Cindy Teevens Interview

Summary

The conversation explores a shift from suffering to causeless joy and the later recognition of a self beyond personal identity. It examines how attention, beliefs, and attachment shape emotional experience and how direct experience can replace spiritual concepts.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can I find lasting happiness that does not depend on external circumstances?
• How can I shift my attention when I become caught in suffering or negative thoughts?
• What is the difference between psychological relief, lasting joy, and spiritual awakening?
• How can I experience unity and freedom from a separate sense of self directly?

Key takeaways

• Happiness does not come from things, people, or events.
• Attention placed on unwanted thoughts fuels suffering.
• Open, present awareness allows natural joy to emerge.
• Enjoy what comes without becoming attached to what may change.
• Direct experience must replace beliefs about unity and spiritual truth.
• When identity shifts, old self-stories can lose their power.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. As of this recording, there have now been about 390 of them, and if this is the first one you’ve seen, you might want to go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the Past Interviews menu, where you’ll find all the previous ones organized in about five different ways.

Buddha at the Gas Pump is made possible by the support of appreciative viewers and listeners, so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there is a donate button on the site.

My guest today is Cindy Teevens. Cindy is up in Ottawa, Canada, and I’ll read a little bio that she sent me, and then we’ll get into our conversation.

Six years after the suicide of her father, in one moment her own intense suffering was swapped for mind-blowing joy, altering her life permanently. Happiness and peace became her predominant states. Laughter exploded at the simplicity and power of the shift, and tears of gratitude flowed.

Understandings began to come about: how we have been living backwards, how we have mistaken the outside for the inside, how we’ve tethered ourselves to the uncontrollable winds of change in the midst of freedom, and how we can return to truth, sanity, and peace.

Cindy dropped everything she was doing to show people how to feel good no matter what, because when you shift your state, problems dissolve, villains become victims, and compassion kicks in. So much gratitude came with this revelation that she began helping people awaken love and joy in their lives.

Months after discovering joy, one day in the woods she was knocked to her knees by an explosion of love that ended the imaginary separation of self and other. Speech fell away, and all she could do was laugh and cry at the cosmic joke. Forty years of self-baggage suddenly fell away. The thinker and speaker she thought she was was gone, yet the self remained—capital-S Self.

Cindy is writing about that direct seeing of self in a third book she’s working on. Her two previous books are Alchemy: How to Feel Good No Matter What and The Happiness Lie: What Generations Have Been Told That Makes You Unhappy.

So welcome, Cindy.

Cindy: Thanks, Rick. Good to see you. Great to be here.

A shift from suffering to joy

Rick: In reading your book and listening to your talks, I got the feeling that this wasn’t just some kind of psychological adjustment, or that you didn’t just tweak your understanding of things. You really did undergo a pretty major experiential shift. Would you agree with that?

Cindy: Yeah, it was very profound, particularly what I call the direct seeing in the woods. The shift in state happens to people all the time; it’s very common. They don’t often do it in the middle of suffering like that, but it was dramatic. It was mind-blowing.

Rick: Sometimes it does happen. I could actually make a category, if I wanted to, on BatGap of people who awaken apparently as a result of intense suffering. It’s not a path I would recommend, but it seems to be fairly common.

Cindy: Yeah, I wouldn’t say that that was an awakening for me. I would just say that it was a shift in state that felt really good and gave me a different perspective. And, yeah, we have this idea—you see Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle—that we have to suffer. But the direct seeing came right in the midst of joy and bliss for no reason.

Rick: And one other thought that kept occurring to me is that you’ve done your best to provide a means whereby others could undergo the sort of shift that you underwent. What do you feel like your track record has been with that? How successful and how easy is it for the average person to undergo a similar shift, or do people end up feeling a little frustrated because they don’t feel like they’re getting what you got?

Cindy: No, everybody’s been able to shift. I haven’t seen somebody not shift whom I’ve worked with. When they’re on their own, they may have more difficulty; they get stuck in certain places. The mind can do that. But when I walk them through it, everybody has a shift so far.

Rick: As radical as yours?

Cindy: This is a shift from pain to joy, and it can be very radical. As for the insight of the direct seeing, that’s a different matter. But the thing is, with Byron Katie and Eckhart Tolle, who they were in their suffering—we have this idea that the suffering caused it. But if you study them closely, something else went on. It usually involved either self-inquiry—“Who am I, really?”—or a surrendering of oneself. That was what was involved with me as well.

So whether suffering or joy preceded it, it doesn’t really matter so much.

🛤️ Seeking an end to suffering

Rick: In going back into your background, there was the suicide of your father, which, of course, we don’t want to dwell on too much, but just the things you went through in your life. And I know you did all sorts of practices and so on leading up to this—neurolinguistic programming and things like that.

Cindy: Prior to my father’s suicide, I felt a draw. I started seeking just months before, and then I became a Zen student. I started practicing Zen. After he passed, it really started me on a quest to find an end to suffering, and I investigated a lot of things.

I wasn’t really satisfied by any of them. I found some intrigue with Zen, and neurolinguistic programming I found useful to a point, but I took it even to the master level, and it still wasn’t what I was seeking. There was still something missing.

Rick: Did you know exactly what you were seeking, or was it just this annoying feeling like, “This isn’t it”?

Cindy: No idea what it was. I just knew this wasn’t it; there was still something. Somehow I knew there was a way to be in this world that was not dependent upon this world.

Rick: In other words, you felt like it might be possible for your fulfillment to be independent of what was going on in the world.

Cindy: Yeah. In NLP, we’re taught you can control your state, and I found that wasn’t true. Even though I finished and graduated and everything, I knew that I couldn’t control my state. I wanted to be very true to myself, and I thought I had to control my state. It was only later that I realized that’s not what it’s about.

Rick: And so you would say that now, for instance, you’re not controlling your state; you’re just spontaneously living without having to manipulate or tinker with your state all the time.

Cindy: I no longer am attached to things, people, or events, which is what I call the happiness lie—the belief that things, people, or events make you happy or unhappy. That’s not where joy now comes from.

Things don’t make you happy or unhappy.

How attention shapes experience

Rick: Do you find that there’s a sort of an undercurrent or a baseline of happiness that just persists regardless of what’s happening in the outer world?

Cindy: Yeah, pretty much. I mean, there might be moments of something flashing through. If I see somebody beating a dog or something—and this has happened—there might be a moment of getting ready to do something, and maybe some sort of anger, just a fleeting flash that takes care of the moment, and then it’s gone.

Rick: It serves a purpose. I would hope that if you saw somebody doing that, you wouldn’t just say, “Oh well, everything is the way it’s supposed to be.”

Cindy: No, you take care of the moment.

Rick: We tend to accumulate impressions, and those impressions influence our lives for decades, maybe. In fact, essentially, you said in your little bio here, “Forty years of self-baggage suddenly fell away.” How thoroughly and quickly can accumulated conditioning actually be jettisoned? It seems like it has a physiological component which might be deeply seeded and which you just can’t shuck off in a moment.

Cindy: When your identity shifts, when who you think you are shifts, then everything that came with the old identity is gone. And is there really an accumulation? Is there such a thing, or is there just what you’re holding to be true now?

What happened with me in an instant was a shift of attention. I had been using a lot of attention, and there was a lot of energy on suffering: “I want this, I want this, I want this.” I was doing a lot of wanting, and I wasn’t getting. It was very clear that it didn’t matter how much I wanted it; I wasn’t going to get it. That was intense energy and intense suffering.

Then two things happened. I promised my dad it would not be for nothing, and I refused to suffer anymore. I couldn’t take it anymore. The thought of suicide came up, but it was out of the question, and I didn’t know what else to do. I just stopped. Right in the middle of that stopping, I heard or knew, “You can give yourself whatever you want.”

Because I had been doing a lot of this wanting, that begs the question: What do I want? I didn’t really know at first, and it took some time to answer this. I knew what I didn’t want. We all know very well what we don’t want, and we don’t practice very often what we do want, so it can be very out of reach. But it’s still there. You have to know what you want in order to know that there’s a problem with having what you don’t want.

Anyway, I shifted my attention from what I didn’t want onto what I did want. One thing after another—acceptance, human dignity, love—I found them all. Bang, bang, bang, all the energy that was being used to suffer switched over into love, joy, and peace in an instant.

That was mind-blowing, because the mind says, “You can’t feel good. A, B, C, and D have happened. How dare you? You can’t feel good. You must suffer.” I heard that, and I would go back into it. Then I would think, “Wait a minute, but that felt really good,” and shift back out again. Then the mind would come up and go, “Yeah, but blah, blah, blah,” and I would go back into the suffering.

So there was this back and forth. I could see very clearly what was going on. I didn’t have words for it, but I could see it, and I learned to sustain the love, the joy, and the peace. I learned to stay out of the suffering mind.

Rick: How long did this seesaw period last?

Cindy: It was most intense the first day, and then over a couple of weeks it started to settle down. I was becoming more and more stabilized.

I remember clearly one day walking on the street, with this joy bubbling up. Then the mind came up and said, “Yeah, but blah, blah, blah.” I just burst out laughing at it because I knew how powerless it was. I thought anybody who saw me must think I was crazy—a woman walking down the street suddenly bursting out laughing at nothing.

Rick: Looking back at that, to what extent do you feel like this was something you did, and to what extent do you feel like it was something that happened to you because you were ripe for it? Maybe a bit of both?

Cindy: If you ask me that now, I would say nothing. If you had asked me back then, I would have said, “This is what I did.”

There was a learning that whenever attention went onto what I didn’t want, it hurt, and whenever attention went onto what I did want, it felt good. What happened was that I started to feel good. I got relief, and I was drawn to the relief.

Every time suffering started to arise, I would think, “Wait a minute. No. Go take the time, shift your state, and start to feel good.” I got the relief, but then I stayed with it a little bit longer, and I started to feel pleasure. I thought, “Wow, this feels really good.” Then I started to pursue it, and it would grow, grow, and grow.

The mind would come in and go, “Yeah, but you can’t feel that good. Nothing’s happened.” In that instant, I would lose it. I thought, “That’s interesting. I wonder if I could sustain it beyond that and ignore the mind.” So I started to experiment with it.

There was this idea of me experimenting and doing this, and I found that it would grow and grow until I was experiencing states of bliss, joy, and ecstasy for no reason.

Rick: Everything is interrelated. You could say there are reasons for everything, but actually figuring them out could very easily be beyond human intellect.

Cindy: Yes, and it couldn’t just be the butterfly because there are so many other things going on here. So you can’t pick out one cause, least of all the “I”—the “I did it.” No, this one doesn’t have an effect on anything.

The happiness lie

Rick: There are Eastern teachings that say the mind has a natural tendency to seek a field of greater happiness, and that there’s infinite joy inherent within us, deep within—ananda, bliss. Given those two points, why do you suppose it is that everybody suffers so much?

It’s as if, metaphorically speaking, we’re millionaires. We have this vast wealth, and yet we’re begging on the street corners to buy a cup of coffee.

Cindy: It is most amazing, really. I think it’s because we all do want to be happy; it is our natural state. We get confused about where happiness comes from, what its source is, and how to get it. You don’t have to get it—you actually are it. But the moment you think you need to get it, you go looking for it in something, and you’re agitated.

Say I had this nice little tape measure and you really, really wanted it. You really, really want it, but I have it. What goes on?

Rick: With me, I think I’ll go down to Walmart. It’s easier than coming up to Ottawa to take yours.

Cindy: You’re planning, “How am I going to get that?” because you really want it. You’re agitated because I have it and you don’t, and there’s dissatisfaction. The minute that you do get it—say, “Here you go,” and now you have it—you stop agitating yourself and you feel so much better.

This is the same relief that I got when I did that. Then we think this causes our happiness, but it’s really confusion. This is why I say that happiness lies. Things don’t make you happy or unhappy, and we’ve inherited that lie generation after generation.

Rick: It seems like external circumstances have a lot to do with our happiness, so you can’t blame people for thinking they do.

Cindy: What’s missed is that it’s not the circumstances, the thing, or the event; it’s the thoughts about it. “Oh, isn’t she great, this new relationship? She’s what I’ve been looking for. She’s perfect.” So you’re onto these good-feeling thoughts, and they’re temporary as long as they last.

Then reality sets in three months later, after the rose-colored glasses fall off, and now maybe the negative thinking comes in: “She’s not what I thought she was. She pretended to be something else.” We’re not paying attention to what’s actually going on, so we miss what actually causes our pain.

Rick: Distinguish for me the difference between a person who resides in a state of happiness regardless of whether or not they get this, that, or the other thing that they want, and people whose happiness rollercoasters according to what they’re getting or losing.

Cindy: The difference is that you enjoy what comes, and if it goes, you don’t suffer. You’re not attached.

Rick: And how do you attain that detachment?

Cindy: You have to start recognizing that your happiness doesn’t lie in things, people, or events, that it’s here and available all the time if you’re looking toward it. Your power of attention—you need to be aware of where your attention is right now. Then you start to realize, “Oh, when my attention is on something I don’t want, I feel it, and it feels bad. When my attention is on something I like, I feel that.”

But your attention can also not narrow onto one thing or another and just stay open. You are just present, and your being is naturally joyful. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything.

From concepts to direct experience

Cindy: Direct experience is important. A lot of people have ideas about things that sound good, but everybody says, “I know that mentally, but I want to get it in my bones or get it in my cells.”

What makes it a concept is having it as a thought that somebody said sounds good, but not actually having it in your direct experience. So, connect the dots that way.

One example is that people will say, “Yeah, everything is one. We’re all one.” But this is an example of having it mentally: “We’re all one until my neighbor lets his dog bark at four in the morning, and now I’m”—[makes dog-barking noise].

So you have to take it from a concept and put it into your direct experience. It has to become your direct reality.

This idea that we’re all one is just an idea, and they’ll say, “Well, why don’t I have the direct experience of this one self?” I say, “Well, actually, you do. You never don’t have it. You’re experiencing it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, but it’s just not your perception.”

Why is it not your perception? Because you have false knowledge. False knowledge says there is a separation. You’ll have a thought that says, “There’s you and me and the world, and we’re all separate,” and that sort of supersedes and overrides reality.

Rick: How do you go from this being a concept to it sort of being in your bones?

There’s a Tibetan saying which I often quote: “Don’t mistake understanding for realization.” I see people doing that a lot. They read enough books and listen to enough talks, and they get really good with the words. Many times, they sort of feel like, “Okay, well, I’m enlightened because we’re all enlightened, right? And I understand that, and that’s all there is to it. I’m done.”

Cindy: Everybody can do this. What you need to do is pay attention to your direct experience as opposed to a thought about it.

For example, there are these ideas and thoughts that there is separation, that there is a you and a me, right? But in your direct experience, can you separate my words from your hearing? No. You cannot. I’ve not found anybody yet who can do this in their direct experience.

All you could do is have a thought about it and go, “Oh no, there’s a you and there’s a me.” But in your actual direct experience, you cannot separate my words from your hearing. So whose words are they really?

Cindy: I don’t actually want you to say that they’re my words. It would be, “I can’t find a you or me. I find words, I find hearing, seeing, touching, tasting.”

Rick: So would one way of phrasing it be, well, the creation rolls along in all of its diversity, glory, and mystery, and we have control over very little, if any, of it?

Cindy: That’s not to say that there is no you. There’s a lot of nondualistic thought out there that says, “No, there isn’t anybody. I’m not here. You’re imagining me.” It’s not that you don’t exist. It’s that there is not a separate you and a separate me.

With the direct recognition, the direct seeing in the woods, it was, “I saw for the first time, through this body-mind, that everything is the same I, is me. I am not limited to this body-person that I thought I was. That is not who I am.”

👁️ The direct seeing in the woods

Rick: Would it be true to say, in your experience and understanding, that both are true—that there is not a separate me and there is a separate me—and paradoxically, both of them kind of coexist? Just like there’s only water, but there are also waves.

Cindy: The wave exists and the ocean exists. They are one and the same. But what we do is, we would be like a wave thinking it’s a special wave that wants to continue as a separate identity. That’s where the error is made.

Rick: Practically speaking, how does one go through one’s day without being so utterly convinced by the individual dramas, and being less attached and less kicked about by them?

Cindy: One of the things that I used to do was play with my direct experience, my direct senses.

One time, I was sitting out on a bench with a friend, and an airplane went by. I said to her, “Where’s the sound?” She said, “In the airplane.” I said, “So, without air, is there sound?” She said, “No.” I said, “So where’s the sound?” She said, “It’s in the air.”

I said, “So, without the eardrum, is there sound?” “Oh, no.” “So where’s the sound?” “It’s in the eardrum.” I said, “So, without the airplane, is there sound?”

She just stopped, dumbfounded, and so did I, because it was the first time I had ever done that. It occurred to me that the sound is not somewhere separate and localized, and neither are any of our senses.

I cannot separate a cup from my feeling. It’s hard, it’s shiny; I cannot separate any of the senses from the sensed. This is the end of duality. Duality only exists in the mind, not in reality.

Cindy: Using the senses this way is going to rub up against the mind, and the mind is going to say, “Yeah, but…” What you do is use your direct experience to inform the mind, rather than the mind informing you about reality.

Sounds are fabulous for this. Any sound that you hear, try to find where it is. Try to find where you are. Where do you start? Where does the sound end? This type of thing is really going to mess with your identity and with your location.

It’s going to mess with all of the ideas of “me” as a separate, localized person, and you can do the same with anything. You’re looking at, seeing, feeling, hearing, touching, tasting, and you’ll notice the difference between that and a thought about that.

That can help you wake up out of the dream, because the dream is all thought-based. What I call the movie of the mind is going to be thoughts and feelings. There can be still shots, moving shots, smells—all of that goes on in the midst of what is actually going on, and the two don’t match up.

Rick: If there are sounds, the bat can hear certain things and the dog can hear certain things that we can’t, and so on. It’s as if each mechanism, each individuality, is fabricating a completely different universe out of that apparently same experience. So which one is true? Which one is real?

Cindy: They’re all different bodies, and so the experience of the body-mind is different for each. But there’s only one self.

It’s like you can have gold in the form of a gold watch, and you can have a gold necklace. They look different in shape and form, have different names, and there’s a different experience involved, but in essence they’re all gold.

So what are we looking at? What have we put our attention on? We’ve focused on the form, and we say, “That is a separate being.” This is all thought-based; it’s not reality-based.

Where is that being seen, heard, felt, or sensed? Is it outside of you somewhere? Using your direct experience this way can eat up and start to dismantle the false self, the false separate self.

Rick: When you had that experience in the woods and fell to your knees, that was the predominant thing initially: “Whoa, everything is myself.” Obviously, it’s not like you’re seeing Cindy everywhere—Cindy tree, Cindy rock, and Cindy bird. That’s not the self you’re referring to. So what’s the actual living experience of that?

Cindy: Everybody starts from a central me and wants to project me out there. Me fell away. This idea of me fell away, and so what is revealed is this I that is fundamental to everybody, is omnipresent. You cannot go anywhere without everywhere you go, there you are.

It’s omnipresent, and it is what everything is, including you. That’s the direct reality and the direct truth. What happens is we get a thought about it, so we have this idea of me. When we think about oneness, we want to think that I become one with something else, that I get to retain the me and it somehow merges with something else, but I still retain me.

No. One means the same—no difference, one without a second—and that’s what it was. I look up at the trees, and yes, I see them as trees, shapes of trees, leaves, and whatnot, but there was an indisputable, inarguable recognition of myself. What had to happen was that the false self had to fall away for this to be revealed.

I went to say, “It’s me,” but nothing came out. I looked everywhere, and everything looked the same. I couldn’t speak. Who would I speak to? Speech came back clearly and grew louder, but I could never identify with it in the same way.

It’s not just speech; it’s the voice in the head that we have and that we identify as us and as other people. We tell stories about ourselves and other people that have nothing to do with other people. That’s how 40 years of self-baggage can fall away, because it has nothing to do with you. It never did.

There is nobody to protect against. There’s nothing to do, there’s nowhere to go. It is the cosmic joke.

Rick: Did you find that this shift to seeing everything in terms of the self made you much more compassionate?

Cindy: It does—not in a suffering way, but in a very compassionate way. It brings you to really take care of this moment, whatever it is. No more, “Oh, gee, I don’t want to take out the garbage now. It’s too cold outside,” or something. You find yourself just taking out the garbage and taking care of the moment, because everything is you and you are everything. That is natural.

Rick: I want to be like Cindy. How do I do it?

Cindy: You can’t do it, because you have to disappear. But maybe that’s the thing you need to do. That may be the last thing you need to do.

What happened for me was more than just an explosion of love and then, boom, it happened spontaneously, as if nothing came before it. Of course, something always does. There was a desire to know the truth. There was a desire to know God, actually. I wasn’t spiritual in that way. I didn’t follow any religion or anything, but I started looking at God as the unknown, as everything other than me, I guess.

I actually fell in love with love and joy itself. I discovered that when you shifted your attention from out there—onto what you think you need to be happy—to here, there was first relief, then love, joy, and peace. The longer you stay there, the bigger it grows.

So I pursued that like a lover. I became obsessed with it, actually. I fell in love with love. Something weird happened at some point: I was the one pursuing it. I would go out in the woods for hours on end and just indulge in this joy, this very real, very sensory love and joy. At some point, it started to pursue me—the me I thought I was.

I would be at a grocery store or something and see a woman with a child, and I would just start bawling right there. “No, no, no, this can’t happen here.” But when this started to happen, I didn’t have any choice anymore in the matter.

In the moment before the explosion of love at the chest, it was very visceral, very physical. I had basically said, “This is so good, and it’s just getting better. I don’t care what I do. Do with me what you will.” It was complete surrender to that.

Moments after that, there was this inquiry: I was seeking God very potently, very intensively, and I asked, “If God is everywhere—and this is what we hear, that God is everywhere, that you turn over a stone and God is there—if God is everywhere, how come it’s not obvious?”

I turned around the question and said, “Well, what is obvious?” Trees are obvious. Rocks are obvious. We think we know what trees and rocks are. They become mundane to us, but suddenly they became miraculous. I thought, “Well, everything is God. Oh, that includes me. I’m not separate from everything.”

Then this explosion happened. It hit my chest and then my head and just knocked me to my knees, bawling with the intensity of love. I had been experiencing a lot of love, joy, and bliss before then, but this was just earth-shattering.

Fall in love with love itself—not a thing or a person.

Rick: How do you intensify that desire? What does anyone do to ramp up the intensity of the desire?

Cindy: For me, it was easy, because I just fell in love. You have to be extreme to reach the supreme. You can’t sit on the fence and muck around; you’re just playing in the mind. There has to be a desire, a flame lit that will make you go beyond.

And beyond what? Beyond the mind, because usually we stop at the mind. The mind will say, “No, you can’t feel that good.” “Oh, okay,” and it’s reaffirmed. The mind will say all kinds of things, like, “You’re separate.” So all of our doubts need to be addressed. They need to be compared against your actual, direct reality.

Don’t just accept what the mind has to say, and don’t stop. It’s like when you fall in love: whatever you’re doing, what’s on your mind? That person, right? So fall in love with love or God or whatever, and whatever you’re doing, this is top of mind. Don’t let it go.

Rick: Maybe it’s a matter of where you put your attention. If you really want this, you’re going to just put your attention in this area more and more and more and more, and one thing will lead to the next.

Cindy: I encourage people to fall in love with love itself—not a thing or a person—and understand that even if there is a person in front of you and you are feeling love, recognize the source of that love. It’s not out there.

When you realize that the love is not attached to somebody, it’s no longer limited to them, their actions, or who they are. It becomes unlimited. And so if you get a taste of this unlimited love that goes beyond the mind, you could become addicted to it, like I did, and that could be adding gas to the flame.

Another way is having a direct realization of some sort that goes against the mind. You’re like, “You know, the mind will say that can’t be, but it is.” You’re the authority; nobody else is.

The five powers

Rick: What are these five powers that you refer to?

Cindy: The first power is your power of awareness, and there’s nothing you need to do for that. It’s completely free. How easy is it to hear what you hear?

Rick: Automatic.

Cindy: Doesn’t take any effort whatsoever, right? Doesn’t take an “I” doing it. So that’s your power of awareness.

The second one is your power of attention, and I can demonstrate it by asking you: Are you feeling your left foot right now?

Rick: Now I am. You mentioned it.

Cindy: So what happened? Had your foot stopped feeling? Your attention is elsewhere, either on me or your thoughts about what I’m saying. So can you sense into the top of your head? What about your right shoulder? Had it too? What happened to your foot?

Attention can contract and it can open. You can direct it and you can narrow it. This is how we can have selective hearing. Even though somebody has a microphone, we can turn the sound up on our idea and down on his voice.

So even though he’s got this microphone, we can actually do that with our attention. This is how we become blind, deaf, and ignorant. When you get in a blind rage, you cannot see the person behind you that you cut off. You’ve narrowed your power of attention onto one thing, to the exclusion of practically everything else.

But it can also open. You can sense into your feet and the top of your head at the same time, take in your peripheral vision at the same time, and notice your breath moving in and out, all at the same time. Do that for a few in-and-out breaths.

Rick: It’s like your awareness softens and expands.

Cindy: So attention is softened and expanded and opening. Is it quiet?

Rick: Yes, more quiet.

Cindy: But you hear things, right? The noise isn’t the outer noise; it’s the inner noise. So I call that coming to your senses, and I call it also the two-minute technique to inner peace. But it’s actually about two seconds.

Rick: Is this something you would advocate doing all day long whenever you think of it?

Cindy: Sure, doing dishes, brushing your teeth at first—these are good examples of when you can come to your senses. What you can learn to do is step out of the movie in the mind, the illusion, the dream, and become very aware of all the senses.

We’ve done the power of awareness and the power of attention. Then you have the power of interest. What you’re most interested in is what you get, and that’s how the practice I call alchemy works. It’s a shift of attention, from what you don’t want onto what you do want.

Then there is the power of discernment. You have the power of discernment over many things. You can discern the movie in the mind from direct reality; a thought as a thought itself, not as what is; yourself as not a thought; and others as not the movie in the mind, not a thought.

We discern a lot of things, or we don’t. If we don’t discern, we get lost in the movie in the mind. We think it’s real. It’s sort of like sitting in a movie theater, and you get right into it and forget you’re in the movie theater. You get in until you get scared enough, and then, “Oh, it’s not happening. It’s just a movie.”

We have so much pain. This is why sometimes pain is your friend. It’s trying to wake you up out of the dream, out of the nightmare. You have enough pain that you can have this recognition and discernment: “It’s not happening. It’s not real.”

Authority is the final one. These operate simultaneously, and authority is something you can’t abdicate. Some people will say, “He hurt me.” Well, you’re saying it. Anybody else saying it? There’s nobody else saying it.

Whatever you say is true will appear to be true, whether it’s true or not. If mind comes up and offers, “Oh no, you have to hurt because this happened,” and you go, “Yes, that’s true,” you give it your stamp of approval. You’re going to hurt. You’re going to believe it. You’re going to perpetuate it.

You don’t have to. You can notice the thought and dismiss it. That’s using your power of discernment and your power of interest: “I’m not interested in this. That’s just a thought.” And you come back to your senses, where it’s safe, peaceful, and quiet.

You can notice the thought and dismiss it.

✨ Awakening and everyday life

Rick: In an important phase of your life, you dedicated exclusive time to this process, spending a lot of time in the woods and stuff like that. In addition to that sort of thing, do you advocate some sort of exclusive time, such as a quiet meditation period or retreats or anything else, to just really go as deeply as possible?

Cindy: I used to, and I still do sit, but I don’t do it for the purpose of going as deeply as possible. I just enjoy it.

Once a day I would definitely suggest meditation, but don’t let it stop there. People usually think, “Well, I did my meditation,” and then they go about their usual mind during the day. The idea is that what you learn when you’re sitting, you carry into your daily life. So every chance you get, feel the feet, feel the breath, take in the peripheral vision, notice all of the tactile senses, and you really start to learn the difference between being lost in the movie, the dream, the illusion, and what is actually going on here.

When people do self-inquiry, they ask, “Who am I?” First it starts on the level of the mind, of the movie: “Oh, well, I’m Cindy. I’m a sister, daughter. I’m a… This is what I do.” That’s the answer you’re going to get. It seems that we have to burn through those until we give up on them.

Rick: When Ramana advocated self-inquiry, he wasn’t encouraging people to engage in a new form of mental chit-chat, or “Who am I?” and all kinds of mental agitation. He was advocating a much quieter settling into something much more experiential.

Cindy: Yes—contemplative, experiential, introverted. I love Ramana’s writings.

The direct seeing wasn’t the end of it. It was another week; there were still some questions and things that were stirring. I did self-inquiry very intensively in the woods again, and there was a moment where the mind just folded in on itself, just self-destructed, and that was the end of the questioning.

So it seems like once you know the truth and you allow it to inform the mind, instead of the mind informing you about the truth—which it can never do—then inevitably, it’ll be over very shortly after that.

Rick: So you had this direct seeing in the woods, and then you had a week of still working through things. You said the mind turned in on itself and then it was over. Can you elaborate?

Cindy: I was doing self-inquiry, and the answers were coming from the mind: “Who am I? Cindy. Who am I?” Initially, the answers would come from the mind, and I’d look at each one and go, “Nope, nope.” Everything that I said that I was in a positive way, I started to look at: “Well, I’m not this and I’m not that,” and threw all those out too.

Then came a point where I realized these are all thoughts. I can’t describe it any more than that, but it was that moment, and it was over. The questions, the seeking—all of that fell away after that final moment.

So the direct seeing is that you see the truth of the one Self, which you are, and then you see what you’re not.

Rick: How did your life roll after that? What was your momentary, day-to-day experience like—getting up in the morning, cooking breakfast? What was your orientation?

Cindy: The experience was very strange for three months—direct experience. I just can’t even… I don’t have words for what that experience was like. Direct experience was very wonky for three months. I think things were settling in, integrating, and rewriting everything.

We could look at it like a virus that says, “You are a separate person.” It’s running, and then it gets rewritten: “You are nothing. This is not who you are.” So for three months there was this weirdness, but it was joyful weirdness of experience.

Everyday life was just normal, but very joyful. It didn’t matter what I was doing; I was smiling. That’s still the way it is now. That hasn’t changed.

What happened over time was that when I was working with people, things started to come out. Then questions started to come, and more and more I spoke about it. It just happened on its own. It wasn’t like, “I’m awake and I have to go and save the world.”

Rick: So it sounds like a period of acclimation and integration.

Cindy: Yeah, and the whole questioning of what it was and all of that didn’t matter. It just fell away.

That was the other thing that happened. I lost total interest in the spiritual thing. I had all these spiritual friends who were seeking and doing this and doing that, and I was just like, “Not interested. There’s nothing to do. Everything’s okay.”

Rick: What happened after three months? Was it just that after three months there had been enough adjustment, and that the whole thing became more normal?

Cindy: Yeah, it does, basically. It just sort of faded. I never sought that experience again. I never wanted it again. What for?

Oh, laughter and joy continue, but the giddiness of the initial transition didn’t continue. I don’t even know what to call it. Giddiness is a good word.

I heard Mooji say this a lot: people will say, “I had this experience,” and then they end up putting it into the past. The mind grabs it and takes it, and it gets added unto me. All of this goes on instead of the “me” falling away.

That almost happened, but I knew enough from the teachers I’d studied. There was a video that I watched of Mooji where he said, “Yeah, there’s the experience, but what about the context?” To me, that meant, “What about the truth? Is the truth still the truth? Is it still true that there is the one Self?” Yes, of course. So it never happened. I didn’t so-called lose it. You don’t lose it; you just trade it for something else.

Rick: Even now, as you walk around, or right now, as you’re looking at me on your computer monitor, do you still see everything in terms of the Self?

Cindy: Yeah, I can’t separate your words from my hearing. As you walk down the street and you look at people, dogs, trees, and cars, is it all the Self? I’m seeing myself.

Absolutely. That could have been compromised at some point, before the mind self-destructed and before this confirmation of the truth settled in, and that was in the first week.

Serving without suffering

Rick: Do you also feel that there’s an analogy that a teacher is like a reservoir, and according to what kind of pipe you put up to it, that’s how much is drawn? Do you find that with certain people they evoke a lot more from you than other people?

Cindy: Yes, definitely. There’s more going on in certain conversations, and certain people will only play in a certain area of the sandbox. Every now and again, I try to pull them out of it. I’ll offer something else to see if they’re willing to step a little further, expand a little further, and sometimes they do.

So there’s definitely a difference between the quality of the questions, and that’s really what makes a difference for people. I can talk about all this and it’s great, but that’s the ultimate question. My answer was, “Where are you not?”

Rick: Do you think humans exist as a living tool that consciousness is using to have a more direct effect in the world?

Cindy: I think the most effective thing you can have on the world is to awaken and self-realize who you are, and then come back and look at this. Until then, who’s asking?

To me, the joy of seeing oneself is enough reason for humankind. There is no higher joy.

Rick: You have had the joy of seeing yourself, but then you have naturally transitioned into, or assumed, the role of a teacher through which your experience is being disseminated or shared with other people.

Cindy: When I surrendered myself, I didn’t care if I swept the streets for the rest of my life, and I still don’t care.

There was this interest to be of use. How can I be of use? I looked at what I had available to me, and that was writing, language, communication, and people. I had already been developing a way to help people out of suffering, so it just carried on. It just cleaned up.

But sweeping the streets is no less of a service. Absolutely no less. It is your being that is of service, not what you do.

Rick: The first priority is to know thyself. That should be the number one tool in your toolkit. Then, having that, there are various other ways you can serve. But if you don’t have that, the question is, how valuable will you ultimately be?

Cindy: Will you be suffering in your serving, and will you therefore be contributing to the mass unconsciousness that goes on? Unhappiness lies within that mass unconsciousness. We agree with each other about our suffering, and so we are feeding it.

The best service you can be, honestly, really, is to wake up out of the dream. Put all your attention and interest, all your powers, into it. Let that flame burn. Throw gasoline on it.

The best way to help somebody who’s suffering is to end your own.

Rick: One way we might phrase it is: “Okay, I see the world is a disaster. Now what can I do to help?” The first priority is to know thyself.

Cindy: It is totally possible to stay in alignment with truth while being present and compassionate with what’s going on. Don’t try to tell yourself something. Question, question yourself, question everything.

Closing reflections

Rick: Here’s a little tidbit for you. I really like this little quote from the Buddha that you put in your book:

“If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.”

I often ponder that sort of thing. What a miracle. Imagine the whole marvelous complexity and beauty of the whole thing. Again, the Buddha says, if we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly—or even a single grain of salt, I would say—our whole life would change.

Cindy: It’s true, and it is a fabulous example, because that is exactly what happened to me in the woods when that thought came up: “How come it’s not obvious?”

And then it was: “Wait, what is obvious?” Well, the trees are obvious. The plants are obvious. But nobody knows how this happens. Nobody knows how a leaf unfolds from nothing into nothing. That’s when the recognition came: “Oh my God, it’s all a miracle. Oh my God, it’s all God.” All of it.

This caught me, though, because in this “all of it,” I am not outside of this all of it. And boom, that was that.

Rick: Beautiful realization. It gives me goosebumps to contemplate.

Cindy: It’s a lovely one. Thank you for that.

Rick: Before we totally wrap it up, give people an indication: If I seem to like Cindy and think I want to get more in touch with what she’s doing, what kind of programs, courses, or offerings do you have?

Cindy: We do have a group program coming up called “Edge Out the Ego.” That’s from the 20th to the 24th, and you can enroll for that.

Beyond that, I have ongoing, once-a-month spiritual inquiry calls open to the public. Anybody can come in and ask questions. We also have a private program available for those whose burning can’t be denied.

That’s about it. You can find out about all of those at my websites, CindyTeevens.com or alchemylovejoy.com.

Rick: I’ll be putting up a page on BatGap for this interview, and I’ll have links to that website and to your books and so on, so people can get in touch and take it from there.

Cindy: Thank you, thank you so much.

Rick: Yeah, thank you, Cindy. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. It’s been a real natural, easygoing conversation.

Cindy: It surely has. I appreciate your questions and your humor as well.

Rick: You were talking about how love needs love, or something like that, and the Stevie Wonder song, “Love’s in Need of Love Today.”

Cindy: I love that you brought up songs because I used to sing and play guitar, and I’m picking it up again. There was a time, though, when I was just disgusted with the ego and I couldn’t sing any songs. I realized they’re all egoic.

I was actually listening to the lyrics instead of just mindlessly humming along, and I thought, “Oh my God, I can’t sing that song anymore.” Then I was actually told by a monk, “Well, no, not all songs.” And I went, “Okay, right. I have to start looking for songs that are not egoic.”

What happened was I found that if you take a different perspective, there is no song that is egoic. Even if you’re saying, “You hurt me, so I never want to see you again,” well, that’s the ego. So I can sing those songs now, too.

Rick: Yeah, what the heck.

Cindy: And then if you’re like, “I can’t live without you,” well, that would be the divine.

Rick: Sigmund Freud said sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, so maybe by the same token, sometimes a song is just a song.

Cindy: With a good little diddly going on.

Rick: Right. So let me just make a general wrap-up point, which is that you’ve been watching an episode of Buddha at the Gas Pump, an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. The series continues.

If you’d like to learn more about it, go to batgap.com. The best place to start there, perhaps, is the “At a Glimpse” menu, where you’ll see everything that’s on the site kind of summarized and itemized. You can click from there to other things, such as subscribing to the audio podcast or signing up to be notified by email of new episodes, and so on.

So thanks for watching or listening, and thanks again, Cindy. It’s been a lot of fun.

Cindy: Thanks, Rick. Thanks for being part of my journey on the way, because everything counts and you were part of it.

Rick: Great, and vice versa.