Donor Spotlight: Brenda Sanders
“It started suddenly with an uncontrollable jerk as I sat on a straight backed chair in a small rustic cottage in Rio Caliente Resort. Then came a loud inner roar like the sound of water rushing, followed by the searing image in my mind’s eye of hot white light shooting up my spine, through my brain and out the top of my head. The force was so strong that my head flew backward as my arms flung upward, fingers splayed and palms raised to the heavens. Accompanied by a strong, hot dry wind the light drew me up and out of my body to an expanded universe where everything was vividly alive, conscious and interconnected,” writes IONS Circle member Brenda Sanders in ‘What is Really Real,’ a chapter in Peak Vitality, an anthology recently released by Elite Books.
An academic biologist at the time of this sudden awakening she has spent the last ten years realigning her life to the knowledge that she is much more than her body and that consciousness is not, as she had previously believed, an awareness produced by the brain but is instead the very stuff that creates the universe. A natural extension of this shift for her as a scientist has been the need to reconcile this direct experience with our present understanding of the nature of consciousness.
Brenda feels that IONS and its partner Nine Gates Programs were instrumental in providing both a scientific framework for understanding the nature of reality and direct experiences with ways of knowing that have helped her forge the conceptual model she presents in her recent writings. “But it is really the friendships that she holds most dear”, she said, as she described her first encounter with the IONS community: It occurred just two months after her spiritual awakening as she sat in a cancer retreat lead by Dr. Carl Simonton, the author of ‘Getting Well Again’ at Casa de Maria. It had been three weeks since she had been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer and most of the time she held onto Carl’s every word as he described the basis of the body-mind connection and how it relates to treating cancer patients. But she couldn’t help notice another group of interesting and eclectic characters holding retreat on the periphery of the beautiful grounds of the former convent. Her attention was drawn out the window toward this group each time they passed by and her curiosity was peaked by the activity that swirled around them. Days later she found a flyer in her room from the Institute of Noetic Sciences describing the Nine Gates Mystery School schedule at Casa de Maria!
She joined IONS immediately and attended her first conference in St. Lois. There she was exposed to a community of pioneers exploring the role of spirituality in health. As an academic scientist she was stunned by the research presented on the role of consciousness in healing. It validated her own newly acquired insights from her spiritual awakening and corroborated Dr. Simonton’s approach to cancer treatment which she attributes her own remarkable recovery as she is now cancer free. In 2000 she attended Nine Gates Mystery School where she continued her transformational work under the tutelage of Gay Luce and a cadre of gifted spiritual teachers. There she met classmates, teachers and staff who continue to guide, support and encourage her. Five years ago she and her family relocated to northern California to be closer to the IONS community. She writes and lives on seven acres near Occidental with panoramic views across redwoods and vineyards to the far off Mayacamas Mountains. There amongst acres of gardens she hones her practice to live in present moment awareness in a perpetual search for the divine. She invites you to visit her website at www.whatisreallyreal.com to download a copy of her chapter and learn more about Peak Vitality.
