Prajna (Ginty) O’Hara Transcript

Prajna (Ginty) O’Hara Interview 

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is Prajna Ginty. Welcome Prajna.

Prajna: Thank you. I am glad to be here.

Rick: Prajna, you live in Grass Valley, don’t you?

Prajna: That’s right, Grass Valley, California.

Rick: My sister-in-law and her husband lived out there for a while but they are not there anymore.

Prajna: Uh-huh, yeah.

Rick: I am going to start by reading just a little quote from you and then in the course of this interview you are going to tell us all about yourself, so I won’t do too much of an introductory biography. Here is what you wrote. “My passion for helping others comes from a profound respect and understanding of the human condition and how we suffer. I listen and function to inspire you to see through unnecessary layers of conditioning that veil your authentic expression. I provide sacred space for stillness practice, deep listening, body-centered psychotherapy, and resources for spiritual awakening that empower you to embody your deepest realization and walk bravely within your humanity. The word Prajna, the name Prajna, translates as heart wisdom, the universal intelligence that resides within all human beings, awake or dormant, but always here. When realized, Prajna shows us that there is no other. We are of the same essence, undivided, already pure, reflecting as each other in this vast array of spirit.” That’s nice. One thing I think I’ll find interesting about this interview, having read portions of your upcoming book, is that I often have the sense that what people call awakening is merely an intellectual understanding or it’s some kind of preliminary thing that’s very nice and very genuine and very sweet, but hasn’t really stood the tests that life may potentially throw at it. And yours had some tests thrown at it to say the least. And it’s interesting how you dealt with all that and came through it. So you’ll be telling people what that means as we get into it.

Prajna: Sure.

Rick: So where would you like to start?

Prajna: Well, I guess I could start what drew me to spirituality in the first place.

Rick: Sure.

Prajna: Okay. Well, I think as I told you in the introduction, I started out with a Catholic upbringing. And being a girl in a Catholic environment back in the early ’60s, there weren’t a lot of opportunities, as you know. So I was the little girl on the outside looking in and thinking “how do you get inside to the Mass”, and was always very curious about the mystery. Like what was going on. And even though I heard the Mass in Latin, there was something that drew me to it. But also there was a belief that was developed because of that religious conditioning that something about me wasn’t allowed to be part of it. So it’s like from the beginning negating your divinity and then taking off, seeking for it someplace else. But something very profound happened on my 10th birthday. I was very close to my godmother and she died exactly on that day. And I happened to be there when it happened. And I saw that something didn’t die. That there was something continuous and constant. And I have never been able to forget that. I mean, through any kind of life experience, whether it be easy or difficult, there was always in the background, this background hum, there’s something that continues. There’s something more behind all of this appearance. There’s something behind form. There’s something that’s living all of this, even when the body dies. So that was a strong impulse in me, very natural. I have no idea where it came from. Some people talk about prior lives, but we don’t need to go into that. But I came into this life with that curiosity.

Rick: Prior lives make sense to me. You know, some people come in with … they’re just really cooking already. And other people, this is the farthest from their interest. And of course, in the Gita, that very question is asked by Arjuna, “What happens if a person fails to reach the goal in this life? Does he perish like a broken cloud?” is the phrase used. And basically, Lord Krishna says, “No, he picks up where he left off next time around. He’s either born into a family of yogis or born into some situation which will be conducive to picking up the practice again in the next life”.

Prajna: Well, I think it’s true. And I think that the family that we choose or that we’re given, whatever it is, that all of it is conducive. That’s something that will come out as we continue to talk, but for me, if I did have a teaching, it would be that your life as it is, everything that we’re given, that’s our doorway. That’s the ground for our practice. That’s the ground for our realization. And even if we jump out of it and we run away from it and we cover ourselves up and we hide, eventually we’re drawn back to that and that is the place that gives us our freedom. Because one part of freedom is, “What am I free from?” And that’s partial and eventually we have to be able to be free to return to everything.

Rick: And when you say conducive, I would say that that applies in the broadest sense. You might be born into a family of alcoholics or something very difficult, and that might not on the surface seem very conducive, but if we see the universe as ultimately being this kind of evolution machine, which is ultimately fostering and propelling our growth toward higher realization, then everything that happens to us, and you can disagree or agree with this, is ultimately serving that purpose, even though it may not seem like it on the surface.

Prajna: I would agree with that very much so. Because like if somebody is born into a difficult family, alcoholism, I’m familiar with that. And there’s a dissatisfaction in that. There’s an underlying dissatisfaction because it isn’t nourishing. And I think that naturally we’re meant to be nourished. And naturally we’re drawn to love. And so if we’re in an environment and that isn’t available to us, we’re going to seek it someplace else eventually. You know, you fall down the rabbit hole so many times before you realize that, I don’t have to do that anymore and you go somewhere else. So I think that there’s a natural impulse toward love. I have babies, and anyone who has had children and babies, you can watch them, and the very first inclination of a child is to reach out. They’re always stretching out first. And we learn to pull back. It’s like the contraction, the pulling back, and the hiding is a learned behavior. And sometimes it’s necessary because we do need to protect ourselves. But the first inclination is to expand, is to reach toward what’s pleasant.

Rick: Good So, all right, 10 years old, your godmother died and you realized there was something didn’t die.

Prajna: Yeah, something didn’t die. And well, then I went through the teenage life that everybody goes through, and that kind of came with a bunch of confusion. And I did a lot of hiding, you could say, and got involved in different addictions and things. And then I met my first spiritual teacher,  Eunice Zimmerman, in Manhattan, New York. And I was given what I guess you would call a psychic reading. My roommate at college kind of dragged me to her because I was mixed up in a lot of things. And she was seeing herself in my behavior and was wanting to show me there’s a way out of that. So, she brought me to Eunice. And the first thing that they did was they gave me a reading. And the reading was kind of to see into your soul, I could say, your soul purpose. And so, what they told me during that reading…

Rick: So, they means Eunice? Eunice had that capability to sort of diagnose your soul, so to speak?

Prajna: Actually it wasn’t Eunice, it was her daughter. Her daughter tranced a guide called RW.

Rick: Okay.

Prajna: Kind of like a Seth. That kind of a thing. And I didn’t know anything about this and I didn’t really know what I believed about it either until I sat there in front of RW and RW pretty much told me my entire life. I was like, “Wow.” And then what he told me is that I had a soul purpose and that at the time it was far from consciousness and that I needed to become conscious of it. And I was to work with Eunice and Eunice would be my guide and she would help me to see through the veils of conditioning so that I could get on with my life, get on with my spiritual purpose.

Rick: So, RW wasn’t going to tell you your soul purpose in so many words, but he said work with Eunice and it will be revealed over time or something.

Prajna: Exactly. All that he said was that it had to do with learning that we’re not separate. And I thought “Wow, that’s a real interesting thing to say.” Because I was 21 at the time and I thought, “Oh my gosh, I’m the same as everybody else.” And that was a lot to try to digest. So then I started working with Eunice and I learned to meditate and do all of these things, but mostly she was helping me to work through unconscious material. So it was therapeutic in a sense. And from there I went on to theology school later on and I felt like I was drawn towards some kind of calling, some kind of service and I didn’t know what it was. But before I went to theology school, I had a dream and it told me that I should go to the church and find somebody there that I could trust and talk to. And that was the first time I had any image come back into my mind about the church because I left it when I was a teenager, feeling betrayed by it because it didn’t really welcome so many things that I saw were real in life that weren’t able to be addressed in this so-called spiritual environment. And it was good in many other ways. So when I got this dream to go to a church, I thought, “Oh, geez, what kind of a church would this be?” And that’s when I found out, I think I was pretty naive at the time and I really believed that whatever religion you were raised in, that you needed to stay with that. I didn’t know there were other options. So that opened me up to all these other possibilities. It just brought me right out of my religious conditioning and I started to explore other spiritualities. First through theology school and world religions and then I went and I lived in an ashram.

Rick: Was that a Yogi Amrit Desai ashram by any chance?

Prajna: Yes, it was.

Rick: I figured just from reading in your book about 300 people, you’re doing a lot of yoga, it sounded like him. It would have either been him or Muktananda, but I figured it sounded like his.

Prajna:  So it was very much a lot of physical discipline. A lot of yoga, a lot of karma yoga, a lot of meditation, and it was all really great. And I’d been there for three years when Eunice showed up. Eunice showed up at the ashram. And before she left, she asked me very one-pointedly, she was very Zen-like, she was kind of a no-nonsense teacher and always right to the point, and she said to me, “What are you doing here?” And I said, “Well, I’m doing all these great practices, can’t you see I’m developing skills and I’m advancing on the path to enlightenment?” And she said, “This isn’t your practice.” And she said, “Get on with it.” And it was like she was reminding me of all of our earlier conversations about get on to the truth of who you are, just get on with it. And then she went home and she died three days later. And I don’t think I would have taken it so seriously had she not died, and that had such an impact on me. Because I was thinking, “Oh, well, Eunice is getting a little old she’s not really seeing the value of what’s happening here.” But  what she wanted me to see is that purification isn’t necessary. And she said, “You could spend your whole life here purifying and it’s not going to change anything. What you are already is enough and that’s what you need to realize.” So, doing that kind of intensive yogic practice can be very extreme. So, when I left there, I left right away and then I went to another extreme and that’s the chapter in my book that’s called “From Ashram to Pantry.” Because I had been depriving myself of all of these delicious foods. We were on a brown rice diet and seaweed and sprouts and twig tea, that was like the extent of it, salad. And so then I went to my friend who opened up her pantry door and oh, just everything broke open and it was like going from one extreme to the other. That’s what happens until you come back into the middle somewhere. And that was when I was introduced to my first satsang.

Rick: I just want to say I can totally relate to that because I did a very similar thing in the summer of ’75. I did all this fasting and fruit diets and one week I ate nothing but barley gruel for a week because I read a book that said that was supposed to be good for you. And boy, when I snapped out of that, I couldn’t stop pigging out. I looked pregnant. I was eating so much, after each meal, I’d be down in the kitchen at four in the morning, noshing on things. I just went nuts. It took quite a few months to balance that out.

Prajna: Yeah. It did for me too. And it was so uncomfortable. And then there was also this impulse. I wasn’t able to stop. I noticed, “I just can’t stop this.”

Rick: The rubber band effect. You stretch it far enough and it just snaps.

Prajna: Yeah. So my entire focus then was food. Everything was about food. I got out of the house a couple of times and what did I do? I went to a food store. I went to a health food store and I saw a flyer there about a potluck dinner that was put on by a spiritual group, and that was the Yogananda group. And so I went to that potluck and I met a woman there that worked at a computer company and they like to hire people on the spiritual path. And I was looking for a job. I was looking for anything to get me out of the pantry, like get my life going again. And so I was able to get that job and she turned out to be my office mate, and she had sat with Nisargadatta Maharaj.

Rick: It’s a good thing you didn’t go and get a job at a Dunkin Donuts. That would have really been your undoing.

Prajna: Yeah.

Rick: I’m sorry. So she had sat with Nisargadatta.

Prajna: Yeah. And so she was in the practice of non-duality. And I saw a couple of pictures on her desk. Ramana Maharshi was there and Anandamayi Ma and people I had never seen before. But I could tell from looking at their photographs there was something that drew me to that. And the next thing I know she asked me if I wanted to go to a satsang, and I didn’t know what that was. And that was the early 80s, I think. It was quite a long time ago. And I was desperate at the time. I was suffering. I was like, I’d lost my teacher. I couldn’t stop eating. I was unhappy. I really missed my community. That was what I loved about the ashram. I loved those 300 people, that we were all doing pranayama exercises together and eating together and working together and all of that. And I did develop a lot of talents while I was there, so to speak, because I did become a yoga teacher and a massage therapist. And I was really very developed then in the healing arts. And that comes into play later because I was able to develop my own business in Silicon Valley. So it was really great in many other ways. So she brought me to satsang and I was in a very receptive mode because I was at angst now at the time. And she brought me into satsang and the ambience was just very conducive to relaxing. There was an old tape of Anandamai Ma playing in the background and it was really quiet. And I just went and I settled down into a seat and the teacher came into the front and started talking about Ramana’s teaching. And what I heard is, “You are the self.” And that just went all the way through and just landed in me and I got it. You know, or it got me. And love opened up in me and the eating immediately fell away. You know, that was one of the first things that I noticed. And also my seeking ended then. I didn’t have to look. I felt like I really returned to something. Like this was the anchor. This is what was going to bring me home. And it did. It did over time. Everything balanced out. You know, the swings in my life started to balance, more harmony and I started to enter a state they call Nirvikalpa Samadhi.

Rick: Define that.

Prajna: That is a very deep absorption in spirit. Where you’re just sitting. I would sit in meditation and I would immediately become absorbed.

Rick: Entirely? No thoughts, no nothing?

Prajna: No thought. No thought. I would even lose the sense of my body. The sense of being located in a body wasn’t there at the time. I was somewhat aware of what was happening in the environment, but it didn’t matter. And at the same time as that continued…

Rick: How long would you be absorbed like that?

Prajna: I would hear the beginning of the satsang bell, then for the whole satsang period. So it would be two hours. Or if we were having some other kind of a day where the meditations were longer, I could sit in it all day. And I didn’t even decide to do it. That was the interesting thing. It wasn’t like a decision got made. And also during that, different energies would open up and my body would go into a different position. And I only knew about that later because one time one of the teachers talked to me and asked me if I could try to sit up straight in meditation. And I said that I didn’t really know that I wasn’t.

Rick: You mean you would just kind of slouch or something without knowing it?

Prajna: Or I would tip. Go off to one side.

Rick: Like Kriyas and things. You were moving like…

Prajna: Yeah. Or my arms would do something. Something was happening and I wasn’t really aware of it until afterwards and they would say something to me. And also especially when they were having new visitors, they didn’t want somebody to be in all these awkward positions.

Rick: Gyrating around.

Prajna: Yeah. But something really profound about that was – I felt like I didn’t talk very much about it, but I think most people, if you’re on the spiritual path, most people, not everybody, are usually coming out of something difficult. There’s a reason that they’re seeking, for happiness, for freedom. So during that time of just sitting, I felt like my prior life was being washed away and that I was being… What’s the word? Like nourished, preserved in a very deep way. And I felt like I didn’t age during that time. I felt a youthfulness and a vitality.

Rick: I’m sure that’s true. I think that sitting in such states has its value. It is very nourishing and purifying and rejuvenating. All kinds of good stuff is happening on subtle levels of the physiology, some of which has actually been studied by various scientists and published in journals and so on. But there’s probably a lot, lot more going on than Western science is able to measure. But anyway, I think it was probably just what the doctor ordered for you.

Prajna: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Rick: And I just wanted to say one other quick thing is, Eunice’s statement that purification doesn’t do it for you or whatever she said, I would suggest that perhaps all that purification and yoga you had done in Pennsylvania had actually kind of prepared the stage for this phase. I’m sure that two can’t be unrelated and that it might have made you more capable of sinking into those deep states.

Prajna: Possibly, maybe. Well, I think one thing that it definitely gave me was discipline. A great deal of discipline.

Rick: Like when it came to Hostess Ring Dings or whatever.

Prajna: Exactly. But I think that’s a good point, I can’t really tell. I think everything in our life can prepare us for the next thing.

Rick: Yeah.

Prajna: So then I became very involved in the teachings of Advaita Vedanta. I couldn’t get enough of it. I remember I had the book, “I Am That”, which I’m sure you’re familiar with, Nisardagatta’s book, and after the end of that period, I had to get a new book because I had worn that out so much, just reading it. And at the end of my time there, I had an opportunity to work on the translations of the Ribhugita, the first time from Tamil and Sanskrit, and editing, formatting the book, and reading it every day to proof it. And that’s one of the things that Ramana said. He said, “If you’re to read anything, read the Ribhu Gita.”

Rick: And let’s just spell that for people. It’s R-I-B-H-U, isn’t it?

Prajna: Yeah.

Rick: Right, okay. In case they want to look it up.

Prajna: Yes, Ribhu gita, it’s a dialogue between the sage Ribhu and one of his disciples on the nature of reality. And it comes in 44 verses. And the Tamil version is really very poetic and beautiful, and the Sanskrit is different, it’s written more in stanza.

Rick: So just 44 verses, so it’s a really short thing?

Prajna: No, they’re long verses. Oh, okay. Well, I should say chapters.

Rick: Like chapters or something.

Prajna: Chapters, yeah. It’s a good-sized book.

Rick: Okay, good.

Prajna: And during that time, I was pregnant with my first daughter, Autumn. And she was born during that time. And she’s a remarkable human being. And I think perhaps from that being able to be born in that environment, and she also heard the Gita every day.

Rick: Nice.

Prajna: Because the whole time I was pregnant with her, that was what I was working on. And she had an easy, natural birth at home, where there weren’t any complications whatsoever. In fact, the midwife almost didn’t make it in time because she just came so easy.  I’m sure you’ve heard of these different phases, and different people have talked about phases of spiritual awakening in different ways. And really understanding that spiritual awakening isn’t a one-time thing and it’s different for everybody. And it really evolves over time. So during that time, I feel like I was in the honeymoon phase. It was really kind of coasting along. And I was able to function at a very high level. I had a business in Silicon Valley. And even though I was going in and out of these deep meditative states, on the outside, in my life I was functioning at a really high level. So I think that that’s one of the things that awakening can do for you, because it kind of clears out the cobwebs of the mind. And you can become very efficient, very focused, very clear.

Rick: There’s a verse in the Gita, “Yoga karma sukoshalam,” which means “yoga is skill in action.”

Prajna: Uh-huh. Yeah. So there was that phase. And then the phase came for the spiritual rubber, where the rubber hit the road, so to speak. And I had twins born to me that were one pound each.

Rick: Like three months premature or something?

Prajna: Three months premature, yeah. And they were smaller than my hands. And I had never been in a hospital before. Never that I can remember. I’m sure I was born in a hospital, but I don’t remember that. And then here I am, helicoptered to this big prestigious hospital, because the hospital in our town thought, “Well, if the babies are coming now, they couldn’t handle it.” So they helicoptered me off to Stanford.

Rick: In other words, you went into labor three months premature or something?

Prajna: Yeah. And it’s still not 100% clear what happened. I could have been having Braxton Hicks, which is an imitation of labor.

Rick: So theoretically, it might have been a false alarm.

Prajna: It could have been a false alarm. Yes. And so there I was in Stanford for the weekend. And as soon as I got there, there weren’t any signs of labor. Everything had stopped. But once they admitted me, they wouldn’t let me leave.

Rick: And they insisted on doing a cesarean?

Prajna: They did. After two and a half days, they said that I had dilated beyond the point of no return. But also, I don’t know how true that was, because their sonogram, their particular machine to really be able to see clearly what was happening with the babies, wasn’t working on the weekend.

Rick: Oh, brother.

Prajna: And when Monday morning came around, they were supposed to bring in a technician. The technician never came, but a new doctor came on. And the new doctor decided that the babies needed to be born, without getting this clear picture. And what they did is they pumped me up with Pitocin to induce labor. And they assumed that the babies were two and a half pounds, but they weren’t. Because if they were two and a half pounds, you can have a vaginal birth. But anything smaller than that is impossible. So the Pitocin wasn’t working. Nothing was working. And so they decided to do a C-section. And the babies came out and they were one pound. And Abby did okay at the birth. Abby came out first, but Libby came out second and she couldn’t breathe at all. They gave her CPR for four hours, lost her twice. And she was in a semi-coma for the first six months of her life. So that was a huge shift for me overnight. This happened in a weekend.

Rick: Boy, you know, it didn’t really come out in the parts of your book that I read that this whole thing might have been unnecessary, at least from a conventional perspective. That it might have been a false alarm. It might have been a complete misjudgment. These days it would probably be an automatic lawsuit if something like this happened. But it’ll be interesting for you to talk about as we go along, like how you have dealt not only with the challenges of your daughters, but with the sense of feeling that that they just blew it, that they did this to you and your daughters unnecessarily. I would have a hard time getting over the resentment myself.

Prajna: Yeah. Well, you know, what happened in the beginning, it’s kind of like with anybody when there’s a crisis, you go into survival mode. The biology is all wrapped up in surviving. So I didn’t have any thoughts about that. As soon as we got out of there and I had the babies, all I could think about were the babies and how we were going to go on to the next day. And my midwife was axed out of the picture at the hospital. So I didn’t have her support, which may or may not have brought something more to light. I don’t know. But when many years later, actually when Autumn was around 10, I think, I found a video, which was a video of the sonogram that was taken by the midwife’s technician. And that was taken two weeks before they were born, two weeks before the big hospital intervention. And in that video, the technician is saying, “Prajna, there’s no better way to carry babies.” He said, “You’re doing it right. This is the Cadillac. They have two of everything, inner sac, outer sac, and two placentas.” Because I didn’t know with twins, there are several formations. You can have 12 different formations. And the highest risk is that they share everything. And they call that twin to twin blood transfusion syndrome. And that’s what the doctor said I had. But yeah, because then if you look at this, nothing is going to change in the sonogram. And if you look at this earlier one, it’s super clear there was two of everything. But I didn’t find that video until they were eight years old and the statute of limitations says age six in the state of California. So I had to, and I have continuously needed to, let that go. It had more of an impact when we watched that video. My daughter, is really bright, my first, is not disabled, but emotionally has been very challenged by the whole situation. She sat there and watched that and she just cried. It’s like without even speaking it, she knew something about it wasn’t quite right. And she was more angry than me. She’d hardly ever had a tantrum. And that day she had such a tantrum. And she said, “Mom, we have to do something about it.” And I did some investigation, and then you have to decide where do you want your energy to go.

Rick: Yeah. And if the statute of limitations had expired, what can you do anyway, I guess?

Prajna: Right, right. You need a real strong, high-powered lawyer. And then you’re going up against a pretty big system. So for me, it’s been a little bit of the grist to the mill in a sense. It’s been my edge and everything that has come as a result of that, the different things that I need to interact with, that normally you wouldn’t. I’m in the medical, I’m kind of needing to work within an arena that I’m not accustomed to. And also to make good choices about that, to really be able to listen and to take what’s useful and let go of the rest and to be open to exploration. I now know a lot of parents and families who have different kinds of difficulties like this. And I really feel that my background, living in the ashram, my meditation, everything that I have has allowed me to stay in this, in ways that I see other people aren’t able to.

Rick: Yeah, as you continue to tell your story, I think people will see that you did an incredible job dealing with the situation of these kids and meeting with resistance from all sorts of so-called authorities that wanted to do things in the conventional way and feed them conventional foods and all this stuff. And what you’ve done is really kind of amazing, in my opinion.

Prajna: Thank you. Yeah, it’s been a long haul.

Rick: Yeah, really. Well, we’re kind of skipping ahead in a way because we’re referring to things that people don’t really know about yet because I’ve read your book and they haven’t. So you had these severely handicapped, brain damaged, premature twins and this was the end of the spiritual honeymoon, as you put it.

Prajna: Yes.

Rick: So maybe pick it up from there.

Prajna: Well, I think I was saying how hormones kicked in for a while, you know, the biology kicked in and I really feel that I was carried by my spiritual practice, too. I feel like it carried me for a while, even when I was in the emergency room in the OR when that was happening. And I could sense even, because I was put out, I couldn’t feel anything, from the waist down. But I could feel and tell when the babies were born. And in that moment, I knew everything was okay. I knew that there was a deeper fundamental wellness that essentially what they are, who they are, was contained in peace. That there was a fundamental okayness. And I knew that they also needed tremendous help. And that was a huge seeing, if you know what I mean.

Rick: I do.

Prajna: To be in that contradiction, it’s a paradox.

Rick: Yeah, because when you say everything was okay, on an apparent level, everything was not okay. You had these two babies that were severely disabled, but you’re talking in kind of a cosmic perspective, everything is all is well and wisely put. And now you have your work cut out for you.

Prajna: Yeah. And let me say something too about that, because this I can say this now though at the time I couldn’t say it, but I remember when I left the Ramana Maharshi ashram, there was a little bit of a falling out there with people. I didn’t choose to leave. My partner actually wrote a letter and put my name to it and that made it so that I had to leave too. But I was very dedicated to being there because I was so into the Rebhu Gita and the teachings. So that was kind of like the rug was pulled out from under my feet, because I really felt that that was my life, that I had found purpose, that these teachings were it. And it was pulled out. And when that was pulled out, you’ve probably had this at different times, like a spontaneous prayer arises in you, like something arises and you’re not praying it, but it’s coming. And when it came then, it said, “If this isn’t my purpose, if this isn’t my service, my work, show me what is.” It came like that. And then when the babies were born, I was like, “Oh my God, my prayer is being answered.” I said, “I wanted to know the whole truth. Show me the whole picture.” And so I said, “Okay, this is the walk I have to take so I can learn, I can get the whole picture.” Not that it’s just this honeymoon. There are these states that we can hang out in, and we want to cling to them, where everything is easy, but then comes the trials and the challenges, so that you can really walk in your beingness. So that didn’t come right away. That didn’t open up in me right away. I was like, “Oh!” I didn’t know how I was going to get through the day.

Rick: Give us a sense of what your typical day was like. After your previous life of nice long samadhis and everything, what was your typical day like now?

Prajna: Oh, I didn’t have sleep. Well, Libby in the beginning, she slept a lot, which was a blessing. But Abby had 10 different surgeries. So I was at the neonatal intensive care unit, where if anybody’s been in a hospital, just multiply the noise by 10 or 20, because you have bells and monitors and timers and all kinds of machines going on all the time, super bright lights.

Rick: Screaming babies.

Prajna: Yes, a lot. And angry nurses sometimes, and sometimes very happy ones. And very, very bright lights. So it’s a full-on environment. And I was in that for four months. So I was kind of wound up.

Rick: Day and night in that?

Prajna: Yeah.

Rick: Really? Like you slept there every night for four months?

Prajna: Yeah. I was in it. Well, I would go back and forth to sleep in the Ronald McDonald house we stayed in. And I had Autumn to take care of, so I would go back there. My mother came and stayed with us for a while, which was very helpful. But I was back and forth because Abby was in critical condition. She was wider than she was long. She was black and blue. Her entire gut split open. She had to have her intestines removed. She had her eyes operated on. It was like really touch and go for her.

Rick: That was the most amazing thing. She had her intestines removed, and yet they eventually grew back.

Prajna: Yeah, they did.

Rick: I didn’t know that was possible. I was wondering if that was because she was really still in an embryonic state, even though she was out of the womb. And at that stage of one’s development, intestines can still grow. Is that the explanation for that?

Prajna: Well, what you’re saying, the doctor didn’t know that either. The surgeon that did it. They called in an expert from Canada because she was one pound. And to perform that surgery on a one pound neonatal is very high risk. So they brought in this specialist, and he came in and he told me he’d prepare me for the worst. He said that he would only have a half an hour to go in there and get all the infection out. And the chances that he could do that in a half an hour, he didn’t know if he could. But when he came back later, he said he got all the infection out, and what he needed to do was remove the entire small intestines. And then they put her on a colostomy bag for three months and said we’ll just have to wait and see. And during that time, she only received my milk. They wanted to give her formula to grow her, and I wouldn’t allow that to happen. So they gave her my milk. And when the three months came again for them to open her up and see what things look like, he couldn’t even believe it. He said, “I’ve never seen this. I’ve never seen an intestine grow back. And how do you explain this?” And I said, “Well, maybe it’s the milk, because it has everything you need in it for life. And she didn’t get any chemicals”. So he said, “Maybe.” So he started to open his mind up. And he was really a good doctor. He was excellent. So she had that going on, and then she had to have her eyes operated on. And they said if they didn’t do the operation, that she would be blind.

Rick: But she wasn’t blind yet.

Prajna: How can you know?

Rick: Well, you said in your book that she would lock eyes with you and really be looking at you while you were nursing her.

Prajna: That’s what I felt. I felt she was looking at me. Yeah. We definitely had a connection through our vision, through our eyes. And then when she had the surgery and the patches came out, her eyes didn’t look at me anymore.

Rick: Right.

Prajna: The right eye. The left eye could, but the right eye was all the way turned in.

Rick: And it stayed that way to this day?

Prajna: Yeah. We’ve done a lot of exercises for that, a lot of work. So she can see. She actually has developed vision. But this right eye doesn’t work. It doesn’t function as well as the left. It’s a stigma.

Rick: Stigma? No, that’s the other thing. That’s the thing Christians get. Stigmatism? I don’t know.

Prajna: It’s little movements.

Rick: Right. Stigmatism, I think.

Prajna: Yeah.

Rick: The reason I’m asking you all these medical questions and letting you go on about this is that people might be thinking, “Well, yeah, but let’s get back to the spiritual stuff.” But I think people really need to get a feeling for the situation and for what you were dealing with. And some of this nitty-gritty stuff helps to paint that picture, I think. And we’ll get into plenty of discussions about spiritual implications and all, but people have to realize that you were … if we want to just recap and put this in a nutshell, here’s somebody who was able to sit in samadhi all day long in a real nice spiritual groovy state who was all of a sudden hit with an overwhelming task or challenge and trying to deal with it. And we have to ask ourselves, if we think that we’re awake or enlightened or whatever we think we are, how it would hold up under more trying circumstances. Usually, spiritual people, unless they get met with some unexpected thing, they manage to organize their lives so everything is kind of smooth. You’ve got your routine and your diet and your comfy little meditation room and everything just cruises along. But what if you suddenly got transplanted into a … what if you got cancer? What if you had a car accident? What if, what if, what if? There are so many things that could happen, how would it hold up under those circumstances? So we’re kind of painting a picture of your circumstances here because that’s the theme that we’re going to be talking about.

Prajna: Yeah. I think it’s important because it also lets people see too that circumstances aren’t what decide your happiness. You can be challenged, and for me, the fortunate part about that is until the end when it got really hard, we’ll get to that, there was this kind of remembering, that we were contained in something bigger. And I had reminders of that. For instance, one of the nurses became a very good friend and one time she brought me a Rumi poem right after my daughter’s eye surgery. And I’d been devastated by that. That really was hard. That hit me very hard. And she read me this poem and it just was so touching and I felt, oh, again, there is something that’s okay in this.

Rick: Yeah. I think another thing worth pointing out is that it wasn’t like you were dealing with this as if, oh, the world is an illusion and nothing’s really happening and there is no self and all that stuff that people parrot. But you were devastated and it’s okay to be devastated. It’s a natural mother’s reaction to a situation like that. And yet, paradoxically, on a deeper level, there was some kind of deep okayness underlying the feeling of devastation.

Prajna: Yeah. And also something that I noticed during that time, which I came to understand happens for all of us, is I saw myself at different times check out. You know, I did check out. And I could see it. I could observe it happening. And it was as if sometimes I would feel I was, and maybe it wasn’t even checking out, but it was as if I was watching somebody else’s life. I couldn’t believe that it was my life. It’s like I was really walking in somebody else’s life and I was waiting for someone to turn the lights on or for that dream to stop. It’s like, okay, when am I going to have my life back?

Rick: So you were kind of in a deep witness state or something at times, are you saying that? That you were kind of seeing it from such a detached perspective that it almost didn’t seem like it was yours. It was like you’re watching a movie or something. Is that what you’re saying?

Prajna: Yeah. In a sense. And then I can understand that too as phases people go through in their practice or in meditation, where sometimes you have to detach yourself all the way and watch it until some kind of resolution comes, so you can walk back into it.

Rick: And sometimes, if not usually, it’s not a willful act to detach yourself like that. It’s just a condition that you find yourself in where you’re involved in this intense thing and yet you feel like you are this sort of silent, detached witness. It’s not like you’re trying to do it. It’s kind of your way of functioning at that time.

Prajna: So let me go on with that story because we’re coming to a dark night. So after a couple of years of this, it pretty much wore me out. And Libby, like I said, she was sleeping until she was six months old. So she had been home for three months and Abby came home at four months old. So we were all at home for two months. And it wasn’t that difficult right in the beginning because we were given help and the doctor came to our house. We had a home visiting doctor who was wonderful. But then Libby suddenly woke up and she woke up crying constantly. It was as if she didn’t have a myelin sheath to protect her nerve endings. It was as if the medication that they gave her wore off. She’d had a drip. She was being sedated to a particular degree. And she was also on oxygen. So we took all of that off when she got home. And one day she just woke up and was just irritable all the time. And she wasn’t able to keep food down. She would projectile vomit. And the only way I could stop her from crying was if I rocked her continuously in the rocking chair, or I had a sling and I would bounce her. We had a mini trampoline we would jump on and taking turns with other people. And it was around the clock.

Rick: 24 hours a day.

Prajna: 24/7, yeah. So I was usually the night person because the helpers didn’t stay overnight. But then a nurse came and helped me during the day. So I wasn’t getting any sleep. And I would rock her and maybe fall asleep for a short time in the rocking chair and then she would wake up again. And it was just her neurology wasn’t developed enough. And she just needed that. She needed to be back in the womb. That’s what she needed. And so after about two and a half years of that, I was so worn out. And I had lost sight of any sense of okayness. All I could see, I was shrouded in darkness. It made me really understand maybe what deep depression might look like. I don’t know what it was. But I went into a really dark, dark place. And I was ready to end it. It was just like this is not the life I can live. I can’t do it. And we live over near the ocean. And it was something took me over.  I don’t even know if I decided it. I was really just taken over by something. And I was ready to jump off the cliff into the ocean.

Rick: You actually walked to the edge of it, right?

Prajna: Totally.

Rick: With the baby in your…

Prajna: With the baby. Yeah, we were both going. And I got all the way to the edge and I was really leaning in and just ready to go, closed my eyes. And I got pushed back, which I can’t even explain. But I got thrown back on the ground.

Rick: It wasn’t a gust of wind or anything. It was something else.

Prajna: It could have been a gust of wind. It could have been something else.

Rick: Okay.

Prajna: I’m not really sure. But it was a big push. And it was like the burning bush kind of thing. It was powerful and it said, “You aren’t going. You’re staying. You’re staying.” It said, “This is your life. This is the one you got. This is the one you’re going to live. Go home and get some sleep.” You know, in so many words.

Rick: And that was conveyed to you in a voice saying that or was it more like that’s the concept that hit you. It was like a message or something. Here’s the deal.

Prajna: It was like a voice.

Rick: Okay.

Prajna: It was very strong. Maybe it was a voice that was speaking from inside. Maybe it was coming from outside or both. But something that was greater than my little mind was telling me I can’t do this.

Rick: Yeah.

Prajna: It was as if something broke open out of that. Something broke open and said, “You’re doing it. Go home. Go back home.” So we walked back home and it was already lighter just walking home. And I fell asleep in the rocking chair with Libby and I slept for four hours continuous. That was the first time I had four hours of continuous sleep in about two and a half years.

Rick: Did you have a husband through all this?

Prajna: I had a partner who left right around this time.

Rick: So he hung in about that far and then he was out. He left.

Prajna: He got really sick. He had the stress. He had a kidney condition that was exacerbated through the stress of it. So he was doing enough just to maintain his job and was very helpful. He was as helpful as he could be. And so I slept and everything started to turn around after that near death experience or that near jumping.

Rick: Near suicide experience.

Prajna: Yeah. That coming that close to the edge broke open my resistance. It was like my resistance to the life that I had was broken open. It was up until that time I was just trying to change. I wanted her crying to stop. Now I wanted to sleep. I wanted all of those things. So it brought me to an edge and then I wasn’t resisting it anymore and guess what? She stopped crying.

Rick: Interesting.

Prajna: Yeah. Not all at once but it slowed down. And I think too because of the resistance falling away it opened me up to more possibilities. And I went to see a neurological acupuncturist after that.

Rick: This sounds a little esoteric but I firmly believe, and I have friends who actually experienced this very clearly, that we’re surrounded by loving entities who try to help us in whatever way they can. And given the fact that we still have free will and everything but I wonder if the deal here was that they said, “All right, this girl has really had about enough. We have to increase the help. Let’s get this baby to stop crying.” I don’t know, it sounds a little weird to people maybe but I really feel like we’re not alone and there are sort of subtler, we could call them guardian angels or impulses of intelligence or entities, which are helping us in our lives. And maybe when you reach such a pivotal point they decided they’d better increase the amount of help they were giving and that’s why Libby maybe … or maybe it was just totally within your own psychology when you stopped resisting and somehow on a subtle level that affected Libby’s way of functioning and she settled down more. I don’t know but it’s just a theory.

Prajna: I really believe there was some kind of intervention.

Rick: Yeah, even what stopped you from jumping off the cliff sounds like it was some sort of guardian angel type of thing, you know?

Prajna: Yeah, there was something happened there. Something turned me around and gave me some comfort for sure. Gave me a sense of, “Well, maybe this can happen.” And it opened me up so that was cool. And then very shortly after that, within a matter of weeks, my old friend Kathy, who I just love, and who had introduced me to my first satsang, she came knocking at my door during that time and she had a tape for me to listen to. She said, “There’s a new teacher in town.” And at the time I was like, I was in this starting to lighten up, dark night, but I was still wasn’t there yet. And I thought, “Oh, I don’t want to hear about enlightenment. I don’t want to hear about all that.” Because I still was under the impression that awakening was about the mountain top experience. And I didn’t need someone to tell me that because that was what I lost. That was gone. And so she said, “No, you’re going to like this guy. He’s the real deal and he’s talking about dark nights.” And I said, “Wow, I’ve never heard anyone talk about a dark night.” And she said, “Yeah, you’ll like this because most of the people in the room were falling asleep.” And I said, “Yes, okay. So I think dark nights are really an important thing to talk about too. So I’m glad we’re talking about this”. But I was at the end and resistance was falling away, but I still had resistance to seeing a new teacher because I really had the idea that spiritual awakening was about bliss and feeling good and all of that. And I thought it wasn’t really a possibility for me, that that had been taken away. But also at the same time, I wanted to listen to that tape. And so as soon as she left, the first thing that I did was put it in the cassette player. We still had cassettes then. It was one of the cassettes. That was ’98, I think.

Rick: I just gave away a cassette player yesterday to a donate place here in town. Guy said, “Well, I guess I can do something with this.”

Prajna: So when she left, I listened to it and it was Adyashanti. It was Adyashanti talking about the mysteries of Christ and the birth, the birth being spiritual awakening, the new birth, and that being the beginning where you just have your foot in the door and then everything unfolds from there. And as part of that unfoldment, we go through these trials and tribulations and big challenges. And they’re all meant to widen our capacity to stand in life because really in the end, it’s about who are you when the lights go out in the end? Because where are your fears? And I think that being able to walk through a dark night is an opportunity to be free of fear. And so I started going to his satsang immediately. He was in town very close to where I lived, in the town I lived in and then the town next to it. So I went twice a week. And I just sat. The first time I went to sit with him, I didn’t even notice the other people because I really just wanted to hear what he had to say. And I went and sat down in the front. And I think I was probably going to satsang for about a year before anybody knew I was going because I just completely kept to myself. And I went and I sat down in the front. But even after the first satsang, I went home that night and I went into my children’s bedrooms and I was just bowing to every one of them. I just was like, “Thank you.” I felt these are my teachers. I was like, “What I’m being given is beyond measure.” And I really felt such a good fortune at meeting Adyashanti for one, but being given the life I was given because it was really going to allow this awakening to take hold in an everlasting way. It wasn’t going to be something that came and went. I lost it. I found it. That was the end of I lost it. I found it. That was truly the end of that. And I started going on retreats with Adya and started to have more experiences of being everything.

Rick: How could you go on retreats with the babies? They were at an age when other people could take care of them?

Prajna: Yeah, they were three by then. And through an agency, I was able to get 40 hours of nursing care a week for Libby. And I had two amazing, great nurses. And they shared that. And one nurse was very willing to stay over and just sleep there when I went on retreat. I was able to go on a 10-day retreat. And that was just amazing. I couldn’t even believe it. And I felt like I just got restored. And Adyashanti and I became very close. And I’m very close with Mukti, too. We’re very good friends. And, because we had private sessions, I shared with him what my realization was. And he was just constantly confirming it. He was just confirming, confirming, confirming. And until one time, I came on retreat, and he goes, “What are you coming on retreats for anymore?” And I said, “Well, because I like to get a good night’s sleep. And the food is good”. And at a certain point, he said, “It’s really time for you to stand on your own two feet.” And that was while we moved to Pennsylvania, and I started giving satsangs. That was in 2001 when I first started. And I had a very powerful experience where the name came to me, Prajna. It came to me during that time. And it came three different ways. And when it came the third time, I said, “Okay, I’ll keep it.” And I told Adi that that was my new name. And he was like, “Yeah, that’s fitting. Keep it. Now go on. Get out of here.”

Rick: Interesting.

Prajna: Yeah. Not like that, but in his own way. Basically that.

Rick: Right. Nice. Well, continue. I don’t have any more questions. I can always think of questions, but I’m just enjoying you rolling out your story here. And you moved to Pennsylvania because there was a Waldorf school or something that you wanted to get your girls into.

Prajna: For special needs kids. Some people have probably heard of the Camp Hill organizations, but they’re started by Rudolf Steiner, who started the Waldorf schools, and a doctor. And their village is for people with disabilities, mostly for adults. And they have them in a few places in the States, but all over Europe. And they had one for children in Pennsylvania, the only one for children in the States, with a Waldorf curriculum for special needs kids. So I did want to get my kids into that because I had created a school in my home. We had a school all the way up to kindergarten, which was Waldorf, and we had special needs kids in it. And I wanted to continue that because they were making really good progress. And yeah, and when I looked at the typical public schools, you had to maybe go outside of the box. So we went outside of the box.

Rick: How were you supporting yourself through all this?

Prajna: How was I supporting myself? Good question. Money has never been a problem for me. It’s like I don’t even think about it. It’s funny. I’ve always been very good at making money. I sold my business when Autumn was six months old, and I got a very good sum for that. And then I was selling baby slings and doing yoga classes, well, not when Libby was during the crying time, I wasn’t doing anything then. But money’s always come easy to me. It’s interesting. And then later on, I started working as a therapist. But through that, and the nursing is paid for. I was getting some help by the state. Anybody who has special needs is going to get helped by the state, at least you used to be able to. Things keep changing as the state is drying out. But that and I’ve been lucky. I think I’m really lucky that way.

Rick: Good. Okay. Just curious. It’s one of those questions that arose as I was reading your book. It’s like you’re doing all this stuff, but where’s the money coming from?

Prajna: Oh, and for our school, I wrote for five grants. I wrote for five grants and I got every one of them. So that school didn’t come from my money. It was funded.

Rick: You started your own school, you’re saying?

Prajna: Yeah. And we took in, we had tuition for special needs kids. And everything was pretty much covered. And then when we went to Pennsylvania, the Waldorf School was a certified non-public school in the state of California.

Rick: Even though it was in Pennsylvania?

Prajna: Yes. What that meant, if you were a resident from the state of California, you didn’t have to pay tuition.

Rick: Okay. I was curious about these practicalities.

Prajna: Yeah, those are good practicalities. 

Rick: So you’re on the East Coast and you’re doing some satsangs and there was something you alluded to about some satsang up in Woodstock or someplace that totally flopped. Or it was a weekend retreat or something and turned out into be a disaster.

Prajna: Yeah. That was my big teacher failing experience.

Rick: What happened?

Prajna: Well, I was really busy when I got out to Pennsylvania. For the first satsang that I did I put a flyer up in one of these 7-Eleven type places. And I don’t know how people saw it, but two people came. And from there, it just grew. It grew very fast. And I was really busy. So I was invited to go to New Jersey. Woodstock was the furthest place I was going to go visit, but I was in Delaware and all these different places doing intensives and retreats and meetings and having private clients. And I didn’t plan to get that busy. I knew Woodstock was a stretch. And it had been a difficult, a typical week at home. And I didn’t get a lot of sleep that week. So when I packed myself up, I didn’t fully pack. I didn’t have any time to plan. I’m jumping in the car and I’m going to barely make it in time. And I wasn’t considering the turnpike traffic. I got a little bit lost. But then I arrived to this woman who’d invited me to come and I had to clean up and change my clothes. I still had my day clothes on with my Libby burps all over me and everything. And I didn’t bring a shirt. I didn’t bring a clean shirt. And she was a very petite woman and her shirt wouldn’t fit me. And so she gave me her husband’s, one of his shirts to wear, which was like this big farmer flannel kind of thing. And so I just kept moving along and we got to the satsang. And before me, that’s where Gangaji had been giving satsangs. So I think they were expecting somebody like Gangaji to come in with flowing white clothes. You know how beautiful Gangaji is and all of her white and this. And there I come in looking a little bit like a wreck, you know, with this flannel shirt on. And it was just a total flop because I didn’t have any time to just sit for a minute and prepare. And so I did a meditation and I didn’t talk much, but I invited people to come up. And the first person that came up, came up to talk about somebody who had just died and they were very upset and distraught. And I just felt like I handled it really poorly because I just wasn’t there. And it just felt like the big teacher failing, but really it was just that I didn’t have enough sleep. But after that happened, on the way home, I realized something in my car. I had had my driver’s seat up like this. And I only knew this because the next day my caregiver borrowed my car and he adjusted the seat. And when I went to get in the car after that, I was like, “Why is the seat way back here?” It was way back. Why did he adjust that? I asked him, and he said, “No, I didn’t adjust it.” He said, “You adjusted it all the way forward.” And so then when I sat in the seat, I realized that actually the way he’d adjusted it was the normal way that the seat is and that I had been leaning forward and driving like this, so that I was driving ahead of myself.

Rick: Ah, so it was sort of a representative of your mentality or something.

Prajna: Yeah, it was that I was still chasing. I was still on this, I was still driven to do, even the teaching thing, it was like, I was driving, I was driving to heal the kids. I was a little bit too much in the front. And then when I got back in the car and then I was able to relax back in the seat and it was a deep seeing for me. And I had to let things fall away. I was trying to do too much. And that was the beginning, or maybe it was a new development or a deeper development of receding into the backspace, you know? Like in the beginning when you’re teaching there can be this excitement, and you want to get out and meet all these people and go around and accept all the invitations and feel like you need to. And then I started to see that I didn’t need to do that. And I started to listen in a different way. And there’s a chapter in my book about listening there. And I really think that that’s what spiritual awakening is. As it becomes more embodied, it can feel like all of our lives are kind of living in the front space. We’re here in this character, this persona that feels like it needs to do, do, do, achieve and accomplish. And when we awaken, we feel, we see that there’s something else that’s living the life. And you recede into your nobodiness. You recede back into your beingness. And then there’s a listening that comes with that. And you can start to listen from a different space and not be the driver, you know?

Rick: Yeah. There’s a saying in Vedic scripture someplace, I don’t know the Sanskrit, but it’s “Brahman is the charioteer.” And, you know, it kind of reminds me of that Greyhound ad, “It’s such a pleasure to take the bus and leave the driving to us.” It’s like you’re not really running the show, and you kind of shift into a space eventually where that’s your experience. Which is not to say that on the outside you might not appear highly motivated and driven and all kinds of plans and projects. I have a picture of Amma behind me, the hugging saint, and there’s this sort of simultaneous, complete, oceanic, all is well and ease, relaxed into the absolute kind of thing. And yet at the same time, frenetic activity every moment, with a million projects going on. So the two can be integrated.

Prajna: Definitely. And it’s more like you’re coming from a place of response, you know? Like when information comes to us, we can either react to it or respond to it. And we can respond, but we can respond from this greater intelligence, which is below the shoulders.

Rick: And the information may come from within us too. It’s not like you’re just following the outer prompts from other people, but there might be an inspiration or a thought that arises, “Do this” But it’s kind of like you’re not sitting there racking your brains trying to come up with such thoughts. It comes from a deep intuitive impulse and then you just respond in an effortless way.

Prajna: Yeah. They call that prajna.

Rick: They do actually.

Prajna: Yeah, definitely.

Rick: And there’s a saying, “Prajna parat,” it means “mistake of the intellect,” and it’s when you lose that relaxed higher intelligence that’s in the driver’s seat perspective and get caught up in the isolated details, and so the prajna value is lost, it’s mistaken, it’s overshadowed, it’s constricted. And I think what you experienced and are describing is a return to that orientation where prajna is in the driver’s seat.

Prajna: Yeah, exactly. It’s a shift in orientation. And it doesn’t happen all at once. It doesn’t happen initially in awakening. Maybe it does for some people, but that usually comes later, that whole getting grounded and moving from a different place.

Rick: I’m kind of leery of the word “awakening” myself because it has such a kind of simplistic static connotation. “Awakening, it happened,”. But I think what you’ve been describing is that awakening can be a beginning, and then there can be awakenings, stages of awakening. It’s like education. You go to the first grade and you say, “Okay, I’ve experienced education now. I’m educated.” But there’s no end to it.

Prajna: Right, exactly. As long as you’re here living.

Rick: Yeah, you’re breathing, you’re still growing and evolving and learning.

Prajna: Yeah. And then also there’s everybody else that’s you too.

Rick: Right, good point. In other words, even if in some sense you’re finished, which ultimately you’re not, but then there’s this larger thing.

Prajna: Collective mass.

Rick: Yeah, the collective intelligence, and that’s not finished. And so you become more of a kind of a tool or a washing machine for the purification of that.

Prajna: Yeah, which is why I think these collective sittings that people do together really benefit the whole. Even if you feel a sense of, “Well, I’m awake,” or whatever, the meditation doesn’t end. It doesn’t end because it’s benefiting the whole and you’re part of it, right?

Rick: You mean if you’re meditating in a group or something?

Prajna: Well, just in general, the practice of meditation doesn’t end. Because we’re part of the whole, it benefits the whole.

Rick: I agree.

Prajna: And that’s why I continue to have sittings. I do a lot less talking now in my satsangs. I don’t have a lot to talk about, I don’t know why, it’s just not there. If something comes, I talk about it, but it’s really about the silence, you know, and people recognizing the power of their own presence.

Rick: I think it was in your book that Adya was saying that the talking he does is almost like just something to keep you entertained while the silence does its thing?

Prajna: Yeah, it’s the resonance.

Rick: And maybe if we could point to an underlying principle of this, it’s that we’re not just isolated biological entities. Essentially, deeply, we are the ocean of consciousness and that ocean can be lived and embodied through these entities, but when that happens and when it’s experienced, it gets enlivened. And it doesn’t just get enlivened within our five, six foot physiology, the field gets enlivened far beyond the limits of our individuality, and that field enlivenment is changing the world.

Prajna: Yes, I agree. It’s a much more fruitful way of being in the world than through egoic consciousness.

Rick: And I think that’s why so many awakenings are happening these days, in many cases with people who haven’t even thought about spiritual practice or done any or anything. They’re tying their shoes and all of a sudden an awakening happens and then they have to figure out later on what happened, but it’s because the field is getting enlivened and it’s like the floor of a forest, somehow the earth is getting more nutritious, all these plants start springing up which weren’t able to grow before. So there’s this kind of global thing happening, which I think is exciting.

Prajna: Yeah, totally.

Rick: Alright, so you were in Pennsylvania, you had the flop in Woodstock.

Prajna: Sorry, Woodstock!

Rick: Woodstock has had more exciting events than you!

Prajna: Yeah, but it was good. I think it was Adyashanti who said that it’s important for everyone to have that teacher workout, so to speak, in the beginning and in the end I think it turns out to be to the benefit. So then, okay, we’re in California now. I moved back to California because this is our home for one and we’d been three years in Pennsylvania and everybody was missing everything back in California, our home and our people and the kid’s dad, it made it harder to visit with him. So we came back and before we went to Pennsylvania we’d applied to a school in Colfax, California that did a Waldorf developmental movement, a little private school, and they didn’t want to accept Abby and Libby then because they weren’t walking. So she said, “Get her walking and I’ll take her.” They were six then, that was before we went to Pennsylvania. So when we’re coming back they’re nine. And Abby had learned to walk as soon as we got to Pennsylvania because we found this program to put her on and she became an independent walker. So we showed up at the school. I’d applied online and over the phone and so we thought that Abby was accepted. But in the meantime, something had shifted with the school. They didn’t let us know, but they’d decided they were going to close. So we were driving to Colfax thinking we were going to go to the school and we got there and it wasn’t happening. And she told us is “there’s another school up in Nevada City, Grass Valley. It’s a charter school. Take her there”. And so we went there and it happened to be on the day that we came, there was one student dropped out. So Abby was able to get in and that’s how we ended up in Nevada City, Grass Valley. And then how I started teaching up here again was there was a guy that I’d seen at an Adyashanti retreat and he recognized me when I came up here, and he said, “Don’t you give satsangs?” And I was like, “Ugh. Yeah, yeah, I do. I do”. So I told him I did and he started hosting me, and then I got really busy again up here doing retreats and intensives and one-on-ones. And to this day, I don’t know how it happened. When I look back at how busy we were! I used to clear out my house. A crew of people would come over that were going to be on the retreat and we would empty my house out and the kids for two nights and have the retreat right in my house. We did that about 10 times and we just had intensive silent retreats and satsangs and it was great. It was really great. And I did that up until they got into high school.

Rick: Do you know Arjuna Ardagh? He’s up there. You know him?

Prajna: Yeah, we’re friends. And there’s some other people around here. But yeah, I kept that going. That was up until I found the video.

Rick: Of the sonogram?

Prajna: Of the sonogram, yeah. And when I found that, I started to slow down. It weighed on me, and I didn’t feel the juice. It had an impact on me and I wasn’t as enlivened and I felt called to stay home more. And I call that my cave time in the book. I felt like I really needed to be with my daughters more, especially my oldest daughter, because she was working through something really difficult. And so it was like that for a few years and that was really, really good, really nourishing. And I’m really glad that happened in a sense because she needed that time and I didn’t need to be doing the teaching. I didn’t need to be out doing that as much as I was. So now it’s simple. Now I can do both. Now it feels like there’s a balance between taking care of my kids and really being here for them 100% and not be tired. And also when people come to me for private sessions in the sittings that we have, I can really be present for that too. I’m not overbooking myself in either direction.

Rick: Now, you’re going to Peru these days? or are we getting ahead of our story?

Prajna: No, I think that’s about where we are.

Rick: So that’s an interesting development.

Prajna: Yes, that is. How did I get interested in that? Well, let me tell you a little about, you might already know about the Shipibo tradition.

Rick: I don’t think I ever heard the word until you mentioned it.

Prajna: Okay. Well, the Shipibo tradition comes out of a particular part of Peru along the Amazon River and it’s a very ancient culture, the Shipibos. And all that they work with is plant medicine. So they have all kinds of plants to heal anything from cancer to growing your hair back, digestive issues, everything. But how they work with the plants, they ingest, they do what are called dietas. And a dieta is a special diet that happens anywhere from a week to a year, the longest is a year. And you go into the jungle and you diet just one specific plant. And I find this to be fascinating just because of my little wrestling match with Western medicine, to find that they are taking something from nature and they will go on a diet with it. And that’s how they learn about its properties.

Rick: You mean that they will go on and eat nothing but that plant for a long period of time?

Prajna: Yeah, the longest is a year.

Rick: Just some weird plant and you will just eat that plant and nothing else for a year?

Prajna: Nothing else. Well, they will have every second or third day like fish or a plantain, something really simple.

Rick: Get some protein.

Prajna: Yeah, and water. But no, the whole idea is that the plant is your nourishment and that’s what’s going to kind of download the information about the plant. I really believe we have a plant self. And in Waldorf education they talk about the plant world, the mineral world. We have all our different worlds. So I think the plant self is very related to our etheric body. It’s like the mood of the soul, in a sense. You know, you have this body, and in our modern world, there isn’t even a culture. Our modernized world has been pretty much depleted of all the cultural traditions. And in Peru and some places along the Amazon, they still are trying to preserve these rich, rich cultures. And with that, the medicines are waking up this plant self. Our plant self becomes enlivened through that and what can happen is really deep healing, not only for the soul, but it can clear out unconscious material too, depending on what medicines you’re using.

Rick: If I could just interject something, it’s like, usually what Western medicine does is it tries to find the active ingredients in a plant and it extracts those and then tries to make it into a commercial product or something that you can take. In other words, like if they discovered that a particular plant seemed to have an effect on cancer, they say, “Okay, cool, now forget the rest of the plant, let’s see what it is in this plant that’s curing the cancer and we’ll extract that and turn it into some kind of a drug.” But I think what the indigenous people would say is that there’s a holistic intelligence in the plant that is lost if you extract. The whole is more than a collection of parts. You can’t just extract an active ingredient and expect it to have the same holistic effect.

Prajna: Exactly. And with these plants, as the shamans ingest them, they see patterns. They see the chemistry of the plant in energetic patterns and they are able to read this, and also then they develop what they call “Ikaros,” which are the songs of the plants. The Ikaro is also a healing medicine. It’s the voice of the plant. There’s a really great book out called “The Singing Plants” that comes out of that tradition. Somebody who did a very extensive study living there with the Shipibos over like three decades created this volume of plant medicine, all the information about it. So it’s really different. They won’t treat somebody unless they’ve already ingested the plant and have been treated and know its properties. And then they work with whatever the situation is.

Rick: So let’s say somebody listening to this had some kind of cancer, for instance. They might go down to Peru and be with these Shipibos and the Shipibo would be able to determine what kind of plant would be good for their particular condition. And then they would put them on a regimen where they were mostly just eating that plant and occasionally a little something else. And maybe they were chanting some songs along with it. Is that what you’re saying?

Prajna: Yes.

Rick: And do many people do that? Are there a lot of people going down and doing that kind of thing?

Prajna: Yeah. This one place is called The Temple of the Way of Light. There are several shamans there. The people that founded the place have gone through a little weeding them out because not all shamans are clean. You have to know what you’re getting into. And anyway, they mostly work with female shamans, which is very, very interesting. Sometimes there’s a balance between the men and the women.

Rick: If it’s anything like Western teachers, I’d say the females probably have a better track record for behaving themselves.

Prajna: Yeah, yeah. They do there too. They have a much better track record. And also, most of them are  grandmothers and they’re really beautiful ladies. So a person could go down there and one of the most popular plants that they work with, of course, is ayahuasca. And I’ve seen people have tremendous results from working with that plant ceremoniously, not in a recreational way at all. But what they do down there is they set up these 12-day workshops. And a person would go there, based on their own interest, of course. There’s something they want to heal in their life, or be free of, or whatever. It’s not necessarily meant for spiritual awakening, because that comes from you. But the plant can clear things out of the way, especially trauma. I’ve seen many people go down there and work with the medicine and have trauma, something that’s really tightly suppressed and packed into the system where years of therapy doesn’t get to it or years of sitting on the meditation cushion doesn’t get to it. And then you go there and this really wise plant opens it up and flushes it out of your system.

Rick: Did that happen to you?

Prajna: No, I didn’t have that.

Rick: So have you done ayahuasca down there?

Prajna: Oh yeah, I have.

Rick: So a typical question someone might ask is, “Okay, here’s this woman who has already undergone a whole series of awakenings and has been a satsang teacher and is pretty well established by most people’s standards. Why would she feel the need to do something like that? Wouldn’t it sort of be unnecessary for someone who’s undergone so much spiritual advancement?”

Prajna: Yeah, it’s not really necessary, but I’m doing it because I’m interested in training as a shaman.

Rick: Okay.

Prajna: So I’m doing the dietas too.

Rick: What’s that?

Prajna: I’m doing all kinds of plants. When I go there, I work with all different kinds of plants. I’m specifically interested in finding some plants that will work for my daughters.

Rick: Have your daughters taken some of these plants yet?

Prajna: No, not yet. They’re not old enough.

Rick: Go ahead.

Prajna: So the way that it works is usually anyone who’s going to diet the plants will also try ayahuasca because it’s kind of like a purger. Ayahuasca means purge. So it’s the mother plant and it’s purging any negative energies or dark energies or any residual. It can even get into collective energies, clearing all of that out of your system. So that would be taken first so that you’re cleared out and then you can take the other plant and you can really see what its properties are.

Rick: What was your experience with it?

Prajna: My experience was getting really, like I felt like I lost a couple of years. When I did the whole ceremony one time, it’s seven ceremonies, it was like all of that sleep that I never caught. I felt really revitalized, like all of the tiredness went. Because when you purge, you don’t only purge through vomiting, you can purge out both ends. You can purge through yawning, shaking.I’ve seen lots of people go there and just have tiredness worked out of their system. And I think for me, that was the main thing that got cleared out, any weariness, weakness, just kind of feeling tired, a little bit exhausted physically. I think I might have been close to having, oh, what is it called? Where from lack of sleep, something develops, but I can’t think of what it was. The other thing that happened for me too, when I said I didn’t have trauma released, I actually did, the scar tissue from when I had the C-section, all of that got worked through.

Rick: How do you know?

Prajna: Well, because it’s not there.

Rick: You don’t see a scar there anymore?

Prajna: Yeah, I don’t see a scar there anymore. And a lot of energy freed up there. It was like that part of my body was closed. It was kind of like contracted energy there. I could never do a sit-up, and now because I do yoga, I can do things that I wasn’t able to do before.

Rick: Interesting.

Prajna: So, I had mostly physical changes.

Rick: So you’re kind of in training to be a Shipibo, I guess you’re saying, well, that’s a tribe actually, but to be some sort of plant medicine expert, right? And you’re going down there and doing the training in stages, a couple weeks here, a couple weeks there, are you?

Prajna: Yeah, I just go for like a week and a half.

Rick: Okay. And is the end goal to be able to do it back in the States?

Prajna: I don’t know. It’s not even defined for me yet. I’m really exploring it, because I met different people working with the medicine and I wanted to consider like, is there something in the plant world? Because I’m sure even in the States, that we have plants that we haven’t even been able to figure out all their properties yet. But I’m just really interested in plants and in herbs and in healing medicine. And I know that my daughters are going to need that for the rest of their lives. So, if I can find something that can offer them more comfort or more function, other than just all of the different physical activities that we’re doing, I’m interested in that. And because I often work with people in my private practice who have trauma, I’m very open. I wouldn’t suggest it to somebody, but if somebody were to ask me about it, I would tell them the truth about my experience in working with medicine. And if they felt drawn to it, I would encourage it because I think it can take a lot of time off of your practice by getting through those heavy, dark places and working it out of the system. But I wouldn’t encourage it for anything recreational. And then also when it comes to the end of the day, it’s really you and presence, but there’s so many things that can support coming to this sense of integration.

Rick: Sure.

Prajna: Because spiritual awakening is one thing, but it’s not going to accomplish everything, as part of the whole picture.

Rick: Right. There’s so many things that need to be worked out.

Prajna: Yeah.

Rick: I’m thinking of Patanjali at the moment, first of all in his Ashtanga Yoga, he has all these different aspects, yamas and niyamas and pranayamas and asanas and all these different things. And then there’s samadhi. And it’s not just samadhi, there’s all these other aspects that are correlated with samadhi and that need to also develop. You can’t develop any one in isolation from the others. And then there’s another point in the Yoga Sutras where he talks about mantras, herbs and gems all being conducive to or able to result in, bring about, I don’t know whether it was samadhi or siddhis. In any case, obviously India has a vast history and tradition of Ayurveda and herbal understandings, and there have been Indian sages who could just talk to the plants and have the plants tell them what they were good for. They could just walk through the forest would kind of cognize or see or communicate with the plants and just know, even without taking the plant, what it would do. And Ayurveda also says that there’s no plant which doesn’t in some way have a medicinal purpose. I imagine even poison ivy or something is going to have some utility in some way, but it’s so little understood in our culture. Hopefully we won’t exterminate these traditional cultures before, well hopefully we won’t exterminate them at all, but hopefully we’ll be able to come to understand their wisdom and apply it because we certainly need to.

Prajna: Yeah, I think working with any of this kind of stuff, it has to be done very responsibly. There’s a time and a place for everything, and somebody could go into a ceremony without a lot of understanding and it could be the wrong time for that person. So it’s something that I don’t take lightly. I take it very seriously as far as considering it for anybody, that you really need to know who you’re with, where it’s coming from, and that you have proper guidance, and that it’s the right time. Because if you think about people on the spiritual journey, lots of this “I lost it, I found it” kind of thing happens because people get tripped up often by suppressed unconscious material that hasn’t been seen yet. Like Christ says, “No stone will be left unturned.” And we have to go beneath all of those places and clear it out. And in the first seven years of childhood, that’s where so much of our conditioning happens, all of the imprinting. And often that’s where the real work happens for some people, because they jumped out of that, or the early teens, and there’s something, some kind of trauma still in the system that is impacting how they’re functioning today. Whether it be depression, whether it be addiction or other kinds of things. So if you can responsibly work with something, I’ve seen all kinds of things get cleared out for people. So that’s my whole take on it.

Rick: Yeah, I’m glad you’re emphasizing that, because I know at least one person, and probably more, who’ve gotten into serious trouble by approaching this stuff recreationally. And so if a person – not that we’re sort of promoting trips to Peru right now or anything – but if a person felt a resonance with this, where is the quality control? How can you possibly know where to begin to find something you can trust?

Prajna: Well I think the place that I found in Peru can be very trusted.

Rick: What’s it called again?

Prajna: It’s called The Temple of the Way of Light.

Rick: Do they have a website?

Prajna: Yeah, they do. They have a very thorough website, which has a tremendous volume of information on it. And they’re hooked up with that – I don’t know if you’ve heard of the guy, Hancock, what’s his last name?

Rick: Graham Hancock?

Prajna: Graham Hancock. He’s done some TED Talks. I think his TED Talk was actually banned. Maybe it’s out again.

Rick: I think I heard about that. There was a big controversy about it.

Prajna: Yeah, but there’s a lot of really good research going on right now and studies with responsible organizations that aren’t taking it lightly and are really being very thorough, and watch. And you can tell so much because everything matters, even as we know, just with food, because food is basically a plant, right? And you can tell when something’s cultivated properly, when it’s grown in good soil and it’s been harvested properly. Well, it’s the same thing, because if something is being used recreationally or for material gain, it’s going to have a completely different property than something that has been planted and harvested for healing medicinal purposes and for ceremony. That’s a very different field.

Rick: So, how many times have you been down there now?

Prajna: Oh, just a few times. I also lead meditations. I go for my training, but my role is more or less meditating as well, leading parts of the workshops with meditation.

Rick: With people who are coming to that place?

Prajna: Yeah.

Rick: Okay. And do you yourself, each time you go, do a different plant for a week and a half to see what it will do for you?

Prajna: Yeah, that’s what I’m working on, and I’m working closely with one particular shaman who’s considered the leads. They actually call shamans surgeons. After you’ve had so much training and he’s been working with plants for 50 years, he’s considered one of the surgeons. He’s met my daughter, Abby, and I’ve talked with him a lot about neurology and things like that. So, it’s almost new for him, but it isn’t all the way new. We have a little bit of a language. I’m learning Spanish. You can speak Spanish, but we’re exploring the possibilities of plants that really work with the neurology. And I bet there’s some here too, I’m sure, because I’ve worked with homeopathic physicians and things like that, and I’ve worked with neurological acupuncture. So, I know there’s a lot that can be done. And besides, it’s nice to just get out of the country.

Rick: Sure.

Prajna: And to experience a different culture. And there’s so many wonderful things they’re doing there. I’m also involved with their permaculture program. In the next five years, they’re planning this. They have little villages involved, so they’re employing the people in the villages. And they’re doing a lot for the people, so it doesn’t have just one focus. And then also, they’re helping to save the Amazon, because the oil companies are coming in there and many of the people in the villages have become very sick from the pollution in the water and just taking over their land. So, we’re working too to educate the people on what their rights are and to bring all the tribes together so they can stand up against the big oil companies. And also, helping them to value their tradition and not to sell it off for a quick sum of money, which is what is happening. And then teaching people in the villages how to continue to work with their crafts. They have one program going on where they’re making all of these purses and water bottle carriers, and I just gave them the idea of a dog leash out of recycled plastic. And then they go and they sell these. So, there’s a lot going on there – it’s a holistic approach. Permaculture is taking care of the land and the people. So, there’s a lot going on, which is fascinating to me. So, that’s what I’m doing.

Rick: That’s fantastic. Yeah, boy, everything you just said was beautiful. There’s one thing which really struck a chord, which was people doing something for a quick shot of money, which is going to have these devastating long-term consequences. There’s so much of that going on in the world today. It’s like the oil companies are rushing up to the Arctic now because the ice is melting because of them, but now they’re thinking, “Oh boy, more opportunities to get more oil,” and it’s nuts. So, in a way I kind of see that as the most critical problem on the planet, which is this short-sighted, greedy, myopic, quick-fix mentality where “I want what I want and I want it now”, and no sense of the larger implications and the long-term consequences. So, I love what you described what you’re doing.

Prajna: Yeah, because these people, they’re not living in the best conditions. So, when somebody presents a big hunk of money to them, all they can think of is, “Oh, well, I’m going to feed my kids for a month or something,” whatever. But yeah, so they’re learning and they’re saying no now and they’re banding together.

Rick: That’s great. I know that happens so much. In Indonesia they’re cutting down all the rainforest to plant palm oil plantations, just devastating. And again, it’s this quick-fix mentality and it’s having a huge impact on climate change. So, there’s some interesting new documentaries coming out. In fact, there’s this thing on Showtime that’s going to be a whole series with all these actors like Don Cheadle and Harrison Ford. But a lot of climatologists are now feeling like a hundred years from now we may not actually have a human race anymore. It seems extreme to say so, but if we experience a six centigrade rise in global temperatures, that’s it. Oceans would be dead, humans would be dead. So, I think it’s really cool, and of course what you’re doing is not specifically about climate change, but I think it’s really cool that “spiritual people” are getting more involved in the kind of thing you’re doing, which if it happens on a grander and grander scale could really be pivotal and critical in saving the planet. Or at least saving the inhabitants of the planet. The planet will be fine, but we may not be.

Prajna: Yes, what you’re saying is really true because, if you think about it, the Amazon River and our rainforests, that’s the lungs of the universe. Without the lungs of the earth, we need that. And there’s a lot of permaculture programs going on around all over the world, and they really look at it in a very holistic way. It’s like, how can we not only take care of our land, but the people? How can we create food forests? How can we recycle, reuse the water? I mean, everything, and how we are so far away from that. But when you go back to these early tribes, that’s how they’ve been doing it forever. I’m reminded of that seven generations thing that the Native Americans say, you have to consider the implication of anything you do for seven generations.

Rick: Yeah, exactly.

 Prajna: Which kind of brings us to the element of time, when you say you don’t know about the inhabitants, how they’ll be, and that’s usually the one thing that speeds up awakening, right? And our embodiment is when we remove the element of time. When there’s no time, then what becomes important to us takes our focus, comes into the focus, right?

Rick: I don’t completely understand what you’re saying. Explain that again.

Prajna: Well, if a person is in some degree of suffering or isn’t awake, or sleeping, or still wondering about the dream, then if you remove the element of time, well, we don’t know how much time we have. We don’t know. It’s a big unknown. And if you remove that element of time, imagine that that’s not here, if you can, we become very focused on what’s really important to us. It’s sort of like it narrows the plane, as far as where our attention goes. The possibility of becoming distracted into things that are peripheral to what matters start to fall away.

Rick: So you’re saying a sort of an Eckhart Tolle “Power of Now” thing here, we’re just focusing and living in the present?

Prajna: Yeah. And if we all did that…

Rick: Sure. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t consider the implications of our actions for the future.

Prajna: No, no, I’m not saying that at all. No. Only that actually, if we’re really paying attention, I think the implications could be only positive.

Rick: I’m just trying to think of this quote. It was by some Buddhist sage. He said something like, “Even though my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma is as fine as a grain of flour.”

Rick: Oh, neat. That’s what I like about you. I’ve listened to a number of your interviews and you always have these great quotes. How do you remember them?

Rick: I don’t know. I have a fairly limited repertoire as anyone who’s listened to enough of my interviews will tell you. But I’m doing this all the time and I pick up new little things here and there. I’m no Deepak Chopra in terms of being a repository of quotes, but these little things come along and they really catch my attention.

Prajna: Yeah, that’s neat.

Rick: Well, this has been great. Is there anything else you feel like we haven’t covered?

Prajna: Well, there’s a lot on my website if anybody wants to go to that. I have some recorded audio, some videos, some samples from my book are there.

Rick: Some nice photos of your family, your daughters. I enjoyed looking at those.

Prajna: Oh, good. Yeah. We have in the very back page on the vision page, there’s a little video where if anybody is interested, they could watch that. It’s like eight minutes and it shows what they looked like when they were tiny babies.

Rick: I’ll have to see that. I haven’t seen it yet. I kind of feel like I know your family now having read a lot of your book.

Prajna: I know we’re a little bit of an open book now.

Rick: Yeah, that’s great.

Prajna: So there’s that and I do private sessions. I prefer in person, but I do do Skype because I work as a body centered kind of person and I really like to be able to be with the person, but I do fine on Skype too. And I can be invited out too now that I’m teaching again. I’m going to London in September and I know a number of people there and I’m going to hopefully get some events together while I’m there.

Rick: Well, there’s a lot of people in London who watch this show, including a friend of mine who manages the forum on Batgap and a number of others. So maybe either they’ll see it and get in touch with you or I could put you in touch with them or something if you want some more contacts in London. And other parts of England for that matter. Up in Northern England there’s this lady named Mandy Salk who runs some kind of Northern England satsang thing, non-duality thing. And there’s Jeff Foster and Karen Richards and all kinds of nice people.

Prajna: And Mooji’s there, isn’t he?

Rick: A lot of the time. He has an ashram in Portugal, but he comes to London. So great.

Prajna: Great. Well, I really appreciate this opportunity.

Rick: It’s been a pleasure. So let me just, make a few wrap-up points. Your website is PrajnaLivingAwake.org.

Prajna: Yes.

Rick: Prajna is spelled P-R-A-J-N-A. And I’ll be linking to that from your page on Batgap.com. And the book will be out in a while. It’s not out yet. And people can’t pre-order. You probably have something on your website where people could get on a mailing list in order to be notified when the book comes out.

Prajna: Right.

Rick: You have something like that?

Prajna: Yeah. I do have something there. And if they get on the newsletter, then you’ll be able to get the update of when it will be published. Because right now, I have an opportunity coming up that I have to wait to see with a publisher. So we have to see if that happens or self-publishing.

Rick:  But I think this whole interview, I think, each interview serves a particular niche in a way. Some people relate more to one than the other. But there are so many people who have fairly serious challenges in life and who may be wondering whether they can live a spiritual life as they would like to when they’re being confronted by such challenges. Or might feel, as you did at one point, that they’ve kind of lost their spiritual moorings because the challenges are so overwhelming. So I think your example will be an inspiration to such people.

Prajna: Yeah. And I think, too, for parents that are at home with their kids, there’s a way of learning all of the opportunities that arise just in being with your children. And what the children bring to us, it’s just phenomenal when you open up to the possibility of it being there. That our spirituality doesn’t happen in satsang or in the temple. It happens in our life.

Rick:  Okay. So let me make some general concluding remarks. Firstly, thanks again, Prajna, for this conversation. It’s really been a pleasure. And for those who may be seeing one of these for the first time, there is a whole collection of them now, well over 200. If you go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, you will see both an alphabetical listing, a chronological listing, a category listing that’s under development. Eventually we’ll have a geographical listing so you can know where particular people are. And so there’s various ways to sort out which ones to watch. It’s going to take you a while if you want to watch all 225, but you can just watch 10 minutes, see if that particular interview grabs you or not. If it does, keep watching. There’s a place to sign up to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted. There is a Donut button. Push that button, you get free donuts right through your computer! There’s a Donate button, which I appreciate people doing if they can. BatGap is a 501(c)(3), which means a non-profit organization in the U.S. There is a link to an audio podcast, so that you can just listen to these on iTunes if you want to. And there is a discussion group that has its own section for each interview, so your interview will have its section. And sometimes there’s not too much discussion, sometimes there are hundreds of posts. So there’s that if you like. And one point is that unless you register on the site, you can’t see the discussion. It looks like there’s nothing there, but if you just click the “login” button that’s at the upper right-hand part of the page and you register, then you’ll see all the messages that people have been posting. So thank you for listening or watching. Next week I’m going to be interviewing Adam C. Hall, who actually in some ways, his story is similar to yours. He experienced very different kinds of challenges, but he also ended up going down to Peru, and he’s also doing something really significant with the environment. He’s got this thing established called Earth Keepers, and he’s used his experience as a real estate developer to take land that would otherwise be developed and plowed or clear-cut or whatever, and turn it into permanent conservancies to help to preserve it. But there’s a spiritual reason why he ended up doing this, there’s sort of an inner underlying story of a spiritual awakening that resulted in his having this motivation. So in that sense it’s similar to your story, and we’ll see what he has to say, but he sounds like an interesting guy.

Prajna: I’ll have to listen to that. And I didn’t know about the discussion forum, so that’s good to know about.

Rick: Keep an eye on that, and people might ask questions that you can answer and so on.

Prajna: Okay, sounds great. [music]