thebirth of mutual Awakening
A Personal Narrative from Patricia Albere
The practice of Mutual Awakening leads to the living realization of awakened mutuality. The discovery and true embodiment of that possibility is what this is all about.
I am not a practitioner by nature. Although I can operate inside of structure and discipline, I’ve found that everything that has had held real power and beauty in my life has arisen through risk, flow, and allowing myself the intensity of direct encounter with reality. Practices and techniques pale in comparison to the heart expanding experience of real contact with the divine. At the same time I know that spiritual practices, when embraced with real intention and a pure heart, have the power to bring us into direct contact with the miraculous.
It is strange for me to think of Mutual Awakening as a “practice” because that’s not how it appeared in my life. What actually happened is that I had the profound grace of entering into a relationship that opened into a mutually awakened way of being. That relationship soon ended tragically, and it was only in the years that followed that I pieced together a puzzle that lead to the practice of Mutual Awakening.
By most standards I have lead an amazing life. I was a precocious child, and as my life unfolded I have always found myself drawn to the edge of everything. I think this maverick spirit is in my DNA. My ancestors came to this continent in the early 1600s and participated in the struggle to establish a living experiment of democratic ideals. I feel deeply connected to my revolutionary ancestry, and I can only imagine that there is some inheritance there that leads me to follow the urging of the edge. Somehow, at crucial times in my life, I always seem to show up at the beginning of something big.
I went to Woodstock when I was fifteen. I had heard something about a weekend concert. No one seemed to know much about what it was, but I knew I had to be there. When I told my mother of my plans, I wasn’t really asking for permission. I knew I was going. My mother seemed to intuit early in my life that the best way to handle my precociousness was to trust me and be supportive. So I arrived at Woodstock with my mother’s blessing.
I graduated from high school a few years later and felt compelled to move to California and be there for a year prior to attending college. It wasn’t that I knew something special about California; it was an unquestioned intuition that I followed. Once again I found myself in an epicenter I hadn’t known existed. I moved into a yellow Victorian house in a district called Haight-Ashbury with no idea that I had arrived at the apex of the Counterculture.
Soon after moving into our house on Haight Street, a schoolmate from high school, living in San Francisco, came to visit. She told me about a seminar she had just done called Mind Dynamics with someone named Werner Erhard. I had no idea what she was talking about. She felt different in a way that was intriguing, and I knew I had to go to his next seminar. I told my mother about it, and she mailed me the $300 for tuition, writing the check directly to Mind Dynamics so I wouldn’t use it for the rent. During that weekend seminar the world, my experience of myself, and what I saw as possible was irrevocably transformed. I had to be part of
what was happening. I went to Werner and asked him for a job. For some reason he said yes. So at eighteen years old I started working for Werner Erhard four months before he would initiate the personal transformation phenomenon known as EST and later Landmark Education.
All I wanted was to share the miracle that had opened up for me with others. Soon I was speaking seven nights a week. The audiences grew until I was addressing thousands of people in venues like New York City’s Lincoln Center. Eventually I was responsible for training others to do what I was doing—awaken people to their true potential and inspire them to realize it. For the next thirteen years I played a prominent role in expanding EST’s reach into the world, speaking to hundreds of thousands of people and training some of the organization’s leaders.
My story was only just beginning. After I left EST I met a beautiful young German man, named Peter. He was a deeply meditative mystic, and we fell in love. As extraordinary as it was, my time at EST could not have prepared me for what I encountered with Peter. Our love was a wholehearted expression of being fully “met” in all dimensions of love—from simple, sweet human tenderness to sacred union. We were an unambivalent “yes” to each other and to the reality of love itself. The force of our encounter undid me, and I surrendered again to being transformed.
The depth of spiritual connection in our love was palpable, and we each knew we had finally met a partner who was aligned with the deepest longings of our own heart. We began to experience spiritual openings that were continuous and intense. Each next awakening revealed more beauty, love, and authenticity than either of us had encountered alone. Any patterns or habits that created separation spontaneously revealed themselves, and we relentlessly passed through them into ever-deeper union.
Divine love, if surrendered to, is incessant and insatiable in its desire for more of itself. It dissolves, shatters, and transforms anything that blocks love’s path toward deeper love. The isolated sense of self that we could call the ego is a by-product of our experience of the lack of love. The ego is an endless chain of habitual activity and reactivity that we mistakenly