Deep Presence and Shamanic Incubation

A few months ago, I started to feel dissatisfied with my meditation practice. For the past twenty years, I have taught meditation as the practice of conscious contentment, which simply means being content with whatever experience happens to arise. When I started leading an intensive program in mystical vision at the beginning of this year, I began to feel that my practice wanted to expand.

It wasn’t that anything was wrong. In fact, it was just the opposite. Conscious contentment had become effortless. It was simply that I felt my further evolution was calling me toward something new. I could never have imagined what was coming, until last month, in the context of a plant medicine retreat, I came into contact with a goddess.

I closed my eyes and there she was, looking directly at me. She told me she had been working with me for a long time, but that now she would become central to everything I did. I spent two days in almost unbroken communion with her, and I feel as though I am entering a dramatically different phase of my spiritual life.

Before that retreat, I had already started shifting my practice from conscious contentment to deep presence. Conscious contentment means choosing to be content with whatever experience you happen to be having. Deep presence means resting in the awareness that exists prior to the arising of time and mind. My experience of deep presence is simply resting in the emptiness before thought while allowing myself to be saturated by the mystery of the unknown.

That is the meditation I was practicing during the plant medicine retreat, and I believe it opened the doorway to my encounter with the goddess. In fact, she herself confirmed that deep abidance in pure awareness was essential for entering into communion with the realm of her being.

Once I made contact with her, she instructed me to continue resting in deep awareness and simply follow her guidance. I found myself energetically guided into heavenly realms that exist beneath the surface of the Earth. I experienced more bliss than I thought I could possibly contain. And then the journey continued as we traveled into realms of pain, suffering, and despair that were as overwhelming in their darkness as the heavenly realms had been in their beauty.

Since that first encounter a month ago, I have continued to experience a connection with the presence I simply call the inner goddess. She has been instructing me in how to design a practice, which I now call shamanic incubation, in which I rest in deep awareness and follow her guidance wherever it leads.

So far, she has never failed to appear during my shamanic incubation sessions, and she has consistently offered new insights about how to refine the practice in ways that are even more conducive to communion.

I sense that many of the people who follow my work are also feeling a desire for an evolution in their practice, and so I wanted to share openly about what I am experiencing. This new dimension of inner work has a momentum and an energy that is propelling me forward. I can feel a profound urgency in the way the inner goddess is interacting with me.

I want to share this exploration with those who feel called to it. The first place I will do that will be in the two-week program Resting in Deep Presence beginning next month.

That program will be an opportunity for me to share directly from this ongoing communion with the inner goddess. I can’t exactly say what that will look like, because I honestly don’t know yet. But I have no doubt that it will be unlike anything I have offered before.