One of the things suffering taught me...

A Note from 2026 This series traces my 25-year journey of consciously exploring sexuality. I originally wrote this essay in 2015, looking back on a stage of that journey that unfolded roughly between 2005 and 2012, through sexuality, spiritual practice, and the transformation of consciousness. At the time, becoming naturally celibate felt like a resolution. It was not. Life later brought desire back with extraordinary force and opened an entirely different chapter—one that returned me to the body, to love, and to the experience of becoming a Lover. That was not the final chapter either. Menopause changed the movement of this energy once again. For the past four years, I have once again been naturally celibate. During this time, the same life force has moved more deeply into my work with people and my exploration of the ancient energies carried by the runes. This journey is still unfolding. This is the first essay in the series. 2015 · Big Sur, CA Transformation of Sexual Energy and the Value of Equanimity There are many workshops on Tantra here on the land where I live, and sometimes I meet people in the baths who have taken one workshop or another on this very subject. They are all sexually active, and Tantra for them is mostly about enhanced and prolonged lovemaking. Originally, Tantra was not really about lovemaking, but about transcending desire. I was never trained in this subject, but it always fascinated me. I have had a lot of passion and desire in me ever since I was a young woman. It would arise so quickly and feel like fire, and I thought there must be another use for this fire besides releasing it sexually. As I became a seeker on a spiritual path and started meeting teachers worth asking, I asked every one of them how to use sexual energy for meditation and transformation. Every teacher and master had his own answer on this subject. One of them was a senior practitioner of the Fourth Way, and he said that Gurdjieff usually told people not to try to manipulate sexual energy without knowledge. He suggested spending it instead of holding it so that it “wouldn’t become sour.” A yoga ashram that I often went to many years ago held another view on sexuality and mostly promoted brahmacharya—abstinence from sex while practicing yoga and living in an ashram. I am not sure how it worked for those guys, but what I remember is that they didn’t look as if they had much vitality or vigor in them. Then I met a female master who told me that I didn’t need a man at all. She said she had been celibate for ten years and desire no longer arose in her. Although she had vitality in her body, she looked very stern to me, almost like a dry twig. But one thing she said caught my attention: it was possible to “have a circulation of energy without release.” A Tibetan Buddhist monk in his fifties whom I met a little later was more fascinated by me and suddenly asked me to be his consort. In his robes and with his big bald head, he looked like an alien to me, and I couldn’t imagine being even slightly aroused by this little man in robes. He pointed out Tibetan bronze figurines of dakinis and men intertwined in intercourse. He told me I was a dakini and that he had seen me in his dream. Tibetan monks take their dreams seriously, he said, and he explained that together we could pull the energy upward and unite in meditation. This sounded very interesting, but looking at him, I knew that I might be a dakini, but not for this particular man. For several more years, I read classical tantric texts and books by modern teachers such as Daniel Odier and Mantak Chia. Nothing really worked for me. “Pull the energy upward” didn’t resonate with me. It sounded like hard manipulation, and I couldn’t understand how such sensitive, subtle energies could be manipulated in this way. Then one night, while I was at a Vipassana retreat, I woke up filled with passion and desire. I lay on my bed and didn’t know whether I could make it through. Upon entering the retreat, I had taken precepts, and one of them was to abstain from sexual misconduct. For some reason, it had stuck in my mind that this meant abstaining from sexual release altogether while engaged in serious meditation at a retreat. I just lay there, burning with desire, and breathed. The desire was so strong that it engulfed me completely, and I couldn’t focus on anything except the feeling of it ripping me apart. I lay flat on my back, my feet and hands apart, my eyes closed, in a dark room. It felt as if I would explode into orgasm if I touched my body with even one finger. I was filled with fire and emitting fire—it was scorching hot! It lasted for a long time, but I noticed that the wave of heat had begun to subside. Suddenly, it was completely gone, and it felt utterly liberating! This was the first time I hadn’t had an orgasm as the sexual energy rose. I was in awe. I realized that what would work for me was the way Vipassana works: awareness of sensations and equanimity—non-reactivity toward arising phenomena, non-doing. After the retreat, some time passed without passion arising. That night at the retreat had certainly retrained my mind, but then passion began to creep in again. This time I knew what would work for me instead of “pulling the energy up,” as all the books said! Since I had been meditating seriously on bodily sensations for many years, both at retreats and consistently every day, my sensitivity to bodily sensations had carried over into my waking state and even into my sleep. I always slept flat on my back, mostly without moving for the entire night. Even while the body was sleeping and resting, the mind remained aware of bodily sensations. My sleep consisted mostly of lucid dreams or a half-awake dream state that included an awareness of sensations. One evening, I lay in bed and felt passion arising in the lower part of my abdomen. I contemplated it for a while, mostly considering which way to go with it: release it or abstain from release. I was trying to feel how strong the passion was, so I placed my attention on it and felt the wave strongly, calling me to ride it. The pull of the sexual energy was so magnetic that everything else faded in its presence. But my inquiry was a stronger force at that moment, and I managed to unglue my focus from the abdominal area and place my attention on the solar plexus. I lay there for a short while, keeping my attention on the solar plexus and resting from the strong grip of the sexual energy. I felt relief, as if I had broken free from a cage! Equanimity suddenly dawned on me in that space of non-doing. In no time, I saw how the energy that just a second ago had felt sexual in the pelvic area was now fully in the solar plexus, and it didn’t feel sexual at all! The sexual flavor subsided completely, and I felt a little excited to witness what had just happened. I felt empowered. “Manipura chakra,” the name came to mind from all my yogic studies years ago. “The center where power gathers.” Now I could really feel it. I felt strong and capable. I no longer felt as if I were a slave to passion. In that state of empowerment, I shifted my attention to my chest and lay there in equanimity. In no time, the energy traveled fluidly upward and filled my heart. My chest rose and expanded. I felt warmth and love for all beings. “Anahata—the space of compassion, the space of love and warmth,” I remembered. As much as I wanted to remain with this warm feeling, I shifted my focus to the throat area. I felt love in my heart, but my attention was already focused on my throat, and I lay in this seeming division of attention for just a short moment. The energy rose. I felt myself in the space of expression. I felt inspired to share this. There might be other people looking for what I had been looking for all those years. Now I had found it, and I wanted to share! My journey continued. I placed my attention on the area of my forehead and waited patiently, equanimously. I could see the difference between waiting with an agenda and resting in equanimity. An agenda creates a little tension, almost microscopic, but it is enough resistance to create a wall that prevents the energy from rising. Trying to “let go” of the agenda was also a form of “doing” on my part, and it didn’t work. Only complete equanimity, non-doing, created a space without resistance where the energy could flow freely. As soon as equanimity established itself, even for a split second, the energy immediately rose in a distinct movement. It traveled through my skull from my throat to my forehead, following an orbit that encircled the space inside my head. It felt like a very focused and visionary state of mind. My attention traveled from my forehead to the area above my head and rested there. I felt a shower of high-vibrational energy over me, consisting of very tiny oscillations. I was engulfed in sensations of bliss and rested in their beauty, innocent and natural. For a couple of months, I practiced this meditation almost every day, until I noticed that the energy began to rise by itself. I started experiencing it in my dreams too. In daily life, I completely lost interest in sexual encounters and became naturally celibate for several years. Until the next chapter of my life...

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. ❤️