Your Deepest Ground: A Guide to Embodied Spirituality

by John J. Prendergast, Rick Hanson PhD -foreword by

In John J. Prendergast's decades of experience as a psychotherapist and spiritual teacher, the area of the body that's most difficult for people to connect with, given our survival fear and trauma, is our physical and energetic ground. This area in the lower belly and at the base of the spine corresponds with the root chakra in the Indian subtle body tradition, the lower dan tien in Taoism, and the hara in Japanese martial arts. While most spiritual traditions focus on opening the mind and the heart, they tend to avoid or undervalue the opening of the ground. Prendergast notes, "It remains largely unconscious and deeply defended."

This guide invites you to take a deep dive into your personal, archetypal, and universal ground, and to see through the false ground of your early conditioning and limited identity. Throughout Your Deepest Ground, Prendergast accessible teachings to help you connect with your ground; sensitive awareness to the trauma we're often holding in this part of our physical and energetic body; sensing and inquiry practices to work with your own body and life; and anecdotes drawn from his teaching that show the power of this work. By consciously opening to our ground, we can experience a felt sense of safety and stability that supports the full flowering of inner peace, freedom, and loving awareness—a truly embodied spirituality.

Audible Audio

Published April 8, 2025

About the author

I am a native of the San Francisco Bay Area and received my undergraduate degree from UC Santa Cruz and my M.A. and Ph.D. from the California Institute of Integral Studies. I am licensed as a Marriage and Family Therapist, happily married, and have an adult son. I have a private psychotherapy practice in San Rafael and am a former professor of psychology at CIIS.

My interest in “spirituality” preceded my formal studies in psychology. I began a regular meditation practice in 1970 and had a brief career as a Transcendental Meditation teacher before leaving that organization.

An unexpected dream with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, with whom I was unfamiliar, happened a month before his death in 1981. This led me to read his famous dialogues in I am That which became a life-changing event, orienting my spiritual investigation towards self- inquiry. Two years later I met Jean Klein (www.stillnessspeaks.com/jean_klein/), a European medical doctor and musicologist, who was a master of Advaita Vedanta and Kashmiri Shaivism. I studied closely with Jean until his death fifteen years later.

In 2001 I began studying with Adyashanti (www.Adyashanti.org) whose presence and teachings have been an essential catalyst for a series of profound openings that continue to unfold.

Other important teachers have been Sri Ramana Maharshi, Byron Katie and Mata Amritanandamayi (Ammachi).

My dear friend and colleague, Dorothy Hunt (www.dorothyhunt.org), who was asked by Adyashanti to share the dharma, has now invited me to do the same.

from http://listeningfromsilence.com/about...