I was hiking on an island and looked out across the water to nearby land. Suddenly I saw that everything inside me was outside me, and everything outside was inside. There was no separation. The water, hills, trees, earth were in me—and my bones, blood, flesh, organs were in them. We were all one. Later, back in the group retreat, there was a sensation of everyone being boundaryless. These experiences created a deep sense of awe, full of spacious awareness.
Louise told me this story, one of thousands I have gathered from more than thirty years of counseling people who have had flashes of awakening. It is a moment when spirit leapt. I titled this book When Spirit Leaps to capture the essence of sudden awakening. I was inspired by an ancient Zen tradition described by Adyashanti, who spent fifteen years doing Zen practices. He said that, in earlier times, a monitor would wander meditation halls holding a narrow stick, watching for anyone on the verge of spiritual awakening. When someone was close, he whacked the meditator on a shoulder blade with the stick, near the side of the neck. This jolted the meditator’s energy upward through the head, and plunged him or her into satori—a sudden enlightenment. While this practice is no longer followed, spirit may still leap spontaneously in a meditative setting. It can even happen without any clear context during an activity as ordinary as a hike.
When spirit leaps, we can be jolted into an energized state, open to a sense of spaciousness, or feel free from our personal identity. We may find it blissful, radiant, joyful, or gently revelatory. This is grace. But this leap of the spirit can also feel challenging—particularly if there is no preparation, we have a traumatic event in our past, a history of addiction, or repressed memories of abuse. And if no one else understands the experience, the beauty and potential of an awakening may be discounted or suppressed.
An awakening is a major shift in consciousness that brings a radically different understanding of who we are. It is part of a spiritual journey to peace and wholeness, and often introduces an internal source of wisdom and alters the external expressions of our life. By pursuing this journey, we learn to feel at home in who we are, which—it turns out—is not who we thought we were. Awakening events along the way answer our longing for truth or God or oneness or realization. As the perception gained through awakening stabilizes, we no longer feel a need for spiritual searching.
Awakening occurs across cultures and is a universal human potential. Even though ample evidence for this exists, few spiritual teachers, meditation instructors, medical professionals, therapists, or yoga teachers know how to recognize the ways that awakening impacts us. Most are unable to offer support. When Spirit Leaps offers a useful paradigm for spiritual seekers and teachers alike, as it describes commonly experienced dynamics that happen as an awakening glimpse moves toward liberation. My goal is to help you understand these phenomena, feel supported as you encounter them, and gain tools that will help you trust the journey so you can allow yourself to relax as the process evolves.
I became interested in this work after my own awakening. I was fourteen when my mother suddenly died and my heart armored itself to protect me from love. My faith in God was shattered. As a young mother in the 1960s, I became involved in the encounter movement, which introduced me to my inner world. I realized how profoundly empty I felt and how this limited my life, so I began an eclectic search for meaning. During the next fifteen years, I began Jungian analysis, followed meditation practices in both yoga and Buddhist traditions, earned an MA in counseling psychology, then entered a doctoral program in transpersonal psychology that blended psychology, spiritual practice, and therapeutic bodywork.
One day, following a powerful breathwork session, energy poured through my body and brought an ecstasy I had never known before. It pulled me deeper and deeper into meditation practice. This awakening triggered a transformative process that was to impact every aspect of my personal and professional life. The energy has stayed vibrant and opened my life to many adventures. I wrote a dissertation on kundalini (as I’ll soon discuss, this is the energy of awakening in yoga traditions), traveled to India, cofounded an organization related to kundalini research, began working internationally, and met my teacher Adyashanti—who opened me to a deeper level of knowing who I am.
Since 1990, I have been consulting and counseling men and women who are awakening within nearly every tradition, and many who awaken outside of traditions. My own journey and the experiences shared by thousands of clients have given me an appreciation of the many paths to realization and of awakening as a natural process. By sharing stories about this transformative journey in this book, I hope to convey awakening as a birthright for all who long for it. While the stories are real, the names have been changed.
To help people live with transformative experiences, I offer support that is drawn from my own experiments, years of listening to others, and research into the history of awakening in several cultures. It is based on a blend of dualistic and non-dual traditions, as I have been deeply impacted by both perspectives. I’ve learned to value the human experience as well as the capacity of consciousness to evolve and transcend our limitations. Adyashanti describes this well: “Spiritually, the human condition is a natural part of the evolution of consciousness trying to become conscious through a form…When a person wakes up, consciousness is evolving through a human form, until it moves beyond separation, and this is liberation.”1
Among the many camps of spirituality, it is unusual for a non-dual teacher to appreciate kundalini, the yogic word for coiled energy in our spine that can be awakened on the spiritual journey. Often, non-dual teachers neither acknowledge nor address the many experiences that arise when this life-force energy is highly activated. Non-dual schools of thought often see human life as only an illusion, and are fond of saying that nothing exists, which extends to mind-body experiences. Students are encouraged to ignore phenomena.
On the other hand, those who believe kundalini is the mechanism that leads to enlightenment are often skeptical about the non-dual teaching that awakening can be sudden and without preparation. Their perspective is that the body is involved in transformation, which makes cultivation through practices essential.
I have a long history of standing in several camps simultaneously. Although I embrace knowing that nothing is happening from a non-dual perspective, I cannot avoid seeing the so-called dreamworld of life with all its challenge, suffering, joy, and possibility. I feel we know and live in two worlds: infinite consciousness and ordinary expressions of material life. To me, we are the wondrous expressions of form within a timeless, unlimited vastness. We appear in order to have our experiences. In this book, I bring these views together. The opening story is an example of this approach because Louise experienced sudden awakening during a hike, and it occurred within the cultivating environment of a group retreat.
Another bridge I make in this book extends over the assumption that Christianity and Judaism are exclusively dualistic traditions. When we read and explore God—beyond the perspective of a churchgoer with a vested interest in the otherness of God and Jesus—to know him as the mystics knew him, we see that there are direct moments of union. Jesus can be heard offering non-dual teachings when he said, “I and my Father are one,” “I am that I am,” and “the kingdom of God is within you.” The kabbalah is filled with images of union. This is why I include notions of the divine, mention God, and include mystical Judeo-Christian views in this book.
I hope you will find elements of your own story in these pages, which are meant to be absorbed on three levels: for your mind to understand and relax, for your spirit to resonate and trust what is happening to you, and for your own authentic activity in life to be inspired.
When Spirit Leaps describes the experiences of the awakening process that lead to liberation. It helps you recognize the many ways awakening is initiated and progresses in your life, supports both the joys and challenges of this journey, offers tools for transformation and grounding, and inspires expansions of consciousness within yourself and our world. It is my hope that you will explore these pages with an open mind and heart, be touched by the possibilities for awakening yourself and for supporting others, and feel the joy that engaging spiritual experience brings into my life and the lives of the people who share their stories with you.