Upon Awakening with Avalon Kalin

When we fix ourselves onto a set outcome for our experience, we know the shadow Hunger. When we are fully present to experience what is, life is full of possibilities. We experience the Boundlessness of experience itself. To do this we must have open hearts. Compassion – and getting to Compassion through feeling – is how we unlock the true Boundlessness that is actually within us. Listen for medit...

How the contrasts of Nonduality & Devotion were dissolved in my heart – before, during, and after my travels into the center of Bengali Vaishnavism. The assumption of duality is also within Oneness; some advocate this opinion. They say that even in the midst of this lila, Oneness remains unimpaired. In Vedanta too, duality is out of the question. Although duality appears to manifest itself before...

Each of us is perfectly designed to be a master at something. Our genius appears as an innate Enthusiasm. Feeling the presence of life in one’s chest – in one’s body – is our natural born state. When did we lose the enthusiasm to live fully in this moment? The beauty is, we can enjoy our gifts in service to life, in forms, arts, systems, fields, skillsets, situations that meet real needs. I am her...

Unlock the potency of your voice. Your awareness is sacred. Attune to this moment. Observe how thoughts and feelings come and go, like waves on the ocean. This witnessing awareness, when established in the voice, becomes alchemical. Like Orpheus, you sing spirit into stones, and all types of “animals” are enchanted into their own harmony and awareness through the sound of attunement. The key is to...

No-one told us our unique contribution was perfectly designed in us as our natural gifts. Your unique Contribution wants so much to shine and to be expressed in the most natural and effortless ways. No self-sacrifice is needed, only letting go of the stuff that is not really us. In order to be ourselves we must know ourselves. From here the natural courage to be oneself comes. It is established in...

Our simple awareness can do so much for us, when we let it. We have fear of being fully present, and victim patterns which outsource our power. When we touch this world – with our hands, feel, smell, taste, and love – we enter into the most powerful experience of uniqueness and diversity of life. In reality we are touching from this simple awareness of the essence of things. It is the natural way...

In this episode I talk about Divine Receptivity – how listening and receiving transforms situations and life, unlocks magic, generates opportunity, and allows abundance. You can speak with your ears. Let the truth come through in all the different ways by being Receptive. Stop and listen. Receive with joy, gratitude, and interest to what the universe is speaking through people, places, and things....

This episode I am joined in conversation with Rama Chandra Das – aka Rob from Rob & Melissa, the renowned kirtan duo. We talk about bhakti, what it means, and how he found it. We dive into the story of Sita and Ram from the Ramayana. We talk about experiences of unconditional love – Agape, and how this can be our offering of service in the way we meet each other during the day. It was a real pleas...

We dive deep into the source of our Altruism and Caring with breathwork and meditation in this 30 min episode. When we tap our Selflessness , our life supporting energy, we are tapping the real “free energy”. The holy grail of fuels. This is the energy that makes an acorn grow into a maple tree. It is the intelligence of mycelium. It is the divine message that all life answers. All life is this we...

This week there was a glaring omission in my podcast. What is so darn funny about chaos? Is it possible to grow a pear? …I mean, a sense of humor? Is it possible that stopping and enjoying this moment could make all our dreams come true? Impossible! Listen for the answer… and for the true secret of comedy… and what makes something funny (you don’t want to know, jk. ;-) You already know. This is a...

We experience everything as Chaos or Cosmos - meaningless change, or divine ordering. When we see through the eyes of a child, we see everything is Play. Everything is a divine game of pretend and everything is a part of this play. That’s what is so serious about it. Ha. Everything has a chance and must play a part. You know? But it can all look like Chaos. Chaos is like “chasm”, a distance to cro...

Celebration is the sacred potential of healthy Detachment. When we accept our expectations and attachments, and then let them go, something happens. We are able to celebrate every event – every feeling, expansion, reorientation, reinvention – as beautiful and part of the unfolding of life. This awareness is beyond life and death. It sees meaning in everything. It sees something more pure than any...

Change can shock us. We have to at times directly experience the precariousness of our own lives, the fragility of this miracle we call life. We must experience our nakedness to fate, to life, to change, in order to awaken to the spiritual logic of it all. We face the limits of our projections and attachments to how things are supposed to be. We face the failure of our illusions to fully explain o...

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. - Viktor Frankl Each of us is an Authority in something, even if it is an authority at simply being ourselves. We are each responsible for the one thing we can control. How we choose to respond to life; our thoughts, feelings, actions...

Here I read some stories of my time in Rishikesh. Being attacked by dogs (or was it Krishna?), Bathing in the grace of the Goddess, Hiking to the Beatles’ Ashram, Ecstatic Dance Partying, Resting at Her banks. Har Har Mahadev on a “Scooty” and More. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit uponawakening.substack.com/subsc...

Tuesday-Sunday (March 24-29) our sun is transiting Gate 17, Opinions . This is about our Awareness , and how we can let it be narrowed by our identification with only one perspective. Or, we can let our deep desire for having an opinion – finding and protecting the integrity of reality in any opinion – lead us to a broader awareness that interconnects perspectives. Our awareness is naturally inter...

From Thursday March 19, to Monday March 23rd, our sun transits Gate 25, Universal Love . This gift of Loving Spirit and Acceptance carries the shadow of Constriction . It is what happens when we forget our natural capacity to Love everyone and everything. It draws us deep into our fears, like a trap that, when leaned into, continues an inward spiral of fear and fear-based thinking that gets more a...

I am back from my trip to India! More on that soon. But for now, here are my reflections on this week’s archetype: Compassion. This week, Friday through Wednesday (March 13-18th), we will experience the gifts of our Humanity, our emotional Suffering, and ultimately our Compassion. I talk about emotional turbulence, lust, suffering, and being human. I provide meditations for you to presence Compass...

Wednesday February 18th to Monday the 23rd, our sun transits Gate 55 in the Human Design astrological mandala. This gift moves us from Victimization to Freedom. This is a new collective Freedom coming from individual awakening. This Gate is at the center of the Gene Keys teachings. It represents a huge collective shift and new phase for humanity. Fear of lack and emptiness becomes trust in life, a...

Friday the 13th through Wednesday the 18th we are in the Days of Feelings & Desires. Desires are endless. Fulfilling them never brings lasting peace. Our desire is meant to move us into evolution, but it also forms the basis of our longing for Divine Union. This comes by feeling our feelings. Feelings come in waves. We are not driven by them when we let them pass through us without reaction. We le...

Saturday through Thursday Feb 7-12 Our sun transits gate 49: Revolution. “Unhappiness is the first sign that something powerful stirs within you.” There is a powerful motivation to protect humanity, protecting humans, protecting the vulnerable, standing up for human beings and living your principles. Is our revolutionary spirit just another reaction, or a positive change? The greatest revolution i...

This week our sun transits Gate 13: Listening. In these days of Listening. Listening is not hearing. Listening is absorbing the sound. It is listening to the whole story, the experience, the experiencer, the past, the whole problem, beyond any raw desire to accomplish a goal, It is Deep Listening. Deep Listening is actually Empathy. Empathy is to be within the other. This is growing and evolving c...

This week Tuesday-Sunday (Jan27-Feb1) our sun transits Gate 19: Approach, Codependency, Sensitivity and Sacrifice. Where is our healthy Sacrifice? What is unhealthy Sacrifice? We naturally want to serve, serve community and individuals. We thrive when others thrive. But we can forget or misunderstand our own needs, not giving time or space for our needs, not growing in those spaces. This makes us...

From Thursday to Monday Jan 22-26, our sun transits Gate 41: Emanation, Fantasy, Anticipation. These can be our days of Emanation, being in the Anticipation of the unfolding of our dreams. In this gate we can live in Fantasy, or we can embrace our manifestation – the energy to honor our hopes and dreams, watching them evolve by fulfilling them. “Means gather around Sattva” is good news. We don’t h...

Friday through Wednesday Jan 16-21, our sun transits Gate 60: Regulation, Realism, and Limitation. Your Realism is magical. Seeing things as they are is to see magic. Creation structures freedom, because structuring serves energy. These days of Containment, of Embodied Magic, show you the power of your boundaries, the freedom created by structure, and the magic that comes when we make room for it....