THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF TRIGGERS

It’s fashionable to talk about triggers these days. People refer to triggers in all sorts of ways. Psychotherapists talk about triggers, when working with past trauma. Relationship counselors talk about triggers, when working with couples seeking guidance for conflict. Spiritual practitioners (and even some spiritual teachers) talk about triggers, when referring to powerful emotions. You…

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If Awakening is to Serve a Real Purpose

If awakening is to serve a real purpose in our lives, it needs to find new forms of expression through our everyday interactions. And if this awakening is to serve a purpose in the bigger picture of birthing a new humanity, it needs to engage us fully with the evolutionary impulse of existence. Enlightenment is…

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The End of the Patriarchy of ‘Mind over Heart’

Transcript of Amoda’s opening discourse at the ‘Open Circle’ Meeting, San Rafael, CA, September 2018. To watch the video and follow the transcript, please scroll to the bottom of this page. There’s a tendency on the spiritual path, when seeking the elusive and much desired state of enlightenment or awakening, to emphasize the mind-qualities of…

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ZORBA THE BUDDHA

There’s a tendency to believe that awakening eradicates all traces of the personality. The unawakened mind holds a picture of an “awakened person” as someone who shows no emotion, who speaks slowly, who never refers to “I” or “me”, who has no memory of their own past (or at least denies that any personal history…

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THIS DARKNESS IS THE GIFT

When the sweet smell of sadness wafts into your heart, do you turn away and bury your head in make-believe happiness? When the stark beauty of aloneness invites you in, do you flap around on the surface to avoid drowning in her depths? When the weight of failure comes bearing down, do you set up…

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After Awakening, We Continue To Be Human

There is a big misunderstanding. That awakening erases our humanness. That personal history is wiped out. That all uncomfortable feelings are vanquished in one fell swoop. That we rise above the searing pain of heartbreak when a loved one dies, that we transcend the fragility of form, that we are immune to the horrors of…

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GOOD-BYE NONDUALITY

Good-bye nonduality. Good-bye dwelling in the pristine perfection of the absolute. Good-bye unbounded happiness, unbounded joy, unbounded peace .. or unbounded anything that denies the dirt and grit of the human experience. Please, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting a regression to ignorance of true nature. I’m not suggesting a resignation to ego’s reactivity….

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The Path of the Mystic

The path of the Mystic is beyond words. It is a fall into the Heart of Darkness in which the self is sacrificed over and over again. The mystic dies into God and yet returns to the World to offer the self as the ultimate sacrifice. This offering serves the totality, it is the giving…

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The Unbroken Amidst the Broken

When I was a child, I told my mother I wanted to be a nun. She slapped me. If only she had asked why I had said that, I would have told her it was because my true home was the silence inside me and I wanted to live here all the time. In my…

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The End of Resistance is the Beginning of Grace

People often read about my story of hardship in my early years. And conclude that suffering is a prerequisite for awakening. But it truly has nothing to do with circumstances. It has everything to do with the depth of existential anguish that comes when you’ve truly had enough of the torture of your own mind…

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They call me a Spiritual Teacher but I have Nothing to Teach.

They call me a spiritual teacher. But I have nothing to teach you. I have no method to offer. No techniques. No practices. No A to Z. There is no path, no way, no guarantee of results. I’m not interested in selling you a product, in packaging a teaching, in feeding the acquisitive mind with…

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Enlightenment is an Illusion

More and more, I come to see that enlightenment is an illusion. Part of the same matrix that keeps us believing in separation. Upheld by millennia of religion and spiritual tradition. Upheld by the self that wants to escape the existential agony of having incarnated as form. As if there is another world that cradles…

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