Satori experience

by Devesh Komaromi

The Satori process is something I have known about for many years, and had been resisting doing just as long. If anyone knows about the “Enlightenment Intensive” version of the process, you’ll know just how long… The story I told myself was that it was too much work, too tiring, and that I probably wouldn’t ‘get it’ anyway.

Then a few years back, my dear friend Louise who had trained with Clare was leading her first group in upstate New York and asked if I would join… to which I naturally replied “no thanks” – rather automatically. Shortly afterwards I had a look at myself and thought, well, maybe I should – if I am avoiding it so much, there must be something there for me… Naturally by the time I next saw her the group was filled. I sighed with relief, but inside something said: “Missed!”

The next day Louise approached me with a mischievous smile: “Guess what Devesh? We’ve had a cancellation – you can join.” And that was that. I can’t say I was looking forward to it, but consoled myself with thoughts that I was supporting Louise, would be with people I knew in a beautiful place, and after all I’d lived a rather adventurous life – how bad could it be?

I’ll tell you…

After the orientation and ‘modus operandi’ were dispensed with, we got right down to it. The group sits in dyads, opposite each other. One asks The Question, and then the other responds. Then, after 5 minutes, the other asks The Question, and One responds. What’s “The Question?” Well there are more than one, but most folks start (and end) with the same one: “Tell me who you are!” The process repeats a few times, and then partners are changed. Repeat, mix and match, repeat some more.

For five days…

Did I lead you to believe that this was ‘a bad thing?’ I misled you! Within the first few minutes of having sat in my first dyad, to do the process for the first time, I was ecstatic. Something just ‘clicked’ – I fell in love with the process instantly. The entire construct felt to me like an exquisite piece of mathematically precise baroque music. Delicious in its simplicity and deeply nourishing in the depth of its conception.

So that was the easy part of this story. How to describe what this process is about, how it works its magic?

It is intensely personal: after a few minutes you run out of things to say, but keep talking. After a while you are amazed at what is coming out – not that it is particularly significant – but that it just keeps coming and coming… Pretty soon inhibitions start to fade and the act of looking (and looking) brings up all sorts of things, not necessarily ‘Significant’ but then again, often there are insights into yourself that just bubble up.

OK. Not always comfortable or easy to see or say – but come up they do, and the seeing and the saying is in and of itself an amazing process. All along your partner is there to witness and to listen, and in that focused attention of seeing and hearing you – support your looking deeper. In seeing and listening to your partner, one feels a sense of privilege to be able to witness another so intimately.

At the same time it is completely impersonal. There is no conversation as such, rather a continuing exchange of the roles of watching and being seen, of speaking and being heard. There is no responding to each other directly, but there is Resonance. By the bucketful. Sometimes it’s just the depth of the gaze, or the silent communion in the recognition of the other’s depths as akin to our own. How do we know? There is no dialogue… We know, we just do – undeniably so.

Our tears bear testament to this.

Is it all blissful for everyone all the time? Nope. The occasional agonised cry bears witness to the intensity and also to the resistance some of us experience at times. There is also the humility of being laid bare – naked and exposed in ways we rarely allow in our ‘normal’ lives. We go on, at times exhausted, often fully energised and ‘on line.’ And sometimes we cannot tell the difference between the two.

It can get psychedelic.

And then, every once in a while, there is the sense of being a fly on the wall watching a room full of all this activity. There is a steady hum of the voices, the echoes of those voices, the gentle waves of movement in the collection of bodies, and the warmth of us all engaged as living cells of one organism in a magical dance all together. Who is talking? Is it you or is it me? Listening to you, I hear my own voice, my own thoughts. Speaking, I hear words coming from somewhere inside this body, but I am not saying them, I hear them at the same time as you do…

And, every once in a while: Something Else.

No idea why, no idea when, no idea from where… Something Else descends for which there can be no ideas, for which ideas as such are just like so much noise in the background of… The Blessing, The Gift… That which cannot be said, but speaks volumes. The Question becomes The Answer becomes Becoming…

Read more: Satori Process with Clare Soloway