But if we're talking about awakening through the chakra system, a lot of people believe that
they awaken everything in the first chakra, then they move on to the second, the third,
the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, and that isn't what happens at all.
Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer.
Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews or conversations with spiritually awakening people.
We've just redesigned the website for the first time in 15 years.
Major redesign, so check it out, bathgap.com
and let us know if you have any problems or find any bugs that we need to fix,
because there have been some.
I guess, oh, let me just add, it costs a lot of money to redesign a website
website and the way we finance Backgap is through voluntary donations. Everything is free, nothing
is behind a paywall, including the audio podcast, but we depend upon the support of appreciative
listeners and viewers. So if you feel like supporting it in any amount, there are PayPal
buttons on every page of the website. And especially let us know if those don't work,
but I think they do. Okay, my guest today is Mary Mueller-Shutan. She's a spiritual teacher,
a healer and an author.
And she's written at least six or seven books.
The Spiritual Awakening Guide,
Managing Psychic Abilities,
Shadow Work for the Soul,
The Body Deva,
Working with Kundalini,
The Shamanic Workbook Series
and The Complete Chord Course.
I've read like two-thirds of her shadow workbook
and one-third of her Kundalini book
and I wish I had more time
because I felt I was learning a lot of things that I hadn't really thought about or known
before and I really intend to finish at least the Kundalini book after this interview is
done.
Okay, so Mary combines her extensive education with her personal meditative practices and
direct revelation of the spirit world.
She's been serving her community as a spiritual healer and teacher since 2004.
And the titles of her books more or less give you an idea of her spiritual interests, but
she is also trained as a number of things, a body worker, Chinese medicine practitioner,
cranial sacral therapist, energy work, shamanic worker.
And Mary says that much of her work is as a representative of the dark feminine, shadow
work, spiritual awakening through the body, emotions, etc.
So I think we have a lot to cover and I encourage the live audience to send in questions.
And I think maybe we'll start, Mary, by just having you give us a little biographical sketch,
you know, how you got into all this.
I listened to it in one of your books and it was an interesting story.
So, you know, in as much detail as you wish to share.
Sure.
You know, I grew up interested in mythology and spirituality and had certainly some spiritual
experiences growing up.
Those accelerated as a teenager, strange dreams, that sort of thing.
I've always been a creative person, and so a lot of my spiritual energy at an early age
was put towards things like writing and painting and creativity and that sort of thing. After
I graduated from college I had what's known as a Kundalini awakening and this rapidly shifted
my path. I went through about a decade long period of education. You listed out a lot of
my educational path, you know, so I went through an immense amount of education, meditative
practices and pretty much for that decade was pretty, I would say, overtaken by the
sort of energies unfolding within me. Eventually what happened was that I started a practice,
first in energy work and craniosacral therapy and then eventually as an acupuncturist.
And as I started seeing people, I started going more in depth into wanting to kind of
understand what this was all about, particularly Kundalini awakening, but just kind of spiritual
awakening in general.
And also I've always been a very sensitive person, and so a lot of the things in my life
I've kind of felt like I've had to do sort of backwards.
For example, one of my most popular books is called "Managing Psychic Abilities," and
that's because growing up I could always find books that were for people that wanted to
become psychic.
There weren't any books or materials out there, at least at the time, for people who were kind
of drowning in their sensitivities. And through kind of my Kundalini awakening, at first I
kind of found, you know, some of the more surface level stuff, and then I found Gopi
Krishna's, you know, sort of stuff, which was an experience, you know, the intensity
of it was similar to mine, but in other ways, culture, time, all that sort of stuff were
a bit different. And so a lot of my work has really been to create these sort of maps of
spiritual awakening of consciousness and to really offer tools for people to not only
understand their experiences, especially in the modern world, but to know what to do about
them. So that's really been the largest focus of my path. And so since that point I've just been
continually evolving, continually unfolding, moved a couple of times, and now I'm in a place where
I'm a spiritual practitioner. I offer spiritual healing services. I'm a spiritual teacher,
And I have books out there for people that are looking for all of the skills and understandings
that I offer.
Good.
Did your kundalini waking take you by surprise or had you been doing some kind of spiritual
practice which precipitated it?
It took me by surprise.
It sounds so odd to say it now, but for the first about seven years that I was experiencing
a Kundalini awakening, I was in denial about it, even though I was doing odd things like
spontaneous yoga postures and having a lot of intensive spiritual experiences.
I did find a group online at that point that was early on that was helpful for me, kind
the early days of the internet, but I had been interested in spirituality as a kid and as
a teenager, but as a teenager, you know, you're not really, at least I wasn't like totally
invested in the practices, you know. I would be interested in chakra meditations and Zen
Buddhism and, you know, shamanism a bit, but nothing was really, you know, kind of
an intensive practice for me at that point. It really took the Kundalini awakening for me to
get to a point spiritually where there was such intense energy flowing through me that I felt
really directed and guided to go in specific directions in my life. So I say my short answer
is that I say that it is very spontaneous because the undeniable symptoms that happened were very
spontaneous but I can now see and look back and see kind of many emergences of it from childhood.
In addition to spontaneous yoga postures and energy flowing through your body and stuff,
what were some of the other symptoms? A lot of trauma and emotions coming up.
That was one of the biggest things that happened was that as a result of Kundalini awakenings,
what happens is that it is the best description I've ever heard of it is the forced flow of
consciousness and so you do feel this intense energy flow going through your body and what
is that doing that is releasing that is unfolding that is trying to move everything out of the way
that isn't pure consciousness and so for me you know I hadn't done much personal work at that
point, you know, I had a vague sort of understanding, interest in psychology and philosophy and that
sort of stuff, but it was all very mental. It wasn't embodied at all, and so to suddenly have
all of these emotions and traumas coming up through my body, to have increasing dreams and visions and
experiences of things like past lives, that was all such an intense opening for me because it took me
way beyond the consciousness or the perspective that I had on reality prior.
Did you remember some particular past lives that you could care to recount that might have
been logical precursors to having a Kundalini awakening in this one?
You know, most of the past lives that I've had have been, you know, somewhat mundane,
And that's what I find with a lot of people.
But I have experienced a tremendous amount of healing from them.
I had a past life in which I remember being killed as a soldier and I didn't know the
word "bayonet" at that point, but I heard the word "bayonet" and looked it up and was
very surprised.
I had a lot of past lives that had to do with starvation and stuff like that, which drastically
impacted my views on food and that sort of stuff.
But I've also had past lives in which I have been,
you know, herbalist, kind of, you know, witchy sort,
healer sort, those sorts of things. But you tend to have stuff come up in
your system during a spiritual awakening.
In terms of past lives, that didn't end so
well. So some of those past lives in which I have done spiritual practices, for the most part, went
pretty well. I had a past life as a poet that really didn't go very well. I had a past life
in which I started intensively reading Saint John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul,
that sort of stuff. I was very interested in Christian mysticism, basically somebody who is
imprisoned for his spiritual beliefs, and so I don't, you know, I don't call myself, you know,
Saint John of the Cross or anything like that, but there was a reason I was drawn to his work
during that time and Thomas Merton's work at that time, because I was sort of processing a past life
in which I very much was attempting to share my spiritual thoughts, my spiritual ideas,
and they were not met well by the culture. Yeah, that's been the fate of many people.
There was an Italian monk, Giordano Bruno, I believe his name was, and he was burned at the
stake for suggesting that the stars might be other suns like our own, and they might even
have planets around them. Terrible thing to think, right? Yeah, I love his story, yes.
Very interesting. You certainly remember a lot of them. I hope you weren't burned at the stake for
being an herbalist during the Inquisition or something. I wasn't. Some of those lifetimes
were actually pretty mundane. So, it would have been, you know, sometimes at a certain point in
in my life I was looking for more excitement, but you know, now I'm just like, okay, I was
an herbalist and that's part of the reason why I was drawn to herbal medicine this lifetime.
For some reason yesterday I was just contemplating what a meat grinder planet earth can be, you
know, how difficult so many people's lives are. You know, if you're kind of feeling,
you know, enjoying your life and all, it's a little bit out of your sphere of influence
our awareness, but when you realize what's happening in South Sudan or Gaza or, you know,
Haiti or many of these other places, people, the earth isn't an easy place to incarnate
on for many people.
It is not, you know, with awareness definitely comes awareness of suffering and, you know,
I know you've talked about things like spiritual bypass and stuff on your show, but it is very
easy to use spirituality to, you know, put ourselves in a bubble and ignore things instead
of really seeing things clearly. And so, if we do expand our awareness, what happens is
that, yeah, the world is a heartbreaking place. It isn't a fair place, you know? It isn't
a place where a lot of us are allowed to thrive, and that's really unfortunate.
Yeah, well hopefully that'll change in the coming decades.
One can always hope and do what one can to bring that about.
Did you study Joan Harrigan's work at all when you were studying Kundalini?
I did not, no.
There were definitely certain people who resonated with me more than others, and I would say that
the um book that the books that really resonated with me were um Irena Tweedie's which is a Sufi
daughter of fire yeah daughter of fire and through that I found Lillian uh Silburn's work on Kundalini
um and her guru who was um Swami Lakshmanju. Oh sure. Which is which was his it can contain
take a little bit to find his work, but it is well worth it for anybody experiencing a
Kundalini awakening because he really talks about embodied spiritual awakening and spiritual
awakening through the chakra system, which is resonated very deeply with me because it
paralleled my own experiences.
Yeah.
Well, as I said, I've only read about a third of your Kundalini book so far, but I found
that the understanding you're presenting is very nuanced and detailed and, you know, I
was learning things that I had never really heard before.
And you know, in comparison to which, I think a lot of people have a somewhat simplistic
view of Kundalini, and they mistake certain things for a Kundalini awakening that may
not be.
You cover that in your book.
And I found that your analysis of the different chakras and the fact that the Kundalini sort
of rises through different chakras in addition to having to work through various sheaths
around each chakra was interesting, because, you know, the Kundalini could rise to a fairly
high level, and yet some of the lower chakras might be still encrusted with these sheaths.
And that can be a rather precarious situation to be in, because you can be endowed with
certain insights and capabilities and so on, but there's a lot of stuff that hasn't been
worked out, which can end up getting you in trouble in terms of your behavior and so on.
Maybe you could take it from there and elaborate on some of that.
Sure.
So, for the first part of things, I will say that the way that Kundalini Awakening sort
of came into the Western world, we kind of use it as a term to mean any type of spiritual
awakening.
And really, there are a lot of different kinds of spiritual awakening.
Kundalini awakening is one of them.
And so, I cover all those different types of awakenings in my book, The Spiritual Awakening
Guide.
If, before you go on, so can one have, I mean, does Kundalini awakening, even though it might
be defined differently in different cultures, ultimately have to be part of any really complete
mature awakening? I mean, that mechanism must be there, even if societies use different terminology
and so on.
Yeah, I do think that it does. I'll use kind of the tired analogy of the mountain. At a
certain point up that mountain, a Kundalini awakening happens. But for some people, they
they have put in prior work, they have, you know, gone through other types of spiritual
awakening, they've gone through, you know, psychotherapy, yoga, like all of that sort
of stuff to prepare their system and to get their consciousness to a point where kundalini
awakening is still a big deal, but it isn't sort of a, you know, a life destroyer or like
sort of a cataclysmic event that it tends to be for people who awaken spontaneously. And,
you know, for example, I work with a lot of people who are prior atheistic or they're,
you know, doctors, scientists, and they come to me and they're having all these spiritual
experiences, and it is incredibly hard for them because there is a lot of resistance there
to having a spiritual experience, to going through something spiritual in the modern world, because
it would mean deconstructing significant parts of their identity and how they see reality in order
to accept spirit and in order to accept that they're having a spiritual awakening. So I do
think that people at a certain point, you know, no matter what path up the mountain that they are,
are, you know, kind of venturing forward have a kundalini awakening. The people who tend to have
more difficult kundalini awakenings experiences are because either they didn't go through--
there's kind of a pre-kundalini awakening period in which the more surface energies of the body
awaken and open. So kind of the like the acupuncture channels and the legs the and
arms and just kind of throughout the body those channels opening beforehand
is really helpful as is getting to like kind of a psychologically good point
with things because the people that have a Kundalini awakening that
where they start from a point where it is spontaneous, where it is unexpected, where they don't have a support system
or the ability to reach out for support because of where they may be in terms of their
their consciousness. They tend to be the individuals that have the most difficulties with Kundalini
awakening. Kundalini awakening, just to offer a basic definition, is a force flow of consciousness
and the classical understanding of it is that it is a curl of energy, of potential energy,
that is located within our sacrum. And so what happens is that when this curl awakens and opens
it goes up the midline. A lot of people use snake analogy, it's the same thing but originally it's
thought of as curl goes through the midline, goes through the chakra system, and the point is that
snake or curl, fully unfolding, fully straightening until you get to the crown and a bit above the
crown to fully open up and have the midline and all of the shockers in our system be flowing.
Would you say that it's a fair assessment, a fair statement to say that it's probably better to
prioritize just purifying and strengthening your system than to make some big effort to
get Kundalini to rise.
Because you're not going to want it to rise if your system hasn't been properly prepared.
It's only going to mess things up for you.
Yeah, you know, the problem in talking about any of that sort of stuff is that somebody
can go to 500 yoga classes or be a yoga teacher and never have their kundalini awaken, and
somebody can go to one yoga class and have their kundalini awaken. And so there's a bit
of, you know, what's going on in terms of larger forces like fate and destiny and, you
know, all of that sort of stuff that are kind of--
Past lives, huh?
of our control in a certain regard for things, but ideally if somebody, you know, is experiencing
any type of spiritual awakening, any type of, including Kundalini awakening, the thought
for me is always one of energetic balance, of embodiment, and of, you know, seeing how
functional they are in this world. Because if you kind of take care of all of those things,
the rest will kind of sort itself out.
Yeah. I mean, I've been involved in this stuff since the 60s and I've seen many examples
of people who literally became psychotic or, you know, got into, you know, were, you know,
hospitalized and went through all kinds of crazy stuff because they were doing intense
spiritual practice and it got to be more than they can handle. There wasn't the proper balance of
integration and stabilization with, you know, the fire they were stoking.
Yeah. Yeah.
Katie: Yeah, we live in a very catharsis-based culture. And so, what tends to happen to people,
even if they're having intensive spiritual experiences, is that they do more and they
do more and they do more and that tends to just deplete the system because there needs to be
time to to integrate things. There needs to be time for the, you know, for everything that's been
flowing out of the system to come to a new state of homeostasis in the body. And so there are people
that very much can go into almost an addictive sort of mentality when chasing catharsis,
when they want their kundalini to rise even more, when they want to do, you know,
more intensive meditation, more intensive spirituality, and that is a good way to get,
you know, I see the results of that weekly, you know, and the result of that are people who are
very depleted for one thing. That's a major factor. Yeah.
Pete: Well, I'm glad I'm aware of you now because we often do get contacted by people who
have, feel they've had a Kundalini awakening and they can't function. They're living in their
parents' basement, you know, they can't hold down a job. They're having all kinds of physiological
symptoms and, you know, it's not always obvious who I should refer them to. So, you'll definitely
be one of our refer, referees or whatever you would call it.
Yeah.
Well, thank you.
And people, you know, my book, Working with Kundalini is definitely a resource that I
would point people to to get kind of familiar with me as especially if they are having a
Kundalini awakening because I always try to provide, you know, essentially maps of spiritual
experiences, but also really practical tools and suggestions as well. And so in particular for
the book on Kundalini awakening, I include things like self-inquiry questions,
as well as at the end I talk about all different types of body work and practices and dietary stuff
that people can can look at and see what resonates with them, what feels right for them in their
their own awakening. Yeah, and there might be things you would proscribe, which is the opposite
of prescribe. In other words, like I remember this guy who who was trying to awaken his Kundalini,
he was doing like a half hour of fast pranayama at a time and and things like that and you know,
kind of flip them out. So you just have to, this stuff is powerful. I'm putting this out,
I'm dwelling on this because I want this to be cautionary note for people to be careful.
Safety first is a good motto to adopt on the spiritual path.
Yeah, safety first is always something that I suggest, you know, to people, especially because
I see the opposite end of things. You know, I see people who have gone through, you know,
30-day meditation retreats who've, you know, gone to, you know, ayahuasca ceremony after
ayahuasca ceremony and they've had some profound experiences but they're also
maybe dissociated from reality or, you know, just kind of not grounded. Maybe they just haven't
integrated their experiences in a wide range of energetic, spiritual, as well as emotional
imbalances can result from that, that can take a bit to recover from.
Pete Yeah. And so, not to put words in your mouth,
but I think you would agree with me that a spiritually mature state should be a very well
integrated one, you know, one in which you're able to maintain worldly responsibilities if you have
them. It wouldn't necessitate retreating to a monastery because you can't function in the world.
Maybe that's your natural thing to be in a monastery, but for most people it isn't.
And, you know, so you should be able to hold down a job or do whatever life requires of you,
and yet enjoy an awakened state of consciousness.
And if that does not describe a person's experience,
if they've been incapacitated by spiritual practice or spiritual awakening,
then some remedial work is needed, I think, to integrate and stabilize.
Yeah, I mean, those are definitely words that would come out of my mouth.
And so, what I would say is that, you know, yes, there are some people that are called to go into a monastery or be a hermit and, you know, all of that sort of stuff.
But for those of us living in the world, there is an opportunity to have an embodied awakening
in which our awakening makes us more essentially spiritually adult, more functional, more emotionally
stable, more emotionally resilient, more open and accepting of others.
Ultimately, I find that spiritual awakening leads to states of connection and states of
union, which obviously I'm not the first person to say such things, but I'm saying this because
one of the opportunities that we have when we are living in the world is to essentially
do shadow work, and one of the biggest things is to get ourselves to a point where we can
experience oneness with other human beings. And what essentially that looks like and that feels
like is that each person that you meet seeing a part of yourself reflected in that person.
So instead of finding separation, animosity, anger, you know, battles, whatever is going on,
we have an opportunity when we're living in the world to utilize the people that we meet as our
teachers as a way of seeing what we have left to work on within ourselves to become more conscious.
Pete: Interesting. So, by that, are you implying that, let's say there's somebody who is
notoriously evil, you know, some serial killer or something, that you can actually,
as a spiritual exercise, see something of yourself in that person and learn something
As a result without condoning
serial killing
Yeah, of course, you know, obviously you're not going to get to a state of well, hopefully like yay serial killers
um
but you know, we're talking about like
Deep shadow work here. Is that yeah, all of us have parts of ourselves that we might define as narcissistic as
sociopathic as psychopathic
um you know getting to some some really deep stuff i i once watched a documentary with a woman who
interviewed serial killers for for a living um and her takeaway is that all of us have the capacity
to kill it's just that some of us do um and so if we're going to that deep place within ourselves
which takes a lot of work and a lot of awareness. A lot of people wish to remain in the light and not
sort of integrate or kind of go into the dark aspects of themselves, but we all have these
really dark aspects of ourselves and what happens when we integrate them is a paradox is that we
find our light if we are willing to accept even the darkest aspects of ourselves, the parts of
ourselves that still cling to hate, to ignorance, to all of that sort of stuff. And I get it's so
hard to look at that sort of stuff, but if we're willing to look at that sort of stuff,
we really can do tremendous healing work within ourselves, and it really does awaken us in a
grounded, embodied way that is, you know, really, really lovely.
I remember somebody wrote a book called "The Dark Side of the Lightworkers".
I forget who that was, but I remember the book. I think I might have read it.
Yeah, so there's a couple of themes going on here, which I think are
they overlap or they're related. Now, we've been
talking about Kundalini and now we're getting into the shadow work stuff a little bit.
A lot of times, people whom you
would consider to be, you know, capable of glowing in the dark,
you know, really like famous spiritual gurus, for instance, who just seem so bright and charismatic
and they radiate Shakti if you're in their presence, you just feel this wave of influence,
you know, radiating.
Then it turns out, you know, oh, well, they were sleeping with their students or, you
know, ripping people off financially or trying to, you know, order a, you know, a hit on
their competing guru or, you know, things like that. And a lot of people have been confused
and disillusioned by this kind of phenomenon, which sometimes almost seems like the norm
rather than the exception. And I can kind of, in my own simple understanding, I can relate
this to both of the things we've been talking about, which is that they might have what
Joan Harrigan calls a "deflected rising," where Kundalini has risen to a significant
degree, but a lot of stuff hasn't been purified and yet one is unaware of that.
And again, in terms of shadow, they're all kind of, you know, full of their spiritual
experience and projecting that onto others, and again, unaware of stuff that ends up tripping
them up, ends up causing them to misbehave.
So maybe you can play off what I just said and provide some insights because as I said,
this does confuse and disillusion a lot of people when this keeps happening over and over
again.
Yeah, there are a couple of ways that I can reply to that.
And the first is, well, I'll tell a story.
Okay, stories are always fun.
Yeah, when I was in my 20s, I really loved martial arts movies.
So I am going somewhere with this.
Bruce Lee and so on.
Yeah, Bruce Lee and all that sort of stuff.
And what you'd see in those movies would always be, not always, but a lot of the times, would
be these huge, like muscle-bound guys that everybody would be looking at, they would
be drawing everybody's attention, nunchucks, like making this big spectacle of themselves.
And then you'd see this one small, ordinary dude in the corner, and when everybody looked
away he just decked absolutely everybody in sight.
And so this is kind of a trope in martial arts movies.
And so my first thought very much has to do with shadow work and the idea of projection.
Until we can find our own light, our own inner guru, what we tend to project onto others
not just our bad stuff, it's also our shadows of light. So we tend to project our wounds,
our desires onto other people. And one of our most notorious projections is our projection of
our own inner guru onto another person. And the type of people that we tend to project onto
are an idealized guru. So somebody who is going to be shiny, somebody who is going to be
grandiose, perhaps even, you know, narcissistic or even personality disordered, and somebody who is
playing a role of demigod, essentially. And so what happens to people is that they will go after,
you know, that person again and again and be disappointed and disillusioned because
that person ends up being human, they end up not being a god, you know. And from the other aspect
of things is that when somebody is willing to take on that power from people, take on that type of
light from people in the guru role, what happens is that all of their darkness that is not being
tended to is still acting out in the background, and at some point it's going to whack them
over the head with it. And so that's essentially what happens is that people attempt to have this
sort of split in their personality where they're trying to deny their humanity, where they're
trying to deny their darkness, and that never works. When we deny our darkness, our emotionality,
all of the sort of humanness of ourselves, it's going to come out at some point.
And if we have all of this light coming and all this power that we're accepting from others,
it's going to do so in some pretty unfortunate ways.
So that's kind of my big statement on things is that what I look for in spiritual teachers,
you know, would be things like somebody who is that, you know, Bruce Lee standing in the corner,
who even when he was offered to fight, and plenty of people offered to fight him because he was
Bruce Lee, he would just say no, you know, they no longer need to prove themselves. They're human,
they can be ordinary, they no longer need to be a demigod. That happens as an end result of
spiritual awakening. Before that, it just tends to be a lot of ego games and a lot of wounds sort of
passed back and forth between people. So I always tell people that if they're looking for something,
you know, looking for a spiritual teacher, to look for humanity, to look for humility,
and most of all to look for stillness. And that is a lot of times not what people are looking for.
Jordan: Nice. Mariana Kaplan, who's been on BatGap a couple times and is a friend,
wrote a book called Halfway Up the Mountain, The Error of Premature Claims to Awakening,
which might also be called premature immaculation. And, uh…
Dinah: I like that.
Jordan: Yeah. And there's some interesting things, I can throw a few questions at you. One is there's
a syndrome, and I've heard you mention this in your book that I was just reading, there's
a syndrome in which there's a tendency at every stage of the game it seems for a person to
either feel that they're finished or feel that they're more enlightened than they actually
are.
Yeah.
And personally, I think it's a nice safety feature to assume that you're less enlightened
than you might be, just to kind of like, you know, consider yourself a beginner.
It's a lot safer.
But anyway, comment on that one and I have some other questions.
Yeah, so I will say that one of the things that I have discovered the more conscious
that I've become, it's sort of like, the smarter that you are, the more you realize
the limits of your intelligence.
the more conscious you become, the more you become aware of the limits of that consciousness.
Pete Which is true in ordinary knowledge, too.
I mean, if you're a physicist, the more you learn, the more you realize how little you
know.
Sarah Yeah, yeah.
And so, you know, and in terms of consciousness, like, you know, you get to a point where it's
like infinity is a large place, you know, maybe I know a corner of it, but, you know,
even, you know, I'm not going to know the whole thing.
So interesting. Yeah, I've been studying the issue of panishad with Swami Sarva Piyananda. We just did some verses recently in which
The
The teacher asked the student. Do you know Brahman and
And he says yes
I know Brahman and they go into this whole thing where he says if you if you think you know Brahman you don't know Brahman
If you do know Brahman, then you you you say you don't know Brahman and it's basically what you're saying here, which is that
If you know it, you also realize that there's no end to the extent to which it can be known.
Yeah, there definitely, you know, at the start of spiritual awakening, people tend to have a very human-centric view of spiritual reality.
and I find the more that you expand the more you recognize yourself
as just a very small part of a dynamic whole. And so
where I am in terms of today is, you know, going into greater and greater
recognition of that, is of, you know, just the best I can,
like allowing forces to move through me rather than feeling like I am the
center of things, so to speak. So that's kind of the the best way that I can describe it is that
we have such-- it's one of our root spiritual issues that we so desire control and so
to getting to that point, one of my favorite quotes is by Ramana Maharshi, like I'm probably
going to butcher it now, but let what comes come, let what goes go, see what remains. And it really
is one of those things that has very much led me on my path because it has pointed to
this needing to let go of control again and again, this needing to be, you know, anything more than,
you know, kind of the drop in the ocean sort of mentality. So, where I think a lot of people do
get caught up is in these sort of illusions of control. But going back to your prior sort of
question about ego and, you know, ego awakenings and the premature immaculate-- I forgot the term
you used. Pete: Premature immaculation.
>> Immaculation, great term, I'm going to have to write that down. Yeah, I do find that a couple
things happen is that sometimes people will have a spiritual, transcendental experience,
and because they've had that momentary experience and it's so different from their ordinary reality,
they kind of figure, "Oh, I'm enlightened, I'm done." And so, I meet people who, you know,
have had these experiences and then with a bit more experience of life they might be like oh yeah that
was just a temporary blip um now let me do the work to kind of get back to that state as like a
permanently abiding state rather than something that just happened to me for you know 30 seconds
or five minutes but um if we were also to talk about the nature of the ego i talk about in my
Shadow Work book and some of my other videos and talks and stuff like that about a loop,
which is a tendency, a repeating pattern that humans go through personally and collectively.
And one of the most significant ones I talk about is called the superiority-inferiority loop.
And basically what that means is that our ego continually tries to assert itself by being
superior to others by being inferior to others and it's wounding. And so if we are able to
do enough personal healing to move beyond that superiority-inferiority sort of game,
we will find ourselves in a place where we have a lot more time on our hands, first of all,
but also being able to go into a place of real compassion and heart-centeredness
because we're no longer attempting to be in competition with others or to try to get the
world to reflect back to us how great, wonderful, special we are. From my perspective now, a lot of
of that is really based in childhood wounding patterns. And if we're able to heal those,
we can recognize that we can just be as we are. We don't need to be even spiritual. We
can just be, again, an ordinary human being. We can be messy. We can be imperfect. We can,
you know, we don't have to do anything or prove ourselves to anybody anymore.
We're watching a Dylan documentary and that brings to mind a line from a Dylan song, "If
you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose, you're invisible now, you got no secrets
to conceal."
Yeah, exactly.
So I'll let Dylan speak that into truth.
that is very true is that that is one of the largest things I find that if people are really
willing to look at that and work at that, that they will, you know, whatever they're
looking for, personal healing, awakening, greater consciousness, that they will find
if they're willing to look straight at that tendency, that loop, and how it plays itself
out in their lives.
Regarding being done, a friend of mine used to say, "How do you know you're done? Did somebody stick a fork in you?"
Well, it's interesting because...
So, I will say that in many ways I feel like I am done with my Kundalini awakening.
But, I say that in knowing that when you get to a certain, like, I don't want to say, like, perspective,
is that things become very paradoxical.
Is that you can sort of be done with things and not done with them at the same time.
And so I kind of classify myself as being done with a Kundalini awakening after some 18, 19 years of it.
I really classified the end of it in 2019 because I'm no longer getting the symptoms of, you know,
kind of the large shifts in consciousness, the shaking, the moving of the body into different
positions, you know, my consciousness is pretty steady. It doesn't shift like it used to. I was
actually reflecting the other day that I can kind of miss a bit having these big
consciousness leaps or like these sudden realizations that sort of topple my
reality down because I don't experience them or don't, you know, probably after I
say that it'll happen after this interview but, you know, I don't really
desire to change my consciousness much anymore and it doesn't happen as much as
as it used to, I guess I'll say.
- Yeah, well, a couple of thoughts on what you just said.
One is that I presume you would agree
that end of Kundalini symptoms
does not mean the end of spiritual development
or personal development.
It's just, it's the end of Kundalini symptoms,
but there's more.
And regarding flashy experiences coming and going,
you're quoting Ramana, as Ramana used to say,
I'm sure many other teachers, you know, if it comes and goes, it's not, that's not it.
Or as the Gita says, the unreal has no being, the real never ceases to be.
So, realization isn't like a perpetual flashy experience or something.
- Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. And I definitely went through a long period of time,
you know, at the beginning we were talking about my educational path and really for 10 years I
devoted myself to doing all of these intensive programs and having these, you know, cathartic
experiences after cathartic experiences that are kind of like, you know, the equivalent of jumping
out of an airplane where you do that sudden sort of like, "Oh wow, like reality is totally different
than it was five minutes ago," sort of thing. And so I do relate to people who are still in that
that phase, but I'm also glad that I'm not.
Yeah, that might also be a hint for people who are using psychedelics.
Firstly, you wouldn't want to be in a perpetual psychedelic experience, but still, anyway,
these intermittent experiences you can have with psychedelics are not necessarily going to lead to a
permanent, abiding realization, that, you know, if you do it just, if you do it enough times,
finally, it's going to stick. Would you agree with that?
I would. I would say that psychedelics can offer such an important perspective shift where people
really can look at their experiences of reality from kind of a top-down sort of perspective.
so getting enough space from their experiences to truly reflect and that space is often
so needed in order to you know process and heal especially difficult emotions or really stuck
beliefs stuff like that. The difficulty then comes with the integration of things. So what is somebody
who goes off, I'll just pick on ayahuasca even though there are plenty of other things we could
talk about, if somebody goes off to Peru and does ayahuasca, are they going to come home and then
just have things sort of close up again, treat it sort of like a vacation experience? Are they going
to experience ego inflation, which is incredibly common, where they now, their ego doesn't integrate
because they now believe that because they've had this experience that they are now special,
superior, all of those things that their kind of wounds want them to be, you know, and they spend
the rest of their time talking about how great they are to other people. There's this quote,
I'm totally going to forget who said it, maybe somebody will remember, but that
"Ego inflation is a sign of poor integration."
I've always loved that quote, even though now I can't remember who said it.
The other thing is that somebody can go from those experiences...
In my first book, "The Spiritual Awakening Guide," I kind of liken it to an elevator.
If somebody's baseline consciousness is on the second or third floor,
and they go up to the roof or you know the 15th floor wherever they're going
well now what happens when they sort of come back down is that they need to
integrate all of that work they need to look at floors 2 to 15 to see what is in
the way of that them being on that 15th floor permanently and that's a lot to
to ask of somebody. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of responsibility. And so sometimes people
can get really lost in feeling all of these emotions and having all these perspective
shifts. But there are parts of them still at the second floor and parts of the 15th
and maybe a part of them at the roof, so to speak.
Yeah. I just looked up your quote. It looks like it was Carl Jung.
Oh, was it? Probably. I always mangle his quotes.
It's a, it lines with ideas from Carl Jung's work on individuation where he emphasized the importance of integrating different aspects of the psyche to achieve wholeness.
Ego inflation can occur when one aspect of the self dominates, leading to imbalance and a lack of integration.
Then it goes on.
That must be. I always have the difficulty of sometimes I'll get a quote in my head and then I mangle it and then it just permanently resides sort of mangled in my brain.
Yeah, no, but it's an interesting theme that we're talking about, which is that you can kind of leap
frog to the 15th floor or whatever analogy we want to use, and even kind of have an abiding
experience there, abiding state, where you seem to be in a, you know, pretty high being,
and you can carry on for years, but there's some stuff in the basement or in the lower floors
that hasn't been dealt with and it can eventually, yeah, it's gonna have to be dealt with or it could
cause some problems. Yeah, and if we were to go back to that disillusionment about gurus,
that's what so often happens. You know, I did a video series on the chakras and talking about
them as a pathway to awakening and each chakra is essentially a perspective on reality. But if we're
talking about awakening through the chakra system, a lot of people believe that they awaken everything
in the first chakra, then they move on to the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth,
the seventh, and that isn't what happens at all. In fact, you know, we kind of, you know, again,
leapfrog between them in order to go back. But really, ultimately, I find that people who are in
later, what I might call later stages of realization, they all of a sudden have this
very baseline for chakra stuff come up and they tend to be kind of confused about it because
they're like, "I worked through my childhood, you know, I feel like this sort of stuff, I've done
this sort of stuff, why is this stuff coming up? And the answer is that for the crown to fully open,
that at the same point, the root opens at the same time, and so there's a need to go back and look at
the gravel and the grit and the stuff that's still remaining in the root.
Is there something one can do to progress most efficiently and safely?
In other words, to process things in an ideal sequence, so one doesn't get too big for one's britches, you know, and thereby get in trouble?
And how would you know if you have or have not adequately processed something at a certain
stage in order to enable you to safely go on to subsequent stages?
Well, if somebody is going through any type of spiritual awakening, it actually in some
ways is kind of easy because what is coming up will continue to come up and sort of wave
its hand until it's dealt with.
real question is if we sort of put our heads in the sand and ignore it or are willing to look towards
it. And so what I suggest for people who are spiritual awakening is to look at whatever is
coming up and to process it, to work with it in an embodied way. There tends to be, there's such
a tendency in the West to have spirituality be from the head up. And there are so many wonderful ways
to process things mentally, to quiet the mind, all of that sort of stuff, and I'm in support of all
that sort of stuff. But until the body awakens, all of that sort of stuff is going to be in the head,
the mind only. And so really finding a method, of course I'm going to suggest my book The Body Deva
which is chatting with the body consciousness to heal, but there are so many different forms of
body work out there in which you know our bodies truly hold on to emotions, to beliefs, to traumas,
to past lives, ancestral healing, all of this sort of stuff is locked in our body, locked in our
tissues. And so I'm very much a proponent of body-based awakening and really the, like if we
were to talk about the the end of kundalini awakening, it would be light consciousness
going to every single cell of the body. And so, my short answer is to look towards emotions,
look towards themes that are coming up, because if you're willing to look at them,
they will present themselves and reaching out for support as you can from community,
from whatever feels right for you in order to heal them, to look at them.
Yeah, regarding support, I was going to ask, is this something when most people can easily
do on their own or would most people actually need some kind of therapist or support in
order to do this because it's too hard to sort of see your own blind spots without some
mirror to help you?
Yeah, so in certain regards, shadow work is that mirror, what we are irritated by or bothered
by another people is often a, you know, it's a disowned aspect of ourselves.
So there's that level of things.
But I always relate things in the following way.
If we have, for example, a small ball of anger within us, that is likely something that we
can heal and look at within ourselves.
The more that that ball grows, the more we need another person, another, you know, a
group, a community, in order to resolve that energy.
And so, one of the things that is happening in the modern world is that we are so subsumed
by so many untended-to emotions because they are so large, there are these really large
balls and because we are such, you know, separatist, you know, individuals in the modern world.
It's part of the reason why I do offer communal healing services like sessions and stuff like
that.
But I do think that people can do a fair amount of work themselves, but I find that a lot of
people that I work with at least have the mentality where they feel like they need to take care of
everything themselves because of conditioning of the modern world and often because of early
childhood trauma where they needed to be adult far before they should have been.
And so those are the exact people that should be reaching out for support. Yeah, my friend Miranda
McPherson, who's been on Bat Cap a couple times, says that she has, and who's been a spiritual
teacher for decades, says that she just routinely, you know, goes to therapy periodically and,
you know, goes to some retreat from some other teacher periodically just to kind of, you know,
have a check, a checkup like that, you know, from a third party.
Katie: I still do that, and I do suggest that people do that, you know. I have friends that
that I have check-in with, I have, you know, a therapist, you know, and sometimes people
are worried because they're like, "Oh, you know, I'm spiritual and I can't talk to the
therapist about spiritual things."
And that might be true, but there's, any sort of therapist is going to understand feeling
disconnected, feeling alienated, feeling sad, feeling, you know, angry, all of that sort
of stuff.
I do recommend that people reach out for support and resources like if they have the ability to I'm also well aware that some people are not in a place to be able to afford some of that sort of stuff as well so I'm mindful of that and you know, there is a tremendous amount of work that people can can do on their own.
And in that case.
A couple of thoughts have been in the back of my mind since about half an hour ago that
I want to bring out, and it relates to all this, but one is, do you feel that sometimes
it's kind of like almost a little dangerous in a way for one to become a spiritual teacher?
I mean, we need spiritual teachers, but it's almost like you end up, you know, with a bullseye
on your chest, which you wouldn't otherwise have. And, you know, you might be surrounded
by adoring supporters who tend to inflate your ego or you, there might be some kind of energy
thing going on that begins to compromise your own health, and, you know, things like that.
So, that's part one of my question about spiritual teachers.
Okay, um, yes. There is a difficulty and a blessing in being a spiritual teacher. The
blessing is very much people coming to me and getting to a point where they learn the
practices, they experience the healing that they need to, until they don't need me anymore.
maybe they only check in once a year, you know, something like that, send me a Christmas card or,
you know, Hanukkah, something or other, you know, that sort of thing. So that is beautiful to witness
is people's growth, people's resilience, people sort of taking back their power and their light
until they have the discernment and capacity to, first of all, be kind of a spiritual adult,
you know, to and to get to a point where they really can rely on their own inner divinity,
their own concept of self for a lot of things. So that is really a blessing to to witness.
I will say that I am different from a lot of spiritual teachers in that a lot of my focus
is on spiritual healing. And so a lot of my interest from an early age was, "Hey, I see
and sense so many of these things. Let me educate myself. Let me start to describe it in a way
in which I can relate it to other people." And so I'm very interested in kind of the mechanics
or mechanisms behind things. And so a lot of my teachings very much have to do about
referring skills and tools. So I will say that that kind of differentiates me a bit from
some spiritual teachers. But I will say that on kind of the glass half full perspective of things
is that yes, people are going to project all sorts of things onto you and some of them can
be lovely and some of them can be quite unfortunate and very rarely do they have anything to do with
you. And so the truth about, you know, spiritual seekers in general is that a fair amount of them
are incredibly lovely people, but there is definitely a contingent of people who are
struggling, who are unwell, who are have a fragility to them, and that navigating those waters with
that contingent of people can be quite tricky.
Pete: Okay, good. Second part of my question is, there have been some well-known examples,
and some not so well known, but nonetheless true, of spiritual teachers, famous ones,
who might have been proclaiming themselves as a life celibate, for instance, and yet having a
string of sexual affairs and even fathering children and things like that. And I just think,
I think to myself, you know, what do they think in their quiet moments? You know, and do they think,
what in the hell am I doing? You know, how can I be projecting this facade and protecting this facade
and yet carrying on like this in the background? How do they rationalize it? And I guess that's the
extent of the question. But it also creates, I think, a huge sort of tension, because their
whole kingdom could topple down at any moment if the thing is revealed, which must be rather
harrowing on the mentality. But I wonder if there's a sort of a deeper kind of corollary
in terms of what is going on with their spiritual development in terms of shadow stuff,
kundalini stuff, the kinds of things we've been discussing. Yeah, so I will say that at this
point I've read a lot of spiritual biographies, autobiographies, and that sort of stuff, and one
of the ones that most interested me, most resonated with me, was me of listening, Adi Das.
Very true to me. And so you're probably guessing where I'm going with this.
I know, but there's plenty of dirt there.
Yeah, and then, you know, you get to a point where he's like, "Okay, women, you need to sleep with me
to let go of, you know, your attachments." Yeah, including the married ones.
They couldn't in any other way sort of. Of course he wasn't being secretive about it. He was out in the open pretty much.
Well, yeah, yeah. He had all this stuff.
Part of that was a bit of the era, but part of it was definitely, you know, just his energy, his personality.
And so, I'm relating that because somebody can be conscious and they don't necessarily, aren't necessarily the best person, you know, that sort of thing.
But on a deeper level, if we are talking about energetics, if we are talking about spiritual awakening, where most people are is still struggling with their childhood patterns.
With their childhood conditioning, trauma, pain, you know, what they, who they learn to be, you know, all of that sort of stuff.
That is where I would say the vast majority of people are, which would be like kind of a first and second chakra sort of awareness or consciousness.
As you move past that state, it can be quite easy to go into a state essentially where you are looking down on other people because they still are in a state of essentially spiritual infancy or spiritual toddlerdom or something like that.
And so when we go into like further spiritual awakening states, a lot of them are not about healing something within yourself or even releasing conditioning.
They are sort of tests of power.
And so if you pass the test, so to speak, you gain more awareness, you gain more capacity within yourself.
If you fail the test, what is going to happen is that people will sense that separation from you, and they will start to project onto you.
So you'll start to take power from others instead of building it within yourself, essentially.
And so that is what I see kind of from a mechanism level from a lot of people who are intelligent people who do have something of, you know, some level of awareness is that, okay, maybe they've moved past, you know, some karma, maybe they've moved past their childhood stuff, but they certainly did not pass that initiation where they are building their own path.
building their own power, their own light from within, they are taking the power and light
from others. Pete: You think they can get addicted to doing that?
Sarah: Definitely. It is so much easier to take the light and power of other people
than build your own. But there is a stopping point with that because, you know, I have,
I'm sure you you've interacted with many many many more spiritual teachers and and people than I have but I certainly have interacted with
many over my past 20 years or so and what happens to people is that
They will have this
There a split essentially happens in them where they have this front that is
Light, you know that can be palpable can be noticeable by other people but inwardly they still feel empty
they still feel all that sort of stuff that hasn't been resolved. And so there does become this split
and in that split their shadows grow even more because you know they're not paying attention
to them. But really if you were to ask you know if they were happy within themselves,
if they're finding peace and stillness, if they were finding that divinity within themselves,
the answer really is no because what they're doing is just taking the light and power from
and divinity of other people who are not yet at the point of claiming that for themselves.
Yeah, this might be what you're saying, but I wonder if this applies to gurus whose
modus operandi is to give darshan, you know, sometimes in an assembly line fashion where
you know hundreds or thousands of people are getting darshan. I wonder, and the person's,
the guru seems to be indefatigable, they can go on for hours. I wonder if there's some kind of
taking of energy in a process which is more, seems more to be a giving of energy that sustains them.
There definitely can be and we also can go into the complicated thoughts of a field of energy being
created and all of those people coming together, telling myths and stories about the guru or the
teacher, you know, if we were to look at a really dark side of things like Keith Raniere, there's a
reason why he turned himself into a symbol, you know, called him--I'm going to forget what he
called himself, but he essentially, by turning himself into a symbol, he was able to sort of
elevate himself to kind of demigod status, you know, creating myths about himself, and so all of these
followers of his would within themselves like feed into these myths and create sort of an energy or
a field unto themselves. So it not only has to do with like the reciprocal energy but it also has to
do with the complicated nature of like being in the thrall of somebody and the complicated nature
of how fields of energy are really created and sort of sustained, and a lot of that can
be done through somebody's careful cultivation of their story of, you know, stuff that we
see all the time using basic, like, NLP techniques and, you know, stuff like that to get people
to sink in and sort of believe this story, so the person becomes more of a myth, more
of a legend than a human being.
Interesting.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does.
Keith Renneri, he was that NXIVM guy who's serving 120 years in jail now and he was having
women get branded and things like that.
Strange things.
The fascinating thing about this is, and you wonder, is are they oblivious to their own,
you know, delusion, to their own megalomania? It's like, do they realize, "Wow, I'm really
getting carried away with myself," or it's more like they just completely buy into their own story
and are blinded to the inappropriateness or danger of where they're going with it?
I think it is a bit of both. However, you know, we are talking about in some instances people
who psychologically would probably be evaluated as sociopathic or narcissistic having those
types of personality disorders in which self-reflection for them is going to be difficult if not impossible.
So they are definitely the types that tend to, unfortunately, gravitate towards being
gurus because that means that they can't have power over people.
And they're also the type of people that, unfortunately, a lot of us are sort of drawn
to because, you know, that gives off a certain amount of charisma.
Those sorts of traits tend to.
So for those people, it would require some self-reflection on their part, which ironically
they don't tend to have.
But for a lot of people, in my line of work, I've had people come to me who have become
very, very sick as spiritual teachers or spiritual healers, and they don't understand why.
And it is unfortunate because they are engaged on a spiritual level with taking power or
giving power in a way that is not kosher.
You know, it is a way that is not okay to do.
And the end result can be somebody getting incredibly out of balance and having to really
face themselves through that imbalance, and it typically doesn't come about emotionally.
It's typically only when it manifests physically that they're willing to tend to it and look
at it.
Yeah.
Wow.
I'm glad we're having this conversation.
It's cautionary, I think, for would-be teachers and also students looking for teachers.
And it's good to be discriminating.
And of course, a lot of people end up getting burned by spiritual teachers and in some cases
disillusioned with the whole scene, you know.
They just figure everybody's a fraud, and that's unfortunate.
But I think it's incumbent upon anybody who wants to tread the spiritual path to just be
wise as serpents, gentle as doves, as Jesus put it, you know.
You just have to be discerning and discriminating and don't throw the baby out with the bath
water and assume that everybody is corrupt.
But be careful.
And, and if you're a teacher, be even more careful.
There's my favorite quote from Pabba Sambhava, not that I know any other quotes from him
is, "Although my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma is as fine as a
grain of barley flour."
Yeah, I love that.
Yeah, that is so true.
I will say both things that yeah, it is interesting to talk about these things and there's a reason
why there are so many documentaries out these days because we kind of feed on that energy.
But there's also the throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I also have you know, cautions about like kind of the anti-guru movement.
There's a lot of unhealed stuff that can happen there as well.
And so I will say that there are a lot of wonderful spiritual teachers out there.
a lot of wonderful mentors out there for people. They just may not be kind of the loudest.
Good point. Good point. Yeah, you're not so loud. I hadn't heard of you very much at all. But
I'm glad to hear that you have a lively practice of interacting with people because I'm sure you're
having a good effect on people. And incidentally, along the lines of this whole conversation,
About seven years ago, a couple of friends and I, including Jack O'Keefe, whom you may be aware of,
started an organization called the Association for Spiritual Integrity because we had run into so much
of this stuff. And it's grown to nearly 800 members and over 50 member organizations,
and we've given presentations at Harvard Divinity School and the Parliament of World Religions, and
it's, you know, it's rolling along, it's doing well, people are well aware of the need for
something like that and the importance of integrity on the spiritual path.
Katie - Excellent. It's always, you know, this field can definitely be kind of a
no man's land, so to speak.
Pete - Yeah, kind of a minefield.
Katie - Yeah, exactly.
So, keep in mind that if there's some things in some of your other books which I haven't read that you want to talk about, steer me in that direction and we can talk about them.
But one thing that comes to mind right now is that in your Kundalini book, you were mentioning some of the things you went through as you were going through that, like rather serious digestive disturbances.
disturbances. For instance, I think you said you lived on nothing but rice and avocados
for six months or something. And this might be worth mentioning because other people might
be going through strange physiological symptoms like that and not getting satisfactory answers
from doctors. And not that we shouldn't go to the doctors and just assume it's Kundalini,
But it might be Kundalini and maybe it's good to know some of the potential complications
that one can go through health-wise while going through a Kundalini awakening.
Well, I will share that my awareness of energy is that we are a continuum and our physical
body is just simply the densest energy that we have.
So the best way that people can heal is to look at all levels and layers of themselves
physically, emotionally, spiritually.
So I will give that caveat before I start.
But yeah, I certainly had a tremendous amount of physical difficulties during my Kundalini
Awakening experience.
It's not like I didn't have emotional stuff come up, but I was, you know, had such a good
support system for that in place that it wasn't, you know, the physical symptoms were really
predominant for me because that was the sort of body or aspect of myself that was most
out of balance.
And so I did go through a period, and still occasionally go through periods, where I don't
eat very much or where my diet needs to shift and I'm definitely willing to listen to my body these
days instead of listening to the conditioning that tells me, you know, this is what I need to eat and
what I need to eat and, you know, that sort of stuff. So that conditioning is very much unraveled
in me. But when I was going through my Kundalini awakening, I had so much energy flowing through me
that too and was processing so much that to add something to my body for my body to process along
with all of the physical, emotional, energetic stuff that was going on would be way too much.
So I did go through periods where my body would just outright reject foods or wanted incredibly
bland diets or you know wouldn't want me to eat for periods of time and I will say just to be very
cautious that I did do like nutrition shakes and you know that sort of stuff during that period of
time, you know, that sort of thing because you know I definitely wasn't a breatharian or you know
anything like that. But you know I definitely went through periods where my body definitely
was clearing and purging much like you know people experience during ayahuasca ceremonies where I
I would be throwing up and you know all that sort of stuff. In one case, in 2008, I experienced
and you know, sorry for the description, but I experienced my body continually going through
the process of throwing up to the extent that I had a near-death experience and was hospitalized
and checked out against medical advice and that sort of stuff. But I had kind of a classic
near-death experience where I was, you know, passed out on the floor of the bathroom ER underneath the
hairdresser and, you know, underneath the hair dryer and looking down at myself and
at that time there was this commercial in the U.S. that was for some animal rescue that Sarah
McLaughlin, who's a very like soft lilting singer, would sing over and make you feel really sad for
all these puppies and I kind of had that experience, you know, looking down at myself, you know,
like how sad and like unfortunate and small I looked in that near-death experience. And,
you know, I could talk about it now, but, you know, it was an incredibly difficult experience
and a big part of that experience for me was on a spiritual level was moving past the fear
of death, which again is a deep shadow topic, but it was definitely something that I needed
to, or at the time my body and my spirit felt like it needed to experience to release that
fear from my system.
I know some questions have come in from listeners.
I'm waiting for Irene to come back in the room and she'll send me the questions.
So we'll be getting to those if anybody has sent in questions.
Okay.
So anything from your side that, you know, we should be talking about that I haven't
thought to ask you?
Yeah, there are a couple of things that I really like to reiterate because my viewpoint
can be a bit different than some of the others out there.
The first is that I believe that the endpoint of spiritual awakening is awakening of the
physical body, so the spiritual heart, essentially.
So I do believe that we go through this experience where we experience energy flow through and
up our crown and have the bindu chakra point here open, all that sort of stuff.
But then we can have an experience, descent of grace, opening up what is known as the
spiritual heart.
And so I find that in the modern world, people tend to be very focused on the crown opening
and going into states of emptiness when there are states kind of going further into that
where there can be emptiness and fullness simultaneously.
To my best description, or the description I like the most about spiritual awakening
and sort of the end result of it, is that it's the end of conflict.
And so my experience of things has been the spiritual heart opening and basically being
in this experience of deepening stillness and a place of where, could call it a cosmic womb,
cosmic pulsation, this sort of beat or rhythm of the universe. And I find that part of the reason
I'm sharing this is because a lot of people focus on the head and you know emptiness and that sort
of stuff. Part of it is because so much of my work and so much of my path has been about embodiment
and I find that really looking to the body and looking at the body and working with the body
is necessary. The only way, I don't want to say the only way, the way that I've found myself
releasing the physical body is going through the body.
And so I think that that is an important point because
there's a lot of things I see out there that are more focused on kind of
dissociation and calling that sort of enlightenment
sort of thing rather than a state of being
more human, more grounded, more simple, more in the body.
So if I were to give a, you know, kind of message or thought to everybody, it would be to
accept all of your emotions, feel all of your emotions, learn how to skillfully work with them
through the body, because that can get you to a point where you can feel basically anything and
allow it to flow through you instead of pretending it doesn't exist or pretending you're above it or
pretending you don't mean-- pretending you're not angry or you know
or aren't afraid or any of that sort of stuff. So
kind of my mini diatribe that sort of encapsulates my work,
but my work is very embodied and it's very much about accepting
even the darkest aspects of yourself because that is really what leads to
awareness and sort of you know a place of
love, a place of compassion for yourself and for others in the world.
You said "endpoint" that you reach the heart and it's the endpoint.
Do you really mean endpoint or is it like a nice way station but there is yet another horizon
or higher possibility after that? I believe that the spiritual, as of today,
that the spiritual heart and its opening is the endpoint. However, there's a question, again,
like we talked about, about dipping your toes in that endpoint versus being, you know, kind of at
the bottom of the ocean of that endpoint and completely being present there. And so that,
I assume, will take me the rest of my life is to continue to fall into this stillness and sort of
cosmic womb sort of state, that spiritual heart sort of state, but if there are states after it
that is wonderful, you know, but I have, you know, seen and experienced this state and it feels like,
it really feels like a return, you know, it really feels like I have worked a fair amount with death
and a bit with birth and they're these huge gateways for us. And so just as we when we were
born we were in the womb of our mothers and felt her heartbeat there is a return to that in a sort
of cosmic way. And so if there are states after that I look forward to discovering them but right
now I'm enjoying deepening this sort of stillness, deepening this sense of really being held
by this abiding energy that surrounds me.
Nice.
St. Teresa of Avila said that it appears that God himself is on the journey.
So I keep that in mind.
If God is on the journey, then everybody's on the journey.
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay, and okay, so that was one thing that you wanted to bring up that I hadn't asked you about. Was there another thing?
How about this, well, go ahead and if you want to take a moment to think of, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
Yeah, in terms of shadow work, Shadow Work for the Soul is my latest book. I have a total of nine books out there.
most of them are related to spiritual awakening or consciousness in some way.
Some of them are related to learning energetic skills and tools and that sort of stuff.
But my latest shadow work for the soul is really about embracing our darkness and seeing it as a form of beauty.
Without our darkness, we're half a person, we're half a being.
And so we have such a tendency to want to be in our light and want to be light.
And it's really by digging in our darkness that we can find that light.
One of my favorite symbols, this primordial symbol of existence, is the yin-yang symbol.
And so it's light on one half, dark on the other, but they have, you know,
there's a circle of darkness in the light part, a circle of darkness in the light part,
I might have transposed those a little bit, but...
Certainly, light and light in the dark part, but vice versa.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah, and so I really love that symbol because, you know, it really shows us,
first of all, the paradoxes of the spiritual path that need to be felt and experienced and known rather than, you know, mentally realized.
But it also has very much shown me that my path has been very much sitting with my darkness,
sitting and accepting all aspects of myself, dark and light.
It can be just as difficult for us to accept our light as it is our dark, but sitting with
all these aspects of ourselves and really accepting them creates a state of wholeness,
creates a state of, you know, integration that eventually leads to this paradox of experiencing
connection with everything, but also individuation at the same point, knowing who you are, being a
human being, having a life where you have friends and loved ones and all that sort of stuff,
just kind of removes the clutter, so to speak. Rita: Are you a mother by any chance?
I am not now. Okay, just curious whether you had kids and how all this related to raising kids.
My simple answer to that is that my kids are kind of my practice in a bit. But yeah, I focus so much
on my education and my spiritual path and that is my path for this lifetime. So okay. Yeah. So
regarding what you were just saying, I was kind of trying to relate it to my own experience as
you were saying it and I was just as an example, you know, I find myself reflecting on things
I have said or done, you know, in my life to people that were that I'm not happy about,
you know, or that were harmful or at all and, you know, kind of processing that dwelling
on it not not obsessively, but just sort of, you know, wondering if this kind of probing
into whether there's still some dregs of those tendencies within me that need attention.
So, is that a good example of what you were just saying?
It is, yeah.
When people are first going through kind of the first couple stages of spiritual awakening,
they tend to focus on their victimhood, and as well we should.
We've been harmed by the world, we've been harmed by people and betrayed by people, and
we should focus on that suffering, that experience, but we can get to a point where we can focus
on the times that we've been a perpetrator rather than a victim and looking at those
and reflecting on those, integrating those, processing those, and in some cases releasing
you know their energy in order to move forward. So that definitely is a big part of shadow work.
As a starting point for shadow work where most people start is the understanding of
the world is a mirror and like if we
are living in the world we have the advantage of being surrounded by people
and on an interpersonal level what happens to the parts of ourselves
that we're really blind to our biggest blind spots is that we
disown them and how we disown them is that we
project them onto other people and so by looking at what really
bothers us in another person, we can start to notice themes first of all. It's not going to be,
"Oh, this one person is annoying." It's going to be, "Oh, I've noticed 10 people who are annoying
in the same exact way." Well, that is a shadow part. And so somebody can do considerable healing
work there. And it's also, you know, we can talk a bit about collective shadows.
our own unhealed stuff, our own divisions within ourselves, the things about ourselves we're
ignorant of. We not only put on other people but we put into the collective.
And so this creates even, you know, at the largest biggest scale things like wars and stuff like that.
One of the easiest ways for people to start working with collective shadows is to
look at pop stars, celebrities, politicians, because those are people in their own right.
They're people who've had their own history, their own experiences of reality, but we also
tend to push our most extreme shadows, hatred, ignorance, fear, onto and also our shadows of
light or which that I mean our beauty, our ingenuity, our you know talent out onto you
know celebrities, politicians, social media personalities and that sort of stuff and so
if we are willing to look at how we respond to celebrity gossip or news or any of that sort of
stuff and you know kind of look at those triggers or experiences within ourselves. What happens
is that we can learn that we have a right to experience whatever emotions we experience,
but we can also use that reactivity to look at places within ourselves that are the most
sort of divided the most sort of ignorant within ourselves as well.
Pete Yeah. Well, this prompts me to ask you
if you have any insights as to, you know, the big picture, what's going on in the world and,
you know, where we're, what might be happening in collective consciousness and where this might lead
in the coming years and decades. And, you know, a lot of people in spiritual circles talk about some
kind of new age or enlightened age or, you know, some something or other coming along, but there
might be a period of darkness before we get to it, just as on an individual level, there could be a
lot of darkness and purging and difficulties you have to go through before you get to a better
place. You ever contemplate that sort of thing? I do. Yeah, you know, I grew up, you know, reading
stuff from the library and so in reading spiritual books over the decades you'll find that people
of that same age will always say like this is the most important era ever you know sort of thing so
it's either like every era is totally special or maybe you know it isn't so um kind of a dark joke
but I find that it's helpful to from a very wide perspective to look at reality as a bit of a
pendulum swinging. And so that means that in order to make progress, typically that pendulum
needs to swing back and there's a need to go into like sort of a regressive period before
it can kind of swing forward again sort of thing. Yeah. Pendulums never stop in the middle.
That's the problem with pendulums. It is, yeah, but there is a question of like if it is swinging
wildly, you know, or if it is sort of swinging a little bit, you know, sort of thing. Yeah, so
we're in more of kind of a wild, wild swing at the moment, so to speak. The other thing that I would
say is that we are in a period that I would call kind of the a period of the dark feminine, and
basically what that means is that we are in a period where our own inner darkness, our collective
darkness, our rage, our apathy, our passiveness, our ignorance, all of that is being sort of shoved
out of us. Our narcissism, all of it is being sort of shoved out of us. I always use ocean metaphors,
So all of that sort of stuff that's previously been lurking on the ocean floor has come to shore
and ideally things coming to such a light would allow for us to recognize them and heal them
and change them in some regard. So that is kind of my my positive thought, my positive swing on things.
but um what I would also say in like a glass
uh full half empty perspective is that we are
living in an age of increasing disconnection
disconnection from you know from spirit disconnection from
reality, disconnection from one another, in some ways from a spiritual capacity,
from a spiritual perspective, COVID was the ultimate like sort of physical demonstration
of that separation, disconnection sort of energy. And so going back to that idea of collective
healing, do we need others for healing? We are sort of drowning in our untended to emotions.
our hatred, our spite, our ignorance, our fear, all of that sort of stuff. And that is
definitely populating our world right now. So we definitely need people who are
willing to take responsibility for themselves, to do their own work
internally, as well as supporting others locally as they can in order to
shift things. So, again, being more positive, it is a wonderful time to do shadow work right now
because so many things are out there that we can be reactive to. Yeah, well, I could start to
pontificate on some of the things you just said, but I think I'll restrain myself and ask a couple
of questions that have come in. Maybe I'll pontificate after that. So, let's see, here we go.
This one is from someone who refers to themselves as "cat down the road" from Connecticut.
I grew up in Connecticut, cat down the road, and I had cats.
Question. Assuming one is ready for it, what is the best and fastest way to induce a Kundalini
awakening? I would always recommend a teacher.
But spinal breathing is one. Qi Gong, microcosmic-macrocosmic orbit is one. I would say to that
you really need to find a Qi Gong teacher to start basic practices before you do those.
Other than that, you know
Things like
flotation tanks ayahuasca ayahuasca is sort of like the plant version of kundalini
You know, in fact some ayahuasca roscoe ayahuasca ros call it mother kundalini
But
yeah, so I I get that question quite a bit and it's difficult for me because it's like do um
Would I tell anybody to go down that road? Not necessarily, but some people are certainly ready for it. I would
absolutely make sure that you have spiritual support systems in place, physical support systems,
that you are--one of the things that I see most often is that people are not basically grounded,
their root chakra isn't open, and so what happens then is that kundalini goes--doesn't go up the
the midline and you know, tends to go up one of the other tracks which can lead to mental
health and physical health issues.
So those are all my caveats, but yeah, you know, things like Qi Gong and spinal breathing
are typically the thing and Ayahuasca and rotation tanks if you can find one around
or sensory deprivation tanks are some of the fastest ways, I guess.
Well, we spoke about this earlier and you alluded to it just now that you don't necessarily
want to induce a kundalini awakening or if you do, it should be approached very cautiously
because as you just said, you can end up with mental or physical problems.
So I guess here's one way of questioning you is, you know, what qualifications would
you want to see in a person who wants to induce a Kundalini awakening? What would you consider to be
prerequisite developments in a person before they should even pursue such a thing?
Um, physical, emotional, spiritual health. So having a physical exercise routine in place,
ideally in nature, so hikes, walking, that sort of stuff. Yoga with a good teacher, you know, to
when we exercise we tend to not get energy flowing through the joints, so not get our joints going
into their range of motion, so energy tends to be stuck. So in order to open up the energy channels
of our bodies we really need to do things like yoga or tai chi or stuff like that that are more
active opening movements. Emotional health is a big one. Israel Rigardi, who is a well-known
occultist, he always joked that, you know, people coming to spiritual practices ideally would have
10 years of therapy behind them, you know, sort of thing. But some way to tend to emotions,
having basic emotional intelligence I go over that in my shadow book but knowing how to work with your your emotions
um
and having ways
spiritually to keep yourself
Grounded and focused on this world this reality rather than getting lost into
Illusion delusion sort of someplace outside the body. Yeah
Okay, so just to reiterate what you said essentially, if a person is having physical, emotional,
or mental problems, then inducing a kundalini awakening might not be the best strategy at
this point. You might want to deal with those things before trying to do that.
Yeah, it would exacerbate any imbalance that you have.
Right, okay. And I hate to sound so cautionary, but again, we get contacted by a lot of people
who are having problems and you know who can't leave the house or you know or just you know
can't hold down a job and so on so you know and I'm not in the position to help them but
we we usually refer them to somebody and uh so I just want to be cautious because I mean this
yeah it's kind of a cliche but the spiritual path is a a marathon not a sprint and you want to
Kind of proceed again safety first you want to proceed in a
in a cautious
Not not wimpy, but cautious
And you know and careful
Uh healthy way so that it it enhances your life as you go along not not um degrades it in any way
Yeah, I mean the best thing that I can relate to people because it is easy to insert so much fear in this discussion
and I will say that Kundalini Awakening has changed my life in so many ways.
You know, I look at reality, I look at myself so differently, and I'm grateful for all that
I've been able to heal and experience, and so I don't want that to get lost.
But I would also say that if it is your choice to have a gradual awakening where you learn
more skills, where you get to know yourself better, where you sort of are able to kind
of walk from shore into the ocean and gradually learn how to swim, that that is a path I would
recommend rather than to suddenly find yourself drowning in deep sea water and have to try
to figure out how to get your way to way back to shore.
Right. Okay, good. There's another question. This one is from Kenny Hogan in Johnstone,
Scotland. I wish I could do this with Kenny's accent, but Mary has articulated her Kundalini
awakening and her experiences of many past lives. Does she have any inkling as to how her advanced
state of consciousness will play out in future lives? You think you're going to have future
lives and if so what do you think? I really am hoping that this is my last lifetime.
Oh come on, we want you back.
I know that that sounds a bit arrogant or you know maybe just a bit like,
"Oh hey maybe she should go back to therapy" and you know, fair point. But um,
I can, one of the things that has happened to me is that you know people talk, I'm going to
to talk about this in kind of more of an abstract way rather because I haven't really had visions
of future lives. So I'm going to talk about it a little bit more conceptually which is
that people talk all the time about present moment consciousness and like I was just like
okay yeah you know that sort of thing like you know yoga term like my yoga teacher would
say it like that's cute you know namaste you know that sort of thing but one of the things
that ended up happening was that as I healed all of this past stuff that my timeline sort of
rolled up from the past to the present and also when I looked at all of my anxieties and fears
that like sort of the future rolled up into the present moment as well. And so while I'm talking
about this stuff I know that it's instructional and helpful for other people hopefully, but at
At the same point, I'm, you know,
very present in this moment and possibly what, you know,
I need to do tomorrow and not really thinking
about the rest anymore.
- Okay.
Yeah.
I know in my own case, I went through many years
of feeling like, oh God, I hope this is my last life.
And, you know, I just want to get out of here
and not come back.
And now my attitude is more like, whatever, you know, okay, God, you know, use me as you
will either I don't come back or I do come back.
It's not it's not really in my hands.
And I, I don't have a strong vested interest in it.
If whatever, you know, the divine will has in store, I'm on board with it.
I think that that's a wonderful way of looking at it.
know at one point that sentiment did come from kind of you know fatigue for me
definitely but now it's just you know I haven't experienced myself in the future
I've experienced myself on all different planes of experience had all sorts of
dreams that are like movies of me in different realities past lives
ancestral stuff all that sort of stuff and you know but no future so maybe I
I will maybe I'm just not open to it, but we'll see what happens
Okay, good. All right, so
Any other points before we begin to wrap up things that you're gonna think tomorrow? I should have said that
Well, it's not tomorrow so yeah, right
My you know tomorrow self in um, I
would again repeat, you know, just kind of the thought that
It is so rare for people to be willing to look at themselves and to work on themselves. And so
Yeah, in fact some
What you might call new invite that teachers just would keep emphasizing there is no self, you know
Don't bother looking at yourself because it's an illusion. It doesn't exist
You know don't do practices because it only reinforces the notion of a practice or they go on and on you're already enlightened
All you have to do is realize that and you're done
Yeah, and I have a different outlook on that. It was just like yeah, our natural state is one of enlightenment
But what has happened is that we've armored ourselves. We've closed ourselves down. We've
Experienced trauma we've experienced all this sort of stuff that has conditioning that has
closed off our bodies and our minds to that natural state and
so somebody who is willing to
Look at themselves and take responsibility for themselves to truly feel their emotions
That that is a valuable way
To get to that state of experiencing that baseline that that natural state of being
That I think a lot of people are looking for but might be looking for in the wrong place at times. Yeah, okay good
So you mentioned that you work with people and you have
Healing groups or whatever you called them and also give us an overview of how people can plug in to what you do
You know connect with you in various ways
Well, you can check out my website Mary shoot and calm on there. You can find the course
Second we got a dog situation here. Okay
There was a little wooden cat statue that was sitting on the air purifier in the hall and
The dog saw it and wasn't used to seeing it there. So he he freaked out all sudden
He thought there was a cat in the house
Well, luckily my cats have not interrupted their otherwise occupies
That is good, okay, so start again what you're saying about ways of engaging with you
Yeah, so Mary shoot and calm
Facebook Instagram, I also do videos on YouTube about varying topics
I have nine books out
Which I'll link to from your back cat page, I guess only if they're on Amazon I'll link to the Amazon
pages, yeah, so
They're all on Amazon
If you go to my website, you can find out information about...
I offer spiritual guidance groups, essentially people going through spiritual awakenings,
spiritual experiences, can join the group and share, ask me questions, whatever they want.
I also offer communal healings, where we... I pick a topic, like anger,
and we feel and heal into it communally.
As well as other courses, you can check out my page. I do offer healing services. I do
not offer individual guidance sessions. I will be very clear about that. My time is taken
up by healing.
When you say healing services, how does that work? Do you mean like over Zoom or you don't
even talk to the person but you're healing them remotely with Reiki or something like
that?
So, spiritual healing, a lot of it is based in what might be termed shamanic healing,
but it's either done via phone or over Zoom and people can check out my website to see
if that resonates with them. So, what kind of things do you take on? I mean, let's say a person
has breast cancer or something like that, would you actually work on them or what kind of healing
are you talking about? It depends on the person. I've certainly worked with people with cancer who
who want to make peace with their death or want to heal emotionally.
And so a lot of my healing work is based off of my book, The Body Deva, which is a form
of self-inquiry and going into the body to look at and resolve any conflicts, beliefs,
energies that are out of balance within the system.
And so I do work with a lot of people who are experiencing spiritual awakening, but the
focus is always what is creating an imbalance in your system.
And so all of my work, I mean you can find out more on my website or check out my book
The Body Deva to kind of get the scoop on that.
I also bring in what may be called, you know, shamanic elements. I bring in my energy, my presence, knowledge,
spirits and energies that I work with. All that's very good stuff into the sessions.
So you're not saying that you might heal somebody of cancer, but that you would help them to heal
the fear and you know... Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I do not claim to heal any of that sort of stuff.
I've been, you know, I am very cautious about that. You know, if somebody comes to
me and they want to do healing work and they say they have cancer for some, you
know, they say they have cancer for example, that's a great example. My focus
with them might be looking at the energetic dynamics behind it, but I'm
certainly not going to promise anybody that I heal or cure anything. Cancer, that
that is something within themselves and has to also do with larger forces at work as well.
So when you're dealing with somebody like that, interacting with somebody, do you base
your what you do on how what they say to you and the feelings you get as you're talking
to them? Or do you actually kind of psychically tune in to what's happening in their body?
Like I know some people who claim to be able to see the organs and somebody's body and
that kind of thing. What I would call it is a form of attuned empathy and so generally
I feel in my own body what they are feeling in theirs and so I draw attention to it but
I always make sure that people in their sessions have agency like I always ask people if stuff
resonates with them because people today feel so powerless that part of the work is the
them learning how to tap into their innate sense of self, their own sense of knowing
and feeling, rather than me being somebody who is telling them what their reality should
be or what their beliefs should be or, you know, what their healing should look like.
So it definitely is a very collaborative process.
Good. Well, that sounds good. Okay, so that gives everybody a good picture and, you know,
I think we've just scratched the surface. If a person really wanted to start reading
your books and all that, and as I mentioned, I want to continue doing, at least with your
Kundalini book, there's a lot more that you, what we can learn from you. But, you know,
I hope this has been a good introduction, both for you and for the listeners.
And I really enjoyed having this conversation with you.
Yeah, me too.
Thank you for having me on.
You're welcome.
And thanks to those who've been listening or watching.
And again, we have a new website.
Take a look at it and play around with it.
And let us know if you encounter any difficulties or find any mistakes or anything like that.
pages you can't reach or something. All right, thanks a lot.
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Thank you.