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Biography

My name is Stephen D'Amico. I am a 37-year-old Toronto-based author and spiritual teacher who underwent a dramatic mystical experience fifteen years ago that basically culminated in a permanent awakening of nondual consciousness. Since then my life has been devoted to understanding enlightenment and helping others reconnect with their true nature.

On a practical level, much of my work revolves around different kinds of service-based actions. I've worked in the field of conflict resolution and restorative justice as a mediator, facilitator, trainer, and project leader for youth social action groups. I have also taught at both the elementary and high school levels, focusing on the special needs of students with learning disabilities.

Currently, I lead a project called Global Awakening In Action (GAIA), which is dedicated to bridging spirituality and social action by providing individuals with opportunities to help others. For more information about this work click here.

So, what does enlightenment mean?

Most teachers avoid this question because as soon as you introduce the idea of enlightenment as an aim, you set up all kinds of expectations and a sense of incompleteness in people. What’s more, you are sure to offend someone – either secularists on the one hand, who write off the whole notion as childish wish-fulfillment, or believers on the other, who see it as a rarified state reserved for saints. The truth, as is so often the case, is somewhere in between.

Enlightenment (aka awakening or self-realization) is a way of shifting your identity that has been understood and explored in contemplative traditions for thousands of years. Most often it happens gradually as a result of extended meditative practice, but it can also happen more suddenly as a result of a spiritual breakthrough. Whatever the case, and despite how completely weird this may sound to some people, once this shift happens you lose primary identification with the small "s" self and end up abiding full-time in this big "S" self, where everything is experienced as an aspect of this Self. This is the eternal and enduring and blissful backdrop of Being, called, depending on the tradition, Source, Spirit, Brahman, Tao, Nirvana, Absolute Reality, Awareness, Consciousness, or even God.

I usually call it Presence. This doesn't mean you are suddenly some perfect person with all the answers to life's problems, only that from this perspective many aspects of human suffering that you may have appreciated intellectually beforehand are understood – that is to say, experienced – directly. This makes you way more compassionate and gives you access to extremely helpful insights into the human condition. For example, whenever we have a thought or a feeling, we're usually embedded in those things. After enlightenment we don’t experience our thoughts and feelings in the same way. We experience them more like clouds moving across the sky. Although this may sound totally impersonal, one of the (many) paradoxes of enlightenment is how fully human and more personal you actually become.

Many paths, one truth

I mentioned there are two ways in which people have historically “woken up” – one path is via the discipline of regular meditation, the other is more sudden and spontaneous. In fact, there are many more ways the path can unfold than this. There are probably as many paths as there are people. For me personally, although I only figured this out recently, my entire childhood was spent conscious of Presence, or in what commentators these days call a “nondual state.”

Nondual means “not-two,” which is a way to paradoxically express the ultimate truth of existence. Which is that there is only one source and substance at the heart of creation and everything else is an apparent modification of it. From a nondual perspective, there isn't the same sense of an intervening ego separating us from reality. This is why New Age people all go on about “oneness.” You recognize everything as part of you, everything as emerging from a single unified source. Most spiritual teachings circulate around this fundamental understanding. It’s also why awakening is so massively of service. It makes you realize how important it is for us to help each other since we’re all part of the same source.

As far as the larger context and reality of nondual consciousness, well, for that you don’t have to take my word for it. Just pick up the Baghavad Gita, or the Tao Te Ching, or Sri Ramana Maharshi’s talks, or any book by any number of contemporary spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle, Adyashanti, or Byron Katie. Google "nondual" or "enlightenment" and go crazy investigating the hundreds of links that come up. The fact is that practically all the world’s great wisdom traditions are about exploring the implications of this core realization – awakening to the often inexpressible realization of nondual consciousness that has so many names in so many traditions.

Back to my bio

I don’t know how or why this is, but I experienced Presence as a kid pretty much all the time. Growing up, I felt like I had one foot in this world and one foot in the formless, a kind of nondual citizenship that made me feel like I was always at home wherever I happened to be. Whenever that connection felt as though it were slipping away, I had various unusual practices I invented to bring it back. Like watching my reflection in the mirror until my awareness expanded beyond all boundaries, or tuning into the subtle energetic or vibratory quality of bodies and objects in the world, or breathing deeply into my belly until a feeling of absolute fullness filled my entire body.

As a kid, I had a strong sense that my purpose in life was to share this nondual state of awareness with others, although I didn't know how or when this would happen. When I turned twelve, I remember making a conscious decision to let go of this way of being. I had a feeling it would come back one day and it did.

It happened in my second year at university at the age of 22. I was living in the basement of my parents’ house at the time. The experience wasn't brought on by any formal meditation technique or anything like that. I was just lying in my bed, thinking about who I was – directing my attention inward – when my awareness suddenly expanded, sort of like a camera panning outwards until it includes the whole universe, except in my case I felt myself merge with this infinite spaciousness. Merge and stay. Permanently.

The closest I can come to explaining it is with a stage analogy. After this shift in my consciousness and identity occurred, I still felt as though I were acting on the stage of life, but also – simultaneously – hovering above it, out of view, kind of like a puppet master directing the action down below, but no longer actually in my body. For the next three years I lived in this transcendental and impersonal but also perfect state of total contentment.

As liberating as this period was, after those three years I eventually decided to integrate my awakening more deeply – to come back down into the world, get re-embodied. It was a massive learning experience and has become a big part of what I teach: how and why we need to make enlightenment a more personal and grounded state of being. Both are needed to complete this very real and human process. Being a person without Presence is the cause of suffering. And Presence without feeling like a person is merely a halfway point on the journey. I can spend hours unpacking that statement. It’s one of the truest things I know.

Which brings us to today and this website and my consultancy. I work with people solo and in groups and talk with them and try to help them. I also organize opportunities for people to help other people, such as distributing blankets to the homeless, volunteering at food banks, and other activities that help wake people up, wake up their call to service, wake up their inborn sensitivity to a deeper and infinitely more fulfilling perspective.

Which leads to the last thing I do, which may also sound weird to some people, but which is the most powerful method I know of to help others awaken spiritually. In the Hindu tradition it’s called shaktipat, which is a Sanskrit term denoting a kind of energetic blessing that can be transmitted to others.

There is a lot of talk on the web and in pop culture about 2012 and the evolution of consciousness and a global shift in awareness and how humanity is on the brink of a mass awakening. With increasing numbers of people all around the world awakening, the evidence is clear that this process is already well underway. My personal sense is that it is only a matter of time before a critical mass of enlightened people will bring about a change in the rest of the population. My offerings for enlightened coaching and satsang – along with the Global Awakening In Action website – is my attempt to assist this shift by changing how people see the world and act within it. I would love your help.