I am a mystic by inclination. And as a mystic I am most interested in making direct contact with the miraculous. But I am also a spiritual practitioner, and I know from twenty years of engagement with meditation that practices, when surrendered to sincerely, lead to the direct encounter of what we seek.
When Patricia Albere introduced me to the Mutual Awakening practice I approached it as any true practitioner would, with respect and passion. I soon began to have breakthrough experiences that opened new realms of realization to explore. These realizations were different from what I had experienced in meditation. At the same time the capacity to open into them was dependent on the same willingness to give up control that had opened me to the miracles of meditation.
In the next few pages I will illuminate the power of this practice by recounting my own journey into it.
A few days before Patricia and I were to make our public teaching debut we met for a planning session at her small but beautiful apartment on the Upper East Side of New York City. We had been working together by phone for months, but this was going to be the first in-person meeting since our partnership began. I walked in wearing dress shoes and a button-down shirt. She was barefoot wearing faded blue jeans torn at the knees. It all seemed perfect.
In the days just prior to our planning session there had been one thing bothering me, and when I saw her I blurted it out almost immediately.
“One thing you need to know,” I said. “I don’t do eye-gazing.”
“Why not?” she asked.
I didn’t have an answer. In searching my thoughts I found no truly solid reason, just a strong conviction that I didn’t feel comfortable with it because in my mind it was associated with overly sentimental, “feel good” spiritual practices. Of course I’d never done any eye-gazing, nor seen anyone do it, so I didn’t have any actual experience on which to base my conviction.
“I don’t do eye-gazing either,” she said with a smile, and then she instructed, “Sit down; this won’t hurt you.”
We sat down and looked into each other’s eyes for about five minutes. She was right. It didn’t hurt. In fact I quickly forgot all about what we were doing and fell into a very sweet and powerful meditative state, and a deep sense of connection began to emerge between us.
It was only a few minutes, but even in that time I could feel that in our encounter something was pulling. It wasn’t personal attraction, or sentimentality. It was a call into depth and sacredness. By letting my prejudices drop for a few minutes I found myself being pulled toward a space between us that felt profound and limitless.
Patricia and I have been teaching together continuously ever since that first meeting, and we still don’t do eye-gazing. But we do experiment with lots of paired spiritual work that we call Mutual Awakening practice.
In these paired practices you often sit face to face with a partner, ideally one who shares your commitment to mystical revelation. Together you and your partner focus on a single or a series of simple guiding questions, answering them repeatedly for a few minutes. If you find the courage to let go, you enter into a state of spontaneous sharing in which your words seem to leap out of your mouth from a place deep inside your soul.
I believe that Mutual Awakening occurs in the meeting of one soul with another. By “soul” I simply mean the deepest place in your being, the essence of who you are. What happens in these beautiful encounters is both overwhelming and illuminating at the very same instant.
During one recent intensive weekend I was engaging in profound encounters of this type in a room full of people who were having similar encounters all around me. The energy in the room was tremendous and seemed to be building without limit. At one point I had the opportunity to do the practice with Patricia and quickly found myself in a mystical vision of a yet-to-be-manifest future possibility.