Sacred Awakenings Series: Isha Judd

Produced by The Shift Network
With gratitude and blessings to our volunteer transcriber Annette Hallett
To listen to the full audio, register at http://www.sacredawakeningseries.com

 

Stephen Dinan:  Welcome everyone to the Sacred Awakening Series tonight. This is your host, my name is Stephen Dinan, and we are now on the seventh call of the Sacred Awakening Series.
Tonight’s guest is Isha Judd. She is someone I have not met personally, but I became intrigued with her as a result of seeing mention of her in various places. She is an Australian woman who has become a spiritual teacher, mainly in Latin America. She lives in Uruguay. I watched various videos on the Web and I was impressed with the depth of her presence, her heartfulness, and overall mission in the world.  I thought it would be great in this series to have a representative teacher from South America. After reading some of Isha’s material on the Web I was struck by the deep relationship she has with animals. It has been a key part of ‘opening to the sacred’ in her life. The title of her book is “Why Walk When You Can Fly”. Her programs have been introduced to children, business people, politicians, and others from all over the world. She has done special programs for prisoners and those with disabilities, and has received support from the Colombian authorities to teach ex guerilla soldiers as part of a process for reintegrating them into society. So she is a spiritual teacher but she is also very focused on some of the deeper social concerns in the world. She has a large following in Latin America now and is starting to travel more widely, and share her book “Why Walk When You Can Fly”    so……..
Stephen: Isha, it is a true pleasure and delight to have you with us on the call tonight.

Isha:  Thank you, it’s my pleasure.

Stephen: Wonderful. There are so many places to begin with you. I would like you, first of all, to provide a little context. As an Australian woman who is now a spiritual teacher living in Uruguay, tell us  just a bit about your own journey that took you from where you grew up to this role in Uruguay as a spiritual teacher.

Isha:  You know it is really a bigger surprise for me. I never dreamed in years that I would be a spiritual teacher. I used to train race horses. I got to a point in my life where I realized that everything I achieved externally was never enough, and I was looking for more. I thought my happiness was in a future moment. I got to a point where I had to change, and change dramatically! The system teaches what I did in order to heal and have the experience I have now. I was invited to South America to teach my system. I thought it would be for a week. I never left. It just exploded in Latin America, and I traveled throughout Latin America. I established centers in Venezuela, and Colombia, and they kept getting too small. Now I am in Uruguay, and this center I don’t think will get too small. It’s incredible when you just surrender to life and just flow, where you end up.  It’s beyond your dreams.

Stephen: Beautiful! I wonder if you can share a bit about your process of awakening in a deeper way. Also how you translate that process into a system to help other people do the same?

Isha:  Well I did many things. I went through a fairly traumatic experience in my life where I lost everything. That was when my spirituality started to open up again. I started to do many things over a period of time, but then I realized that I always got to one point, and that point came up as enormous fear. It was my fear of abandonment. I could see that in everything I did in my life I was always compromising, looking for approval and never really being capable of being by myself. I got to a point where I just couldn’t live like that anymore. I started to go inward, and I had a voice in my head that was telling me that it was time to wake up and this voice guided me. So I started focusing in on consciousness, living in the present moment. I would be listening to this internal voice. It was telling me that I had to speak the truth that I had to be transparent; I had to embrace my humanity instead of putting on masks and images and pretending. I basically had to embrace the fear I had of being by myself. As I was doing this I started to expand what I call ‘love consciousness’ which is a very profound energy that is within all of us. Within this energy, this incredible energy, I found the energy to let go of everything that did not serve me, my addictions, and my self- abandonment. Everywhere I ended up being a victim or suffering because of things on the outside. The more consciousness expanded the more the choices I made were based in self love. Then eventually I experienced this love all the time and I let go of my external crutches. I now have the capacity to teach people to love themselves the way that I did it. The system is simple. The facets that I teach are very powerful. It is something that people can choose in each moment, so that they can experience ‘love consciousness’ permanently.

Stephen: What are some of the key steps you teach in that process?

Isha:  The first thing I teach is the facets, which are truth of enlightenment. They vibrate at a very high frequency. You think these facets with your eyes closed, and they start to elevate your vibration. When that happens, things that vibrate in a low level, like stuck emotions, fears, and attachments are seen very clearly and they start to dissolve and move into higher frequencies. These facets you can use with your eyes opened and your eyes closed. We use them with our eyes closed to clean what I call the support system of the matrix of the intellect.  If you can imagine that we are trapped in an illusion in our heads, of everything that has happened in the past, and everything we believe, and this illusion has a very strong support system in the body. The facets start to remove that support system, so that we start to see clearly instead of just responding and reacting for no apparent reason, or because we are a product of everything that happened before. So as we start to clear this, we start to anchor in a place of unconditional love, and be very present with ourselves, and we start to become conscious of self. We start to see the destructive behaviors and the habits and everything that takes us towards fear. We start choosing for Love. The facets are the principle parts initially. Then as you start to develop this internal unconditional love there are other steps which are; being in the moment, the capacity to flow, always speaking the truth instead of abandoning ourselves in looking for approval, and embracing our humanity. Humans have this idea that they meant to be saints. We are human and we need to embrace our humanity in all the areas that we judge. We need to move beyond, evolve beyond these places to become higher frequencies of love, but not necessarily to negate them or act as if they don’t exist. So it’s basically a path of surrender, of embracing, but through the support of experiencing your true Self. The Self that is the internal Self, which is like this safe house that you have with you all the time. It starts to become very precious. It becomes the most important thing in your life, and, as a consequence, the negative things that don’t serve you any more just start to fall away.

Stephen: Beautiful, I think that is a very simple, very poetic and powerful way to depict that process. I am wondering, as a teacher,  you are working with thousands of people, in our current era where are the places where people often get hung up in terms of this process,  of really embracing their humanity and opening to love. Are there typical places where we are really kind of stuck collectively, where you really have to work extensively?

Isha:  Well all humans have the same dramas. It’s incredible. It doesn’t matter where you go in the world; we are all repeating the same things. We have the fear of being alone, the fear of commitment, and the fear of not being disapproval. It always comes back to basic fear, the fear of abandonment. Because we are taught that love is external, and at the age of around four or even earlier we create this massive separation, and ultimately, it is the separation that we are healing. It can be masked in many different dramas. It can be an addiction it can be a bad relationship, it can be a financial problem, and it can be anything. Ultimately we are experiencing being limited, and we have to heal that internal separation. When we do that we start to respond from love, and we stop responding from the fear of our limitations. But in order to do that we have to embrace our fears and I think that is the hardest thing for humans to do. As we start to cultivate this internal consciousness, which is such a force, and it’s so powerful and so secure- we find the courage to do that. However if we don’t have a support system that’s within us, if it just an intellectual thing, like trying to give up something, it doesn’t seem to work. That is because we don’t have something to replace it and then we just replace it with another addiction or another drama or another something. But when we find our true essence, this profound love, this unconditional love, that is within all of us, we have the courage to start changing, really changing and making choices that are based, always, in love, and then when we become that love. We hold everyone else in that greatness, instead of taking from each other. We become this abundant flow of giving because there is no scarcity. When we are in duality, and in relationships where we are looking for our other half, or try to get someone to fill our needs so that we feel love, there is just this constant back and forth mirror of two people who are not complete within themselves, who need to fill this emptiness. I teach people to fill the emptiness, in relationship or separately, to really focus on filling and healing themselves. When we heal ourselves in this way then we extend it to our children, our partners, society, to everyone, because we don’t project our fears everywhere. It doesn’t matter who I teach; I teach famous people, I teach people from prisons that come from extraordinarily violent backgrounds people with addictions. All people are screaming out for the same thing, they want to come home to the love that is missing within them. They have the memory of that love but don’t know where to find it.

Stephen: One thing I alluded to, at the beginning, that I think would be interesting for you to speak to, is the connection with animals and how they can be teachers, and fellow travelers on this path of love awakening?

Isha:  You know I just did a movie, and in all of the movie I use animals as an example. Animals are a classic example of non judgment. They live perfectly in the moment, and they radiate this profound love. I use animals to show humans how complicated we are. For example I have a falcon that was thrown from the nest when she was young, and I raised her. She is an extraordinarily powerful bird, and she can fly against the wind if she wants to. I am like her mother, I feed her, I take her hunting sometimes, but I feed her, and she knows that when she comes to me she gets fed, but she never flies against the wind. She has this capacity to flow with the current but still keep her eye on her objective. I use animals in this way to explain to people how nature has the capacity to be; whereas we are so rigid and structured and we think things have to look a certain way. We are not actually open to flow, and to just be. Often we ask the Universe for things, and the Universe is throwing diamonds at us, but we are sitting there  clutching our rocks, because we feel secure with the rocks, and we are not open to let go of them, and trust, and start to flow.

So as we expand consciousness and we find the place again, the place I keep talking about, this place of unconditional love within ourselves, we start to cultivate enough trust to flow. In a personal sense I am always surrounded with animals, I am passionate about horses and dogs. My property is like a zoo because I love them. They are so easy, they are so present, they are so giving, and they are so noble. My dogs and my cats, everything I have got here including the falcon, are so comfortable with themselves, they don’t judge themselves. They just are what they are. But humans, no, we are always so violent with ourselves, with our expectations, and demands and then we project that externally.

Stephen: Another big facet of your work, which you started to speak to earlier, is bringing some of these spiritual teachings into populations that might not normally be exposed to this kind of work. For example prisoners, guerilla soldiers, and people who have been marginalized in different ways by society. I wonder if you could tell us, out of all those experiences, is there one particular population which was the most touching to watch open and transform.

Isha:  I think one of the most poignant experiences that I had, was I was in a men’s prison in District Federal in Mexico, This is a prison with about ten thousand men, and it is very high level crime, it is hard core. They announced that I was coming, and a thousand people came, but they came of their own accord. They were not told to come or forced to come, they actually came. It was poignant to have a thousand men in a room, practicing the system, many of them crying, sharing experiences of connection when they touch into this place of unconditional love. I think the thing I saw the most was that they thought there was something so wrong with them. They kept asking me “will this get rid of what’s wrong with me?” I said to them “we are all the same, it's just about choice, it’s about the choice that you are making now.” “We all have regrets in our lives but we can choose to be different whenever we want. This is the one thing that humans have, we have the choice to be the love, and that is the only thing that is important because we are all exactly the same. When you start to choose from that love, and you start to heal and get rid of all that violence and the judgments, everything external starts to mirror that and your lives change. First the change internally and then externally.”

I think the thing that amazed me most was the receptivity, the dedication to practice the system. I send teachers in after I teach. I send teachers in to support these people. The changes have been phenomenal, to the point where a lot of the prison systems have actually given the prisoners the opportunity, that if they practice the system, they will reduce the period of the sentence. It is because the results have been really impactful.  The violence levels in the jail went down dramatically, all of the guards, and the authorities were practicing as well. The response was big. We are going into just about all of the prisons now. We are being invited everywhere.

Stephen: That is fantastic news. That is really heartening.

Isha:  Its great and I always teach my people that we have to take responsibility for this.  Often we feel separate but the circumstances these people have is horrific, really horrific.

Stephen:  And that would really reinforce that sense of self hatred that often fuels crime in the first place.  I think it is beautiful to bring in that spirit of acceptance and love and practice to those arenas. I’d love for you to speak a little bit about the dynamics of being a teacher, a spiritual teacher in the West, and the dynamics around teachers and student, and what that relationship looks like for you.

Isha:  I teach en masse, to thousands of people, the general public or in prisons or whatever. For me, I am just giving, I am just teaching, It’s like I have this secret, because I found what I was looking for, and I just want to give that to everyone. I also have a group of extraordinary teachers; I have just over forty teachers that I trained, who have been with me for many years. We live as a community. We work as this incredible unit. We go into the countries and we promote the system. I have an incredible background for my work. These teachers are focused on enlightenment. They are the ones that live with me. I have lots of very committed students as well, that constantly come into my centers for what I call intensives. That is where we practice the system for many hours together, move lots of things and evolve. The way I teach looks very different in many areas. It became so in demand that I actually released the system in a book, which is in the United States, and in a movie. It was impossible for me to keep up the demand as a teacher; I tell my teachers we are eternal students, and always to remember that, to be in our hearts, and just share our experience.  We are teaching them the system but we are basically allowing people to find themselves. It’s not that we are giving them any belief systems, or information. We are just giving them tools to eliminate the things that don’t serve them; they can find their true essence and their own truth. I try to minimalise it as much as possible, so there is nothing for people to hold on to but their own experience.

Stephen: I’d like to hear just a little about your perspective on the relationship between the sacred feminine and the scared masculine in this world. What sort of medicine do we need collectively to heal the historical wounds and rebalance those energies?

Isha:  You know union is a perfect balance of the masculine and the feminine. We all have those aspects, all humans, we have both masculine and feminine. Gender is an illusion, and as we start to elevate consciousness we come into that place of union, and both of the energies are balanced. When I first started to teach here in South America I used to go into courses and there would be hundreds of women and one resistant male, who had been dragged along, totally disinterested, but obviously his wife had control of the house. Now it is absolutely equal. I have equal amounts of men and women learning and I see clearly how much the consciousness level has risen, because the masculine and the feminine are uniting. I see women embracing their power so much more, and men really getting in touch with their sensitive side. It is just happening collectively because my experience is of one conscious mind, so, as more and more people evolve, this union this balance between the two start to come into being. It is our natural way of being to have the both energies perfectly balanced.

Stephen:  Do you think there is a particular gift from the Latin American culture in general to the larger global spiritual dialogue about these matters. I think of things like Latin American dancing or salsa dancing as having a very high expression of the masculine and feminine working together. I have experienced often times with Latin American men, they have got a deeper reverence for the feminine than the men of other countries. I am curious to know if you feel that there are particular messages or gifts that the Latin American peoples have for the rest of us, in terms of the enlightenment process.

  Isha: The thing I love about Latin people is that they are very emotional. My system is a lot about that. It is not hard for them to connect with their emotions and start to heal. When I started to heal myself I had been taught that to be emotional was weak, and so I never showed emotion. As a result I stuffed so much stress into my system, and so much resentment, because I wasn’t feeling. I teach my students to feel everything until they get back to the point where they have normal emotions.  When you have normal emotions you have a very strong connection with life. Sensitivity and the flavor of life are enhanced dramatically. But we are so taught to live in our heads and we are very intellectual and we justify and clarify. Truth is not about the head, truth is about the heart, and the heart is omniscient, and it lives in union and it feels, and it is innocent, and it is in the moment. It’s completely free like children, but having a mature experience. I think to be able to connect in that way is easy for Latin people, but also I find that people of non- Latin origin, gringos like me, once they connect, they get it very quickly, and they start to grow very rapidly. The good thing about us is that we are very structured, and once we get it we move fast. The Latin people, even though they are very innocent, vulnerable and open are also extraordinarily dramatic. So I don’t know if one is better than the other. It’s just a matter of coming back to our true self,

Stephen: I f you would like to know more about Isha'S work I encourage you to check out her website http://www.whywalkwhenyoucanfly.com.

Vanessa: Your message is very well timed for me because I am going through a period of cleansing in my life, and I need to ask how did you let go of that toxicity?

Isha:  It depends on what level you are talking about. I mean physically I was drinking lots of water, eating really well and not using anything toxic. I used to drink and smoke and I stopped everything. I was choosing for the cleanest form of living. However, I found that that was also a consequence as I started to expand consciousness, and I started to experience this incredible internal love, I found that I constantly wanted to elevate that vibration. So, as I was healing with my system, those destructive behaviors started to fall away by themselves. It was because I started nurturing this unconditional love and it became much more important to me than my addictions or things that we would call toxic.

 David:  I have been meditating for three years twice a day, and I am wondering what is the best way to work with others in partnership to get rid of limiting beliefs. Last night I had a good experience trying these emotional freedom techniques out,  and talking about those kinds of ideas that are limiting, and using that technique. Do you have anything to suggest.

Isha:  Well the facets that I teach in my book are what I used to expand love consciousness, and when you start to expand that, you become very conscious of stuff. Because you are so present you start to see your behaviors that are so limiting, and destructive, and negative. Before those could almost be robotic. You would not even be conscious of them. What I have found is that, when you make that decision to be clear, to be conscious, the Universe starts to create situations so that you can see yourself very clearly, and you can make a new choice.

Abdullah : I like your expression that gender is an illusion very much. Could you elaborate on that?

Isha:  Well I think I will take it up a step and tell you that the human experience is an illusion. We are all just unconditional love, and we are having an experience of duality. Within that duality we are either masculine or feminine, but when we start to break through the duality and come back to a place of union, we start to realize that we are just that love. All the decorations, or the human experience, is basically, something that we are creating, and we can experience both aspects within the human experience, both our masculine and feminine perfectly balanced within ourselves.

Ricardo: I have been working with the facets for about 8 months now.  I used to like this girl, and I was a little bit obsessed with her. But I was unconsciously obsessed, and now I feel something is happening. At least I am conscious of over thinking things and worrying and planning things. How do you see that change. Is that a significant change or am I still stuck here?

Isha:  What I see here is that you are starting to anchor yourself, and you are starting to feel more comfortable being at home with yourself instead of being obsessive externally. When we obsess externally it’s because we are not comfortable within us. We have so much stress we start to project it all outside, but when we start to heal we start to find this quiet place where we can be at home with ourselves, and the mind starts to calm down. The consciousness starts to hold the intellect instead of the intellect controlling everything, and so it starts to become more silent. So it is obvious that you are starting to heal and you are starting find some internal peace yes

Ricardo: Sometimes I feel like that for a long time but then when I get proven I feel I am not as healed as I thought I was.

Isha:    The thing is with consciousness you expand and contract all the time. So when you have those contractions it’s just means you are healing more. Often your mind will hook into the same drama, because we usually have some preferred aspect that we like to get hooked into. It might be a person, it might be an addiction, it could be anything, but don’t worry about that , that is part of the healing process too, and it will keep coming back, but each time with less and less,until it just disappears completely.

 Shirley:  I am interested in the comparison of what your system is like versus psychotherapy, which seems to be very prevalent in California and other parts of the United States.

Isha:  I don’t teach anyone to analyze anything. In fact quite the opposite.  Just to focus on the love in the present moment and if they are meant to see something about themselves, it’s very clear. It comes up through the consciousness and you see it, but it is not an ideal. I call that all stress. So I teach people not to focus on that, and not try to work it out, because within the system I feel that that provokes more stress. If we see something that is not serving us we start to let go of those behaviors. With the facets we are constantly focusing on the internal experience of unconditional love. If you do therapy and that sort of thing, that’s fine, but you practice the system in a different moment. I teach lots of therapists, lots of therapists, and they have incorporated what I teach into their therapy sessions. But it is less about focusing on what we perceive as wrong, and more about focusing on the love and elevating the vibrations, so the things that vibrate in a low frequency, those behaviors  that have judgments will just fall by themselves.

Yvonne:  I love your work and I was on your site while you were talking.  I got that message that you repeated in your head, the one to” wake up” two years ago. I am now divorced. He didn’t want to wake up. I am actually by myself a lot, and I am doing a lot of workshops and meetings.  I just want to keep going and going and going, and I don’t know where I am going.

Isha:  Well you just have to trust. The system that I teach is very precise and direct. The thing I love about it most is that it starts to expand the experience of unconditional love, and from that internal source all the answers come. It’s not that you are going anywhere. You are coming home, you are actually coming back.  What is going to be released is everything that you don’t need. You are going to start finding an internal place of security and all the questions will be answered. But consciousness is always like a leap of faith, you walk through the fear and then the answers come. It doesn’t work the opposite way. You don’t get a contract that says “do this, this, and this ,and then this happens”,  so you have to trust , and keep surrendering and just flowing, being open and alert and see clearly what your next step is.  It will be very clear for you and the more you heal the quicker and faster you move.

Yvonne: Well I feel as though I have something I should be doing something else other than what I am doing but I don’t have a clue as to what it is. I have been doing a lot of healing and a lot of work on myself, for almost a year and a half, two year, now but I still don’t seem to be where I think I should be.

Isha:  I suggest you read my book because it got me where I am. I am sure if you do that one hundred percent you will get exactly where you want to go. I did!

 David:  Thank you very much Isha, I learn about you in Buenos Aires. I am living here in New York with my wife. My question to you is simply how do we nurture and expand the inner love.

Isha:   The facets that I teach go in and automatically start to do that. You start to experience this love and the more you focus on it the more it starts to expand. All the omniscience, all the information is within you so as the consciousness expands you start to see clearly the choices that are based in love, and the reactions that are based in fear. Then you can start choosing for the love in each moment. It is something that will flow and become very natural, but in order to get to that point you have to start removing all the stuck rubbish. When you practice these facets that I teach, that starts to move by itself because you are elevating your vibration.

Stephen: Well we have reached the point where we will have to start to wrap up. As I listened to the various conversations I was very touched by the depth of sharing. This issue of expanding unconditional love really goes to the heart and core of people’s live, and I appreciate people showing up so vulnerably with each other.

Isha: I am really glad you were able to dial back in and I am just so touched by your heartfulness and transparency and the truthfulness that you bring forward and I really think you have an important message for all of humanity. So to close if you had the opportunity to speak to all six billion people on the Earth and really offer a message that speaks to the deepest needs of humanity right now,  what would that be ?

Isha:  We have to take responsibility for our own happiness our own love, our own completion, and then, as a consequence it happens in the world. We all say we want peace, we want to get rid of injustice and prejudice and all of these things,   but it is the responsibility of each person to learn to love themselves. When we love ourselves unconditionally, we don’t need to defend and protect our ideas we can just love other people unconditionally.  That would be the only message I would give to humanity, love yourself and once you can do that you can give that to everyone, but it has to start with the individual.

Stephen: I love that message. I would like to finish this by asking anyone on the line who has been touched by Isha and her teachings to offer her an honoring right now, a love message for her.

 Vanessa:  I would like to thank you, from the bottom of heart, for being vessel of love to me tonight. I said a prayer on Monday, I asked God to open my world and you are part of that miracle.  I would like to thank you on behalf of everyone who feels that way. You have really helped to open my world, and my heart, to the love that I need to journey towards that is already reaching within me.

Isha:  Thank you Vanessa so much

Stephen: Would you, Isha, offer a prayer or a blessing for all those who joined us tonight and who will joins is in the recorded sessions

Isha:   I can just say to people to look in the mirror, and when you do, really start loving and appreciating the person that is looking back at you. When you can do that, miracles will start to happen in your life.