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Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is John Prendergast. John is a spiritual teacher and an author. Now retired, he was an adjunct professor of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies where he taught and supervised master’s level counseling students for 23 years. He was also a licensed psychotherapist in private practice from 1986 to 2021. With Sounds True, John has written three books: In Touch, about tuning in and listening to your body’s wisdom and inner knowing. A book called The Deep Heart. And now a new book—it’s called Your Deepest Ground: A Guide to Embodied Spirituality. John, friend, welcome.
John J. Prendergast, PhD: Well, I feel very welcome. It’s great to be here with you, Tami.
TS: Great to be with you. I’m going to start with a line from the introduction of your new book. You write, “Opening to the ground is a poorly understood yet critically important part of the spiritual quest.” Let’s start there. How is it that it’s so misunderstood? And help us understand the ground?
JP: Yeah, this has been kind of a gradual growing revelation for me after just decades of work with people and also as my own sensitivity has expanded and opened and I’ve been aware working as a therapist and also as a spiritual teacher with students, the process of opening, awakening to true nature, healing, opening. And it’s just been so interesting to feel that in this process, that of inviting the system to open up and to release, have a natural release in letting go that it gets stuck. It kind of plateaus at certain areas and sometimes the area may be constriction in the heart because of a sense of unworthiness, a sense of shame, a lack of self-acceptance and love. That’s quite common. Sometimes there’ll be a knot in the solar plexus around having to do with navigating interpersonal power relationships. But I have found in my work with people that really the contraction in the pelvic bowl at the base of the spine that corresponds with the root chakra in the Indian subtle bodies system is where people hold the deepest contraction and fear.
And it’s often, it’s kind of buried underground and most people operate unaware of it. They’re kind of acting it out in various ways in terms of the opening process, the inward opening process. But in terms of just the free radiance of their life energy and their creative energy and their love, we protect our hearts, don’t we, if we don’t feel fully safe. And it’s been very interesting to see that connection between openness of heart and lack of openness, constriction in the ground. So I just kept encountering this again and again and working with people and as there was an invitation to kind of deepen and open in their exploration, we would keep coming to this ground level of resistance. And I became increasingly curious about what are the dimensions of this? And what I discovered was in a kind of rough way, there are origins that come from our family sources that come from our family of origin, and they can be early attachment kind of issues and trauma and they’re quite common.
So fear of abandonment, fear of an invasion attack. So all this or traumatic material that creates freezes in the system. And then there’s a deeper subtler but very powerful existential level which has to do just with experiencing ourself as a separate self. And as the opening process continues and that feels threatened, there’s a clenching, a resistance that happens. So these two levels that call it psychodynamic and existential, it became clearer and clearer in my work with people and it became clear that this is where the system was in its deepest resistance to a natural letting go process to a full flowering of the human.
TS: You talked about this knot or clenching and located part of this clenching being in the base of the spine. And that made me think of the classic metaphor of spiritual awakening, of kundalini awakening and the coiled old snake that’s at the base of our spine. What’s the relationship between kundalini awakening and opening to the ground?
JP: They’re intimately related, because as the root chakra, as that foundational energy center begins to relax and open, there’s a sense of awareness really descending. And we can feel it because there can be a sense of the legs, the pelvic goal, the legs, the feet actually coming alive, kind of tingling with energy and the sense of connection with the earth gets stronger. And even it’s like going through all the way through the body and the earth just into open, spacious awareness. The more that opening happens, the more the system is available for an upwelling current of life. So it’s like in the release into emptiness, into silence, into stillness, the letting go of all the stories and images of who we take ourselves to be. There’s an availability to an essential life force that quite spontaneously will begin with. That opening will begin to move through us in a palpable way.
Now, it depends on our sensitivity. I mean, usually when we think about kundalini awakenings, there’s these kind of dramatic Gopi Krishna kind of reports, and that does happen occasionally, and it can be quite disturbing. My experience is more as this constriction releases, there’s a gentle and powerful current that we can feel as a kind of warmth or flow or sense of inner alignment depending on our sensitivity. So for some it will be a palpable sense of a column of light, current of aliveness. For others, there’s just kind of a sense of lightness and alignment and well-being in the deep interiority of the body. And that seems to be more common.
TS: You write in Your Deepest Ground, “As you read, pay attention to your body, especially to the felt sense in your pelvis and below. Be willing to be surprised. Your subtle sensitivity is listening.” And I thought to myself, I would like, and I’d like to invite and have you help me invite the subtle sensitivity of the people who are tuning in to hear this conversation, to listen as you’re describing your deepest ground. How can people attune deeply to what you’re pointing to in this conversation?
JP: That’s a beautiful question. It requires a relaxation of the mind, first of all. And the mind is always kind of tending to grasp and grasp, grasp conceptually, for instance, in this conversation. So the invitation is to relax that grasping and to realize there are other ways of understanding that are more intuitive and direct. So it’s like permission for the mind to relax, not to grasp anything, not to get anywhere. And often when I do a guided meditation, I start with that invitation, nowhere to go, nothing to get. Just let yourself be. With that invitation, with the relaxation of strategic mind, attention will naturally begin to drop down and in to the trunk and the midline of the body. So in our conversation, I would just invite people to let your attention naturally drop. No efforting. It’s just like a relaxation and a deep settling. Feel the weight of your body held by whatever you’re sitting in and just kind of let yourself be held by gravity if nothing else.
And kind of relaxing into that sense of being held perhaps by something even greater. So there’s a relaxation letting oneself be held and the attention continues to drop down into the lower belly. There’s just a natural kind of landing or settling that happens. We can also imagine we’re breathing into the hara or the lower dantian, which is below the belly button, and that can be an anchor for attention to that can help us just let attention drop down. And so it’s like our center of gravity has just kind of gradually dropped down and we feel ourselves more just seated in a comfortable and open way. And this is a very receptive state. So that would be the invitation is to just take a few deep breaths, give your mind permission to relax, let your attention drop, feel your breath in your lower belly. And the interesting thing about the ground, I do describe it as a felt sense, and so meaning a whole body subtle sense of generally something or someone, but in this case, it’s actually a sense of reality.
We’re actually attuning with a deeper sense of ground that is not just located in the body, includes the body, but it’s actually underground so we can feel the breath beneath the body as if we’re breathing up from the ground and exhaling into the ground. And that exhalation in particular is a beautiful kind of, what would I call it, like a slide, if you will, just allowing attention to drop and release with that exhalation and letting the exhalation fully release. And there are levels, if we stay with it, there’s a level to that emptying out and that releasing. It just releases and releases and releases, and we just wait for the in-breath to come of its own. So now we’re really attuning to a felt sense of something lower in the body, lower in the body, and actually beneath the body into the depths. This underground dimension is really interesting because it’s not just personal, it has a collective and archetypal dimension to it. It’s not just about the earth body, the physical body and the earth. It’s like we just drop through the body, we drop through the earth, and as we do, we come out of personal levels into more collective levels as well. And then ultimately to the ground of being or a groundless ground, a sense of just deep, dark, spacious silence and rest. And as that, that’s the invitation.
TS: One of the things that I thought was quite curious is that as you began to write Your Deepest Ground, you developed an interest in the work of Carl Jung in a way that you hadn’t in your life.
JP: Exactly.
TS: Even though obviously you were familiar with his work, but you took a, so to speak, deep dive into understanding the collective unconscious. And I’m wondering from that what you discovered about this energetic descent that was already occurring in your spiritual journey and that you wanted to write about. How did Jung’s work inform that?
JP: Yeah, I’m glad we’re talking about this. In some ways it’s the most interesting aspect because that kind of groundless ground deep silence. Darkness was familiar, the personal ground, but this kind of more collective unconscious archetypal ground wasn’t as clear. And this was a fascinating process in terms of writing because I felt like I am learning as I write, I am in a way, the writing of the book and the unfolding of awareness here was happening as a simultaneous act. It was an act of discovery. And so what was the impact? Well, first of all, I think I mentioned this in one of the chapters I was writing in chapter one, and I just finished a page or two and I just stopped writing. And it’s like, oh, the inner voice had stopped and it’s like, well, what is this? And I got quiet and it’s like, you need to understand, you need to be more intimate with this archetypal level.
And so I went back to Jung’s memoir, which I’d read as a graduate student and loved, and it was like, there’s so much here. And then I read The Red Book, which is a challenging read and rather obscure and very interesting book. But I read it and then I went back to the memoir, dreams, memories, reflections, memory, dreams, back to The Red Book, read some commentaries on it. And what happened was I kind of joined Jung in his journey, in this kind of underground journey. I can’t say exactly how that happened. It was a kind of attunement where I was beginning to get a feel for what that plummeting down into the depths, miles beneath the body that he was experiencing and that kind of transparency of different subtle realms that he was so open to. And somehow Jung was an extraordinary explorer in that regard, one of the best in terms of the collective unconscious, and it just vivified this dimension.
So one of the interesting impacts is in the work in my spiritual mentoring work with students was as this happened, their collective unconscious began to activate more. And so there would be streams of conditioning coming from male or female lineages going back through various ethnic, racial gender lines that were coming up to be met and metabolized and released. The collective became more vivified in the field that was shared during this period, more so in the last two, three years than ever before. So there’s just something about that that was activated. And similarly, I found myself using metaphors. I’m more of a kinesthetic person, so I sense and via resonance and the inner visualization is less developed. It’s been there but not as strongly very strong, like clear metaphoric images were arising in my work with people. So that dimension was that kind of imaginal dimension was also vivifying as it became more online here. And there was just a sense as that happened, there was an inner feeling, I got the green light this well enough because to speak about the absolute ground or the personal ground wasn’t sufficient, that the ground is multidimensional, and it really felt important to include this subtle and very powerful realm that Jung describes so beautifully.
TS: You talk about going into this multidimensional ground as going into the basement and then the sub-basement and then the sub-basement. And then it sounds like you’re saying underneath the sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-basement, there’s something that we could call absolute ground.
JP: Yes.
TS: Can you say what absolute ground is point to that?
JP: Yeah. Well, no words can suffice because I would say as I wrote something in me wanted to get to the bottom of everything, and what I found was the bottom was open. So the best way to describe it, well, first of all, I don’t want to speak about it, but more from it. There is a profound silence and stillness and darkness, and there’s no story or image. And even the thought “I am” is irrelevant here. There’s also quality of profound spaciousness, infinitely. So that’s that kind of open-ended quality and something foundational, something unshakable, like something that just is always here and never moves, which I think is why people find the metaphor of the ground intuitively appropriate. So words are very inadequate in pointing to it. And I find that when it’s a field experience, so when it is felt, and here it is in the shared field and transmitted in a certain way to others who are participating, who have some openness to that. Now the interesting thing is, as we were speaking earlier, is as there’s a deep resting in, and as this, there’s a sense of pure potentiality here, there’s a sense of source, like everything is here in potential, and there’s a vibrancy, then a pulse. That one feels an emergent luminosity that feels as if it is rising from and out of nothing. So no one, nothing, then everything appearing.
TS: John, part of what I love about you and your work is that you bring, into your writing and your teaching, your experience of clinical practice many years working as a psychotherapist with people. And you pointed out that we have both psychological blocks to this absolute ground and existential blocks. And I want to talk a little bit more about both of those categories. And also when we touch that, I’ll just use the phrase “groundless ground,” how that can help us work through these blocks. So beginning, for example, with a psychological obstacle and something that I’m intimate with is being really afraid and feeling insecure in our life for some reason. I’m not going to be loved. I’m not going to have enough money. I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel safe where I am. Think it’s great to talk about this unshakable, pure potential luminosity, and I feel it, and I know it sometimes, but sometimes I feel terribly unsafe.
JP: Yeah, safety is really the core theme here and exploring it in a really deep way. So I find what’s really important is not to try to in working what we call fear or contraction, not trying to change it or fix it or make it go away. And of course, that’s what the mind is always trying to do in order to feel better and feel safer. So this brings us to the principle of welcoming experience into presence and the value of the evoking presence, awake, awareness, open, spacious awareness. And there is a grounded aspect of that to whatever degree that is available. So very often we’re having some fear arising. It can be helpful to name what it is and what it’s about. Then I’ll invite people to, OK, just release that for a minute. Just put that down and take a few deep breaths, let your attention rest down and in rest back, just relax back into some sense of open, spacious awareness. Just take a minute and allow that, and we’ll just sit quietly for a minute or two and I’ll say, you have a sense of that. And usually people will say, yeah, some sense. And I can feel that that’s true. And then from this openness, now just receive your fear. Just welcome it in to this open, spacious awareness without an agenda to fix or change it and notice what happens.
And just with that kind of spacious and non-manipulative invitation, what we call fear quite naturally will begin to unfold and reveal itself different layers of it. And so the point is actually to be intimate with our experience to get to know it better. And what’s fascinating is there are different components of what we call fear. There can be the thought, I’m going to die. There can be emotion terror, there can be contraction in the body. And so we can welcome the sensation, we can welcome the feeling, we can question the belief, and this is something we’ve talked about before and is important. My work is meditative inquiry. It’s like, OK, I’m going to die if I whatever, do, don’t do something well. And I’ll just ask someone. Just let your attention rest in your heart and ask yourself, what’s your deepest knowing about this belief?
Don’t think about it. There’s a certain art to letting go of thinking and checking in more intuitively. And once people get a sense of that kind of letting go and allowing of some other knowing to arise, it may not come as a word, may come as just a feeling of some warmth or release or radiance or some intuitive knowing. I invite people to really trust that and let that in. And so these compartments compartmentalize the experience. Inner children who are frightened, or whatever it may be, begin to actually be imbued with the light of awareness, with a sense of the ground, with a sense of openness, with a sense of luminosity. And that’s where the transformation happens. It’s like we welcome our conditioned self into the unconditioned. It’s an art, but I find that people on the path actually can orient to this pretty easily.
TS: One of your initial cues, if you will, was to lean back and pay attention to the space behind you. And I find that extraordinarily helpful. I’m curious to know why does that work so well, at least for me, but why do you think it works so well for so many people and yet we don’t receive that instruction that often?
JP: Not that often. Yeah, that kind of resting back. Well, I think it’s initially we become, this is how we become aware of what feels like a background awareness. Like ordinarily our attention is fixated on the contents of awareness, our thoughts, our feelings and sensations. This particular instruction resting back is a gentle way of attuning with the background of awareness. And that awareness is whereas it may feel initially limited as a certain, maybe a few feet back or a kind of sphere, as we actually become more familiar and intimate with it, we feel the boundless nature of it. It’s like just space in all directions. And that is the nature of awareness, actually. It’s space outside, space inside, same space, but it’s overlooked and because of our tendency to fixate on the contents awareness rather than awareness itself.
TS: And you said that letting go of our thinking process and thinking, seeing everything through the lens of thinking as an art, tell me a little bit about how you practice that art and how our listeners can, because I think a lot of people are extraordinarily interested in getting better at this art form.
JP: That’s true. Well, I think the most important thing, it’s a very important step to be able to see thoughts as thoughts and not as reality. And most thoughts are not problematic. They’re practical, more or less accurate, and it’s not a problem, but certain thoughts are quite problematic in terms of veiling, our sense of self and of the world, what’s really here. So there’s a subtle and important process of differentiating awareness from thought that feels primary. It’s like we actually realize third periods when we’re not thinking and we’re aware, and just to kind of point that out and recognize that, and notice it’s a classic instruction, right? Thoughts are coming and going, like birds in the sky or clouds, and they appear and they disappear and notice the context within which they appear. So that’s the differentiation. We begin to witness our thoughts developing a capacity to witness this basic mindfulness, but it’s helpful to be able to witness it.
And it’s a kind of half step, I would say, from fully disidentifying and the kind of awakening from thought in the realization that who we are is not bound by thought at all. That’s what I would call a mental awakening. And to see for the mind to recognize its own limits, that the mind cannot grasp its source. No matter how hard it tries and how that particular insight comes. It seems more intuitive. There’s a kind of ripeness in that realization that the mind am not going to grasp this. I’m not going to get it, and I don’t need to, that I don’t know. It’s OK. And there’s a humility in that. It’s a healthy humility. It’s like what we’re investigating here is prior to thought. So thought is not going to—thought is very useful, practical, essential, beautiful, wonderful tool in this investigation. It can be a hindrance if we’re trying to grasp source.
And so somehow the mind gets that as well. And there’s a relaxation of that grasping, trying to get it and relaxing into not knowing. It’s like, don’t know mine, don’t know, can’t know, don’t need to know. That last piece was something that was kind of just emerged spontaneously for me. I’d heard many times, don’t know, can’t know, but it’s like I don’t need to know. This is really important because the mind thinks it needs to know in order to manage and control our life in order to be safe and to survive, and the realization, oh, I don’t need to know something else. There is a different principle of knowing here that is available and it kicks in as there’s a relaxation of the mind that there is an inner intelligence and intuition that is actually much more direct, much more alive, much more attuned, much more connected with life. And so we begin to realize there’s a different operating system here. And often there’s a gradual shift, and this is kind of that pilgrimage from head to heart. We realize there’s a different way of relating, a different way of being in the world that actually is much more intimate, much more fulfilling, much more real and authentic. And there’s a kind of gradual trusting in that occurs. So all of that is often a gradual process, I find.
TS: And you mentioned that this is a type of half step, and what that brought up for me is that I’ve seen a lot of people when they start meditating, they become very identified with the witness. I’m the witness. How do we go from that half step to the whole step of your deepest ground?
JP: Yeah. Well, that took me quite a while. And it happened. It happened in several—I was on a retreat with Adya when that happened. I mean, the pointing out of the witness happened early on. My Jean Klein, my root teacher, as he would say, “Don’t fornicate with a witness,” so don’t get caught in the witness state. But even knowing that there was still a subtle identification with the observer and the observed. So it was helpful to point it out that that was happening, but it wasn’t until I saw that seeking was continuing, that the observer was just looking for finer and finer and finer, just the most refined perception possible. And first of all, that that was happening, that seeking was happening. And second of all that there was no end to it, that it would just go on and on and on. And then in that kind of self-honesty, there was a sudden realization, I am that which I’m seeking.
It came as an intuitive flash. Now I’d heard that for 20 years, if not more, of teaching from Nisargadatta, from Jean Klein, from Adya. But somehow there was a readiness here to be that honest with myself about the futility of seeking and that the seeking itself was the hindrance to the recognition of what is always here and has always been here: wholeness. And that wholeness then quickly generalized to the totality of life as well. It’s like it’s all one thing. It’s not two, but how exactly. That’s as much as I can, as well as I can describe it in terms of my subjective experience.
TS: Now, you mentioned, John, these two different categories, if you will, of blocks to the deepest ground, the psychological and the more existential. We’ve talked a little bit about the psychological. I want to go into the existential category for a moment, and this sense of if I really release fully, you call it a fear of annihilation that people have. I’m going to name it more how I experience it inside, which is I’m going to go crazy. It’s really wild, uncontrollable, and what’s going to happen.
JP: Oh yes, good. I’m glad you gave it that iteration. That’s one of the forms it’s taking, which is, I’ll go crazy, right? I’ll lose my sanity because it feels like the center will not hold. And that does come up with people that I work with. And what I tell people is that you are gaining your sanity, you’re not losing it. And somehow just that reassurance along with an attuned connection and sense of rapport and trust is deeply helpful in the letting go. It’s like, oh, it’s OK, because that is what happens. Now, it may be tumultuous. This is an important point too, is that very often there’s a period of disorientation that happens because we’re so oriented to being a separate self and to being inside an inside separate self and outside separate world or self and other. That is just how we are all conditioned to experience life.
So to discover that that’s not true, that this which I took myself to be is a construct and not as a false ground rather than our deepest ground. That this is really what I am shakes the whole system. And depending on how all sorts of variables, some of which we’re not aware of in terms of maturity, it can be tumultuous, particularly if we’ve been living way out of accord with that. If on the other hand, we’ve been investigating and exploring for some time, that’s a less disorienting realization and often will come in kind of stages of opening and then closing, opening and closing, which I call the acclimation process. The conditioned body mind is acclimating to its unconditioned, open, boundless nature, and that is a gradual process. Titration. We get used to the, I thought I was a finite being and I’m an infinite being having a finite experience. I thought I was inside here and now I feel like I can’t locate myself. But what happens is that disorientation precedes a reorientation and there with some understanding and some time, there’s a natural relaxation that happens and we realize, oh, this is actually true about me and about everyone, this kind of molded self.
TS: When you talk about acclimatizing to the deepest ground being this is my language now, a sort of energetic reality in our experience. Like, oh, we can handle it. We can handle this much energy flowing through our system.
JP: Yes.
TS: I’d love to hear more about that and what can help people go through that process when it is tumultuous? I mean, people report all kinds of things.
JP: Absolutely.
TS: I mean, once again, I’ll speak with my own experience, strange headaches, what’s going on, and it’s like, well, I want to control. And so I feel like I have a vise around my head, but it’s kind of breaking open at the same time. Other experiences too. I’m curious what you’ve seen when you work with people and what helps.
JP: What I’ve seen the most is trembling and shaking. Yes, headaches sometimes, but it’s a real unwinding of a core contraction. People experience it as a melting, an unwinding, an uncoiling. And very often there’s a tremoring that happens. And because I’m attuned with who I work with, I feel it and I start, I do this sometimes, not intentionally, but I just find the body starts to release. It’s wanting to release this kind of core tension, and it can feel like a core contraction all the way down and through, right through the midline of the trunk. And so sometimes there’ll be shaking and trembling.
And I mean, I had a meeting yesterday that was like that I was feeling at first, and then I noticed my student who was working with me was moving a little bit. I said, feel free to get up out of your chair and just move freely. I’ll track you. And so for 5 or 10 minutes, she just let her body move. And when she sat down again, when there was a sense of relief, she said, “I feel much more adult.” It’s like there was a shedding of a childhood constraint, a way she had tightly gripped herself that was no longer relevant or necessary. She did it to feel safe.
So that’s the main thing that I see, that kind of unwinding, melting, trembling, shaking occasionally. It’s been really intense. I had a period, I’ve talked about it in the book. I didn’t write about, not this book, I didn’t write about it. Well, two things. First as this, after these kind of intense long meditation courses I did in my twenties, three months, six months, this started awakening the energy field. I went to India. I spent some time with a controversial teacher, Saba, that kind of further opened the energy field. And then I had a good decade of more often, not at night, after two hours of deep sleep, just energy running through the system and jolts, and it was quite uncomfortable and sometimes exhausting that I would have.
But there was one period, this is an interesting to share. This happened maybe 15 years ago. I was, when I was still working as a therapist, and I had three men come in and each of them talked about their fear of abandonment. And the first one I noticed, I started to get a little uncomfortable at the end of the session. Second one was definitely getting uncomfortable, almost shaking the third one, I could barely function. And once he left, I laid out on my couch and I just started shaking for close to an hour without emotion. It was just like release-tense-release going on that I completely trusted. And I know it had to do with this psychological level of a fear of abandonment that had been stored deeply in the body, and it was time to let it go.
TS: So I trust that letting-go process is your counsel to people. If they find themselves shaking or feeling the need to shake, just go ahead, let it happen. Let it run through your body.
JP: Yeah, yeah. That it can be helpful to have someone witness you or be with you if it feels like it’s too much. And there is a role for containment and hands-on work, if it feels like it’s getting out of control, it’s like take care of yourself. But I have found that it’s a natural release process. And when there’s someone there who can say, this is a natural release process like an animal shaking off stress, it’s like then the system self regulates. That’s what’s happening. There’s a deep movement towards self-healing and self-regulation that’s happening, and it requires a release of stored tension and a lot of trapped energy as well. So yeah, it can occasionally take that form.
TS: Now you’re reporting on something that happened many years ago for you, and I’m wondering now in your life with the level of connection you feel to your deepest ground such that you could speak as it to us as part of this conversation. The thing I’m curious about is how in your experience you feel ascending currents of energy, upwellings from the deepest ground, and descending currents, and if they happen in cycles of the breath, one at a time, sometimes a lot of ascending energy, sometimes a lot of descending. How does it roll for you?
JP: Yeah, well, it doesn’t go with the breath and it happens spontaneously. And it just depends on who knows what actually. And sometimes it depends. I’m sitting with someone and it’s just a resonant phenomena. It’s like what their system is needing. And sometimes it’s what is happening in their system. So I can be sitting with someone and just like, it’s like the roof comes off and then there’s just a downpour of light and the person will feel intuitively inspired. And sometimes there’ll be an upwelling and there’s just this sense of profound aliveness, just really core of one’s being vibrant and aligned. That’s when I’m working with people alone. I can be sitting in meditation and one or the other could be happening for absolutely no conscious reason at all. And I have found that they’re related in some way in the sense that I’m glad we’re talking about this as the sense of the ground deepens. And there is a rootedness and no-thing-ness, if you will, deeper and deeper. It’s like there’s a foundation for the higher energy realms to be balanced in the body, like heaven and earth are in communion with one another. And somehow this upwelling current and down pouring that we experience as human beings brings a sense of profound communion and intimacy and aliveness and realness as well.
TS: In Your Deepest Ground, you share that the image of a rainbow bridge between heaven and earth has been kind of a guiding image in your life. And I’d love to hear more about that.
JP: Yeah, this is something that arose in one of those deep meditation courses I did in my twenties, and it was very, very strong image of this arc. Instead of going from side to side, it was coming from the sky to the ground. The rainbow, yeah, the rainbow bridge. And it was just this brilliant, it had some numinous quality to me, there was something really, really important about it, but I didn’t know, but it was referring to, it just felt really important. And I didn’t think about it. I didn’t talk about it. I didn’t share it with anyone. But as this energetic dimension has unfolded and I’ve realized that the body’s not just what we think it is, it’s not just what it appears, that it’s an energy field, yes, physiology and anatomy, but there are all these subtle dimensions to it. And as this has unfolded, it has felt so important in terms of the embodiment of spirit that this kind of intermediate intermediary, subtle level of the body is, the inclusion of that in psychological healing and spiritual awakening is critically important.
It’s kind of the missing piece. And it feels like the body has this rainbow quality, these different vibratory levels that as it opens and as we’re more aware of it, we feel deeply connected with the earth and with the heavens. So it’s like the body and the human experience is this intermediary and profound expression of form and formlessness of light and dark of all these different vibratory and multidimensional levels. And they’re all implicit and available for our experience. And this is an interesting aspect in terms of coming back to Jung, the process of individuation. Because so often Eastern contemplative traditions, I think, have accented the realization of the formless, the contemplative, which is a pretty renunciate—there are tantric exceptions of course, and others that are more grounded. So this embodiment of spirit feels so important, particularly as Westerners, as households, as people who are in relationship, who people who care about the world and the planet and other living beings. It’s like to have a vibrant, communal, intimate sense of that is very important. And so, I don’t know, I’m kind of free associating here with that image.
TS: Well, I want to make one comment, and then I’m going to get super practical because I certainly don’t want our conversation to get too esoteric for people.
JP: I know it sounds pretty esoteric.
TS: That’s OK. I was with you with the rainbow bridge, but my one comment, in Your Deepest Ground, you offer this one word, the word “just.” You’re not just your body. And I say that because often with teachings that emphasize how you’re not your body, you’re not your body, you’re not your body, you’re not your body, I notice there’s a part of me that always feels a little bit like, hey, slow down a little bit. Yes, I get that we’re more than our body, but we also are our body. And so you–
JP: Exactly.
TS: You put this one word in, and I thought, oh, I love that. That was really brilliant, John. So I just want to underscore that.
JP: Well, I appreciate your sensitivity to that because that little word just creates the bridge. It’s like, yes, I am this body and so much more. But if we go, we know what the teaching that you’re not your body, that can be like shock and it can catapult you into really awake awareness. But then what is this? What is body? Is it separate from that? It’s not. And so this just, it’s like I am this body and I am so much more really feels like I am the wave and the ocean to say I’m not the wave, just it’s subtle, but it really devalues the human experience and it creates a split. And this is exactly the point I didn’t fully make with Carl Jung was he was very interested in full development of the human being, the individuation process. The Eastern contemplative traditions were not so interested or didn’t recognize that. And yet Jung was also, he was very suspicious of Ramana Maharshi in those teachings, kind of absolutist teachings. And he felt that they were actually sabotaging, undermining the individuation process. I don’t find that to be true, rightly understood in this point. I’m not just, the body is one of the critical points, otherwise they become dissociative. And we get into subtle or not-so-subtle bypassing and we get into splitting and we get into acting out and all the shadow material that we’ve seen in the so-called spiritual theater.
TS: So I said I was going to make this extraordinarily practical, and I do, I’m going to bring it down to the ground of this moment, which is as our collective, as our society is going through so much tumult, we’re in such a state of chaos.
JP: Yes.
TS: People are looking for any sense of ground. They don’t need the absolute ground necessarily in their own minds. They’re like, God, could I just feel more grounded at this time when I feel so shaken up? And I wonder if you were to somehow concentrate, if you will, into a sort of homeopathic dose that could help anyone at whatever place they may be on their spiritual quest, feel a sense of ground at this time.
JP: Well, first I want to just reflect that I agree. It’s an extraordinarily tumultuous time in their tremendous systems that are deconstructing or being destructed. And it’s deeply unsettling for our sense of normalcy and safety. So just to validate that, and that’s happening individually and collectively, and it’s a field experience, and it activates our individual material as well in ways that we may have felt unsafe and amplifies it. So first is kind of acknowledge the reality of that. Yes, that’s true. It’s very unsettling. And then to realize that the mind of course has a negativity bias and tends to look to worse-case scenarios.
So for the moment, suspend thought, bring attention down and in. I would say that sort of the simplest and basic thing is to bring your breath down into your belly and take several slow deep breaths and feel the lower half of your body. Feel the connection with the earth and feel yourself held by the earth, just like let yourself settle ground and feel held by the earth. Very simple, very practical.
TS: Can you say more about this? I think sometimes when people hear that—being held by the earth—and what does that mean?
JP: Well, we’re held by gravity, by one. So it’s like you relax into being held by gravity, if nothing else. It’s interesting just how much we hold ourselves up. And in just this simplicity of realizing, oh, I don’t need to contract myself so much. I can actually relax into a sense of the ground. It’s also good to spend time in nature. I find there are different levels here. And another which is more of an art is, that a meditative inquiry is to ask oneself, what is my deepest sense of safety? And be quiet. And that may help us intuitively find an inner resource that provides some sense of stabilization and calmness as well. But it is true that I do think and feel and sense that it is our deepest ground that actually is a source of our deepest sense of safety. And it’s the surrendering and opening to that and the trusting of that that is most calming and settling to the system.
TS: I’ve been speaking with John Prendergast, author of the new book Your Deepest Ground: A Guide to Embodied Spirituality. It’s the third book of what feels like a type of progression, dare we say, trilogy of books. From being In Touch to The Deep Heart to now the Deepest Ground. It is an honor to have Sounds True be your publishing home, John, really.
JP: Thank you so much, Tami.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the aftershow Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
