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Soon after I was married, I found myself busier than I’d ever been before. Working two part-time jobs, commuting to acupuncture school, and studying for my state licensing exams, I needed to feel some sense of quiet inside. So I decided to hold the question “Where is rest?”

The answer didn’t come to me in words; instead, I discovered that just asking the question elicited a sense of stillness and peace. Once my mind became calm, I could rest in the busyness.

My interest in stillness didn’t start, or stop, there. Since childhood, I’d wondered about the words from Psalm 46 that we learned in Sunday school: Be still and know that I am God. So when I began hearing Eastern teachings, I was intrigued by concepts such as samsara (continuous movement) and nirvana (cessation).

In the East, an image that’s referred to as the “wheel of samsara” has been used for centuries to depict the continuous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, and the conditions that cause suffering. The conditions of ego that power the wheel are sometimes called the three poisons. They are desire, or attachment; hatred, or aversion; and ignorance, or illusion. When one’s life is lived free of these conditions, one is said to be freed from the wheel of samsara.

In my own experience, the first two conditions, attachment and aversion, are best remedied by addressing the third condition, ignorance. You could say that the root condition of suffering is ignorance of our true nature, ignorance of knowing ourselves as spirit. Attachment and aversion, then, cause day-to-day suffering.

Stillness, I have seen, is both the treatment for ignorance and the ultimate antidote to samsara. When your mind is still, you get a rest from the push-pull energies that drive the ego and cause suffering. In stillness, the energies of attachment and aversion can unwind. The sense of a “me” who desires can relax out of the center of experience and ultimately dissolve. That is the harmonizing quality of stillness.

To get a dose of what life is like divorced from stillness, try this experiment: Think a thought that has “push” energy, such as “I don’t want to go to work” or “I don’t want to have that difficult conversation.” Or think, “That shouldn’t be.” Now check in with your body. Can you feel it registering aversion? It may feel like there’s a hand in your gut, pushing away.

Next, consider a “pull” thought, such as “I want to meet someone who will love me” or “They should do what I want. ” Hold that thought, and then pay attention to your body. Do you feel a grasping fist in your gut? Tension in your shoulders?

Either way, push or pull, your body beautifully lets you know which thoughts will cause you constriction, inner division, or feelings of separation. It would seem, then, that if you could stop divisive thoughts, you’d be at peace with whatever presents itself in each moment.

But wait . . . having trouble finding the “off” switch? Yep, thoughts keep coming. The more you try not to think, the more aversion arises. And the more you try not to have divisive thoughts, the more attachment arises. Both efforts take you further away from experiencing peace.

A Better Way

But there is an alternative to push-pull thoughts. Again, using your body as a thought meter, feel your gut as you contemplate the phrase “Thoughts simply arise.” Let the words permeate your body. Do they make you feel more peaceful, or less so? My guess is that you feel more peaceful. Perhaps you can sense relaxation as you let go of assigning credit or blame for having a particular thought. When you align yourself this way with what life is presenting—with reality—the experience of inner division gives way to peace.

Thoughts themselves don’t create division, separation, and suffering. Rather, investing thoughts with belief, identifying with them, and taking them personally are what fuels the wheel of samsara.

When you identify with a thought, that creates a fixed position in time and space—like a star in the night sky. As you identify with more thoughts, you create more fixed positions, until you have an entire constellation of ideas and beliefs. The lines of that constellation continue to grow and overlap, creating something that begins to look solid, like an object. Those fixed points create an illusion of an individual “me,” with its own boundaries separating it from the whole.

You can live your whole life in ignorance, not knowing that suffering is a result of believing the thoughts that suggest you are separate from the whole. But if you examine your push-pull thoughts, discover which beliefs you’re investing in, and question them, you can slip into stillness and become your own medicine—the perfect antidote to the poisons of ignorance, attachment, and aversion.

What Is Stillness?

Connect with the quiet at the center of your whirling energies.

Begin by sitting comfortably. Close your eyes, breathe deeply, and let your body settle, inviting relaxation. Observe your body as you allow it to cease moving. Lean softly into your experience and give it your whole attention.

Now drop this question into the space between your muscles and bones: What is stillness? Let your body experience the answer. Let the body’s response wash into every part of you, from the top of your head down to the floor or chair where you are sitting. As your body quiets and softens, notice the stillness gather and settle.

Maintaining a steady and intimate quality of attention, let the stillness widen and let your senses open globally to the outer world. Notice the space of your awareness and let it relax outward. Let sounds in the distance enter the space of your awareness, but don’t strain to hear or to make note of them. Notice any sounds that arise closer to you, between the edge of your body and the outer shores of your hearing.

While continuing to soften into stillness, rest a portion of your attention on the surface of your body, allowing it to stop there completely, allowing the stillness saturating you inside and out to soften any sense of boundaries between your body and the outside world.

Let any sense of a “me” who is aware relax out of the center, letting stillness dissolve all attachment, all effort.

Originally published in Yoga Journal

© Mukti Gray 2016

Some have a great interest in discovering their nature as vast, limitless being, and in transcending heavenward, away from the difficulties associated with this earth. 

Contrarily, others have an interest in feeling at home in themselves, in what it is to land, rest, and no longer run away or strive. But they are not sure how to effect change.

Most have both interests, which can create an inner division: “I’d really love to be at home here, but actually I’d love to be out of here.” In both cases, the perspective is often “I am in state A, and there’s something else I want: state B.”

So what is it like to simply be and sense afresh, without striving for a new state? You can sense the energies of seeking stirring in your body and be curious about them. Ask: What is the felt sense of seeking? How does it appear? And from where? Then be still and continue to sense. Let the energetics that you feel change, shift, and convey.

By shining the still gaze of your attention upon energies of restlessness and discontent, the energies, or one’s experience and perception of them, change. With true investment of attention, such change can be greatly transformative.

I’m speaking of a different way of aligning with what is, than that of deconstructing beliefs or questioning what is true or not true. This approach is kinesthetic and utilizes perception. Many find it helpful, direct, and a complement to questioning thought or emotion. Such a way is a departure from resisting one’s state and invites an openness to look anew at what is informing states, and what is informing our sense of self that feels defined by states. Moreover, it allows an opportunity to see both states, and our sense of self, shift and redefine, or un-define.   

As the light of awareness, through directed attention, is brought to a contracted state and resulting limited sense of self, the limits and contractions gradually soften. As the holding of both self and state become imbued with awareness, both can become more spacious, conscious, and liberated.

I encourage you to turn within, to how you sense the energies of seeking, restlessness, and resistance, and to shine the light of awareness through your attention on their very shape, texture, movement, and color, and on the very space and clarity in their midst—as an ever-open sky amidst currents and clouds, conveying the substance of transcendent heaven right here, within.

© Mukti Gray 2018.

By Margaret Brownlie. Originally published by The Sentient Times of Ashland, OR.

If you are reading this article, most likely there is something in you seeking Liberation. Recently, I had the opportunity to meet and spend some time talking with Mukti, a teacher of the non-dual path to Awakening, whose name itself means Liberation. Like most, I knew her primarily as Adyashanti’s wife. I was inspired. I found true beauty, abiding gentleness, deep, deep kindness, authentic humbleness, wide-openness, easy humor, depthful clarity, and gentle authority—the kind that comes from Knowing. She has only been formally teaching for a few years, she has published no books, yet she is also not just the new kid on the spiritual circuit. She has spent her life studying the work of Christ, Paramahansa Yogananda, and the Zen nondual teachings of Adyashanti, following her own path to Liberation, and ripening that for its own sake, until her teaching is instantly recognizable as a true compass for others.

Your teaching is growing really rapidly right now, but to many you’re a new name and a new face. What can you tell us about your teaching about how you came to it?

I find the teaching to be fairly simple, in the sense that the same underlying message seems to come through over and over: that it’s possible to live without a sense of inner division when one’s willing to be willing, and to be curious, and question what is true, what is real, what is living this life. This attitude of receptivity can be facilitated by letting the familiar positions and knowings of the thinking mind rest and relax out of the center, and by sensing into a knowing of a greater order. So, this is the message I come back to over and over again, because many people experience this sense of inner division as conflicting parts of themselves, or they have feelings about how they view things on the inside and then how life is presenting on the outside, and things not jiving with something deep in them that has a love of wholeness and harmony. This sense of division, or lack of harmony, can cause great suffering. There’s a tremendous opportunity that I’ve discovered in my own experience: to really come to know what wholeness is or harmony is, or what intelligence is when not divided.

And how did you come to that?

From as early as I can remember, I had this great desire for people to be kind to one another. I had this sense, somehow, that there was the capacity within us to have a sense of what brotherhood or sisterhood or living in harmony could be. As a little child, I remember watching people and they would do unkind things to other people. I could see that they themselves were in pain and something in me felt that there’s just got to be a more loving way. Later, when I was exposed through my family to Christianity, it really took the form of desiring to know the path of Christ in Christianity. He seemed to be this exemplary person who was able to unite people and to heal, not only physically, but more to heal a sense of ignorance of not knowing their Godliness or their Divinity. And then I think it matured. Through my exposure to Zen or non-dual teachings, I came to an interest in knowing what is Undivided, what is Unmoving, what is Stillness, what is Constancy. So, I would say, those were the main factors that propelled me along. And there was this deep knowing that I wouldn’t be satisfied until I gave everything to This that my heart longed to know and to see.

You mentioned that Christ was one of the influences on your path, what others still influence where you come from now?

In my formative years I was very drawn to the life of Christ and stories of Christ and I went to Catholic schools from grade school all the way through university so it was an influence. At the same time I had a parent, and later both parents, who became very interested in eastern teachings, and particularly the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda. So, while I was attending Catholic schools, I was also attending services where I began to be introduced to eastern thought and to meditation. I think that’s where I very first heard about self-realization or realization, and that it was possible.

I had exemplary teachers in Yogananda’s lineage that lived that realization, and I found that incredibly inspiring. I saw that it wasn’t all about Christ being the only son of God but that there’s all of these great beings who lived that Christ Consciousness or God Realization. That began to open up this window, and even got me to think more on a global stage, of how, all over the world, there were people like me who were seeking these deep truths, and seeking ways to open to the best within them. I saw, “Oh, it’s not just limited to one path. These great traditions are happening everywhere.” As a young person that was rather revolutionary I was exposed to different forms of meditation in that practice, and also Hatha Yoga. I began to have more of a relationship with sitting still and quietness and letting the mind settle to some degree or another. I can’t say I was great at it. But also, through Hatha Yoga I was able to let my energies be more redirected to the body and its wisdom. Those were tremendous influences on me. Studying Chinese medicine also began to open my mind and to restructure the way I perceived the world in a way that was far less linear and much more holistic. And the other greatest influence in my life was Adyashanti. His nondual teachings and the flavor of his Zen background has deeply fed me in the last decade or more.

You have been influenced by body practices in your own life, yoga and acupuncture. When you speak of loving both the form and the formless, how does that relate for you?

The most intimate form we have, that we’re most intimately connected with, is our own body, and if one has the eyes to really see, it’s constantly teaching us and showing us. It’s a great meter of what’s true, what begets Wholeness, or what feels harmonious. Often it’s overridden by the thinking mind, but with practices in which one is willing to set the thinking mind aside for a while and devote time to nurturing one’s body, one can develop a tremendous relationship with that wisdom that the body so affectively and directly communicates.

How does that relate to the Formless?

I don’t see Form and Formlessness as two different things. Formlessness is the greatest mystery that we can encounter and this mystery moves into expression and form as everything that our senses can perceive. It’s not so much that they relate to one another but that they really are one and the same. The One as form is registered in the senses and the One as formlessness can only be known through consciously being the mystery that we are. This is not a knowing of thought but a knowing through conscious being.

I notice that, when I speak of you and Adyashanti, sometimes, there’s a wariness of a western teacher having a non-western name. How did you come to go by Mukti?

Originally I was given the name by Adyashanti. He had an inspiration one day, early on, to come to the group that he was teaching and give everybody a name. This is so typical of the spontaneous nature of Adya. So, he came with names for about ten people, some of which were Sanskrit and some of them were not. I can’t speak to his reasoning, if any, but I do know that for many people I’ve talked to who’ve been given a name, they sit with the meaning of it, and often they have a curiosity to realize the meaning of that name. Let’s say, the meaning might be the name for a quality or an aspect of the Divine. They sit with that name, almost like a koan, to actualize it within themselves.

When he gave me the name Mukti, which is often translated as Liberation, or The Great Release, it was very much a gift for me, and I was very private with it. I just held it in my heart. Very few people knew that I was ever given a name, and I didn’t have any desire to use it publicly. For eight years or so, I did not. Probably the reason I didn’t is because I didn’t want to create any barrier with people who I would meet who may feel like it was strange or foreign, or unfamiliar, or off-putting or something. Being a person, I mentioned earlier, who very much had an appetite for harmony, I didn’t want anything that might cause division. However, when Adya asked me to teach, it just came to me in an instant, “You will go by the name Mukti.” I had no resistance. And I know well enough from different life experiences that when that type of knowing comes, with that type of nonnegotiable, factual, this-is-the-way-it-is feeling, that there is nothing within me that has any desire to do anything otherwise. I had no story about whether I should or shouldn’t do that. It was just a given.

This Liberation that is your namesake, it seems that’s what we all really want. What does that mean, and how do we get it?

What does liberation really mean? This is the golden question and this is a tremendous inquiry for anyone who truly wants to know that. I don’t know that everyone wants liberation. A lot of people want their idea of what it is. Perhaps, they view it as a state that will feel great all the time, or like a “get-out-of-jail-free card,” as Adya says. But liberation—it doesn’t answer to our desire to feel better. There’s this overwhelming tendency for people to assert what it is that they want and in that assertion they are denying what is already here, what is already present. There is no being free of what is. One might even say liberation, by its nature, affirms reality as it is.

And you ask, “How do you get it?” The best way I know how to point the Way is to invite or even challenge people to cease those efforts to deny what is present and to withdraw the en-ergies that feed this sense of “me” that has this incredible, desirous appetite to seek. By reinvesting one’s energy, by seeing what is present already, what is here already, what is actually living this life, one can come to realize the true nature of Self, the true nature of reality.

How do we cease those efforts? Well, ultimately there is no “how” to ceasing; ceasing is the result of no longer striving and seeking. People strive and seek because they believe that they will be fulfilled by what they are seeking. Very few people consider that fulfillment, often brief, comes when things are attained because for that moment, seeking ceases. So, first one must see how seeking itself can cause suffering. Once that is seen clearly, one loses the appetite to seek. For some time, seeking may continue to varying degrees, but eventually the energy for it runs out. Seeking can take different forms. For example, it can manifest as accumulation of possessions or as accumulation of beliefs and concepts that one identifies with. The beliefs and concepts that cause great suffering are those which divide up experience and argue with reality. For example, “This is right, and this is wrong,” or “This shouldn’t be” are concepts that we cannot know to be true outside a thought that says they are. Few people question the real truth of these judgments, opinions, and beliefs or consider what their experience is when such positions are suspended or dropped.

You spoke about reinvesting your energy. We often think of this kind of shift we call Liberation as something that takes place in seclusion or on retreat, but is awakening in any way different for a contemporary person in a mainstream culture? Does it require withdrawing?

Awakening is awakening, regardless of time. If one finds within him or herself an impulse toward liberation, toward knowing and being what is real, that person will experience that movement of Consciousness and have the opportunity to stop and be consumed by that, regardless of what society or historical age they live in. Perhaps one’s path prior to awakening is different for a contemporary person. We do have some interesting factors in this age with all the worldwide communications, and the scope of what the contemporary person has being input into their consciousness.

There’s a lot of news and things that are understandably disturbing that people might fixate on or become identified with in ways that create tremendous suffering. This might be quite different than a life of a monastic up in the high mountains where the scope of input that they receive is of a whole different scale, lesser scale. Most contemporary persons don’t have the support of, let’s say a monastery. And yet, monastics have their own challenges—different societies, different challenges, just different sets of parameters. Somebody in a different age and time may have searched or walked or traveled across countries to find someone who could point the way. Now they can just Google and get to know teachers on the web. So it’s a different ball game, same ball. As to being in seclusion, awakening doesn’t require physically withdrawing, but it does require a willingness to live a life that’s not centered around grasping for what one wants and pushing away what one doesn’t want. That push-pull movement of desire draws us into illusion and is what obscures our true nature.

And your own Liberation, how did that unfold?

I suppose there are infinite factors but my story has some themes. From very early on I made choices at different junctures that were informed by this great sense of wanting to know that which is Whole or Harmonious, Without Judgment, that which is Undivided. So, when I look back over my life, continually, through different relationships or different jobs, I would choose over and over again by following something deep within me that I could just sense was steer-ing me towards the discovery of that. At different times I might have called it my Inner Guru or my Deepest Knowing. And so, that’s an overall theme. And then also, just a sense of deep listening: truly wanting to know the way, and listening deeply to that inner wisdom and my body wisdom to show me more and more how to act in the world, how to be in the world as a person, but also how to come to know myself more deeply. I can’t even say that I can take credit for those things. It was just something moving me to be that way. Ultimately, I think it was a willingness to stop, to stop even the searching, to stop thinking I knew anything and just being willing to get in the back seat.

More specifically, on the day when I had the most significant identity shift I was listening to Adya speak about Stillness and that inner knowing that was seeking to know itself lit up, like a heat seeking missile, with this question that didn’t come from my mind but was deep within me: “What is Stillness?” I sat in meditation to really open myself up to discovering what Stillness might be. It wasn’t an answer to be offered to the mind, but the question delivered me to direct experience of what always is, what is ever present, what is unmoving. In the days to follow, that flowered into that which is forever unchanging and unmoving expressing itself as everything that changes and moves and births itself as form. Since then, there’s been ever more seeing of how that comes into form, and how it forgets itself. There’s been more and more welcoming into remembrance of all of that which has forgotten its True Nature, and in that remembering there’s been a welcoming of all those parts of myself, and in turn of others, that feel separate due to a forgetting that they are the Whole.

There’s stillness that comes from you speaking about all that, and then there is life. On your web site there’s this wonderful picture of you and Adya at Disneyland and you both look like you’re having so much fun. When I first saw that it was such a contrast to most ‘spiritual’ websites—it was a delight. Is this where Liberation leads? To that joy?

Liberation leads to far less and far more than people can imagine. It can be very ordinary, and yet in that ordinariness it has an exquisite beauty, and it includes everything. So, it includes the joyous times. It includes the bitter-sweet times. It includes the difficult times, and there is an overwhelming sense that none of it is to be missed, that you wouldn’t miss any of it for the world. So in that sense, there’s very much a dearness to things—which might bubble up as joy or may be very quiet. There’s no longer a sense of someone who needs to have a say in that. It’s all an expression of our True Nature. The knowing is that what you are is enough in and of itself—that no experience, joyous or not, can add to or take away from what you are. You are quite enough as you are.

Attending retreat can be an active response to your inner or your outer life. Chances are it is both, as the two are fundamentally connected—even seamlessly so, given one’s perspective.

Being drawn to retreat may be a draw “to pull back,” the Latin meaning of “retreat.” Acting on this draw can be wisdom expressing as a stepping back from the current momentum, a slowing down, and an entering into conditions supportive of new direction and new life.

The stepping back associated with retreat can take many subtle expressions, especially in meditation, such as a panning back, which offsets the pull to identify with thoughts, emotions, or sensations; a resting back, perhaps into a sense of aware space or quietude; or a turning within to meet whatever arises and perhaps therein to encounter the mystery of Being.

These workings of loosening identification, sensing into and resting as awareness, and attuning to Being, set the stage for aware Being to become known as the fundamental identity of life, the fundamental ground of one’s existence and all existence.

The true meaning of retreat is to be freshly revealed. On retreat one can attend to such workings and to outer and inner conditions in order to support revelation. Setting the stage for revelation to be presented is an orienting to sanctuary, a withdrawing to the innermost recess, to the holy ground of ceasing. Such orienting can be a sensing that divests seeking of grasping and aversion, such that ceasing then presents center stage, unobscured and unhindered, as the Eternal Unmoving.

© Mukti Gray 2018.

Tell me something about your background and your understanding of spiritual marriage.

That which is awake was calling since I was very, very young. I was raised Irish Catholic and felt that a love of God and Christ was foundational to my life. There was a tremendous yearning to know God. When I was seven, my parents found the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda, and, with that, new perspectives opened up for me. As a young adult, I heard a talk by one of Yogananda’s disciples, Brother Anandamoy, on spiritual marriage. I must have listened to this talk on tape dozens and dozens of times. And the one line that deeply penetrated me was, “The purpose of spiritual marriage is to find that the One in me and the One in my husband or wife is the same One in all of life.” I knew this was my deepest yearning.

Later, soon after I was married to Stephen Gray, now Adyashanti, we attended a satsang (teaching) with a teacher named Gangaji. Right away Adya got up and spoke with her from his perspective. I could see that the dialogue that ensued was from a shared, awakened perspective of knowing Oneness, and that it was a dialogue in which I was not able to participate. As I witnessed their exchange, something came fiercely alive inside me, saying, “In order to have a true spiritual marriage, a true meeting of Adya, I must know this perspective.” And my seeing this didn’t come from a place of jealousy. It just came from a knowing that this must be—it was as though within myself, without literal words, my Being was saying, “This must come to pass. So that I too can meet my husband from this perspective.”

This knowing kicked off a real fire within me. In the past, I’d come from traditions of faith and trusting in the guidance of a savior or guru. But this was different. I think it was the first moment when something in me knew that it was time for me to be truly serious, to truly engage the issue of realization for myself.

To become what you were witnessing in them...

Become that and to no longer waste time. It was as though something just clicked inside me that took me out of a sense of "Whatever God wills" to an intense inquiry: “What is God?  What is this?” Before that, when I had a savior or a guru, I would place my trust in their wisdom, their divinity.

Their enlightenment.

Their enlightenment. I believed that if I emulated them as best I could or followed the teachings that they’d set out, then maybe I would come to know what they know. But in this moment, what happened was it went from following the teacher to “this must be.” There was just something inside me that made not knowing no longer an option, and in that sense it was as though time had run out. Sharing Adya’s perspective had to be in order for this marriage to be what it must be for me, the only thing that will be satisfying for me.

It shifted from wanting to know God to seeing God in these two people interacting, to seeing that they looked out of those eyes of God. And my saying to myself, “I will not be satisfied unless this is my perspective,” changed something. It no longer was about wanting to know God (as an object). I wanted to be that. So this inquiry began . . . “What is that? What is that perspective?” And the word that Gangaji and Adya were using for the One was “Truth.” So, it ignited something new. As opposed to wanting to know love or bliss or the joy of union with God, the movement came to wanting to know the truth of that perspective, of Oneness.

And so, this became my inquiry, a very, very alive inquiry for months. And I had to do it for myself. The outward, more routine spiritual activities I did, such as attending services or meditations, became arenas where I would dive into these questions. I think it’s important to emphasize that something shifted inside me where I had to know. It’s not something that I can take credit for. Something in me just turned.

And yet, one of the distinguishing features of that moment was that the marriage itself became part of the motivation to say, “I can’t stop here. I’ve got to go where I can meet this being where he is.”

If I’m going to be a married person in this world, I have got to know what true marriage is. That conviction was fierce within me. It just had to be. So, that was the drive. Then, after maybe five months passed, I attended my very first silent retreat, which was also Adya’s first retreat teaching as a teacher, in July 1997. I was the retreat leader in charge of the logistics of the event. A few days into the retreat he gave a talk on “stillness.” I knew that he was speaking from a perspective of stillness that I didn’t know. My mind had an idea of stillness, but I could tell it wasn’t matching up with how he was speaking of it. And the way he was speaking of it was mysterious to me. It was unfamiliar but intriguing.

When the day ended and people had gone on to bed, I stayed in the hall to meditate and really dove into that question “What is stillness?” “What is it?” And that was the inquiry that brought me into direct experience of stillness, which flowered into a knowledge that that is Self. That is the nature of Self. Although stillness moves as form, it is the one constant. It is the One. Stillness is the perspective of permanence, of that which does not come and go, even as it comes and goes as form. I think, part of the inquiry that may be of interest to people was that I truly didn’t know what Stillness was. I had completely set aside any ideas that I had about it. And with all of my senses I followed the sense of stillness in my body, and really traced all movements within my body as I was sitting, until my body became more still than I’d ever known. And then my attention went to the outer world, and I sensed what Stillness was in the outer world.

Tracing outer form back to whatever was behind it, which was non-form, the non-movement behind movement. In that inquiry—this is just more of a personal question—did you feel guided by any kind of inner voice or not—how did that tracing phenomenon happen? Was something telling you how to do this or was there just a settling in and of itself?

I did not hear a voice. I guess it just seemed the most obvious place to start...to sense stillness as I was sitting in meditation. Perhaps because some of my main teachers had come from traditions of meditation and had had some of their innermost dialogues with the Divine in meditation, I was drawn to meditate. When I wanted to know something of this order, I would sit and meditate. That was my training. And so, when I went to sit, I sat in meditation posture, as was part of that training.

So, the outer body, of course. was still.

It was still, but I always had experiences of really not truly being still inside. But on this evening, it just seemed obvious that the first place to look was “Is stillness here? Even in the midst of activity of mind and body?”

Including breath, heartbeat, thought, feeling, sensation—all that moves, changes.

Yes. So it was not an inner voice but a natural curiosity to start with, a curiosity about “What is most immediate in my own direct experience of stillness of body-mind?” And the inquiry itself invited a dropping of that question into my Being, not posing it to my mind.

The question, “What is Stillness?”

Yes. “What is Stillness?” I dropped the question “What is stillness?” into my being, into my innermost being, down into my gut. Then I began to sink into a sense of stillness in my body, and all the movement within my own form began to settle and become quieter and quieter, and there remained a very quiet, still watching of all this settling.

And then, there is still another leap beyond the perspective of the watching?

Yes. As my energies were withdrawn from movement, that which is aware of movement became prominent and was experienced as stillness. It also became clear that there was no perceivable difference between that which was aware of movement and all that was in motion. One could say that subject and object were experienced as one.

At the time, this did not register as an insight of oneness, it simply was what I experienced that evening . . . at which point I decided that any more efforting to inquire would be the antithesis of stillness, and so I went to bed. I was fully aware of all of the sounds of the outer world, and I went into deep sleep which later, when I reflected back upon it, was unlike any other sleep I’d had in that I was completely unaware of the world of form at a certain point. I don’t recall even moving. Then I heard the morning wakeup bell, and I went about my functions of the day. I don’t remember much of them to speak of, other than that I fulfilled my duties—but without a sense of self-consciousness, without any sense of self-reflecting. I’m using both of those terms to say that I was not aware of a sense of "me." Then, after breakfast a woman bowed in “namaste” to me. In fact, she did a complete prostration before me and that was when a sense of the awareness that was looking out of my eyes at the world of form recognized itself as emptiness. And the laughter! I felt utter delight at this magic trick of what is completely empty and without form appearing before my eyes as form and appearing specifically as the form of a woman who was bowing to me as if I was something.

I remember you said that her “namaste” was no more significant than if she had bowed to a blank place in the room.

Right, or bowed to a toilet! It was amazing that she actually believed that there was someone in front of her. I mean, it would be as funny as one hair on your head jumping up and bowing to another hair on your head and dancing back and forth, bowing, worshiping each other. It was just delightful and humorous although ultimately those words fall short.

In the moment of the bow, in the moment of somebody in front of me interacting with me as though I were a something, all of a sudden the heightened awareness popped in that I’m not a something; I’m emptiness looking out of this form. And in that moment emptiness was born as an experience. What I am, what life is, what you are, what everything is, was seen as all that is, the one reality. All of this is being perceived from emptiness and clearly there was no “me” in this experience—this experience of myself as no-self or emptiness. And then, as the day went on, that experience opened, registering in my human consciousness as if to say, “This emptiness is this fullness that I’m looking at. This formlessness behind my eyes is what’s looking and is what’s looking back at me. This formlessness is this form, and it’s all arising as one thing. That which is perceiving, that which is sensing life, and the movement of life, the forms—all of them—are arising simultaneously.”

How about after this experience of awakening out of identification with form—how were you different?

Some of the conditioned mind, concepts that separate or cause a sense of a “me,” that create a center or position in relation to life—some of this returned. But a lot of it just mysteriously dissolved. It’s the seeing that has the power to dissolve conditioning.

In the work that I do with people, sometimes insight alone is enough for a pattern to dissolve. More often, however, insight is not enough. Without the experience of awakening, patterns have much more tenacity. I would imagine that, after the experience of awakening, when conditioned mind arises, there is a new perspective that lets you know “this isn’t real”?

Yes.

So, the conditioned thoughts and beliefs have a much shorter lifespan.

It’s more efficient. I guess what I was really left with was a sense that “me” lives only in thoughts that are believed.

So, in a sense, having awakened to the reality that what you are does not depend on believing the thoughts you have about yourself, those beliefs can drop away more quickly. Prior to awakening, we might investigate a defensive behavior pattern (for example, avoiding intimacy) and find the beliefs on which it is based (for example, a belief that “If I let someone close to me, I'll be rejected”), but there is still a tendency to justify the belief because of an underlying assumption that the “me” has substance and can be hurt by others. Whereas once you’ve had an experience that who you really are doesn’t depend on a “me,” and that who you really are cannot be hurt by anyone, then, when the feeling of “me” being threatened arises, we can question it from a whole different perspective, which allows it to dissolve more quickly.

Yes, it does. And, there’s no desire—at least I don't experience a desire—to make it go any faster. When there’s a dawning that it’s all yourself—even the illusion—it’s not something that needs be rooted out. But there’s a natural curiosity to see what the illusion is. There’s this whole fundamental aspect of consciousness—meaning life, reality—that moves to know itself in form, even if that form is a belief or a feeling of threat or suffering. There also seems, from everything that I’ve seen, to be inherent in all of experience a movement towards freedom. So if there’s, let’s say, a painful emotion; that emotion responds. It moves to be seen, felt, heard, experienced. In a sense it’s born to be experienced, and once it’s seen and experienced directly, not suppressed and not embellished, but seen in its exquisite suchness, just as it is, it has served its own life’s function, and it dissolves. You could say it’s been freed.

There is a felt sense that life is living itself, and it’s showing up as feelings. It’s showing up as everything, which includes feelings and beliefs; those are directly experienced, and then life goes on. I’m free to experience these things as they arise. It’s showing up for the whole thing, as all of it. Sometimes people are kind of in a hurry to be free of things, and they miss the freedom of being a human being, of getting to experience the miracle that anything can even occur out of nothing. I want to add as a reminder that everybody’s totally unique. Some people may experience some of the things I've shared that happened to me after awakening, such as a greater capacity to see personal beliefs and patterns which cause suffering; yet many people see such patterns long before awakening. There are those common questions “How does awakening unfold? or What does it look like?” Well, it can look all sorts of ways—from a more gradual dawning of what’s real to a sudden dawning of what’s real.

Perhaps there’s seeing an object and knowing oneself as that object, or as another person, or as all of life, or as nothingness. Perhaps there is a dis-identification from the sense of “me,” or perhaps the “me” is seen to not exist at all. In the absence of “me" one may know what they are not. This knowledge can exist with or without the knowledge of what one is. In other words, there are all kinds of awakenings and seeings, my story is just one. There are no two alike.

Can you tell me anything more about what has changed in your relationship with Adya?

I think the biggest thing that this shift of perspective affected, certainly initially, was how I heard things and how I communicated. A lot of my life’s experience had been that of wanting to be understood and of defending how I acted in the world. For example, feeling like I needed to justify why I did what I did or to explain why I was having the experience that I was having, so that I could be understood or accepted. And a lot of that fell away, so I was able to also listen in a way that wasn’t listening through that defensiveness. That was a huge change. At the time of the awakening I was in a program studying Chinese medicine. As I student I thought I had every ailment that I studied! But because the fundamental fear of death fell away with the awakening, it changed my whole relationship to health. As a result, a lot of the conversations I would have with Adya about my health just stopped. This freed up a lot in terms of energy and time that Adya and I spent together.

I’ve always had this sense of Adya, especially when he was a new teacher; he always felt like a real maverick to me. It wasn’t too long after that movie Top Gun came out, and in that movie there were these people who fly fighter planes and they just respond like this (snapping her fingers). They possess some internal navigational skills that are highly instinctual and intuitive. And Adya felt very much like that; he'd respond immediately to what life offered, and easily reverse direction. Now, within myself I feel that the more this awakening is deepening and unfolding, the more I have a sense of suppleness and ability to shift more quickly. Life is turning this way, “Okay,” and then you turn this way. And then comes its next curve or turn, and it feels a little bit more like somehow the whole ride is being ridden.

You said that the point of spiritual marriage, is for the One in you to recognize the One in the other and together to come to the knowledge of the Oneness that we are. Is this now more available to you?

Yes, to see that the One in me and the One in my husband, in this case, is the same One in all of life. So, it’s not that we need to see that together. But I think the recognition that that’s the same One in all of life came at the exact same time as seeing that it’s the same One in my husband.

Do you think you serve the same function for Adya?

Everything serves that, absolutely.

By Susan Thesenga of Seven Oaks Pathwork Center

© Mukti Gray 2018.

Krishnamurti spoke of how the bird is at once lost to the child who learns its name.

Can you recall when you were a child experiencing the world arising, moment-to-moment, without thought dividing its content?

In the spirit of recalling this perspective, prior to duality, I invite you to read ahead, and then try this exercise:

Look out the nearest window or across the room, and name what is in front of you. Perhaps several names come to mind (e.g., green, tree, pine). Subsequently, wipe each name from your mind as you look at the object, until you can see it without a name. As your eyes relax and your vision widens, take in the view globally.

To take the investigation further, let your listening relax outward, globally. If a thought that names a sound arises, simply let the name relax out of your mind and turn your attention again to what is within your range of hearing, letting your field of hearing widen and relax outward to experience a global awareness.

And finally, invite any sense of the one named “you,” your familar sense of self, to relax out of the center of your experience. You may feel the edge of your body soften or, more importantly, your sense of the one who is tracking perception and doing this exercise, dissolve out of the center.

Rest in this awareness that does not divide, does not name, and which itself will forever remain nameless.

© Mukti Gray 2018.

Previously we touched into the topic of “nonduality.” That is knowing, not on the level of mind, but a knowing of a different order—through consciously being what you are. That is a sense of existing right now, a sense of life looking out your eyes, and life feeling through your senses into this experience, this space of the room, this place. It’s like we are a sense apparatus for raw life, raw consciousness, which feels through us as instruments with five or more senses. What is sensed registers in awareness—this knowingness of existence, this knowingness that is existence itself. This knowingness may express inside as if to say, “I exist.” Existence is very mysterious; sometimes “I don’t exist” describes it more accurately, especially in the absence of self-referencing thought.

Earlier we were talking about suspending the tendency to reference thought, feeling, or emotion—in particular when it comes to the sense of what you are. This is a wonderful practice. In fact, it was a homework assignment that Adya gave the first year that he was teaching, and which I ask you to deeply consider now: Who would you be without referring to a thought, feeling, or emotion to tell you who you are, to tell you what you are?

Asking this question makes you stop, right? Often inside there are all of these self-referencing patterns: “Oops, can’t go the thought route; oops, can’t go the feeling route; oops, can’t go the emotional route; oops, oops, oops.” Then you can feel cornered. Then the opportunity is to sense what it is to be stopped.

From that perspective that doesn’t reference thought, feeling, or emotion, can you feel how your existence would interact differently with certain beliefs, even a juicier one like “Life didn’t turn out the way I thought it would”? Even something really disappointing, or really difficult, or even violent, would not ruffle your ever-present nature. Can you feel how it’s not ruffled—that it doesn’t get pulled off-balance because it doesn’t take sides to begin with? It doesn’t camp in any side to begin with, so when a position is asserted in thought, it doesn’t come up with an opposing side.

If you’re interested in this aspect of struggle, what I’m talking about is really fundamental. To see that perspective, to know it, to really saturate yourself in knowing your natural state that is always available underneath positions of mind—and that’s available when you suspend referencing thought, feeling, and emotion—is to discover that that natural state is inherently unequipped to struggle, to seek, or even to reference time. It doesn’t operate in terms of here or there. In seeking, we’re trying to get here or trying to get there, and then our thoughts are in the future. This natural awareness is already functioning now, looking out of your eyes, and when not referring to a dualistic pattern of thought, is actually incapable of mental struggle.

Could you be bold enough even to ask if this natural awareness is what you are? Is it familiar? Does it have an age? Has it been with you? Has it ever not been with you? This fundamental sense of life, existence, is awake to all the comings and goings of experience—experiences of being a person who likes this and likes that, who has a gender, an age, and roles. Your whole sense of self could revolve around all of these relative knowings of identity, or it could actually shift out of these thoughts into a remembrance—as if to say, “Ohhh, before I knew anything about myself, this was here—this knowingness of existence.” Can you feel how different your sense of self is, in this remembrance? Are you following me? Are you really checking it out?

The more you shift your investment out of the checking account of “me” into the savings account of awareness, it’s like the more rich you become. Transferring your investment is transferring your energy (the energy of your psyche) and transferring your attention. The more you transfer your investment out of all the ways that you try to know yourself through your identities, your beliefs, your conclusions, your positions of mind—and allow the energies to return to this sense of fundamental, aware being—the more your appetite turns to living without division.

There can be a turning of interest inside and your appetites change. I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid I could eat sugar, sugar, sugar, all the time. Now things can taste too sweet, and the kids in my family say, “What do you mean it’s too sweet?” It doesn’t compute in their world that something can be too sweet. But appetites shift over time—appetites for anything, obviously not just food . . . the company you keep, or anything. As your appetites shift, you may say, “I’m just not interested in energizing this sense of inner division and struggle.” And when not energizing struggle, the energy is freed up, and then . . .

From a lecture given by Mukti at her 2009 Kripalu retreat, “The End of Suffering.”

© Mukti Gray 2018

A participant writes:
In meditation I am often drawn to movement. I am familiar with kundalini release, although not conversant in it. I feel energy rising, uncoiling from the root, and my head and neck tend to sway with the gentle motion of its rising. In contrast, I think of Adya’s teachings on stillness, and I once heard you speak of others who experience your presence in mediation like a mountain. My gut tells me that there is no right or wrong way to meditate, but when the movement is happening, I wonder if I would be better served to be still.

I have a second question about a different topic. I am estranged from my mother. I often reach out to her in writing, expressing love and gratitude, but she does not respond. Do you think it is possible to cleanse and release the suffering I experience around our relationship and to accept and forgive a lifetime’s worth of hurt to an extent that can heal our relationship from a distance?

Dear Friend,

I very much appreciate the engaged insights and contemplations that you’ve shared during this course, and I thank you.

When you speak of your being drawn to movement in meditation and wondering if you would be better served to be still, I think you’ve captured both sides of a whole: motion in stillness, and stillness in motion.

My experience has been that kundalini moving upward in the body is greatly served by a strong and simultaneous presence of stillness. Like the idea of balancing softness with strength, rooted stillness complements the fiery quality of rising kundalini, causing it to travel more smoothly and easefully in the body, offsetting the possibility of the kundalini becoming more frenetic and moving in a forceful or jagged way.

My experience has also been that the energetic movement of kundalini, in the presence of stillness, seems to amplify the stillness, as though thickening how the quality of stillness is registered in one’s body and environment. Energy at rest and in movement inform a union (that we grossly divide in reference, but not actually).

Meditations on the hara, such as I’ve mentioned in past Q&A, as well as qi gong, hara breathing, and hara chanting can be ways to develop the presence of stillness and knowledge of one’s nature as permanence.

In regard to your second question, I do believe it is possible for your past and present experience of relating to your mother to shift, release, and cleanse. It is my sense that such a process occurs, in large part, when one’s perspectives shift—perspectives of oneself, another, and of what was and is. These shifts can be small or great and are more than I would address here, but I can offer a couple of general broad strokes.

When one contemplates and senses into one’s identity as Spirit, ego identification may cease to predominate. Ego identification can bring about senses of wrong, missing, lack, problem, division, and often draws these conclusions by referencing past experience to inform the present. 

Spirit, which is not inherently defined by or identified with time, does not organize like ego, and knowing oneself as Spirit brings one's state more and more toward what is now vs. what was then. This is not to say that the human experience of past is forgotten or that the experience of hurt is never to occur again, but ideally there is a great transparency of being through which experience generally flows (vs. predominantly sticks).

When the past arises, it is brought to present, enfolded into the care and flow of presence. This enfolding and healing can take time, as the mind, body, and energetics that are based in finite form assimilate and shift the past. However, this time can seem to reduce as the timeless gaze of awareness bears witness to the energies and holdings of past. As perspectives of identity and time shift, wrongness and malcontent can be replaced with a sense of that which is complete unto itself, in all its forms and phases. One is less identified as a fixed person that life is happening “to” and known more as an expression of a dynamic whole that life is expressing “in” and “as.”

A mysterious aspect in all of this is that one may not need to even accept and forgive what happened, as one’s identity aligns with a sense of what is. It’s as though one's sense of oneself as Spirit transmits a state of wholeness that overpowers the momentum of division (against the past, oneself, another). One’s transmission of permanence stills the mind’s movement to reference narratives that lock the past in present. What happened is clearly known as “what did happen” vs. held as “what should or shouldn’t have happened” (or “who someone should or shouldn’t have been”). The held energy is freed to respond to what did happen and to whom, and to be the healing agent.

Some inquiries for you to consider include “Who am I without referring to the past? Who is my mother without referring to the past? Who am I that does not hold the past? What is it to orient as wholeness? Might I rest the still light of undivided and unidentified awareness (simply awareness, not ‘my’ awareness) on energies of holding and division, so they might join?”

When offering wholeness, wholeness is furthered; when offering division, division is furthered.

From Mukti’s Got Juice? Online Course

© Mukti Gray 2018