Light & Lila is an exploration of the last thirteen years of my life, which I’ve spent studying with my spiritual teacher, Sunyata. She studied with an enlightened teacher for seventeen years, and became a teacher herself.
This blog is meant to share the things I’ve experienced during this time, and the lessons I’ve learned. My feeling is that each person’s path is different, and perfect for them. This is just mine.
In my time on the path, I’ve struggled, made all kinds of mistakes, gotten stuck in self-comparison, and had profound experiences in heightened consciousness. I’ve had years of feeling like the worst meditator and years of feeling totally on my line, zipping along on the path and having a blast doing it. Meditation has helped me loosen the hold that my conditioning and personality has on my life, and it’s helped me learn how to live with more groundedness and humor.
I’m learning how to get funnier each day, and feeling how that humor balances the intensity of the transformations being on the path brings. I’ve learned a very deep trust in existence, and can feel myself opening to life more each day, knowing that whatever experience comes my way is just a prompt to look at what gets in the way of being free and choose freedom instead. I am the happiest I’ve ever been in my life, not because I’m getting what I want but because I’m learning how to let go of wanting things to be a certain way. I’m learning how to bring my best to every situation in front of me, and learning how to be kind and gentle to myself when I feel like I’ve missed the mark.
By the time I got to my senior year of college, I had encountered a few different forms of spirituality. I’d met a lot of New Age people at Berkeley, who were very interested in yoga and veganism, who seemed excited to figure out how to live in a nice energy. I vibrated with them in a certain way, but in my experiences I found that it was difficult to talk to them about the harder things. I wanted to look at the places I got stuck - the dark, muddy spots in my consciousness that felt gooey. I wanted to know how to get beyond my own triggers and habits - the tendencies towards insecurity, towards jealousy, the moments of anger or harshness that came forward, the need for attention and approval. I felt like I was playing a character in my own life and in my interactions with others, and wanted to get to something beyond just feeling chill and comfortable.
I also encountered people who felt that spirituality was something that belonged only to the East. They said that unless one was studying with an old Tibetan or Indian master in a cave in the Himalayas, it wasn’t real spirituality. I didn’t know if that was true, but if it was, it wasn’t particularly helpful given I had grown up in and was living in America. As my senior year of college started, I realized that I was looking for a teacher, someone who had walked the path themself and could guide me on it.
There I was, this 21-year-old kid, looking for the path to enlightenment in Berkeley, CA. I was aspiring towards truth but very stuck inside of my then-current self. I was self-involved and self-important. I desperately wanted attention and had lived my 21 years of life refining the art of getting as much attention as possible. I had a vague sense of my own power, but I had no idea how to get in touch with it or bring it into my life.
I had grown up with a very intense mother bearing down on me for my entire childhood with her rage and self-pity, and now I was indulging in pleasure - smoking weed, having back-to-back relationships with wounded men, and chasing whatever high I could find in life, all while excelling at school. I was looking for something real, and trying to find it in very occult realms. I was reading tarot cards, and considering moving to South America to apprentice with a shaman. My feeling was that the coolest experience I could possibly have in life was either a mind-blowing orgasm, or some experience astral traveling.
The summer before senior year, I signed up for a silent, 10-day Vipassana retreat. I had never formally meditated before, and figured it would be good to jump into the deep end. The retreat was challenging - my mind played all sorts of games and dramas out, the meditations were mostly hard to sit through, and I didn’t know if anything was happening. By the end of the ten days, I’d had one insight: that my mom was suffering in our tumultuous relationship, just as I was. It was a tiny, infinitesimal step outside the structure of my ego, a little dip into empathy. Then the retreat was over and we were allowed to talk to one another, and I reverted back to my full-blown personality, talking about psychedelic drugs and generally being the center of attention.
“Whoever travels without a guide, needs two hundred years for a two-day journey.” - Rumi
Looking back, the Rumi quote comes to mind - “Whoever travels without a guide, needs two hundred years for a two-day journey.” I had a vague sense that I was stumbling around looking for truth, but that my endeavors weren’t really getting me anywhere. The fall semester of my senior year, I wandered around various spiritual communities trying to find something that clicked.
I went to a Buddhist temple where we sat around sharing what we were looking for, and then did silent walking meditation. I went to a Native American church where I met people who were channeling spirits and animal guides through themselves and doing medicine ceremonies. I met a man who walked the forests around Berkeley at night and seemed to be very interested in power. I met a couple while tripping on acid at a music festival - the man had weathered skin and ancient eyes. He spoke to me like he could see into the depth of my being, but after a short conversation the two of them surrounded me and something prompted me to get the hell out of there.
Wherever I went and whatever I tried, I felt what resonated and what didn’t. The man who walked the forests told me about Kali, the Indian goddess of death and transformation. I felt a deep connection to Kali even though I had never heard of her before. As my fall semester progressed, I prayed to her and invoked her, and asked her for help on my spiritual journey. Kali showed up in many of my dreams.
With all the teachers and people I had met thus far, I could sense that they weren’t right for me. The Buddhist temple felt like it ignited no spark in me. The others all had men who seemed interested in me as a spiritual aspirant, but underneath their interest there was something that didn’t feel quite right. I felt what I could only describe as tentacles - subtle pressures that felt like they were trying to pull me in. I started to feel how people had their own agendas. I didn’t want agendas - I was trying to get beyond my own agenda, and getting caught up in someone else’s wasn’t going to get me to freedom.
My fall semester, I was taking a medical ethnobotany class, and decided to study for the final with another gal from the class. She came over, we studied, and then hung out for a bit. During our conversation, I shared that I was looking for a spiritual teacher. She laughed and said, ‘Hey, I have a teacher!’ and suggested I come for a hike with her and her teacher sometime. The semester progressed - the final came and went, and we both did well. I went home to Los Angeles to visit my mom, and the day I landed back in Berkeley, I went on a hike with my friend and her teacher.
We drove to Mount Tamalpais in Marin, where Sunyata met us. We both hopped into Sunyata’s car, and she took us to a hiking spot higher up the mountain. In the lead up to this moment, I had imagined what Sunyata would look like - an Indian woman with white braids, who smelled like palo santo. Instead, she was a regular person, with brown hair, in her 40s or 50s. She looked completely normal to me, very different from the teachers I’d come into contact with before her, who had the kind of edgy, obvious power that hits you in the face. I probably wouldn’t have glanced twice at Sunyata if I passed her in the street. But what struck me was how grounded and real she was - she spoke to us in the car before we started the hike. I don’t remember much of what she said, only that I noticed my friend was paying rapt attention to her words.
We hiked and sat to meditate. Sunyata taught us gazing, looking at a point with a soft gaze as a way to focus the mind before closing the eyes to meditate. We meditated, and I saw beautiful, subtle colors moving through my inner vision. I had never seen colors before while meditating. After the meditation, Sunyata asked how it went. I told her it was hard to focus, but that it was cool to see the colors. I shared with her a meditation I’d had about a year before, where I had meditated on my heart and gotten an inner vision of it being covered in scars. We later went to dinner at Mountain Home Inn, and I shared about my connection to Kali and the sense I had that women have an easier time letting go to existence.
Throughout this entire experience, I hadn’t felt any tentacles. Sunyata felt to me like the most real person I’d ever encountered - she spoke without self-consciousness or self-importance, laughed freely, and felt clear. I had the sense that if she never saw me again, she’d be fine with that. I felt that all she was trying to do was share the light and help me get to what she had experienced herself, what she now lived inside. I waited until my friend went to the bathroom, and then I turned to Sunyata and asked, ‘What does it take to be your student?’ Something in me came forward that felt clearly and decisively that this was my teacher. Now I just needed her to be willing to take me on.
She laughed softly and said, ‘Just show up if you want to, you can come to whatever you like.’ She said my friend would let me know about events, and I was invited to anything and everything. And like that, it was done. The possibility of starting on the path was there, right in front of me, in the form of this normal-looking woman, who seemed to live from a depth that was completely foreign to me then.
At the end of dinner, we walked back to the parking lot, and Sunyata asked me if there were any cultures I felt particularly connected to. I said Egypt and France. She opened the trunk of her car and there were maybe 15 or 20 spiritual books there. She told me to pick two, and said that I could borrow them to read. I picked the two that drew me in - Traveling the Path of Love, a collection of quotes from Sufi masters, and Shankara’s Crest Jewel of Discrimination.
We said goodbye, and my friend drove me home. I went to sleep, not knowing what had just begun. Looking back now, it was the most important day of my life - the day I met my teacher and started on the path.