Offerings
What You Can Explore
What You Desire
Three Proven Keys
How It All Works
To bring your HEART to life through
Waking Down in Mutuality®
Welcome to your exploration of our Human Sun HEART Work and the “liberating gifts of your HEART’s existential sunshine"!
For many people, our work has facilitated an unprecedented breakthrough in their bodies, minds, hearts, souls, relationships, and participation in life. We’ve tried here to introduce a number of ways that might take place for you. We hope what we present on this page will give you clear, action-able information.
You can benefit by reading this section in order. You can also click forward whenever you wish to any of the live links above.
Though we’ve included some relevant graphic illustrations and pics of endorsers and participants, the main visual symbols we’ve chosen for Offerings are photos of flowers, mostly taken by Linda. We encourage you to take some time and feel into those and the other images as you go through this page and all those that follow.
We’ll open with endorsements of our work by two widely respected thought leaders:
“The spiritual teachings of Saniel Bonder and Linda Groves-Bonder embody timeless wisdom, immense practicality, and a refreshing lightheartedness and joy. They are authentic healers — practitioners who help people become whole by discovering their intrinsic holiness. And, they are among the most talented, multifaceted, awake people I know.”
— Larry Dossey, M.D., author, One Mind, The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things, Prayer Is Good Medicine
"Saniel Bonder is one in whom the Conscious Principle is awakened, and he is attempting to forge a new path of mutuality in the midst of ordinary, messy, everyday realities ... and Linda Groves-Bonder is a brilliant teacher in her own right."
— Ken Wilber, philosopher, founder of the international Integral movement, author of The Religion of Tomorrow and other seminal works
Here are your possible next steps for learning more…
To bring your HEART to life through
Maximizing Joy™ and
Waking Down in Mutuality®
Welcome to your exploration of our Human Sun HEART Work!
For many people, our work has facilitated an unprecedented breakthrough in their bodies, minds, hearts, souls, and relationships, their whole participation in life. We hope it can do the same for you.
Below we offer a lot of options. The best first step for many people is simple and old-fashioned: let’s talk!
Of course, you may prefer to explore what’s here on your own and see what sings to your heart. We’re happy to be of help however we can.
The main visual symbols we’ve chosen for our Offerings page are photos of flowers, mostly taken by Linda. Take some time and feel into them as you go. They amplify and radiate the spirit of what we’re also conveying in the words.
Practical Ways to Experience Our HEART Work
We’ll start with ways you can have direct personal interaction and communication with us.
~ Live Online Events and Courses with Us
We post announcements of these on our Events page and in our regular mailings. Two free events on Zoom that we welcome you to attend are Virtual Heart Gatherings, hosted by both of us, and HEART of Peace Meditations, hosted by Saniel.
Beginning in February, 2024, we also host an online gathering every 3rd Thursday of the month for those who’ve purchased one or both of our courses on “Maximizing Joy.”
~ Personal, Couples, or Group Coaching with one or both of us, for:
- Awakening or post-awakening growth
- Conscious grieving
- Intimacy and commitment in transformational partnerships
- Clarifying your gifts and fulfilling your purpose
- Exploring and expressing your creativity
- Other life-issues or areas of interest, including entrepreneurship and leadership skills
No question about it: the part of our work we love the most is personal interaction with people who are moved to go deep.
It doesn’t fundamentally matter to us whether your interest is in “lightening and brightening” your everyday life and spiritual connections or your next phase of embodied awakening, growth, healing, transformation, or contribution, or two or more of these.
We’re happy to get to know you personally and serve your unique needs.
A few general points:
- In a discovery session, we can help you choose an ideal program for your needs
- In general we recommend co-coaching by both of us
- Each of us is also available for individual work with you
- Your program will be quite customized and will include both structure and spontaneity
- We might or might not recommend a particular book, guided meditation, or recorded course as complements to the live coaching
- If you are nearby, we can consider hosting you in our home, "Sun in Your Heart Sanctuary," for one or more sessions
- Otherwise, except for Residential Retreats of course, all sessions are online on Zoom or by phone.
More details on what our coaching service includes
Here are the formats you can choose among for your coaching experience with us:
- 1-Session and 2-Session Intensives
These are super-sessions, you could say — 2.5 hours each with a short break about halfway through. The 2-Session Intensives can take place on a single day or with the second session up to several days after the first. - 3-Month and 6-Month Coaching-Facilitated Journeys
Typically including three 50-minute sessions, one per week, for the first three weeks of each four-week period, with no session in the fourth week so you can integrate what’s happened previously.
~ Retreats online or at our home
- 1-, 2-, or 3-Day Residential Retreats for individuals or couples
- Daylong Virtual Retreats for individuals, couples, or small groups
Each Residential Retreat day typically includes two 2-hour coaching sessions. Those sessions can include any or all of the ways of interacting we’ve described above for our coaching relationships with you generally.
But so much more takes place on Residential Retreats, including a lot of time hanging out with one another, getting to know each other face to face, having meals together, private time for walks, rest, etc., and just being in the intensifying Heart-presence that’s now well established in our sanctuary home.
Most people who come on 3-day Residential Retreats choose the option on the 2nd day of a shamanic journey with Saniel to sites on Mt. Tamalpais, at the ocean, and among the redwoods that are sacred to us.
The Daylong Virtual Retreats can take several forms, depending in part on how many participants there will be. We co-design your retreat in advance with you and anyone else taking part.
If you’d like to learn more about these retreat opportunities — how they’re structured, what you can experience, and more — let’s talk about all that in person.
Please contact us to schedule your discovery session. One of us will get back to you shortly. We look forward to hearing from you!
~ Books & eBooks, Audio & Video Recordings, Music & Song
~ Guided Meditations
~ Evergreen Courses
See our Store for these publications in multiple media. Far more than just sources of information — for many people they're catalytic vehicles of inspiring, life-changing, HEART-activating wisdom.
~ Our podcast interviews hosted by leading podcasters
You can find these on our Events page.
~ New live online courses will be coming again in 2024! If you’re on our mailing list, we’ll let you know more when the time is right.
Thank you for your interest.
Along with our wonderful Human Sun HEART Work team,
we look forward to serving you!
Yearnings Our Offerings Can Help You Fulfill
Remember the questions we asked on our Home page?
Here they are again:
- Do you long for or want to deepen an unshakable, embodied spiritual awakening that embraces all aspects of who you are?
- Are you hungry to ignite your passion, express your unique gifts, and fulfill your highest potential and purpose in life?
- Do you want to lighten your heart and brighten your experience of being alive?
In our personal work with others, we’ve specialized in helping hundreds of people in those first two areas: embodied awakening and creative fulfillment of their life-purpose. Many thousands have benefited along with them in the third area, the easing and spiritual enlivenment of their everyday lives.
Let’s look a little more deeply into all three of those kinds of desired change.
HEART-Illumined Living
Lightening your stress, brightening and strengthening your life, mind, and soul
HEART-Infused Service
Self-empowering the unique expression of your genius & gifts for the greater good
HEART-Illumined Living
Lightening & Brightening Your Life, Mind, & Soul
Linda often speaks of our passion to “reach and touch hungry or hurting hearts.” Everyone’s got pains and dreams. Even for those who look like they’ve got it all together, deeper down there’s an intrinsic human “HEART wound” that’s crucial to appreciate for one's optimal HEART-Illumined Living. It’s central to our various teachings and trainings..
For most people, profound spiritual awakening and embodiment aren’t on their radar or their wish list. We’re more than fine with that. Such realization isn’t necessary for anyone until and unless they come to feel that it is.
Great numbers of people, though, do long for and can enjoy what we call HEART-Illumined Living. It can ease the heavy load of stress you carry and amplify a sense of brightness in your core — that “existential sunshine.” It can also:
- Lessen your sense of isolation and strengthen your connectedness — to your body, others, Nature, and whatever means most to you
- Help you better manage body, mind, emotions, and relationships
- Help you love yourself more, and all your parts
- Inspire you to give and serve more
- Heighten your sense of well-being
- Refine your capacity for self-regulation and resilience
- Strengthen your will and capacity to get things done and realize goals
- Uplift your spirits, deepen your joy, and enhance your optimism and hope
What our clients and friends say about our impact in their lives is due to the HEART itself easing their pains, shining more brightly, and coming more fully alive in them. We simply provide help. (See how in the “proven keys” section below.)
Saniel and Linda are sages and their guidance, wisdom and ongoing support have been life-affirming for me. Both are incredible curators and I feel so grateful to have them as guides in my life. Honestly, having this connection with them sometimes feels like I’ve won the human lottery.
— Erika Cartagena, certified coach, leader and consultant on “people functions” for major corporations, board member for women-oriented start-ups, and a passionate dog-lover
We welcome you to explore the practical options we listed above to see how our Human Sun HEART Work can enhance your own HEART-Illumined Living.
HEART-Awakening
Realizing your Unshakable, Relational Embodiment of Boundless Being
From the beginning of our work in the early to mid 1990s, we have attempted to democratize what’s now widely called “embodied awakening.”
There’s a deep-feeling, visceral signature to our work’s quality of this transformation. It’s not easy to put into words. For us, the mystic and evolutionary scientist Teilhard de Chardin’s phrase about Christ resonates with how the HEART feels in this kind of awakened life: “infinitely distant and infinitely intimate.”
Some of the elements of the Human Sun awakening process:
“Dare to grasp the means of your own realization.” This admonition came to Saniel at a crucial moment in his own quest to awaken.
Most forms of mentoring, coaching, or spiritual teaching require you to follow the instructions of a wiser person or other authority.
Ours doesn’t. We offer suggestions, recommendations, advice and input. You have to be free to choose to put any of it to use, or not. Which takes some daring, for sure!
The HEART wound ripens into the “HEART wound/wellness paradox.” Our version of the awakening process can be an ordeal. That’s in part because it begins with a disintegration in your most essential, core feeling of being. It’s like a caterpillar dissolving in a chrysalis of its own substance before newly forming into a butterfly.
We call that disintegration “the Rot.” It’s often misunderstood as failure or inadequacy. In this process, it’s actually progress.
This passage puts you in greater touch than ever before with the existential HEART wound, also called the “core wound.” Then it gradually reveals a profound HEART wellness at the core of your being. Mysteriously, the well-being doesn’t replace or heal but rather coincides with and gradually “out-shines” that wound or dis-ease.
All of which leads suddenly or gradually to a remarkable transition.
The Second Birth. What our work can help you awaken into is not a transcendent, blissful state apart from life’s harshness and ordeals. It’s an ongoing integration of all your parts — the pains and the pleasures, the darkness and the light, matter and spirit, the human and the divine.
We call it a “Second Birth” because it’s such a radical, that is, “from the roots,” change in your baseline sense of being alive. One person said it well: “I’m here like I’ve never been here before — and there is no ‘there’!”
That birth then opens into your Second Life. Among the many further transitions that can take place:
- Falling into intimate love with the world, Nature, and the Earth more deeply than ever before — and with your local, personal, human life
- Finding a constant calm at the core of your being that strengthens an un-lose-able and unshakable confidence in Being
- Developing natural skill at “greenlighting” all aspects of your life in ways that empower a sense of wholeness you’ve never known before
- Sensing the “beingness” and living experience of other people and creatures with empathic immediacy, a profound “being-with” in mutuality
- Refining an ever-greater capacity to hold multiple, even conflicting perspectives — and also to take authentic, definitive stands and actions
- Through all this, recognizing that the HEART is emerging as you, even as your bodily, human ego, thinking mind, desires, reactions, pains and dreams
The White Heat. There is a potential intensification of the awakened condition in the Second Life that we call the “White Heat” of the HEART. Its main gift is a deeper, continuous confidence in feeling and knowing the entire world and all beings as Conscious Love.
You can find books and courses that address all these aspects of awakening in our Store.
"As I’ve become more and more established in this whole-being realization, I’ve relaxed more deeply into myself and discovered a new confidence in Being. I’m a better, more thoughtful mother, partner, and friend. I’m a more considered and competent leader. I’m living the Mystery of Being in a more conscious way, flowing with life, and more able to appreciate the beauty, tenderness, and majesty of every moment."
— Lynn Evans is a leading executive in global online education at the University of Liverpool in the UK, a wife and mother, and an entrepreneur. [See Lynn’s full testimonial in Appreciations.]
"I feel very confidently rooted in my second life now. It’s distinctly different. The human life still unfolds with all its complexities and challenges and raw humanness, and at the same time there is this unshakable trust in Being, and this unshakable realization of the other part of the simultaneity, which is embodied being. It’s effortless. A game-changer…This second life is the biggest gift that can be given.”
— Ralf Marzen is an international leader and trainer of therapists in the groundbreaking, somatic NARM (NeuroAffective Relational Model) therapeutic school and movement, and a father. [See Ralf’s full testimonial in Appreciations.]
HEART-Infused Service
Self-Empowering the Unique Expression of Your Genius & Your Gifts
Service and contribution have been primary practices not only in most spiritual paths and traditions but in most human cultures. Here are some main points about our orientation to HEART-Infused Service.
Your service can become HEART-Infused at any time. The HEART is always living, breathing, and being each of us — and everyone else, and all beings. It also continually evolves in and through each and all of us, drawing us more and more to make positive contributions of all kinds to our world. This is taking place no matter where we may be on the “map” of any particular path of healing, growth, awakening, or transformation.
HEART-Infused Service takes place through both our “doing” and our “being.” That is, through all our active contributions to others and the world — and also through our simple presence, even when we’re not trying to do anything. In these “doing”-obsessed times, that dimension of dimension of serving through sheer presence is often overlooked.
We could say that “serving by being” is one of the ways the HEART transmits itself continuously between and among all beings and things. Linda likes to point out that everyone and everything is always transmitting its nature and condition to all others and receiving the same from them all, simultaneously. Leading-edge science suggests the same. (See the section on HEART-Transmission below.)
Attuning to and realizing the HEART can open you to unexpected dimensions of your unique genius and gifts. These can include magical or mythical, psycho-spiritual forms of awareness, experience, and ability. For both of us, for instance, vivid relationships with the Divine Feminine in many forms, including traditional archetypes, living creatures, and Mother Earth, have become natural parts of our daily living.
And that intensifying attunement can include refinement and more effective expression of these gifts and your purpose over time. Your purpose or calling may not look like anyone else’s. It may feel more like a calling to “be” rather than any particular things to “do.”
You also may feel as if your purpose and, in Linda’s phrase, your “conscious skillful will” to fulfill it, have been supercharged. This is what we mean when we speak of “catalytic self-empowerment and contribution.”
“Through Saniel's and Linda's work, I have been able to tap more readily into this innate capacity that they refer to as ‘the unshakable joy.’ It has made me a more effective and resilient change-maker, able to withstand life's challenges while remaining grateful with a fuller heart.
Their Human Sun HEART process is an invitation to live this possibility sooner and with greater confidence and trust. If you are a change-maker, you don't have to choose between your advocacy or wellbeing, or between the profound and the profane. You can be at ease with both harmoniously, thanks to accessing the all-inclusive Heart of your being as never before.”
— Amir Ahmad Nasr, aka the artist Drima Starlight, is an artist, futurist, and journalist, and a renowned strategic advisor to evolutionary leaders, including us and our Human Sun team. [See Amir’s full statement in Appreciations.]
That Unlock Your HEART's Potential Gifts
Again and again, for thousands of people over the more than three decades of our work, these three “keys to the radiant HEART” have consistently served the kinds of changes we’ve been describing here.
~ First key — HEART-Transmission: the 24/7, effortless radiation, by those for whom it’s natural, of a presence that:
- intensifies our intimate connection to the ultimate mystery of Being,
- streamlines our embodiment of whole-being awakeness,
- and stimulates post-realization growth
Spiritual transmission might sound esoteric. But as a phenomenon in ordinary life, it’s not unfamiliar to most of us. We know what it’s like to be around a person whose presence and energy are magnetic or enlivening, even without effort on their part.
Adepts in many spiritual traditions convey particular qualities of energy and awareness or special practices through one or another form of transmission.
In our work HEART-Transmission is a simple, effortless, and continuous evolutionary quickening. Its primary impact is not to draw attention to the energy of the transmitter, but rather to help activate the awakening and embodiment of conscious Being in the recipient.
~ Second key — HEART-Exploration: each person’s fingerprint-unique, creative and transformational investigation of the revolutionary precepts and practices of the Human Sun HEART Work, are most effective when directly supported by a realized mentor or coach
Waking Down in Mutuality is the best known and most foundational of our teachings and trainings that present these precepts and practices. We’ll speak more about it below. Other full and distinctive expressions of our Human Sun HEART Work or “Dharma” include:
- The White-Hot Yoga of the HEART™
- The Tantra of Trust™
- The HEART-Force of Destiny™
And some of the specific practices we offer are:
- Six-Step Recognition Yoga™
- Active Conscious Dreaming™ (a HEART-based manifestation process)
- The Falcon’s Glance for Awakening Consciousness™
- Receiving Heart-Transmission Through Gazing
We welcome you to learn more about all these. You can find publications on most of them in our Store. More to come, also!
~ Third key — HEART-Evocation: the catalytic “calling forth,” by both an awakened coach or mentor and wise fellow practitioners, of each one’s potential to clarify their one-of-a-kind genius and gifts and shine their light in the world.
Your crystallization of the universal Power of Being and Becoming is a one-of-a-kind event in Nature that has not been and cannot be duplicated exactly in anybody else, past, present, or future.
In HEART-Evocation we speak to that Godness, that HEART, as It is coming alive and awake precisely in, as, and through you, and manifesting utterly unique forms of genius through your contributions.
We try to make all of our communications HEART-Evocations for anyone who receives them. In our live events and especially personal coaching interactions, we get to take this practice with and for you to a whole other, powerfully personalized level.
Because they are so aspirant-centered, these three proven keys have most often had what we might call an “anti-cultic” effect — which is what we want! As one person who had awakened with our help and that of our colleagues said years ago, “You give us such unprecedented access to ourselves that we forget about you!” We want people to come, get what help we can offer that they need, come into their own fullness and power, and move on freely into their own journeys of further refinement and contribution.
To Bring Your HEART to Life
through Waking Down in Mutuality
Another general phrase we use for how you can benefit from our offerings at any given time is “Optimal Total Wellness.” The Human Sun HEART Work deeply enlightens our ordinary, everyday humanity. It reveals the inherent sacredness, even divinity, of the mundane, and even the profane. In this way it invites us to ground our efforts toward greater bodily, emotional, and relational wellness in the fundamental Wellness of Being.
Waking Down in Mutuality is a primary, current-time expression of what human beings go through when the HEART becomes ever more Self-aware in, as, and through them. Along with the shorter phrase Waking Down, Waking Down in Mutuality is the brand name by which our teachings and work have best been known in the world up till now. (See our Waking Down in Mutuality Facebook page.)
Waking. “Waking up” is an ancient spiritual impulse in us humans. It’s associated with finding salvation or getting enlightened by rising out of imprisonment in your karma, body-mind, and relationships, even the whole material world. Some Eastern traditions point even beyond the soul’s experience of heavenly graces to an absolute, transcendental freedom in “nirvana” or “moksha.”
“Waking” in our approach differs from waking up in all those soulful or sheerly nirvanic, transcendental ways. In it, you don’t first “wake up” and then “wake down,” as some other current approaches suggest. Instead, the HEART opens in you viscerally as transcendental, transpersonal Being and at the same time coalesces into your bodily personhood as a singular, multidimensional wholeness.
Down. The “Down” part of the work involves a paradoxical falling into or landing here in this life and world. It leads to knowing yourself as a divinely human animal with your own particular likes and dislikes, attachments and aversions, none of which is in principle powerful or dangerous enough to obstruct your awakening.
The Down work also includes an ongoing, increasingly refined recognition or “knowing again” and integration of the unconscious and subconscious, “shadow” patterns of your own psyche. It also puts you in touch with the collective, primordial, multigenerational darkness that continues to afflict humanity.
All of which can at times become quite an ordeal, but one very much worth going through.
“[These] teachings have rolled out the red carpet, given me license to morph into the divine, stinking human animal that I am. The lethal, marooned parts of myself, like black sheep in a family, have been met. I have fallen into myself, at last, and am fertile and lit.”
— Shauna Gunderson, a writer, publicist, and mother of two, writing in Saniel’s 1998 book Waking Down: Beyond Hypermasculine Dharmas — A Breakthrough Way of Self-Realization in the Sanctuary of Mutuality
Mutuality. The whole process is grounded in a powerfully transformative quality of relational mutuality — a practice of being true to our total selves while participating with others, whether or not they are doing the same, and in conscious relatedness with everyone and everything.
In this orientation, we come into full feeling, knowing, and being the universal Self-“sameness” with all and everything. At the same time we are participating as our own unique selves among an infinite multiplicity of others and “Othernesses” of all kinds, sentient and not.
What a grace-giving Mystery! And, mutuality is often hard work, it’s often complicated, and sometimes our best efforts at it together fail. Yet its wonderful benefits make it undeniably worth the effort.
Something Simple and Essential
When all is said and done, something simple and essential is going on here:
To the best of our ability, we try to live as sane, humane, wise and loving-kind humans, and to help others do the same.
We help others appreciate and take inspiration, as we ourselves do, from this basic message to each and all: “The Sun in your HEART is rising!”
Here’s a final comment for now, from another client about the most meaningful way our work has served him:
"Saniel and Linda have helped me to understand myself as divine love, the 'I am That I AM.' If I walk in the world being the light that I am, with the grace of God it will give others permission to be themselves as the light that they are."
— Richard Schoeller is a Certified Medium, an ordained Spiritualist Minister and international Spiritualist teacher, and a step-father and step-grandfather. [See Richard’s full testimonial in Appreciations.]
Thank you again for your interest in our Offerings!
We’re happy to give you complimentary access
to our empowering and liberating video:
“The Two Kinds of Joy, and
Why It’s Totally OK for You to Maximize Both”
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and current events and offerings.
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