Welcome to the Trillium Path Foundation Course An Online Course in Profound Embodied Awakening With Ted Strauss for
Welcome to The Trillium Path Table of contents Glossary of terms ii Lesson 1: Orientation... 1 Lesson 2: Images of Awakening...... 7 Lesson 3: Realities of Awakening.... 16 Lesson 4: Waking.... 24 Lesson 5: Down... 32 Lesson 6: Mutuality.... 40 Lesson 7: Onlyness.. 50 Lesson 8: Feminine keys to Awakening.. 58 Lesson 9: Masculine keys to Awakening.... 64 Lesson 10: Transformation and the journey forward... 72 i
Welcome to The Trillium Path A Foundation Course in Profound Embodied Awakening By Ted Strauss Editing by Krishna Gauci and Ron Ambes Video by Wolcott Digital Media Copyright Institute of Awakened Mutuality 2010 & 2015. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without prior written permission of the Publisher. ii
Glossary of Terms Awakening: The lifelong process of realizing who you are in your totality and living your truth in whatever ways are natural for you. Awakening is the process of maturing into your own full expression as a divinely human creature. Being: The totality of existence and non-existence; Absolute and Relative, manifest and unmanifest; infinite and finite, consciousness and form, spirit and matter. Some might call this God, but here the meaning has no religious or theistic overtones. Being Initiation: A feeling or experience of spontaneous, whole Being enlivenment upon encountering the teaching or transmission of the Trillium path. Some feel it as a cautious new hope after what may have been a prolonged period of hopelessness. Some have profound experiences of future stages of awareness; some simply feel a sense of rightness. Bodymind: The manifest aspects of ourselves: our bodies, minds, feelings, personality, and energies. Consciousness: The dimension of Being that is formless, timeless, Absolute, unmanifest, birthless, deathless, universal, and unlimited. We have the ability to know consciousness as the essence of our subject selfhood. Conscious Embodiment: Permitting the descent of consciousness into the body. Conscious Wound: The existential feeling of being simultaneously limitless and limited, especially as felt consciously after the Second Birth. Core Wound: The existential feeling of being simultaneously limitless and limited, especially as felt prior to the Second Birth. It is an underlying whole-being feeling that is felt differently by different individuals, but is often characterized by words like primal separation, confusion, incompleteness, insufficiency, anxiety, entrapment, pressure, or yearning. This feeling prompts us to discover the unity at the basis of our perception of separation and differences. Coconut yoga: The practice of deeply apologizing (without self-defense) when you notice you ve hurt someone. Coconut yoga is a practice that opens us to mutuality through vulnerability and empathy. Down: Awakening to the totality of embodiment -- mind, body, feelings, and energy iii
including all the pleasures, pains, gifts, and conditionings of Earthly existence. Embodied Feeling Witness Consciousness: A stage of awakening in which consciousness is recognized as interpenetrating the bodymind space. At this stage, a practitioner is aware of the paradox of being simultaneously infinite and finite, while still perceiving these aspects as somehow separate, at odds with either other, or needing to be reconciled. First Birth: The physical birth of the bodymind organism. First Life: The life that follows the first birth until the Second Birth occurs. Fundamental Wellness: The whole-being feeling of basic OKness and unity that follows the second birth shift. After the second birth, fundamental wellness is found to be the new context in which all experience arises. Greenlighting: A practice of permitting the bodymind and its conditioning to be exactly as it is in each moment. By giving ourselves a green light to be exactly the way we are with all our human faults and limitations, energy and attention is freed up that was previously bound up in patterns of self negation. The freed energy and attention permits a deepening recognition of our true and total nature. Greenlighting of self, others, and world cultivates Trust in Being through radical embrace. Hypermasculine: Masculine qualities of detachment and left-brain reasoning taken to out- of-balance extremes, resulting in a tendency to fix, transcend, negate, reject, or numb out to life, rather than simply embrace it and let ourselves be affected. Mutuality: The depth of our realization that self and others are not separate because they re simply two aspects of Being. In this work, mutuality is practiced through a disposition that says my truth is true, your truth is true, our truths are often uncomfortably different, but we ll honor those differences and lean into that discomfort because we honor each other as part of ourselves." Depth in mutuality is evidenced by one s willingness and ability to meet others deeply in their reality and to be truly respectful and vulnerable in relationship. Onlyness: The second life perception of Being as a single, seamless reality that excludes nothing. Onlyness is the recognition that Being is not just oneness, unity, and connectedness, but also, because it is everything, it is the Only thing that exists. Rot: The Rot is a pre-second Birth transition during which one loses faith in beliefs that there is a way to fix, escape, or transcend existential discomfort. It is a period of decay out of the natural, defensive strategies for avoiding What Is that permits an increasingly stark encounter with the Core Wound. Second Birth: A sometimes gradual, sometimes sudden shift that occurs within in the larger awakening process, characterized by the recognition that self is no longer limited either to iv
the bodymind or consciousness, but includes All of Being. It is a shift in perception that permits the sense of self to include both unity and duality as a single, seamless reality that needs no reconciliation. It is often felt as a landing ; a feeling of fundamental arrival into self, life, here, and now as never before. Second Life: The stage of life that follows the Second Birth. Transformation: The process of whole Being healing and realignment that follows the Second Birth. Transformation usually takes at least seven years, and brings fundamental wholeness, wellness, and integration to all aspects of one s Being. Transmission: The communication of awakened Being; the blessing force spontaneously radiated by second birth realizers that catalyzes awakening to the Onlyness of Being. The Trillium path: Awakening to Impersonal Consciousness, to Personal Embodiment and Interpersonally in mutual relatedness with others who are doing the same. Trust in Being: Fundamental surrender to the perfection of the universe, including everything we don t like and don t understand. A stage of grace arrived at not through thought or will, but through thousands of experiences of surrendering resistance to What Is. Wakedown Shakedown: The aspect of Transformation that brings the darkness and pain of every hidden wound, split, and pattern in your Being into the light of realized Onlyness for investigation and healing. Wakeup Shakeup: The aspect of Transformation that integrates all your positive aspects, including your unique brilliance and gifts, your love, your light, your confidence, and your own transmission and blessing force. Wakedown Shakedown and Wakeup Shakeup are the down and up sides of the waves of transformation experienced after the Second Birth. Waking: Awakening to consciousness or infinite spirit. Witness Consciousness: A recognition of consciousness that can appear somewhat removed from the bodymind and manifest life. As the awakening process matures, the witness is recognized as simultaneous with the bodymind reality (see Embodied Feeling Witness Consciousness). After the Second Birth, the witness appears no longer separate from the bodymind and world. Years after the Second Birth, any sense of a separate witness disappears. v
Lesson 1: Orientation We're honored to present this foundational course on behalf of the Institute of Awakened Mutuality. The Institute offers Trillium path courses for those who aspire to realize and live their full potential, and for those wishing to become mentors or teachers of this work. This is lesson 1 in our ten lesson series. We ll start with a brief history so you can get a sense of how the Trillium path started and how it evolved, which will help you understand how this work can support your whole Being unfoldment. After that, there's an introduction to Greenlighting; a powerful practice that can greatly facilitate your awakening process. Then we ll explore some important understandings that will help orient you to our work. At the end, I ll offer you something to read and some questions to contemplate that I think you ll enjoy. The Trillium Path The Trillium path is the name of this work. The three pedals of the trillium flower stand for Consciousness, Embodiment, and relatedness. As we get further into the course you will be able to see the central importance of these three aspects and their essential unity. Here s a brief history of how the Trillium path evolved into what it is today. The seed of what became this work was then known as Waking Down in Mutuality and began in 1992 with the work of Saniel Bonder. Saniel had spent the previous 18 years studying with a spiritual teacher where he experienced many blessings, but like many of us, he also learned firsthand the limits of the traditional roles of guru and aspirant. After leaving his guru and coming into a series of his own profound awakenings, he was determined to find a different approach that could bring more direct, reliable results for seekers of awakening and personal transformation. Pretty soon a small group of like minded individuals began working together with him to learn and bring this approach forward into the world. In a Relatively quick way, first one, and then several participants experienced profound awakenings. Over time, many more students came, and many more had major shifts. Before long, profound awakenings became ordinary, expectable events for most participants. Very soon many students became teachers and together we continued to learn what the most effective means were to help others to awaken. From the beginning of this work, students were empowered to claim their own life and truth. We as teachers are steeped in a culture in which students are in the drivers seat of their own awakening process, and as the teachers, we are riding shotgun, being spiritual friends and a guide along the path. We learned to help students end their struggle with life by teaching a disposition we call Greenlighting. Later in this lesson I ll share with you what Greenlighting means and explain how to practice it. That will give you a powerful catalyst in your own awakening process and it will also help you begin to understand the kind of radical, whole Being love, trust, and confidence that fuels this work and makes it so remarkably effective. 1
There are many uniquely empowering ideas and practices that we learned in the early days that I ll share with you throughout this course. But this teaching isn t mostly about idea or practices, it is primarily about how the teachers relate to you and what is being effortlessly transmitted all the time. The blessing force of this seamless realization of Being, combined with the generosity of heart and a capacity for clear discrimination that we learned over the years has created an extremely loving and supportive environment for students to go deep in their exploration of Being. And that depth was not merely in consciousness, but also in our exploration of embodiment and relationship. But it s important to say that no matter how profound these awakenings, and no matter how much surprise and relief they brought to each realizer, it wasn t all happy ever-after from there. In many ways, awakening to non-separateness provided the core, fundamental wellness needed to undertake and endure tremendous healing. For years, those of us who were part of the early experiments chose to go very deeply into our unhealed wounds and patterns together. During this period, we learned the importance of relationship in our own lives and awakening processes. As we passed into the new millennium, we began to experience levels of ease and integration we d never previously known. Central to this work at that time was the idea that the structure of traditional spiritual groups with the guru at the head of the organization was antithetical to the democratic spirit of mutuality at the heart of this kind of awakening. Together we wanted to make the awakening process so accessible that the work needn t rely on any single individual to flourish. With a generosity of heart Saniel encouraged each of the teachers to claim our own truth and take our rightful place in the ongoing management and leadership of our collectively owned work and work moved more into a shared co-operative approach. Fueled by this empowerment, in 2005 the teachers collectively created the Waking Down Teachers Association to support each other in our professional awakening work. Shortly thereafter, four members of the association founded the Institute of Awakened Mutuality to provide education and training. This was the beginning of a new teacher-owned collective approach to our Spiritual work. Central to this was the idea of ethics, agreements and mutual accountability among the teachers. In 2014 Saniel Bonder decided to move on and proceed with his own individual teaching work, while we in this teaching community continued to carry on this unique living experiment in what had already become a strong multi-teacher collective approach. In 2015 the Waking Down Teacher s Association began to use the name Trillium to signify the teaching work of embodied awakening that we do together and in 2016 it became The Trillium Awakening Teacher s Circle. This little bit of history communicates three important things about who we are today and how we can support your transformations. First, the spirit and transmission of love, trust, and empowerment that birthed this work is now available to support your awakening. We can help you awaken directly and bring your gifts into the world. Second, this is not merely a path to personal awakening; it s also a powerful support system for personal and interpersonal healing, and the discovery of real intimacy. And finally, The Trillium path is a uniquely empowering democratic spiritual culture that supports us all to awaken with each other s help and be who we truly are in the world. OK, I promised you a lesson in Greenlighting, so let s get to it. Greenlighting is a disposition you 2
can practice yourself anywhere at any time. Its purpose is to awaken a fundamental trust in Being, starting with your own Being. Have you noticed that in some ways you don t like who you are, how you feel, or how you tend to show up in the world? Do you resist parts of yourself that you ve labeled as bad or wrong? Do you tend to be suspicious of yourself, always trying to fix or edit your thoughts, speech, or actions? Do you tend to either avoid or overindulge feelings of darkness or discomfort? Do you think or feel that something is wrong with you? The difficulty with any version of fixing, avoiding, judging, working on, or resisting yourself is that it amounts to being at war with yourself. A war, by the way, that of course you can never win because, no matter how you feel about yourself, you are yourself. For many people, working on self ends up being a full time job that drains nearly all of the energy and attention that could otherwise be available to support your awakening process. It s like living with a virus that s constantly attacking you, only it s you that s attacking you. Now, not only is there no way to win a war with yourself, but it also doesn t help to be at war with your own war. In other words, beating yourself up when you notice that you re beating yourself up doesn t help. Or, trying to fix the part of you that s trying to fix the rest of you also doesn t work. Any attempt to aggressively work on yourself only causes more struggle. To whatever extent you may be living this predicament, you should know that in this work, we don t have a negative judgment about being conditioned. It appears to us that most people came into this world surrounded by others who were essentially at war with life or with themselves. Most of us grew up receiving constant messages that there was something wrong with us and probably also with others and the world. Many of these messages were so subtle that we didn t even know we were absorbing them because it was simply the water we were swimming in. The good news is that in this work, your conditioning is not an obstacle in the awakening process. You don t need to fix or change yourself in order to experience major shifts. In fact, relaxing your efforts to work on yourself can greatly support your awakening. Greenlighting goes even further than relaxing out of working on yourself it supports your realization that you re OK exactly as you are. At its core, Greenlighting is a practice of self recognition and self permission. Here s how you can practice Greenlighting: Take time in your day (perhaps right now) to consciously give yourself a green light to be exactly as you are right now. This is about blessing yourself to be whatever you are in each moment. Here s what this might look like. If you notice that you re feeling uncomfortable, you can tell yourself I give myself permission to feel uncomfortable right now. If you feel happy, give yourself permission to be happy. If you make a mistake, give yourself a green light to make mistakes. If you feel you re not doing it right, give yourself a green light to feel like you re not doing it right. 3
As you learn to warmly embrace the truth of your humanity, you ll find yourself simultaneously awakening to the truth of your divinity -- because these are not two separate things; they re just two aspects of who you are. Now, Greenlighting isn t something you need to be doing all the time, but it is important to practice it consciously at least sometimes. After some practice, this disposition will begin to inform your normal awareness, easing your relationship with yourself and with the world. As you relax in yourself, energy and attention that was bound up in struggling will be liberated, directly supporting your awakening process. Feel free to go back and read this description of the practice again. It may sound deceptively simple, yet if you actually practice it, I think you ll find it remarkably powerful. Now I d like to offer you some basic understandings that will help you get the most from this course. This work will not match your ideas or ideals This is a terribly important point, which is why I wanted to make it first. Most seekers of personal or spiritual growth are familiar with one or another version of what is sometimes called the Perennial Philosophy, which teaches that there is a transcendent ground of Being that can be directly realized and lived. We agree, but we ve also noticed that what most people think that means, often leads them astray in their own awakening process. This will be the topic of today s homework as well as of Lesson 2, but for the moment, I d like to ask for your willingness to be open to a whole new way of viewing spiritual awakening. One way in particular I d like to ask for your openness is to take in what I ll be presenting with as much beginner s mind as you can, especially if you ve done a lot of other forms of growth work before. By starting afresh, you ll be much better able to understand and make use of what s unique about what we re offering. Words have limits When talking about something as mysterious and paradoxical as awakening, it s easy to get confused about the meanings of words. This is especially true because we each tend to bring our own definitions that are often quite different from others. And so to have some common understanding, we need some common language and meanings. Some of the concepts in this work are difficult to express using either English or traditional spiritual language. Given this, you ll hear some special terms that are important for you to understand. Such terms are not intended to be exclusive jargon, but to open your awareness to new meanings. 4
For these reasons, I ve made available a glossary of terms I d like you to read. I ll say more about that at the end of this lesson. As ephemeral as words are, they re still way more defined than the indefinable mysteries they re trying to point to. As we get closer to core paradoxes, words often seem less and less useful. Sometimes, we ll need to dispense with them entirely and tune into the feelings and the deeper realities they re carrying us toward. We re not asking for blind faith While I am asking you to listen with new ears, I want to make it clear that we re not asking you to simply believe any of the things I ll be presenting. We invite you to personally scrutinize, inspect, and investigate everything we offer and see what feels true or useful to you. Feel free to question us and see how you feel with our answers. As with any discipline, knowledge about spiritual and personal growth is constantly evolving. So we re not suggesting that anything we say is the ultimate truth. What matters is what helps you awaken to the mystery of yourself and Being, in your own unique way. Wholeness includes light and dark The Trillium path is not a way that avoids human limits by awakening to divine spirit. In some ways, it s almost the opposite. In this work, awakening to limitless consciousness simultaneously awakens you to your human limits. From our perspective, spirit and matter are two views or dimensions of the same, singular reality. And so, to whatever extent you resist or reject aspects of yourself you don t like, you re inadvertently resisting or rejecting your divine nature. When you re working within the transmission of our unified realization of Being, embracing human limits is embracing your limitless nature. That s why we don t call this waking up. To be more precise, this is both waking up and waking down because this work encourages you to embrace light and dark, spirit and matter. If you can embrace body and consciousness, happiness and pain, freedom and limits, then you can embrace and realize the wholeness of Being. This work is not therapy. This work is not therapy, and the material in this course is not coming from a psychotherapeutic perspective. Nor is it coming from what has classically been known as a spiritual perspective. This work comes from what we call a whole Being perspective; one that sees all aspects of life and self as parts of a singular, seamless reality. If you re hoping this will fix you once and for all, it may not do exactly what you re imagining. What it probably will 5
do, however, is transform you so radically that you ll begin to become fundamentally at home with who and what you are. Homework: Before you proceed to Lesson 2, please read the Glossary of Terms that precedes this lesson. As I mentioned above, we all bring our own meanings for words in common usage. So when reading the Glossary, I d like you to be specifically attuned to meanings that are different from what you might otherwise expect. By understanding what we mean when we use these words, or at least being aware that you don't yet understand our meanings, you ll have a much better shot at realizing what this work is trying to communicate. The second thing I d like you to do is to get a journal or notebook you can use to record notes, questions, and observations while you re taking this course. It doesn t have to be anything fancy, just something you can easily keep near you wherever you are. And last, I d like you to write in your journal your answers to the following questions: What have I been hoping awakening will do for me? What did I think I d have to do to awaken? Do I believe I m a real candidate for awakening? Why? Please take your time with this contemplation. Your willingness to examine your beliefs around awakening is crucial to your ability to encounter what s actually real for you. And self realization starts with getting real with yourself. The second part of each lesson is a video (or audio) of a live discussion / interaction of parts of this particular lesson. The Video and MP3 Audio Recording (both have the same content) for Lesson 1 are available here: awakenedmutuality.org/foundation-course/lesson-1-media/ 6