Elisabeth Meyer

yes, it is possible

In this episode from the Received Wisdom series I'm going to talk about Elisabeth Mayer. Elisabeth is a spiritual teacher who had studied with the French master Jean Klein. I met her by chance in Canmore, in the state of Alberta, in Canada, up in the Rocky Mountains. And it was one of those chance meetings, in a bookshop, where I sensed some resonance – that I could learn something from this person.

So I studied with Elisabeth for a few months in the summer of 2001. She taught yoga. The yoga she taught, though, was more of a meditation, and some days she gave a discourse.

I learned a lot from Elisabeth, but there are a couple of things that really stick in my mind. One is that she spoke of a time, a retreat she had been on, where she had been in the enlightened state for a few days, continuously. Although that was no longer her lived experience all the time, the fact that she had experienced that had showed her what is possible. And of course it had left a trace in her energy, in her being.

She said that for a long time afterward she had wanted to regain that state as a permanent state. But after a while, even that she saw was grasping at something.

For me, that was a beautiful teaching. It was the first time that a person I was face to face with had put into words so clearly and so strongly, what is possible as a human being, spiritually. And although at that point, it wasn't my own lived experience, in that moment between a teacher and a student, I absorbed something from Elisabeth. And that, in a way, fed into a later event, also during that time with Elisabeth. And this was during some energy work, breathing energy, she called it, her own therapy.

And for me, a great breakthrough came in that moment, energetically within my being, an explosion. When it came into words as a realisation, it was that I'm not unworthy. That wasn't really the full story. The core of it was an energetic transformation in my being. And I am not unworthy was merely one consequence of that, a realisation. I hadn't even known that I had been considering myself unworthy. It had been completely unconscious.

And yet, in that moment, all that had shifted, exploded, disappeared from my unconscious. And from that point onwards, I have not been sensing myself to be unworthy.

I knew in that moment that the root of my ego had been cut, that I would no longer be feeding it. I also knew in that moment that it would take would take some time, some years for the various creeping tentacles of the ego to wither. But I also knew that it would happen. And I think the earlier teaching that I mentioned fed into that.

And all this knowledge came as one of these deep inner realisations. It's not come about through logical deduction. They had not come about through reading scripture. These realisations came from within me, irrefutable, truth. And all of this was through me studying with Elisabeth.

In a way, if I had to pick a single moment on my spiritual journey, which I would call the moment transformation, it was that moment with Elisabeth Mayer in Canmore in 2001. I am deeply indebted to her. Thank you, Elisabeth.