Chris Beckett Transcript

Chris Beckett Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is Chris Beckett. Chris is in Bristol in the UK. In case you haven’t watched one of these, Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awake or awakening people. There have been about 290 of them done so far, so if you’d like to check out the previous ones go to batgap.com. They’re archived and categorized in various ways and there’s also a donate button there which we appreciate people clicking to help support the whole project. Chris got in touch a while back and he sounded interesting and I forwarded it over to Irene, my wife who does the scheduling and choosing of guests. She was fascinated because Chris said, “My good friend Mike reminded me recently that a couple of years ago my comment on spirituality was ‘F enlightenment’ for whatever reason I just didn’t care.” So Irene was fascinated with the fact that somebody who really didn’t give a hoot would undergo some rather profound awakenings, and that does happen sometimes. Usually it’s people who are really keen on it. So we scheduled Chris and we’re going to have a conversation. Chris is a professional musician and we’ll be talking about that and about spirituality and music a little bit later in the interview. So Chris you’ve sent me your bio here, it’s quite long and I won’t just read the whole thing but we’ll kind of go through it because people like to hear people’s story. You said that until this year your only interest in spirituality was in making you happier, you weren’t looking to be changed only to make your experience better, but that to me sounds like change. I mean if you become happier or if your experience becomes better that’s a kind of a change isn’t it?

Chris: I think what I really meant was I wasn’t interested in finding out about anything to do with truth or anything like that.

Rick: So you weren’t seeking some ultimate reality or wisdom or something, you just wanted to feel better and be happier. And I guess you mentioned that your pursuits had been along kind of in the self-improvement realm for some time. So what kind of stuff did you do in that area?

Chris: So probably from the age of like early 20s to late 20s I was kind of going to things like creative visualization was a big thing I got into, kind of using internal worlds to kind of sort of make myself feel better. What else did I kind of do?

Rick: How old are you now?

Chris: 39.

Rick: Okay.

Chris: So I was doing that and I just kind of just wasn’t interested in finding out anything more than what I already knew basically. I just wanted to live better in the world which I knew basically. But then that did all change about five years ago.

Rick: What happened?

Chris: Well I broke up with my partner, my girlfriend at the time, and that kind of created a sort of shift where before that point I felt that I was kind of chasing life and I was manipulating life. Then I suddenly felt the energy change very dramatically and I suddenly felt that life was chasing after me. It was very palpable. In fact I can even remember the moment when it happened. I was going for a walk and I used to get so much support and grounding from nature and suddenly the energy changed and I felt that if I went into nature somehow I’d be transformed in a deeper way. So it just became like fire or something, had this sort of fieriness to it which I just avoided nature in some way.

Rick: So you were kind of afraid of being transformed in a deeper way you’re saying, of avoiding it?

Chris: Yeah, I was completely avoiding it because I knew I was being chased and I knew if I let go into it even slightly then basically this kind of point of energy would just break me open. And that’s exactly what happened. And it did happen, it kind of started, the reaction started a few times before.

Rick: What was it like? I mean I kind of get the image of a volcano about to erupt or something and there’s some smoke and there’s some bulging of the mountainside and whatnot.

Chris: It’s like a nuclear reaction, it’s got a catalytic feel to it. And what happened the previous few times, like it almost happened a year before it happened for real. And it was like a catalytic reaction but somehow the energy got changed at the last moment and I got pushed into something else.

Rick: So you were trying to keep a lid on it in other words, because you were afraid of what might happen if you just let it happen?

Chris: I wouldn’t say so consciously as that. I wouldn’t say I was consciously sort of keeping a lid on it. I mean I wouldn’t say that I was unaccepting of life before this kind of awakening and the shift happened. It’s just that it just didn’t happen, it just didn’t happen. The energy just changed. I did try and get out of it I guess. I kind of felt I wanted to be out of this situation which is happening, this energy which is building up.

Rick: So aside from avoiding nature, which you felt was conducive to this energy building up, were you doing anything else to suppress it? I mean were you drinking or something to try to keep it?

Chris: No, I gave up drinking and all that kind of stuff in my mid to late 20s. By the time this kind of new energy was coming in, I guess that’s from the age of 32 to 37 or whatever, there was a kind of new energy. I did feel very good about life as well. It’s very paradoxical. I was getting more open at the same time, so I was getting more open, but at the same time there was this sort of feeling that there was this energy which I knew that if I went into it, it would just kind of break me open.

Rick: Alright, so that seems to have gone on for a while, but then you finally went into it or allowed it to take you over, right?

Chris: There was no allowing, it just happened.

Rick: Just happened.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. There was absolutely no choice in it. It was just completely like life was … because I never would have gone there myself and just life basically kind of got to the point where it sort of said, “There’s no more time, sorry. You’re just ready.”

Rick: So what was it like? What was the experience?

Chris: Well, it started a week before, so it started from just an energy entering my body basically at a certain point. For the first few days I kind of felt that things were going to be manageable, it was going to be okay, I just felt a bit kind of disconcerted. But by sort of … it happened on a Sunday, by Tuesday, Wednesday, there was just this feeling that this nuclear catalytic kind of thing had just got to a certain point where it was going to do its thing. It wasn’t going to stop.

Rick: Okay. Can you be more explicit, aside from nuclear and catalytic, I mean what was the actual subjective visceral experience you were going through?

Chris: It was just a feeling of my life falling apart completely.

Rick: Was that evident to external observers? I mean, were you losing your job and stuff was becoming dysfunctional or was it more of a subjective thing?

Chris: It all happened so quickly, it all happened in a few days. Literally in a few days I went from my life’s really okay to I can’t live anymore with the way I’m living basically. It was only three days, four days.

Rick: Well how had you been living and what was it about the way you had been living that was no longer livable?

Chris: I really can’t say, just everything just …

Rick: You were doing music and this and this, probably a lot of the stuff you’re doing now, so what actually changed?

Chris: It was just everything just unwound, just my whole sort of sense of who I was completely just started to unravel basically. The only thing I knew for sure was I was dying. That’s all I said to my friends, the friends I met up with. I just said, “I’m dying.” That was the only thing. I didn’t know if this was going to happen or anything. I just knew I was going to die in some way.

Rick: And they probably said, “What are you talking about you’re dying? You have cancer or something? What do you mean you’re dying?”

Chris: I think the people I talked to were kind of quite spiritual, so I think they had an insight into what was going on. They realized it was something key to death.

Chris: Yeah.

Rick: Right.

Rick: Okay, so there was this cathartic moment kind of bubbling up for you and you felt it coming. You must have had some kind of …

Chris: I kind of knew it was going to happen unconsciously because I said to my friend Mike, who was a guy, I asked him to borrow the “End of Your World” book by Adyashanti.

Rick: Which I have right on the shelf back here.

Chris: Yeah, which I had read a bit of a year before and thought was complete rubbish. But he said to me, I was very insistent, he came around for dinner on Friday night and he said, “You need to bring this book with you.” So it was all very … I don’t know, there was just no sort of conscious choice at that point. It was just completely like life was just completely pressing down on my entire life. I just had no sense of any kind of personal will at that point.

Rick: And you weren’t doing any spiritual practices or anything, this was just happening?

Chris: No, I was avoiding them. I was avoiding meditating as well.

Rick: But you had meditated in the past?

Chris: A little bit, yeah. Not much, but here and there.

Rick: That’s interesting. So, I think to the spiritual insider, so to speak, someone who’s been doing spiritual practices and reading spiritual books, they have a sense of what you’re talking about, because the books talk about this kind of thing and they may have had experiences like this. But to the person, like you said a minute ago about the Adyashanti book, you thought it was complete BS or something, because it didn’t relate to your experience. So there could be people listening who might have the same reaction to what we’ve been saying so far, because you’ve been kind of vague and there’s this thing that life was trying to take you over and your whole life was going to fall apart and you thought you were going to die. Try to put yourself in the shoes of the kind of person you had been when you were first exposed to the Adyashanti book and thought it was BS, and try to help that person understand what was really happening in a way that they might be able to relate to.

Chris: What do you mean from the point of view, “Now what I know?”

Rick: Yeah, try to make it clear what you’re talking about, because this can sound like a lot of gobbledygook or it can sound very unclear to someone who hasn’t had that experience. It can sound like nonsense to somebody. So, try to give a sense of what it was you were actually going through and what your actual experience was day-to-day and moment-to-moment.

Chris: So my experience was, I did feel that I was going in some kind of process, but I didn’t have a sense that when this process would happen and how it would culminate. So I didn’t consciously think, “Oh, I’m having a spiritual awakening,” or anything like that. There was no conscious recognition of that. There was just this recognition that I was in this somehow deep process which is going to transform me in some way, and that was tied in with this sense that I was dying in some way, but I didn’t have a sense of how I was dying. But paradoxically, I must have unconsciously or some very deep level realized what was happening, because I borrowed this book from Mike, and I was quite insistent on borrowing that book basically.

Rick: Yeah, so it reminds you of the old Dylan line, “Something’s going on here, but you don’t know what it is.”

Chris: Yeah, it was exactly that. Something was happening, but I didn’t quite piece it together in my mind.

Rick: So it sounds like it happened over the course of a week or so, though, and by the end of that week you did have a sense of what had been happening, and you kind of landed on the other side of it. So what was that like?

Chris: So basically, on Sunday night I was reading the book, and I’d read quite a lot of it already, I was probably halfway through, and I just read this line and it said something like, I can’t remember what the other line said, but it said something like, “You’re not your thoughts,” and then something physically changed within me, like a kind of connection in my brain which kind of linked something together which wasn’t there, and there was just so much energy going through my body. I just realized that my thoughts weren’t true, but it wasn’t a kind of, “Oh, my thoughts weren’t true,” it was kind of like saying it as this process was happening, this just energetic change which just started happening.

Rick: So do you feel like prior to that you had always assumed that you were your thoughts or you had identified that you were your thoughts, and then somehow that identification was broken?

Chris: Yeah, I’d never for a second, like for some reason I’d never actually thought, “What am I? Who am I? Who is this person?” It just never ever occurred to me, and that was the first time which I kind of looked. I didn’t even look, it all happened in one moment, just that sudden connection, I just knew it wasn’t true. Then the next question, because I just kept saying to myself, because there was so much energy going on and so much chaos in a way, it was very chaotic, it wasn’t kind of a calm sort of thing. Then after a while of sort of jumping on my bed going, “My God, I’m not my thoughts,” I then sort of started to ask the question, “Well, what am I?” And then over the next sort of few days I started to realize that somehow I was everything. I started to look at pictures on the wall and I started to realize that the picture and the looking at the picture and me were all the same thing, all the same movement.

Rick: It’s interesting because some people go through years of trying to do Ramana Maharshi’s self-inquiry, and “Who am I?” and “What am I?” and “I’m not my thoughts,” and all this stuff, and can still feel kind of frustrated with that even after years of doing it, and here it just happened to you.

Chris: I know. I’m aware of that. I have friends like that who have been long-term Buddhists, and they’ve spent their whole life sort of trying to find out who they are, look behind. Yeah, it was just ready to happen. I’ve always been quite an honest person. I’ve always been honest about how I’ve been living in some kind of way. I did have a sense beforehand that I knew I was kind of kidding myself, and I had very subconscious moments of sort of diving back into that. I remember having memories of, “Okay, I’m going to dive back into this sort of pretend world where I’m pretending to be the person and everything.”

Rick: Were you able to?

Chris: Yeah, yeah. This was a long time ago. This was in my early 20s.

Rick: Oh, early 20s, yeah. So, even in your 20s before this thing happened, there was already kind of a sense of, “I am not just this person that everybody sees and that most people think they are.”

Chris: Not consciously, no. It wasn’t a conscious thing. It was, I don’t know.

Rick: But it was something, some subliminal thing that was growing.

Chris: Something subliminal. I kind of knew that. I never thought that the world was concrete ever, and I always thought the world was endless in some kind of way. I never really understood how people thought the world was a thing. It just didn’t make sense. But at the same time I had no kind of questioning. There wasn’t the energy of questioning around that.

Rick: Yeah, you just took it for granted. You weren’t thinking about it much.

Chris: I just took it for granted, yeah.

Rick: So, how long ago was this eventful week?

Chris: Two and a bit years ago.

Rick: Okay. And so how has your life changed since then?

Chris: Quite a lot, really.

Rick: In what ways?

Chris: Well, the first thing that really had to happen is I became completely honest with myself. And the Adyashanti books really helped with that, and the Adyashanti videos and this general teaching. So I had to really sort of become really sort of deeply honest with myself and really open as well. And so allow life to be kind of as it is, allow life to be messy as well. That was the big thing I learned from the Adyashanti teaching.

Rick: So could you give us an example of how you might have not been honest prior to this and how you were different?

Chris: I just lost the ability to bullshit myself. Before I could kind of kid myself, but that just evaporated. I had this real sense that if I wasn’t honest with myself, what happened to me was so powerful, there was so much energy, and there was so much physical change going on that it would rip me apart. If I resisted, I had this real sense that I’d either go crazy or my body would just not be able to take it.

Rick: Interesting. What kind of physical change were you experiencing?

Chris: Well, I had a massive kundalini kind of awakening a few weeks after that.

Rick: Huh. Well, let’s hear about that.

Chris: That was a pretty crazy day really. The whole day was strange. I kind of stopped thinking for two hours. I went for a massive walk. Then I came back and I lay on my bed and I just knew I had to focus on this energy in my body. Then my body went into a massive spasm, basically. It was a huge spasm going all the way up my spine. And my spine was doing this, my head was moving. There was nobody there, but it would have been very, very frightening to look at because my head was spinning.

Rick: They would have hauled you off to the ER. Yeah.

Chris: Well, I think if somebody would have touched me, they would have like flown across the room kind of thing, because my head wasn’t moving like this. It was moving at like 100 times a second. I mean, I thought I was going to die. I wasn’t sure I was going to die. I mean, it was terrifying, but my body relaxed. But within that relaxation I was like absolutely terrified.

Rick: You probably had a sense of what was going on though, right?

Chris: Yeah, yeah, I kind of did. I mean, I guess I hadn’t read about … I read about the energetic stuff and the Adyshanti stuff, but yeah, I kind of knew what was happening on some body level.

Rick: So how long did that last, that episode?

Chris: Ten minutes or something.

Rick: How did you feel afterwards?

Chris: Different. I felt like … I didn’t feel particularly different, but I felt it would kind of lead to kind of a big change within my body or something like that. I kind of sensed that it opened a doorway, which is kind of what’s happened. Then I had loads of crazy stuff with breathing and I was stopping breathing and there was lots of really crazy stuff going on with that.

Rick: Sure. Fast breathing also maybe, and stopping and fast and different.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. And then the world went black as well for a few minutes.

Rick: You mean your eyes were open but you couldn’t see anything?

Chris: Yeah, my eyes were closed and they went black, and then I opened my eyes and there was nothing.

Rick: Yeah, as you’re probably aware by now a lot of this stuff is in the literature, you know, people have had experiences like this for eons. And so, something good was happening, but you know, when this kind of thing happens to a person who has no inkling of what it is, it can be pretty scary.

Chris: Yeah, that day I was ready, I’d had enough. I would have happily died.

Rick: The interview I did two weeks ago was with a woman who specializes in Kundalini stuff, so people who are interested in that might want to watch that. Yeah, so keep telling us the story. I mean, this was a big thing.

Chris: Yeah, I mean before that it was very chaotic. I mean, I threw myself back into my teaching. I mean, there was just so much energy and so much. It was really hard going, really, really hard going. It felt like I was in the middle of a hurricane.

Rick: Do you feel like you’re kind of more acclimated or integrated?

Chris: Yeah, I mean a lot has happened since and that was the first few months. That was the first three months were the most chaotic and then it’s definitely changed. Now it tends to be periods of acclimation and then I have sort of

Rick: Another surge.

Chris: New energy opening out. So yeah, the Kundalini thing was the next big highlight. Then over those few weeks and months there was more of a conscious kind of unity sense, that sense of unity grew, and so the sense of no separation. I never got this kind of ‘you are consciousness’ thing that just didn’t sort of happen. For me it kind of just, I don’t know, I mean maybe I just don’t understand what people mean by it, because for me it just kind of went from being me to somehow being everything. So I’ve never got the kind of the consciousness thing, because it was so obvious to me that my body was part of this whole thing and there was more to change and more to transform. It was just so obvious. I just felt it within myself. I just knew there was more. It was kind of self-evident somehow.

Rick: Well I think the ‘you are consciousness’ thing is, you probably have that experience, but you’re kind of not seeing it or understanding it the same way that people describe it. I know of cases where people had been very deeply versed in spiritual literature and teachings and then had an awakening which totally freaked them out because their preconceptions about what it would be based on reading that literature differed so much from what it actually turned out to be, that they didn’t put two and two together and realize, “Oh, this is what I’ve been looking for.” They thought there was something wrong with them. But when you say that you look at the refrigerator or you look at the picture on the wall or something and there’s a oneness with it, what is that oneness? It’s not that the refrigerator is flesh, like your body is flesh. On what level is that oneness? What’s the common denominator that would cause you to say that there’s a sense of oneness with the picture or with the refrigerator?

Chris: I guess it’s just the words more than anything. I just never identified with that word ‘consciousness,’ like love or unity, those words which kind of do it for me. Unity is the one which … because it includes everything somehow. It’s like the kind of “you’re not your body” thing. To me it was, “I’m part of this whole thing.”

Rick: Sure.

Chris: And my transformation as well is part of the whole thing and living my life is part of the whole thing.

Rick: So, what I hear you saying is that there’s a kind of a sense of wholeness that seems to unite the parts, it seems to contain the parts. So, the parts don’t seem to be utterly dissimilar from one another, they’re somehow essentially united or the same, even though superficially they may appear to be different.

Chris: It’s moved more and more towards just feeling like everything’s an expression of the same thing. So, I’m an expression of this whole thing, the microphone is the expression of the whole thing, my friend is the expression of the whole thing, this meeting with this person that’s difficult is an expression of the whole thing, this difficult thing, this difficult energy, this nice energy, it all seems to be an expression.

Rick: Yeah, kind of like waves on the ocean or something, they’re all expressions of the same thing.

Chris: Yeah.

Rick: So, I would suggest that this mysterious consciousness thing is actually the whole thing to which you’re referring, of which all these things are expressions. And the point is that consciousness is not an object, so you’re not going to identify consciousness the way you would identify a chair or a dog or something like that. Consciousness is kind of the knower or the seer, and it doesn’t see itself just as the eyeball doesn’t see itself, but it’s that by which everything is seen. So, maybe that’s where the confusion is that there’s some expectation of, “Wait, where’s this consciousness thing that everybody is talking about?” But you’re actually having that experience of the unity of things.

Chris: It’s because it doesn’t kind of capture the intimacy, because there’s such massive intimacy with everything and every situation, and everything’s just pregnant with this intimacy. The word for me, in my mind, “consciousness” feels like soup or something. I don’t know, it just doesn’t get the feeling.

Rick: It doesn’t have the right connotations for you.

Chris: It doesn’t get the sense of it.

Rick: Yeah, and maybe it has an objective kind of connotation that doesn’t seem appropriate. But I mean, if there’s an intimacy, if I am intimate with someone or with something, there must be some common thread or common bond or common denominator between us that unites us basically or fundamentally, even though superficially we appear to be disunited. And so, I guess the question is, what is that common denominator through which everything feels intimate to you? This is kind of an unfair question because I don’t know if you can verbalize it, but you know, that’s just food for thought.

Chris: It all seems to be the same movement is the best way to describe it. It all seems to be, it seems like a paradox, but it’s not a paradox. I experience that more and more, you know, talking to somebody, somehow we’re separate, somehow …

Rick: You’re not.

Chris: We’re not, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, that’s perfect. Yeah, that’s the way it is.

Chris: Yeah, and it’s living it deeper and deeper from that and allowing that to go deeper and deeper into the body, which has been really what the last two years has been about, going into the heart and then going into the belly, you know, that kind of deeper. That’s really what it’s been about, living it from moment to moment.

Rick: Yeah, you probably kind of got that head-heart-belly thing from Adyashanti, he talks in that way.

Chris: Yeah, it’s been my experience as well.

Rick: Yeah, so can you talk about that a little bit more? Can you personalize it? What is it like to have the awakening in the head and then have it go to the heart and then have it go to the belly, and what’s the actual living experience of that?

Chris: Well, the head thing kind of started in my head for the first few months and the rest of my body kind of tensed up, kind of stopped the energy. So it was kind of very much a head thing. Then as the kind of unity sense and the intimacy grew, then after a few months a kind of a heart opening started and this sense of love and compassion for everything and a sort of deep reverence for everything started to deepen. And that’s got deeper and deeper over the last two years. Then recently, the last sort of few months, it started to go more into my gut and I started to breathe deeper, and that’s been the most difficult things which have come up, because the identification is beyond painful now, it’s just unbelievably painful. And the energy as well going through me, and there’s been a lot of things like that, and it’s kind of brought out my core beliefs and the root. I can see the root and I can see the strands going right into my gut and going right down into the bottom of my belly.

Rick: So in order for me to better understand what you just said, I’ll just kind of reiterate and ask a question as I go through it. So you’re saying there’s awakening in the head, but the body was resisting it as if it was sort of encrusted or something.

Chris: It just closed down, it wasn’t resisting it, I would say.

Rick: It’s not receptive to it or something.

Chris: It just simply had to shut down for a while.

Rick: Like it wasn’t ready to deal with it.

Chris: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, and then it somehow perhaps after some time relaxed and it began to go into the heart and you said greater appreciation for everything. M; Oh, massive appreciation. Even little things, spontaneous crying and seeing somebody on the street saying hello, or not even saying hello or something, just crying.

Rick: Feeling waves of love.

Chris: Yeah.

Rick: That’s very nice.

Chris: Lots of waves of love, but I mean a lot of energetic things because the Kundalini thing started to go deeper and deeper as well. A lot more energy in my body, feeling I had 10 times more energy.

Rick: Did that actually even translate into being able to do more? I mean you could work harder and stuff because you had so much that kind of energy?

Chris: No, I’ve taken it easy on the whole. I’m not the most work-orientated person, I guess, but I do feel I always have enough energy. Even when I’m tired I don’t feel drained.

Rick: So when you say you have 10 times more energy in the body, how did that manifest?

Chris: It’s not kind of energy of doing energy, it’s not kind of, “Oh, I feel like I can do.”

Rick: So it’s not like you take 20 mile hikes or something?

Chris: Yeah, it’s just this kind of … well I mean when it’s coming in it feels like that, it feels like a battery sort of doing that, but when it settles it’s much more sort of in the background.

Rick: But is it more like a sense of enlivenment in the body, like your whole body is just full of electricity almost?

Chris: Yeah, yeah. I have a lot of that.

Rick: Like it’s alive, like it’s waking up where it might have been asleep, but now you feel like the whole body is just …

Chris: Yeah, but not just my body as well, my energy body and also everything around me as well. Somehow the world seems more alive as well. Somehow there’s this recognition or somehow there’s this, I don’t know, it’s just more alive.

Rick: There’s a line from the Bible, The Incredible String Band put it into one of their songs, but it’s, “Your eye is single and your whole body is full of light.” Remember that phrase? song by The Incredible String Band whom you may not know of.

Chris: No, I do know.

Rick: Okay, good, because they were great. I believe they’re from Scotland. In any case, so then when it settled more into the gut, I got the impression you were saying that there were a lot of attachments associated with that which then began to be uprooted.

Chris: They’re starting to be, yeah.

Rick: Just now they’re starting to be?

Chris: Well, they’re conscious and they’re sort of being brought into the light, but there’s this. Maybe there’s this sense that I need to be easy with myself I think, because this new stuff coming from the gut is really, really powerful and can send my body into really sort of bad energetic pain and kind of a lot of energy. So the big thing is I’ve sort of, one of my friends, I’m sort of talking to her, she’s a psychotherapist, so that’s been quite an important development over the last few months. But there’s just this essential core strand that somehow there’s something wrong with me and that essentially feels like if that was taken away then I basically wouldn’t have a clue who I was without it. So it feels like everything’s wrapped around that kind of somehow, even the positive stuff.

Rick: Let me understand that better. So you’re saying that there’s some kind of deep-rooted sense of there being something wrong with you.

Chris: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: And that that …

Chris: It’s kind of universal and personal at the same time.

Rick: Right. I think maybe that’s what the Waking Down people call the core wound. Charaka Samhita, which is a text of Ayurveda, calls it the pragya aparadh, or mistake of the intellect, but it’s said to be the sort of fundamental misalignment or something I guess you could say.

Chris: Yeah, that’s exactly how it feels.

Rick: What you’re saying now is that since this awakening kind of sank into the gut that that’s being worked on.

Chris: Yeah, I didn’t realize I was there until a few months ago when I had a massive energetic difficulty and huge waves of shame coming up, which I never really experienced much shame particularly.

Rick: Yeah, interesting.

Chris: And then that whole sort of, and I could just see the whole system, it was a great relief actually for it to all come out. I just felt, ah, because I just started to completely understand why I did everything, and do everything, why I go about everything in a certain way, why everybody else goes about everything in a certain way. It’s just obvious.

Rick: Interesting. So, I mean, the implication of what you’re saying is that, obviously this doesn’t apply just to you, but that everybody is carrying around a lot of stuff and awakening can be a kind of a solvent which begins to dissolve that stuff and begins to process it.

Chris: My sense from the start was everything would come out. I didn’t get the sense that I could get to a point and just sort of, there’s just so much energy, I just feel not so much effortful now, but I feel I’m being sort of pushed forward still. Whereas before, I was definitely feeling I was being pushed.

Rick: Yeah, I don’t think there’s any end to it. In fact, speaking of Adyashanti, I was just listening to a nice interview he did with Tammy Simon of Sounds True. She’s got this series out about interviewing 34 different people about what waking up means, and Ady was just saying that his major awakenings took place 20 years ago, but it’s just still this never-ending process that’s going on, you know, deeper clarity, deeper appreciation and so on.

Chris: Yeah, I guess my sense is that somehow that carries on, but the relationship to it changes at some point. That somehow I’ve had sort of glimpses of that, that somehow everything was still there, but it was somehow not divided anymore. So I don’t know, I’ve had that sense from the start that somehow I feel there’s this energy that needs to work itself out within my system. I’ve always had that sense that somehow that kind of non-division is part of the process, but I don’t think the process ends at that point. I think just your relationship with it changes. I think that’s the difference. It’s not like an end point where it’s just, yeah, somehow the relationship changes. I don’t know, it’s quite vague, but in a way I’ve had that kind of deep sense from the start.

Rick: Yeah, I think that one confusion that comes in is that consciousness itself, or the absolute if we want to call it, the absolute doesn’t change. So when people get kind of grounded in that, there’s the sense of, “Well, this can’t be improved upon, you know, because it doesn’t change.” So there can actually be a sense of, “I’m done,” you know, “What more could there be because this isn’t going to change?” But as Adyashanti was saying in that interview with Tammy, he was saying this is sort of an egotistic hiding out in the transcendent, and that there is actually no end of possible transformation in terms of one’s embodiment of that or living of that, the refining of the instrument we might say, through which that is lived.

Chris: Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. It’s got to carry on, everything carries on, doesn’t it? Until it doesn’t carry on.

Rick: Yeah.

Chris: This is just another thing which will carry on, isn’t it?

Rick: Yeah, which is good. It’s like, you know, why would you want it to end?

Chris: It’s sometimes difficult, but mostly really good. And even the difficult stuff is kind of good in a way, kind of somehow very alive and somehow I feel deeply kind of love and the unity, even though it’s ridiculously difficult. I can’t … two things are going on, but it’s almost comical sometimes, this sense of feeling like I’m being torn apart, but at the same time there’s this real sense of unity.

Rick: Yeah, well getting born can be difficult, but you know, if you were not to get born that would be even more difficult after a while. I mean, you get kind of cramped in there, so you need to go through that difficult transition.

Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And my kind of commitment to it somehow has deepened as well over the last few months. I had a point where I kind of completely let go in a much deeper way, just had so much energy I just felt being pulled apart, which I’ve been, felt by that loads of times, I’ve had different experiences of that. But I got to the point where I just … sort of a deeper part of me let go, it was kind of a deeper … kind of probably in the gut actually, somehow. So I allowed the energy to go into the gut or something like that, and then the energy started to open up deeper into the gut.

Rick: So that’s what you mean by your commitment to it, that there was a greater allowing?

Chris: Yeah, yeah, maybe a gut commitment if you call it. It wasn’t kind of a conscious commitment, it wasn’t a “I’m going to be more committed to it.” It was just this sense of falling in love with life more, falling even deeper in love into life kind of sense. Yeah.

Rick: So, obviously what you’re going through is … we could have an interview two years from now, ten years from now, and you’d probably be saying, “Yeah, it’s still going on,” and you’d have more things to say about what’s going on, because it would be continuing to unfold. I think people do reach a point, many people, where they really feel settled and they feel like the main fuss and bother and cooking has pretty much subsided.

Chris: Yeah, that’s my sense.

Rick: That will happen? Or has happened?

Chris: No, I wouldn’t say it’s happened. I would say there’s been a lot of deep change happen, but I definitely feel myself energetically to be a person still. I still feel divided in some way, in certain situations. So yeah, my sense is that somehow that stuff gets worked through more and then somehow it’s less of a bother and you’re kind of just happier to live life, I guess. I feel like that already. I don’t know really.

Rick: Well, it’s a matter of degree, you know.

Chris: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: But I know that we never totally rest on our laurels. I mean, you know, a lot of the great sages and saints of this world have been faced with serious challenges.

Chris: Yeah, me too.

Rick: You know, I mean, Jesus Christ for instance. And so it’s not like we kind of just get the kick back.

Chris: No, I’ve had some pretty bad health challenges since the awakening. The tumor in my leg I had to have removed below my knee. It wasn’t fun. So I had to go home and live with my parents for six months. So that was quite interesting as well.

Rick: Yeah. As Ram Dass said, if you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your parents or six months.

Chris: Yeah, definitely. And it was a really humbling experience actually. It really opened up more appreciation for people in difficulty as well, just that kind of connection of people going through difficult things. More and more I had this real sense of that’s me or that could be me. I read something in the paper and I really sort of … real sense of intimacy with what those people are going through, some kind of way. Not experiencing it, but a sense of reaching out, the heart reaching out to that situation or something like that.

Rick: Yeah, I think that’s nice. I mean, there’s a lot of people who read the paper and they think, “Oh, those crazy Muslims or those crazy this and that, and all those gay people.” There’s just a lot of judgmental stuff. Personally I think that spiritual maturity brings with it a greater compassion and acceptance of whatever anybody’s going through. It’s sort of like, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Chris: Yeah, and that was a situation where I had to really accept more and more. The situation was fine, I got really good health care and had the operation, had it removed. It was a benign tumor as well, so that kind of thing. I can’t jog anymore, but that way.

Rick: Ever?

Chris: No, there’s hardly any cartiledge that are left.

Rick: Maybe you can bicycle.

Chris: I can bicycle, yeah.

Rick: He said in your notes here, he said, “I sense it will take a while to get integrated or cook what has happened.” In some way I’m left mystified by why it happened this way to me. It has been like I have been pushed through this process and the pusher is saying, “No time now, you can catch up later,” and who knows where it ends.

Chris: There’s less of that sense now, but that was definitely the sense at the start. It felt like being pushed through a fast track or something. The first few weeks there was something big happening every day. As well as all the Kundalini stuff, there were other realizations as well. There was this big realization that everything actually wasn’t one, that one was a concept. That wasn’t an intellectual thing, that was a kind of felt sense. I got to this point where I sensed that it wasn’t one, it was indescribable. And then suddenly the energy changed and I felt this world shift. I had that sense just before my awakening as well, the kind of the walls moved kind of thing. I felt the energy shift or something. Then I had that sense then as well, that I guess it was essentially a kind of deep realization that everything is indescribable and everything is. It was very palpable but it’s very hard to put into words.

Rick: I have a sense, maybe it’s just a philosophical rationalization, but just as we were talking a few minutes ago about the never-ending quality of evolution, how it just goes on and on and on, I kind of look at it from the big picture in terms of multiple lifetimes. I just feel like our little time … if you took your arms and stretched them out wide and let that represent the history of the earth, then one swipe of a nail file on your fingernail would pretty much wipe out all of human history. So the human lifespan is a tiny thing, and yet there are all these scriptural references to the fact that we really are eternal. And I don’t think those are just referring to the Absolute being eternal, it’s referring to some of our existence as a jiva, as a soul being eternal and continuing to evolve over time. So when I meet someone like you, I kind of have a sense that, well, who knows what you’ve done in the past to ready yourself for what you’re experiencing now. You could have spent a hundred lifetimes in monasteries or whatever, I don’t know, but I don’t think this stuff just happens accidentally to some people and not to others. It’s sort of just appropriate to the level of evolution that you came in with in this life, and it was more or less inevitable that this kind of thing would begin to blossom in your experience when it did.

Chris: Yeah, that’s definitely my sense. I almost have this sense that somehow they put the wrong head on the wrong body or something like that, because I’ve never been interested or curious at all, but yet …

Rick: You didn’t have to be.

Chris: I didn’t have to be, yeah, there was this ripeness, it was ready. But more than anything I think it was the honesty. There’s always been a sense that I couldn’t contain myself even in my 20s or teens. I had this sense of, I don’t know, I just couldn’t put on a show or something, I just couldn’t batten all the hatches down. If I tried to do that everything just would spill out, so it kind of forced me to be somehow honest with myself.

Rick: Well, that sounds really good, I think we could all use more of that.

Chris: Well, honesty is kind of the root in, in a way, I think. The more honest you can be with yourself, it’s more kind of the energy of being honest, it’s more kind of the gesture of being honest with yourself that makes the difference. It’s not actually … you don’t have to actually do anything, it’s just the way that you kind of, I don’t know, the way you sort of touch upon life somehow.

Rick: Well, since you consider this to be such an important point, honesty, let’s dwell on it for a minute and try to get a better sense of what you’re talking about. So I mean, by example we could, I mean, have there been times, can you think of an example where you weren’t quite so honest with yourself as you would like to be, and then contrast that with the way you prefer to function?

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I guess in my early 20s, even though there was this sense that I couldn’t pretend, I had to be in some level honest, there was in some way this sense at the same time that I was putting on this show, that two things were sort of happening at the same time.

Rick: There was something false about the way you were behaving?

Chris: Yeah, yeah, but for me, I have to be honest, at that time it didn’t feel like, it didn’t feel, “Oh my God, I’m being dishonest with myself.” I never really, not until my 30s, had a kind of visceral problem with honesty. That kind of started to take over in my sort of 30s, I think, my early 30s. Yeah, my 20s, I was kind of happy to sort of pretend. I kind of liked it.

Rick: Well, how would you pretend? I mean, what were you doing, just sort of putting on a kind of persona, you’re assuming a persona that wasn’t really you.

Chris: Yeah, for me it was being an artistic person, so it would be a persona, it would be a way of defending myself, you know, and it would be a way of excusing things away and glossing over certain things in my life and certain experiences, just a way of hiding from things.

Rick: Well, you’re an artistic person now, you’re a musician, we’ll be talking about that, so how is the way in which you are an artistic person now, and presumably an honest one, different from the way in which you were one in your 20s and it was some kind of facade for you?

Chris: I guess it’s happened by degrees, that kind of transition from being a kind of musician where I was believing I had to put on some kind of act because who I was wouldn’t cut the mustard, that kind of transition has happened over the last 13 years, 14 years I’ve been doing music and playing music and teaching music. So the teaching the music has been probably one of the main things where my kind of honesty has been developed and cultivated.

Rick: Well, I don’t know if this is what you’re talking about, but I mean I can think of examples of musicians who were very much into their image, or who are very much into their image and projecting a certain image, which you probably wouldn’t see if you saw them backstage, and others who, you know, they come on stage and what you see is what you get, you know, maybe like James Taylor or something, he just seems to be not putting on any airs or trying to be anything other than who he is. Is that the kind of thing you’re talking about?

Chris: Not so, I’ve never been the kind of, I’ve never been an extroverted person, so what I’m kind of talking about would be probably quite subtle things, and just subtle things within an interaction, so kind of very sort of low-level stuff, not kind of, inventing a sort of stage persona or anything like that, and that would just feel uncomfortable. I would have always felt uncomfortable as well, it’s just not my personality. My personality is, I guess, quite quiet, not particularly, it depends, I mean, sometimes maybe a little bit more outgoing, but mostly quite quiet. But you know, that persona was definitely still there, just quietly there.

Rick: When you see other people and interact with other people, do you kind of get a sense of the degree to which they are being honest or not, in the way that you’re describing? To varying degrees, like some people seem like really at varying points on the honesty scale?

Chris: Yeah, it’s just really obvious when somebody is honest. The energy changes, you can just see it. I mean, I don’t physically see the energy, but I sense the change in the energy of the person, the change in the energy within me as well changes. Just something lights up within both people when there’s honesty going on. But there’s different degrees of that, you know, people are honest in different ways, and people can be not forthcoming in some way in an interaction, but quite open and free in other aspects.

Rick: Yeah. You mentioned that you broke up with your relationship before this awakening happened. Have you gotten into a new one now?

Chris: Yeah, I’ve got a boyfriend now.

Rick: How’s that going?

Chris: Really good. I’ve been going out for about six months, seven months.

Rick: Great. And is he also into spirituality much?

Chris: It’s very important to him.

Rick: Great. Has he had any sort of awakening himself?

Chris: I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, who knows? He hasn’t talked about anything explicitly. I wouldn’t like to assume with anybody.

Rick: I suppose the more interesting question would be how…

Chris: He’s a very open, genuine, kind, loving person.

Rick: I was going to say, I think the more interesting or relevant question would be, you know, post-awakening, not that you’ve finished awakening, there’s more to it, but having gone through this transition, what has that done to just your ability to be in a relationship, the quality of the way you interact? I don’t know. It’s like if people don’t know who they are, then how can two people actually have a relationship? They’re just, “I don’t know who I am, I don’t know who I am,” and it’s like the two fools will just kind of bash heads. But if both people have a sense of who they are, then there seems to me there can be a foundation for a relationship with one another.

Chris: There’s that definite feeling within the relationship somehow, there’s this sense of…

Rick: Greater smoothness or harmony or resonance or affinity.

Chris: Yeah, a resonance, a kind of harmony. We’re very similar, we are very well-suited. We do fit well together.

Rick: Yeah, I think that’s important to bring up because everybody’s interested in relationships unless they’re a monk or something, but everybody has them and they are almost always challenging for people.

Chris: Life is just relationship really.

Rick: It is really.

Chris: You’re either in relationship with yourself or you’re in relationship with somebody else. You wake up in the morning, you’re in relationship with yourself, or you’re in relationship with the room. In a way there’s nothing but relationship, but within the nothing but relationship there’s also that kind of unity as well that’s within that relationship.

Rick: Well that kind of substantiates the point I was just making, is that if your relationship with yourself is good, then you actually have a chance of a relationship with others being good. But if your relationship with yourself isn’t, then how can your relationship with others possibly work out?

Chris: Yeah, the more you know yourself and the more you understand yourself and the more you’re aware of yourself, the more free-flow relationship is. It’s not necessarily easy, but you’re kind of more aware of what’s going on and you’re more sort of … it just flows easier.

Rick: Yeah, I think you also have much more of a buffer, you know, you’re much less likely to be reactive. You know, if somebody says something and it’s not like your ego is so invested that you have to just defend yourself or attack the other person, or you’re hurt and all that stuff, it’s more like you can just be an ocean, take it in stride.

Chris: Yeah, there’s a sense that that wouldn’t want to be verbalized, but even if that’s felt then that’s noticed and felt and sort of given it space. It’s important to feel that kind of stuff deeply, I think. That’s really the stuff which is unwinding.

Rick: Yeah, and this is just a thought that comes to mind, but on the one hand we’re talking about honesty and people talk about, “Well, you really should express your feelings and not suppress things and all,” but obviously there are situations in which you can just be totally blatantly honest in all circumstances and express things which might be very hurtful and which might cause bad feelings for a period of days, whereas if you just kind of, not suppress but somehow just hold your tongue in a way, and just kind of be more within yourself and on the self or whatever, then the whole thing can simmer down and five minutes later you’re grateful you didn’t say the thing you might have said and the whole thing is finished.

Chris: I think it’s being in tune with yourself that’s the important thing. When you’re in relationship, when you’re talking to somebody or meeting somebody or anything, if you have more awareness of what’s going on with you then that kind of honesty won’t come about because you’ll realize it’s not actually honesty, it’s something else, it’s a reactive thing and you’re just reacting and allowing that. I mean, sometimes that may happen, but 90% of it is being aware of it and then the energy doesn’t just jump by itself.

Rick: Yeah, I understand what you’re saying, I think it’s really important. One way of looking at it is, let’s just pretend that we’re an ocean and things bubble up from deep in the ocean and ordinarily we don’t become aware of them until they pop out on the surface, but if you could sort of be aware of the full range of the ocean, not just the surface level of waves, then you catch things just as they begin to emerge, just as they begin to bubble from the bottom and you can kind of deal with them there, so to speak, rather than have them become fully exploding bubbles. Does that make any sense?

Chris: Yeah, there’s a lot of truth in that, it feels like there’s a lot of truth. There’s more of this sense if you’re seeing the whole process. I can feel this energetic core contraction, I can feel when that’s triggered.

Rick: That’s what I’m trying to say, yeah. Yeah, that’s a good phrase “feeling the whole process.”

Chris: Whereas before I didn’t sense it, it would still be triggered, but there’d be this confusion I guess.

Rick: Yeah, it’s like, where did that come from?

Chris: Yeah, now it’s like, it’s come from there.

Rick: Yeah, because you’re aware of the deeper mechanics of what’s going on.

Chris: I can feel it being pinged and being awakened.

Rick: Yeah, that’s great. I mean, you know that phrase, when Christ is being crucified, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” It’s like I think pretty much everybody, but to varying degrees, has all kinds of stuff going on that they’re not aware of, and it only sort of becomes evident when it bursts out in some sort of speech or action. But what you’re saying I think is that there’s a sensitivity and an attunement to the deeper mechanics of what makes you tick, and so things don’t take you by surprise, they don’t sort of take you unawares. You’re kind of able to tune into those mechanics at much subtler levels before they become manifest, is that correct?

Chris: Yeah, it’s kind of the intimacy. So fast is that.

Rick: Intimacy with your own experience.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. So the intimacy with my own experience is in itself a kind of hazard light.

Rick: A what?

Chris: Hazard light.

Rick: What are hazard lights? Like warning blinkers?

Chris: Yeah, a warning light.

Rick: I see, right.

Chris: It’s kind of, yeah, it’s just all more self-apparent when I’m not coming from that place of truth, that place of openness and honesty. And it hurts more and more deeply.

Rick: When you’re not being honest. So it’s like a, well I guess maybe that’s the way in which you meant hazard light, it’s like a kind of like, well we have like carbon monoxide detectors in our home, you know, and if there’s just a few molecules of carbon monoxide they would go off, whereas I wouldn’t notice it. I’d be dead before I noticed it. So what you’re saying is you’re more finely attuned to what’s going on, and so you can, I don’t mean to put words in your mouth, but I’m trying to flesh out this thought that we’re having. It’s almost like your behavior can become aligned in an honest way because you’re sensitively attuned to the kind of deeper impulses from which it arises, as you say, like warning lights. Whereas if you’re oblivious to those deeper mechanics then … do you know what I’m trying to say? I’m having a hard time expressing it, do you know what I’m trying to say?

Chris: I think so, yeah.

Rick: Okay. In other words, we’re more self-referral, to put it in a phrase.

Chris: Yeah. It’s more kind of, it’s just this reverence for everything, I guess. You just don’t want to, you know, going to Tesco and being at the checkout is a kind of reverent act, you know, there’s a reverence there. And there’s this wanting to honor that as well, to any interaction, so not just people I know, walking down the street.

Rick: Total strangers, yeah.

Chris: Total strangers, I’ll be open to them, you know, the visceral sense of openness, more openness.

Rick: It seems to be that sensitivity would be a good word to throw in here too, you know, just to kind of, you know, you feel like you see a little insect that has these real sensitive antennae and it just sort of, or like a cat with its whiskers and it just feels every little thing and is attuned and doesn’t go bumbling into something, whereas maybe a puppy dog would just go crashing in. So we just become more attuned and tread more lightly through life.

Chris: There’s that definite sense of not wanting to leave big footprints.

Rick: Bull in a china shop kind of thing. Nice. Okay, let’s talk about music a bit. So you have a website, soundfromsilence.com, which is a real nice phrase, sound from silence, and we could go into a whole thing about how sound arises from silence, but maybe we will. But the subtitle being “Spiritual Discovery Through Music.” So you know, you haven’t been a spiritual teacher in the ordinary sense, but you have been a musician and now you’ve had this spiritual awakening and you’re kind of bringing the two together in order to use spiritual awakening to be a better musician, and also to use music to facilitate spiritual discovery, right? It works both ways.

Chris: Yeah, I was kind of doing it before. I mean, I’ve been practicing, kind of, the emphasis has changed within my teaching. I guess the first five years was about the content and about the kind of ‘is this person understanding it?’ and that kind of thing, and it’s moved more towards how am I when I’m actually teaching the person. I’ve come to realize and seen again and again that how I am when I teach is the most important factor. If I’m open, then it gives space for the other person to be open, and so they’ll tend to learn easier, things tend to flow more. Whereas if I’m not open, then that doesn’t happen as much. So I’ve kind of cultivated that over quite a lot of years, I guess, over the last seven or eight years of my teaching. But then it’s become more explicit since having this awakening. I’ve had a few students who are having lessons more explicitly for that kind of reason. It’s a spirituality and music lesson at the same time. It’s this real desire of wanting to be there for people if I can. I really, really feel that very deeply, very strongly. And yeah, it just kind of feels like the way that I can offer support for people, because the music teaching, I’ve done that a lot. I’ve done it for 13, 14 years. So I can kind of do that quite easily, quite fluidly.

Rick: So you play certain instruments, right? And guitar, and what do you play?

Chris: I play guitar, voice, ukulele, piano, violin.

Rick: Okay, so if someone came to you who played the trumpet or the drums, would you still be able to help them? Because you’re not just teaching technique on a particular instrument, you’re talking about a deeper principle.

Chris: Yeah, really what it’s about is giving a person space and pointers to start to sink down into their body when they’re playing, because the reaction for people almost always when they start playing an instrument is they get the instrument and everything just goes straight into their head and everything’s in their head. You can see it, they’re looking out from their head almost. It creates a really sort of dry loop and it’s very unsatisfying. It’s getting people, it’s giving people the space to allow them to sink deeper and deeper into their body and then there’s more of a trust in what’s happening and things flow more and things like mistakes tend to ruffle them less.

Rick: So I used to be a drummer when I was a teenager, I used to play in bands. So if I came to you, what sort of things would you do with me to help me be a better drummer?

Chris: Well, I mean we’d actually learn stuff. I mean we’d actually learn sort of, if I was teaching guitar I’d actually teach somebody some songs or whatever and stuff which they wanted to learn and stuff which they were inspired by. But more than anything it’s just being with the person and you’re just allowing people to, you’re just giving people the space for them to allow their body to relax more. I mean it’s a simple …

Rick: Are you talking about a transmission kind of thing where just sitting with you in your presence because you’re kind of settled in the self or in …?

Chris: I would say that’s part, yeah. But there’s also ways of getting people to … I mean the big thing is getting people to keep going because the big thing that happens is people get looped into mistakes. So they have a mistake and it brings up within them some kind of real sort of stuff and then they go into the mistake again and again and they get drawn into the energy of it and they get stuck on doing D or something on the guitar or G and they go, “I hate G, I can’t do it,” and they get drawn into it again and again. Part of my job is to keep them going so they can see the bigger picture, so they’re not constantly getting drawn into that because what’s happening is the energy is going back into their head. So you said on your website that you deal with people with all different levels of expertise and experience. So what if Paul McCartney would ring you up and say, “Hey Chris, can you do something for me?” Would you say, “Now you’re way out of my league,” or would you feel like, “Yeah, let’s get together. I could actually perhaps help you take it a step further,” believe it or not?

Chris: I have no idea, if I’m honest. I have no idea if he rang up and said … I think there’s always room for more and more honesty within music. There’s always more and more room for more, more of the communication, more of the openness. You can’t have a limit on that. That’s my experience as well, deepening honesty with the music I create and the music I play, that kind of thing. And you would feel confident, even with somebody like that, that you could help to facilitate a little bit another shade of honesty? I’m just taking him as an extreme example, you know?

Chris: I have no idea what I would do in that instance. I mean I’d definitely be curious, but I would say most of the people I teach, they’re typical people I teach, they just want to learn music to express themselves more. That’s kind of why people come to me, really. They want to express themselves more somehow. They somehow feel that my teaching will help that. I tend to attract students like that anyway, and I just want to expand on that. So whereas in my normal teaching I can’t start sort of talking about openness and presence and unity, I can’t really sort of start talking about those things with most of my students, I don’t know. So I’d like to develop that more, develop it more explicitly.

Rick: Do you have some students who have been with you for quite a while?

Chris: Yeah, yeah. My friend Mark, he’s been with me for 7 years, 6 years.

Rick: So using Mark as a case in point, have you seen him progress more from head to heart to belly as a musician, and how has that manifested in his art?

Chris: He’s become more expressive in his voice. The way that we’re teaching has changed actually, because now we’re kind of recording his songs as well on my laptop, and we’re putting them together in a different kind of way. But yeah, he’s a Buddhist practitioner and he really helped me actually, he’s a good friend, he really helped me with kind of awakening thing, because he recognized what it was. I kind of said to him, “This crazy thing has happened to me,” and he was like, “Oh yeah, this is what’s happened to you.” So that’s been really useful. It’s been as useful for me as I hope it’s been useful for him. There’s more expression coming out and he finds it easier to go into his body.

Rick: Can you think of well-known musicians who listeners would be familiar with, who would exemplify the different stages that you’re talking about? Can you think of musicians who seem to be stuck in their head or who are really kind of heart-oriented or who have progressed to the belly level?

Chris: Okay, so the heart one I would say, Bon Iver?

Rick: You have to take me back to the 60s. So okay, probably people know who that is, I wouldn’t.

Chris: Okay, so somewhere from the 60s, in a way I would say Bob Dylan was both the head and the heart. He sort of, well maybe all three actually.

Rick: How about Donovan? You ever listen to much Donovan?

Chris: Donovan I would say mostly head.

Rick: Very special guy. Interesting.

Chris: Nina Simone would be gut.

Rick: How about Mick Jagger? He’s kind of more the groin.

Chris: Mostly head, maybe a bit of heart. I’d say Jimi Hendrix, definitely heart. The Band as well, definitely heart.

Rick: Interesting. So when you look at different musicians or different concerts and so on, you must look at them slightly differently than the average person would because you’re kind of looking at them in this context of where they’re coming from, what their orientation is.

Chris: I guess somewhat, I mean my sense has always been, you know, is this person being honest? That’s always been important to me. Is this person saying something? Is this person communicating something? Yeah.

Rick: So here’s some other things you say about what you’re dealing with students, you know, embodied practice versus head practice. We’ve kind of talked about that, giving open and honest support. The student has space to contain whatever happens.

Chris: Yeah, because I mean when you start sort of going in a deeper way then stuff definitely comes up. The more open space that you give to that, then the more the person can contain that and they’re less likely to sort of jump on it. That’s quite important as well.

Rick: Yeah, I know that, you know, great musicians, obviously there’s a lot of training involved but there’s also a lot of spontaneity. It seems to me that if you’re stuck in the head to a great extent, then that would restrict spontaneity, you know, it would prevent you from playing from a level of intuition and feeling.

Chris: I think, I mean, especially when you’re learning, you’re actually learning as well, so you are using your cognition to learn as well. You know, if you say to somebody you need to put your fingers here, here and here, then but the kind of head I’m talking about is the, “okay, how are we doing? Is this going well? Am I sounding rubbish? Am I sounding good?” That kind of energy. So I guess, yeah, you need to separate the two out, that you’ve got this, you’ve got the kind of head learning things, learning new technique, which is important. But at the same time, there needs to be this embodiment, there needs to be taking what’s being learned and embodying it into the body. That’s really what good practice is about, is you’re taking new things. Children, quite a few of my students are children, and they’re quite good at that. You can sort of see the more embodiment in them, you give them something to learn and they kind of take that and somehow encode it into the body more, and then it’s easier for them, it just flows easier.

Rick: Yeah, I know in sports they have a thing called muscle memory, where like a great skier for instance, who’s practiced and practiced and practiced, it’s not in the head at all, it’s like the body just knows what to do, you know?

Chris: Yeah, in the end. And you know that can happen to anybody, somebody who’s been learning for six months, because the first thing they play they now find very easy to do. There’s an opportunity for that kind of just complete letting go quite soon.

Rick: It seems to me that confidence would be a big issue. If you have stage fright or something like that, why? And I’ve heard of even well-known performers who would have to vomit backstage before their performance because they had this chronic stage fright. But it seems to me that if a person is really grounded in a deeper spiritual reality, then that would no longer be an issue.

Chris: Hmmm. I think, yeah, it depends. I mean they might physically get nervous, but there’d be a kind of wider openness definitely there. But the confidence thing is very, very important because it comes up so much in people. A big part of teaching is kind of fostering that confidence and bringing that confidence out.

Rick: How do you teach confidence?

Chris: Well, just being there for that person and not judging what they’re doing at all. Praising them as well. Because so many people come to music and the first thing that they say is, “I was terrible at school at music,” you know, and they have this past memory of feeling they weren’t very good at music. So that can kind of be something to go into.

Rick: Yeah, this note I’m reading now relates to that, helping students not to get drawn into the energy of mistakes, supporting a wider sense of being when frustration appears.

Chris: Yeah, going from G to D or something, and they get frustrated. I’ve seen that so many times. You see people get drawn into it. So it’s important to get people to keep playing. I constantly say to people, “Keep going, keep going, keep going,” because there’s this real tendency for them to go, “Oh, it’s not perfect,” or “Oh, there’s a mistake happening here,” and they get drawn in. It’s just not, most minds don’t want to kind of just keep going, so you have to keep pushing people out of that and get them to keep going, because that’s where the flow is. When you keep going, then the flow happens. If you keep stopping and starting for mistakes, then you’re just constantly reinforcing this, “Oh, I’ve stopped. Oh, there’s a mistake. Oh, I’ve started again.” So many people do that when they learn music. You have to keep going, even if you don’t feel like you can keep going. It’s kind of important.

Rick: Yeah. In addition to teaching, do you perform professionally and record and stuff like that?

Chris: No, I do record music. I record electronic music. So I record sort of modern classical composed electronic music.

Rick: You have any up on YouTube or anything?

Chris: I’ve got a SoundCloud page.

Rick: Yeah, you should. Well, send me a link to that and I’ll put it up on, if you haven’t already, and I’ll put it up on your thing. People can listen to some.

Chris: I have a page as well.

Rick: Oh, you should send a link to some of that too. Oh yeah, you have. It’s mkbrd.co.uk, right?

Chris: Oh right, I don’t know if that website still works.

Rick: Oh, maybe. I don’t know. You sent me that link.

Chris: I think that was a long time ago.

Rick: So, knowing when to give guidance, when to sit back. That was your final point. It sounds like you’re as much a psychologist as you are a music teacher.

Chris: Well, I’ve become more and more hands-off with the teaching because I’ve done it so much and it’s so second nature that I don’t have to do much when I’m teaching. I don’t have to kind of jump in and it just tends to be a little bit here and a little bit there and a little bit there. So that just gives me a lot of space to be with a person. Sometimes that’s just allowing the person to have a period where they’re sort of going into doing something and you just feel, “Okay, I’m not going to interrupt this.”

Rick: And what percentage of your teaching is in person there in the UK and what percentage of it is over Skype?

Chris: I’ve got, actually I’ve only got one Skype student at the moment.

Rick: Is it very easy to do over Skype?

Chris: Yeah, yeah, I’ve had quite a few Skype students. The only thing you can’t do is play at the same time because of the delay. That in itself is quite good because it forces the other person to be more reliant on themselves in a way, whereas much more less so now, but there would be this tendency maybe in the past where it would be very easy for me to jam along and they’d feel better and they’d feel supported, but at the same time they’re not sort of tackling what’s coming up as much. So Skype is quite good for that. I mean you can do call and answer, which is quite good.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Chris: It’s pretty good as long as the connections are okay.

Rick: Yeah.

Chris: It’s frustrating sometimes.

Rick: You have a good camera, you have a good microphone and everything. So obviously you’re still a work in progress like most people and you’ve been going through a lot in the last few years and you’ll probably continue to go through a lot, but at least you know something good is happening and it’s kind of like an interesting ride that you’re on now.

Chris: Yeah, I mean my life, I mean the change is profound really. I’m not very good at expressing the depth.

Rick: Do you feel like a deep peace, a peace that passes understanding so to speak?

Chris: Absolutely, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, that comes across. It’s like I have a feeling like you’re kind of very deeply rooted or grounded in a peaceful state.

Chris: Yeah, there is that sense, yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean I’ve been slightly nervous for this interview because I’ve never done anything like this before, but at the same time there was this deep sense of ease and openness.

Rick: Yeah, that has been coming through. I mean, a lot of times I interview people who lecture or teach as a profession, they’ve done hundreds of interviews and stuff, and so naturally you get good at doing that sort of thing and that hasn’t been your thing, but there’s definitely been a sense of deep, I would say ease is the best word, that’s been coming through with you.

Chris: Thank you. And yeah, the depth of the reverence is deep. I’m sure it will only get deeper.

Rick: It will. I also feel like, you know, just as you weren’t really striving for this and it just came along, I think I see that happening more and more. You know, I think it’s a nice harbinger of what might happen on a larger scale to the whole society, that there’ll just be a sort of a greater harmony and peace and smoothness among the human race than there has been in recent history, as people like yourself become more and more common.

Chris: Yeah, my sense is definitely just be honest. If you really do feel you’re seeking and you really do want for something to happen then to be honest with that, that’s really important as well. Because I guess you could kind of look at what’s happened to me and just kind of use that as a kind of a sort of way of being around it. I would say it’s really important to just be honest with yourself, you know, if you really genuinely do want to, just to really honor that.

Rick: Or are you saying that someone might look at you and say, “Well, he didn’t really do much, he wasn’t really pursuing this and it happened to him, so screw it, I’m not going to do anything.”

Chris: Something like that, not so constant.

Rick: “If it happens to me, it’ll happen to me.” But what you’re saying is if you feel the motivation, I mean, to get back to our friend Adyashanti, he said he was such an ardent seeker that he was fanatic. He had just built up this head of steam through about six years of intense striving, that when he finally did relax a bit and just sort of ease off, it exploded. There was this pressure had built up and there was this dramatic shift and awakening. But he would encourage people, I mean, in this interview he was encouraging people not to strain the way he had strained, but to be honest about your ardency, if you’re feeling ardent about this, just give it your all, focus on it, spend time with it, and that to which your attention, give your attention, will grow stronger in your life.

Chris: Yeah, yeah, that’s the really important thing because I think the more honest you are the more it leads you more to this point really where this kind of thing happens, this shift happens. The honesty sort of, you know, I was being honest with myself, I didn’t care. That’s also being honest as well, which you know led to, you know, whereas if I’d had sort of mixed feelings about it then it would have changed the whole dynamic of it I guess.

Rick: Yeah, well you didn’t care in the sense that you weren’t looking for some philosophical wisdom or something, but you wanted to be happy and I think that’s the most basic human desire is to be happy. Spirituality is sometimes not framed in that context, but ultimately that’s the fruit of it.

Chris: Pretty much, yeah. And the kind of the deep, the depth of it and the depth of the connection and the depth of living your life as deeply as you can and the kind of, you know, the beauty of just simply living a life and how amazing it is really.

Rick: Which, you know, might sound like a simple statement but it’s profound because a lot of people are living their lives in a way that they’re not really happy with. They’re struggling, they’re suffering, they’re going through all kinds of trials and tribulations. It may sound simple to just talk about the depth of living life in a simple way, but it’s kind of rare and it’s a blessing.

Chris: Yeah, it is a blessing. I definitely feel very blessed, I still feel mystified.

Rick: “Why me?”

Chris: But blessed as well.

Rick: Yeah, it’s great. Well good, is there anything else you want to just throw in before we wrap it up?

Chris: I can’t think of anything at the moment.

Rick: Okay, well this has been good. There will be, you know, as usual I’ll be linking to you from … linking to your website from your page on BatGap.

Chris: I do want to say the website is quite new, so it’s not on Google yet, so if you search for it you have to search soundfromsilence.com because it won’t come up in the search if you don’t put the .com bit.

Rick: Well it’ll help when I link to it because, you know, once you start getting some links from other people’s websites then your website starts coming up in Google. So people can go there and they can get in touch with you and maybe get some music lessons if they want to. Are you writing anything? Like, any kind of like your life story or anything like that?

Chris: No, just the painting, the model making and the music.

Rick: Yeah.

Chris: And the teaching.

Rick: Okay, good. Well thanks Chris.

Chris: Yeah, thank you very much. I would really like to say that the website has been really helpful to me as well.

Rick: Buddha At The Gas Pump?

Chris: Yeah, because when the whole thing happened I kind of, a few months later, found the website and it was just so helpful to hear people had been through similar experiences.

Rick: Yeah, that’s kind of my motivation to give people a resource where they can find other people that have been through similar experiences or perhaps who have gone a little bit farther than they have from whom they can get some guidance or some inspiration. But I’ve gotten a lot of reports like that from people saying that, “Boy, you know, I didn’t know what was going on and then I found this and I saw these people and it really put me at ease or inspired me,” or whatever. So it’s really fun to be able to provide that kind of a service. So I’ve been speaking with Chris Beckett and this again is an ongoing series. Go to batgap.com to check out all the old ones and there’s some things you can do there like sign up for the email newsletter to be notified each time a new one is posted, or you can subscribe on YouTube and YouTube will notify you. There are about 15,000 subscribers on YouTube now. There’s also an audio podcast of this, and almost as many people listen to that as watch the videos, because I think a lot of people just don’t want to sit in front of their computer for a couple of hours and rather just listen while they’re doing other things. So you’ll see a link on BatGap for signing up for the audio podcast on various devices and platforms. There’s a donate button there, as I mentioned in the beginning, I appreciate that. That’s about it. So thank you all for listening or watching. Thank you, Chris. And next week I will have Stuart Schwartz, who’s a spiritual teacher in the US, down in Florida these days. I’ve been hearing good things about him over the years and I’m looking forward to having that conversation.