Ellen Emmet Transcript - Buddha at the Gas Pump

Summary

The discussion explores awakening as a clear recognition of awareness followed by an ongoing process of embodying and stabilizing that understanding. It also examines the body's role in realization and the need to balance nondual insight with devotion, emotional healing, and personal life.

Questions This Interview Explores

What does it mean to awaken to your true nature?
Is spiritual awakening a final event or an ongoing process?
How can the body be integrated into spiritual awakening?
How can nondual realization include devotion and psychological healing?

Key takeaways

Awakening is a direct recognition of awareness as unlimited and ever-present.
The initial awakening can be clear, while embodying it unfolds throughout life.
The body often retains conditioning that must be explored and relaxed after awakening.
Clear reasoning and direct experience can support and confirm each other.
Nondual understanding need not exclude devotion, love, beauty, or personal healing.
Spiritual teaching should begin with awareness while allowing life’s relative dimensions to unfold.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. This show is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awake—or I prefer the word awakening—people. There are over 280 of them now, so if you’d like to check out the archives and perhaps support our efforts through a donation, go to batgap.com and explore.

These interviews are also being live-streamed these days, so most people watching this won’t be watching it live, but if you’d like to watch future ones live and perhaps submit questions, go to the Upcoming Interviews page on batgap.com and you’ll see instructions on how to do that.

My guest today is Ellen Emmett, and I’m just going to read a bio that Ellen sent in, because it’s a nice synopsis. It’ll very concisely give you an overview of what Ellen is about.

“Ellen’s deepest longing for the absolute was fulfilled when she met her teacher, Francis Lucille,” whom I’ve interviewed on this show. “In his presence over many years, she awakened to her true nature of peace and happiness through continuous and deepening glimpses. The process of aligning and stabilizing her life to and in this beautiful non-dual understanding has never ceased to unfold since then.

“As a child, Ellen was in love with movement and dance. She”—my sister, by the way, has been dancing all her life, and she has all kinds of certification and training in yoga and dance, which you probably find interesting. Yeah, sorry for the interruption. “She knew without words the joy and limitless transparency that the body dissolved into when it was free and alive.

“As an adolescent and young adult, she acutely felt and enacted suffering through her body, struggling with an eating disorder and with depression. Thus, the experience that we call the body has always been central to all of Ellen’s experiences, both in the ignoring and in the recognition of her true nature.

“Today, Ellen lives in Oxford, England, with her husband, Rupert Spira,” whom I’ve also interviewed twice on this show, “a teacher in the tradition of non-duality. She has a private practice as a psychotherapist and facilitator of authentic movement.” We’ll be talking about authentic movement.

“Her background of dance movement therapy and transpersonal psychology has been deeply influenced by the non-dual understanding. Ellen also offers meetings called ‘The Awakening Body,’ an exploration of the body and perception sourced in the teaching tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, Jean Klein, and Francis Lucille. During these sessions, our true nature is explored at the level of the body and of sense perception.

“Ellen has master’s degrees in dance movement therapy from NYU and transpersonal psychology from JFK University. She has a certificate in Laban movement analysis, and her other teachers and mentors were Janet Adler and Marion Woodman, who provided great guidance and support in the realms of feminine wisdom, archetypical energies, and intuitive knowing.”

That’s a good overview. So, as usual, Ellen, in preparation for this I read as much as I had time to. I was reading a long scholarly article on your website, which I was finding interesting, and I also listened to as many audio recordings as I could find. I was just listening to the one you did with Marlies Cocheret on Conscious TV, and right in the beginning of your introduction you talk about “she awakened to her true nature of peace and happiness.” Probably everybody listening to this show has a sense of what that means, but just so that we’re all on the same page, why don’t you describe what you mean by true nature and the experience of awakening to it?

Ellen: Okay. What I mean by true nature is awareness, what we call consciousness, and the awakening was a moment, but the result of a long kind of journey. The moment of recognition, the moment of awakening, was when I heard Francis Lucille on a tape, and he said the words “consciousness knowing itself.” At that moment there was a kind of a yes within me, just a recognition, a resonance.

Of course, it wasn’t clear at that moment what that resonance was about, so then there were many visits and lots of time spent with Francis, where all the vocabulary—which, of course, I’d been exposed to through readings and meetings, etc.—the kind of formulations of what true nature means, became clear at the level of the mind.

What is meant by that, and what I understand by that, by true nature, is the knowing of my being. Not my being Ellen, woman, individual, but my being that right this moment, the very ordinary I that is hearing these words, that is feeling sensations. And if I begin to investigate what that I is, I can come to the knowing, the direct knowing, that it’s not limited to a body and a mind. And, of course, I could go on. I could speak for hours about that.

Rick: Oh, well, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

Ellen: But the knowing of my true nature is the recognition of the unlimited nature of I, and the ever-present nature of I. And, of course, that comes at the beginning as a glimpse or a moment of recognition, and then I guess the journey is the establishment in that.

Rick: Yeah, progressive. As you may recall, the last words I spoke to you and Rupert in California were, “Rupert, the direct path is progressive.”

Ellen: That’s right. It’s direct and it’s progressive both at the same time. It’s not a paradox; it’s just both at the same time—progressive in the sense of the establishment process and that beautiful unfolding, a real unfolding, and direct because right here, right now, we can abide as awareness.

Rick: Yeah, and I like the way you phrase this here, “continuous and deepening glimpses,” and then you said the process of aligning and stabilizing your life to and in this beautiful non-dual understanding has never ceased to unfold since then.

I was just watching this talk that Adyashanti and Francis Bennett gave last week out in California, and they were talking about people who run around saying, “I’m done,” you know. Francis said, “What do you mean you’re done? Did somebody stick a fork in you?” They were sort of playing with the absurdity of saying that one is done with a capital D, when the actual experience of life seems to be a never-ending unfolding.

“The direct path is progressive.”

Ellen: Yes, I think you could always perfect the alignment process, and I guess some people are more or less done, you know. But then it’s a celebratory process, and I don’t think it ever ends, to be honest.

Rick: I don’t either, and I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone who is done, although I’ve met some people who say they are. But I can’t believe that there isn’t still some alignment and refinement and attunement and whatnot that could still be undergone.

Ellen: Yes, I think that’s right. I think that’s the beauty of it, in a way. After awakening, the beauty of it is this unending process of this understanding permeating all areas of life, and that’s quite a vast project. All of a sudden, all the doors open, and all these areas of exploration—the understanding—can percolate throughout so many levels. There’s not enough of a lifetime, really.

Rick: In that thing that I was reading that you wrote, you quoted Rumi as saying, “The physical form is of great importance. Nothing can be done without the association of the form and the essence. The body is fundamental and necessary for the realization of the divine intention.”

I wanted to read that just now because it relates very much to what we’re saying. If we think of the body as an instrument, then I suppose in an orchestra, to use that metaphor, at a certain point your violin is tuned up and you can start playing. But in life, I feel that the physical body through which we realize the divine intention, as Rumi put it, can be tuned up ad infinitum. There’s no end to the attunement.

Ellen: Absolutely. And first of all, the body, I think, needs to be liberated. Even after the awakening, more often than not, the body is still kind of felt and experienced in accordance with the old belief of being a separate consciousness, because it’s very anchored as a conditioning, obviously.

So, in order for that to begin to relax and the body to actually begin to be felt and experienced in accordance with this new understanding, it takes some real exploration, which actually is not always undertaken. So I think that’s the area of the teaching that particularly resonates or is particularly interesting to me in terms of what I like to share. But yes, I think with the body it’s a long-term project.

Rick: Lifetime, as you said.

Ellen: Lifetime, yeah, and beautiful, really a beautiful one.

Rick: So, let’s keep playing with this idea of awakening to true nature and being done and realizing and all that, because I think that a lot of people listen to these kinds of words and they have a sense that there’s some kind of finality to awakening or some sort of watershed moment that one crosses.

Again, there are people running around saying they’re done, but that’s not going to jibe with most people’s direct experience. Most people are going to feel that they’ve had awakenings and then there’s another one, and there still seems to be this attunement and growth taking place.

So it can actually inculcate a doubt where one feels, “Well, I’m not there yet, and there must be a there that I’m going to get to, and since I don’t feel like I’ve reached it, then I’m…” It kind of keeps them in a limbo state where they’re still perhaps doubting their own experience more than they need to.

Ellen: Well, I guess I was lucky. I don’t know if I was more or less lucky than anybody else, but what I feel is important in my experience is that there’s a point where the absolute understanding is met and recognized, and that moment is absolute. I mean, it’s not a moment, but that recognition is the awakening to your true nature, and it’s a true anchor.

If the teacher or the teaching is clear and experiential, over and over again, through a kind of process of higher reasoning with the mind or higher sensing with the body, you go over the pathway from a belief in separation to the understanding of your true nature. You do it over and over again, but with a map that’s steady, and within which there’s no doubt. It’s absolutely certain.

So that, I feel, is important. It’s not wishy-washy, an awakening. It’s a possibility to have a real awakening.

So then what’s more layered and more of a process is the alignment process. So we’re no longer talking about awakening. The awakening happens, you are awake, you know what you are, but you seem to go back and forth, you seem to forget, you seem to re-shrink yourself into the feeling of being a limited awareness.

But because there’s been this deep recognition, and if you’re lucky, a kind of map through a teacher, then there’s always the possibility of going over it again and again and again. And that’s the establishment process. I mean, I don’t know if that’s true for everybody; it’s my experience.

So I think of people who feel that they’re still engaged in a process, there could be two things: either it hasn’t been clear, there’s still a confusion about what I am or what this awakening is, and it needs to be met with something clear; or they’re engaged in this alignment process and they know that, and they do that around the teaching that suits them. Am I making sense?

Rick: Yes, you are. And let us take those two things that you just laid out and try to explore them. So the first one sounded kind of intellectually rigorous, and I imagine Francis Lucille, being a rather intellectual fellow, it was intellectually rigorous in your experience. I mean, Francis is very…

Ellen: Well, intellectual in the sense that it uses the mind, but experiential—and it was for me. I’m not somebody who gravitates towards thinking so much. I was more into devotion, flow, dance, and movement, and it was interesting that the person, the teacher who was somehow chosen, was this, as you say, very rigorous physicist and French rationalist.

But yes, there’s this aspect. You’re right, it’s rigorous because it takes the mind step by step back to its source, and it doesn’t let the mind go off on a tangent. But it’s truly experiential. It’s just as experiential as doing something through the energy body or through a kind of less rational process. But yes, it’s rigorous, and I have to admit that I think that’s super important.

Rick: Yes, so intellectually rigorous. I didn’t mean to imply that it was exclusively intellectual, like you’re just sort of philosophizing and getting into metaphysics and so on, but there’s an intellectual component. It’s sort of a multidimensional thing, isn’t it, where the intellect is involved, but in a sense to corroborate direct experience? As if in walking we have a left foot and a right foot: there’s the experience and then the understanding, and the experience and then the understanding, and the two complement and support one another.

Ellen: Yes, you could say that. It’s using the mind. You’re right, it’s intellectual in the sense that the mind is the tool that’s used step by step, following the experience of investigating, of self-inquiry.

Rick: Yes, and if we can imagine one without the other, the experience could be anything without the intellectual discrimination. One could mistake some mood for the real enchilada.

Ellen: Or have the real enchilada but not have the formulation that helps. It feels to me that the right formulation is so important.

Rick: What do you mean by formulation?

Ellen: Well, for example, when I stuck a tape of Francis in my car, it was in the middle of a teaching, and I heard “consciousness knowing itself.” So that’s a formulation, right?

Rick: Yeah.

Ellen: It uses language, and it brought me to understanding. In other words, it was through the mind that there was a dissolving into true nature. It could have been another pathway.

Rick: So at that point, when you heard that phrase, did it really dissolve into true nature, or was it more like an “aha” thing, which you realized, “Oh, there’s something here. I need to investigate this more. Maybe I’m more than I thought I was, and I need to explore this”? Was it just the first inkling of a sense that there’s a universal aspect to you, or was it actually a real shift?

Ellen: You know, I’d done my little journey already, so there was already an inkling, and at that moment it was a real glimpse, you could say.

Rick: You could taste it.

Ellen: It was a kind of “yes” that was coming from presence, from awareness.

Rick: In the Upanishads they have these things that they call mahavakyas. You’ve heard them, right?

Ellen: Yes.

Rick: Like “That thou art” and tattvamasi and all those things. It’s said that when you’re ripe, just that little phrase spoken by the teacher can elicit a huge shift.

Ellen: Yes, and I guess that was a mahavakya, but it was using the mind, wasn’t it?

Rick: That’s what mahavakyas do.

Ellen: “Consciousness knowing itself”—it had to kind of turn back onto itself and dissolve. I wasn’t aware of what was happening. I mean, I was very new to all of that. It’s only now, looking back, that you can kind of deconstruct all these—what are they?—these processes.

Rick: Well, that’s in keeping with what we’re talking about, which is this sort of intellectual rigor along with direct experience. Yes, and it seems like that phrase, when you heard it—what was it? “Consciousness being aware of itself”?

Ellen: “Consciousness knowing itself.”

Rick: It actually triggered a kind of self-referral moment there. So that was when you were initially introduced to Francis, right? Somebody gave you a tape and you hadn’t really gotten into it?

Ellen: Yes, but the funny thing is, I’d been much more drawn towards a kind of devotional quality. I’d gone to India, I’d gone to see Amma, and I had this dream that was very devotional. Anyway, I had a much more devotional kind of shakti, you could say, a kind of tendency. And then I was introduced to the non-dual direct path, and it was so resonant. It was strange, you know?

Rick: Yeah.

Ellen: It was, in a way, beautiful because…

Devotion within nonduality

Rick: Do you find now that, having been on that path for over a decade, you’ve discovered a devotional stream within that as well?

Ellen: Yes, very much so. I feel that when I teach the awakening body meditations, I always start in a kind of devotional way because I feel it’s almost like turning back towards an altar, and the altar is presence. And of course, the presence that turns towards the altar is the very same presence.

And yes, I feel like devotion is still very much a kind of expression that’s here. I’ve been thinking back on my time before meeting Francis, when I was in India and I had this very powerful dream, which I’ve been thinking back upon because I’m not somebody who has powerful dreams. So this dream kind of stands out, and I realized the whole teaching was contained in that dream, but its form was much more devotional.

Now I can go back to that dream and see that the non-dual teaching is contained in it and kind of let it inform how I express this understanding.

Rick: Yeah, personally, I don’t think that it has to be an either-or situation, and I don’t think that it ever is, actually, entirely. I know naturally some people are more intellectually inclined and some are more emotionally inclined, and so on, but the greatest proponents of non-duality were very devotional people. Shankara wrote all these devotional poems and talked about devotion, and Ramana Maharshi was very devoted.

Ellen: And Francis—often during his retreats he did these guided meditations in the early days, and I think he still does now—but they were extremely devotional, not in a dual way. They start out with really beautiful imagery, sometimes taken from the Christian tradition of surrendering, for example, surrendering the body, surrendering the mind, and surrendering the world to an altar.

I remember this particular meditation of Francis’s, and then him explaining somehow that the altar to which you surrender is presence, of course; it is consciousness. That’s the true meaning of sacrifice: making sacred the body and the mind. All those meditations were very devotional.

Rick: And I think it stands to reason, because as human beings we have these different faculties or components, and one of them is the heart. If you’re going to be a fully developed human being, then you’re not going to be one of these bug-eyed space aliens that doesn’t have any heart, with a great big head and oval eyes.

We have all these energy centers in the body, and they’re all going to wake up eventually, perhaps in a different order for different people, but eventually, if we’re really going to keep progressing, as we’ve been discussing, it seems to me they’re all going to get fully enlivened.

Ellen: Yes, exactly. I mean, if we’re to try to name the attributes, the qualities of consciousness, as Rupert says, awareness is intimately one with all experience, and another name for that is love. So love and intelligence, beauty—all of these are different layers: intelligence, love, beauty, the world. So yes.

Rick: You read these beautiful accounts in the scriptures, Vedic literature and perhaps other traditions, of someone encountering a saint. The saint might be a great intellectual and teacher and proponent of Vedic wisdom or something, but someone comes to meet him, and tears come to their eyes, their hair stands on end, and they just melt in waves of love and devotion.

Ellen: Yeah. Francis never did that, but…

Rick: Well, anyway, I just want to throw that in there because sometimes in the so-called non-dual world there seems to be a dryness, and I think that people are moving beyond that now. That was also one of the themes of Adya’s and Francis Bennett’s talk last week: that there seems to be a whole shift taking place in the contemporary spiritual community, where people are waking up to these more personal values which they at one time may have denounced or felt they had transcended.

Ellen: Yes, and maybe in the neo-Advaita teaching it’s been confusing for people: there’s nothing to do, nobody there. That can be a bit dry too, because people might have a glimpse—which isn’t dry—in the presence of that teaching, but then a few days later it feels kind of blank: nobody there, nothing to do. And yet all these old feelings are there, and there’s a kind of absence of perfume or absence of…

So that’s another way in which the contemporary Advaita teaching can be a bit dry.

Rick: Yes, and in my opinion, not really in tune with its roots, with the traditional Advaita teaching, which included the heart and which wasn’t dry. As I’ve been saying, the main proponents of it were not dry by any definition. They were very heart-filled, and transcendent and immanent both in one.

Balancing the absolute and the personal

Ellen: Yes, but I guess the other trap which might be part of today’s scene is the kind of psychologizing of the spiritual teaching. I’m not saying we shouldn’t. I’m a therapist, and I’m very interested in the emotional components and the personal aspects of the unfolding, but I also feel that it’s a tricky balance.

What are we serving? Who are we serving here in this exploration? Is it serving a kind of pseudo-person if we’re exploring the personal process too much?

Rick: I think I know what you mean. So what you’re saying—well, let’s rephrase it. Probably what we’re aiming at is the complete package, where we have the transpersonal, the transcendent, the impersonal, the unmanifest, the absolute, whatever you want to call it, but then we have the whole range of relative personal faculties and experiences and strata of creation and all that, and we’re aiming at a package which includes them both.

One can go to one extreme or the other: to the transcendent to the exclusion of the personal, and run around referring to oneself as the “Rick person” rather than just saying, “I’m Rick.”

Ellen: Are people doing that?

Rick: Yeah, people do that. They won’t just say, “Hey, how do you do? I’m Rick.” They’ll say, “I’m the Rick person, and there’s nobody here.” So forth, you know: “Please pass the salt.” “Who wants the salt?”

Ellen: But that’s really absurd and silly.

Rick: It is, but people do it. And then the other extreme, what you’re saying, is that one can indulge in all sorts of personal, psychological, emotional this and that without actually bringing the transcendent into the picture, and there’s no end to it. One can spend lifetimes doing that, mucking around without actually building a foundation under it.

Ellen: Yes. Hopefully, a sound non-dual teaching will put the emphasis in the beginning on establishing the fact of awareness and exploring the qualities of awareness, because we have to start there. We have to uproot the illusion of separation.

So it seems that the emphasis is placed on that, but there’s also a deep desire to do that in the students when he or she hears a teaching. In the best of cases, the teacher will point towards a direction that allows this teaching to be explored at all levels, and that will kick up all sorts of things.

In other words, it should start from the absolute and not start from a person trying to change consciousness. You know, it’s true, there isn’t a person there, but on the other hand, if there is a person there, let’s investigate.

Rick: Like we said earlier, paradox. And Jesus said what you just said 2,000 years ago: “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and all else shall be added unto thee.”

Ellen: There you go.

Rick: Yeah. So seek ye first, so that the priority is getting that established, and then all else shall be added.

Ellen: And also, if that really is taking place in the best possible way, the rest takes care of itself more or less. But I think what’s good about the contemporary exploration is that people really want to make sure that that’s taking place, and want to cooperate and explore what tools we can use to allow that more. Maybe in the realm of psychology, in the realm of men, women, the feminine, and spiritual bypass—all those concerns. They’re legitimate, but they have to be in good measure, I guess.

Rick: Well, like you just said, once that’s established, all the relative stuff gets taken care of by itself more or less. I think you said something like that just now, but then in the next breath you said, yeah, but there’s all these other things you can do to help facilitate that. And I’ve seen many instances in my own life as well, during some of its phases, in which all kinds of relative stuff wasn’t getting taken care of. There’s plenty of immersion in the absolute, but that didn’t necessarily automatically bring all phases of the relative into line.

Ellen: In your own, you mean?

Rick: In my own experience and in other people’s too. You can see people who have been meditating for decades that are still pulling shady business deals or screwing up relationships and stuff like that. You can see famous teachers who are radiating shakti out the wazoo but are messing around with their students in inappropriate ways and all kinds of things like that.

Ellen: Yeah. Well, I guess that’s their freedom, but I would also question the depth of their understanding and how in love they are with their true nature.

Rick: And how holistic their development is. In Ken Wilber’s lines of development, they could be way out on one line and pretty stunted in other lines.

Ellen: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Anyway, let’s get back to you a little bit more. So you were in love as a child with movement and dance, and you still are into it. And you were born in New York, you spent 18 years in France, then you moved back to the States, I think to California, was it?

Ellen: New York.

Rick: And you went through a lot of suffering as a child—an eating disorder, depression. What was it, bulimia or anorexia or something like that?

Ellen: Bulimia was my chosen one.

Rick: Your eating disorder of choice. And so how did you pull out of that phase without killing yourself?

Ellen: Well, I went the route of therapy, psychotherapy—not that psychotherapy necessarily did the job of pulling me out. Just a journey, some therapy, a lot of trying to heal through certain approaches that were more honoring of the feminine, that kind of thing. Some of these things were very helpful, but I have to say that the real uprooting of that suffering was meeting Francis, even though it was never addressed head-on by the teaching, because the root of any kind of addiction, or any kind of suffering, is the belief that I am a body and that I will die.

You can do all sorts of therapies, and some of them were very helpful. I’m a therapist, and I meet people in the ways that I was met by some therapies, but it was the ultimate understanding that was so relaxing for me. It was so relaxing to hear and to begin to feel in the yogas that Francis would lead. Even though, again, it was not a psychological investigation, simply to first of all feel my body and to realize that I’m not in the body—the body is in me—and that its substance, its very substance, is consciousness, vibration.

It’s innocent, the body, you know. It took time. It wasn’t like healing overnight or anything, but it was much less charged, having this addiction, so it was going to unwind in its own time.

Rick: So I’ve only encountered Francis in sort of a speaking mode, interviewing him, seeing him speak at the SAND conference and everything, but I’ve heard you allude to the fact that he actually does some kind of yoga sessions. I also heard somebody—maybe it was you, maybe it was my previous guest, John Prendergast—talk about how Jean Klein had some kind of yoga thing that people would be doing. So tell us—I should probably ask Francis this again sometime—but maybe in the context of what you went through, tell us about what your time with Francis entailed in terms of practices and this yoga thing, how that worked and what sort of effects it had and so on.

Ellen: Yes, Jean Klein was very much offering an expression of the body, and so is Francis, and so is Rupert in his retreats. It’s very much a part of their teaching, and it’s also the yoga that I offer. It was very resonant for me when I went to Francis. His retreats are usually composed of a morning—well, now he does everything in the afternoon because he likes to play tennis—but basically the first session of his retreat is a meditation and what he calls a yoga session. It’s a yoga that doesn’t involve any kind of fancy postures. It’s very, very slow.

Rick: And you’re sitting on a mat doing something?

Ellen: You might be sitting on a mat, but you can be sitting on a chair, and your eyes are closed. The first thing that is established, of course, is awareness, but at the level of feeling, awareness is experienced almost like an open, infinite space, like openness, a bit like the sky. Then you begin to explore the body.

Rick: How is it that awareness is experienced that way? What does Francis do to enable people to have that experience? Or what would you do, or Rupert, if you were doing the same thing?

Ellen: We would close our eyes and, first of all, welcome the current experience as it is—the flow of thoughts, sensations, and perceptions—and point out that they’re not appearing in nothing, that they’re appearing to awareness and in awareness. Then maybe provide an image of the sky-like nature of this awareness when you begin to focus on sensations, or the space-like quality of this awareness.

If you go to your experience right now, Rick, and you go to some sensation, for example, the sensation of your hand, the tingling of your hand, and then you tune into this kind of knowing—the feeling of knowing that this tingling of the hand appears in an openness, in a kind of space. So it’s like correlating awareness to space.

Rick: So you’re pointing out something to people that is already there, that they may have overlooked.

Ellen: Yes.

Rick: And you’re enabling them to settle down, because usually the agitation and the outward-directedness of our attention are conducive to overlooking what’s already there.

Ellen: To settle down and to take your stand as the welcoming of experience, which is our true nature. But obviously, we are often resisting experience, and there’s a lot of tension, as you say, and agitation, so it takes time. But that’s the first thing that happens.

Then the body is perceived as a flow of sensations and vibrations in this openness. So it’s as if you were liberating the body of all the labels, because usually our body is experienced as a kind of layering of tension and contraction. That’s kind of the anchoring of the ego at the level of the body—it’s like me, the body.

So when you start to taste the body free, a little bit more relaxed, a little bit more open, from a more open perspective, a safer perspective, then the body reveals itself to be more of an innocent flow of sensations. Already, to do that exploration would be a very big exploration: to explore the fact that I am not in the body, the body is in me, and me is this openness.

That would be a first amazing discovery for me. It was like, whoa, because then, of course, I remembered that I had this kind of chronic fear that was a very intense sensation in my solar plexus. I remember having to kind of welcome that sensation that I had been repressing and controlling, and then asking Francis, “Is it really safe?” and exploring, et cetera, et cetera.

Over the years, the body naturally was relieved of that kind of charge. It was like a “me” charge: “Me, I’m going to die,” and “I’m in danger” charge. But then there are so many other components to this yoga that you explore. For example, we’re very conditioned to feel that I end where the body ends, and there’s a feeling that goes with that.

So there will be an exploration of expanding the body into the space, and the space is alive. It’s not dead; it’s friendly. Then you really go there, you really go, and you really realize, oh yeah, it’s true, I can’t find the place where my body ends and the space begins.

There might also be an exploration of weight, of surrendering weight.

Rick: Weight, like heaviness, weight?

Ellen: Yes, the sensation of weight, the sensation of “me heavy,” “me solid,” “me dense,” which is another habitual way that the ego perpetuates itself, you could say, physically.

So in this approach, there’ll be a lot of releasing of the weight into, for example, the surface of the chair or the mat, and then tuning in and sensing that this so-called chair or mat—if you go to your direct experience, there is no chair or mat, there’s just this kind of sensation. Then awakening to the aliveness of that sensation, to the vibrational flow of that sensation, and then realizing that your true body is weightless.

But it’s all a process, you know, and you can’t really talk about it and describe it. It’s so experiential.

Rick: You’re doing a pretty good job.

Ellen: I was going to say, then there’s exploring movements and the habit of feeling that I am the mover, and then just exploring a very simple movement and evoking the feeling that movement appears in me, that there is no individual mover. That’s a beautiful discovery. And there are some explorations with the sense perceptions, with hearing and touching and smelling.

Rick: Would you say that the body actually really enjoys functioning in the way that you are describing, that this yoga evokes, and therefore, if you give it half a chance—if you give it an opportunity—it’s going to kind of begin to shift into that mode?

Ellen: Yes, absolutely.

Rick: And then if you give it repeated opportunities, that mode will become more and more habituated.

Ellen: Absolutely, yes. It’s the natural state at the level of the body: transparent, weightless, relaxed.

Yoga will also reveal all sorts of layers of emotions, fears, and tensions, which is the beauty of that yoga too. It creates a kind of openness for many, many layers to come up to the surface of so-called suffering, habits of what constitutes suffering.

In this yoga, what’s beautiful is you don’t do anything with the “I” feeling that arises. It’s as if you offered it to presence for presence to take care of. You don’t have to do anything with the stuff that comes up. It’s a very hands-off approach. Very beautiful.

Rick: Yeah, the ocean keeps dissolving spoonful after spoonful of mud and seems to have the capacity to do so.

Ellen: Exactly, exactly. That’s awesome.

“You don’t have to do anything with the stuff that comes up. It’s a very hands-off approach.”

Rick: And this too, I think, is worth dwelling upon, isn’t it? Because it’s not a matter of just sort of sinking into a more natural state of mental and physiological functioning, but in that more natural state, all of the unnaturalness that has been accumulated over the course of a lifetime no longer—well, wouldn’t you say the body has a natural tendency to want to throw that off? And you’re finally giving it an opportunity to do so.

Ellen: Yes, exactly.

Rick: And so it naturally begins to happen without you having to poke around and figure out, “Okay, what do I need to throw off? Let me try to find something.” It just surfaces, whatever’s ready to go.

Ellen: It does, it absolutely does, as long as you truly welcome the body without an agenda, which means that you’ve taken your stand, or you’ve taken your right place, and you are open at least to the possibility that the true I is this openness, this infinite, ever-present awareness.

Because then the body is welcomed. It doesn’t mean the body relaxes immediately. On the contrary, all of a sudden the body is free to surface. I often have the image of establishing awareness and then letting the sensations of the body be free to be as they are.

I use an image of opening cages in the body, because we often have put sensations in caves—knots of density and energetic constellations that are nice and compact and kept. So, just liberating all these different areas of the body for no reason, without any agenda, just to let the body find its own way and reorchestrate itself on its own. It doesn’t need to be told what to do, this poor body. It’s been told what to do.

Rick: Well, it seems there’s an overarching reason, which is that we’ve been carrying around all this baggage for so many years. It would be nice to get rid of it. So, that’s a good reason for going to a retreat and sitting down to do this process.

Ellen: Yes, well, that’s true, that any initial motivation is that we don’t want to suffer anymore, and that’s a fine motivation.

Rick: Yeah. And would you say that during the process there’s an oscillation between deepening, then stuff getting stirred up, then deepening, and then stuff getting stirred up? It just sort of goes in a cycle?

Ellen: Yes.

Rick: Maybe that’s not universal, but is that a kind of general pattern?

Ellen: Yeah. And when you said “deepening,” I would want to say kind of expanding and expanding, but sometimes deepening, too—in terms of allowing this kind of vibrational aliveness of life, of body. And yes, then there can be a shrinking back, or a contraction can arise that seems to shrink awareness back into itself, and then a surrendering again.

So, it’s very alive and not rational. The exploration with the body is not rational at all, which is what was so beautiful in the retreats with Francis. There were these two experiences, one very irrational and the other one very rational, and so it took care of both the mind and the body. And then there was also a dimension of the world, because we explored perception.

Rick: In what way?

Ellen: Well, in the yoga you might explore hearing, seeing, tasting, and touching, and explore experientially—or establish experientially—that hearing, tasting, touching, and so forth don’t appear in a body. A sound doesn’t appear in the ear, and a taste doesn’t appear in the mouth, but they appear in awareness. In a way, it’s liberating the sense perceptions from this localization in the body.

You’ve probably had the experience of hearing where hearing resonates in openness. It’s easier, maybe, with hearing.

Rick: It is easier with hearing because—and actually, I heard Rupert going through something similar to this, maybe this very thing, on that recent audio series that he put out. But when you think of it, we’re more familiar with a subtler aspect of the sense of hearing than we are with a subtler aspect of any other sense, and that is thinking. Thoughts are sounds, and they’re a subtler aspect of the sense of hearing. So, I was reminded of that when you said it might be easier with hearing.

Ellen: But with thinking, you can do the same. You can explore the fact that there is a kind of feeling—a feeling habit—that the thinker is located in the head, and there’s a kind of massive energy sensation there. But you can go to your experience and see very clearly that thoughts don’t appear in the head. Nobody’s seen a thought in the head. They appear in awareness, just like a sound, just like the sensation of touch.

And all these explorations, they’re so beautiful. First of all, they’re like refinements, and they’re like playing music; they’re like tuning the instruments. But also, it’s ongoing. I think it’s quite important to conduct them over extended periods.

But the world part of experience, which was also taken in on Francis’s retreat, and also Rupert’s, and I’m sure other teachers’, has to do with friendship and the kind of lovely atmosphere amongst the sangha, eating together, sharing time together, and having the time.

Rick: Yes, there are so many examples and sayings and so many traditions about the value of having a sangha of some kind. I mean, what is it Christ said?

“Wherever two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am.”

And there are so many examples in Eastern scriptures and others about the value of the company of the so-called enlightened—just being in the company of like-minded people who are all seeking the same thing, and how conducive that is to realizing it.

Ellen: Yes, it was very much my experience. The friendships in the sangha were so sweet.

Rick: And you met Rupert there?

Ellen: I met Rupert, yes.

Rick: So that paid off.

Ellen: That was the only motivation.

Rick: Yeah, that was it. You were just sort of on a quest. Here’s this handsome Englishman with a cool accent.

Ellen: Yeah, I had my eyes on him when I first got there. Yeah. Wait a bit, but—

🧘 Relationship as a spiritual practice

Rick: Yeah, charming fellow. Have your respective evolutionary processes always been conducive to a deeper, more intimate relationship, or have they sometimes resulted in one or the other of you becoming somewhat ethereal or disembodied or something like that?

That might seem like a strange question, and I can clarify it if you like. But, for instance, knowing you and Rupert just to the extent I do, I always find Rupert totally charming but kind of cerebral, you know, a little ethereal when you talk to him. And then here you are—this movement, dance, embodiment person. I mean, how has the interaction of those two tendencies played out for you?

Ellen: It’s played out, let’s put it that way. It still plays out.

Rick: Still playing out?

Ellen: It’s kind of cool because we really see eye to eye with this understanding, and we share a teaching and we share the teacher. So, that’s a real kind of foundation—not that we refer back to it consciously, but it’s so underlying, it’s kind of there. And we are very different characters, you know.

Rick: Of course, Rupert was a ceramic artist, and that’s kind of earthy. That’s very tactile.

Ellen: I know what you mean when you say he’s cerebral. He loves to think, and he articulates through thought. And, you know, you don’t get Rupert to dance very often.

Rick: Yeah. You wouldn’t get me to dance very often either, so I’m not putting him down. It’s just kind of a personality-type thing.

Ellen: So, like any relationship, we’re very polarized. At times it’s been explosive, but then we’d let it be because we knew that it was going to resolve—not so much in whatever conflict, but it resolves a bit later on in understanding.

That kind of friction is so rich, and we learn. I mean, I’ve learned a lot from Rupert, and I continue to, but he doesn’t learn from me so much.

Rick: He doesn’t?

Ellen: Well, I think he learns a lot. I don’t think he adds it on to his array of thinking tools, but I definitely think he learns from me on another level, of course. And so, it’s good. It works.

Rick: Do you think that a polarized relationship such as yours, which has an underlying common denominator—without that common denominator—would probably be hell and probably wouldn’t work out? But do you think, speaking somewhat hypothetically, that a polarized relationship with a common denominator would be more evolutionary than one which wasn’t very polarized at all?

Do you think there’s more opportunity for growth and change and maturation in a sugar-and-salt kind of relationship than there would be in a salt-and-salt sort of relationship? Or salt and pepper, I should say.

Ellen: I don’t really know. I know there’s a great deal of learning potential in my situation with Rupert and in our relationship.

Rick: I’m just curious. The thought just occurred to me; it wasn’t a pre-planned question. You know, people talk about finding a compatible mate, but do you really want a compatible mate that’s kind of a perfect fit on all levels, or is there going to be some greater potential in a situation in which the two of you have some significant differences but there’s an underlying common denominator?

Ellen: I think it’s very important to have shared interests, not just the one underlying common denominator. Rupert and I share a love of nature and a love of beauty. We like classical music. I mean, there are little things that we enjoy doing.

So, despite the polarities of our characters, it’s as if God took a hand. It felt like a match, almost like an arranged marriage a little bit. I had just moved to Temecula to live nearby Francis, and I was happily single, and then it just kind of appeared on the radar, and there we were.

I moved to England, and I felt like, okay, this must be the next kind phase of the teaching. And I knew it was, to be honest. I think it’s one of the most important ways that I have been given to explore this understanding and to refine it. And it is challenging at times, but yeah, I’m not answering your question directly, because it could have been that Rupert could have been more like me, and it would have been equally—

Rick: Yes, but I guess my question is, if he had been—and this is hypothetical, I think obviously, as you just said, you’re meant to be together—would that actually have been as evolutionary?

And I’m asking this not just about you and Rupert, but for people out there who might feel like, “Geez, my husband is this and I’m that, and where’s the value in this?” But perhaps there could be.

Ellen: I think if there’s a genuine interest in exploring and intimacy with this reference point of the understanding somehow, then the other becomes somehow a yoga at times. You know, the differences—the thing that is difficult in the other’s character—challenge you, and that’s a kind of yoga of sorts. Or at other times, it’s a kind of celebration.

Rick: Carlos Castaneda talked about the value of the petty tyrant—not that either of you are tyrants—but he said even very challenging people and situations can be a gift because they have such a—

Ellen: Yes. They bring out the absolute, push the buttons, or the edges, and then you really have to see it.

I remember early on with Rupert in our relationship, we were having some kind of conflict, and he said to me straight on, “Ellen, don’t go for the relationship, go for the truth.” And it was such a kind of wake-up. I knew exactly what he meant, but it was so good that he said it, and it’s very important—that statement—whenever we hit a difficult spot.

“Don’t go for the relationship, go for the truth.”

The tendency, of course, in conflict in a relationship is to blame and to niggle and want to resolve it, and I get caught in that. But ultimately there will be a moment, hopefully more and more, where I take it back to the absolute—or not the absolute up there, but to the truth, to honesty, to love, to a more impersonal understanding.

And in the process of that, there’s a lot that is getting to grow up, to mature, to open, to culture—

Rick: Cultivating patience, tolerance, forgiveness, compassion, all those things.

Ellen: Yeah.

Rick: Well, taking it to a kind of cosmic perspective, which we’ve alluded to a few times, I mean, if the world is not mechanistic and if it really is imbued with intelligence which is orchestrating things for the purpose of our higher good, for the purpose of our evolution, then every little thing is a lesson, right? And every person we engage with is our teacher.

Ellen: Yes, that’s true. I agree with that.

Authentic movement and spontaneous unfolding

Rick: Yes. So, I read a lot in your piece on the internet about this woman, Janet Adler. Is she still alive?

Ellen: Yes, yes.

Rick: Is she getting old, or what’s her story?

Ellen: She’s probably in her late 70s now. I haven’t seen her in quite a few years. She lives on one of those islands off Vancouver.

Rick: I’ll be darned. I’m going out there in September.

Ellen: Oh, really?

Rick: Yeah. I could interview her.

Ellen: Yes. She’s written a couple of books. She had a kind of Kundalini awakening when she was in her 40s, and it came through in the form of very intense visions, but also intense energy in the body. She didn’t have a context within which to approach this. She wasn’t in a particular spiritual teaching. She was a dance therapist, and the way she worked with this energy, or met it, was through this practice of authentic movement, which she hadn’t created, but she kind of tailored it to this kind of spiritual experience that was bursting through her.

I read her book before meeting Frances, and I was so drawn to that kind of exploration, but I didn’t quite know why. There was something about her book, the allowing of the body, the fascination with energy, and the kind of natural unfolding, a mystical unfolding, of the body through spontaneous mudras, gestures, or postures. That was something that I kind of knew in my own experience, and it was very interesting to me. So I sought her out and studied, so to speak. I was with her for quite a few years, and then, in the middle of working with her, I met Frances, and it had a radical effect on how I understood authentic movement.

She always talked about unitive states of consciousness, but she was never exposed to the nondual teaching, so she wouldn’t ever formulate it the way that I then began to formulate it after I met Frances. We never disagreed, but we just kind of parted ways soon after that. I kept the form of authentic movement as something that I still work with with clients.

Rick: Is that still a pretty major part of what you do with clients?

Ellen: Yes, if they want to. Some people come to me especially for that, and then that’s what we do. We talk, of course, but during the course of a session there’ll be a period of time where they will close their eyes and just allow an unfolding, in some cases over many years, so that there’s a… I don’t know how to describe this. It’s hard to talk about, but it’s a very beautiful thing.

In the beginning, people might come because they’re having very unexplainable energetic experiences, sometimes with vision, sometimes with memories from past lives. In this practice, it’s just a time where that can be, and I’m just witnessing. Then there’s a time to just speak. So it’s very simple in the sense that there’s no hands-on, there’s no doing anything with anybody, and there’s no manipulating the body.

But sometimes, because of the background, the nondual background, the understanding that it’s all unfolding in awareness and that ultimately it’s completely safe, and the reality of everything is awareness, people might come with these energetic phenomena. I’ve often now seen that it’s people who have had trauma in their early childhood, maybe very invasive trauma, maybe sexual trauma, and that triggered an out-of-body experience because it was too intense.

The out-of-body experience was a spiritual glimpse, so that later in life there is a kind of confusion. But it’s not rational; it’s right at the level of the body—a confusion between fear, terror, the trauma, and the spiritual longing. I mean, that’s how I articulate it. I don’t really know, and I don’t really need to know.

Authentic movement is often a place where that can begin to disentangle. The fear part begins to relax in the knowledge that it’s welcome, that there’s infinite space, and that the body can relax. Then the visionary aspect, or the glimpses, begins to fully take shape, sometimes just in a recognition of peace, and through the body, maybe in very precise shapes the body wants to take, or a very clear movement.

It’s very beautiful because it’s spontaneous. It’s a kind of spontaneous harmonizing of the body with its true nature, and in each mover it will look different. But it’s also not always beautiful. I mean, it also allows lots of different layers.

Rick: Well, it sounds, from what you’re saying, that, firstly, it’s kind of common for people these days to be having these energetic eruptions, and either that or they’re just seeking you out. But I wonder if there are more people having that these days than there were 30 or 40 years ago. That’s one question. You’re also saying that there seems to be a correlation between people having that and having been traumatized, sexually assaulted, or whatever in their childhood.

Ellen: Or a pain body—you know that notion?

Rick: Well, yes. And where does the pain body come from? Doesn’t it come from traumatic experiences, perhaps? So there’s stuff you could talk about on those two points. But then the third point is, this might seem strange, but are traumatic experiences, sometimes horrific ones, some kind of hidden blessing in that they become catalysts for spiritual awakening later in life? Which is kind of what you just said.

Ellen: Yes, they are in a way. Any suffering, if it’s a call to come back home, it’s not to say that it’s not extremely painful, sometimes excruciating. But if, in fact, it does allow for an awakening, then it is absolutely a blessing.

Rick: I know in my own case, my childhood was pretty rough—an alcoholic father, a mother who tried to commit suicide three times, all kinds of heavy-duty stuff. I was pretty much at my wit’s end by the time I finally latched on to spirituality, and I just took off like a bat out of hell because it was such a relief.

Ellen: Yes, I think it is a relief. When I work with those clients, I really see that often it’s a suggestion that it’s safe—not just safe intellectually, but actually physically and energetically.

When they are in the throes of this energy and their eyes are closed, I might just throw out some words that really evoke the kind of openness or the holding of the earth, or some images that this little body doesn’t have to take care of it all. It’s a kind of reintroducing love to that equation, that problematic equation, and then things begin to unwind, and the trauma can resolve in its own time.

The story of the trauma is very important to be allowed, and it needs to be said and explored. But then there comes a time when that’s done and it can be laid to rest. There can still be an affinity for those people who are drawn, whose portals into the spiritual life have been the body and the energy. They’ll still maybe have an affinity for that, and that’s a very beautiful thing that I’ve found.

People keep coming, and there’s no longer the trauma. There’s just this longing to close their eyes and be moved, and it’s almost like they become the teacher. I feel blessed in those moments with these movers. I feel like it’s darshan, and I think, how strange that our culture has forgotten these rituals. But these must have been rituals. This is a ritual. It feels like a kind of natural ritual, and not everybody would do it or be drawn to it, but some people are.

Rick: Yeah, well, not everybody’s drawn to anything, but it sounds like a useful tool. Do they have to do it with you? Do they have to come to Oxford, or do you have Skype sessions or something with people?

Ellen: I tried that once, but it’s just not…

Rick: Wouldn’t work with movement, no?

Ellen: No, you need to be together in the space. I only tried it once with one client, and we gave it up quite soon.

Rick: Do you do sessions with clients over Skype that don’t involve the movement thing?

Ellen: Yes, I do. There you can still explore the sensations and feelings in the body, but not so much with movement.

Rick: One thing I was wondering about when I was reading about the movement thing is that Janet Adler had a profound energetic awakening, and for her the movements, I guess, were expressions of that raging energy that she was experiencing. But if you don’t have that sort of energetic awakening and you try to engage in something like this, aren’t you just mimicking the external appearances of some of what Janet was doing and just going through the motions, or perhaps just stirring up a sort of mood or an imaginary thing, rather than what Janet was actually referring to?

Ellen: You’re right. Sometimes I used to facilitate groups, and that would take place. There was exactly, as you say, this kind of stirring up of stuff that doesn’t need stirring up. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like facilitating groups like that, and so I don’t actually advertise the authentic movement bit too much.

The people who come are usually people who kind of need to explore in that way. But otherwise, it’s not necessary.

Rick: So you wouldn’t really get into the authentic movement thing with somebody unless they had had an energetic awakening, and then it might be an appropriate tool.

Ellen: Yes, or they might say, “I’m really drawn to it.” They might not have an energetic awakening, but there’s something in them that resonates. Usually they close their eyes, and you kind of get why they want it. You can see that it’s like something that finally can come up to the surface and it’s of another order, maybe, or it’s just not… It’s so hard to put into words.

Rick: I understand. Yeah. I have a few notes I took about it here: authentic movement, devotional expression of nonduality, being moved, connecting you with reality, your true nature.

Ellen: It does, and it’s what I remember in my own experience of when I moved. I would always start with suffering in a way. I would always start with the sense of me as separate, and instead of fighting it or trying to make my way back to my understanding, I would just, in a way, penetrate this resistance because it was a resistance of density and energy.

Then maybe there would be a kind of personal emotional component of anger or whatever, and that would be completely allowed too. It’s sometimes so pleasurable and so important to let this “me” out of the box completely. Who cares at that moment if it’s not me?

Then, if it’s allowed completely, the personal component of the emotion begins to relax, and then the emotion is pure. It’s maybe just pure grief or pure rage, which then paves the way for it to be God’s grief, God’s anger, or God’s emotion. Then it really begins to find its own movement. I mean, then the form unfolds.

I remember arriving at the end of these sessions, and at the time there were still states, because I would seek them out. I would want them again and again: that state of purity and a sense of silence, emptiness, and expansion.

Rick: You would get into these authentic movement things with Janet.

Ellen: Yes, yes, yes. But they were only recognized as unitive states, and then later I was able to somehow understand the whole process from awareness. It’s awareness from beginning to end, but it’s not that I arrive at awareness. I started at awareness.

Rick: Weren’t those tastes of unitive states similar in mechanics to what you began to go through with Frances, but just through a different means? I mean, in his case, you mentioned glimpses and repeated glimpses and deepening glimpses and so on. Wasn’t it just another tool for having glimpses of that same true nature?

Ellen: Except with Janet, it was never formulated as the ground—the fact that awareness was our ever-present, immediate, direct experience, now and now, you know. So there was a kind of evolution from personal consciousness to what she called collective consciousness to unitive consciousness.

Whereas I now would disagree. If I had to formulate it, I wouldn’t formulate it like that. I felt that was misleading, although I feel that it was misleading from the point of view of the formulation. The experience was beautiful.

Rick: Sounds like she didn’t have a teacher the way Francis did, so she didn’t have that kind of structure for understanding and explaining it.

Ellen: Yes, her background was more Jungian psychology and then this kind of spiritual, mystical, more shamanic approach, maybe you could say. And then she did it all by herself, you know. She had a teacher, I think, but I don’t remember who he was—not a non-dual teacher, but some kind of mentor.

Rick: Okay, this is an interesting point you brought out. Let’s see here, a couple of interesting points. One was from Janet about “the relationship between surrender and will regarding my experience with the energy.” I lifted that phrase from that article you wrote. That’s something I’ve personally found interesting over the years, the kind of balancing act between surrender and will.

I mean, one could imagine that surrender had taken place to a very profound degree, in which will had really taken a back seat and the Divine will was running the show. But before you get to that point, there can be years of a transitional period where there’s a kind of tug-of-war or balancing act between those two things. One has to learn discernment in terms of, “What is my individual will and what is cosmic will?” if you want to use that phrase. Should I follow this impulse, or is that just a whim? Is that an individual whim, or am I being told something here?

Ellen: Yeah, well, I know what you mean, but I also want to say that it’s all universal will.

Rick: Yeah. But if you go to that, then the murderer is just carrying out universal will, and Hitler was carrying out universal will. But I’m talking about in one’s own experience.

Ellen: You’re right—in your own experience. When I say it’s all cosmic will, I’m not saying it to be facile. But I think when you’re involved in an exploration where you’re, for example, experiencing personal will, and then comes the unfolding, the kind of spontaneous, effortless unfolding, that which is experiencing those two is awareness. I mean, it’s true. It is being perceived and unfolding in awareness.

It’s really important that it’s not just a bypass to say that, because once you really see that, you realize that the moments of so-called personal will are really moments of tension or subtle resistance, a kind of contraction back into a sense of separation. And there’s no problem, but it’s seen clearly that, “Oh, here’s the me feeling, me—the body feeling,” or, “Oh, here’s fear.” In other words, you’ve got the key, so it doesn’t really matter. Do you know what I mean?

Rick: Maybe one way of clarifying my question is to take an example. I’ve been having some conversations recently with several friends who are spiritual teachers, and we’ve been talking about spiritual teachers who get a little drunk with the Shakti or with the attention that they receive, and so on, and begin to regard themselves as just following divine impulses. They kind of lose the ability to be open to feedback from students.

They begin to feel that whatever thought pops into their head is divinely orchestrated and should be believed, followed, and trusted, both by themselves and by their followers. And one can go very far off the deep end with that line of thinking and get into serious trouble. So that’s just a case in point. Obviously, most people listening to this aren’t spiritual teachers. We’re definitely moved by a higher purpose and by cosmic intelligence, and yet at the same time we have our individual will and our individual intelligence, which can either be at odds with or in tune with that cosmic intelligence to varying degrees.

Ellen: Yes, that’s a nice way to put it. And when it’s at odds, because the compass is the truth of our true nature, ideally, when our current person, the small person, is at odds with that compass, then there’s a feeling like, “I’m going to get that.” If we’re truth-lovers and we’re honest at that moment, we’re like, “Whoa,” and we catch ourselves red-handed.

And therefore there’s the freedom—“Oh, I can investigate this”—moment. That means kind of tracing this contraction, this me-feeling, right back to its root, which more often than not is a feeling of fear or a kind of root feeling of separation. So it’s good.

Rick: Well, one solution that came to mind as you were speaking is that it really is valuable to have a…

Ellen: A good compass.

Rick: A good compass. It’s valuable also to have a teacher and a sangha who can call you on your shit if you’re getting carried away.

Ellen: Yes, if you have responsibility and you’re a teacher, it’s very important that you have some kind of reference, or that your sangha can, as you say, call you on your shit.

Rick: Because if you don’t have that, people can get quite far off the beam before they somehow have a wake-up call.

Ellen: Yeah.

Nonviolence toward difficult sensations

Rick: Here’s a question that somebody just sent in. Let me read it to you:

“Hi, Ellen, many speakers talk about the necessity of placing attention on uncomfortable feelings and contractions in the body in order to heal them, but I have found this practice to be counterproductive and even damaging to my nervous system. For even if we think we are doing this compassionately, without judgment, this type of attention carries the ego’s intention to change and fix, which is in itself an act of violence and contradictory to healing. “Moreover, my experience has been that so much focus on ‘somatic contractions’ actually perpetuates these sensations until they become all that we notice, betraying the truth that they are only a small fragment of experience. What are your thoughts about this?”

It’s a great question.

Ellen: Yes, I agree with that.

Rick: So you can indulge in it too much.

Ellen: I like what you say about the violence. The questioner used the word violence, and how an agenda is—and I think that if there’s an agenda, it’s a form of violence with the body.

The approach that I share, and that of Francis, and the Kashmiri approach, is a very nonviolent approach. There isn’t really a focusing on areas of contraction. It’s more a global welcoming of the body and the world and everything. Then, when you do start to focus on the body, you know you’re kind of offering the body to presence.

Of course, sometimes you might become aware of areas of tension and contraction, and it might be that the invitation of the moment is to allow that sensation to unfold. But it’s a subtle balancing. You’re not expecting the sensation to go away; you’re really seeing it clearly for what it is, and your interest is in awareness, in spaciousness, in the openness.

So the byproduct of such a nonviolent approach, you could say, is often relaxation, but there isn’t necessarily an agenda for things to relax.

Rick: You know, this question plays right into the question I was asking you, which is this sort of balance between individual intention and cosmic will. I’m using cosmic will as a general phrase. I think people understand what I mean by that. But this person’s inquiry has to do with the individual ego’s intention to change and fix, to use the questioner’s exact words, where one is applying individual will.

To me, that’s almost in the same ballpark as individually having to make our heart beat, our blood circulate, and our liver do its thing. We would die if we had to do that, whereas there’s a deeper intelligence that conducts those processes. I think that same deeper intelligence can conduct this process of purification.

Ellen: Without anybody…

Rick: Yes, without our individual manipulation being involved.

Ellen: In a way, the individual manipulation is yet another tension that is also a sensation in the body. It’s a kind of doing-tension, which itself will, in the best of cases, be welcomed in the sense of just being allowed. But as you say, Rick, our true nature is, by definition, allowing at every moment and therefore doesn’t need to do anything.

Rick: We had a bit of an interruption there, but the question I was asking was: one can exacerbate sort of individual discomforts and stuck things if one is using one’s personal will to root them out. It’s almost like that to which we give our attention grows stronger in our life. Whereas I think you’re talking about a very different process, which might easily be confused with that, in which we’re surrendering to something much larger than our individuality, and that has natural purifying tendencies which take care of it for us if we surrender to it properly.

Ellen: Yes, it takes care of the part of a contraction that is egoic, like the “me” part of a feeling in the body. Once we take our stand as this infinite, open, welcoming awareness, eventually the body relaxes. The me-part of the tension goes back to the real me, to presence.

But that doesn’t mean that there might not be chronic tensions in the body that are still lurking around. They’re just sensations, and some might be less pleasant than others, but they’re just sensations.

But if it’s a psychological contraction, and if you approach that psychological contraction with a kind of focus and a kind of, “I’m going to welcome that somatic tension,” and “I’m going to welcome it,” that’s just superimposing yet another layer of tension that’s not very welcoming.

As Francis says, that’s like you’re just standing behind the door with a four-by-five, waiting to plunk the sensation. It’s that you have an agenda, and an agenda, as this person points out, is a form of meddling with experience.

Rick: Yes, there’s that bumper sticker: “Let go and let God.”

Ellen: Yes, that’s nice.

📚 Seeking, finding, and the value of a teacher

Rick: So some people might be hearing this and thinking, “All right, I got that point. If you’re really surrendered to the true nature, then things are going to work themselves out in a way that is far wiser and more effective than anything your individual will would be able to accomplish.”

But that kind of begs the question: how do you surrender to your true nature? I mean, a lot of people out there listening to this might feel like, “I understand that, but it hasn’t happened. How do I get in touch with it if it hasn’t happened for me yet? How do I make that happen?”

Ellen: Keep looking, because you shouldn’t surrender to your true nature if you haven’t…

Rick: Found it.

Ellen: Yes, why would you? That would be blind surrender. But if you’re really interested in, “Who am I? What am I? Am I really this body-mind, or am I…?” If there’s a real interest in that, then one must pursue it. And if it’s a real interest, there will be answers. There’s good teaching out there, and I can give a few recommendations.

Rick: Sure. There’s you, there’s Rupert, there’s Francis…

Ellen: Exactly.

Rick: And some other good people scattered all around.

Ellen: But one must stay looking, investigating, and asking questions until those questions are met. And then it’s not sequential like that. But the surrendering has to be toward something that is trustworthy and true.

So one might lose sight of it, but yet one knows without the shadow of a doubt—even if at times it’s out of sight, out of reach, or seems to be—that it’s the one thing you know for sure. And over time it becomes…

Rick: Less and less out of sight and out of reach.

Ellen: Yes.

Rick: So how would you reconcile “Seek and ye shall find, knock and the door shall be opened” with the sort of “give up the search” crowd and “you don’t need a teacher” crowd?

Ellen: I don’t try to reconcile that.

Rick: In other words, you’re probably saying you disagree with that crowd, and that we should seek and ye shall find.

Ellen: If they’re not seeking, then that’s fine, good for them. But if you’re seeking, then it’s good to seek, and yes, you should find. As long as there’s a seeker there, you can’t pretend there isn’t a seeker there. As long as there’s a sense of a personal, limited me that yet has an intuition that there’s a bigger truth, there’s something more, and there’s a possibility for freedom, it’s so important to really go for that and not listen to whatever teaching tells you there’s nothing, no one there, and nothing to do, before that’s really recognized to be true. No, no, keep looking. As long as there seems to be someone there, then that someone should be doing something.

“As long as there seems to be someone there, then that someone should be doing something.”

Rick: Couldn’t have said it better.

Ellen: Thank you.

Rick: So be true to yourself.

Ellen: Because it’s so miraculous when you are true to yourself. Life meets you, meets itself; truth is met by truth. And of course, when we say these things, it sounds so beautiful, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a journey, a real process, and at times difficult and painful. Yet, looking back on it, you think, “Wow, what intelligence.”

Rick: Here’s a nice phrase I found in what you wrote: “As we travel in and through the dark unknown, we may emerge back into the light of wholeness. This can only happen through our bodies.”

Ellen: Did I write that?

Rick: You did, yes, unless you plagiarized it!

Ellen: I don’t know. Maybe it was years ago.

Rick: Yes, it was years ago.

Ellen: I’m not sure I would agree. I mean, it’s a nice—it’s true, but it’s not…

Rick: Well, I was getting distracted by your little quotes here, but I should have picked up on what you just said, which is beautiful: it’s a journey and it’s an adventure and it’s a never-ending fascination, as far as I’m concerned. You might give up the search, but you don’t give up the exploration and the adventure.

Ellen: Well, there was a quote that Rupert and I found in a book, and I can’t remember the book, so I don’t know who said this. But it was a beautiful quote, and it goes something like, “First we journey towards God, and then we journey in God.”

Rick: Nice, very nice.

Ellen: It’s nice because it’s so true, isn’t it?

Rick: I love that. And then we journey as God.

Ellen: Yes, you could add that.

Rick: And we’ve been doing that all along, thinking that we were doing those other things. Yeah, sweet.

Continuing to unfold

Okay, so Dan, if there are any more questions that have come in, now would be the time to send them to me. Otherwise, this is a typical question that I always ask towards the end of interviews. Basically, the question is: “How do you see the cutting edge of your evolution now? What does the next horizon seem to be, or what have the recent horizons been?”

Some people look at me puzzled because they’re of the “I’m done” ilk, and so that question doesn’t get us very far. But in your case, you seem to have this sense of never-ending unfoldment. What are some areas in which you feel that you’ve been blossoming in recent months or years, and that you look forward to continuing to blossom in?

Ellen: Well, I guess perhaps in sharing this understanding, and especially with the so-called yoga, the awakening body sessions that I offer. I feel that I really enjoy those and that I want to give my energy to those.

Rick: But in your own personal experience, how do you feel?

Ellen: I think that it is because I’ve always been a bit lacking in confidence and a little bit shy, so often craving, but a little bit shy, to really give. Not shy, but it was difficult for me to manifest. So I think that the teaching—the next unfolding—is taking me out into the world a bit more, and so it’s relevant in that way. That’s what comes to mind.

Rick: Good. Well, this interview may help because people usually experience what I call the BatGap bump.

Ellen: Yes, of course.

Rick: So let’s say people feel a resonance with you and like what you’ve been saying in this interview. In what ways can they get involved with you?

Ellen: Well, I guess they can come to Oxford. I teach also in America and in other countries in Europe, and I have a website, so they can go check on my website. Or they can come to Oxford or London.

Rick: We actually have a thing on BatGap under the Past Interviews menu where teachers such as yourself can—and many have—put in places where they are going to be teaching. Then a person could search, let’s say, in Fresno or California. They could broaden it out to the whole state, and then they can see, “Oh, all these people are going to be teaching in this, that, and the other city.”

Ellen: Right.

Rick: So I’ll send you information on how to register for that, and people who are listening can check that out and find out what might be going on in their area.

Ellen: Great, thank you.

Rick: Sure. So, good, let me kind of wrap it up, unless you can think of anything else we haven’t covered that you’d like to throw in there.

Ellen: I think we’ve talked a lot.

Rick: Okay, good. I always enjoy making these interviews long because it’s so much fun talking to people like you.

Ellen: It’s really nice.

Rick: I just want to do it all day.

Ellen: That’s great because you give time for real conversations.

Rick: And no commercials, except those annoying little YouTube ads that come up.

Okay, so I’ve been speaking with Ellen Emmet, and this interview, as most of you watching or listening probably know, is part of an ongoing series. If you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com. There’s a Past Interviews menu where you’ll see all the past interviews organized or categorized in about four or five different ways—alphabetical, chronological, and so on. Check that out.

There is an audio podcast of this. Almost as many people listen to the audio recordings as watch the videos, and there’s a whole page on how to sign up for that. You’ll see it there.

If you look under the Upcoming Interviews menu, you’ll see this thing I referred to earlier about the live streaming, with links to the live streaming for each one and a form at the bottom through which you can submit questions.

There’s a donate button, which we rely upon people clicking if they feel they’re deriving value from this, and it helps to support it. There’s also a little link to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted, so you’ll see that.

So thanks for listening or watching, and thank you, Ellen.

Ellen: Thank you very much.

Rick: Say hi to Rupert. See you both in October at the SAND Conference. My next interview won’t be a week from today; it’ll be two days from today with Amma Sri Karunamayi, who’s a saint from India. That got organized sort of on the spur of the moment and should be quite different from many of my interviews, and I think quite fascinating, so stay tuned for that. So, see you then. Thank you.

Ellen: Bye.

Rick: Bye, Ellen.

Ellen: Bye, Rick. Lovely. Yeah.