Dara "Darananda" Blumenthal, PhD

Dara offers contexts for healing and awakening to unfold. Her approach guides people to access, know, and relate with more and more layers of their direct experience beyond the dense physical level of the body and the personal-self-construct. As these layers get seen and known, without effort or attachment, what’s been left unfelt can finally get met. Self-trust and self-guidance blossom. By feeling what’s been there all along, aspects of separation held throughout the bodymind can be reintegrated into Wholeness. More spaciousness and peace arise. The physiology and nervous system refine and embodiment matures. The natural state emerges organically: Truth is revealed. This is a pathway to embodied awakening through deeply, fearlessly, and compassionately relating with what is. The culmination of this path is what Dara calls “Full Divine Embodiment”.

Dara’s life has conspired to unfold a very clear and direct path to Divine Reality. She came into this life with an orientation to the “richness of Being” - a phrase that’s been with her for as long as she can remember - and a deep knowing that all there was to pursue was true SELF. Generously raised to trust and follow this knowing, the unfolding has been fairly continuous. Dara began formally studying and practicing mind-body awareness at age 20. At 23 she became a Usui Shiki Ryoho Reiki Master and has practiced energy healing since. Dara earned a BA in Sound, Self, and Embodiment from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, as well as an MA in Critical Theory and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Kent, United Kingdom. All of her academic work explored self-identity, (dis)embodiment, society, and ethics. Dara also holds certification as an Integral Facilitator (including adult developmental psychology, Zen awareness, and conflict mediation) and training Hakomi Therapy.

After 14 years of embodied practice (of transcending the thinking mind into direct experience), Dara had a spontaneous Kundalini awakening and full-rising. At 19 years into her practice and during a yearlong retreat, the post-personal stages of development opened and unfolded. Alongside of these openings Dara works with the gifted clairvoyant, Chloe Folan, who has checked, verified, and supported Dara's continued spiritual progress (from the perspective of significant changes in the structure of the subtle body). While the primary shifts have occurred, they are certainly still fresh and the refinement is ongoing (indeed, it is infinite). This isn't an endpoint for Dara, but rather the continued development of living a life of richness and wellbeing.

Today, Dara is in the process of articulating and sharing the path of embodied awakening that she knows intimately and calls “Opening the Form to Divinity”.

Dara’s teachers and mentors from the past two decades include: Dr. J. Robin Powell; Diane Musho Hamilton Roshi; Dr. John Churchill; Rob Daishin McNamara; and Dorothy Rowe. She has also benefited greatly from the work of Reggie Ray, David “Davidya” Buckland, and Chloe Folan's Rainbow Bridge Techniques.

Dara doesn't associate herself with any particular lineage or tradition. However, she has had a profound direct encounter with Tibetan Buddhism over the course of about 14 years, and has found immense support and connection in teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi through a group of his direct sudents (including Dorothy Rowe, Davidya, and Lorn Hoff) since 2020.