Michael Ellick

So I ended up feeling that I needed to serve inside a Christian, that I needed to leave my own religion better than how I found it.

And that as a Western Tibetan Buddhist, I would always be a little bit of a tourist and a foreigner inside it.

But if I committed to my practice inside of a Christian framework, maybe I could help serve and more generously interpret what I came to view as the ancient Jesus mysteries.

And it was around that time that I shifted from serving primarily in a Tibetan Buddhist context to serving initially in odd jobs and volunteering in a Christian context.

It was around that time that this experience emerged.

even after leaving the Tibetan Buddhist world formally, have maintained a pretty serious practice.

Today, I'm as much a meditation teacher as I am a minister.

And that has just been a big fundamental anchor of my life.

But it's substantively changed with this experience.

And this experience that I'll share has sort of informed a lot of pieces of that pursuit ever since.

To go deep in meditation, I think, you know, these days we live in a culture that's pretty distraction-oriented, and it's really hard inside a normal American life to practice with any depth without a community around you, of other people that help kind of ground your system down into it.

But if you do that, if you find your way to that experience, I think the ancient texts and contemporary texts talk about surreal things that can occur.

And the ancient texts talk about a series of powers that might emerge.

In Sanskrit and Pali, they talk about the various powers

things that could happen, including like a certain degree of magnetism or clairvoyance or telepathy.

These are things that people talk about in the ancient tradition, right?

In my own experience, I think that, and I think the experience of others around me, when you start going into longer periods of trance practice, you might start having

light telepathy with people and things like knowing things in advance of clairvoyance um not like a turn on switch power but around the edges those things can start to emerge you know when you really start to practice it can it can bring up um

especially in the beginning it can bring up a lot of buried things if you're someone who has buried trauma or unresolved issues very often it can suck those things to the foreground it's a very common in meditation that when you really start to find a rhythm that things that maybe you haven't dealt with properly rise to the surface and it can feel like you're sliding backwards like

thought meditation was supposed to help me.