Buddha at the Gas Pump

Rabbi Zvi Ish-Shalom, Ph. D., is a professor of wisdom traditions at Naropa University and is the founder of Kedumah, a universal mystical school that teaches a step-by-step approach to spiritual awakening and personal development. Integrating the timeless wisdom of the great mystical traditions with cutting edge knowledge of psychology, science, and the somatic healing arts, Zvi gently points us...

John J. Prendergast, Ph. D., is the author of The Deep Heart: Our Portal to Presence and In Touch: How to Tune in to the Inner Guidance of Your Body and Trust Yourself. He is a retired adjunct professor of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies and a licensed psychotherapist. He studied for many years with the European Advaita master, Jean Klein, as well as with Adyashanti. He...

Julie Brown Yau, Ph. D., has a 30-year background in psychological, somatic and spiritual traditions providing her with a unique depth of knowledge and direct experience. Julie’s unified approach for addressing developmental and complex trauma, includes the latest neuroscientific & psychosomatic findings, depth psychology, & Eastern wisdom. Julie is an author, speaker, and has a private pr...

Vicki Woodyard is a spiritual writer living in Atlanta, Georgia. Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, she graduated from The University of Memphis, magna cum laude, with a B.S. in English and Psychology. She is a meditator, a webmaster and has a lifelong interest in the spiritual path. Her late husband, Bob, died of multiple myeloma in 2004 and they lost their only daughter to cancer when she wa...

Mark has been called “one of the finest spiritual guides of our time,” “a consummate storyteller,” and “an eloquent spiritual teacher.” His work is widely accessible and used by many and his books have been translated into more than twenty languages. A bestselling author, he has published twenty-one books and recorded fourteen audio projects. In 2015, he was given a Life-Achievement Award by AgeNa...

Annette Kaiser was born in Zürich, Switzerland in 1948. She is a spiritual teacher, founder and spiritual director of the retreat center Villa Unspunnen in Switzerland. Under her guidance, this place has become a gem of peace and light, that inspires many people in their spiritual work. She is a visionary of a Universal Spirituality and has written more than ten books. After completing her studies...

Henry Shukman (Ryu’un-ken) is an Associate Zen Master of the Sanbo Zen lineage, based in Kamakura, Japan. He has trained primarily with Joan Rieck Roshi, Zen teacher John Gaynor, Ruben Habito Roshi, and now continues his training under the guidance of Yamada Ryoun Roshi, current abbot of Sanbo Zen. Henry is dedicated to what he sees as core Zen training—clarifying our essential nature to our own s...

Dr. Miles Neale, PsyD, is a Buddhist psychotherapist in private practice and founder of the two-year online Contemplative Studies Program. Author of Gradual Awakening (Sounds True, 2018) and co-editor of Advances in Contemplative Psychotherapy (Routledge, 2017), Miles is a faculty member of Tibet House (US) and Weill Cornell Medical College. With more than twenty years integrating the mind science...

From my earliest memories, God was always at the center of things. After exploring a number of teachers and modalities in the great spiritual garden of late-sixties San Francisco, things really geared up when I learned the Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique in Berkeley in 1967. TM’s gifts were unmistakable and I began a thirty-year career of devoted service to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the V...

Cassandra Vieten is Executive Director of the John W. Brick Foundation, Scholar-in-Residence at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences where she worked for 18 years and served as President and CEO from 2013-2019. She is a psychologist, mind-body medicine researcher, author of numerous art...

Noah is an explorer of what is happening in his own experience. This started on the level of mind, and gradually opened to exploring what's going on in his body, and then from his soul. This journey has led him to meet, feel, heal, and let go of a tremendous amount of pain. Through this journey, a lot of wisdom and honesty has revealed itself. Noah now shares himself and his insights with others....

Rey Hernandez is Executive Director of the Consciousness and Contact Research Institute (CCRI), a 501c3 academic research institute comprised of 15 Ph. D. academics and medical doctors whose mission is to explore the relationship between Consciousness, our Cosmology, and Contact with Non-Human Intelligence via the Contact Modalities. Rey was previously one of the co-founders of The Dr. Edgar Mitch...

Gillian Ross has always found it difficult to put a label on her spiritual perspective. If pressed she would describe herself as a Christian Buddhist yogi and mystic with a penchant for Taoism! Over recent years, however, she has been happy to call herself a spiritual evolutionary or evolutionary mystic in the tradition of Teilhard de Chardin in the West and Sri Aurobindo in the East. Born in the...

Dorothy Walters, Ph. D., spent most of her early professional life as a professor of English literature in various Midwestern universities. She helped to found one of the first women’s studies programs in this country and served as the director of this program for many years. After an extended residence in San Francisco, she now lives and writes in Colorado, where she has a close relationship with...

Sri Shyamji was born and raised in India. At age 12, he met his spiritual teacher in the Himalayas and spent several years under his guidance. The Guru initiated Shyamji into the Saivite tradition of Tantra—imparting a rare oral tradition of sacred sounds (naada yoga), breath (svara yoga), and spiritual wisdom. The grace of the guru (guru krippa) and the spiritual practices he imparted (sadhana) a...

Over his lifetime Tom has dived deeply into inner work while simultaneously living a householder life. Through an ongoing revelation of living in the moment, he integrates the insights of the most sophisticated western-developed psychologies with the ongoing unitive consciousness with which he has been blessed since the year 2000. Tom uses these skills and this wisdom to guide those dedicated and...

Brian Longhurst has been aware of the reality of the spirit realms since childhood. Born in England, he moved to Canada as a young man, where he began what was to become an enduring, personal relationship with Jesus, who manifested in glory to him when Brian was 22. Jesus told him he had come to lead him back to God. From then, his encounters with the living Jesus began in earnest, a decades-long...

Shaykh Burhanuddin Herrmann is a contemporary mystic of the ancient Sufi tradition, called to the path at a tender age. He went through the classic dervish training, which involved an intense daily practice of meditation and prayers under the direct guidance of the Master, accepting his instructions for inner and outer life (including raising a family), extreme solitary spiritual retreats, pilgrim...

Born in Sheffield, England, Georgi has led a life of charm, intoxication, collision and perpetual re-awakening. Having experienced her parent’s divorce and later her father’s death to alcoholism, Georgi was a born seeker for a stable home that was somehow prior to the broken home that she knew.  As a teenager, she attended evening classes at the School of Philosophy in Belgium, that offered a ‘san...

My deepest devotion, throughout my life has been to the discovery and embodiment of our truest nature. I studied organized and mystical religions, I traveled to many countries in our world, getting a taste of different cultures and people, I lived a conventional suburban life as a wife and mother, I lived in chronic confusion, and I studied psychology, all with the gnawing question of ‘what is all...

Some of the opinions expressed on certain topics in this interview do not reflect BatGap’s point of view.  While this may be true of any of our interviews, we wanted to make a special point of it here since the opinions were stated rather emphatically. Hans Wilhelm has created over 70 short YouTube videos in which he explores and visually explains the dynamic of the universal laws. This ‘back of a...

After graduating in French from the University of Exeter and working for several years in conventional jobs in London, Leah found herself deeply unhappy; struggling with feelings of depression, anxiety, disordered eating, an intense feeling of being a ‘wrong’ human being, and desperation to ‘find her purpose’. In 2012, she embarked on a journey of self-discovery, but even after several years of pe...

J. Jaye Gold has been assisting people in their search for inner meaning for 35 years. He is currently living in the Sierra foothills of Northern California where he works with several dozen seekers of truth. Over the years he has deliberately resisted the trend to become a “traveling guru” with thousands of followers, in favor of preserving an element that he considers precious – that of maintain...

Kate Gustin, Ph. D., is a clinical psychologist practicing in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her education from Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley; and has worked in a variety of settings over the past twenty-five years as a mental health practitioner: outpatient psychiatry, community mental health clinics, VA Hospital, college counseling services, and curren...

Kylea Taylor, M.S., LMFT, found two gaps in ethics education in the early 1990s while simultaneously studying to be a Marriage and Family Therapist and working as a senior trainer at the Grof Transpersonal Training where she assisted Stanislav Grof in training practitioners of Holotropic Breathwork®. Kylea observed that working with clients in non-ordinary states of consciousness requires differen...