"... My mother and I lived in a “home for battered women,” until one night she packed our bags and without a word of explanation took us to live with a strange man. I didn’t see my father for many years after that...
Communication was always a problem in my home, right from the moment I learned to speak. My mother’s native tongue was Greek and it took her several years to acquire a rudimentary command of the English language. My father spoke English very well, but his thick accent and frequent use of German expletives gave away his roots. I, on the other hand, could read and write only English, and I spoke it perfectly. I suppose on some level I must have been bewildered, but this strange set-up was my normality. What wasn’t so normal was the strictness of my upbringing. Playing with other children outside of school hours was absolutely forbidden, as was playing with dolls and stuffed toys. Birthdays and Christmas were solemn affairs in which the most exciting gifts, other than pajamas, socks, and school uniforms, were a set of colored pencils and a drawing pad.
The denial of what I believed at the time were basic childhood rights in the Western world cut right to my core, and I came to the conclusion that I was flawed and deserved to be punished by never getting what I wanted. I felt impure and unworthy, so I prayed to Jesus most nights to cleanse me of my sins, and I prayed to the Holy Mother to take care of me.
As an only child with no friends, I became isolated and introverted, and I retreated into a fantasy world that was my only solace. I spent endless hours creating a secret imaginary life in which every detail was mapped out in incredible intricacy, where not only did I have parents who totally adored and understood me, but I also had every single toy and dress I ever wanted, a list of friends who celebrated me, a fascinating life of adventure, and a sense of magic that took me to faraway lands and even into outer space. But this imagined perfect world in which I was perfectly safe, perfectly loved, and perfectly happy never came true.
Eventually, my escape into utopia became a prison. By the time I was a teenager, I had effectively shut myself off from feeling the full vibrancy of life. In fact, I had shut myself off from feeling, period. When I left home at seventeen to go to university, instead of feeling happy and free as I’d expected, I became depressed and socially inadequate. My frequent attempts at suicide led me to believe I’d end up in a mental asylum. I was sent to various psychotherapists and psychiatrists, but none of them could help me. I just sat there looking at the floor, unable to utter a word. It was as if I was separated from both the outer world and my inner world by a thick pane of glass. I could see, but I could not reach out to touch anyone nor reach in to feel anything. I couldn’t even talk about this alienation because I denied that there was anything wrong with me.
Surprisingly, in spite of this internal landscape of darkness, I threw myself with great vigor into my academic studies. I stopped believing in Jesus or the Holy Mother as my saviors, and I invested my hope of salvation in the achievement of a Doctorate of Psychology. The seeking mechanism that had fueled my early fantasy world of perfection was still the driving force of my life, only this time it drove me to work incredibly long hours, almost to the exclusion of anything else. I struggled for twelve years against many odds and then over a period of just a few months, unexpectedly and dramatically, the whole edifice of my life collapsed. Not only had I taken some LSD, but I also started long-distance running and meditation. This potent combination allowed a parting of the veils of conditioned perception and revealed the luminous truth of reality. Somehow, in these experiences, I felt as though I was touching the very fabric of existence, and I deeply understood that oneness was my nature, as well as the nature of everything. After this mind-shattering and soul-stirring revelation, the world never looked the same. But it was not an everlasting state, and there was still some unraveling to happen in the three-dimensional world.
At the age of twenty-eight, I found myself homeless and penniless. Not only had my academic career come to an abrupt end, but my long-term boyfriend had left me. My home was repossessed, I became financially bankrupt and without any income, and almost all my material possessions were taken from me. As a result of all these losses in quick succession, I also lost my pride, my confidence, and my dream of a personal utopia. Every single vestige of identity invested in being an academic high-flyer, an urban superwoman, an ideal girlfriend, or any other picture of perfection came tumbling down. It was both devastating and a great relief. Without the usual attachments of modern-day life, and without the burden of trying to “be somebody,” I found myself fully open to living in the present. I also found myself naturally drawn to asking the question that had been sown in my early childhood: Who am I?
The next seven years were spent in deep inner exploration. A series of mystical and visionary experiences came without warning and were the catalysts for my subsequent immersion in meditation, primal therapy, rebirthing, metaphysics, and a myriad of psycho-spiritual methods. I was particularly drawn to Buddhist and Zen meditation practices and devoted my attention to these. The sanctuary of inner silence seemed very familiar to me. And, unlike my brief encounter with Transcendental Meditation during my university days, which had left me horrified at the intensity of voices in my head, I fell into this space effortlessly. I also loved reading, so I devoured as many traditional and contemporary spiritual books as I could, and along the way I visited various spiritual teachers and enlightened masters. But I quickly discovered that spiritual truth is a fresh discovery, not a learned wisdom. I didn’t want to add more handed-down knowledge to my already acquisitive mind. I wanted to find out through my own direct experience. In any case, I wasn’t looking for enlightenment, so I stopped chasing a “spiritual high.”
What I was really looking for was happiness, and paradoxically it was this search that led me to the land of spirituality—India. While my worldly life was still filled with uncertainty and impoverishment, by this time I did have a roof over my head and was married. But something called me to grow wings and I was willing to leave the relative safety of home and relationship. I arrived at the ashram of the revolutionary mystic Osho, empty-handed and with no prior knowledge about him or his teachings. Although Osho had left his body just a few years earlier, something deep within me immediately stirred and I opened to the unconditional love in his invisible presence. I fell in love with his rebellious spirit, absorbed his words, gave my totality to his unorthodox meditative techniques, and bathed in the silence of solitude for several months. An inner fire that blasted my heart wide open consumed me, and I willingly surrendered to the tantric mystery of existence.
By facing my deep fear of aloneness, I discovered that there was nothing to fear but the idea of fear itself. And by lovingly sitting with this fear, I realized that love is at the core of everything. Somehow this realization allowed me to see that all appearances are impermanent, and this loosened my attachment to the surface reality of form. I stopped searching for a teacher or a teaching; instead, life itself became my guru. For the first time in my life, I felt a certain freedom and joy. Perhaps the many hours spent screaming, shouting, and shaking my way through different forms of psycho-physical therapy and “active meditations” had helped me let go of some of my emotional baggage. Perhaps I had tasted the truth of emptiness. Whatever the reason, I left India feeling reborn and with a new name, Amoda Maa Jeevan, which means “living a joyous life.”
Back in England, I started teaching transformational workshops and developed my own unique method of “ecstatic meditation,” which included intense breath work, crazy dancing, and wild improvised music. I had stepped out of my introvert’s “ivory castle,” allowing myself to be seen by the world and growing beyond my limitations. Life was good.
While I was no longer looking for a spiritual high, there was a subtle seeking still going on that had to do with relationship. I still held a deep belief that I needed relationship to give me something I hadn’t yet found in myself. I needed another to make me feel complete, and to confirm my worthiness by giving me love in the form of a perfect relationship. I clung to the idea that a soul mate would fulfill all my inner and outer dreams. Unfortunately, the man I’d decided was my soul mate (and my husband) didn’t conform to my ideas of a perfect life, and so we raged, battled, and hurt each other, while passionately loving each other, for ten years. One day, seemingly out of the blue, our relationship exploded and there was no mending it. I harnessed enough courage within myself to walk away. Over the next two years, I grieved intensely, attempted to heal my broken heart with all manner of therapies and bodywork, and eventually learned to enjoy my own company and the freedom of living alone.
In the silent space of solitude, a deeper wound revealed itself: the profound existential fear that God had abandoned me. I felt empty and incredibly alone. As I had done many years before, I was sinking into a black hole. Except this time I had enough insight to recognize that this internal darkness was the call to true freedom. I realized that I wanted to be free of the story of “me.” I was willing to give up my need for love, relationship, happiness, enlightenment, and even the need for any certainty, but I had no idea how to do this. There was no teacher, no road map, and no instruction manual. Yet I trusted the gentle yet insistent impulse to be still and to stop running away. I chose not to follow the familiar contortions of my mind as I had done a million times before, and instead meet in naked awareness the most primal of fears: annihilation. I opened to not-knowingness and allowed myself to die into this. And in this dying, all notions of self dissolved into emptiness. I suppose I expected a kind of cold nothingness, but instead an incredible joy arose. Without labeling it or packaging it or reinvesting any identity in it, the emptiness revealed a luminosity of being. It had always been here; and, contrary to appearances, I realized I had never been separate from this.
From that moment on I became a lover of what is, unafraid to get right up close and intimate with whatever showed up in my inner and outer world. My suffering became my doorway to freedom. This freedom looks nothing like I had imagined it to be. I’m often asked: “How is your life different after awakening?” I can only say that life goes on as always, it is utterly unchanged, and yet, in meeting everything as it is, everything has changed.
Today, fifteen years later, the waves of phenomenal existence called “my story” continue. Sometimes the sea is stormy, but mostly it is as calm as a millpond. Sometimes there is pain, hardship, and unpleasant feelings, but with much less frequency and ferocity than ever before. Somehow nothing sticks; pain and discomfort don’t last very long. I now have an exquisite sensitivity to every nuance of life’s movement, and yet nothing interrupts the pristine silence at the core of it all. The radiant jewel that is this silence continues to illuminate the places in my body and mind that are still holding ancient patterns that do not serve the bigger picture of love. It’s an ongoing demolition project in which everything that is not true is destroyed. And it becomes subtler as time goes on. Even as I write these words, I cannot possibly say how it will be next year, or next week, or even tomorrow. All I can say is that the filtering of awakeness into my everyday life happens effortlessly, and there’s nothing I have to do to make it happen. It is ordinary and it is graceful.
Every person’s awakening is unique. The stillness of Ramana Maharshi looks very different compared to the wisdom of Chogyam Trungpa; the secular life of one of today’s nonduality teachers looks very different from the monastic life of a Buddhist monk. Inevitably, the outer expression of enlightenment is colored by history, geography, and biography, yet we often look at spiritual teachers, enlightened masters, mystics, and saints and try to model our enlightenment on what we see. We say, “Ah, this is what it looks like!” and the ego tries to make sense of it according to its own predispositions. Ego loves to package “truth” and then claim this package for itself. It’s a mistaken belief in a spiritual reward system that keeps us on the wheel of seeking. We often hop around from one teacher or teaching to another, looking for something that conforms to our idea of enlightenment. But truth, like love, is uncontainable. It is untamable, unconditional, and universal.
Perhaps because of my life circumstances, my personality, or my karmic predispositions, that which has revealed itself as the truth of who I really am has also revealed a vision for humanity. This vision is both a revelation of awakened consciousness as it emerges in the fullness of this present moment, and it is a revelation of an awakened world as it is emerging into a future possibility. I do not know exactly what this awakened world will look like, but I do know its fragrance intimately. It is the force of this invisible fragrance that moves me to share this vision with you.
I do not know what this awakening will look like in you. I don’t even know if you will awaken or not: it’s not for me to say. But I do know that I’m responding to life’s impulse by inviting you into a conversation that may trigger this awakening in you."
~ Amoda Maa Jeevan
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