has abstract
| - Waking Down in Mutuality (also known as WDM, Waking Down) and Trillium Awakening, are a set of spiritual teachings and a community that seek to support the integration of spiritual awakening into ordinary human life. Waking Down and Waking Down in Mutuality are registered trademarks of Saniel Bonder and Linda Groves-Bonder. The teachings are also offered through the Trillium Awakening Teachers Circle (formerly known as the Waking Down Teachers Association), a non-profit association of autonomous teachers. Waking Down was founded by Saniel Bonder in the early 1990s after (and partially as a reaction to) 20 years of work with his former guru, Adi Da Samraj. While acknowledging the necessity for an organization to have some amount of hierarchy, and for a teaching organization to have a body of recognized teachers, WDM and Trillium Awakening describe their work as aspirant (or participant) centered rather than teacher, guru, or organization centered. Waking Down in Mutuality teachings are offered by the Bonders, through The Trillium Awakening Teachers Circle, and through an educational non-profit for the training of teachers, The Institute of Awakened Mutuality. Trillium Awakening teachers do their work mostly in the form of "sittings" (interactive gatherings), private sessions between teachers and students, and workshops which are taught either by a single teacher or by multiple teachers working together. Bonder describes his teaching on spiritual awakening as similar to Zen and Advaita Vedanta in that it assumes the reality of non-dual consciousness, but also as different from them. According to WDM, realizing that one is not exclusively one's human nature makes it possible to live that nature more fully, rather than requiring rejection of it. For this reason WDM encourages attention to the passionate and embodied aspects of human being, an orientation it holds in common with the tantric traditions of India. The integration of the worldly and spiritual dimensions of life, and the attention to conscious mutual relationships this is said to entail, is central to the Waking Down teaching. (en)
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