My name is Laura Dawn, and you’re listening to episode number 67 of the psychedelic leadership podcast. Featuring my conversation with Zen meditation and mindfulness teacher, spiritual activist and author of luminous darkness, Deborah Eden toll.

One of the most profound lessons that I’ve learned over the years, sitting in ceremony and journeying with psychedelic medicines is that the darkness holds enormous amounts of wisdom. And it’s one of our most powerful allies on the path of inner transformation. Yet, I rarely hear people speaking about the wisdom of darkness from this perspective. Especially in our more spiritually oriented communities where there’s such a strong emphasis on attaining enlightenment. And it was the term endarkenment that immediately caught my attention. And I love how certain salient words jump out at me. And when that happens, I always pay attention and I follow that word, like following a breadcrumb trail. And this word endarkenment led me to Eden’s book called luminous darkness. And engaged Buddhist approach to embracing the unknown. And reading that book was like a full body resonate. Yes. At the turn of every page. Eden spent seven years as a monastic at a silent Zen monastery and has been immersed in sustainable communities for 25 years. Her teaching style is grounded in compassionate awareness. Non-duality mindful inquiry and an unwavering commitment to personal transformation. Truly my kind of lady. She teaches Dharma intertwined with post patriarchal thought and practices. Resting upon a lived knowledge of our unity with the more than human world. And even though in this conversation, We don’t really talk about plant medicines or ceremonies, psychedelic journeys, specifically what Eden shares points to what these medicines are also teaching us about the wisdom of darkness. And these are truly wisdom teachings for our time.

There is so much goodness, in this entire episode. In this conversation, we explore the constant need to fill space with stories and narratives, we talk about the shadow and the impact that pushing away the darkness has on our lives.

Eden speaks about life. As a teacher of love, we explore embodied awareness of raw energy. We talk about the resiliency that can be cultivated through sitting with grief and discomfort. About darkness as a source of restoration and creativity and the transmutation of sacred rage and how to work with that energy more responsibly.

And truly all of these points of conversation lead us back to nature and our inherent connection with this earth.

As many of, you know, studying Tibetan Buddhism has been a parallel path for me alongside my medicine path. And I’ve been studying Tibetan Buddhism for over 15 years, but honestly, I’ve just barely scratched the surface of understanding the depth of what these teachings really hold. And they’ve not only changed my life. They’ve quite literally saved my life. As I’ve moved through the darkness of depression. As I’ve healed myself from the grip of addiction. And as I moved through an incredibly difficult time holding space for enormous amounts of grief through the volcanic eruption, as I share in this episode with Eden.

And I have found that this body of wisdom teachings. They have been the most resonant, complimentary teachings to support my journey of embodied transformation on the medicine path. And trust me, I have searched far and wide, but nothing has come close. To the essence of what these teachings really point to because they essentially point to the heart of transformation. And the practices like mindfulness awareness practice, like my tree practice, like the practice of tongue Len, for example, and the teachings of Bodhi, Chita, or shamba, or the teachings of the six paramitas. Or the three marks of existence. They show us how to open our minds and open our hearts to greater possibility and unhook ourselves from deeply entrenched patterns of body and mind that keep us stuck, disconnected and unhappy.

And this is where the wisdom and science of transformation truly meet, because now there are so many studies that are really just validating what these wisdom teachings have been teaching for thousands of years. They are now showing us the impact that mindfulness has on our health and wellbeing. On so many levels. Science is truly validating the teachings of self compassion. These are essential components on the healing journey that we often want to bypass. Pema Chodron talks about the spiritual path being a path. Of befriending oneself. That wisdom has stuck with me all these years and the older I get, the more I realize just how true that really is.

And these teachings and the practice of mindfulness awareness play a foundational role in transilient a six month training program for psychedelic coaches, integration, guides, and microdosing mentors. Who want to learn a framework for supporting others on the path of embodied psychedelic transformation?

Because what I’ve learned over the past 25 years of being on my own healing journey and supporting hundreds of other people on the path as well. Is that mindfulness awareness and learning how to develop metacognitive awareness of what we are paying attention to in our lives is a foundational aspect to embodied transformation. And all of these teachings are ultimately supporting us on the path of transformation, resilience.

And what I love about these teachings is that they’re showing us how to embody. A more open fluid stance towards life.

So you can learn more about transilient by going to Laura Dawn dot. Dot co forward slash transience. Or click on the link in the show notes.

Where you can also learn more about Eden and all that she offers as well.

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All right friends without any further ado. Here’s my conversation with author of luminous darkness. Uh, Debra Eden toll.

Laura Dawn: Hi, Eden, thank you so much for taking the time to drop in with me today. I’m so grateful for your work and I loved your book, luminous darkness. So I’m so excited to dive into the exploration of the wisdom that darkness holds for us, especially at this moment in time. So thank you so much for being here with me.

Eden : Thank you, Laura. And I’m grateful to be here with you.

And let’s all acknowledge, uh, with inspiration and sobriety, the intensity of the times we’re living in. That we need to, uh, reckon with and to open our hearts to the teacher of both light and dark. And so, yeah, let’s explore luminous darkness, however you’d like to today.

Laura Dawn: Thank you. And thank you for naming the context of these times that we are living through right now. These are times of accelerating change. And it feels really intense for a lot of people right now. So I’m curious what you’re paying attention to, how you’re navigating these times. And is there an internal narrative that you’re holding? Is there a story that you’re holding about these times of transition right now?

Eden : Thank you. My, uh, intention always, always is to drop story and to lean into the space between the stories and to recognize, you know, the subtitle of the book is about, um, meeting uncertainty. And to recognize how easy it is when we’re facing uncertainty, change the unknown, that’s one context for darkness.

The mystery that we wanna go into a narrative or story in order to find kind of a conclusion or a supposedly safe place to reside. And really meditation practice. And when I say meditation, I mean sure sitting meditation might be part of it, but meditation is a way of life, a way of living where we’re committed to remembering who and what we actually are as human beings and together and beyond the narrative or stories.

So I think many people could notice how easy it’s to go into stories and frames now about these times about the intensity of what we’re facing. And I really. Love teaching people to be aware of that, but to drop deeper down into our bodies and our, um, source of natural intelligence, relational intelligence, so that we can navigate the emergence of these times from a more holistic way beyond story.

Laura Dawn: Okay. So what do you encourage people to do through the practice of dropping out of the mind? Letting story fall by the wayside and into the feeling body? Because even in the body we feel something and then it informs the story that we tell ourselves like wow these times feel intense even that’s a narrative

Eden : Yes. Yes. And I just going on what you just said, wanna remind people, the mind is a meaning making machine, and there’s so much possibility and choice when we bring awareness to the meaning, making conclusion, seeking, um, I think of it often as the mind of separation that wants to attain a destination that wants to get somewhere.

when we’re talking about dark and light, we can think about light as the lamp of knowledge and just look at for how long human consciousness has kind of, I would say, stuck ourselves into a little bit of confusion by trying so hard, by emphasizing rational mind as God and trying to get to this knowledge instead of going down into our bodies, what I consider our earth bodies, the field, the felt experience of interconnection and interdependence.

A kind of a deeper source of knowing that we access there. And yes, we can be humble about, um, how story is part of our, uh, existence. So, for instance, one of the roles that I. Play right now is that I’m a, a teacher of sacred activism.

Recognizing these times of change and fluxx and recognizing these times when so many of our old narratives and systems we’ve relied on for a long time, and even perceptions of who we are that we’ve relied on for a long time are starting to disintegrate.

That there’s an incredible opportunity for each of us to, we might say, marry and the sacred our, our personal relationship to it with how we choose to respond wholeheartedly in these times of change. Because from the perspective of, of my practice and path, if we know that what we are here for is love.

If we’re clear on that simple aspect of human uh, existence, then we recognize everything that occurs in our life as a teacher of love. Two points about that. One, I’m not pointing to love as some kind of pink, always soft. Um, easy love can have both a gentle side and a fi