Dani Antman Interview.

Summary

Dani Antman describes a gradual awakening shaped by Kabbalah, Kundalini practice, energy healing, and trauma work. The discussion explores purification, subtle-body perception, healing, and the need to meet people at the level of consciousness where they are.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is the role of purification and integration in spiritual awakening?
• What is the subtle body, and how does it relate to healing and awakening?
• How does distance energy healing work?
• Why do some people experience healing while others do not?
• Can anyone develop subtle perception or energy-healing abilities?

Key takeaways

• Awakening may unfold gradually through years of purification and integration.
• Teachings are most helpful when they meet people at their current level of development.
• A healthy sense of self can provide a foundation for deeper spiritual inquiry.
• Healing involves recognizing the physical, emotional, mental, and subtle dimensions of a person.
• Illness can reveal lessons about how we respond to difficult circumstances.
• Subtle perception may be developed by many people, though natural ability varies.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. And this is my 500th interview. The person who gets the honors for that is Dani Antman. Welcome, Dani.

Dani: Hi, I didn’t know I was number 500. That’s wonderful.

Rick: Yeah, too bad we are not doing this in Indianapolis. But I just want to add that my name is Rick Archer—I forgot to say that last week—and Buddha at the Gas Pump is supported by appreciative listeners and viewers. So, if you appreciate it and would like to make a contribution, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site. We’re registered as a nonprofit, a 501(c)(3).

Dani is an internationally known energy healer and interfaith minister, who now lives in Santa Barbara, California. She’s been at the forefront of energy medicine and healing since 1992, when she graduated from the Barbara Brennan School of Healing. She’s a graduate of the School for Nondual Healing and Awakening, which was founded by Jason Shulman, who has been on BatGap, and she taught there for over nine years. She’s led workshops at the Esalen Institute, La Casa de Maria, and the Lionheart Institute for Transpersonal Energy Healing. She is a Somatic Experiencing practitioner and helps people recover from the effects of trauma and PTSD.

This next part is the bit that excites me the most: she has received spiritual direction and assistance for over 17 years from Patanjali Kundalini Yoga Care. I had Joan Shivarpita Harrigan on the show a number of years ago. And I must say that from everything I know about that center, it’s one of the most effective things that has been presented on this show. It’s not for the masses; they have a very select few who attend, and those few receive very personalized guidance. Everyone I’ve spoken to who has gone there has received tremendous benefits from it.

Dani has been involved with them for over 17 years. And through this guidance, she completed a challenging Kundalini process related to her Jewish past. We’ll be talking about that during the interview. She’s dedicated to guiding others on their spiritual path. Okay, so welcome, Dani.

Dani: Thank you.

Rick: Good to do this. In fact, you know, I didn’t even know that you had any relationship to Joan Harrigan and the Patanjali Kundalini Center until about a week ago, when I started actually preparing for this interview. I didn’t know it when we invited you. It was a real pleasant surprise to discover that.

Dani: I thought that’s how I got invited.

Rick: No, we just thought, okay, she looks interesting. But somehow, at least in my mind, I didn’t make that connection. And I was really happy to see it.

Dani: Yeah, I’ve had a kind of unusual process, because it combines two paths: one of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical path, and the other Kundalini science. I wouldn’t say that they’re the same paths, but somehow, they have been working simultaneously within me. And it’s been a very gradual awakening process, in contrast to some of the people I’ve heard on your show where it’s an all-of-a-sudden Big Bang. My process has been over quite a long amount of time.

Yeah, even the all-of-a-sudden Big Bang people end up going through years and years of integration, purification, and processing of stuff. They might start out with a bang, but that’s definitely not the end of the story.

Rick: Yeah, even the all-of-a-sudden Big Bang people end up going through years and years of integration, purification, and processing of stuff. They might start out with a bang, but that’s definitely not the end of the story.

Dani: Right. It’s kind of misleading sometimes. When I first moved to California from New Jersey, I was already in a Kundalini process. I moved to Northern California first, and it was a hub for all the Neo-Advaita teachers who were going around the country. I remember sitting there, and one woman who was speaking said, “There is absolutely no such thing as purification,” and blah, blah. I was in a raging purification process at the time. It was hard to put together all the pieces for some time. But that’s what I’d like to talk about today.

Rick: Yeah, this year at the SAND conference, I’m going to do a talk on the fact that knowledge is different at different levels of consciousness and at different levels of reality. There’s a level at which that woman is right. There’s no purification. But at that level, there’s also no universe.

Dani: Or anything, right? But it’s not that helpful for people going through struggles. In my work as an energy healer and counselor, I found it really important to meet people where they are. Too much information from a different state of being or level of consciousness is not useful at a certain time.

Rick: Yeah, one should always teach to the level of consciousness of the students, otherwise you’re talking over each other, and there’s no connection.

Dani: Or perhaps slightly higher.

Rick: So yes, you don’t pander to their level of—to their ignorance, if we want to use that harsh term. But you have to speak in a way that they can absorb something and relate to something. I mean, for instance, a lot of people who awaken say, “I always knew this. This enlightenment thing is nothing new. How could I have overlooked it?” And yeah, that’s true. But then if they turn around and start saying to everyone, “You’re already enlightened, you don’t need to do anything,” that’s not helpful.

Dani: Right. And I still hear a lot of that on the various shows and podcasts that I’ve listened to.

Rick: Yeah, I think it’s starting to fizzle out, because a lot of people have just gotten fed up with that message and realize that it wasn’t working. Many of the people who were teaching it and saying it began to realize that they needed a more embodied, integrated kind of approach, even for their own lives, not just the lives of the people they purported to teach. Right. All right, well, we nailed the Neo-Advaitins.

Why don’t we retrace our steps a little bit? Your life has had a number of rather distinct chapters, and those chapters are reflected in the chapters of your book, which is called Wired for God: Adventures of a Jewish Yogi . Let me just show it on the screen here for a second. There it is, Wired for God . So, we want to apportion our time here, because there’s a lot of stuff you and I can talk about. And it won’t necessarily be the most useful thing to spend most of our time talking about some of those early chapters of your life. But let’s run through them, because it’ll kind of set the stage for where you’ve ended up with all this.

Dani: Yeah, I should say, I grew up in New York, and I grew up at the edge of the 1960s. I was born in 1956. And it wasn’t until I started writing the story that I actually realized how tumultuous those times were and their effect on me. I also grew up 10 years after the end of World War II. And it took me a long time to realize that the Judaism that I inherited was a shattered Judaism. My parents brought me up secularly, not religiously. My mother wanted to be more American than Jewish because of World War II. My father had kind of given up the Jewish observances that he was brought up with.

Rick: Where were your parents during the war?

Dani: They were in the United States, but everybody was affected, and anybody who was Jewish was certainly affected by the war. And then also, I was 13 in 1969, a little too young to go to Woodstock. But most of my friends were going to Woodstock. And even though I was 13, I had 15-year-old friends who were already doing LSD. I started smoking pot really young.

So, the times were really tumultuous. The Vietnam War was on TV every single night. And I didn’t realize how much I numbed out just seeing that. I kind of shut down and numbed out. The threat to the young men who were just slightly older than me was that they were going to be drafted in a few years and go off to the jungles of Vietnam. So even though my childhood was basically normal, and I had loving parents, there was still kind of an underlying anxiety about growing up in those times.

In my own home, around the time of coming of age, at 13, my parents were going through a major emotional and financial battle with my grandparents that affected all of us kids. I have a brother and a sister. So, things on the outside looked normal, but they really weren’t. I was slightly depressed, and I didn’t know how to launch myself in the world.

So, tumultuous times, and I was very interested in esoteric things. At a pretty young age, I was reading all of Carlos Castaneda. When those books came out, I was fascinated by the altered states he described in the book. I guess everybody was who read them. I longed to go find Don Juan myself, as a teacher, and to be an apprentice.

Later on, many, many years later, when I found the teachings of Barbara Brennan, they really resonated with me because she had a school that purported to teach how to see into bodies, how to see into energy fields, and how to use them for the purposes of healing. But I’m skipping ahead a little bit.

I was an artist for many years in New York City. I eventually ended up as an artist for interior designers; I had my own business. I spent a good 14 years of my early adult life working really hard. Being a freelance artist, I led a kind of wild and promiscuous life in New York City—a party girl. I wasn’t thinking much about spirituality. By the time I was 30 years old, a kind of switch flipped, and I thought, well, you better settle down, think about getting married, and think about what you are doing with your life.

Rick: One thing I heard you say about your art period was that it demanded great focus. You were doing architectural and interior renderings for architects and designers. And sometimes you had to pull all-nighters to get a project done on deadline. You would just go into this deep, deep focus, and it sort of cultured a certain ability in you that had some advantages later on.

Dani: Yeah, there are a lot of artists who have that focus. Musicians have that focus; you could call it the Zen of art, the Zen of music. There were times when I stayed up all night, and I was really in the zone. There was no thinking involved with the painting I was doing. It was like one big gesture that came out of me after a period of time. It’s very similar to meditation, or the concentration you would need to do a healing with energy work.

The other thing I would say about those times is I started out as a painter, I switched to interior design, and then I became a renderer. My freelance work was doing interior design renderings.

In design school, I had two very progressive teachers. And they would give us projects where we would have to deconstruct the nature of reality to do the project. For example, to design a bathroom, we were given books by Alan Watts, Tao: The Watercourse Way, or something—I don’t remember.

Designing was a deconstructive process. In order to design a bathroom, we had to get to the essence of water. I was 19 years old, and I remember getting very depressed. It’s not that I didn’t understand the assignment; I did. But I didn’t have a Self yet. I was very insecure. I was very young. I couldn’t handle that kind of deconstructive process.

In hindsight, I realized I got depressed because I didn’t have a Self, and they were trying to deconstruct a Self I didn’t have. It was interesting to reflect upon that much later, from a spiritual standpoint.

Rick: Yeah. Did you go to Pratt, by any chance?

Dani: I went to the New York School of Interior Design.

Rick: Okay. My parents met at Pratt; my father was a professional artist. When you say you didn’t have a Self, what I understand you to be saying is what I’ve heard various people say—some teachers say that you have to sort of kill the ego or deconstruct the ego or whatever. But others, I think perhaps more wisely, say, well, you really have to have a strong, healthy ego before you can consider deconstructing it. And I think that’s what you’re saying when you say you didn’t have one yet: you hadn’t developed a strong, healthy one yet. Right?

Dani: Right. I hadn’t individuated yet. I was still living at home. I was very young, in a way, to be doing interior design, where you’re supposed to be telling other people how they should design their houses. I never ended up doing that. I was never comfortable with it.

Rick: Okay, so Barbara Brennan. You touched upon Barbara Brennan, and you really got heavily into that. I heard you say in another interview that at a certain time, right around the time that computer-aided design came out and put you out of a job, you were ready to pick up healing full-time and had gained some facility with it as a result of your training with Barbara Brennan.

Dani: Yeah, it came as a shock to me, though, that I would even do that. At the time, I had been interested in channeling and other esoteric things, but I wouldn’t have called myself overtly spiritual. I passed a flyer on a bus stop one day that advertised a channeler offering sessions in New York.

At the time, I was about to get married. I was 32, I was settling down, and I had a good career. When I went to this channeler, with the intent to find out about my upcoming marriage, she told me I was a healer. I had no idea what that was, nor any conception of what it would be like to do that. She told me to get a book about it.

I actually had to go to a bookstore to do that; there was no Amazon.com. There were no computers in 1988, and Barbara Brennan had just published her book, Hands of Light. I think I read three chapters, and it felt like lightning was running through my body. I was so excited by what she presented—the concept that you could see underneath reality to an underlying energy, to the subtle body. And, of course, it seemed like magic.

But she said in her book that she could train people to do this. Despite the fact that it was so outside of my normal expectation of myself, I signed up for a four-year training. At 32, I think I was one of the youngest people in the class. It mainly attracted people who had been around a while and who were different kinds of practitioners.

Healing as the First Lesson

I had never been in therapy; I had never done any inner work. Much to my surprise, the first lesson was, if you’re going to be a healer, you have to heal yourself. I thought I was just fine as I was. The four years there opened up a Pandora’s box in terms of looking inside oneself to one’s own psyche, conditioning, and psychology.

I had never been in therapy; I had never done any inner work. Much to my surprise, the first lesson was, if you’re going to be a healer, you have to heal yourself. I thought I was just fine as I was. The four years there opened up a Pandora’s box in terms of looking inside oneself to one’s own psyche, conditioning, and psychology.

In order to work with people, I really had to understand my own proclivities and my own conditioning. At 32, I was ready to handle that. I started therapy. We were all required to be in therapy, and we were required to get supervision, which is a credit to Barbara’s integrity, actually.

Rick: It’s interesting. So, you went through the four years of training and became a professional healer. You might mention some of the experiences you had during that training and during your healing practice, because you definitely cultured or developed subtle perception and certain abilities, which may be somewhat tangential to awakening or enlightenment, but which I think are kind of in the orbit of that kind of realization. Many enlightened people have them, but many unenlightened people can also develop them.

Dani: Right. And more importantly, I think one of the things I’ve learned since is the importance of the subtle body in the awakening process itself. That came about later through Swamiji and Joan.

Rick: Let’s define what the subtle body is. I don’t know if everyone necessarily accepts that there is one. I’ve heard people say, for instance, some well-known teachers say that there’s no self, and therefore reincarnation couldn’t happen, because there’s nothing to reincarnate. I happen to disagree. I think that the reason reincarnation and other things can happen is that there is a subtle body, which persists even when the gross body dies. So, let’s talk about that a little bit.

Dani: Right. I mean, I think it exists. But it is possible that when you’re finally liberated, the subtle body dissolves, and then there’s no self, no subtle body, and you don’t reincarnate. So perhaps it is true from, again, one level of attainment.

But as far as I can tell, everything in this world of duality has an energy field that surrounds and interpenetrates it, and it is very palpable. Human beings experience it daily in a very natural way. When you meet somebody with negative energy and you want to just pull back and move away, versus when you sit in the field of some of the big beings that have been on our planet, you can feel that. You can feel the largeness of their energy field, or the potency, or the unification within their energy field.

You can feel it around plants and stones. And in a human being, we were trained to perceive and feel seven layers of the auric field. It’s the same as the yogic sheaths, or koshas. So, there are discernible layers, but they interpenetrate each other. You’d have to be trained to put your attention and focus on a specific level.

For instance, there’s an astral level. When people talk about astral beings, you can perceive astral beings on the astral level. And you can perceive past lives on the astral level. Real or not real, again, depends on your vantage point.

Rick: Yeah, or useful or not useful. A lot of this could probably be a distraction. If we really want to understand the topology of the universe and how it’s all structured, it might be interesting to have at least a passing understanding of that stuff, even if you don’t dwell on it obsessively.

Also, with regard to enlightened people and having the subtle body dissolve when they die, as well as the gross body, probably that happens to some. It may not happen to all, from what I’ve gathered, but then again, there are so many stories.

Even you say that the ancient Jewish lineage has somehow inspired or blessed you in some way. So maybe those guys are actually hanging around on some level in some sort of body and do intervene.

Dani: But also, even Ramana Maharshi, you can reach on the other plane.

Rick: There are so many who have had experiences with him, yeah.

Dani: I’ve had experiences with Anandamayi Ma since I went to “see” her and her ashram. She’s no longer in the body. In the training, these levels became very real for me—as real as I am, as real as the dream world is real. It’s real. And we worked on them or in them.

I saw a lot of healing miracles. At one point, I had my own physical healing through a series of healings with Jason Shulman. I went to Jason Shulman for a series of healings for a problem I had with cervical dysplasia. He also went to Barbara Brennan’s School of Healing. I don’t know if he mentioned that. But at that point, I think he was already practicing, and he was one of the teachers there.

My doctor documented the healing, and after a series of three to six—maybe three or four—healings, and some homeopathy, the condition went away by itself.

Rick: A question came in relevant to this from Michael Punctilious in the Philippines. He asks, “How does distance healing work? What are the mechanics of it?”

Dani: That’s a good question. I currently do distance healing; I work on Skype and Zoom. The mechanics of it are, first, I talk to people. It’s a relational thing. I don’t do distant healing without knowing the person, and I don’t do distant healing on people who haven’t asked for healing. Those are my conditions.

But I talk to the person, and once we’ve pinpointed the area that we want to address, we hang up, and I simply imagine them on my healing table. I’m very adept at connecting long-distance at this point. I can perceive the subtle body long-distance, and I transmit energy through my hands as if they’re in my room.

It never fails that when we talk afterward, they know exactly when I’ve stopped. It’s receivable; it’s experienceable. A lot of times, when we compare what I’ve perceived and what they’ve experienced, there’s a matchup in some form.

Rick: How do you account for the fact that sometimes healing doesn’t work, even among you healers? You mentioned someone who had been very involved with Barbara’s school—one of the star students who ended up dying of cancer. None of you in that school, including Barbara, I guess, was able to help her.

Do you take it that certain karma is sort of insurmountable, or that we have a certain destiny and shouldn’t, in some cases, try to circumvent it with healing?

Dani: It’s a good question. I read that years later, Barbara already knew that that person was not going to make it on the day she heard about the person’s illness. I didn’t know that until recently.

If you believe in karma, we could say it’s karma, or life lessons, or the soul is just meant to go through this journey in that particular way. And equally, why does it work? Why do people have miraculous healings, even without energy work? Some people have had miraculous recoveries from cancer, and science doesn’t know why. But it certainly has been documented that this happens.

I have noticed, though, with people, that no matter what is plaguing you, there are always life lessons to be learned in how you respond to it. And that’s usually what I work with people on. What can we mine from this situation? What’s the lesson?

Rick: Yeah. Okay, have we done justice to your healing phase?

Dani: I would just say that learning about the subtle body was so important for me, because it was as if someone could really tell the truth beyond the facade of a person. Barbara Brennan’s vision was quite amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody that clairvoyant; it is one of the siddhis.

That being said, if you were read by her, you felt completely seen. And when you feel completely seen, you open up, and there’s a kind of inner understanding you can get about your own life—how all the pieces fit together on the emotional, physical, and mental levels.

When you feel completely seen, you open up.

And you feel whole again because of that perception, because of being perceived that way. I think that’s really important. Wholeness involves all the parts—the broken parts and the light-filled parts. That was just the very beginning of dipping my toe in the waters of perceiving people from a very integrated place.

Rick: Yeah, kind of a precursor to what you did later on with Swamiji and all, because that had a lot to do with the subtle body and subtle physiology.

Dani: Right, yeah.

Rick: Do you think that everybody has an aptitude for that sort of thing—the subtle healing ability and subtle perception—or do you think it’s a kind of skill, like musical ability, that some people have more than others?

Dani: I would say both. I always wondered why it came so easily to me. I think that relates to the kind of kundalini rising I had. I think everybody can learn some subtle sense perception. But just like you said with music, not everybody is talented or will really open up in that way.

Rick: Yeah. And not everybody needs to, perhaps, because variety is the spice of life. So, kundalini rising—we’ll talk about that in a few minutes. We’ll explain what that is and everything. Okay, shall we move on to the next chapter?

Dani: Yeah. Which would be Kabbalah.

Rick: Sure. Yeah. There’s also Sananda in there, in the notes you sent.

Dani: Yeah, yeah, we were going to talk about that. A little cringeworthy episode of my nascent spiritual development. Sometime around, right around the end of my training at Barbara Brennan, I had just read Autobiography of a Yogi, I think, and had gotten interested in yoga. My current yoga teacher, a private teacher, had a friend who was bringing someone into town. This man I call Sananda in the book.

Rick: That’s not really his name?

Dani: No. He claimed to be a yogi and a healer. I was married at the time, and my then-husband and I went to an introductory session with Sananda. I became immediately enamored of this person who seemed to have a lot of charisma and presented himself as somebody who could take your karma, relieve you of your karma, as well as teach you a form of healing.

He had a lot of confidence in himself, and more than that, there was a transmission of energy that was quite powerful. Because I was in energy-healing training, I was pretty impressed by that. His transmissions permeated the room and affected my energy body in a kind of excitatory, vibrational way. I signed up for training with him parallel to my training at Barbara Brennan’s.

On the first weekend of training that I did, during an exit interview, which was just one-on-one, he transmitted Shakti, I guess, into my third eye, along with the bija mantras in Sanskrit, which caused a lot of energy to move through my system. It was very impressive. At the end of that transmission, he leaned over and kissed me. I was like, “Wow, what’s going on here?” I was a little shocked and didn’t know how to respond. Then he dismissed me.

Rather than running away from him at that time—which would have been a better response—I stayed and completed a couple of years of retreats with him. Even though that never happened again, there was a constant astral seduction happening. Usually when I was going to bed at night at home, he wasn’t even in the country. But it was very palpable, and very, very seductive. It felt like a very delicious, sexually charged energy coming into my body. It was consistent over a period of years, and very addicting, very stimulating, and very addicting.

During those years, my marriage pretty much fell apart. Not only because of that—it didn’t get off to a very good start anyway. I was a very vulnerable novice, spiritually, a novice practitioner, who got very seduced by the energy and power of this charismatic person.

Some years later, maybe three or four years later, when I was already separated, I had a sexual encounter with him. It was a one-time thing. It blew apart in less than 24 hours when I found out that he was on to the next person in the group. He was a serial seducer of women. I didn’t find out how widespread that was until much later.

I crashed and burned really quickly. I felt humiliated and ashamed. I then entered into a three-year process of therapy, looking at my own shadow. I didn’t know about my Kundalini rising at that time, which made me very vulnerable to someone like him because of the way the energies ran in my own system. I was very sensitive and very vulnerable to that kind of seduction.

I’ve since forgiven myself, but it took a lot of work to look at my own shadow and to repair the pieces of my broken heart and the disillusionment. I felt very invaded, like I couldn’t get him out of my energy system for quite some time.

About a year after that had happened—we were talking about Mother Meera a little bit earlier—I went to Germany to see Mother Meera. There, I had a dream experience in which she helped me clear the remnants of that encounter out of my system. It was quite profound, and the remnants were gone after that dream encounter. I went to her in a dream, and she worked on me. After that, I was clear. Again, that’s on the astral level.

Rick: Do you have any conclusions or observations about teachers like that, who have a lot of charisma and are radiating Shakti and all that business, and yet behave that way?

Dani: Yeah, be careful whom you ask to be your teacher. I think it’s a real abuse of the power of the teacher, even though I was complicit in the encounter. It’s not good. I wouldn’t really recommend it.

At the time, I was so overwhelmed with lust that, in a way, I needed to see it to its end, to see through that. In a way, that was a good thing for me. But I know people who would never have recovered from that and never gotten back on a spiritual path. They would have denounced all spiritual teachers and just said, “No more of that for me.”

I was lucky in that I had really good helpers, and it put me on a better course. But I wouldn’t recommend teachers who are seducing their students. It’s a violation of boundaries and power.

I was lucky in that I had really good helpers, and it put me on a better course. But I wouldn’t recommend teachers who are seducing their students. It’s a violation of boundaries and power.

Rick: Yeah, I know people who have gotten disillusioned like that, and they’ve kind of given up on the whole thing. There have even been some cases of suicide and stuff. So, it’s a pretty sad situation.

Dani: The only reason I wrote about it is because, in the years since, people have come to me for help with the very same issues. It’s still rampant among certain spiritual teachers, and I still hear stories about it. It really hurts people. I don’t see where the good is, basically, in any of that.

Rick: All right. Resisting the temptation to get on my soapbox here…

Dani: We could just say that you have a set of integrity principles for teachers that people should look at.

(See Association for Spiritual Integrity (ASI).)

Rick: Yeah.

Dani: If they’re curious about what they are.

Rick: Right.

Dani: And if you’re looking for a spiritual teacher, look for integrity.

Rick: That’s good. Okay, let’s get on to the Kabbalah chapter of your life, which is still going on. But yes, next topic.

🕊️ Kabbalah as a living mystical tradition

Dani: Yeah. I should say first, I was very drawn to the Kabbalah because…

Rick: What is Kabbalah? Let’s start with that.

Dani: The word Kabbalah simply means “to receive”—in Hebrew, to receive the wisdom of the Jewish mystical tradition. It’s not one book or one path that you could just pick up and follow. It’s a collection of teachings, probably stemming back to the time of Abraham. These teachings have been built upon and expounded upon by different rabbis and sages over the years.

It was originally a very hidden oral tradition, only passed on from teacher to disciple, one-on-one. I think it started to get written down in the Middle Ages, around the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries. Even then, it was available only to a select few. So, even today, many Jews don’t know anything about Kabbalah. It’s still sort of off to the side. It’s certainly become more known in today’s world, but it’s not common knowledge. It’s esoteric knowledge, hidden knowledge.

When Jason Shulman announced that he was starting a training rooted in the Kabbalah, I was really excited to learn about it. Not only that, he had found a way to use the teachings of Kabbalah as a path of awakening and healing.

I would say it was a very unconventional way of learning Kabbalah because most of us who came to that very first training—I was in his first training—had no background in Judaism, Torah, or Jewish law. You were supposed to be steeped in Judaism before you even got near the teachings of Kabbalah. So, that was unusual.

We were prepared for these teachings by doing different exercises that enabled us to come into the present moment and look at our conditioning. Jason, when you interviewed him, talked a little bit about his own Zen background, meditation background, and his studies before he started teaching.

I was so attracted to the teachings that I read many books on my own and started to explore them in parallel with the school, reading a lot and looking at different teachings. What most surprised me is that it really is a living tradition. As we encountered the teachings, they came alive in the room. They weren’t just book teachings.

A lot of Kabbalah was taught symbolically and intellectually, but we were taught experientially, and it became very real to me.

I don’t know if you want to put up the diagram of the Tree of Life so people can see it. We worked with the qualities of the Tree of Life, which you could see in these circles. There are 10 circles, which are called sefirot. They represent different divine attributes that, in the Kabbalistic tradition, God is said to have used to create the world, the cosmos, and all of manifest duality. All of it came out of the combination of these 10 sefirot.

If you look on top, the first one, Keter, is paired below with the 10th one, Malchut, and they’re paired in a central column. There are two side columns, and the two side columns are complementary to each other. They’re not quite opposite, but they’re complementary, or polarities.

The right side, which is the Chokhmah, Chesed, Netzach side, is considered the masculine, and the left side, the Binah, Gevurah, Hod side, is considered the feminine. So, you have a masculine/feminine, yin/yang kind of pairing, and then you have a central middle column.

A lot of other teachers have compared that a bit to the chakra system or the Ida and Pingala nadis. I think they’re really different systems, with some overlaps and similarities, but they have different origins.

We learned how to probe and understand our own conditioning and inner life using these qualities. Then we learned how to do healings, using these qualities and transmitting them through our hands. It’s a pretty profound modality that has changed how I look at the world and how I look at myself.

It’s really helped me to look at the people I’m in relationship with in my healing practice. It’s given me a way to look at patterns in people’s lives and quickly understand underlying conditioning, I would say.

Jason taught it in a very relational manner, and it gave me the platform for not fixing people. I learned how to be more in relationship to people’s suffering rather than having to fix it. And that’s been really great. It takes a lot of pressure off me as a healer. Then things heal in and of themselves because of the condition of relationship.

Rick: My only exposure to Jewish mysticism, apart from maybe interviewing Jason and one or two other people, was a book about the Baal Shem Tov that I read back in the ’70s. He was like a character you’d find in Yogananda’s book or in Life and Teachings of the Masters of the Far East. I mean, he was a really far-out guy. A siddha, basically.

Dani: Yeah.

Rick: I don’t know if he was a one-off and such people are not otherwise found in the Kabbalistic tradition, or whether there was a time long ago when the focus was on enlightenment, as we would currently understand the term, and there were many examples of people developing it as a result of that study.

Dani: Well, if you look at rabbinic history, up until the Holocaust, I would say we have a long history of enlightened sages. There’s a lot of teaching stories about those sages.

The lineage was decimated in the Holocaust and previous inquisitions. The most current one, I think, was Schneerson, who had a lot of those qualities. He was like a Baal Shem Tov of his time, and he was in Williamsburg, I think, until the ’80s. I think he died in the ’80s. But it’s a lineage of light. It’s still a living tradition, and people are still contributing to it in our current times.

Rick: I know it’s somewhat fashionable—people like Madonna have gotten into it and all—but is it something that you think can be resuscitated and really blossom and be a vibrant path for people?

Dani: It is a vibrant path for people. The problem is that it’s very cryptic, and you would really need a teacher even to just decipher what the path is.

Right now, I’m currently studying Zohar, which is a mystical text from the 13th century, with Professor Daniel Matt. I’m taking an online course.

Rick: Oh, his brother lives here, in Fairfield. Yeah. David. Yeah.

Dani: Oh, yeah. David’s online sometimes. Daniel first translated it from Aramaic and Hebrew, and that was a 20-year project. Even though it’s very intellectual, there’s a transmission from the text that is very palpable. And because I already have a background in Kabbalah, I’m getting kind of a juice from it that is below the surface. I’m getting a transmission just from studying it.

Rick: Yeah. Plus, everything else you’ve done must make you more open to getting into the heart of things when you put your attention on them.

Dani: Yeah, the concealed within the revealed words.

Rick: Yeah. Nice. Okay.

Kabbalah’s In-the-World Path

Dani: I think I should just say one more thing. The Jewish/Kabbalistic path is an “in-the-world path.” It’s not necessarily a transcendent path, although there are transcendent teachings within Kabbalah. I believe that you can ascend the Tree of Life toward the top, Keter, which is unitive consciousness, of course. But the path emphasizes being in the world and bringing divinity into the world through your life—through the path of doing good deeds in the world, which are called mitzvot; through study; and through helping other people. It’s very much an in-the-world path.

Rick: Yeah, I would sort of distinguish between monastic and householder rather than transcendent versus in-the-world, because a householder person in the world can very much be established in the transcendent and function from that level of awareness. Outer lifestyle is a rather superficial consideration, in a way.

Dani: But there’s still this idea in Judaism of repairing the world through your good deeds. It permeates Judaism that we’re here to really do something in the world. It’s not just your own little world; it’s the world at large.

Rick: That’s good. I mean, we have a whole category of guests on BatGap, on our categorical index page, about spiritual activism. They’re people who feel we should do something with this spiritual awareness that we’re developing, and not just sit in the cave with it, but channel it into a humanitarian, environmental, or some other thing that helps people on a concrete level.

Dani: Right. And like karma yoga, the Jewish path starts there. That’s a given; you start with that.

Rick: Yeah. And, of course, in Sanskrit there’s the word seva, which usually means selfless service, and it’s considered a really potent and important thing in many spiritual paths and by many spiritual teachers.

Dani: Right.

Rick: Good. So, do you see examples of that in people who are in that tradition, the Kabbalistic tradition? Are they engaged in various helping projects and things?

Dani: Well, my own local rabbi is pretty amazing in that category. Rabbi Arthur Gross Schaefer unfortunately lost his son a few years back, who was a twin, through a drunk-driving accident. I think he was always doing that kind of seva in the world, but right now he’s fostering Palestinian-Israeli dialogue in the name of his son, so he’s a really good example.

Rick: Great. Okay. So, is there anything more you’d like to say about Kabbalah?

Dani: Well, I love the teachings. I loved the training. I was doing teaching for Jason for many years, and I thought it would be the rest of my life. I was well on the teacher track. I was being groomed to take on more responsibility. And…

Rick: I can’t—I just want to interject that I think I heard, or read in your book, that Swami Ji of the Patanjali Kundalini Yoga Care mentioned that you had actually been in some kind of Jewish esoteric group way, way back then with the Essenes.

Dani: Yeah, let me get to that in a minute. I was doing quite well. My career track was on track, my practice was good, my teaching was good, everything was great. And I started to not feel well physically. I got a kind of burnout feeling and started to investigate it medically. There was nothing medically wrong with me. At the time, I thought I might have had chronic fatigue or something.

Around this time, Jason had introduced a practice, a kind of moving nondual practice that he calls impersonal movement. Everybody liked the practice except me. I had a hard time doing it. It produced a very “burn-y” feeling in my head, and it was really uncomfortable. I could see the school moving in that direction, and I wasn’t comfortable doing one of these new, major practices that was going to continue in the school.

It started a process of inner questioning: Was something wrong with me, or was something wrong with the practice? My whole life was tied up with the school at that time. I started to pray from the depths of my soul for help because I didn’t really know what to do. Within two weeks of praying, I went to see a lecture. It turned out to be by Swami Ji, on Kundalini. But it was just, “Okay, I’ll go to that lecture,” kind of thing. When I met Swamiji in person, I realized my prayers had been answered.

Vajra Rising and the Kundalini Process

Dani: The answer I was looking for had to do with a difficult Kundalini rising. During the course of this lecture, I met Joan at the same time. Joan Harrigan and Swamiji presented how the Kundalini works in the subtle body; they presented the teachings of their lineage. Sometime during the second day of lectures, Swamiji started to talk about the Vajra rising, which is one of six different ways that Kundalini can progress through the subtle-body system.

I want to emphasize “one of six different ways,” because my book talks about my process, which is only really one type of process. It was a particularly challenging process, and Swamiji, at that time, said it was a left-path rising. He called it the sex rising because the rising starts at the genitals, then descends toward the base of the spine. So, it starts at Swadhisthana, the second chakra, and goes down toward Muladhara, the first chakra, and then it goes straight up. But it doesn’t go through Sushumna, the central channel; it goes through the Vajra Nadi. The Vajra Nadi supercharges the second chakra and brain centers, and he told me…

Rick: It skips all the intermediate chakras, right?

Dani: Yes, and it gives the person good intelligence. You can have a lot of occult and astral experiences; you can have the gift of healing. You won’t have the gift of full enlightenment because it bypasses the chakras and doesn’t go into the Makara point, which I’ll explain in just a minute. It’s in the upper Ajna chakra, about right up here. You need that to be pierced by Kundalini as she progresses upward to the top of the head, and Vajra rising will not give you that. It gives you a lot of drama, lights, and fireworks, but not that.

While Swamiji was talking, I was doing a big inward groan because I kind of recognized myself as the poster child for that rising. I had every symptom he described on the negative side, and I had a lot of the gifts of the rising. The negatives were a propensity toward sexual addiction because of the overcharged second chakra, and neurotransmitter burnout because the prana goes up and down a lot with this rising. It would go up to the brain centers, and then it would descend. Very often, you could have experiences of light, and then they would go away really quickly and you would get depressed. I experienced that a lot in my life.

What else was there? Astral experiences—I was having a lot of those. There was the ease with which I learned healing. I mean, it kind of explained everything: my interest in channeling and esoteric systems. At the end of the two-day weekend, when I went to say goodbye to Swamiji, he just looked at me very seriously. He was very, very serious, but he did laugh at this point. He said, “What rising do you think you have?” And I just said, “The sex rising?” And he said, “Yeah.” He said, “Don’t worry, it’s easy to fix. Come to our retreat.”

Rick: Let me ask you a quick question here. Knowing what you know, when you look at certain famous figures, do you sometimes find yourself categorizing them by this or that rising? For instance, I watched the docudrama about Albert Einstein a couple of years ago. Obviously, he was a very intelligent guy. He also had a tendency to—he had a way with the ladies, so to speak.

Dani: I didn’t know that.

Rick: According to this documentary.

Dani: Well, as Joan said in her interview, it’s not that easy to figure out someone’s rising. However, I would say I have really finely tuned Vajra antennae, and I can tend to spot that rising.

Rick: Yeah.

Dani: Especially in men.

Rick: Probably, yeah. It takes one to know one.

Dani: I probably specialized in dating Vajra men. And it is possible that the Sananda person I mentioned had that rising and abused it, basically.

Rick: Do you think these six risings are more or less equally distributed, or are some of them more uncommon than others?

Dani: There are two that I know are very uncommon, and the others are probably distributed. I’d love to know what the percentages would be. But the other thing I would say is that it’s a good question for Joan. Probably, they have a very select community that came to them. From the people I met, we were all just desperate for some answers. Most of us had been on a spiritual path for many years and didn’t feel fulfilled—really searching and having problems. So, they got that select community. I think if you had a peaceful rising that was progressing really nicely through your spiritual practice, you would not seek out Swamiji and Joan.

Rick: Yeah.

Dani: It’s a select community.

Rick: Okay, so I just want to add that we’ll get into the whole thing with Swamiji and Joan quite a bit. I know that all the friends I know who went there came back with glowing reports. For instance, I spent a few days with Nirmala and Gina, who have both been on BatGap, last October. They both said that now when they meditate, they just go into samadhi—thoughtless, pure awareness—for the whole time, and eventually come out again. But that hadn’t been happening to them before.

Dani: I would say I have that same experience, but I don’t know those two people.

Rick: They went there to Tennessee and all.

Dani: Yeah, but let’s talk about the progression, because I learned so much again about the function of the subtle body, and at least two stages of the process that can be talked about, which are helpful benchmarks for spiritual seekers.

In order to do a retreat, I had to write a report about my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual experiences. That report was reviewed to determine the rising, even though Swamiji did kind of know. There were subtle things they learned about me through the description in the 12-page report that I wrote.

When I arrived for my first two-week retreat, Swamiji told me that I had come into this life with that rising, and it was stuck at the throat. It wasn’t at Muladhara; the rising had already elevated to the throat chakra, but it was stuck.

Rick: Yeah, this brings up an interesting point. Let me just throw it in here, which is that one can have had a Kundalini rising or Kundalini awakening in a previous life, perhaps even quite a few lives back, and it just kind of carries over. You pick up where you left off in your next life, and it can go through a series of progressions or perhaps declines from life to life.

Dani: Right. And also, I should simply define Kundalini as not being energy, but as being the divine force of awakening within every single person. This force exists in every person, despite what upbringing you’ve had or what spiritual path you’ve followed. They don’t talk about it in Advaita Vedanta; they don’t focus on it. So, despite that lack of focus, it still exists.

Kundalini is not energy, but the divine force of awakening within every single person.

If you came into this life with a very elevated rising, you will not have experienced some of the stages of the Kundalini process. So, you might not ever talk about them in your own awakening process. That’s really important, because some teachers have simply never experienced the rising progressing.

Rick: True. And it’s funny how people sometimes tend to just dismiss or utterly reject things they haven’t experienced. It’s also interesting that a person can have a very profound degree of awakening—in my observation, some kind of unity-consciousness state—and yet be kind of muddled in terms of their understanding of things.

I don’t think that awakening necessarily confers a very clear, thorough, nuanced, conscious understanding of the various subtle mechanics of creation or of the body.

Dani: Right, nor of your own personal psychology or early conditioning. And you can still have rather large chunks of process to do after a unitive experience. I know you’ve interviewed people who have actually talked about that, where it comes up later, post-unity experience.

I did want to talk about Makara Point because it’s not something I had ever heard of before I went there. It’s considered the real opening to the spiritual path. It happens in the upper Ajna chakra, when the Kundalini elevates and pierces a hard cap that sits right in the middle.

For the Vajra-rising person, Kundalini actually has to descend first. It’s not just an upward process. She actually has to descend, go all the way back down to the first chakra, at Muladhara, and then enter Sushumna Nadi for the first time, and then ascend.

Rick: I see. So, for the Vajra-rising person, Kundalini has risen, but not through Sushumna, through one of the side nadis. That is called the Vajra Nadi?

Dani: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, good. So, it’s kind of going up the wrong channel, so to speak.

Dani: Right. And the Vajra Nadi is used by all human beings in the process of having an orgasm. Therefore, there’s a relationship to sexual experience, the orgasmic experience, and over-interest in sex. It might have actually been known as a left-handed process in Tantra. I’m not sure about that.

It has to move into the central column for the process to continue. They gave me practices that were very gentle yoga practices to enable that shift to happen. That shift happened on the second day of my retreat. The practices facilitated it, and it was a very palpable shift.

I experienced my consciousness going upward through a kind of dark purple hole in a green field that I could see on my mind screen. It was just an all-of-a-sudden push of consciousness upward, and it was very blissful. That’s what everybody wants to have happen. It was one of those experiences.

Instead of lasting a long time, I was in the second phase within 24 hours. I had moved into the next phase of the process, which is a restoration and renovation of your whole subtle body. Mine had a lot of bells and whistles.

The first morning of practice after that, there was a lot of writhing and movement, which are called kriyas in the Kundalini process, where my whole body went into a spontaneous yoga posture. It felt like I was throwing up dark stuff, dark energy that just got purged out of me.

I had five years of continuous kriyas of different kinds, which came up with practice. At that time, I was just so fascinated by what was happening inside that I committed to doing the practice. This wasn’t magic. You were given a practice and expected to do it. During the retreat, we did the practice, which was over an hour and a half long, four times a day.

As you can imagine, that’s a lot of practice. At home, I would do it once or twice a day, for about an hour and a half. I thought, “Okay, renovation and restoration—this will be over pretty quickly, and I’ll move on to the next phase of enlightenment.” But instead of that happening, it took a long time.

It really took me years and years to get my damaged subtle body in good enough shape to support the progress of Kundalini. Not everybody has such a damaged subtle body. Mine was damaged because of the deflected rising and poor lifestyle choices. I would say it was because of the sexual stuff and simply overusing my prana as an energy healer.

My life had to change, and I had to eat differently. I went into a very quiet, meditative lifestyle of practice for over 12 years.

Rick: Yeah, the Swiss-cheese subtle body—a lot of holes in it.

Dani: Holes in the bucket. And it was kind of surprising to hear that, because I had had lots of healings. It was a little disillusioning to hear that.

Nevertheless, I would say the roughest part of the process was during the first five years. I felt lonely at different times. We weren’t in a community where we were comparing notes. I went on about one retreat a year to get my practices upgraded, and I took 12 years of notes about what was happening in my inner process.

Swamiji always asked for the notes and could determine what our next practice should be to keep the process moving on the basis of our practice notes. That’s a really rare situation for any seeker to have—a master upgrading your practice about once a year.

Rick: It’s great. This whole topic of subtle bodies is interesting, because I think about the people in mental hospitals who are psychotic or something and who are sitting in with psychiatrists on a regular basis. Usually, they’re given some kind of drugs these days, and their whole malady is considered neurophysiological. There’s usually no consideration of any such thing as a subtle body.

Very likely, what’s going on there may involve some neurophysiological factors, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Very, very likely, what’s going on is a subtle-body and whole-Kundalini situation that’s really out of kilter.

If we really want to get to the root of the problem and enable them to restore their health, then that’s somehow going to have to be addressed. Ultimately, there should be therapies available on a widespread basis to offer that kind of thing.

Dani: I wish that were so.

Rick: Maybe someday.

Stability as the Foundation for Kundalini

But unfortunately, it’s not. Both Swamiji and Joan really emphasized the necessity of having a stable mental life, stable physical life, and stable emotional life. Right food and the right way of living are the foundation for the Kundalini process.

Dani: But unfortunately, it’s not. Both Swamiji and Joan really emphasized the necessity of having a stable mental life, stable physical life, and stable emotional life. Right food and the right way of living are the foundation for the Kundalini process.

It’s also possible that mental conditions really need to stabilize before Kundalini is going to stabilize. You would really need both. You’d need a lot of discernment.

Rick: In a couple of weeks, I’ve got to interview Michael Pollan, who wrote a book called How to Change Your Mind, about psychedelics. It’s on the shelf behind me. He’s going to be on with Chris Bosh, who was on the show about five years ago.

On the positive side, there’s really good things happening with psychedelics. There’s research at Johns Hopkins and NYU where alcoholics and people with chronic depression are undergoing huge improvements after one or two sessions—usually high-dose, very carefully supervised sessions.

On the other hand, psychedelics have been notorious for really screwing people up. These days, ayahuasca is all the rage, and a lot of people are going to South America to do that. There have been some train wrecks as a result of it.

What is your sense of psychedelics? Do you think that, if used very responsibly and judiciously and under proper supervision, they could actually have a healing effect on the subtle body? Or do you think that, in a way, we’re borrowing from our bank account by using them at all, and that there’s going to have to be repair work done later on?

Dani: I don’t think there’s any one answer. It’s really individual to the person. I’ve seen the train wrecks in my healing practice, where there’s so much damage to the subtle body and the brain itself. I’ve also heard some amazing stories where people have snapped out of depression and had a vision of God, and their life has been different ever since.

I’ve seen both. It would be great if somebody with subtle sense perception could be on hand, as well as a medical doctor, and you could do it in a way that really monitored the process.

I know Ram Dass said something about being really sorry that LSD went mainstream so quickly, because the research he foresaw happening never really happened.

Rick: Yeah. Michael Pollan talks about that in his book. He blames Timothy Leary to a great extent, because Leary just went nuts with it, and the whole culture went crazy. Nixon claimed they were the most dangerous men in America.

There was some really promising research taking place, and it got clamped down.

Dani: I think it depends on the condition of the subtle body and the person receiving it, their karma, and all that stuff. That’s the same with the Kundalini rising. The six different risings and the person’s condition when they start practices really inform how they’re going to experience the awakening process.

Rick: Yeah.

Dani: It really accounts for all the varieties that we hear about. I had a bliss-filled Makara experience; someone else might not have had any experience and still have gone through Makara Point. It can be extremely subtle, or it can be a very sacred experience, which it was for me.

It felt very, very sacred—like, “Wow, this is real. That just happened.”

Whereas later on, there wasn’t an experience to remark about. That was an experience that was remarkable, I would say.

During the years afterward, I was very interested in Kabbalistic meditations. I had been pursuing them on my own. I was doing meditations with the Hebrew letters and studying the path of letters, which is a path of Kabbalah where you work with Hebrew letters.

Each Hebrew letter has an energy of its own. They can be used in meditations that are pretty esoteric, but they were quite fun for me to explore for some time.

During this time, I started to have more and more no-self experiences in my practice. At the same time, they were paired with subtle-body repair experiences. So, I had lower-chakra repair going on, and I was having what you would call upper-chakra, no-self experiences. I was starting to have a lot of oneness experiences.

That period went on for probably another four or five years or so. I seem to have passed through the next benchmark, which is Bindu at the top of the head, without one particular notable experience. It was just a kind of gliding into more and more of no-self.

No self, no experience. Sometimes I would do my practice and just stop in the middle because, like you said, I went into samadhi without any effort.

Rick: Yeah. In the notes that you sent me, you have a line that says, “A few universal spiritual milestones that are not imagination, tangible, and real,” which you experienced over 12 years of practice. Have you already mentioned those milestones? That would be Makara?

Dani: That would be Makara Point and Bindu at the top of the head—entry into abiding in unity consciousness.

Rick: And these are universal because ultimately everybody has to go through these, even if they don’t understand them.

Dani: Or don’t remember them.

Rick: Don’t remember them.

Dani: Yeah.

Rick: Which brings up an interesting point. Well, a couple of questions here: “Can you have a kundalini awakening without even knowing it? And can it be so smooth that there’s really no fireworks and nothing flashy going on?” And years later, maybe somehow, some authoritative person confirms that you’ve had it?

Dani: I would think yes. But there is a shift in consciousness. There is definitely a shift in consciousness. I remember in Santa Barbara, I was casually talking to this woman who, I guess, experienced Makara point at some point in her very early life. She noted it as remarkable, but never told anybody. I mean, she told me about it because we were talking about awakening. She went on to have a family; she never became overtly spiritual and was never on a path. She just let it unfold in her life. She’s a really beautiful woman, and I’m sure there are people like that out there.

Rick: Do you think that people who have a lot of fireworks going on and who have difficulties experience that mainly because there is damage in the subtle body, or there are blocks in the nadis or something? And that if the subtle body is in pretty good shape, and there aren’t such blocks, then you won’t have as much flashy stuff?

Dani: Yes, and it depends on whether you also have two of the deflected risings. There are two deflected risings, and they tend to be the risings that produce the fireworks.

I was never a candidate for Vipassana, which I did do. I went on a 10-day Vipassana retreat, but I had a proclivity for the fireworks, so I almost needed to have the teachers I did to come out of that. It was almost a disappointment for me to go into no-self, no fireworks. What, this is spiritual? I had to get over the esoteric stuff and the phenomenal stuff, and really practice resting in that unitive no-self state, which I really like a lot right now. But it took some time to get over a little bit of a disappointment. No fireworks.

Rick: Yeah. I have a friend who’s probably watching this, who went through a very intense kundalini awakening phase—really intense. She feels that some neurons were fried in the process. And in a certain sense, she may never be the same, even though she now feels like she’s very solidly and abidingly awakened, and has been for years. But she feels like some damage was done. Does that ring true to you as a possibility?

Dani: Maybe. What I would say is that Kundalini requires brain support. One thing I didn’t mention is that we were given Ayurvedic oils and Ayurvedic herbs. Sometimes we were given food remedies, and our diets changed. I had a lot, a lot of support on the physical level for the Kundalini process.

During the retreats, we put oils on morning and evening to take out the toxins from the subtle body—actually, physical oils, head to toe.

Rick: Abhyanga.

Dani: Uh-huh. I had Shirodhara a number of times. I was on Ayurvedic supplements for a good, I don’t know, five, six, seven years.

Rick: Yeah, Shirodhara. Just so people know, it’s a cool thing where you lie down and they pour oil on your forehead. God, it’s incredibly relaxing.

Dani: It’s really wonderful.

Rick: In fact, there was some reporter who came to the university here to do a story on Shirodhara, and they had to do Shirodhara. He kind of experienced transcendence just as a result of the Shirodhara—no meditation or anything.

Dani: It’s pretty blissful. But to go back to your friend, because of the intensity of your friend’s process, your friend might need brain support through supplements of some kind. My experience is that the brain is actually repaired after Makara point. Kundalini is actually directing everything from the brain center and systematically repairing the chakra system after Makara.

Rick: So, to extract the question from that, could you say that you couldn’t go much beyond Makara unless the repair took place—that repair needs to take place for the progression to continue?

Dani: That could be true. Some people go right up to Bindu at the top of the head, and the repair happens afterward. That’s really tough. I don’t know if that happened to your friend. But that’s like getting a huge dump of garbage into your subtle body that you have to process out. It needs support.

I mean, that’s the benefit of having a teacher. It really needs support, as it can be very frightening for people. A lot of times, past lives come up, and they feel vibrationally real in your subtle body. It feels like you’re living through it. I had that experience—it feels real, but isn’t. As the emotions and the trauma of that particular past life are healing, you’re kind of reliving it in the moment.

Rick: I know people down here who’ve been meditating for 30, 40, 50 years, whom I regard as really eccentric. I mean, they’re really kind of out of it in many ways, even in terms of practical stuff, like earning a living or anything. They can be off on very obsessive tangents, or you run into them in the grocery store and they run up to you and start going on about conspiracy theories or something.

I’m just wondering whether such people might have been the victims of a deflected rising without knowing it? And, obviously, it would be really beneficial if they could get the right kind of help.

Dani: Yeah, I don’t know. It’s possible, again.

Rick: I am asking a hypothetical question.

Dani: Yeah, hypothetical questions that really would have to be evaluated on a one-on-one basis. There’s all sorts of weird stuff out there. Do they have an attachment? Do they have mental illness? How do you discern the difference? Sometimes attachments come with mental illness.

Rick: What do you mean by attachments?

Dani: You could have negative astral attachments and other entities.

Rick: Entities?

Dani: You know, all that stuff. But once the Kundalini is above Makara point, there is a systemic renovation of your whole system. And you can encounter that for a very short period of time or a very long period of time, depending on the health of your subtle body, your persistence in practice, and grace, I would say.

Rick: Yeah, a question came in from Bartholomew in Melbourne, Australia, who asks, “How long does it take to have a kundalini awakening? What practices can you do to encourage it?” And I would add, do you actually want to encourage it?

Dani: Well, I think it’s over lifetimes. As you said earlier, it could have started in one lifetime, where there’s some arousal of Kundalini. And again, Joan talks about the stages of arousal through awakening, the stages of process in both her book and your interview. But it happens over lifetimes.

And there are some yogas, Kundalini Yoga, where you’re trying to stimulate a rising. I don’t do that. I don’t think it’s a great idea. Better to pray for spiritual help and let Grace do the job, you know?

Rick: Yeah. I know people who did stuff like really intense pranayama for an hour and things like that on a regular basis, and ended up getting into trouble.

Dani: Yeah.

Rick: Because they were forcing something rather than allowing it to come naturally when it was ready to happen.

Dani: Right, and for deflected-rising people, that kind of pranayama is really detrimental. So I wouldn’t recommend it at all. I just want to see something. Okay.

Rick: Yeah. Here’s another good question that just came in from Herman Sohiere from Whammertinge, Belgium. He asks, “The reason they don’t talk about Kundalini in Advaita Vedanta is because it’s an experience, and experiences happen in time with a beginning, middle, and end. Do you have any thoughts on this?”

Dani: Yeah, it’s what we were talking about earlier. What do you do if you’re in the middle of a raging kundalini awakening or opening, and you’re not supposed to talk about it? It’s not useful.

So Advaita practices are useful post-Makara point, post-Bindu. They’re really effective inquiry practices, great for that level of awakening. And for other people, they’re somewhat helpful. For me, they would not have been helpful. I needed exactly what I received. Excuse me.

Rick: Yeah, while you’re getting some water, I’ll mention that—I’ve said this before, but Advaita, which means “not two,” is part of Vedanta, which means the end of the Veda. “Anta” means end. It’s sort of the culmination of everything the Veda has to offer, and there are all sorts of different steps leading up to Vedanta that would not seem very Vedantic, such as yoga and Ayurveda, and many, many other things. But they’re preparatory.

In our culture, we want it now, but it’s not necessarily going to be relevant for us to jump to the final teaching without having gone through some preparatory stages—not relevant for most people, anyway.

Dani: Right. Right. And there’s nothing wrong with the inquiry process. It’s wonderful. But just don’t avoid the rest of the process.

Rick: Yeah. And I think really good Vedanta teachers like Ramana didn’t dismiss the kinds of things we’re talking about today. He kind of met people, a little like we were talking earlier—he met people at their level. And chances are, whatever they were doing, he encouraged that because it was relevant for them. It might not be relevant for them 10 years later, but it was relevant for them at that time. He didn’t say, “No, no, no, you should just be doing self-inquiry and nothing else.”

Dani: I know for sure he didn’t say that, because there are some quotes that I’ve read where he directed people toward a different type of practice.

Rick: Yeah. David Godman and I talked about that in a couple of different interviews.

Dani: Right, right.

Rick: Okay.

Dani: Maybe I should just talk a little bit about my own completion and what’s been going on now, in terms of the current process.

✨ Loss, grace, and abiding awareness

I went through a period of two or three years after a near-death experience, when I was taught by loss and grief. I lost five or six people in my life within two or three years who were very dear to me. My parents died three days apart in 2013. I lost a best friend, a teacher, a rabbi friend, and my cat. I call them the death years because I was really being taught by grief and loss.

At the end of this period, I was pretty worn out. I went to Swami and Joan’s place in Knoxville for what would have been my eighth retreat. I just really went for repair and downtime because I was exhausted.

During that retreat, after doing practices again four times a day, and with good food and good rest, I went outside to sit one morning at around 7:00 a.m., and I was drinking a cup of tea. I happened to look down, and I was watching a little ant that was walking around on the sidewalk with a very big parcel of something in its mouth. The parcel was five times the size of its body.

And just as I was watching it, my mind went completely vast and clear. If I had to describe it, it was something that went: no thoughts, no self, no person, no thinking. It happened from the inside out. It wasn’t that I thought about it. Something opened, I guess, into vastness. And that didn’t go away.

It was time to do my morning practice, and I was able to get up, go inside, and do my morning practice.

Dani: Part of my practice was a contemplation of the words “everything and nothing, and nothing and everything.” They come from Hebrew; the English phrase comes from Hebrew, and there’s a Hebrew relationship to those words.

The Disappearance of Personal Reality

As I did my practice, that sense of vastness kept expanding. Any sense of personal reality actually did disappear for some time. I don’t know how much time, but it was definitely absent. I only know that because it came back.

At a certain point, the sense of personal me did come back. But it became one with That, whatever That was, which I call That because there’s just no way to talk about it. It was rather stunning. It was like, “Oh, that’s That.” That is the subject-substrate of reality. That is what the nondual path talks about.

It is an experience of all, but you can’t really talk about it. It just is. It’s That itself; it’s is-ness itself. Everybody tries to talk about it—I’m trying—but really, there are no words for That.

It was like, “Oh, that’s That.”

It became a kind of base camp, you could say, or something always present. It’s sometimes in the background, and then unexpectedly comes very much into the foreground. I’ve had a number of times, consistently through the most recent years, when it takes over the foreground to the point that the world disappears. I disappear—literally, no world, no me. But then the personality is still there and comes back.

Rick: Can you function during those times when it’s taken over completely?

Dani: Ah, not exactly. Not so much.

It was really amusing. I do weddings; I officiate weddings. Most recently, I was literally mouthing the words of the ceremony, and that background came forward. I literally dug my heels into the earth because the little “I,” Dani, was still doing the wedding. But whatever That was, was overtaking it. It’s not the best timing.

I suppose to trust it completely would be to trust that the wedding would have continued and I would have disappeared simultaneously. But I found I really needed to ground down into my body and into the earth. It’s not separate from the body. I’m aware of the body, but it does overtake perceptual cognition of the world at times.

Rick: Do you know the term Lesha Avidya?

Dani: No.

Rick: It means—Vidya means knowledge, Avidya means ignorance. Lesha means faint remains. It’s a thing from Vedanta, which means faint remains of ignorance, and it’s considered to be essential if this is going to be a living reality, if you’re not just going to have to be spoon-fed for the rest of your life. You have to have it in order to function in the world. There has to be some appreciation of duality and a sense of self and all that.

Dani: Yeah. And, you know, I still drive a car, which has been to my detriment sometimes. I’ve had some fender benders. I exercise. I want to—I’m in the body. For right now, I exercise, and I live a very human life.

I don’t know if I’m down to traces of personality. I still have a personality. But what I would say is that whatever That is permeates this consistently. I still do spiritual practice. I love spiritual practice.

It is a constant running and returning. I was going to say that in Kabbalah, in Hebrew, there is this phrase, Ratzov V’Shov, which means running and returning. That’s considered what we do as humans: We run and return to this place, but it’s not exactly a place. It’s not exactly anything you could describe. But there is a sort of running and returning. You could understand why someone would say that.

Rick: Yeah, it sounds good. There’s a term called Neti Neti, which means “not this, not that.” There’s this thing called the cognitions of Bhrigu, in which you retire from this, and then you retire from that, and then you retire from this and retire from that. There’s this sort of cyclical thing, which results in not only integration, but I also think ascending stages still, even if a profound awakening has taken place. There’s continued room for refinement.

Dani: Right. The last time I saw Swami-ji, which was in 2014, he was talking about superior and inferior Nirvikalpa Samadhi. Inferior is when you have it when you’re inside, and superior is when you can be external and still be in Samadhi and function.

The Jivanmukta, the one who’s in the world and liberated—that process is still going on. I’m quite sure it’s still going on. But it’s very, very, very subtle.

I think it was Miranda McPherson, in one of your interviews, who kept saying, “Relax. You just relax into That.” I really resonated with that. It’s a relaxation, and also, questing just stopped. I mean, how do you quest for That? I am not questing for anything any longer. But I still do practice; that’s a relaxation into That.

Rick: Yeah. There are certain teachers who say things like, “Give up the search” and “Drop this.” They feel that if you’re doing some kind of practice, you must still be a seeker, still searching. We can relate very much to that searcher-seeker energy. I think we were both obsessed with that at a certain time.

Dani: Yeah.

Rick: But just the fact that practice is still taking place doesn’t necessarily mean that that energy is still running the show.

Dani: No, grace runs the show. It’s definitely surrender to That.

At this point, for me, it’s really appropriate not to quest. But if I hadn’t started a quest, I would never have arrived at this point. The quest may be illusory, but it sort of starts things. It starts the questions that lead to a path, and eventually the path disappears, too.

Rick: Yeah. Take an analogy: If you’re feeling miserable, then naturally that can be a sort of desperate feeling, and you really want to get out of your misery. If you start feeling pretty good, content, and happy, then that desperation no longer fits.

If you’re homeless and on the street, you really want some money. After a while, if you’re Jeff Bezos, you don’t have to worry about money, but you’re still making it.

Dani: The Kabbalists say that the illusion of brokenness is created so that you can have the journey of repair. Yeah, it may all be illusion, but still, in this game, there’s that journey.

Rick: Yeah. A couple of questions came in from Kranthi in Freehold, New Jersey. My sister used to live in Freehold—she—yes, I remember, it was Marlboro. Anyway, she asked, “What finally helped you get out of the chronic fatigue? Any tips for beginners?”

Dani: The Kundalini process. The repair process. The fatigue was mainly caused by the holes in the bucket. My prana system was really not strong.

Rick: Yes, you were leaking energy.

Dani: Yeah. I had previously done a lot of herbs and things, and they weren’t helping. I thought, well, the problem must be at some other level.

Rick: We’ve been talking a lot about Joan Harrigan’s place in Tennessee and all, but that’s not really available right now. Joan is sort of on leave of absence from that. We’ve probably gotten people excited about that. But what would you recommend for people who want to get the kind of guidance you got?

Dani: To really dig deeply into the longing for God—basically, whatever you call God: Reality itself, divine knowledge, divine consciousness. Really pray from the depths of your heart for the exact right path, the exact right person to show up on your journey, because those prayers are really heard.

You may have to knock three times before they’re answered, as they say. But in my experience, I’ve been helped at every single stage of the process. I think what most people have gotten from my story is that my longings were answered, that I’ve had a lot of persistence, and that I was on a quest for some years.

The quest was consistent until questing stopped. So don’t stop until you feel like you are fulfilled in your journey.

PKYC is now under the care of a new lineage holder, Silvia Eberl. She lives in Austria and can be reached at bharatpkyc@yahoo.com or www.kundalini-science.ch.

Rick: Yeah. As Jesus said, “Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened.” I see that over and over again, like you did a prayer at one point, and then within two weeks, you met Swami-ji. I see that a lot. Nature is very responsive if we have this sincere intent or desire.

Dani: Yeah, and I would watch for the synchronicities in your life that put a book or a teaching right in front of you, because there are right teachings for right times, like we’ve been discussing, and they do tend to show up.

Also, don’t be afraid to leave a teacher if you have finished with that path. There’s nothing wrong with turning toward something else.

Rick: Yeah. Or if you sense that there’s something really wrong with the teacher—especially then. Don’t say to yourself, “Well, who am I to judge? This guy seemed enlightened, and I’m a schmuck, so I should just stick around even though all these terrible things are happening.”

Dani: Right. That’s how some teachers tell you it’s only your transference. They have no part in it; they’re doing this, they’re abusing you, to help you learn about your transference. That’s not true. I have heard that.

Rick: Me too. And the second question from Kranthi is, “From your experience healing several conditions, do you see that particular ailments, such as cancer, are associated with particular patterns in the energy body?”

Dani: Cancer is a really interesting one. I went to a talk here in Santa Barbara about the genetics of it, and the person said that the genome is actually different in each person with the same type of cancer.

In working with clients, cancer patients, I have also found that the circumstances are different. There has been one common denominator that I’ve noticed, and it has to do with overgiving to everyone else and not taking care of the self—a pattern around nurturing versus receiving nurturance, especially with breast cancer, more than, for instance, male prostate cancer.

There are so many lessons when you go through cancer treatment, from just trying to stay calm and centered in the midst of devastating physical treatments to receiving love.

Rick: The thing you said about the genome was interesting. There’s some promising new research about various specifically targeted therapies based upon the individual’s particular genome and genetics, which is tailor-made for them in particular. It’s in research, showing some really promising results without all the devastating side effects.

Dani: Yeah, and energy healing helps a lot with the side effects from treatment. I know that for sure. I’ve seen that it helps you get through treatments.

Rick: One thing you said in your notes is that perhaps somewhere in the interview, could we talk a little bit about your NDE—your near-death experience?

Dani: I had a near-death experience in 2004, through a car accident. It was at a time when I was going through a really big transition from being at the healing school to—I didn’t know what was next. I really didn’t know what was next.

I was driving on a road in Princeton, New Jersey, going to a group, and the car hit black ice. It flew through the air. Apparently, it spun sideways twice in the air. It went over a fire hydrant, flew between two telephone poles, and landed 100 feet off the road. The airbags did not go off.

Rick: It landed in a field.

Dani: Yeah, and I only know this because somebody called the police and the ambulance, and saw it. The last thing I remember was my hands gripping the steering wheel. The next thing I remember being conscious of was consciousness itself. I was conscious. I was not aware of a body. I was not aware of Dani. I was not aware of personality. I was simply consciousness. I was very peaceful. I was relaxed.

At some point, it was as if consciousness looked down, because obviously I was not in my body, and literally saw the body of Dani in the car. The body was talking to a man in the car, who was not in the car when I started, and was laughing. God knows why I was laughing. In that split second, consciousness really joined the body. I looked at the man in the car and said, “Who are you? What are you doing…?” I stopped and said, “Just what are you doing in my car? Who are you?”

He said, “You’ve been in an accident.” I said, “What do you mean?”—still not really comprehending anything. He said, “Look at your car.” I looked at the car and there was shattered glass. The driver’s side was pushed in towards my body. I wiggled my fingers and toes and figured out that they were functioning. He said, “Well, the ambulance is on the way, and don’t move.”

I went into utter panic at that point, but there was no panic in that other state. In the book, I called it the “peace that passeth understanding.” It was really peaceful and beautiful. In hindsight, it wasn’t that different from the “That” I described a few minutes earlier. They were remarkably similar in hindsight, but one was caused by trauma and being out of the body, essentially, and the other happened through years of spiritual opening and practice.

There was no panic in that other state. It was really peaceful and beautiful.

What was really remarkable was that, at the time, I didn’t know it was a near-death experience. I didn’t see the tunnel. I didn’t speak to God. But when I came to Santa Barbara, I got curious about it. I went to a lecture here. We have IANDS here, the International Association of Near-Death Studies. I’m now on the board of IANDS. I love the group.

Rick: Yeah. You have Bill McDonald recently? Bill McDonald?

Somebody told me that.

Dani: Yeah, he’s a fireman?

Rick: No, no, he’s had all kinds of Vietnam experiences. Somebody just told me that anyway. I’m getting you off track.

Dani: Once I heard about what near-death was, I realized that even though I didn’t see the tunnel, it was such a life-changing experience, because I really got to see that consciousness is not anchored. We’re in the body as consciousness, but we’re not the body.

I became really fearless for quite some time about recreating my life. I was able to move to California and just have adventures in life that I would have been panicky about before. I had a remarkable lessening of anxiety. It was very freeing on some level. It took me a long time to get connected fully back into my body, though.

Rick: Yeah, all the NDE people I’ve interviewed have been changed in a permanent way. It’s such a powerful glimpse that they can never forget it.

Dani: Right. It did make me want to study trauma, which led to becoming a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. I think it was maybe four or five years after the accident, during my own sessions in training, that I got to process the accident.

It was really interesting to see how much was still in my body—in the nervous system, in the large muscles of my legs, where there was a lot of bracing, and in the arms that had braced on the wheel. Now I work with Somatic Experiencing, and I help people process trauma from the body upwards, from the body out.

Lineage, samskaras, and continued growth

Rick: Okay. So, among other things, you are a minister of some sort, and you are going to officiate at a wedding this afternoon, so you have to get going pretty soon. We’re going to have to wrap it up. How much time do you have left?

Dani: Oh, a few minutes. We have a few minutes.

Rick: Okay. Let me know when you absolutely have to leave, because there are a few quotes from your book that I wanted to have you comment on that I thought were pretty cool. Obviously, there are many things in there. These are some things that I just copied and pasted when I read them, and they’re not necessarily related to what we were just saying.

For one thing, Swamiji, whose name—wait a minute, some of the questions came in. Okay, it’s not a question. Swamiji, whose actual full name is Swami Chandrasekharanand Saraswati, said to you that lives with similar themes are stacked in nested layers within the subtle body, like an onion. When you’re ready to address their themes, they present themselves for healing. I thought that was interesting. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Dani: Actually, that wasn’t Swamiji. I learned that from Barbara Brennan.

Rick: Cool.

Dani: When energy runs through the subtle body, it’s likely to hit things that are stored in the subtle body, and past lives are stored in the subtle body. They look like little points until they open up, and they can open up sequentially or not.

When they open up vibrationally, you can actually see the past life. I had one where I actually felt like I was in the life, experiencing it again. You are in it to heal it, so you can see what’s not complete. You can see what the trauma of that life was and, in current time, have enough wisdom to learn the lesson and complete it.

In a way, it happens in current time. It’s really hard to explain. It’s all time at once.

Rick: Here’s another one. You were told you’d been accepted back by the adepts of your lineage. You went on to explain: “Each spiritual path has spiritual adepts who oversee their lineage. And when our longing for God gets strong enough, they guide us step by step on our path, through the channels of spirituality that are most familiar to our souls, toward liberation. Even the most circuitous paths lead home.” Want to comment on that one?

Dani: Well, I had a kind of homecoming experience where I would say there were Jewish-oriented lineage adepts present in my awareness.

Rick: Like Ascended Masters or something?

Dani: Yeah, and I was asked if I wanted to return to my lineage. It was very, very emotional to me, because I feel like my whole life has been partly about healing my relationship to the Jewish lineage, due to a particularly tragic past life, you could say. I feel like it’s really been healed.

In that vision, I said, “Yes.” In subsequent years, the rabbi I mentioned here in Santa Barbara, Rabbi Arthur, and I chose to do a Bat Mitzvah with four other middle-aged adult women, just a few years back, as a kind of bow to the lineage.

Rick: Yeah. The tragic circumstance you mentioned—you said that you had a rather catastrophic fall in an ancient past life, which is interesting, because people don’t often consider that one can have a fall from a high state. But the Vedic scriptures, at least, are full of stories like that, where some great Mahatma still has some ego there, it trips him up, and he has a big fall. Then he eventually works himself back up again and so on.

Dani: It was one of the first things that Swamiji told me, and it somehow rang true on a soul level. I don’t know that I was any big Mahatma or anything like that, but there was definitely a fall of some sort.

Rick: Interesting. This next quote from Swamiji relates to that. He said, “You are the one responsible for erasing the samskaras and vasanas. No one can do that for you. You have to do it yourself. Even swamis can fall into the valley of distraction. Even if you have the highest experience, the atom bomb of samskaras and vasanas can still get you.”

Dani: I can hear his voice saying that. He gave me that warning the last time I saw him. He was really adamant about that. He also said, “You came to me saying, ‘I keep making the same mistakes.’ Don’t make those mistakes again. Be vigilant and do your practice.”

He said that, with regard to this last phase of practice that a number of us are in, “You can go around the wheel like a hamster and just stay there. It’s fine. Or you can still yearn for liberation.”

I know that there are some people who don’t believe that liberation is possible, but I do believe it’s possible. It might not happen this life; it might happen at the time of death. I don’t know. That’s something led by Grace itself. But I do believe it’s possible, sooner or later.

Rick: There’s a line in the puja that TM teachers do when they initiate somebody, which reads, “At his door the whole galaxy of Gods pray for perfection day and night.”

Dani: That’s beautiful.

Rick: Which is to say that even if you’ve achieved the status of a god, there is yet the possibility for perfection—further perfection. So how can people connect with you? You have a number of talents. What do you offer people these days?

Dani: I’m in private practice. I work with people one-on-one on Zoom, by phone, or in person.

www.daninantman.com
dantman170@aol.com

Rick: And what do you do with them?

Dani: In recent years, I’ve done some work with people who are on a journey of awakening. I act as a guide. I work with people with trauma and PTSD. I work with people in life transitions. I work with people with cancer and various physical problems.

Lately, against all odds, because I don’t really have a lot of musical talent, I’ve been leading a chanting group in Hebrew. I completed some studies with Rabbi Shefa Gold, and I have a local group where we chant once a month. That feels like my service to people. It is very gratifying for me, and hopefully for others.

I have one spiritual support group that we do by phone, and I would be happy to start another if people were interested. That group has been running for over 20 years. It’s very small. I would like to start another one, and I would keep it pretty small. I like small groups.

Rick: You might consider making it on Zoom now instead of by phone, since you can see the people.

Dani: Yeah, Zoom would be great. I like to give individual attention. I’ve done some teaching—I have a Jewish workshop, and I’ve been going around and teaching—but I like small groups versus large, impersonal groups.

Closing reflections

Rick: Good. All righty. Well, I think we’ve covered a lot, haven’t we?

Dani: We have. I just want to thank you, Rick, for doing what you do. It’s really important. This just wasn’t available when I was growing up. It’s amazing that people can get a smorgasbord of all these different paths and experiences, and experience it from the comfort of their own sofa.

If I were awakening now, I would watch a lot of videos, see who I resonated with, and then decide.

Rick: Sometimes I think that the advent of technologies that can make spiritual teachings available and disseminate them globally is part of God’s plan, so to speak, for the enlightenment of the world.

In the old days, a teacher like Jesus could only cover a certain small radius that he could walk around. Shankara walked around the whole country of India, but still, it was very limited, with no way of recording it for posterity or anything.

These days, we have all these marvelous technologies that can record things verbatim and disseminate them instantly throughout the world. We’ve had questions from all over the world today. I think it’s a powerful thing for the potential and hopeful awakening of the world. It couldn’t happen without it.

Dani: Yeah, it’s amazing. And it’s also amazing that the words of Jesus, or at least some of them, still survive.

Rick: Yeah. Nothing was written down for every hundred years.

Dani: You can know what the real teachings are. You can still find the truth.

Rick: Good.

Dani: Thank you so much for having me.

Rick: All right. Thanks, Dani. So, we’ll be in touch.

And for those who’ve been listening or watching, thanks for doing so. Next week, there’s this beautiful series of movies. One of them is called Samadhi, and the other is called something else. I think I have it on the shelf back here, but I can’t quite see it. In any case, the guy who made those movies is going to be on next week. I think his name is Daniel Schmidt or something.

Then, the following week, I mentioned Michael Pollan and Christopher Bache talking about psychedelics. So, stay tuned for these things.

There’s an Upcoming Interviews page on BatGap.com, where you can see what’s on tap. Also, if you’d like to be notified when new interviews are posted, you can sign up on the site to be notified by email.

There’s also an audio podcast for those who like to listen to audio while they drive or whatever, and a number of other things. If you explore around the site a little bit, you’ll find them.

So, thanks a lot, and thanks again, Dani.

Dani: Thank you.

Rick: Wonderful getting to know you.

Dani: See you soon.

Rick: We’ll be in touch. Okay, bye-bye.