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by Tania Ahsan
There is a need when on the spiritual path to seek out answers but Amoda says that the key turning point for her was when she dropped the search. “In dropping the search, there was surrender to what is and to life itself. This shifted from searching in spiritual teachings to enlightenment within life itself and it allowed life to be my teacher.” Ironically, Amoda had a profoundly affecting visionary experience, once she’d stopped looking for it, through simply following the yearning she still felt at the end of the searching.
"Externally I seemed successful, outwardly I was teaching and was engaging in creativity so there was an outward success but I felt a kernel of darkness within myself and it was really a yearning for liberation.
I guess there was still some suffering going on. Living on my own and being at home, I didn't use anything like making a cup of tea or reading a spiritual book or chatting with a friend to distract me from this kernel of spiritual longing. Instead of turning away from it to these sorts of everyday distractions, I faced it instead.
I decided to be with it whenever it arose and in that moment, something shifted for me.
“So, while in this state, I asked ‘what is the way through my suffering?’ and I fell to the ground, I felt pulled down and I received a vision. It was a very real experience that showed me how to find God in everything. What was given to me was a very real, visceral, experiential way through suffering — not just on a personal level for me but on a collective level — an experience of my ‘AM-ness' and that ‘I AM-ness' experience led to liberation.
"The keys I received were presence and openness, not as a spiritual practice but in everything in life — good, bad, challenging experiences, all can be responded to using these keys. The difficult moments are the real teachers because when you are absolutely present with it and practice being open to it, there is a softness around it and the keys really shifted things for me. I call it a radical awakening because it changed my relationship to everything."
This changed the way Amoda looked at relationships and the way she had of being in the world and interacting with others. “The way it manifested was that I stopped being a victim, be it a victim of relationships or a victim of life, the sort of thought that manifests as a ‘poor me, life is so difficult‘ [attitude].
It changed that and what went through me was that I recognised the light within and recognised my own divinity.
“We have a choice between love and fear in every moment. I no longer looked for a relationship in the conventional sense because I stopped looking for a relationship to make me happy. I realised that everything was a relationship to God, to the God presence within, and that became my primary motivating force. There was no longer any co-dependency and no searching for anything. Awakening happened because I stopped the search. The real turning point came then and I wrote my book and developed a teaching to integrate what it all means and learn how to speak to others about it. I had no intention of teaching this but it happened and I became a servant for divinity; it was a personal challenge for me.
"One of the gifts that I have is that I teach people to walk through the valley of darkness, in small and big ways, and to embrace the darkness as a catalyst for change and I want to inspire, encourage and empower others and give pointers on how to walk through that darkness, to release their emotional stories from the past. At this point in time there is a lot of chaos and breakdown and it is really quite frightening with an increasing number of changes happening. I say in my book that you need to be an agent of change and this sounds like I'm saying to go out into the world and start campaigning and demonstrating and that is part of the call of our times but the basis of the teaching is that we need to be the change, we have to have an inner transformation in order for real change to happen.”
Amoda is convinced that you have to begin the process of change with yourself, being careful not to succumb to egocentric motivations. “Unless we have gone inside and awakened, unless we are doing that, we cannot be of service to the world. We have to have a shift in motivation. Sometimes we might be doing good things but that can be in self-service, the voice of ego, and ‘what can I do to make myself feel better about myself?’ We have to do these things in the world in real alignment with the power of God, the creator, the Universe, otherwise it is built on weak foundations.”
The I0 spiritual lessons in Amoda’s new book are based on the vision she received in 2002 that radically transformed her life. She says: “Each lesson awakens us to our I AM-ness, which is the source of our true power. Each lesson is based on a facet of our true radiant nature and activates a specific quality – or power — that creates inner and outer change. Put together these 10 qualities — or powers - become like a jewel that expresses the magnificence of who we really are and empowers us to be agents of change in our lives and in we world.
“Each lesson needs to be applied over and over again, in order to activate an inner spiritual muscle.
In my new book, I provide daily exercises that activate this muscle.”
This article was first published in Kindred Spirit Magazine
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