by Awakin Call Editors: Dr. Judith Blackstone is the founder of the Realization Process, a contemporary method of spiritual awakening that includes embodied, psychological and relational healing…

Awaken

Over the past 40 years, she has developed and taught this process to thousands of people across the world. Among her thousands of clients and students are people from wide- ranging cultures, faiths and backgrounds. Her trainings are sought out by many who work in healing professions themselves, and she’s worked extensively with survivors of trauma. Judith’s explorations of Eastern traditions include studies in Tibetan Buddhism, a year in a Zen monastery and a 23-year connection to the ashram of a Hindu teacher in India. She studied with several leading lights in the Advaita Vedanta tradition. She is the author of half a dozen books including Trauma and the Unbound Body, The Healing Power of Fundamental Consciousness and Belonging Here, a Guide for the Spiritually-Sensitive Person. Judith is a trained psychotherapist, deeply experienced in multiple modalities of mind-body healing and her first career was as a professional dancer. What follows is the edited transcript of an Awakin Call interview with Judith Blackstone. You can watch or listen to the full conversation here.

 

(Moderator) Pavi Mehta: I want to begin in a kind of unusual way. I want to begin with a verse from Rilke and I’m just going to go right into it: “The inner? What is it if not intensified sky hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.”

My encounter with your work has felt deep with that kind of inner intensified sky and those same ‘winds of homecoming.’ What comes up for you as you hear Rilke’s words.

My connection to Rilke goes back to before I could read. My father used to read to me the poetry of Rilke. That was his idea of a bedtime story and it couldn’t be better. And he would read it in German and then he would translate it for me. And what was interesting about that is, because he was searching for the words, it felt as if he was making up the poem, that it was his poem coming right towards me and from him. So yes. My father and then my dad’s teacher, Rilke, has been with me for a while.

And that phrase, ‘homecoming,’ what does that evoke for you?

Yeah, homecoming. To feel comfortable, to feel truly, truly comfortable.

And in that context, can you share what lies at the heart of what you do? What is it that you’re attempting to offer into the world?

You know, I think it’s contact, actual contact with oneself, with other people and especially with everything in nature. Of course, many people find it easier to have contact with nature, but real contact with other people, with what you’re feeling– that things really ring true. That’s what I’ve been wanting. And, of course, the work I’m teaching just came out of ways that I found to get through to myself, to heal myself. That’s what I really needed.

Contact. That’s a beautiful word. You are often called a contemporary teacher of non-dualism, and for people who may not be familiar with that phrase, could you share a little bit more context?

It’s an umbrella term. It means so many different things to different people and different teachers. To me, and there’s a whole lineage of people who would agree with this, it means actually realizing oneself as a unified ground of being. So unified within, which at the same time is unified between oneself and everything around one. So to me, non-dualism means oneness. Doesn’t mean that to everybody, but that’s what it means to me and to many other teachers like myself.

Can you take us back to when you were nine years old and you stole away from home to go visit the synagogue–what were you looking for and what did you find?

You know, a child’s mind is interesting. I was brought up in a very strictly atheistic home. Now I think there are really good things about that in finding actual spirituality — there was nothing I had to unlearn. I was just given the bare bones [laughs].

A lot of children have the sense of a kind of a numinosity, a kind of presence or something in the air really. I felt it outside of myself in the backyard and in the air, and that was inexplicable to me and yet seemed somehow quite significant. I did somehow relate it to that need to get up close, to get real. And again, I don’t know how, or why, I associated that with religion.

And religion in my neighborhood in Brooklyn was Judaism. I am Jewish. My family is Jewish. Everybody went to the synagogue, pretty much except my family [laughs]. We were above that kind of thing, you know [laughs]. So, I went, and I did find that numinous presence in the synagogue, I did find it there and I found that very, very interesting. And, I would have actually probably devoted myself to it at that point. I did begin to learn to light candles on Friday night [laughs]. I had only the very elementary facts at my disposal.

I begged to go to Sunday school, and my father forbade it, but my mother talked him into it and I got to get one class there. And in that one class, I managed to learn a little bit of the Hebrew prayer that they say over the candles.  I would bring that in. And then that was, I guess, my first spiritual experience.

There is something so poignant about the child’s yearning to touch, to come up close to what’s real… I want to shift now, to talk about your dance career. I feel like it’s something that gets lightly passed over in the telling of your story. But I came across this 1970 review of one of your performances in the New York Times that said…..

Oh, [laughs] you really have researched this!

“Judith Blackstone, a taut, driven, radiant dancer.” You met your remarkable dance teacher, Donya Feuer, when you were nine years old. She had just returned at that time from touring Asia with Martha Graham. She would go on, a few years after working with you, to Sweden. And later on in her career, she worked very closely with Ingmar Bergman.

She did.

She was not your usual neighborhood dance teacher.

No no, she was wonderful.

When you were ten years old, she handpicked you to perform with her in her duet. It was her first major dance performance. And then you spent several years working with her, and fifteen years in total working with one of her partners. The crux of my question is: what did you discover of yourself in dance, and what did you lose of yourself in the process?

Yeah, that’s the arc of that story. Donya chose me out of this dancing school in Brooklyn, the Marjorie Mazia dancing school. And, then I had just a miraculous maybe six months in rehearsal with this incredible artist, this passionate woman.

She was in her early twenties — [laughs] you know, when I think back, she was just a child herself. But it was just the two of us and she introduced me to the expressiveness that the body can convey, you know. Of course, I had no dancing technique at that time. So she would say things like, “Okay close your eyes and walk very slowly downstage as if you are walking on grass.” And you could feel the grass. I mean it was just phenomenal for a child, it was like a game, you know? A beautiful and very serious game. She made something extraordinary. I can see why Bergman picked her to work with when she got to Sweden.

And, that’s what dance meant to me — it meant that same kind of numinous quality was now something that I could actually feel animating my body, and I could express that aliveness. It was wonderful.

Then I started going to ballet classes. I’d been trying to strengthen a body that was really not meant to be that strong. And so I made a kind of exterior body, on top of my body. And I also became, interestingly, quite objectified. To get the technique, you had to look at yourself in the mirror, along with a bunch of other people, and think, “Oh, my leg is a little bit lower, but I’ll lift it up.” And so you’re kind of out there, in the mirror — you’re no longer really here [in your body], you’re there in the mirror. And in adolescence, that can happen anyway — you know, that kind of objectification. Suddenly, you’re like a girl, and getting all kinds of strange attention, you don’t quite know what to do with. So that objectification, and the way I coped with it — was to make the best object I could — that I had to undo finally, to get through to myself.

Yes. And you followed that path as far as it would take you. You also had an acute form of scoliosis and another spinal condition. You had to work really hard to counterbalance that.

I did, yes. I had a chiropractor tell me, when I was around fifteen, that dancing was not for me. I was like, “You’re kidding, That’s all I am.” And so I just worked to make myself stronger. And for a while, it held, and then finally it broke — couldn’t hold anymore. And then I wound up without my dancing, without my nice objectified body, without my strength, without my band of fellow dancers. I stared really deep in the hole. And what could happen from there?

The operation that they did to fuse your spine, fused it in further, in misalignment. And so you, who had an exquisite sense of balance, were suddenly in this shell of misalignment–

That’s right. It was excruciating. I couldn’t walk a straight line across the room because I would just be disoriented. I was fused out of whack. I had a particularly good sense of balance — I was one of those people who could stand on the ball of one foot and then lift up the other leg and then go around and then come down. So, I had a very good balance. And now I couldn’t look in the mirror, my face was all squished to one side. I mean, it was just really not a good idea to have that surgery.

And then the real work began, because I had to find a way to undo it. And I went around to healers, I met some very interesting people. I went around to every kind of bodywork  available at that time. It was the early seventies. And nothing worked. So, I had to sit and figure it out myself, actually lie on the floor, figure it out myself and make very deep, subtle contact with myself in order to start to heal, to begin to feel normal.

And very luckily, very fortunately, really (although it certainly didn’t seem so at the time), people were coming to my dance studio where I lived, for dance classes, because that’s how I made a living. I was in my mid-twenties, and so I’d have all these people come in for dance classes and I couldn’t dance. So I began to teach them these little subtle things that I was discovering in this inward process of myself. And of course, their problems — and I was interested to see that they also had difficulties in their bodies, maybe not as bad as mine, but still things — misalignments, imbalances and so forth. So the ways that I was finding to balance myself and to get to center, in the off-center body, I could teach, right? So that’s where it started.

When you were somewhat immobilized, you were discovering a new capacity for movement — a movement almost like motionless dancing–

It certainly started out motionless, but I think even more importantly, I was finding that you could refine your awareness. You can get to a more subtle level of your whole being, and that was completely new to me. I began to be interested enough in it that I lost my despair about having lost my previous life, and began to focus on this — because this seemed really interesting. And then I started to go to bookstores and grab books that might explain this — books on yoga, books on martial arts- like, “What is this more subtle kind of level of being?” I started to read about it and began to make those sorts of correlations

You practice deeply in different traditions, but did you ever take a teacher? 

Well, Sai Baba, I took as a teacher. All the people that I learned the most from have fallen from grace. I mean, you can just barely say their names in public, and yet they helped me so much. But I considered him my teacher for years, from 1975 to the year 2000, when it all hit the fan. So, there was that. I was not a devotee, you know, I could not be a devotee. I always had that atheist foundation. Aside from that, I was also desperately looking for my own healing. I had this problem in my back. I was uncomfortable. At the beginning of this, you asked me what homecoming was, and I said “comfort.” I was uncomfortable and so I was kind of desperate for healing.

I was also very, very, very curious. I began to be curious intellectually because it seemed to me that the Buddhists were saying something different from the Hindus and that some Buddhists were saying something different from other Buddhists. To me, coming from my atheist background, that means, “They do not know,” right? These people are saying this, and those people are saying that. We as a human race, we do not know. So, that interested me.

I was also looking, so I could not just stop in one place. I needed to know, is this going to help me? Is this going to help me? And is this going to explain this pervasive consciousness that I was beginning to feel more and more palpably, more tangibly? Where is the explanation for that? I was very interested that there were explanations in the Hindu teachings, both to be found in the Sai teachings and to some extent in the Vedanta and could be found in some of the Tibetan Buddhist teachings, Chen and parts of the Khardic traditions. If you really stretched, it could be found in some of the Zen traditions. Anything that  alludes to this ground of being, I was very interested in that. Because what is it? So, that is what kept me from just parking somewhere.

 I remember you writing in your unpublished memoir, a line about recognizing at some point that it was not just your back that was broken. But almost like a capacity for love that had been limited. And there were different facets of healing that were coming to the surface on this journey. 

Yeah. As I began to introspect and inter feel, I realized that I needed healing everywhere. It is very interesting. Once I was sitting in on one of Sai Baba’s lectures in India and Sai Baba would talk in a very general way about loving your neighbor and doing service. So that was his main thing. Of course, he had like 20,000 people in the audience. But occasionally, he would throw in a line that would be about the universe and that would seem to be about you in particular. You know, at some point in the middle I would kind of zone out …. love everybody, help everybody, yeah, yeah. That is very nice. But then he said “You have to cut through many layers to operate on the spine.” What?? Did he just say that? [laughing] And that is how I felt. I felt like I had been pierced through many levels of myself and each one had to be healed, and definitely psychological. Of course, I trained as a therapist, I have a lot of experience with psychotherapy and different kinds of psychotherapy, but I was most interested in the kind of tightness that I felt in my body. A lot of it was around the spine curvature. But, all kinds of tightness, all kinds of constriction. And so, I began to work on myself. I always seemed to be like, “Well, that is good, but let me see what I can do.” If it is just my personality, I do not know if it is great.

But anyway, I was working on myself. I worked with a bodyworker, who used to put her hand on the tensions in my body and she would say that she was feeling for the movement inside the constriction. Then I began to be able to do that myself. I could focus in, and I could feel that there was movement in the constriction. In fact, if we moved further into the constriction, then it would unwind. And I was like, “oh,” and I began to unwind myself. And that was something that I did for years and years on myself. I did not teach it. I did not bring it into my work as a therapist. One day I had a very, very sensitive client come, and I could see the tension. By that time, I could just see everybody’s tensions. She was working with something and I thought, “well, I will try to explain to her what I’m doing here. That I am focusing with them, on the tensions in such a way that there is internal movement further into the tension. And then let go.” She was able to do it. No problem. It was easy, easy peasy. So, then I started to teach everybody so everyone can do it. It is the psychological aspects of the realization process.

Definitely sounds simple, but it’s amazing that you’ve discovered these practices that help open people to being able to access that. Could you describe the Realization Process in a nutshell and the different pillars of it?

The Realization Process is basically a way of uncovering an experience of this very subtle consciousness that we actually can experience pervading our whole body. So that gives us a sense of our whole internal being at once. And at the same time, when we experience that, we transcend that individuality. We still experience it, but we transcend it at the same time. And we experience oneness, this ground of being pervading our own body, and everything around us — not just living beings, but the computer, the printer, [everything]. So our consciousness becomes subtle enough to pervade all of the content of our experience, in other words. And it pervades inside and out.

And in doing that, it reveals and helps us access and release the psychologically-based constrictions, the trauma-based constrictions in our body. And it helps get to the core of our being, to the source of our love, to our greatest openness of emotional responsiveness, our greatest fluidity of our thoughts, and our greatest fluidity of pleasure, and so forth.

Because this consciousness — I call it fundamental consciousness, but it’s mentioned in many of the Asian teachings, especially — it’s a disentangled aspect of ourselves. So, when we know ourselves as fundamental consciousness, all of the contents of experience move more fluidly. We experience stillness and fluidity, change, at the same time. They’re inextricable– ground and content.

So, that’s what it is. It’s a series of practices, a series of techniques for inhabiting the body, opening to the ground of being, fundamental consciousness pervading the body and one’s environment, getting to this subtle core of the body, letting go from there so that we actually stabilize and live and know ourselves as that ground.

I’m sure for many listeners this all sounds wonderful and wonderfully distant as a possibility. Could you begin with talking a little bit more about why inhabiting the body such an important part of this work?

Yeah, it’s a letting go. Fundamental consciousness is — as the Buddhists call it– self arising. It’s not something we create. I mean, that’s what’s so amazing about it. That’s why a lot of the spiritual traditions have called it Buddha nature. Like our true nature, like who we really are because we don’t invent it or imagine it, we uncover it.

And so it’s a letting go. But if we just let go, most people will let go from the surface of themselves in a kind of spacey way. And then, you know, things look good out there, but they’re vacant inside. That’s not yet fundamental consciousness, which pervades– which is the ground of our own being, it pervades our whole body and our environment. So, we need to let go into fundamental consciousness, not from the surface of ourselves, but from deep within the whole internal space of ourselves.

So that’s why I start by inhabiting the body. Now inhabiting the body also turns out to be the deepest contact we can have with our individual being. So, it’s healing on a personal psychological level. I mean, at that point in our process, I think our psychological healing and maturity isn’t separable from our spiritual maturity. It is the same process.

So, when we inhabit the body, we have a palpable sense of our own existence that we take up space. Many sensory people, myself included, feel very flat to the world, like life is just living right on us, you know? Like we don’t exist. And I think that some of the non-existence teachings get traction from that sense– we grow up feeling like, “Yeah, I don’t exist.” But when we inhabit the body, we have a tangible sense of actually taking up space, and having inner volume– of existing. That for me, personally, was very healing psychologically because I could then go out in the world, and all those people who always just seem so intimidating, so much more kind of there than myself — I have my own tangible sense of existing and then I can interact with them, no problem. Up there I was.

So, healing psychologically brings in self confidence. And the qualities — this is serious, but it’s not distant from us. It’s right here, and I found most people can do it. It can take a few months sometimes, but most people can find this, given the right direction into it.

When we have the body, we uncover qualities of our being. So we can actually feel love, we feel love in our chest and then we can actually feel it everywhere in our body. But to feel love inside your body without even needing an object of love, that goes a long way to healing the kind of self-loathing, shame, and so forth that many of us grew up with.

It’s common knowledge in the therapy world that when children have been abused in any way, they feel shame. They blame themselves, like “What’s wrong with me?” I think almost everyone grows up with some amount of self-loathing. But with that feeling of love inside your own body, it’s hard to keep disliking yourself. They’re like, “I’m made of love, so I must be not a terrible person. I’m made of love.”

And same with the actual feeling of your intelligence. Actually feeling your intelligence. So all that self-talk of, “I’m so dumb, I’m so stupid,” kind of dissipates when you feel your intelligence. And it also helps in interacting with other people. Like “I have my intelligence over here. You have your intelligence over there. We can really relate now without either of us overpowering the other.” We uncover an actual feeling of power in our body. That was amazing for me to feel too.

There really is a feeling of power. And of course it’s not power over someone. In fact, when you feel that power in yourself, you have less and less desire to overpower, or bully anybody else. Because you’re finding yourself, you’re competent in yourself, you have your own power. So, inhabiting the body is very important, both for the letting go into the pervasive space of the ground of being, and for really knowing one’s own self and healing one’s own personal life.

Beautifully said. I’ve heard you refer to your work as peer teaching and not an approach that requires being reliant on the teacher. What do you mean by that?

Well, anyone who can do these practices and knows them can teach them. It’s the practices themselves that are helpful — if they are– not the teacher. I’m not transmitting my glorified state to somebody else. Their state might be better. I have no idea, you know. So it’s not a transmission. It’s definitely not about directing your devotion towards the teacher. So in that sense, it’s a peer teaching. Anyone who can do those practices can teach them.

One of the things that you say comes from this work is the capacity to feel, think, and sense at the same time. Can you share a little bit more about that?

When we inhabit our whole body, we have a sense of our whole being at once. It’s amazing because most of us, we’ll think or we’ll feel. To do both at once, that of course enriches both. It brings truth to our thoughts, our emotional truth to our thoughts. And it brings clarity, a lack of confusion, to our feelings. So it’s very good. Writing is a wonderful way to practice that. That you’re writing, not just from your head, not just from your heart, but from your whole being. So everything’s affected by it, the way you see, that wholeness, the way you receive life, and the way you express yourself.

You’ve also said on different occasions that this is not metaphysical practice, and you’re not using intuition when you work with people. Can you speak about those distinctions a little bit?

Yes. People want to know–what is the nature of the universe? And I’m talking about this ground of being. Is that the nature of the universe? How could I know that? I don’t know. So, it’s very hard to talk about the ground of being without it sounding like you’re making a metaphysical claim. But I try my best to talk about it as an experience, and as an experience that we’re capable of — that human beings have obviously, if you read the spiritual literature, have always been capable of. That does not necessarily reveal to us the nature of the universe. Some teachings, I think, maybe particularly the Hindu traditions, will talk about Brahman or pure consciousness, Self with a capital “S”, as being the nature of the universe, so that when you realize it, you’re actually realizing the nature of the universe. I love that teaching, but I don’t know if it’s true. [laughing]

Some Buddhists will talk about this being the nature of mind, and that also makes sense. When you’re experiencing consciousness, when you’re experiencing the table — and consciousness pervading the table — perhaps you’re experiencing your own mind along with the table, right? Your own consciousness. How can we determine which of those claims is true? We can’t. So people who will sometimes come to me for spiritual, for metaphysical, information that I can’t give. Buddha would not answer metaphysical questions. He said it was because it was not relevant to realization. But maybe he didn’t know. [laughs] It’s possible. So I just go right to “I don’t know.”

There you go. That’s a great answer; “I don’t know.” And what about intuition?

Judith: Intuition, yeah. People are sometimes interested — until they find they can do it themselves quite easily — that I can see what’s going on in the body. I can. I can see where someone lives. I can see when it switches. I can see when emotion goes through them. I have been able to see that for a long time now. Teaching dance classes brought that out. I call it “see feel” because you can actually do it with your eyes closed and just feel it — the movement in the other person’s body — you can see and feel it. So when people are like, “Wow, how did you know that?”, they think I’m intuiting it — like it’s coming to me, but it’s not. It’s just simply seeing and feeling. It’s maybe the subtle range of seeing, but it’s just plain seeing and feeling. So I can’t look at someone and go, “Oh, they’re going to go to Paris next month and meet the person of their dreams.” I can’t do that.

(Host) Kozo Hattori: There’s something that I really resonate with, with your work, because for so much time, I was trying to get to “the beyond,” and at the expense of my body, both physically and… Like, I’d sit in meditation until I bled and I thought it was hemorrhoids, but it turned out to be a tumor. So I was really just disregarding my body to get to that beyond-beyond.

Yeah. Strong-willed fellow you are. Strong.

Yeah, yeah, stubborn. Stubborn, I’d say. [Laughter] But I like how yours is in the body but at the same time, like you said, permeable. So both in the body maintaining that boundary, but also access to outside of it.

You know, if you’re really interested, people who are really interested in this realization, who haven’t realized it yet, you can put an object in front of you, you know, something that you like to look at, feel that you’re in your own body, attune to this space pervading you and the object and just sit there a few minutes every day until the object is permeable. Right? So we’re experiencing objects as both solid [holds up a water glass and taps it with her finger] and made of this luminous space at the same time. Right? Form and emptiness at the same time. It takes a little practice but not as much as they say in ancient teachings. [Laughs] You know, you can get there.

Oh, wonderful. So, Carrie says: “Thank you so much for this conversation, Judith. We are surfing many of the same waves. My journey also includes scoliosis, subtle awareness at a very early age, teaching embodiment. I play with the words occupy your own body. Which sounds very familiar to you. I love to make it very simple and playful, so traumatized minds can find themselves that being in the body is actually the safest place to be. Will you please speak a little bit about developing the training practices. How did you come to linearize what you sense, what you found through experience? Did your therapeutic education play a role in how you developed your program?”

You know, only part of my program focuses on the therapeutic aspects of the work. And it all came into play… Gee, I hardly know how to answer that. I mean, I had to linearize it in order to teach it. I had to teach it in a certain sequence. Writing about it years ago, my first book, that was my main challenge. It felt to me, I could see it. I was living at the Zen monastery at the time, 1981, and I had this vision of how it all fit together: psychology, embodiment, spirituality. But it seemed like a mandala, it seemed like a circular vision. And when I sat down to write it I thought, “Where do I start with that circular vision?” Because if I talk about fundamental consciousness, people are like, “What?” If I talk about the body, then?

So that was the challenge in terms of the writing; not so much in terms of the teaching, because people come to you. They’re right there. You have to teach it in a certain order. But with the writing, I always decided I would start with trying to explain fundamental consciousness and then go on from there. And pretty much all my books follow that pattern. I’m not sure I’m answering your question, but the truth is, it developed very organically. I don’t even remember developing it. I do remember people coming to me, and I would teach.

When I taught at Esalen, I particularly had to put it in order and I had to name it. I didn’t yet name it The Realization Process, but I had to give it a name, and I had to describe it. So, when I first started to teach as Esalen, which I think was also 1987, that’s when it really began to take shape as a thing. I thought “I’m teaching this thing” — this series of practices.

Did you find when you linearized it, or when you had a step-by-step — when it no longer was the mandala and it was more a step-by-step thing, did you find that it became more accessible or do you find that you lost some pieces of it?

No. I don’t know if it became accessible for others, but it became easier for me to express it. I don’t think I lost any pieces. I would start with the ground and then I would talk about the core, and then I would talk about the body, and then I would talk about psychology. I don’t think I lost any pieces. I think that actually gave me a framework because, here’s the thing, because fundamental consciousness is the ground of the mandala. So it kind of does tie in all pieces.

I did want to talk, the woman’s name was Carrie, about how she says the safest place to be is in the body, and that’s such an important thing. At first, of course, people who are traumatized don’t believe that. It takes a little leap of faith because we’ve constricted the body against the traumatic experience in order to protect ourselves. We’ve left the body and we know, like in severe trauma, people leave the body altogether. They really disassociate. So to take a little leap of faith that you’re actually going to feel safer once you come back to yourself. Of course, for someone who’s had a lot of trauma, that needs to be done gradually. “Where do you most feel you can inhabit the body?” and so forth.

But there is that moment of trusting that, once you do make contact with yourself — and it’s true, you have the tangibility of your being. You have yourself back. You’re no longer a victim. You have yourself back from everything that’s come and hurt you, everything that’s coming toward you, and you’re no longer that object. You become the subject of your life looking back out at the world with your own being. So that’s a very, very wonderful point she made about the safety being in the body.

And that’s when you experience that power that you were talking about, that power that you have within — when you are that fundamental consciousness, right?

Power, love. All of the aspects of ourselves are so important for that healing, and for feeling safe in the world.

Beautiful. Someone else asks how to delineate between sensing and imagining.

You know, at first people say, “I don’t know if I’m just imagining,” But, with practice, the experience becomes very tangible and then there’s no question that you’re imagining it, that it’s happening. But yes, many people will say that, at first, they hear the instruction, they think they’re following the instruction, but they’re not really sure. It can be a new experience. They don’t know if they’re imagining or not. But that passes.

Okay. And then someone asks, “Which of your publications best support the meditation practices that we experienced during the call?” So if you want to continue with this meditation process, which book should they get?

My most recent book is Trauma and the Unbound Body. It does focus on the psychological work, but because it’s the most recent, it’s probably the most clearly expressed. The Enlightenment Process, which I wrote quite a while ago, talks specifically about the spiritual work. Belonging Here, which was the book before this last one talks about embodiment most clearly. So I’m not really sure. In this lockdown situation that people have been in, I’ve just completed a book exactly on the meditation work. So I will be sending that out in a couple of weeks to be published soon, but I’ve just written that book that you’re asking about.

Oh, wonderful. Well, we can’t wait for it. We have one last question that we ask all our guests, Judith, and it’s “How can we as the ServiceSpace global ecosphere support you and your work or you, and what you’re trying to bring forth in the world?”

Well, what I’m trying to bring forth in the world, being in true contact with ourselves and each other, you can value that, which you probably already do. And whatever means you have of achieving that, of getting through to that, then I certainly encourage you to do that. So that’s what I’m most trying to bring out in the world. If you’re interested in The Realization Processtherealizationprocess.org, everything is there. But in terms of supporting the main goals, we all have our ways of doing that and we’re all together in that.

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Judith. It’s interesting. You mentioned contact and that was one of the key terms for you. And we’re all in this lockdown where contact is not allowed in society, but I think the most important contact we can have is with ourselves. Your work is a very timely and very powerful offering in this time of lockdown. Thank you so much. I know I’ve benefited from it greatly.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, letting me be part of this. I feel such a good feeling about your organization, we’ll call it. That’s why I said yes because I went to the website and I thought, “Oh, that looks good. I’ll do it.”

Source: Daily Good