Being far more aware of what’s going on around and within us provides valuable insights that can dramatically improve how we flow through life. This heightened awareness brings fresh perspectives, increased clarity, and wisdom, enabling us to make sound choices while significantly reducing our stress levels. But how aware do we need to be to foster truly conscious personal growth?

Let's say we've set personal development goals that involve adopting a healthier lifestyle. It takes a commitment and the will to see it through consistently to achieve our goals. We’re on a roll for a few weeks, but then we find ourselves challenged: perhaps we get some bad news, or we don’t get enough sleep.

Then, a friend brings over some alcohol and cake. While we've been choosing well up to this point, we’re confronted with temptation, and we kind of want a treat. Recognize this experience?

In this less conscious version of ourselves, we think, “Hey, I’ve been good, I deserve a treat! I NEED it!” So we scarf down the food and drink. This is an unconscious decision where the pain or suffering or discomfort or fear plus the promise of an immediate reward blinds us to the longer-term impact on our goals.

If we do this, it’s not because we were bad people. We’re just conditioned to act this way. Most of us received “treats” to cheer us up when we were young — often because it was the only way our parents could find would calm us down. And that’s what they were taught would make them feel better (at least initially.)

Their patterns are simply “gifted” to us, so we, too, learn to want or expect a treat when feeling challenged.

In this scenario, it’s the same situation but we’re somewhat more aware. Aware enough to recognize what we’re feeling, and why we’re feeling it, but then submerge that awareness so we can have our treat. Our desire for immediate gratification takes precedence, and we knowingly go against our better judgment.

This would have been a great moment for one of our bullshit detector friends to step in. But alas…

While we bury our awareness that we’re going off-track (so it doesn’t interfere with our momentary pleasure), we’re haunted by guilt and unease because we know we’re letting ourselves down.

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This sort of aware but not aware enough stage is generally more difficult than being really unconscious because once the dopamine hit of whatever we did wears off, we haunt ourselves for how we acted. Again. And for many people, strong self-judgement or even self-hatred follows.

It’s probably easier if you don’t evolve from unconscious to semi-conscious. Less suffering. Oops, sorry. Too late!

As conscious individuals, we acknowledge that we’re being confronted by both whatever is challenging us, and by our desire for immediate gratification. But we don't allow it to derail our long-term goals. We're aware of the importance of keeping our choices aligned with our objectives. We strive to strike a balance between enjoying the present and working towards our goals. In doing so, we make choices that optimize taking care of ourselves in healthy ways. And it feels good. Certainly way better than haunting or hating ourselves.

Awareness allows us to connect with our feelings, values, and inner wisdom, providing critical insights that allow us to make far wiser choices in our lives. With this heightened awareness, we can see a clearer, less distorted, and broader picture of our choices' impacts. This is crucial in guiding us on our evolving journeys — now and into the future.

It's my mission to support people in living and leading with greater ease, wisdom, and inner peace. To feel more deeply connected with those around them.

If you'd like to tap into your deeper insight and practical wisdom to live and lead more consciously, feel free to reach out at bodhi@bodhijeffreys.com to set up a time to connect.

To see what others have to say about the work we do together, please check out the testimonials here. I look forward to connecting.

There's a lot more content available here on the site and on these social media platforms.

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Thank goodness for millennials.

Their desire— and almost demand — for leaders to be more straight forward and forthright has accelerated the necessity for leaders to adopt transparency as a mainstay in the workplace.

More than one-third of the workforce is made up of millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996.

They tend to reject being kept in the dark about what’s going on — unwilling to invest themselves without knowing the why of things.

This reflects just how much they respect, value, and need transparency.

As conscious leaders, it is essential that we find ways to proactively meet the core needs of our NextGen workforce to support them in bringing their best foot forward for the benefit of their careers and our companies.

Doing so, we can collectively benefit from the energy, brilliance, and power of the millennial talent pool. Let’s explore how we can become more authentically transparent with our teams, and as a result, far better leaders.

Millennials will not put up with a lot of bullshit.

They feel less married or locked into any company than prior generations have, and they’re very comfortable, even fearless when it comes to moving on — especially when dissatisfied with their current position or work environment.

Trust is a big issue, as the volume of public outings of greed, corruption, and hidden agendas — in governments and businesses — have made trusting corporate integrity difficult for millennials.

From their view, that we even need whistleblowers says a lot, and seeing whistleblowers being condemned for stepping forward further degrades the potential for trust.

Millennials are understandably allergic to all the manipulating and machinations that go on in politics and in business, so when we announce that we’re going to do things in a new way, they’ll ask “Why?”.

They won’t accept that it’s because we think it’s better. For them, it’s simple. “What’s the real reason? Just be transparent. We'll follow you if you lead with integrity. If it makes sense to me, for us, I’ll be on board with it.”

At the core of “transparency” is a commitment to embody honesty and openness in our work environments.

Communicating our intent and motives behind various actions is an act of inclusion that helps all employees to feel more in the loop and a part of what’s going on.

Open and transparent communication helps to form a foundation of trust and a collaborative environment.

The more consistently we are open and honest with our teams, the stronger the foundation of trust we build

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There are so many ways in which leading with transparency can improve our work environments and organizational performance — with all employees, not just millennials. Just a few of the benefits include:

Integrating transparency into the way we lead will yield significant positive benefit to our organizations and our enjoyment in leading. It takes focused intent and dedication to transform how we show up with our teams, how we build our workplace culture.

Since transparency requires a willingness to be more easily seen, it can bring about a feeling of vulnerability and a bit of fear. If you experience that, it’s best to deal with this fear or vulnerability head on so that you can powerfully and effectively bring transparency into your leadership.

Sure, if we’re not practiced in leading with transparency there can be a learning curve. If there is, keep remembering the benefit to your career and organization are so worth it.

It's my mission to support people in living and leading with greater ease, wisdom, and inner peace. To feel more deeply connected with those around them.

If you'd like to tap into your deeper insight and practical wisdom to live and lead more consciously, feel free to reach out at bodhi@bodhijeffreys.com to set up a time to connect.

To see what others have to say about the work we do together, please check out the testimonials here. I look forward to connecting.

There's a lot more content available here on the site and on these social media platforms.

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Body awareness can provide rich information that can benefit our decision-making and it can substantially reduce stress.

An important way to attune to wise decision-making is to pay attention to what our bodies are telling us.

This can provide valuable real-time information regarding how aligned or not aligned we are with decisions we’re contemplating.

A reliable way to check how well we’re aligned with a decision is to sense how relaxed our bodies feel. Our bodies can tell us if a choice feels right or not, and it’s a good idea to start paying more attention to how relaxed or tense our bodies are.

If a choice feels right, wise, and in alignment with our heart and values, our bodies can be calm and relaxed. It takes practice to become sufficiently aware of the body, and some of us are more in touch with our bodies than others, but everyone can do this.

In looking at ways to support ourselves in making wise decisions, noticing what our bodies are telling us can cue us to any misalignment in our decision-making process.

If we consider moving forward with a decision that is out of alignment with our values or our integrity, we will experience an internal conflict that will result in our bodies getting tight.

For example, if we’re planning to make a decision that will be good for us personally, but we know it will negatively impact others (friends, family, clients, employees), the inner conflict will drive the mind to strategize how to justify doing what we’re planning to do so we can get what we want.

The discomfort and guilt about our planned behavior could well be enough of a signal from your conscience to reconsider the choice.

But if not, the negative experience we’re setting up will cause the body to contract, generating tension in the body. This is designed as a way for our conscience to get our attention.

It serves as a line of defense to support living in alignment with our values and what we truly care about, rather than getting lost in myopically getting only our own needs met.

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There’s an old saying, “If it’s tight, it ain’t right.” Certainly, some of us are better listeners when it comes to our bodies, but all of us are capable of sensing that our bodies are experiencing greater tension.

It’s easy to tell when we are dramatically out of alignment.

When there’s a lot of tension rising in our bodies, our breathing becomes faster and shallower. Some of us even briefly stop breathing for a while.

In a sense, this is the body’s way of serving as our bullshit detector. No need to rely on outside support!

Rather than waiting for our bodies to send extreme signals that we’re out of alignment, there is great value in learning to listen for the body’s more subtle signals, like tightness in the shoulders, a sense of pressure in the chest, a slight headache, etc.

If recognize these body signals, they can be a great gift because if we pay attention to them, we can make the appropriate course corrections to get back into alignment with our values.

You can see this quite easily when letting go of the need to reach perfection. Not only does this cause the body to relax again, but the whole of us ultimately feels better.

It's my mission to support people in living and leading with greater ease, wisdom, and inner peace. To feel more deeply connected with those around them.

If you'd like to tap into your deeper insight and practical wisdom to live and lead more consciously, feel free to reach out at bodhi@bodhijeffreys.com to set up a time to connect.

To see what others have to say about the work we do together, please check out the testimonials here. I look forward to connecting.

There's a lot more content available here on the site and on these social media platforms.

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In life, the ability to compromise generally is regarded as a positive thing; indeed it’s vital to getting things done and getting along well with others. I’ve experienced great outcomes born out of compromise, and no doubt there are countless examples we all could share that illustrate its importance and value.

What’s far more interesting and fundamental for us as evolve beings, is to be aware of instances where compromise — tempting though it may be — is counterproductive or damaging to us, our relationships, and our lives. I’m talking specifically about situations where we compromise our integrity.

For all of us, rock-solid integrity is an imperative. And “integrity” is a powerful word with (at least) two definitions that most people view as distinct, but which I see as closely correlated.

The first one is most frequently associated with human behavior: “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.”

The second is “the state of being whole and undivided,” which typically is applied to objects or territory, but for me, is central to excellence in living consciously.

The connection between these two definitions is illuminating. If we possess and live out strong moral principles, we won’t compartmentalize how we act in just one area of our life. For instance, we wouldn’t live out our strong moral principles at home, but ignore them at work as we stab a co-worker in the back to get ahead.

Nor would we rationalize deviations from “true north” on our moral compass; in this aspect of our lives, we would be whole and undivided.

If we’re paying attention, we’ll see that we face temptations to compromise our integrity every day. This can take so many forms, like not telling our partner the truth because it’s inconvenient or uncomfortable, to not telling the checkout clerk that they forgot to ring up an item.

Say we spot a seemingly great opportunity that will bring us substantial personal gain but wouldn’t be good for a friend; all it would require is a slight pivot to the left of “true north” to generate what we, in that moment, “think” is good for us personally.

But at what cost?

A common theme that can drive us to compromise our integrity is a need for “more”. This could show up in so many ways, like a need for more recognition or status, more autonomy, more attention, more money and shiny objects.

A slightly different angle on a need for more shows up as an underlying feeling of scarcity, like there’s not enough. Need, greed, scarcity are all in play as temptations.

When we compromise our integrity and get what we want without consequence, we risk planting the seed for further compromising our integrity. We have a conscience to help us not do things like that.

We need to listen to our conscience because that inner voice is what guides us to act virtuously in a given situation.

When we don’t listen to our conscience, breaches of integrity can occur which can come back to haunt us.

For example, what happens when somebody notices: “Wait, shouldn’t we have been in this true north direction?”

If we feel threatened when confronted this way, we can move into a self-protective mode that can lead us to further compound the misdeed by creating justifications or by diminishing that person, or getting rid of that person from our lives so that they are not in the way of us getting our needs met.

We may not be aware of it, but we’ve all done this in some way. For most of us, we can remember what we felt and said the first time we got caught with our hand in the cookie jar as a child.

It doesn’t mean we’re terrible people, but it does mean that there’s something to clean up.

Falling into a pattern of integrity breaching behavior is a risky path to walk down. Even veering slightly out of integrity can result in a major energy drain, impaired relationships, a damaged reputation.

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There are many dominoes that begin to fall when we don’t act in alignment with our conscience and integrity.

When we compromise our integrity, we’re implanting a seed of disharmony that will take root inside of us. The longer we breech integrity, the more the seed will grow and haunt us, and the more we will ultimately suffer.

Experiences like this affect our physical health. Our bodies feel tense and tight, and don’t function optimally when we are fighting our conscience. When we are contracted at the physical level, it’s stressful, and this type of sustained stress is not good for our well-being.

One could say that is by design — a wakeup call to get our choices and actions back into alignment with our values.

In fact, harnessing our awareness around all of this is essential and the key to living consciously.

When we have acted without integrity, it’s important to clean up the mess we’ve made and to be fully accountable for it.

As we step up and take total responsibility for our choices and actions, it becomes easier to navigate to our “true north”. And with that, our bodies and minds relax, and we find that the freedom to act and to be in alignment with what we know is virtuous to be profoundly empowering.

It's my mission to support people in living and leading with greater ease, wisdom, and inner peace. To feel more deeply connected with those around them.

If you'd like to tap into your deeper insight and practical wisdom to live and lead more consciously, feel free to reach out at bodhi@bodhijeffreys.com to set up a time to connect.

To see what others have to say about the work we do together, please check out the testimonials here. I look forward to connecting.

There's a lot more content available here on the site and on these social media platforms.

🔥 Get Bodhi's latest Insights and Tips

🔔 Subscribe to the Bodhi Jeffreys YouTube Channel

👔 Connect at LinkedIn

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We’re going to make mistakes, it’s part of that whole being human thing. Hopefully, we learn from them. I’m pretty sure my client, Christian, learned from his particularly painful lesson having to do with transparency.

Get a nice cup of tea, kick back, and I’ll tell you a story that may well guide us all in being “cleaner” in our relationships.

Christian owned a technology company with 80 employees. They were an upbeat team that reveled in the family feel and creative latitude they had in their jobs. They also felt taken care of by the healthy bonuses they got at the end of each of the last three years — the result of rising profits.

Christian countered the offer, willing to accept less for the sale if the demand for bottom line increase was reduced and keeping his team employed.

They wouldn’t go for it and said the purchase was only worth it if the profit margin was larger and that they would merge the production with another overseas company for cost-savings.

Ultimately, he decided to go for it.

The sale price was so substantial that he planned to give everyone 6-months’ severance at close-of-sale to share in the bounty and also have time to find other work.

Christian considered telling the team but decided against it. This lack of transparency was an act of manipulation.

But he didn’t want anything interfering with reaching the goal and he thought that it was better to just operate as usual. So he set his sights on creating a plan to generate the increase in profit.

(Now, let’s freeze this story for a moment. I know that some of Christian’s choices will sound like terrible leadership, some of it even shake your head stupid. But this story and its entanglements are not unusual. It goes on all the time.

We get caught up in wanting things and lost inside of that wanting. And it makes us say or do things we normally wouldn’t. We’re never at our best when this happens. So, a bit of compassion for Christian…and for ourselves. And hey, this has a storybook ending so keep reading! Alright, I’ll continue.)

Okay, so he decided not to tell the team because he wanted what he wanted.

Putting his plan into motion, he began to enthusiastically cheerlead for bigger sales and better efficiency. Of course, the team thought that was odd because he had never done that before.

More than anything, this distracted the team. And when big gains didn’t happen, he began adding pressure, another thing he’d never done before.

At a team meeting, they asked what was going on. Christian, with difficulty making eye-contact, made up a story about how after three up years, companies often plateau. He said the best practice was to push hard so teams will kick butt. They all just looked at him and he felt a big knot in his stomach. Then came the onslaught of negative feedback, and he didn't know how to handle all of the strong judgement.

Right after that meeting is when he sought me out for coaching.

In our sessions, Christian quickly recognized the extent to which he had breached trust with his team. He saw that his out of character behavior was driven by his strong desire for the big payday.

And the fear — that if he told his team about the possible sale, that some employees would leave.

And if key team members left, that would kill his chances of improving the bottom line. He’d be left with not only no sale — but having lost core team members.

Clearly, ego overtook his common sense and the goodness of his heart. Desire has done this to all of us when we’re insufficiently aware.

Christian felt shame about how he had treated everyone and wanted to clean things up. We agreed that transparency was imperative, and his gut said telling them the entire backstory was the right thing to do.

By the time he was ready to face the music, he was in a place where he could allow that they could have very strong feelings and views about what he had done.

He wanted to honor the team and return, if they were willing, to being in partnership together.

He called another meeting at which he explained and apologized for his off behavior and the pressure he had leveraged, as well as its impact on them.

He told them about the offer he received, his excitement, his plan to give them each 6-months’ severance as an expression of gratitude.

He shared how wrong it had felt to withhold what was going on from them and for lying.

He closed by saying that the sale offer was still on the table, but that he didn’t know how or whether to proceed and wanted their input.

The team was very angry and did beat him up verbally for a while. But they were also somewhat disarmed by his newfound transparency and courage to vulnerably own what he had done.

The team had mixed feelings about the idea of losing their jobs but receiving a 6-month severance, which was very tempting. For the most part, they really liked their jobs and had liked the company environment.

At some point, the room got quiet and it seemed like there was nowhere to go with the conversation.

Christian then told them that the choice of whether to go for it or not was entirely in their hands. And acknowledged that he was just stating the obvious, because the only way it could happen is if they all got on board and went for it, aligned.

He and I had run numbers prior to the meeting and based on that, he then told the team that if they did decide to go for it, that he would up the severance package to 9-months.

For him, this was a part of cleaning up his behavior and coming back into balance. A costly one, yes, but it felt right to him.

The team ultimately bought in and went for it, and it brought them together, perhaps more than ever. They worked it. They really worked it and nearly reached the threshold required. But it wasn’t enough to make the sale work.

So what happened? They all celebrated a great year of working in harmony and thriving, got huge bonuses, and kept the jobs they loved. (FADE TO BLACK)

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When we give up strategizing how to manipulate people, and instead, let down our walls and communicate transparently — the stress of trying to get people to do this or that naturally drops away. In its place can be a profound sense of freedom.

Being transparent doesn’t mean we have to share every aspect of what we’re thinking, feeling, or doing — discernment about what is most important and relevant to share is required.

Yes, when learning to lead transparently, we may share a little too much or not enough at times, but with practice, we’ll learn, over time, where the sweet spot is.

With greater self-awareness we’ll be far less inclined to attempt to manipulate. We’ll be more aware that our desires are driving our needs toward inappropriate behaviors. And we’ll find ways to better meet those needs.

We all have the capacity to expand and deepen our awareness. We all have the capacity to be open and honest — to live transparently. We all have the capacity to do this…Now.

It's my mission to support people in living and leading with greater ease, wisdom, and inner peace. To feel more deeply connected with those around them.

If you'd like to tap into your deeper insight and practical wisdom to live and lead more consciously, feel free to reach out at bodhi@bodhijeffreys.com to set up a time to connect.

To see what others have to say about the work we do together, please check out the testimonials here. I look forward to connecting.

There's a lot more content available here on the site and on these social media platforms.

🔥 Get Bodhi's latest Insights and Tips

🔔 Subscribe to the Bodhi Jeffreys YouTube Channel

👔 Connect at LinkedIn

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With so many competing priorities vying for our attention, adding an awareness practice can seem like an unrealistic goal. Or worse, a burden — just one more thing to add to the to-do list.

Even when we set out to integrate being more present into our days, that intention often gets pushed to the back burner while we deal with everyday demands and put out real-world fires.

But if we aspire to live more consciously, being aware is not simply a nice-to-have; it is a must-have that needs to be prioritized.

Cultivating awareness has great payoffs and there are so many areas of our lives where we can leverage awareness.

Being aware enables us to pay attention to key things we normally might not notice. It allows us to be fully present and engaged in any situation at hand. And the benefits of being aware are compounding in nature.

Awareness opens up our senses, allows us to perceive situations in a much deeper way, and offers insight into how we can better handle whatever comes up.

Awareness is what allows us to notice things like the subtle cues our partners are sending, the changing moods of our children, the impactful hidden or underlying meaning in conversations with friends.

Oftentimes, this is critical information essential to our ability to maintain our relationships… and our sanity!

So, how can we insert more conscious awareness into our day without a lot of additional effort or time-consuming practices?

While awareness is a fairly simple concept, it’s not always the easiest thing to remember to do when our days are demanding. It does take discipline and practice, but over time, it becomes second nature.

Being aware is very much a real-time practice that can be accomplished anywhere, while we’re doing anything.

The key to practicing awareness within a busy schedule is simply to take a moment to stop, breathe slowly and deeply, and “tune in” — taking a moment to check in with what we’re experiencing.

This can include noticing what we’re feeling physically and emotionally, observing our thinking, sensing any pressure we may be feeling, listening to what our intuition might be telling us. We can also open up to what we sense is going on in those around us.

Once we get the hang of what this is like, we can incorporate being present, aware throughout the day. We’ll notice much more when we’re working on our projects or having conversations. We’ll pick up a lot more “data” as our awareness expands.

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As our presence and curiosity grows, we gain a far more comprehensive view of what’s really going on around us.

And that insight gained offers a greater chance of avoiding costly missteps we might not have seen; and to make far better informed, wise decisions.

Therefore, being aware can save time, energy, money, reduce stress on ourselves and those around us.

Even when it feels like we don’t have an extra moment and we’re under pressure to perform or respond, being aware helps us to pause and consider not just a bigger picture, but a much clearer picture.

And the moments we take to broaden our awareness now may well save us days or months of time, energy and stress in the long run.

It's my mission to support people in living and leading with greater ease, wisdom, and inner peace. To feel more deeply connected with those around them.

If you'd like to tap into your deeper insight and practical wisdom to live and lead more consciously, feel free to reach out at bodhi@bodhijeffreys.com to set up a time to connect.

To see what others have to say about the work we do together, please check out the testimonials here. I look forward to connecting.

There's a lot more content available here on the site and on these social media platforms.

🔥 Get Bodhi's latest Insights and Tips

🔔 Subscribe to the Bodhi Jeffreys YouTube Channel

👔 Connect at LinkedIn

➡️ Connect on Facebook

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Lessons learned early in life lead most of us to equate our talents and accomplishments with how “good” we are — a measure of our personal value. This gets reinforced over time with every compliment and critique.

It also leads to wanting, even needing the approval of others, and for them to see us in a positive light.

We try to make sure we don’t fail because we don’t want to lose respect. And this places an out of proportion pressure on our need to succeed.

All of this generates stress which impacts not only us, but those around us.

If we pay attention to this, we can free ourselves from this cycle by disconnecting our personal value from our performance. And doing so allows us to be far more relaxed and at ease with ourselves, dramatically reducing our stress levels.

When we are identified with our performance or achievements, we wrongly believe that the quality of our work carries more meaning than simply being about the quality of the work itself.

The irony here is that we think we need to succeed and not fail because we believe that it will mean something about us; but making those around us stressed-out and miserable will certainly give us what we don’t want — to be judged and viewed negatively. That’s a lose-lose proposition.

Worse, so many people beat themselves up for not being perfect or not good enough at something. Creatives do this a lot. Parents often engage in this, thinking that every screw-up by their children is a reflection on themselves.

That’s not to say it’s not wise to do some self-reflection, but beating ourselves up isn’t helpful. We don’t actually learn well from beatings. A more open, caring and compassionate approach facilitates learning. But just for all of us.

We need to raise our self-awareness enough to stop applying meaning to situations where no meaning exists or belongs.

When we let go of defining ourselves by our successes and failures, we free ourselves to allow any success or failure to be an outcome of whatever work and circumstances were involved.

We can celebrate our successes, our performance, even our capabilities without any story that it makes us better people who are more worthy.

We can make wiser decisions and learn from the experiences where we succeed and don’t succeed without making it about our worth.

A person once went up to renowned consciousness teacher, Eckhart Tolle, after one of his events and said, “Wow, that talk was incredible!”

Eckhart smiled and nodded his head, saying, “Yes, I thought so too!”.

I so loved this. Eckhart didn’t make the compliment about himself in any way. He simply shared in the delight that he, too, felt the work was exceptional.

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You’ve demonstrated excellence and success in at least some area of your life. Enjoy that. Appreciate it. Celebrate your good works. And in a relaxed way, strive to improve in whatever areas you feel inclined to do so.

And know this: from the day you were born, you were inherently worthy, and that has never changed.

It's my mission to support people in living and leading with greater ease, wisdom, and inner peace. To feel more deeply connected with those around them.

If you'd like to tap into your deeper insight and practical wisdom to live and lead more consciously, feel free to reach out at bodhi@bodhijeffreys.com to set up a time to connect.

To see what others have to say about the work we do together, please check out the testimonials here. I look forward to connecting.

There's a lot more content available here on the site and on these social media platforms.

🔥 Get Bodhi's latest Insights and Tips

🔔 Subscribe to the Bodhi Jeffreys YouTube Channel

👔 Connect at LinkedIn

➡️ Connect on Facebook

📷 Connect on Instagram

⚡️ Follow on TikTok

I ask everyone I work with whether they actually like the stress and tension of trying to control others, of finding ways to bring about enough fear in people in hope of getting their needs met.

Not one of them has turned to me and said, “Ah, yes, that IS what I wake up in the morning for.” It’s a miserable way to engage in relationships.

Yet so many of us have done this over the course of our lives. Mostly because we didn’t know how else to get our needs met. And likely were unaware we were even doing it. This is how we learned to operate while growing up.

But there are better ways of showing up that not only build greater connections, but also feel better to us.

Significantly increasing everyone’s sense of trust and safety allows us all to have greater ease. Let’s take a look at what it’s like to be highly functional in our transparency.

When we attempt to instill fear in others in hope of getting the to either give us what we want or be how we want them to be, we shoot ourselves in the foot. When people feel fear, a lot of their physical, mental, and emotional time and energy goes into trying to “survive” the experience.

That’s not very connecting, is it. As I’ll say again, we may end up getting what we want, but is this really how we want to live? Behaving in this way drives stress and increases tension in relationships.

Living transparently requires us to communicate openly and authentically about what’s going on for us in our lives or in our relationships.

We’re up front with what’s going on and share where we’re at. It’s actually a relief to be this open. And once you get past the fear of being too vulnerable, it’s quite liberating.

People feel good with those who are transparent, in part, because this way of being builds trust in relationships and people just feel more at ease around us. Because it’s real, people feel a greater sense of connection and inclusivity.

This inspires them to be more transparent with us and others, to be more collaborative. In work environments, it leads to better communication, better morale, better solutions, better performance, better production, and a better bottom line.

And this is all without using fear to get what we want or get others to do what we want them to do or be how we want them to be. As you can see, this all distills down to getting what we want regardless of what’s best for anyone else.

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Free of engaging in fear-based manipulative behaviors, we can establish a space where people feel safe enough to question us and offer perspectives we may not have seen.

To do this well, it is imperative for us to be able to vulnerably listen to and learn from criticism offered, which helps people to feel heard and valued.

But to successfully deal with our fear-based feelings of being judged, we need a certain level of healthy self-assuredness so that when we do receive negative feedback, we can really listen — not self-defend or make others wrong or duck and run for cover.

To powerfully bring transparency into our lives, we need to raise our self-awareness about whether we are using fear to manipulate others. And awareness puts us better in touch with our intuition, which can alert us if we’re acting out of alignment in some way.

Self-awareness would also help us to see if we’ve acted out of alignment with our values. If we proactively own our errors, unkind things we’ve said, inappropriate behaviors, we can do our utmost to clean up any mess we’ve made with those we’ve impacted. We would not wait until we’re under duress or in fear of being outed.

Transparency is foundational to a higher quality relationships. We feel and function better, our relationships flourish, we experience much lower stress, and a greater sense of connection.

Why wouldn’t every one of us embrace transparency?

It's my mission to support people in living and leading with greater ease, wisdom, and inner peace. To feel more deeply connected with those around them.

If you'd like to tap into your deeper insight and practical wisdom to live and lead more consciously, feel free to reach out at bodhi@bodhijeffreys.com to set up a time to connect.

To see what others have to say about the work we do together, please check out the testimonials here. I look forward to connecting.

There's a lot more content available here on the site and on these social media platforms.

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Without awareness there is no wisdom. And there are so many ways we can come to this conclusion.

Being aware, it becomes very difficult to convince ourselves that doing things that are out of alignment with our values or out of integrity are justifiable. Without awareness, the things that haunt us – signals alerting us that we’re out of integrity – can be easily buried or ignored.

We often don’t want to see those signals because acknowledging them could interfere with getting what we think we want. Often times, we’re not seeing the picture because we've blinded ourselves to the price we’ll pay later on.

We can be quite skilled at avoiding or denying these signals from our conscience or awareness.

There’s so much do deal with in our busy lives that we can easily use truly important matters to purposefully distract ourselves from any uncomfortable thoughts we don’t want to experience.

We often don’t want to see those signals because acknowledging them could interfere with getting what we think we want. Often times, we’re not seeing the picture because we've blinded ourselves to the price we’ll pay later on.

We can be quite skilled at avoiding or denying these signals from our conscience or awareness.

There’s so much do deal with in our busy lives that we can easily use truly important matters to purposefully distract ourselves from any uncomfortable thoughts we don’t want to experience.

Being aware takes into account all of what we sense and feel, what we know, what we value, and what we perceive in the world around us. It helps us see where there are gaps in what we know — crucial input before we make a decision.

Unfiltered, undistorted awareness is essential because it helps us to see what’s really going on. Then, we can make truly wise decisions.

Those of us doing our best to live more consciously strive to evolve the foundation from which we operate, realizing greater and greater capacities over time.

What are some core areas in which we need to raise our decision-making awareness?

Every decision will be better informed when we’re aware of what we and others think and feel; what our needs and desires are; what our patterns of behavior are when trying to meet those needs; and how well we’re aligned with our values as we move through each day.

All of this provides information and insight into the forces involved in any decision, and with heightened awareness, we stand a greater chance of arriving at wise decisions.

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Wise decision-making requires a holistic view of situations that allows us to see a more multifaceted picture than traditional decision-making — a broader range of potential far-reaching impacts our choices may have on ourselves and our those around us.

With our intent to live more consciously, we recognize and value the interconnectedness of everyone and everything on the planet. Thus, as we endeavor to make wise choices, we also look at how we might positively impact or influence the world around us.

This doesn’t mean that if there is any possible harm resulting from our decisions that we abandon them. We live in an imperfect world. In wise decision-making, our intent is to raise our awareness so that we can take all that we are able to notice into account, weigh what we see, and find ways in which we can mitigate or minimize any possible negative impacts.

Taking feelings into account is essential. As we consider our choices, we pause to become more aware of how we and others feel about the various aspects of the decision. This is important data. It opens our eyes to what’s going on within us and others, providing a richer picture of what’s going on.

And raising our awareness of how other’s voices are influencing us can be key as well. While there’s great value in listening to and learning from the wisdom, critiques and creative idea of others, it’s also important for us to notice when we are allowing ourselves to be “over-influenced”.

Addressing fear head on so that it doesn’t unduly influence us is essential. I’m pretty sure that none of us have listed “acting from fear” as one of our values.

Free of fear’s shadow, we can see the landscape of what we’re considering choosing from a neutral vantage point. This allows us to see with greater clarity and increases the odds of arriving at a wise decision.

We’ll also do a gut check and test out how honest we’re being with ourselves about what we’re thinking of doing, checking for any breaches in our integrity that might be flying under the radar and partially or fully blinding us.

Without being aware, we would not have access to this vast treasury of information. Without self-awareness, we would not have access to our internal sense of knowing what feels right in any given situation.

With the clarity and insights derived from awareness, we become far more capable of navigating wisely through all our decision-making opportunities. And truly, awareness ultimately makes our lives easier and less stressful.

It's my mission to support people in living and leading with greater ease, wisdom, and inner peace. To feel more deeply connected with those around them.

If you'd like to tap into your deeper insight and practical wisdom to live and lead more consciously, feel free to reach out at bodhi@bodhijeffreys.com to set up a time to connect.

To see what others have to say about the work we do together, please check out the testimonials here. I look forward to connecting.

There's a lot more content available here on the site and on social media platforms.

🔥 Get Bodhi's latest Insights and Tips

🔔 Subscribe to the Bodhi Jeffreys YouTube Channel

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To people unfamiliar with it, the phrase being conscious immediately evokes questions.

For starters, how can anyone be anything other than “conscious”? What’s the alternative – sleepwalking through life? Fair point, if by “conscious” we mean physiologically awake. But being conscious is about much more than mere cognizance of one’s surroundings and the ability to respond to stimuli.

I’m talking here about “consciousness” in a much deeper, more profound sense – one that makes a qualitative (and, ultimately, quantitative) difference in how we live our lives.

The pivot from the way most people live to living consciously is effectively a paradigm shift having to do with expanding and deepening our awareness and moving through life with all of the advantages that awareness offers.

Awareness is the foundation of conscious living. Being aware of what’s going on within and around us provides rich information that up-levels our perception, our communication, our decision-making — essentially, everything.

And awareness opens doors to fresh insights, greater clarity, and wisdom, all while dramatically reducing our stress levels.

When we lack awareness, we can miss noticing negative feelings we’re having like being agitated in a conversation, or tension our partner is feeling. The failure to sense such things can easily lead to angry outbursts, added pain, or even damage to or loss of a relationship.

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As conscious beings, here’s how we might approach the above situation differently.

If we are more conscious, we are less likely to unknowingly let pressure build in us until we have no choice but to launch a damaging outburst of anger.

If we are aware of the agitation we’re feeling, we give ourselves an opportunity to see what’s irritating us and to deal with the source of it directly.

And if we are aware of a partner’s or friend’s or child’s overwhelming tension, we can, with skill and care, surface it in conversation with them to see what supportive steps we can all take to resolve the issue that’s driving the problematic tension.

We’ll dive deeper into the tenets of living consciously in future blogs, but let’s touch on a few to help you get a sense of what this is all about.

Living consciously, we approach our families, friends, those we work with, our decisions, etc. from an empowered, grounded, calm and compassionate way of being. We’re deliberate in our assessments, and incorporate more than just our minds and intelligence.

Thanks to being more present, we’re more in touch with our feelings, our values, what’s transpiring all around us, our genius, which gives us access to different types of invaluable information.

Greater insight becomes available as the wide range of subtle and nuanced information provided by our enhanced awareness enriches our objective view.

When merged with our intelligence and life experience, the result is a far greater capacity for wise decision-making. Wiser living.

We’re also committed to operating with more transparency and authenticity.

Here again, mastering awareness is crucial, because we need to have sufficient self-awareness to know what there is to be transparent and authentic about, and to know whether or not we’re actually being transparent and authentic.

To live more consciously, we must also be dedicated to ensuring that our decisions, actions, and communication are in alignment with our core values.

We carry an intent for that everything we do is positively transformative for ourselves, our families and friends, our businesses and the world around us. This guides us as to how to best invest our inner and material resources.

As part of our personal growth, we recognize that issues that come up must be addressed head-on rather than swept under the proverbial rug and ignored.

We’ll face our challenges and work with others to find viable solutions that best take care of all of us, to the degree we’re able. We really do perceive “failure” as education and growth opportunity, an invitation into something better.

That’s all for now. I invite you to take the journey with me as we explore how being more intentionally conscious can bring greater satisfaction, abundance, and joy to our lives.

It's my mission to support people in living and leading with greater ease, wisdom, and inner peace. To feel more deeply connected with those around them.

If you'd like to tap into your deeper insight and practical wisdom to live and lead more consciously, feel free to reach out at bodhi@bodhijeffreys.com to set up a time to connect.

To see what others have to say about the work we do together, please check out the testimonials here. I look forward to connecting.

Check out all the content available here on the site and on social media platforms as well!

🔥 Get Bodhi's latest Insights and Tips

🔔 Subscribe to the Bodhi Jeffreys YouTube Channel

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What Is has to do with what’s real — the raw unfiltered truth of what’s taking place. The Is-ness of existence.

There is What Is, and there is our relationship to What Is. That “relationship” is our interpretation of what we’ve experienced. Most often that interpretation is based on our history — the lens through which we’ve been conditioned to see things.

There’s nothing wrong with having an interpretation. But on the path of awakening, the imperative is to be able to distinguish between What Is — what’s real as observed in a neutral way — from any conditioned, thought-based or colored interpretation of what’s real.

The great value of being able to discern What Is from the relationship we form to What Is, is that it’s our interpretations that typically cause our distorted emotional reactions that interfere with relationships, clear thinking, productivity, and more.

Byron Katie’s process, “The Work” is a great way to help distinguish what’s real.

Presence is a state of consciousness in which we have a pure, felt, direct experience of What Is, prior to thought. A sense of Being. Being the awareness that we are — living as awareness. An aware Presence.

We’re “being”, flowing, not locked in our minds compulsively thinking.

In presence, what would we notice? We sense energy. It’s often subtle, but not always. When we distinguish the color blue from red, or the musical note F from G, we’re distinguishing different wavelengths of energy. Sometimes we can sense a person is upset, sometimes we can’t.

I’ll take it up a knotch.

Let’s say we’re out in nature, sitting in a state of stillness. In presence, being with nature. A man approaches and says in an alarmed tone, “My daughter’s missing!”

In presence, we sense the energy, tone, and volume carrying the words to us. We notice their facial expression as the the words are expressed. We might sense the tension or fear they’re experiencing.

Next, still in presence, our brains comprehend (not interpret!) what’s been said. The actual meaning of the words.

In presence, our hearts are open, we may feel care, concern, and compassion for the man and his child. But we’re able to think clearly and wisely respond to assist as able.

But where most people generally leave that state of presence is when we start to form a relationship to What Is or interpret what’s going on. Forming a relationship to What Is is essentially making the situation about ourselves in some way.

If in our personal history there was a time when we were not paying appropriate attention to what our daughter was doing and she got lost and hurt, seeing and hearing the man in fear might trigger that old pain and guilt, leaving us somewhat brain scrambled. We might start to panic too. Not helpful.

Note: It’s very challenging to stare at a phone or computer screen and stay in a state of presence. This is why so many of us can get lost in our screens.

We can always come back into presence. It’s actually our natural state. Maybe not our “normal” state due to our conditioning, but it is natural to all of us.

Here’s a short 8 minute audio track, “One Consciousness Meditation”, that can help you return to presence at any time.

The Now is the "field" in which this reality of What Is is happening. It’s the space in which everything is taking place.

It’s always The Now. Five minutes ago when I was washing lettuce, it was the Now. In twenty years when I'll be at a club dancing, it will be The Now.

Our thoughts arise and dissolve in the Now. Our feelings and emotions arise in the Now and then dissolve in the Now. Civilizations have risen and fallen... in The Now.

The Now is not time-based, it's presence-based.

When we are in a state of presence, we are aware of being in the Now.

And it’s one Now. It's not "this now" then "this now" then "this now". Those are references to moments of the Now.

Everyone and everything simply takes place — ever in The Now.

To flow your way more into The Now, read or listen to anything by Eckhart Tolle.

This dialogue between Gangaji and Simone Marie Lorenz covers so much ground, including their each of their lives as activists.

Gangaji shares about being arrested and spending time in jail, and her many mistakes made and lessons learned along the way.

This exchange is rich, illuminating, and empowering. Together, Gangaji and Simone provide insight into ways in which we can better respond in a more empowered and effective way to what is going on in the world.

Simone: I’m exploring how we can do activism from greater conscious awareness rather than from separation and egoic identification which can so often create more problems and keep the fighting mentality going. Looking at the world around us, is this not desperately needed?

Gangaji: That’s right! We have to see that.

Simone: How might we respond the various crises on the planet without projecting our unconscious need for enemies and conflict to give us some inflated sense of who we are? And if we’re not being motivated from fear or anger, what can we be motivated by, and can it be effective?

Gangaji: Yes, is it even possible?

Simone: What do you see as an alternative way of doing activism?

Gangaji: Obviously, the only thing is to wake up, right?

Simone: Yes, that’s the ultimate consciousness activism.

Gangaji: Really, it is because everything you said is all about identification. And identification needs protection. And identification makes enemies and finds enemies. That’s the truth.

Simone: Early in your life you were involved in social activism. Can you share anything about those experiences?

Gangaji: Yes, I would love to share that. Initially, I did some activist work when I was teaching school in Memphis, Tennessee and it was right at the time of desegregation. I was in a school with primarily black students and white teachers. So it really raised my consciousness enormously.

I grew up a Mississippi southerner and I was around black people all my life but I was really conditioned and believed them to be subhuman. Really different from human beings. Wonderful, and I loved them, but different from human beings. So there was definitely a shift that had to occur and it started because of a teacher I had in college. And then later, ending up at this black students’ school as a young teacher was wonderful. It was enlightening.

It was also right at the time that Martin Luther King was coming to Memphis, Tennessee because of a garbage strike and it’s also where he was shot. I was married to a socially prominent doctor and I was teaching school and we both became very moved by seeing how unconscious we had been and seeing the absurdity of it, the horror of it, and how far back it went in our particular family histories.

So we felt like we had to make some kind of statement. We began to march in the civil rights marches and we invited some black people over to our house which was totally radical. That’s about all we did. [Laughter] That was the limit. That was exhausting but it started something and it was actually thrilling to step out of an identification I had had of myself and step into a new identification.

There’s this kind of self-righteousness that goes with activism that feels really good, you know?

Simone: Sadly, all too well.

Gangaji: Initially it’s innocent and it does feel good just because one is telling the truth and there is a broadening of the mental expanse, but within that is an “us versus them” and I made a lot of enemies at that time, just in the way I would talk to people I had been friends with for years. I would talk to them and preach to them. I became a preacher. It didn’t and it doesn’t work.

At the same time the Vietnam War was happening and at that time all doctors were put into the military for a couple of years. So my husband went into the military and we went to Washington, D.C. which was a great place to be because there were a lot of demonstrations and marches. I became very active in that. I wasn’t teaching school, I had a lot of free time and became a marcher, a demonstrator. And again, it felt really good and I made even more enemies, and friends too of course. But it just sort of ended when we left Washington and moved to San Francisco where I got caught up in a whole other thing.

This was in 1972 so it was amidst the whole drug explosion and a different way of living. I left my husband and after some years I met my present husband Eli, who had been an activist most of his life, from the time he was sixteen on. He had come to Mississippi on the freedom trains, on the freedom buses, and so that was a huge identification in him.

And he was also a spiritual seeker. I was not a conscious spiritual seeker until I met him. I had spiritual experiences but in him for the first time, I linked the two — that you could be a political activist and a spiritual seeker. I had sort of left my political activism behind when I got to San Francisco and then, after meeting Eli four years later, I picked it back up. Maybe just to please him, just to be a good seductress — if he likes politics then I’ll be political again.

And this was really a pivotal time because we were living in a little town in Northern California and they were going to — and did — put a nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo and we thought that was a really bad idea since there’s an earthquake fault that runs right through it.

So a group of us became part of the Northern Alliance of the anti-nuclear movement and became nonviolent trainers. We were training people to be nonviolently protesting and arrested. As a nonviolent trainer and protester I went to jail for about two weeks with a group of women from this town. It was a beautiful experience and it was an important experience. The actual going limp and being carried away by the policemen in all their SWAT gear and being in a very small jail with a group of women and having to work with that, was beautiful.

Gangaji: But it was also clear that it was play for me because I’m in the middle class, it’s not like I’m really in jail. I got to experience jail while knowing we weren’t going to be in jail for a year or two years or even six months. So it was useful but it was still play.

And I also got to see a very important thing, I got to see the identification. That in order for us to feel good there really had to be a bad guy and they really had to be very bad — and they were! We would have meetings with the Pacific Gas & Electric people and they were horrible. They were just so ignorant in the things they would say and the way they were treating us and so they were easy targets for being the bad guy. But it was the first time I didn’t like the feeling of hatred that was being generated and that’s because in the time of meeting Eli I had begun the spiritual search too.

So I saw that there’s something really off here. Unfortunately, I found it in the spiritual groups too. Have you experienced that as well?

Simone: Yes, time and time again, and each time, so painful and heartbreaking.

Gangaji: Right, because it's the same thing. There is an identified enemy, whether it’s the unenlightened, whether it’s the Christians or whether it’s a Buddhist or whoever, somebody. “I’ve got it now and they don’t,” and the preaching begins, internally if not externally. That was a huge realization because the activism was dramatic and wonderful and yet it didn’t feel right.

So I just put politics aside. I didn’t see how it could work. I didn’t see how it was possible. The identification seemed so deep in me and I saw it was deep in everybody else too and I didn’t have a clue how it could be dislodged. It seemed to me that the answer was to retreat from everything —to just not be involved in politics. I did that for a few years. I didn’t read newspapers and I didn’t listen to news. We never had a TV and we just lived our life. It was a spiritual quest.

But we didn't escape the identification in the spiritual quest, it was still there. It was the same thing. It was only when I began to mature and recognize that that’s really the root of the whole problem everywhere. That it’s the same thing whether we call it political or spiritual, or therapeutic, or whatever we name it, it’s still this root of egoic identification that then generates suffering in every direction, internally and externally. This is akin to what you shared with me earlier.

Simone: I would get so hooked when engaging with groups doing activism. At the time, I could see that there was no way we could be effective operating from fear and spewing anger all over the place. There was so much fear around what would happen if we didn’t stop the insanity in society, but we were the insanity as well.

Gangaji: Yes, exactly.

Simone: My body didn’t handle it well. I would get wiped out and be unable to function because I was such a sponge for all the negative energy. Fortunately, the body’s clear message was actually a blessing.

Gangaji: That’s right, fortunately.

Simone: I had to step back from all the activity and look at what was going on. But it also didn’t feel right to retreat and isolate myself either. My heart couldn't let what was being perpetrated in the world go unaddressed. That’s how this project was born. I knew I needed to learn how to better combine the inner consciousness work I had been doing with the outer activism rather than just being secluded or separated in a spiritual practice or retreat somewhere.

Gangaji: I agree. That’s not satisfactory. It is for some people and that’s fine. I believe what we’re really talking about is if there is this kind of affinity and love for the world, then that in itself legitimizes the political play. At one point I thought everybody should be political since politics touches everybody. And then at another point I thought everybody should withdraw from politics and then the whole thing would crumble. Now I realize that it’s where your heart is. Ramana Maharshi was not political at all. They begged him to be political because India was in such trouble at the time he was alive. But it just wasn’t...Simone: It wasn’t his nature.

Gangaji: That’s right. It wasn’t his nature. I believe that that’s an important message for people to get, that if it is your nature to retreat, that’s fine. And if it is your nature to be involved, that’s fine also.

But this is really important to be in truth about because there’s often a spiritual overlay that one shouldn’t be involved. There’s a kind of spiritual thing about not reading newspapers, or not being up on what’s happening, not voting and it’s dangerous. Of course it’s dangerous. Historically, we don’t have to look so far back. In the 1920s, in Germany, there was a flourishing of a kind of new age spiritual recognition and a withdrawal from politics.

I have to say that that’s a very important part of my message to people, that if you are drawn to activism, if you are interested in it, then this is part of where you bring yourself. Your awakening is brought to that realm, brought to the realm of political activism. Like this book you’re writing. It’s a way that you can share it without being beat up by it.

Simone: Regarding the non-dual teaching of the East “Accept all as it is”, that everything is perfect as it is, I have seen a misunderstanding of this in some of the spiritual community. People thinking, “It’s okay, we’re not supposed to change anything, not supposed to get involved, so let’s just be passive.”

Gangaji: Right, “let’s be passive.” That’s still doing something, you see, it’s just more subtle. It’s just an egoic concept about what not doing is.

Simone: A belief, rather than what is actually alive in them or are moved towards.

Gangaji: That’s right. Because really it’s taking a moment to stop — as you must have done when you realized that, “I’m getting beat up by this doing activism, this is horrible, something is really wrong here.” There’s a moment where you just stop. Where you retreat into the cave in your heart. Where you’re just absolutely still. Where you find peace, rather than look for peace. Where you find perfection, even in the midst of undeniable imperfection. And then it’s the surrendering to that that leads your life into its natural purpose without all the figuring it out that we are trained to do, and are conditioned to do, and which the ego takes over so easily. It can take over anything but it so easily takes over what we are trained to do.

Simone: Hearing you speak of your own experience, of how exciting it all was when you were involved in the activism, I am reminded of the kind of power rush, the intense adrenalin rush that happens in the body. It can become addictive when we’re identified with the drama and excitement of it all.

Gangaji: Yes, that’s absolutely true.

Simone: Can you speak of an alternative motivation for activism other than egoic identification, and feeding off of drama, anger or fear? Regarding activism, some people see acting from love as airy-fairy or just an unrealistic concept, or as passive and weak in comparison to the power of fighting, as illusory as that is.

Gangaji: Yes, that’s the challenge.

Simone: With a limited understanding of love, people may think, “Well nothing will change if we just go around loving everybody." Could you speak to the true meaning of being motivated by love?

Gangaji: We can see that every revolution may start with the most altruistic, true understanding of injustice and what needs to change, but those movements have gotten co-opted every time — the American revolution, French revolution, Chinese revolution, Russian revolution. It’s clear in history that the power itself corrupts and we finally have to be willing to be mature enough to see that within ourselves, how the flush of power corrupts our own motivation, which started actually as love — love of human kind or a love of the planet.

The flip-floppy, new-agey kind of '60s love certainly won’t work with because that’s not about love, that was just about sex really. [Laughter] That was just a psychedelic trip. At its core it was beautiful but it also got corrupted by the power that comes from that because there’s a huge adrenalin rush there.

It seems to me that there has to be a maturity and whether we as a species are at that point or not I don’t know. I don’t believe that anything can truly happen until we are at that point collectively or critical mass-wise, where there are enough people who really have the maturity to tell the truth individually and collectively, about the corruption from power, adrenalin power or political power or guru power, whatever — power over — how that has continued and continues to corrupt the innocence and the inclusion of the truth of love. Not the feeling of love, but the truth of love which is naturally caring for oneself and recognizing oneself in everyone to some degree.

Even if you’re just seeing humanity or the Earth, and you see that the Earth gives us life — there’s a natural love for the Earth. This is very basic and can be ecstatic and blissful, but in general it’s a very basic ground of love. And that’s all we have in the end. We have experiences of power, but they will go because they eat up themselves and they eat up the host.

So what we are left with is the invitation to love and to not know. Because part of the experience of power is the intellectual knowing, the self-righteousness and the preaching, and “it should be like this” and “you need to change” and “we need to do this” and that’s been true in every movement. Just take a moment and reflect — even if it’s just historically — every generation has known what “should” happen and every one has made a mess of it.

There’s a power in not knowing, in just opening, opening to see. And this is huge because this strikes at the root of the identification because the whole basis of egoic identification is built on protecting the form. The form is vulnerable.

One of the gifts of the nonviolent training was that you were just there at the protest site. You were not going to be violent whatever the police did. We didn’t expect them to do anything although there was a little tear gas. But in the generation before, in Selma and Birmingham they had done quite a lot. They had set dogs on people and had beat people. And of course violence is happening all over the planet now. People get arms chopped off or are randomly killed or raped. There’s a huge amount of rape all over the world.

I was just reading about how in Bangladesh there’s this rampant epidemic of rejected suitors throwing acid in the face of the women that reject them and although there are laws against it, nobody’s prosecuted. I was speaking to this woman who had recently emigrated from Russia and she said, “You don’t even hear about it but Russian women are raped all the time.” She could not tell me how many times she had been raped by her ex-boyfriend, by his friends, by strangers. Raped.

There’s violence so rampant on the planet and when one takes a stance of nonviolence — and I wouldn’t even say that that’s my philosophy, I don’t think it’s always appropriate to be nonviolent — but when one is willing to be vulnerable like that what happens is the protective measures and the fear that those protective measures are based on are exposed. There is a realization, “Oh my God, who knows? This could turn bad.” It has before — Tiananmen Square. Nobody thought it was going to be like that and it just turned out violent.

So there’s a facing death of the form that has to occur and that’s what Gandhi and Martin Luther King talked about, the willingness to say, “Okay, hit me. Beat me. I’m here. I’m not moving. I’m coming back. You’ll have to kill me. You kill me, there will be other people who will come back.”

Nelson Mandela was in jail for the whole prime of his life. There’s a power in that but it is based on the power of love and it’s based on the power of, “I will not hate you, and if I hate you I will not act on that hate. I will not follow that hate, even at the risk of my own life.” This is huge.

And again I want to say that nonviolence is not necessarily my position, I’m not attached to that. But in my life it was very appropriate to shake lose some identification with form that prepared me for finally getting at the root of that identification. I firmly see that if we don’t wake up it doesn’t matter what changes happen — that we’ll be corrupted by our power to change. We have been corrupted by our power to change.

Simone: So much so that we’re on the verge of extinction, in spite of all our humanitarian efforts.

Gangaji: That’s right.

Simone: There seems to be a call for something new, a greater creativity to come up with sustainable alternatives. Especially now that we’re faced with the corporate globalization of the world.

Gangaji: Which has already happened. It’s a fact. It’s happened.

Simone: So rather than just opposing it and fighting it and making corporations “the bad guys” what can we do? These “monster” corporations are actually made up of people. In our fighting them, we find ourselves again being in a state of war with other people, so what could be an alternative approach in this situation?

Gangaji: I can’t even say that I’m against opposing it, because it seems that that has its place. If somebody burst into this room with malevolent intention for us I would jump up and oppose that. It’s like a wild animal out of control. You know it as part of the Earth but it’s out of control and it’s time to say, “Stop.”

So I’m not even against activism as it has been because that’s part of the whole too. And perhaps that even has to continue to get our attention. If there weren’t opposition to any number of things how would we even know what’s going on in the world? Which is the way it was centuries ago — the kings said, “Do it”, and it was done, and maybe you found out about another tax or something five years later.

It’s just that for those who have recognized the futility and the incongruity of this opposition within themselves, there must be a call for them to not know so that, as you say, creatively something new can come forth so that there can be a merging of activism and non-activism, where something altogether unknown is revealed.

Simone: So that the actions we take can be a conscious response rather than an unconscious reaction?

Gangaji: It must finally be a conscious response.

Simone: The action itself may be the same but the energy behind it could be different.

Gangaji: Yes, it might be the same. And there’s even a place for unconscious reactions. Sometimes you don’t have time to access what is going on, to ask who is this man coming at me with this weapon?

Simone: You don’t have time to meditate first and get clarity.

Gangaji: Exactly. It’s like, what’s the unconscious reaction? Stop this, or run.

Simone: Then there’s a trust also.

Gangaji: There’s a trust in the whole and also without buying into the momentum of the conditioning of the whole. It’s really paradoxical, extremely paradoxical. And it’s also very humbling. There is, to me, a saving grace in the humbling of it. It doesn’t mean that you aren’t active but you are much more humbly active than we’ve ever been willing to be because we don’t know what mistakes we are making at this time.

We assume that we aren’t making the mistakes, that “they” are making the mistakes. If we can assume that mistakes are being made everywhere, and we are certainly making mistakes that we are not conscious of, then there is at least a humility and a willingness to see as we go along. We can see that perhaps the way I’ve been talking to the utility people or corporate America is not exactly in rapport. [Laughter] Perhaps there’s a way of being with them so we can actually meet, that we can actually talk.

I remember a demonstration in San Francisco, when I was a nonviolent trainer, and we were in a line waiting to get into a meeting and there was this guy that looked really horrible. This was the post-hippie era but he was really into the whole dirty, hippie look. And I said, “You know, I really believe our message would be heard much better if you’d clean up your act a little bit because they’re just going to dismiss you. They’re just going to ignore you.”

He didn’t relate to that at all and who knows, he may have been right. They’ve got to learn to accept everybody, too. So that’s at play as well. But there must be, for some of us, a willingness to speak the vocabulary of those we are trying to reach and to be informed to a certain degree so that we’re not just dismissed as “fringe.” Although we are the fringe and we have to recognize that we’re the fringe, we also have to recognize that fringe is where the change happens. It’s where real change always happens and then it percolates back to the center.

Simone: So we can do our part to at least meet the other side.

Gangaji: Yes, and that is met within ourselves, because that is the only place the other side exists. The whole web of us vs. them is built upon, “I’m worth surviving” and “What will it take for me to survive?” And of course you can see that globally if you’re identified with the corporate culture, this is part of survival. That’s the way they see it, they see themselves as warriors and that they’re playing the role of a warrior. And they’re getting the benefits of the role of a warrior and the adrenalin rush.

But to recognize that that dynamic is also going on internally in the spiritual warrior or the activist warrior. It’s the same thing. Until we can see that we just participate in the same way, we’re just tribe vs. tribe. The strong will win and we aren’t the strongest that way. We don’t have the money, we don’t have the ammunition, and so there has to be something else.

Simone: And it's important to be aware that there’s something more important than just our temporary physical survival — like how will we survive, how will we live?

Gangaji: That’s right.

Simone: By playing their game or coming from Truth.

Gangaji: That’s right.

Simone: The “big Truth” not the personally owned "my truth."

Gangaji: Well, that’s it. And that’s just huge. If you look at it in a certain way, what we’re talking about is a near impossible task. It’s not the way human beings are programmed. It’s always been about conquering, it’s always been about territory and so we are really speaking about a huge evolutionary shift. Clearly, either the shift will be made or the extinction will happen. Or something else will happen — we’ll colonize space or something — who knows. But looking at it now, there’s an urgency. There’s a sense in many, many people that something has to change. Something more than this same old pattern of they hit us, we hit them, over and over.

Simone: Let's look at acting from Oneness. When we speak about acting from a consciousness of Oneness, for many people it can feel like it's just a concept. If one hasn’t experienced it directly, or doesn’t sustain awareness of it, how can support people to go beyond an intellectual understanding of it — so that it doesn’t just become a conceptual belief?

Gangaji: It’s like a religion then, a Oneness religion. But beyond an intellectual grasping for what Unity is, what's true is that Unity’s been here all along and you’ve known it all along.

Simone: And yet most people are looking for that big, supernatural experience of what Oneness is.

Gangaji: Yes, that’s right. They’re expecting something. If you are willing to let go of any picture or any idea of what Unity consciousness is, or any idea of what any state or feeling you should be having is, then you realize that Unity consciousness is simply what is always here — regardless of feeling.

There can be feelings of separation but they’re appearing in Unity consciousness. Then you don’t have to suppress your feelings of separation because they’re in the way of your realizing Unity consciousness. There can be anger or there can be hatred or there can be violence. You don’t have to suppress the arising of those human things, because they’re arising in Unity consciousness. Of course, you don’t have to act on those impulses either.

Part of the huge mistake I see when speaking with people is that many of them are spiritually conditioned because of spiritual experiences and the states that they evoke and they want those states back because it felt very good. This is the corruption by power again. Those are very powerful states. So then the mind gets corrupted and it’s like a drug. It’s really no different from a drug. It releases the same kind of endorphins and it’s like, “I have to have more of that Unity consciousness, that’s what I need to get. And I need to be experiencing that all the time.” And of course you don’t have time for that, no one has time for that, it’s like being stoned all the time. You couldn’t get anything done! [Laughter]

The truth of Unity consciousness, the truth of realization is so much simpler because it’s already here. It’s simply not identifying with a thought about who you are and what you need to feel, or a feeling or an emotion or a circumstance. And recognizing in that instant — it takes less than an instant — what’s here, what’s here right now.

And then you see it’s always here. Then the action that comes from that is more honest. It may not always be pleasant but it’s more honest because it’s not about trying to get to That, it’s coming from That. You see the trickery is that the mind can’t capture That. It can’t remember Unity consciousness — luckily — or it would just be another object. You can’t remember it. It’s not rememberable, because it’s present.

Simone: It's not real now when it's a memory from the past.

Gangaji: That’s right. Then it’s an object. You can remember sensations you had in wonderful experiences, exalted in altered states, but Unity consciousness is present in the most ordinary states. Everything is here. So no excuses! [Laughter]

Simone: Do you have any suggestions for those times when we find ourselves in situations that feel absolutely hopeless in the face of overwhelming unconsciousness and darkness? How can we maintain integrity and light and stay centered?

Gangaji: I speak to people about this all the time. It’s not usually in the context of activism but it’s the same question in an emotional context. And all that is ever needed is to meet whatever is appearing. Now that doesn’t mean if the murderer is running into the room that you don’t run out, I don’t mean it like that. But if there’s negativity — whether you’re just looking at the world today, or you’re experiencing it in yourself or experiencing it in your family — if you can stop for a moment, there’s a moment of retreat that I have discovered that has to occur.

To just stop and meet everything within you. Meet the heart and the nonverbal madness without resisting it and without indulging it because there’s a kind of dramatization of indulgence that can happen where one goes mad with the negativity. So to not go mad with it but to meet it in an open way of exploration. It can be terrifying because it’s huge and it seems annihilating and there’s a fear that arises that you can be annihilated by this negativity. But just stop and the fear is there, but without following the story of the fear, just meet it within yourself.

And then there’s a discovery that the waves of negativity part and there is a sanctuary of love and peace. This has to be directly experienced. Then there’s a recognition that what one has been fighting on the outside is really once again a reflection, a projection of the inside. Not that it’s not there but it’s a meeting of the fears — childhood fears, genetic species fears, fears that have not ever been met. We have within our genes the memories of our very superstitious ancestors, with really demonic kinds of beliefs. And this has to be met so that we can recognize that the demons — your demons — can be set free, liberated. It’s my realization that this is natural in stopping and meeting what is appearing, without taking that to be an absolute religion.

If you’re in an abusive situation, leave the situation, then stop and meet the horror of that, the shock of that, the terror of that. Also it doesn’t mean don’t get therapy, it doesn’t mean you don’t take care of your needs. All of that happens and you just take a moment to fall into what has been resisted throughout time. And then you aren’t part of the resistance anymore, you’re part of the liberation.

Even the resistance has had its place, and I really want to stress that. I’m not saying it’s inappropriate to resist. It’s appropriate to resist at certain times. Sometimes there’s just a misunderstanding of words. Everything has its place. But what has been overlooked is the possibility of seeing what everything is placed in. And that’s you. That’s who you are. That’s who one is. That’s Unity consciousness.

Simone: So it can be appropriate to move with resistance in a particular situation and to do that without being in separation from others or within oneself.

Gangaji: Yes, that’s right. And when you have been willing to face death and you realize that even if this body dies because of these negative emotions I’m experiencing, even if it really does annihilate this body, I AM. This body is gone, but I AM. The nervous system, the memories, the history, the relationships, all gone, but I AM. So the attachment of consciousness to the particular body is, if not severed, loosened. There’s more space. Then, when resistance is appropriate, it’s appropriate. It has nothing to do with a me or them, it has to do with the play. If your finger has gangrene you cut off your finger.

Simone: It’s an appropriate response.

Gangaji: Exactly. You don’t say, “Oh it’s sick, but it’s me, I love it, it’s fine” and then the gangrene just spreads. Soon you’re going to have to cut it off. So it’s an appropriate response and maybe a painful response, but it’s an honest response.

Simone: And the response would not be about power or unity against something.

Gangaji: Yes, that’s really important.

Simone: People often unify against a common enemy or a cause or a situation. But it’s not actually unity. It’s an illusion, a forgery of unity.

Gangaji: Yes, although as with the metaphor of the finger, in a sense you’re preserving the unity of the body, so you get rid of this finger that otherwise would destroy the integrity of the body. And it’s worth losing the finger, it’s disposable, it’s dispensable. We’re all disposable and we will all be disposed of and once that is directly recognized — then until that disposal happens — there’s a life force that’s freed up for this creativity that you were referring to. For what’s been unknown. And more of a willingness to see mistakes and a willingness to see habits and patterns that when seen just fall away or if they continue don’t cause harm.

It takes just an instant to recognize your Self and that recognition then continues throughout time for as long as this body is alive. There’s a deepening and there’s a broadening, but the essential experience, the essential instant is that willingness to die right now. Then there’s a realization, “Oh! What I was so trying to keep from dying is going to die.” And let it die. And then until it dies, how is time spent? So much time is usually spent around avoiding that question or protecting oneself from the reality of that question or protecting the body from death.

This is to me what is possible at this time — that that energy can be freed. That attention can be freed. Where it goes, how it’s used, I don’t know. I’m not a prophet at all. I don’t have any sense of what will happen, how much time we have, any of that. I just know that there are people at this time, who understand what that means — how much energy is built around that protection of the body. And they have tasted the release of that and have experienced how much freed energy there is.

Simone: And what would you say to those who say, "If all of the physical world is impermanent anyway, and the essence is eternal, why should we do anything to preserve the Earth or humanity?"

Gangaji: Well, people do say that. That’s halfway around the circle. Half baked. If you just follow it all the way through, you see that even that which is impermanent and unsaveable is one’s Self. This is consciousness, and it’s true that we can’t save the planet and yet the planet is our mother. Just as you can’t save your mother, when your mother’s going to go she’s going to go, but you are there to save her until the last breath — yet without the illusion that you can actually save her. But still your whole life is given to that, because how else is your life to be lived? If it’s to be lived in a cave, then that’s where you are, enjoying your cave. But if it’s to be politically active....

I think what you’re referring to is what some people bring up when there’s a burnout, when there’s a feeling of futility or hopelessness. Then it’s imposing a spiritual belief on “What’s the use?” I think we’ve all experienced that. “What’s the use, it keeps happening, it doesn’t change, it seems to get worse, so what’s the use?” But when one really faces meaninglessness, or “no use” or the impossibility of being saved or saving, there’s something that opens up — that the essence of meaninglessness is absolute meaningfulness. And the essence of not being able to be saved is redemption. But this is something that can never be understood by the mind because it can only hold polarities. It’s a paradox. It is only understood directly in experience.

Simone: So when you see that this planet is not going to physically survive forever, animals and people are going to die away, once you get to really accepting that then our natural movement or essence can emerge which would just be to love. There would just be love moving in the world.

Gangaji: Yes! [Laughter] And this surprises people.

Simone: And love would naturally move us to take care of each other and the planet without any strategies or thoughts of the future.

Gangaji: That’s right, that’s perfect.

Simone: But we don’t usually get to that place.

Gangaji: And people are very afraid of getting to that place — that it will be the opposite of love because people have such a profound distrust of what their core nature is.

Simone: Yes, that I couldn’t possibly be naturally loving! [Laughter]

Gangaji: [Laughter] That’s right. That’s the dilemma, to really invite that sense of despair or meaninglessness or hopelessness, and to the degree where it is met, such a discovery is made. I look at my life when I was searching, searching everywhere, for happiness and then spiritual happiness — however it was defined. And that was completely appropriate at the time, but to look back at that, there was so much energy and attention to try to escape the void or the meaninglessness. Then to stop and fall into the void, into meaninglessness, into hopelessness, and all of a sudden, my life is now of use! Before it was just about taking. That’s the divine paradox, that there is a flip. It’s just like with Ramana, even though he was not political — he wasn’t a political activist in any sense of the word — he’s had a profound political effect. Just by being himself.

Simone: A revolutionary.

Gangaji: Yes, by being true. But not by plan or agenda or idea.

Simone: Not seeking his sense of value or identity through that.

Gangaji: Right.

Simone: That was one of the things I had to face when I initially took a break from the activism groups and projects. Without them I felt, “Well then, who am I? What’s my purpose?” And I saw how I had been getting egoic validation from finally feeling that I had some value in the world by doing all the activism. And then once I let go of those activities I had to really look at what my motivation had been and how that was tainting my actions or preventing me from being as effective as I could have been had I not been attached to the activism in that way.

Gangaji: That’s right, that’s a huge leap. That’s really huge because you have to face so much. And that’s how your sensitivity really served you.

Simone: One of the things I’d like to go back to and explore further is when you said that we have our spiritual concepts of what Unity and Oneness are, but that anger and hatred may arise in that as well. Could you expand on that a bit more?

Gangaji: Well, we are aware of anger and hatred, and Unity includes all.

Simone: So don’t make those feelings the enemy.

Gangaji: That’s right. That gives us a devil and then what happens is that there’s a suppression of that feeling and it goes underground. And the attacks become more unconscious or the internal attacks are there. Totally inappropriate attacks, like you attack somebody who is walking by your house rather than somebody who has actually burst in. It gets distorted because the human animal has these emotions that were part of the survival of the body. And if we try to get rid of them we’re trying to form our idea of the evolved human being rather than meeting the emotions as they appear — to recognize what’s deeper than human — that which is the unified principle.

Simone: One of the things I’m concerned about is that hard core activists in the street getting thrown in jail or laying their life on the line may feel that this is new age fluff and that we don’t know what we're talking about because we haven’t been in their shoes. How can one respond to this other than that many of the old ways of activism haven’t ultimately worked?

Gangaji: Well, I think it’s to be expected that it will happen. There will be opposition. Let it break your heart. It’s heartbreaking. You know where you’re coming from and you will be misunderstood. You will be greatly tested. To what degree we don’t know, but we’ll find somebody who will misunderstand you and condemnation won't be far behind.

Simone: It’s impossible to speak everyone’s language.

Gangaji: Yes, exactly. And maybe some will understand what you say. What a blessing that is. It’s pretty amazing that anybody understands anybody considering how primitive and limited communication is and how distorted it gets. So the offering really has to be something that’s between the lines, something that can resonate and that you have no control over in terms of who will resonate with it. It could be somebody who has done really hard time.

There are people who have resonated with satsang who have been in jail for many years. And wow, what a surprise that was! I knew I wanted to speak to people in prison but I had no idea it would be so well received. And on the other side there are spiritual seekers who totally write me off, so what to do? It’s heartbreaking. The whole business of being human is heartbreaking.

Simone: Life is heartbreaking.

Gangaji: [Laughter] Yes, life is heartbreaking. It just is and that’s actually good because that also keeps us humble and keeps us open. If we let the heart break and break and break and break, then we see what’s unbreakable.

Conscious Activism Dialogue with Gangaji & Simone Marie Lorenz

February 3, 2003
© 2003 Simone Marie Lorenz

There are thousands of ways to write about awakening, but ultimately, all of them are mere pointers to what it really is. We don't have words for it, just relatively pale descriptions of what the process of awakening is like.

It is something one must experience directly, and by grace or with proper guidance most people can get, at the very least, an initial taste of it to begin their journey.

Awakening, at a deep level, is a profound state of being where one is a living presence, a living awareness, in a human body, experiencing life.

Awakening is not an abstract experience, it's actually more real than what we've been experiencing as everyday "real life."

It's more real because in an awake state we are not saddled with identification with our story — that repetitive ego narration of a limited version of ourselves that we’ve been conditioned to believes ourselves to be.

Most people walk around with an underlying belief that there is something wrong with them.

Hungry or starving for love and fearful of being seen or judged, there is often great psychological and emotional suffering, which can eventually manifest as physical illness.

And so much of the tension in life comes from unconsciously looking at everything through the stress-generating question, "Is this an opportunity (to get love, security) or a threat (to my survival or to getting or keeping love)?"

In one's natural state of presence, identification with the mind-made sense of self — its limiting beliefs and suffering life — dissolves.

In that state, there is no fear around survival. Instead, there is a sense of love for all life.

A recognition that all life, every life, is sacred and worth cherishing. There is no emotional neediness or grasping for love, no fear of not having enough.

Rather, there is a state of ever-present unconditional love, wholeness and abundance.

There is a felt sense of being one with all that is, and simultaneously an awareness of being a unique individuated expression.

This is our natural state of being.

For the vast majority of us, being in a state of conscious presence comes and goes. When we’re in that space, we’re filled with light.

When we’re not, we generally suffer to some degree. But only because we’ve temporarily forgotten who and what we really are.

Awakening is available to everyone. And while there is no way to force it to happen, there are ways of nurturing the seeds of awakening ever present within each of us.

People often share how being out in nature — a natural setting like a forest or the ocean — can help bring them into stillness. Into a state of presence.

What gets broadly overlooked is that we are nature as well — nature confused perhaps, but nature nonetheless.

And once we allow the morass of the mind's complexity and its compulsive thinking to drop away, our true nature of oneness and presence can be felt and known.

And as we realize this deeper truth and live as the radiant, still beings that we are, then those who may not yet have awoken to this essential truth within themselves will seek you out, recognizing you as a great wonder of the natural world — so that they, too, can remember who and what they truly are — and live more frequently, in presence.

And when you’re with others, remember that there is a great gift to being able to listen more deeply than one's normal listening state. To really be in a state of presence with someone.

To move beyond just listening to the words, to sensing the energy that the words carry. Sensing the energy that carries the words. Sensing the overall energy emanating from those we’re with. Aware, sensing.

The felt sense of awareness that’s prior to thought and interpretation. The direct experience of what's real.

From that space we are much closer to the whole of what is being expressed. Deeper than what gets filtered through the mind — interpreted, limited, distorted.

In presence, there’s no need to plan what to say because if something isn’t moving through us to express, presence is the expression. That’s what touches people.

Deep listening, in presence, brings warmth to those around us. It's intimate, connecting, unifying. The healing effect of being in Oneness and feeling so heard, seen, known is a most precious gift.

This timeless dialogue between Eckhart Tolle and Simone Marie Lorenz focuses on the need for today's activists to be centered and grounded in The Now, in presence when engaging in their efforts to bring about positive and constructive change in the world.

Eckhart speaks to how many activists often begin by fighting — initially, against some common enemies.

But because they haven’t first addressed the root cause of human unconsciousness in their own lives, they soon begin fighting amongst themselves as well.

This undermines their potential, and the internal war splinters or breaks up groups trying to do good in the world.

Simone: What are your experiences or observations regarding activism, especially regarding the potential futility of fighting even that which is considered “the good fight”?

Eckhart: Yes, there’s a losing sight of the root cause of all those manifestations of human unconsciousness that you find in the world — whether it’s destruction of the environment, suffering inflicted on animals, starving children, violence. There’s no end to things that need to be changed. It’s easy for the mind to become absorbed in one particular cause, to become obsessed with that, and then you lose yourself trying to fight one manifestation of human unconsciousness.

You can never ultimately win this battle when you only address the many ways in which dysfunction of the collective human mind manifests. There’s no way of winning that fight against unconsciousness because you cannot fight unconsciousness itself. You can do little things to sometimes remedy certain extreme manifestations here and there, but unawareness of the root cause of all those manifestations leads to being lost, losing oneself in that battle and ultimately getting drained.

You also find that within many groups that are fighting, initially against some common enemies, conflict develops within the groups themselves. This is because the people who are engaged in those struggles haven’t looked at the core — the root cause of human unconsciousness. They carry the human unconsciousness, whose manifestations they are fighting against, into their own action, into their activism. Before they know it, they’re fighting amongst themselves as well.

So there are many groups that are fighting for peace or fighting against war, but sooner or later they’re fighting amongst themselves. They wage an internal war and the organization splinters or breaks up.

Simone: Yes, I've lived through that. People would be drawn together, passionate about a cause and moved to take action. Eventually, there would be disagreements about how to best take action. People would get so attached to their positions and started perceiving those with differing views as "enemies". It was painful to experience. That's why I feel we need to wake up out of our own unconsciousness first, because without that we inevitably add to the pain in the world that our hearts want to mend. But I'm really torn about this because there are so many major challenges in the world that urgently need attention. Yet until we get to the core of it...

Eckhart: Yes. It’s so important to look at the root cause of all that. And that is spiritual work — to realize what the root cause is. It’s a false sense of self, a sense of identity that’s based on a conceptual reality and a sense of identity that it is never enough. It always needs more, and it needs its enemies.

So the activist must begin to look at this deeply embedded structure in the human mind, the egoic mind, which is the need for enemies. In some cases, it looks as if you’re fighting for a good cause. But if you haven’t looked truly within yourself, very often the deeper unconscious motivation for those struggles is the unconscious egoic mind structure that needs its enemies. Because when you are fighting against something or someone, your sense of who you are gets strengthened. That ultimately fictitious sense of identity gets strengthened, especially for people who carry a lot of anger into their activism. For them it can temporarily feel good.

Simone: And we do this as groups, religions, countries.

Eckhart: Right, because there's also a collective egoic identity: you identify with your group or cause against all “those” out there, or one particular group of people that you are fighting against. And you’re fighting what looks on the surface like a very worthwhile cause, but it is possible that the deeper motivation is to unconsciously strengthen your sense of self. Even when activists talk about their worthwhile cause, as long as they are trapped in an egoic identity they need to enhance it because the egoic identity has the deep-seated need to strengthen its sense of self.

Some people do it through acquiring status, possessions or knowledge, or by identifying with certain mind structures that cause them to judge themselves as failures. That works too. You can base your identity on the mental image of being miserable and then you will seek miserable experiences. You will be seeking all those things for a stronger sense of self.

Simone: Even if that stronger sense of self includes greater suffering.

Eckhart: That's part of the madness that's there if you haven’t looked into the underlying unconscious mind structures. And you'll bring all of this into relationships as well. No area of your life will be left untouched by this.

And if we only look at the manifestations of unconsciousness — there’s so much — where do we start? What’s the most important one? Is it the fact that humans and children are starving, or is it the fact that we are destroying nature — the very basis of all human life — is that even more important? Or is it the weapons and the military— the continuous warfare — is that it?

And there’s no realization that the core of all that is madness. It is an insanity in the human mind, a deep flaw in the human collective mind which all the ancient traditions have also pointed to. This is a the deeper meaning of “original sin.” What the Buddha called “suffering,” and what Hinduism calls “illusion.” There’s a flaw, and once you see it that’s already the beginning of freedom. Just seeing that unconscious core of the human mind is already the beginning of freedom.

The seeing is awareness arising, the witnessing consciousness arising. Awareness arising is an internal experience, not something you can see outside of yourself. And when you see the core of human unconsciousness in yourself, you realize there’s nothing personal in it at all. It’s nobody’s personal problem. It’s simply collective. It’s the species in its present stage of development. That’s how it is, nothing personal. But it’s essential to see it in oneself.

Simone: Because without seeing it you can't truly know what is at the root of the madness. You might not even recognize that there's madness!

Eckhart: And once you’ve seen the core of unconsciousness as the ego’s deep-seated need to enhance itself, to have opposition somewhere so it can define itself through one form of enemy or another — and you’ve seen that in yourself as well — you’re less likely to construct an identity for those people who are still totally in the grip of that unconsciousness and therefore producing all the manifestations of unconsciousness that we find in the world. Whether they are manufacturing or using weapons, killing humans, destroying the environment, it’s all the same.

The important thing is that once you’ve seen it as non-personal you will not point at others and say, “Those are the evil ones.” Because when you personalize human unconsciousness and believe that you possess the truth or are on the side of good and they are on the side of evil, you've gone mad again.

"Good and evil” is really consciousness and unconsciousness. When you believe that you represent good and you’re fighting evil out there, then you have not yet seen something within yourself because unconsciousness/consciousness is within each human being. If you identify with consciousness only and say “all unconsciousness is out there,” that’s an illusion.

The true meaning of evil would be human unconsciousness. The original meaning of “sin” as used in the Old Testament is missing the mark, you miss the purpose of life. That’s the original translation of “sin.” Realizing that, you would already operate from a greater dimension of freedom.

Simone: Gandhi embodied this.

Eckhart: Gandhi did not create enemies. He did not make the British into enemies and yet his was a powerful way of activism. And it is not the only way. There are other similar ways of doing it. Mother Theresa did a lot of good and never created an enemy. Martin Luther King pointed things out while not identifying others as enemies “out there.” The activism actually becomes more powerful when you are no longer personalizing it. You can take action but it won’t be action against a projected identity that you have out there. It won’t be against “those people,” and it will be more effective action.

But this can only happen when you’ve already discovered within yourself that the cause of human unconsciousness is here, within. Then there’s freedom to act. And then there’s also not the compulsion, the obsessive element, because when you are obsessed with a cause or an action, you can very quickly get drawn into unconsciousness yourself. When you’re fighting unconsciousness, whether as an activist or fighting unconsciousness in another human being, you very quickly get drawn into unconsciousness yourself. That applies whether it’s a collective fight or whether it’s on a personal level.

You cannot fight unconsciousness or the manifestations of unconsciousness out there. That draws you into unconsciousness because that’s reactivity. It’s a fascinating subject and it’s very subtle. It’s good to look at people who were effective in bringing about a certain amount of change in the outer world and see that the most effective ones did not create enemies.

Simone: That’s a great pointer as to which forms of activism are most effective — the ones that do not create enemies.

Eckhart: Yes. Part of activism includes, in many cases, speaking out and pointing things out because people don’t realize certain things. But that can be done in an unconscious way with a lot of anger and negative energy — accusing and making enemies. You might be writing a letter to a newspaper and, although the facts may be true, everybody who reads that letter feels worse and more angry after reading it. And then each reader who opened the paper that morning and read it carries that energy into that day. It’s unimaginable what that does to the collective energy field, just one little thing like that.

Simone: Or when we come from fear.

Eckhart: Fear — a very strong energy. But the same letter could be written from the point of greater consciousness without the element of anger or fear, a letter that simply points out the facts and the madness of it without personalizing the madness. Then it’s actually more effective because anything that you do that contains fear or anger creates more of that. And that’s the trap for activists — not seeing that. Then they contribute to the unconsciousness, believing they’re fighting for the light but they are actually creating more darkness.

Simone: Often one of the pitfalls in activism is that being motivated from fear or from reactionary anger feels much juicier to the ego. It’s more seductive and easier to get caught in.

Eckhart: Oh yes, because it gives you a stronger sense of self in the absence of having found a true sense of self. That true sense of self is who you are beyond mind, beyond mental concepts, beyond mental images. In the absence of that, every ego is looking for a stronger sense of self. So what you call “juicy” means it feels good to the ego. It doesn’t really feel good to you but to the ego feels good because the ego grows through that.

Simone: There’s an adrenaline rush and all the physiological things that go along with that.

Eckhart: Yes, it’s an amazing thing to see but, once you’ve seen through all that, there’s a lot to be said for how good it can feel when activism is done in a conscious way. It’s a wonderful thing. Personally, my function, almost exclusively, is to address the root cause. So I could be called, in that sense, a “specialist.” But there is a lot of room for those who not only address the root cause within themselves but also the manifestations of unconsciousness in the world. This is what you are referring to as Conscious Activism. Being in balance when engaging in activism, not getting lost. You’re very likely to be much more effective when you no longer believe that all the bad is out there.

Simone: World transformation needs to start from within.

Eckhart: Yes.

Simone: But can we afford to wait for this transformation, this awakening of consciousness to occur? We’re running out of time as the global crises become more urgent.

Eckhart: We don’t need to wait and do nothing. Bring more awareness into the doing because it is there that consciousness can actually come in. If someone sits alone, waiting for some change to happen — perhaps they no longer interact that much because they feel they're not ready — then they could wait a long time. You actually see it more clearly the more you interact. The more you do, the more you can become aware of certain mind structures in yourself.

For example, I mentioned writing a letter to a newspaper. You may feel there’s something that you need to say about something — recent events, or whatever the cause is. You can sit down and write a letter and then the next morning you get up and read it and you suddenly sense an undercurrent of anger or fear in the letter. And you recognize that that was the state you were in when you wrote it last night. Then you pause for a moment and see that, in subtle ways perhaps, you had created an enemy. And then you write that letter again in a state of greater clarity but it doesn’t contain the undercurrent of fear or anger. When you write something, have a little bit of a gap where you can look at what you’ve written — perhaps leave it for a few days, a few hours, and come back to it.

When you are talking to someone you don’t have that gap, and you might realize only afterwards that some of your speaking was motivated by unconscious fear or anger. And then the next time you are more attentive, perhaps more alert when you engage. That self-observation comes in more and more. But avoid being critical. When it’s critical self-observation then you’re making unconsciousness into a person again, a “me.”

Simone: That’s where I often get lost. I can become too cautious that I don’t taint things I do or say and then that cripples or paralyzes me in taking action.

Eckhart: Yes, but the doing itself is the learning.

Simone: It takes a lot of trust and surrender.

Eckhart: Yes, it’s wonderful. And there’s a lot you can do when you meet with people who are also engaged in whatever form the activism takes. Just one conscious person — maybe not even totally conscious, but one person endeavoring to be in the state of presence — can make a big difference. You could just be there, present, without necessarily needing to say a word. Just holding a conscious space.

Just being there, is often enough a teaching in itself. Being there in a state of presence and not condemning others in your group who perhaps get drawn into unconsciousness. Again, not making an identity and saying, “You should know better,” but accepting them with compassion. Compassion arises when you see that there’s nothing personal in human unconsciousness. Compassion, not just for the people around you who are with you, but also for those that represent unconsciousness to you.

Inevitably, compassion arises when you no longer personalize the manifestations of unconsciousness. “They know not what they do.” But see that without feeling superior, another little trap of the ego. The ego can come in through the back door at any point. Even when you realize that “they know not what they do,” the ego can suddenly claim superiority. Again you would have, in a subtle way, made an identity out of unconsciousness because then you feel superior and they are inferior — comparison has come in.

So the work happens on two levels: the outer and the inner, simultaneously. It’s not that you need to get the inner right and wait. It’s better simultaneously because it works more effectively. One can easily fool oneself if you withdraw and say, “I’m going to spend three years in meditation just to see if I can become free.” But if you isolate yourself you wouldn’t get enough reflections to even know whether you are free or not. It’s only through human interaction that you can get the reflections, the reactions, and then you learn about yourself. It’s easy to fool yourself if you are shut away in a room and perhaps your meditation goes well. It’s as if you’ve “made it” . . . until you start interacting again. And then you get the reflections and realize, perhaps not!

In a way, the greatest saddhana, or spiritual practice, especially for our present day civilization, is to do human relationships. How could it be otherwise? There’s never been so many humans living on the planet; they’re everywhere! You can’t get away from them so this has to become your spiritual practice. The main focal point or spiritual practice in some recent teachings such as A Course in Miracles is human interaction, relationships. This is different from some spiritual traditions in past times where people would withdraw as much as possible. For those times, perhaps that was appropriate. And for a few, isolated individuals here and there — even nowadays it may still be appropriate — but for most, needing to withdraw would not be true.

Simone: There’s more at stake now. There may not be a livable planet left by the time we come out of our isolated spiritual practices.

Eckhart: Yes, that’s right. The urgency of change is here very strongly.

Simone: The words “unconscious” and “conscious” have different psychological, medical and spiritual definitions. Let's clarify what you mean when you use those words, like when you referred to Jesus pointing to unconsciousness when he said, “They know not what they do."

Eckhart: You have to look at the human mind to understand what being unconscious is. The simplest definition is complete identification with the mind, which includes emotions, reactions, and behavior patterns, thoughts and beliefs — all thinking-based. Complete identification with thought and emotions. Complete identification means there’s no witnessing presence at all. You’re run by conditioning from the past. It’s the collective conditioning of the collective mind. You’re run by that, and you and everybody else thinks there’s a “somebody” there. [Laughs] “Unconsciousness” is complete identification with that. And being “conscious” is to step out of identification with mind. Not that there is no mind anymore, but what arises then is the awareness, the witnessing presence. That is the growth of consciousness.

Many people these days may be conscious for a while, quite present for a few days or even a few weeks, and suddenly something happens and they get pulled back completely into unconsciousness again. And then you suffer. And through the suffering you wake up again. You may sometimes meet people engaged in spiritual work who seem totally awake, and then you meet them again a few weeks later and they’re the opposite. [Laughs] That can happen; it’s the case with many people. And again, it doesn’t mean that you made a mistake when you saw them before. It just means they got pulled back into mind.

You can perhaps observe it in your own life. Sometimes there’s great presence and then perhaps something happens, often through a relationship or interaction with another human being, and it pulls you back into reactivity, thoughts, emotions — enormous mind structures being amplified by old emotions.

More and more people will be ready to see this operating within, but some may not yet be able to. And others still so identified with mind will refuse to see it. The mind doesn’t want to see it. The ego, the egoic entity, doesn’t want to see it. And some people may react when they hear the truth of this as they did strongly with other teachers. With Jesus, they reacted very strongly. There was less readiness then so they killed him.

Simone: Yes, which is why I see Conscious Activism as an act of great courage, both in the willingness to face one’s own shadow, as well as facing unconsciousness in other individuals and the collective. For me, there's such urgency for more of us to step up, for more and more conscious people to step forward and act.

Eckhart: True. I can see that many people are going through inner transformation now. It's also important for us to pay attention to what's going on in the world around us and to see how we want to contribute to the inner and outer transformation that urgently needs to take place. Each of us needs to transform and contribute in our own way. The very outcome of life on this planet depends on it.

And paying attention not just in conventional activism but in day-to-day interactions as well. How conscious you are affects every interaction, every human encounter. You can affect a person unconsciously through fear and that will have ripple effects throughout the collective, or you can affect people through being in presence and then presence spreads throughout the collective.

Simone: Conscious awareness, conscious living, is the ultimate activism.

Eckhart: Yes.

Conscious Activism Dialogue with Eckhart Tolle & Simone Marie Lorenz
Oct. 22, 2001
© 2001 Simone Marie Lorenz

Living in separation lies at the core of suffering and imbalance so rampant in the world and in our lives.

Healing this fractured and contracted state of being in separation from each other, from nature, from our essence, from love, is central to the path of awakening.

In coming back to wholeness, one moves toward embodying a deep awareness of truth and reality, cultivating one's capacity, ability, and willingness to live in presence, oneness, stillness, and freedom.

As we evolve, we become more and more free of egoic identification, of our conditioning, our karmic patterns, of mind-based emotional reactivity, and other symptoms of living in separation.

We return to the wisdom of heart-based living in The Now.

Our lives — and the lives of all those around us — change for the better, every step of the way.

There is a broad spectrum of feelings to experience in this human incarnation, and there is also a continuum of the degree to which we allow ourselves to feel and express those feelings.

The more we allow ourselves to feel across the entire spectrum of feelings, the greater our potential for living a full and rich life.

Sure, most people prefer to experience what we consider "positive" feelings, e.g., happiness, and most prefer not to experience feelings that are considered to be "negative" or painful.

Avoidance, distraction and denial are attempts to block one's awareness of those very present feelings.

Feelings are a form of energy and ultimately, cannot be denied without great cost.

Any attempt to block feeling is a block of one's natural flow which necessarily leads to imbalances that will show up in one's life in one way or another at the physical and/or mental/emotional levels.

We naturally feel deeply. We may attempt to shield ourselves from feeling at times, (consciously or unconsciously), but the experience of feeling is still taking place at some level.

Both positive and negative feelings are a part of wholeness and the totality of our being. Such is the inherent polarity in all of existence.

Have courage. Allow the feelings. Your reward is freedom.

I remember all too many times in younger days, being in movie theaters, experiencing rich, strong feelings. The body naturally wanted to cry out to organically release the buildup of feeling energy.

But in those days I was so fearful of revealing my raw vulnerability that even when everyone else in the theater was sobbing loudly, I would choose to let my head nearly explode from the pressure of pent up energy rather than let anyone see me cry.

Such is the pain of resistance. Oh dear young self, how I wish I had been there for you.

As each of us allow ourselves to fully feel, to expand into and embrace What Is, we can live more vibrant and richer lives, discovering the uncharted territory of our own true nature and paths.

To do this, we must absolutely allow and express whatever feelings, thoughts, and emotions arise within us. No denial. No avoidance. No distraction.

Just opening up to and allowing the flow of it all. In doing so, freedom and peace are present.

Through the last 8 years of Simone's life (my beloved wife of 27 years), she was in sleepless pain 23/7. It was relentless and each of us experienced intense feelings — at times fear or helplessness.

But we had long ago committed to each other to allow it all, to truly be present to what we experienced, and to share it with each other. And we did.

Moving through the process of having to let go as her life was slipping away, we turned toward the pain, together. It took everything we had to do this, because regardless of how far along any of us are on the path of awakening, resistance can creep in.

I mean, really, who would want to feel this or go through this? But we can.

Following her transition... the grieving... opening up new portals to pain stronger and deeper than anything I had ever experienced.

Breathing slowly and deeply. Allowing feelings to move through. Some waves more like tsunamis. But they would subside. More breathing, allowing, releasing.

Embracing it all. It only hurt so badly because the love was so deep. Sensing that allowed smiling. Cherished memories seeped through the pain.

I am grateful to have felt all of this. It honored the love and path Simone and I shared so bonded as one. Sacred.

It would have been tragic to have dimmed my light and muted my experience.

Shutting down would have cut me off from feeling, feeling her and feeling me and feeling you, which is the very last thing I would want to do.

Time passes and a lightness of being returns. This is not just the unfolding of the grieving process. It’s a form of Grace — which we, having allowed our deepest feelings to move through us – co-create.

Feel. Breathe. Allow. Breathe. Embrace the feelings and the energy that carries them. Breathe.

Breath… is life.

As we allow ourselves to fully feel, expanding into and embracing What Is, we live more vibrant lives, discovering the uncharted territory of our own true nature.

Moved by her love for children, animals and the environment, Simone Marie Lorenz engaged in many activist initiatives over the years. She was driven to do what she could to bring about positive change in the world, joining with others to creatively generate solutions to serious issues.

But she found every one of those experiences discordant for two primary reasons: 1) the groups always needed to identify an "enemy" to fight against; and 2) the participants inevitably began fighting amongst themselves.

Simone felt that spreading more violence in the world could not be the way to bring about positive change. She wasn't against powerful action being taken but felt that it had to come from love, not hate. Simone was no flower child, rather a force of nature that could stop you in your tracks with a word or a look. But she saw clearly that acts of domination were not the way to change the world.

In 2001, she was inspired to create the "Conscious Activism" project. The first stage of the project was to dialogue about how to more consciously engage in activism with some of our time's great consciousness teachers and agents of transformation:

The dialogues that arose out of their meetings together are rich, illuminating, and empowering — providing guidance toward new ways of taking action in the world to end unnecessary suffering.

Simone could not complete the project before her passing. I will see this through for her by releasing these incredible dialogues — fulfilling her lasting gift to the world, her hope we could come together as one.

On August 18, 2015, my name legally evolved to Bodhi Jeffreys.

I was born with a name that never felt right. I never felt like a Bruce Cohen (Bruce Jeffrey Cohen). It's a fine name, and I'll be auctioning it off on Ebay, but it just never resonated with me. Worse, hearing it was irritating at a very deep level.

In college, I used stage names when playing music in clubs. I used Bruce Jeffreys for a while and it was better but still not right for me. I even tried Joshua Blakely, but discovered that I didn't have enough chest hair to pull that off.

My dear sister even ran a "Name That Bruce" contest. We received over 70 entries, some of which were so funny, but alas, nothing showed up.

Forward decades to 4 years ago. The name thing still haunted me. And for a guy who's work in the world depends on him being clear, this sure eluded me. Timing not right? Couldn't get out of my own way? Bad name karma for that time during the Ming Dynasty when I named my child Boobiedoo?

But in 2011, in a sacred ceremony, Simone and I gave each other names — names we could grow into over the next span of our lives and work. We agreed to choose names that would start with the first letter of our first names, S, B.

I chose Shanti for her and she chose Bodhi for me. Without sharing the names with anyone else, for 4 years we used those names exclusively with each other. She became Shanti and I became Bodhi. If felt so right.

Every time she called out to me it was like a sweet song playing. It was vibrationally resonant,as though I'd stepped into a new frequency, my true vibration.

In late May, 2015, as her life force was slipping away and the time was nearing where she could no longer speak, she looked at me tenderly and said, "Bodhi my dear, you do realize that when I'm gone there will be no one to call you by your true name? It's time to tell the world who you are."

It was a devastatingly painful moment....and liberating.

It took a month of being with this, working it out, processing anything that was in the way of clarity and freedom to reach the moment of absolute surrender. Then elation. Got in my car and off to the courthouse I went.

Bodhi is often mistranslated as enlightenment. Closer is awakened. But the purest translation is "true nature of things". Jeffreys comes from the English, "Godfrey" which comes from the Germanic, "Gotafrid", which means "peace of God". For me, the translation is "freedom". And this is what my work and path in the world has always been about: The true nature of things and freedom.

As with so many things, Simone's intuition was spot on. This is a name I can spend the rest of my life growing into, more and more deeply. And it finally feels right.

Now, and ever, Bodhi