Hi ATS Friends.
I just thought you should know that the Awakening to Spirit Group became a Meetup group this month. At our gathering on November 18 we had 5 new participants who found us through Meetup. Now word will get out more easily about our group. We are excited about that! It is wonderful to meet new people drawn to nondual wisdom spiritual teachings!
The all day satsang with Jac O’Keeffe in October was a big success! We all loved having her and hope to have her back with us next year.
Our next gathering takes place on Saturday November 18 from 10 am to noon.
I was just certified in Somatic Experiencing, a three year training process. I am now a “SEP”, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. On November 18, I will lead you through a 25 minute meditation and then some Somatic Experiencing exercises for accessing the wisdom of the body.
I hope you can join us. If you are new to this website and our group, please do not hesitate to email me to introduce yourself and ask any questions you may have.
Also, I want to give you advance notice that Amoda Maa will return to present a half day intensive on Saturday, February 10 from 12:30-4:30 pm. Amoda Maa presented an intensive to our group last June and she was very well received. You can read about her on her website: https://www.amodamaa.com/
I am excited about the Sunday October 15th intensive with Jac O’Keeffe! She will offer a satsang from 10 am to 4 pm at the Davis Holistic Health Center at 1403 Fifth Street. Cost is $90 if you pay before October 1, and $100 after October 1 and at the door.
Jac experienced a spontaneous awakening in 1997 gaining access to powerful and intuitive healing capacities. She left a successful career pioneering national community arts policy in Ireland to establish a healing practice. Working with a medical team, Jac explored the spiritual causes underpinning a range of psychiatric illness, culminating in the development of residential programs for people with clinical depression. In 2003, she moved to India to intensify her own spiritual practice. After a two-year period without thoughts, Jac began to teach. Since 2008, Jac guides others in her teachings and publications to transcend both dual and non dual perspectives. She also prepares spiritual teachers for liberation. www.jac-okeeffe.com and www.goinghomeguide.com
To pre-register, pay before October 1 using the Paypal link on my website, https://soulwisdomtherapy.com/policies.html When I see that you have paid $90 I will know that it is for the Jac intensive. Please let me know if you’d like me to email you a receipt.
I hope you can come! Please share this info with friends and family.
Hello Dear ATS Friends and other Nondual Spirituality Followers.
Our Davis monthly gatherings resume in August. On Saturday August 19 from 10 am until noon, we will continue to explore the teachings of Byron Katie, and how we can embody them so that they are not just a mental process for us.Check out www.byronkatie.com for more information on her “Work” for awakening.
I am very excited about the upcoming daylong intensive with Jac O’Keefe on Saturday, October 14. Please take a look at her website and read about her awakening: https://jac-okeeffe.com/about Jac hails from rural Ireland but more recently has lived in Florida. We are very fortunate that she will be with us in Davis!
With great gratitude and love of life in all its forms and formlessness.
Deb
Hello Dear ATS members and visitors.
We will be meeting again on May 13 from 10 am to noon. The theme will be working with Byron Katie’s “Work” to free ourselves from polarized thinking. I will be sharing a video of Byron Katie doing the Work with someone who struggles with Donald Trump. Then we will discuss the video and do our own work with “The Work.” Even if you have used this technique, I think you will find this gathering useful.
Here’s a description of Byron Katie’s “work”:
Byron Katie, founder of The Work, has one job: to teach people how to end their own suffering. As she guides people through the powerful process of inquiry she calls The Work, they find that their stressful beliefs—about life, other people, or themselves—radically shift and their lives are changed forever. Based on Byron Katie’s direct experience of how suffering is created and ended, The Work is an astonishingly simple process, accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds, and requires nothing more than a pen, paper, and an open mind.
Through this process, anyone can learn to trace unhappiness to its source and deal with it there. Katie (as everyone calls her) not only shows us that all the problems in the world originate in our thinking: she gives us the tool to open our minds and set ourselves free.
Also, if you haven’t yet signed up for the all day (10-4) Amoda Maa Intensive on June 17, please do so soon if you can. It will be amazing! (Please read the last blog post to learn more.)
Warm blessings,
Deb
Hi ATS Friends and Newcomers!
Happy Spring!
For our April 15 gathering, Deborah will lead the ATS group through some meditations and experiential exercises on tapping into our body’s wisdom to work through unpleasant or disturbing emotions and as a way to heal the body/mind and clear the way for awakening. Deborah will include some of the i-Rest teachings as well as Somatic Experiencing processes and other body-mind techniques. Deborah is a certified i-Rest teacher and in her third year of training to become a certified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner.
Please email Deborah if you plan to attend or not.
Exciting news for Saturday, June 17 event!
Amoda Maa will return for a full day –10 am to 4 pm–due to popular demand!
This one day Living Your Awakening in Every Moment intensive is an opportunity to dive deeper into the inquiry as to what stands in the way of living your awakening in every moment. Amoda Maa invites you to meet the full depth and breadth of your human experience with courage and tender honesty, and offers guidance about the process of awakening and its embodiment from mind to heart to belly. There will be time for silent and guided meditation, discourse, and questions & answers.
Amoda Maa will be accompanied by her husband and beloved, Kavi, who will support the guided meditation with his ambient guitar music.
Amoda Maa is a contemporary spiritual teacher, author, and speaker. After years of spiritual seeking, meditation, and immersion in psychospiritual practices, an experience of the dark night of the soul led her to a profound inner awakening. Then, after a long period of integration, she began speaking from silence in small gatherings. She offers meetings and retreats, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and events, attracting spiritual seekers and people looking for peace and fulfillment in an increasingly chaotic world. Her teachings are free of religion and tradition, and she brings to them a deep understanding of the human journey, born out of her own experience.
Amoda’s newly released book Embodied Enlightenment (New Harbinger, June 2017) is based on her vision for humanity and the conversations on the cutting edge of spiritual inquiry in her meetings with people from all around the world. She is also author of Radical Awakening (Watkins, 2015) and Change Your Life, Change Your World (Watkins, 2012). To learn more, visit http://www.amodamaa.com
Please email Deborah if you plan to attend. Cost will be $90 with a sliding scale down to $75.
Hi Awakening to Spirit Group Friends and Visitors.
We are in for a treat for our next monthly gathering: Amoda Maa will be joining with us! Please RSVP wiht me if you plan to come. [email protected]
Cost is $40 or whatever you can afford. read about Amoda Maa below:
Amoda Maa is a contemporary spiritual teacher and author.
Her teachings are both timeless and refreshingly modern, offering profound pointers to truth beyond spiritual tradition or ideology while bringing a cutting-edge perspective to spiritual inquiry.
There’s an urgency today to evolve beyond humanity’s current ego-based paradigm, and along with it, a unique expression of enlightenment is emerging. Amoda’s teachings show you that awakening is no longer about abandoning or transcending physical reality in order to live a spiritual life: it’s about the fulfillment of your divine destiny by living the truth of your inner radiance while in an earthly body. Through these teachings, you are called to anchor yourself in the pristine perfection of your inner light and then to fully embody and express this light amidst the imperfection and darkness of the world. The invitation is for you to discover authentic freedom by being both fully awake and fully human.
“Amoda is a fresh clear voice of the grounded feminine who speaks directly to the heart of anyone hungering for lasting peace in a turbulent and uncertain world. The clarity of her realization shines forth through her words, as she calls for us all to consciously embody the living truth in our ordinary human existence.”
Amoda’s childhood and early adult years were marked by personal hardship. In her late 20’s, at rock bottom, she found herself fully open to living in the present, and she embarked on a journey of inner exploration that eventually led to a love affair with India. After many years of intense meditation and psycho-spiritual practices, as well as a series of spontaneous transcendent and visionary experiences, she stopped searching for a teacher or teaching and life became the real guru. In 2002, an experience of the dark night of the soul led to a profound inner awakening. After a long period of integration, in 2012 she started speaking to small gatherings in the UK.
Today, she is a unique voice attracting spiritual seekers all around the world as well as countless ordinary people looking for peace and fulfillment in an increasingly chaotic world. She offers talks, meetings and retreats, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and events. She brings to her teachings a depth and breadth of understanding of the human journey, born out of her own immersion in the furnace of personal transformation.
She is the author of How to Find God in Everything (2008), Change Your Life, Change Your World (2012), Radical Awakening (2016) and the soon-to-be-released Embodied Enlightenment (June 2017).
More info at www.amodamaa.com
Watch Amoda’s interviews and talks at https://www.youtube.com/amodamaajeevan
Dear Readers.
I am very excited to share about our upcoming events for January through March.
For our Saturday January 21 ATS gathering, Mukti–Adyashanti’s wife–will be presenting a satsang for our ATS group over skype and having a dialogue with us!
We will meet at our usual time and place–10 am to noon, at the Davis Holistic Health Center. The cost for coming to our Jan. 21 gathering will be greater since we need to pay Mukti an honorarium. Depending on how many attend, the cost, including the room rental fee, will be somewhere between $35 and $45 per person. Here is a description about Mukti:
About Mukti
Adyashanti formally welcomes Mukti, his wife, as Associate Teacher of Open Gate Sangha. She offers private meetings, leads monthly meditations, and is available for group satsangs and intensives by invitation. Mukti has been a student of Adyashanti since he began teaching in 1996, and together they officially founded Open Gate Sangha. Previously, Mukti studied the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda for over 20 years. In her own teachings, Mukti points audiences back to their natural state of wholeness or undivided consciousness. Licensed in acupuncture and certified to teach hatha yoga, Mukti has a love of the whole of experience in form, as well as the formless.
To read an interview with Mukti on the topic of “Spiritual Marriage, go to this link:
http://www.adyashanti.org/mukti_teachings/spiritual_marriage.htm
For our gathering on February 11, we will create SoulCollage cards once again to bring in new energy and hidden wisdom from our deepest selves relating to what we want to manifest for the New Year. Creating SoulCollages has become a yearly tradition for our group. I will also lead us through a guided meditation to help prepare us for manifesting whatever wants to come forth through the SoulCollage cards. If you have never created a SoulCollage card, please know that you don’t need to be artistic. All you need to do is to bring with you 5 pictures or photos from magazines that seem compelling to you. Your magazine pages will be added to the pages everyone else brings, and each person will create their SoulCollage cards from the collection of the magazine photos. I will supply the cards and glue sticks.
Please email me ([email protected] to let me know as soon as possible if you plan to attend the Jan. 21 gathering with Mukti, and the Feb. 11 gathering for creating SoulCollages.
I am also very excited to let you know that for our Saturday March 18 gathering we will have another nondual, awake spiritual teacher–Amoda Maa—joining us in person for a satsang! Here is some info about Amoda:
Amoda Maa (Amoda Maa Jeevan) is a contemporary spiritual teacher and author. Her teaching arises out of direct experience of awakened awareness and emanates the untamable fragrance of freedom whilst radically embracing the mystery and mess of human existence.
In 2002, after many years of spiritual seeking, meditation and immersion in psycho-spiritual practices, a spontaneous awakening catapulted her out of a dark night of the soul, revealing the luminosity of awakened presence. Without a teacher or instruction manual or any agenda, she opened to an unending falling into the abyss of being. And, in surrendering wholeheartedly to the unfolding unknown-ness and aliveness of this moment, she became a “naked lover of what is”. Since that time, all seeking stopped, all methods dropped, and a gentle but unequivocal coming home to rest in unconditioned nondual awareness has become embodied as a living reality. In 2012, Amoda started speaking from silence in small gatherings in the UK. Today, she offers Satsangs, Retreats, and Private Meetings to a growing global community.
In the period between awakening and teaching in public, Amoda wrote two books: HOW TO FIND GOD IN EVERYTHING and CHANGE YOUR LIFE, CHANGE YOUR WORLD. Both of these arose out of a mystical visionary experience around the same time as her awakening, in which she was shown the key to humanity’s suffering and the potential for the birth of a new consciousness and a new world. Today, she no longer speaks or writes directly about this experience and her teaching has evolved in both depth and breadth, preferring to point to the radiance of being that is here within each of us and the journey of embodiment amidst ordinary life. Rooted in innate wisdom born of psychological and philosophical insights and fertilized in direct experience through personal suffering transformed into abiding grace, her teaching is free of all dogma, tradition and ideology.
I have had the privilege of sitting with Mukti and Amoda Maa numerous times and both women are luminous, awake spiritual teachers who present with great clarity, inspiration and love as they impart their messages about nonduality and awakening.
There is more exciting info to share with you about what’s in store for 2017 for our group. And that information will come to you soon.
Namaste, dear ones.
Deborah
For our meeting on Saturday, November 19, we will be engaging in a 30 minute meditation and then discussing sections of the Michael Singer book, The Untethered Soul. This beautiful book directs us to live a life of greater freedom to be our deeper selves and directs us in how to not get trapped by our ego-minds. Please come join us!
Dear ATS Friends and New Website Visitors.
If you weren’t able to join with us when we visited with Prasanna in June, you are in for a treat!
The date is Saturday, October 15. We will again first meet together to have brunch/lunch at the Sunflower Cafe in Sonoma at about 11:15, and then proceed by carpools to visit Prasanna arriving at about 1 p.m. Note that you do not have to join with us for the brunch if you’d rather not.
For those of you who don’t know about Prasanna, he is an awake Indian man who shares “truth” with those of us who seek to live in and from truth. He is a teacher of nondual spiritual wisdom.
Prasanna has translated a book of Nisargadatta Maharaj’s and has written his own book titled: Two: The Love Story of One. He has also been interviewed on documentaries about Nisargadatta and has been quoted in other books. He is a very humble man who travels very little but receives guests from all over who seek to awaken to the truth of who we are. He is also an amazing spiritual painter and has shared some of his paintings with our group.
Please email me if you would like to join us.
Note that we will not have our regular thirs Saturday of the month ATS gathering in October.
Namaste,
Deborah