About
Posted by otryba
Over the years,people have been asking me to share what I’ve learned of Deep Freedom as an invitation to the totality of your experience NOW. It is NOT about recreating some other people’s cultural, religious or spiritual experience. It is an invitation back into the wholeness and power of the experience YOU are having right now. It is a labor of Love that ends the war against ourselves that is so typical of how we experience our lives and even our spirituality in the West, an invitation to move beyond correction and into CONNECTION.
I’ll share a little of my background and how this work evolved.
I grew up between two divorced parents whose worlds spanned the French and Swahili-speaking world of Belgian colonialists (repatriated from Africa to the lovely, affectionate land of the Walloon people in Belgium) and the Polish, German, and English-speaking world of my father in Chicago. Going to the United States at age 5 with my father and brother, on what was supposedly a two week vacation, I didn’t return to Belgium or see my mother again until 8 years later. Experiencing the loss of my mother, language and culture, and then recovering it in my adolescence, gave me a profound sensitivity to the experiences of people around the world experiencing cultural disruption today.
The numerous rationalizations underlying cultural conquest not only denigrate the peoples being conquered, it also prevents those doing the conquering from examining their own cultural disruption and the enculturated, sanitized despair that underlies conquest of others and, consequently, of oneself. Spending several years at a time with one parent, then the other entailed adapting to parental cultures that were radically divergent on multiple counts. I got it early on that people have a strange way of being convinced about their worldview – in ways that aren’t necessarily convincing to others - and how we inspire joy & bring pain to loved ones because of these convictions whose roots are embedded in our neurology.
I began to look beyond my parents’ worlds, delving deeply in world religions starting with Buddhism at age 13, several years as a Hindu monk at age 15, then Christianity, then science. At age 18 I had an experience that gave me a glimpse of the world unmediated by language or belief. It didn’t last long, but it impressed upon me that however we name the world; that’s how it appears to behave as we experience the description and, ultimately, avoid the world.
At age 19 I met the first person who spoke to my experience. He was a Danish-American from L.A. who had apprenticed with the last male and last female medicine people of the Latgawa-Takelma people (known as the Rogue River Indians of Oregon). I became his apprentice in the threefold art of Seeing, Hearing and Moving and have trained since 1984 in how to read and use sacred mountains for transformation. Through my teacher, Rockman, I met indigenous people from all over the Americas, some of whom I became close to and traveled with. My journeys took me from the American Arctic down to Guatemala, then on to Indonesia, studying, living, learning, working, loving and laughing with indigenous and non- indigenous people along the way, and continuing my shamanic studies while also pursuing a 20-years study of Tai Chi, Chinese Medicine and also Western Medicine, working as a Critical Care, Community Health, Post-Surgical, Post-Partum Registered Nurse all over the United States and in some parts of Latin America.
My quest to understand and to See, Hear and Move in the world, and not just my ideas of the world, took me to places few people go or linger in. Whether spending 5 months in Tlingit country 5 miles by canoe from the nearest town up in Canada’s Yukon territories, or living in remote, indigenous communities in Mexico, my life has been profoundly enriched by the wisdom, humor, intelligence, and insight of people whose lives rarely appear on the media screens of mainstream culture, except perhaps in some tragic or romanticized form. What I discovered were not simply people living another way of life, with other “belief” systems, but people who revealed profound and hidden truths about my own nature and capacities as a human being.
With that experience, and long journeys where I lived, more than traveled, with people in different cultures, I began to realize that there are ways in which we Westerners are very different from many other cultures. Close friendship with three Cheyenne friends over five years made me acutely aware that they were operating out a different EMBODIED experience of being human than mine. Then spending time with Zapotec, Mixtec & Mixe friends in Mexico or my Balinese & Minangkabau friends in Indonesia made me aware that there are ways of being human that awaken the body, mind, heart, organs in different ways. Living with indigenous and non-indigenous people around the world was profoundly enriching and, at the same time, very ordinary. While I was doing all of this exploration, I also became more aware of what was occurring in my experience.
In my time with people in non-Western cultures, I promptly became aware that there was a level of discovery awaiting me, personally, that was not about shamanism, rituals, or using sacred mountains, but that had to do with how we, as human beings, inhabit our world, body, and experience at a very foundational, human level. I also became increasingly aware of a turmoil within.
In 2001, during a 30-day solo trip in the deserts of Utah, I discovered a tremendous grief at the core of my being. The experience was as if an abscess of grief at my core had exploded and blew most of what I experienced as my “self” to pieces. I discovered that most of my so-called “spiritual journey” and quest, was actually an avoidance of this grief and the felt-experience that was at the heart of it. I became very conscious of how I became disconnected from feeling at age 7 and, simultaneously, became aware of how similar disconnections have happened in my family ancestry.
Although some people have labeled this an “awakening,” experientially it was more of a death. It was the death of the romance I had with a persona that had protected and alienated me from my own innocence and my capacity to FEEL deeply. I began to experience ALL of the emotions which I had tried to avoid in my so-called “spiritual” life. Innocence was Feeling, including the capacity to feel everything that our culture censors us from feeling. This confounded all of my notions of spiritual evolution which assumed that to be “spiritual” means to feel certain things and not others.
It was also the birth of a dimension of Love that was terrifying to me; not love as some desired emotion, but Love as the courage to BE IN THE PRESENCE OF ALL that arises in Experience, without the conditioned reflex to remedy; the willingness to BE nakedly, in the raw, dispossessed of my whole arsenal of “methods” to “fix” my experience or that of others, collected over my lifetime. Over the years, this awakening to Deep Freedom continues to deliver an openness to feeling, relating and prospering in ways that are very surprising and delightful.
My courses are designed to identify the innocence and brilliance of our being human and the pathways that we take to embody our world. As we begin to appreciate how consciousness develops, we can enter into a more integrated appreciation for the totality of our experience and thus move beyond the self-conflicted neurology that we develop to survive and adapt in disconnected cultures: cultures where humans are disconnected from each other and from the world that they not only inhabit but are an integral part of. Although there are certainly many things you can learn by engaging with Deep Freedom Now, I believe that the greatest benefit is that you will learn to notice, appreciate and relish more of what is already present in your Life and how beautiful you already are, as a human being, regardless and WITH everything you bring to the mix that is you.