WHILE THE MIND OF SEPARATION IS LOUD AND LIVES IN SHALLOW WATERS, WHOLE MIND IS QUIET AND LIVES IN DEEP WATERS. IT HEARS THE HEART BEATING… THE WAVES ON THE SHORE… THE RHYTHMIC EXPERIENCE OF EMBODIMENT.
- Deborah Eden Tull
WHAT IS UNIQUE ABOUT THIS WORK?
Eden offers experiential teachings and inquiry from the heart of Zen in a down-to-earth way that is relevant to today’s world. She draws upon teachings from the natural world and diverse wisdom traditions that help us to remember who we really are. Eden empowers people to embody presence and re-awaken to their own essence and profound capacity for relational intelligence. She empowers people to live in conscious courageous engagement with themselves, with others, with our planet, and with the world-at-large, making the connection between personal and collective transformation.
Eden works with people of all pathways, secular and Buddhist. She mentors both those who are new to meditation and deeply experienced practitioners who have been on the path for a long time. She works with leaders, activists, and change agents, as well as those who sense that we are all called to be leaders in this age of change.
Eden’s teachings stem from the following wisdom. You can scroll down to read more about Eden’s personal journey:
The purpose of meditation is not to find an island of peace, but to bring peace and presence to every aspect of our lives - from how we communicate, work, love, and engage with the world around us. There is no island of peace outside of We Consciousness.
This is not a practice of “getting there” or attaining anything. There is nowhere to get to. Awareness is already awake. We practice to remember the already awakened state.
We meditate not just for personal healing and awakening but for collective transformation. Spiritual teaching must be relevant to today’s world. As we release limiting beliefs that do not serve us, we shed collective beliefs that have confused humanity and caused violence and distortion for generations upon generations.
Real practice does not begin until self-improvement ends. In other words, the popular myth of self-improvement does not actually return us to wholeness or vibrant aliveness.
You may be tempted to locate the problem as your ego and get rid of it. But practice is not about trying to cut off the ego. It is about healing a case of mistaken identity. It is about realizing that we are so much more vast and boundless than the separate self and limited identities we have clung to out of fear and habit.
Embodiment is the purpose of practice. The body, our emotions, and triggers, our grief, and our personal and collective traumas are the grounds for our awakening. While traditional approaches to enlightenment have focused on an “up, up, and away” mentality, which often discounts the body, ordinary life, and human pain, in this practice we are invited “down and in'' to the body and our pain. This is the gateway to awakening. Rather than divorcing body and spirit, light and dark, sky and earth, expressiveness and receptivity, yang and yin, this is a practice of wholeness and non-separation.
We do not wake up in isolation. We wake up together. Relational mindfulness offers this very process of spiritual practice in today’s world. It teaches us relational intelligence, resilience, and both soft and fierce compassion.
About Deborah Eden Tull
How we treat ourselves and how we treat our world are one and the same.
Long ago I found myself asking the questions, “How can I cultivate peace and sustainability in my life and help others to do the same? How can I contribute to a more conscious, equitable world in an age of such disconnect?” These questions have taken me on a journey that continues to inspire and humble me to this day. I often feel as if I’ve lived many lives in the years I’ve been here.
My journey has taken me from city to farm and back many times, to sustainable communities around the world, to the life of a Zen Buddhist monk, and to living and serving as a dharma and mindfulness teacher, writer, activist, and sustainability educator — committed to living and teaching the path of engaged interconnection.
Born and raised in the city of Los Angeles in a family of free thinkers, artists, and activists, I had some experiences at a young age that inspired me to courageously seek out alternatives to the over-consumptive and stressful life I witnessed in the city. My mother’s work to address systemic homelessness exposed me to the vast social injustices of our time and at the same time I became aware of the rapid loss of living systems on our planet. I lost my father to cancer at age 11 and this loss opened up a lifelong inquiry into love, consciousness, and what it means to walk through darkness and live wholeheartedly in the time we are here. I also had experiences as a young person that opened me up to a much larger reality than what we consider ordinary reality - experiences that deepened my awareness of the invisible realm and mysticism.
I left LA in 1991 to attend Hampshire College and over the next decade I practiced meditation, worked as an organic farmer, studied sustainable design and green architecture, and spent a lot of time living “off the grid”, learning to work in partnership with nature in intentional communities. I worked for some of my heroes in the field of sustainability. I learned that, even in the world of change makers, I learned that our greatest challenges to personal and collective well-being often lie in our deeply limited conditioned perceptions about the world and ourselves. The trance of separation seemed to keep even well-intentioned people caught in the duality of “I versus you” rather than “We.” It also seemed to cause a grave disconnect in our relationship with the natural world and the biosphere we call home. The mind of separation perceives through the lens of disconnection, dissatisfaction, and competition. It believes in power over, rather than power with. It compels us to live in survival mode sustaining feelings of fear, threat, and judgment in an effort to have control over life.
The good news is that the mind of separation only has the power of the attention we give it. Meditation offers a path to freedom… and to conscious response in a changing world.
My experiences led me to turn within and, at the age of 26, I entered a silent Zen monastery to train as a monk for the next seven and a half years. One of the gifts of my training was to discover that the only way to truly cultivate transformation, and remember the unity that is our birthright is from the inside out.
Interconnection is our natural state of being. As is inner connection.
How we treat ourselves is reflected in how we treat our world. Through cultivating a practice of present moment, compassionate awareness, our relationship to ourselves and thus to all of life transforms. Our relationships with our self, one another, and our planet shift, and we come home to the authenticity and interconnection that is our birthright We remember who we really are…beyond the distraction of the mind of separation.
My primary teachers are the wisdom of the natural world and Zen awareness practice. I have also spent many years immersed in Shamanism, Animism, Conscious Movement, and Deep Ecology, practices which help us to move beyond the bubble of separate self and live in reciprocal relationship with all forms of life. Each of these practices embrace the consciousness of “We” and non-separation. Some of my teachers and inspirations along the way have included Joanna Macy, Cheri Huber, Walter Makichen, Diana Winston, Pam Weiss, Vandana Shiva, and Simon Buxton. I have also been influenced by the teachings of Wendell Berry, Masanobu Fukuoka, Gabrielle Roth, and more.
In 2007, after years of living off the grid and close to the earth, I returned to Los Angeles and set out to incorporate the tools and skills I had learned into life in a metropolitan city and began teaching others to do the same.
WHAT I OFFER
I offer retreats and courses on compassionate awareness, relational mindfulness, and how to allow daily life to be a laboratory for awakening. I also teach The Work That Reconnects, as created by eco-philosopher and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy, and guide people through the process of transforming our pain for our world into compassionate action.
The backbone of awareness practice is the notion that “how you do anything is how you do everything” or “as above, so below,” as Western mystics sometimes say. In every moment of our lives, we are either moving from compassionate presence or from the mind of separation. We are either focusing on the process of our lives (which positions us to see clearly and honor interconnection and long-term sustainability) or the content of our lives (which positions us as a separate self, standing outside the landscape of life looking in and assessing, judging, and seeing through a distorted lens).
WHAT MEDITATION IS
Meditation is not just something you practice on a meditation cushion. It is a moment-by-moment engaged practice and a way of life. For many people, there is a sense of “duty” with becoming more conscious, but part of what I teach is also the most enlivening, creative, joyful, passionate, and life-affirming work we can do. Meditation is not about finding “peace” and stopping there. It is an invitation to ever expand our heart’s capacity and to continually release the lens of “other” in relation to ourselves, other people, and all forms of life.
My teaching style is experiential, engaged, and based in fierce compassion. As a female teacher it has been life-affirming for me to take a stand for the deep feminine in a male-dominated world, and my teaching arises from this place.
For me, this work is a tremendous and continual gift. I witness transformation in people’s lives every single day and experience the willingness, tenacity, compassion, and resilience of people all over the world committed to waking up..
I offer my teaching in lovingkindness.
All are welcome to participate.
In Peace and Passion,
Eden
