I guess I had assumed that I would be Sri Mahayogi’s disciple forever. I certainly knew that my commitment to awakening was enduring. But life had other plans.
Shortly after I moved to California, I took a job at a software company that offered yoga classes. The yoga teacher and I struck up a friendship, chatting after class. We did the delicate dance people do in professional situations and slowly, carefully revealed to each other just how deep we’d each gone down the spiritual awakening rabbit hole. I told her about Sri Mahayogi. She replied with a question, “Have you ever heard of Adyashanti?”
I cautiously dipped my toes in the water. I was loyal to Mahayogi, after all, though he had the integrity to emphasize that the loyalty needed to be with Divine Consciousness, not to him.
So I bought Adyashanti’s only book that was available at the time, The Impact of Awakening. I took the book out on a date – a 3-week solo silent retreat – and it helped catalyze my first awakening experience on the mountain (more on that another time).
So I had to meet this guy in person. I went to my first gathering (satsang) in a church community room in Palo Alto, CA. At first, coming from Mahayogi’s multicultural and age-diverse community, I remember feeling shocked to see a room of white, middle-aged people who all seemed to have purchased their clothes from the same place; everyone was dressed in yoga clothes, and half the women had shawls. Years later, I came to affectionately call this the “California non-dual retreat uniform.” But soon, as Adya started to speak, all that fell away. Of course, I heard his words, but what was more interesting was that I felt his words. My body and soul were vibrating in response to each concept he shared. It felt like he was reading directly from a book in my soul.
At the time, I thought maybe others in the community had this experience too, but a friend once told me, “Oh, I had the opposite experience. I thought Adya was speaking an alien language! But I knew I had to listen to him anyway, that some part of me was getting it even if my mind couldn’t.”
After what felt like a lightning rod experience with him, I was hooked. I wanted more. And it wasn’t just my mind that wanted more – honestly, that was the least of it. Whatever was in me that had resonated with Adya’s words and transmission was magnetically compelled to keep showing up, listening, sitting, expanding, diving deeper. Looking back on it, I see it was a choice, but also a choiceless choice. I was on a train that had its own destination, regardless of what my mind thought about it, and I just needed to let it carry me where it wanted to go.
Meeting one’s guru is a sacred thing. The guru can become the ultimate mirror of potential and the Self that we don’t even know we are. They become the gateway for us to remember the vastness of Creation, Divinity, and Love. It is a special relationship that is difficult to put into words, and doesn’t have any other comparison in our Western culture. Fortunately, both Sri Mahayogi and Adya wanted us to find the true guru inside ourselves. Adya always said to me that the only gratitude I needed to give him was to awaken fully, but nevertheless, my gratitude to him is immense and feels boundless.
Adya’s style was direct, focused, and to the point: Awakening means that you realize you are not who you think you are; you are emptiness/oneness/stillness/silence/love/peace/life/creation, which is Everything and All That Is. His style was more austere than Mahayogi’s. Adya didn’t offer yoga or dictate practices around diet or meditation. He invited us to sit in silence and offered us a few, clear, intense, and poignant teachings to point the way back home.
This is what I wanted, and I jumped into the deep end of the pool. But it’s not for everyone. Over the years, I watched others in the community fight with this style of teaching: they wanted to arrive at the clarity and freedom of awakening, but they needed a path that had more to it, was less austere, and was also trauma-informed. I realized, some years into the work, that most people have multiple competing motivations on their spiritual path. Some of them truly want to be one with God. Others partially want Oneness, and partially genuinely and sincerely need to be seen, healed, and loved. And/or they wanted to explore the mystic part of life – you know, the chakras, angels, and ascended masters and all that, which has its own unique value. I say this without judgment: Adya’s teachings were not designed for healing trauma or for New Age mystics.
In my case, this was great. This was awesome, actually, because I knew how to do the healing part. I’d already devoted the last ten or more years to healing and had an abundance of resources and tools. I also knew the mystic part inside and out, forward and backwards; I didn’t need help with that. I’d started exploring that path as a teenager. By the time I met Adya, I wanted awakening.
You might wonder what happened to my Christian faith. It never went away. Curiously, though Adya’s school of teaching was called Non-dual Vedanta and he came from Zen Buddhism, his roots were also Christian. In our one-on-one meetings, we would inevitably end up talking about Christ. The love and faith in Christ burned as brightly as ever for me, and maybe even brighter. Through the path of awakening, I was removing barriers between my heart and Christ’s immense love.
Awakening – and the full-being kind of embodiment that Adya was fostering – is not for the faint of heart. The next six years were remarkable, extraordinary, and messy. Untangling old habits, beliefs, and identity is messy. Coming to know Oneness was extraordinary. During one silent retreat with Adya, I had a visceral experience of being part of the whole universe and the entire universe being in my belly. Over these years, I experienced coming home to Self, to infinite love, to God & Goddess, to Life itself. I had not known that this depth of peace and love was possible. In the emotionally tormented moments of my childhood, I never would have dreamed that I could feel sustained peace like this.
At the same time, these extraordinary experiences would often have the impact of blowing out patterns of thought, belief, emotion, energy, or behavior. I often felt like my human existence was being stripped bare, reshaped, clarified. The blowouts would leave me wordless for days or weeks, struggling to describe or explain my experience. I remember my brother once pleading with me, “Come on! You’re really good with language. Try harder!” It felt excruciating to try to find words – any words – to describe my experience.
As I look back on this time, the words “nothing blob” – as in No Self – come to mind. Like a caterpillar in a cocoon turning to goo, I spent a decent amount of time during those six years as a nothing blob. During one retreat, I was so deep in the experience of Oneness that I couldn’t remember how to eat or even what eating was. I remember staring at a plate of salad and merging with it. I noticed a motion that was happening with people’s arms and forks. I followed and imitated the motion. I held the fork with a beet on it in front of my face for some time. I was one with the beet and the fork. The people around me were doing a motion of putting the beet into their mouths. I did the same. The beet sat in my mouth. Eventually, saliva and biology kicked in, and I started to chew. “Ah. Eating. Right. I remember this.”
I was blessed to be able to work for Adya in his office as his Program Director, because it gave me a safe and supportive space to expand, deepen, untangle, make mistakes, try again, and sometimes show up to work as a mostly-nothing blob. During that same retreat where I was one with the beet, I was supposed to be working. I remember trying to calculate how much water we needed to purchase for the second half of the retreat, and a simple calculation took me at least 45 minutes. I apologized to one of my colleagues, who compassionately put his arm around my shoulders and reassured me, “It’s a good retreat, Sonya!“
Working for Adya gave me another benefit; I got to watch him live Truth in Action. He trusted us to do our jobs; he would always tell us that he hired us to do the things that he could not. He just asked us, “What’s really true?” As we made critical decisions for the future of his organization, our North Star was always Truth. He didn’t care what the answer was, as long as it was true. And we knew it was true when it resonated in our bodies, clear as a bell. We could all feel it. I know most people say, “That’s my truth”, and truth is subjective. In one way, it is, if we are referring to the intimate and specific experience of a singular human being. In the way that Adya was inviting us to tune into what’s bigger than us, it really wasn’t. It was a movement in the Universe that we could tap into, bigger and deeper than any individual. When someone speaks from that place of Big Truth, my whole body rings with recognition.
It was with Adya’s inquiry of Truth that I found my own experience of Wisdom. My name in Greek is Sophia, which means wisdom. Sophia is also the Goddess of Wisdom, and when I have felt into the essence of Her, she is the vast presence of Divine Feminine. My experience is that wisdom is a vast ocean, and that ocean bubbles up through each of us so we have our own unique voices of wisdom that guide us on our paths. Truth and wisdom work together, powered by and with love.
If you have done sessions with me, you know that I orient to Truth, Wisdom, and Love to try to figure out the many complexities of human existence. This is just part of the legacy of those remarkable six years. And the rest of that legacy… well, that’s a story for another day.
