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CINDY SAUL: I was in the audience when you did
the meditation at Unity Church in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho recently.
I won’t even go into
all your wonderful acting history and those things. That’s public
knowledge. What I’m interested in is the inner Lindsay.
There comes a time
in most of our lives when we realize that there’s something more. When
was that moment for you?
LINDSAY WAGNER: I think it was when I was 20. I had a pretty good case
of ulcers by the time I was 20, which was unusual for someone my age,
needless to say. But I was in UCLA and they were wanting to operate. My
boyfriend’s mother was the personal assistant to Dr. William Hornaday,
who was the cofounder of the Church of Religious Science. They came to
the hospital and offered to take me through the process of healing with
an MD internist and I was able to avoid the surgery. They taught me to
meditate. They had me write my own autobiography, everything I could
remember up to that point in my life. Just go for it, write it, let it
come out. And then they had me write a chronology of every time I could
ever remember being sick and get the help of my family to help with it.
They were asking, how could ulcers be stress related?
I have a pretty tumultuous family and
when things are really bad, I’m fine. It’s when nothing’s happening that
I get sick. So I don’t get it. Through having me do this autobiography,
the chronology and linking up events, what I saw was I’m the kind of
person that’s great in a crisis, that handles everything and is able to
set emotional reaction aside. But I also had no training in handling my
emotions once everything was over and everything was fine. Our family
wasn’t particularly skilled in dealing with emotions, either. So
basically they said, “Well, what’s your problem? Everything’s fine now.”
So I still didn’t deal with them. I stuffed, stuffed, stuffed, stuffed.
It was all eating its way out of my stomach. That’s what they were able
to show me, in my own handwriting. After I knew everybody else was fine,
a very short period after that, that’s when I would get sick.
So my body was having to process the
emotions, because they were not allowed to be acknowledged. They taught
me, through visualization, meditation, which was all monitored by a
doctor – and I did not have to have the surgery. It was just amazing to
me, what I learned about myself, what I saw my body going through.
Memories I had by being willing to open up and things that moved through
kind of freaked me, at that age. I’ve always been a strangely, on my
own, religious kid and very spiritual. I was raised a Christian and had
a very strong relationship with Christ.
Quite a while before that, my
experiences had been direct, from the time I was very young. I had a
hard time with many of the church systems that I was exposed to when I
was a kid. I loved it and I would go. Sometimes I would even drag my
family to church, but I would have trouble because in Sunday school we
were expected to not ask questions, just learn this and believe it. That
was the environment I was in. But I had such strong experiences. I could
pray and talk to the divine and get answers, even as a young person. It
was hard for me to just take and believe what I was taught. All of it
didn’t make sense together with my experience. So by the time this came
along, it was “Ah-ha!” Here’s something that incorporates a lot more
than Science of Mind and is in no way contradictory, from my
perspective, to my relationship with Christ. This has actually enhanced
it all and I felt that embodiment more and more.
Not that I didn’t go through time periods
in my life as a young woman with challenges. By the time that had
happened, I would say I was at a low with my belief and not being sure
of what to believe. I was kind of letting go of it and saying this
connection is in here. And through that experience, I was given
permission to deeply honor that connection in here and be reminded that
the spiritual path of religions, whatever, they’re the road signs. They
aren’t the “It.” Often we forget that. We can get so mesmerized by the
rights and wrongs that other people ingrain us with, that we forget that
those are the sign posts. We have a spark, each one of us.
That’s what started that. I had a lot of
growing and learning to do, but from a different place. I’ve never seen
the contradictions that a lot of people see, from one path to another. I
see different modalities and practices and specific beliefs on how
things work, but if there’s something you haven’t believed and deeply
experienced yourself, it’s only a philosophy.
That’s true.
No matter how much you believe it to be
true, it’s still a belief. Therefore it’s still a philosophy to you
until you’ve experienced it. So for me it’s been an interesting journey.
Especially in the
environments you’ve been working in, which are high stress with lots of
deadlines, to maintain that sense of connection or that sense of peace,
it was excellent that you got introduced to meditation so early on. It
gave you an anchor. It really
did. Even when I was at my most off center time periods, I had that –
and you phrased it so well – I had that to hang on to and to keep me
grounded enough to where I could walk through and keep awakening to, the
dysfunctional patterns that we all inherit one way or another, from our
families, from our culture, from our gender, in terms of programming and
all that stuff. It didn’t render me any source of life to go through all
that. When did
you decide to become a vegetarian?
When I was 18. It was about the chemicals.
That was the first thing. I was concerned about the chemicals the
animals were being fed and then the way they were being raised. All that
chemical stuff was going into my body, so I started avoiding it
initially for that reason. I think the thing about the inhumane
treatment of the animals came a few years later as I learned more and
more. It was a health commitment for me in the beginning. It was not
about the cholesterol, it was about the chemicals. That was an early
awareness for me and a choice.
It’s all helped keep
you the peaceful person that you are now, peaceful inside.
Yes.
When I saw you at
the Unity Church in Idaho, I felt a presence with you before you even
entered the room. There’s a certain thing that you feel when you
recognize another person who has worked on keeping themselves in balance
and peaceful. I feel that you’re very connected with your flow and that
peace within. I just want to acknowledge that.
There’s a good quote
I came across recently, “Stillness is the language God speaks and
everything else is a bad translation.” Which I think is really true. You
have to go into the stillness to hear that voice within.
Eckhart Tolle poses
a question in his book A New Earth which is very interesting, Is
humanity ready for a transformation of consciousness? What do you think?
I’m going with yes. That’s my affirmation.
I hold the space for that. I don’t know that I have the quintessential
answer for the whole of humanity, but I do know that, as a part of that,
I absolutely hold the space for that to be true. I think Eckhart Tolle
is one of the most important writers of our time.
Absolutely.
I am just blown away by him. He’s been on
my recommended reading list for a while.
How did you become
involved in the Oneness University?
I met someone at a function who was a
facilitator. A mutual friend introduced us. I was being very
energetically sensitive, extremely sensitive. I have always been
cautious. I have to feel really comfortable with someone and their
energy before I allow myself to do that, because of the balance. When
people work on me, including masseuses, sometimes and I start feeling
funny. It’s almost like it’s throwing me off a bit.
Right.
So I’ve always been very cautious about
that. A good friend of mine was at this event with me. I don’t remember
what it was called but the Dalai Lama had inspired it. It’s a global
organization that gives awards to people for being world spiritual
leaders, helping to bring acceptance among the cultures. Mae Chee
Sansanee is a Buddhist nun from Thailand who has a big center in
Bangkok. She’s an amazing teacher and quite a force in the evolution of
humanity. She’s a friend of mine and she was being given the award, so
they asked me if I would present the award. That’s the event we were at
that evening. Another friend wanted me to meet this person who was doing
amazing energy work. He brought this person over and I asked what he
would do. He said he would lay his hands on my head and allow this
energy to flow through. I said OK and I looked in his eyes. When I
looked in his eyes, I felt this beautiful energy in me, just looking at
him. Some of the ways that a blessing can be transmitted is through eye
contact as well as intention. I felt this beautiful energy. I was
invited to a seminar the next day we both went and it was truly profound
for me. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. I’ve
had some really wonderful and profound experiences in my meditation and
in my practice that have been quite extraordinary and this became one,
without me doing anything, with him just laying his hands on my head. I
thought this stuff is really colossal. I want to know more about this.
So I went the next weekend to a church and learned about Oneness
University and what it was about. What I loved about it, too,
intellectually, was that this was here for everyone. It is not here to
deify anyone in particular. The blessings are flowing through this
couple, in India, it came through them initially. Their whole goal is to
put themselves out of business, not to set themselves up for a lifetime
of devotees following them. It’s intended for them to initially help a
certain number of people and then for those people to take this out into
the world and share it with others. And they also believe that the time
is here when we have, as a species, the opportunity to jump level.
Yes.
I love that whole philosophical end of it,
as well as the experience of it. I wondered how effective this was
because I had been doing counseling for a long time. That’s something
morphed over the years as I have changed and learned and found things to
be more helpful.
At that time I was actually working in
the L.A. County Jail with families that were struggling with domestic
violence. I was working with the batterers, men who were incarcerated
for battery and their families, counseling those who had a desire to
continue to learn about themselves and transcend the syndrome, to help
the families re-connect in a healthy way. I thought, “I wonder how this
would effect, if it would help.” You could feel how immediately it moves
you to a much more loving place it quiets the chatter in the mind, which
is what gets in the way of our being able to just experience another
person. It activates the frontal lobe, our spiritual center, which is
the part of us that allows us to feel the simple joy of being alive.
That was my experience of it and I thought, “I wonder how that would
work with other people. I want to know this.” So by the third week, I
decided to experience it! I went to India and did the program. It was
almost a month, 21 days. I was
excited about the potential of it, for myself as well as those I might
be able to share it with — my kids and my friends, who I call my angel
guinea pigs, when I learn something new.
I went, the week before I went to
India, to a seminar with someone else, another facilitator from Sweden.
We went to her weekend workshop and I saw how my son was affected by it
and how my business partner was affected by it. Some people feel it
stronger than others. Some don’t feel it at all. My partner in the
program that we were doing is someone who I consider to be a very
spiritual person, very sensitive, very intuitive and yet he never felt
it. He said, “I don’t understand!” He felt like nothing was happening.
Yet what started happening for him was exactly the goal, which is, his
whole life around him, in every aspect – at work, his family – started
changing because his energy had changed by way of this, even though he
couldn’t feel it.
I love these kinds of
stories! A difficult work
relationship that he had was cleared up, all by itself. His daughters
whom he dearly loves but had been estranged from him in various ways,
through their family history, literally moved from New York to come live
with him and brought all the grandkids. It was awesome!
His life just changed, but he kept saying,
“But I still don’t feel anything.” I said, “My goodness, your life has
changed more than anybody else. Get over it!”
Eventually he started feeling it. And he said, “I think part of what
kept me from feeling anything that I may have been able to feel was that
I had a strong sense in my mind of what I thought shifting to a higher
plane was going to feel like. I was looking for that.” The mind, again,
which is the premise of my whole program that I do, is looking at how we
live through those programs in our minds. So we can’t feel what’s here
right now.
Yes! If we just put the mind somewhere else while these things are
happening, so we can just experience. That’s the trick.
That’s the essence of the programs that
I’m doing, is getting people through this to that. Getting some
practical sense of it, by examples and hopefully people are forthcoming
enough.
I loved working with those people in
Idaho, because they were so open and forthcoming in the program. A lot
of times people just share something that we can talk about that’s real
for them, instead of just using examples.
It’s difficult if they don’t want to
share. They were so open, we were able to go so deep. I really enjoyed
working with that community. That was fun for me, talking about it,
seeing with our own examples as well as the examples that I bring to the
conversation, how that applies on a practical level to our life. Then
utilizing the Oneness Blessing in the program, which instantly will calm
down the parietal lobe activity which is the part of the brain which is
responsible for a lot of that chatter.
Monkey mind.
Monkey mind. The energy just calms it
down. The frontal lobe activates more. And so we then have an actual
experience of what’s it’s like once we get to a point where we can live
with that new equilibrium, a more active frontal, a more quiet parietal.
If I had to break down the program, that’s kind of the elements of it.
Set out the premise of that perspective, our path is to create our
present reality until we can experience life without it.
And then experiencing the blessing.
Right after the blessing, you have to work really hard to not have an
experience of more quiet.
When the blessing is
given, do people have to renew it every so often? Does it lose its
charge? My experience is
that, oftentimes people have quite a high from it. And then they start
to settle back down again, but never settle down to where they were
before. Ahh.
That’s my personal experience. It’s not
like other things that I’ve experienced or modalities that I have used,
that are great. We need all that we can get so we can stabilize there.
But most things I’ve experienced before, you kind of settle back down to
where you were before. You need to recharge for that reason. That’s not
my experience with this. My experience with this is that it has its own
life, so to speak. It stimulates something. It doesn’t stop, it just
gets stronger. So each time you may have a high. You may settle down.
You may not. But most people settle down but never again to where you
were the last time. It’s kind of like a step ladder.
It has peaks. It’s often, but not always, a different experience when
you have it next time. Also, you’re not in the same place you were. Your
baseline is different. If you have it a few times and you never have it
again or even once, it just won’t stop. It trickles. That wasn’t my
experience.
Are there other
practitioners or others in the US who can do this blessing or do people
have to go to India? There
are many in the United States who can do the blessing.
OK.
If you want to become a practitioner, one
needs to go through the program because the program is very intense. In
order for you to stabilize enough… it’s a submersion program.
What city in
India did you go to?
It’s called the Golden City. It’s a big area where they have this huge
campus. Outside of Chennai.
Excellent. I’ve been
twice to India and that’s where I go, Chennai. I love India. It’s a very
heart-centered place for me. Very sacred. It’s a different experience
and it’s hard to explain to anybody who hasn’t been there.
Yes. Apparently they’re not giving the
initial programs in India anymore. They’re doing it in Fiji. They have a
new campus. There are enough people around the world doing it that it
doesn’t take someone as long to stabilize any more. We were there for 21
days. The people who go now only go through an actual submersion of
seven days to become a practitioner. It’s like if you’re starting
anything. It’s harder to get it going with the first drop, so to speak.
You’ve got the momentum
going now. How can people find out more about this?
onenessuniversity.org is the official website of Amma and Bhagavan
and the Oneness University in India. And there is the
onenessmovement.org which is a website by a woman named Raniji who
is one of the early facilitators who started the movement in the United
States. When someone wants to go to become a facilitator or whatever,
you go to her website to sign up.
Is that the
blessing, deeksha? That’s how
they refer to the blessing in Sanskrit. In Sanskrit it means
transmission or it means initiation or to initiate. It also means
blessing. It’s about a transmission of energy. Basically what deeksha
is, is a oneness blessing. In English speaking countries, it became the
oneness blessing.
Thank you for joining us
today Lindsay. Thank you.
too.
Lindsay Wagner’s website is
lindsaywagner.com. |
