When I was 21 years old, I had a spontaneous opening that changed my life.

I didn’t know what had happened to me to make me feel so connected to the world and filled with joy. It lasted about three days. It was a drug-free, spontaneous opening of my heart.

I then spent the next 40 years searching for the ease and flow and joyful energy that filled my heart to overflowing.

My search began with reading. My bookshelves are filled with books with titles like Be Happy! and The Best Year of your Life. Dozens and dozens of them. Most of them spiritual books.

I began taking workshops. And therapy. And more therapy. And yet I still was seeking for the answers to my heart’s longing for the overwhelming joy and happiness I’d felt at 21.

Most of us resign ourselves.

And I did that, too. I “moved on” to my adult life, falling in love with the woman of my dreams, a most loving and beautiful woman (inside and out). Liz and I have been married for 34 years and have three adult children. I worked in sales, management and training in our family business, wholesaling medical and nursing books.

But I kept searching.

Searching for what it was that had once opened my heart so wide and was so exhilarating there was energy pouring out of me. And little by little, I inched my way toward what I was seeking.

And then it happened.

I found two online courses over a period of five years (2010—2015) that leaped me forward. With Debbie Ford’s online Integrative Coaching course, and Arjuna Ardagh’s Awakening Coaching, I had a deep personal transformation into a direct, felt understanding of my own nature and its wholehearted wellbeing.

In 2014, as I was finishing my certification as an Awakening Coach, I discovered my teacher, Rupert Spira. With his mastery and guidance into a spiritual practice called The Direct Path (from the perennial wisdom of Advaita Vedanta Hindu philosophy), I am deepening awakening into my true nature. It was Rupert’s artistry in language and creative teaching that facilitated and deepened my understanding and the entry into living from the heart, which seems to me to be the path of spiritual liberation.

I am no longer a seeker. I live more and more from this felt understanding of my true nature beyond thinking and conceptual living from a mental model.

I have lifted off the limiting concepts and live from my true nature of pure awareness, presence, or consciousness.

I know that this understanding has made all the difference in allowing me to integrate the ease and flow that I first fell into spontaneously and unwittingly, and now am thrilled to have integrated that elusive awakening by integrating The Direct Path.

Joyful Living Global expresses my heart, my passion and my purpose: Using my life to serve the greater good of awakening to our true nature.

As Eckhart Tolle, author of the bestseller, The Power of Now, states so clearly:

“(Awakening to our true nature) is the one thing that changes everything.”

~ Larry Steven Weiss