The Art of Being Conscious in this Hay Universe - Elena V. Nezhinsky's Blog

The Way People Come to Me

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:15:03 GMT

Very few people see me at the market and immediately come in to work with me. Someone may walk past my Purple Tent several Sundays in a row. Sometimes they stop for a second and look, sometimes they keep walking. Then one day they come in and say, “I see you here every Sunday, and there always seems to be someone sitting with you.” By then, I’m no longer completely new to them. Something has had time to settle.

I don’t stand outside the tent trying to bring people in. I don’t call anyone over. I’m simply available. This is how my work tends to grow in general. People often read my articles and posts for a while before they contact me. They may also read one of my books or hear about me from someone they know.

When people come back, the work is usually easier and often deeper. They already know the process, they trust me, and I already know something about their life and how they move through it. We can get to the real thing much faster.

My work doesn’t grow through constantly finding new people. It grows through familiarity — through someone seeing me again and again, reading something I wrote, hearing about me from a friend, working with me once, and coming back months later with a question. The relationship develops over time.

The Mystery of Tantric Meditation Revealed?

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:00:14 GMT

The Mystery of Tantric Meditation Revealed? MSU Researchers Report Findings from Studies of Tibetan Monks

Psychophysiologist Alexander Kaplan: “For the first time, we have obtained objective markers of subjective states.”

Russian neurophysiologists have announced the first results of a multi-year project studying tantric dissolution meditation in Buddhist monks directly in Tibetan monasteries.

The researchers recorded the monks’ brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG). The findings were significant enough to be published in Scientific Reports, part of the Nature portfolio.

Alexander Kaplan, Doctor of Biological Sciences, professor and head of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology and Neurocomputer Interfaces at Lomonosov Moscow State University, spoke about what the researchers have discovered over several years of work.

How did you become involved in studying meditation in Tibetan monks?

In 2018, during a meeting with Russian neurophysiologists at his residence in Dharamsala, His Holiness the Dalai Lama proposed creating a joint scientific project devoted to studying the nature of the human mind through research into the brain mechanisms involved in Buddhist meditation. We began the project that same year.

I became especially interested in a particular class of meditation — practices of Highest Yoga Tantra aimed at individual transformation.

These extremely complex practices contain a fascinating process. First, the monk mentally visualizes himself in the form of an enlightened deity, and then gradually “dissolves” that image.

For practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, the goal is not simply to withdraw attention from the external world, but to learn to move into deeper layers of the mind, eventually reaching a particular state known in Buddhism as clear light .

Buddhists maintain that the “clear-light mind” naturally appears during such transitions as falling asleep, waking up, and dying, among other circumstances.

Tibetan monks train themselves to recognize this state and to use it in spiritual practice. Throughout their lives they practice this recognition, believing that spiritual practice performed in this deepest state of mind can lead to profound spiritual realization.

The monks most skilled in these meditations became our volunteer research subjects.

Is this meditation a single practice, or does it consist of separate stages?

According to ancient written sources, the dissolution process in tantric meditation consists of eight stages, the last of which is called “clear light.”

Monks in tantric Buddhist monasteries follow the same traditional sequence.

For a scientist, this is an extraordinary opportunity: we have a standardized mental procedure being performed by all the participants.

All that remains is to place sensors on the monks and observe how brain activity changes as they move progressively deeper into their own minds.

And these are people who have practiced for ten, twenty, sometimes forty or fifty years.

The difficulty was that tantric monasteries had traditionally been closed to researchers studying brain mechanisms. Recommendations from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, together with the participation of the Russian Nalanda Foundation, opened the doors of tantric monasteries to researchers — although, at present, only to my group.

How did you formulate the scientific purpose of the project?

No matter how long humanity studies the brain, one of its greatest mysteries remains the same: how does the activity of purely physical nerve cells, electrical impulses, neurotransmitters and other biological mechanisms generate the psychological world of a human being — the subjective reality in which we actually live?

From the perspective of practical neurophysiology, we can ask which brain structures, and in what sequence, participate in the activities of the mind.

How are mental images created?

How is a mental reality constructed from those images?

How are emotional states such as love, compassion, joy and grief formed?

Which brain structures or networks sustain subjective experience itself?

And ultimately, what are the brain mechanisms underlying transformation through tantric practice?

The Buddhist monks from monasteries in India, Nepal and Bhutan were not merely our experimental subjects. In a real sense, they became collaborators in this work.

Why monks? Wouldn’t artists, architects or writers also be suitable?

People in creative professions certainly tend to have strong — sometimes exceptional — capacities for imagination, intuition and visualization.

But scientifically they make difficult subjects because every person has a different style, a different skill set and a different developmental history. How do you draw conclusions from such variability?

Tantric Buddhist monks, by contrast, have been raised within the same traditions, studying the same texts and training in the same monasteries.

For more than six hundred years, generations of Buddhist monks have practiced the same tantric meditation known as Guhyasamaja.

During each session, the monks visualize themselves as this Buddhist deity — with three faces and six arms — in extremely precise detail. Then they slowly dissolve that image and other elements of their mental reality.

Where else could I find such extraordinary subjects for research into the nature of the mind?

Does it really matter that Tibetan monks have trained their imagination for generations? What if you simply asked ordinary people to visualize the same deity?

In our university research into the brain mechanisms of imagination, we asked students to imagine closing the fingers of one hand into a fist while we examined which regions of the brain showed changes in electrical activity.

This is an extremely simple task, and the expected result has long been known: so-called mu activity should decrease in the motor regions associated with the hand.

Yet we observed the expected EEG response in only about 30 percent of the students.

Another 30 percent developed the ability after practicing for a week or two.

The remainder never demonstrated strong enough motor imagery.

And that was only the image of their own hand.

The monks are visualizing something vastly more complex.

Moreover, they do not simply imagine the form of a deity. At the same time, they attempt to embody within themselves the exceptional positive human qualities associated with that deity.

How many monks have you studied over these eight years?

At this point we have recorded, analyzed and published results from approximately forty-five monks practicing Highest Yoga Tantra.

No other group in the world has a comparable dataset suitable for this kind of systematic research.

But collecting it is difficult.

Every year we organize two or three expeditions to monasteries in India, Nepal and Bhutan. Even then, a single expedition may yield usable recordings from no more than ten monks.

Monks who practice Highest Yoga Tantra are relatively rare within the overall monastic population.

They may also be in retreat, where we cannot reach them, or traveling between monasteries.

For statistical analysis, we ideally need groups of forty to fifty practitioners for each variation of these meditation practices.

We currently have another fifty to sixty recordings being processed and analyzed from monks practicing related meditations within other traditions and procedural frameworks.

What about hermits who do not live in monasteries? Have you worked with them?

Yes.

Hermit monks are often among the most advanced practitioners of tantric meditation.

Many live outside monasteries, sometimes high in the mountains in extremely remote locations, so that they can devote their entire lives to practices involving deep exploration of the mind and of their lived experience.

We organized a scientific expedition to Ladakh, in the Himalayan foothills of northern India, where hermits have long lived at altitudes of around four thousand meters.

It was not easy.

We needed recommendations not only from His Holiness the Dalai Lama but also from the teachers directly responsible for these hermits.

The hermits were scattered across different locations in Ladakh, so we traveled to visit them carrying backpacks full of research equipment.

So far we have obtained approximately ten to fifteen recordings.

We have also recorded meditation sessions from hermits living in special retreat centers near the residence of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

In our search for highly experienced practitioners of deep meditation, we also conducted an expedition to the Kingdom of Bhutan, visiting remote monasteries where monks devote nearly all of their time to contemplative practice.

How many electrodes do you place on the head when recording EEG?

In my university laboratory we can use as many as 256 electrodes.

But installing that many electrodes takes a great deal of time.

For an experienced monk, waiting for a long experimental setup is undesirable because by the time he arrives for the study he is already mentally preparing for meditation.

So in field conditions inside monasteries, we normally use approximately forty-five EEG electrodes.

In addition, we use sensors to measure oxygen concentration in the cerebral cortex through functional near-infrared spectroscopy, or fNIRS, across fifty-four locations.

With assistants, we can install everything in approximately twenty minutes.

Then recording begins, the monk starts his meditation, and we leave the room until he tells us that the practice is complete.

The duration varies greatly: from fifteen minutes to an hour and a half.

What was your hypothesis? What were you hoping to see in the EEG signals and measurements of oxygenation in the brain?

According to the structure of tantric practice, monks pass through eight stages in which mental images are progressively dissolved.

In scientific terms, they move through eight successive psychological states, gradually freeing the mind from layers associated with the external physical world — images, thoughts and forms — until reaching what the tradition describes as an entirely pure state of mind: clear light.

My hypothesis was that these transformations of subjective experience would have a physical reflection in the signals recorded from the brain.

If traces of these stages could be detected in EEG and fNIRS signals, we might then begin to understand which brain structures participate in the subjective movement from more superficial states of mind into deeper ones, ultimately reaching the mysterious state called clear light.

In that state, according to hints in Buddhist texts — and, admittedly, some scientific imagination on our part — the integrated experience of a human life may manifest itself.

So you were trying to distinguish a meditating brain from a non-meditating brain using EEG?

No.

Comparing “meditation” and “non-meditation” is largely meaningless if we are talking about a rigorous scientific approach.

Meditation is a form of reflection on the nature of one’s own subjective world.

Certainly we can distinguish EEG patterns associated with active thinking from those associated with relaxed wakefulness.

But EEG cannot simply tell us whether a person is thinking about advanced mathematics, a summer vacation or the nature of their own mind.

And these EEG characteristics vary greatly from person to person regardless of whether someone is experienced in meditation or in writing poetry.

Our task was different.

We wanted to observe how brain activity changed while a tantric practitioner moved from ordinary perception of the physical world toward the state known as clear light.

We hoped that, over the course of the meditation, the EEG recordings might reveal several different types of segments that could approximately correspond in number and duration to the stages of dissolution described in tantric practice.

Two scientific papers have now been published, with the most recent appearing in Scientific Reports. What were you able to demonstrate?

First, our central hypothesis was supported.

In the EEG of a monk engaged in dissolution meditation, we were able to identify a relatively small number of distinct segments — usually between six and ten — occurring sequentially and clearly distinguishable by quantitative EEG characteristics.

Because similar segments appeared in almost all of the several dozen monks studied during meditation, we cautiously proposed that these EEG segments may reflect stages of tantric meditation.

The next question was whether a segment identified in one monk resembled segments identified in other monks.

Across the study we analyzed 341 quantitative EEG features.

You mean characteristics of brain waves? Have you abandoned the traditional beta, theta, delta and alpha rhythms?

Not at all.

We simply analyzed the frequency structure of EEG in much greater detail, at intervals of 0.5 Hz.

We also included many additional quantitative characteristics: correlations between pairs of EEG channels across different frequency ranges, phase shifts between EEG signals in different channels, and other measures.

This detailed quantitative analysis allowed us to identify the segments we were looking for.

Each segment was defined by a distinctive combination of characteristics, including frequency-related ones.

And were these different EEG segments similar across different monks?

Yes. That was the crucial question.

Across all of the monks we identified more than four hundred segments.

It was entirely possible that each monk would have his own unique pattern of segments.

If that had been the case, it would have been difficult to reconcile with the fact that all of them were performing the same structured meditation.

But we were fortunate.

This became our second major finding: every one of those several hundred segments could be assigned to only eight basic types .

That strengthened our hypothesis that these recurring EEG patterns may reflect the same stages experienced by practitioners during tantric meditation — stages leading toward the clear-light state.

Did these EEG segment types appear in the same sequence in all monks?

In principle, they could have appeared in completely different sequences.

Imagine labeling the segment types A, B, C, D and so on.

One monk might show the sequence BDACFEHG, another EGAFCBHD.

There are more than forty thousand possible combinations.

With thirty-five monks, it would have been entirely possible for every monk to display a unique sequence.

Had that happened, it would have cast doubt on the idea that these sequences correspond to the eight traditional stages of meditation.

But this is where we encountered our most important result.

Instead of tens of thousands of possible combinations, we found only six typical combinations of EEG segments.

This suggests that monks may perform this particular practice somewhat differently, combining or moving through stages in several characteristic sequences.

We identified six groups of monks.

Were those groups different from one another in any meaningful way?

Very much so.

Two of the groups were composed, by about 80 percent, of monks with the greatest meditation experience — those with the largest number of retreats and the longest histories of practice.

At the same time, two other groups contained no monks with extensive practical experience at all.

This led us to the conclusion that we had identified EEG characteristics that reflect not only the process of meditative dissolution itself but also differences associated with the practitioner’s level of experience.

Has this been done for the first time?

Yes.

These findings offer the first objective glimpse into the processes occurring during tantric dissolution meditation.

And because my group is currently the only research team working inside these tantric monasteries, we also possess the largest EEG database in the world devoted specifically to tantric meditation.

We are willing to share it.

What do these results tell us more broadly?

They suggest that unusual states of mind — including the sequential states occurring during tantric dissolution meditation — have measurable correlates in the physiological activity of the brain.

Deep meditation can therefore have real psychophysiological consequences and may alter the functional organization or “settings” of brain systems.

This may help explain some of the positive psychological changes observed in long-term tantric practitioners.

Our next step will be to determine specifically which brain structures and which EEG characteristics are involved in particular stages of tantric meditation.

Perhaps this work will bring us somewhat closer to a broader theory of the brain, a deeper understanding of human nature, and eventually to understanding how useful meditative techniques might be applied by ordinary people.

Author: Anna Urmantseva
Photographs from the personal archive of Alexander Kaplan

Time to hit the pavement

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 20:06:27 GMT

On Sunday morning, as I was getting ready to go to the farmers market, Anthony looked at me and said:

“Time to hit the pavement.”

I started laughing because, in a strange way, that sentence describes my entire career trajectory.

Years ago, I worked in the spiritual world, but I eventually realized I wanted my work to be much more grounded in ordinary life.

For a while, I didn’t know what that was supposed to look like. I still had to make a living, but I didn’t want to go back to the kind of work I had already left behind. Eventually I understood that refusing to participate in the game at all wasn’t the answer. I needed to learn how to play it differently.

Years later, I had a dream telling me that I would be doing Runic Diagnostics and that this was how I would support myself financially. That eventually led to farmers markets, Clarity Sessions, and a little purple tent on a parking lot.

These days, “hit the pavement” is not even a metaphor. I literally sit in a purple tent on a parking lot, on the pavement, talking with people about relationships, work, money, fear, children, decisions, and whatever else life has dropped in their lap.

Occasionally I shuffle some little wooden sticks around.

Quite a career move :)

But maybe the work itself hasn’t changed as much as it looks. I am still interested in the same thing: what is actually happening here, beneath the stories we tell ourselves? The difference is that now the investigation happens right in the middle of ordinary life.

Time to hit the pavement.

A Life That Supports Me

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:30:04 GMT

I’ve been thinking about what material support really means.

Usually we think of money, property, a house, savings, steady income. But for me, that isn’t enough.

Good material support is something that does not consume my energy and does not leave me powerless.

That sentence landed exactly on something I had felt for a long time but had never put into words.

I’ve already owned a house. I know what it means to have property, maintain it, pay for it, and be responsible for it. And yes, I would happily live in a beautiful house again — somewhere I could work in peace, close the door, and not have to think constantly about the practical side of life.

But owning a house itself is not the goal.

If a house requires me to spend twenty years saving for it, constantly thinking about the mortgage, repairs, taxes, maintenance, and turning a large part of my life into supporting that structure, I’m no longer sure it is support.

It may be the other way around: the house is not supporting me. I am supporting the house.

That does not work for me.

A cabin could work. A small house on someone else’s land could work. A home on wheels could work. A private space near people with whom I have connection and mutual support could work.

What matters to me is something else: quiet, fresh air, privacy, the ability to close the door and work. A place where my body can relax. A space that supports me instead of requiring constant effort from me.

I don’t need complete independence from other people. I don’t really believe in that kind of independence. None of us is completely independent. We all live inside networks of support — through people, work, land, skills, and relationships.

What feels much closer to me is another formula:

My own work. My own money. My own decisions — within relationships, reciprocity, and support.

Not a solitary fortress. And not a dependency in which I have no choice.

I don’t need to carry the whole world on my back in order to feel free. But I do need to stay in a position where I still have a voice, a choice, and the ability to act.

Maybe that is why I’m seeing more clearly now that material support, for me, is not simply an amount of money.

It is a structure of life in which I have a place where I can be myself, work, recover, breathe — without having to give away all of my life energy in exchange for the right to stay there.

That is the kind of support I want.

What happens at a Clarity Sessions at the Market

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 02:35:35 GMT

Most of the time, I begin a market session by looking at the person’s life more broadly.

We look at the general situation and the energy behind what is happening right now — what forces are shaping things, where the tension is, and what may not yet be visible.

Sometimes people come with a very specific question. Sometimes they only know that something feels off, stuck, confusing, or ready to change. Both are fine.

The issues that matter most usually begin to show themselves very quickly: a relationship, a decision, a transition, a conflict, a work situation, something that has been difficult to understand or move through.

The diagnostic gives us a starting point, and then we talk about what is showing up and how it connects to the person’s actual life.

Often, the session brings together things the person already senses but has not yet been able to connect. Once we can see what is really shaping the situation, things often begin to make much more sense.

At the market, we usually have about 20 minutes. It is a short format, but surprisingly often that is enough to see the core of what is happening and understand the situation from a different angle.

You do not need to prepare anything in advance. You can come with a question, or you can simply sit down and say, “Let’s look at what is going on.”

That is usually where we begin.

Shaking Off Powerlessness

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:10:05 GMT

Recently, I put a lot of time and energy into something, only to realize that I had very little control over what happened next.

What surprised me was not the situation itself, but how familiar the feeling was.

I realized that one of the reasons I had tolerated that kind of powerlessness in the past was that I had become very good at surviving it. I could lose something important, adapt, rebuild, and keep going.

There is strength in that.

But if you become very good at surviving loss, you may stop asking whether you should have to lose so much in the first place. That is what I am looking at now.

I want to become more conscious of the structures I enter — where my time, energy, work, money, or trust are going, and whether I still have a voice, a choice, and a way out.

And right now I have this image of a big wet dog finally climbing out of the water and shaking itself off.

I already know I can survive.

What interests me now is building a life where I do not have to keep proving it.

Mystery and Fantasy Are Not the Same Thing

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 16:24:02 GMT

Yesterday morning, while I was setting up my purple tent at the farmers market, a woman approached me.

I had almost finished and only had two tapestry walls left to hang.

“Did you come to see me?” I asked. “Yes,” she said.

“I just need to finish these two walls. Come back in about five minutes.”

She agreed and walked away, but never came back.

I don’t know why she didn’t return. Perhaps she changed her mind about bringing a personal problem to someone she had never met. During our brief exchange, I could see that she was nervous. Sitting down with a stranger and speaking about something vulnerable is not always easy. But her disappearance touched something unexpected in me.

I wondered how people might perceive me when they see the purple tent, the runes, and the words Runic Diagnostics. Do they imagine that I enter some mysterious state or communicate with invisible beings?

The thought made me strangely sad, because it is so far from the way I work—and from who I have been throughout my life.

I do not enter a trance or communicate with invisible beings. When I draw the runes, I feel nothing unusual—only a deep neutrality. In that sense, the process can look surprisingly ordinary: I draw the signs, study the configuration, and information about the situation begins to emerge.

I am an engineer by education and an analyst by nature and professional training. Before I began working with human lives, I worked as a systems analyst. My job was to enter a complex system, understand its architecture, identify the relationships between its different parts, and see where something was no longer functioning as it should.

That is still how my mind works.

Even during years of intensive meditation, I remained grounded in direct experience. Vipassana meditation requires a rigorous kind of attention: you keep returning to what is directly present—the body, the breath, physical sensation—without disappearing into imagination.

The natural world is filled with patterns. You can see them in the veins of a leaf, the spiral of a shell, the branching of trees and rivers, and the movement of larger natural cycles. Forms that appear separate are often expressions of the same underlying principles.

Human beings have always observed these patterns. Over time, they developed different symbolic systems to describe relationships that were otherwise difficult to see. Astrology looks at relationships between planetary cycles and human experience. Other systems work with numbers, images, geometric forms, or ancient symbols.

The existence of a symbolic language does not require spirits. A person who can recognize patterns within a complex system is not necessarily communicating with strange entities. Sometimes they have simply learned how to read a particular map.

The runes are the symbolic language I learned to read.

For me, they are also ancient living forces—fundamental movements that can be observed in nature, in the psyche, and in the unfolding of real events. Before I ever used them diagnostically, I spent years observing how these forces operated in my own body, mind, relationships, and life circumstances.

When I learned to use the runes as a diagnostic instrument, I first applied the method to my own life, then worked with people I knew, and eventually with clients. I continued testing the information against what was actually happening, learning to distinguish what came through the symbols from my own assumptions and interpretations.

When I draw the runes for someone, they reveal the architecture beneath the visible problem: opposing forces, hidden motives, blocked movement, unrealized possibilities, and the deeper pattern connecting events that may appear unrelated.

Then my analytical mind, my experience with people, and direct conversation all come into the work. We look at the person’s actual life. We ask questions. We examine what fits and what does not. We bring the information back into concrete reality.

I will never know why the woman walked away. But that brief encounter showed me that I carry a fear of being mistaken for something I am not.

Perhaps the purple tent and ancient symbols make the work look mysterious from the outside. There is mystery in it. I cannot explain why these particular signs provide such precise information about a human situation.

But mystery and fantasy are not the same thing.

My work is grounded in attention, observation, pattern recognition, and an honest conversation between two people. No spirits are summoned inside the purple tent.

There is only a person, a real life, a difficult question—and our attempt to see clearly what is there.

Anxiety at 3 in the Morning

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 16:06:11 GMT

This is a subtitle for your new post

A lot of people wake up at 3 in the morning and cannot fall back asleep. I know this very well because there was a period in my own life when I would wake up in the middle of the night with anxiety and fear and then lie there while my mind tried to explain what was happening. It would replay old situations, imagine future problems, argue with people who were not even in the room, prove why something was unfair, and search desperately for a solution.

I see the same mechanism in people I work with. Something painful is happening in their life, or something happened years ago, and the body responds with fear, anxiety, tension, heaviness. But most people barely notice the physical sensation itself. Attention immediately moves into the head, and then the story begins: this happened because of that person, this is unfair, why did they treat me this way, what am I going to do, what if this happens, why did my life turn out like this?

The mind starts explaining the feeling, arguing with reality, rehearsing conversations, trying to fix the past or control the future. But before there is a story, there is a sensation. There may be pressure in the chest, tightness in the stomach, heat, trembling, heaviness, or a wave moving through the whole body. The sensation is uncomfortable, sometimes extremely uncomfortable, so attention escapes from it almost immediately.

What I show people to do instead is to come back into the body and stay with the actual sensation without explaining it. Yes, it's difficult. The sensation may become stronger. It may spread until it seems to fill the whole body. For a while it can feel as if you simply cannot tolerate it anymore. But if you stay with it, something happens: sensations move. They rise, intensify, sometimes engulf the whole body, reach a peak, and eventually begin to subside.

The story in the head can continue forever. And without learning this, it is very difficult to change anything deeply. You can spend your whole life telling yourself the same stories in different forms: people are unfair to me, nobody understands me, I was treated badly, I am unlucky, my life should have been different....endless variations of these stories we can entertain.

You can tell yourself these stories for ten years, thirty years, or the rest of your life. You can keep proving that other people were wrong and that your suffering is justified. And sometimes they were wrong. Sometimes what happened really was unfair. But that still does not free you from the suffering.

At some point, if you want something to truly change, you have to stop feeding the story and learn to stay with the raw experience underneath it. That is where the real work begins.

I’m going to fight for myself

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:52:27 GMT

One day, a woman walked into my purple tent—the kind of person who usually comes to the Sunday market for vegetables, fruit, honey, and bread, not to sit down with me for clarity on whatever is going on in her life.

She was well in her seventies. Her life was established. She had investments, several rental properties, and from the outside it would have been easy to assume that everything was fine.

Women like her usually don’t walk into my little circus tent. They already have their own system in place—doctors, attorneys, financial advisors, people they call when something goes wrong.

That Sunday, I was working at the market as usual. I had just finished setting up my tent when I stepped outside and noticed a woman on the other side of the parking lot. She was looking at me as though something inside her was saying, Go over there, but she wasn’t quite sure.

I looked at her and smiled. She, as if she had stopped resisting, walked toward me.

She looked distressed. She was sweating from anxiety and almost shaking. She was in such a state that she was willing to try almost anything. That is how a woman in her eighties, who would normally have had no reason to walk into my purple tent, ended up sitting across from me.

She sat down and began telling me a story that sounded like a bad dream.

Her husband had died. She was living on income from a few rental properties they had invested in together years ago. One of her tenants was an attorney.

And now he was suing her.

That first day, she was so confused and overwhelmed that it felt as though life itself had simply blown her into my tent.

We talked for a long time. After looking at the situation, I told her that selling the apartment now did not look like the right move, it would only add to her stress. I was worried that if she kept pushing in that direction, she might end up in the hospital. I didn’t tell her that, I just suggested to take the apartment off the market.

About a month later, she came back. This time, she came specifically to see me.

She said, “At first I didn’t believe you. I thought, how can I not sell it? The easiest thing would be to sell the apartment and get this man out of my life.”

She tried to sell the apartment, but the tenant made it difficult. Showing it to a potential buyer required certain legal paperwork through her attorney, and every time that happened, it cost her hundreds of dollars. After several attempts to show the property this way, she did end up in an emergency room with heart palpitations and high anxiety... And then tenant made her an offer to buy the apartment himself—far below market value.

She began looking differently at everything that had happened over the previous months and suddenly she saw the whole picture.

All the expenses, restrictions, and pressure had been leading toward one point: the moment when she would become so exhausted and frightened that she would finally agree to his terms.

And something changed in this tiny woman.

She said to me, “I understood what you meant that day. I decided I’m not selling this apartment. I’m going to fight for myself.”

She decided to sell another property, raise the money that way, and fight for this apartment to the end.

The woman sitting in front of me was no longer the same person.

The first time she came in, stress had made her almost helpless. Now the strength she had probably carried through her entire life was back.

There was a spark in her.

A determination to restore justice for herself.

She is tiny. But she is a lion. I have enormous respect for her.

I told her I wanted to share it even in our small local community, because I think there is something here worth seeing. She was happy for me to do it and gave me permission to tell her story.

After meeting her, I started thinking about women of her generation, women now in their seventies and eighties.

They have lived enormous lives. They worked, raised families, built things with their husbands, saved money, bought property, invested—often for one very simple reason: so that when they became old, they would remain independent.

Today, we look at them and sometimes see only one word:

landlord.

She owns several apartments? Then she must be wealthy. Privileged.

And this is where something begins to happen to our ability to feel another human being.

I understand why laws exist to protect tenants. I know there are landlords who abuse their power. I am not trying to turn this story around and present landlords as some newly oppressed class.

But sitting in front of me was one particular woman.

She is is that last stage of her life now. Her husband is gone. She is alone. And now she has to navigate courts, attorneys, contracts, and a tenant who, because of his education and profession, understands that system far better than she does and knows how to use it. He is an attorney himself, so he can prepare his own legal paperwork. Every response on her side means another bill from her lawyer. And he decided to use that advantage.

Her pain was real. She told me how difficult it had been to find an attorney willing to defend a property owner, and that, from her perspective, the system already sees someone like her as a person who has enough money and enough property to protect herself.

And suddenly I saw how easily we do the same thing. We stop seeing the human being once we have decided which social category they belong to.

Tenant—vulnerable. Landlord—powerful.

Poor—deserving of compassion. Rich—they’ll be fine.

But human life does not work that way.

Sometimes behind the word landlord is a tiny woman in her eighties, shaking from confusion and powerlessness.

And sometimes the most important thing you can do for her is to help her find her own strength again.

I feel deeply for people behind my stories

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 07:00:01 GMT

A couple of days ago I posted a story, and afterward I noticed that my heart was pounding.

The article took about six hours of my life. Six hours of attention—rewriting, cutting things out, putting things back in, checking whether one sentence changed the meaning of another. The story itself wasn't complicated, but there was a real person behind it.

When someone tells me something important about their life, especially when they are vulnerable, I take that seriously. And when I later write about them, even with their permission, something in me becomes extremely alert. Did I tell it truthfully? Did I accidentally make the person smaller than they are? Did I turn them into a victim? Did I make them into a hero because it made the story better? Did I use their life to make my own point? Sometimes one small detail can change the entire feeling of a story.

I removed quite a few legal details from the article I was writing. Some of what I deleted was interesting, and some of it helped explain what had happened. But at some point I realized that if I kept all of it, the reader might begin analyzing the legal case instead of seeing the woman.

And I wanted you to see the woman.

Writing about real people never feels casual to me. I want the person to still be there when I am finished—not reduced to a symbol, a social category, or material for an article. A human being.

I have also been writing about people I meet at the Carmel Valley market, where I am with my Purple Tent every Sunday. And even with these small stories, my heart sometimes pounds when I press Post. I care about the story, but I care even more about the person behind it.

~~~~
The link to the story about this woman:
https://www.elenanezhinsky.com/she-is-a-lion

How I Learned to Know

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 12:00:07 GMT

For a long time, my way of knowing came through practices. Meditation, yoga, silence, direct investigation of consciousness. But even that had a beginning.

Before I was a year old, something happened that I can only describe as a complete shift out of the body and into Consciousness. Along with it came an extreme sensitivity. The environment I was growing up in did not feel safe enough for that sensitivity, so I shut down. In a way, that explains why I could not really begin with people.

There was too much identification with the character, too much sensitivity, too much protection around it. So first I had to go inward. Spiritual inquiry and practice became the way to step outside that character enough to see it.

Then life changed the curriculum. My learning began to come through circumstances. The character had to be dragged through life for a while, so to speak, and tested there. Choices, losses, changes of direction, consequences. A lot of learning happened alone, but no longer in the protected space of practice.

These days, I seem to learn most through relationships.

Not only intimate relationships. Friendship, work, clients, collaboration, family, strangers. Some interactions are easy. Some are confusing.

I am learning.

Interesting, for many people the order seems to be almost the opposite. They begin with relationships and all the mess that comes with them. Then circumstances force them to question themselves. Eventually they may turn toward spiritual practice or inner investigation.

Apparently I needed a different sequence.
First, get out of the character enough to see it.

Then let the character be trained by circumstances.

Then bring in other people and see what happens.

Some of it goes beautifully. Some of it goes crooked.

Seems like this is my current practice.

Elena's Story

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 22:19:05 GMT

The Analytical Mind, Awakening, Ancient Forces, and the Return to People

On Sundays, I sit beneath a small purple tent at the farmers market in Carmel Valley. People come with questions about relationships, work, family, difficult decisions—or simply with the feeling that life no longer brings them the joy it once did. They sit down across from me, I lay out the runes, and together we look at what is really going on.

This simple encounter draws on my whole life: an engineering education and systems analysis, more than ten thousand hours of serious meditation, profound spiritual experiences, years of inner and psychological work, and the gradual unfolding of an ability that has been with me since childhood.

The Analytical Mind

By nature, I am an analyst. I have always had the ability to see a system as a whole, hold many factors at once, and notice the connections between them.

That way of seeing led me to study engineering and later become a systems analyst. My work was to enter complex systems, understand their internal architecture, see exactly where something was breaking down, and determine what needed to change. It gave professional form to a way of thinking that came naturally to me and taught me to hold enormous amounts of information in view without losing sight of the system as a whole.

That capacity has stayed with me. Today, I apply it not to technology but to a far more complex system: a human life. The ability to hold many factors at once, see hidden connections, and find the point where change can truly begin is one of the foundations of my work now.

It was at Time Inc., in 1998, that I met my first spiritual teacher. He was a vice president of information technology, a highly successful professional, and someone who had been deeply engaged in spiritual practice for many years. Through him, I began to look beneath the surface of life and ask a very different kind of question.

Awakening and Human Wholeness

I began meditating long before meditation became part of mainstream wellness culture. For me, it was never primarily about health or lifestyle. It opened the door to a much deeper investigation of consciousness.

I went through classical meditation training: first Zen, then Vipassana, and later direct inquiry into consciousness. I spent long periods in deep retreat, directly investigating the nature of mind, identity, and consciousness.

Those retreats also reconnected me with experiences from much earlier in my life.

Some of my earliest experiences, from infancy through about the age of five, involved states of perception I had no way to understand or name. In the earliest one, when I was about a year old, I experienced myself not as the baby lying in the crib, but as an unbounded awareness in which the body and everything around it appeared. There were several other experiences of this kind during those early years.

During those retreats, I experienced profound states of consciousness—states commonly described as awakening or enlightenment. In one of them, the same experience returned. This time, I was able to recognize it consciously as it was happening: I experienced myself as awareness itself rather than as the person within it. At that moment, the forgotten childhood experiences returned with remarkable clarity, and I understood that they had all been expressions of the same fundamental experience.

Recognizing this continuity made one thing clear: this perception did not begin with spiritual training or anything I later learned. It was present before I had language or beliefs about it. After the age of five, this way of perceiving closed down almost completely, and for many years I lived without conscious access to it. Its return was gradual, unfolding through meditation, inner work, and life experience.

Later, I wrote about some of these experiences in my book Buddha on a Bull: A Practical Approach to Enlightenment.

Over time, I saw one thing more and more clearly: what I am at the deepest level does not change. Forms change. The body changes. Character, circumstances, and roles in life change. But the presence through which all of it is lived remains the same. Once this is recognized, it becomes difficult to see yourself—or anyone else—in quite the same way again.

These experiences changed more than my understanding of consciousness. They changed the way I see another person.

When someone sits across from me in a difficult situation, I see more than their confusion, conflict, or pain. I see the whole person and the life in which this particular problem has arisen. We can go very deeply into the situation itself without losing sight of the larger context.

I can hold different sides of a situation at once—contradictory facts, feelings, motives, and consequences—and stay with those contradictions without rushing to reduce them to one convenient explanation. Often, that is when what had been hidden begins to come into view. Sometimes it becomes clear fairly quickly where movement can begin. At other times, simply no longer forcing the situation toward an immediate solution allows it to start untangling on its own.

After many years of my own practice, I began working with people. For more than fifteen years, I worked with people going through spiritual awakening, deep inner crises, and major life transformations. These were not theoretical conversations about consciousness. I worked with real human stories—relationships, fears, losses, inner conflicts, and those moments when an old way of living no longer worked.

Over those years, I held countless one-on-one conversations and sessions, worked with people from different countries, wrote and taught, and created hundreds of articles for Complete Humanity. Gradually, my interest moved beyond spiritual awakening alone toward the whole human being—toward the ways consciousness, psychology, relationships, family patterns, and real-life circumstances weave together.

When the Runes Entered My Life

Runic Diagnostics turned out to be the missing piece I needed in order to see the deeper motives within a situation right away.

I do not work only with runes, but they have become one of my primary tools. Sometimes it feels as though they are what I had been waiting for all my life.

Long before Runic Diagnostics, I had been learning to observe energetic processes directly. Living close to nature, I spent a great deal of time observing fire, water, earth, and air—watching how these forces joined, interacted, and expressed themselves in the material world.

When the runes appeared in my life, I began observing them in the same way. They entered my life with tremendous force. For a while, it felt like a hurricane. Every day I walked in the mountains, observing how these forces manifested in my body, psyche, and life circumstances, and writing down what I was beginning to understand.

Later, I discovered that almost everything I had been learning to see through runic energies in my own life became useful in my work with other people.

Those observations became notes, and gradually the notes grew into a book, Walking the Runes: My Life with Ancient Forces.

By that time, however, my many years of work as a spiritual teacher and guide had already come to an end. I explored different tools and directions, but none of them felt like my path. Work on the rune book came to a halt. I withdrew almost completely from public life.

One evening, before going to bed, I turned to the Divine for direction. I wanted to know what I was meant to do next and how I could still be useful in this life. That same night, I had a lucid dream that felt more like a real encounter than an ordinary dream. In it, I was told:

“You will be doing Runic Diagnostics.”

Things began moving almost immediately. A series of events soon led me back to the Russian rune master I had worked with on the book—events that were hard for me to dismiss as coincidence. This time, however, I needed a master to help me understand how Runic Diagnostics worked. That began ninety days of intensive daily work.

After that dream, everything changed. The runes became not only forces I observed, but also a diagnostic instrument. Through the signs I draw, I receive specific information about a person’s situation. I do not enter a special state or experience any particular sensation in order for this to happen. The information simply comes through the symbols, and I have tested its accuracy many times in practice.

At first, I applied Runic Diagnostics to my own life. Then I worked with people I knew, and later with clients. I was not simply studying a system. I was constantly testing it in real situations and learning to distinguish living information from my own interpretations.

By then, the runes had become integrated with everything that had come before. Analytical thinking, the ability to sustain attention, psychological understanding, and the capacity to see broader patterns—all of it came into the work with them.

That book is now nearly finished and will be published in 2027.

For me, the runes are ancient living forces. Through them, I see what is operating beneath the visible surface of a situation: inner contradictions, blocked movement, possibilities that have not yet been realized, and the deeper pattern organizing events that may look chaotic from the outside.

The analytical mind gives this work precision. Spiritual experience helps me perceive the whole person. The runes reveal the forces operating within the situation, and direct conversation brings all of it back into the concrete reality of that person’s life.

Together, this allows me to work with very complex situations without oversimplifying them or losing sight of the whole picture.

Returning to People

I first offered Runic Diagnostics publicly at a festival in Southern California. I arrived with a folding table and chair and had no idea whether anyone would come up to me at all.

People stood in line for three days.

That experience gradually grew into my purple tent at the farmers market.

People who come to me privately usually already know what they are looking for and can afford this kind of work. The market is different. There, I meet all kinds of people. Some later come to me for a private session. Some cannot afford one. Some come specifically to see me. Others are simply walking by with vegetables, coffee, or a dog—and suddenly stop. Anyone can come over and sit down.

There is something very ancient in this. Spiritual teachers did not always live only in monasteries or apart from ordinary life. Some sat right where life was happening: among merchants, travelers, craftspeople, and families. If someone was seeking, they could walk up.

In old Zen images, the path does not end with awakening on a mountain. The final stage is a return to ordinary human life. After the searching and the realizations, a person comes back to the people with open hands.

My purple tent is that kind of place.

My whole path comes together there: systems analyst, meditator, writer, spiritual guide, and a woman who learned to work with ancient forces.

When someone sits across from me, we may begin with one specific question. But I never forget that this question is only one part of a much larger life—and that the person is always more than the problem they came to solve.

That is where our work begins.

Big Sur Is Burning, Ferraris Are Everywhere, and I Am Here

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:05:58 GMT

The Monterey Peninsula feels completely surreal this week.

To the south, Big Sur is burning. People have been evacuated, Highway 1 is closed in places, and families, workers, and visitors have had to leave without knowing when they can return.

At exactly the same time, Car Week is in full force—one of the major automotive gatherings in the world. The peninsula is filled with exotic cars, antique cars, collectors, parties, displays, and extraordinary amounts of money.

I look at my Facebook feed and half the posts are about fire. The other half are Ferraris.

And here I am, somewhere in the middle of all this, completely restructuring my life, finishing a book about ancient forces, rebuilding my website, and writing openly on Facebook about sexuality.

This is clearly not a carefully designed content strategy. It is simply what my life looks like right now.

Life does not arrange itself into one coherent or respectable theme. Crisis, luxury, fear, beauty, absurdity, and private transformation can occupy the same small peninsula in the same week.

Perhaps this is also why my work is what it is. I am interested in the whole field, not one isolated event—in what is happening underneath everything, and how a person finds their thread in the middle of apparent chaos.

Big Sur is burning, and at the end of each day, I check the latest reports on the fire’s spread. Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and Porsches are everywhere; I hear them roaring in the distance. But it is quiet enough here to keep working on my book.

Monterey, August 2026.

The Book Becomes Life Again

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:56:41 GMT

While I am at the market, I work on my next book. I sit in my purple tent and write until someone comes in. Then I put my papers back in their folder, set the book aside, and work with the person in front of me.

I have worked with people for many years, mostly online before the purple tent appeared. I was always drawn to transformational sessions—those rare conversations in which something suddenly clicks, a person sees what has been holding them in place, and the next cycle of development can begin.

What I was missing was a reliable diagnostic instrument. Nothing I had studied gave me such a clear snapshot of what was actually happening in a person’s life as the runes eventually did. People naturally describe their situations through conditioned thinking, old programs, hopes, fears and the stories they have learned to tell themselves. The runes immediately show the forces underneath the story.

But the runes are a magical instrument. Learning their meanings is not enough. It took my whole life—and the clearing of many things within my own consciousness—for them to move through me with the clarity they do now.

The preparation began long before I knew anything about runes. As a child, I was taken out of my body several times and shown directly that I was not the body, not merely this little human being. At the time, I had no framework for those experiences. Now I can see that they were part of a much longer path.

This is the book I am writing in the purple tent: the stories of how I came to channel the runes and finally received the immediate diagnostic instrument I had always needed in my work with people.

Then someone walks in, I put my papers aside, and the book becomes life again.

He built the AI version of me

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 02:26:06 GMT

A man met with me today because someone had recommended my book Gateless Gatecrashers to him. Then he found one of my old YouTube videos (the one in the picture), made a transcript of it, fed the transcript into an AI, and instructed it to speak to him the way I was speaking to the person in the video.

Two rounds later, he entered an expanded state of consciousness.

Then he googled me because he wanted to talk to someone who understands awakening.

We met today. It was a great conversation—deep, interesting, very alive. I was sitting there listening to how he had found me and thinking: well, this is something new! :)

Someone took an old video of mine, extracted the way I was working, asked an AI to reproduce that kind of conversation, had a real shift, and then went looking for a human being who could actually meet him there.

That part matters. He came because something opened, and he wanted to talk to someone who knew that territory.

So no, the AI did not replace me, maybe not yet ��

It gave him two rounds, and then he googled the woman from the video.

Welcome to 2026 ��

Clarity often comes through disillusionment

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 18:43:35 GMT

Clarity often comes through disillusionment. And disillusionment can be very painful.

People speak a lot about truth, awakening and transformation, but rarely about the moment when an old illusion starts collapsing inside you.

Illusion is not just a wrong idea, it is: identity, hope, belonging, self-image, protection, a way to survive emotionally.

So when clarity suddenly appears, people often feel pain before freedom. This is usually the turning point.

Some people are ready to stay with that pain long enough for something real to reorganize inside them. Others quickly run back into defending the old illusion. They just not ready yet, its not their time.

And what I found for myself from years of working with people in different ways, not everybody wants clarity. Not everybody has to. But when someone is ready to see, even difficult clarity can eventually bring more peace than comforting illusions.

The Decorations Changed. The Work Remained.

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 07:03:43 GMT

Sometimes people from fifteen years ago suddenly appear again.

Some remember my books. Some remember long conversations about awakening. Some are surprised to find me sitting in a purple tent these days, working with runes at farmers markets. And it makes me smile.

Because the further along I go, the less it seems that I have ever changed my work.

The decorations changed.

There were books. There were years devoted to awakening. There were years when I disappeared completely. Now there are runes, farmers markets, a purple tent, and conversations with people from all walks of life. But the work itself seems strangely familiar.

Someone sits down in front of me and begins telling their story. Usually not from where it really hurts, because we all know how to walk in circles. And then something comes that has probably always been my way of working with people:
"Look"

"No, not there."

"Look here."

"Listen."

"Where is the pain?"

"What is really happening?"

Little by little, thread by thread, beneath the fears, explanations, memories, and endless stories, something real begins to appear.

People often think the method is the important part. Awakening. Runes. Psychology. Knowledge.

But methods change. Books end. Entire chapters of life come and go. Something remains: sensitivity, the ability to see, knowledge that only life itself can give, the ability to hold the thread, and the intention not to get lost together with another person in endless stories, but to stay long enough for something true to reveal itself.

Perhaps that is why people sometimes return after ten or fifteen years. They may not remember the words. They may not even remember what we talked about. But they remember that someone wasn't afraid to look with them. And that was always my work. Just sitting across from another human being and saying,
"Sit down."

"Look"

"No, not there."

"Look here."

"Listen."

"Don't run away."

"Let's see what is true."

The decorations changed.

The work remained.

What Do I Really Want?

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 18:49:38 GMT

This morning I woke up and asked myself a simple question.

What is it that I really want?

Immediately, familiar images appeared.

A small cabin by a creek.

Or a house with expansive views.

Dreams I've carried for years.

Even before that, there was a piece of land in Ecuador that my ex-husband and I bought, where I dreamed of living close to nature.

For a few moments those old dreams passed through my mind.

And then suddenly I became very still.

So still that it almost felt like Elena disappeared for a moment.

The dreams disappeared too.

And what remained was this simple, aware presence. Completely at peace.
Needing absolutely nothing.
Everything was exactly as it should be.

Life wasn't solved. Nothing had changed.
Yet everything was perfect.

As I rested there, the answer to my question became completely obvious.

I want those things: a cabin on a land, perhaps a house on the hills.

They are beautiful, and maybe one day life will bring them.

But they do not stop the question of what I truly want.

And when I got very very still, I knew it:
I want to help people discover even a moment of this peace for themselves - an innate harmony of our beingness. Because I know how deeply healing it is.

Over the last years I've immersed myself completely in being human. Grief, confusion, uncertainty, losing direction, finding it again. Those experiences made me understand anyone who comes to me. I too have lived life. So much of it.

But this last week something else happened.

In the middle of my own uncertainty, I remembered myself.

Not Elena. Something much quieter. Much simpler.

The awareness that has been here all along.

Nothing about my work changed.

The runes are still the incredibly revealing instrument I use.

People still come with heartbreak, confusion, impossible decisions, grief, or simply the feeling that they've lost themselves.

For years, I've helped people see their situations more clearly and discover another way forward.

That hasn't changed. What changed was me.

I recalled that I no longer feel I have to bring someone to peace.

I simply have to remain there myself. If I remain there, people often find their way there too.

It feels like a much quieter place to work from.

Give me that 10$ back!

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 03:05:18 GMT

When I started offering Clarity Sessions at the farmers markets, I chose a donation model for one simple reason.

I wanted anyone who genuinely needed to be able to sit down with me, regardless of what they could afford.

For four months, it worked beautifully.

People who couldn't contribute much came anyway. People who could often gave more. Somehow it balanced itself, and I started thinking maybe this really could work.

Then one Sunday, a well-dressed woman, vacationing in the area, sat down in my Purple Tent.

We spent about forty minutes together. It wasn't a light conversation. Like most sessions, it required complete attention. For those forty minutes, her life became my work.

When we finished, she reached into her purse and handed me ten dollars.

I looked at her and said something I had never said before:

"This is not a charity. I work hard. I take my work seriously."

She looked surprised, reached into her purse again. "Here's twenty. Give me the ten back."

At that moment I wanted to give her money back. Obviously she needed it. I agree, its expensive to vacation in this area.

This incident and a few before made me question my intention. A few days later I realized something else. The donation model itself wasn't the problem. It simply wasn't serving everyone in the same way. So I made one small change.

The Purple Tent will continue to be available to my fellow locals by donation, because that was always the heart of the idea. For visitors, I'll offer shorter market sessions for a fixed fee.

The generosity remains.

It simply has clearer boundaries now.

An opportunity to learn about myself

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 17:50:42 GMT

11 years ago, I came from NYC to California to rest after a brutal divorce. I thought, why not work in a kitchen, not think about anything for a while, and add my skills to a team?

It was a strange turn of events. Before that I had been a computer programmer and systems analyst in Manhattan, spent years studying and teaching yoga, later accumulated more than 10,000 hours of classical meditation, helped build a medical business with my ex-husband. But somehow, at that moment, frying corn cakes and washing dishes in a busy kitchen felt exactly right.

I value new experiences and don’t classify them in the usual way. Every experience here, while alive, is an opportunity to learn more about myself. Still learning and still interested These days, many of those lessons come through conversations with other people. I never get tired of watching someone suddenly relax after seeing their situation from a different angle. And sometimes we even laugh together at our predicament here.

Thank you for being here

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 06:08:47 GMT

Something beautiful happened these last two market days. Several people said something to me that I wasn't expecting.

"I'm so grateful you exist." "Thank you for being here."
"I'm grateful I can just come and talk to you."

It touched me ❤️

Today, three women sat down with me. Each conversation lasted longer than usual. They needed it.

They all found their way to my purple tent differently. One has been reading my Facebook posts. Another was sent by someone who had already sat with me. The third had seen me at the market many times but had never had the chance to stop.

What struck me how effortless the whole day felt.

Not because I suddenly figured something out. The effort had already happened.

It was in showing up every week, sitting in the purple tent, writing, listening, and simply being available. And people just walked over.

As I listened to these women, I realized they weren't thanking me for a service. They were grateful that if life became confusing, they knew there was a place they could simply come, sit down, and talk.

That realization touched me more than I expected.

I never set out to create something like this. I simply wanted to be available.

Looking back, I think that's what has been growing all along. Not just a little purple tent, but a place where people know they can come when life gets tangled.

❤️

Deepening the Roots

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 07:00:06 GMT

Yesterday I had the feeling that I had crossed some invisible threshold.

Not that I had arrived somewhere, but something had changed.

For the past few weeks, I noticed that I mostly worked with people who came to the market specifically to talk to me. I realized that recognition had happened.

People no longer stumble into my Purple Tent while shopping for vegetables. They come looking for me. Someone tells a friend. Someone remembers seeing my posts. Someone says, "You should talk to Elena."

And I thought that perhaps life unfolds much like a tree.

At first, roots spread wide.

They search.

They explore.

They reach in many directions.

Recognition comes.

Connections are formed.

The web expands.

And then, something else begins to happen.

Roots grow deep.

A mature tree does not need to spread endlessly.

It needs nourishment.

And nourishment comes through roots going deep.

There are seasons in life when we are meant to spread wide.

And there are seasons when we are meant to deepen.

Not more people, but better fit.

Not more access, but more trust.

Not quantity.

Depth.

And this part is the most interesting:

Trees do not control their roots.

Roots grow where nourishment and gravity invite them.

Perhaps wisdom is recognizing the season we are in and allowing the roots to do what roots have always done.

Spread.

And spread some more.

Until one day, without consulting us, they begin to go deep.

In their own time.

One of the things suffering taught me...

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 18:14:37 GMT

Empathy says

"I feel your pain."

Compassion says:

"I know your pain."

Empathy can be overwhelming.

It can rush to fix.

It can panic.

It can act emotionally.

It can even become confused and carry burdens that do not belong to it.

Compassion is quieter.

It recognizes suffering because it has known suffering.

But because it knows,

It does not assume that love means immediate action.

Compassion can sit beside pain without becoming lost in it.

It can allow people their own experiences.

It can trust life enough not to interfere with every discomfort.

Perhaps that is why compassion feels so peaceful.

Not because it cares less.

But because it understands more.

And because it understands more, it no longer needs to act on every emotion that passes through.

Sometimes love acts.

And sometimes love simply knows.

��

The Wound We Keep Trying to Escape

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 07:00:09 GMT

Most of us carry a wound. Not necessarily some dramatic trauma, but a painful sense that something is wrong with us, that we are not quite okay as we are. Sometimes it appears as anxiety, loneliness, tension, or a vague dissatisfaction that follows us through life.

And naturally, we look for relief.

Some drink. Some use substances. Some work endlessly. Some distract themselves with entertainment, relationships, or constant activity. Or we build a personality of authority and hide in there.

Anything that allows us, even temporarily, not to feel the pain.

Eventually many discover that these remedies do not last.

And so some of us turn toward spirituality. Perhaps we have already exhausted other options. We realize that temporary bandages will never bring lasting peace. We are willing to go all the way. We are ready to transcend suffering itself !

But here we encounter a great disillusionment:

Transcendent experiences do not heal the wound.

Years of spiritual practice do not heal the wound.

Even the most profound enlightenment experiences do not heal the wound.

In fact, as many sincere seekers discover, the pain may become even more intense. The structures and defenses that once protected us begin to fall away, and what we spent our lives avoiding may stand before us more naked than ever.

So what is it that we are really seeking?

The ability to simply be ourselves without tension. Peace of mind. Contentment.

Who worries about enlightenment when they are deeply content? Who thinks about transcendence when there is simple peace?

Perhaps what keeps us in perpetual suffering is not the wound itself. It is the endless effort to avoid feeling it.

And healing begins not when the wound disappears, but when we stop running.

What we have always wanted was never some extraordinary state. We simply wanted permission to be here.

Exactly as we are.

Without tension.

Without inner war.

Without having to become somebody else.

Without hiding our beautiful, vulnerable self.

The Day Peter Got Discovered

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:59:44 GMT

One of my neighbors at the Carmel Valley farmers market is Peter, 79 year old woodworker who makes black and white photography framed in raw wood.

There is something about his work I really enjoy. The subtlety of black and white. The texture of unfinished wood. Nothing flashy. Nothing trying too hard to impress anyone.

Every Sunday he quietly arrives at the market with his photographs and wooden frames. He could easily stay home at his age, but instead he keeps showing up.

I noticed something about him recently. Peter never rushes. Not physically. Not psychologically.

In a world where everybody is optimizing, accelerating and reacting to constant stimulation, there is something deeply human about an old craftsman simply continuing to show up with pieces of wood, black and white photographs, and his quiet presence.

This photo somehow captures two humans showing up every Sunday with our strange offerings in the middle of the Hay Universe . Peter looks like a man who quietly sanded wood for 60 years and made peace with reality. I look like a festival piñata that escaped containment in a parking lot

Direct Communication with Reality

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 23:24:27 GMT

When I first learned reading runes, I was guided in my dream to a teacher in Russia, a Mage. I am deeply grateful for that period, he gave me the initial insight and understanding in rune interpretations I needed.

My relationship with the runes never became static. It wasn't a matter of memorizing meanings and applying them forever. It continues to evolve. I notice patterns. The runes notice how I see those patterns. Meaning emerges through the relationship itself. This is not something anyone taught me. There is a living participation taking place.

At some point, my teacher and I naturally went our separate ways, because I could no longer allow someone else's insights to override my own direct experience.

Many traditions speak about this moment in different ways. In Buddhism there is a famous saying: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." , because eventually one must stop following someone else's realization and walk one's own path.

Mastery, to me, is not the perfect repetition of what we have learned from others.

That may produce skill. But art begins when something more immediate appears.

When there is direct communication with Reality itself.

Then the art becomes alive.

And perhaps the learning never really ends. It simply becomes a conversation.

The Difference Isn't Depth

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 21:23:03 GMT

People sometimes assume that market sessions are "little sessions" and private consultations are the "real thing" or somehow deeper.

I don't see it that way. The difference isn't depth.

At the market, sessions are focused mostly on one inquiry. We look at the runes first. Then I ask questions, people answer, and together we interpret the runes and bring clarity to what is happening.

There is not much unnecessary wandering. The process itself is very concentrated. Life becomes clearer, and then I move on to the next person. The tent belongs to more than one human being.

Private sessions are different, but not because they are deeper. There is simply more space. More room for people to tell their story. More room for tears and connections. Sometimes people need to tell their stories, even if this is not necessary for interpreting the runes.

Sometimes people have multiple inquiries. Different parts of their lives need attention. We move from one area of life to another as the conversation unfolds naturally, allowing each part to receive the attention it needs.

In the market, the session serves the flow of humanity. In private, the session serves the spaciousness of humanity. Neither one is a lesser version of the other. They are simply different environments.

And perhaps this is why I never saw the markets as a way to lead people somewhere else. The purple tent was never meant to be a doorway to a "next level." It is already whole in itself.

Private consultations are not an upgrade. They simply provide a different kind of room for what people may need.

Fire, Water and Brass Pipes

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 05:37:16 GMT

There is a Russian saying:
“Я прошла огонь, воду и медные трубы.
”Literally: “I went through fire, water and brass pipes.
It sounds strange and dramatic :) Fire and water I understand. But why brass pipes?

Fire is suffering. Water is instability and life itself. But brass pipes are glory, praise, self-importance, ego inflation. Sometimes the brass pipes are harder to survive than the fire.

Pain can humble people. Success can intoxicate them.
This is why Russian sayings sound like someone survived: war, heartbreak, revolution, betrayal, spiritual crisis and three symbolic deaths ��

Meanwhile Americans say: “I’ve been around the block.”
Russians go through fire, water and brass pipes. Americans just stroll around the block :). But both probably point to the same thing: life eventually educates everyone.

One Continuous Conversation

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:52:00 GMT

I have a strange relationship with time.

People often say things like:

"Good morning." "Good night." "Long time no see."

Somewhere inside, those things never carried much weight for me.

Even as a child, I remember having a difficult time adapting to formal social greetings. It wasn't rebellion. I wasn't trying to be difficult. I simply didn't understand why so much attention was being given to the doorway when we could already be inside the house.

Years later, while studying Runic Diagnostics with rune master in Russia, I noticed the same thing. We worked together every day for months. Each morning he would begin with "Good morning", and it took me a while to adapt to that ritual. I simply did not experience our interaction as something that had stopped. Yesterday we were discussing runes, life, dreams, symbols, and human beings. Today we were discussing the same things. For me it felt like one continuous conversation.

The same thing happens when I reconnect with people after years apart.

Someone will say: "Wow, it's been ten years."

And of course I know it has been ten years, but internally it often feels more like:

"Ah, there you are. Anyway, where were we?"

The conversation continues. The relationship continues. Life moves on.
The calendar feels less important than whatever is actually alive between people.

Over the years I have realized that this is also how I work with people.

When someone sits down with me for a consultation, I am usually not very interested in introductions, roles, titles, or credentials. Those things have their place, but my attention naturally moves toward the person, toward what is actually happening, toward the living reality beneath the story.

Sometimes after only ten minutes of conversation, people begin speaking about things they have not spoken about with anyone for years.

Perhaps because I do not experience them as strangers for very long.

Suddenly two human beings are talking about something real.

This immediacy has become a framework for much of my life.

It is probably why I enjoy the farmers markets and coffee shops as places for my work with people.

It is probably why I can reconnect with someone after years and feel as though we are continuing a conversation that simply paused for a while.

And perhaps that is why "long time no see" has never felt quite accurate to me.

The conversation was still there waiting patiently for us to continue.

Real, Down to Earth, Simple Changes Matters

Fri, 29 May 2026 01:04:40 GMT

Real, down to earth, simple changes matters as much as huge transformative experiences.

Sometimes people just need a real conversation, a little clarity, a little perspective, and permission to relax out of the compressed version of themselves for a moment.

These are actual messages I received in the last two days after sessions:

“After our conversation I relaxed more.”

“I sleep better.”

“Kуча позитивных эмоций. Спасибо вам большое!” ("Tons of positive emotions, thank you so much!")

“You inspired my daughter to continue studying!”

“Elena, because of our talk, it helped me stay strong and not text him yesterday!”

“You see the highest potential of the person and show it to us in the most positive way.”

Honestly, these full-on hay testimonials �� make me smile because underneath all the mystical language, runes, symbols, psychology, and strange Purple Tent atmosphere, what people seem to experience most is simple human relief.

And I think people are much more tired, emotionally compressed, and overstimulated than we fully realize.

Sometimes a real conversation changes the direction of a whole day, or even a life.

I used to think I was a bit anti-social

Sun, 24 May 2026 05:40:28 GMT

I used to think I was a bit anti-social. I loved being alone, solitude was my way of life.

But looking back, I think a lot of it was simply sensitivity without enough grounding.

I withdrew for many years into inner worlds, spirituality, observation.

The deep depression in the past couple of years completely changed me. I gave up all the defenses because I had no choice. And at this point in my life, I feel more human than ever.

Not because I became less sensitive. It feels as if I got a center of gravity that contains and directs that sensitivity where it belongs: to feel in the immediacy of the moment and be useful with my sensitivity to another human being.

Now I enjoy people.

I enjoy real conversations

and simple human contact.

Just sitting with another while life untangles a little for them is a gift.

Vicissitudes of Life made me much more human

Sun, 24 May 2026 02:47:56 GMT

It wasn't spirituality that did it. It was life.

Shock, disillusionment, grief, losing my sense of direction, losing the spark, and then slowly finding my way back into life again.

After going through certain things, it becomes much harder to divide people into categories like successful and unsuccessful, together and falling apart, strong and weak.

Life can break anyone.

And people can also find their way back from very dark places.

I think that's part of why I ended up at local farmers markets, where anyone who feels drawn can simply sit down with me. Not because I have everything figured out. Maybe almost the opposite. I stopped trying to figure life out and found a different way of looking at it.

Something softened after going through enough reality.

Now, when people sit across from me confused, looping, grieving, ashamed, lost, or simply unable to see clearly, I simply understand what it means to be human.

This made life feel more real and more meaningful than many grand ideas ever did.

Nothing actually changed that much

Mon, 11 May 2026 16:25:53 GMT

Years ago I was sitting in retreat circles, spiritual gatherings, speaking to groups, talking for hours about consciousness, awakening, transformation.

Now I sit under a purple tent at the Farmers Market with a sign saying “Psychic Life Coach”

And honestly… nothing actually changed that much.

A person sits down.

Life is tangled.

Runes hit the table.

Something becomes visible.

The fog breaks a little.

What changed is that the work became immediate.

The Runic instrument uncovers what's going on instantly.

Not trying to wake up people.

No spiritual theater.

No pretending we know everything.

More direct human contact.

Someone comes confused, uncertain, heartbroken, stuck, overwhelmed. We look together. Something in them relaxes.

And somehow this strange little purple tent became one of the most human and meaningful spaces I ever created.

What I see is that clarity, presence, and honest human connection matter more than anything.

And that’s enough.

How Runic Diagnostic differ from Tarot reading?

Wed, 06 May 2026 08:58:38 GMT

The oldest runic system dates back to around the 2nd century CE, making it nearly 2,000 years old. These symbols were used by Germanic and Norse peoples not only for writing, but also in magical and symbolic practices.

Tarot, by comparison, first appeared in Europe during the 15th century as playing cards and only later became associated with divination and various esoteric traditions. As a divination tool, Tarot has been used for roughly 250 years.

Over the years people have often asked me about the difference between Tarot and Runes.

I am not a Tarot practitioner, and I have had only a few Tarot readings myself. In my experience, Tarot often provides information and insight into a situation. In the right hands, it can be a valuable tool.

My own path, however, has been with Runes.

From my experience, Runes reveal the underlying energies present in a situation. I experience them not simply as symbols carrying information, but as living forces that interact with reality itself.

For this reason, I approach Runes with respect. I have found that working with them is not simply about receiving information. Intention and interaction matter. In inexperienced hands, attempts to influence a situation can sometimes produce results different from what was intended.

When I work with Runes, I am looking at the energies active within a situation so that we can understand what is truly unfolding without illusions.

From there, we can explore possibilities, consider available options, and model different scenarios. My role is not to predict a fixed future, but to help people move forward with greater clarity and make the best decisions possible within the circumstances they are facing.

How I, real Human, differ from ChatGPT in my work with people

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:38:13 GMT

I talked to ChatGPT today for the first time, so I am not a virgin anymore :)). I wanted to see how clear and deep AI will go with me about the subject. I wanted to see what it can and can't do. Here is my simple discovery:

ChatGPT can pull out any kind of information available by this time on the internet, analyze and summarize in a very clear way, in a blink of an eye, and I loved that! If the question is precise, it will give you the answer.

But where I saw we, real humans, better?

I will tell you on my own personal example, on what I do.

I am an intuitive, and people come to me with problems they THINK they have. I talk to them and see that their issue is not in what they thought, but something deeper. I was always highly intuitive and worked with people on a very deep level, but now I also use ancient energies of Runes as an instrument. They immediately show me ENERGIES present in a situation: what's in subconscious mind, what in conscious, what's in energy field, emotionally, what energies present in a social circle about this issue, what's going on actually in physical reality, and much more.... I see a comprehensive picture of ENERGIES.

This is it: ChatGPT pulls the information, Runes pull the energies.

Both are DATA, one is information based, another - energy based.

I come into the picture as an Intuitive and can use this data, from both sources, in my work. I am only using data from Runes, I never engaged with ChatGPT until today. But I can see how I can utilize AI's information based data, just for my personal research. I will continue to write my imperfect blog posts myself, with some grammar mistakes that only human can make now, so you know its me, still here :) But, lets see where ChatGPT can't fill in for me, the real human intuitive.

For example, someone came to me recently with this inquary: "Elena, can we look up if this profession will work for me?" I did a diagnostic on that question and saw that it doesn't matter what kind of proffession or field of work he is talking about, the issue is deeper, and it will be hard, very hard, if not impossible, to actually get employed in that area without addressing this underlying issue (I will not voice the issue here, because it was very personal). I asked a few questions and I told him: "Lets look into your current relationship (just an example, we could look into anything in his life, but it was just intuitively right in that man's example, as it turned out). "By looking at this important relationship, we can see what energies are present in your life", I said to him, "then we will have more clear picture why you actually hit rock bottom and not sure about anything, and the job too."

Runes open the situation, make hidden seen, and my conversation with the person goes into completely different direction, deeper, much deeper, it's not scripted in any way at all, I am not confined by any kind of rules or algorythms, it depends on the situation, this become a very personal coaching, a mentoring, or sometimes a ministry, for a person to start seeing what is, the truth, and recreate themselves, drop all the illusions that are on the way of a better life for them.

And in a case of this particular man, it was a matter of survival for him and his family, so I manifested for him myself what it means to be completely open, honest with yourself, willing to change, I filled the space with real energy of inspiration and courage, so he could snap out of whatever was holding him, and actual transformation began.

Can ChatGPT serve in this way? No. Definitely interesting and helpful instrument, but if you are a real human, you are magical Being that can impact this Reality with energy, with consciousness, with Love, compassion, empathy, creativity, and real Wisdom that is a culmination of it all. ��

Sing Your own Song!

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 02:06:50 GMT

We all have our unique tone, unique vibration,
the unique song to sing in this lifetime.
Please do not take on someone else's song,
there is no song better then your own, truly.
You know it, but your vocal cords are so tight
from trying to sing the song that is not yours,
that nothing comes out,
and you are silently listening to others who sing theirs,
who are fully living themselves, while you are hiding,
unfulfilled, frustrated, secretly bitter, uninspired, and unhappy.
Find a courage to sing your own!
The world needs to hear it!

Spiritual Journey ends on a town's market, thats right!

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 23:48:18 GMT

In these very chaotic and crazy times, in which we happened to live, I am opening myself in all kinds of ways to help people to find out the answers to their questions to come into inner balance, and perhaps even harmony in themselves. After decades of my own inner work, years of hard-core meditation, deep spiritual revelations, and work in the field of coaching, I now open to work in a different way, on a town market, so I can help people from diverse walks of life.

In classical Zen meditation text "10 Bulls", or Ten Ox-herding pictures, the journey of the adept goes through different stages of development, and ends on a market. Not in a complete dissolution of the mind and expansion of Consciousness, no, all this happens in the preceding stage. The last stage of the spiritual path is where one finds himself on a market, right in the middle of the town's bazaar! Yes, in modern times it can be Internet or the office in town, but in my story I arrived to a town's market, 100% classical Zen! :)