Tree Wiseblood Interview

Summary

The conversation explores a lifelong search for God through nature, devotion to Meher Baba, marriage, and surrender. It also examines how encounters with spiritual teachers and an intense inner crisis led to recognition of the Self.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can a sincere prayer or cry for help receive a meaningful response?
• Can spiritual awakening happen through marriage, ordinary life, and personal relationships?
• What role can nature play in spiritual growth and direct experience of the sacred?
• How can devotion to a spiritual teacher continue after the teacher has left the body?
• What happens when surrender leads to a direct recognition of one's true nature?

Key takeaways

• A wholehearted appeal to the divine can open a direct relationship with what is sacred.
• Nature became a living spiritual path when organized religion felt empty.
• Marriage can expose unconscious patterns and help dissolve ego-centered habits.
• Devotion can remain intimate and transformative even when a teacher is no longer embodied.
• Surrender may involve letting go of the need to control life or complete a personal identity.
• Awakening was recognized as discovering what had always been present.

Transcript

🕊️ Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. There have been about 350 of them now, and if this is new to you, you can go to batgap.com and you’ll find them all, all the previous ones, organized and categorized in various ways under the Past Interviews menu.

This show is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you feel like supporting it, there’s a donate button on the site. So, thanks.

My guest today is Tree Wiseblood. That wasn’t her original name, and maybe we’ll get into how she ended up with that name. But she’s in Australia, out in the boondocks, or the Outback, as they call it, somewhere near Sydney. She’s on 17 acres of land. She said she was watching wallabies and kangaroos jumping around this morning.

In fact, it is morning for her right now; it’s about eight o’clock in the morning there. I read her book, which is called Hot Flush, Dark Cave. In essence, it’s about menopause as a spiritual phase of life, a spiritual opportunity. There are all kinds of very interesting things in it that happened to her during that phase.

But first, before we get into any of that, I would like to read her bio.

The spiritual journey does not consist in gaining what a person does not have, but in dissipation of ignorance concerning himself and life, and the growth of understanding which begins with spiritual awakening. To find God is to come to one’s own self.

And that’s from Avatar Meher Baba, of whom Tree has been a devotee for many decades. And it’s kind of interesting because after we scheduled her interview, someone emailed and said, “Hey, how come you’ve never interviewed anybody who knows anything about Meher Baba?” And I said, “Well, as a matter of fact, we’ve got somebody scheduled.”

Going on with her bio, this is in her words:

No longer the person with its conditioning and history, here now there is only this, and the overall feeling is, “I don’t mind.” No fear, no push, a great emptiness that is also a rich and all-pervading fullness. Here there is silence, peace, and an exquisite sense of joy. Here it feels so light, marinating in the Self. It is as if nothing is happening, and yet, happening graciously unfolds. To look back at the dream, the necessary mistaken identity, it seemed like so much happened. Personhood was such psychological suffering: separation, feverish, fearful struggle, always restless, dissatisfied, looking outside for love and fulfillment. Now peace and love reside here. I have spent thirty years with Avatar Meher Baba in deep devotion. Baba has administered His kiss and His kick, expertly unraveling the ego identity. Longing for the truth, and with nothing more to express in this life, I knew I was going to die. Not sure if it was the body or the ego, I completely surrendered. Shortly after, whilst watching Mooji on the net, he pointed and I said with total conviction, “I am that.” In that recognition, I hysterically and uncontrollably laughed for hours. I could hardly breathe from the laughter, and I asked God to help me. The laughter only escalated. Thank God. The funniest thing, the divine joke, was that I knew I had always been that. I love Meher Baba and Mooji, the brightest reflections of the true Self, I know. It’s quiet here as I experience the bliss and love of the Self.

So that’s Tree’s bio. As you can tell, she’s a good writer. So welcome, and thanks for doing this.

Tree: Hi, Rick.

Rick: Tree is one of those people whom you wouldn’t have heard of ordinarily. She’s not out there as a spiritual teacher, not kind of on the satsang scene or anything like that.

She happened to email Irene about something, and Irene’s curiosity was piqued. They emailed back and forth a little bit, and Irene suggested that maybe she would be a good person to interview because her experiences seemed to be rather profound. So one thing led to the next, and here we are.

Maybe we should start out, at least, by going a little bit chronologically. That always seems to work, and then we’ll see where else we end up. Was Meher Baba the first significant thing that we want to talk about, or are you one of these people who, even as a little girl, had experiences? There was something I read where you were just nine years old or something, and you went outside and cried out to God, “Is this all there is?” Tell us that story.

Tree: Yeah, I did that. I was living in a brick house with the television continually going, electric lights happening, and the family, and something felt bizarre and not quite right. It felt empty, but not a beautiful emptiness, just an emptiness.

So I did go out and cry and implore the night sky, to God, “This isn’t it. This isn’t it, is it?” And I received a really beautiful hug, like a divine hug, and I got told, “No, this isn’t it. Just wait, just wait.” And so I continued on.

Rick: And you were just a little kid, right, eight or nine years old at that time?

Tree: Yeah, I think I was about nine, yeah.

Rick: That kind of thing happens fairly often. I mean, not every day, but I find it interesting. I’ve heard a lot of stories where people sort of implore whatever they’re speaking to, maybe they don’t know, and it answers. It gets some kind of response.

Tree: Yeah, from my experience, if you implore with all your heart, you’ll be answered, yeah.

If you implore with all your heart, you’ll be answered.

Rick: How is it that the universe is so sentient that we can implore like that and get a response?

Tree: I think because we’re—well, I don’t really know, but I can just waffle out what’s coming through here. I think it’s because we’re put on this planet to realize who we are. So each and every soul—God has the time and space for each and every soul, you know?

To that finite being, your soul—your soul, just, I don’t know—you’d cry out from all your heart, but all your heart, and you’ll be answered. That’s just my experience, yeah.

Rick: And to some people, even to say that there is a God who could respond is a leap of faith. But in reading your story, your orientation is that the universe is very intelligent, very alive, and very responsive to our needs. Or we could say maybe more concerned with our growth, which might be a better way of putting it.

Tree: Yeah, yeah. I feel like everything’s here to administer to us to find who we are, yeah.

Rick: So, what happened between age nine and these crazy teenage years?

Tree: My parents weren’t at all religious, and so “God” for me can be a bit of a dirty word in some circles because people have had bad experiences with religion.

My sister, brother, and I were sent to church on Sunday morning, not because my parents were religious, but because they wanted to sleep in. So we would go along to church, and I was the youngest. I went to Sunday school, and there were these beautiful hippies in Sunday school, a man and a woman. They were sort of deeply in love and deeply in love with Jesus.

This was my first experience, and I can remember seeing a beautiful light surrounding them as they sang to Jesus. So I really loved that.

Then, when we came to an age where you had to go to the church, I can remember really loving the religious art and the windows, but the energy of the people didn’t work for me. I went home and said, “That’s it, I’m retiring from that.”

Then I went from that to the starry sky, to nature, to the mountains, the rivers, the trees—just nature. I always felt a presence. As a kid, I often felt a presence behind me, and sometimes I felt that presence coming through me.

🛤️ Nature as a spiritual path

Rick: Your whole book is so nature-oriented. You basically lived in a cabin or something for three years, and you’re always sitting out in the woods and under the sky and climbing mountains. Nature was like your religion in a way out there.

Tree: Yeah, very much so. I sort of see now Avatar, Meher Baba, and Mooji, and nature—just perfection, like perfect reflections of the Self.

Rick: Can a human being ever be as perfect a reflection of the Self as nature itself? I mean, we’re part of nature, but it almost seems like we’ve alienated ourselves from it to some extent.

Tree: Well, I think at our core—Baba, yes, and all of us at our source, you know.

Rick: At our source.

Tree: But our mistaken identity—not so much, yeah.

Rick: I think that’s an important distinction because a lot of people say, “Well, we’re all already enlightened.” And, yeah, true, ultimately in our essence, but you have to apply that to all seven billion people in the world, and then it’s not so obvious with some people as with others.

So it renders the whole term “enlightenment” meaningless, and we really should aspire to some more ideal reflection of that essence than is ordinarily the case in most people’s lives.

Tree: Yeah, yeah.

Finding Meher Baba

Rick: So how did you find Meher Baba? How did you run into him?

Tree: I always had this belief in universal Source, God, this presence behind me, and sometimes coming through me. I’d just gotten married—this would have been 33 years ago—and my husband was a dancer. He was doing a dance show, and he discovered Meher Baba in Sydney while looking through a book of photographs.

By the time he finished the book of photographs, he was crying with recognition: “This is God, this is God.” My husband was a big spiritual seeker, and he felt that when he married me, it was a failure in his seeking.

Rick: He thought he should be a monk or something?

Tree: Yeah. He was sort of drawn to that and then drawn to me. So he felt a lot of failure around that initially.

Then he started to read about Baba, and he said, “Oh, read this stuff about marriage. Meher Baba talks about marriage. Ideally, celibacy is the way to go, and that’s the ideal. But if you’re not at that state, it’s ridiculous—you’re banging your head against a wall to try and be celibate. So marriage is the next best thing because you go through hell and back almost in marriage.”

That’s been our experience. You go through the hard times and the good times, and it’s a really great thing for ripping apart the ego, shred by shred, really. I think that’s Meher Baba’s way of working.

Rick: I spent about 15 years in the monastic program in the TM movement, and I had the same sort of hang-up your husband did. It was a bit of an adjustment getting married. But I would agree with what you just said: it’s like having your own private guru in a way.

Hanging out with the guys in the monastic setting, people could get very idiosyncratic, very carried away, very obsessive, and there really weren’t many checks and balances. Some people were having good experiences and all, but in many cases there was a great lack of integration and groundedness, and so on.

Tree: I think it’s for some. I think it’s for some, and what a wonderful thing. But for us, it was marriage, and we had a lot of work to do and a lot of reflecting of each other.

Rick: There were a lot of great saints. Wasn’t Yogananda’s master a householder? Lahiri Mahasaya, and many others. If you look at the tradition of teachers in many traditions, some of them were married and had children.

Tree: The story then goes that he fell in love with Baba and sent me the teachings on marriage, and I went, “Oh, yeah, this is true. This is great. This is truth.” Then he was overseas in London dancing, and he said, “I’m going to go and visit Meher Baba.” I just got this really strong push inside: “I’m coming.”

He couldn’t get a visa to fly that way, so he had to come back to Australia, and it was almost like Baba wanted both of us. Within weeks, we were both in India at Baba’s tomb.

❤️ Meeting Baba at his tomb

Rick: You speak of Baba as if he had been alive, but of course he wasn’t at that point. If he’s not alive, why would it matter if you went to his tomb or just connected with him in Australia?

Tree: In a way, he is so alive and he is everywhere, and so I can experience him equally here. But it was just this really strong longing to go, to go to his place. I really felt called to go, yeah.

When I first went into Baba’s tomb, I was quite naive. I didn’t know anything about gurus. It had only been universal source and nature, with a little bit of warmth toward Jesus. But I just turned up and walked in very naively and said, “Hi, Baba. My name is Michelle. I’m here. I’m from Fitzroy. I’m here.”

When I said that, I just felt overwhelming love, and I said, “And I love you.” In the tomb, the feeling is just so alive and so beautiful and divine. It’s a very special place.

I came out of the tomb—I took darshan and came out of the tomb—and I was gobsmacked. I couldn’t speak for days. I just couldn’t physically speak. There were a lot of Americans into Meher Baba, and they were sort of going around, “Oh,” and it was a bit like, “Oh, the little Aussie lady—she must be mute,” because I couldn’t utter a word.

Rick: And neither did he for 30-something years, right?

Tree: Yeah, I think 44, but I’m no good at figures. Baba kept silence, and of course, here am I talking today. It’s the anniversary of Baba’s silence today.

Rick: Some people say that if you don’t have a live teacher with whom you can interact, you can kind of get away with anything, because who’s to say whether what you’re doing is legitimate or not, useful or not, or whether you’re off the track?

But in those notes that I just read, he said there was both the kiss and the kick. So somehow or other, he kept you on track, even though he wasn’t in the body.

Tree: Oh, hell yeah. Just very alive, very here, orchestrating the whole show. Even in dialogue, if you sit still long enough—or it’s not that I sit, but I walk in nature, and I do sit in nature—and listen, he is alive and conveys messages and talks. He arranges situations.

Rick: How do you know that it’s Baba doing that, not just the divine intelligence, which is omnipresent anyway?

Tree: Sort of same-same, but a little bit more personified, in that you feel his presence, and he smells like a rose, and you feel him in you. It’s a bit hard to describe, Rick.

Rick: There are millions of Christians and Muslims and so on who are devoted to Jesus and Muhammad, and probably other examples, who could very much relate to what you’re saying in terms of their own chosen path of devotion.

Tree: Back in Baba’s tomb, we only stayed for two weeks, and it was a honeymoon. It was an absolute honeymoon with Baba.

On coming out from there—you pay your respects and bow down at the master’s feet, so you put your head on the tomb and send your love—I put my head down on the tomb, and my head literally got stuck to the tomb.

It sounds bizarre, and I’m getting a bit panicky and trying to pull up, and there are all these people waiting. But I tried and I tried, and I just could not lift my head.

In the end, I just surrendered and thought, “Oh, well, it’s Baba’s tomb. He wants my head stuck here. I’ll just wait it out.” After about five minutes, I could get my head off the tomb.

I came out, and I did have a very strange sort of mark from having been attached to the tomb on my forehead. Then one of the women mandala said, “You take the flowers into Baba’s tomb.” So I took the flowers in, and the same thing happened again.

Rick: Do you think you just went into such a deep state that you really couldn’t get up?

Tree: No, because I was totally present and in my body and aware. I just physically couldn’t lift my head off. It was suctioned on.

Rick: Did you ever figure that out, or does it still seem like a mystery to this day?

Tree: Baba talks about taking your sanskaras. If you put your head at the master’s feet, they absorb your sanskaras. So maybe I just had a hell of a lot for him to absorb.

✨ The awakening through Mooji

Rick: You were with Baba—or I would say you still are—and it’s been a long time. But then more recently you’ve branched out a little bit.

Tree: A friend of mine, Amanda, came and she had some beautiful DVDs of Mooji, and we sat and watched them together. She’d been to Rishikesh to see Mooji many times, and she said, “I think you’ll like this beautiful being.”

We sat and watched, and, yeah, same thing: total recognition, just total recognition of the Self in Mooji. What a beautiful being—so prolific and generous and powerful.

Rick: And then you were watching Mooji one day, and there was just some major awakening that took place.

Tree: Before I went on tour with my husband, I was walking up and down in our house, and I just felt like, “Oh, it’s over. It’s finished.” I didn’t have anything else I wanted to express or do. It was like, “Oh, there’s nothing.”

I thought, “Oh God, maybe I’m dying.” I got a real sense of, “I think I’m going to die.” My sister and I are really close, and I rang my sister and said, “Hey, I think I’m going to die.” And I said, “Something’s dying. I don’t know if it’s the ego or me, but it’s over.”

I hung up from that phone call and I just got this incredibly desperate longing of, “Oh, I can’t do it anymore, Baba.” I was so over the person. This was in sobs and throwing myself on the floor, a bit of a tantrum. “Baba, you do it, you do it.”

And so from there, I packed my bags and went on tour. I had lots of time, and my husband has a little laptop, so I was just devouring Mooji when he was out doing his work.

One night, my husband and I were both watching one, and he’s not into Mooji, by the way, but he was sitting watching with me, luckily. And Mooji pointed, and I understood that I was that. I just started to laugh and laughed hysterically for hours. The joke was that I knew that I’d always been that.

The funniest thing, the divine joke, was that I knew I had always been that.

Rick: When you talk about that now and it stirs up so much emotion in you, why do you feel that it does?

Tree: It’s just that the Self seems to bubble continuously with this blissful bliss. There’s just bliss that bubbles and bubbles and bubbles out.

Rick: All the time?

Tree: It’s there all the time. Sometimes it’s underlying and I’m active and doing things, but the bottom line is there’s that bliss. Sometimes it is joy, but it’s also excruciating. It’s almost like an excruciating—it’s not painful, but there’s this heart and bliss that comes out. Sometimes you look sad and you get a bit teary, but you’re not actually sad.

Rick: Some traditions say that once Self-realization has happened, the development of the heart can proceed much more significantly than it ever could before. Once the Self has been realized, it provides a platform for the heart to really start to blossom much more than it ever has. So do you feel like something like that might be in process with you?

Tree: Definitely. Everything is—like, even washing the dishes is a joy. As a person, I remember I would martyr, and I’d be washing the dishes, and it was a whole story. There were always fights over the dishes and psychological sagas and drama. And now it’s just washing the dishes. The bubbles in the water look beautiful, and the cups are shining.

Rick: Do you feel like it’s something that actually continues to become more and more profound as time goes on?

Tree: Well, this is all only a year ago that this happened, so I feel like I’m just integrating now and becoming functional, actually. The last year, everything has been just really—visually, it was too much. I was reading Baba. Now I can read Baba and understand him, which is great, because I never could before.

I was blown out of the water, really. And it’s sort of so empty here that you’re sort of everything; you’re everywhere. The other day my husband said, “Oh, look at the mountain,” separately looking at the mountain, and I got where he was coming from, but I couldn’t look at the mountain. There’s no distance between me and the mountain.

Rick: That thing about the clarity, too—you know that saying from the Bible about seeing through a glass darkly and then eventually it’s going to be clear? It’s as if we have kind of dark, foggy glasses on or something, and then the glasses somehow become clear.

Tree: I didn’t realize life could be like this. Another funny one for me was when I saw—I was staring at a McDonald’s sign, you know the McDonald’s thing? Just looking at it and just enjoying it. A person would never have enjoyed a McDonald’s sign. There would have been a whole political story around it and a whole judgment happening, and I just find my head spins around and there’s no judgment.

Rick: I have a friend who said that after her awakening, she used to sometimes just sit and stare at a rock or something, and it’s just like an utter fascination.

Tree: You just get drawn into the detail and the beauty and the texture. A woman had this beautiful, wavy hair, and I was just staring. My daughter said, “Mom, you’re in the city. You can’t just sit there staring. It’s not right.” So getting used to that visual has taken a long time to integrate.

Menopause, solitude, and the dark cave

Rick: Let’s talk about this book. It was quite a ride. You were going through a phase where you were really tuned in to the spirit world or the subtle realms, and it was part of your rite of passage that accompanied menopause. Let’s proceed sensitively, and let’s talk about some of the things that you talked about.

The wind can either blow on and through you with ease, or you can brace yourself against it and fight it. Life is also like that. Let me flow through you. Surrender.

Rick: You received this message: “Because you are vibrating at the same frequency, you are a conduit for cosmic energy to Earth, something in regard to helping shift the Earth’s energy. There is also a balancing of male-female energy. You will receive spiritual gifts, releasing them in each other.”

It was like you were going through this whole process where you were being sort of shepherded along, or worked with, worked on by these various entities. They were putting you through this initiation period, preparing you, really putting you through the wringer in a way, and helping you purify, all with the sense that you have a role to play. Is that a fair assessment?

Tree: I don’t know about the purgatory bit, but it was a very rough ride. I did feel like menopause, at the time, was a portal for me to go in and down and dive down. At the same time it started off as just a restorative. It was a period in time that I could just have a look, just have a deep look, and it ended up being three years.

Rick: And you went off and lived in some cabin or something?

Tree: We’ve owned this property for many years. We sort of brought the kids up in a tin shed here on the property, and we’ve since built a house when the family’s grown up and left home. But I got an intuition to go. I wanted time to myself, and we were living in Melbourne. The kids went to university, my husband had a job, and I just thought, “I’m going to the tin shed.” I called it my cave, but it was a tin shed.

I received in the stillness and the quiet because it was very quiet. No television, no internet at the time, just lots of listening, lots of listening. And then there was seeing into subtle realms, and I feel like a refining process and a clearing out and a healing of the person.

Rick: It seems like you’re going through a lot of past-life stuff in this process of refining and healing. There was one scene where you were apparently part of a Native American tribe and you had gone down to the river with your horse. While you were down there, soldiers came through and massacred the whole tribe, but you escaped because you happened to have gone down to the river. You were feeling remorse and guilt for having escaped the fate of everyone else.

Maybe you could comment on that whole principle of past experiences and the necessity to work them out, resolve them, purge them. If there is no self ultimately, how is it that we have apparently played all these roles in successive births?

Tree: I suppose there’s a person until there’s not, and there’s a soul’s evolution. This is only my experience. I have experienced—or have been aware as a kid—of quite a few past lives.

When I went into the cave, I thought I just had to work through this person’s life, get a few wounds out, clear it up, clean it up, and move forward on the spiritual path. But it happened that the soul was carrying guilt from a past life. This past-life being did keep surfacing in me. I could feel it, and I would strut and walk.

I was a male American Indian in one past life. As a kid, I always had this recurring dream of coming out early in the morning, flipping up the teepee flap, riding a horse to the river, and washing my face in the river. It was just a really strong, recurring dream.

During the three years of menopause, this warrior would appear within this being. I felt like him. He had a bone chest plate, and he was a really strong, young, beautiful warrior.

I also had to clear the guilt that he was carrying. I did re-experience a scene of that, and a whole load of people gathered. I was relieved of my guilt, and great love was given. So it’s like now there is this—and that doesn’t exist, but it did. It did exist.

Rick: Some people think that little kids come in as tabula rasas, that they’re enlightened, they don’t have any baggage, and then they get corrupted as time goes on. But according to the whole reincarnation way of thinking, we come in with plenty of baggage, which is why we come in. It’s not enough to say intellectually, “Oh, I’m already enlightened,” because that’s like writing “sugar” on a piece of paper and expecting it to be sweet.

Tree: Definitely. That is—I feel, felt here. I am. This is felt here.

Rick: In other words, it’s a living experience.

Tree: Because I wasn’t an intellectual person, so if you needed to be intellectual to get it, it wouldn’t happen.

📚 Teachers, transmission, and receptivity

Rick: Do you find now, in talking to various people, that it’s sufficient to say to them, “Hey, there’s only this, it’s only that, you are that,” and so on? Or do you feel like that would not really be a tremendously useful instruction for most people?

Tree: I think probably when Mooji says that, he carries a whole—

Rick: There’s an energy with it or something.

Tree: Yes, there’s an energy with it, and with bhava, and there’s work that they’re putting through. And I think if people are at that point to hear that, then that’s great.

It wouldn’t go down so well with my kids, and yet they’re aware of all this stuff and they’re more aware than they probably let on. They often say funny things like, “Oh, my person’s really pissed off about this today.” But I don’t feel it’s my role to teach anyone anything.

Rick: There’s something significant in what you just said. There’s the teacher who is transmitting some sort of energy, and then there’s the student or the recipient, and both have to be in the right condition.

Any old character can’t just come, get in front of an audience, and say, “You’re that.” It’s not necessarily going to have the desired potency. And the recipients are going to have different degrees of receptivity and ability to actually receive anything from even the most enlightened being that ever existed.

Tree: I think you could possibly just, without words, stare into Meher Baba’s photo or stare at Mooji on the internet, and I think it could almost be that simple. Although the teachings are also useful, just when you can see in the creatures or in the eyes of someone, if they’re silent, you can just feel and see the Self.

Rick: That’s how some teachers give darshan, just through a look. Ramana did that a lot.

Tree: A few months ago, I had a vision of Ramana. He walked past me with a calf. He just looked into my eyes, and, yeah, the look—it’s the eyes.

Rick: Did you know that one of his primary devotees was a cow?

Tree: Lakshmi, the cow. His eyes were just so burning and beautiful, just divine.

Rick: Tell us more about this whole phase of your life, living in the shed, in the cave. Tell us some of the more significant things you went through and why you feel they’re significant.

Tree: There was a lot of input from the spirit world, and for me that was significant because I really feel like the spirit world does try to help us. It’s almost their job to help us on the path.

Rick: What is the spirit world exactly, in this way you’re using the phrase?

Tree: I had, in particular, two spirit guides come to me and guide me, give me guidance.

Rick: One was a buffalo man and the other was an eagle man or something?

Tree: The buffalo man sort of taught me his craft, which was hands-on healing. And the eagle spirit man was just there. He was just full of light and guidance.

I was a bit nervy and said to Baba, “Is this okay? Is this okay?” And he’s like, “They work for me. They work for me.”

Rick: In other words, they were his assistants.

Tree: The spiritual realm does work for him. So I felt that it was all okay, and I feel like other beings just sort of helped in the purification and the lightening of the vibrations of the vessel.

Rick: And how did they help?

Tree: I had a lot of healings done on me, a lot of visions, and a lot of healings where these beings from other spheres—not from the gross plane—came and helped and did literal healings on me.

So it was very real. It was as real as this gross plane is real. This subtle sphere was very real.

Rick: Do you still perceive it, or did that go away with the Self-realization?

Tree: With the bubbling of the Self, I’m self-sufficient. I actually did stop before the awakening with Mooji. I did get the intuition to stop.

It is very alluring. There are many adventures on the subtle spheres. It was a part of my journey, but I got guidance to stop, so I did stop, and pretty soon after that I had the awakening with Mooji. I wouldn’t suggest, “Run around looking for spiritual beings or other planes,” but I felt it was a very strong instrument and work on me.

Rick: Talk about dagger removals.

Tree: I remember being in the cave at night and being told to go in and down and just find the wounds, find the wounds that the person is carrying. With the wounding, the noise, the stories, the entrapment, these guides came and started to perform these fantastic ceremonies of smoking and pulling out wounds. So, identifying the wound, beings from the subtle realm would come and perform the removals.

Rick: If someone had been in the room with you, they would have just seen you lying on the bed and nothing unusual going on. But with the subtle perception, there were beings, and they were actually using some kind of smoke or sage or something and performing a kind of subtle surgery on you.

Tree: It was subtle surgery. My husband was in bed once beside me, just sleeping, and enactments were going on. And it was very real.

Rick: Each dagger represented a particular trauma that had been held for who knows how long. Withdrawing those daggers was a delicate operation, and when they were withdrawn, there was some subtle bleeding or emission of some kind of substance from your body.

Tree: I can remember my brother dying. He died in a car accident. It was a very violent death. That was stored as a trauma in my being, and I was attended by a whole lot of beings.

Each wound was pulled out. At this stage, it was in the form of a dagger, and it was pulled out. There was just a great release and a lightness of being after every little wounding and trauma was removed.

In the life of the person, I felt it was great work because it was stripping all the layers, wounds, and stories that you carry and that make this life heavy and bound.

Rick: Those are impressions caused by experiences that overload our sensory or emotional apparatus. They sort of leave an imprint, and those imprints can be very sticky. The average person wouldn’t necessarily experience guides and daggers being removed, but they might experience physical pains, movements, or some other manifestation as the deep impression starts to get worked out.

Tree: Definitely.

Rick: I had one experience reminiscent of yours. During sleep, I was ushered into a room and asked to lie down on a pallet and hold on to some handles. Some sort of being came and worked me over with something like a trident, up and down my spine, and it was absolutely excruciating. But I realized that something really good was happening, and I held on for dear life.

Then I rose up out of it into the waking state, with this feeling of vast relief and release, as if I had been bound by steel bands that had finally been broken.

Tree: Fantastic. Lots of clearing, lots of clearing. And with the clearing, the stories leave, and the more stories that left, the more you can just be here.

Rick: There was this thing where you had a really bad headache, and finally the headache burst through the crown of your head and you got this message saying, “Your body is the building, and now on top you have a vessel.”

Tree: I did have some very painful, dramatic openings. One was an incredible headache where I thought, “Oh, should I ring the ambulance?” I thought, “No, I can’t. I’m in too much pain. I think I’m just going to die.”

I ran out to the front of the cave and threw myself down in the dirt. I was rolling and holding my head, screaming to God, and God just said, “Let go, let go.” I felt this burst. Incredible pain burst through the top of my head, and it was like a birth of some sort.

There were lots of those sorts of faculty openings, and a lot of them were quite painful.

Tree: It was intense, fantastic and intense and painful, and it was quite bizarre. It did end in the third year in absolute illness—in bed, finished.

I actually got chronic fatigue in the end. It was almost like maybe this was all too much—all these openings of faculties—and I ended up with chronic fatigue and severe pain in my face, incredible pain in my face that just wouldn’t go away. I spent months and months just lying in bed.

I had this vision of my body all chopped up and dismembered in a rubbish bin at the end of the bed, and it sat like that for months. I just got guided: “Just surrender, surrender.” It was almost like this experience was some sort of prototype for the next awakening, because I did come up out of all that rebuilt—still as a person, less person, but a person was still there until the Mooji thing.

Rick: There are precedents for this. Saint Francis nearly died and was extremely sick, and when he came out of it, he was Saint Francis. There are many other stories where people really go through the wringer.

Ramana said that he could enlighten people if he wanted to, just like that, but it would kill most people. The transformation can be so radical for the body that it can be more than you can handle, and so it has to be parceled out sometimes in smaller increments.

Trauma release and the body

Rick: What is this thing you’re doing now? Some transformational release or something?

Tree: It’s called TRE, and it’s Trauma Release Exercise.

A man called David Berceli, an American man who works in the field of trauma recovery, devised this technique. It’s basically tapping into our body’s innate release mechanism, which is tremoring. We all have this mechanism in us as mammals.

Rick: Tremor, meaning moving, shaking.

Tree: It’s a shaking. You’ve probably seen your dog shaking in a thunderstorm. We’ve interpreted that merely as fear, but in fact David Berceli has realized that it’s the release of fear. It’s the release of the charge that’s been built up and the muscle contraction that we go into when we’re in fear. It’s like shaking out all that muscle contraction and balancing the nervous system.

After my great illness, I still had incredible pain in my face. I thought it was maybe my teeth, so I just kept getting teeth pulled out, and my dentist was like, “They’re all fine.” I got a whole load of teeth pulled out, and I still had pain.

My sister introduced me to TRE. I went along to a three-day workshop, and I came out and my whole face contraction unwound. The pain was just gone.

Rick: But you wish you hadn’t had those teeth pulled out.

Tree: I’ve got false ones now in there, so I can chew and smile without scaring people. But losing teeth was also fantastic for tearing off more shreds of who you thought you were. So I’m grateful for even the teeth going.

Rick: I don’t think I’m a teeth, but I prefer to hang on to them if possible.

Tree: I’ve trained in TRE and do the shamanic work, but I feel that this is useful. I know Mooji says, and I totally believe it, just listen to Mooji or Baba, and it is there. The Self is there, and it is. But my experience was I cleaned out some trauma.

Rick: The Self is there for everyone. But do they experience it? For the most part, no. There’s a big difference between saying that everybody is ultimately the same Self and actually embodying it and clearing away all the crud that would make us a genocidal person, or even committing minor infractions or whatever.

Tree: My experience was the shamanic work that the guides and the subtle beings did on me, followed by a few years now of TRE practice.

Devotion and nonduality

Rick: Is there anything that has been significant for you, is significant now, that you really want to have the opportunity to express?

Tree: I can only share what helped me, because everyone’s path is so different. But for me, it was surrender to the Guru, reflecting myself in nature and feeling myself as that perfection of nature. So the combination for me was Guru, solitude, devotion—lots of devotion.

Rick: In some non-dual circles, devotion and surrender are put down as dualistic or emotional. How do you feel devotion and surrender are significant and perhaps don’t contradict the principles of non-duality?

Tree: The love is there for that perfect being, and yet at the same time I feel that perfect being coming out through here. So, in a way, there’s no separation, and yet I can enjoy their beauty and adore them at the same time.

Rick: So there’s oneness, and yet there’s a flow of devotion?

Tree: Yeah. And the more I adore Baba and Mooji and nature, the more the bubbling flows out of the Self.

Rick: Shankara said that the intellect imagines duality for the sake of devotion. To me, that phrase implies that there’s an intrinsic beauty in devotion, a sweetness in devotion, that it’s an experience one would want to have, even for a master of non-duality.

Tree: I’ve seen Baba pray, and Mooji pray to Papaji.

Rick: It’s actually quite a devotional scene around Mooji, from what I’m told.

Tree: Whenever I see all the beings in his presence, they look so clear and very light and beautiful.

✨ Integration after awakening

Rick: It’s only been a year since your awakening, and I’m sure that if we were to talk a year, five years, or ten years from now, it will have matured and deepened. Do you have a sense of where that’s heading?

Tree: I realize—coming down and integrating a bit—I feel like I was so far gone and way out that people would start talking from their person, and I was inappropriately laughing, thinking, “Aha, they think they’re the person,” and I would laugh, and it was inappropriate.

Then I had nights and nights of visions, really violent visions of humanity: rape, torture, just humanity’s violence. And then, a few nights after that, I experienced everything—the elements, mountains, the creatures, the people, all the hopes and dreams, and just the great beauty of the play.

It sort of brought me in and down and a bit more integrated and more functional. So that’s been the change so far. As Baba says, “The shock when you see the Self is so great, but it’s just the beginning.” It’s the beginning of the involution.

Rick: Some people would think of awakening as the end, but I’m not sure there is an end. It’s perhaps wise to have the attitude of a beginner. It’s easy to have an experience that seems so complete and profound that you think, “That must be it.” You can get stuck there unless you remain open to more.

Tree: I got the prompting that, “You’re wallowing a bit in the bliss.” I had been staring at the concrete floor for eight months, not doing a lot. At the time, I felt like there was nothing to do; I didn’t want to be anything, I didn’t want to do anything.

I spoke to Mooji on the net about that, and he said, “Yeah, you feel like that, but there will be doing.” And there has been more doing recently. I’m back into working, and I feel more functional, but there’s the underlying full, empty bliss happening there.

Rick: They say that there are five sheaths, or koshas, and the subtlest one is Anandamaya kosha, the bliss sheath. So even bliss is said to be a sheath, something that constrains us in some way. And it has to go; it has to be broken through.

Tree: I got that intuition quite strongly, like you’re wallowing—slap!

Rick: Snap out of it.

Tree: That’s very Baba—chook, get on.

Rick: Chop wood, carry water.

Final reflections and TRE

Are there any final words you’d like to say to people?

Tree: I would like to talk about TRE. I would say that if people are interested, they should take it up as a practice because it calms your physiology down. We are in the body, we’re in this human condition, and we can get stuck in states that are turned on: fight or flight, freeze, dissociation, flop. By regulating the organism with TRE, we can come to a really calm mind and come into the present state.

David Berceli doesn’t say anything about enlightenment. This is just my experience, which certainly makes you a more easy-to-live-with person. You respond as opposed to react, so you’re less reactive. It’s just a fantastic practice for human physiology.

Rick: Do you have to learn it from a person directly, or can you learn it off a website?

Tree: You can get a DVD, but it is really great to learn from a person. It is a self-healing technique, so you just learn it, and once you can self-regulate, you can go away for life and practice it.

Rick: Are there teachers of it all over the world?

Tree: There are teachers everywhere in the world. You just get on the global TRE website, and there are lots of teachers.

Rick: Do you have any inclination to talk to people around the world?

Tree: I’m not really feeling that, Rick. I will have this place for maybe a retreat at some stage, where people can come and be in nature and just have the enjoyment. I feel particularly that women would like to go and be in nature but don’t feel safe to go camping in the bush. With this little 17 acres with trees and a mountain, I will work towards setting up a retreat for people—not just women, but anyone.

Rick: You could have women’s retreats exclusively sometimes.

Tree: Maybe. I’m sort of looking to that as part of the work, but I don’t know.

Rick: I’ve been talking with Tree Wiseblood. Originally, Michelle was your name. This book that I read, Hot Flush, Dark Cave, which I found rather fascinating, is it in print? Is it downloadable from your website?

Tree: No, I haven’t even edited it. I just sort of wrote it down. It’s not published.

Rick: Do you have any intention of publishing it ever?

Tree: If there was an interest, yeah.

Rick: Can people contact you through your website?

Tree: Yes.

Rick: It was an interesting book, far out. It was fascinating. I like reading things that kind of stretch my assumptions about the way the world works.

Tree: It certainly stretched mine.

Rick: You’ve been on quite a ride. Thanks.

As people watching this mostly know, this is an ongoing series. There’s a new one every week. To be notified of new ones every week, either subscribe on YouTube or sign up to be notified by email on the BatGap website, or both.

This also exists as an audio podcast, if you like to listen to things while you’re commuting or whatever. The Donate button, as I mentioned earlier, and a bunch of other things—if you poke around in the menus on BatGap.com, you’ll find some things that you may find of interest, including all the previous interviews categorized and alphabetized in every which way.

So thanks for listening or watching, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks, Tree. Wait a minute, let me get a shot of you doing that. Very good. I had to switch the camera. Okay, thanks a lot. Bye.