Last Saturday, we had the privilege of hosting Awakin Call with John Prendergast.

John J. Prendergast, Ph.D., likens the investigation of the heart to “an archaeological dig.” Helping people excavate layers of the heart culminates his life’s work weaving together his various disciplines – as a psychotherapist, professor of psychology, somatic healer and nondual spiritual teacher – with his own deep self-inquiry. “The deeper you go, the more tender the layers,” says Prendergast. “We abandon ourselves when it feels too painful to remain intimate with our essential nature.” Author of The Deep Heart and In Touch, Prendergast is a retired adjunct professor of psychology and a soon-to-retire psychotherapist in private practice in the Bay Area. Inspired by a leading Indian guru of non-dualism, he has studied extensively with spiritual masters including Jean Klein, a master of Advaita Vendanta and Tantric Shaivism, and Adyashanti, a trained Zen Buddhist teacher.

Below are some of the nuggets from the call that stood out for me (with time stamps from the video).

The “inner teacher” (7:15): He dedicated his first book In Touch to his two main teachers, Jean Klein and Adyashanti, but his later book, The Deep Heart, to the inner teacher. “In a way, life is our teacher, and sometimes specific human beings play that role -- you know, a very powerful catalytic role -- but it's a provisional one.”

Early inward listening for what felt deep and authentic (9:18): His early years seemed (from the outside) a bit meandering – 6 months at a Swiss meditation retreat, to an ashram in India, to a year of law school in San Francisco, and then graduate school in psychology, but inwardly things felt congruent. “it just feels like I was following something, just continually surrendering and just letting go and listening and following. And that's how it is now. I continue to listen.” What was he listening for or listening to? “I would say something authentic and alive, something that felt deeply resonant for me. Looking back, I can see what I was interested in was actually the truth of my being, more than any particular form or any particular practice or any particular career, but I couldn't have named it.”

“Big” ideas and academia as too small; his turn to meditation and Indian spiritual traditions (11:22): “when I was an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, I was a European history major, of all things in the intellectual history major. So I was interested in big ideas, but when I began to meditate, I became interested in the meditator, in consciousness itself, and I found the academic realm too small. So I looked into teaching meditation and exploring in that direction. That was my first introduction, I would say to Vedanta, and some of the traditional texts like Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita in Indian spirituality. There was something that spoke to me in that tradition, in that way of teaching. Interestingly, when I was in high school and I heard a record of Ravi Shankar, it was in 1967. There was something so familiar in this sound that it led me to begin to explore Indian spirituality. I read Yogananda, Ramkrishna. There is something there that was very alive for me and began to meditate.”

Going deeper and deeper – and letting go of “seeking” (12:40): “looking back, I was looking for states, I was looking for higher states. I was definitely in the seeking mode and had egoic agendas to appear and be a certain way. And, those just got gradually clarified, kind of stripped away. So I think that listening, following what felt deeply resonant and felt authentic. I was, for a short period, a TM teacher and then something about that didn't feel fully authentic for me. It was useful, the practice and the introduction, but there was a call that I felt actually from my heart from some very quiet, deep knowing to keep exploring. And it required letting go each time and a release and a following and it just continued to unfold.”

Fuel for the path – suffering or truth? (15:30): Some people are fueled by suffering, and some by a quest/yearning for truth. For John, suffering/loss not the main fuel, compared to many other people. “But I have worked with many, many people over four decades and really immersed myself in their experience. And I have gone to hell many times with my clients. Metaphorically we entered into realms of tremendous suffering, because of trauma, developmental trauma, or life circumstances where people shut down and freeze and dissociate and go into hiding and the slow process of thawing and opening up. So I know this terrain of suffering, through my work with people, because I work with many people who were on the spiritual path, and I have seen that this suffering that they have gone through, has led them to question much more deeply, their ordinary reality. And, to break through their common-sense experience and open to a deeper dimension of life. And I see this as a very, very common path ….

“But for me, it was different. I had a fairly peaceful, ordinary middle-class upbringing in the San Francisco Bay area. And I am very grateful for that. Not without some difficulty or suffering, but relative to most, it was a fairly easy life. And the problem with that is one can get stuck in a kind of bubble of comfort, and not really open to actually the suffering of humanity into a life of service as well. One can stay in a very circumscribed life. So I think this is where the heart is really important too, because there the heart opens. We actually are more sensitive to the suffering of others and into collective suffering, as well. And there's a natural impulse to then move towards that and help alleviate that.”

A Transformational Dream Visitation (21:33): John had a dream involving Nisargadatta Maharaj, which was “remarkable because I didn’t know who he was.” Although he has a somewhat “skeptical doubting quality to my mind,” he was open because the dream “had such a numinous sand powerful quality to it” and the sage knew details of his life. In the past, when having big openings, “my mind would come in and say, are you fooling yourself? You know, are you just wanting to think well of yourself or you think you're further along than you are? And so, that skeptical attitude continued for some years.” But “in this case, it didn't. For some reason the channel was open to receive that particular experience.”

In the dream, he found himself in a poor area in Mumbai standing outside of a simple apartment. He looked inside and there was a sage with luminous eyes. “And as soon as I looked into his eyes, I became lucid in the dream. I was aware of this was dream state, but the dream continued and there was a communication that happened.” Nisargadatta telepathically asked “can you be my translator? And I thought, ‘but I don't know your language.’ … But he came out of his apartment, took my arm. And at the time I was studying with Sai Baba and he said, ‘I know you're a student of Sai Baba, but you can spend some time with me.’”

After John woke up, he asked his housemate who had been to India about the sage that his housemate had visited in Bombay. And he said Nisargadatta and pulled out a picture, and John realized it was the same person. His housemate gave him the sage’s “very famous book of inner dialogue, mostly with Westerners. And it really had a profound effect. I was in a more devotional kind of practice and orientation at the time. And I remember reading one particular sentence, which was ‘the seeker is the sought.’ The one who is looking is what is being looked for. And something in me said, ‘yes, I know this is true.’ And there was a huge internal shift. That's when self-inquiry began.” For two years, Nisargadatta’s writings became his “Bible” for two years.

And it turned out that Nisargadatta died a month after the dream.

Meeting his teacher Jean Klein, the Energy Body emphasis of Kashmiri Shaivism, and becoming in Touch with Body (26:18): A few years later, John met his teacher of 15 years, Jean Klein. Jean had a strong presence. He had integrated Kashmiri Shaivism into his approach to Vedanta, and had learned a way of being with the body that was different than what he learned with Krishnamacharya. Klein had said “I had learned about the dead body [from Krishnamacharya], but with the Kashmiri tradition, I'd learned about the living body.” There was something about energy and the pulse (the “liveliness”) that he had learned from Kashmiri Shaivism and that he incorporated in his work. So his retreats would have this body approach that he didn’t like to call yoga – involving very slow, directionless movements without any particular goal (no end gaming). They were micro movements in awareness – the invitation was always to be with what is, to “know yourself as a space in which your body is moving” – completely accept your somatic, emotional, energetic experience. The movement was a kind of an energy body yoga that involved working with the subtle body.

“Jean was very sensitive to the energy body. When he was younger and able to, he would lead a yoga class and then he would just kind of walk around and make the slightest adjustments. He could sense where some tension was held or there was some kind of condensed energy, and just touch it. And there would be some kind of opening or release that would happen. He was very sensitive. So it's an energy body yoga. I had a very interesting experience once with him on one of my first retreats. In the yoga, I was sitting doing some posture and he came up behind me and he put his hand just behind my heart and just touched that area, just like that. And that night I had a dream that a worm was coming out of my ear. And I thought, ‘well, what is this?’ And I realized it was doubt. And I also could feel there had been a fracture in the energy body, behind the heart area, and that had healed and released with his touch.

“So he was very sensitive to the energy body. He was a lover of life. He wasn't a renunciant. He loved art, he loved beauty. He was a great lover of beauty. And I think the Kashmiri tradition brought in that aspect of embodiment and a more immanent nature as well. … He was very sensitive to the body. He understood it physically, but he was very sensitive to the energy body as well, and this is not well understood, but an important part, I think, of this unfolding of awareness because our bodies are doubts and conditioned. And so, to be in touch with our body, to accept the body, as it is from a sense of presence, allows an unfolding to happen.”

What is “the deep heart”? (34:40): The pilgrimage from the head to the heart “is the biggest shift in terms of our identity – to release our identification with thoughts and stories and concepts and beliefs, and allow our attention to actually rest in the heart area and to live increasingly from this way that's both loving and wise.”

As we go more deeply, the layers are more tender. “By the heart, I'm not thinking about the physical heart. I'm speaking of the center of sensitivity and of knowing and being that we can sense in the center of our chest.” We shield and then ignore the sensitivities of the heart; sometimes it’s a heavy shield because of the pain of keeping our hearts open. “Gradually, given the right environment and attuned and caring and insightful person -- they could be our partners, it could be a friend, it could be a psychotherapist -- the heart begins to open and we discover these younger and more essential layers.”

Layers of the heart (38:00):

• Psychological work helps us recognize how we defend our hearts in relationship, and from ourselves (our feelings of unworthiness, or that something is lacking and flawed in us). We begin attuning and start uncovering these younger and deeper layers. Part of deep heart is personal.
• A deeper and subtler level still is the soul, which is on the edge of the personal and impersonal. It consists of certain qualities of being that are unique to each individual, like colors. “This is a level where we can connect on a personal level with family, with friends, with lovers that's extraordinarily intimate and touching and nourishing. And also the level of the archetype where we may find work that really expresses, in a deep way, in a satisfying way, in a way that we feel well used, who we are.” It’s often medicine journey work goes to this level, Jungian work, shamanic work; deep dreams come from this level. So this is where the archetypes show up – the first level of creativity near the bottom of our oceans. To sustain contact with this layer, quite a bit of psych work/clearing needs to happen. The back of the heart area itself feels like a portal.
• The impersonal/non-dual state: “when the back of the heart opens, we feel we're opening into something infinite, unbounded, unconditional, into a field of unconditional, all-embracing love and awareness, loving awareness, we could call it. It’s whole in itself and intimate. With everything. And this is where we come into non-duality, where the personal sense of self is no longer relevant. It's still there, but experientially, it's not in the foreground of awareness. And we feel a sense of communion with the whole of life, a sense of oneness, where the sense of a separate self -- a subject and object – dissolves. And a knower and a known disappears. There's just a knowing, a loving and a being. In Sanskrit, it’s Sat Chit Ananda which means a quiet joy. There's a quality of quiet joy, of profound love, a simplicity of being that's non-local and yet is intimate with all beings. And when that opens, it's just like the heart as a portal really feels very open and it's something coming through us that's much greater than us. It’s a universal quality of love that has the capacity to embrace collective suffering because as the heart opens, our sensitivity to suffering actually increases. Our own suffering diminishes, because we come home. This is one of the metaphors. And coming back to the pilgrimage metaphor is there's a sense of coming home to ourselves, of being at ease simply as we are, of knowing our native wholeness, of knowing there's nothing we need to change. There's nowhere we need to go. It’s a profound sense of rest and connection.”

Resistance to Opening the Heart (43:50):

• We re-encounter some of the pain that led us to shut it down in the first place
• Fear of losing our identity, small self, as we move into the unknown. “We get attached to our suffering. We get attached to our little self because it's familiar, there's a certain sense of ground. Our little prison cell is familiar to us. And the idea that who we are is actually much greater than that is difficult for the limited sense of self. There's a fear of losing identity and a fear of losing control.” “We have a constructed ground based on conditioning. And as we let go of that, as it is seen-through and released, it feels more and more like a kind of groundlessness initially, and it can be very frightening. And this is where the terror tends to come in because we feel like we're losing control. … At the same time, it's so liberating to be able to face and walk through this and discover this profound sense of openness that is our ground of being. And then there's just a deep sense of being rooted in something much deeper than the earth. There's a rooting to the earth itself -- which is beautiful and important -- but this is deeper than that. It's not just the body. It’s not just the earth. It's actually to the ground of being, of awareness. And the more intimate we are with that, the safer it feels to open the heart.”
• Fear of changing life, losing relationships: Reality is inherently grounding. If we are living out of truth, and come into the truth, it is really disruptive. That’s why people resist opening to it – it changes their life. “However, as you turn towards it more and more, there may be a period of disorientation that proceeds a reorientation. And that reorientation is something very profound. I would say an essential truth of our being. It’s deeply grounding and we feel ourselves more and more settled, more and more deeply grounded, meaning no matter what's going on, whatever challenges we face … there’s something that feels unshakeable.”
• Opening of the heart has to be accompanied by a clarity of the mind or awakening in mind as well.

His initial meeting with Adyashanti (51:15): Resonance with Adya's presence, "Finish me off", looking into the eyes of infinity.

A short guided meditation by John into the Deep Heart (59:30)

How to get “unstuck” at the beginning layers of the journey to the heart? (1:06:35): Our “stuckness” is a pointer and a portal.

• Identify body contraction. So start with the body and identify where in your body that feeling of stuckness lives. It will be felt as a contraction – sometimes in the physical space, but more often in just the interior space of the body and often in the trunk of the body (neck down into the pelvis).
• Sense, accept, welcome it affectionately. Begin by simply sensing it – feeling it, allowing it, accepting it, welcoming it, being curious and affectionate about it – not trying to change it or fix it, because that will just engender resistance.
• Breathe into it. “It can be helpful to actually breathe into it a little bit, not to change it, but actually to be more intimate with it on a sensate level, and often just by allowing this by letting it be and letting it in, there's a natural relaxation that begins to happen.”
• Ask if there’s a belief that goes with the contraction and bring attention to heart. “Now what's true is often we'll have a belief system, that corresponds with this contraction, somatically, and often it's a limiting belief about ‘something's wrong with me.’ I work a lot with core beliefs with people, and they usually revolve around two themes. One is that ‘I'm lacking in some kind of fundamental way’, or ‘something's wrong with me -- I'm flawed,’ and often we'll have both or some combination of those. So we can kind of sit with the contraction in the body and we may feel some relaxation. And we may then also ask the question. Is there a belief that goes with this? … We don't ask the mind -- we're not going to the mind for an answer. I bring attention to the heart area and ask for what my deepest knowing is about this belief and then be quiet. It may come as a word, and we know that it's coming from a deeper place from our mind because there will be a felt shift.
• Let the release/opening in. “Something will release, something will open. Then we let it in. This is a very important step because we're getting out of the conditioned mind and we're orienting to the light of awareness and we're letting the light of awareness in to the conditioned body, mind. And this is how transformation happens. This is how we get unstuck. This is how we can begin to access our deeper knowing and our deepest knowing as a way to invite the light of awareness into these places that are stuck, and they are stuck. They're often frozen and compartmentalized and they're waiting to be attuned with and received, with the right quality of awareness and attention.”

Deepening is an act of service (1:21:05): “Deepening is not a private act. To deepen in oneself is not selfish; it's actually the opposite. It's releasing ourselves from self-concern, releasing ourselves from our egocentricity, so that we are available to our brothers and sisters and feel them as such, not just as words, but really our kinship with one another in openhearted support. I think this journey into the heart is a journey into the heart of humanity and to be of service to them.”

Giving up seeking (1:23:55): Ultimately we need to get out of the seeking mode, as there’s no end to it. “We are already complete and whole and that's not a state, that's something we share with all beings. And at some point we discover, we let go of the search, we come to rest in our being. And to me, this is the most important step, not to search for states, not to continue with the becoming process, but actually to come home and rest as we are. … It's not complex. It's actually very simple. What is complex is to navigate life as a very separate self, constantly defending this kind of image that we have.”

“I feel in service of something much greater than myself, so I don't need anyone to be in service of my teaching or my approach because it doesn't feel like my teaching or my approach. It just feels like an offering that comes through and comes through many people. It comes through all of us actually one way or another as an open-hearted approach. And what does the world need? It needs love and wisdom. It's great to have a rational mind, that's important, but we need more than just a rational approach to life. We need an approach that's suffused with love and wisdom. And how to do that? It's not so much doing. It's actually a simple recognition of what's already here: that's a natural capacity to love and to be wise. And a lot of it is about learning to attune, be quiet and listen, and then to follow that in whatever way is true for us. And it will be true differently.”

Staying in touch: To learn from John, go to his website listeningfromsilence.com; he has a newsletter. You can also go to his YouTube channel. A lot of his work now is online, but as things open up and as energy allows, he’ll offer in-person retreats. His wife, Christiane Prendergast, also teaches Jean Klein’s style of subtle body yoga.

Pavi closed with this beautiful quote from John’s book:

As the body awakens, so does the world. When we discover that the core of the body is made up of empty, vibrant and wakeful openness, we experience the world differently. The world as "other" dissolves, becomes intimate. Awakening does not end with the discovery of our true nature as open awareness. This is only the beginning of another process. Life is also inviting us to discover the true nature of our body, and by extension the world. There is a natural movement of open, loving awareness to saturate the densest levels of form in order to meet and free the areas of greatest confusion and suffering. Loving awareness will liberate everything that it touches if we are honest and vulnerable enough to allow it.

Lots of gratitude to all the behind-the-scenes volunteers that made this call happen!

--Preeta