Mary Shutan Interview

Summary:

• Background: Mary Mueller Shutan is a spiritual healer, teacher, and author.
• Books: She has authored several books, including:
  • The Spiritual Awakening Guide: Kundalini, Psychic Abilities, and the Conditioned Layers of Reality
  • Managing Psychic Abilities: A Real World Guide for the Highly Sensitive Person
  • Shadow Work for the Soul: Seeing Beauty in the Dark
  • The Body Deva: Working with the Spiritual Consciousness of the Body
  • Working with Kundalini: An Experiential Guide to the Process of Awakening
  • The Shamanic Workbook series
  • The Complete Cord Course: Working with Cords through Energy Work and Shamanic Healing
• Spiritual Practices: Mary combines her extensive education with personal meditative practices and direct revelation of the spirit world.
• Community Service: She has been serving her community as a spiritual healer and teacher since 2004.
• Interview Highlights:
  • Discussion of her spiritual journey and experiences
  • Insights into working with Kundalini and psychic abilities
  • The importance of shadow work and seeing beauty in the dark
  • Techniques for managing psychic abilities and sensitivity
  • Working with the spiritual consciousness of the body

Key takeaways:

• Spiritual Healing and Teaching: Mary Mueller Shutan is a spiritual healer and teacher with extensive experience in the field.
• Authorship: She has written several books on spiritual awakening, psychic abilities, shadow work, and working with Kundalini.
• Integration of Practices: Mary combines her formal education with personal meditative practices and direct spiritual revelations.
• Community Service: She has been actively serving her community since 2004, offering guidance and healing.

Full interview, edited for readability:

Mary: But if we’re talking about awakening through the chakra system, a lot of people believe that they awaken everything in the first chakra, then they move on to the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, and that isn’t what happens at all.

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews or conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve just redesigned the website for the first time in 15 years. Major redesign, so check it out, batgap.com and let us know if you have any problems or find any bugs that we need to fix, because there have been some. My guest, oh, let me just add, it costs a lot of money to redesign a website and the way we finance BatGap is through voluntary donations. Everything is free, nothing is behind a paywall, including the audio podcast, but we depend upon the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So, if you feel like supporting it in any amount, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the website. And especially let us know if those don’t work, but I think they do. Okay, my guest today is Mary Mueller-Shutan. She’s a spiritual teacher, a healer and an author. And she’s written at least six or seven books. The Spiritual Awakening Guide, Managing Psychic Abilities, Shadow Work for the Soul, The Body Deva, Working with Kundalini, The Shamanic Workbook Series and The Complete Chord Course. I’ve read like two-thirds of her Shadow Workbook and one-third of her Kundalini book and I wish I had more time because I felt I was learning a lot of things that I hadn’t really thought about or known before and I really intend to finish at least the Kundalini book after this interview is done. Okay, so Mary combines her extensive education with her personal meditative practices and direct revelation of the spirit world. She’s been serving her community as a spiritual healer and teacher since 2004. And the titles of her books more or less give you an idea of her spiritual interests, but she is also trained as a number of things, a body worker, Chinese medicine practitioner, cranial sacral therapist, energy work, shamanic worker. And Mary says that much of her work is as a representative of the dark feminine, shadow work, spiritual awakening through the body, emotions, etc. So, I think we have a lot to cover and I encourage the live audience to send in questions. And I think maybe we’ll start, Mary, by just having you give us a little biographical sketch, you know, how you got into all this. I listened to it in one of your books and it was an interesting story. So, you know, in as much detail as you wish to share.

Mary: Sure. You know, I grew up interested in mythology and spirituality and had certainly some spiritual experiences growing up. Those accelerated as a teenager, strange dreams, that sort of thing. I’ve always been a creative person and so a lot of my spiritual energy at an early age was put towards things like writing and painting and creativity and that sort of thing. After I graduated from college I had what’s known as a Kundalini awakening and this rapidly shifted my path. I went through about a decade long period of education. You listed out a lot of my educational path, you know, so I went through an immense amount of education, meditative practices and pretty much for that decade was pretty, I would say, overtaken by the sort of energies unfolding within me. Eventually what happened was that I started a practice, first in energy work and craniosacral therapy and then eventually as an acupuncturist. And as I started seeing people, I started going more in depth into wanting to kind of understand what this was all about, particularly kundalini awakening, but just kind of spiritual awakening in general. And also, I’ve always been a very sensitive person and so a lot of the things in my life I’ve kind of felt like I’ve had to do sort of backwards. For example, one of my most popular books is called “Managing Psychic Abilities” and that’s because growing up I could always find books that were for people that wanted to become psychic. There weren’t any books or materials out there, at least at the time, for people who are, kind of drowning in their sensitivities. And through kind of my Kundalini awakening, at first, I kind of found some of the more surface level stuff and then I found Gopi Krishna’s sort of stuff, which was an experience. The intensity of it was similar to mine. But in other ways, culture, time, all that sort of stuff were a bit different. And so, a lot of my work has really been to create these, sort of maps of spiritual awakening, of consciousness, and to really offer tools for people to not only understand their experiences, especially in the modern world, but to know what to do about them. So that’s really been the largest focus of my path. And so, since that point, I’ve just been continually evolving, continually unfolding, moved a couple of times, and now I’m in a place where I’m a spiritual practitioner. I offer spiritual healing services. I’m a spiritual teacher, and I have books out there for people that are looking for all of the skills and understandings that I offer.

Rick: Good. Did your kundalini awakening take you by surprise, or had you been doing some kind of spiritual practice which precipitated it?

Mary: It took me by surprise. It sounds so odd to say it now, but for the first about seven years that I was experiencing a Kundalini awakening, I was in denial about it even though I was doing odd things like spontaneous yoga postures and having a lot of intensive spiritual experiences. I did find a group online at that point that was early on that was helpful for me kind of early days of the internet. But I had been interested in spirituality as a as a kid and as a teenager. But as a teenager, you know, you’re not really, at least I wasn’t, like totally invested in the practices. I would be interested in chakra meditations and Zen Buddhism and shamanism a bit, but nothing was really kind of an intensive practice for me. At that point, it really took the Kundalini awakening for me to get to a point spiritually where there was such intense energy flowing through me that I felt really directed and guided to go in specific directions in my life. So, I say, my short answer is that, I say that it is very spontaneous, because the undeniable symptoms that happened were very spontaneous. But I can now see and look back and see kind of many emergences of it from childhood.

Rick: In addition to spontaneous yoga postures and energy flowing through your body and stuff, what were some of the other symptoms?

Mary: A lot of trauma and emotions coming up. That was one of the biggest things that happened was that as a result of Kundalini awakenings, what happens is that it is, the best description I’ve ever heard of it is the forced flow of consciousness. And so, you do feel this intense energy flow going through your body and what is that doing? That is releasing, that is unfolding, that is trying to move everything out of the way that isn’t pure consciousness. And so, for me, I hadn’t done much personal work at that point. I had a vague sort of understanding, interest in psychology and philosophy and that sort of stuff, but it was all very mental. It wasn’t embodied at all, and so to suddenly have all of these emotions and traumas coming up through my body, to have increasing dreams and visions and experiences of things like past lives, that was all such an intense opening for me, because it took me way beyond the consciousness or the perspective that I had on reality prior.

Rick: Did you remember some particular past lives that you could care to recount that might have been logical precursors to having a kundalini awakening in this one?

Mary: You know, most of the past lives that I’ve had have been, you know, somewhat mundane, and that’s what I find with a lot of people. So, but I have experienced a tremendous amount of healing from them. I had a past life in which I remember being killed as a soldier, and I didn’t know the word bayonet at that point, but I heard the word bayonet and looked it up and and was very surprised. I had a lot of past lives that had to do with starvation and stuff like that, which drastically impacted my views on food and that sort of stuff. But I’ve also had past lives in which I have been, you know, herbalist, kind of, you know, witchy sort, healer sort, those sorts of things. But you tend to have stuff come up in your system during a spiritual awakening in terms of past lives that didn’t end so well. So, some of those past lives in which I have done spiritual practices for the most part went pretty well. I had a past life as a poet that really didn’t go very well. I had a past life in which I started intensively reading Saint John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, that sort of stuff. I was very interested in Christian mysticism, basically somebody who is imprisoned for his spiritual beliefs. And so, I don’t, you know, I don’t call myself Saint John of the Cross or anything like that, but there was a reason I was drawn to his work during that time and Thomas Merton’s work at that time because I was sort of processing a past life in which I very much was attempting to share my spiritual thoughts, my spiritual ideas, and they were not met well by the culture.

Rick: Yeah, that’s been the fate of many people. There was an Italian monk, Giordano Bruno, I believe his name was, and he was burned at the stake for suggesting that the stars might be other suns like our own and they might even have planets around them. Terrible thing to think, right?

Mary: Yeah, I love his story, yes.

Rick: Yeah. Very interesting. You certainly remember a lot of them. I hope you weren’t burned at the stake for being an herbalist during the Inquisition or something.

Mary: I wasn’t. Some of those lifetimes were actually pretty mundane. So, it would have been, sometimes at a certain point in my life, I was looking for more excitement. But, now I’m just like, okay, I was an herbalist. And that’s part of the reason why I was drawn to herbal medicine this, this lifetime.

Rick: For some reason, yesterday, I was just contemplating what a meat grinder planet Earth can be, you how difficult so many people’s lives are. If you’re kind of feeling, enjoying your life and all, it’s a little bit out of your sphere of awareness, but when you realize what’s happening in South Sudan or Gaza or, you know, Haiti or many of these other places, people, the Earth isn’t an easy place to incarnate on for many people.

Mary: It is not, with awareness definitely comes awareness of suffering and I know you’ve talked about things like spiritual bypass and stuff on your show, but it is very easy to use spirituality to put ourselves in a bubble and ignore things instead of really seeing things clearly. And so, if we do expand our awareness, what happens is that, yeah, the world is a heartbreaking place. It isn’t a fair place. It isn’t a place where a lot of us are allowed to thrive, and that’s really unfortunate.

Rick: Yeah. Well, hopefully that’ll change in the coming decades. One can always hope and do what one can to bring that about. Did you study Joan Harrigan’s work at all when you were studying Kundalini?

Mary: I did not, no. There were definitely certain people who resonated with me more than others, and I would say that the book that, the books that really resonated with me were Irena Tweedie’s, which is a Sufi…

Rick: Daughter of Fire

Mary: Yeah, Daughter of Fire and through that I found Lillian Silburn’s work on Kundalini and her guru who was Swami Lakshmanju.

Rick: Oh sure. Kashmir Shaivism.

Mary: Kashmir Shaivism, which was his, it can take a little bit to find his work, but it is well worth it for anybody experiencing a kundalini awakening, because he really talks about embodied spiritual awakening and spiritual awakening through the chakra system, which is resonated very deeply with me, because it paralleled my own experiences.

Rick: Yeah. Well, as I said, I’ve only read about a third of your kundalini book so far, but I found that the understanding you’re presenting is very nuanced and detailed and I was learning things that I had never really heard before. And you know, in comparison to which I think a lot of people have a somewhat simplistic view of Kundalini and they mistake certain things for a Kundalini awakening that may not be. You cover that in your book. And I found that your analysis of the different chakras and the fact that the kundalini sort of rises through different chakras, in addition to having to work through various sheaths around each chakra, was interesting because, you know, the kundalini could rise to a fairly high level and yet some of the lower chakras might be still encrusted with these sheaths, that … And that can be a rather precarious situation to be in, because you can be endowed with certain insights and capabilities and so on, but there’s a lot of stuff that hasn’t been worked out, which can end up getting you in trouble in terms of your behavior and so on. Maybe you could take it from there and elaborate on some of that.

Mary: Sure. So, for the first part of things, I will say that the way that Kundalini awakening sort of came into the Western world, we kind of use it as a term to mean any type of spiritual awakening. And really, there are a lot of different kinds of spiritual awakening. Kundalini awakening is one of them. And so, I cover all those different types of awakenings in my book, The Spiritual Awakening Guide.

Rick: Before you go on, so can one have, I mean, does Kundalini awakening, even though it might be defined differently in different cultures, ultimately have to be part of any really complete mature awakening? I mean, that mechanism must be there, even if societies use different terminology and so on.

Mary: Yeah, I do think that it does. I’ll use kind of the tired analogy of the mountain. At a certain point up that mountain, a kundalini awakening happens. But for some people, they have put in prior work, they have gone through other types of spiritual awakening, they’ve gone through psychotherapy, yoga, like all of that sort of stuff to prepare their system to get their consciousness to a point where Kundalini Awakening is still a big deal, but it isn’t sort of a, a life destroyer or like sort of a cataclysmic event that it tends to be for people who awaken spontaneously and, you know. For example, I work with a lot of people who are prior atheistic or they’re, you know, doctors, scientists, and they come to me and they’re having all these spiritual experiences and it is incredibly hard for them because there is a lot of resistance there to having a spiritual experience, to going through something spiritual in the modern world because it would mean deconstructing significant parts of their identity and how they see reality in order to accept spirit and in order to accept that they’re having a spiritual awakening. So, I do think that people at a certain point, no matter what path up the mountain that they are kind of venturing forward have a kundalini awakening. The people who tend to have more difficult kundalini awakenings experiences are because either they didn’t go through, there’s kind of a pre-kundalini awakening period in which the more surface energies of the body awaken and open. So, kind of the like the acupuncture channels and the legs and arms and just kind of throughout the body. Those channels opening beforehand is really helpful as is getting to, like, kind of a psychologically good point with things. Because the people that have a Kundalini awakening that where they start from a point where it is spontaneous, where it is unexpected, where they don’t have a support system or the ability to reach out for support because of where they may be, in terms of their consciousness. They tend to be the individuals that have the most difficulties with Kundalini awakening. And so, Kundalini awakening, just to offer a basic definition, is a force flow of consciousness and the classical understanding of it is that it is a curl of energy, of potential energy that is located within our sacrum. And so, what happens is that when this curl awakens and opens, it goes up the midline. A lot of people use snake analogy. It’s the same thing, but originally, I thought of this curl goes through the midline, goes through the chakra system, and the point is that that snake or curl, fully unfolding, fully straightening until you get to the crown and a bit above the crown to fully open up and have the midline and all of the chakras in our system be flowing.

Rick: Would you say that it’s a fair assessment, a fair statement to say that it’s probably better to prioritize just purifying and strengthening your system than to make some big effort to get Kundalini to rise? Because you’re not going to want it to rise if your system hasn’t been properly prepared. It’s only going to mess things up for you.

Mary: Yeah, you know, the problem in talking about any of this sort of stuff is that somebody can go to 500 yoga classes or be a yoga teacher and never have their Kundalini awaken and somebody can go to one yoga class and have their Kundalini awaken. And so, there’s a bit of what’s going on in terms of larger forces like fate and destiny and all of that sort of stuff.

Rick: Past lives.

Mary: Yeah, out of our control in a certain regard for things. But ideally, if somebody is experiencing any type of spiritual awakening, any type of, including Kundalini awakening, the thought for me is always one of energetic balance, of embodiment, and of seeing how functional they are in this world. Because, if you kind of take care of all of those things, the rest will kind of sort itself out.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been involved in this stuff since the 60s and I’ve seen many examples of people who literally became psychotic or got into, were hospitalized and went through all kinds of crazy stuff because they were doing intense spiritual practice and it got to be more than they could handle. There wasn’t the proper balance of integration and stabilization with the fire they were stoking. Yeah.

Mary: Yeah. We live in a very catharsis-based culture and so what tends to happen to people, even if they’re having intensive spiritual experiences, is that they do more and they do more and they do more. And that tends to just deplete the system, because there needs to be time to to integrate things. There needs to be time for the, for everything that’s been flowing out of the system to come to a new state of homeostasis in the body. And so, there are people that very much can go into almost an addictive sort of mentality when chasing catharsis, when they want their kundalini to rise even more, when they want to do more intensive meditation, more intensive spirituality, and that is a good way to get… I see the results of that weekly, and the result of that are people who are very depleted, for one thing. That’s a major factor.

Rick: Yeah. Well, I’m glad I’m aware of you now, because we often do get contacted with people, by people who have feel they’ve had a Kundalini awakening and they can’t function. They’re living in their parents’ basement, they can’t hold down a job. They’re having all kinds of physiological symptoms. And it’s not always obvious who I should refer them to. So, you’ll definitely be one of our refer, referees or whatever you would call it.

Mary: Yeah, well, thank you. And people, you know, my book, Working with Kundalini is definitely a resource that I would point people to, to get kind of familiar with me, especially if they are having a Kundalini awakening, because I always try to provide, essentially maps of spiritual experiences but also really practical tools and suggestions as well. And so, in particular for the book on Kundalini awakening, I include things like self-inquiry questions as well as, at the end, I talk about all different types of body work and practices and dietary stuff that people can look at and see what resonates with them, what feels right for them in their own awakening.

Rick: Yeah, and there might be things you would proscribe, which is the opposite of prescribe. In other words, like I remember this guy who was trying to awaken his Kundalini, he was doing like a half hour of fast pranayama at a time and things like that and, you know, kind of flipped him out. So, you just have to, this stuff is powerful. I’m putting this out, I’m dwelling on this because I wanted this to be cautionary note for people to be careful. Safety first is a good motto to adopt on the spiritual path.

Mary: Yeah, safety first is always something that I suggest to people, especially because I see the opposite end of things. I see people who have gone through 30-day meditation retreats, who’ve gone to ayahuasca ceremony after ayahuasca ceremony, and they’ve had some profound experiences, but they’re also maybe dissociated from reality. Or, just kind of not grounded. Maybe they just haven’t integrated their experiences, and a wide range of energetic, spiritual, as well as emotional imbalances can result from that, that can take a bit to recover from.

Rick: Yeah. And so, not to put words in your mouth, but I think you would would agree with me, that a spiritually mature state should be a very well-integrated one, one in which you’re able to maintain worldly responsibilities if you have them. It wouldn’t necessitate retreating to a monastery because you can’t function in the world. Maybe that’s your natural thing to be in a monastery, but for most people it isn’t. And so, you should be able to hold down a job or do whatever life requires of you and yet enjoy an awakened state of consciousness. And if that does not describe a person’s experience, if they’ve been incapacitated by spiritual practice or spiritual awakening, then some remedial work is needed, I think, to integrate and stabilize.

Mary: Yeah, I mean those are definitely words that would come out of my mouth. And so, what I would say is that, yes, there are some people that are called to go into a monastery or be a hermit and all of that sort of stuff. But for those of us living in the world, there is an opportunity to have an embodied awakening in which our awakening makes us more essentially spiritually adult, more functional, more emotionally stable, more emotionally resilient, more open and accepting of others. Ultimately, I find that spiritual awakening leads to states of connection and states of union, which obviously I’m not the first person to say such things, but I’m saying this because one of the opportunities that we have, when we are living in the world, is to essentially do shadow work. And one of the biggest things is to get ourselves to a point where we can experience oneness with other human beings. And what essentially that looks like and that feels like is that each person that you meet, seeing a part of yourself reflected in that person. So instead of finding separation, animosity, anger, battles, whatever is going on, we have an opportunity, when we’re living in the world, to utilize the people that we meet as our teachers, as a way of seeing what we have left to work on within ourselves to become more conscious.

Rick: Interesting. So, by that are you implying that, let’s say there’s somebody who is notoriously evil, some serial killer or something, that you can actually, as a spiritual exercise, see something of yourself in that person and learn something as a result, without condoning serial killing.

Mary: Yeah, of course, obviously you’re not going to get to a state of well, hopefully like “yay serial killers,” but we’re talking about like, deep shadow work here is that, yeah, all of us have parts of ourselves that we might define as narcissistic, as sociopathic, as psychopathic. Getting to some really deep stuff. I once watched a documentary with a woman who interviewed serial killers for a living. And her takeaway is that all of us have the capacity to kill, it’s just that some of us do. And so, if we’re going to that deep place within ourselves, which takes a lot of work and a lot of awareness, a lot of people wish to remain in the light and not sort of integrate or kind of go into the dark aspects of themselves. But we all have these really dark aspects of ourselves and what happens when we integrate them is a paradox, is that we we find our light if we are willing to accept even the darkest aspects of ourselves, the parts of ourselves that still cling to hate, to ignorance, to all of that sort of stuff. And I get it’s so hard to look at that sort of stuff, but if we’re willing to look at that sort of stuff, we really can do tremendous healing work within ourselves and it really does awaken us in a grounded, embodied way that is really, really lovely.

Rick: I remember somebody wrote a book called The Dark Side of the Lightworkers. I forget who that was, but I remember the book. I think I might have read it. Yeah, so there’s a couple of themes going on here which I think are, they overlap or they’re related. Now, we’ve been talking about Kundalini and now we’re getting into the shadow work stuff a little bit. A lot of times, people whom you would consider to be capable of glowing in the dark, you know, really like famous spiritual gurus, for instance, who just seem so bright and charismatic and they radiate Shakti if you’re in their presence you just feel this wave of influence radiating. Then it turns out you know oh well they were sleeping with their students or ripping people off financially or trying to order a hit on their competing guru or things like that. And a lot of people have been confused and disillusioned by this kind of phenomenon, which sometimes almost seems like the norm rather than the exception. And I can kind of, in my own simple understanding, I can relate this to both of the things we’ve been talking about, which is that they might have what Joan Harrigan calls a “deflected rising,” where Kundalini has risen to a significant degree, but a lot of stuff hasn’t been purified, and yet, one is unaware of that. And again, in terms of shadow, they’re all kind of full of their spiritual experience and projecting that onto others. And again, unaware of stuff that ends up tripping them up, ends up causing them to misbehave. So, maybe you can play off what I just said and provide some insights. Because as I said, this does confuse and disillusion a lot of people when this keeps happening over and over again.

Mary: Yeah. There are a couple of ways that I can reply to that. And the first is… Well, I’ll tell a story.

Rick: Okay. Stories are always fun.

Mary: Yeah. When I was in my 20s, I really loved martial arts movies. So, I am going somewhere with this.

Rick: Bruce Lee and so on.

Mary: Yeah, Bruce Lee and all that sort of stuff. And what you’d see in those movies would always be, not always, but a lot of the times, would be these huge, like muscle-bound guys that everybody would be looking at. They would be drawing everybody’s attention, nunchucks, like making this big spectacle of themselves. And then you’d see this one small, ordinary dude in the corner, and when everybody looked away, he just decked absolutely everybody in sight. So, this is kind of a trope in martial arts movies. And so, my first thought very much has to do with shadow work and the idea of projection. Until we can find our own light, our own inner guru, what we tend to project onto others is not just our bad stuff, it’s also our shadows of light. So, we tend to project our wounds, our desires onto other people. And one of our most notorious projections is our projection of our own inner guru onto another person. And the type of people that we tend to project onto are an idealized guru. So, somebody who is going to be shiny, somebody who is going to be grandiose, perhaps even narcissistic or even personality disordered, and somebody who is playing a role of demigod, essentially. And so, what happens to people is that they will go after that person again and again and be disappointed and disillusioned because that person ends up being human. They end up not being a god, you know. And from the other aspect of things is that when somebody is willing to take on that power from people, take on that type of light from people in the guru role. What happens is that all of their darkness that is not being tended to is still acting out in the background, and at some point, it’s going to whack them over the head with it. And so that’s essentially what happens, is that people attempt to have this sort of split in their personality where they’re trying to deny their humanity, where they’re trying to deny their darkness. And that never works. When we deny our darkness, our emotionality, all of the sort of humanness of ourselves, it’s going to come out at some point. And if we have all of this light coming and all this power that we’re accepting from others, it’s going to do so in some pretty unfortunate ways. So that’s kind of my big statement on things, is that what I look for in spiritual teachers would be things like somebody who is that “Bruce Lee” standing in the corner, who even when he was offered to fight, and plenty of people offered to fight him because he was Bruce Lee, he would just say no. They no longer need to prove themselves. They’re human, they can be ordinary, they no longer need to be a demigod. That happens as an end result of spiritual awakening. Before that, it just tends to be a lot of ego games and a lot of wounds sort of passed back and forth between people. So, I always tell people that if they’re looking for something, looking for a spiritual teacher, to look for humanity, to look for humility, and most of all to look for stillness. And that is a lot of times not what people are looking for.

Rick: Nice. Mariana Kaplan, who’s been on Bat Cap a couple times and is a friend, wrote a book called Halfway Up the Mountain, the error of premature claims to awakening, which might also be called premature immaculation. And…

Mary: I like that.

Rick: And there’s some interesting things I can throw a few questions at you. One is there’s a syndrome, and I’ve heard you mention this in your book that I was just reading, there’s a syndrome in which, there’s a tendency at every stage of the game, it seems, for a person to either feel that they’re finished or feel that they’re more enlightened than they actually are. And personally, I think it’s a nice safety feature to assume that you’re less enlightened than you might be, just to kind of like consider yourself a beginner. It’s a lot safer. But anyway, comment on that one and then I have some other questions.

Mary: Yeah, so I will say that one of the things that I have discovered the more conscious that I’ve become, is sort of like, the smarter you are, the more you realize the limits of your intelligence. The more conscious you become, the more you become aware of the limits of that consciousness.

Rick: Which is true in ordinary knowledge, too – I mean if you’re a physicist the more you learn the more you realize how little you know.

Mary: Yeah, yeah, and so, in terms of consciousness like, you get to a point where it’s like infinity is a large place. Maybe I know a corner of it, but, even you know, I’m not going to know the whole thing. So…

Rick: Ah, interesting.

Mary: Yeah,

Rick: I’ve been studying the issue Upanishad with Swami Sarvapriyananda. And we just did some verses recently in which the teacher asked the student, do you know Brahman? And he says, Yes, I know Brahman. And they go into this whole thing where he says, if you if you think you know Brahman, you don’t know Brahman. If you do know Brahman, then you say you don’t know Brahman. And it’s basically, what you’re saying here, which is that if you know it, you also realize that there’s no end to the extent to which it can be known.

Mary: Yeah, there definitely, you know, at the start of spiritual awakening, people tend to have a very human-centric view of spiritual reality. And I find the more that you expand, the more you recognize yourself as just a very small part of a dynamic whole. And so, where I am in terms of today is going into greater and greater recognition of that, is of, just the best I can, like, allowing forces to move through me rather than feeling like I am the center of things, so to speak. So that’s kind of the best way that I could I can describe it, is that we have such, it’s one of our root spiritual issues that we so desire control and so to getting to that point, one of my favorite quotes is, um, by Ramana Maharshi. I’m probably going to butcher it now, but “let what comes come, let what goes go, see what remains.” And it really is one of those things that has very much led me on my path, because it is pointed to this needing to let go of control again and again, this needing to be anything more than kind of the drop in the ocean sort of mentality. So, where I think a lot of people do get caught up is in these sort of illusions of control. But going back to your prior sort of question about ego and ego awakenings and the premature immaculate– I forgot the term you used.

Rick: Premature immaculation.

Mary: Immaculation, great term, I’m going to have to write that down. Yeah, I do find that a couple things happen is that sometimes people will have a spiritual, transcendental experience, and because they’ve had that momentary experience and it’s so different from their ordinary reality, they kind of figure, “Oh, I’m enlightened, I’m done.” And so, I meet people who have had these experiences and then with a bit more experience of life they might be like, “oh, yeah, that was just a temporary blip. Now let me do the work to kind of get back to that state as a permanently abiding state rather than something that just happened to me for 30 seconds or five minutes.” But um If we were also to talk about the nature of the ego I talk about, in my shadow workbook and in some of my other videos and talks and stuff like that, about a loop which is a tendency, a repeating pattern that humans go through personally and collectively. And one of the most significant ones I talk about is called the superiority-inferiority loop. And basically, what that means is that our ego continually tries to assert itself by being superior to others by being inferior to others and it’s wounding. And so, if we are able to do enough personal healing to move beyond that superiority-inferiority sort of game, we will find ourselves in a place where we have a lot more time on our hands, first of all. But also, being able to go into a place of real compassion and heart-centeredness, because we’re no longer attempting to be in competition with others or to try to get the world to reflect back to us how great, wonderful, special we are. From my perspective now, a lot of that is really based in childhood wounding patterns and if we’re able to heal those we can recognize that we can just be as we are. We don’t need to be even spiritual, we can just be, again, an ordinary human being, we can be messy, we can be imperfect, we can, you know. We don’t have to do anything or prove ourselves to anybody anymore.

Rick: We’re watching a Dylan documentary and I just, that brings to mind a line from a Dylan song. “If you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose. You’re invisible now. You got no secrets to conceal.”

Mary: Yeah, exactly. So, I’ll let Dylan speak that into truth is that that is very true, is that that is one of the largest things I find. That if people are really willing to look at that and work at that, that they will, you know, whatever they’re looking for, personal healing, awakening, greater consciousness, that they will find if they’re willing to look straight at that tendency, that loop, and how it plays itself out in their lives.

Rick: Regarding being done, a friend of mine used to say, “How do you know you’re done? Did somebody stick a fork in you?” [Laughter]

Mary: Well, it’s interesting because, so I will say that in many ways I feel like I am done with my kundalini awakening. But I say that in knowing that when you get to a certain, like, I don’t want to say perspective, is that things become very paradoxical. Is that you can sort of be done with things and not done with them at the at the same time. And so, I kind of classify myself as being done with a Kundalini awakening after some, you know, 18, 19 years of it. I really classified the end of it in 2019 because I’m no longer getting the symptoms of kind of the large shifts in consciousness, the shaking, the moving of the body into different positions. My consciousness is pretty, pretty steady. It doesn’t shift like it used to. I was actually reflecting the other day that I can kind of miss a bit having these big consciousness leaps or like these sudden realizations that sort of topple my reality down because I don’t experience them or don’t … Probably after I say that it’ll happen after this interview, but I don’t really desire to change my consciousness much anymore and it doesn’t happen as much as it used to, I guess I’ll say.

Rick: Yeah, well, a couple of thoughts on what you just said. One is that I presume you would agree that end of Kundalini symptoms does not mean the end of spiritual development or personal development. It’s just it’s the end of Kundalini symptoms, but there’s more. And regarding flashy experiences coming and going, you you know, you’re quoting Ramana, as Ramana used to say, and I’m sure many other teachers, if it comes and goes, it’s not, that’s not it. Or as the Gita says, the unreal has no being, the real never ceases to be. So, realization isn’t like a perpetual flashy experience or something.

Mary: Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. And I definitely went through a long period of time, at the beginning, we were talking about my educational path. And really for 10 years I devoted myself to doing all of these intensive programs and having these cathartic experiences after cathartic experiences that are kind of like the equivalent of jumping out of an airplane where you do that sudden sort of like, “Oh wow, like reality is totally different than it was five minutes ago,” sort of thing. And so, I do relate to people who are still in that that phase, but I’m also glad that I’m not.

Rick: Yeah, that might also be a hint for people who are using psychedelics. Firstly, you wouldn’t want to be in a perpetual psychedelic experience, but still, anyway, these intermittent experiences you can have with psychedelics are not necessarily going to lead to a permanent, abiding realization, that, if you do it just, if you do it enough times, finally, it’s going to stick. Would you agree with that?

Mary: I would. I would say that psychedelics can offer such an important perspective shift where people really can look at their experiences of reality from kind of a top-down sort of perspective. So, getting enough space from their experiences to truly reflect and that space is often so needed in order to process and heal especially difficult emotions or really stuck beliefs, stuff like that. The difficulty then comes with the integration of things. So, what is somebody who goes off, I’ll just pick on ayahuasca even though there are plenty of other things we could talk about, if somebody goes off to Peru and does ayahuasca, are they going to come home and then just have things sort of close up again, treat it sort of like a vacation experience? Are they going to experience ego inflation, which is incredibly common, where they now, their ego doesn’t integrate because they now believe that because they’ve had this experience that they are now special, superior, all of those things that their kind of wounds want them to be. And they spend the rest of their time talking about how great they are to other people. There’s this quote, I’m totally going to forget who said it, maybe somebody will remember, but that “Ego inflation is a sign of poor integration.” I’ve always loved that quote, even though now I can’t remember who said it. The other thing is that somebody can go from those experiences… In my first book, “The Spiritual Awakening Guide,” I kind of liken it to an elevator. If somebody’s baseline consciousness is on the second or third floor, and they go up to the roof or you know the 15th floor wherever they’re going, well now what happens when they sort of come back down is that they need to integrate all of that work. They need to look at floors 2 to 15 to see what is in the way of that them being on that 15th floor permanently. And that’s a lot to to ask of somebody. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of responsibility. And so, sometimes people can get really lost in feeling all of these emotions and having all these perspective shifts. But there are parts of them still at the second floor and parts at the 15th and maybe a part of them at the roof, so to speak.

Rick: Yeah. I just looked up your quote. It looks like it was Carl Jung.

Mary: Oh, was it? Probably. I always mangle his quotes.

Rick: It’s a, it aligns with ideas from Carl Jung’s work on individuation, where he emphasized the importance of integrating different aspects of the psyche to achieve wholeness. Ego inflation can occur when one aspect of the self dominates, leading to imbalance and a lack of integration. Then it goes on.

Mary: That must be. I always have the difficulty of sometimes I’ll get a quote in my head and then I mangle it and then it just permanently resides sort of mangled in my brain.

Rick: Yeah, no, but it’s an interesting theme that we’re talking about, which is that you can kind of leap frog to the 15th floor or whatever analogy we want to use, and even kind of have an abiding experience there, abiding state, where you seem to be in a pretty high being. And you can carry on for years, but there’s some stuff in the basement or in the lower floors that hasn’t been dealt with and it can eventually, it’s going to have to be dealt with or it could cause some problems.

Mary: Yeah, and if we were to go back to that disillusionment about gurus, that’s what so often happens. I did a video series on the chakras and talking about them as a pathway to awakening and each chakra is essentially a perspective on reality. But if we’re talking about awakening through the chakra system, a lot of people believe that they awaken everything in the first chakra, then they move on to the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, and that isn’t what happens at all. In fact, we kind of, again, leapfrog between them in order to go back. But really, ultimately, I find that people who are in later, what I might call later stages of realization, they all of a sudden have this very baseline for chakra stuff come up. And they tend to be kind of confused about it, because they’re like, “I worked through my childhood, I feel like this sort of stuff, I’ve done this sort of stuff, why is this stuff coming up? And the answer is that for the crown to fully open, that at the same point, the root opens at the same time. And so, there’s a need to go back and look at the gravel and the grit and the stuff that’s still remaining in the root.

Rick: Is there something one can do to progress most efficiently and safely? In other words, to process things in an ideal sequence, so one doesn’t get too big for one’s britches, you know, and thereby get in trouble? And how would you know if you have or have not adequately processed something at a certain stage, in order to enable you to safely go on to subsequent stages?

Mary: Well, if somebody is going through any type of spiritual awakening, it actually, in some ways is kind of easy, because what is coming up will continue to come up and sort of wave its hand until it’s dealt with. The real question is if we sort of put our heads in the sand and ignore it or are willing to look towards it. And so, what I suggest for people who are spiritual awakening is to look at whatever is coming up and to process it, to work with it in an embodied way. There tends to be, there’s such a tendency in the West to have spirituality be from the head up. And there are so many wonderful ways to process things mentally, to quiet the mind, all of that sort of stuff, and I’m in support of all that sort of stuff. But until the body awakens, all of that sort of stuff is going to be in the head, the mind only. And so really finding a method, of course I’m going to suggest my book The Body Deva which is chatting with the body consciousness to heal, but there are so many different forms of body work out there in which our bodies truly hold on to emotions, to beliefs, to traumas, to past lives, ancestral healing, all of this sort of stuff is locked in our body, locked in our tissues. And so, I’m very much a proponent of body-based awakening. And really the, like if we were to talk about the end of kundalini awakening, it would be light consciousness going to every single cell of the body. And so, my short answer is to look towards emotions, look towards themes that are coming up, because if you’re willing to look at them, they will present themselves and reaching out for support as you can from community, from whatever feels right for you in order to heal them, to look at them.

Rick: Yeah, regarding support, I was going to ask, is this something when most people can easily do on their own or would most people actually need some kind of therapist or support in order to do this, because it’s too hard to sort of see your own blind spots without some mirror to help you?

Mary: Yeah, so in certain regards, shadow work is that mirror, what we are irritated by or bothered by another people is often a, you know, it’s a disowned aspect of ourselves. So, there’s that level of things. But I always relate things in the following way. If we have, for example, a small ball of anger within us, that is likely something that we can heal and look at within ourselves. The more that that ball grows, the more we need another person, another, a group, a community, in order to resolve that energy. And so, one of the things that is happening in the modern world is that we are so subsumed by so many untended-to emotions, because they are so large. There are these really large balls and because we are such separatist individuals in the modern world. It’s part of the reason why I do offer communal healing services like sessions and stuff like that. But I do think that people can do a fair amount of work themselves, but I find that a lot of people that I work with at least, have the mentality where they feel like they need to take care of everything themselves because of conditioning of the modern world and often because of early childhood trauma where they needed to be adult far before they should have been. And so those are the exact people that should be reaching out for support.

Rick: Yeah, my friend Miranda McPherson, who’s been on Bat Cap a couple times, says that she has, and who’s been a spiritual teacher for decades, says that she just routinely goes to therapy periodically and goes to some retreat from some other teacher periodically just to kind of have a check, a checkup like that, you know, from a third party.

Mary: I still do that, and I do suggest that people do that. I have friends that I have check-in with, I have a therapist, and sometimes people are worried because they’re like, “Oh, you know, I’m spiritual and I can’t talk to the therapist about spiritual things.” And that might be true, but there’s, any sort of therapist is going to understand feeling disconnected, feeling alienated, feeling sad, feeling angry, all of that sort of stuff. So, I do recommend that people reach out for support and resources like if they have the ability to. I’m also well aware that some people are not in a place to be able to afford some of that sort of stuff as well, so I’m mindful of that and you know, there is a tremendous amount of work that people can do on their own. And in that case.

Rick: A couple of thoughts have been in the back of my mind since about half an hour ago that I want to bring out, and it relates to all this, but one is, do you feel that sometimes it’s kind of like almost a little dangerous in a way for one to become a spiritual teacher? I mean, we need spiritual teachers, but it’s almost like you end up, you know, with a bullseye on your chest, which you wouldn’t otherwise have. And you might be surrounded by adoring supporters who tend to inflate your ego or you, there might be some kind of energy thing going on that begins to compromise your own health, and things like that. So, that’s part one of my question about spiritual teachers.

Mary: Okay, um, yes. There is a difficulty and a blessing in being a spiritual teacher. The blessing is very much people coming to me and getting to a point where they learn the practices, they experience the healing that they need to, until they don’t need me anymore. Or maybe they only check in once a year, something like that, send me a Christmas card or, you know, Hanukkah, something or other, that sort of thing. So that is beautiful to witness is people’s growth, people’s resilience, people sort of taking back their power and their light until they have the discernment and capacity to, first of all, be kind of a spiritual adult, and to get to a point where they really can rely on their own inner divinity, their own concept of self for a lot of things. So that is really a blessing to witness. I will say that I am different from a lot of spiritual teachers in that a lot of my focus is on spiritual healing. And so, a lot of my interest from an early age was, “Hey, I see and sense so many of these things. Let me educate myself. Let me start to describe it in a way in which I can relate it to other people.” And so, I’m very interested in kind of the mechanics or mechanisms behind things. And so, a lot of my teachings very much have to do about referring skills and tools. So, I will say that that kind of differentiates me a bit from some spiritual teachers. But I will say that on kind of the glass half full perspective of things is that yes, people are going to project all sorts of things onto you and some of them can be lovely and some of them can be quite unfortunate and very rarely do they have anything to do with you. And so, the truth about spiritual seekers in general is that a fair amount of them are incredibly lovely people, but there is definitely a contingent of people who are struggling, who are unwell, who have a fragility to them, and that navigating those waters with that contingent of people can be quite tricky.

Rick: Okay, good. Second part of my question is, there have been some well-known examples, and some not so well known, but nonetheless true, of spiritual teachers, famous ones, who might have been proclaiming themselves as a life celibate, for instance, and yet having a string of sexual affairs and even fathering children and things like that. And I just think, I think to myself, you know, what do they think in their quiet moments? You know, and do they think, what in the hell am I doing? You know, how can I be projecting this facade and protecting this facade and yet carrying on like this in the background? How do they rationalize it? And I guess that’s the extent of the question. But it also creates, I think, a huge sort of tension, because their whole kingdom could topple down at any moment if the thing is revealed, which must be rather harrowing on the mentality. But I wonder if there’s a sort of a deeper kind of corollary in terms of what is going on with their spiritual development, in terms of shadow stuff, kundalini stuff, the kinds of things we’ve been discussing.

Mary: Yeah, so I will say that at this point I’ve read a lot of spiritual biographies, autobiographies, and that sort of stuff, and one of the ones that most interested me, most resonated with me, was me of listening, Adi Das. Very true to me. And so, you’re probably guessing where I’m going with this.

Rick: I know, but there’s plenty of dirt there.

Mary: Yeah, and then, you know, you get to a point where he’s like, “Okay, women, you need to sleep with me to let go of, you know, your attachments.”

Rick: Yeah, including the married ones.

Mary: They couldn’t in any other way sort of.

Rick: Of course he wasn’t being secretive about it. He was out in the open pretty much.

Mary: Well, yeah, yeah.

Rick: He had all this stuff.

Mary: Part of that was a bit of the era, but part of it was definitely just his energy, his personality. And so, I’m relating that because somebody can be conscious and they don’t necessarily, aren’t necessarily the best person, you know, that sort of thing. But on a deeper level, if we are talking about energetics, if we are talking about spiritual awakening, where most people are is still struggling with their childhood patterns. With their childhood conditioning, trauma, pain, you know, what they, who they learned to be, all of that sort of stuff. That is where I would say the vast majority of people are, which would be like kind of a first and second chakra sort of awareness or consciousness. As you move past that state, it can be quite easy to go into a state essentially where you are looking down on other people because they still are in a state of essentially spiritual infancy or spiritual toddlerdom or something like that. And so, when we go into, like, further spiritual awakening states, a lot of them are not about healing something within yourself or even releasing conditioning. They are sort of tests of power. And so, if you pass the test, so to speak, you gain more awareness, you gain more capacity within yourself. If you fail the test, what is going to happen is that people will sense that separation from you, and they will start to project onto you. So, you’ll start to take power from others instead of building it within yourself, essentially. And so, that is what I see kind of from a mechanism level from a lot of people who are intelligent people, who do have something of, some level of awareness, is that, okay, maybe they’ve moved past some karma, maybe they’ve moved past their childhood stuff, but they certainly did not pass that initiation where they are building their own power, their own light from within. They are taking the power and light from others.

Rick: You think they can get addicted to doing that?

Mary: Definitely. It is so much easier to take the light and power of other people than build your own. But there is a stopping point with that because, you know, I have, I’m sure you you’ve interacted with many, many, many more spiritual teachers and people than I have, but I certainly have interacted with many over my past 20 years or so. And what happens to people is, that they will have this, a split essentially happens in them, where they have this front that is light, you know that can be palpable, can be noticeable by other people. But inwardly, they still feel empty. They still feel all that sort of stuff that hasn’t been resolved. And so there does become this split and in that split their shadows grow even more, because they’re not paying attention to them. But really if you were to ask if they were happy within themselves, if they’re finding peace and stillness, if they were finding that divinity within themselves, the answer really is no, because what they’re doing is just taking the light and power from and divinity of other people who are not yet at the point of claiming that for themselves.

Rick: Yeah, this might be what you’re saying, but I wonder if this applies to gurus whose modus operandi is to give darshan, you know, sometimes in an assembly line fashion where you know hundreds or thousands of people are getting darshan. I wonder, and the person’s, the guru seems to be indefatigable, they can go on for hours. I wonder if there’s some kind of taking of energy in a process which is more, seems more to be a giving of energy that sustains them.

Mary: There definitely can be and we also can go into the complicated thoughts of a field of energy being created and all of those people coming together, telling myths and stories about the guru or the teacher. If we were to look at a really dark side of things like Keith Raniere, there’s a reason why he turned himself into a symbol, you know, called him – I forget what he called himself, but he essentially, by turning himself into a symbol, he was able to sort of elevate himself to kind of demigod status, creating myths about himself. And so, all of these followers of his would, within themselves, feed into these myths and create sort of an energy or a field unto themselves. So, it not only has to do with like the reciprocal energy but it also has to do with the complicated nature of being in the thrall of somebody and the complicated nature of how fields of energy are really created and sort of sustained. And a lot of that can be done through somebody’s careful cultivation of their story of stuff that we see all the time using basic NLP techniques and stuff like that to get people to sink in and sort of believe this story. So, the person becomes more of a myth, more of a legend than a human being.

Rick: Interesting.

Mary: Does that make sense?

Rick: Yeah, it does. Keith Raniere, he was that NXIVM guy who’s serving 120 years in jail now and he was having women get branded and things like that. Strange things. The fascinating thing about this is, and you wonder, is are they oblivious to their own, you know, delusion, to their own megalomania? It’s like, do they realize, “Wow, I’m really getting carried away with myself,” or it’s more like they just completely buy into their own story and are blinded to the inappropriateness or danger of where they’re going with it?

Mary: I think it is a bit of both. However, you know, we are talking about, in some instances, people who psychologically would probably be evaluated as sociopathic or narcissistic having those types of personality disorders in which self-reflection for them is going to be difficult if not impossible. So, they are definitely the types that tend to, unfortunately, gravitate towards being gurus, because that means that they can have power over people. And they’re also the type of people that, unfortunately, a lot of us are sort of drawn to because that gives off a certain amount of charisma. Those sorts of traits tend to. So, for those people, it would require some self-reflection on their part, which ironically they don’t tend to have. But for a lot of people, in my line of work, I’ve had people come to me who have become very, very sick as spiritual teachers or spiritual healers, and they don’t understand why. And it is unfortunate because they are engaged on a spiritual level with taking power or giving power in a way that is not kosher. You know, it is a way that is not okay to do. And the end result can be somebody getting incredibly out of balance and having to, really, face themselves through that imbalance, and it typically doesn’t come about emotionally. It’s typically only when it manifests physically that they’re willing to tend to it and look at it. Yeah.

Rick: Wow. I’m glad we’re having this conversation. It’s cautionary, I think, for would-be teachers and also students looking for teachers. And it’s good to be discriminating. And of course, a lot of people end up getting burned by spiritual teachers and in some cases disillusioned with the whole scene. They just figure everybody’s a fraud, and that’s unfortunate. But I think it’s incumbent upon anybody who wants to tread the spiritual path to just be wise as serpents, gentle as doves, as Jesus put it, you know. You just have to be discerning and discriminating and don’t throw the baby out with the bath water and assume that everybody is corrupt. But be careful. And, and if you’re a teacher, be even more careful. There’s my favorite quote from Padma Sambhava, not that I know any other quotes from him is, “Although my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma is as fine as a grain of barley flour.”

Mary: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, that is so true. I will say both things that yeah, it is interesting to talk about these things and there’s a reason why there are so many documentaries out these days because we kind of feed on that energy. But there’s also the throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I also have cautions about kind of the anti-guru movement. There’s a lot of unhealed stuff that can happen there as well. And so, I will say that there are a lot of wonderful spiritual teachers out there, a lot of wonderful mentors out there for people. They just may not be kind of the loudest.

Rick: Good point. Good point. Yeah, you’re not so loud. I hadn’t heard of you very much at all. But I’m glad to hear that you have a lively practice of interacting with people because I’m sure you’re having a good effect on people. And incidentally, along the lines of this whole conversation, About seven years ago, a couple of friends and I, including Jac O’Keeffe, whom you may be aware of, started an organization called the Association for Spiritual Integrity because we had run into so much of this stuff. And it’s grown to nearly 800 members and over 50 member organizations, and we’ve given presentations at Harvard Divinity School and the Parliament of World Religions, and it’s, it’s rolling along, it’s doing well. People are well aware of the need for something like that and the importance of integrity on the spiritual path.

Mary: Excellent. It’s always, this field can definitely be kind of a no man’s land, so to speak.

Rick: Yeah, kind of a minefield.

Mary: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: So, keep in mind that if there’s some things in some of your other books which I haven’t read that you want to talk about, steer me in that direction and we can talk about them. But one thing that comes to mind right now is that in your Kundalini book, you were mentioning some of the things you went through as you were going through that, like rather serious digestive disturbances. For instance, I think you said you lived on nothing but rice and avocados for six months or something. And this might be worth mentioning because other people might be going through strange physiological symptoms like that and not getting satisfactory answers from doctors. And not that we shouldn’t go to the doctors and just assume it’s Kundalini. But it might be Kundalini and maybe it’s good to know some of the potential complications that one can go through health-wise while going through a Kundalini awakening.

Mary: Well, I will share that my awareness of energy is that we are a continuum and our physical body is just simply the densest energy that we have. So, the best way that people can heal is to look at all levels and layers of themselves physically, emotionally, spiritually. So, I will give that caveat before I start. But yeah, I certainly had a tremendous amount of physical difficulties during my Kundalini Awakening experience. It’s not like I didn’t have emotional stuff come up, but I was, had such a good support system for that in place that it wasn’t, the physical symptoms were really predominant for me because that was the sort of body or aspect of myself that was most out of balance. And so, I did go through a period, and still occasionally go through periods, where I don’t eat very much or where my diet needs to shift and I’m definitely willing to listen to my body these days instead of listening to the conditioning that tells me this is what I need to eat and what I need to eat and, you know, that sort of stuff. So that conditioning is very much unraveled in me. But when I was going through my Kundalini awakening, I had so much energy flowing through me, that too, and was processing so much that to add something to my body for my body to process along with all of the physical, emotional, energetic stuff that was going on would be way too much. So, I did go through periods where my body would just outright reject foods or wanted incredibly bland diets or wouldn’t want me to eat for periods of time. And I will say, just to be very cautious, that I did do, like, nutrition shakes and that sort of stuff during that period of time, that sort of thing, because I definitely wasn’t a breatharian or anything like that. But I definitely went through periods where my body definitely was clearing and purging much like people experience during ayahuasca ceremonies where I I would be throwing up and all that sort of stuff. In one case, in 2008, I experienced and, sorry for the description, but I experienced my body continually going through the process of throwing up to the extent that I had a near-death experience and was hospitalized and checked out against medical advice and that sort of stuff. But I had kind of a classic near-death experience where I was passed out on the floor of the bathroom ER underneath the hairdresser and underneath the hair dryer and looking down at myself. And at that time there was this commercial in the U.S. that was for some animal rescue that Sarah McLaughlin, who’s a very like soft lilting singer, would sing over and make you feel really sad for all these puppies. And I kind of had that experience, looking down at myself, like how sad and like unfortunate and small I looked in that near-death experience. And, I could talk about it now, but it was an incredibly difficult experience. And a big part of that experience for me was, on a spiritual level, was moving past the fear of death, which again is a deep shadow topic, but it was definitely something that I needed to, or at the time my body and my spirit felt like it needed to experience to release that fear from my system.

Rick: I know some questions have come in from listeners. I’m waiting for Irene to come back in the room and she’ll send me the questions. So, we’ll be getting to those if anybody has sent in questions. Okay. So, anything from your side that we should be talking about that I haven’t thought to ask you?

Mary: Yeah, there are a couple of things that I really like to reiterate because my viewpoint can be a bit different than some of the others out there. The first is that I believe that the endpoint of spiritual awakening is awakening of the physical body, so the spiritual heart, essentially. So, I do believe that we go through this experience where we experience energy flow through and up our crown and have the bindu chakra point here open, all that sort of stuff. But then we can have an experience, descent of grace, opening up what is known as the spiritual heart. And so, I find that in the modern world, people tend to be very focused on the crown opening and going into states of emptiness when there are states kind of going further into that, where there can be emptiness and fullness simultaneously. To my best description, or the description I like the most about spiritual awakening and sort of the end result of it, is that it’s the end of conflict. And so, my experience of things has been the spiritual heart opening and basically being in this experience of deepening stillness and a place of where, could call it a cosmic womb, cosmic pulsation, this sort of beat or rhythm of the universe. And I find that part of the reason I’m sharing this is because a lot of people focus on the head and you know emptiness and that sort of stuff. Part of it is because so much of my work and so much of my path has been about embodiment and I find that really looking to the body and looking at the body and working with the body is necessary. The only way, I don’t want to say the only way. The way that I’ve found myself releasing the physical body is going through the body. And so, I think that that is an important point because there’s a lot of things I see out there that are more focused on kind of dissociation and calling that sort of enlightenment sort of thing rather than a state of being more human, more grounded, more simple, more in the body. So, if I were to give a kind of message or thought to everybody, it would be to accept all of your emotions, feel all of your emotions, learn how to skillfully work with them through the body, because that can get you to a point where you can feel basically anything and allow it to flow through you instead of pretending it doesn’t exist or pretending you’re above it or pretending you don’t mean – pretending you’re not angry or aren’t afraid or any of that sort of stuff. So, kind of my mini-diatribe that sort of encapsulates my work. But my work is very embodied and it’s very much about accepting even the darkest aspects of yourself because that is really what leads to awareness and sort of a place of love, a place of compassion for yourself and for others in the world.

Rick: You said “endpoint” that you reach the heart and it’s the endpoint. Do you really mean endpoint or is it like a nice way station but there is yet another horizon or higher possibility after that?

Mary: I believe that the spiritual, as of today, that the spiritual heart and its opening is the endpoint. However, there’s a question, again, like we talked about, about dipping your toes in that endpoint versus being kind of at the bottom of the ocean of that endpoint and completely being present there. And so that, I assume, will take me the rest of my life is to continue to fall into this stillness and sort of cosmic womb sort of state, that spiritual heart sort of state. But if there are states after it that is wonderful, but I have seen and experienced this state and it feels like, it really feels like a return. It really feels like I have worked a fair amount with death and a bit with birth and they’re these huge gateways for us. And so just as we, when we were born, we were in the womb of our mothers and felt her heartbeat, there is a return to that in a sort of cosmic way. And so, if there are states after that I look forward to discovering them, but right now I’m enjoying deepening this sort of stillness, deepening this sense of really being held by this abiding energy that surrounds me.

Rick: Nice. St. Teresa of Avila said that it appears that God himself is on the journey. So, I keep that in mind. If God is on the journey, then everybody’s on the journey.

Mary: Yes. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, and okay, so that was one thing that you wanted to bring up that I hadn’t asked you about. Was there another thing? How about this, well, go ahead and if you want to take a moment to think of, I didn’t mean to interrupt you.

Mary: Yeah, in terms of shadow work, Shadow Work for the Soul is my latest book. I have a total of nine books out there. Most of them are related to spiritual awakening or consciousness in some way. Some of them are related to learning energetic skills and tools and that sort of stuff. But my latest Shadow Work for the Soul is really about embracing our darkness and seeing it as a form of beauty. Without our darkness, we’re half a person, we’re half a being. And so, we have such a tendency to want to be in our light and want to be light. And it’s really by digging in our darkness that we can find that light. One of my favorite symbols, this primordial symbol of existence, is the yin-yang symbol. And so, it’s light on one half, dark on the other, but they have, there’s a circle of darkness in the light part, a circle of darkness in the light part. I might have transposed those a little bit, but…

Rick: Certainly, light and light in the dark part, but vice versa.

Mary: Yes, exactly. Yeah, and so I really love that symbol because, you know, it really shows us, first of all, the paradoxes of the spiritual path that need to be felt and experienced and known rather than, you know, mentally realized. But it also has very much shown me that my path has been very much sitting with my darkness, sitting and accepting all aspects of myself, dark and light. It can be just as difficult for us to accept our light as it is our dark, but sitting with all these aspects of ourselves and really accepting them creates a state of wholeness. It creates a state of integration that eventually leads to this paradox of experiencing connection with everything, but also individuation at the same point. Knowing who you are, being a human being, having a life where you have friends and loved ones and all that sort of stuff, just kind of removes the clutter, so to speak.

Rick: Are you a mother by any chance?

Mary: I am not, no.

Rick: Okay, just curious whether you had kids and how all this related to raising kids.

Mary: My simple answer to that is that my kids are kind of my practice in a bit. But yeah, I focus so much on my education and my spiritual path and that is my path for this lifetime. So.

Rick: Okay. Yeah. So regarding what you were just saying, I was kind of trying to relate it to my own experience as you were saying it and I was just, as an example, I find myself reflecting on things I have said or done in my life to people that were, that I’m not happy about, or that were harmful and all, and, you know, kind of processing that dwelling on it, not obsessively, but just sort of, you know, wondering if this kind of probing into whether there’s still some dregs of those tendencies within me that need attention. So, is that a good example of what you were just saying?

Mary: It is, yeah. When people are first going through kind of the first couple stages of spiritual awakening, they tend to focus on their victimhood, and as well we should. We’ve been harmed by the world, we’ve been harmed by people and betrayed by people, and we should focus on that suffering, that experience. But we can get to a point where we can focus on the times that we’ve been a perpetrator rather than a victim and looking at those and reflecting on those, integrating those, processing those, and in some cases releasing their energy in order to move forward. So that definitely is a big part of shadow work. As a starting point for shadow work, where most people start is the understanding of the world is a mirror and, like, if we are living in the world we have the advantage of being surrounded by people. And on an interpersonal level, what happens to the parts of ourselves that we’re really blind to our biggest blind spots is that we disown them. And how we disown them is that we project them onto other people and so by looking at what really bothers us in another person, we can start to notice themes first of all. It’s not going to be, “Oh, this one person is annoying.” It’s going to be, “Oh, I’ve noticed 10 people who are annoying in the same exact way.” Well, that is a shadow part. And so, somebody can do considerable healing work there. And it’s also, we can talk a bit about collective shadows, our own unhealed stuff, our own divisions within ourselves, the things about ourselves we’re ignorant of. We not only put on other people but we put into the collective. And so, this creates even, at the largest, biggest scale, things like wars and stuff like that. One of the easiest ways for people to start working with collective shadows is to look at pop stars, celebrities, politicians, because those are people in their own right. They’re people who’ve had their own history, their own experiences of reality, but we also tend to push our most extreme shadows; hatred, ignorance, fea

Rick: onto and also our shadows of light or which that I mean our beauty, our ingenuity, our talent out onto celebrities, politicians, social media personalities and that sort of stuff. And so, if we are willing to look at how we respond to celebrity gossip or news or any of that sort of stuff, and kind of look at those triggers or experiences within ourselves. What happens is that we can learn that we have a right to experience whatever emotions we experience. But we can also use that reactivity to look at places within ourselves that are the most sort of divided, the most sort of ignorant within ourselves as well.

Rick: Yeah. Well, this prompts me to ask you if you have any insights as to the big picture, what’s going on in the world and where we’re, what might be happening in collective consciousness and where this might lead in the coming years and decades. And a lot of people in spiritual circles talk about some kind of new age or enlightened age or some something or other coming along. But there might be a period of darkness before we get to it, just as on an individual level, there could be a lot of darkness and purging and difficulties you have to go through before you get to a better place. You ever contemplate that sort of thing?

Mary: I do. Yeah, you know, I grew up reading stuff from the library and so in reading spiritual books over the decades you’ll find that people of that same age will always say “this is the most important era ever” sort of thing. So it’s either like every era is totally special or maybe it isn’t so um, kind of a dark joke. But I find that it’s helpful to, from a very wide perspective, to look at reality as a bit of a pendulum swinging. And so, that means that in order to make progress, typically that pendulum needs to swing back. And there’s a need to go into sort of a regressive period before it can kind of swing forward again, sort of thing.

Rick: Yeah. Pendulums never stop in the middle. That’s the problem with pendulums.

Mary: It is, yeah, but there is a question of like if it is swinging wildly, or if it is sort of swinging a little bit, sort of thing. Yeah, so, we’re in more of kind of a wild, wild swing at the moment, so to speak. The other thing that I would say is that we are in a period that I would call kind of a period of the dark feminine. And basically, what that means is that we are in a period where our own inner darkness, our collective darkness, our rage, our apathy, our passiveness, our ignorance, all of that is being sort of shoved out of us. Our narcissism, all of it is being sort of shoved out of us. I always use ocean metaphors, so, all of that sort of stuff that’s previously been lurking on the ocean floor has come to shore. And ideally, things coming to such a light would allow for us to recognize them and heal them and change them in some regard. So that is kind of my positive thought, my positive swing on things. But what I would also say in like a glass uh…

Rick: Half full

Mary: half empty perspective is that we are living in an age of increasing disconnection, disconnection from, from spirit, disconnection from reality, disconnection from one another. In some ways, from a spiritual capacity, from a spiritual perspective, COVID was the ultimate sort of physical demonstration of that separation, disconnection sort of energy. And so going back to that idea of collective healing, do we need others for healing? We are sort of drowning in our untended-to emotions, our hatred, our spite, our ignorance, our fear, all of that sort of stuff. And that is definitely populating our world right now. So, we definitely need people who are willing to take responsibility for themselves, to do their own work internally, as well as supporting others locally as they can in order to shift things. So, again, being more positive, it is a wonderful time to do shadow work right now because so many things are out there that we can be reactive to.

Rick: Yeah, well, I could start to pontificate on some of the things you just said, but I think I’ll restrain myself and ask a couple of questions that have come in. Maybe I’ll pontificate after that. So, let’s see, here we go. This one is from someone who refers to themselves as “Cat Down the Road” from Connecticut. I grew up in Connecticut, Cat Down the Road, and I had cats. Question: “Assuming one is ready for it, what is the best and fastest way to induce a Kundalini awakening?”

Mary: I would always recommend a teacher. But spinal breathing is one. Qigong, microcosmic-macrocosmic orbit is one. I would say to that you really need to find a Qigong teacher to start basic practices before you do those. Other than that, things like flotation tanks, ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is sort of like the the plant version of Kundalini. In fact, some ayahuasqueros call it Mother Kundalini. But, yeah, so I get that question quite a bit and it’s difficult for me because it’s like do, would I tell anybody to go down that road? Not necessarily, but some people are certainly ready for it. I would absolutely make sure that you have spiritual support systems in place, physical support systems, that you are – one of the things that I see most often is that people are not basically grounded, their root chakra isn’t open. And so, what happens then is that kundalini goes, doesn’t go up the midline and tends to go up one of the other tracks which can lead to mental health and physical health issues. So those are all my caveats. But yeah, things like Qigong and spinal breathing are typically the thing, and ayahuasca, and flotation tanks, if you can find one around, or sensory deprivation tanks are some of the fastest ways, I guess.

Rick: Well, we spoke about this earlier, and you alluded to it just now, that you don’t necessarily want to induce a kundalini awakening or if you do it should be approached very cautiously because as you just said you can end up with mental or physical problems. So, I guess here’s one way of questioning you is you know what qualifications would you want to see in a person who wants to induce a kundalini awakening? What would you consider to be prerequisite developments in a person before they should even pursue such a thing?

Mary: Physical, emotional, spiritual health. So, having a physical exercise routine in place, ideally in nature, so hikes, walking, that sort of stuff. Yoga with a good teacher, you know, to… When we exercise, we tend to not get energy flowing through the joints, so not get our joints going into their range of motion, so energy tends to be stuck. So, in order to open up the energy channels of our bodies, we really need to do things like yoga or tai chi or stuff like that that are more active opening movements. Emotional health is a big one. Israel Regardie, who is a well-known occultist, he always joked that, people coming to spiritual practices ideally would have 10 years of therapy behind them, sort of thing. But some way to tend to emotions, having basic emotional intelligence, I go over that in my shadow book, but knowing how to work with your emotions. And having ways spiritually, to keep yourself grounded and focused on this world, this reality, rather than getting lost into illusion, delusion, sort of someplace outside the body.

Rick: Yeah, okay. Okay, so just to reiterate what you said essentially, if a person is having physical, emotional, or mental problems, then inducing a Kundalini awakening might not be the best strategy at this point. You might want to deal with those things before trying to do that.

Mary: Yeah, it would exacerbate any imbalance that you have.

Rick: Right, okay. And I hate to sound so cautionary, but again, we get contacted by a lot of people who are having problems and who can’t leave the house or, or just can’t hold down a job and so on. So, I’m not in the position to help them but we, we usually refer them to somebody and so I just want to be cautious, because I mean this, yeah, it’s kind of a cliche but the spiritual path is a marathon not a sprint and you want to kind of proceed again safety first. You want to proceed in a cautious, not wimpy, but cautious and careful, healthy way so that it enhances your life as you go along, not degrades it in any way.

Mary: Yeah, I mean, the best thing that I can relate to people because it is easy to insert so much fear in this discussion. And I will say that Kundalini Awakening has changed my life in so many ways. I look at reality, I look at myself so differently and I’m grateful for all that I’ve been able to heal and experience and so I don’t want that to get lost.

Rick: Good, yeah.

Mary: But I would also say that, if it is your choice to have a gradual awakening, where you learn more skills, where you get to know yourself better, where you sort of are able to kind of walk from shore into the ocean and gradually learn how to swim, that that is a path I would recommend rather than to suddenly find yourself drowning in deep sea water and have to try to figure out how to get your way back to shore.

Rick: Right. Okay, good. There’s another question. This one is from Kenny Hogan in Johnstone, Scotland. I wish I could do this with Kenny’s accent, but, “Mary has articulated her Kundalini awakening and her experiences of many past lives. Does she have any inkling as to how her advanced state of consciousness will play out in future lives?” You think you’re going to have future lives? And if so, what do you think?

Mary: I really am hoping that this is my last lifetime.

Rick: Oh, come on. We want you back.

Mary: I know that that sounds a bit arrogant or, you know, maybe just a bit like, “Oh, hey, maybe she should go back to therapy.” And, you know, fair point. But, um, I can… one of the things that has happened to me is that, people talk… I’m going to talk about this in kind of more of an abstract way, rather, because I haven’t really had visions of future lives. So, I’m going to talk about it a little bit more conceptually, which is that people talk all the time about present moment consciousness and like I was just like, “Okay, yeah.” You know, that sort of thing. Like, yoga term, like my yoga teacher would say it, like, “That’s cute.” You know, “Namaste,” that sort of thing. But one of the things that ended up happening was that as I healed all of this past stuff that my timeline sort of rolled up from the past to the present. And also, when I looked at all of my anxieties and fears that, like, sort of the future rolled up into the present moment as well. And so, while I’m talking about this stuff, I know that it’s instructional and helpful for other people, hopefully. But at the same point I’m, uh very present in this moment and possibly what I need to do tomorrow and not really thinking about the rest anymore.

Rick: Okay. Yeah. I know in my own case, I went through many years of feeling like, “Oh God, I hope this is my last life.” And, you know, I just want to get out of here and not come back. And now my attitude is more like, “Whatever. Okay, God, use me as you will. Either I don’t come back or I do come back, it’s not really in my hands and I don’t have a strong vested interest in it. If whatever the divine will has in store, I’m on board with it.

Mary:I think that that’s a wonderful way of looking at it. You know, at one point that sentiment did come from kind of fatigue for me, definitely. But now, it’s just, I haven’t experienced myself in the future. I’ve experienced myself on all different planes of experience, I had all sorts of dreams that are like movies of me in different realities, past lives, ancestral stuff, all that sort of stuff, and you know, but no future. So, maybe I will, maybe I’m just not open to it, but we’ll see what happens.

Rick: Okay, good. All right. So, um Any other points before we begin to wrap up things that you’re gonna think tomorrow? I should have said that

Mary: Well, it’s not tomorrow so…

Rick: Yeah, right.

Mary: But if I were to invite my tomorrow self in, um I would again repeat, just kind of the thought that it is so rare for people to be willing to look at themselves and to work on themselves. And so um,

Rick: Yeah, in fact, some what you might call Neo-Advaita teachers just would keep emphasizing “there is no self, you know, don’t bother looking at yourself because it’s an illusion it doesn’t exist, you know, don’t do practices because it only reinforces the notion of a practicer.” They go on and on “you’re already enlightened, all you have to do is realize that and you’re done.”

Mary: Yeah, and I have a different outlook on that. It was just like, yeah, our natural state is one of enlightenment. But what has happened is that we’ve armored ourselves, we’ve closed ourselves down, we’ve experienced trauma, we’ve experienced all this sort of stuff that has conditioning, that has closed off our bodies and our minds to that natural state. And so, somebody who is willing to look at themselves and take responsibility for themselves to truly feel their emotions, that that is a valuable way to get to that state of experiencing that baseline, that natural state of being that I think a lot of people are looking for, but might be looking for in the wrong place at times.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, good. So, you mentioned that you work with people and you have little healing groups or whatever you called them and also give us an overview of how people can plug in to what you do and you know connect with you in various ways.

Mary: Well, you can check out my website maryshutan.com on there you can find the courses.

Rick: Hang on a second, we got a dog situation here.

Mary: Okay.

Irene Archer: He’s barking at this.

Rick: There was a little wooden cat statue that was sitting on the air purifier in the hall and the dog saw it and wasn’t used to seeing it there so he freaked out all of a sudden. He thought there was a cat in the house.

Mary: Yeah, well luckily my cats have not interrupted, they’re otherwise occupied. That is good.

Rick: Okay so start again what you’re saying about ways of engaging with you.

Mary: Yeah, so maryshutan.com, Facebook, Instagram, I also do videos on YouTube about varying topics. I have nine books out.

Rick: Which I’ll link to from your Batcat page, I guess I’ll link, if they’re on Amazon, I’ll link to the Amazon pages of them.

Mary: Yeah, so they’re all on Amazon. If you go to my website, you can find out information about, I offer spiritual guidance groups. Essentially, people going through spiritual awakening, spiritual experiences can join the group and share, ask me questions, whatever they want. I also offer communal healings where we, I pick a topic like anger, and we feel and heal into it communally. As well as other courses, you can check out my page. I do offer healing services. I do not offer individual guidance sessions. I will be very clear about that. My time is taken up by healing.

Rick: When you say healing services, how does that work? Do you mean like over Zoom or you don’t even talk to the person but you’re healing him remotely with Reiki or something like that?

Mary: Yeah, so spiritual healing, a lot of it is based in what might be termed shamanic healing. But it’s either done via phone or over Zoom and people can check out my website to see if that resonates with them.

Rick: What kind of things do you take on? I mean, let’s say a person has breast cancer or something like that, would you actually work on them or what kind of healing are you talking about?

Mary: It depends on the person. I’ve certainly worked with people with cancer who want to make peace with their death or want to heal emotionally. And so, a lot of my healing work is based off of my book, The Body Deva, which is a form of self-inquiry and going into the body to look at and resolve any conflicts, beliefs, energies that are out of balance within the system. And so, I do work with a lot of people who are experiencing spiritual awakening, but the focus is always: what is creating an imbalance in your system. And so, all of my work, I mean you can find out more on my website or check out my book, The Body Deva, to kind of get the scoop on that. But I also bring in what may be called, you know, shamanic elements. I bring in my energy, my presence, knowledge, spirits and energies that I work with, all that very good stuff into the sessions.

Rick: So, you’re not saying that you might heal somebody of cancer, but that you would help them to heal the fear and you know.

Mary: Exactly, yeah. I do not claim to heal any of that sort of stuff. I’ve been, I am very cautious about that. You know, if somebody comes to me and they want to do healing work and they say they have cancer for some, they say they have cancer, for example, that’s a great example. My focus with them might be looking at the energetic dynamics behind it, but I’m certainly not going to promise anybody that I heal or cure anything. Cancer, that is something within themselves and has to also do with larger forces at work as well.

Rick: So, when you’re dealing with somebody like that, interacting with somebody, do you base your, what you do on how, what they say to you and the feelings you get as you’re talking to them? Or do you actually kind of psychically tune in to what’s happening in their body? Like I know some people who claim to be able to see the organs in somebody’s body and that kind of thing.

Mary: What I would call it is a form of attuned empathy. And so generally, I feel in my own body what they are feeling in theirs and so I draw attention to it but I always make sure that people in their sessions have agency like I always ask people if stuff resonates with them because people today feel so powerless that part of the work is them learning how to tap into their innate sense of self, their own sense of knowing and feeling rather than me being somebody who is telling them what their reality should be or what their beliefs should be or, you know, what their healing should look like. So, it definitely is a very collaborative process.

Rick: Good. Well, that sounds good. Okay. So, that gives everybody a good picture and, you know, I think we’ve just scratched the surface. If a person really wanted to start reading your books and all that, and as I mentioned, I want to continue doing, at least with your Kundalini book, there’s a lot more that we can learn from you. But, you know, I hope this has been a good introduction, both for you and for the listeners. And I really enjoyed having this conversation with you.

Mary: Yeah, me too. Thank you for having me on.

Rick: You’re welcome. And thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. And again, we have a new website. Take a look at it and play around with it. And let us know if you encounter any difficulties or find any mistakes or anything like that, any pages you can’t reach or something. All right, thanks a lot.