About
Course Author’s Background
Professional training
- Meditation Practitioner / Teacher Certification
- Meditation and Life Coaching Certification
- Meditation: Practitioner and Teacher Certification
My spiritual journey taken through
- Yoga: Patanjali’s eight limb Raja yoga
- Buddhism: A special interest in the Soto Zen tradition
- Christian Mysticism: Yeshua’s sublime insights and teachings
- Shamanic World View: Working with spirit guides etc.
A Personal Tale Of Four Spiritual Awakenings
When the call of the Road Less Travelled became irresistible, nearly five decades ago, I knew little of what was in store for me.
Back then, there was no internet and there were very few books available on mysticism, yoga or Buddhism etc. At the time, I relied on a second-hand book dealer who specialised in these subjects.
I was living in a rural part of Northern England, which meant that at the time there were no classes or centres nearby that I could visit. I was inspired by Spirit and guided by it.
This self-reliance had its advantages and disadvantages. Firstly, I learned to trust my inner guidance and secondly I avoided the trap of visiting ‘special gurus’. However, there was no one around to correct my mistakes or to discuss these things with.
My first awakening
A few years into my meditation practice, following the “Who am I?” enquiry of Sri Ramana Maharishi, I had my first awakening. I simply blew out of my mind during a meditation at home, into an altered state of consciousness.
It was like finding a trap-door in a dark cellar I’d been in up until that time, and running free into sunshine and fields around the house.
It only lasted a few minutes, before my mind kicked in with something along the lines of “holy fuck, what the yogis said is true”. I then collapsed back into my mind/body process and stayed there for the next couple of decades.
The period that followed, sometimes referred to as the ‘dark night of the soul’, was challenging and I slipped into a mild form of depression. I had no one to talk to about my experiences and no idea how to manage the life-changing perspective I’d found. I had the fear that if I did open up about it, I’d be labelled as ‘mentally ill’.
Awakening number two
By now my practices had matured and diversified.
Was that a good thing? In some ways it allowed me to clear out the side-effects of karma and the general trauma associated with rough and tumble of living. The downside being that complexity seldom helps in spiritual matters. Simplicity and focus of practise often helps to cut through the crap.
I wrote in my journal:
“Sitting on the train, doing a ‘Who am I’ practice – just looking out of the window at the passing scenery – not interpreting what I saw – just looking.
“I then wondered what being is behind it all? As a result, a curtain parted, and my consciousness opened up and continued to expand into the eternal, limitless beingness behind all life. I was awed and almost in tears, busily trying to hold myself together and appear normal to the other passengers on the train.
“This opening up into the vast consciousness of life carried on for several hours – an ongoing expansion into limitless being.
“In the end I brought the process to a close, as I felt that I would either go insane or die from the amount of energy flowing through my brain.
“I experienced that at the heart of life is no-thing and that no-thing is All of Life.”
Now comes a challenge: how to reconcile my everyday life with this experience and how to modify my spiritual practices having found what I had been searching for for many years.
The side-effect on my everyday life was that my values and identity had now changed. After experiencing the emptiness of all things, what do everyday concerns like careers, possessions, relationships etc. really mean?
And all my spiritual practices up and to that point had been ‘searching’ for this. Now it had found me, what was there to do? I understood that in a sense, we’re already enlightened beings, so searching for it invalidates this truth.
A third awakening happens to me
This isn’t a slip of the pen, we don’t achieve awakening – it finds us when we’re ready.
For me, this was seven years after my previous awakening experience. A different scenario again – this time in the mountains of Peru – on an ayahuasca retreat.
A different kind of awakening too. The first two had been awakenings of the mind, this one was a heart awakening. Prior to this awakening, I’d only ‘thought’ I was coming from my heart, i.e. it was really a mind-based perspective.
Through the relentless guidance and ruthless persistence of the Spirit of Ayahuasca to endlessly repeat a ‘love and blessings’ mantra, I broke through my internal barriers to my heart centre – and truly learnt to dwell there.
My heart awakened: Pure bliss – dwelling in the boundless unconditional love and compassion of God.
A fourth awakening comes along
This one was a little less dramatic and it centred on my body, when taking part in a meditation retreat
In my journal I noted:
“This body is the living truth.
“Enlightenment is here and now. It is in our every cell, every atom of our body, not in some special state, not somewhere else.”
It served as a reminder of the utter ordinariness of enlightenment; that awakenings are simply a remembering – a remembering of who and what we already are.
In Summary
As you can see from the above experiences, spiritual awakenings come in all sorts of shapes and sizes.
We prepare ourselves with our daily spiritual practices and rituals. We follow some itch that we cannot quite scratch. We trust a process that we don’t fully understand, and maybe we never will. How, when and to whom spiritual awakenings happen remains a mystery.
When awakenings do happen, it is through the Grace of God.
I hope you enjoy my courses.
With Best Wishes,
David R. Durham,
Mystic lover of God.
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