Title: Evolutionary

Gender: Female

Age: Ageless

Location: Lenox, MA

I live at the EnlightenNext Center in the beautiful, and currently frigid Berkshires, along with a group of other Evolutionaries– spiritual brothers and sisters–all students of Andrew Cohen who do spiritual practice, meditate, study, work, eat, a mostly  ph-balanced raw food gourmet diet, practice power yoga or crossfit, create the smokin'  What Is Enlightenment? magazine,  and explore together what it means to really create a new culture and a new consciousness.

I've always been a utopian idealist, half rebel and half spiritual seeker. As a teen I fluctuated between listening to “Genesis” and “Santana,” studying Hebrew and Judaic Philosophy in a liberal Reconstructionist congregation, whitewater kayaking and avoiding as much structure and institutional rules as I could. I left high school after 3 years, to volunteer in a development town in Northern Israel, and learned then of the mild forms of segregation that exist between Jews from North Africa and the more affluent lighter skinned European Jews. It was the beginning of my own awareness of tribes and memes, and the multitude of factors that create social cohesion or conflict. I  began working with a small band of friends to establish an alternative community in the Galilee, with an Arab sister-city until the Lebanese war broke out in '82. Deeply disillusioned, I changed my mind, and started looking East. I studied governance, regional development & educational theory high above Cayuga's waters at Cornell, began to practice yoga and Zen meditation, and in the early 80s travelled to India in search of awakened masters and the practices and teachings that could enlighten.

It’s a long story from start to finish, suffice it to say I had numerous unforgettable and classic experiences as a seeker, from mystical revelations at 17,000 feet in the Tibetan plateau, to powerful cosmic conscience in the presence of the great modern day saint Swami Chidananda, to teachings with HH the Dalai Lama at his palace in Dharmsala, to my own impatient insistence and respectful request to several of the Tibetan rinpoches I’d come to know to help me find my “root guru,” that teacher with whom I was philosophically, spiritually, karmically, and on a soul level resonant with, who I could work with to disembed my consciousness from its lower structures.

 
It was in 1986, in Dharmsala in Northern India that  I met Andrew Cohen, barely 6 months after he’d begun teaching. I have lived and been integrally involved in the evolution of the body of his students, our network of centers, and the evolutionary spirituality movement that is being born out of his teaching work and which I well expect to grow wildly and out of control. Andrew’s teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment is really meant to help map and guide our development, to cultivate soul strength and moral core, and to help us identify and access the creative impulse in ourselves, that pure forward seeking passion that looks only towards the future, and wants ever higher and freer levels and stages of consciousness to become reality on earth. There is so much to talk about and so much to create. I look forward to engaging with my new Zaadzster “friends,” and to see as we rub up against each other in creative entanglement, what we can do to really push our culture up and forward out of the isolated individualistic post modern cultural constructs and into some new stage of independence and unity that has yet to come into being.

Member Since: Thursday, August 17 2006

Last Visit: 281 days ago.

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