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Susanne Marie – Embodiment is Never Ending  

Interview by Renate McNay 

Renate:  Hello and welcome to conscious.tv.  My name is Renate McNay and my guest today is Susanne Marie.  Hello Susanne.

Susanne:  Hello. 

Renate:  Susanne is a spiritual mentor and a spiritual guide and she's visiting us from California, and we are very happy that you came all the way to be with us. 

Susanne:  Thank you. 

Renate:  So Susanne you are one of these rare women, I have to say rare women because I really was looking out for them, who had a profound awakening within the context of raising children. 

Susanne:  Yes. 

Renate:  And I would like to talk with you about it.  It's interesting because some weeks ago I interviewed somebody, I had dinner with in the evening and he came with his partner.  And I asked her, "Are you awake?"  I asked her and he answered and said, "She cannot wake up."  And then he said, "A woman who has to attend to children cannot wake up."  And that is his experience in working with women, with mothers.  And I remember also Adyashanti saying that he has [worked with] so many young mothers, who - when they intuitively feel that they are approaching the infinite - they pull back, because they say, “I don't know if I'm a good mother afterwards.  I don't know what happens.”  So I'm really interested in exploring this subject.  How was your experience? 

Susanne:  Well for me it was a choice-less thing.  I didn't have the experience of approaching awakening and having an opportunity to say no.  It just grabbed me.  And I fell into the abyss of it without actually at first knowing that that's what awakening was. 

Renate:  So you were not looking.  Were you on a spiritual path at that moment? 

Susanne:  Well, I've always been on a spiritual path.  What I mean by that is that when I was a child I had the experience of knowing myself as being one with everything.  And the way that I discovered that, was by the process of that starting to ebb away [at the age of] around seven or eight and going into my ninth year.  And it was very painful, very painful and I felt like I... the way I describe it is I felt like I had a cloak put over me and it was starting to snuff out what it was that I knew to be true.  And I didn't have words for it; I didn't have the awareness of unity consciousness and so on.  I just knew how I felt, the experience of oneness. 

Renate:  So does that mean your experience was you did not feel separate from your parents, or from your environment? 

Susanne:  From anything, yeah.  From anything. 

Renate:  How interesting. 

Susanne:  And then, my parents and adults around me taught me what being separate was like.  And I think that happens for most children, but maybe younger, where the feeling of separation begins younger. So when that started to ebb, it didn't fully go away, but when the experience of unity started to ebb I was immediately looking for that part.  I was looking for it in other people's eyes.  I was looking for myself because a part of me felt like it had gone away. 

Renate:  So that was more an intuitive searching… you didn't probably know what you were looking for. 

Susanne:  No.  I was just looking for acknowledgement from the adults I suppose, from others, to see if they knew who they were, if they could look back at me with eyes that were revealing that they knew who they were.  And I didn't find many eyes like that.  Off and on I did, which was very helpful.  So, I'd say that already as a teen I was starting to go on a more intense spiritual search because it became evident to me that I didn't want to build a persona.  I didn't want to become somebody, and that really became evident in my early twenties when I was going to college and I was confused about completing something. 

Renate:  So when you say, “I didn't want to become a persona”, can you say more about that?  Does that mean you didn't want to build structures - ego structures? 

Susanne:  Right, I always wanted to be authentic and true to myself.  And I had a hard time discovering a career path, or something resonated with me that felt true and I was unwilling to just do what my parents wanted me to do and become something.  What so many people were doing, becoming something, having identity in the career of their choice and so on.  And there was something that was leading me deeper, and by saying no, even though it was sometimes hard to follow my truth, by saying no, I was being guided within to a deeper place of finding out what was really true for me. 

Renate:  And how was that then, when you had children yourself? 

Susanne:  I knew from a very young age that I wanted to have children.  From when I was a little girl I knew I was going to have a boy and a girl.  So when I had my children I took it very seriously, in terms of wanting to be the absolute best parent that I could be, doing the attachment parenting and as conscious as I could.  Family bed, and nursing for as long as I could, and all these things, and really wanting to be present for them and wanting to give them what I felt like I hadn't received myself, which was the gift of presence.  And being able to really meet them, and look in their eyes and validate their being-ness. 

Renate:  And did they respond?

Susanne:  Beautifully. 

Renate:  Because we all come in already with a certain package, I think. 

Susanne:  And they still respond. I mean, they're teenagers now, and they look at people and they are able to... [be] - they're here.  And so many children are and a lot of it gets lost by the adults around them not just letting them be, letting them be themselves. 

Renate:  And your children were very young, I think they were three and four…

Susanne:  Three and five.

Renate:  …when you were blown apart, when you had this profound awakening.  Would you tell us what happened in your awakening? 

Susanne:  Right.  So, I had been a natural mystic in my late teens and twenties. 

Renate:  What does that mean? 

Susanne:  What that means is that I easily went to other realms, in meditation and I was guided in my dreams.  I was guided in my dreams and had beings come to me and teach me and give me things that I needed, and I felt like it was a lot of clearing.  A lot of clearing was happening and I felt so blessed and guided.  And I was a bit ungrounded on the earth.  The children, they helped ground me I have to say, because it made me have to be here and be present to them.  But in terms of my relating to life, to work and things that, like what people do, what humans do, I was still kind of naïve.  I had a naivety to me. 

Renate:  When you had to be more here for your children, did you lose somehow the connection?  The lucidity… or could you hold that? 

Susanne:  Yeah, and my children and I went on a yearly, and sometimes twice yearly, pilgrimage to go see Amma. 

Renate:  Maybe you explain who that is. 

Susanne:  Yeah, she's an Indian guru and she lives in India and she comes to the States a few times a year.  And she has an ashram in California, where I live.  She comes and she gives hugs, she's called the hugging saint.  And she's very politically active.  She's a wonderful role model for me as a woman; how engaged she is with others and how willing she is to meet each person that comes to her and be available to them. 

Renate:  She's also coming to the UK.  I sometimes see a poster, but somehow I never made it to be there.  But I hear beautiful things [about Amma]. 

Susanne:  Yeah, she's beautiful.  So my kids would come with me and they loved it, they loved the environment.  And I meditated a lot while they were growing up.  And still, I had this idea, a bit of a naive idea, that spirituality was something that would be obtained.  Like my freedom would be something that would be obtained by being in a constant state of harmony and bliss.  I thought it would be a state, an achievable state, and I felt confident, actually [of achieving it]. 

Renate:  So that means you worked for something.  You wanted to reach something? 

Susanne:  Yeah, I worked for it but I… I trusted actually, even then I really trusted.  I had an inherent trust, probably from my childhood.  But what I wanted was that feeling back.  What I wanted was the sense of knowing that, and for the feeling of separation to drop, you know.  That's what I was really wanting.  And I would enter into it and then it would ebb, and then I would enter into it. So then, when the kids were three and five, I had a series of tragedies that happened in a short period of time.  The kids’ father - we were together until the kids were three and five - he needed to leave, he needed to take care of himself.  He wasn't doing well.  So he left the family and he came back on the weekends and stuff, but essentially I was left alone with the children, very young children.  And then three months later, my brother died.  My brother was a year younger than I, and we grew up so close, so very close that - that unity experience that I'm describing that I had as a child - we were in this bubble together.  This unity bubble, that even when the adults, in their innocent persona, personalities, when they would do their thing, which a lot of adults tend to do, Daniel and I would be in this understanding together.  So losing him, even though he was living elsewhere, blew my world apart.  Blew my world apart, because actually ...

Renate:  He was your soul mate? 

Susanne:  He was.  He was just the closest thing that I knew and it blew my idea of feeling safe in the world.  [That] was really compromised.  I think that having those spiritual mystical experiences was kind of a buffer and it protected me.  I felt like it protected me on some level, from the harshness of reality.  So when that happened and Daniel died, I immediately, within twenty four hours, I asked the spiritual guides that I had - I had some clear guidance, and guides - I asked them to leave me alone.  I felt betrayed. 

Renate:  And you wanted to know where he went.

Susanne:  I did, yeah.  I wanted to know where he went and I made a vow, I made a commitment to find out.  And with these little kids, with my two children sleeping next to me - because we did a family bed - I would just lie in the middle and travel through these bardos with him, energetically.  So I was tracking him for hours every night. 

Renate:  So you found him?  You found his energy, or what was left?  Did you have the feeling he realized that? 

Susanne:  I don't know, that I don't know.  It wasn't like I had communication with him.  It was more energetic, it was all energetic. 

Renate:  And how far could you go with him?  Because there are different levels within the bardos, I mean, within the Buddhist tradition. 

Susanne:  Yeah as far as we know.  I wasn't studying Buddhism at the time.  This was just an intuitive thing.  And I really felt… actually I feel like it was a set up.  You know sometimes you can feel how some things are predetermined.  And so, my traveling with him was a combination of freeing him and freeing myself.  We were so interconnected.  What he was, was starting to disappear as it went on.  It actually felt directional.  Like energetically, it felt directional. 

Renate:  So [by] the disappearance, do you mean structures, which were still there? 

Susanne:  The sense of Daniel, what had been built up.  And who knows, maybe not just from this life, but what had been built up was going through its disintegration process.  And I don't know what was being experienced on that end, but I was just experiencing it on my end as a dissolution, and I was committed to go the end with him.  And then it could have been longer than two weeks, I have to say I can't remember the time very well.  In one of my journals I wrote three months, but it could have been three weeks, I don't know… because at that point time had really disappeared for me.  When you experience a deep grief, a lot falls away, and a lot gets cloudy too.  So, there was this point where I just remember that he was no more.  There was just this thin thread that just disappeared, and there I was like "Oh", and it was over. 

Renate:  And what happened to your grief then?  What happened to you with the realization [that] he is annihilated, he is gone? 

Susanne:  Yeah.  Well, that has been a process.  The understanding on the human level that he's really gone, it's almost like one catches up over time to a reality so profound and so big.  It comes in chunks and pieces and moments, and you go "He's really gone", because that was kind of a timeless experience, of going with him into the timeless.  And going through that last little veil, there was something that didn't leave, there was something in here [touching her chest] that felt like it was also gone, it was also in the beyond.  And that's remained, that's remained. 

Renate:  Do you have a feel [for] what that is? 

Susanne:  It was a gift, and it was like the gift of Daniel.  Like the gift of Daniel to know myself as the beyond, while being here, while being in form and functioning.  So there's a piece that is in the unborn, that's all I can say.  It's kind of an unmovable… it's not absence and doesn't even feel like pure potentiality.  It just feels like the beyond.  Just feels like the beyond.  And for a while I was explaining it like, it felt like one foot was in the beyond and one foot was engaged.

Renate:  In this life.  Which had to be engaged to care for your children, I guess. 

Susanne:  Yeah, so that's the part of coming back to parenting.  I feel like it was for them to be so little… I think it would have been harder if they had been older, because I could meet their needs, at that time, going through everything that I was going through.  Because my ability to communicate really fell away, my ability to be tracking time really fell away and they were so little that I was able to meet them and be with them in the moment.  You know, not having to plan their schooling.  It was right before kindergarten. 

Renate:  You were also telling me that as the structures within you started to disintegrate, there was a kind of a groundless-ness, which the children also… [could feel].  I mean the children need ground, at this age. 

Susanne:  Yeah.

Renate:  So I guess that wasn't easy for your children then? 

Susanne:  Well that I don't know.  It's later that I wonder about that with my son who is [now] almost seventeen.  But with my daughter, I think it was okay, she was three.  But other things were happening for my son [for which] he didn't have good support.  His father had left and things like that.  But at the time, it didn't cross my mind because I was so enveloped and engrossed in the moment to moment.  And just being able to... I [once] caught myself putting the ketchup in the freezer.  There were just these moments (smiling) where things were falling away, so radically. 

Renate:  You started to ‘dysfunction.’  [laughing]

Susanne:  I was like... a little bit of dysfunction.  And I actually appreciated the being in a role of mother.  It gave me a focus.  It narrowed down consciousness to the point of being able to have a reason for actually showing up here, because there was so much that was falling away.

Renate:  Was there sometimes a feeling in you, or a thought that you wished to be on your own and expand into the nothingness or stillness? 

Susanne:  There were times when I felt like it would be really helpful.  And sometimes the kids' father would come on the weekends, when they were a little bit older, like when Gaya was five, that's when it started.  So for two years I was really with her, and with them.  But when she was five I would take some weekends here and there and I would go to a little retreat center, to a personal retreat, just like a hermitage kind of thing, and then things would just take over [laughing].  But a lot of undoing was happening in the night, and a lot of undoing was happening while they were occupied and even while driving.  It used whatever opportunity it could to undo itself. 

Renate:  Did you have a practice during this time?  Did you meditate, or what was it you said, the children helped to focus consciousness?  Was there anything else which supported you in your own process at that time?  Did you read books, or do anything?

Susanne:  Yeah.  First of all, I feel lucky in that I had an inherent trust, because you know, some people get scared when things start falling away. 

Renate: That’s right.

Susanne:  I was seeing through the nature of things, like I saw ephemeral nature of things.  I would look at something and it would just become one-dimensional, flat, and colour would be gone because all the meaning that I had given to reality was returning back.  Everything that I had believed in, was returning back to the source that had given the meaning. 

Renate:  Yeah, can you say a little bit more about that?

Susanne:  There was a desire to really understand the nature of things, and all this came spontaneously.  And, so the kids could be playing and I could be staring at something.  And it would be a meditation, just then.  And there would be, a sort of this... I know these words later, but at the time I didn't understand, it was just this spontaneous thing, that everything I had believed in like, "Oh, that's a lamp."  That lamp, the idea of it just ebbed away and it became just flat, or a car.  And I even did that with language, like with words and I couldn't read anymore, I couldn't look at a page with writing.  It made no sense, the words would be scrambled. 

Renate:  So it went back into the nameless. 

Susanne:  Yes, back into the nameless.  Even language, realizing that we infuse meaning into words.  We put ourselves into everything

Renate:  But then how did you do that with the children?  You know, you had to explain.  Kids constantly ask, what is that, what is that, and why and how does that function?  I have two grandchildren at this age and they want to know everything and take everything apart.  So, in a way for you it was all receding, but yet you need to teach them.  You need to teach them structure, ego structure. 

Susanne:  The pace and the beauty of the children was something I could meet, and the innocence of their questions I could meet.  I was in a place of deconstruction, but I was also in a place of wonder.  So I enjoyed exploring with them about things and I didn't explain everything.  The kids started to go to a Waldorf kindergarten, and it really suited me that in kindergarten they say, "I wonder" a lot to the kids, unless it's a real practical question.  Instead of giving an answer to everything, they would say, "I wonder".  Like "How far is the moon?" and they would say, "I wonder", and it just leaves this kind of opening, so that it doesn't become such a linear thing.  That really worked for me.  [laughing

Renate:  That's beautiful.

Susanne:  And I was like, “Let's stay as open as we can in this…” because that's the space I was in too.  And gratefully, the falling apart of belief structures, I call them platforms of belief… what I realized is that everything is empty except for these mind-made platforms of belief.  That identity, what we take ourselves as, it jumps from platform to platform imagining that those are real.  In between is all this space.  So, those platforms of belief were disintegrating and there was more emptiness there, but that didn't mean that I couldn't meet the children in what they were starting to infuse life into.  They were starting to believe in things, and it was an interesting thing to be dismantling at the same time that they were building up identity.  But it's so innocent and I saw, luckily I feel, I saw the whole thing as completely innocent. I saw the building of an “I”, being an “I story”, believing that we're somebody, is just part of … it's developmental, and biological and it helps us differentiate.  It helps us navigate this world. 

Renate:  You said it very beautifully, if I can find it… [looking into her notes].  Yeah.  “Somehow there is no mistake.  Just true nature, consciousness, finding out about itself.” 

Susanne:  It is a total… I mean if you look at children, they're just delighted with exploring themselves and bumping up against life, to find out about themselves. 

Renate:  When I sometimes sit and observe my grandchildren, how the ego structure develops and how they are getting more and more identified with form, with their face when they look in the mirror and I feel saddened.  There is some sadness in me arising… that they have to go through all that to wake up, to find ‘home’.  And somehow you cannot save them. 

Susanne:  No, you can't.  But when you know inside what’s really true, that we're free… 

Renate:  Despite all that. 

Susanne:  Yeah, of course, despite it right!  I just can't believe in it anymore.  I just can't believe in it and they grew up with somebody who just doesn't believe in it, at the same time honouring them.  I don't know what that does for children. 

Renate:  But do they realize that now, how different they were raised than other children? 

Susanne:  I don't think so. 

Renate:  No? 

Susanne:  No.  They see me do my groups in the house and they're like, “Oh here come mom's spiritual friends.  Don't let them eat all the cookies.”  [laughing]  They're just like, “Your spiritual friends are really hungry.”  One time my son asked me what I do, about it.  I don't talk about this stuff with them.  If they want to know something, if they ask me, I'll tell them.  I'm sure that it's infused and it's part of… so much of what we get from one another is energetic.  So they have a mother who, energetically… that I am the way I am. 

Renate:  Sure. 

Susanne:  Right?  But one time my son asked me, he must have been fourteen, or something like fifteen.  He sat down next to me and said "So mom, what is this spiritual stuff about?"  [laughs]  And I thought it was sweet.  And I just, like in five minutes or so, I explained.  I think I took a little piece of paper.  It wasn't like I was waiting for this at all, so it was all spontaneous.  It'd be fun if they never asked me.  I drew a circle [gestures drawing a circle with her right index finger on her left palm] and I said, "So I started off here", at the top of the circle [pointing to the top of the imaginary circle on her palm] my childhood, "and I knew who I was.  But then somehow I started to forget", and I drew down the circle [moving her index finger over her palm in the clockwise direction to the bottom of the circle], "And I went on a journey to find myself".  “And I went back and I started to remember more and more about myself.”  [continues moving the index finger around in the clockwise direction, back towards the top of the circle]  Because that's what I call it, I call it a remembering, instead of an awakening.  Those words are fine, but for me it was a remembering.  And I said, "that's why I ended up back here."  Right here [pointing to the top of the circle].  But what I didn't say was that so much growth and so much deepening and an immense amount of learning, has happened through the act of forgetting.  I mean, so much growth happens through forgetting.  And he said, "Well, why didn't you just stay there? “Why did you move?  Why didn't you just stay there?"

Renate:  Yeah, good question.  [laughs]. 

Susanne:  And I said "That's it!"  I said, "That's why you are perfect the way you are, where you're at."  So for me, if they never go on any kind of journey, or if they do, that's not for me to know, what's right for them.  I don't know [what’s right for them]. 

Renate:  Is there, out of your own experience, any advice you can give to mothers who are going through an awakening in the moment, or just simply are on a search? 

Susanne: Well there are some things that I could say, and one is that whatever they - a mother or a father - would give themselves, they give to their children.  So, any unraveling that someone can do to get back to their True Nature, to their authentic selves, that's a gift that they give their own children, because children are naturally authentic, and we were all children.  And so when we leave ourselves, it's a pain, it hurts.  And so that's what later for some people creates a seeker to want to come back home, to the feeling of wholeness, now whether that was when you were in the womb, or when you were a little infant, but the memory of it is there, and we wouldn't be going to look for something if we didn't know it inside.  We wouldn't be searching for something if we didn't already have a sense [of it]. 

Renate:  It's very beautiful, what you just said.  It touches me because my oldest son did not lose oneness, contact with oneness as well and I had no idea.  Only when I started to wake up myself, he was seventeen then, he came to me and said, "So mummy, everything you just found out, about who you are, and what God is, or this world, I always knew.  But I never could communicate with you about it because you weren't ready." 

Susanne:  Oh my goodness. 

Renate:  Yeah. And of course, only then I really could see him for who he was. 

Susanne:  That's beautiful. 

Renate:  That completely resonates with me, what you just said.  What you do for yourself, it's also nourishing the soul of your children and helping them in the process.  So, [there is] one other thing that I would like to talk with you about, something you say is close to your heart, which is embodiment.  And, I want you to explain what embodiment means for you. 

Susanne:  We can break up the word and see that ‘body’ is in there, and ‘em’ like going in, being with the body.  When I was in my early twenties I studied yoga and meditation and it was part of my wanting to return back to wholeness.  Yoga made so much sense to me, because I felt like I was landing back in myself, and resting.  In between all the asanas and everything, I would just rest and be with myself and feel the stored conditioning.  The things that had been built up, that wanted to be met, I felt into them through yoga.  And at some point when the kids were little and I was still doing some yoga, my yoga became more of the daily life, because yoga can be everything.  Yoga means union. 

Renate:  It's a practice. 

Susanne:  It's a practice, yeah. I tend to be a body type, in the sense that I discover a lot about myself through the body and I learn about myself and I trust in what it's telling me.  I trust in the intelligence of the body.  So before remembering myself, I already had an understanding that all of this [moving hands up and down to indicate the entire body] is mind, not just this [touching the head].  All of this [placing hand close to and in front of the body] is intelligent and informs me.  It gives me clues, every moment, of what's going on, through sensation and through experience. 

Renate:  Do you mean also that this [gesturing towards her body] is all emotions?  Everything is stored in our cells.

Susanne:  Yeah, completely.  It's such a storehouse of memory.  And so I trusted in that, and I felt like I was cleansed quite a bit internally through having met myself so much over the years.  But when the big dropping away happened, when my brother died and those experiences happened… I didn't mention that my father died nine months after my brother.  So that was another huge shake, earthquake of all the paradigms that I had believed in.  [They] were just wiped out.

Renate:  That's how your security system fell. 

Susanne:  My whole security system including financial.  Everything, all the support systems were shaken free and loose, and then shaken free. You know what I mean, because I was like, “What's real?”  “What's really real, if that doesn't support me?  What's really real?”  So once all that happened, the mind wanted to understand - first I'm going backwards before I get back into the embodiment piece - so the mind wanted to understand itself.  It really did. It wanted to understand what is real, and in the end, who am I?  The "I", what is the "I"?  And then I discovered Ramana [Ramana Maharishi] and Adyashanti later.  Different teachers that showed me that I was on the right track.  It's so nice to have these different things.  And the book I am That was like my bible beside my bed for years. 

Renate:  That's Nisargadatta [Nisargadatta Maharaj]. 

Susanne:  Nisargadatta, yeah.  With the kids beings small, you know, that was like my bible. 

Renate:  That gave you a holding somehow. 

Susanne:  It did.  It did, because I trusted.  Just like Nisargadatta, he trusted his teacher.  I trusted in what was happening to me and then I trusted that there was reflection by these other masters who said that this is real.  This is real and it's okay to have things fall so, to disintegrate completely, you can trust that.  But the embodiment piece wasn't happening right then.  The yoga had ebbed and it was more of a mind experience, of mind waking up to itself, that's how I describe it.  Because if everything is already that… but what doesn't know that?  And so, there was mind that was wanting to know it.  And it already had a felt sense of it.  So all the pieces that didn't know that, were starting to meet itself.  I don't know how to put it.  But it's like mind has, in my experience, mind has the capacity to wake up to itself. 

Renate:  Yes. And what does the mind use for that? 

Susanne:  Well, the substance of mind is made of the god-self.  The substance of mind is made of god-self.  Just because parts of mind are lost, seemingly lost…

Renate:  So it's like what you said earlier, everything is there but it just needs to remember that. 

Susanne:  Yes, totally.  And then those veils that seem to layer the remembering, the knowing, they get to be seen through.  So that's like what they call Sadhana, or the work; is being able to see through those veils.  And then it becomes lighter.  You can feel it.  You feel like you're getting closer.  It is funny because it is sort of a journey to be one's natural self, because these veils have been built.  Like when I said I felt like a cloak had come over me, well that cloak wanted to be seen through and it had its own intelligence of how to do that. 

Renate:  So you did it through yoga, by bringing attention to all these different structures? 

Susanne:  Yeah, prior to the big shakedown in 2002 with my brother dying, it was through yoga.  And I was aware that it was becoming thinner.  I could feel myself more and more, I could feel my true nature.  And then that, what happened collapsed it.  And what I’m guessing…

Renate:  How did you feel your true nature?  How is the feeling? 

Susanne:  Yeah [laughs]  Actually it's a sense.  It's a really profound sense of understanding.  Like, the understanding becomes one of body knowing. 

Renate:  It's a knowingness. 

Susanne:  Yeah, a knowingness.  And you can feel into it.  Just like you can feel into the sense of ‘I’.  Like, having a sense of ‘I’, you can actually feel it. 

Renate:  Oh yeah, it's like a body armour, I can feel it in my whole system.  [laughs].

Susanne:  Yeah, exactly.  [laughs]  But the sense of Self, the sense of what we really are is deeper than that, than that sense of the ‘I’ and it contains it. 

Renate:  It's almost like a stillness you touch in, which is pervading. 

Susanne:  That's nice. So, back to the embodiment… once the mind was I guess, satisfied [laughs]… something was satisfied, since then the mind has just been fine.  It's not a problem.  It rested.  It came to rest in what it really is, its True Nature. 

Renate:  It stopped bothering you? 

Susanne:  Yeah.  Bother doesn't matter anymore, if bother happens. 

Renate:  Does that mean, when the mind comes to rest, the body starts releasing automatically?  How does that work? 

Susanne:  Yeah exactly.  So the inherent intelligence of what we are, which is guiding the whole thing of undoing, everything that gets built up gets to be undone.  And you can see that in nature, you can see that in everything.  It goes back to its essential, it disintegrates.  So everything that gets built up gets undone and that includes [everything] in a lifetime and we don't know when that will be, or how.  That's part of the mystery, of how and when that happens.  So then the undoing… the undoing is still happening. 

Renate:  You said that the embodiment goes on for the rest of your life. 

Susanne:  It feels like that because it's not just undoing, it's also getting to know itself as the whole.  So it undoes and it comes out and it learns about itself, through other, through everything.  It's just awareness itself learning about how vast and beautifully complex, and what capacity it has to penetrate itself, and to know itself as every little thing.  So then, feeling and thought and experience, is all welcomed, and it's part of the exploration.  It becomes part of the love that it has for itself.  It doesn't want to turn away from anything.  So part of the embodiment is learning to turn towards, as opposed to away. 

Renate:  Yes, welcoming everything. 

Susanne:  Welcoming everything, on and on and on and on.  And how could that ever end, because we don't know, it's so vast. 

Renate:  Yeah, and you know, in a way, what I think or what I feel is [that] not everybody is ready yet for the embodiment.  It's really being able to say yes, as you say, to everything.  And it's just so much easier to hang out in the absolute reality, detached from the messiness, from what we are feeling, which is also shown in the state of our planet.  For me, as we were speaking earlier, the embodiment is very connected with mother earth also.  Only then, when we are embodied fully, we know what the earth needs, because that is One thing. 

Susanne:  It is One thing.  And we get to feel the allowance that mother earth has.  Look at what's happening; look at everything that's arising.  There is such allowance. 

Renate:  She's shaking at the moment… [mother earth]

Susanne:  It doesn't mean that it's sustainable. 

Renate:  Storms everywhere… but she's still holding us. 

Susanne:  Yeah, it doesn't mean it's sustainable, but there's an allowance.  And that's what our capacity is, because we're that.  There's an allowance.  And there is an inherent beauty in that shakedown and incredibly also sad in different kinds of ways.  And to let yourself feel all that, let yourself really experience all that, it opens us up further to what's possible.  So we're not limiting our experience. 

Renate:  So in your guidance with people, in your groups - we only have a couple of minutes left - but explain a little bit [about] what you do with people.  How do you help them in embodying and connect them, guide them to who they are? 

Susanne:  I like to really support being-ness in the group and really invite people to come forward with what they know to be true.  So there's an invitation there for allowance.  And for many people that can be already so much, of just being invited to finally be, and to rest and to maybe be with their experience as it's arising right now.  And tell the truth, to finally tell the truth of what's going on right now and including it all.  Including what's going on, if there's nervousness, or judgment, or even if there's love emerging, to tell the truth. 

Renate:  And where they pick it up in the body, I guess, [where they] feel it in their system. 

Susanne:  Yeah, exactly, there's just a language that I like to use in the group, of being able to start to pay attention to what is happening here [points to body].  Because presence can be known here [places hand in front of the head], here [places hand in front of the heart] and here [places hand in front of the stomach].  And it's kind of a slightly different experience for each one.  And not to only direct here [the stomach] because there are times it is really appropriate to know the spaciousness of what we are [points to the head] through mind.  Other times you just feel this love [pointing to the heart] for the whole.  It starts to emerge for the self, first.  That's what I really like to point to. And then finally, the instinctual response, the fear itself, the fight or flight, and what's going on here [places hand over the stomach], to start telling the truth about that.  Many places for us to go.  [laughs

Renate:  I just want to spend one moment to read something, which I picked up from your website, which I thought was really beautiful.  "There is a growing movement in the awareness of the collective consciousness to include the understanding that our bodies are divine.  Consciousness is evolving to include all of itself.  The era of recognizing the absolute truth that 'I am not the body' is expanding."  It's beautiful. 

Susanne:  Thank you.

Renate:  We have a long way to go… [both laugh]  but evolution is happening. 

Susanne:  It is, and things happen quickly.

Renate:  Thank you so much for being with us, Susanne, and sharing your insights. 

Susanne:  Thank you so much Renate. 

Renate:  And thank you for watching conscious.tv and I hope to see you again soon.  Goodbye.

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