Sharon is a gifted intuitive and a spiritual teacher in the lineage of Adyashanti. Sharon has a devotion and great love of the Truth. Adyashanti asked her to teach 2003 and guide those genuinely drawn to the path of Truth. Since then, Sharon continues to deepen into and embody this Truth herself. She invites you to “Come home…” to That which you’ve always been.

In her presence you’ll taste a palpable expression of love and intimacy that allows you to feel safe dropping into the deep vulnerability required to know yourself as the All.

Sharon offers support for the required shift of identity that is both direct and tailored to each person’s journey.

Her teachings are based on her deep realization of silence and the way silence expresses itself in form. She notes, “Often there is still a thread that says the ‘me is going to get it; the ‘me’ is going to wake up. And it just isn’t true. It actually wakes up out of the ‘me’. “ So in her teaching, Sharon emphasizes how silence wakes up in the body and how the embodiment process is actualized. She is well qualified in this endeavor by her many years as an intuitive counselor. Since she has the ability to “read” the physical and energetic body, she is uniquely able to help unlock patterns that inhibit realization and the embodiment process that follows.

Sharon Landrith offers Silent retreats, intensives in the US and Canada and dokusans over the phone and in person. Please see more info on her website: sharon-landrith.com.

There’s a chapter on Sharon in Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Wisdom: The Feminine Face of Awakening by Rita Robinson.

Interview recorded 2/11/2012.

Video and audio below. Audio also available as a Podcast.

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As you may have noticed, BatGap was down for a couple of days. Unbeknownst to me, the site was using so much bandwidth and server capacity that it was slowing down all 200 sites on the server it was sharing. Without warning me or offering a smooth transition to a better plan, my hosting company (IXWebHosting), whose motto is “Hosting that grows with you”, shut down not only BatGap but five other sites I was hosting with them (my business, my wife’s business, etc.).

Fortunately, my dear friend Hemant Singh, a New Delhi entrepreneur, happens to own a web hosting company with servers in the U.S. He worked tirelessly for two days to get all the sites moved over. BatGap is now on a much faster server. (You may have noticed that the site loads quickly now.) Hemant will monitor its performance and make sure that it never again exceeds its bandwidth or server capacities. Hemant has helped me with BatGap technical issues all along, without compensation, but he can’t offer the hosting for free, so the hosting fees have risen from about $3/month to $75/month – still a very good price for what I’m now getting.

On that note, on the advice of our accountant, we’re in the process of registering BatGap as a 501(c)(3) Organization (non-profit). This will mean that U.S. citizens (and maybe others) will be able to get a tax write-off on donations. The accountant’s fees to set this up will exceed $1,000, but I think it will be worth it in the long run. It may eventually enable me to do this full-time. If you’d like to contribute to defraying this expense (which is pretty much wiping out current BatGap funds), please click one of the donate buttons in the right hand column.

Thanks for your participation in this adventure. I find it very fulfilling and supportive of my own growth, and it’s a joy to hear the reports of others who find the same.

Eli Jaxon-Bear was born Elliot J. Zeldow in Brooklyn, New York, in 1947. His eighteen-year spiritual path started in 1971, when he was a federal fugitive during the Vietnam war. In 1978, Kalu Rinpoche appointed him the president of the first Kagyu dharma center in Marin County. In 1982, he was presented with a Zen Teaching Fan at ChoShoJi Zen Temple in Japan.

After a search took him around the world and into many traditions and practices, his path and his search ended when he was pulled to India in 1990, where he met his final teacher, Sri H.W.L. Poonja. Confirming Eli’s realization, his teacher sent him back into the world to share his unique psychological insights into the nature of egoic suffering in support of self-realization.

Eli infuses the teaching with his teacher’s living transmission of silence. He presents a unique map of egoic identification as a vehicle for ruthless self-inquiry and final realization of true freedom. He dedicates his life to passing on the transmission of his teacher.

Eli currently meets people and teaches through the Leela Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to world peace and freedom through universal self-realization.
He is the author of Sudden Awakening into Direct Realization, (New World Library), The Enneagram of Liberation: From Fixation to Freedom, (Gangaji Foundation Press), and he is the editor of Wake Up and Roar: Satsang with H.W.L. Poonja, (Sounds True).

Interview recorded 2/5/2012

Video and audio below. Audio also available as a Podcast.

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Mariana Caplan, PhD, MFT, is a licensed psychotherapist, professor of yogic and transpersonal psychologies, and the author of seven books in the fields of psychology and spirituality, including, The Guru Question: The Perils and Rewards of Choosing a Spiritual Teacher (Sounds True, 2011), Eyes Wide Open: Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path (Sounds True, 2010), which won five national awards for best spiritual book of 2010, and the seminal Halfway Up the Mountain: the Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment.

She has spent 20 years researching cutting edge and controversial topics in Western Spirituality, and dialoguing with the great spiritual teachers, scholars, and luminaries of our time. She is a leading spiritual psychologist, using somatic approaches to psychotherapy to support spiritual practitioners and teachers with the process of healing trauma and moving towards psychospiritual integration, and working with the complex discernments that arise in the context of spiritual practice and in spiritual communities.

She is an adjunct professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies where she creates and teaches innovative public and academic programs. She has degrees cultural anthropology, counseling psychology, and contemporary spirituality, and is a teacher, lifelong practitioner, and lover of yoga philosophy and asana.

Mariana resides in the San Francisco Bay Area where she has a private psychotherapy practice, and ecstatically enjoys her life as a new mom.

Mariana’s website

Interview recorded 2/3/2012

Video and audio below. Audio also available as a Podcast.

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The Open Secret message is totally radical and uncompromising.  It is a rare and singular expression of absolute non-dualism.  It bypasses the mind and speaks directly to the very core of a wisdom that is imminent in all of us. When there is a readiness to hear, all seeking and need for personal endeavor falls away, leaving simply the wonder of what is.

There is no me or you, no seeker, no enlightenment, no disciple and no guru.   There is no better or worse, no path, and nothing that has to be achieved.  All appearance is source.  All that apparently manifests – the world, the life story, the hypnotic dream of separation, the search for home – is the one appearing as two, the nothing appearing as everything, the absolute appearing as the particular.

There is no separate intelligence weaving a destiny, and no choice functioning at any level.  Nothing is happening, but this, as it is, invites the apparent seeker to rediscover that which already is…the abiding, uncaused, unchanging, impersonal silence from which unconditional love overflows and celebrates.  It is the wonderful mystery.

Tony Parsons has been sharing this “open secret” with people for over ten years. His talks and workshops are highly regarded in England and Western Europe.

Tony’s books:

• As It Is: The Open Secret of Spiritual Awakening
• The Open Secret
• Nothing Being Everything

Tony’s website

Interview recorded 2/2/2012

Video and audio below. Audio also available as a Podcast.

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