Bubble Burst

"One early October evening in 2006, in the kitchen with a spiritual teacher named Mooji, I approached him and said, “I’ve listened to your CDs and I know you’re big on self-inquiry, but I have to tell you, I’ve tried it many, many times. It may work for some people, but not for me.” Regarding me quizzically at first, he smiled broadly, and said, “Oh really…” And then it began, the relentless inquisition:

Mooji: “What is this me that this inquiry doesn’t work for? Show it to me.”

Me: “I can’t.”

Mooji: “Try. Look for me.”

I closed my eyes and nothing. “I can’t find anything.”

Mooji: “And who is reporting that?”

Me: “I am.”

Mooji: “Remind me again, who is this I?”

Me:  “No one”

Mooji: “Too quick. You must have read that somewhere. I don’t accept it. I don’t accept any answers from your mind. Now look and take your time with it.”

And on and on it went like that. To say that this exchange was uncomfortable is an understatement. No answer worked. I kept looking and not finding and Mooji, God bless him, just kept at it. He was ruthless, slashing away at my mind. There was nowhere to hide. Whatever response I gave, was not it. He kept pressing me, asking me to peel back another layer to find what was witnessing each discovery. The pressure was unbearable.

Without warning something shifted. To say something happened isn’t entirely true because whatever it was, happened outside of time. My first thought was, “This has always been so.”

Next, I had an image of a Laura puppet crumpled up on the floor. As I gazed down on it, I saw the absurdity of ever believing that I was the character, Laura. There was no death and this whole life thing that I had been invested in was all a big ruse. No one had ever been born, lived, and then died. I couldn’t tell you who or what I was, but I was crystal clear on what I wasn’t.

Thanks to Mooji’s loving persistence, his refusal to quit, the bubble of my individual identity burst. I could no longer believe the story that the character, Laura, was who I was. Other than that, I couldn’t find myself. The “I” that I thought I was didn’t exist and never had. Once personal identification had been shattered, all that remained was the realization of what had always been so—awareness. I was the awareness in which all transient events, including the life of this Laura character, took place. How strange that I could ever have believed that I was a person! Not only that, the goal called self-realization never existed. It was merely a concept, an idea arising in the vast, empty oneness that I now knew myself as.

Life since that timeless moment has not been what I would call nirvana. Truckloads of conditioning, in the form of anger, sadness, crankiness, reactivity, and identification with the character Laura, have come up to be met by the spaciousness. The difference is the lovely, quiet joy that resides  most of the time. All in all, I wouldn’t change a single step on my journey. My heart is brimming with gratitude toward my family, friends, and spiritual teachers for the roles that they played in this cosmic discovery of no one home."

~ Laura Katleman-Prue is a graduate of the Theravision Institute of Transpersonal Pschology in Boston. She has been teaching meditation and self-inquiry since 2007 and has successfully counseled people about their eating issues, both individually and in Skinny Thinking Workshops. Skinny Thinking grew out of her desire to share the techniques that permanently healed her eating, weight, and body image issues.