Bonnie Greenwell Interview Transcript: Kundalini, Awakening, and Energy Phenomena

Bonnie Greenwell 2nd Interview

Summary

Bonnie Greenwell explains how kundalini and spiritual awakening can unfold through meditation, spontaneous events, and different traditions. The discussion explores the return of old patterns, the role of energetic clearing, and the need for informed guidance.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Is spiritual awakening predetermined, or do longing and spiritual practice matter?
• What is kundalini awakening, and how can it affect the body, mind, and emotions?
• Why can spiritual awakening include confusing or difficult experiences?
• How are spiritual awakening and psychological transformation connected?
• How can someone find appropriate support during a kundalini or awakening process?

Key takeaways

• Awakening is available to everyone, but deep longing and persistence often help it unfold.
• Awakening may come in glimpses while old identities and patterns continue to resurface.
• Kundalini can clear entrenched emotional, psychological, and energetic patterns.
• Kundalini is not always blissful, so difficult experiences need informed support.
• Awakening can happen with or without deliberate energy practices.
• No single spiritual tradition explains every form awakening can take.

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. I’ve done hundreds of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu. This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. If you appreciate it and feel like supporting it in any amount, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site, and there’s also a Donate page that offers or explains other ways to donate.

My guest today is Bonnie Greenwell. I interviewed Bonnie several years ago and really enjoyed the conversation. In fact, I listened to that conversation this week and thought there was quite a bit in it. We really covered a lot of ground, so if those listening to this one find it interesting, you might want to check out the previous one as well.

Bonnie is a transpersonal psychotherapist and non-dual teacher in the lineage of Adyashanti. After her kundalini awakening in graduate school, she wrote a dissertation and book on the kundalini process. In 2003, she met Adya and experienced a deep shift in consciousness that led to editing his books Emptiness Dancing, which I think I have on the shelf right behind me, and An Invitation to Teach. She has worked as a mentor guide for people in kundalini or awakening processes for over 30 years.

Her fourth book, When Spirit Leaps: Navigating the Process of Spiritual Awakening, was released last June. Bonnie was a founder and director of the Kundalini Research Network and has trained people internationally to work with spiritual emergence and understand kundalini phenomena. She believes the awakening of consciousness to truth is a natural realization available to all who sincerely long for self-realization, and that kundalini is fundamentally a clearing and transformative energetic support for this process.

She offers webinars and consultations on the web and can be contacted through her website and her Awakened Living blog, which I’ll be linking to from her page on www.batgap.com. Well, first of all, welcome, Bonnie. Thanks for doing this again.

Bonnie: Thank you for inviting me.

✨ Bonnie’s first kundalini awakening

Rick: I’ve often referred people to you over the years who get in touch with some kundalini situation, usually something that rather concerns them. I usually refer people either to you or to Joan Harrigan. Joan is retiring from that now, so I guess it’ll just be you. Also, Lawrence Edwards is a good person to refer people to. I’ve interviewed him also.

Bonnie: I’ve appreciated that, and I’ve enjoyed all the contacts that I make. It’s been a gift for me to meet all the fascinating people who contact me over the years.

Rick: Yeah, me too. We move in interesting company when we do this sort of thing, don’t we?

Bonnie: Yeah, it is. It’s really lovely, isn’t it? It’s just fun. You get to meet the most interesting people and hear the most amazing stories.

Rick: Yeah, fascinating. I don’t know if we covered in your first interview the kundalini awakening you had when you were in college or graduate school. In case we didn’t, would you want to just explain that a little bit, what happened to you?

Bonnie: First of all, I went back to graduate school when I was about 40, so I wasn’t just a young college student. I did a degree in personal psychology. At that time, I had about fifteen years that I had been doing meditation pretty steadily, so for a long time, and I had done a lot of Jungian analysis and a lot of therapy. I was licensed as a marriage and family counselor at the time.

So, I had a lot of background, and I went to ITP because, at the time, it did a lot of bodywork as well as having spiritual teachers who would come through and speak. I was interested in those things and thought that I might as well get a doctorate for doing it.

So, when I was there, I went to a workshop with Gay Hendricks. Have you ever interviewed Gay?

Rick: No, I remember the name, Gay and Bonnie Hendricks, I believe.

Bonnie: No, it’s Catherine.

Rick: Catherine, okay.

Bonnie: Yeah, and Gay was doing something called Radiant Breathwork at the time. Now he’s dealing with relationships, but at that time he was doing Radiant Breathwork. I watched him working with someone else, and I immediately knew it had to do with spiritual awakening.

It was the first time, even though I’d been in many yogic systems and other places, that I felt the strong connection between the body and spiritual awakening. So, I went to Gay and asked him to work with me and just told him I wanted to let go of any barrier to knowing God.

Kundalini Activation and Ecstatic States

I worked with Gay, and after just one intense session, I went back to class. I was sitting on the floor, as was usual at ITP in those days, and my energy just started rising, just went up over and over. I was extremely ecstatic from it, and when the class was over, I went to a meditation room there and just sat for a couple of hours and went into an altered space.

Fortunately, I was in a group of people who were familiar with kundalini, so I was not having fear about it. I knew what it was from watching Gay work and from talking to other people there. I was also quite involved with Christina and Stan Grof at the time.

So, I was just on the verge of doing my dissertation and decided to do my dissertation on kundalini. Because the experience tended to be very, very wonderful, I was feeling incredible bliss spontaneously, walking down the street feeling connected with everything. It’s a really wonderful experience, and I got curious about the difference, because I kept hearing from people who were having difficulties with it.

So, I wrote a dissertation exploring the difference between someone who has a positive experience and those who have difficulties with it. It led to publishing my first book and to establishing the Kundalini Research Network with other people that I found who were involved and interested in the topic.

Rick: Someone said they’re having some problems with the sound. Your sound is breaking up a little bit, but I don’t think there’s anything we can do about that. It’s a bandwidth thing. But don’t worry about it; there’s nothing you can do. Okay, well, that’s a good overview. What kind of meditation had you been doing for 15 years?

Bonnie: When I was young, I had a Jungian analyst who was a follower of Yogananda, so I used to sit with him. He did meditation every week, and then I had a friend who was a psychologist who was a student [of ?], and so I also sat with him part of the time.

Then I also got interested in The Three Pillars of Zen, and so I was exploring that as well. Before that, I had been involved with an organization called Creative Initiative Foundation, and that was my first exposure to the idea of meditation and also to Jungian psychology.

When I left that organization, I just had this incredible longing to make a deeper connection, and that drove me into sitting for hours. I’d get my children off to school, and I would sit for many hours a day, just sitting, using different approaches and doing different practices at different times.

✨ Is awakening predetermined?

Rick: This brings up an interesting question, which I wasn’t going to ask until later, but it kind of relates, I think, to what you’re saying. Someone named Clarice from Freehold, New Jersey, asked, “Is awakening predetermined? Some teachers seem to avoid answering this question because they don’t want people to lose the motivation to practice.” She also adds that this is perhaps related to the topic of free will.

The reason I think it’s relevant to what you were just saying is that some people just seem to come into this life with the seeds of a very strong, ardent desire for awakening and enlightenment, and so on, and it just consumes them, and they pursue it and very often get results. Others just aren’t interested.

Texts such as the Bhagavad Gita talk about how we might have done spiritual practice in a previous life and then come into this life and be born into circumstances that will be conducive to continuing our path. So, do you have any comments or thoughts about whether it’s predetermined? I know we’re going to talk a lot about the significance of practice. I don’t think even if you think it’s predetermined that you would say, “Don’t bother doing anything, and it’ll happen if it’s meant to happen.”

Bonnie: I don’t think we can know if it’s predetermined. That would just be an opinion or a belief system. I think that the potential for awakening is built into every human, but the longing for it varies greatly, and many people are just so distracted by other goals, intentions, and challenges in their lives that they’re never drawn to those kinds of existential questions that draw meditators.

Longing as a Catalyst for Awakening

So, I feel that anybody who has a deep longing—I think that’s kind of the primary dynamic that supports awakening—is persistent with that. In a way, you could say that that which is longing is pure consciousness, and it’s simply meeting that call.

So, I feel that anybody who has a deep longing—I think that’s kind of the primary dynamic that supports awakening—is persistent with that. In a way, you could say that that which is longing is pure consciousness, and it’s simply meeting that call.

On the other hand, I’ve met many people who had spontaneous awakenings who weren’t intending it at all. In those cases, it might indeed be predetermined, or it might very often appear possible that it was coming from a previous life, and they were obviously going to wake up in this life whether they expected it or intended it or not.

So, it can happen both ways. There are many different events and things that can happen that cause at least a glimpse of truth. It doesn’t mean they wake up and stay awake and enlightened suddenly; it just means they have glimpses. They’re being called.

✨ Awakening as an ongoing process

Rick: When you use phrases like “wake up” or “stay awake,” and so on, it kind of sounds black and white, on and off. It’s like either you’re awake or you’re not. If we take the example of sleep at night, obviously there is a transition period between waking and sleeping where we’re sort of trying to wake up, but we’re not all the way there yet. Then, obviously, a little bit later, when we’re into our day, we would say we’re totally awake as compared to what we were when we’re asleep.

So, do you think that’s a reasonable metaphor for spiritual awakening as well—that there could be kind of deep darkness where there’s hardly any glimpse of it, and there could be very clear realization of it, but there could also be a middle ground which is sort of foggy but still some degree of it?

Bonnie: I think a better metaphor would be somebody who has to wake up every night, get up, and then go back to sleep again. I think what happens to most people is an initial awakening event in which suddenly everything falls away and they’re just standing there in their pure connection with everything, or with a very clear sense of, “I don’t exist. I’m not what I thought I was.” But then the old psychological patterns and the old identities come back.

I believe that for most people, there’s a kind of moving back and forth between the sense of freedom, openness, and experience, and the sense of contraction and being entangled in some old emotional issue or dynamic. That’s why I think of the energetics of the process as being a clearing process, because it feels like the energy supports the clearing that has to happen.

The awakened state is always there.

There’s a letting go of, “I thought I was really free, and now this has come up, so clearly I’m not free anymore.” People get very upset about that, but the awakened state is always there. It’s just that all these other preoccupations and distractions—and you could say your dharma, things that arise in your life that belong to you—arise. They have to be met, understood, or really accepted in some new way, so that the light of pure consciousness has more possibility to shine through.

So, it goes on, I think, for most of our lives, for most people. It’s not a permanent state for most people, at least not in the beginning. In fact, Adya once told me that the Buddhists say that after an awakening, you should allow about 12 years for it to mature or become more stable, and that’s if you stay committed to your practice. You’re not just saying, “Oh, I’m done,” and wandering off into other distractions.

Rick: Yeah, so let’s dwell on this a bit more in terms of the definition of awakening versus enlightenment and so on. I hear Adya himself saying that even in his own experience there’s a continuing growth, and who knows if or when it ever ends. Some people would take exception to that, and they would say, “Well, that which awakens doesn’t change, and so how can it grow?” What would be your answer to that?

Bonnie: Well, the awakened state doesn’t change. I mean, the awakened state is there, but as I said, it gets kind of clouded over by our personal aptitudes, attachments, and challenges. You could think of it as the sky. The sky never changes; the sky is always there. But sometimes it’s full of clouds, sometimes it’s full of darkness and shadows, and sometimes it’s just bright sunlight.

So, the ground of being isn’t going to change, but your ability to be in touch with it and move from that is going to vary greatly depending on many different circumstances.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a good answer. We could even say that a rock has the same ground of being that we do, but the rock has some room for growth in terms of being a conscious, functioning being of some sort. By the same token, we have room for growth. Perhaps we’re better off than the rock, but that doesn’t mean we or anyone has reached the ultimate possibility of embodying pure consciousness.

Bonnie: The human that we are gets attached to our bodies. We’re designed in bodies to function as human beings with one another and in separation. So, when consciousness wakes itself up, the human characteristics that we have, which are programmed into us to be human beings, become very alarmed by letting themselves fall away.

So, there will be a struggle between the character of “me” and the energy, which at first feels very unknown, very much not me, that’s coming up through us and trying to take over our lives. There’s a sense of struggle for most people for a long time, until they can allow themselves to let go and allow the insights, wisdom, and potentiality of their true nature to come through.

It’s just natural because we’ve been built as a physiological system in such a way. Often, the people who are going through this have spent many years improving their self-image or their ability to function in the world. They’ve individuated, and it’s like you have the feeling of, “I’m going to lose all of that. It’s all been for nothing. The whole way I’ve been living my life was wrong.” You get into these struggles, and there’s room for growth. There’s room for more.

Rick: Would you say that’s true of everyone, that there’s a struggle and a feeling that you’re losing your ability to function, or is that just one of a number of varieties of experience that can come up?

Bonnie: There’s some kind of dynamic between the old, established personal self and the true nature, which has a very different sense of identity. That can vary greatly. For example, somebody who’s been in a very long-term spiritual practice, and this is what they’ve been looking for a long time—the awakened state or awareness—has a context for it. They might more easily let go.

Or someone may have had a near-death experience or been in a car accident where their kundalini was activated. One woman, for example, was a dentist, and she activated her energy through a shamanic workshop she went through. It can be very hard if you’re very scientifically oriented and all of a sudden you’re seeing things very differently. So, it varies greatly from one person to another how they meet the energies as they arise.

Rick: But I guess, just to summarize the general point you’re making here, awakening entails a real transformation of the vehicle through which awakening is experienced, or anything is experienced—namely, the mind, the nervous system, and the personality. You can’t pour new wine into old wineskins. You’re going to have to get a new wineskin or transform the old one into a new one. I think that’s what Jesus was alluding to when he said that.

Bonnie: Yeah, I think that’s true. That’s what the energy process does. We have 72,000 lines of energy flow in our body, and I feel that we are energy fields. In fact, I saw a quote by Einstein the other day where he said, “Everything is energy.” If you could move at the speed of light, you’d become infinite.

So, we’re energy fields, and everything that’s ever happened to us in this life, and maybe even previous lives, is woven into our energy field. When kundalini arises, its function is to clear out those old knots, patterns, belief systems, assumptions, and everything that was created in our energy field and our consciousness because of our past experiences.

Rick: Yeah, that’s an interesting quote by Einstein. You know, it takes about two million years for light to get to us from the Andromeda galaxy, but if you were a photon—if you could imagine a photon having a perspective—the photon arrives instantly. So, for a photon there’s no distance. The photon, you could say, is infinite, as Einstein said. It’s omnipresent; it’s everywhere instantly. I think there’s a kind of corollary between that and the way consciousness is described.

Why kundalini needs to be understood

Okay, so in your book you mention at some point that some spiritual people or traditions, perhaps Advaita or maybe Neo-Advaita people, kind of dismiss the whole energy thing as an illusory consideration that we shouldn’t bother dwelling on. It’s as if we’re just getting ourselves caught up in unnecessary complexities if we give much attention to it. You address that question or doubt in your book, so I’ll let you do so here.

Bonnie: One of the reasons I’ve written this book, and all my books, particularly this last one, is that so many of the people who contact me have a traditional spiritual system. Often, if they raise energy or have unusual phenomena going on in their meditation centers, they’re told that it’s wrong or dangerous, or that they shouldn’t come to sittings anymore because they’re disturbing people. They’re not being given the support and guidance that they need.

This is true not only for therapists, who often misdiagnose a spiritual awakening, but it’s true for yoga teachers, Buddhist meditation teachers, and even energy workers. When people go into transcendent states or particularly energetic activities, sometimes they make sounds, and sometimes their bodies are doing strange things all night. They get frightened. They don’t have anyone to talk to because their teachers don’t understand the process.

Unless you have a teacher who’s really gone through the whole process themselves—and many have not—they’re not going to have an understanding of it. The advantage of a teacher who does understand it is that I’ve seen many different systems, people coming out of many different systems with many different kinds of phenomena, whereas most teachers who teach about kundalini are saying, “This is how it’s supposed to be. This is what it looks like.”

One teacher wrote to me inquiring about his student, who was having difficulties. I wrote back, and he said, “This can’t be kundalini because kundalini is always positive.”

Rick: Where has he been living?

Bonnie: So many people have written in and said that when they found my book, they wished they had found it ten years earlier because they had struggled alone for a long time. They didn’t know what the energy was, they didn’t know how to manage it, they were afraid they were going crazy, and they didn’t know how to bring it out.

What I found is that when they get stuck in the energetic process, they don’t know about waking up. They don’t know what it means, in a sense, to wake up—to recognize their true nature. If they can continue to move in the right direction, once that shift happens, the energy is much calmer and much easier to live with.

What’s been important to me, and what I’ve learned and been so grateful for, is that I started out with the yogic model. I spent some time in India, and I did a lot of classical study of kundalini. Yoga is definitely a model that uses the energy body to bring one into an awakened state, to bring one into awakening. When I was in that model, I didn’t know that it would be possible to have an awakening without the energy.

But when I started sitting with Adyashanti, I started seeing people have awakenings, having these great shifts of consciousness, but afterward their energy would start to change. I’ve been really blessed in seeing that it can happen in both ways.

Unfortunately, sometimes in Advaita or Buddhist systems, there’s not a recognition of the energy, and in the energy systems the awakening can happen first. I’ve been able to see both sides of that picture.

Rick: Pull any one leg of the table, and all the other legs will come along. One thing I appreciate about your books and your whole perspective is that it’s so all-encompassing. You’re open to all possibilities as having relevance to the awakening process.

I also consider that my perspective, because I have to if I’m doing a show like this. I’m talking to such a variety of people, and I hear week after week stories of very significant shifts and awakenings through such a variety of means. If I had to summarize it, I would just say that God is not a one-trick pony.

The diversity of creation that we see in a rainforest or in the world in general is paralleled by the diversity of spiritual paths, or means through which—and varieties of experience that—people can have as they awaken.

Bonnie: That’s true. That’s the advantage of being like yourself or like me, because we get to hear stories that obviously come from so many different traditions, practices, and encounters with life. So, you can see the broad range of ways that awakening can happen.

Rick: I was talking to a gentleman last weekend, and he had gotten some flak from religious fundamentalists at a certain stage of his path. I reminded him that there are some 40 billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy, by most estimates, and they’re saying these days that there are perhaps 10 trillion galaxies in the known universe. If even 1% of those Earth-like planets—and who’s to say they have to be Earth-like—have some kind of intelligent life on them that has begun to tune into the spiritual dimension, just think how many varieties of spiritual experience there are in the universe, and how absurd it is for anyone to be rigidly insistent that theirs is the best or the only way.

Bonnie: I think a lot of times, particularly in fundamentalist systems, if participants wake up, the whole idea of somebody having an experience of the sacred, or of God, or of the universe is threatening to the hierarchical structures of that system, because you don’t believe anymore. It’s not about believing; it’s about having an experience.

And in many systems, you’re really not supposed to do that. You’re supposed to go on faith in the system that you’re in, or in the particular minister or priest who is the head of that system. So, it’s very hard for people in a real fundamentalist system. Often, they get terrible advice, being told it must be of the devil or it must be dangerous, or that they sound crazy, and it can be very damaging.

So, I think what you’re doing is very important. I refer people to you all the time, too, but I’m hoping—I’m getting old, and I’m wanting to get this material out there and in the hands of ministers, priests, and various people who are in a role where they can tell somebody, just give someone a book or tell them, perhaps, “This is what’s happening to you,” instead of frightening them to death.

Rick: Yeah, it’s great you’re doing that because, as I see it, the pace of awakening and the frequency of it, the commonality of it in the world, is increasing. There’s something in the field that’s getting enlivened, and more and more people are waking up. As you say, in many cases, they don’t know what it is, or they get flak from their religious leaders and so on. So, I think it’s really something that’s going to have to become more common knowledge, and is becoming more common as we go along over the coming years.

Bonnie: Unfortunately, as it becomes more common knowledge, there’s also quite a bit of distortion on the web, so people need to be cautious. People need to find their own intuitive knowing about what’s right for them and really develop that capacity for discrimination, along with trust in their own energy and their own experiences. There are a lot of distortions that are presented to people, and you can get stuck in the wrong direction for a while.

Rick: Before you get off that point, I just want to say I’ve been thinking about that as I was reading your book and about the importance of both knowledge and experience. It’s like they’re the two legs through which we walk on the spiritual path, and you can’t really walk on one leg.

Balancing Spiritual Experience and Knowledge

Experience without knowledge can result in all kinds of fear, confusion, and misunderstanding, and taking Thorazine or something because you think you’re going crazy. And knowledge without experience can become fanatical, pedantic, and dry, and one can mistake mere knowledge for the actual experience to which it refers. So, I think it’s really an important safeguard and necessity on the spiritual path to be simultaneously cultivating both in a genuine way.

Experience without knowledge can result in all kinds of fear, confusion, and misunderstanding, and taking Thorazine or something because you think you’re going crazy. And knowledge without experience can become fanatical, pedantic, and dry, and one can mistake mere knowledge for the actual experience to which it refers. So, I think it’s really an important safeguard and necessity on the spiritual path to be simultaneously cultivating both in a genuine way.

Bonnie: I feel like one of my prime intentions is to create a context so that you have a context for the kind of phenomena that’s arising, which, in my opinion, is that this is an opportunity for human transformation. It’s happening to you because you’ve been invited for your consciousness to wake up and live in a new way in the world. It can be thought of as dangerous, but it doesn’t have to be. It can be thought of as a human-potential transformative experience of being more aware of your being.

Rick: And two people might have the very same experience and interpret it in both those different ways. It’s like we all look at a painting or listen to some music and have very different interpretations of it, yet it’s the same painting, the same music, the same sunset we’re looking at.

Bonnie: Right. Yeah, it touches us in different ways. It calls us, I think, to a new expression in the world. If we stay with it, if we embody what we’ve seen and what we’ve felt, it calls us to find a way of expressing it in what, from our deepest core, feels necessary to come through us. And that’s why you’re doing the work you do. Something called you.

Rick: Actually, in a way, Adya called me. I’ve been doing this stuff for my own spiritual practice and pursuit for decades, but I was out in the garage listening to Adyashanti while working out on a Bowflex machine, and the idea popped into my head to do an interview show. Then that idea wouldn’t leave me alone.

Initially, I thought of it as a local radio show on this little station we have here, but that wasn’t really going to happen. Then finally we got it started and put it on the internet. One thing led to the next, but I’ve always felt like there’s a real nice wind at my back, and that doing this project is something that’s needed and something that’s supported.

Following the inner impulse

Bonnie: That’s such a good point, because a lot of times people who have had an awakening and gotten it established want to know what to do. When we’re younger, before awakening, you would say we’re driven by the intellect, the mind, or the intention. We have goals in life, and we’re going after those goals.

But it doesn’t work that way after an awakening. It works as a spontaneous thing. To me, after my Kundalini awakening, I wrote my dissertation. There was nothing else I could have written about. I was so full of this energy, so I did it with the thought that if only one person gets some use out of this, it’s worth my time.

Then somehow the Kundalini Research Network evolved, and it was like it happened through me. I managed it for several years. It was effortless; it was just happening. It really was not something I decided in my head: “I’m going to do this.” It was as if it just came through. It was like, “Okay, bring people together who have had the experience.”

And I think people need to understand that if they don’t know what to do, it has to do with listening, really intuitively dropping in and waiting for that inspiration. If it’s the right thing, for kind of bubbling, it’ll keep coming up until you lean into it a little bit and see if it’s what you’re meant to do.

Rick: Yeah, and you were talking a little earlier about discrimination and discernment. I think some people can swing too far in the other direction, where they’re just sort of following their impulses because they feel like that’s the way the universe is guiding them. But you can end up indulging in whims. You can quit a good job or quit a good relationship or something just because you have some kind of impulse. It all needs to be tempered and counterbalanced with other factors and so on.

Bonnie: I think that’s true. You have to learn the difference between the ego’s impulses and deeper potentialities. Usually, I tell people, if something keeps coming up, if it repeats itself, maybe it belongs to you. Lean in a bit, pay attention to the results, see what happens, and if it’s meant for you, if it’s the right thing, it’ll unfold in just the right way.

If it’s not, you won’t be comfortable; you won’t be happy pretty quickly. You’ll know, “No, this isn’t going to work for me,” or, “This was just temporary. I don’t know why.”

But even with the Kundalini Research Network, that energy ran out for me, and it was just over. When I left that organization, within a few weeks or months, I met Adya, and it opened a whole new door.

Then I helped him with Emptiness Dancing. I decided to create Emptiness Dancing. That was a new experience, and for a long time I thought, “Well, I don’t know if I can do this. It sounds like I’m just trying to get attention or something.” I didn’t know if it was an egoic impulse or not, but it kept coming up.

So finally, I just went to him and said that we had all these talks that had been written down, transcribed from his lectures and satsangs, and they were just sitting in the fireplace. I said, “I’d really like to take some of your talks and put them into a book. I think it would be helpful for the organization, and people would find you.” And he said, “Okay.”

So, I did that. That just opened me up to a whole other world, really. That came from following something that was kind of pulling me. It’s very interesting. It takes a while to get the sense of how it is to fall into that part of yourself, but it happens eventually for people who stay in this process.

Rick: It does. There’s a saying in Sanskrit—I don’t remember the Sanskrit—but the English of it is, “Brahman is the charioteer.” I think what it means is that, well, you can think of a chariot or you can think of a car, and initially we feel like we’re driving it. We’re in the driver’s seat; we’re in control.

But you were talking earlier about this transition one must undergo, and the transition entails, among other things, a shift in who’s in control. Eventually, Brahman is found to be the charioteer—the wholeness, the cosmic intelligence, or whatever it is—and we’re just going along for the ride.

But it’s tricky as the transition is underway, and it can take decades in process, because there can be this gray area where it’s like, “Whose impulse is this? Is this my ego? Is this something that’s meant to be in some deeper sense?” It’s a constant discernment that has to be worked out in order to allow.

You can’t surrender too much to the point of passivity and indecision, but you don’t want to be egotistically dominant in terms of forcing it—”My way or the highway.” There’s a balancing thing that happens over time.

Bonnie: Well, what often happens is, if you’re moving in a direction where you feel crappy, you don’t feel well, and you have all kinds of barriers come up, you’re both interior and exterior. Most of us are raised to believe we should fight through everything. But instead, we need to actually listen: What’s the message here? Is this the right place for me? Is it toxic? Am I feeling dead in my work now? Do I need to really listen?

We need to learn to listen to the silence, as Adyashanti likes to point out, and wait and be patient, because this is a new thing that wants to be heard. But unless we go into the silence and the stillness and spend some time inviting it, it’s not going to show up. True nature doesn’t push through; it doesn’t push through our egoic stuff. We have to meet it, and we have to get into a cooperative relationship with it so that it will really open up.

Rick: There’s some quote that came to mind when you said that. I don’t remember; there’s some scriptural thing either from the Bible or some Vedic text about how the Divine is not pushy. It’s not going to beat down the door and insist that it be welcomed in. It’s going to need to be invited. There needs to be a sort of surrender, really, from our side, a cooperativeness, and it’s not going to force us to do that.

Bonnie: That’s true. I’ve heard Adyashanti say that, too. That’s why meditation and sitting in stillness and resting are so important after an awakening.

Rick: Maharishi once used the analogy of going in for surgery. Surgery can’t operate until you’re willing to lie still and be willing to undergo the process.

Bonnie: That’s right. It helps if you begin to see that you never had any control anyway, that that was an illusion all along. If you look back at your life, you’ll see that you didn’t control most of the major events in it.

The person you’re married to—you didn’t say, “I’m going to find such and such, that’s just like this, and I had control.” I met my husband in a parking lot. It wasn’t controlled at all.

And your children—when you have children evolve, you have very little control. You have a lot of influence emotionally and psychologically, but most of us would say that our children have moved in directions that we didn’t foresee for them. At least, that’s been my experience. And I know my mother was a very devout Catholic; she’d be quite shocked to see what I’m doing.

We have the ability to respond, to accept responses. We appear to have that ability, although it’s probably based on our conditioning. But our lives have included many, many amazing things that happened not because we were in control of them.

Rick: It’s interesting that we’re dwelling on this topic as much as we are, but I’m just reminded of so many instances in which parents demand that their child be a lawyer or something like that, which is completely opposite to what they want to be. It’s like Dead Poets Society; that was one of the themes of that movie.

In my case, from the age of four, I wanted to play the drums, and my parents kept saying I should learn to play the piano first. I hated playing the piano. That went on for ten years, until I finally got a drum set, and then I took right off with it.

Obviously, kids need guidance, but there’s something about letting go. There’s this verse in the Gita: “Creatures act according to their own nature; what can restraint accomplish?”

Bonnie: You know, that’s an issue for a lot of people who have awakenings: they’re in a career that they chose, or maybe they’re college students. One young man I’m thinking of was an economics major in college, and he had a terrible automobile accident that activated his energy. He just didn’t want to study economics anymore.

Many people are in professions because somebody directed them to that and said it would be the wisest thing to do because they’d make more money, or because their family—all their family does it—said they ought to do it.

Rick: Do you remember that line from The Graduate? Dustin Hoffman is trying to figure out what he’s going to do, and the guy says, “Plastics.”

Bonnie: If that’s been your story—if your story has been that you’ve been in the wrong field, or you’re with a group of people who feel really toxic—you won’t be able to stay in that. Eventually, you’re going to have to listen to your gut about what you really want to express and what would feel congruent and authentic.

You’re going to have to make some changes, or you won’t be happy. You don’t have to make the changes, but if you want to be content and free, you may have to make some serious changes.

Rick: I’m going to segue here back to something we were talking about earlier. I just want to dwell on that a little bit more and then go through some other points.

We were talking about awakening, and you said, as you were talking about that, that it’s kind of unusual for a permanent shift to take place—that there’s this sort of “I got it, I lost it” thing. You implied that that’s going to be the norm for most people. But do you want to correct that before I go on, if that’s not what you meant to say?

Bonnie: All I can say about it is that it takes time for pure consciousness to be more consistently dominant. One way I take it is that here’s the little self—the me, the person, the character you’ve been pretending to be all your life, with all your goals and abilities and accomplishments and problems—and here’s pure consciousness. All of a sudden, wham, this is up, and then this comes up.

It may take an hour, it may take a week, it may take a few months. That’s about the longest this ever stays. And then this comes up again, and then you’re going like this.

Eventually, if you stay committed—meditating, facing your stuff, facing your psychological problems, and getting your life oriented in a way that feels more authentic—it becomes more and more present. Eventually, this is more dominant, but this might pop up once in a while.

That’s how it seems. I’ve talked to thousands of people, and of course, if there are people who just have one simple awakening and they’re completely free for the rest of their life, call me. But this is usual for the people that I work with.

Rick: Yeah, I think one thing that people might find helpful—and I think most people understand this—is that you can have a really profound experience. Let’s say you’re in meditation and you have this transcendent, blissful, unbounded experience. You feel like you’re omnipresent or something.

Integrating Unbounded Awareness into Daily Life

Every experience of that nature tends to fade, and many things tend to integrate through repeated exposure to them. As they integrate, they become the norm. You might not even think about it. You could actually be in quite an unbounded awareness while driving your car and talking to your wife or doing whatever you’re doing, but it’s just kind of the natural state, and it’s not something one reflects upon or remarks upon.

Every experience of that nature tends to fade, and many things tend to integrate through repeated exposure to them. As they integrate, they become the norm. You might not even think about it. You could actually be in quite an unbounded awareness while driving your car and talking to your wife or doing whatever you’re doing, but it’s just kind of the natural state, and it’s not something one reflects upon or remarks upon.

So the contrast, when something initially happens, can be quite notable. But enlightenment is not a contrasting experience. It’s not a flashy experience; it’s more of a natural state that becomes as comfortable as breathing or something.

Bonnie: What I feel it is, is a different way of perceiving the world, and the perception is different. It’s more holistic, more in the moment and present in the moment. It’s more intuitive. It’s more just being present with what is and not resistant to what is. Those are some of the qualities that I feel.

That becomes more the norm in how you function. I think the thing that really falls away is what Freud called the superego—the part of your mind that’s always telling you that maybe you’ve made a mistake, or something’s wrong, or asking, “What’s wrong with that person?” That collapses; it doesn’t have any purpose.

So there’s much more clarity when you’re with people, or reading, or listening, or just being present with what is, and responding in a way that feels authentic—like it’s coming from the heart or the gut rather than the mind.

The mind has stored all that information that you’ve picked up over the years, all the books you’ve read, but it just kind of comes up automatically. You don’t have to work to think about what you’re going to say.

Rick: Yeah, I know the way Eckhart Tolle operates. He says that he never prepares for his talks or anything. He just gets up on stage, gets in the car, goes to the place, gets on the stage, sits down, and something starts coming out of his mouth.

On the other hand, I know that when Adya prepares a course, he does a lot of research. He has books around his house with little tabs in them, or he’s taking notes of things and all that stuff. So I don’t think the two are incompatible.

Obviously, if you were, let’s say, an awakened person studying to be a doctor, you’re not just going to wing it. You have to do all kinds of study, learning, memorization, and everything else to be an effective doctor or airline pilot or anything else. There’s no incompatibility there.

Bonnie: Well, what I have found has been interesting. I’ve known Adya now for maybe eighteen years, and I would say that, for many years, everything he taught was spontaneous. He may have had an idea of a theme when he came into a satsang, but it was really spontaneous expression.

I think what happened—and I’m projecting here because I haven’t ever asked him—is that he began to meet so many students, thousands of students from all over the world. He became much more interested in looking at the cross-referencing of all the different students.

I think that after a while, at first everything feels really spontaneous, but the mind—many people will say that their mind is not sharp, and that they can’t really learn academically for a while. It feels uncomfortable. You can do it.

I found, for myself, that I went to graduate school and couldn’t teach from a program anymore. I just hated it. I had to teach spontaneously, so I quit teaching graduate school.

But I believe, from what I have seen, that after a certain period of time, the mind becomes much clearer and crisper in a way, and so you can go back to absorbing information, at least if it’s meaningful to your spiritual work. Maybe for other things too. Maybe you become more brilliant. Maybe Einstein was awake and got his brilliant ideas from that; I don’t know.

I’ve seen Adya evolve in that way, and I’ve seen it in the kind of programs he teaches—in his interest in bringing in many other rich resources that he finds in the world.

Rick: I may interview him again in a week or so. If I do, I will ask him that, because I think it’s an interesting point.

Okay, so just to put a cap on it, I hesitate to use the term enlightenment because it has such a superlative, static connotation, like it’s some kind of pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Do you feel that there is some state that humans achieve or have achieved that is worthy of a term with such connotations? Or do you feel like even the most enlightened beings ever to walk the planet still probably had a horizon before them that they could explore? Or do you feel that that’s just something none of us can really speculate on until we get there?

Bonnie: It’s a good question. I think the problem is that everybody has a different story about what it means.

Rick: That’s the problem. It shouldn’t be that way. I mean, there must be something that that term relates to in human experience, as is the case with most words.

We shouldn’t all have an opinion as to what fifty-five miles an hour means. It means something that we have to abide by. So it would be nice if words corresponded to actual realities and we agreed upon their meaning.

Bonnie: I think it’s easier just to say what you mean by it and then see where everybody fits in, because some people will say, “Oh, it means you can walk through walls; it means you can translocate, like Ramana was said to do.” Somebody said that their teacher—and there are teachers, some of them in the classical tradition—say, “Oh, you can’t possibly become enlightened in this life; you’re not ready.” Or they take up something with pride, like you mentioned the other day, or sometimes a teacher you interviewed said he never sleeps. Some will say you never dream.

So people will say, “Well, gee, that’s not true for me, so I’m a long way from being able to translocate, and I still have dreams occasionally.” I like to think of enlightenment more as being present in the world in a way that feels very free and very open. Love comes through sometimes spontaneously, for no reason at all. You’re very open to having particular results, less reactive, wanting to be of service, and embodying some of the other qualities that we’ve talked about.

People don’t become enlightened; enlightenment arises.

People don’t become enlightened; enlightenment arises. It just becomes more present. I don’t believe an individual—most people will not tell you they’re enlightened, and they won’t use that phrase. The personal little “me” that talks doesn’t feel like that’s even possible. You can always find a dozen reasons why you’re not enlightened, but consciousness can come through at times and be very, very beautiful. For some people, that happens more consistently, even permanently for some.

I think the other thing that people get confused about, and what’s wonderful for me with my friendship with Adya and Mukti, too, and others, is that they’re willing to be normal humans. They’re willing to be normal; they’re not pretending to be on some elevated level that normal people can’t relate to.

I took a package in for the sangha, and the postmaster saw the name on the package and said, “Oh, Steve, he’s a nice guy, isn’t he?” So it’s just like he knows how to be ordinary. Even though he’s not just ordinary, he’s got a perspective and a capacity to bring what the average person doesn’t have.

Rick: Yeah, I think that’s one reason Adya is so popular with a certain group. And it’s a safety factor also for him and for students, because I know of a number of teachers who get into this specialness thing, and it gets more and more inflated. They end up creating a weird scene around them; students have a weird relationship with them, and they end up crashing and burning in some way, because pride goes before a fall.

So I think it’s a safeguard for both the teacher and the students—his students or her students—to keep it grounded, to keep it real.

Bonnie: I think it’s very important. I don’t think anybody who’s truly free—and maybe we can talk about it more as freedom or liberation than enlightenment—anybody who’s truly free needs to be worshipped by anyone, or even wants to be worshipped, or wants to be considered special. Instead, they’re likely to look at everyone else as having the same source and the same potential. They’re not likely to put themselves on a pedestal or have people throw flowers at them and all of that. That’s kind of the old, ancient, classical way of honoring your guru.

Maybe it was useful at one point in time, because what you were doing was honoring the Self, and it was devotional, but it’s not relevant today. It’s not helpful with the kind of work we’re doing today.

Rick: Yeah, I would temper that statement a little bit. It’s a little bit unnuanced. Firstly, this whole devotional thing is somewhat of a cultural thing. It’s more normal in India than here, for instance. But secondly, I would say that even here there are people for whom it’s still relevant.

You go to see Amma, for instance, and the scene around her is quite devotional, although the first thing she does when she comes into the hall is bow her head to the floor to everyone else. So I don’t know; I’m just careful not to make blanket statements.

Bonnie: I agree there. In this age of spiritual evolving, very powerful devotion is very helpful. This is true in Christianity—devotion to Mary, Jesus, or a saint. In India, many people find a special being that they choose, and they throw all their devotion to that being. It’s very important because it opens the heart.

If you’ve had that channel opened in your life and you wake up, you’re much more able to move from an embodied awakening. So almost any path will include some approach to opening the heart.

So, yeah, I certainly went through a very strong period of devotion myself with Yogananda, and I’ve seen it in many other people. I don’t think devotion takes you all the way to realization, but I think it prepares you; it opens the channel.

Rick: Yeah, there’s an age-old debate about that between the Vaishnavites and the Advaitins—about whether devotion and maintaining some separation between you and God is a state you’d want to perpetually be in for the bliss of that relationship, or whether you’d want to go for full merger and union.

As some teachers have put it, it’s really none of your business at this stage. Decide that when you get there. It’s not something to argue about.

Kundalini, samadhi, and embodiment

So, okay, we were talking earlier about the relevance of energy to awakening, and you were saying how some teachers sort of dismiss it or don’t consider it terribly relevant, or don’t know anything about it, and others would consider it instrumental. I think you would be one of those who would say that it’s definitely something that needs to be understood and dealt with, because it’s going to happen to so many people.

But here’s a question that kind of extends that a little bit: Is a Kundalini awakening or opening—even if it comes to some completion, if there is such a thing—sufficient for true enlightenment, or does one need some teacher or other influence to fully come to rest, even after Kundalini has fully awakened?

Bonnie: Well, that’s a challenging question. There may be people who have had, all on their own, a complete realization of truth through a Kundalini activation, who have never had a teacher. Those don’t tend to be the people who call me, so I can’t say that I’ve met a lot of people like that.

Rick: Let me rephrase the question slightly before you go on. Is full awakening of Kundalini tantamount to, or perfectly correlated with, full development of consciousness or enlightenment? Or is it just one stage of it, with something more that needs to be done after that or needs to happen?

Bonnie: I believe it’s a stage. It’s important for enlightenment or liberation, but usually, in the system of Kundalini specifically, the goal seems to be samadhi. Samadhi is a great sense of consciousness merged with the universal. I’ll simplify it by saying that it’s not quite enough.

People can go into samadhi and just spend all their time lying down or leaning against a wall, or going into a cave and disappearing. There’s a need to return and bring the energy back down below the neck, and sometimes there’s a great need to clear out your old psychological stuff.

Bringing Awakening Back into Ordinary Life

If you have unfinished psychological business that you’ve never worked on, everything is going to come up eventually. Sometimes people are capable of going into samadhi states or satori, and they feel free and escaped from their body and their life. The next step is to come back into your life, to be awake in life.

Sometimes you need some guidance; you need a context. Your next-door neighbor or your parents aren’t going to help, because they’re not totally detached. So you need some place—a community or some kind of guidance—to get a context for how to be alive and have an awakening. How do I live it? How do I connect with whatever this wants from me, to participate in the world, and to do it in a way that’s going to be unique to me?

It would be useful to have some kind of guide. It might be a teacher; it might be a community that’s working through this together in some way, supporting one another. It might be a good friend there with you. I can’t say—I wouldn’t say—that no one can be their own teacher, because that just makes no sense. But it’s probably rare for somebody to achieve this with no guidance.

Rick: I just want to say one thing about samadhi. There are a number of different kinds of samadhi, different terms for different stages or degrees of samadhi, and I don’t claim to be an expert. But I believe it’s nirvikalpa samadhi, isn’t it, which is supposed to mean “without break,” so that it’s an integrated state which one can live in the midst of dynamic activity, and yet there’s a sort of continuum of pure awareness, regardless of the circumstances or what challenges you may be confronting.

Bonnie: I think that would be comparable to living from an awakened or enlightened space. It’s not as dramatic as the kind of samadhi where you’re out of your body.

Rick: It’s integrated. Yeah, I mean, when Ramana first woke up, he went into deep samadhi in that pit in that temple, and insects were chewing his leg, but he was oblivious to it all. Later on, after years in a cave and an integration, he was fully functioning, and yet in that state of samadhi while talking to people and running an ashram.

Bonnie: He was in a different state.

Rick: So I think that’s an important point: that which initially might require complete inward turning of the senses and an inability to function can eventually get integrated and stabilized, and be lived in the midst of all functioning.

That doesn’t mean you’re living in a state of not having your senses functioning. It means they’re functioning, and yet that pure awareness—which once required complete inward absorption—is now stabilized in the midst of anything.

Yeah, I was listening to Adya last night. He was on a recording, and he was saying something about how there are degrees of situations that might test that. He was referring to his health problems and the severe pain it had caused him. He said there are certain things that you can tolerate without losing your equanimity. But he said even in his own experience, at times it went past a certain point, and he was less established than he would have liked to have been.

Bonnie: True—great physical pain. I don’t believe that if you’re awakened or liberated, you never have feelings either. People have grief.

I remember Baba Hari Dass at Mount Madonna Center. When one of his primary students died—someone everybody thought would probably take his role eventually—you know, he felt it. He talked about feeling it. He didn’t talk, but he would write on his little chalkboard. He said that when you’re awake, it’s not that you don’t have a feeling, but you never hold on to it; you don’t carry it around. It flows through you.

I thought that made a lot of sense.

Rick: Also, you have more of a buffer. Let’s say you’re a billionaire and you gain or lose a thousand dollars. It’s no big deal; you’re a billionaire. But let’s say you’re homeless and living on the street. Gaining or losing a thousand dollars, even though it’s the same amount of money, would be a huge deal.

So this pure awareness, or whatever we want to call it, is like a kind of inner affluence that results in natural equanimity.

Bonnie: That’s a good way of putting it.

✨ Preparing for awakening

Rick: Okey-dokey. There’s a lot of practical advice in your book about preparing for awakening, getting grounded, getting stabilized, and preparing the vessel. So maybe we could talk about that a little bit.

If someone has a deep yearning for enlightenment or awakening, if they have a longing, what can they do to prepare for its dawning and to support it?

Bonnie: Well, I think that, of course, having a consistent meditation practice, where you go into the stillness, if you find a school of meditation in addition, is a good place. Other schools of meditation, or if you have a center near you that does mindfulness or something like that, or TM or whatever, it is having a consistent meditation practice which you’re sincerely using to connect with your longing for truth.

It’s a longing for truth. It started out for me as a longing to know if there is a God, but everybody has a kind of different longing or goal they’re seeking—inner peace or something of that sort. But I think that the longing for truth, not caring what the truth is—“I want to know what’s true”—and then just dropping it and going into deep stillness is helpful.

Something to open up your body a little bit better, like yoga or qigong or something that opens up those energy flows in the body, is very helpful. If you’ve had a trauma, had any kind of a rough time as a child or a young adult, psychotherapy is very helpful, because yoga brings up everything, and it’s going to bring up things. Meditation and yoga will eventually bring up the things that you are holding on to.

So, if you’ve learned how to look at that and hold it and work with it already, it’s much easier if you’re familiar with the territory and you already have some ways to deal or cope with old memories or distressing habits and things like that. It’s good to be healthy and to take care of your body. I think those are the basics.

I’m going to drink a little water. Sometimes I cough when I talk so much.

Rick: Just as you said, “It’s important to be healthy,” you coughed.

Bonnie: Yeah, I felt some throat blockage.

Rick: You said that the longing for God, or to know if there’s a God, was one of your initial impetuses. What’s the plural of impetus? In any case, how did that go? I mean, what’s your orientation to that question now?

Bonnie: Back in the days when I was in that organization called Creative Initiative that I mentioned, I did some psychological work. My mother died suddenly when I was fourteen. My family is Catholic, and to me, if God could do that, God was, at the very best, if God existed, indifferent. That was how my father saw it, because he was very devotional.

She had a brain hemorrhage that she died from. It was unexpected, and in those days, they didn’t have the ability they do today to help someone who might have survived. So, I was pretty shut down for ten years.

When we started to do personal work in this organization, I began to open up to the pain that I discovered and worked on, and began to see that there was kind of a hole in me. I discovered it wasn’t just missing my mother, but also missing God, because I had had a strong devotion as a young child.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know how to fix this.” And people said, “Well, why don’t you meditate?” I had never done anything like that. I began to do all that serious meditation I mentioned earlier. But it was really with that deep desire to know if there was a God.

I had a major breakthrough during that time in which the question went away. It wasn’t as if God appeared; it was more like some kind of expansion happened and the question disappeared. God was no longer some person out there that I was looking for. I felt connected, I guess you could say, and I felt very blissful. It was very blissful.

What happened is, I was about twenty-eight or thirty at the time, and I was washing dishes one day. I was feeling wonderful, and I thought, “I’ll never do anything like feeling wonderful washing dishes.” And so, I decided to go back to graduate school and become a counselor.

So, during those years of going back to graduate school and taking on all of that, starting to work in that field, I kind of lost that deep connection. That’s one of the reasons I went back to a graduate school that had a spiritual component, because I wanted to reconnect.

By then, my question was more, “I want to find something to take me further, let me go, bring me to truth.” So that was really the driving force in my own story.

Rick: Would you consider yourself a seeker now, or do you feel like that whole seeking energy has dropped off, just as the God question dropped off?

Bonnie: I don’t have any interest in seeking, but I keep staying open to possibilities. It’s not an attachment; I’m happy where I am. I want to be of more use to the people that I work with, so I still stick with my work as much as I can, but I’m not attached. I just want to stay open to what life wants to give me.

Rick: Do you still meditate or do some kind of spiritual practices?

Bonnie: Off and on, not with any consistency. There’s no drive, but I’ll feel like it and sit down and drop into that space. And I do satsang, too.

Rick: You do what?

Bonnie: Satsang in Ashland here.

Rick: It’s interesting. I had my fiftieth anniversary of learning to meditate this summer, and I’ve done it very regularly ever since. Sometimes I actually got a little flack when I announced that on Facebook, because some people said, “Geez, you know, fifty years—haven’t you sort of gotten it by now? You’re still seeking after all these years, like Paul Simon’s ‘Still Crazy After All These Years.’”

But I don’t relate to it that way. It’s more like what you were just saying about an ongoing interest and fascination and exploration and adventure. There’s so much to learn and experience, and it’s no longer driven by the sort of empty, craving feeling that you may start out with. It’s more like feeling a great deal of fullness and contentment, and yet no diminishment of enthusiasm and fascination with this whole field.

Bonnie: I agree. I think of it as marinating in the truth, marinating in that deep stillness. To be open to it is like going home. You know, Adya’s doing a program right now, a three-month meditation program that I’m participating in.

One of the things he says is, if you’ve had an awakening, don’t just assume it’s done and say, “That’s it, I don’t need to do any more.” Keep sitting, keep meditating, because there’s unlimited potentiality that can arise. I don’t know if that’s the language he used, but that’s my interpretation. Don’t stop; keep sitting. He recommends it, and I think that’s really true.

I always tell the people who come to me with their issues, “See what’s next. Just let yourself…” It helps you embody it in that place more and more, and you can drift away from it if you never take the time.

Rick: Yeah, I’m no expert on the Buddha’s life, but I’m told that he practiced some kind of meditation all of his life, some hours a day, and yet he was already liberated.

Bonnie: Especially today, I think we’re living in a really intense world. There’s all kinds of data being thrown at us all the time, most of it geared to make us frightened or worried. There are crowds and traffic; we’re not living in a healthy environment for the most part.

I think meditation gives you a center. It gives you a connection so that you can move much more from the hara, from the deepest point of connectedness in the world. It’s very easy to get scared. There’s always something on the television or the radio, or the driver next to you who’s wired and throwing negative energy your way.

Heightened Sensitivity During Awakening

It’s very important for people in an awakening process. Usually, your sensitivity becomes very heightened, and sometimes it’s really important at these stages to avoid toxic input as much as you can, whether it be people who upset you, going to big-box stores, or watching too much television.

Some people can’t even read the newspaper today, because their sensitivity and all their senses are just very acute, at least for a while.

Rick: Yeah, for a while. I mean, it depends on what you can handle. I went through a phase where I would just feel scatterbrained and drained if I went into a Walmart or something. Now it doesn’t bother me.

Bonnie: Usually. But it’s important, too. I think meditation gives you a home base. It helps you grow that stillness inside of yourself, and that makes it more and more tolerable to be in environments that are chaotic.

Rick: Yeah, I find it rejuvenating. I also find it interesting to challenge it in ways that aren’t deleterious, such as playing really intense sports or something like that, and finding that the juxtaposition of silence with that intensity is just fine. It’s not shaken by having pickleballs slammed at my head.

Bonnie: That’s great.

Rick: The term “spiritual emergence”—when I first heard that term, I thought it was sort of a play on the term “emergency,” because you hear about people having emergencies with kundalini awakenings that they can’t handle. I guess that’s part of what Stan Grof was trying to help people with.

But you can tell me in a second if there’s some synonymy there. Emergence really means something like a chick emerging from an egg, or a plant emerging from the ground. It means sort of a blossoming forth, and I guess that’s the sense in which that term is used in that phrase.

Bonnie: You could say consciousness is emerging, something in the energy is emerging, something new is emerging and changing the system. More often, it’s equated with a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.

Rick: There you go. That’s why you have that on your book cover—lots of little butterflies. Do you often deal with people? I think I’ve referred some people to you who were having a really hard time. What percentage of the people you talk with are having a difficult time coping with the kundalini awakening that they’re experiencing?

Bonnie: Oh gosh, it depends on what you mean by a hard time. There’s a huge range. Most of the people I talk to, once they have a context and they begin to make friends with the energy, to make friends with what’s happening to them, look at it in a more neutral way and let go of their fear. Then a lot of the issues stop.

They still have difficulties figuring out what to do about the fact that their head is jerking a lot, or various things are happening. But once they develop a cooperative relationship with the energy, instead of saying, “I don’t want to have this happening. Stop it,” things change.

Sometimes people go for a few days without sleeping, and that’s going to make them look very psychotic. Those are the ones that often end up hospitalized. The ones who end up hospitalized have usually had the awakening on a psychedelic. They’ve gotten very, very wired and excited. Maybe they were in India, were new and immature about it, and didn’t sleep for two or three days.

Well, anybody who doesn’t sleep for a couple of days is going to look psychotic. It doesn’t require a kundalini awakening, but they have an experience, and there are examples of this in the book.

One woman was a psychiatrist. She had a very dramatic experience with depression after an opening that occurred during, I think, labor, or was related to birthing a baby. Her husband hospitalized her because he was so alarmed by it.

So, if that happens, it’s hard, because people have this little gnawing feeling that something’s really seriously wrong with them, and they really wonder, “But gee, I had this ecstatic moment of total unity. What does that mean?”

Rick: Yeah, well, that kind of relates to what I was saying earlier about the importance of knowledge and experience. Without adequate knowledge of what’s happening, your head starts shaking or something, and you think you’ve got a neurological disorder, which you may, and you might need to get it checked out. But there are all kinds of phenomena like that that happen with kundalini awakenings that could be really disconcerting if you have no idea what they are, but which you take in stride with a shrug if you know that that’s what it is. It’s okay, fine, something good is happening, this is not dangerous, I’ll just kind of go with it.

Bonnie: You know, one of the things I’ve really tried to do with my book, and I’m not sure if it comes across, is show the general good health of most people who go into a spiritual awakening process. Most of the people I talked to have had successful lives at some level. They’ve either raised a family or been professionals in their field. I’ve talked to judges, psychiatrists, teachers, medical professionals, and IT professionals. They’re people who are not people who have mental disorders or other kinds of problems before this happened to them.

So, to look at what’s happening with a little bit of distance instead of being totally immersed in it, the way that you might be if you’re more tenuous, they’re seeing these weird things and they’re saying, “What’s going on here? I don’t understand it. I don’t care about my work anymore. I’m having all this energy. I can’t sleep at night because my energy is revving up and running through me. I’m scared because I had this vision. I don’t know what it means.”

So, they’re trying to understand it, and they’re not unhealthy people. Once they get a context about what is happening to them and they can see some things they can do to ground the energy, or maybe they need to do less of some kind of practice they’re doing, they need to get a new context because somebody told them that they were crazy or that the devil was after them, and they knew that couldn’t be so. So, they don’t have any context. But once they get that, then they can work with it.

What I’m doing with people that I do assessments with is webinars, where I bring them together. They love it because many of them are all alone. I’ve had people in Norway, Switzerland, China, and Taiwan, and they don’t know a single person they can talk to about this. If they do try to talk to people in their community, the people, at the very best, don’t understand what they’re talking about. They may be supportive because they say, “Oh, I really care about you. I’m sorry you’re going through this.” They have no way of helping them get any kind of understanding.

So, they’re so happy to meet other people and see that these other people look just as normal as you and I. They’re just normal people. They’re interesting people. Then they start to feel more okay. “Okay, well, all right. I guess this is something important I need to understand better that’s happening to me. Maybe when I was meditating, this was what I was aiming for. I didn’t know it, but this is the process.”

Once they understand that, things calm down greatly. Getting rid of fear is the most important thing anyone can do. Then there’s a lot of other things you can do. You can really trust the energy itself. To accept and trust it makes a huge difference. You can do activities to try to express some of that energy. That’s very helpful. There are many things they can do. If you’re bothered, get some energy practices that open you up more.

Once they understand that, things calm down greatly. Getting rid of fear is the most important thing anyone can do. Then there’s a lot of other things you can do. You can really trust the energy itself. To accept and trust it makes a huge difference. You can do activities to try to express some of that energy. That’s very helpful. There are many things they can do. If you’re bothered, get some energy practices that open you up more.

Once they get a handle on, “There are actually things I can do to get in a more cooperative relationship with the energies,” they feel a lot better. So, that doesn’t really take very long. It’s really just knowing.

Rick: Good, that’s an interesting point. I’m glad we keep coming back to that, the value of knowledge. There’s that saying, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” I think that the more one can understand this whole process, without becoming obsessive about it, the better served one will be.

But it’s an interesting point you just made about how most of the people who come to you are fairly accomplished people, professionals of some sort or something. You’re saying, I guess, that there seems to be a correlation between having one’s act together, having one’s life together, being a coherent, mature person with a well-developed sense of self or whatever, and having some kind of awakening. Is that what you’re saying?

Bonnie: Well, what I feel is anybody can have an awakening, but most of the ones who contact me, their history shows that they were pretty functional, very functional. An exception is young people, nineteen- or twenty-year-olds. Often, it’s because of a psychedelic that they’ve had this opening, and they haven’t really yet developed their place in the world. They’re still in that other transitional phase of, “I’m not who I’m going to be.”

It’s a lot harder in a way for some of them, because then it’s… I don’t know quite how to explain it, but it’s good. You’ve probably seen that several of the Buddhist teachers have said that it’s much better to have a good ego before you go through this process than not to have it. If you’re kind of borderline or bipolar before your awakening, it’s much harder to figure out how to cope with it because your way of functioning is more erratic.

And so, you really need to take care of the underlying psychological issues. You have to be mature before you enter the awakening process. And it’s a kind of a mix of learning: What do I have to do to take care of myself so that I can deepen my awakening and live with more, deeper peace and presence in the world?

✨ Psychedelics and spiritual awakening

Rick: Yeah, it’s an interesting point. You take kind of a dim view of psychedelics, I think, in your book. At least that’s the feeling I got as I was reading that section. And yet these days there’s a lot of interest in it. People are microdosing, and there are popular books out. Michael Pollan, whom I hope to interview, has a book called Changing Your Mind, in which he compares the mind to a snow globe, and he said, “You know, at a certain point in your life, it’s good to just shake up the snow globe.”

That is precisely why I would be very reticent to use anything like that, because I feel like I’d be playing Russian roulette with my brain. I think there’s been a certain amount of brain sculpting going on, to use another popular term, neuroplasticity, all these years, and why gamble with it?

But for some people it seems to really precipitate an awakening, and yet, as you say, taking the 60s as an example, if people go about it in any kind of a reckless way, or if they’re not mature and psychologically healthy, they can get into big trouble.

And one more statement before I bounce it back to you: In spite of what I just said, psychedelics apparently are being used to help people suffering from PTSD and alcoholism and stuff like that. So, there’s some conflicting evidence in there, and since they’ve been illegal, it’s been hard for adequate research to be done, but there’s certainly growing interest in them these days.

Bonnie: I think that it’s quite possible to have very expansive experiences on psychedelics. The difference is that once you take it, once you use that substance, it’s just going to do what it’s going to do. So, if you’re a very adventurous person and you’re pretty stable, maybe it’s not a problem, but it’s a totally unpredictable ride. So, there are many positive things and negative things about it.

I’ve run into a number of people who had huge openings when they were young in the 60s. One friend of mine was wandering on the beach, babbling and totally out of control, and was hospitalized. And that whole experience stunned him so much that it was years before he was willing to go back to any kind of school. He was afraid of meditating and spiritual things, afraid it would throw him into that same place.

I’ve seen a number of people that that’s happened to. Ram Dass is a case in point. He decided to let go of the psychedelics and go to India and find some real teachers about this stuff. And that worked out well for him. It’s really a crapshoot. For some people it’s going to be helpful, and for others it’s not.

There’s a new drug that seems to open up a part of the psyche that has a real gut appeal. It seems one can go into very beautiful connectedness, and people are experimenting with it.

Rick: Is that DMT or something?

Bonnie: Yeah, DMT. I’ve known people that have done that who are mature. It seems to last about 15 minutes. It’s not like four or five hours. And the people I know who have used it are very mature, very experienced. They’ve appreciated the boost.

But I don’t know. Generally, there’s no research on that kind of thing right now, and who knows whether it’s got a long-term impact on the brain that’s positive or negative? We won’t ever know until we are able to research such things.

Rick: I also wonder, although I’m in favor of marijuana being legalized, because I think it’s ridiculous that people are being put in jail for it, as I was a couple of times back in the 60s. At the same time, I wonder what the long-term effect is going to be of its use.

I know what the long-term effect on me would have been had I been doing it all these years. I would be a very different person, in a bad way, than I am now. But who knows? Maybe it’ll be like it was for us. Maybe it’ll be a stepping stone for some people.

Bonnie: Some people think marijuana is particularly good for people who are in a spiritual process. I’ve known a few who have had spiritual experiences while smoking marijuana, who meditate on it, and who became quite distorted. They had a little more psychotic-type episodes, or they developed a lack of discrimination.

I cite one in my book, a man I met many years ago who had been visiting Muktananda, and he would do practices looking at Muktananda’s pictures. Then he was on an airplane, and he decided he had to bless everybody. So, he’s walking up and down the aisles blessing everybody, and of course, he got told to sit down, but he wouldn’t sit down. He had other tendencies like that that got him in a lot of trouble.

It’s like the brain. I don’t think the brain is going through changes in long-term meditation; it’s slowly evolving and opening up new brain centers. If you throw in a substance that creates images and allows you to have kind of a hallucinogenic effect, it’s like you get all mixed up. You don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. Your discrimination isn’t so good.

I can’t speak from experience about marijuana because that isn’t part of my history, but I’ve certainly talked to a lot of people who use it, and there are some who are attached even though they’re waking up. The other thing a yogi once told me is that it leaves toxins in the body, stores them in the fat cells, and one of the things the kundalini is trying to do is release all your toxins.

So, if you’re smoking pot regularly, you’re going to probably have the need to release energy, but then other people have told me it calms the energy down. How interesting it would be to do some really serious research.

Rick: I remember seeing some research that indicated that there’s some kind of chemical gunk deposited in the synapses between neurons if people smoke a lot of pot. But I don’t know. This whole topic is somewhat a matter of opinion, although I think it’s something that could be researched more.

But I have friends in India who are of the opinion that 99 percent of those sadhus who sit around the Ganges smoking pot are just bums. They’re just potheads. There’s nothing, no real serious significance, to their realization.

Bonnie: Have you read Christina Grof’s book about The Thirst for Wholeness, or something? She talks about her own addictions and how important it was for her to get off alcohol and drugs, and how much they messed up her spiritual process, her awakening process. I can’t remember the full title of the book, but it was by Christina Grof, if any of your listeners are interested.

Rick: Well, the body is the temple of the soul, and it’s the instrument through which anything is experienced and through which awakening is experienced. And so, I think what you and I have been talking about for two hours is that there’s an importance to cultivating or nurturing the vehicle so it’s better and better able to support this experience we’re interested in.

And by “experience,” I mean an abiding state, not just some flash in the pan. Drugs tend to be flashes in the pan by definition: you go up, you come down. So, it’s just something to be approached, if one is going to approach it at all, with tremendous caution and respect.

I had this realization when I was 18 on LSD one time, and it was the last time I ever took drugs. I was sitting there reading a Zen book, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, at three in the morning, and it just kind of struck me. I thought, “Wow, these guys are really serious and I’m just screwing around. And if I keep on like this, I’m going to live a miserable life. What’s more, I’m stuck in this body, and if I damage this body, I’m going to be stuck in a damaged body.”

I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it as clearly at that point, but that was the essential realization. I thought, “That’s it. I’m going to stop taking drugs, learn to meditate, and see what happens,” and I’m grateful that I did.

So, I’m open-minded. I want to interview Michael Pollan and some other people on that topic. I’ve done so before, but I’m just very, very cautious and reticent on the topic, because I’ve seen so much damage and so many problems.

Bonnie: Yeah, I agree. I feel the same way. I’m not opposed to it, but I think it can go in any direction and you’re really taking a gamble. It might be worthwhile for you, but if you really want a functional, stable life with deep inner peace, if you’re drawn to that rather than drama, you might want to do meditation instead.

Rick: Yeah, I think another thing is that whatever drugs do to our brain chemistry to enable us to have certain experiences, I think most researchers would say we have the capability of producing those chemicals or those brain states without any substances.

There are subjective methodologies, such as meditation and other spiritual practices, which can elicit those things, but will do so in a safer way when the time is right, when you’ve actually built up the degree of purity or clarity that would naturally support such an experience.

But like you said earlier, someone—a young person with no spiritual background or anything else—can pop anything in their mouth and it might elicit all sorts of changes in the brain. But are they really prepared for that? All the deep conditionings, impressions, impurities, and everything else that may be in the system are still going to be there, and you may stir up a hornet’s nest if you just embark on such a thing without the kind of preparation that serious spiritual traditions usually advocate.

Bonnie: It’s a slow, transformative process with meditation, breath practices, and yoga. It’s a slow evolving and changing of the brain. With a drug, it’s sudden, and you just have no predictability about what’s going to get changed, how you are going to feel afterward, or even if it’s going to fall away.

It’s going to get added, like these visions and things that are going to be more of a nuisance than a benefit.

Rick: And also, how are you going to stabilize it? That was one of the complaints of Ram Dass and others. You always come down, and are you going to take LSD all your life in order to stabilize the state of realization? I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s going to have that effect, so you have to think long-term. What is really going to serve me over the course of my entire life?

Bonnie: That’s what it was, yeah. I agree.

Rick: Well, I don’t know if we want to end on this note. We’ve been talking about all kinds of things, and here we’ve been talking about drugs for the last 10 or 15 minutes. Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you want to be sure to mention before we wrap it up?

Bonnie: Well, I would say that in my book I offer a lot of solutions and potential explanations for various phenomena that arise. But generally, I just want to say that there are certain cornerstones that really help us with awakening: meditation; working directly; being friendly and curious instead of being afraid; meeting and clearing up your old psychological stuff; trusting that this is a process that wants to bring you to a new level; recognizing that it can give you more inner peace and much more clarity, and that it’s not out to harm you in any way; using creative expression to express some of it; taking good care of your body; and being authentic.

Those are the cornerstones that I’ve been using in looking at what somebody really needs. And if anybody listening is a therapist, yoga teacher, or meditation teacher, those are the things that people need in order to come to a more balanced and harmonious place with their energy. So, I just want to make sure people know that my mission in life is to get that information out there.

Rick: Those are pretty useful prescriptions for life—for anybody’s life, spiritual aspirant or not.

Bonnie: That’s true.

Rick: A question just came in from a listener in Austin, Texas. I might as well ask this. It’s Kate from Austin—I just said Austin. She said, “I had a drastic change of personality, much more open and relaxed. I would shake and lie still for hours at night or during the day, didn’t need to speak for days at a time, and felt lovely. However, there was a lot of sexual energy, which was fairly alarming. I still have to swim a mile and do yoga once a day.” What’s all that about?

Bonnie: Energy comes up from the base. It can get stuck in any of the chakra areas, or it can overactivate any of them, so sometimes it just gets stuck in the sexual area, in the second chakra, and it can be very uncomfortable.

Sometimes when it’s in the heart and becomes really active, you can feel difficulty with your heart or chest, beating too hard, or trouble breathing. Some people have these funny neck movements.

What I usually tell people is that there are two possibilities. Learn the bija mantras—B-I-J-A mantras. Those are tones to activate each of the chakras, and you can use them to move energy from one chakra to another. You can find people doing those in a couple of places on YouTube. There are classical yoga sounds for each chakra. OM is the one people are most familiar with. OM, LAM, VAM, RAM, YAM, HAM, OM—those are all listed in my book.

The other thing is that on my website, kundaliniguide.com, there’s a meditation for harmonizing the chakras that I put on there. I felt it would be useful to help people learn that, through attention, you can move energy to different areas.

So, you’re coming into a relationship with your own energy. It’s your own life force; it’s your own energy. You can get in contact with this energy, and you can learn, when there’s too much in one area, to bring it to a different area of the system. That meditation on my website was designed for it. Some people have said it was helpful, so I would suggest that.

The other thing is that if this person is doing something, they need to look at their life and see if they’re doing anything that’s overcharging them. It’s good to be a detective. When I have too much sexual energy, what was I doing that day? Or when I’m awake all night with too much energy, what was I doing? Where was I? Who was I talking to? Was I worried about something? What was going on?

That way, you can learn to adjust your day to the things that feel more balanced and harmonious. And you can recognize that, because you can think of the energy as trying to release stress from your body. It’s trying to release everything; it’s trying to make you very open.

So, the more you’ve got in there that’s stressful or anxious, or if you’re preoccupied with something, the more it’s going to need to work that out, and it usually chooses to do it in this way. So, that’s what comes to mind, right off the top.

Usually, I do consultations where I send people a questionnaire so that I can get background information. It makes a difference for the guidance I offer if I know someone’s history. I’m always looking for correlations between certain behaviors, beliefs, or history and the kind of phenomena that they’re struggling with.

So, yeah, they can get insights. There’s a contact form on kundaliniguide.com or awakeningguide.com, and then I’ll send them the questionnaire and other information about the assessment. That’s the best way.

Rick: I’ll link to those things from your page on Batgap. Also, I think it sounds good that she swims a mile a day and does yoga. That’s great. I’m a big advocate of physical activity. A lot of times, spiritual types sit around on their butts too much.

In fact, I was just talking to a friend the other day here in Fairfield, where thousands of people have been meditating for years. He saw a bunch of people recently whom he hadn’t seen in a long time. He was shocked at how old they looked, and he happens to be a tennis instructor. I see him up at the gym all the time because I go up there, and we both thought that the problem is inactivity.

These people sit around too much, their diet might be inadequate, and they don’t get enough sun, and it ages you. So, it’s again coming back to this theme: the body is the vehicle. You have to take care of it and find balance in all things.

Bonnie: I agree. So, it’s very good to do something physical to keep your body healthy and as open as possible.

Rick: Okay, great. Well, I guess that’s a pretty good wrap-up point. Thank you, Kate, for that question that enabled us to sort of end it on that interesting practical note. I presume those who have been listening understand that you can get in touch with Bonnie if you feel that what she has to offer might be useful to you, and I think just about everybody at some stage of their spiritual practice might find it useful.

In any case, there are her books. I have read two of them now, one for each of the interviews I’ve done, and I’ll be listing them all on batgap.com, linking to them so people can check them out if they like.

I found them very useful. In fact, this one has this blurb on the back from a guy named

You’ll find this one of the more useful and memorable spiritual books you’ve ever read.

That’s my little blurb on the back. I like practical advice, and I like it when people don’t have a one-size-fits-all attitude. They realize that there are so many varieties of spiritual experience, and everybody’s just not going to fit into the same mold. Different people are going to need different bits of advice, practices, remedies, therapies, or whatever in order to deal with whatever they’re going through. I think that’s the reality of the situation.

Okay, great. So let me just make a wrap-up point or two. You’ve been listening to an interview with Bonnie Greenwell, and this is my second interview with her. If you enjoyed this one, you might want to go back and listen to the first one as well. I’ll interlink them on BatGap.

Obviously, I continue to do these. If you like to be notified of new ones, go to batgap.com and sign up to be notified by email, or you could subscribe to the YouTube channel. It also exists as an audio podcast for those who like to listen while driving and stuff.

Next week, I’m going to the SAND conference. Are you going there, Bonnie?

Bonnie: No, I won’t be there this year.

Rick: Okay. Well, I’m going out, and I’ll be doing a bunch of interviews there and a panel discussion and whatnot. I’ll be putting them all up on BatGap, so there’ll be the usual post-SAND flood of material when I get back.

So, thanks a lot for listening or watching, and we’ll see you for the next one. Thanks, Bonnie.

Bonnie: Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.

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