Mike Jenkins trained as an actor and has worked in theatres in London and around the country. He later worked as a performing arts teacher and customer services trainer and now creates and manages websites to help people connect with their audience. He has written two stage plays, a growing collection of poetry and has always been drawn to expressing his own perception and perspectives and exploring that of others, through the creative arts. Mike loves to talk, sing, walk, read, write, cook, eat, sleep and to help others to feel and know the deep joy, grace and peace at the centre of all life.
After many years of mental and emotional distress in his 20s and a diagnosis of cancer at the age of 29, he began exploring spiritual teachings with a voracious zeal. In 2010, after encountering the works of Tony Parsons, Jeff Foster, and many other contemporary teachers, Mike began to experience more profound changes in his perception of himself, others, and ~~of~~ all life and began writing about this on a blog. That blog was called: Nothing Saying This, so titled in recognition of the experience of the state of consciousness sometimes referred to as ‘no self’ or ‘the absolute’ and in some traditions referred to as ‘witness consciousness’.
He has given talks in Leicester, Yorkshire, Lancaster, London, and Brighton, recorded dozens of videos on YouTube, was interviewed by Rick Archer on the popular spiritual awakening video series Buddha at the Gas Pump, and has written many articles and some short eBooks. For several years, Mike helped to manage and run silent retreats, weekend workshops, and online courses (along with Jane Metcalfe) for former Trappist monk and American spiritual teacher Francis ‘Fran’ Bennett, traveling around the UK and accompanying Fran to Barcelona, where she first spoke presenting as a trans woman. This period was a profoundly special and privileged time, spent in the company of a friend, spiritual mentor, teacher, and brave soul whose integrity was to prove too much for some in the world of living spiritual teachings and who ultimately met the harsh realities of human limitations. Fran died in January 2022, in America, after complications brought on by worsening type 1 diabetes.
It was the arrival of Fran in Mike’s life that began the process of what she would have termed ‘immanence’, or as she said many times ‘coming down from the mountain and into the village’. In talks with the American Spiritual Teacher Adyashanti, Fran often spoke of the embrace of Jesus and The Buddha, illuminating the movement of ‘transcendence’ up and out of egocentric consciousness and perception and the ‘immanence’ of the Christ journey, down into a human body of flesh and blood.
Not I, Not I
the space in the sky
the silence in sounds
the eye in aye
in love whatever
may live or die
I did not go
you left me.
Look!
Here I am
forever free.
Failure, Surrender and Living in Grace
In many ways, I continually experienced extreme states of egocentric consciousness almost all of the time, swinging wildly from ecstatic joy and pleasure to deep and dark despair, stopping off at confusion and delusion along the way. Not only did these patterns create a great deal of chaos in my life effecting work, money, home life and relationships, but the accumulative impact of the stress and anxiety that resulted from these experiences also led to developing unhealthy coping habits such as drinking and smoking and finally to serious physical disease in the form of cancer, at the age of 29.
Four years after successful treatment for cancer and just 1 year before I was given the all clear, I stumbled upon some teachings of modern, Western teachers of nonduality (or Advaita Vedanta) and almost instantly experienced a sudden shift within. It felt like a huge chunk of heavy, embodied pain and resistance had fallen away, like a great mass of land breaking off, disappearing and dissolving into the vastness of an ocean. In time, I came to understand that my ultimate identity was this vast capacity and the repeated returning of my awareness to the unchanging and infinite within me (or rather, me within it), slowly began to feel more and more like my true and natural home, more and more like my true Self. Since then, I have been learning to trust that wisdom within. I have come to know it as a wisdom that appears to have a capacity to supply never ending kindness, compassion and unconditional love in the face of whatever difficulties and pain life may present to it. Trusting in that vast, timeless, unchanging and undying love through the living of my life in the world seems to come more naturally every day.
Life can and does present all of us, at some point, with some form of very painful suffering. My own suffering has blessedly not been in vain. In fact, I am thankful for every ounce of suffering, for it has shown me that it IS possible to live in a peace that passes understanding; that there is a happiness available to us that is beyond our traditional ideas of happy vs. sad and that there is a contentment that is contented even in the lived experience of discontent.
With much love
Mike