Adam Chacksfield Interview

Summary

The conversation explores non-dual awareness as an open, ever-unfolding reality that cannot be captured by beliefs or philosophies. It also examines how gentle attention, surrender, and supportive presence can help people meet emotional pain, trauma, and resistance.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can I experience reality beyond concepts and fixed beliefs?
• What does it mean to surrender and remain open to whatever is present?
• How can I work with difficult emotions, trauma, or inner resistance?
• Why is accepting not knowing important on a spiritual path?

Key takeaways

• No philosophy or mental model can fully contain the truth of direct experience.
• Openness means allowing awareness to meet experience without trying to control it.
• Gentleness helps painful feelings unfold without adding shame or inner violence.
• Awareness can reveal unexpected depth in even simple bodily sensations.
• Supportive presence can help people safely meet deeply buried trauma.
• Spiritual opening involves becoming comfortable with mystery and not knowing.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. Probably most of you watching this have watched other ones, but if any of you haven’t, if you go to BATGAP.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, you’ll see about three hundred and fifty-five of them, at this point, archived under the Past Interviews menu—archived in about four or five different ways. This program is made freely available to anyone who wants to watch it, and it’s all made possible by those who feel like supporting it to some degree financially. So, there’s a donate button on the right-hand side of the page. If you feel inspired to help support it, click that.

My guest today is Adam Chacksfield. I’ll just read his official little bio here, especially for the benefit of those who might be listening to the audio podcast and won’t have read the bio on the website.

Adam is a non-dual spiritual teacher whose retreats and private sessions are known for their transformative power and love-saturated depth. He devotedly serves the alive field of awareness as it unfolds, reveals, and liberates, rather than any fixed philosophy. Adam first turned toward spirituality and meditation after a series of profound psychedelic-assisted openings led him to experience the truth that lies beyond all philosophies. At age thirty-three, he left his career as a university professor of political theory to devote his life to spiritual unfolding.

For a few years, Adam struggled to try to piece together all the apparently contradictory teachings and practices. These efforts decisively fell away when he came across the non-dual teaching of Peter Fenner and realized the openness that can never be captured in words and requires no practice.

Adam started inviting his friends to do non-dual inquiry with him and was amazed by the ease with which the direct experience of openness could be shared. In 2010, with Peter Fenner’s encouragement and support, Adam started to publicly share with groups and individuals. Since then, his teaching has been profoundly influenced by the opportunity to soak in Jeannie Zandi’s heart-centered and full-bodied transmission.

Adam now shares the direct experience of the heart and mind falling open. In this effortless opening, the suffering involved in resisting feelings and believing thoughts spontaneously releases. The natural abundance of joy, peace, wisdom, and love becomes apparent and available. Heart-centered, gentle, and direct, Adam offers a path straight into the truth of who we are.

In addition to leading retreats in North America and Europe, Adam meets with individuals and is the creator of Falling Open, a four-month online course. He’s also the founder of the Center for Non-Dual Awareness, a supportive community for those called to share non-duality.

So, welcome, Adam. Thanks for doing this.

Adam: Lovely to be here, Rick.

From political philosophy to openness

Rick: Yeah. So, you were over in—you’re from Britain originally, but then you’ve been in the States for quite a while. You were teaching political philosophy in Macomb, Illinois, of all places?

Adam: Yeah, Western Illinois University.

Rick: I guess you wanted to be near the birthplace of Ronald Reagan, right? That’s why you established yourself there?

Adam: I always thought he was Californian, but…

Rick: Well, he was born a couple of hours north of where you were teaching. And actually, you were not too far from where I live. Did you ever come through Fairfield? You say you went to Des Moines. You must have driven right through Fairfield on your way to Des Moines?

Adam: Yeah, yeah. I visited the coffee shop in Fairfield a few times.

Rick: Okay, Cafe Paradiso or Revelations? It might have been Revelations.

Adam: Revelations, that’s right, yeah.

Rick: There’s two of them competing. Okay, and now you live in the Bay Area, right?

Adam: Yeah, just north of Berkeley.

Rick: Okay, good. So, I don’t know as much about you as I often know about people I interview because you haven’t written a book and you don’t have too many videos, but we’ll just kind of wing this, and I’m sure we’ll get into all kinds of interesting stuff. But you come highly recommended—Pam, Pamela Wilson, likes you, so you can’t be all bad. I have a lot of respect for her.

So, let’s do the old chronological bit for a few minutes before we get into the substance of what you teach. You were teaching political philosophy. How did you end up in that?

Adam: Yeah, I just became fascinated by politics and philosophy and ideas as a teenager. I would debate with people, loved to argue, loved to figure stuff out. And, yes, I ended up going to grad school in political science, studying political theory and public policy, and was really passionate about figuring out what the truth was. I really wanted to work it all out, and I…

Rick: Are you still interested in politics?

Adam: Not so much, no. It’s really dropped away. Yeah, I paid a little attention this year, but it’s not like it used to be at all.

Rick: Do you still like to debate people, maybe on spiritual topics instead of politics? Or has that tendency fallen off, too?

Adam: Yeah, that really has fallen away. I can be in the midst of an argument, with people arguing around me, and just not be interested in getting involved.

Rick: Interesting. I’d say that that probably has something to do with this openness word, which we’ll be talking about more. It’s hard to be vehement about a fixed position if you’re in openness.

Adam: Yeah, exactly. It’s this way that any fixed position is missing part of the whole. It’s advancing a particular posture and highlighting something, but it misses the rest. So, it’s hard to invest in those now.

Rick: Yep. I’m sure everybody’s heard the blind man and the elephant metaphor—you know, the blind men arguing over what an elephant is like. One’s feeling the trunk, one the leg, and one’s feeling the side. They all have completely different impressions of it, but obviously none of them has the whole elephant.

Adam: Yeah, and it got to a point in my academic career where I was like, wow, I’m really sincere and smart, and there are all these super-sincere and smart people, and we’re all arguing. We all think we’re right. We’ve all got our lovely, sophisticated theories and our arguments against everybody else’s sophisticated theories, and it’s like, what’s going on here? Why do I believe that I’m right and the other people are wrong? It’s like everyone’s missing something. Every philosophy is inadequate.

It’s really vulnerable for us to just admit we don’t know.

Rick: You know what I find interesting? You can have a political preference, or a preference for any number of things, and yet, at the same time, not be fanatical about it and realize that it’s natural for different people to have different preferences. So, you kind of grant others the liberty to have their own preferences, even though they differ from yours.

Eileen just said, “Except for Trump!” All right, yeah.

Adam: And there’s a way in which, now, we can sort of feel where people are coming from—the way that their heart is obscured, you know, the way that people cling to a position to protect themselves or to try to convince themselves they know what the right answer is or what the truth is. We can sort of feel how that’s unfolding through people.

Rick: Yeah, you know, I’ve often thought of this in terms of the little petty wars that people get into on the internet, where they start bickering over this or that position. I don’t know, it’s kind of like, in a way, people are trying to fortify their egos, or buttress their egos. There’s an insecurity that they’re reacting against and trying to protect against by being so vehement about a particular position. You know what I mean?

Adam: Yeah. I mean, it’s really vulnerable for us to just admit we don’t know. To just be innocently present to what’s here and not be claiming that we know what’s going on, that we hold the answer in the mind—that we can be the one who knows. To really admit that that’s not the case, that we can never grasp the truth with the mind—there’s a real vulnerability in that, in “I don’t know.”

Rick: Yeah, I was exchanging emails yesterday with a fellow named Lorne Hoff, whom I’ve taken a retreat with. He’s a very interesting spiritual teacher. He hasn’t wanted to be interviewed so far because he’s got enough attention as it is. I just gave him more. But he was saying—I kind of realized, at a certain point, that I was wrong about everything.

And I said, “What do you mean, you’re wrong about everything?”

He said, “Well, it’s just that I had all this knowledge, but when I actually had the experience to which that knowledge pertained, I realized that my concepts”—and I’m saying this a little differently—“bore no resemblance to the realities that they were meant to represent.” You know what I mean?

Adam: Yeah, totally. It is so surprising when we open to what’s here. I’m constantly surprised. When I sit and just allow myself to open, it’s like, wow! What’s going on? What’s actually here? It bears no resemblance to anything we say about it, or to any of the mental models we hold.

It’s almost like we’re doing poetry. At most, we’re invoking or pointing to what’s here, but what’s actually here is just so subtle, so rich, so different from any way of symbolizing what’s here.

Rick: Yeah, that’s beautiful. Incidentally, I just want to interject for those who are watching the livestream: there is a question form at the bottom of the page of the Upcoming Interviews page, which is under the Upcoming Interviews menu. Or maybe it’s called Future Interviews. So, if you want to post a question to Adam while we’re doing this interview, you can find the form there. Just scroll down to the bottom of the page.

Psychedelic openings and the end of certainty

All right, well, this is going well so far. We’re just meandering here, but Falling Open—I want to get into that more. You mentioned that you had a very profound psychedelic experience, or several of them. The truth that lies beyond all philosophies—are those worth mentioning in any detail? I mean, a lot of people have had those sorts of things, but what was it like for you?

Adam: Yeah, I mean, the first psychedelic experience I had was very much the revelation that you were talking about, Lorne Hoff, pointing to.

Rick: Lorne Hoff. L-O-R-N-E, Lorne.

Adam: Oh, yeah, sorry, Lorne Hoff. Yeah, just this—wow. I spent all this time investing in my philosophies, my precious beliefs and ideas, thinking, “I’m so sophisticated.” And I realized I can’t affirm a single one! I can’t find any starting point for knowing anything!

It’s like there are just so many—what is this? There’s no starting point, no reference point! It’s like we have to make up a reference point. There’s so much here besides the thoughts, the beliefs, and the constant attending to living inside a story and living inside my beliefs. It’s like 99.9 percent of reality, which isn’t a symbol, was being completely missed. Wow—it’s like there’s so much here. It’s so alive!

Rick: When you came off the psychedelics, did you find that your reference point and your certainties were kind of reassembling? Or were you never able to quite put them back together? Was it like Humpty Dumpty, and you could never quite put him back together again?

Adam: Yeah, it was fascinating. I was like, “Wow! Something really big and profound and important happened there.” It was a visceral experience of deconstructionism. It was the end of philosophy, meeting reality that’s not symbolized.

But I found that the mind wanted to come up with a story, an explanation of what that was. Then, the next time I took a psychedelic, I was like, “Wow—this is not at all what I thought it was!”

Rick: Yeah, it’s quite similar to the experience of meditating, as well. When I first started meditating, I would be trying to figure out what meditation was. I would have some explanation of what meditation was, and then, when I’d open to what was true, it was like, “Wow, it’s nothing like I think it is!”

It’s totally different. So, just to do that again and again in meditation—continually undercutting any sort of storyline for what reality is, what I am, or what meditation is.

Adam: Yeah.

Rick: Do you find now, having been on the spiritual path for quite a while, that you’ve been able to settle into a clear understanding of what reality is that coincides with your experience? Or, instead, have you just gotten comfortable with the mystery—with living in a condition of not knowing and not needing to know?

Adam: Yeah, you said it perfectly—the second one. It’s so surprising. I’m constantly surprised by the way I imagine things will be, how I imagined them to be, and then reality is just constantly surprising. Reality is so surprising!

Rick: So mysterious—how everything unfolds.

When you say “reality,” I know words are always going to be inadequate, but presumably you’re talking about experiences that you’re having—experiential unfoldings. What sort of unfoldings are these? And I presume they’re continuing? Is it possible to do them justice at all with words, or at least give a flavor, taste, or aroma of what it is you’re undergoing?

Adam: Yeah, it’s the way that we can let awareness into our experience. When we let awareness into our experience, we just open. It’s almost like a kind of prayer: “Let me know the truth,” or, “Let me feel what’s here. Let me know this. Let this be revealed.” There’s this sort of intention of opening.

Rick: And would the word “surrender” do it for you?

Adam: Sure, yeah. Surrender is definitely a big component of that. It’s just dropping any need to be right, or good, or to know what’s here. Intellectually dropping our opinions and our positions, just letting ourselves feel what’s here.

As awareness touches something, it opens. The mind has impressions of what’s there and thinks it knows what’s there, but as awareness touches it, it feels like everything just opens up.

Rick: And keeps opening, and keeps opening, and keeps opening! In other words, some people use the phrase “free fall forever.”

Adam: Yeah, it’s awesome! I mean, I’m awed by it. I’m so grateful for the revelations that are revealed.

It’s simple stuff. If we go into a feeling in the body—a feeling in the heart, or a feeling in the leg or feet, or whatever—we imagine we know what’s there. We think it’s tightness, but as awareness starts touching it, if we drop our agenda toward it and just let it be as it is, we know it so much more intimately. It’s like—hmm.

✨ Awareness, surrender, and the body

Rick: There’s another sense in which I think this relates to what you’re saying about not really appreciating or knowing what this is that we’re living in and interacting with. I saw a YouTube video the other day about the size of the universe.

They were saying that there are more stars in the known universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world, and that there are more atoms in a single grain of sand than there are stars in the known universe.

If you think about that—a single grain of sand, with all those atoms, trillions and trillions of them—each one of those atoms is functioning perfectly, as atoms should function, with all of its subatomic particles and its relationship with all the other atoms in that grain of sand. There’s this perfectly orderly thing existing in complete accordance with laws of nature that we only partially understand.

Then there are these trillions of grains of sand and trillions of planets and stars. I often use this as a contemplative device: to contemplate the wonder of creation and the fact that what we’re actually witnessing, usually unwittingly, is a display of intelligence so vast that we can’t possibly fathom or comprehend it. It’s just mind-boggling! Do you ever play with those sorts of ideas?

Adam: Yeah. When we open as wide and as vast as we can, it’s like, where’s the edge? Where’s the edge of what we are or what we’re in touch with? We can’t find an edge.

Just as when we go in and say, “Okay, what’s there? What’s that point of tightness there? What is that?” it just opens up. There’s a whole universe in apparently nondescript feelings in the body.

So, yeah, I totally get what you’re talking about. It’s the direct experience of that. Whether we open to the vastness or go deep into something, it just keeps opening in either direction.

Rick: There’s a Sanskrit saying: anor aniyān mahāto mahīyān, which means “smaller than the smallest, greater than the greatest.” In either direction you go, there it is.

I think a lot of people, when they hear about openness—letting down your guard, relaxing into the vastness, and those kinds of phrases—feel enticed by that. They think, “That sounds great,” but then they feel there’s a kind of grip. They feel there’s some bondage or some constraint that prevents them from fully opening, even if they want to. How do you address that concern?

Adam: It’s about making so much space for that experience, meeting that experience without any agenda, with so much gentleness.

So often, we meet experiences—we feel things—and we’re just like, “That shouldn’t be here! This should not be here.” We see that our heart is closed and think, “That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. I’m not evolved. What’s wrong?”

When we look at what’s here and explore what’s here, we’re subtly trying to do violence to our experience. We’re trying to change it.

Sometimes I’ll hear people say, “I’m trying to be with it,” or, “I’m trying to accept it.” You can hear how there’s a sense of, “I know it shouldn’t be here.”

Rick: Yeah. It’s like rejecting what is.

Adam: Yeah, and it’s not just a belief that this shouldn’t be here. It’s so deeply entrenched in the body. It’s this sort of rejection of our experience: “I know there’s something bad in here. There’s something wrong in here. There’s something wrong with me.”

When we meet that place, it’s about softening and being as gentle as we can. It’s just letting awareness touch it as it is, without any violence or any movement to change it.

Holding space for trauma

Rick: Let’s keep digging into this. To take a more extreme example, let’s say someone has been abused or traumatized in some way, or has PTSD from being a soldier or something like that. That means there are a lot of stored impressions, pent-up stress, pain, or hurt.

A lot of times, people with those kinds of problems try to escape it or blot it out with drugs or alcohol, or they act it out through violent behavior and so on. That’s an extreme example, but everybody has some degree of this.

How do you defuse that? You’re talking about gentleness and acceptance, but practically speaking, a person listening to this—somewhere on that scale from severe PTSD to normal human hang-ups—how do they begin, on a daily basis, to unwind, release, and free themselves from that kind of load?

Adam: It can be very helpful, especially if we have severe trauma, to have people hold space for us.

Rick: What does that mean?

Adam: Somebody who’s able to maintain that sort of representation of awareness—someone who’s resting in awareness, in loving awareness. The connection that we have with the person who’s holding space with us can act as an anchor and return us to this benign nature of awareness as we go into difficult places.

Rick: So, just to make sure that’s clear: say someone like yourself, or Pamela Wilson, or one of the hundreds of spiritual teachers out there, sits with somebody like that and provides a ground of being in which the person feels comfortable enough to relax more—something like that?

Adam: Yeah, I mean, when we’re exploring, we’re letting awareness meet what’s here. That’s ultimately what’s happening. We’re just allowing loving awareness—the field that is—to touch these places that we’ve learned to stay out of, that we felt we couldn’t meet or feel.

We’re letting those places that we’ve buried, that we’ve contracted and contorted around, be here and be felt. When we do this, it’s very easy to notice shame come in. We can notice this sort of agenda of violence to get rid of what’s here, to push it away, to change it.

It’s easy for us to lose that groundedness in the field, to lose contact with awareness itself. That’s the role of a space holder. A space holder can help us connect with that space. Ultimately, nothing is really necessary; awareness is doing it all.

I’m just saying that, in some extreme cases where people have very deep trauma—space holding can be helpful regardless—for some people, it may not be possible to go there themselves. They may need support.

Rick: Yeah, and they may just need the opportunity. Their life might be a rat race otherwise, and they need to get away and sit in a quiet place with somebody and settle in.

Are you suggesting that when they begin to do that, it might initially increase the discomfort because they’re beginning to encounter something that was repressed? They might, without the reassurance and presence of a space holder, as you put it, recoil from that increased discomfort, chicken out, and get back to distracting themselves somehow.

Adam: Yeah. When we open, we’re going to meet those places, just as you said. What about the people who say they feel a grip, or they feel closed down? We’re inviting awareness to meet those places that we have turned away from. We’ve said, “This part of reality just shouldn’t be here. This part of my experience shouldn’t be here.”

There can be habits of just turning away from that: “I’m just going to keep my life small and keep my experiences as minimal as possible because I don’t want to run into this. I’m going to keep myself numb so I don’t have to feel the stuff that I’m feeling.”

When we sit with this intention of opening to what’s here, it’s very normal for difficult things to come up. Even if we haven’t had terrible things happen to us, just normal developmental experiences that we have as human beings will typically bring very uncomfortable feelings up.

These places just want to be met. “Can I be here? Can I be here?” These are the places that were damned, that were cursed, that were told to go away.

Rick: So, you probably meet with people maybe once a week or once a month or something like that? Do you get them on a routine where they can learn to do this on their own when they’re not meeting with you, and continue to dissolve and neutralize this stuff?

Adam: Yeah, I find that it’s kind of like an orientation in the world. Once we experience, “Wow, actually, we can meet this stuff,” we experience this sort of miracle of what awareness does when it touches these difficult places.

When we’re able to just be there and witness the feelings without trying to shut them down or get away from them, we start realizing what’s possible and how we can open and be here as we are.

People find that this happens in their lives. It just opens more and more space in their lives, and there can be all kinds of practices to support that. In fact, pretty much every spiritual practice is supportive of that.

For spiritual practice, I think it’s really important for people to be attuned to what’s nourishing them. Rather than saying, “This is the true spiritual practice and everyone’s to do this,” it’s about really noticing what allows them to open, what feels right, because there’s a signature of that opening, a sort of turn to the truth.

Rick: Yeah, so you find what works for you.

Adam: Yeah.

Rick: Sure. Some people love going to kirtan, singing, and they feel a great deal of openness in singing and dancing. That’s a big release for them. Other people like to sit and just meditate quietly.

We could list a whole bunch of things. Some people like to do a whole potpourri of those—a toolkit full of different things.

Adam: Yeah, I think it’s really good to appreciate how there’s no true practice. That’s one of those nondual sayings, right? There’s no practice needed.

Given that there’s no true practice, we’re not looking for the true practice. It’s about really being engaged with what’s real. Even when we say, “I am going to meditate,” when we sit, what happens? It’s different every time; it’s a unique unfolding.

It’s about being alive to what’s really happening, what’s really going on in our practice, and being there for it. There’s no mechanical solution that will get us there. If I run this particular practice or say these magic words, that won’t get me there. It’s the quality of the presence we bring to our practice, the aliveness.

Rick: I think that’s a good point. You alluded to something like this earlier, but basically, if a person has a spiritual practice—let’s say they sit and meditate—and sometimes they have really nice experiences, if those nice experiences cause them to begin to try for those experiences again, rather than just being innocent with what’s happening the next time, then a habit of manipulation can grow.

One can get more and more caught up in that and get very frustrated. It’s quite the opposite of this sort of falling into openness that you advocate.

Adam: Yeah, it’s like, what’s really here? This is another part of it: there’s no true practice and there’s no true experience. There’s no right experience that we should be having. The right experience is the one that’s going on right now.

Rick: Yeah.

Adam: It’s about really opening to what’s true, what’s really here.

Rick: I think an underlying principle of this also is that, if our practice is really natural, then we’re not doing it. It’s not our effort that’s making something happen. It’s more like a cooperation with nature.

Nature knows best how to handle it. If we just get out of the way and let nature handle it, then different things will happen at different times, but it will be optimally effective.

Adam: Yeah, that’s beautiful. It’s the sense of effortlessness, the effortlessness of opening. We’re not forcing anything to open.

Rick: Yeah.

Adam: We just let awareness do what it does. We let it touch us, let it move us, let it open things. It’s not on a timetable.

People can feel like, “It’s not moving, it’s not moving.” It’s just that we get to sit in whatever the truth is for as long as it wants to be here.

Rick: Yeah.

Adam: It’s complete surrender. There’s no place to get to anyway.

Rick: Let me take the example of a rose. We’re watching it: “It’s not blooming, it’s not blooming. Maybe if I pull this little part off here and kind of pull that open…” Nope, we killed it.

You have to just let it bloom in its own time. Maybe you can provide some nourishment or some fertilizer that will facilitate the process, but it’s not going to bloom any faster by manipulating it from the outside. You could use other examples, like a chick hatching or whatever.

Adam: Yeah, and again, we can become really attuned to that as well. One of the questions we can ask when we’re doing a practice is, “Where’s the effort? Am I trying to do something?” It’s about allowing that to relax.

Again, we’re not even doing violence to that, because we can think, “I’ve got to try not to try.” But we just notice, “Oh, I’m really struggling. I’m really trying to make something…”

Rick: Are you there? Hey, can you hear me? I can’t. Yeah, we had a little hiccup there in the Internet, but you made the point. That was good.

I used to be a TM teacher, and one of the principles of it was that the mind has a natural tendency to seek a field of greater happiness. If we just allow that tendency to have its way, then the mind will naturally settle down, and awareness will expand and so on. But any inception of individual effort, control, or manipulation will only interfere with that.

Adam: Yeah, I think that’s really it. We’re trying to control something. We’re being invited to open to the mystery, to open to the great unfolding that’s happening.

There’s such a vulnerability in that, and we have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s so easy for us to want to say, “I just need it to be this way,” or, “I just need it to be that way.” Then we try to bring effort, control, and manipulation. A whole cycle of suffering starts.

We just get what we’re given. We get the experiences that we’re given. The universe is providing us with all these different experiences, the whole experience of life, and we get to be here for it. We get to open to it.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a good point. I think it bears repeating from various angles, and I don’t think you’re advocating passivity or lackadaisicalness or anything like that.

One can be quite ardent in one’s desire for deeper truth and so on, but that ardency has to be counterbalanced with an innocence or an effortlessness. I think that’s what you’re saying, right?

Adam: Yeah, there’s sort of a paradox in there. There’s this sense that there’s nothing we need to do. That could be a really good reminder. We’re involved in trying to get somewhere and trying to achieve something, but there’s nothing we need to do. We don’t need to be anything. We don’t need to become anything.

We get to be here as we are. At the same time, when we arrive here, when we’re at ease with just being as we are, just being here, there’s the call of the heart, in a way. Our devotion to what we love—the heart wants to be here, wants to express itself, wants to love.

Capacity, sensitivity, and the layers of experience

Rick: Hmm, you were talking a few minutes ago about bringing awareness to this, and that it might be noticed in the body, or in whatever feelings and things arise. It seems like people have different capacities of awareness to bring. Some people might be like a little cup, and others are like a big bucket, and others like a lake, and others like an ocean.

If you had some mud to dissolve, you’re going to get different results whether you try to dissolve it in a little cup, in the bucket, in the lake, or in the ocean, in terms of how polluted the water seems to get when you dump the mud in there. I don’t know whether this analogy is breaking down, but some people may not feel they have the capacity to deal with the volume of mud that they seem to be encountering, or are afraid they’re going to encounter, and so on.

Somehow, there has to be this balance between encountering that stuff and increasing one’s capacity. I imagine the more we encounter and resolve, the more the capacity expands, and therefore the more we can encounter and dissolve. But would you like to comment on that?

Adam: Yeah, it’s beautiful, pointing to capacity, and that fear that we don’t have the capacity. In a way, that’s sort of the basis of the grip that you were talking about earlier. The way that we can say, “Oh, I don’t want to fall open.” We sort of doubt our capacity to be here, our capacity to feel everything that’s here to be felt.

In a way, we’re doubting the capacity of our hearts. As we open, we discover the true capacity of our hearts. It’s like, “Wow, all of this gets to be met. We can actually be here for the whole experience.”

Rick: Yeah, I imagine one could encourage a person by saying, “I realize you’ve been through a lot and you’ve experienced a lot of trauma, and so on, but trust me, if you begin this process, then your ability to be comfortable with it and to get more and more grounded in openness will grow. It’s just a matter of taking the first step.”

There’s a verse in the Bhagavad Gita which says something like, “Even a little of this practice removes great fear.”

Adam: Mm-hmm. Yeah. When people sit for the first time, sometimes discomfort immediately comes up, and it’s like, “I’m doing it wrong. I can’t do this. I’m out of here!”

So, to notice how much we want to turn away from difficult things. In a way, why are we not just innocently here all the time, fully present and open? Well, it’s because stuff comes up that we don’t want to feel, and we find a way to exit.

Starting to notice how we exit is important. It might be leaving the meditation room, but it can also be much more subtle than that. How do we distract ourselves and numb ourselves? What do we do when something painful is being felt?

Rick: Yeah.

Adam: Often, we’ll notice that we’re actually running. For many of us, our lives are one big sort of run away from what we’re feeling. Just stay as busy as possible, stay in the mind, keep recycling the same stories, reassuring ourselves that we know what’s going on.

Rick: It’s like George Bush said after 9/11: “Go shopping!”

Did you yourself spend a lot of time in meditation practice? And do you still?

Adam: Yeah. I was very devoted to meditation for many years. Now it’s a little different for me. The work I’m doing is sort of meditation. That’s one of the beautiful things about doing the work I’m doing: I get to be open space for people.

My own practices—I still very much sit down and open to what’s going on, and explore what’s here. I also do a lot of movement, just letting the body move how it wants to move. Authentic movement would be the closest word for it.

It’s really just letting the body do what it wants to do, dropping any agenda about what posture, position, stretches, or anything else there should be, and just letting the body unfold how it wants to unfold.

Rick: Yeah.

Adam: There’s such a wisdom in the body, knowing how to move energies and meet things.

Rick: So, do you advocate to people whom you meet with that they try to establish some sort of practice, where they go into a room, shut the door, and sit for 20 minutes twice a day, or some such thing? Do you get them into that kind of routine, if possible?

Adam: I’m not a big advocate of pushing practice.

Rick: Not pushing, but do you encourage them? Do you say that this might be valuable if they could get into the habit of spending quiet time, closing their eyes, and feeling whatever it is that they feel?

Adam: Yeah. I’m very hesitant to—I often won’t really talk about my personal practices, because they change anyway.

Rick: Yeah.

Adam: It feels very specific to what’s alive for me now, what’s helpful for me, and where the juice and nourishment are. I’m mining that particular area right now.

It’s very personal, it seems to me, how people relate to practice and what’s going on for them when they practice. People can sit and meditate, and all they’re doing is attacking themselves: “I shouldn’t be having this. I can’t get where I’m going.” They’re calling it meditation, but of course…

Rick: Well, you’d want to talk them through that.

Adam: Yeah, but it feels really important that people are drawn to practice by their love of the truth.

Rick: Yeah. In other words, they should be self-motivated. They shouldn’t feel obligated or pressured or anything like that. They should just feel inspired themselves.

Adam: Yeah, because practice can really have a dark side to it. It can become, “I should always be practicing more. I should be practicing more. I’m not doing it properly. If I were doing it better or doing it more, I’d get better.”

All this inadequacy, all this stuff that shouldn’t be here, would be clear if I were just doing the proper practice. So, really, awareness is what liberates. Awareness does it all. It’s about people being alive, however they’re showing up, and alive to what’s going on in their lives.

Rick: Yeah.

Adam: They’re really present for it.

Rick: I was listening to an interview with a guy the other day, and he was saying that a good litmus test for any practice is whether you actually enjoy it. If you don’t enjoy it and don’t feel like doing it, you’re probably not going to keep doing it. You’re probably going to create strain if you force yourself to keep doing it. That might be a way of evaluating how effective a practice is for you.

Adam: Yeah. Is it in alignment with what’s true? We can trust our own movement, in a way. What’s nourishing us has a signature to it; it feels right.

Often, people can end up doing spiritual practice because they believe it’s the right thing to do, even though it’s not actually nourishing them.

Rick: The dog is sneezing here. Yeah, say that again. I was laughing at the dog. Repeat what you just said; that was good.

Adam: We can really trust ourselves to know what nourishes us, to notice what the experience with our practices is. We don’t need to be captivated by a belief system about this being the true practice, or this being the right practice, or that we should be practicing more.

It’s about really noticing what’s yummy, what feels good, and what’s nourishing to us—not in a facile way. When awareness touches even the painful stuff, there’s such gratitude just for meeting it. It’s like, “Wow, I get to actually feel this. I get to actually be present for this.” There’s a sort of rightness to it, even if it’s not pleasurable.

There’s a way in which we love the truth, so it has a signature energetically. It’s just like, “Yes, this is the right thing to be here for.”

Rick: Yeah.

Adam: It’s energetically just, “Yes, this is the right thing to be here for.”

Rick: Do you find, in your own experience or in working with people, that initially there’s quite a load to deal with when you start “letting awareness touch the painful stuff,” to use your phrase, but that at a certain point you seem to work through the bulk of it, and then it’s downhill from there?

By downhill, I mean in a good sense: you’re just working off the remnants, but you’ve dealt with the lion’s share of it. Otherwise, if that weren’t the case, there might be the prospect of a lifetime of dealing with heavy stuff, which could be a little discouraging.

Adam: Yeah.

Rick: Maybe it varies tremendously from one person to the next.

Adam: The way I might characterize it is that it feels like there are layers. There are sort of gross layers, like, “I feel such out-of-control anger or grief,” or whatever it is. We start to meet that, and then new layers show up.

It feels like there are more and more subtle layers: “Oh, I notice there’s a kind of holding back from reality.” We start to feel subtle energetic ways in which we distance ourselves, ways in which we’re not willing to be fully present to our experience.

Certainly, some slight forms of suffering drop away, in my experience, and more subtle sensitivity shows up. But it doesn’t feel like, “Oh, now I’m free from pain.” In a way, we’re actually sensitizing ourselves, so we can feel everything at a deeper level.

It’s not that we’re going to ascend out of this realm of pain and pleasure, or stop feeling deeply or feeling heartbroken. It’s more that we realize the capacity for a broken heart when the heart is open.

It’s more that we realize the capacity for a broken heart when the heart is open.

Rick: That’s beautifully put. I think you are—you’re still there? Okay, I was afraid your internet froze up, but you’re just standing still.

I love that. The whole thing of clearing away the gross and then working your way toward subtler and subtler levels of it, I think, is very apt and wise. It’s not like you’re ever going to get to a point where you don’t feel things anymore because you’ve worked through everything. In fact, you might feel things even more acutely.

Adam: It’s not like this is the program we must be on. It’s more like coming from this place of: there’s nothing we need to do. We just let our hearts unfold. We’re called to this by the heart. The heart wants to feel what’s here, wants to be alive. We want to feel all the energy of life.

So it’s not that, “Oh, my God, I’ve got to clear out all this junk,” and it goes on forever. It’s not endless work.

Rick: Yeah.

Adam: It’s just the movement of love, the movement of our hearts.

Rick: Yeah, nice. It’s sort of the natural tendency of life, in a way, to evolve, if you want to use that word. I think, personally, it’s the deepest desire of any human being.

Adam: Yeah, it’s the deepest truth of our heart. So I think it’s really good to trust our own hearts, to trust the natural movement. Because we can easily, when we hear something like somebody’s story, or my description of falling open, say, “Oh, I’m supposed to be doing that. What’s wrong with my heart?”

There are so many seasons to the spiritual path. There can be seasons where we just hang out in bliss, or there can be seasons where we—there are all kinds of seasons. It’s about listening to where our hearts are called, moment to moment. We’re not trying to force ourselves into some spiritually evolved box, enlightenment box, or awakened box.

It’s about really trusting our own unfolding. There are different flavors. I mean, your show is a beautiful example of that. There are all these hundreds of people involved in opening, and they’re all opening in different ways, with very different flavors.

Rick: Yeah. I thought of a metaphor for that the other day. No two raindrops reach the ocean by the same path. All the billions of raindrops that fall might have some similarities—they may all go down a river or a stream—but when you look at it, every single one of them is unique, to some extent, often to a great extent, in terms of how they reach the ocean.

Adam: Yeah, that’s so beautiful. For people listening, I really want them to know that the truth is within you. It’s your opening to the truth that wants to unfold through you. You don’t have to follow somebody else’s story or somebody else’s guidelines. It’s about really listening.

Even if you’re putting yourself in the field of a teacher or something, you’re listening to your experience with that, because your heart is nourished by that experience, not because you need to become like them.

Rick: Yeah, that’s important. I like people to tell their stories when I interview them because a lot of times people feel, “Hey, I can relate to that. I did that. I’m a bozo like that guy,” or whatever. But it’s also important, in the same breath, to emphasize that it’s never going to be the same for you as it was for anybody else.

Each one is unique, and I think BATGAP illustrates that in a way, because every week you see a different flavor. Everyone is different. There might be some similarities, but hopefully it drives home the point to people that their own path is as legitimate and as valid as that of any of the people I interview.

We’re just hopefully demonstrating that ordinary people, of every description, can arrive at realization, deeper truth, or whatever we want to call it.

Adam: Yeah, awareness is here. It’s what we’re made of; it’s what reality is made of. That’s why I love the term “falling open,” because it’s all we have. There’s an abiding invitation of reality: “Come here. Be here. You’re welcome here.”

It’s like a whisper. We’re so busy running around, trying to avoid what we don’t want to feel. We turn away from that; we don’t listen. We’re just being called here. Our hearts are calling us here.

Rick: Yeah, it’s like diving. You just get up on the board, take the correct angle, let go, and gravity does the rest.

Adam: Yeah.

Rick: I just want to throw something in before we move on. There are some nice questions that have come in. I interviewed Richard Miller a few weeks ago. He’s a psychologist who teaches Yoga Nidra, and he happened to mention something I didn’t know. He said that the Buddha was said to have been doing some sort of spiritual practice all his life, even after his enlightenment, and to have actually been processing things that came up—sort of, as you would put it, bringing awareness to various things that needed attention.

This went on all his life. I’ve made a new friend in the last week or so named Michael Rodriguez, whom I’ll be interviewing eventually. He’s written this whole thing about post-realization sadhana, which I find fascinating.

If people think that they’re going to have some kind of realization, that it’s going to be the final thing, and that they’ll be done—that there will be no further refinement, clarification, or resolution of things—they might be in for a surprise.

Adam: Yeah. A lot of this is the movement away from life, the attempt to find some fixed position, some fixed experience. We can often imagine, “Oh, awakening or enlightenment is the end of my problem,” the problem of me, the problem of life.

Actually, we’re being called to be fully alive, to be here more, to be in the flow of this unfolding. We’re not supposed to arrive at a fixed destination or a fixed point. We’re called to open to this space that’s not fixed, that’s constantly flowing through us.

Shame, guilt, and the end of violence

Rick: Yeah, nice. All right, let me ask you a few questions that have come in. This is a little bit of a long one, but I think it’s pretty good. This is from Margaret in San Francisco, and she asks:

“Dear Adam, could you please reflect on a major human challenge I’m facing, pertinent to both personal and massive global issues, in whatever way clarity moves through you? I’m deeply struggling with the fact that much of my daily human existence depends on infrastructures that are deeply destructive to the natural environment, as well as contributing regularly to governmental decisions to wage war and murder innocent people to secure lands with oil. For instance, to maintain our consumeristic economy, et cetera. “My inner response is clear and comes from love: a sense of clear urgency to take steps I can to adjust my life choices to more sustainable ones, as well as an urgency to be as awake as possible, so life can move through me in whatever healing, balancing ways she deems best. “At the same time, I have a major murky pain-body response: guilt, shame, and self-loathing, both at all the ways I did not feel capable of changing my life or being an activist in the world, as well as shame at how unawakened I remain, despite seeing through the mind illusion repeatedly. I still live in what feels like a constant haze of mind addiction and mind decisions much of the time.”

That looks like a separate question. Go ahead and answer that one.

Adam: Yes. Shame feels, in a way, like the antithesis of openness. In many, perhaps most, cases, I feel like that’s the block in the door. It’s this belief: “There’s really something bad here. There’s something wrong inside me. There’s stuff that’s here that just shouldn’t be here.”

Again, I don’t want to make it seem simple, like you can just believe something different. It’s so much in the body. It’s like a rejection of this. It’s probably been mirrored to us when we were younger by caregivers. It’s a really visceral sense of, “This should not be here. This is so obviously wrong.”

We can’t be tender enough with these places that have been so harshly treated, so abandoned. We need to let ourselves feel the whole truth of our experience, and feel the pain that lives there—the pain of the shame and the pain that lives behind it as well.

Rick: Well, yeah. I would also say to her that we live in a world in which many things are not ideal: the ways we get energy, the ways we get food, and all kinds of things like that.

We can do a certain amount within our own lives to try to live in a more enlightened, more sustainable way, but it’s always going to be less than ideal at this stage of the game. Don’t beat yourself up too badly over it. Just do what you can.

I heard a beautiful saying this morning. I forget exactly how it’s worded, but everyone knows the principle: if you want to change the world, change yourself.

I think it might have been Gandhi, or somebody, who said, “It’s easier to wear shoes than it is to pave the earth in leather.” That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do what we can to change the world, but I think our greatest leverage is self-transformation, in whatever way we understand that.

By really transforming in a significant way, we’re making a tremendous contribution to a better world.

Adam: Yeah. This shame that the questioner is talking about—that’s the violence. It’s the belief that, “I shouldn’t be the way that I am,” that there’s something wrong with me, that needs correcting, forcing, or getting rid of.

That’s manifest in the world. It’s that violence: “We need to get rid of the bad people. We need to get rid of the bad things.” We’re bringing that energy of violence to everything.

So it’s about softening, feeling, and becoming sensitive to what the truth of our experience is, letting it all be as it is.

Rick: Yeah.

Adam: That’s how the cycle of violence comes to an end: when we meet the truth of it.

Rick: I was listening to an interview this morning. It was actually a panel discussion from the Science and Non-Duality Conference with Peter Russell, Elisabeth Sahtouris, Drew Dellinger, and another guy. One of the participants or panelists was saying—or maybe it was an audience member asking the question—that there are certain things which psychologists say are just unhealable through any kind of psychological method. Pedophilia, for instance. They were saying that if you’re a pedophile, you just don’t get over it through anything that psychology has to offer.

Do you feel that through your approach, or some approach of a spiritual nature, someone with really incorrigible behavior of some sort can actually be freed from it? Can a real scoundrel, doing terrible things, actually rise beyond the possibility of behaving that way anymore?

Adam: Yeah. I don’t see any point in holding the opposing viewpoint, the belief that, “It has to be this way. I’m always going to be this way.” In a way, that’s a sort of hopelessness about ourselves: “This is just how I am. I’m always going to do these messed-up things. I’m always going to turn away from my experience. I’m always going to run from this particular thing.”

But when we actually open, we start to realize, “Wow, actually, this stuff can be met.” It’s just feelings in the body, sensations, energies. It can be met, and when we meet it with nonviolence, it comes into harmony.

Rick: So do you feel like a behavioral tendency such as pedophilia, for instance, actually, if you get right down to its core, can be located as some sensation in the body that is at the root of such a tendency? And that by somehow feeling and healing that sensation, one would find that the behavioral tendency dissipates or disappears?

Adam: Yeah. As we become more sensitive to what’s going on, it feels like our actions naturally come into alignment. When we feel the harm we do to people, when we start to become aware of that and take in their experience, it just breaks our hearts. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to use a harsh tone. I don’t want to tell this person, through my vibe, that they should be different than they are.”

We can just feel that it doesn’t feel good.

Rick: Have you ever considered going into a prison and working with some of the people there?

Adam: No, I haven’t really. I just go where I’m called, where I’m invited.

Rick: Folsom will be calling soon.

Here’s another short question that came in, and I have a feeling how you’re going to answer this, but let me just ask it. Sean from Illinois—he might have been one of your old buddies from Macomb—asks, “If you could give someone just one suggestion or a piece of spiritual guidance, what would it be?”

Adam: Well, I have no idea. It totally depends on who it is. I guess I don’t know that I want to actually…

Rick: You know how I would answer that one? I would say, “Seek and you shall find.” If you have the motivation to do something, just keep favoring that tendency, that motivation, and various opportunities and options will present themselves to you.

Nature is very responsive. I was discussing this last week, I think, with Chris Selene. There are so many examples of people who, once they put out the petition to the universe, so to speak, put out the call—“Hey, I’m tired of the same old, same old, and I really want to know what’s true and what’s real”—get a tremendous response from the universe, from nature, and all kinds of opportunities present themselves.

Adam: Yeah, absolutely. Radical transformation is possible. I sometimes joke about how, years ago, I was living as if I were in past lives. Half of me doesn’t even remember how I was then. It’s like, “Wow, what was it like to live in that body, in that worldview?”

It’s almost like shedding a skin or something. It’s just a totally different universe and a totally different experience. In my experience, that’s actually accelerated. It feels like there have been several of these transformations. It’s like, “Wow, what was it like 18 months ago?” It’s hard to remember because so much has shifted.

It’s really so different from what we think it is. It is just so different.

Not knowing without turning it into a story

Rick: Good. Here’s a question from Connor in Jefferson, Colorado. Connor asks:

“Hello, Adam. Your presence is very warm. I have a question for you. When falling into the depth and beauty of here, non-dimensional peace, often the mind rises in reverence and love for the gravity of this beauty. I tend to spin out from there. Alternatively, the gravity of not knowing what I am or what anything is tends to ignite narration. If you could speak to this, I would be very grateful.”

Adam: Narration.

Rick: I think maybe he starts to put a story on it or something.

Adam: Right.

Rick: Yeah.

Adam: Right. So it’s really getting—there’s no story to land on, there’s nothing to figure out, and there’s no truth of this that we’re going to capture in words. There’s no importance to the symbolization of this. We’re not trying to land on a particular model of the universe, a description, a philosophy, or anything like that.

So it’s really just letting that come to rest. “I don’t know” is sort of the height of wisdom when it comes to being present with the truth.

Having said that, there is absolutely nothing wrong with expressing the truth. It’s sort of like poetry. We can see it as art. We can see the impossibility of giving words for the experience that are accurate and complete, and yet it can be beautiful to express. It can be evocative, and it can be helpful.

The trick is not believing the words—not believing that, “Now I’ve given the comprehensive definition of enlightenment, life, or the universe.”

Rick: You went through a phase where you were reading a lot of spiritual books and thinking about things. Do you still enjoy reading spiritual books and that kind of thing, or have you lost all interest in it?

Adam: Yeah, it’s really dropped away. When I first started having these openings with psychedelics, I became very interested in people who were writing about spirituality and psychedelic experiences. That gradually went into meditation and spirituality, and this sort of looking for clues as to what the hell was going on here, what this was about.

Rick: So you do some retreats with Jeannie Zandi?

Adam: Yeah.

Rick: You still do, or you have done?

Adam: Yeah, I went on a retreat with her in January. That was the last one. I’m not taking her upcoming program, but I’ve been really involved with her work for the last three years. It’s been an incredibly powerful, transformative teaching for me.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve met Jeannie, and every year or two we talk about, “Hey, we should do an interview one of these days.” Then she always says, “I think I’m going to get my website more together first.” So she’s in no hurry. But one of these days I’ll interview Jeannie. She’s nice.

Adam: Yeah.

Rick: The reason I brought that up is that you mentioned in your bio that her whole teaching is very heart-centered and full-bodied. A lot of times, nonduality is not presented in a very heart-centered way. There isn’t a lot of flavor of the heart. It seems to be kind of heady or transcendental—just sort of absolute and abstract: “There’s no person,” that kind of thing.

You seem like a fairly heart-centered guy. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what that means for you, being heart-centered as well as being nondual, and whether there’s any contradiction in that. I don’t know, and probably you don’t, but let’s talk about that for a bit.

Adam: I sometimes talk about it as the mind falling open and the heart falling open. For me, there were sort of two different experiences, in a way. In both cases, it’s a return to naturalness, our natural state.

In the first one, with the mind falling open, it’s just giving up this hope that we’re going to know, or this effort to try to know—to try to capture with the mind what the truth is, to figure out what the true practice or the true teaching is, or what’s really going on here.

It’s just really getting that this is so vast, so open, so subtle, and totally uncapturable in words. Any words are always partial, always putting meaning on something that is prior to meaning.

So it’s just really letting go of that and letting ourselves be here: “Wow, what is this?” It’s just this open, innocent presence. You can sort of feel the mind relax when that happens. “Wow, I just get to be. I don’t have to know anything. I don’t have to show up with my theory of the universe or my theory of what I am. I can just be here as I am—or whatever that is.”

With the heart falling open, I often experience it as a softening—just letting awareness touch everything that’s here, all the way into the body, all the way into the deepest parts of what’s here.

Awareness has such a gentle touch. There’s no violence in it. Even when it’s touching something tender, agonizing, or heartbreaking, it’s like a wind blowing over a wound. It’s so sweet, in a way.

It’s just opening to vulnerability and sensitivity, letting ourselves be here and feeling everything that’s here. It’s letting the defenses fall away, just letting them melt in their own time.

Rick: As you know, bhakti is a major aspect of the spiritual repertoire that many people are oriented around. Bhakti means devotion—or love, to put it more simply.

Do you find that, in terms of the heart-opening thing you’re describing, it has resulted for you in a much more profound experience of love, devotion, reverence, or things like that?

Adam: Yeah. It feels like a natural consequence of intimacy—intimacy with what is. It’s awesome to know the truth of our hearts. Even to get a little taste of it is so beautiful.

It’s so unlike what we’ve been taught. We’ve been taught that we’re not right and that we’ve got to get good. And then it’s like, our hearts are so beautiful, so precious.

Rick: Do you feel a kind of sense of God? I mean, what is your thought of God? Your feeling, your orientation toward whatever God may be, however you may conceive or understand God to be?

Adam: I find that I’m very playful in the way that I describe reality and the way that I use metaphors. I’m not holding any conceptual map of what’s going on, like, “Oh, there’s the heart, and then God speaks to the heart.” There’s nothing like that.

But the way some people refer to what God is resonates deeply. It’s this sort of surrender to what’s here, the vastness of what’s here, and the lack of any means of controlling what’s unfolding. Everything is just being given to us. Reality is giving us every moment, every experience, everything that’s here.

Rick: Yeah. If you’re out walking in a beautiful place, like walking in the redwoods in Northern California, or on the beach, do you sometimes find yourself feeling a sense of devotion or adoration for the divine intelligence that seems to be behind this or orchestrating this beautiful play?

Adam: Mm-hmm, yeah. I find myself touched deeply by so much of my experience. There are so many different aspects to it. Sitting with people and just being touched by their experience—the beauty of their hearts, and even the suffering—is so beautiful.

There’s also this sense of vastness. How magical is this? Just the way that this is unfolding is so mysterious and so deep. There are just so many endless layers to it. It’s unfathomable.

❤️ Meeting feelings directly in the body

Rick: Yeah, nice. Here’s a question that came in from Chris in the UK: “Hi, Adam. When are you coming home?” No—“Hi, Adam. If you notice the grasping in meditation, would you advise just opening up to the grasping at the level of the body, in a loving way?”

Adam: Mm, beautiful. Yeah, really, it’s about meeting whatever is here with love. I find that the invitation to meet with love is so helpful when we’re in the place where we’re totally convinced this shouldn’t be here: “I’m doing it wrong. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be having this experience. This is so not what an evolved person has.”

It’s just having such compassion for it. “Ah, this is the experience that’s here. This is the experience that’s here. We get to feel this.”

Rick: Mm. There was a song by George Harrison—which obviously he didn’t coin the phrase—but it was, “This too shall pass.”

This too shall pass.

I would say that if a person feels like they’re hitting a rough patch in meditation, or in life, or whatever, keep that phrase in mind.

Adam: And be curious about what’s here. Not to try to figure it out—“Why is it here, and what do I need to do with it?”—but just, “What’s the feel of it? What’s the most intense point of it? What hurts the most about this?”

Really going to exactly the place where we’re trying to squirm away, where we’re saying, “This shouldn’t be here. This shouldn’t have been.” What’s the most excruciating part of this experience? Really allowing awareness to explore that territory.

What is it that I don’t want to feel that’s here? These sorts of inquiry questions can be really helpful, just pointing us toward the truth—the place that we always run from, that we skip over and try to ignore, deny, and repress.

Let’s just turn toward that. What is this place I’ve been taught to escape from, to not be present to?

Rick: In doing that, would you say, as a general principle, that any sort of emotional or psychological thing that we might be going through does have a physiological correlate? Is the best way of dealing with and resolving these kinds of things—for example, strong feelings of anger or fear—to allow yourself to locate the physiological correlate and let your awareness dwell on that, rather than playing around in the fear?

Adam: Mm-hmm, yeah. It’s about going to the deepest place. Typically, when we notice an active mind, it’s because the stuff that we don’t want to feel is there. We’re trying to figure it out, trying to get away, or solve a problem. We make it something mental that we can grapple with in the mind.

It’s this sort of numb, fuzzy feeling. So when we go into what’s actually being felt in the body—what’s the energy that’s here, what are the sensations that are here—it’s a deeper level. We can feel, “Wow, this is not what I imagined. This is not what I thought it was.”

The mind’s trying to solve some problem that doesn’t even exist, and it’s like, “Oh, there’s energy here that wants to be felt.”

Rick: Yeah. So are you saying—at least, I think you’re saying—that the mind might come up with rationales for some kind of fear or some sort of thing that’s being felt, which actually have nothing to do with the root of that feeling? The mind is just fabricating something because it doesn’t like to have a feeling without some kind of rationale?

Adam: Yeah.

Rick: And then, if you can settle beneath that and get down to the core feeling, which is rooted in the physiology, at some point you can really root it out.

Adam: Yeah. When we feel fear in the body, typically the mind wants to go out and look for something to be fearful about.

Rick: Yeah, and it could be one thing or another. It could be any number of a dozen things, but it’s not that.

Adam: Right. It’ll just project out. “Oh, that’s the problem. If I can just solve that, then I won’t have fear anymore,” right? As soon as that’s gone, there’ll be something else.

So, yeah, it’s about meeting the actual experience of the energy in the body. Often fear is really just something we don’t want to feel. It’s an energy that’s uncomfortable or painful. There’s nothing really to it, but we imagine that it means there’s some serious problem here, that there’s really something wrong.

But it actually doesn’t. It’s just an energy in the body.

Rick: I think the same could be said of cravings. “I need cigarettes. I need food. I need this or that.” Really, there’s a physiological sensation that can be located and dealt with on that level. If it is, the craving can just dissipate, rather than directing the attention outward and trying to consume the thing that the craving seems to be wanting.

Adam: Right. Yeah, it’s about really letting awareness do its work. We just point ourselves toward the stuff that we’ve been turning away from, and we let awareness touch it. We let awareness reveal the experience.

When we’re in the mind, in the mind’s version of what’s happening, it’s so far removed from what’s actually going on. We think, “Oh, I want a cigarette,” or “I want chocolate,” or something. Then, when we start feeling into the body, all kinds of stuff is there. It’s a whole different universe, a different level of reality.

Rick: Interesting. So, in a way, the body is a portal to freedom. It sort of tells us—oh, is it Mary O’Malley that I interviewed a while back? I just got an email from someone about her the other day. She has this phrase—I forget exactly how it goes—but it’s sort of that which appears to be the obstacle or the problem is actually the opportunity to resolve something.

Adam: Yeah, that’s beautiful. Anytime we notice, “This shouldn’t be here. This shouldn’t be this way,” that’s the opportunity. What’s being felt there? Let me feel this place that I’ve condemned, that I’ve been taught to condemn.

Even when we say “the body,” what is the body? The mind thinks it knows what a body is. It has an image of the body and calls it, “This is the body.” But when we actually let awareness touch what’s here, it’s not at all what the mind imagines. Again, there are so many layers.

Rick: Yeah. When you said, “What is the body?” I flashed on the perspective of physics as to what the body is, which is essentially empty space, with some virtual particles bubbling around. Ultimately, it’s not this flesh-and-blood thing if we get right down to it. It’s sort of an energy field, or an accretion of probabilities, or something.

As such, it’s not etched in stone. It’s malleable. I’m sure you’ve heard the word—what is it? Neural plasticity.

Adam: Mm-hmm.

Rick: Where anything in not only the brain but the nervous system is plastic. It’s malleable, changeable, healable.

Adam: Yeah. This is so much my experience: that we can have a totally different experience of reality. When I say this, it’s not like, “Five years from now, you can have a totally different experience with reality.” It’s just turning toward reality, and everything shifts.

Rick: Yeah.

Adam: It’s not at all what we imagined. It opens up.

🕊️ After a spiritual opening: old habits and new layers

Rick: Nice. Here’s another question. This is from Scott in Half Moon Bay, California: “After having a major spiritual opening, why would I find myself being drawn back into old bad habits, such as drinking again for the first time in 15 years?”

Adam: Yeah. I’d like to ask follow-up questions with these questions.

Rick: Yeah, you can say something, and the person can send in another follow-up if you want, if we go along.

Adam: I mean, if I’m working with somebody, I would really be curious about what’s going on. I’m going to sort of just guess. It feels very much like something I’d like to talk about. When I sit with someone, it’s not like I know what the truth is and you don’t know what the truth is. It’s like you have the inside seat on the experience, the reality that’s unfolding in you and through you. So, I’m supporting awareness, exploring what’s there, opening what’s there.

That’s what I would do in this case with someone who comes in and asks that sort of question: Why would this be happening? We would explore what’s going on. Just to conjecture, I would be very happy for the person I was sitting with to say, “Oh, no, that’s not it. There’s nothing like that.”

It does feel like there’s an adjustment to opening. When we have a big, radical opening, often we want to contract and hide again. We’re just not prepared to have all that energy and be this wide open in an ongoing way. So, it feels like an acclimatization to openness.

We open, and then it becomes more possible. It’s a bit like you were talking about: the cup gets bigger, right? It’s the resource that we have to be open. There can be opening and closing. It’s very normal for there to be opening and closing; it’s a natural rhythm. We get to realize how wide open we can be, how vast we are, and how much capacity there is here. It just grows so organically. It’s like the flower blooming that you’re talking about. It’s not something we have to force.

Rick: Maybe I’ll just throw in that you were saying earlier about the strata or deeper layers of impressions that we might work through as we go along. There could be stuff built into our makeup that is just peacefully slumbering. It has kind of not caused any problems, like a sleeping elephant or something; it’s just lying there sleeping.

Then we have a big opening. That opening, I would say, in a way wants to be sustained. We want to have a kind of opening that isn’t just a flash in the pan. It would be nice to live that way, in an abiding way. But it may be that there’s a lot of stuff lodged in our physiology and our subtle body, however we want to understand it, that is really not compatible with living in that open way.

Now that we’ve had an opening, the time has come for stuff that was slumbering to wake up and be cleared out. There might be an old habit, an old tendency, or an old thing that we thought we had put behind us years ago that is sprouting up again.

I mean, maybe you tell me if I’m wrong, but if you were working with Scott, you might sit with him and have him go into whatever deep sensation or feeling seems to be associated with this desire to drink again. There must be something there that could be discovered and perhaps resolved without recourse to alcohol.

Adam: Yeah. And just to really be innocent about the exploration. It’s very easy, when we notice a behavior—“Oh, I shouldn’t drink,” or “I shouldn’t watch TV,” or whatever—to be very harsh. We’ve got to attack it; we’re going to find the solution and go in there and sort it out.

It’s really about letting awareness innocently reveal what’s there. It’s not knowing in advance that we shouldn’t be drinking or shouldn’t be watching TV or whatever. It’s really just exploring: What is here? What’s the actual experience?

There’s no condemnation, no “We’ve got to kill this off” or “Stop this.” It’s just really feeling into what’s actually going on here. What is our experience? The truth will liberate us anyway.

Again, the path can have different seasons. It may be the season for closing down right now, after a big opening. There’s no violence to it. There’s no “We’ve got to force you open” or “We’ve got to change what you’re doing.” It’s really just letting awareness do its work.

Rick: Yeah, that’s nice. It’s a very compassionate way of putting it. Guilt-tripping yourself over it is obviously not going to help. If a person had a serious problem, maybe they need to go to AA or something as a support group for what they’re going through.

Adam: Yeah, I mean, if you’re burning down your house or something, then it’s like, well, let’s put down the torch.

Rick: Yeah.

Adam: But if you’re just watching a lot more TV than you think is good for you, we can be really gentle about that and explore what’s going on.

Rick: Yeah, just don’t do it with a lot of beer.

Here’s a question from Marin in Portland, Oregon. She asks:

I see the brain as an organ and the mind as something else entirely. I also understand PTSD as an event that injures an organ of the body, the brain, in addition to having an effect on the mind. How does awareness heal the brain, if it does?

Adam: Hmm. I tend to speak just from my own direct experience. I notice that I’ve been hurt, and there are reasons why my body contorted, closed down, numbed out, and distanced itself from the heart.

When I was involved in that philosophy, I had no idea what love was or what my heart was. I was like, “Oh, I’ll give you a theory of what love is,” or something. It was total BS, nothing connected to the direct experience of love.

There was stuff there that had been put there for a reason, because of whatever experiences I had when I was younger. I didn’t have deeply traumatic experiences, but I had a normal human upbringing, with imperfect parents and an imperfect environment, and so on. This stuff does heal; it can fall away. I feel so blessed and so grateful for the gift of opening that’s happened.

Rick: In response to Marin’s question, there is definitely a correlation between mind and body. That’s pretty well established in scientific circles, and there is a correlation between behavior and the brain, also.

They’ve done MRIs on people who have certain types of chronic criminal behavior, and they find that there are actual functional holes in their brain, in terms of brain activity. Certain things are more shut down than in the average person.

There have been studies on various kinds of meditation showing that those functional holes, so to speak, can be healed and re-enlivened and brought back to normalcy. Consequently, behavior changes. It’s an interesting area. There are researchers who are working on this kind of thing.

Adam: Yeah, everything’s interconnected. There’s nothing separate in the universe. Everything’s affecting everything all the time.

Rick: Yeah. Here’s a question, and Dan, who sends me the question, says the location wasn’t given, but it’s a lovely question. So, here’s a lovely question:

Hello, Adam. You mentioned that you practice something like authentic movement. What advice would you give someone who would like to start opening up to their body and their body’s intelligence?

Adam: It’s really an invitation to let awareness into the body. I guess I’ll just describe what I do, which was taught to me by Jeannie Zandi. I’ll close my eyes and let my body move however it wants to move, and I’ll keep my eyes closed for the entire period.

Rick: Will you be standing up in the middle of the room or something?

Adam: It could be lying down, or it could be sitting. The body will just move however it wants to move, so it’s different every time. I’m just letting myself be completely immersed in the experience and feel of the body, letting it move as it wants to and letting it be still when it wants to.

Rick: So, if we were to watch a videotape of you doing that, what would we see?

Adam: It totally depends.

Rick: Would you be dancing around the room or gesticulating in different ways?

Adam: Ha-ha, yeah. It can be entirely different; there are so many different ways. I could be lying on my back, yawning, and hardly moving at all. I could do all kinds of poses that look a bit like prayer or yoga or something, or Tai Chi.

But it’s not coming from the mind. The movement isn’t like, “Oh, I should stretch out my legs,” or “I should do…” It’s really being in the body and letting the body lead. It’s letting the body do whatever it wants to do and letting myself be surprised by what it does. It does crazy things—the weirdest sorts of stretches and contortions.

Rick: Interesting. I’ve heard stories of people having Kundalini awakenings and then, without really knowing much about yoga or anything, spontaneously going into various yoga postures. Some may actually speculate that that’s how the yoga postures got developed. It wasn’t, “Well, let’s see what my body can do,” but more like the body of some yogi was spontaneously going into these positions, and the yogi took note of it.

Adam: Yeah, it feels like that’s what all the practices around the body—Tai Chi, Qigong, and yoga—are pointing to: the aliveness of the body, the body’s intelligence, the body’s wisdom.

Rick: Yeah. So, let’s see. I read a bunch of your essays that you recommended, just to see if there was anything in them that we haven’t covered and that would be interesting to touch upon. We’ve talked about most of this stuff.

Here’s one that we didn’t talk about, I don’t think:

Only the dropping away of the fear of loneliness makes us truly available for intimacy. Now we are free to open to others because they don’t need anything from us.

That’s kind of an interesting point. What would you say to that?

Adam: Yeah, just to, like, I think early on in the essay, maybe it’s just to be really gentle about the feelings we have about being rejected, feeling lonely, unloved, or unwanted, around being unworthy. This is sort of the core wound, in a way. Many of us have a place like this.

The sentence you read just sounds a little like, “Yeah, we’ve got to get rid of that.” But it’s just to be so gentle, to really let ourselves feel that place. It’s not wrong that we have this feeling. This was put here; this is the way we coped with our early experiences.

When we act from trying to get rid of that by grabbing hold of a partner, trying to have as many friends as we can, or something, it’s like we’re just trying to see how that wound is not going to be healed by anything out there. We have to let awareness touch that. We have to turn toward that experience. There’s nothing out there that’s going to take care of that, fulfill it, satisfy it, or heal it.

Rick: Yeah, interesting point. I guess another way of putting it is that if we’re kind of empty within ourselves, nothing and no one outside of us is going to be able to fill that emptiness.

Any relationship we get into, if we’re empty and the other person is empty, neither person is in a position to give. Both are in taking mode, and therefore nobody gets, because nobody gives. But if we’re full within ourselves—“My cup runneth over,” kind of thing—and if the other person is, too, then obviously that could be a very different experience.

Adam: Yeah, and again, I’m always really attuned to the way that we can condemn ourselves. I really hate for someone listening to this to think that what we’re saying is that we have to be full of love and light and cleaned out entirely before we engage in a relationship, or that we’re only doing harm to other people by the way that we’re loving or something like that.

Most of us have this place, some form of this, some way that we’re thrown into this by particular events. If a partner leaves us or something, it’s often a direct line to this pain. So it’s really about being so gentle and compassionate with this place, and giving it the loving awareness that it wants, that it’s asking for.

Rick: That’s nice. I think if we were to summarize this whole interview, or to summarize you in a couple of words, it would be gentleness and compassion. Your whole persona really exudes those qualities, which is nice. Those are beautiful qualities to have, and it also kind of summarizes your teaching. You just have this real gentle, compassionate, non-manipulative approach. Refreshing.

Adam: Yeah, and I would just say that the experience here is that this is what the universe wants to do through me.

Rick: Yeah.

Adam: It’s not that I’m trying to be loving or something. This is how awareness appears to me. This is the way that it’s amazingly gentle, you know?

Rick: Were you often gentle, even as a child? Were you really kind to animals? You didn’t bully your friends at school or anything like that? Have you always been a gentle guy, or did you really transform into a more gentle person?

Adam: Yeah, when I was a child, I think I was fairly gentle. But when I was a teenager and in the years after that, there was kind of a harshness in my tone, especially with political debate.

I was very much like, “I don’t understand why you’re crying. I’m just being rational,” and very identified with the text, not really attending to what was actually being felt or what sort of energy was vibing. I was really kind of shut down to that aspect of reality. So it’s something that I’ve become resensitized to.

For me, there was a sort of sense in that time period that it wasn’t okay to be the way that I am. It was a struggle to show up and not be condemned, to be okay where I am.

To realize how benign awareness is—it’s already sort of blessed our existence. As messy as we are, with all the wounds that we have, with all the clumsiness and clunkiness of being a human being, we get to be here as we are. There’s a sort of welcome in awareness.

When awareness touches, it just opens and soothes what’s here. It’s like, “Wow, we get to be here!”

Rick: That’s nice. It’s very soothing just talking to you. I’m not always as mellow as this during interviews. I’m just kind of sitting here like a blob.

Innocence, remorse, and the falling away of identification

Here’s a question that came in from someone named Eli: “Could you please say something about the falling away of emotions, if you have any experience with that?”

Adam: Yeah. For me, what we call emotions—again, there are gross emotions, like anger, sadness, fear, or something—and as we open, the more subtle layers reveal themselves. There’s a mutation that happens.

We find the layers of truth that are deeper than the manifesting emotions that the mind would call and think it knows. We get in touch with the openness of what’s here, the holding for everything that’s here, everything that we are. So there’s not an identification with emotions, might be another way to put it.

When things show up that are uncomfortable, we often immediately think, “I don’t want to feel this. This shouldn’t be here. It’s bad that this is here. I’m unevolved. I’m not what I’m supposed to be.”

Then, as we open to it and allow it to be here as it is, it sort of opens by itself. There’s this shift into open space, where we’re still really present and sensitive to what’s being felt, to all the different things that are here.

But there’s nothing—it’s almost like it’s impersonal. There’s no “This is good” or “This is bad” because it’s here. There’s no one to take the credit or the blame for any of it. It’s just, “This is what’s in the field. This is what’s being experienced. This is what’s being felt.”

Rick: Not judging.

Adam: Yeah. It’s so intimate with what’s here.

Rick: Yeah, one theme that underlies everything you’re saying is that there’s a deeper dimension to life. Call it a vertical dimension, although that’s just a word. What appears on the surface of life is—I think you said something like this in the very beginning—just the tiniest fraction of what’s really going on.

Adam: Yeah.

Rick: Your whole approach seems to be to settle more and more deeply into the heart of things.

Adam: Mmm, yeah. Beautiful way to put it. It’s really about giving ourselves to life, just letting the universe have us.

Rick: That’s great. All right. I don’t know if any more questions have come in, but I think we’ve covered quite a bit of ground. Is there anything that comes to mind that you want to just throw out there?

Adam: Yeah, I think maybe just to speak to shame a little bit more. Everything we feel is innocent, so innocent.

When we identify from shame, we’re often like, “Oh, this means I’m bad. This feeling that’s here means I’m bad.” But how could a feeling that we’re experiencing, that’s just coming into the field, make us bad? We’re so innocent. Everything we experience is so innocent.

It’s really that, yes, it’s so impersonal in a way. This is what the universe has given us to feel.

Rick: By innocent, do you sort of mean that everybody’s doing the best they can? Even if we do something that—you know, once in a while I’ll remember something I did 30 or 40 years ago, and I’ll just sort of cringe. “God, what a thing to have done.”

But you act according to your level of consciousness, your level of maturity, or whatever. The fact that I cringe now, rather than just saying, “Oh, that was cool,” probably means some progress has been made.

Adam: Yeah, and it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have the experience of remorse. We can deeply feel that: “Ah, you know.” Just without condemning ourselves.

We can see, again, that it’s innocent. As you say, how could I have done differently? I didn’t know.

Rick: Yeah.

Adam: It doesn’t mean we don’t have the experience of remorse, or that we don’t feel heartbroken for what we’ve done. But we can see the innocence of that. It’s actually a return to our heart.

Our heart so wants to own everything we’ve done that betrays it. That feeling of remorse is like returning to the beauty of our heart.

Rick: Yeah.

Adam: It’s returning to the truth.

Rick: We have a follow-up question from Scott in Half Moon Bay, who was the fellow who was tempted to drink again.

Thank you. Inquiring into the desire to drink brings me to lots of emotion moving in my heart. It feels good to be open there, and it’s intense. Maybe I can allow this and love myself.

Adam: Oh, beautiful. Beautiful.

Rick: Yeah, well, Half Moon Bay is not terribly far from where you are. Maybe you and Scott can get together and have a session or two.

Adam: Yeah, that’d be lovely.

Rick: Okay, well, thanks, Adam. This has been, for me, a very relaxing and peaceful kind of interview. You just have an air about you that’s mellow and soothing, and I really appreciate it.

Not that I don’t like the more intense conversations I sometimes have, but this has been really enjoyable for me and, hopefully, for the 131 people or so who are watching the livestream and sending in questions. Many people will obviously watch the archived version over the coming weeks, months, and years.

I’ll be linking to your website, as always, AdamChacksfield.com, right?

Adam: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Through that, people can get in touch with you, go on your email list, I suppose, and see what you’re up to in terms of retreats, this and that, and the usual.

So, I’d like to thank you again, and thank those who have been listening or watching. As you know, this is an ongoing series, so if you’d like to get on my email list, there’s a place on BATGAP.com to do that. You’d get about one email a week, every time a new interview is posted.

This also exists as an audio podcast, so there’s a page for subscribing to that. There’s the donation button—as I mentioned, it’s kind of necessary and much appreciated—and a bunch of other things. If you just explore the menus, you’ll find some interesting little tidbits.

So, thanks for listening or watching. Next week, I’ll be interviewing someone named Annette Carlstrom over in Sweden. So, thanks a lot, Adam, and…

Adam: Yeah, thank you, Rick. Yeah, really, really lovely sharing with you.

Rick: Great, yeah, I really appreciated it. So, talk to you later.

[Music]

[Music]

[Music]