Founder and Teacher of Grounded Awakeness

 

Long before Grounded Awakeness existed, Marius had spent many years searching. Life had taken him through the pursuit of success, self-understanding, healing, spirituality, and eventually awakening. As his investigation deepened, he longed for more than another explanation of himself. He wanted to discover what was true, and believed that seeing it could finally bring the struggle to an end.

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Then the foundations of that pursuit gave way.

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The collapse began with several weeks in which the ordinary movement of thought was almost entirely absent. The mind that had spent a lifetime interpreting, anticipating, and trying to find its way through life had fallen into an immense stillness, and the familiar sense of being someone with a past to explain and a future to secure had been profoundly disturbed.

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What followed reached further into the foundations of his existence. There were further cycles of collapse, accompanied by disorientation, existential fear, profound grief, and the loss of much that had previously given his life meaning and direction. Much of what he had once taken to be reality was revealed as something the mind itself had constructed. Amid the upheaval, there also emerged a newfound intimacy with the simplicity of existence, opening in time into experiences of extraordinary beauty and love.

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The disintegration continued for nearly two years. There were times when something seemed to have finally fallen away, only for the familiar sense of self to begin taking shape again around what remained. An understanding could offer a new place to stand. An insight could seem to settle something once and for all, until even that was seen as another thing to hold on to.

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What became increasingly apparent was how deeply fear was involved in this movement. At times it was unmistakable, arising as the familiar foundations of his existence were threatened. At others, it was more difficult to recognize, concealed within the urgency to understand what was happening or the relief of finally arriving at an answer. Even the search for truth carried an unspoken demand that whatever was discovered must somehow bring an end to uncertainty. Again and again, Marius found himself confronting the extraordinary capacity of the self to survive its own exposure, finding new ways to preserve something of itself even as its previous foundations fell away.

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Through this unravelling, he began recognizing something in the way people spoke about their own awakenings. Profound experiences and genuine insights were sometimes being taken as final conclusions long before the movements of self had come to an end. Something real had been discovered, but the meaning assigned to it went further than what had actually been seen. Around these conclusions new identities could form, often strengthened by the agreement of others who believed they had arrived at the same place. And once the search was declared complete, there was little reason to question what remained. Fear, attachment, and the need to defend and preserve a familiar sense of oneself could continue, now protected by the conviction that liberation had already occurred.

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Grounded Awakeness grew from this seeing.

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Through his writing and forthcoming book, The Corruption of Awakening, Marius challenges a confusion at the heart of contemporary spirituality: mistaking the recognition of the self's illusory nature for freedom from the bondage that continues despite it.

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The writing, however, is only one expression of his work.

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Today, Marius meets with people from around the world, both privately and in regular live gatherings. ​People who work with him often speak of an uncompromising honesty they have struggled to find elsewhere. Some describe it as encountering a clear mirror. Marius is willing to question an understanding that seems perfectly reasonable, to stay with something another person would rather move past, or to challenge a conclusion that has brought an inquiry to a premature end. What people find just as significant is that this directness does not feel like a personal judgment. An uncomfortable observation can arrive in the middle of an affectionate conversation, and laughter is never far away simply because the subject is serious.

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As people return and relationships deepen, something becomes possible that cannot be established through writing alone. Trust grows through continued encounters, and with it the freedom to bring things into the open that might otherwise have remained hidden and protected. There is room for the inquiry to unfold through the relationships themselves, without every meeting needing to produce an answer or a new understanding.

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Grounded Awakeness is taking shape around these encounters, bringing together people who are willing to give the pursuit of liberation a genuine place in their lives. What began through writing is becoming an undertaking that can be entered and lived, with others who are willing to discover how far the inquiry can go.

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Alongside his writing and teaching, Marius and his wife are developing Suan Jai, a home for rescued animals in rural Thailand.