LU is focused guiding for seeing there is no real, inherent 'self' - what do you understand by this?
I understand this to mean that the person I have learned to present to the world is imaginary - comprised of thoughts, ideas, beliefs, acting, and it is not who or what I am.
What are you looking for at LU?
What am I looking for at LU? Pointers and support that will help me clearly see through the beliefs, ideas, and conditioning that create separation and cause suffering.
Without any prior spiritual seeking or study, I experienced a sudden and profound "awakening"/ ego death during a single counseling session 35 years ago, followed a week later by another another profound experience that uprooted my sense of identity. (I was in counseling to try and recover from a sudden, inexplicable utterly destabilizing, drop into a persistent feeling of terror and despair and thoughts of suicide in my early 30s after a relationship breakup).
For the next two or three months after my awakening in the counseling setting I experienced a felt sense of lucid presence every nano-second of the day and night and a feeling of being connected from my heart center with the infinite well of all love and all joy. For the first time in my life I felt completely well inside. I felt as if I'd found everything I'd ever been (unknowingly) looking for, and I assumed this would be my condition going forward. In a family encounter a couple months later I received an unexpected explosion of rage from my step mother in which she, screaming, severed any contact with her or my father.
I was in shock for a day or two after that family encounter and woke up a couple mornings later back in the darkness, despair and anxiety I'd been in before my awakening. That state of destabilization and despair became my normal again. It was like a fall from heaven to hell.
A year later I returned to the same counseling setting where my awakening had occurred, hoping to find my way back to my awakening again. This time what came up spontaneously during my counseling session was a memory of being sexually assaulted by my father when I was four years old. The trigger for that assault was an explosion of rage from my mother that was eerily like the explosion of rage from my stepmother that blew me out of my "awakening" as an adult.
I have spent 35 years since that time doing one thing after another to find inner wellness again -- therapeutic work, and a long search in the non-dual world, which only yielded more confusion and despair. My awakening had a very different flavor than the awakenings I found discussed in the non-dual world, which often felt very heady, cold, distant, hierarchal, subtly egoic, & unattainable. My awakening involved a profound heart connection with the source of all love and all joy, and an ability to see the radiance of every human being and know that everyone had this heart connection (although most were unaware) and a profound equality with every other human being, no hierarchies.
In the counseling session where I awoke, I very suddenly realized that the way I had tried to present myself to the counselor, and to the world (as an exceptionally "good" person) was a pretense and fabrication and I was moved to acknowledge that everything I knew myself to be was a complete fake. In that moment where I made the acknowledgement I felt myself spin into nothingness, everything stopped, my mind stopped, I felt my "self" die. The next thing I knew, I saw legs, my legs, and I realized that I didn't die, but everything I thought I was died. And then there was a flood of relief and a steady stream "downloads", awarenesses that trying to fit myself into the small identity box of a "good" person was the cause of my separation and suffering.
If you'd asked me what I was during the two months that followed I would have said, "there is no way to define me. I can't find anything here (pointing in the direction of my body) that defines me. What I am is infinite possibility."
In the 35 years since I fell out of the the awakening back into despair, I've done a huge amount of inner work and although there are ways in which the inner work has been helpful, none of it has been decisive in helping me recover a felt sense of inner well-being. I went through a period of significant trauma as an adult many years after the awakening that seemed to trigger feelings of my early traumas and resulted in 4 successive nervous breakdowns from feelings of overwhelming terror.
In recent years i have become aware that much of my suffering seems to be self-generated, learned, conditioned, arising out of thoughts and beliefs. I recently came across discussions on Fetter Work on YouTube with Pernille, and Kevin Shanilek, and what they were talking about felt resonant to what I have been exploring in my own life, so I have started to engage those kinds of Fetter work inquiries. The spirit in which Pernille and Kevin offer their work feels "clean" to me (I've been in "spiritual" settings and with teachers that felt rife with confusion and unspoken agendas). Pernille's discussions pointed me to LU. As I read the LU website descriptions this project also feels like a clean expression of goodwill and support to diminish suffering in the world.
From LU I would just like some support in clarifying my own beliefs that cause suffering and separation. I have done a lot of my inner work alone. It would be great to have some human support in this process.
What do you expect from a guided conversation?
Just a conversation or sharing with a regular human being who has experienced what the fetter work points towards (direct realization of the absence of a personal self) and may be able to make suggestions and offer clarifications that may be helpful to me in clarifying thoughts and beliefs that lead to confusion and suffering. I appreciate that guides here are offering their support for free, from a sense of basic human sense of well-wishing and kindness for others, that others be free from suffering.
What is your experience in terms of spiritual practices, seeking and inquiry?
I've done 25 or 30 years of spiritual searching on and off via teachers and readings and retreats and meditation and other kinds of practices.
On a scale from 1 to 10, how willing are you to question any currently held beliefs about 'self? 11
riverinalaska
Re: riverinalaska
Hi riverinalaska, Deanna here.
I'd be happy to walk this path with you. I'll offer a few bits here, and you can see how you feel about moving on together.
-In our conversations, I'll do the asking and you'll respond, when ready, with 100% honesty.
-I'll help to keep us focused and moving with timely replies, pointers, and questions.
If this sounds OK to you, please let me know how you'd like me to address you.
And here we go :)
Does liberation mean recovering an inner sense of well-being? Are these the same thing?
Just breathe and answer now, not with thought. Answer with awareness.
Could "a sense of well-being" be a thought or belief that leads to confusion and suffering?
Look very closely. How does it feel to look from this edge?
With love,
Deanna
I'd be happy to walk this path with you. I'll offer a few bits here, and you can see how you feel about moving on together.
-In our conversations, I'll do the asking and you'll respond, when ready, with 100% honesty.
-I'll help to keep us focused and moving with timely replies, pointers, and questions.
If this sounds OK to you, please let me know how you'd like me to address you.
And here we go :)
In the 35 years since I fell out of the the awakening back into despair, I've done a huge amount of inner work and although there are ways in which the inner work has been helpful, none of it has been decisive in helping me recover a felt sense of inner well-being.
Does liberation mean recovering an inner sense of well-being? Are these the same thing?
Just breathe and answer now, not with thought. Answer with awareness.
What do you expect from a guided conversation? Just a conversation or sharing with a regular human being who has experienced what the fetter work points towards (direct realization of the absence of a personal self) and may be able to make suggestions and offer clarifications that may be helpful to me in clarifying thoughts and beliefs that lead to confusion and suffering
Could "a sense of well-being" be a thought or belief that leads to confusion and suffering?
Look very closely. How does it feel to look from this edge?
With love,
Deanna
-
riverinalaska
- Posts: 3
- Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2025 8:29 pm
Re: riverinalaska
Hi Deanna,
Thanks for your reply and your offer. Kevin is the name I go by. You can call me that.
I'm not sure what the word liberation refers to. During my first awakening I felt liberated from an idea of myself (as a "good" person) that I saw had caused me to separate myself from others and led to suffering. There was a profound feeling of freedom, happiness, being unburdened of shame and guilt, no rules, nothing to believe or practice.
I use the term "inner well being" to refer to what I experienced during that awakening and to what is called "fundamental well-being" in Finders Course (a course I took developed by Dr. Jeffrey Martin that is a 3 month experiential dive into a number of most successful historical and contemporary practices for "awakening"). I am in touch with a community of Finders Course people who have taken FC and most of whom subsequently report coming into a persistent sense of "fundamental well-being" despite the ups and downs and challenges of life, and as I understand them, many or most of them came into this by dis-identification with a separate self). Although I took the course a few years ago, I did not have that same outcome.
"A persistent sense of inner well-being" is just one way of referring or pointing to an outcome that many people who make a spiritual search report. This could also be a way of saying "freedom from suffering" or a "loosening of identification with the the small suffering self." I think people come here to find freedom from suffering and some apparently do. That is my desire also.
Yes, it seems to me that "a sense of well-being" could be a thought or belief that leads to confusion and suffering. It feels like a good question to consider.
Thanks for your reply and your offer. Kevin is the name I go by. You can call me that.
I'm not sure what the word liberation refers to. During my first awakening I felt liberated from an idea of myself (as a "good" person) that I saw had caused me to separate myself from others and led to suffering. There was a profound feeling of freedom, happiness, being unburdened of shame and guilt, no rules, nothing to believe or practice.
I use the term "inner well being" to refer to what I experienced during that awakening and to what is called "fundamental well-being" in Finders Course (a course I took developed by Dr. Jeffrey Martin that is a 3 month experiential dive into a number of most successful historical and contemporary practices for "awakening"). I am in touch with a community of Finders Course people who have taken FC and most of whom subsequently report coming into a persistent sense of "fundamental well-being" despite the ups and downs and challenges of life, and as I understand them, many or most of them came into this by dis-identification with a separate self). Although I took the course a few years ago, I did not have that same outcome.
"A persistent sense of inner well-being" is just one way of referring or pointing to an outcome that many people who make a spiritual search report. This could also be a way of saying "freedom from suffering" or a "loosening of identification with the the small suffering self." I think people come here to find freedom from suffering and some apparently do. That is my desire also.
Yes, it seems to me that "a sense of well-being" could be a thought or belief that leads to confusion and suffering. It feels like a good question to consider.
Re: riverinalaska
It's nice to meet you, Kevin.
Thank you for the depth and clarity of this share. You’re naming the heart of the path: the longing not just for fleeting peace, but for the stabilization of freedom, the falling away of identification with that “small suffering self.”
Let’s slow this down and stay intimate with it.
You said:
"I did not have that same outcome [as some others who took the same course]"
Can we gently look there?
Right now—what does that sentence feel like in your body?
Is there a subtle contraction? A reaching? A sense of lack?
Where exactly do you feel that desire—for what others have found?
What if the very craving for freedom is the last veil of suffering?
Not wrong. Just subtle.
Can you see how even the idea of “persistent well-being” becomes a new identity—a more refined version of the separate self?
Let’s ask this:
Who is the one that hasn’t had the outcome?
Can that “me” be located in direct experience?
Or is it a thought, an image, a looping reference?
And when that sense of lack is looked at—gently, curiously—not to solve or analyze, but to include…
What remains?
Here’s the question I invite you to live with for a while, not as a concept but in your bones:
What would it feel like to not become anything?
No Finder. No Awakened One. No “me” who made it.
Just this moment—breathing, pulsing, hearing—without needing to mean anything.
Could that be the freedom?
Not a gain, but a loss. Not arrival, but the end of arriving.
Let this soak:
You’re not behind.
You’re not missing anything.
You’re just being invited into a deeper surrender than the one you hoped for.
Tell me now:
What happens in your body when you drop the goal of “persistent well-being”…
…and let this exact experience—longing, not-knowing, rawness—be utterly welcome?
What is revealed?
With love,
Deanna
Thank you for the depth and clarity of this share. You’re naming the heart of the path: the longing not just for fleeting peace, but for the stabilization of freedom, the falling away of identification with that “small suffering self.”
Let’s slow this down and stay intimate with it.
You said:
"I did not have that same outcome [as some others who took the same course]"
Can we gently look there?
Right now—what does that sentence feel like in your body?
Is there a subtle contraction? A reaching? A sense of lack?
Where exactly do you feel that desire—for what others have found?
What if the very craving for freedom is the last veil of suffering?
Not wrong. Just subtle.
Can you see how even the idea of “persistent well-being” becomes a new identity—a more refined version of the separate self?
Let’s ask this:
Who is the one that hasn’t had the outcome?
Can that “me” be located in direct experience?
Or is it a thought, an image, a looping reference?
And when that sense of lack is looked at—gently, curiously—not to solve or analyze, but to include…
What remains?
Here’s the question I invite you to live with for a while, not as a concept but in your bones:
What would it feel like to not become anything?
No Finder. No Awakened One. No “me” who made it.
Just this moment—breathing, pulsing, hearing—without needing to mean anything.
Could that be the freedom?
Not a gain, but a loss. Not arrival, but the end of arriving.
Let this soak:
You’re not behind.
You’re not missing anything.
You’re just being invited into a deeper surrender than the one you hoped for.
Tell me now:
What happens in your body when you drop the goal of “persistent well-being”…
…and let this exact experience—longing, not-knowing, rawness—be utterly welcome?
What is revealed?
With love,
Deanna
-
riverinalaska
- Posts: 3
- Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2025 8:29 pm
Re: riverinalaska
Thanks Deanna. I appreciate the questions and pointers.
(how do i put your comments in a shaded box, like you did with mine)
"Let’s ask this:
Who is the one that hasn’t had the outcome?
Can that “me” be located in direct experience?
Or is it a thought, an image, a looping reference?
And when that sense of lack is looked at—gently, curiously—not to solve or analyze, but to include…
What remains?
Here’s the question I invite you to live with for a while, not as a concept but in your bones:
What would it feel like to not become anything?
No Finder. No Awakened One. No “me” who made it.
Just this moment—breathing, pulsing, hearing—without needing to mean anything.
...
Tell me now:
What happens in your body when you drop the goal of “persistent well-being”…
…and let this exact experience—longing, not-knowing, rawness—be utterly welcome?
What is revealed?"
When I first read your post a couple nights ago and checked into my body everything felt fine. There was no sense of lack. I felt happy and well in that moment.
I'm not sure what the sense of "me" is. It's something I orient to less and less. But when there is intense physical and energetic discomfort, there seems to be a "me" that is associated with this body and the pain.
The morning after reading your post, I had an experience that I wrote about in my journal:
"A significant shift in perspective happened this morning as I woke early and lay there letting myself rest and feel the steady procession of thoughts and feelings that came up without trying to control any of them, just witnessing and being curious - feeling good came up, fear came up in different iterations, contraction, mind hooks. Feelings I would normally push away. Thoughts I would normally push away. The effort to have only good feelings and thoughts. They all came and went.
It was a tremendous relief to turn toward them with curiosity, let them come and go, and realize how threatened and frightened I have been of the thoughts and feeling themselves, and what an internal fight I was making to control them. So much of that arising out of innocent, unquestioned beliefs. To feel them as harmless, welcome, to feel myself as a witness, a presence, as something more than the thoughts and feelings, as the space in which the thoughts and feelings happen.
I have heard people talk about this a thousand times and I've tried to do that myself a thousand times, but I never began to "get it" till this morning. I have felt so utterly threatened by "bad" thoughts and "bad" feelings, and when I take the labels off the feelings, like "fear," its just energy moving, often just an impetus to jump up and correct something. What a relief not to need to do anything but let them come and go and see that life is unfolding "apart from" these movies in the mind, this mental and emotional and energetic activity. It can't really be "apart from" but when awareness is more broad than just in my head, there is a world "out there" moving and dancing.
I had a remarkable day, following from the experience this morning. It felt like a layer of fear and confusion lifted, and I felt happy the rest of the day. The happiness was from the unburdening of child-like confusion and beliefs that there is something I "don't get," that there is "something wrong."
The experience this morning unburdened me of a tremendous amount of fear, and exposed how much fear I've been carrying. Since childhood, I have been frightened/terrified of my feelings and thoughts. Since childhood I have believed that I needed to control my feelings and thoughts to be "good."
This morning I realized that I don't need to be afraid of my feelings and thoughts. They were only threatening and intense to the point they were because I was so frightened of them.
Today felt something like my awakening again. The feeling was "I'm okay." There's nothing wrong with me. Life is just "this." There's nothing I have to "get" (understand about life), nothing to figure out or correct. Life is just this moment and there is no right or wrong way to do it.
All of the ideas that spiritual teachers are special or know something I don't collapsed. I could feel them all as just regular people speaking to the same experience I was having today of there being nothing to "get", that life is just what's unfolding, and the more we resist it the more confusing and painful it gets. There is no specialness in that. They are not special people."
I not infrequently have experiences like the one I recorded in my journal (above) that feel like a breakthrough and then sometime later I will be challenged by the circumstances of life and find that I don't feel so clear any more.
This morning is a good example.
I woke up this morning I woke up feeling the physical and energetic contractions in my body that have been so uncomfortable for many years. They sap my energy so that my attention is on trying to be with the discomfort and it's hard to be present with anything else, and I have difficulty functioning. This has been an experience of suffering.
I try to accept the feelings and welcome them but I will find my mind dissociating to find relief and I alternate between turning my attention toward the pain and dissociating. Intense physical/energetic discomfort does seem to cause suffering.
I heard a talk by Adyashanti recently where he says that he had regular periods of intense pain for many years which eventually resulted in PTSD and now he is taking anti-anxiety medications for the PTSD. The pain was apparently caused by an anti-allergy medication he was taking and he stopped taking the medication so that he no longer has the pain, but he now has the PTSD from the recurrent experiences of pain.
In the past he has given many talks that sound as if he is encouraging people to just be with their physical pain, turn towards it, and not add the suffering of not wanting what they were experiencing.
In this recent talk he shared that he was good at being with the pain he experienced for many years because of his endurance athlete training in his early years, but eventually the ongoing pain wore his resilience down and led to the PTSD. The anti-anxiety meds he takes would seem to indicate that there are feelings that are too much and for him there is no benefit in trying to welcome or be with them, that he just needs relief from them.
In the past during episodes of significant pain or terror I've gone looking for advice on how to deal with it and heard hear spiritual teachers like Kim Eng, Eckhardt Tolle's partner, giving people who experiencing intense pain and are searching for relief the advice that to be free of the suffering "you need to accept and welcome the pain as if it's never going to end," and I wonder if the people giving that advice ever been through really intense or overwhelming pain or terror.
Last week Adya and John Pendergrast, and Jonathan Gustin did an online (fundraising for cancer) interview with Riaz Motan another spiritual teacher who has cancer and is going through a lot of pain and may die soon, and it sounded like Riaz was acknowledging that is has been quite a challenge to bring the kind of orientation we're talking about here, dis-identifying with the small suffering self, to the pain and suffering he's going through and the prospect of dying/leaving his wife and child.
(how do i put your comments in a shaded box, like you did with mine)
"Let’s ask this:
Who is the one that hasn’t had the outcome?
Can that “me” be located in direct experience?
Or is it a thought, an image, a looping reference?
And when that sense of lack is looked at—gently, curiously—not to solve or analyze, but to include…
What remains?
Here’s the question I invite you to live with for a while, not as a concept but in your bones:
What would it feel like to not become anything?
No Finder. No Awakened One. No “me” who made it.
Just this moment—breathing, pulsing, hearing—without needing to mean anything.
...
Tell me now:
What happens in your body when you drop the goal of “persistent well-being”…
…and let this exact experience—longing, not-knowing, rawness—be utterly welcome?
What is revealed?"
When I first read your post a couple nights ago and checked into my body everything felt fine. There was no sense of lack. I felt happy and well in that moment.
I'm not sure what the sense of "me" is. It's something I orient to less and less. But when there is intense physical and energetic discomfort, there seems to be a "me" that is associated with this body and the pain.
The morning after reading your post, I had an experience that I wrote about in my journal:
"A significant shift in perspective happened this morning as I woke early and lay there letting myself rest and feel the steady procession of thoughts and feelings that came up without trying to control any of them, just witnessing and being curious - feeling good came up, fear came up in different iterations, contraction, mind hooks. Feelings I would normally push away. Thoughts I would normally push away. The effort to have only good feelings and thoughts. They all came and went.
It was a tremendous relief to turn toward them with curiosity, let them come and go, and realize how threatened and frightened I have been of the thoughts and feeling themselves, and what an internal fight I was making to control them. So much of that arising out of innocent, unquestioned beliefs. To feel them as harmless, welcome, to feel myself as a witness, a presence, as something more than the thoughts and feelings, as the space in which the thoughts and feelings happen.
I have heard people talk about this a thousand times and I've tried to do that myself a thousand times, but I never began to "get it" till this morning. I have felt so utterly threatened by "bad" thoughts and "bad" feelings, and when I take the labels off the feelings, like "fear," its just energy moving, often just an impetus to jump up and correct something. What a relief not to need to do anything but let them come and go and see that life is unfolding "apart from" these movies in the mind, this mental and emotional and energetic activity. It can't really be "apart from" but when awareness is more broad than just in my head, there is a world "out there" moving and dancing.
I had a remarkable day, following from the experience this morning. It felt like a layer of fear and confusion lifted, and I felt happy the rest of the day. The happiness was from the unburdening of child-like confusion and beliefs that there is something I "don't get," that there is "something wrong."
The experience this morning unburdened me of a tremendous amount of fear, and exposed how much fear I've been carrying. Since childhood, I have been frightened/terrified of my feelings and thoughts. Since childhood I have believed that I needed to control my feelings and thoughts to be "good."
This morning I realized that I don't need to be afraid of my feelings and thoughts. They were only threatening and intense to the point they were because I was so frightened of them.
Today felt something like my awakening again. The feeling was "I'm okay." There's nothing wrong with me. Life is just "this." There's nothing I have to "get" (understand about life), nothing to figure out or correct. Life is just this moment and there is no right or wrong way to do it.
All of the ideas that spiritual teachers are special or know something I don't collapsed. I could feel them all as just regular people speaking to the same experience I was having today of there being nothing to "get", that life is just what's unfolding, and the more we resist it the more confusing and painful it gets. There is no specialness in that. They are not special people."
I not infrequently have experiences like the one I recorded in my journal (above) that feel like a breakthrough and then sometime later I will be challenged by the circumstances of life and find that I don't feel so clear any more.
This morning is a good example.
I woke up this morning I woke up feeling the physical and energetic contractions in my body that have been so uncomfortable for many years. They sap my energy so that my attention is on trying to be with the discomfort and it's hard to be present with anything else, and I have difficulty functioning. This has been an experience of suffering.
I try to accept the feelings and welcome them but I will find my mind dissociating to find relief and I alternate between turning my attention toward the pain and dissociating. Intense physical/energetic discomfort does seem to cause suffering.
I heard a talk by Adyashanti recently where he says that he had regular periods of intense pain for many years which eventually resulted in PTSD and now he is taking anti-anxiety medications for the PTSD. The pain was apparently caused by an anti-allergy medication he was taking and he stopped taking the medication so that he no longer has the pain, but he now has the PTSD from the recurrent experiences of pain.
In the past he has given many talks that sound as if he is encouraging people to just be with their physical pain, turn towards it, and not add the suffering of not wanting what they were experiencing.
In this recent talk he shared that he was good at being with the pain he experienced for many years because of his endurance athlete training in his early years, but eventually the ongoing pain wore his resilience down and led to the PTSD. The anti-anxiety meds he takes would seem to indicate that there are feelings that are too much and for him there is no benefit in trying to welcome or be with them, that he just needs relief from them.
In the past during episodes of significant pain or terror I've gone looking for advice on how to deal with it and heard hear spiritual teachers like Kim Eng, Eckhardt Tolle's partner, giving people who experiencing intense pain and are searching for relief the advice that to be free of the suffering "you need to accept and welcome the pain as if it's never going to end," and I wonder if the people giving that advice ever been through really intense or overwhelming pain or terror.
Last week Adya and John Pendergrast, and Jonathan Gustin did an online (fundraising for cancer) interview with Riaz Motan another spiritual teacher who has cancer and is going through a lot of pain and may die soon, and it sounded like Riaz was acknowledging that is has been quite a challenge to bring the kind of orientation we're talking about here, dis-identifying with the small suffering self, to the pain and suffering he's going through and the prospect of dying/leaving his wife and child.
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