Continue reading on The Harvard Gazette.

The participants will learn how to use the Transessence Technique (TT) both for themselves and with others.

The teaching will cover:

1. A general understanding of TT ie function of disidentification in everyday life; how to recognize the difference between personality and present time (neutral place), how to strengthen the connection with the neutral place
2. A practical application of TT in the clinical set up of a session.
3. Guidance in working as a therapist from the neutral place.
4. Information about when TT is applicable and how to use it with other modalities.

This training targets people who are already working in the therapy field and would like to have an accurate tool for their work as well as those therapists who are interested in changing their present work approach. This is not intended as a therapist training.

Continuing supervision days will be decided upon at this training.

Upcoming Transessence Technique Trainings in Lithuania

PART I: July 10 – July 14, 2024, Shanti Resort, Lithuania (in-person participation)

PART II: September 20 – September 23, 2024, Zoom. Begins on Friday at 15:00. 2.5 days in total (online participation)

PART III: October 11 – October 13, 2024, Zoom. Begins on Friday at 15:00. 2.5 days in total (online participation)

Upcoming Transessence Supervisions in Russia

July 26-28, 2024
Online

Contact info:
Mandir
premmandir@gmail.com

With the help of the Transessence Technique (a tool for essential living) we will take a deeper look at what action comes from Present time.

We will learn to distinguish between our personality structure (reaction) and present time (action). So much is possible when we learn to step out of the past!

One day in the middle of a therapy session in Poona, I found myself in pain about something (not a new experience for me, to make an under-statement!). Tarika, the therapist, said, “It’s about time you see that you don’t need to continue going through your entire life carrying this wound.”

I don’t remember what my actual response was. What comes to me now is this feeling I had of dumbfounded disbelief and defensiveness, like, “Huh?!! Whaddya mean?! What wound?! I’m not carrying around any wound. This is me!! I’m just feeling my pain. Isn’t this why I’ve been coming to see you for sessions – so I could go through my pain, really feel it and transcend it (well, maybe eventually transcend it after 10 more years of intensive therapy, more groups, and deep meditation marathons)?”

I was so deeply identified with this “woundness” that Tarika’s words pierced me like an arrow. I trust this woman immensely, so I could at least begin to let in what she was saying. Truthfully, though, in that moment, I was so identified with “my wound,” “my pain,” that I was unable to totally comprehend the profoundness of what she was saying. And I had no idea how powerful an effect it would have on my life when it became my own understanding.

I’ve been quite a therapy junkie in this lifetime, participating in a lot of groups and individual sessions – many of these invaluable, deeply healing experiences. Still, I have always carried this feeling of woundedness, of being a victim. Both my parents died before I was old enough to know them, and I was raised by siblings who themselves were essentially children. Love became associated with abuse, pain, and abandonment. I learnt never to expect love, never to expect others to want to be there for me. When anyone did offer this energy I did not really trust it: I was certain that pain and/or abandonment were waiting just around the corner. Eventually I was able to see that I too had been abusive with people I professed to love, pushing them away and making my greatest fear into a self-fulfilling prophecy. I had never learned love.

I’ve spent probably thousands of dollars paying therapists to help me to “transform” myself (or so I thought). I can see now that on a deeper level I was paying them to give me the love and acceptance I never got as a child, something which I didn’t yet know how to give myself. I’m not devaluing these therapy experiences in any way. They were tremendously important in bringing me to the point where this letting go is now possible. And yet it is so valuable now to understand what else (besides my “seeker”) was underneath the surface of my passion for therapy. You see, I always felt that something was wrong with me the way I was and so looked toward therapists to fill this hole of deep lack. I always felt I had to do something to improve myself because who I was was flawed.

All this started to change in that session with Tarika. A few months later I decided to do the Anti-Fischer-Hoffman process (AFH), a very intensive three-week group co-led by Rani, Sudha, and Tarika of the Osho institute for Love and Consciousness. This group was a surgery. It allowed me to take a deep look into the blind spots created by my conditioning. It threw me back onto myself and made clear how awareness is truly a choice I am free to make in each moment.

Shortly after AFH, I did the Transessence process in a group with Tarika, and through this I was able to expand tremendously my budding understanding of how this woundedness, this idea of life as a painful, loveless struggle is learned, is a conditioning. I have spoken these words many times before, but they have never come from this place of strength, of deep rootedness I feel in myself as the words flow out of me in this moment. Previously, I was “understanding” more with my head. Right now it is coming from my guts.

I’d like to share a little about how this process works. What I appreciate most about Transessence is that once you have some experience in doing it, it can be done either alone or with a partner who facilitates. First you get in touch with the difference voices inside, with the parts of your personality that are ruling you around a particular issue. It is like when you feel unworthy but believe you are unworthy. This is identification. Then comes an inner struggle to become different, better. You don’t want it to be as it is. The Transessence process helps to view these patterns, emotions, and beliefs from a distance, reconnecting you to a place of silence, of wholeness, a place where no change is needed.

I am struck by the utter simplicity of this process of disidentifying, which for me is always ongoing. It’s something I can move into with my awareness, and slip out of with unawareness. (I do my best not to judge the many moments of unawareness). My experience is that the less I am identified with this “woundedness,” the more life energy is available for expansion, for lovingness, for creativity, or living authentically and joyously. I am repeatedly awed by many moments of clarity I experience when I “get it”. In these moments, it’s so simple, and often there’s just a hearty laughter.

The last few weeks I’ve been excited that Tarika is coming to Marin in late September to share this Transessence process in a weekend group, “A Step Out, A Step In: The Magic of Disidentification”. My heart had a big YES for organizing one here after doing it twice in Poona. What a gift to able to bring to Marin a delightful taste of Osho’s work, and a method that reflects one of His core messages.

This group and, in fact, all my work with Tarika has had such a deep impact on my life that I don’t want anyone to miss this opportunity. This is a very simple yet powerful technique, which can be used any time we are feeling strongly identified or charged about any life issue. It is creative, playful, often humorous, and always magical in the way it helps people to see clearly through to core beliefs and conditionings and then to step back, to experience that we are not the mind.

What I love about Tarika is her ordinariness. I find her to be very present, communicating with total honesty yet with deep compassion and sensitivity. She makes the transforming of consciousness an artwork, a playfulness, an adventure. You can expect Zenlike clarity alongside a sense of humor. Such a delight it has been for me to work and to play with her, that I am very happy to have her share with us this process of her own creation.

Dear Tarika, soon you will be leading a Transessence Technique Training in Lithuania, how was the birth of the Transessence Technique?

I developed the technique years ago because I needed something that could bridge  my experience in meditation with my  daily life. I have been meditating for nearly 40 years and at the same time I work as a therapist. For some time these two things were different aspects of my reality but when I met Osho I understood, slowly, slowly,  that actually he really wanted those experiences to come together: living in  the world with the understanding that we are not our personality and also  going deeper into meditation.

So, I know my life history to certain extent, I know how it takes over, I also found out that if you know too much of it nothing changes so I had to stop saying I know, I know. At that time I had a private practice working and I had a supervisor, Charlie, who was an alternative psychiatrist.  I loved Charlie dearly because he had a different  understanding about working with people than the traditional psychiatrists. Somewhere during the time that we were working together I  wanted to see what would happen if I would not  be living through my personal history, what would that mean? what would be there?  to be just  humming and meditating and not talking to anybody?.  He was interested enough in what character means, as he was doing a lot of work on character disorders, to  start to play around with what would happen if there would be a very clear way of seeing the difference between one’s own personality and the being place, the place in our human experience that is not conditioned.

During that experiment I was my own guinea pig, I was the one that was being worked on. So as we were working I started seeing many things of myself that  I would not have considered possible to let go. Things that I would feel: that is me, that is who I am, that is  how it is and that is how it is going to be.

Slowly I started to notice  through the way that we were setting up  the personality in our work together, how a lot of what I was calling my being was actually not, was in fact a full pile of old conditioned stuff  that I had neatly packaged and was living through.

That became interesting, I was really turned on by the idea that what I was experiencing in meditation on a daily basis, that sensation, I could have it not just when I meditated but actually when I was doing ordinary things.

How did the work evolved from being only an experiment into a solid technique?

What actually really established the idea that we have come into something very important was when I worked on a horrifying  experience in my life at that time.

I came very much in touch with how much fear I was living with through getting divorced and a whole bunch of other things. I was constantly in terror. I looked perfectly all right, I did my job, I was great at what I was doing and really loved what I was doing but at night I was living in this terror, so much so that I would hardly sleep. I did not know myself that way so in one of my sessions with Charlie I decided to do a set up with this situation and what happened was that I was able to recognize  the conflict I was living in, because we were dealing  very clearly with the duality of the mind.

During that session I was able to see  the struggle  that kept getting stimulated every evening. Following the Transessence Technique structure, I put it out, and I connected with what I was calling the Neutral Place  at that moment. I felt a completely different experience of my life.

Suddenly, I could see that this conflict, actually, doesn˜t exist, it is only an old, old, repetitive program. It was beautiful, I felt great, I was happy, I was relieved from something that I have been carrying around and I had not realized.  Then I actually said to Charlie: we will have to do this session one hundred times more because  this fear is a core program of my life but  surprisingly,  it did not come back, next night and next night and next night and thirty or more years later it never came back. I never activated that old program again. Then I realized,  wow,  we had really created something that is a wonderful tool to recognizing present time. That it was when Charlie got uninterested as he wanted only to deal with how to make the personality look better once we understood what it was the dynamic. Then I said, I am not at all interested in making any personality look better, I am going home now with my technique. Bye, bye Charlie…

I felt I needed then to really continue to work with myself with this understanding that when I dis-identify, when I release myself from the grip of that old conditioned stuff called history, I have  an opportunity to be in present moment and things are totally different.  The Transessence Technique grew from that understanding.

For the first couple of years I was essentially using it with myself, just going deeper into the concept of what is the personality and how it feels and looks like and then slowly, I started inviting some friends who were doing other type of work  with people, to look at it. We played with it and I used it in my private practice. It took quite a few years  before I started to  present it more publicly. And only five or six years ago, after it grew up as it is now, that I am enjoying  thoroughly  to actually pass it on and train people to work with it.

How does the Transessence Technique works?

It works simple, because for me simple is the only thing that works. I have an incredible capacity to understand but basically I only do simple. What happens through the Transessence Technique is that you create an understanding, first of all about what you carry  at your personality level, how identification actually lives inside, what identification is, and what it feels like when you step out of the identification. Then it is possible to experience the sensations of being in this present moment. There is a big difference from what the habitual, conditioned sense of yourself  is and what is basically being in present time.  That is what the work is about.

The set up is very simple. There is the guide giving you the opportunity to  look at issues that are going on in your life. The guidance helps to bring realization on how the issue is held together by a duality, as the mind works that way, the mind is never singular, it always has two things binding: good or bad, right or wrong, yes or no, because that is how we are conditioned, is never just experience and move on, is collecting information, understanding it, making  it fit somehow in your reality and then living it, that way, always and forever.

With  the Transessence Technique we really learn what the parts of the personality are, how do they interact with each other and how to get the opportunity to have a distance. We experience how is possible not to be part of the reaction and then, finally,  sense what is the action, what can we do in present moment that is different than our historical habit, seeing which options are available in the given situation.

The work is very much focused on the Neutral Place, how I called it when I was doing the work on myself and now called Present Time, the unconditioned, natural experience of this moment.

What do you mean by action? Isn’t witnessing the conflict enough?

During the session the client realizes which action is available,  which is not witnessing because witnessing is a meta position, witnessing is a place that is above all of what is happening and does not have any connection to it but sees it. With the Transessence Technique it is very much about recognizing once you create a space, how do you move through it.  When we are no longer bound to  historical reactions, what kind of action can been done in this present moment, which brings a totally new set of possibilities. So that is what the Transesence Technique is about.

How  did it get the name  Transessence Technique?

At some point it named itself because for quite a few years it was just known as the work that Tarika was interested in. Some people knew about it but  when I started to share it with people more they kept on saying how do you call this and I kept saying I do not know. I meant it,  until one morning, as phenomenal as it is, just like a tape across my head, I saw the name Transessence, with an S. This was  quite interesting, that is the transit to essence, the way to essence, and I thought wow! So the technique must have named itself and then I asked a few people who were playing around with it: What do you think of the name transessence and yes, it makes sense.It was also very touching because the technique  has a very clear base somewhere inside of me, and I needed to follow it, to find out how to give it life, make it available and actually teach it so people can use it and that is what is the most important for me. That whether people use it with other people, as some people do now as it is actually part of  their package of professional techniques, or whether they use it just for themselves, I am really interested in teaching it so people can use it.

Then  you have fully available the experience of what that Neutral Place is that we all know, since when we meditate we all go there. Whether  you like it or not, at some point you go there, most people do not like it because it is not all that exciting.   But at the same time it allows you to go through conflicts in a much more direct and easy way, recognizing what is actually important in this present moment in your life.  It is also a very simple way to find what is your action, more about what do you need to do in order to feel complete and whole and connected to yourself.