Rebecca with Master Yu Tian Jian
How and when did you become interested in the mind-heart connection?
It is said that the love of God is beyond anything we are capable of withstanding. During my own awakening I was flooded with a love so intense that after a bit I became unconscious. I came to two hours later. I couldn’t take the intensity. Since that experience of Cosmic Love, I’ve seen again and again the truth that the heart knows what the head cannot imagine.
How did you become a Bhakta?
I think I always knew that the Divine is personal and approachable. When I was a small child I would talk to God at night before I went to sleep, even though I was not raised in a religious family. It felt natural that God was there with me, was friendly, and interested.
Later my awakening came through the pure grace of a divine being. Our relationship is very old, perhaps eternal. This is my personal deity whom I call Divine ONE or Divine Mother. These are just labels. In truth, it is impossible to find an accurate title, name, or label for a being beyond all dualities.
To say I am a Bhakta feels like the best description I can give for my continuing relationship with my personal deity through whom, and by whose grace, my transformation continues to unfold.
How did you get started in meditation?
That’s kind of a funny story. I was just out of college, where I’d to read the assigned material for so long. I began to haunt the bookstores, hungry for ideas, and I came upon a little book, still in print I think, called “How to Meditate” by Lawrence LeShan. I couldn’t have told you why I wanted to meditate, I didn’t know anyone who actually did it, but I was sure that I must. So I took the book home and began to practice on my own. I’d sit cross-legged against the wall in my bedroom, I had a roommate at the time, and I’d try to count my breaths from one to four, repeating, for five minutes. It was excruciating.
Then one day I was at the grocery store and ran into a guy I’d know in college. He had this incredible glow about him, and I asked him about it. He said he’d met this Christian mystical group called The Holy Order of MANS and was studying with them. Ugh, I thought, church. I’d visited my share of churches and I didn’t understand the Christian path, or paths. That would come later. I would actually learn about the heart path of Christ through the paths of the East.
Anyway, I went home and tried to forget about it, but I couldn’t sleep that night. The next morning, on my way to my office, I made a sudden turn and drove to the house of the guy from college. I banged on his door, it was about seven a.m., until he came to the door in a bathrobe. I made him tell me everything he knew.
The following Wednesday night I attended the class at the Order house. It was led by a plump, retired firefighter named Brother Bill. And it was the first time I’d met anyone who talked about reincarnation, other than poets I’d read, like Yeates.
The Order was Christian, but had many friends in Eastern traditions and taught meditation. While in the Order, I danced with Sufis and met many people on the Buddhist, Sufi, and Hindu paths. One I remember with fondness was a wandering monk from India. He was an old man who seemed to radiate peace and love, a little man who had given up all of his false identities, even his name. We called him Mr. No Name.
I found that it was a lot easier to meditate when I had some personal guidance. It’s also easier if you at least occasionally meditate with a group. The group energy will carry you a long way.
What type of training have you had?
Nothing is as powerful a teacher as personal experience; books and the words of teachers cannot replace finding out for yourself, but here is how the world would see my training. I began meditation at the age of twenty-two, just out of collage. I have a business degree and made my way in the world as a business professional for over thirty years. During those years my passion was meditation and Eastern Philosophy. I studied seven years with the Christian Order I mentioned earlier. I was ordained by a Chan Buddhist priest in 1995 as a Buddhist nun. I have meditated with the Siddha Yoga followers of Swami Muktananda and Swami Chidvilasananda (Gurumayi), with Tibetan, Chan and Zen Buddhists, and I can find no difference in the heart of their various teachings. The methods differ however, and I have found some more powerful and beneficial that others. I am a member of Self-Realization Fellowship, the organization founded by Paramahansa Yogananda.
On the Western front, I studied Psychology for many years (almost finished a PhD as a matter of fact). After two years in analysis with a wonderful Jungian analyst, seminars with people like Clarissa Pinkola Estes (before she became famous as the author of Women Who Run With Wolves) and two years working in a mental health clinic with American Indians, I realized I had not found what I was searching for – an effective way to help people free themselves from their problems in a reasonable amount of time. Something didn’t feel right about people spending seven, or ten, or fifteen years in therapy, especially since they didn’t seem that much better off for it.
But ten years of meditation. . . now that made sense to me. . . especially since my own awakening came after nine years of meditation practice.
But even meditation seemed to be missing something. The impact of many meditation practices on the subconscious mind seemed too slow to me. I discovered that with the right hypnotherapist hypnosis and NLP are fast and successful approaches for changing what is in the conscious and subconscious levels of mind. Learning hypnosis also prepared me for discovering the power of imagery as used in esoteric Buddhistand other mystery schools to enter the superconscious. With the right tools we can go consciously into both the subconscious and the superconscious.
I have found no conflict between these seemingly diverse methods. In fact, meditation and hypnosis is the same thing! Sometimes they are interactive between the guide and the client. Otherwise, they are the same.
Why do you do this work?
Because I must. There is a point on a person’s path beyond which sharing is not an option. The original peoples say: the shaman must shamanize or die.
Who do you consider to be your current spiritual teacher(s)
Divine Mother and Paramahansa Yoganandaand his lineage
Swami Chidvilasananda and Master Yu Tian Jian I consider to be very special spiritual friends.
Can you highlight the most meaningful moments on your spiritual path in this lifetime?
Paramahansa Yogananda explains it this way. A man asks, “How could God, the Unmanifested Absolute, appear in visible form?” The Master answers, “If you doubt, you won’t see; and if you see, you won’t doubt.”
I will just say that he is right. Before that moment there is preparation, including initiations, meditation, prayer, longing. After that moment come the years of growing into the View, of integrating what you’ve experienced.
Of course, along the way are many amazing moments!
What do you think of past lives? How do they impact who we are today? Do you have any awareness of your own past lives?
In my late twenties I got married and we went on a driving trip for a honeymoon – Santa Fe, the Grand Canyon, that area. In Santa Fe I wanted to find a quiet place to meditate so we entered a Catholic church. I remember that there was a huge stained glass window with sunlight filtering through it to fill the space with rainbow colors. We sat for a while in meditation, and while we sat, someone began to play one of those enormous pipe organs, the kind that fill up the entire space with heavenly sounds.
When we were walking toward the door I looked down. I was wearing a nun’s habit. Long black skirt, white bib. This was no foggy idea, not at all. I could see it, with the toes of my rather old black leather shoes kicking out from under the skirt with each step. I could see it perfectly; it was all as clear as ordinary reality.
When we got to the door my young husband pinched me on the butt and the vision was gone.
Before that I had believed in reincarnation. After the nun’s habit experience I burned with a desire to know the truth of it. A few years later I was blessed with an even more profound experience. I was shown the records of all the lifetimes of all people, and how we all have access to these records – to study and learn from them. Sages of the past have called these the akashic records, but I’d never heard of them before my own experience.
Since then I have learned more about my previous lifetimes. Some good, like being a shamanic healing woman in Mongolia over two thousand years ago. Others not so great, like the time I was hung for leading peasants in a rebellion.
We are the sum of our experiences, remembered or not.
What are your feelings on women and enlightenment? Do you feel women are capable of achieving enlightenment?
I know that most Buddhist orders have taught that women are incapable of enlightenment. This was the excuse for not teaching them the esoteric practices designed specifically to prepare one for the initial event of awakening. Hey, they usually weren’t taught to read!
In fact, Buddhist nuns have, since the time of the Buddha, been required to take additional vows beyond those of the monks. These additional vows ensured that even the most accomplished woman would be treated as inferior to the most novice monk.
I must confess that this, coupled with St. Paul’s influence on the Christian belief that women are the root of evil and must be silent in the church and subservient to their husbands, caused me a lot of grief at one time. I know that these beliefs are so much a part of our subconscious programming that, even if we say we don’t believe it, we still are greatly influenced by this history.
What I know first hand though is that women are capable of enlightenment. The practices are useful, wonderful in fact, but if you don’t have access to them there is one sure way to reach God anyway. That one way is devotion. Desire to know the Truth, the Beloved, by any name, is a prayer. Make that prayer intense enough, over time, and it has to be answered. I am proof of that. And so are the numerous women saints of every culture, every religion, and every time in history.
I often wonder how many women have reached enlightenment and have never come to the attention of the world. In a world where education, religion, publishing, and the media have been controlled by men and male oriented organizations, isn’t it likely that women have been ignored, even if they were brave enough to step forward? Why face ridicule over what is so personal and intimate and transforming. We have nothing to prove.
Why do you think we are here on this planet? What is the purpose of our lives?
Wow, that’s a big question. Maybe there’s not just one answer, but if there is, it would be to wake up. I see people suffering, but I also see how much people want to hold onto their beliefs, their cause of suffering, and their goals, another cause of suffering.
We may be here to wake up, but we’ll be allowed to stay here (to keep coming back) as long as we need or want to. No one will make us wake up if we choose to keep sleeping with nightmares, but there are masters and enlightened beings who will certainly put all their significant weight to bear if we decide we want wake from the dream.
How can we be truly happy? How can we actualize true happiness?
Happiness is not about the external world, happiness is about consciousness. Some say that we are on the brink of an evolutionary leap into cosmic consciousness, or a previously unknown awareness. Richard Bucke who wrote “Cosmic Consciousness” around 1900 thought so. He was a physician and psychiatrist in Canada who had his own enlightenment experience. This led him to study the similar experiences of others. (If you read the book you’ll notice that examples of women are almost entirely missing.) He postulated that we evolved from the instinctive mind (subconscious) into a being with the self-awareness of the intellectual mind (conscious), and now we are moving toward cosmic consciousness (superconscious and beyond). The evidence of such a transformation is in the increasing numbers of those experiencing enlightenment.
If enlightenment seems too lofty a goal, think of it this way. There are two states of experience: We are either in trance, which means our lives are mostly on autopilot, with repeating thoughts and subconscious motivations mapping our day, and generally causing unhappiness, or we are in some level of an awake state, maybe not enlightened, but wakeful just the same. Awake equals happy, and that’s something we can all experience. In fact everyone already has. It’s those fleeting moments when we are in the zone, maybe making love or playing a sport, or working on a project that absorbs us. And it’s when we are overcome with love, and it’s when we realize that we’re not alone in the universe, because we know that there is someone or something much bigger than we are here with us, watching over us every moment.
The goal then is to increase the moments when we’re in the awake states, through our own efforts and through the grace of the divine ones, little by little, until we’re happy all the time. To be liberated while in the body is to be in union with the Absolute. It’s all meditation then. This is called Natural Samadhi. It’s ultimate happiness or bliss.
What does the future hold for you?
I currently live with my husband on Maui, which has a romantic allure for those who visit the islands. For those of us who make our homes here, we feel how isolated this little rock is, out here in the Pacific. For me, Maui is the perfect retreat location.
Actually, I came here for a spiritual retreat and to write, and I never left. I guess you could say that I’m still on retreat, because my days are spent in meditation and writing, and with family and friends.
As for the future. . . only Divine Mother knows what She has in store for me. . . and I wouldn’t have it any other way!