we are all ordinary miracles.
I’m a teacher of the art of meditation, certified as part of Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach’s Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Program of the University of California at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center.
I’m also a forest therapy guide, certified by the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy.
I’m an ordinary miracle - just like you.
I’ve got the best “job” in the world - supporting you as you remember your own truth. My deeper personal story is relayed in the first podcast.
But how my own journey unfolds has little bearing on your own. I’m not here to teach you what beauty and peace I experience now perpetually as my life. I’m here to guide you to unlock your own path to that same state of being that ALREADY exists within you. That’s the good news - this remembering and realization belongs to all of life. With courage, trust and commitment we can surrender to the perfection of the universe together. If that sounds intriguing, then this may be the right time and the right place to for us do “the work.”
I was mostly an “ordinary guy” doing digital technology and leading start-up ventures. That was until I remembered my “extra ordinary” existence, the week before Christmas in 2017. My truth is that I had one of those “lightening bolt” moments of insight during a spontaneous meditation sitting in the closet of my family’s home. Everything I thought I knew vaporized instantly as an expansion beyond words occurred. Imagine closing your eyes and experiencing yourself an everything in the universe - no plants or psychedelics involved. Yeah, hard to describe and unfathomly unexpected. I try to use words to convey the experience in the podcast. What I can say is that whoever I thought I was before that moment was obliterated. All my desires, preferences and behaviors were wiped clean - full system reset.
I wasn’t seeking this. If you’d asked me what a spiritual awakening was before that day, I would’ve been able to make something up, but I really had no idea. Now, this wasn't just a newfound bliss, floating in the clouds, and basking in unending peace - this was initially very hard to understand. To rediscover everything anew at age 38 and be unable to talk about it openly simply because I didn’t have the words and spiritual vocabulary to convey it.
Everything that drove me motivationally was completely altered. So many things shocked me, like never eating another piece of meat - even though I’d never been seeking to be vegetarian then, much less vegan. It wasn’t a choice. I simply had no more business eating meat. I wouldn’t have gone a single day without it before that moment. The examples like that, of deep lasting changes go on and on.
Many of the people I’d hung out with and things I used to “like doing” seemed completely foreign to me and no longer offered me any enjoyment. Things no longer in resonance for my time and attention cause me literal physical pain if I try to do them. Waking up then automatically at 3am and meditating for hours, seemingly against my will initially, was completely inevitable. Whoever had been driving this bus previously no longer had the keys. So who was driving? Turns out, me but the capital M, “Me.” The universal, eternal me - not who I had been pretending to be, unbeknownst to little m, “me.”
Having no overtly spiritual friends at that time, it took me a couple of weeks of reading about awakenings to know undoubtedly that this was what I was experiencing, whether I wanted it or not.
Why'd this happen to me? Why now? How do I figure out who I am and what I love, all over again? What is my purpose with this new state of being? It set me off on a one-year journey traveling around the world that has really never ended. Eventually I met my spiritual teacher Ram Dass in Maui and he introduced me to Neem Karoli Baba. I’d found the spiritual home of my heart that had been there always, patiently waiting for me to remember that I am the universe. Ram Dass gave me the name Balarama, brother to Krishna. I go by Bala for short.
As I write this, it’s been 5 years since my spiritual awakening. It has taken this long to integrate the relearning of who and what I am and to be ready to share it with whoever feels it helpful to listen.
Hear my attempt to share this experience within the confine of words.
Unconditional love is the most powerful phenomenon powering the entirety of the universe. Now I offer ways to explore and experience your own true nature as nature. I do this with personal sadhana programs virtually and in-person as well as deep nature therapy and group meditation at Just Love Forest.
