Grounding and Embodiment: Lessons From Six Decades of Practice

A woman sits in a pool of afternoon light and tells a story about walking down a street with her head hanging low. She was deeply depressed. Then a young man with blonde curls noticed her, bent down until he could find her gaze, and pressed into her hand a small card bearing a message from Meher Baba: "Don't worry, be happy." The moment stuck with her for decades. It is the kind of detail that, in a longer conversation, tells you more about a person than any list of credentials. That scene opens a 52-minute video in which Susan Murray, a singing bowl sound healer and holistic wellness mentor who recently turned 80, talks with her younger colleague and friend Prema Gaia about a path she describes as roughly sixty years long. Its real subject is how a spiritual life gets built, one unglamorous step at a time, and what it looks like when the person building it decides the most useful thing she can do is hand the tools to someone else.

How Does Spiritual Awakening Actually Begin?

Murray's answer to the first question is refreshingly undramatic. Asked whether her awakening was a single satori or something gradual, she said it was "very gradual," and she located its origin in her mother. Her mother was spiritually oriented and passed along practices that had helped her. The core of it, Murray said, was simple: "just cultivating trust that the universe is a supportive place," and that if we align ourselves with spirit to whatever degree we can, we will receive what we need.

The first concrete evidence came in an unexpected form. As a young girl facing her first period and its cramps, Murray was handed a copy of Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, a book she had never read. The cramps went away. "Oh, this works," she recalled, calling it perhaps the most stunning thing that had happened to her up to that point. [0:108]

What matters here is not the specific doctrine but the method. A child was given a text, tried it on a lived problem, and noticed a result. That is a practitioner's logic, and it runs through everything Murray describes afterward. Practice is tested against experience. Nothing is taken on faith alone.

What Did Carlos Castaneda Teach About Stupid Moods?

The reading life that followed was omnivorous. In her freshman year of college she discovered the Shambhala Bookstore on Telegraph Avenue and, as she put it, "started perusing the bookshelves." She admits that for years it all felt distant. "It took me many years to realize that it wasn't just something to read about, it was something to live," she said. [0:213]

The turn came with Carlos Castaneda. Murray describes a discouraged day when a thought arrived with the force of an epiphany: if she was this unhappy, she was probably believing something that wasn't true. She had no idea what to keep and what to throw out, so she decided to discard anything she could identify. She gave up her apartment and began meeting people differently, living more simply.

The line that really landed came from the teacher character in Castaneda's books, who tells the author that a spiritual warrior must be prepared to die at any moment. Then comes the question that stopped Murray cold: "You don't want to die in some stupid mood, do you?" [0:310] "No," she recalled answering herself. "I'm tired of my stupid moods. I don't want to die in a stupid mood."

There is a serious lesson buried in the humor of that phrase. It reframes mood not as weather that happens to you but as a habit that can be noticed, examined and gradually exited. Murray's entire later practice is organized around this idea: learning to recognize a stupid move quickly, and to get out of it more quickly still.

Why Did Altered States and Meditation Matter in the Bay Area?

Murray is candid about the setting. Living in the Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s meant living amid the flower children, the hippie movement, and a culture fascinated with altered consciousness. "That was what seemed to me the easiest way to change my point of view was to change my consciousness," she said. She explored altered states, and she describes this period not as a shortcut but as an apprenticeship in self-knowledge.

The turn toward discipline arrived through a friend. A young woman with striking red-gold hair, dressed in indigenous clothing and fond of travel, told Murray about Transcendental Meditation. Murray got initiated. "That was also probably the most stabilizing thing I had done up until that point," she said, noting the value of meditating regularly. She later lived in a house full of meditators, and the group attended a teacher training with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Humboldt, in Northern California, which she called mind-blowing.

The sequence she describes is worth noticing. Experimentation came first, then a regular, daily container. Murray does not romanticize either phase. She frames the whole thing as "a series of many many many many, probably hundreds or thousands of little steps."

What Role Does Plant Medicine and Ceremony Play?

When Gaia asked about sacred plant medicine, and how early experiences gave way to more intentional, containerized ceremony, Murray's answer was about people more than substances. There were not many personalities to follow, she said, but there were encounters. The Meher Baba card was one. Another was the teacher's question about dying in a stupid mood. In each case a single well-timed message did more than a library. [0:554]

The conversation also moves into territory about shame and vulnerability. Murray describes processing shame and the freedom that came from being witnessed. She says she could have "literally die[d] of shame" in certain moments, and that being in the presence of someone else who could co-regulate her nervous system was one of the most important experiences of her life. [0:857] [0:950] That observation, that healing often needs another regulated human in the room, is the hinge on which her later emphasis on group practice turns.

What Are the Grounding Tools Murray Uses Now?

Murray's current learning centers on the energy school associated with Lynda Caesara, which she is studying through three classes, one with Caesara and two with one of her students. Her description of why she keeps learning is blunt: "I have just become sort of a junkie for learning techniques which help me feel stable and grounded and allow me to be more helpful." [0:1629]

The session that Gaia built around this conversation includes two live practices, and the transcript preserves enough of them to show their logic. The first is a fiber-tying exercise. Murray describes "these are our attention fibers," and talks about how attention is gathered, closed and brought back, in a way that she frames as creating safety and coherence. The exercise draws on Caesara's meditations, one of which involves a phrase about hands held together that Murray says has stayed with her. [0:1168] [0:1541]

The second is a full energetic centering meditation. Excerpts in the transcript guide the listener through the neck, down through the rib cage, into the bones, and then up toward the space overhead, with attention to filling the heart and extending one's essence into the surrounding field. If you have never tried a body-first grounding practice, the structure is familiar to many traditions: you start with physical sensation, then widen attention outward, then return it to the body. Murray's emphasis is on daily repetition. The practice is meant to be done again and again, not once for a feeling of relief.

Murray's view of these tools is practical. They are not the end of the path. As she puts it, she is "still gathering tools," and her current work is organized around sharing what helped her when she was in distress. Describing the people she meets who are suffering in ways she recognizes, she said, "I want to share with them the tools that I have learned." [0:506] Her sense of purpose emerged from her own struggle, and it has become "probably the most fulfilling part of my life."

Why Does Late Blooming Matter?

Near the end of the discussion, Murray laughed at her own trajectory. Sagittarians, she noted, tend to be late bloomers. She turned 80 in December and hopes for another decade or two, if her health holds. Her life suggests that the late bloom is not a delay but a compounding. The tools accumulate, the stupid moods become easier to spot, and the work shifts from self-repair toward service.

That is the real arc of this video, and it is more useful than any single technique. A girl given a book for cramps grew into a seeker who tried everything, learned to discard and to keep, and eventually built a daily discipline that now supports others. The lesson is not that you need to follow Murray's exact path. It is that the path is made of small steps, tested against life, and shared when they work.

Where to go from here

If this conversation resonated, start small. Pick one practice and do it daily for a month rather than sampling ten. Notice when you are in a stupid mood, and ask whether you are believing something that is not true, the question that began Murray's own turn. Find at least one person who can co-regulate with you, since her account suggests that witnessed vulnerability does much of the healing work. Then watch the full video, including the two live practices, and let the centering meditation be the start of a routine rather than a single experience. The most honest takeaway from Susan Murray's six decades is that the tools matter, but the daily return to them matters more.