Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and I’m back today with Mariana Caplan. I interviewed Mariana about a year ago and she’s one of my favorite spiritual authors. I’ll read a short bio of her here. She’s a licensed psychotherapist, a lifelong Yogi, or Yogini as the case may be, and the author of seven books in the fields of psychology and spirituality, including Eyes Wide Open, Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path, The Guru Question, The Perils and Awards of Choosing a Spiritual Teacher, and Halfway Up the Mountain, The Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment. She is currently working with nine interns conducting living research on the intersection of Yoga and western psychology, and is in the process of writing a book, workbook, and academic article on the subject. And that’s the subject we’re going to talk about quite a bit today, Yoga and psychology, although we might veer off here and there into other things. One thing I just want to say about your books, Mariana, if I had to sum them up in a sentence, I would say they’re all about honesty, and not BS-ing yourself, about your own degree of progress, about your teacher, about anything, just sort of learning to be truthful and honest. Your books make it clear how valuable that is and how useful, and how deluding yourself, if you’re really sincere about spiritual progress, is not a very helpful tactic.
Mariana: Thanks Rick. That’s a kind of compliment I think I’ve spent my years working toward, because that’s always been my goal. And of course, I had a teacher named Lee Lozowick. I have a teacher, but he passed on two years ago, and that’s what he was in the world. He was a stand for spirituality that was completely committed and uncompromised, but no bullshit, right, no extras. He really, really taught us and kept us close to the ground. So, to have been able to convey that through books is really an honor.
Rick: Yeah, I mean sometimes I think of the word disillusionment, and I think of it as having a positive connotation, because obviously the whole enlightenment game is all about coming out of illusion, so, we want to be disillusioned, you know. And sometimes that hits us in the conventional sense of the word. We get disillusioned with our teacher, or with this or with that, but it’s a growing up process in which we’re actually getting more clear about things.
Mariana: Yeah, I mean disillusionment in Halfway Up the Mountain, which I think is the book that you and I originally connected around. There was a chapter on the path of this actual cycle of disillusionment. And the paradox of disillusionment is I think of it as an incredibly happy, successful, healthy aspect of the path, which paradoxically usually feels really bad when it’s happening. So, it’s a mark of success, it’s progress, we want it, we court it, and it often doesn’t feel good when it’s happening.
Rick: Yeah, and sometimes people let that really trip them up. They get disillusioned with a teacher or with their own progress or something, and they give up on the whole thing. I would encourage them to just take that as a lesson, take it in stride, and keep on moving because there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Mariana: Yeah, and we’re going to be talking about Yoga here specifically, and psychology, and in Patanjali’s 196 Yoga Sutras, there’s actually a sutra later on that addresses the point on the spiritual path when the student has made a lot of progress and is suddenly getting stuck in disillusion that they’re not able to make further progress. What do we do then? We hold fortitude, and it’s actually marked as a moment on the path, and that’s a moment on the path to stay and cultivate fortitude, faith, company, study, patience, because that’s an actual moment where we can step back because it’s disheartening. Or we can, in psychological terms, stay with the impasse, and on the other side of the impasse, if you work skilfully with it, there actually is, it gives way to what’s next.
Rick: I remember also something from the Yoga Sutras where he talks about long, dedicated practice, in other words, just really sticking to it for a long time. Sat-tu-dhirgha, what is it?
Mariana: Sah tu dirgha kala nairantaira satkara asevitah dridha bhumih. My Yoga teacher, Bhavani Maki in Kaua’i, she used to drill that in, and it’s a beautiful one because it says, “Long, consistent,” and I don’t think consistent has to mean seven days a week, “Consistent over many, many years, dedicated practice, done with sincerity.” Definitely yields fruit and grounds us on the path.
Rick: Which sort of flies in the face of the popular notion that you’re already there and all you have to do is give up the search and you’re done. So much for that.
Mariana: That is not untrue. Yeah, on some level. But talk to a sincere, married, 30-year-old, 30-year-old practitioner, married or struggling with a relationship practitioner with some health issues who has had a teenager or an illness, and it just doesn’t fly in the way that on our first or second trip to India, and we read Ram Dass’s book well before he had a stroke, and we walk around talking about that, it just means something different.
Rick: Yeah.
Mariana: Many of these things, they’re ultimately true, and yet nobody is exempt from, I mean, I don’t know if you even want to be exempt, but from the laws not only of duality but of development, of human development.
Rick: Yeah.
Mariana: And human development can be articulated in karmic terms. If that’s the way we want to talk about it, but everybody goes through a process of human development, including the enlightened teachers, right?
Rick: That’s a recurrent theme in these interviews. Some people are sick of hearing me talk about it, but I feel it’s really important because, well, for all the reasons we’ve just been discussing about sort of not deluding yourself on the path and so on, but it’s the way it is. I have yet to, after 150 some odd interviews, I have yet to find anyone that I feel is 100% finished, and I usually ask them point blank about that kind of question, and the more, I’d say, mature ones always say, “It’s still getting deeper for me. It’s like an exploration. I don’t know where it will end, but there’s always more.” And there’s something obviously which you discover at a certain point which never changes, and that’s fine, but it’s kind of the interface of that with the rest of life that knows no end in terms of refinement and deepening.
Mariana: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, Patanjali seems to be present in our interview, right? In this beautiful, in this iconography, he sits on this bed of snakes that’s called Ananta, and Ananta is endlessness. And the path is endless, and again, I think we want it to be. And I had, we’ve spoken about this in other moments, but my teacher’s teacher was one of the saints of old, Yogi Ram Surat Kumar, the kind which we find very few of anymore, but I had the great fortune of being close with him when I was a little bit too young to really get what I was experiencing, but old enough to feel it and think about it for the next 20 years. And what was so beneficial about meeting him at such a young age was that he was an enlightened man who, I mean, he never talked in those terms, but he had stumbled into his enlightenment 50 years before I met him, and he never, ever stopped. And it was like a process of, it actually seemed to increase in velocity in his case. So by the time I met him, you know, he was just a comet falling, falling through the sky into endlessness, and the talk of enlightenment or, you know, we’re already there, you don’t have to do anything, I mean, that would be for him like, you know, a baby kind of fiddling around with the first little, like, toys, kind of like that. I mean, it was just, the conversation was in an infinite, I mean, it was an example of the endlessness. And of course, if we don’t really take that into account, at least at the level of contemplation and eventually through experience, we miss out, we miss out on what life has to offer, which is an endless, right, an endless deepening, changing, hopefully maturation. And that’s right, that’s what it is. And who would want to stop at a bunch of great enlightenment experiences? We miss out on all the juice and lessons, right, and intimacy.
Rick: A friend of mine posted a Facebook comment today in which she said, “My New Year’s resolution for 2013 is to give up seeking.” And I said, “Okay.” I said, “Well, seeking, you don’t have to give up seeking because the sense of sort of an empty, craving, seeking sort of thing is going to fall off naturally when there’s enough finding, but there’s going to be no end to finding if you think of it in terms of discovery and exploration and deeper unfoldment. So don’t try to give up anything, just keep on keeping on.”
Mariana: Wake up, brush your teeth, see who’s in your life that needs attending to.
Rick: Yeah. So let’s talk about Yoga and psychology.
Mariana: Yeah.
Rick: You can lead the way on that and I’ll just ask you questions.
Mariana: Yeah. So, Yogi Ram Surat Kumar, although he wasn’t a practitioner of asana, maybe he was, for all I know, he was a great, great, great Yogi. So, I kind of stumbled into Yoga almost–well, from the back door. I just stumbled into the greatest Yogi I’ll probably ever meet in my entire life and had no idea who he was, and I started studying asana many years later and studying psychology really my whole adult life. And an experience that you and I share in different ways, you through the show and all of your life experiences, that I have talked to a lot of people on the spiritual path. I mean, a lot of people on the spiritual path, and I’ve talked to them in confidence and in intimacy, and I thought when I wrote Halfway Up the Mountain about premature claims to enlightenment, I thought I would put that aside and get on to bigger and brighter subjects. And I could not have predicted that that was the beginning of almost being a receptacle for the truth of people’s experience on the path and of teachers and of the students of the teachers and of the consorts of the teachers and of the ex-wives and of the people who have the kids with the teachers and of the teachers and their struggles with clinical depression and anxiety attacks and where that intersects with psychiatry and what that does to their self-esteem and not only how are they integrating it, but how can they present it in a way that supports their students and yet allows them to be authentic and endless. I honestly find it beautiful because somewhere in our hearts we start the path, we say we want truth, we intuit it, but we have no idea what it is, and then if we live, as we were saying with that Yoga sutra, with sincerity and consistent effort over time, the path itself and practice itself, as it should, bears fruit in us. So, coming back to Yoga, I was thinking this morning when I was thinking about…
Rick: Let me interject a question here. If it bears fruit, wouldn’t we eventually be moving beyond all this yucky stuff and have you found examples of teachers who have risen to a level of clarity and integration where all the sorts of human dramas you just alluded to have been transcended and things have gotten really smooth? If not, then one might ask, “What is the point of all this? I thought we were supposed to somehow become really happy, integrated, psychologically healthy people through spiritual practice.”
Mariana: Well, it’s a good question. I want to take a minute with it. When you say that, two teachers popped into mind, and they both sit on different polarities, and I like to hold opposites. That’s right, again, Yoga, that’s the idea, is learning to hold opposites in the same space. So first I think of someone like Arnaud Desjardins, who was a great spiritual master in France. He died about a year and a half ago, a year after my teacher. He was his best friend. I knew him for a long time. Arnaud, through the course of life, when he died in his 80s, I think he was an integrated man, and I saw a little drama in his life.
Rick: Maybe his testosterone had just fizzled out at that age.
Mariana: In his 80 years of experience, he had been through marriages and dramas with his children and his students and his organizations and a divorce and a big affair with a movie star that he worked out with his teacher in the context of his spiritual life early on, and many things, and then illness. So, the drama doesn’t end because then you have to figure out how to die. And so, there’s someone like Arnaud. He was unusually integrated, and again, we don’t really know what people struggle with in their inner worlds because oftentimes we think we see these examples of integrated people, and then I get the manuscripts first of the next expose, and the information comes in sometimes confidentially and sometimes through the next exposure.
Rick: How about that Yogi whose name I can’t pronounce who was your teacher’s teacher? I mean, I guess he smoked cigarettes or something, but would you consider him to have been an example of someone who was free of human foibles, or is there really no such example ever?
Mariana: Well, it’s interesting. I don’t think he’s the–when you deal with the saints, and I think it’s interesting because when we think that we’re going to be a saint, it’s sort of like thinking that we’re going to be president. I mean, one person is every four or eight years in the whole world, and sometimes people become saints, but when we compare ourselves to the saints, I don’t think it’s that useful. I mean, he was actually doing something else. So, maybe he was free of human drama, but he wasn’t entirely human. You know, that same period in Tiruvannamalai, which is the popular Neo Advaita hangout in India these days, there was a guy called Bench-swami, and Bench-swami was an apparently enlightened man who was in the Samadhi state, and he lived on a bench. He never moved from his bench. I think he peed on his bench, and they had a whole system, and people would come and get high from being with him. I mean, maybe he was above human drama, but he wasn’t inside of it either.
Rick: Yeah.
Mariana: And most of us not only don’t want to be on the bench, we want to participate in life, and we want to integrate, right? And we want to refine our relationships, and we want to love more deeply. I mean, I think at this point in my life that experiences of intimacy that I might have in love or with my child, you know, new and deeper heart openings in a relational context, they’re more interesting to me than a Samadhi state, Because, I actually think at this point they’re a little harder to come by as well. I mean, you do enough spiritual practice, and, you know, now the drugs are quite popular and even integrated, so, people do ayahuasca or they do what they do, and we can get the states. We can get lots of them, but a relational state of intimacy, right, of which there’s endless flavors, or with a client, right, moments of love and opening, those are great mystical states. They’re just relational, and those continue to open and change and often are directly related with the depth of our own inner work and interpersonal work. And they’re states that we long for, because I think we’re both at a stage of life where I run into a lot of old friends who were in India forever or are, but many people ended up sacrificing relationship or family for the path, many. And they have all the states, and they have some of the guidance in the states, but the longing for human love and contact, right, and touch and sharing and giving, right, they’re just as relevant as these other desires, and those happen within the human domain.
Rick: Yeah, so I guess if I could summarize what you said, if you’re one of these rare souls who can live on a bench, and, you know, we see examples of this in India ever since reading Yogananda’s book and so on, then you might seem to be kind of above the ordinary conflicts and messiness that characterizes life in general. Although it would be interesting to transplant such a person into an ordinary life, if hypothetically you could do that and see what ended up happening. But for the most of us that’s not going to happen anyway, it’s a moot point, and so, the complexities and conflicts and frictions of day-to-day life, from relationships to health to finances to what have you, are just going to be part and parcel of our experience, regardless of how spiritually progressed we may become. Would that be a fair summation of what you just said?
Mariana: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also, Arnaud used to say that people come thinking they want truth, but very often they want to be happy, right? And we want to be loved. And part of being loved is loving, right? Loving and being loved. And it’s not inseparable from truth, but it’s often a deep part of our aspiration on the path. We don’t just want — we don’t want to leave the world. We just don’t know how to do the world in a way that brings insight and love. And, you know, it doesn’t all happen at the same time. And before we get too far away, and I know we want to hone this in on the Yoga and psyche project, as it were, but I use the example of Arnaud, but I was recently visiting the ashram, Lee’s ashram. I hadn’t been there for a long time, and there was a visiting teacher, a Tibetan, an American Tibetan Lama. And different than Arnaud, he was — his name was Trachtam Rimpoche. And he was also speaking truth, but he was very — he reminded me of Lee in the way that he was giving refined teachings about — I don’t know, whatever they do in Tibetan Buddhism, the red dot, how it separates from the white and the consciousness. And then he’d sit and say, “And don’t you think that that exempts you from getting depressed now and then?” And he writes songs about the blues, and he goes, “I go through cyclical depressions, and just because you’ve mastered these kinds of teachings, don’t think that it gets you — it gets you off the wheel of the things that happen to human beings.” And he said it strongly and articulately with a confidence and a transmission of truth that, again, it warmed me. Because, maybe there’s another way to consider the path where we just learn how to open to it and digest and integrate life. We have so much time to be dead.
Rick: I think one reason people have that sort of expectation a lot is you read the spiritual literature, and it’s all about ananda and these blissful states that you’re supposed to be able to be in. And we kind of think, “Oh boy, if I can achieve that, then I’ll always be in bliss, and so there won’t be any room for depression.” But again, I haven’t seen any examples of it, and I’ve seen some pretty nifty people. I’ve seen some very blissful people, but they still seem to go through the cycle of normal human emotions. By blissful people, I mean great famous saints and so on. They still are prone to anger and tears and even depression, at least externally it appears to be that. That’s their experience. I don’t know what’s happening inside. There may be an underlying foundation of bliss with the facade of depression or anger, but that’s the way it appears.
Mariana: What is the insistence on favoring bliss? I know that it’s really, really pleasant, and I’m a Yogi, so we like bliss. The wonderful thing about Yoga is that if you learn to practice in a certain way, without drugs and without getting into a cave in India, you can practice in a certain way, and you can invoke deep states of pleasure and samadhi and different states of bliss and enjoyment and freedom. It’s so wonderful, right? It’s so wonderful. But any kind of insistence on that being the state that defines the spiritual path seems to rule out the rest of life and going into bridging to Yoga and psychology, we find ourselves in a lot of problems. This year alone, I was talking to a friend recently, in the last 12 months we’ve had 3 or 4 major Yogic Buddhist scandals. I mean major ones, let alone all the minor ones. I think that there is something that psychology has to bring to Yoga, and certainly, we know that these Eastern imports have something to bring to us. That’s why more spiritual practitioners are studying Yoga and Buddhism than Judaism and Christianity and Native American spirituality. There’s something, especially Buddhism, right? There’s something so wonderfully accessible about them and the methods. And yet, I know this is a familiar conversation, but if we look at where everything breaks down in the lives of teachers and in the lives of communities and in our own disillusionment, which is fine if it doesn’t take us away from the path, but it’s unfortunate, I mean it’s fine if it brings us closer to the path, but it’s unfortunate if it takes us away from the path. All of this occurs in the domain of psychology. Most spiritual practices work well. And it’s not a problem that that’s so. It’s just a question of how as Western practitioners we refine our understanding and approach to the path and our expectations and we understand our longing and what’s involved. And then we don’t, it doesn’t need to become a disillusionment. I was recently speaking on a show, some friends of mine, two wonderful Yoginis, Anne Cushman and Janice Gates, they started the Mindfulness Yoga program at Spirit Rock. And they had a call in and the call-in person said something to me to the effect of, “Are you trying to tell me that if I approach a new Yoga teacher or a new spiritual teacher that I should expect that this teacher might end up propositioning me for sex or might have some secret something that’s going to pop out?” And I said, “You don’t have to expect it, but you might want to be prepared for that possibility.” And not in the black and white way, like that happens and I’m going to run for the hills, but be prepared, like how are you going to think about it? And how are you going to think about the human condition and your condition and teachers and the path so that you can optimize your practice and you can optimize the benefits that you’re going to take from the teachers? And of course, none of that takes away from a teacher’s responsibility and accountability for their actions, but that’s what they have to do. And most of your listeners are practitioners, so we have to do what we have to do.
Rick: I guess at this juncture we could reference your book, Halfway Up the Mountain, Error of Premature Claims to Awakening, and suggest that virtually everyone who is out there as a teacher isn’t necessarily at the mountaintop. And then ask the question, “Well, if they were at the mountaintop, and if there is a mountaintop, would we expect impeccability or could we still expect, or does being a screw-up at times even characterize life at the mountaintop?”
Mariana: And particularly a discernment, which was the subject of Eyes Wide Open, a discernment to make is when the teacher falls, what happens there? How do they respond? How do they handle it? And how do they support their community through it? Because, I think that separates the wheat from the chaff. And separating when a teacher really makes an error from when a teacher gets a divorce. People get so disillusioned with a teacher because they get divorced. That’s not a teacher screwing up. That’s human relationship going through its course, and we have no idea, nor is it our business. All the variables that went into a teacher’s divorce, unless it’s some public thing that is directly relevant to the teacher’s effectiveness to the students. So I don’t consider, I mean, marriages sometimes break up, right? We all know that. So that, I want to just make that distinction, because I have people coming to me all the time, devastated because their teacher got divorced, and they don’t know what to make about the tradition, and the path, and the lineage. I don’t know, I’ve been a psychotherapist. That happens in life. But, and distinguish that from teacher screwing up. Teachers screw up.
Rick: I think the reason we’re dwelling on this point so much from slightly different angles is, we can maybe make it even more explicit. There’s an underlying assumption that enlightenment, or self-realization, or whatever you want to call it, is some kind of idyllic state, and it’s a state at which we’ve finally risen above the possibility of making mistakes. We’re kind of in tune with the cosmic intelligence, and all of our action is going to just flow spontaneously in a life-supported manner, and we’re not going to be doing anything which is going to hurt anybody in any way. There are teachers who have explicitly explained it in those terms, and a lot of people have taken that to heart, and that’s their expectation. So, somehow that expectation either has to be dismantled, or it has to be reconciled with reality.
Mariana: Yeah, it’s interesting, right? So, we haven’t touched the subject of somatics yet, but I do have a lot of body-centered psychotherapy, which is most of what I do, and the great bridge between psychology and Yoga is the body. But, because I’ve been studying it for so long, I experience a lot of life through the body. So, when you describe that, I feel nauseous. My first response is, “I’ve got this nausea,” when you talk about this state.
Rick: Well, you’ve heard it, though, I’m sure. You’ve heard that kind of explanation of what it is.
Mariana: I heard it, but I think I get nauseous because I just perceive, I just feel the heartbreak, and the devastation, and the suffering involved in the propagation of such a teaching. I hear that because I mean, yeah, granted, it’s my living, so in some small way, it benefits me. I’m saying that really as kind of a joke, but I hear that, and the suffering that takes place. It’s just a misunderstanding, and it diminishes the path. It diminishes the radiance of the path and of life, and you think about such a teaching. I don’t know why teachers would insist on propagating that, but you think about the suffering in the teachers themselves, where they experience the contradiction between that teaching and their own lives. So, they’re struggling with that and how to manage that. I’ve talked to many of these teachers. We got to meet up at the Science and Non Duality Conference, and the joy for me in those conferences, especially the year before last, my son was nine months old, so I spent the whole conference in the hallway, kind of talking to whoever sat down and played with us, and just enjoying the company because there were so many wonderful people there. The teachers would just sit down, and these are the conversations we have. Then, not only are they struggling with the contradiction or the incongruence in themselves, but then in propagating those teachings, you’re proliferating that contradiction in students. Then, those students are nurses and doctors and therapists and teachers, and then they, of course, want to do their part in bringing forth the teachings, and then they have the same contradiction to work with. Whereas, if we consider in this moment, just a working definition of awakening or enlightenment as congruence, more like a Jungian, like a congruence with life and ourselves and the laws of the universe, which include all the everything, it just gets more real, more honest. It gets softer. Heartbreak is a beautiful thing. Heartbreak humbles us.
Rick: I was actually going to ask you, I was going to say, if this idyllic state of enlightenment doesn’t actually exist, if we can’t find living examples of it, present or past, then what’s the best we can hope for? What would be a more honest, realistic definition of enlightenment? You started to answer it. One in which we’re not just lowering the bar and selling ourselves short, but what it actually is. What is actually attainable for a human being in any reasonable or practical sense? I think it’s important to anchor down a clear understanding of that and perhaps help to begin to reverse this trend that you just described of people propagating an unattainable ideal.
Mariana: Yeah, and the reality is, as far as I understand it, is that we don’t entirely know what is attainable for each of us in this life. When you say that, one of my Yogic mentors was Robert Svoboda, who is a wonderful Yogic scholar. He used to say that you go deep within yourself and you conceive and feel into the greatest possibility, your deepest aspiration for the path. You envision and feel into that from the deepest place that you can. Then you look at what’s the next point. It’s almost like connecting the dots, because we don’t want to diminish the path and the possibilities. We hold to the deeper vision and we keep practicing. We keep practicing in all the ways that life reveals to us to practice. I can’t talk to people about not practicing. There are so many ways to practice and the non-practice approach makes zero sense to me. But we keep practicing, because the practice is greater than us. The transmission and the possibilities are greater than our conceptions of them. So, if we envision and aspire and intend and then attend to the next step in front of us, we hold a possibility for what can become of each of our own unfolding process, and yet stay really real with what’s in front of us.
Rick: One thing that occurred to me when you said that is that one little syndrome I’ve noticed is that when people are really fixated on a far-reaching, idealistic notion of enlightenment, they very often belittle their own progress and feel like they are just light years away from ever attaining anything of real significance. Whereas what you just said, if we just look to the next horizon, and then having reached that horizon, look to the next one, we can be more honest about the very significant progress that we may actually have made.
Mariana: Yeah, and the path is infinite. There are so many things I can’t say with total conviction, but I believe this. The path is infinite, and each human being is unique. And if we really accept those simple things that most people could probably agree with, that they feel in themselves, that the path is infinite, that actually means, and that we’re unique, that it really means that wherever we are on it is perfectly okay. It’s a point on infinity, and it actually can’t be measured because we have unique karma and unique gifts. So it actually is okay. It may not feel very good, but again, it’s just not true that we’re not far along enough. That’s in relationship to a projection and an idea, and it doesn’t account for our uniqueness and our gifts and what our lives can be.
Rick: I came across a quote from St. Teresa of Avila in which she said that God himself is on the path. He too is evolving.
Mariana: That’s beautiful. I think that’s beautiful. And if God had teenagers, God would experience a certain amount of internal crisis and confusion about what to do in this situation and that situation.
Rick: God does have teenagers.
Mariana: Yeah, and God gets cancer and God weeps. An environmental crisis happens and God has anxiety attacks about it and doesn’t know what’s going to happen when the earth disappears and where to go next and how to manifest itself in the widest possibility. God itself.
Rick: So how are we doing on our conversation?
Mariana: Who is God?
Rick: Are we starting to take off chunks and chew upon them in terms of this Yoga and psychology discussion? And just the way this is unfolding, are we hitting on some of the themes that you would like to discuss?
Mariana: We’re hitting on them, but after I get through wondering about poor God who doesn’t have anybody to go to for therapy, as we consider that, who does God go to for support?
Rick: Maybe he’ll give you a call after this. The show’s getting pretty popular, so you never know.
Mariana: Poor God, right? Who does God get to go to for emotional support? And why shouldn’t God get that and need that? I have no problem with that idea. There’s no one available. I do want to hone in on that. I think this passion we share for this particular angle of the path is so inspiring. And just before we hone into some of the principles of Yoga and psychology, which I think will actually be useful for a lot of your listeners, I thought again to one of the greatest moments of all the interviews I did when I was a young woman. I was interviewing Vimala Thakar, who was the late successor of J. Krishnamurti. J. Krishnamurti didn’t have successors, because they were a non-successor type of path. But she was the one. And at the end of this interview, she talked about all the challenges in her life. And then she said to me, for every challenge that I encountered, I would say to myself, “This is a love letter from God, to which I must find a response from within.” And it’s like that maybe we’re God’s therapy. It’s like these are the love letters, the challenges of our lives. And we go inside and look for the most congruent response we can find in ourselves, as we are situated today with what we’ve learned and what we haven’t learned.
Rick: That’s nice. Well, if God is really omnipresent, then we are him, expressing through these apparent forms and growing as we grow.
Mariana: That’s just so much more human, and it can really undercut so much self-hatred and self-negation.
Rick: So, when you talk about Yoga and psychology, are you talking about hatha Yoga mostly, or also the whole kit and caboodle?
Mariana: I’m talking about the whole kit and caboodle. And the people that I end up working with are mostly Yoga teachers or long-term practitioners in this type of seminar. Why? Because people, when they’re hungry for the path, they very often end up in Yoga or Buddhism. You might know this better than I do, but “Yoga” is probably the most popular choice of a spiritual practice. I put that in quotes because a lot of Yoga isn’t very spiritual in how it’s offered. But it’s more there than anywhere else, so people enter the path in that way. And they enter, as we’re talking about, just with hopes for some relief of suffering and ideas of bliss or peace or all the things that we come to the path with. And then those who get deeply into Yoga, as we were saying, discover that there’s a lot of bliss to be found, and it’s quite methodical. You can do, especially physical practice, you can really achieve certain states. And whether you’re doing that through Yoga or through a vipassana meditation or following the neo-Advaita track and getting the experiences that people like to get so much. What seems to happen for almost everybody after a period of time is we see that that isn’t translating, that isn’t having a direct translation into our relational lives, in vocational lives. It doesn’t translate. None of that ends up. A little bit of that helps us be better partners and better parents and operate in the world and figure out how to share our gifts and how to make a living and how to enjoy friendships and how to minimize drama in our lives. But a lot of it doesn’t. And it’s been happening really for a long time, since spirituality got imported into Western culture. A lot of the teachers from Jack Kornfield onward regularly integrate their stories of coming back from India and starting to date and just then throwing themselves into psychotherapy in a very short time because all of those states of emptiness were not amounting to these, they weren’t integrating into these other areas of life. And of course, one approaches to say, “Then we leave the world.” What does that mean? It just means we’re dysfunctional and can’t make a living. And we’re living like starving artists on the spiritual path, which is fine if we want to do that. But once people are 40 and 50 and 60, they’re really interested in being able to have health insurance as they grow old. And to have health insurance, you need a good job or you need money. And we want to live in a house where we feel comfortable as we prepare for later stages of the path. And there’s the world and there’s the relational part of life. And those wounds, those traumas that were created in relationship are often best attended to and resolved in a relational context. And there’s no shame in that. There’s no failure of the path. There’s no failure of us. So, we get to this point where so many Yoga teachers, many of them are thinking, “Wow, I wish I’d simultaneously done a psychology degree.” Or, “If I had this knowledge, I could serve my students a lot better.” Because you just hit this point. I was talking to an old friend of mine who runs an Ashtanga studio in Barcelona. I love going to Spain. And we were there. We always connect up. And she’s been an ashtangi for 20 years. Ashtanga is a very rigorous practice. And she said she can go through the intermediate and advanced series of Ashtanga. And for those who have no idea what I’m talking about, Ashtanga is so rigorous. And when you talk about an intermediate or advanced series of Ashtanga, you’re talking about things that very few human beings can contort their bodies to do. So, you’re referring to Patanjali’s Eight Limbs, right? When you say Ashtanga? Or is this a different thing? In this way, Ashtanga Yoga was brought forth by Pattabhi Jois. So it’s just a very popular brand of Yoga. Most of the Yogas that are practiced came from Pattabhi Jois and Ashtanga, or they came through Shivananda, or they came through… I don’t know why his name is… Iyengar. Or Desikachar. So there’s just a few lines from which all the others were birthed. But her point was that she could go through all of these things. And you have to do some intense breathing, and everything has to be coordinated. And she could be totally spaced out, and obsessing about a psychological challenge, or still the way that the fact that she was adopted, lives and still maintains an alienation in her life. This is just an example of a great Yogi friend who is deeply honest about the path.
Rick: So would you say that if practice doesn’t translate into daily life readily enough, or integrate into it very readily, can the practice be faulted? Or are you saying that almost always there should be some kind of therapy, some kind of something to supplement practice in order to take care of the areas which spiritual practice of any kind is not really capable of addressing?
Mariana: I don’t fault practice at all. It’s more that we’re importing Eastern practices into a Western life.
Rick: And sometimes the proponents of those Eastern practices are actually saying, “All you need to do is this, and everything else will be seek ye first, and all shall be added unto thee.” You don’t have to do the psychotherapy or anything if you do my meditation practice or my this and that. That’s actually the teaching sometimes.
Mariana: It is, but those people very, very often end up the subject of some major spiritual scandal, or they end up a role model like Amrita Sai, who fell and then followed his process of making amends and doing his own psychotherapy later and offering that example. The practice itself isn’t to be faulted, and it’s not that everybody who does spiritual practice has to go into psychotherapy. Some practices are learning and working to integrate that component into the practice. The point is that we’re Western practitioners living in a very certain period of time, and no amount of truth discounts the also-truth of duality, right? And the also-truth of the arising of karma and in psychological terms, human development. We’re Western practitioners who have been raised in a culture that the Western psyche is different than the Eastern psyche. Most of us were raised in homes where our parents were not psychologically integrated people who taught us how to work with the whole world of emotions. Half of us came from families that were broken or they should have been broken, and they weren’t broken. There’s the trauma of divorce and there’s the trauma of people who were raised where there should have been divorce and there wasn’t divorce.
Rick: Yeah, that was my situation. My parents were always saying, “We have to stay together for the sake of the kids,” and meanwhile they created a hell.
Mariana: I know, right, but there’s the trauma of parents who did not divorce, right? Being raised in parents who did not divorce.
Rick: What you’re saying is that Kipling was right in a way, you know? “Never the twain shall meet.” You can’t completely transplant an Eastern spiritual practice into a Western culture without somehow supplementing it, integrating it.
Mariana: Integrating. So Western psychology, and again we should talk a little bit more about psychology because it’s a word that’s as useless as enlightenment until we talk about what we really mean by it, because everybody has these ideas.
Rick: I’d like to do that, sure.
Mariana: A lot of people are subtly against psychology, but the projection is as unthought about as it adds our projection of enlightenment. But it’s just about integrating. If we’re going to import, what do the findings, not only of the old psychology, but somatic psychotherapy and trauma research and neuroscience, right? What are the benefits of the Western intelligent findings of the spiritual path have to add and bring to the path so that Western practitioners who are interested in studying spirituality, whether it’s Buddhism or Advaita or Yoga or even old things like the patriarchal Judaism, but they want to study Jewish mysticism, right? What do these things have to give to each other? It is absolutely true that we’re, every time must have been unique in history, right? That’s the funny thing about we’re in a unique time in history. Every time must have been unique in history because it was the only time, but we’re in the one that we’re in, right? You and I are sitting in different states talking to people all over the world. It’s so beautiful. From our last interview, I ended up with psychotherapy clients in these countries far reaching, and we sit in the living room like this. It feels like we could be sitting in the living room and can meet each other. Most of my clients I rarely deal with. I don’t have Nepali clients or Indian clients. I have European clients and clients who were somehow formed in some variation of the Western psyche. There’s no reason why the benefits of trauma research, why, for example, here’s a question for psychology, why when somebody can do all of this wonderful spiritual, when they can hit all these high enlightenment states, and they can even intellectually articulate what happened in their childhood, they embrace psychology enough to do that, that they’re going along and they still encounter in their body these intense states of anxiety in relationship and will, with the flip of a dime, feel like they’re in a war zone, right? Or their life is at stake. This happens for regular people all the time. Why? Because those things are stored in the body. So, angling into our question about psychology, the psychology that I like to think about is the psychology that’s being developed. Buddhism is 2,500 years old and Yoga is 5,000 or 10,000 years old, depending on who you ask, and Western psychology is 110, or I haven’t counted lately, 110 or 120 years old. And I, at the moment at least, I resonate with the idea that psychology is a Western offering to the spiritual path, when practiced and developed as is possible. So when I think about psychology, I think about the psychology that is becoming, and is becoming possible.
Rick: I really like what you’re saying. I listened to your interview with Rick Hanson. I thought it was great. I’d like to interview him one of these days. He’s a neurophysiologist or neuroscientist. I recommend you. You have an interview series going, don’t you? We can link to that. People might enjoy listening to the one I just referred to and to some of the others because you’re talking to scientists about these kind of topics. But I think you’re kind of pointing to another one of these underlying assumptions, which is that the Eastern spirituality doesn’t really have anything to learn from the West, that they are the masters of the spiritual just as the West is the master of the scientific. But I think that both actually can grow into a much greater wholeness by a kind of a marriage in which all of our scientific understandings of the brain and so on are appended onto Eastern spiritual practices. Conversely, a lot of the Western scientific stuff, which is capable of destroying the planet, needs an infusion of spirituality, which perhaps the East can provide more so than other traditions. So as we grow into more of a global community through communications and transportation and so on, it seems like this melding together is taking place with mutual benefit for all.
Mariana: Yeah, and where all of those things, this marriage actually takes place is in the human body, in each of us. So, I think that the most interesting development in Western psychology has been bringing the body into the picture. And it’s not a new development in many ways. Reich was on it and got persecuted for it, and Jung talked about the body. So, it’s not that it hasn’t been talked about, but the availability now, or the increasing availability of psychological approaches that know how to work in the body. And this is where Yoga and somatic approaches, somatic meaning body-centered approaches, blend so beautifully, because Yoga has an entry point into the body, or physical Yoga practice. It actually starts to teach you how to inhabit the body and feel sensation in the body and feel consciousness in the body. It doesn’t teach, unless the Yoga teacher was trained psychologically, it doesn’t teach how to work with trauma and memories and relationship issues in the body. But when you start bringing the knowledge of the two of those together, you get something really interesting. So, the biggest shift in my life as a psychotherapist and my life as a spiritual practitioner was when all of this started coming down into the body. As a psychologist, I was going through a period of illness in my 30s, and I called up a friend who was a somatic psychotherapist, and I said, “What is all this stuff about trauma, and can I have a session?” And I went, and after my first session, I felt that all of the psychotherapy I’d been doing until then was limited, because this man was taking it into the body. And similarly, I had been with Yogi Ram Surat Kumar, I had been with my teacher, I had done years and years and years and years of meditation, and then I started getting really involved in asana, because like many people in meditation, when it’s at the level of from here up, it’s hard to swim in, and for me, it’s hard to learn how to swim in. And for me, the rooting of physical practice and breath, it anchored the process of consciousness. So, when I could anchor my curiosity of how I was formed and start to perceive my trauma and my struggles and sensations in the body, and when meditation and consciousness could start to have a place to find its way into the body, and we could start really digesting our emotional reactivity and our trauma in the body, and start to — I mean, when you bring meditation into the body — so Reggie Ray is another person, he’s one of my friends and elders who I’m going to be interviewing in this series I’m working on in Yoga and psychology. He ended up splitting from his whole tradition. He split off because he — well, I don’t know exactly why, but he felt that meditation on the body, which was the name of one of his books, that it had to go that way. And when we get excited, when we learn — we have to learn it. Who teaches us this? When we start to learn how to experience consciousness in the body, and when we start to learn how to digest our emotions in our body, the body awakens. And this principle of endlessness we’re talking about becomes very practical. It’s no longer a concept. When you start to be able to journey into the body and consciousness in the body, There, it’s like the first time you discover meditation. I mean, it’s a bottomless, endless possibility to awaken radiance and activity in the body, and it’s really, really exciting, and it has implications that are very real life, like how our experience of sex is, right? That’s important to us. And when we’re experiencing emotions, hard emotions, the most effective way that I have come across in my whole life of working with them is learning to intelligently work with them in the body, and you can actually process them. You don’t have to sit for a week and think, “Why did I get upset in that moment?” You can learn how to meet that in the body and largely work through it in 5 or 10 minutes when you know what to do.
Rick: So let’s use that as an example. Let’s say you got upset, and you work through it in five or ten minutes. What’s the actual experience that’s taking place there? Are you noticing a physical sensation in your heart chakra or something, and you’re letting your attention dwell on that, and it’s kind of dissolving through the attention? What’s happening there?
Mariana: Okay, so the mistake I’ve made in this interview so far, I just realized when you reflected it back, it’s a 5 to 10 minute piece because I think I’ve spent the last ten years learning and studying and did 3-year training in order to learn how to work with something in five or ten minutes. I think about all the Neo-Advaita listeners who like to do things really, really, really quickly, or not at all. So that’s why I said it was a mistake because we don’t want to get too excited about quick fixes.
Rick: There are people who can climb Half Dome in a few hours without ropes, but don’t go out and try it.
Mariana: We can definitely address your question, but it’s something that we need to learn how to do. However, we’re going to learn how to do it, whether we study it in books and practice or get in a study group or we do a training. After I worked with a somatic psychotherapist who was my friend, a wonderful therapist out here, I went about trying to figure out what was the smartest somatic trauma training that was available and promptly putting myself in it. I studied for three years in the lineage of Peter Levine, who developed this model called somatic experiencing. It’s one of a number of good schools available. They might have approached it a little bit differently, but that’s the one that I studied in and have based a lot of my integration of Yoga and somatic psychotherapy on. A few of the wonderful things that I learned in that school of trauma, and it’s not a spiritual school, but if you do your spiritual homework and then you learn how to work with trauma, the trauma, not like just the rape that happened to this person or that person, but the trauma in a very broad definition. Whatever happened that we remember or don’t remember that causes us to clamp up and brings the anxiety and the insomnia. Often, it’s something we don’t remember and I think that we have to remember it. So, trauma in the sense that all of us experience. When I did this training, we spent the first four long days in learning how to experience a place of resource and pleasure and sanctuary in the body. So, learning how to experience safety in the body and the old schools of psychology. When we first started going to India, whatever that was, I don’t know if you’ve been or not, but metaphorically when we all first started going to India, psychologically at that time, people were doing a bunch of drugs hoping that they could relive everything all at once and get it done once and for all. Or they were trying these early cathartic schools, they were following Fritz Perls or doing the earlier forms of holotrophic breath work where you just go for as much catharsis as I’m willing to endure, as much pain and feel it all the way. Just let me feel it and I’ll feel whatever I have to and I’ll lock myself in this room for three days and fast until I feel this whole thing so I can be done with it.
Rick: It’s a marathon, it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Mariana: And it’s great and it never works, it just never works. And what I learned and am thoroughly convinced of is that actually through safety and through the cultivation of love, pleasure, warmth, and the sanctuary as a physiological state in our body, that’s the road through which we learn to work with the trauma. So, when we talk about these kinds of states arising, it’s not going to be as simple as going into the body and just shaking or feeling. What I end up teaching people how to do is, well first it’s about how to experience consciousness in the body because that’s not a given. So how to enter into the body and experience the life of the body and the emotion of the body as sensation in the body. Every emotional state we experience has a physiological component. Every thought we have has a physiological component. So, learning how to perceive the body so that we can start to take these states and work with them in the body. And the process, I don’t want to undersell it by trying to put out a whole method because it’s too quick. It’s the kind of thing where at the moment the screen comes up, do not, just try these practices, especially don’t teach them, without some guidance or without some knowledge or some study. But basically, even when you’re in the hyper aroused state, you’re learning to bring yourself to a state where the nervous system is more relaxed. And there are simple techniques that help you do that even in highly activated states. And then what we learn to do is to dip gently into almost the outer layer of the traumatic states in the body for very, very short periods of time. And you can actually metabolize them. You can digest them. So, it’s about cultivating a place of safety and reprieve in the body and then consciously dipping into the states of arousal or activation and then dragging our consciousness out of it and back into a calmer state and dipping in and out of these states. And when I first started studying it, it’s an hour process and there’s two people watching, one therapist, but now I have a two-year-old and I have experience with it. So that process is going to happen while I’m grabbing a bottle of juice and walking to the car. But you can train yourself to do it. And it’s another point worth mentioning because hardcore spiritual practitioners, which many people who listen to your show must be, and I certainly, from everything I know about you and myself, that’s where many of us start. We don’t know about gentleness when we come in. We’re much more about passion and fire and burning our way into enlightenment and speed and the suffering of God if we’re theistic and to actually be converted to a process of gentleness and slowing things down. And when I was young, I didn’t even think peace was very interesting. You look at all the words on the path, you know, “passion” and “cutting through” and “peace” and “enlightenment” sounded boring. And those don’t sound boring at all anymore.
Rick: Yeah, well you know we were talking about what Western science can bring to Eastern spirituality and when I listened to your interview with Rick Hanson, he was talking about how the brain changes over time through experience. And if you think about the state of enlightenment, whatever it is, if it’s a radically different state of subjective experience, then it must be a radically different state of physiological functioning. And if you look at how the physiology is, how it functions, it doesn’t turn on a dime. It doesn’t undergo radical transformations in a 24-hour period or something. There’s always a gradual culturing that has to take place. And so, I think what you’re saying is in tune with that fact. And you’re describing a method whereby that physiological transformation can be facilitated in the right direction. And I know in my own experience, I’ve been meditating at least a couple of hours a day for 44 years and the whole process these days is kind of like a CAT scan of the body to a great extent. There’s always a sort of noticing of what’s going on here and what’s going on here and sort of bringing awareness to that. Maybe that’s not exactly what you teach, but I find it very… By the end of a session, I feel like I’ve just been physiologically rejuvenated and a lot of crud that had been hidden there has been cleared out and the whole thing is working more smoothly. And as you say, there’s probably no end to that, to the refinement and purification and culturing that can take place. Which is not to say that it’s just sort of a hopeless, endless process that’s never going to reach any fruition. But even if there are stages of fruition, milestones if you will, and even a final one, if they’re speaking hypothetically, there’s still going to be refinement after that because of what the body is and how it functions and what its innate capabilities are. Let’s say the self has been realized with complete clarity and there’s just this Sahaja Samadhi being lived all the time. Fine, but then what? Can your senses become more refined? Can your heart or emotions become fuller? What are the physiological correlates to that that have to change in order for that to happen?
Mariana: That’s so beautiful, how you’re describing that. You kept using the word fruition and I kept seeing fruits. And I was thinking, well, of course there’s fruition. I was just imagining bigger and juicier and more interesting fruits and your path comes to fruition. What would you want to do? You would want to taste more fruits and serve. I mean, imagine fruits that we don’t even know existed. Who wouldn’t want to sit there and serve and eat and share and know all the fruition? And when we talk about the possibilities in the body, there’s two things that come to mind. One, in the very brief period of my life where I was studying Jyotish Vedic Astrology, which I really know nothing about, but I was studying it for a short period of time and the astrologer who I was studying with conveyed to me, and I actually understood it at the moment when he was talking about it, he said that the Vedas are encoded into the cells of your body.
Rick: Yup, there’s a whole book that’s been written about that by a guy here, who’s sometimes here in Iowa, which is called “Ved and Human Physiology” and he correlates all the different books of the Vedas with different structures in the brain and nervous system. It’s quite a fascinating thing.
Mariana: Nice. And it’s not just the Vedas that are encoded, right? The Koran has got to be encoded if you practice in the Islamic and the Old Testament is probably encoded into the cells of our body. Everything wise is encoded into the cells of our body. So when you talk about how many people can talk about meditation practice like you can, it’s your own experience of it, but when we consider that all of the knowledge of the universe is encoded into the cells of our body, and let’s take this with another experience I’ll put on the table. I went a few weeks ago back to Washington, D.C., where I was raised, and my family moved away when I went to college, so I had never been back since I was 19. And my brother came down and we did a pilgrimage to the house that I was raised in for 18 years, and we knocked on the door and the people were very nice, so we spent about an hour walking through this house. And I had just an experience that I had never had before in life where everything from childhood, every memory was just thrown at me at the same time as many as could fit in the synapses of my brain were happening at the same time. And they weren’t necessarily significant things. I remembered all the tools on my father’s tool chest and how it was designed and what the plaque on the door to the closet was and how I used to go inside and make sure nobody was sitting there before I went to sleep. And I remembered the times that I was right, that I was sick and stayed home, and my mother took care of me and the ribbons that we tied on the little things for my pot mix all at once, right? The radio and what it looked like and the songs that used to be playing while my mom was cooking. It all just happened at the same time. And the horrible things and beautiful things, they were all just being remembered at the same time. So that’s a really helpful explanation of psychology as well. I mean, it’s just there and it’s in our body. So if these Vedas or your Koran or your New Testament, it doesn’t matter, right? If that’s encoded in the cells of your body and every trauma and every wonderful thing, it’s all encoded into the cells of our body. And then the body is just going to, I don’t know, there are just two really interesting pieces of information to hold at the same time. And it’s a very reasonable explanation of karma as well. It’s just there and it’s there for the taking of consciousness. And why wouldn’t we be taking all the skills of the very best therapies and trauma research and the best neuroscience and the best Eastern technology and the most wonderful people we can find to hang out with in our lives and the not wonderful people that we’re given to hang out with anyway because they’re part of our lives and just take it on as the life that we’re given for a very, very short period of time and aspire toward the greatest spiritual unfolding that we could conceive of. We don’t even know what that is anyway, but aspire, right? And hold that too and accept the bad days, right, where we just feel like shit and consciousness seems a million miles away and practice bringing all of our skills to that too and just kind of taking it on. I can’t really think what else there is. Our life is about our work and our vocation and we do that, but it’s just what the game is about.
Rick: It gives new meaning to that song, “Your Body is a Wonderland.” I forget the guy’s name who sang that song, but it’s kind of becoming the focus of our conversation at the moment. There’s that saying, “The body is the temple of the soul,” and I think we’re kind of elaborating on that theme and kind of highlighting the significance of it, but the body is hundreds of trillions of neurons in the brain and this infinitely sophisticated mechanism and that’s the vehicle if we’re going to do anything in life. When I was 18 years old and had been taking drugs for a year, I kind of had this realization one time. I was sitting there in my basement bedroom on acid reading a Zen book and it just hit me like a ton of bricks. Wow, I’m stuck in this body and if I damage it, I’m going to be stuck in a damaged body all my life, so, I better really clean up my act here. That’s when I decided to learn meditation, but on the positive side, it’s this incredibly sophisticated exploratory tool the body is for discovering what the truth of life is and the meaning of life and the significance of the universe and so many deep questions. It’s through this instrument. If you think of spiritual practice as a science, most sciences use instruments external to the scientist, a microscope, a telescope, whatever, and some experiments take a long time, 15, 20 years to actually reach some kind of conclusion. So in this case, here’s our instrument and the experiment might take decades, but it’s continually yielding new knowledge as we continue to explore deeper and deeper.
Mariana: Yeah, yeah, yeah, beautifully said. And then we’re going out into the cosmos, but we can see how, for me, Yoga has so much to bring to the awakening of the body and the somatic approaches, the body-centered approaches to psychology. They’re natural allies and aids in awakening the body, and we are talking passion about the body, but I, like a lot of listeners, and it’s important to think about they might be listening like I was when I went to therapy when I was 23, and my therapist said, “Oh, you’re really out of your body,” and I had no idea what she meant. I had no idea what she meant, and I remember thinking, “What does that mean?” And obviously I’m supposed to be in it, but what does that mean, and how do I get there? So as we were getting a little ecstatic, which I support and love about the possibilities, and then there’s all of these people who are listening and saying, “How do I even know if I’m in my body?” And I had to ask every couple of years, “Am I in my body yet?” I don’t think so. Am I in my body yet? How will I know when I’m in my body? And it just takes a while. It takes some instruction, especially some of us come in through paths that are teaching us to leave our body, and a lot of Yoga, you go to the wrong teacher, and they’re just teaching you how to leave your body and get further away from it rather than closer to it. So, I just want to bring the remembrance that nearing the body, it’s not complicated, and it’s not hard, and it’s not really complex, but it has to be learned and taught and practiced. And a lot of times why people don’t initially want to get near it is because initially when we get near it, like when I was using the example of visiting with my child at home, all that’s there. So, when we first start to look at ourselves, when we first start doing challenging, introspective work, there’s a lot of gunk. When we first enter into the body, we might find for women a lot of shame, and a lot of women have a lot of hatred for their body, and shame. So, there’s some layers of gunk that we’re going to encounter in there. The nice thing about the gunk is that even though it’s really thick and gooey, it can fairly easily be removed. It’s not the best, but sometimes people don’t know how to, and it’s like there’s stuff. But it’s really workable grounds. It’s like you buy a new lot of land, and to clear it, it’s going to be a drag, but you spend two weeks and you make a lot of progress. Yeah, and you enjoy the land. Well, I was listening to your interview with Raphael Cushnir, and you or he brought up some verse from the Bible about how if you don’t face the stuff that’s there, then its kind of is your enemy, but if you face it, then it can be your friend. You can probably quote the thing. Yeah, yeah. I’m Jewish, so I rarely quote anything Christian, but it was the Gospel of Thomas, or it was Jesus, and he said, “If you face that which is within you, it becomes your ally, and if you don’t face it, it becomes your enemy.”
Rick: There’s something like that in the Gita too, where if you know the self, then it’s your friend, and if you don’t, then it behaves with enmity like a foe. There’s that verse.
Mariana: It’s really an ally, because it not only ceases to be an enemy, but it becomes a great asset. The way that it becomes an asset, as we grow up and grow older, most of us start to want to serve and get something on the path. I think it’s a function of development. You’re younger on the path, and you just want to be free of suffering, and you want to enjoy more, and then you hit 35 or 40 or 50, and you start to feel, “Well, what am I going to leave the world with? What can I offer?” It becomes almost more interesting than what you can get, because you’ve gotten a lot of what you can get. Then you start to get by being able to share and give. When we face what’s within us, and we really know it and meet it and are humbled by it, then it becomes part of our offering. Just like you’re doing with me in this conversation, when we can use those experiences and not be ashamed of them or think less of ourselves because of them, and we learn how to communicate them, then other human beings, which is what we all are, then they say, “Me too.” It makes the teachings accessible. It’s very helpful for people when a spiritual teacher will talk about when they had to go on meds, which most of them won’t, and when they had their nervous breakdown, and when they got ahead of themselves and got inflated. It’s really helpful for people because it says, “Oh, you’re like me, and you’ve come a long way, and that means that I too, I’m made of the same stuff as you, and I have those kinds of experiences.” When we face what is within us, it really becomes an aid to our offering in life, whoever it is that we’re given to offer something to.
Rick: One question that’s been percolating up in the last ten minutes is, people are listening to this, and I think at this point many people are thinking, “What do I do? Should I book an appointment with Mariana? Should I go and find a teacher? But she’s warned against teachers who just get you out of your body. How do I find some kind of practical application for all this? How do I do this somatic Yoga or whatever, so as to really get some benefit, and not just have spent an hour and a half listening to a theoretical talk?”
Mariana: Yeah, yeah, that’s where I go with it, too. So, let’s think about it together in this moment. I think if people haven’t done some good chunk of psychological work in their life, while they’re on the spiritual path or in their life, or it’s been a really long time, or their relationships or their parenting or their anxiety or their depression evidences that it’s time for an update, I think that people should, if they want to gain the most benefits of the spiritual path, that they should take on a good chunk of psychological work, and that they should consider and ask around from the people that they know who’s the best person available that can help them with that, even if it costs a little bit more money, because a mediocre or poor psychologist, there’s no discounts, just like in India, right? If you want toast with butter or toast with butter jelly, there’s no discounts in such a world. I think people should make sure that they’ve given their psychological process some good time. I had done, in the course of my studies, a lot of psychological work, but about five or six, maybe six years ago, I thought, “I’m due. I’m due.” I found the best somatic psychotherapist that I could find, and I drove an hour each way to see him, and I put myself there for three years. I’m so grateful. It deepened my meditation. It deepened my Yoga. It deepened the quality of our conversation right now. I think that’s important to do. I’m finding my way, as my friends have, into the world of multimedia, and I’m grateful for my interns to be helping me with that. Any day, I’ve been promising it for a while, but I’m going to be able to. I have a small Yoga studio at my house here in California, but I’m going to be able to live stream things that I do so that I can talk to people at a larger, further away. I think it is wise to seek out spiritual guidance. We use these conversations, and we use all the resources we have to try to make the most grounded choices in who we seek help from. If you’re looking for teachers in your area or that you can travel to, and we’re talking, I think, pretty convincingly about the value of the body and life and ground and relationship and its relevance to the path. If your teacher is telling you that there’s a quick fix and that you don’t have to practice or that we’re going to transcend all suffering, I would run the other way. If a teacher, by their example, by the long-term practitioners around them, and by what we feel in their presence, is talking about something that is longer-term but sustainable and has implications for human relationship, I think it’s a lot more interesting. I never want to stop studying. I can’t wait until my son is old enough that I’m dreaming of finding a local Tibetan Buddhist teacher where I can just study meditation more deeply when the next opportunity arises. We want to look for really grounded teachers or grounded psychotherapists or grounded groups to study with. If we don’t know what grounded means, because sometimes we don’t, we enliven that question. When we’re visiting, it’s like, “Is this person going to help me become a better person, a wiser person, a more caring person? Is this person going to make me more human?” To fill it out and to use the help of those kinds of teachers and to never think that we’re beyond help or need. It doesn’t mean anything less about us or the path or the teachers. It doesn’t really mean anything. It just means that we’re growing. To not expect to find a perfect teacher, because it’s just a recipe for disaster at this point. I wrote all these early books. I wrote two books about gurus, two versions of a book ten years apart. It was really two books. When I was 30 years old, because it was my doctoral dissertation, the first “Do You Need a Guru?”, I was traveling in Europe and all around the States and talking passionately about gurus. Now, always, people so often write emails saying, “Who do you think that I should study with?” Especially, “I’m going to India. Can you give me a lead to enlightened gurus?” I just don’t know who to send people to. I more have to say, “There’s a number of really wise teachers available.” A bunch of them hang out in Buddhism and some hang out in Yoga and some hang out in Advaita and some hang out in Judaism. It just feels a little different. I never thought I’d live to the day where I would be talking about this. Hopefully, I’m only halfway through my life or less. It seems like we’re in a team. I can see my teacher rolling over in his ashes. I mean, a grave, a samadhi shrine. I think we’re in a collaborative teamwork process here, where we really need to help each other. We need to seek the company of the wise and seek the company of wise peers and not expect to find perfection. My teacher supported me, even though I had different views than him. I just saw him. I was visiting a samadhi shrine and then I just saw him flip when I’m talking about this collaborative effort.
Rick: Well, in the Vedic literature there’s often references to the value of being in the company of the wise. I’m sure that’s true of other traditions too. That in itself is supposed to be a very potent technique, just being in the company of the “enlightened.” As you were speaking, I was thinking, rather than having to be able to give specific recommendations when someone says, “Which teacher should I see?” I think a more useful instruction would be to learn to be conversant with the underlying principles we’ve been talking about in terms of what you would expect in a teacher or what you should expect and should avoid. If those are taken to heart, then finding an effective teacher will be a piece of cake. It’ll just fall into place when you have the right orientation to know what you’re looking for.
Mariana: Yeah, and quite honestly, I spent 10 years of my life producing 3 books to help people have that information. So as we’re talking about this, it’s not vague. Two books ago I did Eyes Wide Open, Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path. Not only did I put all the best of my learning into it, but I had the wonderful editors, it sounds true, who just whipped my butt for 2 years of refinement. I wrote 3 books basically helping practitioners get the information they need so that they can be wise consumers.
Rick: Yeah, I’ve read all 3.
Mariana: We refine our discernment. That’s the value of knowledge. We’re talking about the body, but it’s inextricably linked to the mind. We continue to study and we deepen our knowledge and refine our discernment. Then it’s not as much of a jungle as we think. I’m not worried about encountering a scandalous or false teacher who’s going to screw me over. I’m not going to. I’m might encounter a teacher who does something stupid, but as long as I’m getting the information that I need from that teacher, I’ll be okay with that. There are ways that we can learn how to walk the path with diligence. Of course, we’re refining it, the theme of our conversation, one of them. It’s a very learnable skill and a set of knowledge that’s available to us.
Rick: I would say that if somebody has been with a teacher that disappointed them or didn’t live up to their expectations, then hey, even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day. Undoubtedly, you’ve gleaned something of value from that experience, even if it was to be sadder but wiser. In my own experience, without getting into specifics, I feel like I’ve moved on in a certain way in life, but there was a huge benefit from everything I’ve been through and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. It’s like Mick Jagger said, “You can’t always get what you want, but you get what you need.”
Mariana: Yeah, and we have the choice to make value of what we’re given. We definitely do. The tantric path teaches us that all aspects of life can be used for transformational benefit. We just need to learn how to do that and to choose to do that.
Rick: Yeah, and don’t let that tantric principle be an excuse for indulging in all kinds of hedonistic things. That’s not the spirit in which that was meant, I don’t think.
Mariana: Yeah, well that’s not what tantra is. That’s just a misconception of tantra. If we’re stuck on certain aspects of what happened to us with the teacher, then you do the therapy. I work with that all the time. I work with fallen angels, the fallen practitioners, or the fallen teachers. If there’s trauma, then you can work through the trauma so you can reap the benefits. It’s all really doable.
Rick: Yeah, yeah. Really doable. Well, I’m getting to the point where I feel we should probably wrap it up, but it’s so enjoyable talking to you and each thing you say elicits another thought. If we really do conceive of God as being omniscient and benevolent, then in the big, vast, ultimate picture, everything we go through has some value to us. It’s meant for our growth. God doesn’t play dice with the universe. He’s not capricious, he’s not cruel. There’s some kind of loving hand, even if it’s scrubbing behind our ear and causing us discomfort and we’re screaming out, to use a metaphor with your child. But ultimately, everything is meant for our development and evolution. At least, that’s the way I see it.
Mariana: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree, I agree. And we learn, we learn, we choose to make use of it, but sometimes we have to do a certain amount of work to get enough freedom to be able to choose to do that. And we choose to do that. And Rick, it’s so enjoyable to have these conversations. I’m so happy I get to have them.
Rick: Yeah, me too. I hope we’ve covered all the things you wanted to cover. Is there anything we’ve left out that you feel is really important?
Mariana: I guess the one thing is really just what I’m doing now. Okay, tell us about that. Which is this Yoga and Psyche, I’m calling it the Yoga and Psyche project, or the Yoga and Psyche Integration Project. And I kind of haphazardly put out a little note in one of my newsletters that I was looking for a research assistant because I have this book that’s pushing its way through, but I don’t have the time I used to have because I have a young child. And I got flooded with offers for help, and I’m saying that now because I would like to continue to be flooded with offers of help. If people are listening to this, I can’t take all of it, but I decided to take a bunch of it.
Rick: And they don’t have to be in California, they can be anywhere?
Mariana: Yeah.
Rick: Okay.
Mariana: Yeah, and I got these skilled younger and older people who wanted to participate, and I found myself with what I call a good problem. I didn’t know what to do with them, and then we pulled ourselves, I pulled everyone together and started learning what people’s gifts were, and who was willing to do what was needed, and who was only willing to do what they wanted to do because not that many people can research one book. And we created a project that corresponded to the size of the people who wanted to contribute. So, and this is just the last six months, I just kind of fell in my lap, so suddenly with all this help, we have, you know, we’re doing academic research, we’re designing a quantitative study on the Yoga and Psyche Method. I’m developing and how it actually is going to work and how it translates into an EEG scan, and we’re making a user-friendly workbook so that Yoga teachers can learn how to, can get some basics on how to work psychologically with their students, and I’m writing a book on the subject. And with all of this help, people can bring their gifts, and really, you know, like eight, nine minds, they’re just much more than one. And part of the living research I’m doing, so, the point of this project that we’re at now is just, I think, yes, Saturday I released the first dialogue that I’m doing with different psychologists, yogis, neuroscientists, and trauma researchers on the subject to learn, to learn more. So, when I was a young woman doing these books, I’d travel all around the world to meet these people and interview them, and now I’m grown up and we have this technology, so not only can we just do it like this, but now we can share them. So, I’m calling it living research, and part of what’s alive about it is not only can people listen to the research as it’s happening, but one of my interns set it up so that people can contribute and, you know, bring their comments in and bring their experience in so that we can actually gather the thoughts and input of all of these people on the path who are listening and participating, and that becomes part of the research. So, it’s this really – I’m just at the beginning of it, so I’ll have to tell you next year, you know. It’s come out of it, but it’s really a way to let people who are, you know, equally skilled and as committed to the path, they’re just not doing this public thing, contribute their insights and thoughts and skills. So that’s what I’m doing these days when I’m not being quiet and mothering, which is what I’m doing most of the time.
Rick: Well, I’ll be linking to your website from bathgap.com and people can go in there and sign up for your interview series and your email newsletter, and I guess you’re alluding to the one you did with Rick Hanson, that’s the one you published on Saturday, right, which I listened to. It’s a fascinating talk. And they can get in touch with you if they’d like to engage with you one-on-one or participate in whatever way works for them.
Mariana: Yeah.
Rick: Good. And that’s – what is it?
Mariana: RealSpirituality.com. And I’ll be linking to that anyway. Great. So let me make a few wrap-up points. I’ve been speaking with Marianna Caplan, and I’m sure we’ll do this again in a year or two or whatever, and then maybe next time you release a new book I’d like to have another conversation with you. And this is part of an ongoing series. I’ve done over 150 of them now. There’s a new one pretty much each week. If you’d like to check out some of the previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, which is an acronym for Buddha at the Gas Pump, and they’re all archived there. You can sign up for an email newsletter to be notified each time a new one is posted. There’s a discussion group there which crops up around each new interview, and last I looked there were about 150 very intelligent posts from last week’s interview, and so, feel free to plunge in and participate in that way. There’s a donate button there, which I very much appreciate people clicking if they feel the inclination. It helps to make this whole thing possible for me to do, and I actually hope to somehow move it into being a full-time gig, hopefully without having to restrict access. It would be nice if there were enough donations that I could just do it and not have to say, “You’ve got to pay to watch them,” or something. That rubs me the wrong way. There’s also an audio podcast, which if you’d like to listen to things like this while you’re commuting, you can sign up for that and get it on your iPod or your MP3 player. Next week I’ll be interviewing Kurt Johnson, who’s wrote a book called “The Coming Interspiritual Age,” and the week after that I’ll be interviewing Father Thomas Keating, who’s about 90 years old and also is a big player in this whole interspirituality discussion that’s taking place. Thanks, Mariana.
Mariana: Those are beautiful projects, and I’m so happy for your success. Thank you. I want to say that, and it just occurred to me, and I’d be happy to do this for somebody else. I think one of the interviews, if it hasn’t been done already, should be with you about your experience and what happened, like when I went back to my house and got flooded by all those memories, your experience of encountering all this new knowledge. I propose you being one of your guests. It’s been proposed before. Actually, a fellow did an interview with me a couple of years ago, and perhaps we can do it again one of these days. I’m a little reluctant because I don’t feel like I’m some kind of enlightened teacher.
Mariana: Neither is anyone else in an interview.
Rick: Right. I just sort of feel like, “Hey, this guy is good at asking questions.”
Mariana: That’s how everybody else is.
Rick: Maybe we’ll do that sometime, and you’d be a good one to do it.
Mariana: Blessings for the project.
Rick: Thanks. See you again in person pretty soon, hopefully, maybe next fall at the Science and Nonduality Conference. So long. Thanks to everybody who’s been listening or watching, and we’ll see you next week.