Robert Silvers

Teacher

Welcome Message

Welcome!

I’m happy to be of service to you in your awakening process. I see our work together as being about you, so that your unique and whole self can be expressed.

Let me tell you a little about myself, so you can see if you feel drawn to working with me. To begin with, my life has been centered on personal and spiritual growth. As a teenager, I was faced by existential questions such as “what is my life about?” and “what does it matter what I do in life if death is at the end?”

In order to deal with those questions, I  became a Buddhist monk and spent eight years at a Zen center. While I did find answers, I also found that I needed to expand my life beyond the confines of a training center, and even beyond the confines of Buddhism. This led to an exploration of many different spiritual paths (Hindu Advaita, Jewish Renewal, Sufi groups, incarnational spirituality, etc.), as well as psycho-therapeutic and personal development work. I have also studied the Enneagram extensively.

After a period of several years of searching (unsuccessfully) for a spiritual path that truly “spoke” to me, I found Waking Down in 2009. I became a mentor in 2011 and a teacher in 2012. I was also the Executive Director of the Institute of Awakened Mutuality from 2011 to 2014. I stepped away from Trillium in 2018 for some personal reasons, but I’m very happy to be back in the teaching community, and I look forward to assisting students experience and deepen in their Whole Being Realization.

As far as my work life outside of spiritual communities, after I left the Zen Center of Los Angeles, I worked briefly as a corporate accountant. I then obtained an MBA from UCLA and a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Stanford, leading to a career as a business school professor. I left that career after a decade, and since then I have been a clinical hypnotherapist, and a life coach. I have also served on the Boards of several nonprofits.

I feel that these life experiences allow me to support people coming from a wide variety of situations and perspectives precisely because of my experiences in both the “spiritual” and “secular” worlds.