Interview on Enlightenment with Eliza Mada Dalian

ELIZA MADA DALIAN is a self-realized mystic, spiritual teacher, and internationally acclaimed master healer. Her leading edge perspective on healing and enlightenment offers clarity, guidance, and major transformation in this time of profound shift in global consciousness. Affectionately known as MADA, she is also the founder of an evolutionary new healing method—the Dalian Method™ for Health and Consciousness, which offers a practical solution for spontaneous healing and transformation of consciousness for individuals, society, and the planet.

Interview courtesy of Evolve Magazine and Eliza Mada Dalian

KG: What inspired you to be so keen and hungry to “wake up”?

MADA: I was five when I saw my grandfather die. He was struggling with cancer and was in a lot of pain. I saw him grab the bottle of morphine that he used to help him ease his pain and start to drink from it, while my mother and aunt tried to take it away from him. When he was done drinking, he lay on his bed and became calm. Shortly afer, he stopped breathing and died.

I lay awake that night feeling his presence in my room. I was afraid. Thinking of his motionless dead body, I realized that one day I too would die, and that the world would keep on going after my death just as it did after my grandfather’s death. The sun would continue shining, trees would continue growing, and people all around the world would continue living their lives, regardless of whether I was here or not. This realization made me question: Who am I? Where have I come from? Where will I go when I die? What is my purpose here? And I felt unless I found the answers to these questions my life would be lived in vain.
KG: When so much of the world that we live in does not aspire to reach that same goal, what helped you not get distracted?

MADA: Being in the presence of the enlightened master Osho helped me the most in cultivating a disciplined practice of daily meditation. He not only imparted intellectual knowledge about enlightenment, but also devised many practical tools for seekers to practice and experience it for themselves. His Active Meditations were instrumental in helping me to quickly silence the mind and experience my inner presence.

Traditionally, people interested in self-realization and enlightenment naturally gravitate toward ashrams and monasteries. This helps to shield seekers from the world, so they can focus on their inner search for Truth, or God. The unfortunate side effect of living and practicing exclusively in ashrams and monasteries is that they also create a dependency on the institution, which undermines the seeker’s responsibility to draw upon and manifest their uniqueness, strength, and inner power in the world. In his revolutionary new approach, Osho tried to break this dependency by asking seekers to go back into the world and be responsible for their own survival. They could return to the ashram when they needed to re-energize and deepen their practice.

In my personal experience, the biggest obstacle to enlightenment is our fear of survival and death. What a master and his energy field provide is the ground where the seeker can develop trust and courage to face their fears and surrender to the unknown. It is like learning to swim. If someone who is a good swimmer holds your hand, it helps you gather the courage to jump into the water.
KG: What qualities does a seeker need to cultivate to help them on their journey to awakening?

MADA: First, one needs desire and determination to wake up and know oneself. Second, we need honesty, sincerity, and the will to cultivate courage. To be able to see our own unconscious we need courage to look inside with absolute honesty. If you cannot be honest with yourself, how can you be honest with others, and with God? Third, focus and discipline with meditation (self-witnessing). Fourth, would be a non-judgmental attitude and unconditional acceptance of oneself and others. Fifth, willingness to take responsibility for your thoughts and emotions, and willingness to look at the lessons behind everything that life offers you. Sixth, have a trusting and grateful heart. Seventh, be willing to face all your fears and surrender to the unknown. With any of these qualities missing, it will be very difficult to face and transform the ego.

KG: You teach that the ego prevents us from being present. You also teach that it needs to be embraced. Would you comment on this apparent contradiction?

MADA: Like the two sides of the same coin, the ego is both an obstacle and a friend. This may seem like a contradiction, but it is more like a paradox that needs to be understood. Everything in the universe is always in a process of evolution and transition from unconsciousness into consciousness. The ego has a significant role in assisting us on this journey. The ego is the womb that cradles, nurtures, and protects the body, so we can transform our unconscious energy into conscious energy. The ego-mind creates the necessary boundaries around us, so we can do our inner work without interference and imposition from outside. Like the mud without which the lotus cannot come to bloom, the ego provides the soil upon which the seed of consciousness germinates, develops, and flowers.

Because each person operates at a different level of consciousness, wounding of the ego’s natural development is inevitable. By wounding the ego-mind, it becomes easy to use and dominate it. This is how social, religious and political organizations have dominated individuals for centuries. Once the child’s developing ego-mind is wounded, he can be easily controlled and manipulated. In turn, he learns to control and manipulate others. When someone manages to heal their wounded ego and breaks out of the collective cycle of co-dependency, it becomes difficult to control such a person and he or she becomes a threat to the status quo.

The ego-mind becomes a challenge when we get identified with either its wounded, or its healthy state. I call the process of transformation of the ego-mind into self-realized consciousness “healing into consciousness.” We are healed into consciousness when we dis-identify from both the positive and the negative states of the ego-mind. When we choose one side (positive, i.e. love) over the other (negative, i.e. anger, hate), we remain in the duality of the mind and move from one side of the pendulum to the other. Identified with this movement, we fail to recognize the unmoving presence of our being in the Now. So to come out of the duality of the ego-mind, we need to dis-identify from both our negative and positive thoughts.

The easiest way to start dis-identifying from your thoughts is to first embrace the ego-mind and understand its purpose. When you embrace all your wounds and understand the lessons behind your pain, behavior patterns, and choices without blaming yourself or others, you can heal the “wounded ego” into a “healthy ego” more easily. When you understand your lessons, you will also understand that both darkness and light are part of you. This understanding will help you to step out of the contradictory nature of the mind and take full responsibility for the way you think, feel, and behave.
KG: Most of us have difficulty practicing silence and presence in the Now. The journey to stillness often seems arduous and almost impossible. How can we learn to stay present?

MADA: What makes the journey to presence arduous is the struggle with your mind, desires, and fears. There are many challenges on the journey: the challenge of facing your fears, surrendering your desires, and taking responsibility for your own life; the challenge of watching your mind and emotions and breaking through your personal, collective, and religious conditionings.

The key to presence is your breath. When you think, “I need to be still and present” and try to achieve stillness through your mind, it will begin to chatter even more. The simplest way to experience presence is to simply watch your breath. In the process of watching the incoming and the outgoing breaths, you will become aware of the unmoving gap between inhalation and exhalation. Your being exists in this unmoving empty gap. So to be present in the Now, you need to learn to welcome the emptiness that exists in the gap and relax into it. Truth, joy, and creativity always arise from within the emptiness of our being. Your ego-mind always tries to avoid emptiness, because it cannot exist within it. When you avoid emptiness, you also avoid the present moment. So, you cannot truly know stillness, if you don’t make friends with your inner emptiness, which exists in the gap between your incoming and outgoing breaths.

By settling your awareness in the gap, you will gradually become conscious that what comes and goes simply revolves around the still, unmoving center within your being. So we can say that the mind, and life and death, exist in inhalation and exhalation, while our eternal being exists in the unmoving gap. This is why it is important to incorporate meditation into your daily life. Allocating a little time every day to just watch your breath can help you grow and expand your awareness of the present.
KG: Your book In Search of the Miraculous: Healing into Consciousness has received seven prestigious book awards. … What would you say is the main message of your book?

MADA: The main purpose of the book is to help you understand, step-by-step, the journey from pain, fear, and suffering into liberated, enlightened consciousness, and have the tools that can help you on your journey. The book will help you understand, accept, and transform your ego instead of condemning it and struggling with it. Only a ripe fruit falls from the tree, and a flower opens when the bud has fully matured. Transformation of our ego is no different. It can only be dropped when it is fully developed and its purpose is complete. When the ego-mind is full of suppressed wounds and desires and you try to drop it, you will create more confusion and anxiety. You are ready to surrender your ego when you have no desires and judgments about how things should be, and feel okay with whatever life brings you. Life teaches us to let go on every step of our journey. If we have difficulty in letting go of things and people, we will have difficulty in letting go of the ego.

Silence and presence are the fragrance of the flower. If the flower denies the roots, the stem, and the leaves, it will never come to blossom. And, if you try to push the flower to open prematurely, you will kill its fragrance. Our spiritual growth from the unconscious ego state into consciousness and presence is the same. So instead of focusing on the outcome, my message is to focus on the nourishment that the plant needs to grow and become strong enough to support the flower. In other words, first focus on healing your wounded ego into a positive healthy state. This book can help you understand step-by-step the journey from ego state into enlightened consciousness and will help you recognize where you are on your journey to flowering. There are also many exercises, active meditation, and visualization techniques that will help you strengthen your inner witness.
KG: Besides being a spiritual teacher, you also have a miraculous ability to permanently alleviate pain and illnesses, often perceived to be incurable. You have helped hundreds of people with your ground-breaking new healing method (DHM), which simultaneously also seems to flick on the switch to greater consciousness. Can you explain how you came across this method and how it works?

MADA: I was working as a social worker in the early 90’s, when I became increasingly frustrated with the band-aid solutions that were applied to deeply rooted problems. No one seemed to have a permanent solution for the problems I saw my clients experiencing. It was clear that trying to change people’s beliefs with affirmations and the mind alone is a long, arduous, and in most cases, futile task, because the mind itself is the creator of the problems. When it comes to healing, the law of attraction works both positively as well as negatively, based on what kind of beliefs are imprinted in our body and energy.

Then, almost by chance, I rediscovered an ability I had as a child, when I was able to read thought forms in people’s body and energy. I resigned from my job and decided to explore this further, to see if I could find a way to create permanent and lasting transformation in people physically, psychologically, and spiritually, instead of just providing temporary relief. I worked in private practice with hundreds of people, gradually becoming aware how the many intertwined layers of thought forms and emotions suppressed in the entire body were creating the physical, emotional, and mental problems. Scientists call these layers of suppressed thoughts and emotions the epigenetic code. I began to read this code, and the original imprints that created it. After thousands of hours of experimentation, I saw a universal pattern of personal and collective unconsciousness that is created and sustained by this code.

Incorporating my ability to hear thought forms in the body, and identify presence of consciousness in the person’s energy, I found a way to systematically release the unconscious imprints, emotions, and beliefs from the body’s cellular memory. In a single ninety minute session I could not only create a permanent energetic shift in consciousness, but also help heal chronic physical pain and illnesses such as asthma, thyroid, fibromyalgia, and many other “incurable” conditions. I call my method “the bull’s eye method,” though it is known as DHM (Dalian Healing Method). This method not only heals the body of pain and illness but it also creates a one-hundred-and eighty degree energetic shift in consciousness, transforming fear, pain and suffering, and opening a door to the being where we can experience and truly know what it means to find inner stillness and be present in the Here and Now!

Kindi Gill, ACA management consultant, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

MADA’s book, In Search of the Miraculous, is a recipient of seven book awards. It is a luminous step-by-step spiritual manual for healing the ego into consciousness. It reveals the significance and purpose of the ego and takes us through the seven stages of its development, to the point of its final surrender and transformation. Dalian describes the role of the seven energy bodies and chakras in transforming the ego-mind into consciousness and guides readers in how to strengthen their inner witness so they can break through the illusion created by the mind and discover the truth for themselves. An array of questions and answers, practical suggestions, exercises, meditation and visualization techniques offered throughout the book make it an ultimate guide to spiritual enlightenment. This book will delight anyone interested in living in the Now! MADA travels internationally, offering workshops, retreats, individual healing sessions, and Active Meditation Teacher
Trainings. She lives in Vancouver, Canada.