Countless books have been published about the therapist-client relationship. In preparing to write The Awakened Guide, Eli Jaxon-Bear (Wake Up and Roar: Satsang With Papaji, 2017) did not read any of them. "I never considered it," he says. "I've been working on this material since the 1980s, and it . . . has grown organically. I'm not influenced by what other people might be doing or not doing."

Jaxon-Bear calls The Awakened Guide "the culmination of my life's work." It is a life spent in an often fraught spiritual journey, which he previously chronicled in his memoir, An Outlaw Makes It Home: The Awakening of a Spiritual Revolutionary (2018).

The Awakened Guide charts a path and proccess by which leaders, teachers, coaches, healers, and helpers can learn, develop, and put into practice the tools to become a True Friend to their clients. In doing so, they can help their clients achieve the ego transcendence that will allow them to see not their projection of the world, but the world as it is. 

"The waking trance we call ego," he writes, "is based on the belief that 'I know who I am. I know what I am. I know where I am.' All belief is a trance state."

In his book, Jaxon-Bear emphasizes the importance for a therapist to be fully “awake” and in the moment during client sessions: “When you do not have a personal agenda for how the moment should be, you can experience the moment as an intimate embrace,” he writes.

In conversation, Jaxon-Bear defines a therapist that is a True Friend asone with the willingness “to give up your personal views, opinions, and rights and wrongs for that period of time when you can be open and quiet and hear someone else without judging, comparing, or reflecting. It is so rare in our world, but anybody can do that.”

What are the benefits of being administered to by a True Friend? Jaxon-Bear says, “It means the client has someone open-hearted and not putting them into a [slot] such as, ‘This is OCD, and you should be treated with this.’ All of that is business and it clouds the relationship. The therapist-client relationship should be open and clear.” 

But being a True Friend does not necessarily correlate to having a long-lasting relationship with the client. The therapy that lasts decades is the stuff of comedy cliché, as in Woody Allen’s joke in Annie Hall about seeing a psychiatrist for 15 years. “I’m making excellent progress,” his character says. “Pretty soon when I lie down on his couch, I won’t have to wear the lobster bib.” “You don’t need a therapist as a lifetime friend,” Jaxon-Bear says. “The shorter the better; one session is best.”

Kirkus Reviews calls The Awakened Guide “a concise but detailed road map to a more fulfilling therapist-client relationship” and said that “Jaxon-Bear’s consistent encouragement and passion for the work shine on every page [of this] insightful treatise on the transformative power of self-reflection.”

Jaxon-Bear, 73, lives in Ashland, Oregon, with Gangaji, his wife and life partner of 45 years. The Awakened Guide has been published in the midst of an epochal health crisis.

As it happens, April 22, 2020, marks the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day. “We saw this coming,” Jaxon-Bear says. “Part of the thing we heard about when we went to the first Earth Days was about the destruction of the planet and whether there would be clean water issues, mass migrations, and a pandemic. This [pandemic] will not be our last one. Everything of the old order is already crumbling, the liberal democracies are under pressure, and our way of life is being destroyed before our eyes. Most people do not consider themselves powerful against such institutions as the government or the oil companies. All we can do is take responsibility…and wake ourselves up.”

If some of that sounds like something out of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” it may not be a coincidence. When he was a junior in high school, Jaxon-Bear saw the folk singer and proclaimed voice of his generation in a concert at New York’s Town Hall in 1963. “It changed my life,” he says. He was also influenced by iconoclastic writer John Barth, whom he admires for pushing the boundaries of the novel.

Another life-changing moment occurred when he met his own spiritual teacher, Sri H.W.L. Poonja, in India in 1990. Poonja is known by his followers as “Papaji.” “It changed everything totally,” Jaxon-Bear says. “I spent 18 years on a spiritual search; I gave my life to it. I vowed not to have children and not [to]…[settle] down to a so-called normal life. I became a Sufi, Zen Buddhist; I went to a monastery. But I never found what I was looking for. People gave me practices but not freedom.”

In his youth, Jaxon-Bear worked for social justice. He joined civil rights marches in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965 and later worked as a VISTA volunteer in Chicago and Detroit. During the Vietnam War era, he was an anti-war activist who became a federal fugitive. But he found his calling as a teacher, utilizing his own tools to develop what he called Leela Therapy (his Leela Foundation is “dedicated to world peace and freedom through universal self-realization,” according to the website). He set up his own practice, published his first book, and taught in such far-flung locales as Vienna, the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, and Hawaii. 

“I was happy, I had my best friend and partner with whom I had been together since 1976,” he says. “But I knew it wasn’t over. I was called to India to find my teacher.”

An Outlaw Makes It Home fully tells the story of how Jaxon-Bear met Papaji. In that meeting, he shares, “I knew in that moment I had a living Buddha. My heart opened. Everything I was searching for, I found.”

He considers The Awakened Guide’s value to extend beyond therapists; it also has lessons to teach couples. “This book gives you the possibility for real, direct contact for yourself and [for] each other,” he says. “You don’t need jargon. It’s about being open-hearted and receiving. You can learn how to listen to your partner with a quiet mind and open heart without judgment.”

And that, he maintains, can lead to a nonviolent revolution in which people “wake up to their true nature and connect with each other heart-to-heart.”

 Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer.