My Whole Being Evolution Background
by Rod Taylor
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Personal Evolution
My path of spiritual evolution consciously began in my early adulthood. I have been meditating regularly since 1970, and teaching meditation and spiritual knowledge since 1973.
My regular practice of various forms of meditation originally began when I learned Transcendental Meditation® (TM) in 1970. I became a TM Teacher in 1973 and actively taught TM for about 25 years. Over the years I learned and practiced the TM-Sidhi Programme® and many other advanced TM programs and techniques, and participated in numerous months-long in-residence meditation retreats. My TM meditation practices and teaching role were invaluable to me experiencing transcendent consciousness, expanding my awareness, connecting with the Infinite, releasing stress, maintaining balance and good health, and contributing to the lives of others.
In 1995 I began to actively engage in a rich variety of additional healing, personal development, and spiritual modalities, and then facilitate others in their practice and knowledge in these areas. I particularly benefited from Divine Will, Soul Love and other meditation programs from Orin and Sanaya Roman; Awakening Your Light Body meditation programs and retreats from Daben and Duane Packer; and Pangu Shengong Qigong Moving Form, Non-Moving form, Advanced Form, and Healing Skill developed by Master Ou Wen Wei. Over the years, these various processes brought healing and expansion to my heart, experience of consciousness as a field, and enlivenment of energetic flow throughout my body.
I learned internal awareness processes, including training in Focusing, that can help people connect and be present with bodily sensations, allowing resolution of inner issues and discomforts, and providing ways to shift from overactive thinking to being more present in the now. I’ve also received training in the Option Process Dialogue, a supportive way to help others explore personal issues, uncover beliefs, and let go of obstacles to health and happiness.
In 2002, I became a certified instructor of Pan Gu Shengong, a form of Chinese Qigong – a powerful healing practice designed to absorb Qi (universal energy) to increase vitality, strengthen spirit, restore balance, improve health, and enhance wellbeing. I teach a Moving Form, Meditation Form, and Healing Skill of this Qigong. I’ve found these practices to be wonderfully complementary to the work I offer as a Trillium Awakening teacher, as they provide embodying, balancing and energizing support for ongoing integration, health and well being.
I became a teacher of Trillium Awakening™ programs and services in 2007 (called Waking Down in Mutuality until the teachers’ association renamed itself Trillium Awakening Teachers Circle). Supporting participants in their processes of whole being realization has been a rich, fulfilling and evolutionary experience for me. In contrast with my teaching experience in other fields where there was an intention to pass on knowledge from another source, supporting participants in this work is about being myself in mutuality with others as we explore their awakening process together. I offer awakening knowledge and guidance as it arises in relation to their unfolding experience.
I appreciate the collective conscious mutuality and we-space practices I learned through the Evolutionary Collective led by Patricia Albere. Through intensive involvement as a core member over the two-year period 2016 and 2017, I experienced increasing enlivenment of my awakened nature, deepening realizations in the subtle nature of life, and experience and expression in the collective field of love.
I have a Bachelor of Art Degree focussed on Creative Intelligence, a Master’s Degree in Adult Education focused on human resource development and training, and post-secondary certification in Conflict Resolution focused on interest-based negotiation and mediation. I worked for over thirty years in the public sector in the areas of community development, human resource development, and individualized on-the-job training.
Interpersonal Evolution
As the father of four children, I have experienced tremendous richness, connection, and love, and I have been challenged and prodded in ways that required me to investigate and develop deep areas of myself not previously conscious.
My relationship with my children’s mother brought me love, acceptance and fullness that I had not known before, and yet it eventually thrust me into an experience of what I think of as “the dark night of my soul.” The agony and loss in that experience became a catalyst that moved me on a path toward my conscious embodied awakening.
In 2010 I came into love relationship with my beloved wife, Andrea. Our shared love in day to day life is a source of great joy and well-being in my life. This relationship has brought me gifts of fulfilling personal love, rich companionship, increased grounded wholeness, further recognition and integration of my finite nature, and great enrichment in living my life.
Expressing Evolution
During my early years as a Trillium Awakening teacher, I found myself discovering and sharing deepening realizations about the nature of awakened mutuality. I came to realize that whole being realization provides a ground of wholeness that offers and requires new principles of relating in awakened relationship. My discerning realizations became the theme and content of workshops I was offering in the United States and Australia. At a workshop in Canberra in 2013, Ralf Humphries, who was a participant in the event, requested to record my presentation on Awakened Mutuality. He later made a transcript of the recording and invited me to participate in editing it and adding content I felt was needed. With Ralf’s encouragement, editing background, and design skills, we used this material to produce a book of my teachings called “New Principles of Awakened Relationship”.
In 2017 I found myself being moved to create diagrams that would help me in my teaching role to express the nature of advancing whole being realizations that were emerging in my awakened life. This process eventually expanded to include describing stages of human evolution from Source to Source. It was a remarkably compelling and engaging project over an intensive period of 6 years from early 2017 through to early 2023. The content arose through whole being grace emerging in me as cognitions, revelations, and inspired expressions, to become the discriminative details I expressed in a broad range of graphic charts. I used these charts as the graphic components for the Whole Being Evolution Map™, for clarifying the Whole Being Evolution Teachings, and as content for offering Whole Being Evolution teaching events.
Throughout this process Ralf Humphries offered vital catalytic support through his awakened attention, discerning questions, and wise interactive companionship; Van Nguyen engaged with me in deep insightful conversations in advanced areas of the map; and, Francesca Blackstock co-created with me six online retreats that made a catalytic contribution to my final clarifications of the Map. This process culminated with us offering a groundbreaking 23 session online course to the Trillium Awakening Community – “Awakenings Beyond Initial Whole Being Realization: Illuminated by the Poetry of the Whole Being Evolution Map” – and in August 2024 releasing the recorded course and materials as a Free Advanced Self Study Course.