Summary:
Kimberly Lafferty is a teacher-practitioner specializing in adult developmental psychology and Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. Here are the key points:
- Background: Kimberly has over 12 years of intensive study in Indo-Tibetan traditions and leads educational cohorts combining developmental psychology with Buddhist theory.
- Professional Role: She co-leads the Minds I developmental course with Terri O’Fallon and serves on the Board for the Association for Spiritual Integrity.
Personal Life: As a wife and mother living in the North Cascades, her environment greatly influences her worldview and practice. - Resources: The interview is available as a video and podcast, with a discussion in the BatGap Community Facebook Group. Kimberley’s website is mentioned as ‘The Confluence Experience’.
Full transcript:
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the gas pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done just over 700 of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P and look under the past interviews’ menu. While you’re there at the site, poke around a little bit. We have a relatively new thing that I’ve been working a lot on this this year, a Bat Gap AI chatbot that has over 40,000 documents loaded into it now. And you can ask it all kinds of questions, and have interesting philosophical conversations with it. It’ll even tell you how to cook brown rice, but it’ll also give you some spiritual tips at the end of that. All of this is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So, if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the site, and a page offering alternatives to PayPal. Also, we have a team of volunteers, who are doing various things. So, if you’d like to help in some way, get in touch. My guest today is my friend, Kimberly Teresa Lafferty. Like many of my good friends, I’ve never met her in person, That’s the way it is these days. But I met her through the Association for Spiritual Integrity, which Jack O’Keefe and Craig Holliday and I founded about five years ago. Kimberly is now on the board of directors of the ASI, and I’ve always been very impressed with her clarity and brightness and creativity and positivity and so on, as you’ll see in a minute. Kimberly is a seasoned teacher practitioner, specializing in constructive adult developmental psychology and Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. She completed over 12 years of intensive Indo-Tibetan study, including the required retreats. She leads both open and advanced adult educational cohorts, aligning developmental psychology, and Buddhist theory. She co-leads with Terry O’Fallon the penultimate Mind’s Eye year-long developmental course through Stages International. And I already mentioned the ASI. Kimberly is a wife and mother living in a remote valley of the North Cascades of North America, Washington State, which deeply impacts her worldview and practice. So, Kimberly, welcome.
Kimberly: Thanks, Rick. This is going to be fun. And welcome to all of you who are listening now, and listening in the future. I’m glad you’re here.
Rick: Yeah. And tell us about this place where you live.
Kimberly: Oh, it’s fantastic. I first discovered this place. It’s called Mazama, Washington. Mazama. You can google it y’all and I discovered it 25 years ago, when I was a corporate refugee and really first seriously got on the spiritual path, and it was the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. I’d been for a weekend, for a mountain bike race at the time. I was in my early 20s and it was extraordinary. It was like living in a paradise, but I had a life to lead and a spiritual path to follow, so, I had to leave the valley and just about, oh, 10 years ago or so, I was able to come back. So, it’s really a full circle time for me to live in this place, which is my chosen place once again. Forest is absolutely gorgeous.
Rick: Yeah. So, you and your family just live way out in the boondocks, right? Surrounded by a gazillion acres of forest and
Kimberly: Something like that. Yeah, we definitely live at the end of the road where the last house in the northern end of the valley. Fortunately, culturally, there’s a lot of extraordinary people here, who have also made the choice to live here. So, it’s a beautiful, there’s good restaurants and a good bookstore and a nice art gallery and all the things that a post-postmodern girl could want also. So, that’s nice too.
Rick: Wow, sounds great.
Kimberly: Yeah. Yeah.
Rick: Sounds kind of like northern exposure or something.
Kimberly: I like that.
Rick: If you ever saw that show.
Kimberly: Oh, yeah.
Rick: So, would you call yourself a corporate refugee? So, you were kind of a Starbucks CEO, not CEO, but executive back in the, when you were in your twenties?
Kimberly: Yeah, I was definitely on the executive track. I graduated from undergrad university at 21 with student debt and needing to get a job and not sure what I was going to do. Starbucks was a very young company at the time. Gosh, I think there were less than a hundred stores, if you can imagine. And it was a good job. And I sort of got caught in a good job, and it was a good company, and I was there for seven years. And it was wonderful, like nothing bad to say about it. If you’re going to do the corporate thing, it’s a great place to do it. But there came a time I was 27 or 28, living in Boston, running a large, pretty good chunk of the operation out there, had a fancy boyfriend, had a fancy salary, had a fancy apartment, and I was miserable. I was absolutely miserable. I’d done all the things you’re supposed to do, and it wasn’t working. And I had a big spiritual experience and that’s what got me on the path. So…
Rick: Yeah. Tell us about that experience. You were miserable, so you started dancing and then you went into some yoga poses or something and you had a breakthrough.
Kimberly: I did. I did. Spiritual experience is a first-person experience. So, when I’m talking about it and I’m talking to you listeners, because I believe everybody’s had profound experiences, even if maybe you’ve forgotten. But I was just in a low place. Again, I was 27, 28. And why wasn’t I happy? I had the boyfriend I’d wanted. I was relatively attractive. I was athletic, I had enough money, but why wasn’t I happy and I was really in a state of depression, although I didn’t really know it at the time, and one day I just was miserable and I started to do a practice that I’ve been doing since I could walk it feels like. I just was all by myself in my apartment, and I started to dance. I put on some Annie DeFranco, and I started to move, and my mind -I was so miserable that I just let go. My mind dropped; my breath took over. My breath led the way and I found myself in what we call Pachimottanasana in Sanskrit. it’s a forward fold. You’re sitting on the ground, your legs are straight out in front of you. and you’re folded way down.
Rick: lLke touching your toes or near the…
Kimberly: Touching your toes and yeah, as I’ve said elsewhere, I was a pretty flexy girl, but it was extremely blissful and extremely comfortable. It shouldn’t have been that comfortable. And I remember feeling like I had a choice to start -sort of thinking about, “Why am I this comfortable? Why does this feel so good?” or just let go and go for it. And I did. And it’s my breath, my back actually started to undulate. My breath got deeper and deeper, slowed down and eventually stopped. And the next thing I remember, I was at the top of the ceiling looking down at my body. And I had this sensation, this sort of thought without thought, or words without word of: “Am I safe?” Like, “is it safe to leave? Can I park my body here, basically, and leave?” And the feeling was, yes, you can. And I had what I believe, as I said, many people have had experiences like this. Later, I learned we call it the clear light. It was beyond time, beyond space. No thought, no concepts. We can only really use metaphors or words to try and point to this experience that is beyond words. It was exceedingly blissful and radiant and luminous and very aware and alive.
Rick: Were you totally absorbed in that light, or were you still observing your body down below you?
Kimberly: At that point, there was the light and there was me and there was no difference. And it wasn’t me, it was everything. Now, of course, I wasn’t using any of these words at the time. I came, the next sensation I experienced was a sense of coming down. It was a very visceral sense of coming down back into my body. Again, my breath started up again. I realized I hadn’t been breathing during that time. I had no idea how much time had passed, because you’re not in time. I learned this later. Time is a relative thing. And again, breath slowly came out. My third eye was on fire. Like if you put your hand on my third eye, it was what we call the third eye here was hot. It was very, very hot to the touch. And I slowly came up and I grabbed my journal, I still have it, which is fantastic because we can look at it and do all sorts of analysis. And I started to write down the implications of what I had seen, these insights and tried to capture it. And I remember I wrote in my journal that the only words I could use to describe it were as if one is all things, all things you could possibly imagine one is, and it’s just orgasmic bliss, as if everything, existing thing in the universe was having an orgasmic experience. And orgasm is the only word I could find that was close to it, that completely otherworldly sort of beyond words blissful experience and I had a series of insights, and some pre-cognitive notions about how I would use this experience. it’s almost like it was, well, very much was, it wasn’t almost. I was in contact with a second person, as a first person experiencer, I was in contact with what we think of as a spiritual company. I wasn’t personifying them, I just called them the company. It was this deep, deep sense that I wasn’t alone and none of us were alone. And the insight was “You’re going to spend the rest of your life learning about this and teaching,” (teaching is the word I used,) people how to experience this for themselves using yoga and Buddhism together. Tibetan Buddhism.” Now the outside of a short little class in college, I’d never studied Buddhism. I’d taken one or two yoga classes in my life. That was a real surprise for me. It was a very novel, especially those two together. I never heard of that at that point. This was 19 like ‘97, ‘98. So, I mean, there’s a lot more to say about that, but that was the essence of it.
RICK: Yeah. I remember you saying that even when you were a little girl, like four years old, you’d have these questions like, how did I get here? And who are, how come this guy is my father? And you were asking all these deep questions, trying to make sense of your existence.
Kimberly: Yeah, definitely. I didn’t have the easiest childhood. It wasn’t like capital T traumatic like many people, and we don’t want to get into a thing of comparing our trauma, but I had divorced parents and a single mother. We didn’t have a lot of money, it was hard. It wasn’t what you see on the TV, right? And the gift of experiences like that, is we do start to question Why? Why am I me? Why do I look like this? Why was I born in Stanford California in 1970? Why is this my family, what am I doing? And I’ve learned since then that those challenges, the struggles, the pain, the suffering that was evident in my family of origin and evident all around me, not just my family, walk into a classroom and you experience this. It really gave me the gift of developing deep inner resources and I’m not talking about this association I’m not. I’m talking about this in a very healthy way. I had to start to go within and so from a young age I did have what we might call spiritual experiences. Back then, I called it the holy spirit, because that was the framework that was offered to me. I was going to catholic schools, but I developed a very strong inner confidence and inner resources where I could find what I needed by going within and then finding company, knowing that I was not alone and none of us are. None of us are.
Rick: I heard you say in one of your recordings that trauma has a purpose, that there’s too much opportunity for growth in it for it to be an accident, which I think you were just saying, basically.
Kimberly: Yeah,
Rick: Zooming out a little bit, I just see the whole universe as an opportunity for growth and nothing is an accident whatsoever. And that can seem rather harsh if you consider some of the things that happen to people, but if you zoom out enough, there’s an evolutionary agenda.
Kimberly: Definitely, yeah. The zooming out can be such a refuge and such a gift, you know? We talk to, we’re tracking at the Association for for Spiritual integrity, it comes up in a lot of our conversations. This line between trauma and transcendence, this line between pain and joy, and could they exist without the other? Those polarities? I’m not sure.
Rick: Well, we can talk about that more. Now, this company you’ve mentioned, you seem to be alluding to like some kind of Guardian Angels or some sort of subtle beings or something or other. Is that what you’re saying?
Kimberly: Sure, I am. Enow, all these years later, and all the decades of practice, and all the decades of study, I’m hesitant to put some cultural trappings around them. Mostly because, I don’t know, right? Do I, my mind, my social construction, what I was exposed to, how Kimberly with her history and her experiences, and we tend to make meaning out of these extraordinary experiences or spiritual experiences based on those things, right? I mean, that makes sense. So, my sense now is the company, the insight, what I ask, I get an answer. When I need help, it comes. You have to ask, people; you have to ask. Please remember this, you have to ask. But if you ask, you shall be answered. It might not come, likely won’t come in the way you think it does. But my sense now, if I were to frame it, is; it’s where we all meet. It’s all of our ultimate selves. It feels like, because it’s out of time, it feels in a way like it’s my best future self. And that sounds like a contradiction, but the being that I am, and the being I am becoming both at once. And when I say I, I mean all of us. We are these human beings walking around having these spiritual experiences every day, and one thing I’ve seen, is where ultimately, we walk around as these relative people with social security numbers and we’re sick or we, have this issue or this issue. But ultimately, it’s where we all meet. And so, it’s less individual and more collective, if that makes sense.
Rick: Yeah. Couple of thoughts. Firstly, what you were saying reminded me of that, Bible verse of, “Seek and ye shall find, knock and the door shall be opened.” Once you have the intention. I’ve seen that so many times. When, sometimes people are literally, “I can’t take it anymore.” They’re on their knees praying, and then something happens. Once they since that’s what happened to you.
Kimberly: Yeah.
Rick: Once the desire, once the intention is sincere and ardent enough, “okay, we hear you, we’re coming.”
Kimberly: Yeah. Yeah. One of the messages I got when I sat up, it’s wonderful to recall that experience, too. So, thank you for asking. It was probably, the big one one of my spiritual live, this extraordinary experience I had. I started to get these little messages and the first one was, “Ask the question you have to ask.” And I’m surprised even now how often I forget. We sort of feel lost in the woods sometimes, but we’re not actually asking for help. And then the second one was, “Pay attention to what’s happening.” Develop these senses of of attention to what’s happening in the moment. And that’s served me well since then.
Rick: Yeah. Another thing that comes to mind as you were describing this sort of structure of the reality that we’re talking about, in terms of its universality, how it’s our shared ground state, you could say, is that it is that, but it also arises in impulses, like the ocean. All the waves have a common source in terms of their ocean-ness, but then they also have their individual wave expression, and there are other waves, which might interact with them in some way. So, it’s always, for me, it’s always useful to kind of have a multi-dimensional perspective and not ever say that it’s all this or it’s all that.
Kimberly: Yes, yes, agreed, agreed. And the wave and ocean metaphor is a wonderful one to feel into what I’m trying to use words to describe. I was plunged full on into the ocean in that experience and came back down as the wave.
Rick: Yeah. Wave now realizing that you have an ocean aspect to you, you’re not merely a wave.
Kimberly: Right, but was I enlightened? Was I fully awakened? Was I even awakened? I’m not so sure.
Rick: Those are tricky words. We’ll get into them.
Kimberly: I had to do the work. I had to do the work for that.
Rick: Yeah. So, you came out of this experience, and it was, were you like, “OMG, what just happened? What should I do now?” And, it must have altered your trajectory and gotten you going on things that you wouldn’t have anticipated getting into.
Kimberly: Yes, yes it did indeed. I took a few weeks, a couple months for me to take a sabbatical from my job, just to name check Starbucks again. They were extremely kind to me, extremely generous. They allowed me to take a two-year sabbatical which ended up being, leaving for good. But I knew I needed to go find others, who could not just… I didn’t need someone to explain it to me, but I knew, obviously, I was not the only person who had had experiences like this. Clearly, I was not special. Like, that was obvious, right? And I’m not putting myself down. It was just reality. Like other people had obviously experienced things like this. This is before Google. Okay. So, I couldn’t Google orgasmic bliss experience, leaving your body. That wasn’t something that I could do at the time. And I had been given, the message, you’re going to go study Buddhism, go study yoga and Buddhism. So, within a few months, I moved to this, the most beautiful place I’d ever been. I had enough money, thanks to my well-paying job to take a couple years off. I started to try and meditate. Sounds True was a pretty new publishing company at the time. Amazon, just in the past two years, had started. They were just shipping books back then.
Rick: Yeah, it started with books.
Kimberly: It started with books. I found Ken Wilber also at the same time. I started to read Pema Chodron books, for your listeners who may know the Tibetan Buddhist books. The Dalai Lama was a bestseller at the time. He had written the Art of Happiness I think, the year before. And so, I started listening and as soon as I started listening to Tibetan Buddhism and at the same time digging into Ken Wilber’s integral philosophy, those two domains, they knew what I was talking about, and that’s what I wanted to learn, and it was so similar to my experiences, many of the things that these two arenas were pointing out, that I just started devouring these books. I tried to figure out how to meditate. I continued to have what we call state experiences, temporary experiences that are novel and extraordinary, but I was still Kimberly. I was still, everyday Kimberly and figuring out how to have a life. I met my partner who ended up being my partner for seven years at the time, somebody who also studied Tibetan Buddhism and Wilbur’s work deeply out here in the middle of nowhere in this beautiful valley that I now live in again. And we went to Nepal and went to the Himalayas, and I studied at Kopan Monastery. I found the arena where people were talking about what I wanted to talk about and asking the questions that I wanted to figure out the answers to. And that’s how I got particularly into Tibetan Buddhism very deeply. And then it went from there. But at that point, I went full on as a dharma, we won’t call it a dharma bum, but as a dharma, which is the study of spiritual wisdom, particularly Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, it’s not just Tibetan Buddhism, it’s Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, and got very seriously aligned with the lineage of the Dalai Lama as my particular domain study.
Rick: And so, I presume they had translators in this monastery and you were able to read, Did you learn any Tibetan?
Kimberly: Yes, I did learn some Tibetan. I never was one of those people who completely got into translating, but I learned enough to read it simply. I learned a pretty extensive vocabulary, which you just learn after studying the texts for so long. It was my journey into Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. So, this was now, let’s see, I went to Nepal in ‘99-2000. I remember because we did a trek to Everest. We went up to Everest Base Camp right after a six-week retreat outside of Kathmandu in Bodnath. If anybody of your listeners have been to Bodnath, it’s an enclave just outside of Kathmandu, where there are many beautiful Tibetan Buddhist monasteries. And yeah, it was ‘99-2000 because I remember we were in Namche Bazar, which is a town on the way up to Everest, when on New Year’s Eve ‘99-2000. I remember that, Rick, it was like the world was going to end or something when it turned to like all the computers.
Rick: Oh, Y2K,
Kimberly: Y2K, that was it. Yeah, I was out there in the middle of the Himalayas when that happened. Everything was fine though,
Rick: Yeah, it turned out okay.
Kimberly: Yeah, so I, and at the time I was studying with Rinpoches, I was studying with Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who’s well known in certain circles, studying with Tibetan Buddhists. And it was wonderful, and it was exciting. And then I started to meet the next generation, the first generation of Americans and Westerners that had also gone to India, and also gone to Tibet and learned the teachings and brought them back. And it was really when I found a community of western educated first second generation, I mean for such first and second generation American, let’s just say for lack of a better word, Tibetan Buddhists that it really took off. I think if I had stayed In… you go to these temples. It’s all in Tibetan. There’s a lot of cultural trappings. It’s all beautiful But that’s not what appealed to me. It was the application of the wisdom and how we can apply it to our modern life, While also integrating modernity and what we know about modernity at the same time. So Yeah, so I found some American teachers and communities, and started to study very deeply for the next 12 years and do a lot of retreats, started teaching about halfway through that, encouraged by my teachers to do so.
Rick: So, I heard you mention retreats. How much long retreat did you do? Did you do them in some kind of monastic setting or were you just doing them in your little cabin and on your own? What kind of experiences did you have on these long retreats?
Kimberly: Oh yes, okay. So, well, if I added them up, it’s years of solitary retreat, years of solitary -really my traditional practice for doing solitary is I would do, one to two usually two during this 12-year period five to six weeks solitaries a year, so You go in for five to six weeks. These are what you call layroms or tantric retreats. Once you go through the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist study path and you do all of the prerequisites and you have certain realizations. You enter the path of Vajrayana or the diamond way or tantra and when I say tantra, people think all these things. It’s not any of that. It’s not neo tantra. It’s not what you google. Vijnan Indo-Tibetan Buddhist tantra is an old Traditional, very what do you say, well laid out path of practice. It has two different stages of it in my lineage, and the Anantarya, Yuga Tantra lineage. There are deities, but when you enter that path and you get these tantric empowerments, you make a commitment to do a certain amount of solitary retreats. So, I would go in and I did it in, sometimes I did it in…
Rick: Quick question, quick question. What does the word tantra itself mean if you translate it into English.
Kimberly: Yeah, it means thread.
Rick: Thread, okay. Yeah, Like sutra in Sanskrit.
Kimberly: It means sutra. Yeah, it’s another word for sutra. It means thread and it means lineage. It means lots of different things, right? It’s the main thing that it means.
Rick: Okay. And so did to do these retreats, did you have to get some kind of approval or certification from teachers, more experienced than yourself? Or because I’m sort of, I don’t think most people would do this, but if somebody without the proper training or understanding were to think, “I’m going to do a six-month retreat. I’ll just go sit in a little hut someplace and do this on my own,” I don’t know if that would go too well.
Kimberly: Yeah, have fun. It would either be really boring or really dangerous or somewhere in between.
Rick: And I believe I’ve done some of these long things too. Six months here, six months there, and you get pretty nutty at times, you know? You really need some kind of stabilization and people checking on you and things like that.
Kimberly: Yes, and stable psychology, which perhaps we’ll come to later. The need for modernity, as well, to give us the gifts of what we know of psychological wisdom. Yes, so these particular tantric retreats that I’m talking about, I’m a Vajrayogini practitioner. Vajrayogini is a certain, you think of it as like an archetype or a deity that you practice, and so it’s very rigorous. you’re not just going into a cabin and thinking about nothing. There’s a ritual to go in, there’s a ritual to go out. I would usually do it; I’d find an off-grid cabin somewhere and there are various places around mostly the southwest that I did it. My first lay run again, that’s a word that means to get ready to practice the later stages of Tantra practice, which have to do with your working with your wind, what we call your winds, channels and drops, your subtle body, your energy body, you’re doing very technical visualizations and practices, working with the inner energies of your inner body, right? And the maps of your inner body. So, these tantra retreats, you go in, you have a ritual that’s like a 1500-year-old ritual to go in, you’re meditating four times a day. It’s a four-part retreat. You do a long meditation session before the sun rises, another before noon, a third before the sun sets, and a fourth before bed. You’re doing yoga, you’re eating very healthy, you’re not seeing anybody, talking to anybody. I got to the point where I could hear the electricity, the sounds of just electricity in the walls, I could hear, and it would be disturbing. So, I would usually do an off-grid cabin somewhere. There are many places, if you know where to look. Sometimes you just rent a little house somewhere, and you go in and it’s very rigorous. You don’t see anybody, you don’t have books, you don’t have your phone, you don’t have your computer, but you’re busy.
Rick: Do you have to go into town to buy food?
Kimberly: No, you don’t see anybody.
Rick: How do you get your food?
Kimberly: Yeah, so well, you learn how long cauliflower lasts in your cooler or your refrigerator that you’re unplugging for your meditation sessions. Yeah, there’s different ways to do it. What usually happens is you have a caretaker that does deliveries for you once a week or once every two weeks. Some people like to go on retreat and have people cook for them and deliver food. I didn’t. That was way too distracting for me. I would get, I would start fantasizing about the person who was delivering food and leave them notes and leave them like it was completely distracting. So, I needed to be really on my own. There are places set up for it. There’s a town called Crestone, Colorado, which listeners, there’s wonderful retreat places out there with caretakers that will, give you deliveries. And there’s always a system. You don’t need, we’re not silly, right? Let’s not be silly. There’s always a system where if you need help, if you’re in danger, if you hurt yourself, there’s a way to alert somebody, you know? So that’s always the case too.
Rick: So what kind of experiences did you have on these things, good, bad, and whatever?
Kimberly: Yeah, oh, so many.
Rick: Well, I’m sure it wasn’t about this experience or that experience. There was a higher, broader, more abiding purpose, but there must have been some interesting things along the way.
Kimberly: Oh, yeah, we can talk about the interesting things. Well, zooming out for a second, one thing I can say is over this course of 12 years, as I was doing these retreats, I know that I grew. Like Kimberly, who has her personality and her parts and her shadows and her issues and her traumas. And I know that it helped me grow up psychologically. I’m aware of that and I got that feedback that that was the case. So that’s a good thing. In terms of the experiences, the first retreat I did, the first layrom retreat, I’d done a lot of other solitaries at this point, but the first Tantra retreat I did, where I went in, I was a new Vajrayogini practitioner. And Vajrayogini is this archetype of bliss. She’s a feminine wisdom. She’s what we call a Dakini. She’s considered like the feminine Buddha of all the Buddhas, like the awakened feminine energy, and that she uses desire and passion and love to awaken herself and help others awake wake up and grow up both, and she’s very sexy, and she’s very. She’s got these little teeth, And she’s considered semi-wrathful. She’s not one of those wrathful deities like kali, where she’s going to cut your head off or something She’s just a little bit wrathful, perfect for me. Just very attractive And you’re calling on this yes- second person Deity, the texts say actually exists, right? You can believe it or not, but that they exist. There is actually a dimensional being in the world. They exist as the realization of bliss wisdom itself, and they exist as who we are becoming and in Tibetan Buddhist Tantra, you take these energies and these archetypes, and you absorb them into yourself. And that’s what people either love about it or don’t love about it, right? You’re taking these energies and you’re bringing them into yourself, so that you are becoming a deity yourself like that. An awakened being, not a deity like, “Oh, I’m a goddess. I’m so great.” Nothing like that. It’s this awakened love, bliss, wisdom. So, I went on my first layrom, my first retreat with Vajrayogini, by the way, she’s red. She’s the color red and the texts say that she’s like light; like she’s shining in this sort of ruby red light and the text say she’s red because she’s in love with you, and in love with all beings. Which is really sweet; that she has a crush on you. And I went in my first retreat was at a cabin a little cabin off grid in the Sierra Nevada mountains. My friend, Brian kindly let me use his cabin. You had to hike in like a mile and it was hiking in with my water and going back, and getting another load of things, going back in, and I had just closed- it’s called a sum Boundary. I had just closed a boundary, and it’s an energetic boundary. Your Tibetan bodhisattva Buddhism -I say it often -it’s a mash-up of Indian Buddhism, meeting Bon shamanism, which was the religion of Tibet at the time like a hill tribe religion, very shamanistic a lot of spirits and nature spirits, and I love all that stuff. I grew up catholic. I love saints and incense and Deities and mysticism and I also grew up in the new age, right? So, all of that stuff fit me very well. But I went in, and I closed my boundary, where you walked the four corners, you walk the four directions. and you set this energetic boundary and you make offerings, and you ask any spirits inside or out, inside or out that are going to create obstacles in your retreat- you ask them to leave, and you ask your own. -you can think of them as Guardian angels or ancestors, my grandmothers are with me on these retreats, both of them. And I you ask them to support you and be there with you, and I closed my retreat, and I went back to my little cabin, I still remember it so clearly, and I looked up into the sky and there was this red fireball -like bright red. And I had just done these prayers to this red lady, to teach me and to help me grow up and wake up in in our secular language. And there was this red fireball -like with my eyeballs, I was totally sober, totally straight. not on anything. I’m like “Am I seeing what I’m seeing?” and it was quite large and right above my head and it floated across the sky, and it was a little terrifying. It was a little terrifying in my body. I didn’t start to spin stories about it, but I had just done this long ancient prayer to this red lady, and I remember it was kind of getting close to bedtime and I went inside and I kind of put myself to sleep, and “it’s going to be okay, Kimberly.” And I had amazing dreams that night and that was one of the most powerful retreats, the first one that I did. And there were other, extraordinary experiences, anomalous experiences, which later became a field of study in the next era of my life, after this particular era. I started to study extraordinary experiences and how we make meaning of them, based in large part on the experiences that I’ve had.
Rick: Yeah, we’re going to talk about that. I remember you saying that one time you didn’t set the boundaries properly or something, and you came under attack and the window shades or shutters were flapping even though there was no wind, and there was all this crazy stuff going on.
Kimberly: Yeah, that was the second layrom, the second retreat and this one was in an old guardhouse on ancient Apache land that was fought over. Very, very sad, tragic story of what happened to the Apache and what the American military did to them, of course, and their land. And this land was very bloody. There’s a lot of blood shed on this land. This little stone guardhouse, 150 years old at least, was right by a spring. And the spring, this isn’t a chair of common mountains, this spring was guarded. They had to guard the spring and keep it for the military and keep anybody else away from it. And I went in, it was just a little bed, it was a tiny room. And I went in, and I had such a good first retreat and I’d had a lot of realizations, and I could feel myself growing and I took a very sophomoric approach to this. I didn’t do all of the rituals that you’re supposed to do to protect yourself, because even now my modern mind is like, “oh do I need to make those particular cakes you need to make? In Tibetan Buddhism you have to make these cakes and you make them out of bread and flour and milk. Imagine getting a bunch of wonder bread and tearing it up and putting stuff in there and forming it into certain things, and then cutting up this processed cheese and sticking it on there with toothpicks. I was like, “is this cultural trapping? Do I really need to do this? I’m waking up and I’m growing” and I didn’t take it very seriously, because I was such a great practitioner and so advanced you see and I went to sleep that night and I had a dream. I still see it so clearly in my mind where I I was staying at some beach house, and I left the sliding glass doors open. Like I literally left the doors open and I remember still can see his face. I remember this sort of if we think of it as sort of a demon-like feature like a scary looking monster creature was coming to the glass door and looking in, and looking at me and I knew I was dreaming. It was a lucid dream. And so I woke myself up in the dream and yes, there were papers flying all over the place There’s the window this old window was flapping open. I went outside there’s no wind and I could hear again with my ears, with the with the five senses; not a meditative hearing but a here with my ears, chanting and I might say it’s Native American sounding chanting. I I don’t know, but that’s how it sounded to me how I sort of classified it Deep, deep chanting. I wasn’t afraid, I wasn’t scared, but I knew it was a lesson to take things seriously and I went back inside and I did the mantras I was supposed to do, and I purified things. And the lesson there for me -it wasn’t that you did it wrong. They’re attacking you. It’s that the way we treat our practice, we say in Buddhism, it’’s empty. It’s empty of any self-existence of its own. It has no power from its own side to wake us up. It has no power from its own side to harm us whatsoever. But the way we treat our practice, equates to the results we get and so if I take my practice seriously, of course I’m going to get better results, right? If I cut corners and think I’m so great and lack humility and lack vigor and rigor in my practice, then what kind of results am I going to get? It’s just like anything else. You’re married. I’m married. Of course, our quality of our relationship depends on how we treat it. I we treat our relationship with reverence and joy and honor, of course, we’re going to get better results. So, what I took from that lesson, it wasn’t some, “Oh, they’re going to hurt you,” it was, “Treat your practice seriously. Do it well, and that’s going to create the results that you get.”
Rick: Interesting. Yeah, I was on a six-month course one time, led by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and we were in Biarritz, France at that point. And he said one day “keep your windows closed,” and, then when I went to bed that night, I thought “I like fresh air. I’m going to leave my window open a little bit” and that night. I actually had some kind of dream where I was attacked by some kind of witch-like creature. And I started doing a Sanskrit puja in my mind and that dispelled it, but I thought “Okay, I’ll close the windows.”
Kimberly: Yeah, and also ,I believe after all of these years. It’s a multi-dimensional universe. It’s populated with many things known and unknown, and we are obviously not alone, right? And that has proven to me in my own experience through the decades. Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. So, is there anything more you want to say about your whole Tibetan Buddhist area? Y and I could do an interview every day for a month, and we wouldn’t run out of things to talk about, but is there anything you want to say about this chapter before we move on to anomalous experiences and some other things that we’re going to talk about.
Kimberly: Yeah I know many of the listeners, Tibetan Buddhism, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, for me is an absolutely precious, precious gift to humanity. It is the most complex, spiritual technology that I’m aware of that we had. It was a whole culture. It was a whole social system devoted not to making money or devoted not to advancing technology. As you know, one of my teachers says, “Yeah, Tibet’s technology didn’t get much more advanced than yak butter.” Right? However, I think it was Ken Wilber is the one who said that. However, spiritual, the spiritual technology is the most advanced out there. And I have found that to be true. So, it is a precious gem that part of my mission is to preserve it, save it, and get the jewels. Because I feel like I got the jewels. It also as Americans or Westerners is not modeled in a monastery somewhere, it needs updating and it needs integration with psychology and with the gifts and tools that we have now. That’s what I’d like to see because there can be abuses and there can be problems and many of us have heard of those I certainly am not blind to the issues of Tibetan Buddhism with gurus who have not dealt with their shadows and I have my own stories. Again, that could be a whole other podcast about that. And yet, such precious opportunity for evolving and developing our waking up process. And for me, waking up and growing up are deeply intertwined.
Rick: And you may know the word “Kovach” in Sanskrit, which means like an armor. And it’s said that, there’s perhaps an individual Kovach, which we were kind of just talking about in terms of your preparation for that retreat. And there can also be a Rostra Kovach or a national armor, in a sense, that is created sort of by the coherence or the spiritual potency of the collective consciousness of the people. So, one wonders, well, what happened to Tibet? Was there some kind of corruption in there which caused them to be susceptible to the Chinese invasion? Or was perhaps the Chinese invasion some kind of cosmic play to get them out of Tibet and more into the world so the rest of the world could partake of their wisdom?
Kimberly: Yeah, I’ve been educated. I’ve had an education that is comparable to a Geshe. Geshe is like having two PhDs in Tibetan Buddhism, and if 1959 didn’t happen, if the diaspora didn’t happen, I would have never had that opportunity. What is it really, Rick? Is it true that they were corrupt, or is it true that it was meant to be? Well, what functions? What’s most effective? What is the best way we can see this that is the most true for us? And for me, yeah, I think I just answered that question. If the diaspora didn’t happen, if my teacher didn’t walk over the Himalayas, and go into India and then start to spread this wisdom that was surrounded by the Himalayas, and held secret for so long, I never would have had the opportunity, or to find beings and people that could help me figure out and integrate that experience I had in Boston.
Rick: interesting. So, thanks Mao Tse-tung. Yeah. Or however you pronounce your name.
Kimberly: Right.
Rick: It’s interesting. Sometimes there are these really horrible, catastrophic things that happen, but then the consequence, is that humanity seems to learn a lesson and something good comes out of it.
Kimberly: Trauma to transcendence.
Rick: Yeah.
Kimberly: What’s going on there? Something interesting. Yeah,
Rick: okay, so, um, “Spiritual development from modern research and ancient tradition does waking up automatically grow us up?” Is that what we want to talk about next?
Kimberly: Sure, we could.
Rick: Do states of consciousness and states of ego development intersect? And my answer to the first question is, sorry, I used to think that waking up automatically grew us up, but there’s precious little evidence of it.
Kimberly: Yes, well, I think the mistake that we make often is we have this extraordinary, unity experience, experience of oneness. And it can happen with children. Children have experiences of oneness maybe with a mountain or with swimming with dolphins, and adults too, right? We have these experiences with trees or in nature, maybe we take some substance, and we feel in our being and our body, how our body is connected to everything, and we are all one. And that’s wonderful, right? It’s glorious, it’s a wonderful experience. And then later we start to wake up to the realization, that we are socially constructed beings. That Rick is Rick, and what he calls himself based on how he was raised, the content and context that you were exposed to as you were growing, up your whole story, which I’d love to ask you all about sometime, right? that got you to France and got you into the TM movement and all of these things and we are constructed, based on our exposure and experiences as we are growing up and we start to see that under that, we’re also not that. That there’s something perhaps below that, or under that. That is more our true nature, and we start to see that we can release the social constructions. We can release our context we can release these beliefs of what we are and that identity of self continues to grow, and eventually we begin to see that we are awareness itself and we are aware of Awareness. That I am you, is the you looking through your eyes into my eyes and me looking out through your eyes Is this same awareness that we share and that everything I could possibly perceive, or you could possibly perceive In this room and listeners in the room you’re sitting in; Aal that you perceive is arising in you the big you the capital You, Not the little you, with the social security number. Even say your name to yourself, is arising in your awareness. And so, we see, and this is where our study at stages international and constructive developmental Theory comes in, we can see from the science side, from the research side, how our identity of what we call ourselves, evolves and grows through our lifespan. And is tied to these continuals throughout our lifespan waking up experiences. So to answer your question, no, like spiritual teachers that go out and like, “Oh, I had this experience and now I’m fully enlightened.” I don’t quite believe there’s a fully enlightened personally. There’s no end point. We have these experiences and then we come back down from them and almost always we’re still the same person that we were, right? But spiritual, those waking up experiences we’re finding tend to be natural. They happen to virtually everybody. They may not call it that, but this developmental pattern we see of how our identity changes is something we all share as humans. And no matter what our culture, no matter what our background, if we have educational opportunities, we can progress perhaps faster or farther. But there is this deep intersection we notice between waking up and change. Our identity continuously changes, like who you are today, Rick and how you see the world and how you see yourself, is obviously very different than when you were 10. And different I would say when you were 20, when you were 30, and on and on
Rick: now an interesting question is, let’s say if I had not been doing spiritual practice all those years, how different would I be than what I am now? I think I wouldn’t even be alive, but if, presuming I had lived, I also think I would be very different. But some people argue that, the growth that we experience through spiritual endeavors is just normal maturation, and we’re putting some kind of spin on it, with all of our spiritual lingo that we’ve immersed ourselves in.
Kimberly: Could be, I could see that argument.
Rick: That’s an interesting area for scientific study, if that could be measured somehow.
Kimberly: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting, we find that there are certain things that are necessary, but not sufficient for growth. And part of it is this cognitive maturity that happens in terms of subject-object, in terms of how we’re seeing ourselves and how we see the world. The transformational process, I think, is of the, we’ll call it identity or the ego, was explained very beautifully by the educator-scholar Robert Keegan, Bob Keegan, out of the Harvard School of Education. He’s really a great leader in this field, and he described the subject-object process. That transformation happens when what was previously hidden from us, becomes an object of our awareness. What was previously subject, becomes object and a new subject is replacing it. So that’s a lot of fancy words for saying, let’s say this, we’re all going around looking at the world with a pair of colored glasses on that we’re not aware that we’re wearing. That’s a metaphor for the subjective state of mind, and the transformation process of our identity, or in this case, let’s call it our ego. Now, everybody, when I’m saying ego, it’s not a negative thing. I’m using it as a neutral term. So just think of it as a neutral term like identity. Okay. The transformational process is when we take off those glasses, or maybe they fall off, or maybe someone takes them off and hands it to us. That’s kind of the mystery of how that happens. But we take off those glasses, and we look at them, And we say, “I’ve been seeing the world through this way and now it’s an object.” And we have a new pair of glasses on that. We can’t see and that’s the subject object process and as we continue to take off our glasses throughout our lifespan and say, “oh I’ve been seeing the world this way,” right? We might not use those words. And that’s how we actually continue to evolve and grow and that’s very well tracked. And I encourage everybody to check out Stages International and the courses we’re doing there. I’m not getting a kickback from that, it’s not a financial benefit for me, nothing like that but it really is the best developmental framework that I’m aware of that answers this question and we’re continuing to explore this question of how that waking up and growing up process intersects? What is that process of evolution of our identity as we grow?
Rick: yeah, it would be interesting, I don’t think we’re anywhere near there yet, but it’d be interesting if all these stages of development that both psychology understands and spiritual traditions understand could be thoroughly mapped, and correlated so that we can figure out if there if how the language connects between different cultures that are actually describing the same thing, and also correlated with neurophysiological measures as waking, dreaming, and sleeping have been.
Kimberly: Yes, yes, indeed. And there are some fantastic maps out there that, whenever we do a map in these areas, it’s like everybody has a way of, one of my teachers says, sort of, cutting up reality and talking about it, right? The work of Ken Wilber has some beautiful maps that he’s the great synthesizer, and he puts all the different theoretical maps together so you can look and say, “oh, this map is measuring identity, this map is measuring spiritual intelligence. This map is measuring cognitive development, “right? Because they’re all measuring different things. I love what you’re talking about neurobiology, too, and these maps, are really a matrix of consciousness, how our consciousness evolves how our consciousness develops and that’s really the research that we’re doing.
Rick: Yeah, great. let me get a couple questions in here that people sent in while we’re still on this kind of topic. So, this is from Marty McConnell in Chicago. How do you reconcile or connect such an ancient practice as Buddhism with modern thinking, with science and technology and even therapeutic approaches?
Kimberly: How do you connect the two?
Rick: Yeah, how do you reconcile and connect, juxtapose and harmonize this ancient knowledge that you’ve been studying with modern knowledge, which you’ve also been studying?
Kimberly: Yeah, that is, that’s, thanks, Marty. That is the work, the mission, the experiment of my life and what we’re doing at the Confluence Experiences. We’re looking at how we can bring together in a confluence, these two great traditions of spirit and mind, of spirituality and psychology. How we’re figuring it out. I mean, one thing is to release the nonsense of the cultural trappings or the parts of Buddhism that just don’t function or work well in modernity and doing that very carefully and very cautiously. For example, the practice of guru yoga, the whole guru thing. There’s so much silliness in it. And yet, there’s also a point for the ego having something, somebody to bend its knee to, to actually admit to our modern mind or individualistic mind that thinks we have everything figured out, that somebody else could teach me something. That itself Is difficult for the modern mind. So, for example guru yoga, how do you not throw out the baby with the bath water to use a common term? But yet let go of the cultural ridiculousness, for us; the stuff that doesn’t really apply anymore and keep the gold, for all that the dross keeps the gold. And then psychology, psychology… B
Rick: efore you get off that point, I would say one of the biggest challenges there is on the guru’s shoulders to have the maturity not to have all the adulation go to his head, which 95% of the time it seems to do, causing all kinds of problems.
Kimberly: Yes, I mean, this is a big, we’ll get there, but this is a huge part of our mission and work at the Association for Spiritual Integrity, is how do we help and support our spiritual teachers of multiple denominations or non-denominations to do that well.
Rick: And a lot of teachers these days are trying to adopt a non-hierarchical approach, even in the way they arrange the chairs, and it’s still obvious that they’re kind of the leader, but there’s an attempt to sort of say, “Hey, we’re all in this together.”
Kimberly: Right. Yeah. I mean, we could talk about it a lot. This is what we’re experimenting with and doing at the Confluence Experience. I started a Tantra group, a Vajrayana cohort. We’re a year in. For the first time in 12 years, I started one. And there is a horizontal power structure in terms of, “I’m Kimberly. I’m vulnerable. I don’t have anything to hide. I’ll tell you about the argument I had this morning with my husband. I’ll tell you about my…” I’m honest with I’m clearly doing shadow work. I’m there with you as a fellow spiritual aspirant and yet If I don’t step my job is to be the holder of that seat, my job as a lineage holder is when I am giving, say a tantric empowerment, which I’m doing in a month, if I if I don’t hold that, it’s not Kimberly It’s not Kimberly holding it. If I don’t take that seat, then I can’t help anybody. And I didn’t spend those 15, 20 years, what good was it? So, it’s this flex flow between a horizontal power structure when it’s appropriate, and I’m sorry, people hate the word, but it’s not a power hierarchy, it’s an experience hierarchy.
Rick: Yeah, and kind of a knowledge wisdom hierarchy. –
Kimberly: A knowledge wisdom hierarchy, And then in my circle, when I’m not making the business decisions, somebody with more business experience is making the business decisions, because they hold the seat in that case. Or our AI expert in the field is making the AI decisions. So, we’re experimenting with this flex flow structure where when it’s appropriate, it’s horizontal. When it’s appropriate, the person who has the most experience in that domain is the one who’s leading us, because then we’re leaderless and you can’t go very far.
Rick: Yeah, and that’s the way the world works. You don’t go to, you don’t spend tens of thousands of dollars to go to university to study with a bunch of people that don’t know any more than you do. The whole assumption is that these guys really know something and that’s why I want to spend time in their presence. But then, on the other hand, it doesn’t grant these professors the liberty to do whatever they want and to dismiss you if you question what they’re doing. Like, if they want to sleep with all their female students or something, their knowledge of physics does not excuse that kind of behavior. And I would say the same should be true of any kind of supposed spiritual attainment, because you and I have heard these stories about people saying, “Oh, I’m not sleeping with the women, it’s God doing it, and I’m just an instrument of God,” and yada yada.
Kimberly: oh please, yeah, and just to get it on the tape, every spiritual teacher, so those of you out there looking, you want to progress spiritually, you want to increase your spiritual intelligence, your spiritual wisdom, have waking up experiences, wisdom, love, care, compassion. It’s like learning anything else. Go find a community a teacher That help you learn, and that teacher whoever it is or that community should uh have some sort of feedback process, should be doing their own shadow work or psychological shadow work, therapeutic work, should also be a person, be human. You can be human and divine at the same time, and that actually we all are, and that’s part of the path that we walk.
Rick: Yeah, and just one more point to throw into in here, is that I’ve had people actually argue with me that there is no correlation between awakening and behavior. You can be an awakened drunkard. You can be an awakened, womanizer or whatever and I disagree. I think that in the beginning you start to use the terms awakening or enlightenment, things like that a little bit. We both sort of got a little skittish when we use those words. But I think that if we’re going to use them, then we shouldn’t just be referring to some inner state of consciousness, we should be referring to a holistic development that has somehow occurred, in which you are really walking your talk and, and that, all the various purifications have taken place in whatever way that is understood. It’s understood differently by different traditions, but most traditions do emphasize the importance of an ethical foundation and a real purification of one’s whole mind-body system, emotional system, and shadow system, and all that other stuff, if you’re really going to be a fit reflector or receptacle for this higher consciousness.
Kimberly: yes. You said it, Rick. You can, two points I want to make about that. You can truly tell spiritual wisdom by behavior. It’s about behavior. Does behavior change? And you go out, say you have some psychedelic experience, you have some awakening, whatever experience, does your behavior change? It’s all about, am I kinder? Am I wiser to self and others? You’re a person too. So, am I kinder? Am I wiser? Am I more compassionate? Am I starting to take off those glasses, and see with new eyes, right? So, the other thing, and this is very, very strong in the lineage of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, the big goal is to see what we call emptiness, which has a lot of meanings in itself, and is an evolving thing, or ultimate reality, or satori, right? Where you perceive, you pierce reality directly, and see how reality functions for yourself. Nobody can tell you or tell you to believe it. It’s really a belief system. It’s a path of practice where you see and experience realization for yourself. And one… I don’t have to say…
Rick: It would be absurd to say, “I believe I’m holding a pen here.” It’s obvious.
Kimberly: Exactly. So, in the old Ripoches, to my own lived experience of this, there’s no disagreement. You know you’ve had a real experience of wisdom. You’ve had a real capital R realization. It’s called a tokpa. It’s an embodied realization, like the real deal, awakening and like whatever. If automatically, spontaneously, naturally, your heart opens and there’s a like a, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to change the way I do things. “Oh my gosh, I want to care for other people. Oh my gosh, I want to be loving and more compassionate, and more forgiving of selves and other”. And so, if that compassionate side and experience doesn’t immediately follow the wisdom side, then we’re off base somewhere. The two go together like two wings of a bird.
Rick: Yeah, now bring in the chakra model. I think that there could be awakenings in some chakra, maybe the head chakra or whatever, without a corresponding awakening in the heart chakra. So, it can be a partial development or partial awakening and some of these things can be very intoxicating and convincing and one can jump to all kinds of conclusions about one’s state of development or completion. But that’s why as you said earlier, there’s no end to it. I think we’re all works in progress and it’s like the word education. Are you educated? Yeah, I’m educated. Could you be more educated? Of course, I could always learn more.
Kimberly: Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah, that’s really true. And it’s interesting too, about the chakras, because in my practice, and in the tantric Vajrayana practice that we do, very loosely, you develop wisdom cognitively and through embodied experience, develop compassion, start to, to change your behavior. And then once that foundation is laid, once what we call shadow work is done, once we’ve done a lot of healing of our early childhood stuff and the things that have happened in our life and we’ve applied the psychological tools that we also have at our disposal as modern complex humans, then you start to work with opening up those chakras, which are not pretty little flowers, they’re choke points in our body. And this is the system, the technology of Tibetan Buddhism, that we have an energetic subtle body, and you start to work with shooting energy and opening energy up to open the heart, to ground and to open up our different areas of our body.
Rick: The point you just made might relate to a question that Alyssa from New York State asked. In practicing both Western psychological development lines and a Tibetan Buddhist Vajrayana worldview, I struggle with the fact that a lot of Western developmental psychology models are defined by social, educational, economic norms, many of which I don’t necessarily agree with, and more importantly, they are not uniform across cultures, versus the transcendent model of Buddhism. Does that help? Does that make sense?
Kimberly: It’s a great point. It’s a great point, Alyssa. -Great point, Alyssa. I mean, no doubt you could argue that these developmental models were created in the context of the frame of, Western educated, usually white people, creating these models and doing these studies mostly with Western educated white people. That is certainly true. And the social context and constructs that we have that create our, that’s relative reality and that’s what creates our relative reality. So, fair point. On the other hand, there is so much data and research that is cross-cultural, that these human waves that we go through or stages or structures, you can think of it like a, like the rungs on a ladder, or as one of my teachers more accurately defines it, it’s like a balloon. Like we were talking about, Rick now is very different than he was in other areas of your life, your growth is more like a balloon. And there is quite a lot of evidence that all humans, all around the world, go through these waves or structures of human becoming in a very similar way. They’re deep features, similar with surface structures that look different. And there really isn’t argument in, again, yes, it’s the academic world, it’s going to have its own sort of rules and languages and ways of seeing, but there’s been just literally dozens and dozens and dozens of studies that are cross-cultural that validate this data. So…
Rick: Let me ask you a couple of questions from Rin Esser in Turkey, and Rin makes a point that she’s a female, because we wouldn’t necessarily know that from the name. So, first question, why does non-duality make so many people impractical in daily life, as if in a vegetative state? It puts me in this space of non-thinking and being non-engaged with life.
Kimberly: Oh, well stop doing it. Stop doing it, girl. What a beautiful question and thank you for asking it. And non-duality is a big topic. There’s a lot of things we can be non-dual with. Who’s the looker? What’s the object? What’s the subject? If anything is bringing you to that place, then I would try something else.
Rick: Yeah. I would encourage you, Rin, to watch my interview with Jessica Eve. We talked about this at great length. And there’s a verse in the Gita that says, “Yoga karma sukoshalam.” Yoga is skill in action. And yoga is non-duality. It’s union. So, if you’re really experiencing non-duality, you should be actually more dynamic, more skillful, more effective in action. And if you’re not, then something’s missing.
Kimberly: Yes.
Rick: And here’s a second one from the same person. What does it mean when you say you can find anything by going inside? As a non-awakened human, when I look inside for guidance, I feel confused and not finding answers to my questions. What can I do to get clear guidance?
Kimberly: Thank you for that. And I appreciate the opportunity to clarify that. So, thank you for the question. Speaking of my personal lived experience, when I go inside, I find the cosmos. By cosmos, I mean capital K Cosmos, which is beyond space and time. By going inside, it’s much more than my individuality. I go inside to find the outside and the two are not one. I would say, I would ask you to keep asking the questions, to find a teacher or a community that you can connect with, because you obviously have a lot of passion and desire, and the internet provides a lot of opportunity if you’re not finding it in the town that you live, to, connect with me, connect with others, to keep exploring this, and you’re not alone. You’re not alone. That’s what I want to tell you as well.
Rick: Good. Okay, unless you have anything else at the tip of your tongue, let’s start talking about anomalous or extraordinary experiences, which you’ve been researching a lot lately and very interested in. So, start us off to explain what those are and why and how you are interested in them.
Kimberly: Yeah, thanks. So anomalous experiences, is just another way of saying extraordinary or out of the ordinary experiences. They’re defined as in the literature, meaning, in good grounded psychological literature, different categories of anomalous experiences. You might find like that fireball I saw in the sky that one time, things like UFOs you see in the literature, or craft, or things that you see that seem to be outside of you. Other categories of anomalous experiences are around time and space where we have maybe precognitive dreams. There’s lots of good research on data on people having a dream where they see something in the future and then it happens. Maybe somebody dies or there’s a car crash. There’re anomalous experiences around death is very common. Somebody close to you dies and maybe you get a visitation, or the moment they die, you sit up in bed and you had no idea they were sick, you know they died. Or around death, very extraordinary experiences around near-death experiences, those who report near-death experiences. Lucid dreaming can be categorized as anomalous experience. What we call non-human entities, people have encounters with beings that do not seem human, right? So, this is part, this is not weird, people. This is part of our human story. If you look through our literature, through all of our humanities, it is riddled with these extraordinary experiences, which are not only mythic, they’re not only story, right? Most of us, almost everybody I’ve ever sat down and talked to and really started to question have had something, an experience they can’t explain. And so, like I explained a couple of them, right? Like things that were non-ordinary, that were classified as extraordinary. And I’ve had them most of my life. So, when I, after my 12 years deeply studying Tibetan Buddhism, I had a calling. I had a deep call to that that era of my life was complete and that I had sort of gotten stuck. I’d plateaued in my own growth and development. And I had a very clear vision and call it was actually a precognitive moment, which perhaps I can get to where when I met my now husband, and I saw that my future in the next era was going to involve having a child, being a wife, and getting out of my precious little bubble and being out in the world. And that was a big surprise to me. I did not expect that this was going to be the next era of my life. And during that time, I went back to graduate school. I got degrees in human development. I did long years of doctoral work. And I picked as my dissertation topic, I studied anomalous experiences and how we make meaning of them. Because at the time as a spiritual teacher I’d been for many years, I am the recipient of these stories. You have something really wild happen to you, who do you tell? People are going to think you’re crazy, right? Well, I hear the stories. That’s the gift I get of holding the seed I do as a spiritual friend for people. And I knew I wasn’t crazy, I knew other people weren’t crazy. So, I wanted to know; how do we not- my job is not to, and my research is not about proving whether that red fireball was really up there, or proving whether there were really ghosts, or spirits in my retreat cabin, or proving if you get a visitation from a being of light whether it’s real or not. I’m not interested in that.
Rick: t’s also very problematic because this stuff is really hard to prove. Even if half the population say they have experienced these things, how do we know it’s not hallucination? How do we know they didn’t dream it up? You can’t prove it as easily as you can, the existence of the fact that the earth is not flat, and something like that.
Kimberly: Yeah, yeah, and true. And as I was digging into this research, and into the modern Western psychological research, it was very clear, there’s, good work being done, that the majority of people who report these types of experiences are sane. They don’t display mental health issues, other than our normal everyday mental health issues that we all have, right? Like they don’t, these are normal everyday functioning people in the world who, when you sit down and talk to them, most everybody has a story, right, that they can’t explain. And what happens when we have these experiences often is we go into a sort of ontological shock. Rick, maybe you have one that you can share with us, but you have it sort of out of the ordinary experience and ontological shock just means, how do I make meaning of this? It’s like the mind searches for how to frame this. What does this mean? What does this mean about reality? What does this mean about myself? And so, I started to study the different types of anomalous experiences that people had and I listed some of them. And more importantly, I started to look at how the meaning making we make of it, like how it impacts us, and how we frame it to ourselves, tends to change as we grow, as we evolve in our child, in our adult lifespan. How we think of it when we’re young, becomes different than how we think of it now. And I started to really look at that, because it’s also a big part of our humanness, is these extraordinary experiences.
Rick: Yeah. And I can hear some people thinking, well, don’t so many different spiritual traditions and teachers say that such experiences are distractions, and you shouldn’t pay any attention to them? How come she’s so into studying this stuff if it’s a distraction, if it’s a cul-de-sac.
Kimberly: Yeah, I can understand that. Well, it’s part of our human gift. It’s part of our human story, right? And I believe that these extraordinary experiences that we have, give us big clues and indicators of where we’re headed and where we’re becoming in our human evolution, you know? Because often, they’re signs from sort of our future self, these experiences, these encounters that we have start to make more sense the more we mature and as we go. And that’s something that I’ve definitely seen happen in this research that I’ve been doing.
Rick: Yeah, and the fact of the matter is, people have them, you’re going to have them, even if you’re not seeking them. Obviously, I think you can get obsessed with stuff like this and start seeking it to the neglect of something more, something deeper and more abiding. But even if you’re just going straight for that, you’re going to have these experiences along the way. And I think on the one hand we could say maybe they’re meant to be there to be enjoyed, or to teach us something like Like if you’re driving to California, you might want to stop and see the world’s largest ball of string or the world’s largest frying pan or something that they’ve got on some kind of walled drug in western South Dakota. You see the signs for hundreds of miles before you get to it. So, these things are not necessarily, and if they were mere distractions, why would they be discussed in such great detail in so much spiritual literature? Why would so many saints and sages have written autobiographies and described those experiences?
Kimberly: Indeed. And one of the main takeaways of the study and just listening to people’s stories, is that relates to everything I’ve learned in my own spiritual work as well, and also, in the psychological work and study that I’ve done, is we think consensus reality is so real. We think that the way we see things is exactly the way they are and my political view is true and yours is not true. And we get so boxed in thinking we’re living in these, it’s almost like we’re living in our own little phone booths of reality. And when these experiences happen, like the phone booth gets blown up. it’s like we start to see that this sort of consensus belief system that we’re operating in, that there’s, something more, that something else is going on. And that’s the why. It’s a way, because these are experiences that so many people have had outside of any spiritual tradition, right? These are mostly ordinary people living their life, right? They’re not running off to Tibet or running off to the monastery, or they are ordinary people living their life and something extraordinary happen to them, right? These are people. And so, what is going on? One of the, this question I’ve been asking since I was a little kid, who am I? What is real? Why are we here? I believe that by exploring these anomalous experiences, by taking them seriously and understanding that they’re actually pretty normal, that we can find a clue in our human story to what act to answer those questions that I’ve been seeking since I was a kid.
Rick: Yeah, would you agree? I think it -actually I thought of this as you were telling your initial experience in Boston that I think sometimes these experiences are ways of God or whoever, zapping us to kind of create an imprint that we can’t forget and that is going to impel us to continue to search. kKnd of like Richard Dreyfus when he was a telephone lineman in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He got zapped by the bright light from the UFO and then it was a brain implant. He couldn’t forget it. it would it just come it just obsessed he obsessed about it until he finally reached the goal that it had it had Implanted in him.
Kimberly: Yup, piling those potatoes.
Rick: Yeah, right. This means something. Just means something.
Kimberly: I love the way you describe that, Rick, because that to me is more real than this getting up, going to work, arguing with your neighbor, arguing over politics, what is right, what is wrong. That to me is capital R real, right? And what is going on there, it’s so universal, it’s so steeped in our who we were as humans and who we’re becoming. That for me, it’s like the golden fleece of system.
Rick: Yeah,
Kimberly: And we have a lot to learn. We have a lot to learn.
Rick: One of my biggest, earliest ontological shocks was the first time I took LSD when I was 17 and the main takeaway from it was that the shock, actually shocking realization that everyone saw the world differently. I always assumed everyone saw the same world. And that that morning after being up all night, we went into a donut shop and we’re buying donuts and I was just marveling at how I appeared to be seeing the world just compared to the women selling us the donuts and was thinking, wow, we’re just all in different universes. And one thing I sometimes wonder, and people have suggested this, is that the psychedelic renaissance that seems to be taking place now as untethered as many aspects of it are, could be kind of a collective jolt to enable lots of people to realize that there’s more to life than meets the eye. And I don’t think it’s any kind of ultimate solution. They’re going to have to get on to more natural practices and so on, but it could be a sort of catalyst initially to… which otherwise, the millions of people who are doing that, might not do in any other way.
Kimberly: Indeed, yeah, we could certainly talk about that. It is common, and I did not include psychedelic experiences in my study, because they’re really a category of their own, so the experiences that I was codifying happened with kind of a quote-unquote normal state of mind and more recently really been looking at um the psychedelic renaissance as you say and what a gift it can be to have exactly the experience that you described, which is taking off those glasses individually and collectively and you looked and saw “Wow, This is how I saw before and now I see differently”, right? It can be very, very useful for that, and I believe that the second psychedelic renaissance seems to be really doing a lot more good than harm right now and the danger of it is misuse, just like everything else and using psychedelics as a path where “This is how I’m going to have this experience, instead of learning to do it myself.” If you learn to do it yourself, you can replicate it. So, I am pro psychedelics. I’m not saying I’m against psychedelics. I think the usefulness is very much there and we need to be really cautious at the same time. Just like anything right anything can be abused. The other thing we see is, with overuse of psychedelics what we call the self can get dissolved and deconstructed and blown out again and again and again, so that the self can’t quite coalesce and by self. I mean like your identity your healthy persona, your healthy identity. So, we want to make sure that we don’t overuse it. It really is something that should be used as it was intended in our traditions, Including the Tibetan Buddhist tradition use of substances as a sacred, rare, precious opportunity that you do. You have an extraordinary experience like you did and then you go integrate it. You go Integrate it. So that’s really important.
Rick: Yeah, some teachers say that it actually damages the subtle body in a way. I think Carlos Castaneda’s teacher, if he was a real person, and if that’s a real story, said something similar. He kind of gave that to Carlos as a way to kickstart his journey, but then he said, “Okay, if you keep doing this, it’s going to do you harm. Now you have to do it without.”
Kimberly: Exactly right. That’s exactly right. Yeah. – Agreed.
Rick: Yeah. And I hear stories of people who don’t heed that warning and just going on and on with the stuff and Who just get pretty out of it? So
Kimberly: mmm um
Rick: Yeah, okay. So, where’s what next? I’m sure we haven’t exhausted this topic.
Kimberly: no no, well, I would … what we can talk about is the ASI.
Rick: okay We’ve alluded to some of that stuff, but let’s say more. k Yeah, so the association for spiritual integrity, I’ve been working with for two years and I it’s the first time in over a decade and a half, that I was called to work with a non-profit and work with an organization that is focused on supporting, educating, bringing conversation around spiritual work in the world- specifically how we support spiritual teachers, spiritual communities in the world and the importance of ethics. It really is about, as we go forward as a spiritual aspirant, where is the place of ethics in our practice, individually and collectively? Do communities that we are involved with have ethical standards? The ASI, we have an ethical code that we encourage and ask our members, to commit to whether they’re spiritual teachers or spiritual students, and then we have organizational codes of ethics as well. And I guess what I want to ask you is…
Rick: I want to just actually say that I’m the one who puts up the list of all the members and everything, and we have, I think, 600 and well, quite a bit more than 600 individual members now, and I think 32 or 33 organizational members. So, it’s growing.
Kimberly: Yeah. So, what have you noticed in your years of work with ASI? Like what do you see are the sort of the best practices or the big problems out there that you’re noticing?
Rick: Well, the ASI started because, I think it was the 2018 Science and Nonduality Conference. Jack O’Keefe, Craig Holliday, and I all gave talks on this similar topic unbeknownst to one another. We hadn’t coordinated them. Jack and Ellen Emmett attended my talk, among other people, and we got together for lunch afterwards. And over lunch, I don’t know if it was Jack, it might have been Jack’s idea, we decided we should start an organization, which originally we called the Association for Professional Spiritual Teachers, but I wanted to broaden it a bit, and add the word “integrity,” I wanted to, I like the word, the term “spiritual integrity,” because it doesn’t exclude students, which I think are an important component in the whole thing. So, issues I’ve seen, obviously, it almost seems like the norm rather than the exception that spiritual teachers from the East are ethically compromised. They perhaps were raised in an Ashram, didn’t have any kind of, you know, shadow work or psychological work or training in, and had assumed certain things perhaps about their own development, which when they got into a Western culture, just sort of crumbled. They were, they discovered they had all kinds of drives and impulses they didn’t realize they had. I’m just conjecturing about their inner motivations. But personally, I feel like spirituality is the hope of the world. It’s the most fundamental thing that a person can experience, and if it can be experienced more broadly, more collectively, it will be the most pivotal or fundamental thing to bring about change in the world. And therefore, when I see so many spiritual teachers violating basic ethical codes, that you shouldn’t even violate if you’re a teenager, much less an adult, much less a spiritual teacher, I feel it sabotages the whole enterprise of spiritual awakening in the world, and it also disillusions spiritual seekers. I know instances of people committing suicide, they were so disillusioned, or at least getting off the spiritual path because they decide that it’s a whole- it’s a bunch of bunk if their teacher could behave this way. And I think that’s tragic, both for them, and again, for the whole world. And so that’s a bit of a long answer, but that’s my orientation.
Kimberly: Mm hmm. Yeah, we’ve done some I and thank you, thank you for starting the ASI, because I feel like we’re growing quickly, we’re evolving quickly. And we’re also only just beginning. if you hadn’t had that lunch, at the time, we wouldn’t be seated here. So, I want to thank the past you for doing that, from this seat here.
Rick: And especially, I think we should thank Jack who has been, this thing wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without her. She’s like this dynamo, Jack O’Keefe. We all acknowledge her as the leader of it.
Kimberly: Yeah, we love you, Jack. Thank you. Keep doing the good work. We’ve done some developmental, psychological, sort of psychometric assessments on spiritual teachers, a lot of spiritual teachers out there, and the vast majority of them, I’m speaking very generally here, speaking as a spiritual teacher myself, they’re not as advanced as they think they are, developmentally, just to sum it up.
Rick: And someone might say, “Who are we to judge?” But perhaps you could answer that question. But I also, personally, my attitude is it’s much safer to underestimate your level of advancement. Consider yourself a beginner. Because compared to what is possible, we all are.
Kimberly: Absolutely. And so, again, spiritual teachers, what we want to encourage, what we want to educate in ourselves and others, is to keep doing the work. To do-any spiritual teacher should also have a therapeutic process or practice at some point in their life. They should also have shadow work. They should have peer review and peer feedback and if that’s not happening, then there’s a real danger to get stuck to get developmentally stuck to not think you need to grow. And that’s where problems start to come in. So that’s what we want to avoid.
Rick: And we have peer groups in the ASI, don’t we?
Kimberly: We do. We have peer groups in the ASI, which is something we’re going through a pilot with. We put, dozens and dozens of people through and look forward to launching that in a wider scale in our membership in the probably in the next 18 months or so. I myself am involved in a peer group of other spiritual-like teachers. It is, we’re on year two, it is one of the most precious areas of my own development where I can show up with other spiritual type teachers or leaders in their field and talk about things that you can’t talk about elsewhere, to share issues that you have as a teacher thematically, individually, collectively, and that’s a precious opportunity. Because our spirituality is, Who was it? I think it was Kant who said, you know, you’re in modernity when you don’t want to be caught praying. Right, like you don’t want someone to walk in the room and catch you praying. Modernity is thrown out. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for not so good reasons, Aae religious traditions because there has been a lot of nonsense. There is a lot of abuse like we acknowledge this right? This is all happening and yet these spiritual traditions are these, this precious as I started this call it gift of humanity and life without a spiritual life, at least for me and for many of us, is, flat. It’s flatland. What’s the meaning? What’s the purpose? Is it just to eat more to have another great vacation? I love good food. I love vacations. Don’t get me wrong.
Rick: But he who dies with the most toys wins, right?
Kimberly: Right, I wish it worked. I wish it worked, right? I wish it works. But after you get to the point and the great classic text, the Heart Sutra, which is something that I’m going to be teaching publicly the first weekend in May. So, I’m inviting anybody to, come check that course out if they’d like. It outlines, it’s just one of the great classic texts of Buddhism, perhaps the classic texts. It’s the most taught, it’s the most quoted, the most misunderstood, it’s the most mysterious. It sounds like an acid trip.
Rick: How does it go? Isn’t there like one verse that is the most famous from the…
Kimberly: is emptiness, emptiness is form.
Rick: Yeah.
Kimberly: What the heck does that mean? Well, fortunately, due to the kindness of my teachers, I got a word by word, understanding and translation and teaching on what it means. And when you dig into it, it’s profound. And not only is it profound in terms of everyday application to your life, but it lays out the path of practice, how to actually practice. So, it’s this gem of spirituality, and I agree with you. It doesn’t have to be a tradition, it doesn’t have to be Buddhism, but a human life without our spiritual life, what kind of human life is it? Right? And so, for example, the Heart Sutra lays out these milestones and these steps of how to practice. And the first step, the way that you even begin to step on the path and start your spiritual journey, is you realize that you want to, you realize that you have to, that there’s something more than having the most toys and dying, then getting that next promotion, then making more money, then getting the boyfriend. It’s like what happened to me in Boston, that blessing of happening in Boston. If I wish this worked, I wish the fancy apartment and fancy boyfriend in the family- it’d be great if it did, right? But there’s something missing. And that first step is, Nin Jun in Tibetan is renunciation, is to get serious about the spiritual path. And the Heart Sutra lays that out, lays that out very, very clearly how to do that. And that’s really beautiful.
Rick: I did a panel discussion with Mukti, who’s Adyashanti’s wife, and Francis Bennett and Locke Kelly at one of the S.A.N.D. conferences all about the Heart Sutra. So, people can find that on BATGAP if they want. But what you’re saying here is very important because this, spiritual stuff is, it’s real, and it actually is like if we want to use the ocean analogy again, the apartment and the boyfriend and the money and the this and the that, those are the waves and there’s nothing wrong with waves. But we’re missing out on the whole ocean beneath the waves if we don’t probe into this deeper reality that spirituality enables us to probe. And therefore, we’re unfulfilled.
Kimberly: Yes, yes, And we have to see it for ourselves. Nobody can tell us. No. It’s not a belief. It’s not like, “Oh, I believe it or I I don’t believe it.” We, our own, our mind, our hearts, are the nature of the ocean already. But until we see that for ourselves, until we experience that for ourselves, it’s just an idea, right? It’s just a belief. Once we do experience that for ourselves, everything changes, everything changes. –
Rick: One of the descriptions of Brahman or ultimate reality is that one of its attributes is said to be bliss. And it’s said that any happiness we derive from outer circumstances, is just sort of a reflection of that inner bliss bouncing off the outer thing, the way the moon reflects sunlight to us at night. And that’s why it can’t really be that illuminating, as the direct cognition of that bliss is, after which then everything is seen as that.
Kimberly: That’s right. Yes, after which everything is seen as that. we practice, we figure out how our behavior creates more bliss and more happiness for ourselves and others and how it does it. We figure out how to be a better wave, so to speak, how to be the most evolved relative. Another word for the wave is a relative self, right? Relative reality. We are walking around minds and bodies and social security numbers and that too can evolve. That’s the growing up part. Like we’re not stuck in these bone booths, we can blast out, and evolve and become something extraordinary because we see the claims of say example, Tibetan Buddhism and also yoga like Patajali’s Yoga Sutra, I’ve studied deeply, deeply, deeply, and it lays out a path of practice about how we can evolve our minds, evolve our bodies into something else, right?
Rick: Yeah, obviously, a lot of people when they think of spirituality they think of monks in caves. And basic attitude of the monk is apparently, “Well, the world sucks and I don’t want anything to do with it, so I’m just going to stay in this cave and marinate in my inner experience.” But there’s a cool verse in the Gita which goes, “Contact with Brahman is infinite joy.” And we could use the analogy of lying still in a bathtub and it doesn’t feel that warm or sloshing around a bit and all of a sudden you feel the warmth. So, if one is able to access that inner reality and engage in an ordinary life, like you were doing, then that life serves as a something to mix, to slosh up the bathtub with. It stirs up the bliss. And actually, end sup with something that’s more than the sum of its parts. More fulfillment than you would have just sitting with your eyes closed in a cave or just engaging in the world without experiencing the inner reality, somehow the two together you get 200%.
Kimberly: Oh yes, you preach yes, yes, and yes again. And that is what you just define Tantra in my word, that’s my Tantra and my path. And what we’re doing in our Tantric communities that the confluence experiences, coming together in community and supporting each other to slosh around in that bathtub. And to be in the world yet be infused with wisdom and bliss and kindness and care and compassion and to live fully alive lives as spiritual human beings in this world. Doing our gifts. The Talking Path is about stepping into your gifts, finding your deepest callings, stepping into your power and using it for good.
Rick: And you’re not only infused with the bliss, but you infuse it into the world as an instrument, an infusion tool. As you move through your life, you kind of radiate that kind of influence. And that’s how it’ll, I once when I was a kid, I saw this, this thing where they had a whole room full of mousetraps and with ping pong balls on the mousetraps. And they just kind of set off one of the mousetraps and then ping pong ball flew set off another one, that set off others, and the whole next thing you know, the whole room was popping. So, I think that we have this influence on everyone and it’s mutual and the more people begin to exude the kind of influence we’re talking about here, the more exponentially it will grow.
Kimberly: That’s gorgeous. Yeah. One of the terms I use for that is mutual enactment. Each moment we are mutually unfolding reality. We are mutually enacting reality. He great Buddhist scholar we were talking about him earlier, perhaps before the call, Robert Thurman. He is going to… you did a… you did a… did you say you did a call with him once?
Rick: I’ve done two in-person interviews with him at the S.A.N.D. conference.
Kimberly: Yeah, yeah, he… same idea. He had a beautiful metaphor.
Rick: I just started laughing. He went into this thing about DMT suppositories. My first interview with him.
Kimberly: Somehow, it’s all connected with the subtropics, but his metaphor was it’s like bubbles in a bath, where you’re in a bath and it’s full of bubbles and one bubble lights up what happens to the bubbles around it?
Rick: Right, so yeah analogy
Kimberly: So that’s the why? We want our human lives to be full of meaning, to be full of depth, to step into our greatest gifts and our greatest power. And sometimes these spiritual experiences happen out of nowhere, like I described what happened to me in Boston, right? It was like a blessing, and it came out of nowhere. But the rest of the, any sort of progress that I’ve done has come from practice. It has come from putting my attention on it, taking it seriously, not just kind of sitting around waiting for things to change or evolve, right? Is taking it seriously. And that’s what I really encourage your listeners to do, is get on a path of practice. It doesn’t have to be mine, it doesn’t have to be what you were raised with. It doesn’t even have to look like a traditional spiritual thing, but find really what you want to learn spiritually in a community that you want to learn with, because we are harmed in relationship and we are healed in relationship, right? We want to be in a relationship with perhaps a lineage and a community that really suits us. So there is a plethora of opportunities out there now in this world, on this BATGAP. The resources on BATGAP, there are I don’t know how many hundreds you have of different types of opportunities to study but find what really calls you and don’t waste the time.
Rick: Yeah, and don’t be a dilettante, if something doesn’t seem to be working move on but also don’t feel, honor-bound to stay with something that isn’t working. So, in other words you don’t want to flit about, but you have to take things seriously but there’s no harm in sort of moving around a little bit until you find what really works for you.
Kimberly: Absolutely, absolutely, yeah check it out, I agree completely and even for me the path of my spiritual practice and my work and particularly Tantra, I use the metaphor of Tantra. It can be dangerous, you’re doing things like working with power and working with energies in your body and working with being in the world. It sort of felt like making my way across a minefield at times, especially with these ancient, old ideas and traditions. But I made my way across that minefield. Luckily, I didn’t get blown up. Some people did get hurt.
Rick: Yeah, well, you had a friend who died in a kind of a seclusion thing. And we’ve heard the term spiritual emergencies. And we often get contacted for people whose kundalini has gone haywire, and they can’t hold down a job anymore, and they’re living with their parents. And so safety first, that’s always a good, That’s always a good proviso. But on the other hand, it’s a journey that we must take. If Frodo just wanted to stay safe in the Shire, then that whole story wouldn’t have happened. Sometimes you have to just go out and do it. Go ahead, you can respond.
Kimberly: Oh yeah, but it’s true. No, the hero’s journey isn’t easy, right? You’ve got the dragon, and I made it across the minefield, and I got the gold, right? And it wasn’t without mistakes and it wasn’t without issues, and it wasn’t, but I got the gold and that’s what the journey takes. It takes walking this path of practice.
Rick: Which is still not to say that something could happen. You still have to be like Padmasambhava said, “View as vast as the sky Karma as fine as a grain of barley flour,.” We have to sort of be on our toes, because we’re never beyond the possibility of making some kind of error.
Kimberly: Absolutely. And then there’s the danger of spiritual bypassing.
Rick: Yeah. Right.
Kimberly: Where we use our spirituality to bypass psychological work that we need to do, which is why we always, and I’ve learned in the past 25, 30 years to pair the spiritual work, with the psychological grounding. And so now I don’t do one without the other. They’re both like the key to the work we do with the Confluence Experience and my real mission and my calling.
Rick: That’s great. Have you said as much about that as you wanted to say? Or is there something more you want to say about that?
Kimberly: Well, what else do I want to say about that? If you’re interested in the work, you can check out the website. As I mentioned, I am teaching the Heart Sutra in early May, I’d love people to come and give feedback and reflections and learn what they can about that. There are other tradition work grounded as well, calling you have to psychological work. And for your friends who are listening, look for that psychological grounding as well in any spiritual endeavor that you do, in any spiritual work that you do. When you’re doing psychological work, make sure that you include spiritual work as well, however that means for you. Whatever kind of calling you particularly have to spiritual work, grounded as well, calling you have to psychological work, find where you’re headed, where you’re going. Spirituality is like about our future, right? It’s about what happens after we die, it’s about where we’re headed. Psychological work is more about our past, where we came from and how we were constructed. And when we do both of those together, we really are in that magic spot.
Rick: How does a person find a good therapist to work with that understands the spiritual dimension? Yeah, it’s exactly what you said about the spiritual life. You’ve got to check out a few, most therapists will give you a freebie. They’ll talk to you or they’ll go to one session, ask them the hard questions, interview them. They’re not all the same. Transpersonal therapists are certainly out there. I have people I could recommend, if anybody wants to reach out to me individually. There’s certainly amazing psychotherapists I know that include the spiritual work as well. I’d be happy to, provide lists for people.
Rick: Okay, good. Yeah, you can contact, you’ll have your website stuff on your page. And, and there was the whole category on on the categorical index page on Bat Gap of psychologists and therapists too. People like John Prendergast and many others. Another thing I wanted to throw in here, we have a little bit more time, this kind of loops back to something we were saying, but I think that it’s easy to get depressed or discouraged when you see what’s going on in the world with so many things, climate change and politics and Gaza and Ukraine and so many other things, fentanyl and potential for nuclear war and if all you know about the world is what you get on the news, I don’t blame you for being depressed. But as I was saying earlier, I think that there, and as you and I have been saying for the last two hours, there’s a deeper reality underlying all this. And I think that the key to resolving all these manifestations of incoherence in collective consciousness is to create coherence in collective consciousness, which spirituality does, first for the individual and through individuals for the collective. And that’s been my most fundamental motivation since I was in my 20s or early 20s. And one of the most fundamental motivations for starting Bat gap is to somehow propagate the understanding and popularity of spiritual practice so that it can have an impact on the world. Bit’s touch and go. We could blow ourselves up. There could be catastrophic climate change. I just read an article the other day that there’s some ice shifting in Antarctica, that if it breaks loose could raise sea levels by five meters, which would pretty much inundate all the hundreds of millions of people in coastal cities around the world. I don’t know if spirituality can stop that, but it could at least help us deal with the, well possibly get sensible about changing our climate, our influence on the climate. And also, if we do face huge societal catastrophes, to do so with greater sanity and with greater mutual support rather than every man for himself.
Kimberly: Mm-hmm. Thank you. Yeah. Well, and I do believe that spiritual, in my experience, the spiritual and psychological growth and development If we all grew up our ethics if we grew up our spiritual wisdom, if we continue to grow our psychological health and heal our traumas and transform them into transcendent experiences, we would have the capacity to meet this meta-crisis that we have, this crisis of prices, these multiple prices that we have. There’s a fantastic developmental researcher who use the stages model, Gail Hochachka. She did studies on climate change and how people perceive climate change as they evolve through these stages of development that I’m talking about. She found in the most mature. I’m speaking, this just in my language, so forgive me Gail. She would say it more gracefully, but as we thought as our wisdom grows as our cognition and our development and our identity Evolves, the despair lessons. Creativity comes in creative solutions, right? We are no longer paralyzed by this meta crisis that we’re facing. It’s easy to be paralyzed by it. I feel it. I understand it. What do we do? What can we what could we possibly do to address these issues? It’s depressing. I mean I take a lot of news breaks because it’s so depressing. We find if we can evolve this grow up and waking up as I’m talking about, if we can do our work, to grow ourselves psychologically and spiritually, amazing insight creativity reduction of Despair is actually what we’re seeing in the data.
Rick: Yeah, so Irene and I are always wrestling over the TV remote because I want to watch this news story. She says, “No, no, I can’t stand it. Let’s fast forward. Let’s mute it.” Well, the pace of change is continuing to accelerate and AI is coming along. That’s going to accelerate things exponentially even more. And so, in a way, Darwin was right, survival of the fittest is the law of nature. If a donkey is carrying a load that’s too heavy, you either have to lighten the load or strengthen the donkey. And I don’t know if we’re going to be able to lighten the load in terms of the onslaught of change that the world is experiencing and is going to experience. So, we have to be fittest, so to speak. We have to strengthen our little, our individual donkey.
Kimberly: Yeah, I love it. Get those muscles.
Rick: Yeah. And then you can meet the challenges. At least you have more capacity, to meet whatever life brings your way. –
Kimberly: Yes, and I’m optimistic because of it. I’m optimistic that we could, we can build the muscles of these donkeys, through the work that we’re doing here, you know? And as humans, who are humans having a spiritual experience every day, I believe, find the answers to these and save our human condition and human story as we go forward.
Rick: And by saying we’re optimistic, I don’t think we’re saying, at least I’m not saying that there aren’t going to be some difficult situations as there currently are and will continue to be. But we’ve kind of got an ace in our, we’ve got a good hand of cards here that the other players aren’t seeing, in that we kind of realize there is this spiritual dimension, which is not something that those who are worried about world problems generally are counting on to make any kind of difference. But I think it is making a difference and will continue to make an even greater one as more and more people participate in exploring it.
Kimberly: Absolutely. I have learned that we can literally recreate our reality, not the way we think, not the way we tend to think of it, but through mutual enactment together, individually and collectively, we can change things very quickly.
Rick: Yeah, good. I’ll let you have the last word in that and having said that. Okay, so I will be putting up a page on Bat Gap and it will have your website and any other contact information you want me to put up there. And obviously you’re starting a course in the beginning of May, did you say?
Kimberly: I did, yeah. We’ll be doing a weekend retreat on the Heart Sutra, which outlines the the path of practice goes into these deep esoteric topics in a very pragmatic way.
Rick: So online retreat, right? Online.
Kimberly: It’s an online retreat. Yeah, first weekend in May. Everyone’s invited.
Rick: Yeah. And of course, here we are. And this is, what is this, February of 2024. And people might be watching this five years from now. But hopefully you’ll still be doing good stuff. And people can just go to your website and see what you’re up to probably get on some kind of mailing list.
Kimberly: Absolutely. Please do.
Rick: Great. Well, thanks, Kimberly, and I’m glad that we’ll continue to be seeing each other, and interacting through the ASI, which otherwise is like, “Oh, we’re finishing the interview, I’ll never talk to Kimberly again,” but this, we’ll have our little monthly things and we’ll stay in touch.
Kimberly: Well, to be continued. Thanks, Rick.
Rick: Thanks, and thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. And let’s see, my next interview, is going to be a doctor named Neil Theis. He’s actually some kind of a kidney doctor, I met him at the S.A.N.D. conference and, boy, I wish we still had those S.A.N.D. conferences. Those were so much fun. They were such great get-togethers. Anyway, he’s a wonderful guy, interesting person, and that’ll be the next one. If you go to the BatGap website, you can sign up to be notified of each new interview that’s posted. You can subscribe to the YouTube channel to get notifications. Anyway, check it out. Yeah, if you haven’t been there before, check out the website and see what we’ve got. I even have a humor page where there’s many, many funny spiritual cartoons.
Kimberly: That’s the best part. Thank you so much for your work through the years and bringing this this into the world Rick. Thank you so much.
Rick: Well, we’re all doing what we can as the Beatles sang.
Kimberly: All right.
Rick: Thanks Kimberly. All right. Thank you. Yeah. Talk to you later.
Kimberly: Bye!
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