Elena's Story
Engineering, Awakening, Ancient Forces, and the Return to the Marketplace
On Sundays, I sit under a small purple tent at the Carmel Valley Farmers Market. People arrive carrying questions about relationships, work, family, difficult decisions, or lives that no longer seem to fit. We sit across from each other, place the runes on the table, and look at what is really happening.
Behind this simple meeting stands a lifetime of preparation: engineering and systems analysis, more than ten thousand hours of serious meditation, profound spiritual experiences, years of psychological transformation, and the gradual opening of an ability that had been present since childhood.
The Analytical Mind
My path began with an analytical mind. I earned an engineering degree at a technical university in Russia before moving to the United States in 1991. Here, I continued my education in computer science and eventually became a Senior Systems Analyst at Time Inc. in Manhattan.
My work was to enter complicated systems, understand their underlying architecture, recognize where something was failing, and determine what needed to change. I learned to follow the thread through enormous amounts of information without losing sight of the system as a whole.
That way of seeing never left me. Today, I apply it to something far more complex than technology: a human life. The same ability to hold many moving parts at once, detect underlying patterns, and find the point where change is possible is central to how I work with people now.
It was also at Time Inc. in 1998 that I met my first spiritual teacher. He was a Vice President of Information Technology, a highly accomplished professional, and a lifelong spiritual practitioner. He inspired me to look beyond appearances and begin asking much deeper questions.
Awakening and the Whole Person
I began practicing yoga and meditation before they became part of mainstream wellness culture. For me, they were never primarily about health or lifestyle. They were a doorway into a much deeper investigation of consciousness. I entered serious classical training, first in Zen and then in Vipassana, followed later by intensive inner inquiry. I spent long periods in silent retreats, looking directly into the nature of mind, identity, and consciousness.
During these retreats, I experienced the complete dissolution of mind and body—the kind of experience people describe as awakening or enlightenment. Yet it did not happen only once. These experiences opened into a direct re-experiencing of the same state of consciousness I had known in infancy and childhood.
I later described some of these experiences in my book, Buddha on a Bull: A Practical Approach to Enlightenment.
I was not simply given one extraordinary glimpse of who I am. I was shown, through the entire movement of my life, that what I fundamentally am had never changed. The forms changed. The body changed. The personality and circumstances changed. But the essential presence living through them remained the same. Once this is seen, perception does not easily return to its former boundaries.
These experiences did more than change my understanding of consciousness. They changed the way I perceive another human being and made it difficult for me to reduce anyone to the problem they are currently facing.
When someone comes to me in the middle of a difficult situation, I cannot see only the struggling person sitting in front of me. I see the larger human being whose life contains this struggle. The immediate problem matters, and we enter it fully, but I also see it as one pattern within a much greater movement.
This allows me to stay present with considerable complexity without becoming lost inside it. I can follow the many threads of a person’s situation while retaining a larger perspective. Sometimes we discover the precise point where movement is possible. Sometimes the complexity begins to relax because, for a moment, it no longer has to be forced into an immediate solution.
There is an energetic dimension to this work as well. I can remain fully present with conflicting parts of a situation without trying to simplify them. This often allows something deeper to become visible.
After more than ten thousand hours of meditation and profound revelations about the nature of mind, I began working with people going through spiritual awakening and changes in consciousness. I also wrote hundreds of articles for my Complete Humanity blog.
Eventually, my work moved beyond awakening alone. A human being can recognize the vastness of consciousness and still have relationships, inherited patterns, psychological wounds, practical decisions, and a particular life to live. The spiritual and human dimensions cannot be separated without diminishing both.
When the Runes Entered My Life
Runic Diagnostics became the missing piece.
The runes are not the entirety of my work. They are an essential instrument within it—one I believe I had been waiting for all my life.
As a child, I had a natural sensitivity and experiences I could not understand. For much of my adult life, that part of me remained largely dormant while I developed in other directions—through analytical work, meditation, psychological inquiry, and ordinary human experience. By the time the runes entered my life, I was able to meet that sensitivity with far more discernment, stability, and depth than I could have earlier.
Long before Runic Diagnostics became part of my work, I had already learned to observe energetic processes directly. During a period when I lived close to nature, I became deeply attentive to the forces of fire, water, earth, and air, and to the ways they combined and expressed themselves through matter and natural processes.
When the runes entered my life, I began observing them in much the same way. They came in with tremendous force. For a period of time, I felt as if I had been caught inside a whirlwind of energy. I was walking in the mountains every day, watching how these forces moved through my own body, psychology, and circumstances, and recording what I was learning.
What I was learning through my own life would later become directly relevant to how I work with other people.
I began writing about what was happening. That work eventually became Walking the Runes: My Life with Ancient Forces, a book that is now nearly complete and is planned for publication in early 2027.
By that point, the work I had done for years as a spiritual teacher and guide had come to an end. I had explored other tools and disciplines, but none of them felt like my own path. My book about the runes had stalled. I had withdrawn almost completely, and I could no longer see what I was meant to do next.
In that state, I asked very directly for a path to open—for a direction in which I could still be useful in this life. That night, I had a lucid dream experience that felt more like an encounter than an ordinary dream. I was told very clearly:
“You will be doing Runic Diagnostics.”
That experience set something in motion almost immediately. Through a series of events that felt anything but accidental, I was led to a Russian runic master, someone who had spent decades working directly with these forces. What began as an agreement to work together for one month became ninety consecutive days of intensive daily training.
After the dream, something shifted. The runes became not only forces I could observe, but a diagnostic instrument. Through the runic signs I draw, specific information about a person’s situation becomes available to me. I do not experience this as a special sensation or altered state; the information simply comes through the symbols with a degree of accuracy that I have repeatedly been able to verify.
During those ninety days, I began by applying Runic Diagnostics to my own life, then worked with people I knew, and eventually with clients. I was not simply learning a system. I was testing what I was being taught against real situations and gradually learning how to work with the information the runes revealed.
By then, I was not approaching the runes in isolation. Everything I had developed before—analytical thinking, sustained attention, psychological understanding, and the ability to perceive larger patterns—became part of how I learned to work with the information they revealed.
I came to understand the runes as ancient living energies rather than a system of symbolic definitions. Through them, I can see forces operating beneath the visible surface of a situation: contradictions, hidden loyalties, blocked movement, unrealized possibilities, and the deeper pattern organizing what appears to be chaos.
My analytical mind gives the work precision. My spiritual experience allows me to see the whole person. The runes reveal the living energies moving through the situation. Direct conversation brings everything into the reality of the person’s actual life.
Together, these elements allow me to navigate considerable complexity without reducing the person or losing sight of the whole.
The Return to the Marketplace
My first public experience offering Runic Diagnostics took place at a Russian music and art festival in Southern California. I arrived with a folding table and a chair, uncertain whether anyone would come.
People lined up for three days.
That experience eventually led me to the farmers markets and the purple tent. I sit there because I want to be available.
A private practice naturally reaches people who already know what they are looking for and can afford to pursue it. At the market, I meet people from every walk of life. Some can work with me privately. Some cannot. Some arrive deliberately, while others are walking past with vegetables, coffee, children, or dogs when something makes them stop. Everyone can sit down.
There is something ancient in this arrangement. Spiritual masters did not always remain hidden in monasteries or elevated above ordinary life. Some sat in the town marketplace among merchants, travelers, workers, and families. When a seeker found them, they were available.
In the old Zen images, the path does not end with awakening on the mountain. Its completion is the return to the marketplace. After searching and finding, one comes back into ordinary life with open hands.
The purple tent is my marketplace.
It brings together the engineer, the systems analyst, the meditator, the writer, the spiritual guide, and the woman who learned to work with ancient forces.
When someone sits across from me, we may begin with one immediate question. But I never forget that the situation in front of us belongs to a much larger life—and that the person living that life is far greater than the problem they came to solve.
That is where our work begins.
