me because, you know, we need to be present with the biological aspects
of existence too, even while we're on the spiritual journey. Another devotee had a history of
what's called schizoaffective disorder, which is kind of like bipolar disorder with some
psychosis. But he was on medication when he came to the community and was doing well from
a psychiatric perspective. He ultimately decided he wanted to go off of his medications and
this teacher supported him in doing that. Well, he got manic and he got psychotic and this teacher
then seemed kind of proud. He interpreted it as a manifestation of this teacher's own force,
like it kind of overwhelmed this guy. No, this person has a biochemical imbalance.
Just like, you know, if you've got diabetes, you need medication. If you've got high blood
pressure, you need medication. You know, there are biological components to our existence that we
need to honor and attend to. And when teachers start giving you advice about things that
is not, they're not trained in or that's a red flag.
Yeah. Well, if this guy really believed his own words that he was an avatar and was the
greatest teacher to, you know, bless the earth, then he probably believed that he had the
power or ability to, you know, make such, offer such medical advice.
And you know, he, and of course it's very self-deluded because he wasn't qualified.
I mean, the same teacher I happen to know divested a few of his students, at least, of very large
sums of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And in one case, the guy had, some guy told him he had gotten an inheritance of about $900,000
dollars and he said, "Oh, you should have told me this money has Asuric energies attached
to it and you need to give it to me so I can purify the money for you, otherwise it would
have been very bad for your evolution."
And the guy signed it over to him and last I heard he was still trying to get it back,
I don't know whether he did or not.
But is this teacher so cynical and so insincere that he's actually just using that as a line
to get money, or does he really believe -
- He believes it.
- The stuff that he fabricates, yeah.
- He, this particular teacher believes it in my experience.
- Yeah.
- So, what does that say if you believe that you are the greatest and that everything you
say is the truth and that no one can, you know -
- Yeah.
- You alone can solve all the problems of the country or of your students or whatever.
And even using it as justification for bad behavior, like this teacher, and you know, I don't necessarily want to just get into criticizing this particular teacher, but just to use it as a demonstration, he would say, "Okay, I lost my train of thought, Rick. Where are we going with this?"
Whether this teacher in particular, or teachers like him, since we're just using him as a template, actually believe all this stuff that they say.
Yeah.
So, using this "I'm the avatar" or "the one" to justify bad behavior.
So, this teacher would say, "Well, because I'm this vessel of truth," and he also believed
he was Krishna incarnate.
Yeah.
Because I'm this vessel of truth, everything that I do is used to further truth in this
world to further your spiritual growth. So again, just used as a justification, and it is such a
primitive defense that it's hard to understand. I mean, this is my mind, you know, critiquing it,
of course, because it's, yeah. But...
- Kind of reminds me of Richard Nixon telling David Frost, "Well, if the president does it,
then it's not a crime."
- Yeah. Yeah. So, and then another red flag is when a teacher
fosters dependence on their wisdom or their teachings or them instead of turning you back
to yours. That doesn't mean they don't offer support and, you know, teachings are so useful
and so are transmissions of energy, but using that to foster dependence on them
is just sort of another egoic maneuver to keep them as teacher and you as student. It's one of
One of the things that bothers me about teacher, like I don't even like that term, I remember
when I was filling out the form you asked me to fill out for BATGAP, I had to check
a box, you know, like what category will this be in?
And I just kind of had this aversion to teacher and I reluctantly checked it because nothing
else kind of was like, nothing else matched up.
But I really feel like, you know, I'm just a friend and we're all walking arm in arm together.
And I just want to serve and love and offer my heart and offer my humanness because we're
all human.
So, anyways, I think trying to foster dependence keeps that whole projection thing going, keeps
a spiritual teacher who's really identified as being a spiritual teacher is really underneath
everything going to need students for there to be a teacher. Does that make sense?
Yeah, sure. I mean, that's his bread and butter. But obviously, I mean, you wouldn't want to have
stayed in medical school for the 30, 40 years. At a certain point, you graduate and you become a
doctor, you know, and any teacher and no medical school would succeed if it tried to keep its
students there forever. So, obviously, it wants to graduate them and have them go on and perhaps
even train other doctors and so on. So, it should be that way with spiritual teachers, obviously,
and as a mother, you know, there's a stage at which one's child is dependent,
but you don't want them living in the basement when they're 40.
- Right. The whole intention as a mother bird or a parent bird is that they fly the coop, right?
- Yeah.
[Laughter]
>> The whole thing of it.
So and along with the humility thing is just entitlement and lack of gratitude.
I witnessed that and was always just baffled by it.
There was never an expression of gratitude or a sense of it.
It was just this entitlement, like, you know, I gave money and I don't, and not that I cared
personally, if there was a thank you or something like that, but there just wasn't a heartfelt
sense of gratitude.
Pete: Yeah.
Kirsten: Okay, and the last red flag is just if we are overriding our common sense.
Pete: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: But I'm sure you know of a lot more red flags if you want to keep this part
of it going.
Pete: Oh, I'll see if I think of any. But yes, common sense is an important thing and
one thing I often say with regard to the Association for Spiritual Integrity is that we hope to
kind of in, raise awareness of what is and is not appropriate on the spiritual, in a spiritual
community or with a spiritual teacher. And, you know, because one thing I've seen happen many times,
including from my own, through my own eyes and with my own former teacher, is that, you know,
you sit there and things are getting weirder and weirder. But then you think, well, this guy is
so impressive and it's had such an impact on my life and he's apparently enlightened and I don't
think I am, therefore I guess I'll just keep sitting here and so, you know, we've seen the
extent to which cults can go off the rails. I mean, Jonestown being an extreme example, but
many others with that kind of mentality, I think, among most of the students, they just,
and it's incremental. It doesn't, you know, if you just walked into that scene, you'd say,
"Oh, my God, this is weird. I'm leaving. Bye." But if you've been there since the start,
it's like the frog in the slowly heating water. You don't notice that it's heating.
Yes. Yeah, exactly. I love that analogy. And just that, I think, you know, this is another example
of where the mind can really be useful. Recognize each of us when we're with a spiritual teacher
that the nature of this is projection, that they have it and I don't, that that's not true,
but that's sort of the game we're playing as we move along on our journey, and sometimes we need
to see it out there before we can realize it here. So if your mind can hold that framework and you
recognize that, I think that can be really useful in terms of not buying into completely that they
have it and you don't. Yeah, it's a balancing act because obviously they have something that
we don't have or we wouldn't go there to get it. You know, like the same with the school analogy,
they know stuff in medical school that you don't know yet, so you want to be there to learn it.
But on the other hand, well, actually medical school is an interesting example because
as you described it, that so many of the doctors teaching were egomaniacs and were just extremely
cruel to the students and abusive and full of themselves. So, maybe there's a corollary here
between that and the spiritual teaching scene.
Sarah: Maybe so. Yeah. It's on a different level. You know, the medical is more sort of the mental,
that the physical aspect of existence and spiritual teachers are operating at a
hopefully different level. But along those lines, just kind of shifting into the medical system,
it's very fear-based and the training is and so is the medical environment and I can give a couple,
and I go into that more in the book. Is it okay to kind of go in this direction, Rick?
Rick - Yeah, I just want to say quickly, I'm reminded of my friend Miranda McPherson,
who's a spiritual teacher and been on BatGap a couple times. And she's been in her 50s, I guess,
and she's been a spiritual teacher since she was in her 20s and through going through various phases
of it, but she makes a point of going to therapy periodically, maybe once a month or something,
I don't know how often, and going to sit with other teachers or go on other teachers' retreats
and stuff like that, just to kind of get feedback and keep it real and, you know, have a little
bit of self-scrutiny.
And it's a good example.
Yeah, and in my experience, therapy can be such a support for a spiritual journey.
Of course, they're not really separate.
It also can, everything can be its opposite, right?
But the support is, just like we were talking about before, with therapy, I learned how
to open to aspects of myself and open to my emotions, open to, become aware of my thought
patterns, become aware of my tendencies. What I found late in my teens was I'd
been in intensive therapy for a long time. I felt hopeless at some point because I
realized I was just moving the furniture around in the house, you know, like, but I
would be doing that forever, you know, like I realized somehow like this isn't
it, you know, this isn't what I'm longing for, this isn't what I'm seeking, this
inner child work, this cognitive work, this, all this. Right. It didn't go deep enough.
Yeah, and I'm sure there are some therapists who can take it deeper than others.
But the nature of what we call the spiritual journey, and again, there's really truly no
differentiation but it's useful to have these concepts.
The nature of the spiritual journey is the dissolution of the individual me, right?
Like dropping into this place of love that we all are.
So, I think they can go hand in hand, and the other piece is psychological maturity can
really support our spiritual journey.
When that's not there, we still have to meet those aspects on our spiritual journey, meet
the contractions or psychological issues or trauma or whatever.
Those are going to come up for sure with the intensity of the spiritual journey.
Yeah, now some spiritual teachers say that there's a tight correlation between development
of consciousness and then the development of all the other aspects of your makeup, you
know, your psychology, your health, your behavior, and so on.
And others say, like Ken Wilber says, for instance, that the correlation can be very
loose.
He has what he calls lines of development model where, you know, consciousness can be very
developed and yet your emotional maturity could be very undeveloped. They can be way out of sync.
And, you know, I kind of think of it as a big stretchy rubber band. There's a correlation,
they do kind of pull each other along, but they can get really out of sync. And, yeah, so, and this…
Jennifer: To your point, with spiritual teachers.
Pete: Yeah.
Jennifer: Right? I mean, they can be very advanced spiritually or have had profound insights and
and realizations and still have left a lot behind.
It's not integrated.
- Which is why somehow or other,
you need to pay attention to all this stuff
and maybe therapy is only one tool
and there could be others,
but it really needs to be holistic, your development.
And in fact, the word enlightenment,
I hesitate to use it because it can,
is sometimes attributed to people who like we're saying
are very out of sync.
have a lot of consciousness development but are pretty messed up in other areas. And I would
reserve that word if I were to use it at all for someone who is holistically developed in all areas
and there's no end to that. Right. I mean, enlightenment, you know,
it doesn't exist and it's what we all are. And sometimes our minds like to put it on to somebody
out there, you know. But I would agree that the more an individual human being has
open to all these different aspects of being and their personal stuff, the more awake,
and I mean that literally, you know, not just in sort of the spiritual terms awake,
but literally the more awake that person is to being itself.
Yeah, and I, as you say that, I'm thinking of, you know, some so-called spiritual teachers
who if they were to hear this conversation would say, "You guys are crazy.
You're just wallowing around in all this Maya, all this illusory stuff.
Can't you just realize that you're already enlightened and you don't even, it's not that
you are already enlightened because you don't even exist and that alone is and there's only
this and you don't need practices, you don't need teachings, you don't need therapies,
just, you know, wake up."
>> Yeah, and you know, when I was, I guess I'll call it just sort of coming up, I'm still coming
up, we all are, but early on when I moved to the Bay Area to do my residency in order to be around
spiritual teachers, the non-dual teachers back then, and I don't know about now because I
don't have much opportunity to listen in on podcasts and stuff, but back then that was kind of-
of what was being taught, you know, this, this, none of this is real and, and this truth and
wisdom coming through them that resonated so deeply in me, like it's true that there
is no other, instead of saying none of this is real, I prefer to say there really isn't
any other, but here we are, you know, I've got this body, here it is, you know, but,
But kind of going a little deeper with that too is there is, for me, I'll just talk about
myself, and this happened when I was parting ways with that spiritual teacher, and for
this I will ever be grateful, not to the teacher, but just to that whole situation.
The realization of what I call "Aloneness" with a capital "A," some people might call
emptiness, with a capital E, that there is no other. For me, and I know everybody that
has this realization experiences it differently, but it was utterly devastating. It was so
stark, so devastating. It was almost like a nuclear bomb went off, but so enormous that
it blew up the whole world and the whole universe. So nothing was left. So stark. And it was,
realization was, and still reverberates through here, much more real than anything I had ever
experienced. It wasn't just a mental philosophy, you know, like a philosophy. So, it's like,
you know, we can come to that and it's the ego's worst nightmare. It's like if I had
known that at the beginning of my spiritual search, that's where it would sort of culminate,
I would have run the other way.
But Rick, I totally forgot why I got on this tangent.
It's not exactly a tangent, but what were we talking about so I can kind of come back
to the context of it?
Rick: We were talking about the Neo-Advaita philosophy.
Oh, yeah.
You know, nothing is real.
Yeah, that there is truth there.
Yeah.
But in my experience, so this time of utter, utter devastation alone, and there was nothing
anybody could say, no teacher could say anything, because all of that was recognized to be, you
Unreal just another thought or so you truly are alone in that
There's nobody to depend on nobody to turn to nobody nothing. There's nothing
Now over time my experience was it was gradual here other people have different experiences
There was just sort of this very gradual after a long period of that
Engagement in the world little by little and it wasn't that I wasn't I was going through my motions and doing what I needed to
do to take care of my daughter, to work, all of that. But I'm talking about sort of more of a
human being engagement in the world and this recognition or experience of it more as a dance.
Pete: Object to life.
MaryLiz Yes.
Pete: There's a line in the Briharani.
MaryLiz Be this human being, this individual point of consciousness here in this body and to be able
to identify as this. So, yeah, so there's a profound truth to what those teachers were saying
back then when I was, you know, resonating deeply with what they said. And now, for me, there's also,
you know, just this -
Pete: There's a larger truth.
Kirsten: - life.
Pete: Yes.
Kirsten: Yes, yes.
Pete: There's a line in the Briharanika Upanishad where a student is espousing the kind of, you know,
nothing is real philosophy that you were just mentioning and the teacher says to him,
"This Brahman of yours is one-footed." So, it's partial. There's a famous line from Shankara
who wrote, "Brahma," I'm reading this, I don't have it memorized, "Brahma Satyam Jagat Mithya
Jivro Brahmaiva Napara," which is typically translated as, "Brahman is the only truth,
the world is unreal, and therefore ultimately there's no difference between Brahman and
individual self. But mithya does not mean the world is unreal. It means it is existing and
non-existing simultaneously, or neither existing nor not existing. And one classic metaphor that's
used is if you go into a pottery shop and see a bunch of pots, you could truthfully say that
there's nothing here but clay. That's it, clay. But that's not entirely true because there are pots,
even though they're made of clay, it's equally true to say there are pots here in this room and
you can do things with them. So, you know, the world is both real and unreal. It exists and it
doesn't. It's paradoxical. Debra:
Yes, it is. And, you know, to come back to that profound realization, the nature of realizing
that nothing is real is not having access to this other leg, if you will, like you said,
it's just, this is all there is. So, yeah, I just wanted to speak to that part of the journey,
partly in case other people are experiencing that. And there's different levels of that
experience of aloneness too. You know, there's sort of the human level of loneliness. Everything we
experience is an emanation from a quality of being that's right next to truth or love or,
you know, the core essence of our being. So, sometimes it gets further and further out on
the branches, the experience of it, but that's why we can follow everything back to what we really
are.
And that's where integration comes in.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
Stabilization, integration.
Yes.
And it doesn't have to be either or.
You don't have to swing back and forth from this extreme to that extreme.
Both can be lived simultaneously.
Yes.
Yeah.
And that takes time, as you said.
You know, I mean, at first you were blasted with this and, you know, there wasn't much
integration and then the integration gradually happened.
Yeah.
And you know, now my experience of life is just this river flowing through, but to pop
any bubble, so to speak, of course there's stuff that comes up, you know?
I get impatient with my daughter and I'm overwhelmed a lot of times with, you know, everything
that my mind thinks that I need to get done.
And sometimes I have reactions that come up to something that's, you know, like a pain
body that's coming up in my patient.
I had anxiety that came up about this interview.
So, you know, it's not like you get to a place where there's just this, "Oh, it's all joy
and wonder."
But there is this underlying sense of this wonder and miracle and this experience of
life as energy and as a dance.
Yeah, I wasn't going to use those very same words, but I was actually going to use the
word "underlying."
I was going to ask you, is there, despite all these human things that we all experience,
is there an underlying something, rather, that is abiding, you know, continuous, and
that is kind of foundational to all the relative experiences in your life.
Yes. Yeah.
Yes. And, you know, sort of moving into the mind too with that, it's like before when stuff came up,
it was like I was working on me all the time. This project of me, I call it, you know,
that disappeared after that period of aloneness and emptiness. This is the gift of that.
Nothing. It wiped out everything, all longing, all spiritual endeavors, all
thoughts that I needed to get somewhere, trying to get anywhere spiritually. It just wiped. There
was nothing left. There was nothing left. So, that's kind of where it's still at, where there's
nothing left to get. So, there's a freedom in that, but there's still stuff that comes up.
But there's not this, it's a little hard to put into words.
- No, I know what you mean.
- You get it, yeah. So, the project of me dissolved. It doesn't mean that when something
comes up, I don't sometimes search. And I think a lot of people interpreted that as, you know,
okay, I'm done. I need to have technique or something, but it kind of comes up in the moment
as opposed to, I'm trying to get somewhere. You know, there's a line in the Patanjali's
Yoga Sutras in the Niyama's section where he says, "From contentment, one attains unparalleled
happiness." And, you know, Papaji famously said, "Give up the search." And I think a lot of people
interpreted that as, you know, okay, I'm done. But I think what happens is at a certain stage,
one naturally does give up the search in the sense of the yearning, nagging, you know, oh, God,
I can't be happy until I find this thing, quality that often rules the lives of spiritual seekers,
and a contentment dawns. And so, you no longer feel that way.
- Yes.
Pete But it doesn't mean you're done.
It doesn't, I mean, to me, that shift happened, I don't know when, it just, you know, kind
of snuck up, as Jesus said, like a thief in the night.
And, but I'm still as enthusiastic about all this stuff as I ever was, but it's more of
an adventure and an exploration rather than a desperate yearning, searching kind of thing.
Yeah, it's kind of like this. In my experience, I didn't give it up. It just sort of disappeared.
Yeah.
That search seeking.
Right. Well, to use an analogy, the sun began to rise and you were no longer stumbling around
the dark, you know, looking for something because there is some illumination that had come. And,
you know, so there's, you know, no longer stubbing your toes and you're enjoying life
with some degree of sunshine.
>> Yeah, beautifully put.
>> Yeah, and I'm sure you don't feel like you've lost interest in spiritual stuff or
anything like that. You wouldn't be doing this interview if you had, I don't suppose.
>> Right, yeah. It's kind of like, again, it's sort of like I experience life as a river
moving through and, you know, what appears, it's like I'm curious about and whatever appears,
and I take the next step and there's a joy and a wonder and love, love and compassion that arises.
Yeah.
- Yeah, well, speaking of life as a river, ponder the spiritual implications of these words,
row, row, row your boat gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a
dream. - I love it.
it.
Yeah.
You're still rowing.
Still rowing.
But the river is mainly doing it.
You're just kind of, you know, tweaking it a little bit here and there like you do with
your steering wheel or on the road, micro adjustments.
And you know, since you're not thrashing against the current anymore, you're merry and life
is a dream.
Even as life is a dream.
Yeah.
Right.
Beautiful.
Yeah.
Okay, what else we got?
have a lot of interesting points here to talk about. One thing I would love to, I mean you,
yeah, no, yeah, please go for it. Okay, I think we talked a little bit about, yeah,
we talked about therapy. I would love to just bring up the issue or topic of psychiatric medication
on a spiritual journey. And I bring it up because I remember, you know, back in my 20s hearing
some very prominent teachers say that psychiatric medication, advising not to take it because it's
an avoidance of being present with what it is. And some of them, of course, like Thorazine or
whatever, they're going to really dull you out totally, but right, but there's certain ones that
are... Yeah, I mean, there's certain ones that I wouldn't prescribe because they're addictive and
because they do just kind of cloud the mind. But just like the point being more, is psychiatric
medication really an avoidance of being present with what's arising or what's coming up? Or
can it be a support for further deepening? And I think each of us needs to first assess
motivation for wanting or not wanting medication. And you have to sense into that, like, am I
avoiding something? Or in my case, it was I had been sitting with this heavy energy of depression
and opening to it for years. And I did not want medication because I had the idea that it would be
closing off my doorway to truth. And I suffered tremendously as a result. Finally,
you know, extremely depressed and suicidal, I agreed to take medication because it was kind
of life or death at that point. Was this in your anorexic phase or later?
Um, no, it was later. Yeah, during medical school.
During medical school. Yeah.
Yeah, operating on three hours sleep. Yeah.
right or less. Yeah. So, and when I took an antidepressant for the first time, it takes a while
for this three or four weeks for them to actually kind of kick in. I was astounded. It didn't make
me high. I just felt like I was myself and it really allowed me to, I could feel that it was
sort of breaking my neuronal pathways out of these tracks they had been going down over and over and
over again all those years. And it opened up my mind and my whole self to the possibility of further
deepening. So there is such a thing as a biochemical imbalance and I think, you know, one way again to
attuned to, is it right for me or not, is have I been sitting with something or opening to or
working with something? And we all have to be really honest with ourselves. You know,
when I'm working with it, am I really resisting it or avoiding it? Or am I really genuinely
opening to this and just kind of going around and around and no transformation, no shift?
In that case, it's likely a biochemical imbalance. And I'll add that, you know, research shows us in
terms of antidepressants. When they're given to people who are depressed with a biochemical
imbalance, those people improve, typically. When they're given to people that aren't depressed,
nothing happens. It's not like they get high. They just experience the side effects of the
medication, but they don't get high. So it's not like if you take certain kinds of medications,
it's not like you're going to get a high and be able to run from something that needs to be
experienced. Yeah, all right. I have a few questions on that. One is, do you, in most cases,
does a person take such medications for a long, long time or continually, or do they just get
you through a phase and then you can stop them again? That's question number one. Each person
is different. I mean, of course, there's from the medical level, there's guidelines with that. If
it's first episode of depression, it's best to be on, and research backs all this, it's best to be on
the antidepressant for at least a year to try to kind of get those, you know, make sure you don't
default back into those grooves. If you've had more than a couple episodes, it would be longer
term. And it's different for each sort of mental health issue. Bipolar disorder typically needs
medication long-term. That is truly a biochemical imbalance and schizophrenia
or schizoaffective disorder. Now, there's all these caveats though. You know, there
are people I know that I work with who, if another psychiatrist saw them, would
chalk them up as psychotic, but they're having a spiritual opening. So, there's
all these caveats, but there also is just true psychosis where the mind, there's an
imbalance of chemicals and thank goodness we have medications that can help set that straight.
Yeah, I have another question but before I forget, I'm going to send you a link to an
organization that contacted me recently that includes Daniel Ingram and a bunch of other
people that I've interviewed and they are, he's a doctor, and there's them and then there's
also Cheetah House with Willoughby, Britain, which deals with people who've had psychotic
or other such episodes as a result of spiritual practice.
But this first group, I forget the name of it, is recognizing that there is a kind of
an epidemic of spiritual awakening taking place and they're trying to raise awareness
of that so that it's not misdiagnosed.
And so that, I mean, because I've been contacted by people who themselves, they don't feel
like they're mentally ill, but they feel like there's something powerful going on.
They don't know what it is, and they think there might be something wrong with them.
And a little bit of reassurance might be all they need.
Yes.
You know?
Yes.
But other people get destabilized by such things and might need some medications.
Yes.
And I can speak from my own experience as well about just having these sort of kind of wild
experiences.
After I went on my first go anchor the pasana retreat which many of you may know or quite intense and a lot of people get
cracked open with those I
Returned to medical school after taking a break from that school
And I would find myself in all kinds of states something cracked wide open where there was no me there was there was no ability to
differentiate
Objects suddenly I'd be in somebody else's body
You're seeing or as I remember or as
You know, I don't even know that my mind believes in past lives. I don't care
whether they exist or not, to tell you the truth, but I remember one
time clearly walking behind a woman and just all of her past lives just flipping
through. So all these experiences that can happen when we're cracked open and I,
thank goodness, knew that I wasn't psychotic. I knew this was some kind of
opening and nature would have it or the universe or whatever we want to call it that I got somehow
linked up with a psychiatrist that was open to this, which is extremely rare. So, I got support.
Pete: Yeah.
Mary: Which back in those days was hard to come by. There wasn't the internet or anything like that.
Pete: And I remember you saying that some guy who gave you a ride home from that retreat,
if it was that same retreat, was really bonkers after.
>> Yes. >> Yeah.
>> He was, and he was giving me a ride to the airport from the retreat and he was just weeping.
I mean, I was concerned for our safety in that car because he was weeping so profoundly while
he was driving. It had opened up a memory of old sexual trauma that he had not had access to.
And, you know, Goenka retreats, at least when I used to go to them,
they're very Eastern and not supportive of sort of our Western sort of psychological understanding.
And so, it's just technique, technique.
Other places, like, the reason I ended up shifting over more to Spirit Rock was because they did
have – they held the space for these types of things as well, the emotional, the psychological.
Yeah.
Okay, so that brings up an interesting point, which is the whole point of the necessity
of proper support and care and caution in an intensive meditation retreat.
speaking I wouldn't advise throwing newbies into a 10-hour-a-day meditation routine or
whatever the routine is. It's just too much too soon, too fast. And I know there have
been many casualties from such things. And then, second question I have, unless you want
to comment on that.
I think in general I would agree. In my case, I had tried meditating, you know, like an
hour here or there or whatever and I had such a monkey mind and you know I couldn't get anywhere
with it and I and my nature too is to dive in all the way so I just was like I'm going all the way
with this 10-day retreat and so yeah but it was precarious it was very precarious and you know
if you can imagine going through the intensity of medical school while experiencing these states you
you know, where I didn't know time or space, didn't know, I'm here,
I am supposed to be asking patients, what's the date.
I don't even know the year, the nothing, what a date is, you know?
So just, and then juggling all the left brain stuff,
having to study and you know, all night and this and that.
And it was very intense, but in retrospect,
my sense is that the intensity of medical school kept me
grounded world and kind of balance that out. But boy,
"Oh, it was a pressure cooker." I can imagine. Yeah. Another question I had is, you know,
let's say that there existed facilities where people could go if they were depressed or having,
you know, difficulties, but they were also a spiritual seeker. And like, you know, five minutes
ago, you're talking about the value of medications as a supplement to spiritual practice or whatever
to help get you through rough periods. Do you think that under such care, medication could be
forgone and that there could be actual spiritual practices or some kind of methodologies to kind
of get you through depression or these other difficulties without chemical aids? Or do you
think that even there, medications would be an important part of the protocol?
It depends on the person.
If the depression is deeply ingrained in the nervous system, then medication can be a real
support for further deepening.
It's not a bad thing.
it's not like we need to try to avoid it at all costs. But there are many people who shift,
that energy shifts with meditation or even just with therapy, just sort of addressing
the psychological aspects. So I don't think there's a hard and fast rule about it. I think
each person is unique in their biochemistry and their genetic predisposition and their
history of trauma, all of that.
Yeah, I guess a related question is, do you think that doing, obviously we want to change
the biochemistry or we want to change whatever is going on in the brain that is causing depression,
change it to a healthy state where we no longer have the depression.
Spiritual practices I think can do that, they do change the brain, there's been a lot of
research on that, but can medication also do that so that if you take it for a while
it resets the biochemistry and you can taper off the medication, but you will have a different
brain chemistry going forward.
I think that would be a great study.
Yeah.
Just to see.
What we do know from research in general, but this is without necessarily somebody utilizing
spiritual practices, is that if someone goes off of medication too soon, they typically
get depressed again.
But as you're saying, if there were these extra supports in place that were actually transforming
the biochemistry or the neurobiology, I can't see why not for some people, depending on,
again, how deeply ingrained this is.
Yeah.
I mean, there's all kinds of different methodologies out there.
You know, there's bionaural beat, or whatever they're called, and there's Ayurveda, and
there's a million different things.
you can imagine something that would just sort of be able to custom tailor a protocol for each
individual, you know, using whichever of these methodologies would be helpful. It would be really
cool. Yes, polytrophic breathwork. Yeah, there you go. Even recently, some studies a friend of mine
spearheaded using MDMA to treat PTSD, like what we call the lingo we use is sort of treatment-resistant
PTSD that everything else had been tried, medication, therapy, everything. And not just
throwing MDMA at them and off you go, but in a somewhat of a breathwork type session,
holotropic breathwork type session, significant improvement in the depression with one or two,
I don't know what the protocol was, but it was a limited number of sessions. And it was long term
with these studies. So, to your point, I mean, that wasn't, they're not on medication long-term.
It's not depression, it's PTSD, but the symptoms shifted dramatically with those interventions.
Yeah, you're probably well aware of the research at Johns Hopkins and places like that where
stage 4 cancer patients who are terrified of death, you know, have the most profound experience
of their lives on psilocybin or something, they're not afraid of death anymore, or alcoholics, or
whatever, you know, just lose the desire. And, you know, so, yeah, all this stuff is valuable and
needs to be better understood and studied. And while we're still on this topic, I just want to
mention Ajah Shanti announced when he retired that he had, you know, been through a lot of traumatic
experiences, particularly regarding from his health situation, I think a lot of pain, and that
that he was actually taking some anti-anxiety medication to help him through that phase,
which is one thing I always liked about Ajay is he just tells you the truth.
And, you know, that could be very helpful to people that someone, a role model like
him would admit to doing that.
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah.
All right, a question came in.
I mean, there it is.
This is from Corin Turgaman in Israel.
I'm going through Kundalini awakening the past last five years and also diagnosed with ADD.
Attention deficit disorder?
That's ADD.
All right.
I'm currently first year of academic studies and I wonder if I should take medication for
ADD like Ritalin.
I don't know how it may affect the energetic phenomena of Kundalini.
Good question.
Thanks for sending it in, Corinne.
Wow, that's a really good question.
you know, I guess I don't feel real comfortable giving medication advice
without being able to talk to you a little bit more, Corin, but there are
different medications for ADD. There are the stimulants, they're sort of
more potent, like you mentioned Ritalin, Adderall, but there's a few that are
gentler and are not stimulants, including Stratera is one of them, one of the
oldies but goodies. So I would, you know, I would just tune into having
compassion for yourself. If you're going into this academic setting and
experiencing this kundalini energy at the same time, that's
really intense. If you feel it's best for you to try to navigate that without
medication, then go for it. But if you start feeling like it's just too intense
or you need extra support with the ADD just so that the academics aren't
terribly problematic, then you might want to try medication. It doesn't mean you
have to take it forever. And I don't know, I'm not knowledgeable enough to know
whether medication interrupts Kundalini. In my experience, when I took medication,
my spiritual, for depression, so ADD, different thing, my spiritual journey
deepened as a direct result of being able to sort of get off the train tracks
of these loops that my mind was taking. So I wish I could be more specific. I
don't know if ADHD medication would interrupt the Kundalini process. I don't
think it would, but I don't know that for sure. Okay. Would you be open to having
paid sessions with people like that around the world who, you know, would like
to speak to a psychiatrist who has a spiritual orientation? And I don't know
what the legalities of that would be or anything, but are you maxed out and
wouldn't really be interested? No, it's, right now life is sort of shifting in a different
direction with the book out and stuff. So I'm opening to different, you know,
different work in the world, if you will, or different ways of being in the world.
I am limited, unfortunately, because of the MD. I'm only able to work with
individuals who reside in the states that I'm licensed in, which is South
Carolina and California, and I'm not yet set up to do that right now. But I am
opening to that and certainly groups. I've just started working with some groups,
so that would be another possibility where we could engage in a conversation like that.
I've interviewed some psychologists. They're not named them. I don't want to get them in trouble,
but they do online sessions with people all over the place. How do they do that? Are they
breaking the law? I mean, you mentioned psychologists.
that's different than a psychiatrist. I see. Unfortunately, the MD is limiting in terms of
who we can see. You've got too much education. I guess. I don't know. I mean, the mentality,
I guess, behind these laws is that if there's a bad outcome and a patient needs or wants to sue,
they can't really sue us in a place where we're not licensed. I don't know. So. Okay. Okay, good.
So, what else? I've got a list of points here. What pops into your mind?
Well, sort of the medical world or autism or whichever.
Oh yeah, we haven't talked about your daughter yet. Let's talk about that.
So, tell us about your daughter.
Well, my daughter, her name is Saachi. She's 15 years old and she was diagnosed really young
at 16 months of age with autism. And I'll just give a little background so you all can
kind of understand how I came to my sense of her. I always sensed that she was this
exquisitely sensitive being and it certainly manifested physically for her. She, you know,
was exquisitely sensitive to sounds and lights and just from the time she was born, screaming and
when we would go into a grocery store sensitive to other people just crying and not able to sleep just
real sensitive to sensory input. And when she was diagnosed, I fully bought into the traditional
medical disease paradigm. Nothing wrong with it, but that was I was very limited in how I saw it
out of fear. It triggered a lot of fear in me, and I would say the couple of fears were,
I'm a single mom and her biological father is an anonymous sperm donor, so it's not like there's
another person in the picture, or and she doesn't have any siblings. So one fear is like, who's going
to be there for her when I'm gone? So it triggered that, if she's not able to be fully independent.
And then the other fear that it triggered was, "Will she be able to love or be loved?" because
the core symptom from the medical paradigm of autism is lack of sort of social-emotional
connection. Now, that's actually false. It looks that way, but it's quite the opposite.
These beings are so deeply connected, there's very little or no separation. But at any rate,
I got thrown into the fear mode with the diagnosis and threw myself into therapies and all kinds of interventions
And it still pains me to say to try to help her be more normal
So that she could function in this world so that she could love and be loved. That was always my motivation and
Over time it was like there would be these the curtains would part and I would see these
different aspects of her, you know, the fear would blind me to it but then it
just would come through like she just was, she would speak my thoughts and I kept
denying it and saying, "I must have said that, you know, but finally, okay she's
really saying it. I did not say that, I just thought that." And she, you know, she
was fully aware and would feel whoever came in the house, their emotions and
and just psychic. I mean, I can, I'll tell one story real quickly. We went to see
Shamdas chant. He came to Charleston and we both love chanting and we had never heard of him or
seen him before, but we went and we both enjoyed it. She was probably three or four at the time.
Came home, went on with our lives, didn't mention it again, but about a year later,
She couldn't talk yet, but she could try to formulate words. She started saying, "Shut up,
shut up, shut up," and I couldn't understand her. And she kept saying it over and over and over
again. And this went on many times a day to the point where I was getting so frustrated with it,
I didn't know what she was saying. I was trying to understand, you know, tried everything to get
her to not say it, you name it. I told the therapists about it, they were involved,
everybody involved in trying to get this thing to go away. Well, it didn't work. And then finally,
one day I understood what she was saying. She was saying Shambhas and I said, "Well,
Sachi, he's back in India. We can't go see him now." And she kept on. And so I thought, "Okay,
I'll just look and see maybe he's somewhere in the United States and I'll just take her to get this
over with. I'll take her wherever." And so I looked it up and she'd been doing this for about a month,
literally a month before he had died. And so, you know, she had received that somehow.
Pete: Yeah, like in a motorcycle accident, right?
Jennifer: Yeah, yeah, you know. And so, once I understood and we went down into the yard and
got a flower and brought it and I said, "Oh, I get it now." You know, after we, you know,
sort of were with that, she didn't say it anymore. So, that's just one example of just this openness
where you know this energy and this accessibility is the wrong word it's
just this porousness to energy, information, all of that. And so my
paradigm or my way of thinking about autism expanded or deepened. I think
there's there is value in the medical disease paradigm because we identify
what we call symptoms but by the way the symptoms are a manifestation of this
deeper openness, porousness, sensitivity. I have friends on the spectrum and I'll
give you one example, a direct example of how a symptom can be a manifestation of
this deeper sensitivity. So my friend Tony tells me one of the core symptoms again
of autism is lack of eye contact, that's what we call it. My friend
Tony tells me she can't look people in the eye because she sees their whole
soul, their whole being, and it's just too much for her. So she's found a way to
compensate. She looks people on the forehead. So people that can verbalize
this openness or this, she doesn't call it openness, but I do, you know, they're able
to speak to that, but most of these beings cannot. And my experience of my
daughter and the patients that I work with who are on the spectrum and just in
general neurodiverse people who don't fall on the normal curve and we can call
them brain disordered, no problem, that's sort of the medical paradigm. We can do
that from this sort of neurotypical or underneath the normal curve because
there's more of us, but watch out because more of these beings are coming into the
world and that normal curve is going to get broader and broader. So anyways, this
is what I recognize about my daughter and other beings on the spectrum is that there's this
profound openness and porousness. And so she is a perfect mirror for me because she is so
pure and innocent and open. That doesn't mean she's not a kid. She's a teenager and we are
really going through it with the teenage years. You know, I get hollered at and all the other
good stuff. But that's my deeper understanding and recognition of these beings. And so, I
founded this non-profit Living Darshan to help sort of usher in this deeper understanding
of these beings. Yeah.
Nice. I'll link to that from your Batgap page. I want to ask you about some of the spiritual
implications, but first I just wanted to ask you as a doctor, what you make of the allegation
that vaccines cause autism. There was that study by Andrew Wakefield that was published in The
Lancet and was later retracted due to ethical concerns and fraudulent data. But the conspiracy
theory, if you want to call it that, lingers. Yeah, it is a polarizing issue. I am in the
medical field and I value research studies and the left brain and research has not shown that vaccines
cause autism. Having said that, I have a couple of friends who are mothers and who say that right
after their child got a vaccine, it was sort of, you know, there's two types of autism, the
progressive and regressive that the regression developed. But there have been many studies
done now that don't show the correlation. Now, as you know, there's a difference between
correlation and causation. I mean, you know, something, you know, people have heart attacks
all the time and sometimes after getting a COVID vaccine, somebody has a heart attack.
Now, was it caused by the COVID vaccine or, you know, were they just due to have one?
Yeah, yeah. Now there might be other factors involved, like my daughter has a genetic issue,
and so along with that is the autism, but also immunosuppression, and so she can't get live
vaccines. You know, so there may be other factors involved that sort of affect vaccines, but that's
my medical take on it. And again, I acknowledge my medical left brain bias with that, but you know.
Yeah, well I didn't want to spend a lot of time on that, but I just wanted to see what you thought.
Um, yeah, so this is interesting. So you say there are more of these kids coming in.
Is that a statistical fact? You know, some people are still trying to chalk it up as,
"Oh, it's just being diagnosed now." But I can tell you that several years ago,
I remember when it was 1 in 96 children or 90-something children, at least it was 1 in 88.
Now it's 1 in 36. This is not just because it's being recognized. This is, you know,
more and more beings that are on the spectrum and also just the term now that people are using to
broaden that out is neurodiverse, like people who think differently, who process things differently
are coming in, there's no doubt. And I have a friend who's really into human design, which I
don't know a whole lot about, but he tells me that the guy who started that way back in the 70s or
early 80s foresaw that these beings, he didn't call it autism then, would be coming in. And I
have another friend who's very psychic and communicates with non-verbal people on the
the spectrum and verbal, but you know, they tell her they're here to shift the consciousness,
human collective consciousness.
And as we touched on yesterday, Rick, the symptoms make sense if we think in terms of
these exquisitely sensitive beings who are vibrating at a frequency that's much faster.
not, you know, it's not, none of this is better or worse. I'm not saying that, but they're vibrating
at a higher for an over, but it just, they just can't learn it on this planet. So, they come in,
in these bodies, in this kind of grosser realm. And of course, it's hard to function. Of course,
it's like, and it really is like they're coming from another realm. I mean, my daughter, I mean,
there's so many things like they don't understand social etiquette. And I mean, you can teach it
over and over, but they just can't learn it. And my daughter too, like, I'll just share this.
You know, she just doesn't understand the need for clothing. And you know, we all didn't
understand the need for clothing. Like, you know, she runs around naked and doesn't understand that
when there's people here, we need to keep our clothes on. And so, you know, the way I try to
explain it to her is, well, we live in a culture, a society, where, you know, there's certain rules
and we kind of have to live by them. So, my job, one of my jobs as her mom, is to help her learn
how to live in this realm. But on, so it's not like I'm changing necessarily what I did when I
was driven by fear, right? Because I'm still supporting her towards independence. But what
she is doing her role here, even though she's not verbalizing it, and others on the spectrum,
this is my take, you know, it's a paradigm, I get that, but is that they are here to shift
the collective energy of the planet. And I'm open to anything, you know,
critique of that perspective as well. When I felt, when the sort of the download for the vision of
Living Darshan, the non-profit, came through, I did, I really searched deeply, like, is this just
like a compensation for grief about her condition? Like, am I just trying to make her and others on
the spectrum into some kind of, you know, special being or yes, special. And I really searched that,
I'm not finding that anywhere because I'm really, well, I didn't find that anywhere,
any need for her to be special in that way. And also, I don't feel attached to that being the
reality, you know, so anyways, it can be an ongoing reflection, but yeah, that is interesting.
I'm totally open to the idea that there could be groups of souls that come in and that we
move from dimension to dimension, soul families or whatever.
And I'm also very open to the idea that there are other realms or lokas as they're called
in Sanskrit where life is very different than it is here.
And they're not necessarily on some planet someplace, but just in other dimensions.
And that we move from dimension to dimension as we go through various lifetimes.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Anyway, it doesn't matter what I believe, but anyway, I do.
A couple more questions came in.
Let's see.
Okay, since we're on the topic of autism, this is from Bhavani Kondamundi in California.
I would like to know your thoughts on autism.
We've already expressed some, but she has a 17-year-old son on the autism spectrum who
has speech delays to no speech, but he uses vocalizations of sounds. He seems very free-spirited
without wanting to take any responsibilities like typical people and seems very present
in the moment. Loves nature, music, hikes. Any advice for me to work with my son?
You know, those of us who are parents of folks on the spectrum, we really chose what I would
like to call like an advanced curriculum of the soul.
Pete: Yeah.
[Laughter]
Katie: Because it's intense and I mean, what you're describing is this freedom of spirit
that he is and this inability to sort of fit into our world the way, into this realm the
way we would sort of expect someone to.
What I do, and I think you said her name is Bhavani?
Bhavani, right.
Yeah.
What I do, Bhavani, is I recognize my role in supporting Saatchi in learning how to be
in the world.
And I do that.
And it's a lot of work, and it's hard, because it takes a million times more teaching, and
just don't come naturally to these beings that would come to others. So it's hard.
But I just keep doing that. In truth, my... well, I'm not going to say that. But I
just keep doing that in my role as her mother. At the same time, realizing and
recognizing this depth of her being. And that recognition, that really seeing her,
allows her to bloom even more. I don't know how to, I don't really know how to
put that into words, but I can see her her spirit expanding. Yes, we want...
That's what you were saying in the beginning. You were saying people have this need to be seen.
Yes, it's universal, you know, it's universal. So when I recognize that in her and
mirror that back to her, not necessarily through my words, but just the awareness
of it gets transmitted, our recognition of who they are, just like when we're with
anybody. It's just kind of everything's amped up, you know, exponentially with
folks on the spectrum because the intensity of their energy, because, you
know, but keeping, maybe just really keeping in mind and recognizing with
your heart your son's beauty and that while we want our kids to function in
this world, there's a greater, there's a deeper intention for, I've realized, for my daughter.
She has her purpose in this world and what we're trying to do by making them more functional
in the world is sort of superficial. It's necessary, but it's on the surface. It's necessary
and intense and hard, but holding the space for this deeper understanding, even as you're
working with your son, and I'm sure it's frustrating. He's not taking responsibility. You know,
want him to be independent. So allowing for that too and then everything my
daughter brings up in me is a doorway, an opportunity. I don't always take the
doorway, but it always, whenever we're given an opportunity in life,
whether it's with our autistic kids or otherwise, you know, if we don't, if
there's a doorway, something that arises in me that's uncomfortable or creates
suffering in me and I don't open it and go through that, guaranteed it's gonna
come up and bite me in the bottom later in a bigger way, because life is going to have
us walk through these doors ultimately and open to these aspects that are hard to be
with.
So I got off on a tangent there.
That was a good tangent.
Yeah, but Bhavani, you know, my heart is with you.
It's hard.
It's really hard.
And there's no solution.
just know that you are on, you are partaking in an intense souls curriculum here.
Nice, that's good. Okay, here's a question unrelated to autism from Hamad Lachman in
South Africa. His question is, I'm going through a Kundalini awakening the past five years and
battling with sexual transmutation. I don't know quite what he means by transmutation,
but maybe you do. Change. Oh spiritual. Changing spiritual. Can you chat of the importance of
celibacy during Kundalini awakening? Oh. Can you tell me what Irene said about
the sexual transmutation? How she clarified that? How did you clarify that, Irene? What?
Mindy wants to know what you just said. Yeah. Oh, just I looked it up. What transmutation? Oh,
she looked it up. What does it mean? It means the energy's shifting, you know, from. So it
So it doesn't mean the person is becoming transgender, it means, okay, I got it.
Yeah, let me quickly comment because I know what it means now and then you can elaborate.
So it's said that when you go through a Kundalini awakening, the energy is rising, right?
And it's said that if sexual desires are not fulfilled externally, the energy gets sublimated
and rises up and is transmuted into sort of higher energy and enlivens the higher chakras.
And that if one is going through such a transformation and is not so,
that it can sometimes feel very draining. I think that's what he means.
>> Okay. I'll start by saying I am not a Kundalini expert. I mean, I certainly went through what I
I didn't know was Kundalini energies and risings. But what I do know is that when we are able
to refrain from discharging any type of energy, whether it's sexual, whether it's anger, whether
it's... when we're able to refrain and hold it, yes, it can transmute into other energy.
But there are times when it's too much and we need to rein it in.
I know I experienced that where I, you know, the energy was so intense at one point and
I talked to my teacher.
I could feel that it was, I was going to go nuts.
My brain was going to, literally, my whole brain was going to, the circuitry was going
to go wacko because it was so intense and I had been trying to stabilize it. I had, I don't eat
meat but I was trying to eat meat. I was running, I was doing all that stuff to try, I wasn't going to
satsangs. I was trying to, because I was afraid for my daughter. Ground yourself. Ground myself
because I was afraid I would become permanently non-functional because it was beginning to damage
my nervous system. So in that case, discharging energy, now that's extreme, but I think we
each have to really listen or get guidance from someone, hopefully, that you can work
closely with when you're experiencing that. And listen deeply. If your natural tendency
is to sort of discharge the sexual energy, well, it might be useful to really hold that
and see what happens with that. If it becomes too intense or dangerous on any level, then,
you know, you need to take a little break from that. Now, Kundalini teachers might say otherwise.
They might say, "No, just hold it, hold it, hold it." I don't know. Again, I'm not an expert in
Kundalini, but I know in my own life I have had to, against my will, because I was so one-pointed
about truth, I had to, for safety's sake, so that this human vessel could continue to survive,
I had to a few times back off. Pete: Yeah, safety first.
Sarah: Mm hmm. Pete: There's a couple of spiritual teachers
in South Africa. There's a fellow named Brad Loglin whom I interviewed about a year ago or
something and his wife, Leslie Temple Thurston, although she's not teaching anymore, but you might
might want to get in touch with Brad and he'll find him on Batgap. Maybe he could
help. And of course in this day and age you can talk to people all over the
world. But something good is happening. You can be assured of that and you just
need to like as Mindy was just saying, you just need to kind of pace
yourself and you know do things that are stabilizing and integrating. You don't
necessarily need to ground yourself in like if you don't eat meat you don't
If you need to work, you know, you need to try to make sure that you're functional to
do that.
So, it all...
And hike in the woods and do yoga or various things that will have a grounding influence.
And part of it, too, Rick, depends on our life circumstances.
Like I have a responsibility to be able to parent my daughter.
And you know, if you need to work, you know, you need to try to make sure that you're functional
to do that. So, there's a lot that can play into our decisions about how we work with
energy.
Yeah. But, you know, I'm sure you've seen this, Mindy, and you've talked about it today,
and I've seen it over the years. The spiritual path is, it is a marathon and not a sprint,
you know. So, you know, and safety first, it bears repeating. You want to sort of stabilize
and integrate and make sure that you know everything is in order and not push yourself so hard
that you do crack because people do crack.
Yes, yeah.
And if you read Gopi Krishna for instance, he'll describe this in detail but you know
the nervous system can become actually damaged as a result of not handling this properly.
Another good resource is Joan Shiva Pitta Harrigan who's on Batgap who's written a massive
book all about Kundalini in great detail. Everything you've always wanted to know about Kundalini,
but were afraid to ask. In fact, we have a whole category, I think, of Kundalini in the
categorical index page on BatGap. So, educate yourself and find good resources.
Great.
Okay, so is there anything else? We're kind of getting near the end. Is there anything
else that you want to, oh, you know, one thing I just wanted to say is that an overriding
sentiment that I got from reading your book is just the, it made me, just I love the feeling
that it gave me, but just the power of a mother's love. It's like the most powerful thing in
the world in some respects, and you know, just, it amazes me, and you know, it's, in
a way it's kind of what saves the world, and it's the hope of the world, but just the devotion
and an incredible force of a mother's love.
And you've been such a beautiful example of that.
I just, I mean, you didn't have a choice, I don't think,
'cause you are who you are, but I commend you for that.
- Thank you, Rick.
Thank you for saying that.
You know, and what comes to my mind too,
as you say that is, it's not limited to mothers, of course.
The energy of that love is,
obviously it resonates with you, so it's in you too,
we have a male body or female body. Yeah, my mother, I often think of her that way. I mean,
she went through a lot of difficulty. He was my alcoholic father and three suicide attempts and
all kinds of things. But boy, she just she hung in there and ended up having some really nice
spiritual turnaround later in life. That was very gratifying to me. Still a little nutty to their
dying day, but there was a she definitely shifted to a higher phase. Yeah.
I love the part about still a little nutty. You know, it's like, our quirks are so beautiful.
Yeah, it's what makes us human. So, you know, the mental criticism and I got to get rid of this got
to get rid of that. It's like, you know, delight in it. Just you can go down that mental track or
whatever. But it's just I mean, I just love my quirks. And I love quirks. And that's why I chose
to be a psychiatrist, of course, because I love quirks, quirks, quirky people. They're quirky.
Yeah, but you know, we can embrace what we would otherwise criticize in ourselves and others.
Yeah, I'm full of all kinds of nutty sayings and songs that I got from my mother and Irene and I
I sort of joke about it. I even sometimes occasionally think of a new one that I haven't told her.
All right, Mindy, so this has been great. I really have enjoyed getting to know you,
reading your book, talking to you, and we'll see where it goes from here. You'll have a
page on Batgap. Did you want me to put your email address on there for people to get in
touch with? They can do that through...
They can do it through my website.
Through your website.
I just went to edwardsmd.com.
Rick>> Right, and you also have your Living Darshan website, so I'll put links to both
of those up and there's contact info on those, contact page or something.
Maffie>> Perfect.
Rick>> Great.
So, thanks a lot and thanks to our mutual friend Maffie for having recommended you and
set this up.
Maffie>> Yes, yeah, thank you Rick.
Thank you so much and thank you all of you for being present here with us.
We are all in this together for sure.
Rick>> Great.
And speaking of Spirit Rock, I think my next interview is with Joan Halifax Roshi.
Okay.
She's associated with Spirit Rock.
So stay tuned for that.
All right.
Well, thank you.
You're welcome.
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