Vera de Chalambert Interview

Summary

Vera de Chalambert describes a lifelong movement from dissociation and spiritual seeking toward embodied presence, shaped by trauma, migration, religious study, and healing work. The discussion explores how mystical experiences and nondual practice can be integrated without using spirituality to escape pain.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can early trauma affect embodiment and spiritual experience?
• How can intense mystical or awakening experiences be integrated safely?
• How can spiritual practice become embodied rather than intellectual or escapist?
• How can devotional spirituality and nondual awareness be reconciled?

Key takeaways

• Spiritual growth can involve learning to inhabit the body rather than escaping it.
• Intense spiritual openings need grounding, mentorship, and careful integration.
• Healing means meeting pain with radical hospitality instead of trying to fix or avoid it.
• Buddhist and Kabbalistic teachings can complement each other in healing.
• Every experience can become an invitation to deeper intimacy with reality.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done well over 400 of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to watch previous ones, go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu, where you will see all the previous ones organized in several different ways.

This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to support it to any extent, it’s important, and we appreciate your support.

Incidentally, if you’re watching the video of this and you see all these marks on my face, I had some precancerous skin things burned off a couple of days ago, so it looks like I’ve been attacked by an octopus or something. But it’s nothing serious; it’s just a precautionary thing, and it’ll clear up.

My guest today is Vera de Chalambert. I’ll just read her little bio here first. Vera is a spiritual storyteller and Harvard-educated scholar of comparative religion. She speaks and writes about spiritual culture, mindfulness in the modern world, and the divine feminine, and has been a speaker at the Science and Non-Duality Conference in the US and Europe, Sister Giant in Washington, DC, and other gatherings.

Vera holds a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School, where she studied comparative mysticism, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida in religion and literature. She also happens to speak about four languages fluently. Her work explores the meeting place of creativity, psychology, and spirituality, and is informed by insights from both Eastern and Western philosophies.

Vera is a graduate of the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, and has been a student of Jason Shulman’s non-dual healing work. She is deeply influenced by Buddhist and Kabbalistic lineages.

Vera’s recent work has been on the topic of holy darkness, an exploration of the dark goddesses associated with transformation and initiation, found in the world’s great wisdom traditions, the most well-known of whom is the Hindu goddess Kali. Vera is a mother and a devotee of the mother. She’s working on her first book on the dark feminine. So, welcome, Vera.

Vera: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Rick. You know, when you read that, I’m always wondering, like, “Whose bio is that? Why is it being read?” And that person seems like they have something figured out, and that is absolutely not the case for me. So, I am so grateful that you invited me. I’m not quite sure, as you know, why, but I’m really grateful to talk with you.

Rick: Well, I am too. I first really became aware of you sometime earlier this year, although I think you said we met at the SAND Conference, but I don’t remember that, actually. But I was reading a thing on one of those SAND Conference emails that go out, the Science and Non-Duality Conference emails, and it was so beautifully written that I had to email Maurizio, the organizer of the SAND Conference, to ask, “Who wrote this?” And he said, “Oh, it was Vera de Chalambert.”

And I said, “Wow, it’s beautiful, it’s deep, it’s profound, it’s so nicely written.” So, you know, I have to get to know this person. So, I started reading some of your stuff, and you wrote several articles about Kali, especially that one where a picture of Kali was projected on the Empire State Building in New York.

Vera: Right. Isn’t that cool?

Rick: Yeah, it was interesting.

Vera: How amazing.

Rick: They’re great articles, and I posted one to my Facebook page, and somehow or other that caught Marianne Williamson’s attention, and then she ended up inviting you to Sister Giant.

So, in any case, you know, you’re kind of self-effacing and a little shy, and not used to all this publicity stuff, but I really think you have something to say. And, you know, I’m sure if we spoke 10 years from now, you’d have even more to say. But, you know, we’re all works in progress, and…

Irene:(Irene laughs)

Rick: What? What’s so funny about that?

Irene: It sounds funny.

Rick: Irene says, “It sounds funny!” But really, I mean, you know, you’re very humble, and that in itself is a qualifier for being on this show, actually. (Laughter)

Vera: I’m not sure I’m humble. I just am very scared.

Rick: Well, it takes humility to say that. And it’s natural. I mean, there are some famous actors like, you know, Meryl Streep and people who still get butterflies when they have to do something in a public way. So, it’s just a human reaction.

Okay, so you have a very interesting story, and I thought it would be interesting to start with that story, where you were born, some of your milestones growing up in terms of your growing awareness of God and spirituality and so on. It’s a fascinating story. So, let’s start with that. You were born in Ukraine, in the former Soviet Union.

Vera: Yeah, exactly, in the former Soviet Union. When I say that, I realize I’m older than I think. So, I was born in the former Soviet Union, and I was born quite premature. And I’m only mentioning that because, as I think about my life, I realize that’s actually a really big piece for me.

I was born about two and a half months premature, and I spent a lot of time in an incubator. And I think that affected me in a particular way, like this early trauma, where I didn’t have a sort of built-in container. My childhood was spent in this boundaryless place, where I couldn’t tell where I was, and I was kind of feeling everything all the time. Everything was kind of directly moving through me.

And I think that there is this way in which I’m still continuing to heal that gap, that kind of developmental gap of not having many boundaries or healthy boundaries.

Rick: It would seem that someone who spends their first couple of months in an incubator isn’t getting a lot of touching and closeness to the mother and all that. That must have an effect.

Vera: Exactly. Yes, and as early as I could remember myself, there was really this sense of feeling everyone and kind of seeing everything from above a little bit. I even had this, I remember, a really early memory of looking into my hands and then zooming inside my head into this black box inside my head, and then… whoosh!… just popping out.

That was an experience that I think I was born with a body, and when I was born, I had casts. I was crippled; I was born with my feet turned in and under, and I had casts for the first two and a half years of my life. And so I think having the experience of being in the body as I came into this world wasn’t very comforting for me, and so I just hung out elsewhere.

If I had to say, I would say that my path so far has been a path into this body, into incarnation, right? Learning how to tolerate the muchness and the beauty and the heartbreak and the discomfort of this world.

My path so far has been a path into this body, into incarnation.

Also, I think that went along with, or kind of matched, my very early sensibility of moving towards the Divine. I lived in this Jewish, secular environment where God was poetry and art and protest and literature, and my mother, instead of reading me fairy tales, would read me this beautiful, heartbreaking poetry from Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova, these soul-wailers of the Russian soul, if you will, right? People who had seen the shattering of their worlds, who lived through revolutions, and I think that really profoundly affected me.

I remember the first time I heard the word “God” as a child. It was outside of the home somewhere, maybe in a kindergarten situation, and it was like my whole body landed. It was like, “Oh yeah, this is where I belong.” And then I’ve been like a one-trick pony ever since. It’s like my only interest, my only direction, my only devotion, in so many ways.

As I was telling you—we talked a little bit before our interview—I grew up in this city called Lviv, which before World War II was actually a Polish city. A lot of Polish people loved it, and Martin Buber was born and raised there, along with many incredible thinkers and scientists. So many Polish people loved the city that many of them stayed instead of going back to Poland once the city became Soviet.

That meant that I grew up in a trilingual culture: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian. I went to a Polish school, where all the subjects were taught in Polish. Also, what we should know about Polish people is that they’re very deeply and devotionally Catholic.

Although in the Soviet Union religion didn’t exist—it was a topic that was non grata, it was not really allowed or welcomed—you could get into serious political trouble if you practiced any form of religion. There were nuns and priests coming into my school, because it was a Polish school, teaching religion subversively. And for me, that was just like heaven. That was all I ever wanted.

Secretly from my parents, because I figured that wouldn’t be so kosher, I studied with the nuns and the priests and had my First Communion. I secretly went and had my First Communion at about ten, where I confessed that I wasn’t actually Catholic. Maybe this is not very kosher of me, but… Then I came back home and told my parents, and they didn’t know what to do with me. What do you do with this? My dad was like, “Oy vey!” My mother was like, “I don’t know what to say.”

Then I thought, okay, this is maybe very unkosher, because I was never baptized. So I went at the time—this is right as the Soviet Union breaks down. There’s mass chaos, and there’s economic and social chaos: currencies changing all the time, people wailing openly in the streets and digging through garbage dumps. There’s no bread. It’s like a real collapse of my world at the time.

You know, where some kids kind of have this narrative that when their parents have a divorce, there’s this little voice that says, “This is my fault that they got divorced,” somehow the way it landed in me was that it was my fault that the world around me was collapsing. Somehow I wasn’t pure enough, that I could have somehow been better.

After the Catholic First Communion, they had mass baptisms at the time. I snuck into a mass baptism in an Armenian Orthodox Church, because my mother’s father was Armenian. I kind of thought, “Oh, wow, there’s a connection there.” And so I had a baptism there.

There were Baptists coming in, in stadiums, kind of doing the Holy Spirit thing. And of course, that was my life. I was sneaking away to try and find God everywhere.

Then we were very fortunate to become political refugees at the time. My family and I emigrated when I was eleven to Florida.

When I came to Florida, this other world opened up. Judaism in the former Soviet Union was considered an ethnic identity, a national identity. It was something stamped in your passport that you had to hide most of the time, because there was sort of systemic antisemitism. That was not something you wanted out there, and it was very pervasive.

Even as children, the teachers would say, “All the Russian kids, raise your hands. All the Ukrainian kids, raise your hands.” So until it got to me, I didn’t want to raise my hand. This was something you wanted not to. You wanted to fit in. You didn’t want to stick out. You didn’t want this to be your cross to bear, so to speak.

Then I came to America, where all of a sudden, not only was it okay to be Jewish, but it was a religion. That was a great moment for me, when I thought, “Oh my God, there was something about my lineage that could connect me to the Divine, too.”

So then I kind of dove into the Jewish tradition. Because I came to America and didn’t speak English, I felt like I was split and that my world was cut off somehow, in the sense that there was no way that I could communicate where I was coming from: the gray and the heartbroken and the devastated and the shattered.

And then, into the Florida sunshine, smiling people, large supermarkets with 25,000 colors and cheeses and breads, while I was just coming from a world where people were waiting in line for bread. That was my only responsibility as a kid, for an hour or more, until there was no bread when you got to the front.

I had these kinds of very difficult dissonances. There was such a dissonance between my new life in America and my old life. I had such a difficult time finding my place and integrating the various narratives that formed me.

So what happened then, as I was becoming a teenager and felt like I still didn’t believe, is that I drowned myself in books. I went into the library and read every New Age book in the library. I read indiscriminately: philosophy, religion, Ram Dass, everything I could get my hands on.

Not surprisingly, when I came to college, that led me into a pretty easy choice of direction, which was religious studies and comparative literature at the time, as well.

Consciousness Studies at the University of Florida

I was extremely fortunate because I came to the University of Florida, and at that time, the University of Florida had this emergence happening. The faculty of the Arts and Sciences and the medical school at UF had these incredible professors who were all kind of profoundly interested in consciousness studies, who were very deeply influenced by the work of Ken Wilber, and who formed something called the Center for Spirituality and Health.

It was largely due to the patronage of Mickey Singer. I don’t know if you know who Michael Singer is?

Rick: I do. I’d like to get him on the show sometime.

Vera: Of The Untethered Soul. At the time, he hadn’t yet written a book; he wasn’t yet on the scene. But he already had this beautiful place called the Temple of the Universe in the woods in Alachua, where he would invite lots of different spiritual teachers.

He was one of the patrons of the Center who made it possible for the Center to begin inviting some of the world’s great mystics, thinkers, and spiritual teachers. My mentor at the time was the director of the Center. His name was Shaya Isenberg, Sheldon Isenberg, and he was really my first spiritual mentor. He was a Renewal rabbi and a Wilberite, a Wilberian kind of integral theory thinker. He was the chair of the Department of Religion at the time, and he really took me under his wing and mentored me.

Actually, it’s funny: I just learned that David Deida was his first mentor as well. I became the student director of the Center, and somehow at that time a community of students arose where we all had the same longing. We all had that same thirst for spirituality, for embodied spirituality, for paradox. It was really interesting.

We got to meet all kinds of people. We had lunch with Ram Dass, and Father Thomas Keating was the inaugural guest. Reb Zalman would come and work with us. They would come and spend time with us. They would do weekend-long workshops with us.

I felt so deeply shaped by that time, both because by the time I was 19 or 20, I had read everything Ken Wilber had ever written, so it was difficult to have a kind of magical, mythical understanding of religion, and also because I began to receive transmissions from these elders, from these incredible teachers in our culture, whom I got to experience firsthand.

I also helped grow this community of students. When we came together, we had a contemplative community that formed. At the time, it looked like a wisdom circle. We came together every Sunday morning or Saturday morning and really shared our processes, trying to integrate all these different practices that we were being given.

For example, Father Keating came and taught us Centering Prayer. We would do these practices together. We would see how they met our ordinary human lives and our post-teenage dramas. It was quite a profound shaping time for me.

Then I went off to Harvard Divinity School, where I also got a lot of pieces. I was really fascinated, on the one hand, by comparative mysticism. I was interested in how the experiences of mystics across the spectrum of different religiosities and religions compared. What did they all experience? What was the language that they used?

On the other hand, there was this other academic part of me that was really interested in discourses of power. What are the ways in which reason oppresses? How does language trap us? Somehow, I feel like these things are continuously moving through me: the questions of power, the questions of how we form identity, and how we connect to the real. How do we connect to the real?

Then I went off and studied for four years at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing. For me, that was the real divinity school experientially, in the sense that it was all about working with trauma and doing profound kinds of psychospiritual process work. I didn’t just get to talk about being afraid. I got to scream it out and beat it out and use my body in the healing process.

That was really the beginning of my descent into what I think of as my incarnation. Until that time, I was really living maybe from the heart up, but maybe from the neck up. It was at the Brennan School, where there was a lot of core energetic work being done, that I began to understand that this body is in something, too.

I understood it on a mental level—I mean, integral theory and such—but not in an experiential way. I also began to become more and more sensitive to subtle worlds and subtle energy realities.

Rick: Give us an example or two of that, how you experienced that.

Vera: On a large scale, we go around thinking—okay, so even though I had these very expanded experiences from a very early age, where I wasn’t located in my body, let’s say, and all kinds of things happened, I always felt like I was someone in a liminal space between this world and the next.

There are so many kinds of experiences, right? But working as a healer, which was kind of what I was doing at the time, it was like an entirely new world. Before, there had been an intuition and a general sense of something invisible being there. It began to be as concrete as a rock.

Running energy began to be as real as having rocks thrown at me, for example. It wasn’t something intuitive or amorphous. I began to perceive what different people’s traumas looked like in their fields. Sometimes I would be in a healing session and these entire movies would open up about someone’s life, right?

Then you would feel kind of—I don’t know, is this my projection? What is that? I began to explore these more subtle realms, and it was quite an interesting process.

I want to say that I had some profound experiences, especially at a certain point, of a kind of psychic opening. When I was 18, I went to this retreat. It was kind of a silent retreat, and at some point I think my container wasn’t strong enough to tolerate what opened up for me.

People seek enlightenment or awakening, but for me it looked like a peak experience that my body couldn’t tolerate. I was in a kind of expanded state. I went to sleep, saw a bunch of dreams, and then went into a darkness. I couldn’t turn off my awareness of it, and it felt like an infinity, like an eternity. Then new dreams came up.

Basically, what happened was that for a whole night I couldn’t turn off. When I woke up, I couldn’t tell if my body was real anymore. I had this kind of break. I remember laughing hysterically, and people were coming up to me. They were saying, “You should leave,” but they didn’t feel comfortable with me leaving. Everything just kind of…

Rick: Broke open.

Dissociation and Uncertainty During a Spiritual Opening

Vera: It broke open, except it broke open in a very dissociative way. I couldn’t tell what was real. I couldn’t tell what was happening. That was when I was 18 or 19, and I think it wasn’t very helpful for me, actually.

I think that the rest of my time, from that point on, was spent mending what had broken open prematurely and integrating my personality. Luckily, at the time I was in a context where I had mentors at the University of Florida.

After the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, I started working with Jason Shulman, who is really my teacher, this wonderful Baba for me. He’s not very well known, and I’m not exactly sure why, because I think he is one of the most integrated teachers on the scene.

Rick: We’ve been looking at him. Even before I knew that you were connected with him, over the last couple of weeks we’ve been looking at him and thinking, “Whoa, this guy looks interesting. I should have him on the show.”

Vera: He is absolutely extraordinary because he bridges the theistic—which means God-centered—narrative, or spiritual way of being, this devotional, God-centered way, with the nondual perspective. He is a Zen teacher. His lineage on one side is Zen, and then what happened to him was that the Kabbalah opened up for him.

If you know anything about Kabbalah, you will know that it is esoteric, impossible to understand, kind of heady, and difficult to touch with a ten-foot pole. But what happened in his case was that the entire lineage opened itself up to him and began flowing through him in the direction of how to use that lineage and that wisdom for healing, in a healing way.

He brought the Buddhist and the Kabbalistic together, and those two traditions have always been the dominant, shaping narratives for me.

When I met Jason, I remember just hearing about him and my entire body feeling like, yes. I went and Googled him, and I knew I had to work with him. It was like this—you know how it happens with teachers? He was mine. I did another three years of working with him, and it really shifted the way I looked at healing and the awakening process.

Rick: In what way did it shift?

Vera: I stopped using the spiritual life and the healing process to get out of my pain. His work was a deep invitation to radical hospitality toward everything, very tantric in its nature, really, in that way. It was a real invitation to paradox, to not resolving, to not fixing things, to not using anything to save ourselves from reality, but rather using everything that arises for deeper intimacy with what’s here.

Do not use anything to save yourself from reality; use everything that arises for deeper intimacy with what’s here.

A lot of the teachings that I had received before, intellectually or even maybe spiritually, began to become embodied while I was working with him. He has a number of really fantastic books. One of them is The Instruction Manual for Receiving God, and I highly recommend it.

Jason was a really deep part of my heart and a formative influence. Then I went off to Paris with my great love, who was a Frenchman. Very quickly, I had children, which was another part of what I feel was an initiation for me: motherhood.

Talk about embodiment. Talk about spiritual teaching, right? Everything that you’ve ever wanted to deny about yourself comes straight up in your face, and everything is triggered. Sleepless nights break you down and break you open. They really bring you into the body. As a woman, you become the food. You become the food of every kind—emotional, psychological, and physical.

That was extremely challenging for me, especially because my natural proclivity was not hanging out in this world. I didn’t know how to change the diapers, make the food, or do any of this human stuff that was so abhorrent to me.

Even though I could talk about embodiment—and I still do, and this is still where I wrestle—please don’t think that I’m saying I’m now beyond this. This is the territory that keeps moving through me over and over again. But when I became a mother, it was particularly eloquent for me.

From transcendence to incarnation

Rick: Well, you said something at the very beginning, and you’re alluding to it now, also. If I could rephrase it in my own words, it’s like we’re all kind of learning how to live on this planet.

I think we all have a sense that perhaps we came from somewhere else, or that we ultimately belong somewhere else, or something. It’s intense here, and it’s difficult, and we never get a break in terms of having to learn and deal with stuff.

As we were discussing the other day when we were doing audio testing, we’re all bozos on this bus.

Vera: I love that so much. I’m a bozo; we’re all bozos on this bus.

Rick: Yeah, everybody’s kind of in the same boat, and if we think that someone else has it all figured out and doesn’t have any challenges, then we’re just not seeing the situation clearly.

Vera: Yeah, and frankly, what else but becoming intimately familiar with our own suffering can move us towards service, towards healing, towards the awakening process? Because what does that mean, the awakening to what? How many more men does it take to go up a mountain, you know, to stare at walls? So, we’re awake; it’s not such a big deal.

I mean, I feel like for someone who’s kind of more prone to expanded states of consciousness, I’m constantly like, “So what?” And, of course, there are so many different qualities of experience, but really, on some level, for me it’s always been like, “Cool, but so what? Like, what now?”

Rick: Yeah.

Vera: What now? So, we get an insight. What now? How do we bring it down? How do we work with that broken and that human in us, you know, that isn’t about some kind of other state, but like here and now?

Rick: Yeah, just this morning I was listening to a SAND conference panel from a couple of years ago with Matthew Wright, Adam Bucko, and Francis Bennett.

Vera: Oh, I love that so much.

Rick: Yeah, and they were kind of talking about this very point of the non-dualists versus the sort of people who might tend to dismiss the whole thing as an illusion and not deal with your personal stuff, versus those who have been there, done that, and realized that, okay, what’s next is that you actually do have to deal with it all and kind of come down into it and learn how to live in it.

Vera: Well, it seems to me that there is this movement of integration, this kind of descent back down into incarnation.

And I think it’s like there’s also this way in which we talk so much about the emergence of the feminine in this time on the planet. There seems to be almost this natural emergence of a spiritual teaching through reality, through culture, through everything, where we are being made to face our reality here and now.

We’re being brought back down into the mud, into the yuck, into the mess, into the heartbreak of it all. And my God, thank God, enough already with blissing out on mountaintops.

And that’s not to say that we shouldn’t have deeply contemplative spiritual lives. We should and we must. But, like, Andrew Harvey always speaks about sacred activism, right? When the passion and love of the mystic for God and the passion of the activist for justice come together, this third fire emerges within us that can actually be an offering to this world.

Rick: Yeah, you know, the farmer throws his corn into the mud and then gets much more corn that way.

Vera: Well, and, you know, even I think in the yogic tradition there’s this very famous meme of, “No mud, no lotus.”

Rick: Yeah.

No mud, no lotus. And so, my interest has always been in some way like the feminine movement. You know, the masculine is the movement towards up and away, towards transcendence. The feminine movement is down into the body, into our sensuality, into desire, into devotion.

Vera: No mud, no lotus. And so, my interest has always been in some way like the feminine movement. You know, the masculine is the movement towards up and away, towards transcendence. The feminine movement is down into the body, into our sensuality, into desire, into devotion.

So, yeah, even when we were talking in preparation, I said, you know, “I’m really nothing.” If I’m anything, I’m like a devotee. Like, I am at the feet of the Mother. I will worship. I will wail. There’s, like, I don’t have anything to offer but those qualities. I feel like this heartbreak and longing of which my heart is woven. And so, that’s a really downward movement.

Rick: And I’m sure you’re not suggesting that it has to be either/or. Like, there are these two camps, the up and out and the down and in. It’s integration, both/and.

Vera: Both/and. Always both/and. And for me, it has certainly been that the initial movement is completely up, up and away, and that natural tendency where I think we tend to use that as defense, as a way to save ourselves from all of this muchness and all of this pain.

And so, it seems to me that my work emerges from this other place. It seems to me that what is emerging on our planet right now is inviting us into this other place. Probably because this place, the feminine, really has been exiled. Because it must become integrated into our spiritual lives, into our political, social, and ecological realities.

I don’t remember who said it—Clare Dakin, right? She said, “The exclusion of the feminine has led us to a world on the edge of collapse. The re-emergence is going to be a dance to behold.”

Rick: Interesting, beautiful quote.

❤️ Meeting Amma and the initiation of Kali

So, hang on a second. So, what we’ve discussed for the last three or four minutes I’m going to leave as a teaser, because we’re going to get into it much more, but I’m going to bring you back to your story. Because I think the whole complete story is interesting. So, you’re in Paris, you were raising these kids, and life is great.

Vera: Perfect life, healing center.

Rick: Healing practice, great husband, great kids, great this, great that.

Vera: Beautiful, you know, like the fairy tale. The fairy tale.

Rick: Yeah, and then I think a critical point was you went to some Amma program, right?

Vera: Yeah, you know, so what I should say is, fairy tale and a very deep sense that I’m containing. I can’t let go; I’m containing. Containing it so it doesn’t change, right? Like, there was already a sense in which I was living in a rigid way, which is actually not naturally who I am and how I am, but there was this sense of having to hold on.

Rick: Like, “I don’t want to lose this. This is so great.”

Vera: “I don’t want to lose it. This is all I want, this is all I need,” like a completely desperate, co-dependent relationship with the moment, with the reality. And a kind of a real sense of becoming somebody.

And not that I was really becoming somebody, but in my head there was this real kind of like, “What should I be? What should I look like? How should I present myself to the world? Oh, I’m a healer now. Oh, I should be wiser. Oh, I should…” There was this wanting to become more perfect, wanting to become more serious, less this mess that I am naturally, and more appropriate in the French way and in the normal social way.

And having more spiritual experiences, I remember having this weird thought like, “Oh, I should really create a more serious meditation practice.” I was trying; it was like I was compartmentalizing to make more of a perfect life.

You know, Amma came to Paris, and Amma comes to Paris once a year. And I wasn’t a big Amma fan. It wasn’t like, “Oh, let’s go see,” because there’s such a bhakti field around her, so many people who are devoted to her and who really experience her as the embodiment of the feminine and of the Mother. That wasn’t at all my story. I just wanted to go and get hugged. It seemed like a fun thing to do.

And, of course, I went into the huge compound where she comes, and just as I came in and walked into the space, I found myself on my knees, wailing, with all of my heart, wailing into the ground, “Mother, burn me up.”

Rick: Which was kind of unanticipated, right? You weren’t a natural-born wailer; you were just sort of like…

Vera: I was a very natural-born wailer. My family would cry at dinnertime because we’d be speaking about things. I am, like, when someone reads poetry, I will wail. I’m a natural-born wailer.

Rick: So, this wasn’t totally uncharacteristic of you.

Vera: It wasn’t totally uncharacteristic, but that moment in my life, it was uncharacteristic for that moment in my life.

Rick: Yeah, it was spontaneous; you hadn’t anticipated it.

Vera: It was spontaneous, and “Mother, burn me up!” was not my language. And “burn me up,” for a person who was containing it all, was definitely not what I was going for.

And I kept repeating it and wailing and wailing, and it wasn’t stopping. For a while I was just there on my knees. And as I was saying it, it was like automatic; words were coming out, and I kept thinking, “Who is saying it? And stop it, I don’t mean it.” There was a fear. I’m like, “I don’t mean it, I don’t mean it. What the fuck does it mean?” It was like a very strange experience.

And the entire night there was this beautiful table of jewelry. There were bracelets and prayers and all kinds of things. So you’re all expanded, you might want to buy something; it’s really good for business, I’m sure.

But there was this table, and I kept circling it. There were beautiful objects, like jewelry and beads, and there was this earring there that I kept looking at, this beautiful golden earring with things hanging off of it. And it was like I needed it so much. I kept going back, and then I was like, “I’m not going to be a spiritual materialist. I’m not going to consume.”

And I kept being pulled back to the table, so finally I asked the lady. I said, “Listen, this earring, where’s the other one? I would really like to try them on.” And she said, “Oh, there is no other earring. This is from the altar of Kali. This came from Kali’s statue in Amma’s ashram.”

Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I hadn’t heard the name Kali before. I was a scholar of comparative religion. From a distance, at arm’s length, I absolutely knew about this dark Hindu goddess, and I wanted to have nothing to do with it, like my Judeo-Christian kind of consciousness—really nothing.

The hair on my hand stood up, and I bolted. I got out of there; I didn’t want to have anything to do with that table or anything else. I didn’t exactly get the connection between Amma and Kali, either. Actually, that freaked me out, I remember. I had no idea.

And so, you know, that was the night of Devi Bhava, where she blesses people and marries people and blesses babies.

Rick: Oh, yeah, I’ve done it many times.

Vera: And so then, at the end of the night, what she does is throw rose petals on people, and so you get showered by Amma’s roses.

(Rick’s dog starts barking.)

Do you need to go?

Rick: No, Irene’ll take care of it.

Vera: So, I was just blissed out and showered by the roses and by love. What’s really interesting also is, when you hug Amma, it’s not some kind of lovely, peaceful hug. It’s like, “Hug, next, hug, next.”

Rick: Yeah, especially if there’s a huge crowd, like in Paris, she paces it according to the size of the crowd.

Vera: What’s interesting is that she held me. She pulled me out, she pulled me back in, and people tried to push me through, and she held on to me and pulled me back in. I was like, “Whoa!” She kind of held me for a while, and then I moved through.

It was morning, maybe five in the morning—I guess it was after six. I got into the car with a friend of mine, and we got on a highway in the woods. Maybe ten minutes after I left Amma’s darshan, a red car came out of its lane on the highway and, at full speed, rammed into our car.

It was like the traditional story: life in slow motion. Everything slows down, and you have this weird life review. You’re going to die, and all kinds of things happen. It was like an instant answer, right? “Mother, burn me up.” Here you have it.

I found myself on the ground. I didn’t know if I was alive, I didn’t know if I was broken open, and I had no sense of where I had landed. But I felt that same energy that made my hair stand up. I felt it move through me, and in every cell of my body I knew that my life would never be the same.

Then, very miraculously, except for having herniated discs and being dislocated, I was okay. Everyone who came onto that scene said, “This is impossible. This is a miracle.”

Rick: You had your seat belt on, I presume. Must have.

Vera: Yeah. So, very quickly afterward, my life began to be—you know, I call it, I began to dance with Kali. Immediately, I could no longer work with people. The healing practice had to shut down.

All of the uncertainty within me that I was containing, all of my confusion, all of my heartbreak, and all of my fear—I was being shaken up. The accident shook up everything that was held down in my cells, held down in my heart, everything that was a no: not for me, not this. It was all beginning to come up.

I was shaking through every day, completely overwhelmed. I’m generally overwhelmed because I’ve experienced so much and so deeply, very often, but this took it to a whole other level.

That began an identity crisis: Who am I now? What do I do? Everything I thought I knew, I didn’t know anymore.

It was really not an unusual or extraordinary encounter with death, where everything that doesn’t belong and everything that isn’t true has this natural way of shifting out.

Then, within months—maybe three months—my father passed away. It was a tremendous shock. Within a week, my life in Paris closed down. Everything I had built, everything I knew, and I moved back to the States with my family.

Another kind of stripping began, where I became a fatherless child. It was interesting because there I was, just being stripped, just beginning to reconfigure myself and my identity, and just beginning to integrate something and get a new sense of who I was or should be or whatever. Then that got shaken up again, burned up.

As my father died, I began to feel deeper and deeper levels of pain and trauma surfacing in me. I think that when my father died, I began to connect to ancestral trauma. My father was a Holocaust survivor, and I think that was very deeply in my field and in my cells.

I remember that period felt very much like trauma that I couldn’t tolerate, that was beyond anything, was coming up and out. I think that was happening because I had just recently been shaken up, and then I was shaken up again. It was deeper and deeper stuff.

Then, just as I was beginning to reorient myself once again, I began to move through a devastating divorce.

For someone who is, confessedly, a drama queen—meaning I don’t just feel pain; I feel heart-wrenching pain—everything feels tremendous in my field, just like joy and love and ecstasy. I have this ecstasy-agony place in me that is very big and tremendous.

I have to say that death was nothing compared to what I experienced with the divorce, because the divorce shattered and threatened everything that I identified with: the perfect mother, the perfect wife. I was far from perfect, but in my head it was my story—the fairy tale.

The fairy tale was such a profound part of my false self, and of belonging to a particular kind of world that was comfortable and affluent. All of that was stripped away at once.

It was like I was being burned alive. In fact, it was so profound that I remember having visions of being stretched in those medieval torture devices, on a rack, while being burned alive.

One night I had such an extreme experience. This was all psycho-spiritual pain, but the pain was so physical in my body that I passed out from it.

That night, the pain was so profound. I passed out from pain, and for maybe two or three days I couldn’t feel anything at all. It was as if something in my brain overloaded and blew out. I had blown out my capacity to feel any more pain.

Rick: And maybe you just got rid of such a load of it that you were given a brief respite from having to process it, maybe.

Vera: Yeah, maybe.

Rick: I told Irene that story about seeing Amma and saying, “Mother, burn me up,” and then having a car accident and divorce and all this stuff. She said, “Oh, I hope she doesn’t tell that story, because I wouldn’t want people to think that happens to everybody who goes to see Amma or that it happens to everybody who gets involved in spirituality.” And it doesn’t, obviously.

Vera: I think that it does, actually. Not everyone who goes to see Amma, but I think the way the mystery unfolds itself through us, how life humbles us, and how the process of spiritual maturation unfolds for each one of us is completely unique.

Our relationship with teachers and different fields of grace is completely unique to all of us. But I would have to argue, or at least question, whether that doesn’t happen to everyone on the spiritual path.

Rick: Yeah, to some degree and in different ways. I think it depends on how quickly you move and how artful the process is—whether you’re using a scalpel or a machete.

Vera: Yeah. And I realize now that I prayed for that.

Rick: Yeah, you said, “Bring it on.”

Vera: I did. I said, “Bring it on,” because somewhere that bhakti place in me, that place in me where I just wanted to offer myself up—from the earliest of ages, that was the only thing I really wanted.

I think what happened was that when I came into the field of Amma, the deep yearning in my heart that I was containing couldn’t take it anymore. The deep yearning in my heart to offer myself up, to lay at her feet, to be her instrument, to be burned up, began to move through me.

Even if consciously I couldn’t choose it—some part of me chose it. And so that began to burn me up on a level that I think I consented to, in the deepest part of my being.

What was very interesting about that period of burning was that I began to have visions. Sometimes you can do something to help yourself. Somehow I knew, in some wise place within me, that there was nothing I could do to save myself from what was happening to me.

My prayer life began to change. I used to pray, “Mother, please help me. Help me,” because I was in so much pain and it seemed to be relentless. And I was a mother; it wasn’t like I could just be in my ecstatic pain. I had to function.

My prayer life went from, “Mother, help me, save me, help me,” to “Take me.” There was this reorientation that happened: “Don’t ever stop until there’s nothing else to burn.” That’s all I began to want.

Don’t ever stop until there’s nothing else to burn.

It was like maybe a weird, masochistic kind of thing, but the places where I began to feel most intimate with life and most intimate with God were those places of radical heartbreak, where I couldn’t save myself.

God, in her wisdom, was kind enough to put me in a place where I couldn’t save myself, where I had nothing to hold on to, and where all of my old defense mechanisms and structures weren’t working anymore.

I had one experience, actually, and I wonder about it. I had a number of weird visions that came when I had tremendous pain, but in one of them, I was in a supermarket. I passed by the lobsters, and my heart just cracked open, like it spilled over. I kept moving past the lobsters, but all I could feel suddenly was the pain of the lobsters. Then it went into larger and larger fields of pain: the pain of the society we live in, of people having to survive, of war and genocide.

In some weird way, all of the suffering of the world began to flood through. It started with the lobsters, but then it just kept expanding.

By the time I moved from the beginning of the aisle to the middle of the aisle, I was being pierced from every direction. This was one of the very few times when my physical world and my spiritual vision merged.

What I saw was gaping blood coming from me in all directions, and I actually couldn’t tell if it was real or not. I thought, “Oh my God, I’ve become a wound of Christ.” I had this kind of weird Christological feeling, this experience.

I was holding on. I couldn’t see anything anymore. I was shaking and holding on to the aisle, feeling this unbearable heartbreak and pain.

Then, as I began to feel orgasmic, as this weird energy began to move through me, I couldn’t see what was happening. Tears were rolling down my face. I had to make my way through the aisle and out of the store, while all of that continued to move through me.

I had to find enough human concentration to drive myself from the store to my house so that I could lie down.

That was maybe one of the most horrifying, terrifying, ecstatic, beautiful experiences that I had. I didn’t really know a parallel to it. Something happened that was so tremendous, which I don’t want to analyze, but it was a profound experience for me.

Those kinds of experiences began to unfold for me a few times during that period. I almost wonder if it had to do with burning up karma or beginning to open me up in a way where I couldn’t hold anything at bay anymore.

Service, purpose, and the call to be used

Rick: I was listening to an interview you did with Chitheads or one of those shows, and someone asked you what your inspiration in life was, or what the purpose of your life was. You said, “I just want to be used. I just want to be a servant of the Divine as much as I can be.” I can really relate to that. I have a feeling that once one makes that intention and expresses that conviction…

Vera: The prayer.

Rick: Yeah, it’s sort of like the Divine says, “Okay, we’ve got a live one here. Let’s give her some juice. This person is willing to be an instrument, so therefore let’s transform this instrument as much as possible so she can be maximally effective and really serve to her full capacity.” Once you’ve signed up for that, it can become very intense.

Vera: Yeah, certainly it has been for me. This whole year has been like walking on water, and I feel like everything I have to do is as if someone might tell me, “You have to walk on water now,” and me saying, “What? How? I can’t do that. That’s not what I’m capable of.”

I will tell you that a year ago I was still on my knees. I wasn’t sure what I had to offer. I went to the Science and Nonduality Conference and gave my first talk about Kali, which happened to be randomly on the exact four-year anniversary of my car accident. But I remember at the time thinking, “What am I going to do? Am I going to be a substitute teacher? How do I make a living? Who am I?” I had nothing. I was still in this total unraveling.

I started saying this thing—I would say, “Mother, use me or kill me. Use me or kill me. Use me or kill me.” It became a mantra for a while. I actually wrote an obituary for myself. I was in so much pain and had such a sense of not being used.

The next day—or maybe two days afterward—I was at the ocean. I went at night and was lying there, looking at the stars. Then, all of a sudden, it started raining sand on me. I sat up, and a giant, huge turtle was at my feet, digging a nest.

I just sat there in awe for an hour, looking at this mother turtle give birth. I thought there was something that was like an initiation for me.

Rick: It was an omen of some kind, yeah.

Vera: An omen of some kind. It was a huge beach. She could have chosen anything, but she came to my feet.

Afterward, very quickly—it seemed like overnight—I came back from SAND, and I wasn’t sure what I was doing. Then the election happened, and this article that seemed to be fully birthed in my head came out and went globally viral, all over the world.

Rick: It was “Kali Takes America: I’m with Her.”

Vera: “Kali Takes America.” It kind of took America and got translated into German and Russian. It was such a crazy experience.

Then Marianne Williamson read it somehow, and she called me up and asked me to come to Sister Giant. I was like, “You have the wrong person. I am a nobody. What do you mean?” Then she was like, “Do not speak about yourself that way.”

Somehow, it began opening doors. I began to be invited places. I began to have this different movement moving through me. I cannot say, I cannot tell you, “Oh, I feel connected to my purpose.” In fact, I would say that’s my deepest pain still—not knowing if I am in fact being used, yearning to help the world more.

That pain and confusion that we all feel right now in the collective is also very deeply in me. But I can tell you that somehow my yearning to be an instrument is a million times clearer than it was, and it was already so perfectly clear. That yearning is becoming deeper and deeper. I don’t know if I’m actually being used, but I can tell you it’s the one prayer in my heart.

Rick: You know, I think that people see that in you, or else the fact that you are supposed to be used causes the Divine to inspire people who are able to connect you with a larger audience to do so. People see in you the ability and the capacity and the spiritual maturity to be an important contributor.

Vera: Thank you. I hope that’s true.

Rick: It’s really obvious, reading any of your stuff.

Vera: I’ve had some profound teachers who are not very popular. In the popular, dominant culture, the people I felt most affinity with would be Andrew Harvey and Mirabai Starr, Adam Bucko, Matthew Fox, Cynthia Bourgeault, and Charles Eisenstein.

What’s particularly interesting is that the people I felt most connected to began reaching out to me. They were the ones posting my articles.

Andrew Harvey called me on the phone. I was like, “Who is this?” He was like, “This is Andrew, darling,” and I cried. I just wailed at him for about 15 minutes. He said, “Don’t worry. Never stop crying. This is the best conversation I’ve ever had.”

What’s amazing is that before I wrote “Kali Takes America,” I read Mirabai Starr’s translation of Dark Night of the Soul. But it’s not just a translation; it’s also her unique transmission, her interpretation of Dark Night of the Soul: St. John of the Cross. I feel like the article largely emerged from it.

Then she called me, helped me, supported me, and mentored me. There’s this way in which the people who were dearest to me—these people out there who were celebrity spiritual teachers, who touched my heart on the inside—reached out to me on the outside.

Rick: Yeah, well, that article struck a chord.

Holy darkness and the dark feminine

So what do you think it was about the Kali article that struck such a chord? What did you say in that article that really lit up everybody’s radar?

Vera: I think that it just came out at the right time because everyone was shocked. A lot of people, after I read the article, were like, “Oh, you think Trump is Kali?” And I kept saying, “No, no, no, no, I don’t think Trump is Kali at all.”

The quality, the archetype of Kali that I saw emerging through Trump winning the election was actually through the complete shattering of our narratives. It was such a tremendous shock for everyone. It was a great disillusionment with our systems, with democracy, and actually, that’s the function, for me, of the process of spiritual maturation and of what holy darkness is all about.

It shocks us into reality. It takes away our misconceptions, our self-deceptions. It is incredibly disappointing. All of those ways in which we puff ourselves up and tell ourselves the stories and know things and have certainties—it comes and shakes it all up, and it leaves us in this place where life really happens: in the uncertainty of it all, in this groundless nature of reality.

And so I think what happened was that everyone felt that kind of shattering of illusions. I’m not saying there’s something great about Trump winning the election; I’m just saying it was such a surprise. It was such a disruption to the orders of things that I think there was a tiny opening that began to let more real feelings come through.

And so I think me naming that connected with people more than anything. Then there was the way that maybe I wove in a little bit of pop culture with the passing of Leonard Cohen, which happened around that time as well. He had this album called You Want It Darker.

When he wrote the song, when people heard the song, all the reviews of the album had some version of, “Oh, Leonard Cohen, he has given up. He is depressed.” But really, what he was saying with that album was that—no matter how dark it gets, I am ready: hineni, hineni. I am willing. Take me. Use me.

It was like an offering, an offering of that part of us. He says, “There’s something in the human soul that yearns to serve when the emergency has become articulate.” And I think, in a way, we are living in this time, with climate change and with the political realities of the day, where the emergency has become articulate.

Rick: I was thinking about that, and I often think—I’ve kind of felt since the ’70s that we’re on the brink of some really dramatic changes in the world. You think back to the Civil War, World War I, the Depression, World War II, and you think, “Are we really in such dire times compared to all these other times?”

Vera: There’s less suffering now than at any other time in human history, perhaps. Someone somewhere is always living through an apocalypse. There is genocide; there is war. There’s human trafficking. There’s such a tremendous amount of suffering on this planet, such a tremendous amount of separation and cruelty and violence.

What is different about this moment is that our species has never threatened its own continuation on this planet. This planet might be fine no matter what we might be able to do to it, but really, we are threatening everything living on this planet and our own species.

So in that way, since the development of the atomic bomb, this is a new level of engagement with our planet.

Rick: Mark Peters from Santa Clara, California, asks, “Can you share how you’ve come to interpret the iconography of Kali in your own life?”

Vera: That’s a great question. There are all these different forms of the dark feminine that began emerging. In this weird way, I would see something and be like, “What is that?” and then find out that that’s actually one of the expressions of Kali.

Everywhere I go, in different cities, I get guided to icons of the Black Madonna—just really interesting ways in which, in my life, it just keeps emerging.

Rick: I’ve heard you in several lectures and read a bunch of your articles talking about the dark feminine. It almost seems a little sexist. Why should just the feminine be dark? Is there a dark masculine? Is there a bright feminine?

Vera: Of course. In a way, it’s not really feminine or masculine at all. For me, Kali, that quality of reality, is beyond masculine and feminine, but the great mystery has a feminine kind of essence to it somehow.

There’s also something about the feminine that’s naturally dark. The womb is naturally dark, the yoni is dark, the earth, the damp, dark earth from which everything gives birth. This darkness and the feminine are very interconnected.

The Dark Feminine and Kali

The dark feminine is the full feminine. Alan Watts used to start his lectures about Kali with an anecdote of an astronaut going up into space and then coming back, with everyone saying, “So, you went up there. What is God like?” And he comes back and says, “She’s black,” because of that holding environment of the darkness of space, the way it holds our planet, the way it holds everything.

For me, the light feminine, let’s say in the case of Mary, is the illuminated, beautiful virgin who gives birth to Christ. It’s such a comforting image. It says, “Yes, you suffer. All my children suffer. I’m with you in your suffering. I will hold you. Call out to me and I will be there.”

It’s an inviting image that first pulls us into the spiritual life. But as we mature, there almost is this kind of process that is universal. In every culture and every spiritual lineage, we hear stories of what St. John of the Cross would call the dark night of the soul. In other traditions, this would be the death before you die, some kind of period of deep crisis that is necessary for spiritual maturation and for the eventual process of union with the Divine.

And so it seems to me that the entry into that process—the process of direct relationship with reality, not through a teacher, not through an idea, not through a book, not through a concept, but direct relationship with reality—to me, that’s what the dark feminine is. It’s that quality of reality that initiates us into union with the Divine.

In the Hindu tradition, there are Kali, Chhinnamasta, and Chamunda. In the Buddhist tradition, we have the great Dharma protectresses. They are the great emanations of the dark feminine, too. They are not for the faint of heart. They’re fierce, they’re surrounded by fire, they’re surrounded by clouds of smoke, because the smoke has to obscure the mind.

Like in the Christian tradition, the cloud of unknowing—we have to enter the cloud of unknowing, where our mind and our sense of self all get clouded so that we can begin to have union with the Divine. Those weapons are there because that’s what it feels like to make contact with the real. It’s not fun, it’s not cute, it’s not lovely. It strips you to the bone, it breaks your heart, it cuts through illusion.

For me, the spiritual process is a process of deep disappointment. Jason Shulman says, “Everyone thinks that spirituality is about light, and it is, but it is also a process of becoming disenchanted with our illusions.”

Spirituality is about light, but it is also a process of becoming disenchanted with our illusions.

That will never be comfortable, and it is the ultimate comfort as well, because then there is nothing that you have to save yourself from anymore. You know that wherever it is that you find yourself, there the Mother is already holding you, because you know that there is nothing you’re willing to turn away from any longer, and that the Mother is there holding it all with you.

Rick: Tracing my own history of learning to meditate in the ’60s, at first it was all just an infusion of bliss and greater strength and energy and so on, because I had so bottomed out at that point. Then, eventually, over the years and decades, some real deep stuff had to be dealt with, and it wasn’t pleasant. That still goes on in my life.

Even though there is still the infusion of bliss and divine energy, there is also the wringing out of anything that ultimately doesn’t belong there. Gurus will behave that way with people too. For instance, with Amma, at first it will be all love and hugs and a wonderful scene. Then, if you really want to get close, she starts really becoming more of the Kali figure and knocking it out of you.

And so that seems to be a sort of archetype of the spiritual path. First, it’s all inspiration and beauty, and then you really have to go through it. But I think that there might be a final stage in the archetype, which is that you finally do process all this stuff and kind of step out into the sunshine again.

Vera: Union.

Rick: Yeah, union. And so it’s not always going to be the stage of suffering and having your heart ripped apart.

Vera: Please understand, I’m not saying that it’s always going to be that. I am focusing on a very particular part of the spiritual narrative. It’s where I feel a resonance.

Rick: And a very important part, and one that has been swept under the rug a lot.

Vera: It’s where I think there’s a great gap. I think there’s a gap in our collective pop-spiritual culture there. We’re unwilling to look at the shadow; we’re unwilling to mature. I think this is emerging, this is an emergent quality right now.

We are going to be faced with a deep reckoning of our collective karma on this planet. The power of the initiation of Kali, that power of being stripped down to only what’s real, is going to be happening for us collectively because it must, because this is what we need on a deeper level as humanity. So there needs to be a kind of crucifixion that we enter.

Rick: Here’s a quote from Andrew Harvey that I think you had in one of your articles:

In preparation for the birth of the Divine, the entire human race is now going through a global dark night, which will result in a new humanity that has been humbled and chastened by tragedy, so that it may open completely to the mystery of Divine Grace. There will be no resurrection of an embodied Divine Humanity without a systematic, perfectly organized, brutally complete crucifixion of everything in us that keeps us addicted to the systems of illusion that are now rapidly destroying everything.

Vera: Andrew Harvey is such a prophet. And I believe that. I felt that to be true.

When I saw Kali on the top of the Empire State Building, to me that was the sign of the times. And it’s not about fearmongering or us being afraid or not afraid. It’s about that quality that I think, if we’re lucky, we get to face. We get to be thrown up against death, where we begin to see what’s really important and where we can yield into it.

We stop splitting life and saying, “I can only have these experiences, and only those experiences are spiritual and good, but those other experiences, I’m not so interested in. I want to keep them at bay.”

When the spiritual life begins to be a defense, a kind of cloak of protection, that’s where we have to ask ourselves, “Is that really what we yearn for?” Because I think there is a deep collective yearning for the real. That’s what we really most want, even if it takes a burning up, even if it takes deep suffering.

When the spiritual life begins to be a defense, a kind of cloak of protection, that’s where we have to ask ourselves, “Is that really what we yearn for?” Because I think there is a deep collective yearning for the real. That’s what we really most want, even if it takes a burning up, even if it takes deep suffering.

Rick: If a person doesn’t know why this is happening to them, either individually or to the world collectively, it’s a whole lot worse than if you realize, “You know, there’s a catharsis taking place here, and I’m just going to see it through and feel deeply into it.” Something good is happening ultimately.

Vera: The first spiritual truth, like the Buddha said, is that life is full of suffering.

So, there’s a way in which we have to begin to have the right relationship with suffering, not as a punishment for something that we did that was bad, or a karmic retribution, or something that’s unique to me and mine, but something that is universal, something that is afflicting, that is a condition for incarnation.

Suffering is the condition for incarnation on this planet in this shape of imperfection that is human. So there will always be suffering. There’s nothing special about suffering, and if anything, suffering is a great tool of connection, right? Knowing that I suffer and you suffer, and you are a bozo and I am a bozo, and you are a holy mess and I am a holy mess.

Most likely, we will have disease. We will suffer from being away from our loved ones, from not knowing what our purpose is, from being away from the Divine, from being subject to climate change, and from our loved ones dying. Accepting that is vital for the beginning of the spiritual life.

Then there’s also a way in which I think there’s something about suffering and extreme suffering that also has a potential to purify. I am not into purification; I am into the murk and the mess. But it seems to me that there is a function of suffering that seems to bring us towards union, to make us, when we can no longer protect ourselves, yield to the Divine.

And I don’t think that’s the only way. I think, especially for those of us who have a lot of trauma in our system, it’s so important not to blow ourselves out, to be so gentle and so kind and so tender-hearted with the ways in which we suffer, and to remember that however suffering arises in our lives, it’s not an abomination.

It’s also not something we need to recycle and glorify. When you do look through every tradition, there is something akin to the Divine itself breaking itself open, offering itself, being crucified, that the brokenness is an inherent part not only of human life, but almost of the Divine life itself.

Rick: God is not a masochist. He or She doesn’t inflict suffering to get its yayas out. There’s an evolutionary imperative in the universe, I think, and being constricted and calcified in a limited perspective, like you were saying in Paris—you had it all together, everything’s cozy, everything’s right—but you needed to be broken out of that to move on to something bigger.

Also, Kali is not a demon. Kali is a killer of demons.

Vera: Exactly. She’s the slayer of demons, and there’s a lot of misconception in the Western world about Kali. She’s terrifying. But in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the associations with God are awe and fear. God appears in the same way as Kali, like clouds and smoke. God appears as a pillar of fire and as a cloud. And, of course, that part of God in the Jewish tradition is seen as the Shekhinah, as the feminine aspect of the Divine, too.

That natural fear we have of being naked before the Divine, I think, is a necessary and very important function of Kali coming in. Fear has an important function. Kali is terrifying, and it’s important for us to get in touch with our fears so that we’re not containing them. She lets it all surface and says, “You can’t turn away from that either. That too is my child. There’s nothing which I will exile.”

In one of the tantric texts there is a story of Kali where Shakti, the Divine feminine, incarnates as Sati, and then Shiva and Sati have this great love. Sati’s father isn’t so cool about Sati marrying Shiva, because Shiva is the Lord of the dead. He has dreadlocks, he is horrifying, he hangs out in cemeteries, he puts ashes all over his face.

Her father has this great sacrifice planned and doesn’t invite Shiva. Sati gets extremely angry because she is disrespected. The feminine is disrespected here. She wants to go to her father to express her anger, and Shiva says, “No, you will not go anywhere.” Now she’s disrespected twice: by her father and then by her husband.

In the text, what happens is that she turns into a ferocious, fearsome black goddess. Shiva himself becomes terrified. He says, “Who are you, and what have you done to my beloved Sati?”

And she says, “Shiva, don’t you recognize me? This is my true form. I only make myself convenient and beautiful so that you can take pleasure in it, but you will not disrespect me.”

Even the god of death himself was terrified in the face of pure reality. Pure reality is meant to be so terrifying that it strips us to only what is real.

And to me, that’s what Kali does. She cuts through all the bull. For me, you had to take everything out of my cold, dead hands. There’s no part of me that would have been like, “Here.”

There was something like a grace that needed to come through. I mean, this was fierce grace, but there was a grace in this kind of being faced with what was most terrifying.

Silence, chaos, and integration

Rick: Do you find that, having been through so many waves of this process now, you are kind of used to the routine and relinquish your grip more willingly, or are you still being wrestled with on a regular basis?

Vera: Oh, I wrestle. I wrestle to the death every single time. I can’t surrender. I can’t feel my heart sometimes. It’s always a struggle.

Also, I’m not in that vulnerable place that I was for a few years anymore. I think that happens for all of us when we just lose somebody or when we go through difficulty. There’s a particular intimacy with life that happens.

At this moment I feel like I always pray to surrender. That’s always my prayer. I pray to keep being polished.

The Sufis say that the mirror of my heart keeps being polished by joy and by suffering. But whatever God wants of me, I trust more and more that whatever appears is the instrument of my spiritual process. It is what I need most to keep healing and awakening.

The Sufis say that the mirror of my heart keeps being polished by joy and by suffering. But whatever God wants of me, I trust more and more that whatever appears is the instrument of my spiritual process. It is what I need most to keep healing and awakening.

Rick: The surface of the ocean is always going to be turbulent. If that’s all you know—the surface of the ocean—then the feeling is going to be that it’s all turbulence.

But if you somehow accustom yourself to having access to the depth of the ocean at the same time, and if that becomes abiding, then the turbulence is much more tolerable. I think that spiritual practice and spiritual maturity do that.

Vera: Exactly. What’s really also interesting about that play is that that’s literally what Shiva and Shakti are, what Shiva and Kali are. Shiva is all-pervading, abiding, all silence, and we are permeated with all-abiding consciousness.

Shakti is the play of life, the movement of life, everything that arises and falls away. Actually, Shiva without Shakti is just Shava, which is a corpse.

So, the ways in which those two come together in us, the ways in which we are both able to become silent, to make a relationship with that deep quietness, and the ways in which then we allow ourselves to be penetrated by that in the dance of life—I think that cooks us very, very profoundly.

Rick: There are millions of people in the world—billions—who are buffeted by the insanity of the world without necessarily having recourse to that deep silence, and it’s very difficult for them.

Vera: It’s very difficult for me.

Rick: But you do have recourse to deeper silence. You have an advantage that many people don’t have, do you not?

Vera: I really wouldn’t know how to compare, but I do know that I’ve had experiences of emptiness, which is kind of… I’m not sure if that’s the same, but it’s only very recent for me that I feel like I’ve been dropping into, or had any experiences with, deeper silence.

Rick: Even if you have the intellectual understanding that there’s a deeper mechanics to this drama that we see playing out, that there’s something very fundamental taking place, that’s a solace in and of itself.

Vera: I think my way, or my proclivity, and maybe the way of the feminine, is a little bit towards a different paradigm. It’s like you’re not trying to counter chaos with silence, but rather there’s a way in which the pain and the chaos of it become the medicine.

There isn’t this kind of dichotomy that we set up—silence versus the pain and suffering of the world—but somehow it’s this deep relationship that we begin to grow to everything that is here, that is us, that is within us, that is reality, as much to the deep quality of our essence in silence as to this dance of the holy and the broken.

The emotions are the great wisdom. Like a jungle fire, they are the yogi’s helpers.

So maybe it’s not always, “Do I have access to silence?” I feel like more and more I just drop in and feel everything that’s there, and it doesn’t necessarily feel very silent for me. Sometimes it does, but sometimes in my deepest dramas, where I am on my knees wailing, where I’m confused and overwhelmed and not at all in those awake states, somehow, in just moving through that, I meet a deeper calm than I ever knew.

Calm and Silence After Emotional Processing

Rick: That’s a key point. There is kind of a calm after the storm. Once you have processed a whole batch of stuff that needed to be processed, then you’re able to rest in a deeper calm, a deeper silence, that buried stuff was obscuring or blocking in your experience.

Vera: There are a number of models of relationship with reality. I think that there’s always a question, a feeling in me, that it’s not just arriving in some kind of state, but that there’s a vaster process taking place.

It’s like, yes, our nature and who we are and all of this stuff that happens, but then there’s a kind of emergence, a co-emergence with the Divine. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin used to say, “Union differentiates.”

It’s not like arriving at some kind of a place and now I’m awake, and now I’m enlightened, and now I feel the silence. There’s a way in which life is actually constantly trying to move through us.

Sometimes I feel like an orifice, and actually sometimes I feel like everything is an orifice. It’s like this pulsing of life, and it’s relentless. How do we become the orifice willingly and relentlessly? Somehow in that, there is this co-emergence that happens—new things. It’s almost like life is evolving, or God is evolving. There’s this real kind of process that’s more than just, “I’ve arrived in an awakened state.”

Sometimes I feel like an orifice, and actually sometimes I feel like everything is an orifice. It’s like this pulsing of life, and it’s relentless. How do we become the orifice willingly and relentlessly? Somehow in that, there is this co-emergence that happens—new things. It’s almost like life is evolving, or God is evolving. There’s this real kind of process that’s more than just, “I’ve arrived in an awakened state.”

Rick: Look at some of these characters whom we admire as being fairly awake or profoundly awake, somebody like Amma, for instance. There is a very deep silence, and sometimes she describes her experience as being just like nothing is happening and everything is just the Divine.

But in terms of the manifest expression of that, there is this incredibly dynamic, charismatic personality, which is not plain vanilla in any way, shape, or form, but has actually become more vivid, more animated, and more full of interesting qualities than the average person, by far.

Vera: What I most value in the people whom I consider my mentors is how extremely and profoundly human and imperfect they are. There was never any pretense or exaggeration, or even the sense that there was a willingness to be anything other than completely themselves.

They’re just so completely themselves. They’re letting their imperfect flag fly high.

I really feel like that place of self-disclosure as a human being is really important for all of us, so that we get out of the totalitarian chains of shame and separation from those very human, beautiful parts of ourselves.

The more we disclose our humanity to each other, the more permission we all have to be who we are, and to let people in our spiritual lives also just be imperfect human beings, living imperfect human lives. There’s such mercy in that, such forgiveness for our humanity.

📚 Teachers, students, and the limits of spiritual ideals

Rick: There are tendencies in the spiritual community, at least in certain nondual facets of the spiritual community, to de-emphasize the human part and to say things like, “It’s all a story,” or, “There’s only this.”

Vera: That’s the same place that tends towards the transcendent masculine upward movement. In some way, there’s a really strong correlation. And so now it’s only beginning to integrate. We’re beginning. There’s the evolutionary and the involutionary movement.

Rick: We should aspire for, appreciate the value of, or recognize the necessity of, full blast on both engines. That’s why I’m trying to bring in this silence thing—not to overemphasize it or to use it as a place to hide out from our humanity, but so that we can go full blast, and there we’ll have a much bigger package than if there’s any kind of imbalance between the two.

Vera: Definitely.

Rick: To think that awakening is some kind of monolithic place we arrive at, where all the various pieces and facets of our personality, our body, our emotions, our intellect, our senses, and all this stuff have come into complete, perfect alignment as our consciousness awakens, is very unrealistic.

Vera: It’s ridiculous. I actually have no interest in the terms “awakening,” “enlightenment,” or any of those things. It’s somehow insulting. These kinds of idealized images are actually insulting to my heart.

I think it’s so passé, it’s so over. If I have any sense of what’s to come, I think more and more real, more and more grounded, more and more embodied, more and more imperfect, is what we’re going to be seeing on the spiritual scene. I think that it’s great to have insight, but the only thing that really matters is how we live it in our really ordinary, imperfect lives.

Rick: I’m preparing a talk for the SAND Conference about the ethics of enlightenment, and I’m also leery of the “e” word. There are so many examples of people who are supposedly enlightened or supposedly awakened who really have not behaved in ways that one would hope or expect some higher spiritual development would involve.

Vera: Do you think that it’s also because these people were placed in systems where they were expected not to be human? They’re not allowed to express their imperfect humanity, so they become not just some kind of projection of the collective culture or their group, but something like a real human being trying to live it?

Rick: Some of them, actually in private, have explicitly said that they don’t want to expose that more human side of themselves. I was once in a small room with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and about two other people. He was messing around with drawing something, and he got some magic marker on his dhoti. He immediately had to get up and leave the room, change dhotis, and come back because he didn’t want to be seen with magic marker on his dhoti.

Vera: And then there’s this investment in continuing to feed that idealized image to the people who are now all hooked on you. There’s this really weird relationship between the teacher and the student. On one hand, it’s so powerful and necessary, or can be so tremendously useful. On another level, it almost feels like it always outlives its usefulness and then turns into some kind of pathology. I always question: At what point does it outlive its usefulness?

Rick: There’s a tendency for it to, too, and that’s something the individual has to decide. For many people, being with a certain teacher for a certain amount of time is very valuable, and then there’s a time when it’s valuable to leave.

But that doesn’t mean everybody should leave. It doesn’t mean nobody should have a guru, or that the whole idea of a spiritual teacher is obsolete. There’s a place for it, but it’s a very individual consideration.

Vera: I do feel that spiritual mentorship is important—that it’s important to have teachers and mentors in our lives—and that it doesn’t necessarily have to be some kind of guru, an awakened person. That kind of spiritual friendship and relationship that develops with our teachers doesn’t have to be that full-on.

Rick: It doesn’t have to be hierarchical; it can be more egalitarian, more peer-to-peer, and everybody’s got something to contribute, everybody’s got something to share. But at the same time, some people actually have progressed further. There is a spectrum of spiritual development, and you can’t wipe that out.

Vera: And at a certain point in your spiritual development, something is appropriate that is not appropriate at another time in your spiritual development. And if we’re lucky, and if we are graced with teachers with enough integrity and kindness, they facilitate what needs to be facilitated at an appropriate time.

Following grace

Rick: A real key ingredient is earnestness and sincerity, two key ingredients. If you have both of those, then you’re going to progress. Look at you, with your on-your-knees earnestness and sincerity in terms of willingness to undergo whatever it took. If you have both of those ingredients, you’re going to progress quickly.

Vera: I don’t really know, and I don’t even know if progressing is the thing. Maybe all this emphasis on progress is a masculine tendency: “The spiritual life is so that we can progress, so that we can achieve something.”

I want to progress, don’t get me wrong, but at the same time there’s this other part of me that’s like, maybe I won’t progress. Maybe there’s a value to real surrender, and real surrender is literally not even having the agenda of progress. It’s trusting that there is a deeper intelligence in life, a deeper intelligence that guides and unfolds each one of our steps and each one of our spiritual lives, and that when we are in touch with that intelligence, it has its own idea of progress.

Rick: I’ve been progressing all these years, but not necessarily according to my agenda, or my conception of how it was going to go. It has its own intelligence, and the whole process is one of surrendering more and more to that intelligence and letting it. There’s a saying, “Brahman is the charioteer,” letting Brahman take the reins.

Vera: It’s beautiful. And I know for me that’s definitely the constant orientation, the constant direction. How do I orient myself? How do I offer myself up? How do I listen deeply enough so that impulse—where something emerges from you and then it takes you to that next breath, to that next step?

I’m always just trying to listen deeply enough so that I can follow that impulse, that true impulse, not some kind of idea that, “Oh, I want more of this now,” or “more of that now.” So, may we all be so guided by grace.

May we all be so guided by grace.

Rick: Yeah, “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.”

Vera: “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.” Amen.

Rick: Beautiful, Vera. So I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, and I’m sure we’ll have others because you’re going to be progressing, my dear. And so am I, God willing. So I’ll see you in a week or two at the SAND Conference.

Vera: It’s coming up very soon.

Rick: Yeah, time’s flying. And anybody who can make last-minute plans, go to the Science and Non-duality Conference page. There’s even a page for it on my website under “Upcoming Interviews,” where you can get a discount if you sign up through that.

Vera: You can watch the livestream. If you can’t go to the conference directly, you can watch the livestream and see all the main-stage talks. If you’ve always felt like you wanted to be there but for some reason are hesitating—don’t hesitate. Go. It’s all going to unfold. It’s like this beautiful field of miracles and synchronicity and soul connection.

Rick: It really is. I think this will be my eighth one. And there’s also a thing—you can get them to send you the audios of all the presentations, like on a little memory stick or a DVD or something. I did that, and over the course of the last year I’ve listened to almost all the ones that I missed.

Vera: Wow, that’s awesome.

Rick: Yeah, I would listen to things while I rode my bike and cut the grass and stuff like that.

Vera: Oh, Rick, thank you so much. It was such a pleasure.

Rick: Oh, you’re welcome.

Vera: And I look forward to seeing you again soon.

Rick: Let me just make a couple of quick wrap-up points. So I’ve been talking to Vera de Chalambert. I’ll be linking to her website. She hasn’t written a book—well, she’s writing a book; it’s not out yet—but if you go to her website, I’m sure you have some kind of thing on your site where people can sign up to get your little email newsletters when you send them out. I get them. And then people can be tuned in to what Vera is doing.

Vera also does interviews. She does them for the SAND website, and she interviews some of the same people I’ve interviewed and others, like Charles Eisenstein and Kabir Helminski, whom I’ll be interviewing in a couple of months.

Vera: Oh, Kabir, he’s so delicious, he’s such a gift.

Rick: Yeah, he’s great. And I enjoyed your interview with him. So, check—you’ll be notified of those things if you subscribe to Vera’s email newsletter.

In terms of this show, it’s an ongoing thing, as most of you know. If you would like to be notified of other ones as they are published, you can sign up for my little newsletter. There’s a link on the site; you get like one email a week. And there’s also an audio podcast of this and a bunch of other things. If you just explore the menus, you’ll see some useful resources.

Vera: Hey, can I end with a poem?

Rick: Yeah, please.

Vera: Okay, so this is just a poem that really, really touched my heart, and I think is quite appropriate for this time. It’s by Martha Postlethwaite.

Rick: I posted it on Facebook this morning. I saw it.

Vera: You did, isn’t it beautiful?

Rick: Yeah, I got a huge reaction. People loved it. Go ahead, read it.

Vera:

Do not try to serve the whole world or do anything grandiose. Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently until the song that is yours alone to sing falls into your open, cupped hands and you recognize and greet it. Only then will you know how to give yourself to the world so worthy of rescue.

So may we each find our clearing.

Rick: Beautiful, thank you, Vera. Let’s end it there.

Vera: Okay, thank you. Bye, everybody.

Rick: See you soon.