Finding the Fourth Way

When I began to get traction with these particular presence exercises and meditations from the Practical Awareness Course, I saw that it was an advanced path of transformation. The technique is unique because you learn as you go about life and not just on the meditation cushion.

Something started happening for me with that traction.

I had just moved from Paris with two kids in tow, escaping an abusive, gaslighting husband while painstakingly leaving a full concert schedule as a professional classical pianist behind. I was in crisis though my career looked so put together. My inner life was in turmoil. I was full of fear and I had no self-worth.

I could not recognize my own self-loathing and unworthiness. I was beating myself up for having such a ridiculous situation. Life was showing me that I didn’t get it, but I could not figure out why and I was running out of options.

There comes a point when you cannot stay in denial. Life has a great way of letting you know enough is enough.

After starting these practices, I began to see how I was bypassing my feelings; justifying my predicament, and convincing myself that I was either above it all or a complete failure (yup, I had both). I would often resist feeling vulnerable and felt I had to be invincible to be strong.

I had been battling through, sucking it up, and carrying on. I didn’t need help. I couldn’t go there.

This journey enabled me to truly feel and, consequently, to accept my emotions. I started to understand that my "can-do" attitude often masked a deeper neediness. A lack of boundaries, stemming from ingrained neediness, led me to marry an abusive and manipulative individual. The neediness itself was rooted in a deeply conditioned part of me that I was initially unaware of.

I could no longer pretend. I was alone with two children and felt incredibly alienated. Despite a successful career, daily meditation, and discipline, I was adept at deceiving myself and those around me.

With this new kind of practical approach to being present, I started to accept my pain, my woundedness, and most of all, the contradictions within me because I could now see them in a new light.

This wasn’t about living out old traumas or re-enacting them. It was a softening of myself to myself because I started to be able to see my attachment to these ideas of worthlessness for the first time.

My teacher helped me and I had to allow myself this help. I had to let go of knowing it all and getting it. I became humble to the powerful energies developing within me that could now catch me in the act of this grand pretending.

Learning how to have this depth of presence is what did it.

My attachment to how I presented myself in the world, what I thought I deserved from others, and how I desperately needed others' love and approval began to crumble. Not because I focused on those things or “fixed them”, but because I became present to what they actually were: conditioned constructs.

The need to be accepted and loved gradually lost its grip. The more this happened, the more I accepted and loved myself on a level not possible before. My relationships shifted from codependence to love and connection.

I gained healthy boundaries.

My inner life flourished. My children were free from having to fulfill my needs, and I found my lifelong partner with whom I teach this work.

This is not a “someday my prince will come” story. It’s the story of learning to give and receive love.

I have witnessed scores of people come to things in themselves with these practices of presence and self-observation that they didn’t think were possible. That is why I believe in this course and the methods that it teaches.

If you are looking for ways to see through your own prison and learn to love, I invite you to join us in the Practical Awareness Course, offered every year.