Lynn Marie Lumiere Interview

Summary

The conversation explores how non-dual awareness can transform intimate relationships without denying the reality of human differences. It also examines why awakening must be psychologically and relationally embodied, how suffering can become a doorway to freedom, and why recognition of awareness is available in ordinary experience.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can non-duality be applied to intimate relationships?
• Why can spiritual awakening fail to produce kind or mature behavior?
• Is awakening immediately available, or does it require years of practice?
• How can someone begin recognizing and resting as awareness?
• Why do people look outside themselves for love and happiness?

Key takeaways

• Non-duality and relationship are a living paradox: one being expresses through many distinct forms.
• Awakening does not automatically heal trauma or create relational maturity.
• Psychological healing and intentional practice help awakening become embodied in daily life.
• A simple recognition of awareness can be the beginning of awakening.
• Short, repeated moments of resting as awareness can make it more continuous.
• Meeting life openly matters more than explaining why events happen.
• The love people seek in others is already present as their own true nature.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to watch previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu.

This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, which sounds a lot like what NPR says, but that’s basically it. There’s no advertising, and we do this as our full-time thing now. So if you feel like supporting it and appreciate it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site.

My guest today is Lynn Marie Lumiere, MFT. What does MFT stand for, Lynn?

Lynn: Marriage and Family Therapist.

Rick: Okay. Lynn is a non-dual psychotherapist and an author who is dedicated to awakening consciousness and meeting life’s challenges as doorways to greater freedom. Her work is sourced in over 40 years of dedicated spiritual and psychological exploration, as well as almost 30 years of marriage and practicing psychotherapy.

This experience has led her to the understanding that no matter what the problem, healing and freedom from suffering are possible when we tap into our infinite and ever-present true nature. She has been especially interested in applying this understanding to healing relationships and trauma.

Lynn Marie is one of the pioneers in the exploration of non-dual wisdom and psychotherapy, and is a contributing author to The Sacred Mirror: Non-Dual Wisdom and Psychotherapy, published in 2003. She’s also the author of Awaken Relating: A Guide to Embodying Undivided Love in Intimate Relationship, to be published July 1st of 2018, which I’ve been reading.

Her primary spiritual teacher is Adyashanti, who’s been on BatGap a number of times, and she has studied with many teachers from non-dual Buddhist and Hindu traditions. She lives in Grass Valley, California.

So we had this power outage this morning and had to delay the start of this interview by a couple of hours. I went up to a coffee shop where I could use their Wi-Fi, because I didn’t have anything at home, to get on my iPad and try to contact you, Lynn, and various other people who needed to be notified of what was going on.

A friend sat down and was talking to me while all this was going on, and I explained to her that I was going to be interviewing someone who specializes in using non-duality to enhance relationships. She said, “Well, that’s a bit of an oxymoron. I mean, non-duality—the word Advaita itself means ‘not two’—but relationships imply at least two.”

I’m sure you’ve been confronted with that before, so how do you respond when people ask you that question?

Well, that’s the living paradox. The truth of this existence is entirely a paradox. There are no two, and we’re all the same one being, and yet it’s expressing itself in all of these different forms, and we relate to each other in these different forms, even though we’re the same one being. So both are true. It’s a paradox.

Lynn: Well, that’s the living paradox. The truth of this existence is entirely a paradox. There are no two, and we’re all the same one being, and yet it’s expressing itself in all of these different forms, and we relate to each other in these different forms, even though we’re the same one being. So both are true. It’s a paradox.

Rick: Yeah. A friend of mine posted on Facebook the other day, “For God’s sake, please don’t ever use the ocean and wave analogy again,” because he’s so sick of hearing it. But it’s a handy analogy. I mean, it’s one ocean, but there are individual waves. You can’t say there aren’t individual waves, but it’s all the same water.

Lynn: That’s right. It changes the experience of relationship as we come into that understanding more, because the more we experience the other as separate, and as having something we don’t have, and so on, that’s where it causes a lot of discord in relationship.

Rick: Yeah. Another thing my friend said when I mentioned what we were going to be talking about, she said, “I’m kind of skeptical of that.” She says, “I know people who’ve been meditating for decades, some of whom actually claim to have had profound awakenings, and they’re still jerks. They still act like assholes. Maybe they mistreat their wives, or they do this, or they do that.” And she said, “How do you reconcile that paradox?”

Lynn: Well, if they claim to have awakenings and they’re still being jerks in relationship, it means they don’t have relational maturity, or haven’t healed their relational wounding, or so on, which awakening itself doesn’t do. Awakening alone will not do that.

So the whole embodiment piece includes bringing that awakening into our being, into our wounding, into our humanness, and then into relationship. Some people may have an opening, but they don’t work with themselves on the psychological or emotional level, or develop relational maturity.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve heard several different angles on that whole thought. One is that some people take refuge in the absolute view, so to speak, and say things like, “Well, the world is an illusion, so forget about it. It doesn’t matter what you are on a relative level. There is no relative.”

Others say, “Awakening has nothing to do with behavior, and there’s no correlation whatsoever. You’re just going to be whatever you are when you wake up to your true nature.”

And others say, “Well, there is a correlation, and awakening is going to inevitably percolate into your relative personality and transform it for the better”—hopefully, yeah, for the better.

And others say, “It’s not going to happen automatically. You’re actually going to have to do something, and if you don’t intentionally do something to integrate awakening into your relative life, it may not happen.”

So there are four different viewpoints there. What do you have to say?

Lynn: I think I go along mostly with the fourth one. I do think—I think the third and fourth. I think there is a correlation, and it’s all inseparable to me and in my process. You also do have to make some kind of intentional effort to embody this awakening. It doesn’t just happen automatically.

Rick: Yeah. I know in my own case, I think spiritual practice definitely softened me and made me more sensitive gradually over the years. It’s been a lifelong process. It made me more averse to inflicting any kind of harm on anyone else and made me more tenderhearted, I would say.

But it wasn’t just the spiritual practice. I also think it was life—being married, interacting with people, growing up. Some would say that’s a fifth perspective: that spiritual practice doesn’t really change your personality; you just mature. You can think of all kinds of people who were wild and crazy in their teens and early twenties who are now very well adjusted in their fifties or sixties.

Lynn: Well, spiritual practice is a part of that adjustment that happens, if they do it. It’s all a part of it. What we call relative reality, we engage with that every day, and that’s part of what wakes us up and helps us embody.

It’s an illusion in the sense that it doesn’t have any independent existence.

Rick: What doesn’t?

Lynn: The relative reality. You could say it’s an illusion in that sense, but to me it’s not irrelevant. It’s an expression of our consciousness playing out, like a mirror reflection of that, so it’s giving us feedback all the time about where we are, just like our inner experience is giving us feedback all the time.

If we’re feeling unrest or pain inside, then it shows that we’re out of alignment, so we’re constantly being worked with through our experience.

Rick: Yeah. I would go so far as to say, taking that thought, that what happens in our lives—even events that we seemingly have no control over—is not random, coincidental, or arbitrary.

The whole universe is pervaded with intelligence. We are that intelligence; there’s nothing but that intelligence. It’s trying to wake up to itself in this or that embodied expression, namely this human being or that human being, and it will orchestrate things so as to wake us up. Sometimes those things might be a little harsh because we need a bit of a slap to come out of our slumber.

Lynn: Yeah, that seems to be true to me. It all has some infinite wisdom. It is pervaded—that’s the only thing that’s happening. So it is trying to wake itself up. Everything is about waking up. In my sense, that’s what everything is about.

Rick: Yeah, and of course not everyone would agree with that, and it might just seem like a philosophical perspective. But I think you might agree that there’s some kind of experiential verification of it that becomes clearer and clearer as you go along.

Lynn: Oh yes. We suffer less, feel more peace, feel more stabilized in resting in our being, and experience more joy and more love. Those are all experiential indications that we’re on the right track.

Rick: Yeah, and if we’re on the wrong track, there can be a few hard knocks to alert us to the fact that we are.

Lynn: That seems to be true for most people. It has been true for me. It seems like we’re so asleep—most people, anyway—that we do need some hard knocks sometimes.

Rick: Right. And that can be taken too far, because sometimes people say things like, “Oh, so-and-so got cancer. It must be his karma. He must be doing something wrong,” or something like that, which I think can be quite heartless.

There’s a saying in the Gita that karma is beyond the range of human intellect—the intricacies of it—and you can’t just make these glib pronouncements about why this or that happened to somebody.

Lynn: Yeah, I agree with that. Ultimately, it’s beyond our understanding, so I think the best stance is to be in not knowing. What’s important isn’t trying to make some sense out of why this is happening because of this or that, but how we meet it. Whatever it is that comes, what’s important is how we meet it. We don’t really know what’s going on.

Rick: No, and you’re not going to figure it out.

Lynn: No, and it wouldn’t help even if we could.

Rick: Yeah, true. You might figure it out and still not meet it properly, so how we meet it is probably the most important thing.

Lynn: That’s right. That is the most important thing, and that gets back to my point about awakened relating and how we need some awakened consciousness to be able to meet life—the hard knocks especially, but all of it, really.

Without some awakened consciousness, we don’t actually fully meet it, because if we’re operating out of the egoic structure, then all that it knows is resistance to what is in some form or another, right? Reacting to it, resisting it, getting caught up in it, avoiding it—the entire repertoire of the ego structure is to avoid or in some way get caught up in what’s going on.

It’s incapable—it’s just a function for survival—of meeting what is. So it’s really necessary for us to have some sense of our own awakened consciousness to be able to meet life.

How we meet life is the most important thing.

Rick: Yeah. Jesus said, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” I would add, they knew not what they did, what they were doing, because they knew not what they were, what they are.

Lynn: That’s true. If you don’t know, you don’t know, and so you do the best you can with what you have. You just stumble along with the ego structure and all of the defenses it has to offer, which don’t really go anywhere. But if you don’t know anything else, that’s all you have.

✨ Awakening is immediately available

Rick: Yeah, now in many traditions, and perhaps to some degree in the public consciousness, or at least the consciousness of spiritual seekers, it’s often assumed or taught that awakening is really a long-term project and could take decades, could take lifetimes. And here in your notes to me, which I’m going to be going through at various points of discussion, you say, “Awakening is immediately available now.” What keeps most people from it is a belief that it is out of reach, as well as beliefs about it needing to be a big, spectacular experience. So let’s dig into that one a little bit.

Lynn: Yeah, let me explain that. When I’m talking about what is immediately available, I’m referring to just an initial glimpse of recognition of this nondual awareness that is present all the time, that’s looking out of our eyes. I feel that that is immediately available, and that just having a glimpse of recognition, becoming aware of being aware, is to me the very, very beginning of awakening.

The whole process of ultimately stabilizing in that, realizing that that’s what you are, realizing that that’s what everything is, is what can take what appears to be time. For most people, that’s a gradual process. But what I feel is immediately available is just that simple recognition of what we are beyond the thinking mind. Many people don’t just put awakening as something out of their reach or far away in the future; they leave out even that simple beginning.

The whole process of ultimately stabilizing in that, realizing that that’s what you are, realizing that that’s what everything is, is what can take what appears to be time. For most people, that’s a gradual process. But what I feel is immediately available is just that simple recognition of what we are beyond the thinking mind. Many people don’t just put awakening as something out of their reach or far away in the future; they leave out even that simple beginning.

Rick: Yeah, that’s helpful. I mean, you could maybe make a metaphor of just as the dawn begins to break and the birds begin to sing, you can see a glow on the horizon, and that’s the sun. You’re seeing it, but it’s going to be a lot brighter at noon.

Lynn: That’s true, but once we have the recognition, then we have an opportunity to return to it. To me, then that becomes the practice. Once we know that, paying attention to that by resting as that becomes the practice. The more we rest as that, the stronger it gets, the more it grows in our consciousness.

Rick: Would you say that you can rest as that both in a meditative way, eyes closed or whatever, just sitting quietly, or even in the midst of dynamic activity? Is it possible to rest as that to some extent, and would you want to? Or would that kind of divide your mind if you’re trying to play tennis and rest as that at the same time?

Lynn: Well, that can be done at any time, at any time. The more conscious this awareness becomes, the more awake to itself it becomes, then the more accessible it is, no matter what we’re doing. It’s like the background that’s always here, but you’re awake to it. So it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. You don’t have to sit down and close your eyes or stop anything. It just becomes—the background just becomes more in the foreground and can be experienced at any time.

Rick: And is experienced perpetually, really, as it grows, and without having to think about it, like breathing?

Lynn: Right.

Rick: I mean, because people shouldn’t have the sense, I don’t think, that they need to sort of keep checking in all day long and doing something to maintain awareness. It’s like having taken a shower, you maintain a certain cleanliness throughout the day or whatever. Or, I don’t know, breathing is an example. Or just being awake in the ordinary sense—you don’t have to keep reminding yourself that you’re awake; you are awake. Do you agree with that, or do you feel like there should be something more that one should do?

Lynn: Well, I think it depends on where people are at. I think in the very beginning, first of all, if there’s no recognition of awareness, all they have is thoughts. All they are is identified as the thoughts, as the egoic mechanism. Then, when there’s a direct knowing or experience of the nondual awareness that holds all that and pervades all that, they have a chance of being somewhere else.

And yet it depends on the person. They may need to check back and check back. The practice that I put in my book, which helped me a great deal, is a practice of short moments of resting many times over time, which makes it more continuous. So you might have to do many short moments repeatedly until it becomes more pervasive, more natural.

Rick: I think Eckhart Tolle might recommend something like that too, as I recall.

Okay, and, you know, what we discussed in the last few minutes is that the very first glimpse of one’s true nature might be rather dim by comparison to what’s possible. I mean, if you want to sort of put that on one end of the scale and Ramana Maharshi on the other end of the scale, there could be a pretty wide spectrum in between. But anybody can have that first glimpse, and from wherever they start, they can take it from there and begin to cultivate it and stabilize it. That would be a fair summary?

Lynn: Yes, I think so. Several things I want to emphasize are the accessibility of that. It’s something that’s just always here, very ordinary in many ways. It’s immediately available, so that’s one thing I want to emphasize, because there are so many ideas and beliefs about awakening being hard to get to or far away.

And then, yes, it needs to be given attention; it needs to be valued. Sometimes I’ve pointed this out to people and they go, “Yeah, I’m aware,” kind of like, “So?” It doesn’t feel like anything special, and then they kind of toss it aside.

So it’s also important to know how important that is—that little initial glimpse of awareness, which can seem like just awareness. You don’t yet feel the qualities of it, like deep silence or deep peace or love, and you don’t just know that that is the doorway into infinite amounts of love and peace and wisdom.

Having some understanding, even if it’s intellectual, of the value of that is important, so you will commit to it, because it’s a devotion, really—becoming devoted to it. It takes a deep commitment to keep returning to that and resting as that, rather than remaining in the habituated state of being in the constantly moving mind.

Rick: Yeah, I think that point you just made about understanding is an important one. That’s part of the reason I do this show. Understanding can go a long way toward inspiring people to commit themselves to some sort of practice or process, because it gives you a vision of possibilities, and it can also instill confidence that you are capable of this.

That was one of my initial motivations, too. I would run into people who had been meditating a long time—even people who had been meditating for years—who felt like awakening was never going to happen to them because they conceived of it as something so extraordinary, and they felt like they were ordinary people.

So I started interviewing people who claimed to have had some awakening, who were just people around town here, just to show their peers, “Hey, this guy, and this person, and this woman are having this, and you can have it too.” Then it just kind of branched out into this.

Lynn: I think that’s very important for people to get—that it’s available to them. Last week I was on retreat with Adyashanti, and he said that in the 22 years that he’s been teaching, he has seen that the biggest obstacle to awakening for most people is believing that it’s not available to them somehow, that it’s out of their reach, that it has to be some big thing—all the beliefs and ideas about somehow it’s unavailable. He says that’s the biggest obstacle.

Rick: There’s that old example of a fish in water being thirsty, saying, “Oh, the water is unavailable. Where’s the water?”

Lynn: “When am I going to get to the water?” It’s really like that. It is literally like that, because we’re just surrounded and pervaded by it, and there’s nothing but that. It’s just right here. But it is more of an inward focus. We’re always looking out. Even thoughts are looking out; we’re looking to something other than that most of the time.

Rick: Yeah, and that’s because the senses are designed to direct the attention outward. That’s their job. So there’s that verse—I quote the Gita a lot because there are a lot of handy verses in it—but there’s that verse about it being like a tortoise withdrawing its limbs within its shell. You can turn the senses 180 degrees, go inward, and find the source of the senses and the source of everything, which is your true nature.

Lynn: Yes.

Rick: And just one more verse to throw at you. Pardon me to those who have heard me quote this kind of thing too many times, but it says, “No effort is lost and no obstacle exists. Even a little of this Dharma removes great fear.”

Lynn: A little of the Dharma—what does that mean to you?

Rick: A little practice. A little turning your attention to this, putting your attention to this—some kind of step in the right direction, however you choose to do that. Even a little of it can make a big difference.

Lynn: Oh yes, absolutely, absolutely. It’s the most important thing, so whatever effort we make can go a long way—just looking for something beyond this sense of a separate self that we feel we’re trapped in.

Rick: And one thing I’ve experienced in talking to all these people on this show and hearing their stories is that there’s a real potency in just having the sincere intention or desire for this. Once you “seek and you shall find,” once you have that intention, all kinds of opportunities and possibilities begin to present themselves.

Lynn: Yes, I think so. I think that’s one of the most important things: a sincere desire for this. In many ways, that’s the ticket home—to just have the sincere intention and desire. We don’t know what creates that or why some people have that and other people don’t; we really don’t know. But at some point in life, or lifetimes, people develop a real, sincere interest in this. I know that happened for me, and nothing could stop it. It just took over.

Rick: Yeah, me too. I’ve been a fanatic most of my life now.

All right, so we’re going to be talking about relationships. We were talking a minute ago about the senses being sort of outward-directed, and we know that it’s typical of many relationships to be looking for something from somebody—looking for someone to love us, looking for some satisfaction or gratification or whatever from other people.

One of your points, I think, is that we already are the love, the peace, the happiness, or whatever that we’re seeking. We’re just out of touch with that when we externalize the source of that love.

Lynn: That’s right, yes, and that’s so common, that in many ways it has never even been questioned, that love is found outside of ourselves. We live our lives, and I know most of my life I lived with that understanding. I was seeking love outside of myself in another, and the problem with that is it’s just not true. The actual truth is that we are the love that we’re seeking. We’re looking out there toward the other and missing what’s here.

Even if we find something that opens up with another person in relationship, when we fall in love, there is a magical experience that does open up. In many ways, it opens up an experience of that deeper love that we are. It opens up, and we get to share that with the other. It doesn’t feel like there’s any separation, and there’s deep, unconditional acceptance for however long that magical state lasts. Then it eventually gets pinned on the other person as being the source, and that’s where the division and problems start.

So what I’m talking about is bringing that understanding in there some, seeing that what opened up there opened up something that’s within us already; it wasn’t coming from the other person. As we find more of the love that we actually are, then we can share it with the other and with everyone, and we have more love if we just let that go.

So what I’m talking about is bringing that understanding in there some, seeing that what opened up there opened up something that’s within us already; it wasn’t coming from the other person. As we find more of the love that we actually are, then we can share it with the other and with everyone, and we have more love if we just let that go.

But this is a tough one. I decided to take that on in my book, and it’s like, I don’t know anybody else who’s really done that, at least not to that extent. It’s new in human evolution for all of us to even explore what I’m talking about here.

Rick: Yeah, well, maybe it’s new. Let’s talk about that. There have been spiritual traditions that have honored the paradox and the value of relative experience as triggers for awakening, as catalysts—for instance, the whole tantric tradition. Tantra doesn’t mean sex; sex is only a small part of tantra for those who usually hear that aspect of it.

But another question is: Sometimes, if a person hears the kind of thing I just said—that we’re already the love that we seek—they might conclude, “Well, why do you need another person? If you are the love you seek, why bother trying to interact with another person? Can’t you just find that love directly and be content with that?”

Lynn: Yes, and that kind of thinking is classic dualistic thinking, because the mind can only think in terms of either/or. You’re doing this or you’re doing that; that’s the way the mind thinks.

But it’s like we find that we are the love and we experience that within our being, and we still move toward relationship. It’s not out of need in the same way as it is when we believe we’re in separation. We are human beings. No matter how awake we are, we’re human beings, and human beings are social creatures. We do best in relationship, and we naturally move into relationship.

When there’s love there, we love to share it, and we love to share it with somebody intimately, in addition to all other kinds of relationships. So there’s a natural movement in human beings toward that, no matter how much we realize this.

Rick: Yeah, I also think that the right kind of relationship can serve as a catalyst to open the heart and enliven things that really wouldn’t happen automatically so easily on your own. Do you agree with that?

Lynn: Oh, absolutely, yeah. That’s also one of the main points I was making in my writing: Relationship is probably the biggest catalyst we have, and we’re in a relationship with everything at all times, right?

My book was focused primarily on intimate relationship because I feel that’s where people have the most trouble. It brings up the deeper, more vulnerable parts of ourselves, and relational wounding, if we have it, and our deepest fears of abandonment and so on come up more in the closest relationships, in ways that absolutely would not happen without being in relationship.

Being really in relationship, whether it’s a close human relationship or with everything, is what wakes us up. It’s what shows us all these parts of ourselves.

Rick: I was on a monastic program for about 15 years, from the ages of about 22 or 23 up till 37, sometimes living in ashrams. People could get so idiosyncratic in that lifestyle, so kooky, because they didn’t really have the kind of checks and balances that you have in a close relationship.

If somebody started to rub you the wrong way, you could just gravitate to somebody else, or just hang out with other people, and you were never really called on your stuff.

Lynn: Right, exactly, yes, that’s true. We can’t get away from our stuff in a close relationship. Many monks may have been in a monastery all their lives, but if you put them in a marriage, it would be a whole different story, because that brings it all up. It’s a mirror, and then it matters how we meet it. Can we meet it in a way that brings about deeper awakening and deeper embodiment of that awakening?

I think that relationship is one of the ways that that happens most, or potentially.

Rick: My wife was in the women’s counterpart to the program I was on, and we went from those programs, cold turkey, into marriage without actually having any sort of real, ordinary courtship period or anything else. It was sort of intense.

Lynn: I bet it was, so you experienced what I just talked about.

Rick: Yeah, and it was intense for both of us. I was a piece of work, with all kinds of obsessions and whatnot.

Anyway, to shift the topic a little bit, but not too much, there are people like Mickey Rooney or Elizabeth Taylor who were married seven or eight times, or Donald Trump three times—and that only counts the marriages. There’s this syndrome of falling in love, and it’s all hunky-dory, and then it starts getting difficult. Then you think, “Well, this one isn’t working out,” and your attention gets caught by somebody else. You think, “Well, this one seems like the real deal here. I’m starting to feel that feeling again.”

In some people’s lives, that syndrome repeats itself many times, and yet they say statistically that second marriages generally don’t last as long as first marriages, or they have a worse track record. Perhaps the track record continues to decline as the marriage count increases. How would you explain the mechanics of that pattern, and what can people do to avoid being caught in it?

Lynn: Well, some of it is what I already mentioned about falling in love. It’s this magical experience, and we don’t understand that it’s opening up something that’s already there. Remember I said it gets pinned on the other person? That’s where the trouble starts.

You start to feel separate, you start judging the person, and you get more and more separate. There’s more and more conflict, and so you think, “This isn’t right.” Then you go on to the next one, and maybe that’ll work. You’re seeking that high again, too. People are seeking that high, and then the same thing happens. “This isn’t right,” and so, instead of taking a look at what they missed in what opened up, they blame it on the fact that it wasn’t the right person.

If you’re a little bit more involved, you say, “Well, maybe it’s something in me, and I have to go to therapy and work on it.” Oftentimes, people come to therapy after they’ve repeated this pattern enough times that they start to think, “Well, I need to take a look at myself. I’m repeating a pattern here.”

You also see that it’s similar types of people and similar patterns that repeat themselves. People finally get it, if they’re lucky, that they need to look inside and start examining what’s going on on a psychological and emotional level. If they’re even luckier, they’ll look deeper to see what’s actually here already.

🩺 Non-dual psychotherapy and healing trauma

Rick: Yeah, and of course, most marriage therapists in the world—there are probably many thousands of them—don’t have this nondual perspective. Given the growth of interest in spirituality and nonduality and all that, I suppose it must be seeping into various people’s practices and methodologies, but you’re probably still in the extreme minority. What advantages would you say that you have as a therapist over someone who’s using more conventional means?

Lynn: Well, it’s a pretty significant advantage because, you know the saying attributed to Einstein: “We can’t solve a problem on the level at which it was created.”

The root cause of all the problems that people experience in relationship or anywhere else is the belief in separation. That’s where it starts. Out of that, we grow up in a world of separation that causes a lot of wounding, trauma, and disturbance, and people struggle like crazy with relationship.

A conventional therapist will work with the trauma or the wounding and so on. That can be opened up, made more conscious, and relaxed to some degree. But in terms of really being free of the struggles we have living in separation and duality, that can’t happen without a nondual understanding, and without a direct experience of our nondual being.

If the therapist has some direct experience and is sitting as that, then that in itself can potentially open that up. There’s a resonance there that everybody can feel, whether they’re conscious of it or not, and it provides a deep safety for them to open up and take a look at what they need to look at.

If they’re ready, then the therapist can point directly to this in them. If they recognize it within themselves, and it’s conscious within them and awake in them, and it’s awake in the therapist, then real magic and transformation can happen in a way that it cannot without that.

Rick: Yeah.

Lynn: It’s very limited how far you can go without that.

Rick: I sometimes like to think of one’s true nature—pure awareness, if you want to call it that, unbounded awareness—as being like a solvent that can dissolve a lot of stuff.

To use a metaphor, without recourse to that, it’s as if your awareness were like a cup of water and you wanted to dissolve some mud, so you put the mud in the cup of water. The water—the cup—doesn’t really have the capacity to dissolve that mud. Whereas if the awareness can become like an ocean, then it can easily dissolve quite large loads of mud.

Lynn: Right. Awareness is the solvent. It’s the universal solvent. It’s the only solvent.

Awareness is the solvent. It’s the universal solvent. It’s the only solvent.

That’s one of the understandings that has been growing in my own process: There really isn’t any alternative. The more you understand that, the more committed you become to turning toward this mystery, which the ego doesn’t really like in many ways, resting in that, because there’s no sense of a self there that’s really defined.

But I see that I don’t really have any choice. There’s getting to be more and more immediate suffering if I go on into separation, and there’s no solution there to anything.

Rick: Some nice work has been done and is being done using meditation of various kinds in inner-city schools and with veterans suffering from PTSD and things like that. They’re very often finding that serious trauma can be healed, which seemed kind of intractable otherwise.

Lynn: Yes, it can be. In the work that I do, I speak about the importance of bringing in this awareness, to have something that is already free of the trauma, that was never touched by the trauma, that has the power to dissolve it if it’s strong enough in us, if it’s awake enough in us.

I feel that with most people, they also need to do some trauma work with the nervous system, because trauma can dysregulate the nervous system and make it very difficult to be present in the moment. Peter Levine, whom I studied with, is one of the leading trauma therapists and teachers. He defined trauma as the inability to be present with what is.

We know that being present is required to be awake, right? Being awake is about being present with what is. I wrote an article in The Sacred Mirror, I think it was in 2003, about that. In my own experience, it was difficult having a dysregulated nervous system early on and having spiritual teachers say, “Just be present with it,” when I couldn’t be. My nervous system didn’t have the capacity to do that.

So I needed to work both ways: really work with the trauma and really work with the awakening. They were inseparable for me.

Rick: I’m glad you said that, because I think spiritual development is a neurophysiological process as well as being a more subjective one. Sometimes that’s not taken into consideration, but those who do consider it can tell us that there’s all kinds of physiological change taking place. You can do fMRI scans and see that the brain is really being restructured, and there are all sorts of things that can be measured that change profoundly over time.

Lynn: Yes, and as we rest more deeply in that awakening, it brings the nervous system into more of a state of rest. I think that’s what we’re all longing for. With trauma, it can be helpful to actually use methods and skills to facilitate that.

Rick: Yeah, there was one study I recall where they measured meditators—the speed or the ease with which they habituated to stressful stimuli. Someone who didn’t meditate would continue reacting rather markedly to repeated stressful stimuli, whereas the meditators habituated rather quickly. They certainly reacted initially, but then the reaction just kind of dropped off.

There wasn’t this sort of habit pattern compelling the nervous system to keep responding unnecessarily and inappropriately to something.

Lynn: That’s true. If somebody has significant enough trauma in their nervous system, even with meditation, it might keep pulling them into repetitive reactions if they don’t work through that trauma.

Rick: Sure. I’m not intending to say that meditation alone is the panacea here, but it’s just an example of some research that was done. I’m sure that the work you do is an important adjunct to meditation and important in and of itself.

Okay, going through our notes here a little bit more. So we’ve kind of covered this one, I think: the ego mind cannot ever provide for our deepest needs; only our being can, right? Is there anything more you want to say about that?

Lynn: Well, when we go back to relationship, most of the human race is looking to get needs met from other people. Most of us had deficits in our childhood; we didn’t get all of our emotional needs met, and we’re looking for those needs to be met through another person.

That’s really problematic because there isn’t really another person separate from us who has something to give us that we don’t have. That’s an imaginary thing, so it can’t work, and it causes a great deal of suffering for people. It points them back to themselves, where those needs can get met.

We need to find that deeper ground of stability and love that’s always here, that never moves. No human being, even in the best of relationships, is always here and always available, always attending to you. That’s just not possible. Yet we long for that security and stability and never-ending love, and that’s only found in our own being.

Rick: Yeah, and if people don’t believe that this is the way it is, then just listen to pretty much 95 percent of all the pop songs ever written.

Lynn: They’re all about that.

Rick: Yeah, they’re all about that: “Oh, baby, I can’t live without you,” blah, blah, blah.

Lynn: We don’t know what they’d write about if people woke up out of that. What would they sing about?

Rick: True.

Lynn: It’d be different.

Rick: Okay, so I’m going through some notes and it triggers our conversation. “We cannot fully transform ourself or our world without addressing issues at their root, which is the belief in separation and duality. Relationships will always be challenged within that belief.”

Both parts of that point I really like. You can’t solve problems on the level of the problem, which paraphrases the Einstein quote. You can’t help a tree much by watering its leaves; you have to water the root. Palliative care and treatment are superficial and don’t really get to the cause. You’re picking weeds; you can’t really get a weed out unless you get the root out.

So maybe comment on that one first, and then we’ll discuss the second part, the belief in separation and duality. Addressing it, pulling it out at the root—getting to the root of things rather than just painting the roses red. If you pull weeds out at the tops, they just grow right back, right?

Lynn: I feel like there’s an evolutionary imperative that the human race is facing right now to wake up out of separation and duality. Unless we get to that root cause of all the insanity that we’re seeing in increasing amounts in our world, it is not ultimately going to shift.

If we keep going to superficial resolutions and just cutting back a little bit, then it grows back. That’s not turning it around. Now we’re at a point where the survival of the species and the planet itself are being threatened.

Generally, through the evolution of life on this planet, it seems that when life is faced with an evolutionary imperative, something happens. So that’s what I’m hoping for: that something will happen and the human race will start to look deeper into what’s going on here.

As I said, it’s consciousness playing out as reflection. We look at the world; it’s a movie playing out of our individual and collective consciousness, and it’s a mirror being held up to us. It’s like, “Are you going to look at this? Look what’s happening here.”

People still blame external things—politicians or situations—and think we need to change this in order for it to be better. We do that in relationships all the time, instead of going to the root of it. That’s going to be necessary if we’re going to survive ultimately.

Awakened activism and collective responsibility

Rick: Yeah, I think we get the politicians who reflect the collective consciousness of the people, and that collective consciousness is the conglomerate, or the sum total, of all the individual consciousnesses.

There was a nice section in your book where you were interviewing somebody, and he was ticking off some of the many problems that alone could wipe out the human race. There are quite a few of these that have the potential to do so.

I’ve talked to people who only see that side of it and are pretty glum, pretty pessimistic about the prospects for our long-term survival, or even our survival past the end of this century. But then, in your interview in the book, he expressed very nicely how there seems to be this counterbalancing force arising in terms of this mass awakening taking place. You don’t see much of it on the news, but it’s nonetheless real and significant, and hopefully potent.

Lynn: Yes, and I think that is coming out of that evolutionary imperative. There’s a movement, and consciousness keeps increasing, moving, and accelerating. It can get intense for all of us because this needs to happen right now.

It’s a race to, as somebody else said in the book, “beat the clock against mass extinction.” We don’t know if enough people are going to wake up in enough time to turn this around.

It’s a race to, as somebody else said in the book, “beat the clock against mass extinction.” We don’t know if enough people are going to wake up in enough time to turn this around.

Rick: No, we don’t. I’m glad you said that, because I don’t think we should be complacent and take solace in New Age platitudes about the golden age coming and all that stuff.

Lynn: We’re all going to ascend.

Rick: Pardon?

Lynn: We’re going to ascend.

Rick: Yeah, actually that’s what some of the Christians think: that they’re going to get pulled up to heaven and everybody else is going to just sort of live in flames.

But it takes diligence, attention, and sincerity. Everyone who is in a position to do so, and is aware of what we’re talking about here, needs to do as much as they can with their life to help shepherd this thing along.

From Self-Absorbed Spiritual Practice to Collective Responsibility

Lynn: Oh, absolutely. I know for myself, the more my process evolves, it has naturally evolved from the beginning. Even the spiritual process was very self-absorbed: me and my spiritual experience, my meditation, my therapeutic work, and my process. There’s nothing wrong with that; it needed to be that way for a while. It was pretty consuming.

Now it has opened up to include more of the whole and a concern for the whole, and a very deep knowing and experiencing that I’m not separate from the person sleeping on the cold sidewalk, or whatever I see—the many countless horrors in the world. These are my own self, and I’m experiencing it that way. So not only can’t I dismiss it as an illusion—you know, in a way it is, and in another way my heart just breaks for what’s happening in the world—but there’s a natural movement to do whatever I can to facilitate and alleviate the suffering in others.

That’s where I got into what I called awakened activism, which I spoke about at the SAND conference last year. I have a political activist in me. I used to be one when I was younger, and then I just kind of gave up and went into spirituality. I thought, “Okay, I’ll find freedom that way.” Politics was just too hopelessly corrupt.

But I came back to it. I got inspired by Bernie Sanders trying to move toward a revolution, because I saw that one was desperately needed. Unfortunately, that didn’t follow through. So I sat with it for quite a while. I sat with what strong opinions I have. When it gets to politics, everybody has really, really strong points of view.

Even sort of really awake or very conscious people—you can get a group of people, and I’ve experienced this together in a room, that have a lot of awakeness, and they’re still fighting over these different points when it comes to politics.

I saw that we needed a more awakened, less divisive way of approaching the great problems that we’re facing on the planet. Somehow, I needed to wake up out of my fixed points of view. They were very strong, and I would fight people over them.

It took quite a while of sitting with them and feeling the reactions, and resting in the reactions, before I finally moved beyond that. I feel like I’m holding them lightly. I have a real understanding that we ultimately don’t know what’s going on, even on political levels, let alone cosmic levels.

That opens the way to allow a movement of a deeper wisdom. Again, we’re not solving the problem on the level it was created. We need to move from an infinite wisdom. Our little egoic, conditioned mind can’t even begin to solve the problems in the world. It’s only going to approach them from a place of opposition and fighting against whatever it is we’re fighting against.

When I was in the antiwar movement in my early twenties, I stopped because, at one point, I was in a massive demonstration. There was tear gas being thrown, yelling, and cops hitting people. I just stood there and realized that I was protesting war in a war. We had created a war between us and the police.

We have to get beyond all of that to be able to move into a kind of activism that’s sometimes called spiritual activism or sacred activism, and what I’ve called awakened activism. It’s just a little bit different in that I’m adding awakened, non-dual understanding to it—coming from a more undivided place, beyond our points of view. That’s asking a lot of people to do, but I think that’s what’s required.

Rick: I think so. I’m reminded of that Buffalo Springfield song, you know: a thousand people in the street singing songs and carrying signs that mostly say, “Hooray for our side.”

Lynn: Yes, right. They’re right. Even the people fighting for peace and against war—even though it sounds like what they’re doing is right—they’re still taking a stance and fighting against something. They’re back in duality, and there’s no solution there.

Rick: There have been some nice initiatives where people have gotten together physically in a hall or something, from polar or opposite ends of the political spectrum, and have managed to learn to see each other’s points of view and find common ground. There are some interesting movements and initiatives in that direction.

But I definitely think, getting back to the non-duality thing, that it really can be a tremendous asset or aid to doing just what we’re saying here.

Lynn: Yes, because that’s the common ground. Non-dual being is the common ground. When we start seeing that we’re one being, one planet, and stop all of this division and fighting against “the them”—whether it’s the Blacks, the Muslims, or the immigrants—there’s always a them. We’re one being. We have to get into more of that understanding.

Rick: Yeah. Nisargadatta said that the ability to appreciate paradox and ambiguity is a sign of spiritual maturity. I know in my own case, I’ve been to quite a few different countries. I spent three months in Iran one time, nine months in the Philippines, and visited India a couple of times.

Wherever you go, even in a country that you might consider antithetical to your perspective or belief system, like Iran, where many people might feel that way, you meet these gems—these wonderful people—and they’re everywhere.

There’s another guy I saw recently who is a Black man who makes it his mission to convert Ku Klux Klan members. Having done so, he collects their robes as a sort of token of his success. He has quite a few robes that he’s collected. He just sits down with them, man to man, human being to human being, and begins to communicate. Eventually, he wins them over through that directness.

Lynn: Yeah, and I think that’s a part of what I call awakened activism, and also of our embodiment of awakening as we evolve. We’re attending more to the whole and not just me, me, me.

We each have a gift to offer. We each have some special gift that we are offering to the whole. We are this one being expressing itself in seven-point-whatever-billion ways. As that opens up in us, there’s something we have to offer.

Like this person—maybe that’s his piece, converting Ku Klux Klan members. We each have something. It’s only the ego that says, “Well, their gift looks bigger than mine.” It doesn’t matter what it is. If it’s your particular gift that you’re here to offer, it’s the best thing you can give.

Rick: Very true. We all have different talents and different gifts. Also, look at nature itself—how diverse it is, how much variety there is. Look at the tropical rainforest and how much diversity it contains, and then go to Siberia and see the animals and the kinds of plants there. Wherever you go, if we want to speak of God or the divine, it’s like this explosive creative force that just keeps churning out diversity.

Lynn: Yes, explosive creative force. That really is what it is.

Rick: Yeah, and I don’t think—you sometimes hear people speaking of a more enlightened world as being less diverse in a way. We’ll all believe the same thing, or there won’t be any individual governments, or who knows?

It seems to me that variety is the spice of life, and that variety and diversity can be harmonized. Their clashing parts can be reconciled or lubricated by this solvent of non-duality.

Lynn: Yes, absolutely. It all comes together in that solvent. We can actually be more of the individual expression. That’s my experience. The more I wake up, the more fully the Lynn-Marie expression gets to be. She’s not so inhibited by all these insecurities and self-doubts and so on, and she gets to be more fully her expression.

Rick: Yep, I agree. All the so-called enlightened people that I’ve hung around with have these vivid personalities—full of life, uniqueness, joy, and expressiveness. There’s no sameness among them on that level.

Lynn: No, no, not on that level—just on the being level, the deeper being level. But, yes, they get to be more fully the unique expression, and at the same time there’s the sameness. This is the paradox.

Rick: Yeah. I mentioned the rainforest a minute ago. The reason there’s so much diversity there is that it’s such a fertile place for plants to grow. There’s more diversity because the ground is nutritious for the plants.

The ground of being is nutritious for us, so tapping into that isn’t going to make us all the same. It’s going to make us different—in a way, more different and more unique.

Lynn: Yes, absolutely.

Rick: And yet harmonized with one another.

Lynn: Yes, harmonized because we see that we’re the same thing. The other is our own self, so that naturally harmonizes everybody. I mean, that’s the solution.

We don’t know, as we said, how many people are going to really wake up to that in time to change this planet, but that is the solution.

Rick: I don’t think it’ll take a majority. In fact, it could be in the single-digit percentage, because it’s so potent.

Lynn: That’s right. Just a few people really established in that changes everything.

Rick: Yeah. One percent of the cells in the heart are called pacemaker cells, and they regulate the synchronized beating of the entire heart. In a laser, the square root of one percent of the photons have to align coherently before all the rest of the photons entrain with them, and the whole thing behaves as one coherent beam of light.

Lynn: It’s true, yeah.

Rick: These examples in nature.

Lynn: That’s right, that’s right. So it’s not going to take a majority. That’s good news.

Rick: Yeah. I suppose another way of explaining that is that the more fundamental a level you operate from, the more leverage you have—the more influential you can be.

Again, apologies to those who have heard me use this metaphor many times, but if you were to try to change the course of a river down near its mouth, where it enters the ocean, you couldn’t do it. It has already run its course, and there’s too much force.

But if you could get back to the source in the mountains, or wherever it starts out, maybe with some little diversion you could change the course of the river. If you can get back to the source of your thought, to the source of your behavior, and function consciously from there, with very little effort you can change the whole…

Lynn: Oh, because you’re operating from the infinite power of our being, and that’s what has the power to change things and influence things. So we need to rest back in that, plug into that, be that, and let that move as each of us. Let that do what it knows to do.

Rick: Yeah, and this would get us back to the relationship thing again, which we’ll keep coming back to. If you don’t function from there, then by the time you’re ready to speak or act, there’s such a sort of a—you’ve become gripped or identified with whatever you’re about to say or do.

Whereas, if you do function more from the source, there isn’t that gripping, and so there’s a greater freedom to be spontaneously in accord with whatever is the right thing to say or do.

Lynn: Yes, it gives you the space to do that, because it’s resting in a big open space of allowing and accepting. Even if something comes up and does grip you, then you can always access that again to open up that grip. Whatever is happening, that is the solution.

Rick: Yeah, I find in my own experience that if something comes up with my wife, I could say something, but if I were to say that particular thing, there might be three days of bad feelings. Or I could just say, “Hold on now, just okay,” and five minutes later, the whole thing’s gone.

Lynn: Yes, I find in my experience that oftentimes whatever comes up in a relationship can be resolved or solved in the awareness without ever needing to take it to the partner.

Most things don’t need to be taken to the partner. If they do, and you allow them to resolve in awareness, you rest them in awareness, then you have the clarity and the wisdom to know how to do that. You’re going to say it in a way that won’t create bad feelings for three days.

It gives you a way to be more awake in your relating, to have a place to go, so to speak. I don’t know how else to say it—a place to rest that provides wisdom, space, and love, allowing whatever is happening, even the intensely charged things that come up in a relationship, to unfold in a way that doesn’t end up being reactive to the other person and causing harm.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, think how many people are in prison because they behaved reactively or impulsively. If they had a little bit more discernment, they would never have done that thing.

Lynn: No, no. The majority of murders, from what I’ve read, have to do with emotional reactivity.

The three R’s of awakened relating

Rick: Yeah. Incidentally, for those who are listening to this live, we have about 150 people on. If you have a question and would like to ask it, you can go to the Upcoming Interviews page on batgap.com. There’s a form at the bottom of that page through which you can submit a question.

Okay, so as we go along, we’re going back and forth having this conversation, but if there’s anything that comes to mind that I’m not bringing up, feel free to just jump in and we’ll talk about it.

Lynn: Okay.

Rick: Okay, anything at the moment?

Lynn: Well, maybe I can talk about what I call the three R’s of awakened relating, because that applies to everything. It applies to all of life, and that might be useful for people. It’s just kind of a little map that came out of my consciousness. No map is absolute truth, but I tried to break it down in simplistic terms that could hopefully reach a larger number of people than just the non-dual crowd, so people could understand.

First of all, the first R is “recognize.” It’s possible to recognize, as I spoke about earlier, this ever-present, aware space that’s always here, that’s behind all thoughts, that’s always looking out of our eyes, and that pervades everything.

There are simple ways of doing this, such as stopping thinking for a moment and just seeing. Most people can stop thinking for two seconds and then see that they’re still here. What’s still here? It’s not something that you can define or grab hold of, but you can experience that there’s still something—an energy, a presence, something that’s aware—that’s still here.

Pausing Thought to Recognize Awareness

We don’t have to stop thought forever, but for moments it’s necessary just to see what’s here behind the constant stream of thought that obscures the awareness that we actually are. That’s one simple way of getting a glimpse of it.

If we get a glimpse of that, we see, “Oh yeah, there’s an awareness here in that gap.” That’s awakening. That’s the very first step of awakening. You get that glimpse; you’re awake. Then you have a chance of returning to that again and resting as that.

Even if it’s for a couple of seconds at a time—and people need to know this—in the beginning, it’s usually only a couple of seconds that people can be with direct being before the mind comes flooding back in and pulls us out. It’s just returning to it again, even in very short moments, again and again and again.

First, it’s recognized. Then it’s rested in, and that needs to happen as often as we can remember to do it, as much as we’re committed to doing it, and as much as we recognize the importance of doing it. By going there, we’re going directly to infinite being. We bypass the mind and go directly to that which has everything we’ve ever needed or wanted.

We start to understand that. We go there, even if it’s for a couple of seconds. Then we learn to rely on that. Something happens in a relationship or in our life—where do we go? It’s good to take a look at where we go.

Usually, we go to our conditioned mind, which just has a bunch of conditioned thoughts. Or we go to other people and their conditioned thoughts—nothing that really goes anywhere. Or do we go back to that direct experience of being? Even a few moments of its power can change the whole situation.

People think they have to be there all the time or have some deep realization, never moving from it. I’m trying to break it down so people can start to see that they can access this and bring it into their lives.

We start to rely on that. It becomes our go-to. It becomes a place where we turn for everything that we need: security, comfort, answers.

There is a fourth “R” that didn’t make it into the book. I thought of it after it was too late to make changes. It’s “realize.” Ultimately, we realize that we are that which we’re resting in and relying on. The more deeply we understand that we are that, we start to see that everything is that.

To me, that is what you could call enlightenment, or being awake, starting with the first glimpse and moving up to that. So that’s my little map. I thought it could be helpful to break it down for people and give them a practical way to move toward that.

Rick: Yeah. I guess I have two things to say to that. One is that if it seems appropriate, and if it fits your lifestyle or whatever, if you can find some kind of practice that you actually devote your attention to exclusively for a certain period of time every day—some kind of meditation practice where you sit for 20 minutes, half an hour, or whatever—I think that is a valuable engine on the train, as well as this thing you’re talking about that you might do throughout the day.

Lynn: It enhances it, because oftentimes cutting through the mind to the direct awareness is challenging if you’ve never done any meditation, if you’ve never done any mind training where you’ve really trained your mind to be more concentrated and quiet.

In Tibetan Buddhism and Dzogchen, which I’ve been influenced by a lot, they would only give these direct instructions—a direct pointing out of awareness itself—to monks who had been meditating for 20 years or more, who had really developed concentrated, quiet minds. Then they would tell them.

We don’t have time for that now, so people are being given this direct instruction without having done mind training. It can be helpful to do that. Even though it’s not necessarily taking you directly to the awareness, it helps you to be able to see it and stabilize in it.

Rick: Yeah, and I would say, find a practice that is enjoyable to you. This shouldn’t be a chore. The guest I had on last week, Dean Sluyter, teaches meditation. He was talking about naturalness a lot, and if it’s unpleasant to sit and meditate, you’re not going to do it.

There are types of meditation one can learn that you look forward to doing, which are refreshing and enjoyable, and even blissful. So find something like that, if you can, if that appeals to you.

Lynn: Right, and we live in this techno age where I hear from a lot of my clients that they’ve got apps with all kinds of meditations on them. They use guided meditations and go to their apps to listen to those.

Rick: If that works for you. Personally, I would prefer not to be reliant upon any external contraption, but whatever floats your boat, whatever works.

Another thing about your saying, “Realize you are that awareness, and so is everything”—you said earlier something about belief in that, or something like that. I just wanted to add that what we’re really talking about here is not a belief.

You can stand on a sidewalk and read the menu of a restaurant and believe that the food in there is really delicious. You can starve to death doing that. You have to have the actual experience. There is a distinction between believing and experiencing.

Lynn: Oh, absolutely. Many people who are in religions rely on belief. They’re taught that they just need to have faith in the belief, and then it keeps them from direct experience.

Even in the non-dual spiritual world, which I’ve been in for about 25 years, it develops its own religion and its own concepts and dogma that people start believing in instead of going to direct experience.

I know for myself—and in many ways it’s been a blessing and a curse—that I feel things strongly. As I started on this path, I was in way too much pain to rely on a belief or a concept. I needed real experience, and that absolutely was necessary for me.

Rick: Yeah, and that’s actually the scientific method, if you think about it. A scientist wants to do an experiment on something. He has a certain amount of belief that his hypothesis might pan out, so he states the hypothesis. At that point, it’s only a belief: maybe this is true.

Then he starts doing experiments to ascertain experientially whether it’s true or not. Maybe it will turn out not to be, or maybe it will turn out to be, but he’s not content with mere belief. Mere belief wouldn’t get him anywhere. I think spirituality should have that kind of scientific emphasis.

Lynn: Yeah, that might be helpful.

Rick: One shouldn’t be satisfied with belief.

Lynn: No. Well, it’s not satisfying. Like I said, for me it didn’t resolve my pain, so that wasn’t going to do it.

Rick: Yeah.

Lynn: You can’t rely on a belief when the going gets rough. It doesn’t hold up.

Rick: Yeah. Another problem there is that if you try to make a belief absolute, then every other belief clashes with it. You see everybody else as the other, as the enemy, and in extreme cases, as deserving of death because they don’t ascribe to your belief.

Lynn: That’s right.

Rick: And that creates a lot of trouble in the world.

Lynn: Yeah, that’s caused most of our wars. It’s crazy, but that’s how crazy it can get.

Truth, responsibility, and projection

Rick: Yeah. Okay, back to these wonderful notes you sent me. This is good fodder to chew on. Actually, it’s funny—the one my eyes just fell on springs right off what you just said:

Our world is showing us daily that living in an imagined duality causes massive suffering. Our world is a reflection of our consciousness. It is consciousness. We need to look in the mirror of that reflection and take responsibility for what we are all creating.

Lynn: Yes, I had mentioned that before, so I’ll just emphasize what I didn’t emphasize, which is taking responsibility. That’s something that’s very difficult for the ego, the egoic imaginary separate self. It doesn’t like taking any responsibility; you know, it’s always something else’s fault.

So, you need to have some degree of consciousness, whether it’s awakened consciousness or just being a more aware, conscious person, to be able to start taking responsibility. That’s absolutely necessary to see in our personal lives: our behavior, how we are in relationship, what comes back to us, and what feedback we get from life.

Life is telling us; it’s a reflection of what’s going on inside of us. But the tendency is to make it about the other, right? The tendency is to always make it about somebody out there.

Like you said earlier, our politicians are reflections of our collective consciousness, and that is so true with our current administration. It’s a reflection of this kind of culture that’s been developed out of reality TV and whatever. It’s reflective of where our culture is devolving into. But people blame them, you know, or blame the current president; it’s all about him.

Really, can we take responsibility? We created that. The same is true with the troubles we have in our life: We always have some responsibility for them. A willingness to take responsibility comes from living more from a space bigger than the ego, because the ego just doesn’t do that.

Rick: Yeah, I also think that, in relation to this point, a love of truth is valuable. Politicians, for instance, say all kinds of things that might please their base or might please their donors or whatever, but have no relationship whatsoever to what’s actually true.

There are sites like PolitiFact, which analyze the things that different politicians say, and they have ratings ranging from “really true” to “pants on fire,” meaning that it’s so untrue.

I don’t know—you can’t make everyone wish for that—but in one’s own life, it’s nice to have a desire to really know what’s true, not only about political issues or things politicians might speak about, but about anything. What your guru says, if you have one: Is it true just because the guru says it?

There’s that great quote from the Buddha where he says, “Don’t believe something just because I said it. Test it in your own experience and your own understanding, and see if it’s really true or not.”

Lynn: Yes, that’s good, because aside from taking responsibility, being committed to truth is another quality that’s needed in order to awaken and embody awakening.

Rigorous Honesty in Spiritual Practice and Relationships

This is something that my teacher, Adyashanti, has always emphasized, and I learned it from him over the past 20 years. He’s really emphasized being honest and truthful, first of all being honest with yourself—that kind of rigorous honesty.

There are so many ways we can delude ourselves and not be honest with what we’re actually experiencing and what’s actually going on. Being committed to truth means both speaking truth to each other on a relative human level and being committed to the deepest truth we know in any given moment.

Rick: Yeah, and I don’t think that means in-your-face honesty necessarily. My wife was at the dentist yesterday, and they always have oldies from the ’60s playing on the intercom there. The dental assistant was singing some song, and my wife said to her, “You know, you really can’t carry a tune.”

I thought, “Wow, that sounded kind of harsh.” You don’t necessarily need to tell somebody their tie is ugly, or you don’t like their face, or some such thing.

There’s a story about Winston Churchill where he went up to a woman at a party and said, “Madam, you are the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen.” She said, “Mr. Churchill, you are drunk.” He said, “Yes, madam, but in the morning I’ll be sober, yet you’ll still be the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen.”

Lynn: He wasn’t too pretty himself.

Rick: No, he wasn’t, actually. There’s a saying in Sanskrit: “Speak the truth which is sweet.”

Lynn: Well, yeah, that’s it. I’m glad you brought that up, because I want to clarify that this isn’t what’s meant by speaking the truth—just downloading all of your negative judgments about somebody. The negative judgments are not the truth.

If we have some kind of reaction to somebody, it’s mostly always something reflecting back to us, some part of ourselves that we’ve disowned and therefore are judging in somebody else. So we would be honest about that in ourselves, and then mostly nothing needs to be said to the other person.

If we give truth to the other person, it’s usually something like, instead of getting angry that they weren’t there for you in a certain way, saying, “I really needed your support, and I’m scared,” that kind of thing.

That’s what I mean by being truthful in relationship, instead of saying something that’s not really true about them, when really what it is is that you’re scared.

Rick: Projection of our own thing.

Lynn: Yeah, so that’s what I mean by being truthful in relationship.

🩺 Shared awakeness and relational healing

Rick: Yeah. Well, a question came in from someone whom I think you may know, John Lumiere Wins, from Nevada City, California.

Lynn: I think I know him.

Rick: John asks, “Could you share some stories of using shared awakeness in working with trauma and/or relational wounding?”

Lynn: Share stories?

Rick: Stories of using shared awakeness in working with trauma and/or relational wounding.

Lynn: Yeah, I have some. I have a lot of experience with that myself. John and I have a lot of experience with that together, and in my book I describe experiences I have with clients.

Sometimes I just use everything that there is. If I have a client who has some awakened awareness, then they can be with even a very strong traumatic experience, which is the hardest thing to be present with. It pulls us out of the present moment very strongly.

So we resource the body in different ways through various work I can do. We can just gaze together, lock eyes, and go into that awareness together, where a field opens up—a presence between us that holds the space for that experience to be had and to allow it to unfold.

We’re there together; there’s the other, so they’re not alone. That’s the resource of being in relationship. There is also the resource of guiding them to feel their body in certain ways and ground in that, along with the massive resource of the shared presence of our own being, being there together.

Allowing that intense experience to dissolve and open up into some kind of deep, connected presence is a very beautiful, powerful process—to bring those things together.

Rick: So give us some concrete examples, if you can, in terms of people you’ve actually worked with. In your book, you have specific stories about people who did this work with you and the kind of changes they underwent.

Lynn: Well, I just described it, but you want me to describe the actual symptoms that they were going through?

Rick: Well, you know, what happened to Mary? Mary did this, and this is the way she used to be, and then she became like that. If you can give us just a couple of concrete examples of actual cases.

Lynn: There are cases like what I just described, where we came together and they were there within the shared presence together.

Rick: You have a woman in your book who had been sexually molested by her grandfather, and that definitely had an influence on her behavior and her relationships. Then she went through this whole process with you, and her behavior and her relationships changed quite a bit. So, examples like that.

Lynn: Right. As I was just starting to say, there are examples where that got resolved more with me in the shared presence together. In that case, that person actually had a depth of awakening to such an extent that she was able to be with some of the deeper wounding on her own; some of that happened outside my office.

I use that, even though it’s not common, as an example of what can happen with awakened awareness: that even on your own, with something terrifying like learning to sleep alone with the light off for the first time in her life, she could be with the terror of that in the presence of her own awakened being and have that resolved within a week.

Rick: Yeah, because her grandfather used to come into a room at night. You mentioned that the siblings, or the sisters, would trade off staying awake to stand guard or something like that, but it didn’t always work out, so it built this huge trauma.

Lynn: That’s right, and so she had a great fear of sleeping alone. She had to overcome that, and she did it on her own with her own presence.

In the other cases, they worked with that with me. We have both of our presences there together, and that would be true for most people.

Rick: Well, a burning log can get another log burning, but once the other log is burning, it can maybe burn on its own.

Lynn: If it is burning strongly enough, it can even get through something that powerful. I wanted to give that amazing example so people could see that it was possible.

Rick: Yeah, sure. John also asked, “What about being awake in relationship and in the world?” I think a nice example of that was your chapter about Adyashanti and Mukti, his wife, and how they feel that an awakened relationship, based upon two awakened individuals, enables them to interact in the world differently than might ordinarily be the case.

Lynn: Right, yes, and it also grows the relationship. There’s no longer this need to get something from each other; you can just more or less enjoy each other and share this love together.

It spills out into wanting to give beyond the relationship. That’s the fruition of awakened relating: It develops beyond the relationship.

In the case of Adya and Mukti, they actually don’t spend a lot of time together. On the retreat last week, Mukti was there for the seven-day retreat. Adya said it was because they could spend some time together, since they spend so little time together with their mutual travels.

They’re really just giving what they have been given. They’re giving it out, both of them fully beyond the relationship, and that becomes more important than the relationship.

Rick: I was thinking before, when you were talking about how earlier on you were self-absorbed in your spiritual quest, and then at a certain point you began to have a more giving orientation. It reminds me of the 23rd Psalm: “My cup runneth over.”

Until the cup is full, you’re going to be busy filling the cup. But at a certain point, it’s going to run over once it’s full, and it’s going to continue to overflow.

Lynn: Yeah, that’s just a natural movement of our evolution, I think. The more ego-identified we are, the more we’re just totally self-absorbed, and it’s all about me—to actually insane degrees.

Look at what’s happening on the planet, where people try to get more for themselves, like corporations denying other people a lot in order to get more money for themselves.

Rick: Oh, yeah. I mean, possibly extinguishing the human race just to make sure the next quarter goes better.

Lynn: Right, so that the heads of the coal and oil industries can get more money. So it goes from that extreme to slowly opening and opening to more of a sense of the one being that we are, and taking into consideration everyone, and taking care of everyone. In general, this world’s not organized that way, but like you said, there are gems everywhere you go. You find these beautiful, open-hearted people.

I think this is just my personal opinion, so this is just an opinion, that what’s really wrong with this planet is more the leadership than the people. It’s got a leadership where people with the most money and the most power tend to be on the greedy side, but there are a lot of beautiful, open-hearted people in the world.

Rick: Yeah, well, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Bernie Sanders sent out an email yesterday about Disney—you may have gotten it—and how the head of Disney got something like four hundred million dollars last year, but there’s a tent city outside Disneyland where a lot of the employees live because they can’t afford to live in ordinary houses.

Bernie’s email was about giving them at least fifteen dollars an hour, which is still barely a living wage, so there’s this huge inequity in the world.

Lynn: Yes, and that’s growing more and more, isn’t it?

Rick: It is.

Lynn: We’ve seen the tent cities. I just moved here to Grass Valley three months ago. I lived in the Bay Area for over half my life, seeing Oakland and San Francisco.

Rick: All these tents under the bridges.

Lynn: Oh my God, it’s just getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and nothing’s being done about it. They just keep pushing them away somewhere. This shows how far we’ve gotten from our true nature, our basic humanity, and our inherent sense of compassion and caring for each other—how far away we’ve gone from that.

The people who are worth five hundred billion dollars still don’t want to pay taxes or give their employees fifteen dollars an hour. It’s insane, literally insane levels of greed, and that’s where it goes when we don’t wake up.

Rick: Yeah, and there’s historical evidence to suggest that extreme disparities of wealth and privilege like that lead to the toppling of civilizations.

Lynn: Yeah, they’ve all toppled. All of the empires have toppled for that reason. They always end up there, where everything goes to the top and they ignore the masses, leaving the masses with nothing, and then it collapses in on itself. The American Empire, in particular, is right on the verge of that, or it’s heading toward that.

Rick: Yeah, and lest people listening to this think that they’re now listening to a couple of socialists—heaven forbid—I think this is germane to the whole issue of spirituality and to profound points such as the idea that we are all one, essentially.

If you’re really thinking in terms of your body, you wouldn’t want to put a mitten on your hand in the wintertime and run around naked otherwise. You’d want to somehow protect the whole body. If we really are all one—and I think most people listening to this will realize that, essentially, we are—then it’s not good enough to know that on a sort of transcendent level. It really has to manifest. It has to be appreciated in terms of its full range of manifestation.

“Whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me,” to quote Jesus again. Hopefully, if spiritual awakening is really dawning in the world, we’re going to somehow see things being shuffled around so that this becomes a practical application of this perspective.

So much suffering—starvation, for instance—is completely unnecessary now. There’s enough food in the world to feed everybody, but things just aren’t distributed properly.

Lynn: Right.

Rick: That’s just one example. It’s like taking into account, first of all, the wholeness of ourself, just being with the truth. That’s it; it’s just being with the truth. It doesn’t work to live away from the truth, within separation and duality. We just come into alignment with what’s actually true: We are the source of everything we’re looking for, and we are one being.

Nothing’s going to work until we come into alignment with what’s actually true and include all of ourselves, including all of the hurt, wounded, and abandoned parts of ourself and our whole being. Then we can work toward healing the planet and taking everybody into account. How can everybody have what they need? We take care of each other.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, there’s actually almost a stereotype of spiritual people as being selfish. You see that sometimes. It’s like you were saying a little while ago: “Me, me, me.” It’s my evolution, my meditation, my diet, and it can get kind of neurotic. But maybe that’s a phase, and people grow out of it if their growth is genuine.

Lynn: Yeah, it was a phase for me, and it was necessary at the time because it was so all-consuming, working through everything I had to work through. I didn’t have much space for anything else, so it was necessary at the time, but I did evolve through it.

Rick: Yeah, so we don’t want to sound judgmental toward people who might still be functioning that way. But we do live in precarious times. Many people might deny it, especially if it has some relevance to their income, but there’s a very real possibility that billions of people could die unnecessarily in the coming decades for a number of different reasons. You can’t evolve spiritually if you’re dead.

Lynn: It’s just interesting what it takes. We were talking in the beginning about needing hard knocks to wake us up, and it’s sort of like, how bigger a hard knock can you get than that kind of evolutionary imperative? And still, people are sleepy. I don’t know what it’s going to take, but they are waking up more, for sure.

Rick: I think part of the problem is that it’s a slow-moving train. Take climate change, for instance. It doesn’t seem like it’s happening very quickly. Then there’ll be a snowstorm in Washington, D.C., and some senator will bring a snowball into the chamber and say, “Ha ha, global warming,” because people aren’t statisticians and they don’t understand science. They’re not looking at major trends, and they’re not interested in truth; they’re interested in pleasing their donors.

Lynn: That’s exactly right, and I think it’s saying that it’s pretty dire.

Rick: Yeah, so it’s funny that we’re meandering like this, from relationships to consciousness, to global warming, to politics.

Lynn: Well, like I said, it all applies to everything.

Rick: It’s all intertwined.

Lynn: It is. It’s all intertwined, and the truth of what is applies to all of it.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s kind of neat that we’re both talking this way, and I think not just us, but a lot of people do these days. You’ve got people like Andrew Harvey and others talking about sacred activism, Vera de Chalambert, and many others. I interviewed Kimberly and Foster Gamble, who did the Thrive movie, and we were talking about how, back in the day, the activists were shouting in the streets, and both camps thought that the other was in la-la land and that nothing was going to happen.

Now the meditators are sort of thinking in terms of sacred activism, and the activists are thinking in terms of spirituality, and there’s this kind of marriage that’s taking place.

Lynn: Yes, and I think, like Andrew says, you have to do something. He gets so intense about it: You have to get off the cushion and do something.

I wanted to make that point too. I know in the nondual world it’s been common to think, “Do nothing,” and that there’s nobody to do anything. For many, many years I did not meditate because there was that influence of, “You’re not supposed to do anything.” It’s all a matter of just being or just accepting what is.

Eventually, I realized that there is a kind of doing that needs to happen. You could call it an effortless effort. The resting is kind of an effortless effort, but I also had to backtrack and do some real mind training for a while, to learn to have my mind become more trained and quieted.

Not everybody has to do that, but I chose to do it. There’s a constant kind of non-effort effort, an intentionality that’s involved in this. It’s a giving of everything—all of your attention and your devotion—to this.

It is a misunderstanding that there’s nothing to do or that you’re not supposed to do anything. That’s also true with what’s going on in the world. I hear people say, “Well, I’m waking up, and that’s enough,” or, “What is there to do? It’s all an illusion.” These are all concepts that we hold on to. There is something to do.

Rick: Yeah, there are concepts, and it’s also a confusion of levels, which is one way of putting it. There is a level at which you don’t do anything, and you’ve never done anything, and nothing’s ever happened, and there is no universe, and all that jazz.

Lynn: But unless you’re there, that concept doesn’t do you any good.

Rick: Right. And even if you are there, you might, to all appearances, be dynamically engaged in activity.

Lynn: That’s right.

Rick: Going back to the Gita again, Krishna says, “What would happen to the universe if I did not continually engage in activity?” And yet there are other verses that say that the awakened person, even sitting and standing and doing this and doing that, does not act at all—and yet he’s doing stuff.

It’s just a matter of appreciating that there are different levels of reality. We can grow to incorporate them all, and then we resolve these paradoxes. You won’t be doing anything, and yet you’ll be doing everything.

Lynn: Right, that’s another paradox. Yes, there is plenty to do in the world as we’re moved to, but it’s important where it’s coming from.

Rick: Yeah. We’re on this point, actually. Many people, like perhaps yourself in your old days, got burned out on activism because they didn’t have recourse to that silent level.

There was an old group called “Kill for Peace.” Look at the Weathermen and groups like that. They’re trying to change society, and they’re killing people. What kind of society is that going to be?

Lynn: Well, look at our government. They’re fighting for peace and creating wars for peace. That’s Orwellian.

✨ Practical steps for awakening

Rick: All right, well, we’ve got a couple of old radicals here. We’re almost going two hours, and we’re retracing our steps a little bit, but it’s kind of fun because we’re going around and around, back to the point, to a new point, and back to the point.

Lynn: And like you said, they’re all interconnected.

Rick: Yeah, so hopefully people find this useful, but I do. In any case, before we wrap it up, maybe we should do a wrap-up that gives a synopsis and some action steps that people can take to get something practical out of our conversation. How would you like to approach that?

Lynn: I think the most important thing would be to have that basic recognition, to either find a way to have that recognition, whether it’s pausing the thoughts for a few moments and noticing what’s there, or, as Rupert Spira says, asking people, “Are you aware?” And it’s just kind of getting aware of awareness.

If you already are aware of awareness, rest as that. Dedicate yourself, devote yourself to that. All we really have to give is our attention, to really rest attention in that, to know that that’s the most important thing that we can be doing.

Out of that, we awaken more, and out of that, we become more the fullness of our expression, and we’re able to give to the world in a way that only we can. But it’s not going to happen unless we go directly to our own being. So, to me, that’s a very practical way: recognize this, it’s immediately available, but then devote yourself to it and rely on it until it becomes more and more stable and obvious, and eventually takes over. It’s already doing this life, but it’s allowed to consciously take over. That’s how we awaken: we really recognize it, and then we devote ourselves to it.

All we really have to give is our attention.

Rick: Yeah, and I would say it’s a lifelong project, but the fruits of it are immediate, so it’s not like you’re going to wait a lifetime for something good to happen.

Lynn: That’s right. Yes, there are fruits of that right away, even if it’s just moments of more peace or rest. But there’s benefit right away, that’s true, and then that can motivate us.

Then we can learn that when things get difficult within our life or within ourself, we have that to rest in. We have something to so-called turn to, to hold us and inform us and provide us with everything that we need. It’s not out there in others, or even in a spiritual teacher or a partner or anybody; it’s that beingness within ourself.

Rick: It really does develop in one a reservoir that can be drawn upon in times of difficulty. I was talking to a friend, and she’s saying her father has a sort of dementia that makes him really nasty, and how trying that is and everything. But there’s some kind of buffer that’s been developed through years of spiritual practice that makes it easier to deal with a thing like that.

Lynn: Yes, and it’s important not to wait until things get really difficult to turn to it. That takes a deepening of understanding of the value and importance of this.

Rick: Yeah, I was trying to think of a biblical parable, but there’s even the story of the ant and the grasshopper or something. What was the one where the animal is accumulating what it needs for the winter and the other animals are just fooling around, and then the winter comes and it’s too late?

Lynn: Yes, and we do have to deepen our presence so it’s strong and stable enough, consciously, to hold us in the really difficult stuff.

Rick: Yeah, and when the difficult stuff comes, if you haven’t been doing that, it’s too late to do it. You’ve got to sort of do it as you go along so you’re ready. There’s a saying in the Yoga Sutras, “Heyam dukkham anagatam,” which means, “Avert the danger which has not yet come.”

So, you’re in California, you have a book, and people could read that wherever they are. I’d hold it up, but you sent me the e-version, so I imagine that I’m holding it up here.

Lynn: That’s available for pre-order on Amazon right now. Yeah, I’ll link to it. I think the books will start to be shipped within a few weeks, later in June.

Rick: Yeah, I’ll link to it from your page on BatGap. And aside from the book, is there any other way people can engage with you? Do you do any kind of sessions over Skype or anything like that?

Lynn: I’m actually doing more and more sessions over Skype because I’m transitioning from the Bay Area to here. So, yes, I’m doing a lot of sessions over Skype. That’s available, and you can connect with me through my website, this is myname.com.

Rick: Good, I’ll be linking to that from your page on BatGap also, so people can get in touch. All righty, well, thanks. This has been a lively conversation.

Lynn: Yeah, covered a lot of territory.

Rick: Yeah, thanks for listening or watching, and thank you again, Lynn.

Lynn: Thank you, Rick. Bye-bye.

Rick: Bye. [Music]