Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Dr. Judith Blackstone. Judith is an innovative teacher in the contemporary spiritual and psychotherapy fields. She has developed the Realization Process—a method of realizing fundamental or nondual consciousness and applying it to psychological and physical healing—and has taught the Realization Process for over 25 years. Judith is the author [of the] Sounds True book The Intimate Life: Awakening to the Spiritual Essence in Yourself and Others, and also the audio learning series The Realization Process: A Step-by-Step Guide to Embodied Spiritual Awakening. Most recently with Sounds True, Judith has authored a book called Belonging Here: A Guide for the Spiritually Sensitive Person, where she explores five of the most common challenges of people who are spiritually sensitive, along with exercises and meditations for living mindfully and compassionately.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Judith and I spoke about the gifts and challenges of spiritual sensitivity. We talked about what it means to be transparent to life and the paradox that we feel more connected to our unity with others and the outer world when we experience the internal space of the body. We also talked about spiritual bypassing and our tendency to avoid feeling pain, and what it might mean to actually let pain move through us. And finally, we talked about what a working definition of “spiritual maturity” might be. Here’s my very deep, and for me, my very meaningful conversation with Dr. Judith Blackstone.
Judith, in your new book, Belonging Here, you talk about a class of people, if you will that you call, “spiritually sensitive people.” So what does it mean to be someone who is spiritually sensitive?
Judith Blackstone: [Being] spiritually sensitive can take several forms, but in general, it’s a particular attunement to or openness to life that many people who end up doing spiritual work, who find themselves on the spiritual path, have actually had all their lives. And it can take the form of sensory sensitivity—that’s sensitivity to sounds or to subtle light emanating from nature. It can take the form of emotional sensitivity where everything moves you—the pigeons on the rooftop move you. And certainly there’s tremendous attunement to other people’s emotional states, so that you’re aware of every little fluctuation, even when these emotions aren’t at all expressed. You can feel them in another person’s body and so forth, and very often you can feel them in your own body as well, what other people are feeling.
It can also take the form of cognitive sensitivity—a sensitivity to meanings, where you are able to know what’s going on between people. You can see the big picture. Sometimes that’s called “holistic thinking.” You have a kind of perspective where the play that’s being unfolded between people becomes very clear, because you’re not just looking from one perspective, but you’re looking from the perspective of everyone involved. And that kind of cognitive sensitivity also helps you feel philosophically inclined, so that you have some sort of understanding or resonance with all of the philosophies that we have on the planet, [and] certainly the philosophies that accompany [and come within] spiritual practice.
TS: So now I have a positive word: being “spiritually sensitive,” instead of just thinking, “I’m a total freak.”
JB: Yes.
TS: I said that humorously and then you had a kind response. But I guess what I’m talking about here is, do you think it’s that a certain percentage of people are born this way? I mean that you just come out of the womb and, you know, [people say,] “That’s a spiritually sensitive person.” Like someone else might be born and they have the makings of a great athlete or a great musician.
JB: You know, that seems to be the case. Of course I can’t say that definitively, I haven’t done scientific research on that, but it certainly seems to be the case that this is a kind of talent that we’re born with. For example, I worked with a man who was an identical twin and felt much more sensitive, just much more deeply attuned to life than his twin. And you know, and when you say, “So I’m not a freak,” of course, if you grow up feeling attuned to the world in a way that the people around you are not—especially the important people around you like your parents or your siblings, your teachers—then you can certainly grow up feeling as if you’re quite odd.
TS: Yes. Do you feel that part of what you’re doing with this book is—is this part of your conscious intent to help people who have perhaps felt odd or freakish understand that they have a different kind of sensitivity and that that can be honored and celebrated?
JB: Yes. Absolutely. So there’s that. There’s the self-respect and the honoring of that gift and the appreciation of it. And then there’s how those gifts are actually entranceways into spiritual awakening, or spiritual maturity. So emotional sensitivity, of course, is an openness of the heart. And if that’s cultivated rather than clamped down on, if it’s allowed to be cultivated, then it becomes that wide open unconditional love that’s part of spiritual maturity, and the same with sensory sensitivity and cognitive sensitivity.
TS: Now, in Belonging Here you actually put spiritually sensitive people in five categories. And you’re very careful to say that these categories are not definitive, that many people find themselves in several categories, and you know, it’s just an architecture that can be helpful. I’m curious how you came up with these five categories. You’ve already introduced them in our discussion, but if you can just clearly identify these five different categories and how you developed this system.
JB: Yes. I have been working with people as a psychotherapist and as a spiritual teacher for 35 years—a long time. So over the years I’ve come to notice patterns. Many of the people who come to work with me, for example, would describe themselves as “thin-skinned”—that any kind of sound, a motor sound, what other people would think of as white noise or background noise, seems to penetrate and overwhelm them. So that was certainly one category.
Another is that many people who have this kind of openness have abundant kind of energy, not just energy in the sense of vitality, but that actual streaming, pulsating aspect of ourselves, that fluidity. And that can create a kind of ungroundedness. Many people—you know, we all organize ourselves a certain way in childhood to protect ourselves from abrasive elements in our environment. But if we have a lot of energy, we can really sail up really easily above the environment. We can become quite ungrounded. And by the same token, we can become quite diffuse so that we abandon ourselves and diffuse out into the environment energetically. So that’s a way of using this gift protectively. Because I’ve seen that so often, that became another so-called category.
Another is the sense of being trapped in unreality. As we organize ourselves in childhood to cope with all the various rejections and confusions that come up, in even a totally normal, loving household, we do become further and further away from the actual, authentic impact of life and our own authentic response to life. So we become a kind of caricature of ourselves. All of us, to some extent, become an abstract idea of ourselves in certain ways. We think of ourselves in that way. We think of ourselves as, “I am a teacher,” or, “I am a vulnerable person.” Abstraction rather than actual felt experience of ourselves. So in doing that we become real in a way, right? We become less spontaneously, authentically responsive to life.
People with certain kinds of gifts—part of the spiritual gift that I didn’t mention earlier is the ability to detect dissonance from consonance, from harmony. The ability to detect off-balance or unreality. And so even though we have all created this reality to some extent, people with this spiritual gift feel very trapped in it. They suffer from it. So that’s been another category. You know, those categories actually—the five categories are presented as challenges. The first one is the challenge of becoming resilient to that “thin-skin-ness,” not feeling impinged upon by life. And the second was the challenge of being grounded. And then another, this one is like the challenge of becoming authentic.
Another challenge I mention is the challenge of being happy even when you’re attuned to so much suffering in the world. The degree of suffering in the world seems pretty constant, you know? If we look back at history, it looks like there’s always been suffering in the world. And in fact, Buddha himself is said to have claimed that life is suffering, and people with emotional sensitivity are very clued in to this suffering. They’re clued in to their parents’ suffering, to begin with. Even a fairly happy parent can have layers of sadness underneath, layers of anger. And most people won’t even penetrate through to those layers, won’t be aware of them. But a person with a lot of emotional sensitivity will be able to detect that sadness, or loneliness, or frustration—whatever’s going on deeply inside a person.
And then it becomes hard for them to be happy themselves. How can I be happy when there’s so much suffering in the world? You know, one of the definitions of the bodhisattva in Buddhism is the person who hears the cry for the world. And now, of course, with television and all of the media, those cries for the world are amplified, are brought into our homes. So that becomes another challenge that I write about in another chapter in the book—the challenge of being happy, even without losing our attunement, our responsiveness to the suffering around us.
The last challenge that I mention in the book is the challenge of acceptance, of accepting this flawed world that we live in and our own human limitations—that spiritual awakening is not a matter of becoming non-human. In fact, we become more human. And some of our limitations we will have all our lives. There’s no question. If we look at the really great spiritual teachers closely with attunement, we can see that there’s some suffering left in every human being.
So that challenge of accepting oneself, of not trying to purify oneself with starvation or a million mantras all day long and so forth, but the acceptance of oneself as a human being, that becomes a very important part of spiritual maturity as well.
TS: You know, Judith, there’s so much I want to talk to you about in this, and I notice it’s all very close to me, very close to my heart. And I just want to circle back for a moment as we unpack this conversation because I started by saying, “Oh, now there’s a term like ‘spiritually sensitive’ instead of quote unquote, ‘freak.’” You know, it does seem to me that in our contemporary Western world, people who are thin-skinned and who really feel the pain of other people, and people who are particularly sensitive to when people are off or not being truthful, those kinds of things aren’t necessarily validated in our contemporary Western society the same way as, “Get a thick skin! Bounce back! Be productive. Be good in school. Come on. We’ve got to rush. We’ve got to get out of here.”
There is a sort of bias, it seems to me, in our contemporary situation, which says, “Buck up and be a tough producer.” I’m curious what you think about that, meaning is it particularly difficult to be spiritually sensitive, using that term, in our contemporary Western world, do you think?
JB: Yes. Certainly. You know, I’m not sure compared to what. I’m not sure if it’s more difficult than it was 200 years ago. I have a feeling it’s probably less difficult. But always, the mainstream of society is going to value productivity and the toughness that that requires: the ability to keep your eye on the wall, your nose to the grindstone, whatever it is, and not be disturbed by the actual sensory experience, the emotional experience of life.
TS: Do you think that there’s a percentage of the population that find themselves in this spiritually sensitive category? I know that getting into numbers is difficult, but do you have a sense of that?
JB: I really don’t. You know, there’s that study done by Elaine Aron, I think her name was, who talked about the highly sensitive person, but she wasn’t specifically talking about spirituality. She was talking mostly about sensory sensitivity. And she came up with a 20 percent number, I believe. I think that’s the number she came up with. But I have not done that kind of study, and because of where I’m situated, which is working with spiritually gifted people and being on a spiritual path myself, it looks like quite a lot of people. [Laughs] So I really don’t know what the numbers would be.
TS: Yes.
JB: Very often one is the only one in one’s family like this. So that might give you a sense of numbers.
TS: And would you say that, in terms of your own life, one of these five categories or a couple of these were the ones that were really the ways that you experienced your own spiritual sensitivity?
JB: Yes. I’d be hard-pressed to eliminate a category in my own experience, and that tells me something about why I’ve chosen these particular categories. I’m sure there are others—these are the ones I’m sensitive to. I started out as extremely diffuse and ungrounded, and trapped in a really odd persona that was really hard. And this is how the Realization Process—which, of course, the book is mostly about, this method for coming back in one’s body, for feeling comfortable and alive within one’s body, and at the same time connected with everything around oneself, and the cultivation of the ability to tolerate one’s sensitivity.
This is how it came about—for me to feel authentic. I knew I was off and I was out of contact with people around me. And it was [causing] tremendous suffering for me, but it was very hard to know how to get back. Simply understanding that I was off didn’t seem to do it. I had to really enter into my body in a way where I actually felt a oneness with the life around me. I didn’t feel real. I didn’t feel authentic until that occurred, until I could actually drop down and feel that the center of my being was the center of all being, was the center of everyone’s being, was the center of the being of the trees and the mountains. And I could drop down into actual center.
TS: Now, I want to talk more about the Realization Process and how it addresses all five of these different aspects of spiritual sensitivity. [There’s] just one thing I really want to understand, because you’ve talked about people who find themselves in one or more of these categories, all of these, and I know it’s a little weird to talk about them as categories, but we’ll just keep going here, as having both gifts and challenges. And I wonder if you could just say a little bit about that—the idea of the gift and the challenge and how they might go together or come together in someone’s life.
JB: Sure. This is just what they are. And you know, for example, like sensory sensitivity. Well, that’s obviously a gift. It’s wonderful to be able to see the light emanating from people and from everything in nature, to be privy to that very subtle aspect of life. And also, as we become even more sensitive, we come to actual spiritual awakening. Knowing ourselves as a very, extremely subtle dimension of consciousness pervading everywhere—transparency that pervades everywhere. And that’s what I’m talking about [when I say] spiritual awakening. So sensory sensitivity is a doorway into that. And it’s a wonderful gift.
But it can be also very limiting not to be able to sit in the room where there’s a loud motor going on, not to be able to walk down the street without feeling completely shattered by sensory stimulation. It can be a terrific problem. Now, it turns out that when we actually reach this ground of our being, this very subtle consciousness that we can know ourselves as, then we can allow the stimulation to move that ground. And it doesn’t disturb it. It doesn’t disturb our basic identity.
That’s an amazing shift for someone who grows up with sensory sensitivity, that we can actually become even more sensitive, that we don’t have to protect ourselves against the world. We can allow the vibration of sensory stimulation—sounds, sights—we can allow the vibrations of other human beings and all of their emotional life to pass through that ground of our being without rattling us, without disturbing us or altering our own being in any way. So even though we’re responsive to other people, we’re no longer altered by them. We’re no longer blown about by the winds.
TS: Now, I want to just go into that a little more directly right here, because I think that’s something that many listeners would love to be able to do—to feel very sensitively the experience that’s coming at them and then have it move through. I mean, you talk about it as being “resilient.” So how would I grow in my ability to be resilient like that?
JB: So the interesting thing is that when we inhabit our body—and let me talk a little bit about what I mean by that, because I don’t just mean awareness of the body. I don’t mean being aware of our breath, or just being aware of the sensation of our feet on the ground. I mean actually being present within our body so that we feel we have a sense that we are the internal space of our body, that we live there.
When that happens, then the constructed boundary between the inside and outside actually dissolves, and we find ourselves in this expanse, this luminous expanse—which, by the way, has been talked about for thousands of years, in the East particularly, right? And we can actually enter into it quite naturally just by inhabiting our own body. Inhabiting our own body is something that’s very easy to cultivate. It’s like being in your feet, actually being present within your feet, being in your ankles and your lower legs, and so forth. Being in the whole body.
So as that occurs, and as we live within the whole body, the body itself becomes transparent. What I mean by that is we experience it as transparent, as clear-through open. And when we experience that, then the vibrations of life can move through that emptiness without disturbing that emptiness at all. We’re not missing in that, we’re actually present. That’s what’s so interesting—it’s presence itself that is transparent in that way. So we don’t go missing. We don’t abandon ourselves. We become even more present, even more palpably existing as we become open in that way. And in that presence and emptiness, then the vibrations of life can move right through us.
TS: Well, what you’re saying, as I hear the words, it sounds very paradoxical in a sense. The more I occupy the internal space of my body, the more there’s a sense of what you’re calling realization of being one with everything. That seems, in itself, kind of paradoxical. I’m occupying myself but I’m unified with all life at the same time?
JB: Yes, it is. It’s paradoxical and it’s fantastically benevolent that we can feel deeply in contact with the world around us as, and really only as, we cultivate that deep contact within ourselves.
TS: OK. So we’re talking about this thin-skinned person who learns how to deal with their sensitivity and becomes resilient. Then you talked about the challenge of someone who has quite a lot of energy, and the challenge of being grounded. How would you help someone become more grounded?
JB: So grounding has two aspects to it. One is the actual knowing of the lower portions of ourselves, you know, our actual connection to the ground that we’re standing on. And that requires inhabiting the lower part of our body. We all are in touch with ourselves to some extent. Hopefully every human being is to some degree in touch with themselves, in contact with themselves internally. But most people are more in contact with the upper part of their body than the lower.
That’s just simply been a cultural preference that’s been handed down generation to generation. It augmented through Western religious teachings that what’s important is to be loving and aware, but not so much powerful or sexual or connected to the functions that occur as we become in touch with the lower parts of our being. So just to inhabit your feet and actually feel that you are in the internal space of your feet, will connect you to the transparency that pervades you and the ground. That’s real grounding.
The other aspect of grounding—you know, I talked about that diffusion, about how some people rise up above themselves and how some people diffuse outward from themselves, leaving the internal space of the body vacant, and they live in the air around themselves. Actually, we all do that to some extent, but these people can do it to a higher degree. And then the grounding is becoming connected internally, all the way through to the core of themselves.
In the Realization Process, there are specific exercises for inhabiting the body, the whole body, and also for connecting to a very subtle core of the body, the vertical core of the body that runs through the torso, neck, and head. And people who have diffused themselves outward really need to come in touch with that subtle core, vertical core of the body so that they know themselves all the way thought to their inner depth.
TS: And again, the gift of the person who has this capacity to have a lot of energy and to be quite diffuse, what’s their gift?
JB: Well, the openness, the energy is a wonderful gift. It’s the source of feeling extremely vital, and empowered, and once you’re actually living inside your body and you feel that energy moving through the internal space of the body, you feel extremely alive throughout your whole being. And then, of course, there are other benefits to having that kind of energy. Some people are able to heal other people through touch, to connect, to feel extreme deep contact on the level of energy.
TS: You know, we can keep going through the three other categories. But I just want to ask this question. It seems that your antidote to the challenges and the difficulties to each type of spiritual sensitivity is some approach of embodiment. Is that correct?
JB: Yes. Yes it is. To accept oneself is to really know oneself, to experience the love in one’s own chest, to experience the actual power so that we don’t need to protect ourselves from what we perceive as forces that might overpower us.
All of that is entailed in inhabiting our own body. So yes, I frankly feel that inhabiting our own body, really knowing ourselves and coming alive, has all of our essential functions—our ability to love and understand, to feel empowered, to feel sexually responsive—that all occur through becoming present within ourselves.
TS: And in your view, do all people find ways to go disembodied? Or are spiritually sensitive people more likely to take this disembodied route?
JB: That’s a really good question. I think everyone disembodies themselves, just perhaps not as deeply. For example, a person who’s very open, they already have, as children, a lot of contact with themselves. And they can then find themselves, or fragment themselves, or distort themselves very deeply with a lot of force of will. So what you often get is, as they come into adulthood, a very deep, a very intense imbalance between what’s open and what’s closed.
So in other words, a spiritually sensitive person can grip themselves up with extreme tightness. Now the good news is that they can use that same sensitivity to get right inside that gripping and let go. They’re also more bothered by it. They want to feel open. They want to feel oneness with everything. They have an intuition or a glimpse of that deep contact that they’re capable of, and they want to get there, whereas other people can live their whole lives as abstractions, as ideas about themselves as the kind of roles that they take on without needing that kind of contact with themselves, without needing that kind of openness.
TS: Yes. And then, what would you say is the embodiment antidote to the person who’s so sensitive to pain, to the person who hears the cries of the world and is overwhelmed by it, and has this challenge of being happy?
JB: Yes. Well, there again, when we know ourselves as that transparency, as that presence and openness, then the emotional vibrations can pass through us. You know, so we can build much more tolerance for allowing other people’s pain to move through us without us what we call taking on that pain, without mirroring them.
Now, that doesn’t mean that we become unresponsive. We may see that person in pain, over there, across the room from us, and feel a response in ourselves. But we don’t become them. We’re not entrained, right? We don’t mirror that sadness. We can feel the space, the luminous transparency that pervades them, as us. We can still be in ourselves. We can still be whole in our own body having our own feelings.
Now, also, as we inhabit our body, we come into the qualities of being that emanate from within the body—love, and voice, and understanding, and power, and sexuality. When we feel love within our own chest, there’s always a happiness to that. We find that we have happiness emanating from our own core, that our body makes happiness and that we’re not being happy at the expense of other people, that this is our natural birthright and does not interfere with our responsiveness towards them, with our actual care for other people. In fact, it increases that.
TS: In some ways, as you describe the person who’s very sensitive to emotional pain, it’s sort of similar, in a sense, to the people who are sensitive to bright lights or noises, but just more on the emotional frequency. Would you say that’s fair?
JB: Yes, yes. Another thing that happens for the emotional person is, as they inhabit their body, they come into other ways of being. For example, I just worked with a woman just this last week—and of course many of the people I work with are like this—who was just describing this emotional tumult that she’s always in. And as she described it, she put her hands on her chest, and she’s pretty much just rocking back and forth, you know, sitting on the couch, and she’s just living in this emotional level because it’s so intense for her. But as we inhabit our whole body, that emotionality becomes balanced with other qualities of being, becomes just part of our wholeness rather than our only modality.
TS: I’d like to talk a little bit more about these qualities of being, because often when people talk about the presence inside the body, they talk about it without any qualities. You know, it’s just open, unconditioned space. So where do these qualities come from?
JB: That’s a really good question! I don’t know where they come from, but there they are. They’re right in the body. The body seems to make these qualities. Some people say they emanate from the chakras, which is the subtle core of the body, but what does that mean, you know? [Laughs] We still don’t really know where they come from. It’s a great mystery, and yet, there it is.
You know, the more we inhabit our chest, and the more we get to the core of the chest, the more we feel this spontaneous welling of love within our body. The more we inhabit our brain, interestingly, the more we can actually feel our intelligence, feel the quality of our intelligence. And the more fluidly our intelligence works. So there’s a very simple equation of inhabiting the body and functioning, and you know, the functions that are our human birthright.
TS: Yes. So if I wanted to feel my intelligence more, how would I inhabit my brain?
JB: By living inside it. So there’s space in there.
TS: Plenty of it. Plenty of it, actually.
JB: Yes. There’s plenty of it. [Laughs] And we can either observe it from outside of ourselves, “Oh, there’s our brain,” or we can get right inside it.
TS: Yes. Now, it’s interesting. You’ve used this word a couple of times in our conversation, “transparency”—that we’re discovering a type of transparency within the body, the lack of a real boundary from the inside to the outside of the body. I wonder if you can help people understand that. It seems to be something to me that you really get inside of you totally. You get this transparency thing.
JB: Yes. There’s another amazing thing about us—and also a mystery. The more we experience our internal being as a whole, the more actually open [we are], the more we feel like we’re made of space, that we’re made of consciousness. So to be present in the body, our consciousness is everywhere in our body. Right? So we live in our arms. That means that our consciousness, our presence, our being, is in our arms. The whole body becomes a main of consciousness. Consciousness and physicality become absolutely one.
Well, this consciousness has certain characteristics. It’s empty and it’s present at the same time. It’s luminous. We experience it pervading everywhere. This description is in all the spiritual teachings—certain lineages, not in all the spiritual teachings, but in all the religions have at least one philosophy that talks about this essence or Buddha nature or ground of being that we can experience as a kind of mutual transparency. It’s self and other; [it’s] inside and outside. So if we’re looking at a tree, that tree is also made of space. Our own body’s made of space. The tree is made of space. If we’re looking at the chair, our own body’s made of space, and the chair is made of space.
We don’t really know what that is. I don’t know what it is. Some philosophies say that’s actually the nature of the universe. It’s made of consciousness. And that as we attune to that, we’re attuning to the nature of nature. Right? We’re attuning to our actual nature—pervasive consciousness. Other teachings say that what we’re actually doing is experiencing our own mind, along with what the mind is revealing to us. So consciousness becomes conscious of itself at that point.
I don’t even think we can determine what the difference is there, whether what we’re experiencing as that transparency is our own consciousness clearly unveiled, so that along with what we’re conscious of, the consciousness itself knows itself, or whether we’re coming into touch with the actual nature of the universe. However, when two people both attune to this level of transparency, it certainly feels like it’s the same one mind, the same one consciousness that they’re both attuning to.
TS: And then the relationship, Judith, between this fundamental consciousness, as you call it, and the qualities that we find in the body?
JB: There again, there’s a lot of argument in the spiritual world about whether this essence of ourselves has qualities. In both Buddhism and Hinduism, there are teachings that say that this ground of being, this very subtle consciousness, has innately qualities. For example, in Hinduism they’ll talk about sachidananda—so Brahmin, or “self” with a capital “S,” or “pure consciousness,” as they call it, has the qualitites of sachidananda, which is truth, intelligence, and bliss.
In Buddhism, they also talk about rigpa, or primordial awareness, or various names that they give to this, as having the qualities of bliss, emptiness, and clarity. And other teachers will say, “Oh, no. It’s just completely empty. There [are] no qualities at all.” Well, so I don’t know, metaphysically, whether this space, for one thing, actually exists or whether it has qualities, but I do know that as we inhabit the body, we come into the basic qualities of our being, and that we can feel. We can feel those qualities. I don’t know what that means, metaphysically. But we actually and unquestionably feel more capacity for love—actual quality of love, actual quality of understanding. Even our voice, what we experience as we enter into our neck, has quality to it. That whole internal being has a qualitative experience. And then, we have a qualitative sense of self that replaces that abstract sense of self. So we’re no longer an idea, we’re this living, walking, talking, qualitative being.
TS: Yes. And I want to circle back, because there were two other challenges of spiritually sensitive people that I want to make sure we talk about. You talked about the challenge of being authentic for the person that finds themselves shifting to match all the energies of the people around them. And so what might be an embodiment antidote, if you will—I’m coming up with this phrase, “embodiment antidotes”—for that challenge?
JB: [Laughs] That one’s so clear that we feel real when we inhabit our body. When the consciousness and the body become actually integrated, unified, that’s when we have a sense of being real. And it’s a very interesting thing that there actually seems to be one center.
For example, if I find the very center of my chest, often called the heart chakra, it will resonate with [the heart chakras of] other people who are around me. So that center of my being touches the center of their being, and the center of their being touches the center of my being. There seems to be just this one center. Well, we can live off-center, or we can live right in-center. And when we live in-center, we have that sense of being real.
TS: And then the final, the challenge of acceptance—you talked about the person who finds themselves like an alien landing, and that that’s the challenge that they face. What would be the embodiment antidote for that?
JB: Right. Self-love. When we inhabit our own body and we feel this love actually in our own body, and we feel our own understanding and so forth, it becomes much more difficult to loathe ourselves, to dislike ourselves, to want to fuss with ourselves and make ourselves different than we are. We come into a real compassion for ourselves, and an actual self-love. Then it’s very easy to look around us and to feel that same sense of compassion and kinship for the life around us. And compassion in the sense of, “I see that they’re not quite centered. I see that they’re off-center, that they feel anger, or they feel greed, they feel limitation, and yet they have this capacity to come to center.”
So this is an incredible dynamic between where we find ourselves and where we can actually be. This is human nature: that compassion for that sense of limitation, and that sense of being able to then come towards center, and the deep desire that people feel even if they’re not aware of that desire—that is, they do become more open, then they do become aware of that desire to live right in the center, right in the source.
So that process unfolds as we come in touch with ourselves. Now, I’m talking about cognitive sensitivity there, about people who can see what’s going on, and how that’s a gift because it becomes the real perspective that, for example, this compassion requires. We need that to be able to see the whole picture, that yes, they’re suffering, but yes, they have that pure love, that wonderful light inside of themselves—that kind of perspective. And [we need] that ability to encompass both limitation and potential. But starting out, that kind of sensitivity can be a tremendous challenge to a child who sees what’s going on, and yet the parents either don’t see what’s going on or don’t want to see that clearly, and so [they] negate the sense of the child’s reality. So there you have both the problem and the entranceway into spiritual maturity.
TS: Now, you introduce this interesting term in Belonging Here: “relational trauma.” And as you’re talking about what life might like for a spiritually sensitive child, I wonder if you can explain this term, “relational trauma.”
JB: Yes. That’s not my term. That’s a term that’s being used in relational psychoanalysis. For example, we can have big traumas like car accidents, or rapes, or huge traumas, war and so forth, but the actuality is that there are these little inevitable traumas in everybody’s life. And those are the things that go wrong between child and parent almost daily, right? So there’s the child looking up at this loving face of the parent and suddenly, one day, the parent’s face is not loving. It’s sad. It’s transformed with grief. Or it’s angry. It’s transformed with anger. It has transformed from a loving face to an angry face.
Maybe this happens periodically. Maybe there are irrational behaviors, drunken behaviors, right? So all of these make for relational traumas, the small traumas. And so I’m using the word “trauma” to mean anything that can’t be simply accepted and metabolized by the child. That the child must protect against this or they will be overwhelmed. So that’s the sense in which I’m using the word trauma. And all of these traumas are relational. The older sister who comes banging on you with the toy, the poorly disguised jealously of the mother for the daughter, or the mother for the son—all of these twists and turns [happen] even in the most normal and supportive family.
TS: So it sounds like all people go through a level of relational trauma whether or not they’re spiritually sensitive.
JB: Yes. Yes.
TS: And the importance in understanding relational trauma for the spiritually sensitive person, how would you explain that?
JB: Well again, a sensitive child will be more alert to these things that don’t quite happen, to the emotional level of the stress around them. So they will have to protect themselves more and more often than the child who doesn’t have that sensitivity, who’s just going along fine. Mother says we’re happy, so we’re happy.
But a person who’s more tuned in than that, they have to protect themselves. And they may also have to protect themselves from the sounds, and the sights, and the smells around them more than the person who doesn’t have that sort of sensitivity. So the organization of being may be tighter and more copious than someone who doesn’t have that kind of sensitivity. But as I said, that sensitivity also can help us go directly into the organizing and into the tensions with which we have limited ourselves protectively. So that spiritually sensitive person has more chance to release themselves more easily.
TS: Now, I want to come right out and say something, Judith, which is that I think your work in this area of spiritual sensitivity is really important and really helpful. And the reason I say that is I’ve seen so much, what’s called “spiritual bypassing” occur in the audience that Sounds True serves and in the whole area of people who are interested in the spiritual path. People find this spiritual sensitivity inside themselves and they actually go in the opposite direction than the direction you’re describing in Belonging Here. Instead of going into their bodies, they somehow go out into more of a sense of being different [or] unusual, and kind of belonging in space, not belonging in their bodies. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that.
JB: Yes. I think it’s very important, because in order to actually realize ourselves, we need to open our own being to transparency, to this very subtle consciousness that pervades, that we can experience emanating everywhere. So if we simply keep our heart closed, and we try to rise above it, or negate it, or tell ourselves that our personal story doesn’t matter, or our personal suffering doesn’t matter, then that heart stays closed. We never open our heart to the transparency.
The same [is true] with our belief system. If we tell ourselves, “Well, those limiting beliefs, they belong to the small Judith, you know, not to the actual being,” then actually that clamping down on the brain is still there. What’s important here is that it’s our heart, our very own heart with all of its suffering and so forth, that it opens and matures and becomes that all-pervasive love. It’s our own understanding, our own awareness—which, to begin with, is limited and burdened by all sorts of beliefs and abstractions—that needs to open, and is basically the all-pervasive awareness that is part of that transparency. And it’s our own wellness, our own power, our own sexuality that opens our own being, that opens and becomes an all-pervasive sensation that pervades everywhere, that’s part of that transparent physical sensation.
So if we just simply ignore ourselves and how we got there—you know, we need our personal story, also, because that’s the pathway that organized those holding patterns. So that very specific story is what we need to revisit in order to be able to actually unfold the specific holding patterns in our own body that then allow us to live within our own body. If we just try to get away from that, then we may find some amount of release, but we won’t actually realize ourselves.
TS: Now, that’s a kind of radical idea, meaning a lot of people believe, “Oh, the story—you know, feel the sensations, but drop the story. Drop the story.” You’re actually saying something different.
JB: I am. For one thing, our story, that’s our richness. If we dislike that, if we don’t honor it, don’t respect it, then there’s a certain amount of self-enjoyment and richness in life that we miss out on. That’s for starters. But the other thing is that, as I said, the history—our own very specific history of our relationship with our very particular mother and father and siblings, teachers—that’s what caused us to twist away from life, to make ourselves off-center, to bring ourselves off-center.
So we need to align ourselves with that volition, with that very specific child and the very specific challenges of our childhood in order to then unfold. Letting go of these holding patterns is like letting go of a fist, right? We’re actually letting go of our grip on ourselves, our protective grip on ourselves. But if we can’t find the muscles—you know, not just the muscles but the command to the muscles that order that fist—then we’re not going to find the command to let go of the fist. That’s that same alignment. We need to be aligned with our volitional holding of the fist. I’m using that metaphorically, so that volitional grip on ourselves that we created as children.
TS: Now, Judith, I said I had so much I wanted to talk to you about, and I realize I need to bring it to a close, but I just have a couple more questions I’m going to squeak in here. I’d like to hear what you think about this idea that the reason we avoid our embodiment—[the reason that] people would prefer to skip their stories, skip their body, just go out into boundless space—is because we don’t want to feel the pain. Like, that’s the main reason we avoid it. You know, I don’t want the pain, so I go out instead. What do you think about that?
JB: I think that’s true. I think there’s a kind of hopelessness, too, that there’s no hope for this, for healing this. “OK, so I did 30 years of psychoanalysis, and I still have the same misery. There’s no hope for it.” But, in fact, there is. And we need to be able to tolerate the movement of pain through us, in order to belong here, in order to be really open to life.
TS: What can you say about that to help people? I love that phrase, “tolerate the movement of pain through us to belong here.”
JB: Well, it really isn’t our actual nature. That much is true. So the more we come in touch with the actual ground of our being, the more we can let go of all of the movement of life, both happiness and sorrow. Everything moves through that ground of our being without altering it as we more and more know ourselves with that ground of our being. It’s just, how do we get there? How do we get there?
So we need to get there by going inward rather than away from ourselves. So that’s the first step. And then, of course, once we’re there we can pretty much tolerate everything, anything. We let go of the movement of life altogether. We let that be fluid.
TS: And then just one final question, Judith, which is, I’ve heard you use this phrase a couple of times, “spiritual maturity,” and I’m curious, if you had to define that term, “spiritual maturity,” how you would define it. What makes someone spiritually mature?
JB: Well, I think of spiritual maturity as awakening to this pervasive fundamental consciousness. That’s how I see it. So it can be called non-duality or oneness. As we inhabit ourselves, the constructed, imagined boundary between self and other dissolves. And we find ourselves both present within our own form and open to life. That, to me, is the beginning of spiritual maturity. Once we’re there, we can keep opening to it. You know, there’ll still be some residue, there’ll still be some holding patterns. And if we can bring patience and compassion to that, then we can keep maturing.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Judith Blackstone, and Judith, thank you so very much for a very deep, and searching, and powerful conversation on your new book, Belonging Here: A Guide for the Spiritually Sensitive Person. You know, Judith, you’re really offering an unusual body of work, a body of work that combines so much of your experience clinically working with people, your own internal process and discoveries, your work with embodiment and trauma. It’s really amazing. I’m very grateful to you.
JB: Oh, thank you so much, Tami.
TS: Judith has also written another book published by Sounds True called The Intimate Life: Awakening to the Spiritual Essence in Yourself and Others. And we’ve also published with Judith a six-session audio series on The Realization Process: A Step-by-Step Guide to Embodied Spiritual Awakening, in which Judith takes listeners through many of the different exercises and practices that are part of the Realization Process. Thank you for listening. Sounds True.com. Many voices, one journey.
