Luminary: Arjuna Ardagh
Ardagh was educated in England, at Kings School, Canterbury, and later at Cambridge University, where he earned a Master’s degree in literature. Since the age of 14 he has had a passionate interest in spiritual awakening, and began to practice mediation and yoga. In his late teens he trained as a meditation teacher. After graduating from Cambridge, Ardagh devoted himself more fully to the call he felt inside him, and studied with a number of prominent spiritual teachers, in India, Nepal and Thailand as well as in Europe and the U.S. In 1987 he founded the Alchemy Institute in Seattle WA, and trained several hundred people in a transpersonal approach to hypnotherapy.
In 1991, after returning to India for prolonged meditation, Ardagh met HWL Poonjaji, a direct devotee of the great sage Ramana Maharshi. With Poonjaji’s help, the author went through a radical shift of perspective. Rather than attaining anything of what he had dreamed of, he had the profound realization that he had been seeking for what he already was, and always had been. He realized that it was in the abandonment of seeking and wanting that the heart found its fulfillment.
In 1992 Ardagh returned to Seattle and began to share with other people what he had recognized to be true. He quickly discovered that this same realization was easily accessible to anyone who was willing to look in the right place, and that this had a profound effect on simple day-to-day life. He has been traveling, both in the U.S. and Europe, for the last 13 years, facilitating this kind of shift, and reflecting with people on the art of living life from this recognition. Ardagh has experienced that the shift is becoming progressively easier for ordinary people, with no formal preparation, and he has met with many other teachers and writers who have come to the same discovery.
Ardagh has also developed the Living Essence Training, which prepares people to be facilitators of this shift in consciousness with others, and to cultivate translucence. He and his staff have trained more than 350 practitioners in the U.S. and Europe. He speaks at many international conferences, and has appeared on TV, on the radio and in print media.
In 2005 Ardagh's The Translucent Revolution: How People Just Like You are Waking Up and Changing the World was published. Drawing upon the author’s dialogues with thousands of writers, teachers, and workshop participants around the world who have been touched by a radical awakening, and whose lives emanate translucence. He blends observation, anecdote, and research, including commentaries from leading pioneers in the field of human consciousness like Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, and Neale Donald Walsch, to offer simple, concrete strategies for cultivating a translucent way of life. The Translucent Revolution offers a blueprint for positive change and an optimistic perspective on these uncertain times.
Arjuna Ardagh did more than 170 in depth interviews to research The Translucent Revolution, and surveyed more than 13,000 people. The interviews take up more than 250 cassette tapes, and the transcripts make up more than a million words!
Arjuna's website: www.livingessence.com
Arjuna Ardagh on the Essential Shifts
