My name is Jim Tolles. I am a teacher.
I teach people how to be free of suffering and transform their lives.
Suffering is driven by our attachments. Attachments include beliefs and emotions as well as our more basic sensations and primal patterns.
I’ve helped people realize freedom from attachments since 2010.
It is hard work.
However, it is possible.
It is possible to realize you’re free and be truly enlightened.
Who Am I?
I know you want a story about me. Your ego wants to feel safe. It wants to feel like it’ll get what it wants.
But you’ve come to a person teaching you about ego death.
That’s a big conflict of interest because my ego died. I’ll show you how to die and be reborn in the present moment.
My story is similar to only a few of you. Most of you on the spiritual path have deep and/or complex trauma. Intense pain has driven you here.
That didn’t drive me.
My path has been one of success.
I succeeded by so many of society’s standards.
I graduated with a 4.0 GPA from high school as one of four high school valedictorians.
I got a full-ride to go to college (I went to college, essentially for free).
I earned two degrees in four years (one in Creative Writing and one in History).
I graduated from college summa cum laude.
I helped a city councilmember win re-election in my first full-time job, and I helped write a city application that allowed a city to be a finalist for being one of the best cities in the U.S.
I turned my writing passion into a career as managing editor at a successful start-up, which is still in business as of today.
I got a girlfriend.
And….
Well, it wasn’t it.
A restlessness and yearning inside me wasn’t satisfied.
Still, I went on to have a six-figure job at a major tech company.
All of this happened before I was 30 years old.
Society’s success standards didn’t bring me what I thought I wanted.
A Spiritual Awakening Finds Me
A yearning towards spirituality drew me away from social standards for success. In 2007, I had a spiritual awakening.
What did that mean for me?
Desire and restlessness disappeared.
My mind went quiet.
It felt like someone turned off a blaring radio for the first time in my whole life.
Then life started to fall apart as my illusions got shaken.
The next 8 years involved:
- A humbling process
- A learning process around how ego and attachments are held in the body and how to release them
- A backsliding into old career paths that no longer served me
- A profound opening of my heart and learning about the many layers of love
- The start of spiritual teaching in 2010 and learning how broken most spiritual people are
And a lot more than that.
The years since then have been even more revelatory.
Realizing Full Freedom
Realizing full spiritual freedom, I understood that I am free of all attachments, and
Life Is.
It wasn’t a big moment.
The initial awakening moments can be big moments, although not always. My initial moment gave me a stark contrast. The final realization was more like the sun reached high noon. It went from 11:59 AM to 12 PM.
Not much of a change.
When I say that I’m free of all attachments, that means I can see and let them go. It doesn’t mean that I don’t find illusions in me. I find them, but I know how to unlearn them. I know I always have a choice, and I can act upon that choice.
But that’s not what many of you think realizing freedom is.
The spiritual bypassers think total enlightenment is the ultimate escape.
It isn’t.
It’s life staring naked and unwavering straight at you along with all your problems you thought you’d escape in broad daylight.
The spiritual copers hope they’ve found a way to coexist with all their problems and feel good.
It isn’t.
Life isn’t about feeling good all the time.
The spiritual self-medicators think they’ve found a way to neutralize their pain.
Being numb doesn’t take away your issues.
The spiritual thrill-seekers think enlightenment is a full-on, all-day rollercoaster.
You’re dissociated. Go to therapy. Face your trauma.
The spiritual knowledge-collectors confuse realizing full free spiritual freedom as a kind of omniscience.
Quite the opposite.
I realized, as others have, that I know next to nothing.
That realization freed my mind.
I know how to come back to awareness and breathe.
I know I can learn anything that is possible to learn, and I know how to ask questions to get to reality and the truth.
I can do this with any attachment inside me or external world situation around me.
And I have.
And I’ve created new patterns.
I can do this again and again whenever I need to.
I am not trapped in the initial responses of my ego anymore.
What About Spiritual Bliss and Ecstasy?
What’s hard about this whole conversation is that you’re most likely comparing it to the nonsense that followers of other teachers wrote down, embellished, and have canonized.
It’s rare that a spiritual teacher really breaks down what the reality of realization Is.
The confused spiritual follower writes most of the stories.
Typically, those stories are profoundly incorrect or interpreted too literally by spiritual seekers of today.
Rumi is one teacher who comes to mind who did a lot of his own writing.
His ecstatic poetry is often misinterpreted, but it’s not hard to see why he might be ecstatic from time to time, not all the time. He was a well-to-do man with a strong community breathing fresh air; drinking natural water; sleeping on his circadian rhythms; moving his body a lot to get to where he needed to go; and eating local, non-gmo, organic food.
If you wake up in that world and don’t feel ecstatic, that’s on you.
Bliss and ecstasy are experiences that come and go.
All experiences come and go, and attachments to any experiences cause suffering.
In surrender to reality, we let them pass through us.
My Philosophy and Methodology
My philosophy is surrender.
My philosophy is grounded in teaching people that they have to learn how to transform otherwise they will do what they know.
What do people know?
Surrender typically leads to several spiritual awakening stages that repeat:
- Unlearning and healing
- Rebalancing
- Experiencing the unknown
- Reimagining and repatterning yourself based on reality now that you know what it is
However, there is so much resistance to even starting.
Resistance shows up as pride, shame, self-doubt, self-pity, guilt, fear, and so many others.
All of it is in resistance to seeing yourself and reality.
I help you focus on accepting where you are and the reality you’re in.
That’s what a spiritual freedom teacher does.
However, “spiritual teacher” is not a sufficient term. What I do covers so much more because I meet people where they are. That means I am also a:
- Disciplinarian
- Cheerleader
- Judge
- Salesman
- Health coach
- Love guru
- Incrementalist
- Sex education teacher
- Career counselor
- Community leader, and so many other roles as is needed to help someone break free of ego.
The initial methodology is focused on the basics like breathing and coming back to awareness.
This is the alpha and omega tool.
Again and again, a person has to learn to not implicitly agree with their perceptions of themselves.
Instead, they learn to inquire into why they think what they think, feel what they feel, and sense what they sense.
In surrender, I can use any and everything as tool of ego dissolution and transformation. That includes:
- Romantic relationships
- Career changes
- Health improvements, and more.
Certainly, it also includes instruction around:
- Meditation
- Journaling
- Breathwork
- Yoga nidra
- Awareness, and others
Additionally, most people reading this are heavily traumatized, and without surrender, no healing is possible.
In fact, hundreds of people have come my way after having thwarted their therapists, counselors, and healers for decades because they’ve resisted their traumas.
They want their traumas to go away if they are even willing to accept that they exist.
Surrender embraces trauma so that the body can resolve itself.
This is the easy part.
Trauma is a state of tension.
The body yearns to release and relax.
The harder parts are unlearning ego patterns that have been praised and rewarded.
The even harder parts are learning how to learn again and repatterning yourself consciously.
Almost no one gets to the next part.
There’s no ego or animal body incentive to do so. For many people who succeed at healing through surrender, they end up on a plateau and end right when the possibilities of realizing freedom truly begin.
Getting off the Spiritual Plateau
Resolving old wounds and traumas are like healing two broken legs and standing up for the first time. You no longer need the metaphorical wheelchair.
You may feel like it is good enough.
If you don’t go further, you never learn to walk,
Or to run,
Or to jump,
Or to dance.
I want to see you dancing.
What Are My Credentials?
I’ve been working with people since 2010. I have an immense catalog of experiences dealing with countless ego issues and constructs like:
- Self-worth issues
- Scarcity fears
- Pride
- Guilt
- Broken nervous systems (shaking and trembling bodies)
Energy-caused Involuntary Muscle Spasms or Kriyas
As for official credentials to make your ego think I will be successful in helping you because a bunch of other people awarded me certificates and degrees in the past years to validate my ability to point towards freedom and transform you, I don’t have those.
I took the experiential route.
You will have to take the experiential route to realize your freedom too.
Humble Yourself to the Work
This is a snapshot of me and my methodology. If you want to go further in humbling yourself and learning about realizing freedom and transforming out of your old ego, you can learn more about my services below.