INTRODUCTION

I met Hameed Ali in the summer of 1975. At that time, my life was opening up at a tremendous rate. A few years before I had won a prestigious fellowship for graduate study in experimental psychology, and I moved to Boulder for graduate school with my wife and infant son. I was enjoying my studies, my research, and the intellectual challenge of the frontiers of cognitive psychology. I had also begun to discover an entirely different dimension of my life through encounter groups, meditation, hypnosis, biofeedback, and other consciousness-raising techniques. Rock climbing gave me a new sense of confidence and power in my physical body and, along with massage and yoga, woke me up to deeper potentials for body-centered growth. Boulder was a hot-bed for the human potential movement, and I was trying out as much as I could.

Until my last year of college, my inner life had been fairly narrow--or should I say, shallow. I came from a pretty conventional and sheltered middle-class upbringing. My parents were mostly loving and supportive, but my emotional life was pretty restricted. Aside from angry eruptions once in a while, I had very few strong feelings, positive or negative. Moving to Boulder in my early twenties offered many ways to reconnect with myself.

At the same time, I felt a deep dissatisfaction in my life. As I moved from one method to another, I found myself still unfulfilled. Even as I stepped into challenging and growthful situations, I managed to hide in the background, thinking (or wishing) I was invisible. My mind was pretty adept at shielding me from anything that would truly alter my world and my sense of self. I was accumulating experiences without changing very much. I was drawn to new and more intense experiences, but I kept running into barriers to letting myself be deeply affected.

In my deepest and quietest moments, I was torn. Many of my experiences felt transforming, but something in my core still felt rotten and afraid. I found I was merely fitting these extraordinary experiences into the same old, two-dimensional framework. Almost immediately they would pale and lose their aliveness. They felt dead; I continued to feel stuck and impoverished. Driven to keep filling myself, to keep my sense of aliveness for more than a moment, I was jumping from one training, system, or workshop to another. A haunting sense of deficiency dogged me through all of them.

When a friend told me he had found a new sort of growth work which had impacted him, I was mildly interested. He described it as an emotional housecleaning. This didn't have the same flash appeal as some of the things I'd been involved in, but it still resonated as an important piece for me so I signed up, not knowing just what I was getting into.

Thus, I found myself in a group of eight participants with two leaders, Hameed Ali and Karen Johnson. The "Process," as they called it, involved three months of very intensive psychological work. I wrote my autobiography from different perspectives, I contacted my repressed rage and pain, I relived many childhood experiences, and I began to make peace between my emotional child and my rational intellect.

Still, I was a tough nut to crack. Although I was doing my best, my intellectualizing defenses were very strong. My mind was constantly trying to "figure this out" the way I had figured out other work. Of course, figuring out meant coping with it, not really understanding it. I was busy trying to look good and trying to impress my teachers, while at the same time I was constantly fitting these experiences into my pre-existing categories, keeping myself at an ever-so-slight distance from them. And when that didn't work, I would go to sleep, both literally and figuratively. At the end of the three month process, I had opened up a great deal, but I felt a familiar touch of disappointment. Some core of my life felt unchanged. I was tempted to move on to the next thing.

Yet there was something different this time. Hameed had caught my attention in a new way. It was not that I found him warm, personable, or charismatic (although surely I have seen his kindness and tenderness since then). He was a direct and often stern guide. I saw his sense of compassion and humor, but mostly it was an undaunted quality that struck me. He had the most steady, unobstructed presence I had ever encountered, before or since. Some part of me responded to him, though he did not fit any of my pictures of the kind of teacher I would be attracted to. I guess I had always expected someone who would combine the warmth I had at times felt with my mother and the approval I wanted from my father. I felt neither of these from Hameed in those first three months, but what I did find was much more rewarding.

When he said that some of those who had completed the Process had formed a small ongoing group and that he was leading it, I signed up. We began meeting every other weekend, Friday night and all day Saturday and Sunday, often an hour's drive away. It was a huge commitment of time and energy. I questioned it often, but I always found myself coming back to it.

My upbringing, my personality style, and my scientific training had produced in me strong skepticism and an ability to distance myself in the service of a misunderstood "objectivity." I challenged Hameed and his work often. Yet he consistently responded to who I was, not my fears, my shame, or my avoidance. When I tested him by hiding behind concepts, he drew me out, sometimes gently and sometimes with a challenge. When I faded into the background or into the pseudo-safety of my fantasies, he confronted me.

I remember a time after I had been working with him for a year or two when I got mad about something and dumped it on him (unfairly). I was screaming at him at the top of my lungs and pounding on the floor. I was in touch with a deep, deep reservoir of hatred and pain. A little later I realized I was also testing him to see if he would reject me for what would have been a shameful outburst in my family. He stayed right with me, unflinching.

It took five years before I found myself trusting this unfoldment. All through that time, Hameed was constant in his unwavering acceptance and presence.

Much of those early years in the Work (as he called it) was aimed at opening up my restricted emotional life. Through the Process and my subsequent work with Hameed, I gained more insight into the underlying dynamics of this pattern. I came to appreciate even more my mother's kindness, generosity, playfulness, and humor. However, I also realized that her kindness was often driven by a deeper guilt and that much of her humor had a cutting edge to it. It seemed that my father was away most of the time, working to provide for his family's material needs. I came to a deeper gratitude for him, and we found new connections. I also came to understand how often he was distant emotionally or on the verge of anger.

There was a pervasive injunction in my family against strong feelings of any kind, including excitement, anger, or love. The feelings that did come out often felt damaging. I often felt an atmosphere of shame and covert hostility which occasionally erupted into outright fighting. One of the clearest rules I remember as a child came from a story in which one of the characters (Thumper in Bambi , as I recall) says, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." I believe it was well-intentioned, but it made for a lot of quiet times around our dinner table.

When I was two years old, my mother gave birth to twins. My older brother was now twelve, and he was developing his own interests outside the home. My father was gone most of the time, and naturally my mother had her hands full. This was a time when I needed steady support to venture out into the world and a soft lap to return to for "emotional refueling." However, I was left alone a good bit of the time, and my mother's lap was usually occupied. I learned it was easier to hide my needs and feelings than to have them overlooked, and I learned to distance myself from my inner life. This defense of distancing and using my mind to compensate for a lack of real contact further developed throughout my life.

Understanding these patterns and their origins loosened their hold on me. There was more than just my emotional healing going on, though. Looking back, I now realize that I was developing new capacities and qualities. Both the world and my inner experience took on more color. What I had previously seen in tones of gray became richer and more beautiful. I felt three-dimensional and more alive to myself. I came out of my shell into the world. I was less afraid to let myself be seen, and as a result, I began to see others in new ways, too. I was curious about how other people felt and how they saw the world. I gained a capacity for genuine compassion toward myself and others.

The group with Hameed was growing, and the Diamond Approach was beginning to take shape for me. He brought in a number of insights and practices. For example, he used the Enneagram (an ancient system of insights into personality and human nature derived from Sufi sources, Gurdjieff, and Oscar Ichazo) as a way of looking at the ego and its core beliefs, deficiencies, and idealizations. Aspects of depth psychology revealed the psychodynamic issues that were binding us, and understandings from several of the world's spiritual wisdom traditions helped deepen our capacities for awareness. Sufi stories, Reichian breathwork, and emotional release were all important in our individual and group teaching sessions. Meditation practices still provide an important foundation for all our work.

All of this was applied to our own experiences and unfolding. I remember Hameed referring me back again and again to my own experience to examine and understand what he was teaching. He constantly encouraged me, as he did with all of his students, not to take what he said on faith, but to check it out for myself in my own experience.

For nearly twenty years, I worked with him in one-to-one Reichian-style breathwork sessions each week or two. For most of that time, we continued to meet as a group every other weekend. (His schedule has changed recently to a longer, less frequent retreat format). It was a huge commitment of time and energy, and we were covering much ground. During those years, I often had the experience when Hameed finished a particular segment of his teaching that it was the conclusion of the Diamond Approach. "Well," I would think to myself, "that was great. I wonder where I'll go next." Then, as if noticing an overlooked door on my way out of the house, I would sense that there might be a little bit more. I would peek through that new door and discover that what I had thought was the whole house was just the foyer!

We had begun by working on old wounds and personality patterns and studying personality from a new perspective. Then, Hameed introduced a new set of material on what he called Essence. At first it seemed to me that he must have been making it all up because I had so little reference in my own experience to what he was describing. As I continued to explore however, I began to see and feel what he was talking about. I discovered that while the ideas were new to me, the experiences felt deeply familiar. In some cases, I have had a sense of discovery of what was there in me all along, but hidden. Other times, I have reflected back to see that qualities and capacities have developed that were not there before.

Every few years, Hameed introduces a new facet of the Diamond Approach, and I have to say that most of the time they start out sounding like science fiction to me. Yet the teachings always come with the encouragement to examine them directly and experientially. Never have they been given as abstract theories or pronouncements to be taken on faith. Each of these facets could be a whole system on its own, but he has showed how they are intricately interwoven with his previous teaching. Each segment has provided me with a whole new perspective which made all the previous teaching come alive in a new light. Again and again, I had a sense of "Oh, that's what that was all about."

It was many years before I stopped being surprised when what I thought was finished turned out to be just another step. Yet I have never stopped marveling and feeling grateful when what had seemed complete opened into an even greater and more complete context. It was as if the journey was a set of inside-out Chinese boxes. I had started in the smallest and most restrictive, and every time I stepped into a newer, larger one, I felt a great sense of relief and freedom. Instead of finding smaller and smaller boxes inside, I was finding bigger and bigger boxes outside, each more radiant and refined than the one before.

At times, Hameed has encouraged us to explore other avenues of personal and spiritual development along with the Diamond Approach. My own explorations led me to work with wilderness experience as a spiritual practice. For sixteen years, I have participated in and guided wilderness trips which incorporate solitude, fasting, and direct contact with the earth. I value this work enormously and have found over and over that my work with the Diamond Approach and my wilderness work, as a student and a teacher of both, have complemented and expanded each other. Hameed's teaching has allowed me to understand and more deeply take in the lessons of an earth-centered spirituality.

I also found that systems-oriented marriage counseling with a very skillful and insightful therapist helped my own development as well as my marriage a lot. I feel that my work with the Diamond Approach has helped me to go deeper with this counseling and to get more value from it. The question of the timing of exploring these other avenues is very important, though. For me, there have been times when looking into other systems was a way to avoid a difficult issue. By avoiding my work with the Diamond Approach, I was unconsciously avoiding a certain wound. At those times, Hameed guided me to stay with what was coming up and not to distract myself. However, Hameed has never presented his work as a closed system.

In his work, Hameed was taking us into a territory, a spiritual landscape, that I couldn't even imagine. I began to realize that the emotional and psychological work was really the doorway--necessary, but only a beginning. With his support and guidance, I began to experience more and more subtle states, states of unconditional peace, strength, self-worth, love, and intimacy with my life. I was experiencing a depth and richness that touched me very deeply. Each new experience brought up deeper defenses, issues, pain, and fear. I came to realize that this was a necessary part of my expansion and development.

I also learned something that seemed so right and obvious in retrospect but which I had never heard before. I don't have to get rid of my ego; my task is to understand it, accept it, and allow it to unfold. (I will say more about this later in the book; for now, I would just point to it as a central feature of Hameed's teaching.) The irony is that for so many years, and even now, I have had to work hard to disidentify from my ego's reactions and to free myself from its hold. There was no way around that work. Yet, what I have finally understood is that the ego is really only the product of halted development. I have come to an understanding of my stuckness. This brings a compassion for my suffering, and an even greater appreciation for these difficulties.

I am learning to walk the line between not indulging in my ego patterns while not rejecting them either. I can appreciate the unique terrain of my own life. Hameed has held with great caring the gifts, triumphs, tragedies, and accidents that make my life unique. In a way, working with him has been the opposite of cloning. I have come to be more assured of my absolute uniqueness, even while I discover my seamless connection with all that is.

Initially, Hameed didn't spend a lot of time naming and explaining Essential states and their correlated issues. Nor did we do a lot of comparative analysis between systems. This came some years later in his teaching. His focus has always been more on opening up to whatever is happening in the moment. He was interested not only on the experience itself but on the background of our experience, its medium and texture. The important question was, so what? How was I holding onto (or rejecting) my experience? Was it touching me? How was I letting it into my life and living it?

Very early in his work with us, Hameed taught a basic awareness practice of actively sensing our arms and legs, looking, and listening. We practiced sensing, looking, and listening with an open and present-centered awareness. I realized later that this practice, along with understanding our psychological reactions and resistance, is a foundation of his work with us. Although the sensing, looking, and listening practice is a very helpful technique for getting us more in touch with our bodies, senses, and feelings, it is more important than that. It has formed a basis for our work on presence, witnessing, and the deepest dimensions of our experience.

The shift toward the medium of experience undercut my inclination to "collect" experiences and insights. With Hameed's guidance, I found myself not only tracking my experiences, but being able to notice my awareness itself. I also noticed a quality of being less reactive and more present. When someone was upset with me, I was better able to be open without needing to hide or get defensive. When I found myself feeling abandoned, I could more easily tease apart my own old reactions from what was happening in the present. My basic core issues didn't change exactly, but my response to them did. I became more able to examine them and not be overpowered by them. I discovered that by following my issues, I was led to a richer and more authentic sense of myself.

I remember, for example, a time after the end of my first marriage and before the beginning of my second when I was grieving a loss of a romantic relationship. For days, I had been feeling betrayed and resentful, going through the same emotions over and over again. I worked on this in a group session with Hameed. First, I felt my anger and hurt, then sank into a deep sadness. I cried hard. This was not just one relationship I had lost, but all of them. I was an adult man losing a lover, a junior high school student feeling rejected by my friends, a humiliated little boy sent off to school before he was ready, a toddler feeling abandoned by his mother and father, and an infant crying alone in his crib with no response. All these losses at once flooded me, and I felt the deep shame of being unlovable. Eventually, though, the crying subsided, and my shame lessened. I felt a relief and a lightness that was new for me.

With Hameed's support and guidance, I stayed with this lightness. It eventually gave way to a sense that I was being showered with luminescent jewels of different kinds, like a rain full of grace. I was touched beyond anything I could have imagined. I felt held in the arms of reality and blessed, well beyond the resolution of my loss. I saw that what I had lost was really an image in my mind of being loved and that what is really here is a genuine love and value that is intrinsic to my own nature. I found a degree of self-acceptance I could not have dreamed of. I knew the universe to be loving and precious, and I knew I was part of it.

That experience kept unfolding over time. Along with similar experiences Hameed later identified as states of Essence, it led to a greater trust and confidence. My issues about being seen and valued were having less of an effect on me. When they did come up, I saw them more clearly and they changed more quickly. Of course, that was not the last time I will feel rejection and loss. In fact, it seems to me that my subsequent feelings of abandonment have been even deeper and more painful, often seeming like I was abandoned by everyone--the world, myself, and God. Yet, there is an increasing openness to the pain and to the states that follow.

A similar issue arose years later. I was on an advanced training retreat Hameed was conducting for Diamond Approach teachers. My mother had died six months before, and I had been struggling with a decision to leave a job that I loved but which did not support me and my family. I was with my mother during the several weeks before her death and when she died, and I had time to talk to her and make my peace with her leaving. As I sat with her those weeks, I learned more about her pain and suffering. I expressed my sorrow and found deeper love and gratitude for her, and we shared some very tender moments. In the weeks up to her death, I felt her soul transform from feeling like a thick, black tarry substance to a clear black fluid and then to a luminous, transparent black space. I watched her struggle to let go and finally succeed. In the six months since her death, I felt I had grieved and let go, though I missed her at times.

During this same time, I was coming to a resolution with my decision to change jobs. After looking at my choices, I was clear about the best decision for my family and myself. Still, "clear" and "resolved" are not the same. I became aware of a psychodynamic layer that was involved. It was an old pattern of getting something I loved and then losing it. It reminded me of being in high school as a popular tenth-grader with a close group of friends and then moving to a new school with a very different subculture and no friends at all. At a deeper level, it felt like a replay of being two years old and delighting in being the focus of parents' love and attention, only to lose it to the babies. At its deepest, it was the sense of having been held by an all-fulfilling reality and then being thrown into a world of struggle and aloneness. With all these layers activated, there was a huge amount of loss and anger tied to what might have been a simple career decision.

The psychological loss of my mother when I was two, her death, and my job change all began to overlap and intensify each other. I was clear cognitively, but there was still a more subtle layer of distress and suffering that I could not seem to get to.

Then I went on the retreat with Hameed. He was teaching about an egoless dimension of pure awareness and emptiness. (I will say more about this in Chapter Nine.) The retreat had been very good for me. I found a clarity and radiance I had never felt before. One night near the end of the retreat, I got into a very deep layer of pain about my mother's suffering. As if out of the blue, I was swept away with an intense sadness about not being able to help her or take her pain away. On the walk from the meeting hall to my room, I collapsed in tears. By the next morning, I was feeling intense sadness about my own life and the pain caused by trying to hold on to the images of what I wanted.

As I stayed with these experiences, I came to a place that I can only describe as beyond coming and going. I saw that my mother's life had been precious, but that what she really was, her true nature and source, was never born and could never die. I still missed the person she was, but the sadness had turned to tenderness and my guilt had unfolded into gratitude.

I also realized, not only as a mental insight or an emotional feeling, but in my bones, that my life, too, was an expression of that same dimension beyond separation, birth, death, or any other concepts. I needed to make my choices about my job, but these choices evaporated in the face of the immensity and clarity of pure awareness. I felt aware of being transparent to Being as it was moving through me. My job choice, and indeed all my choices, were no longer problems to be solved; they were purely the flow of Being through my life. This flow felt empty and as if there were no substance to it, yet it was radiant. All the world and all experience seemed made of pure, clear crystal. I felt the preciousness of our fragility and vulnerability as human beings. I realized there was nowhere else to go except to abide in the present moment. And then the sense of "I" evaporated into the emptiness, and all that was left was pure crystalline awareness.

Lest these experiences sound idealized or romanticized, I remind you that they were preceded by many years of difficult work and study. And they certainly were not one-time resolutions of these issues. There are still times I grieve for my parents, feel angry at them, or try to win their love (although they are more likely to be measured in minutes than days). My feelings of being abandoned arise in a hundred different ways, and at times, I still feel resentment for my losses. Yet there has been a shift which I notice when I stop my busy-ness and distraction. My experience is less entrenched than it once was, more fluid and open. I find it easier to rest in the grace of each moment, and I experience myself more as an expression of the flow of Being through my life. I am more consistently able to step forward out of my fantasies and fears and into the truth of my life as it is.

Again and again, I have learned that the focus of the Diamond Approach is not only on the experiences of true nature as Being, but on the clarity, lucidity, and directness of my experience. For me, the Diamond Approach has been about a quality of my everyday life, not only about remarkable experiences. The remarkable times are richer, clearer, and easier to describe, but they are only the peak experiences. Most of the landscape of my life feels more ordinary, yet precious and rich. As I reflect back over twenty-four years in the Diamond Approach, I notice that I feel more at home in my life and the world. Most of the time, there is a curiosity about my experience and a confidence that I have what I need to live my life to its fullest.

As I sit at my computer typing this, I am aware of a sense of ease that eluded me for many, many years. I hear a bird singing outside my window, the dishwasher running downstairs, my wife's voice as she talks on the phone. I am aware of some of my thought process as I type these words. I feel a tension and concern: Who are you? Will I communicate this to you clearly? Will you understand? As my attention flows through these different perceptions and thoughts, I feel an appreciation, a light sort of gratitude for being here, now. This feeling grows in my chest until it includes all that is flowing through my awareness: birdsong, dishwasher, Judith's voice, my typing, the tension, the appreciation, and the awareness itself. And I feel myself opening more until all of these are part of the same flow and unfoldment. This flow feels personal; it is every bit mine. At the same time, I feel no separation or alienation from the world around me. All of these contents of my awareness feel like they are just different shapes or textures of the same medium. It is this openness in the flow of consciousness which, to me, is at the very heart of the Diamond Approach.