An Interview with Ellen Emmet 

Women and Consciousness Series hosted by Renate McNay
April 23, 2013

Extracted from Ellen Emmet's website: http://www.ellenemmet.com/about/

Ellen was born in NYC and raised in Paris, growing up in an American household while attending a French school. 

As a child,  she was always moving and dancing, abandoning her body to music, running with the wind, rolling on the earth. She was in love with the joy that the body dissolved into when moving and dancing.

During that time, Ellen often felt a sense of disconnection between her real experience and the way life was reflected back and explained to her by parents and teachers. She read fairy tales and wrapped herself in the mystical aura surrounding certain aspects of her catholic school upbringing.

In adolescence and into her twenties, Emmet acutely felt and enacted suffering through her body, struggling with an eating disorder and depression. She embarked on a desperate search for healing through various modalities of therapy and also in the spiritual world.

Dance Movement Therapy attracted her in its acknowledgement of the numinous and unitive wisdom inherent to direct experience through the body and pointed her towards a more natural understanding of healing.

In her early 30’s Ellen traveled to India. There, in the Ashram of Chandra Swami, sitting in Anandamayee Ma’s Samadhi, or walking up to the source of the Ganges, she was deeply touched by a quality that resonated with the longing in her heart. The ultimate answer was still out of reach but she knew that there was something, a truth, a home towards which she had been un-knowingly directing all her energy.

The answer came a few years later when she met Francis Lucille. The first words she heard him speak were: “Consciousness knowing Itself”. These words ignited a direct recognition in Ellen's heart, a resounding silent “Yes!” and ushered in the next chapter of her life.

During the years that followed, she spent as much time as she could with Francis, attending retreats, sharing conversations, experiencing body awareness sessions, and spending lovely ordinary moments with him and many others friends. This was a period of active exploration of the understanding that her true nature is pure, open, unlimited, un-located awareness, while deeply investigating layer upon layer of beliefs in the mind and feelings in the body that seemed to oppose this understanding.

Today, Ellen lives in Oxford alongside her husband Rupert Spira, whose pure and luminous teaching never ceases to deepen her understanding. She continues her practice as a Psychotherapist and Authentic Movement facilitator allowing her background of Dance-Movement Therapy and Transpersonal Psychology to be permeated by and to express the non-dual understanding. She also offer Non-dual Yoga sessions in the tradition of Kashmir Shivaism, exploring our true nature at the level of the body. 

Extracted from Ellen Emmet's website: http://www.ellenemmet.com/about/

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Ellen will be one of the guests on the panel Renate McNay will be hosting as part of Women and Consciousness Series on Conscious TV on April 23rd.

If you have any questions you'd like us to ask Ellen on your behalf, please do let us know by leaving a comment here on our blog or contacting us through our e-mail conscioustvblog@gmail.com or our Facebook page under Conscious TV.

Until then, you are more than welcome to  listen to an interview Renate conducted with Ellen in 2011.