by Adam Gordon
Zulma Reyo is an American teacher of Puerto Rican descent and the founder of the Zulma Reyo School of Consciousness, based in Mallorca. She has lived an interesting life across many locations around the world, including London, India, South America, and Cyprus. The original school was based in Brazil. Her first book, Inner Alchemy, was republished in a revised and updated edition in 2021. More recently, she released a new book titled Emergence of Consciousness – Death of the Ego.
Zulma was born in New York City and inherited her mother’s gift of mediumship. Since childhood she has been conscious that life extends beyond the apparent material reality and that death is not the end of life. In the wandering life that followed as a seeker, she describes herself as being in service.
“I am not a guru. For as long as I can remember, I have been a teacher-guide to anyone who cared to listen. I prefer to call this ‘service’ rather than ‘teaching’. Through touch, massages, listening to people, I’ve come to understand the dynamics of life directly. And all of this has gone into the school curriculum today, sharing with people how I learned what I see. I always prize direct communication and simplified practical language rather than abstract or theoretical information.”
She picked up many academic qualifications but then studied Primal Therapy under its legendary pioneer Arthur Janov at the LA Primal Institute. These were the heady days of the late sixties and early seventies. After that, Zulma travelled and studied with teachers from many traditions. Having read much about Stylianos Atteshlis over the years, I was keen to hear her talk about the time she spent with him. Stylianos Atteshlis, the celebrated mystic and healer known as Daskalos, lived and worked in Cyprus. At one point, Zulma’s work in Brazil was under attack. Outspoken and uncompromising in her emphasis on classical healing modalities over popular New Age spiritualism or Shamanic variants, she ultimately drew the attention of dark forces. She set out to find help and visited Daskalos’ Stoa in Nicosia, Cyprus. While there, she was involved in a car accident in which she broke her back. When the master was told, referring to these dark forces, he said, “They don’t know who they have come up against.” This meant himself. He took the matter in hand and stepped up to work on his student’s behalf.
As she told me, “He started instructing us, giving us information that would help us in Brazil. This was a major influence in my life, even after his death. Being the extraordinary person that he was, and is, he is powerfully available both on the physical plane and also on the inner planes. He vowed to protect us and to be with us. He taught me a great deal, including reminding me of my past lives. He was a teacher who has greatly shaped my teaching life. Before him I had others, but he is the most recent, the most comprehensive, and the most intimate, in the human sense.”
Zulma is 82 now and realised that she could be of greatest service if she could share her experiences with others in leadership positions, in such a way that they pass them on and spread the practical wisdom contained therein.
“On the very first day of the three- and five-year courses that I run, I tell students that we are going to work towards two outcomes. The first is the demolition of your ego and the other is the transference of power to your soul. When I say ‘demolition of the ego,’ I mean egoism—the part of the ego that demands separatist and special treatment. Egoism places us at the centre of the world. It is exploitative, exclusive, mental, intellectual. All this has to be refined and elevated to serve the spiritual self.”
Her first book Inner Alchemy comes across as a comprehensive workbook, covering numerous exercises and techniques to help us achieve self-mastery. It’s well laid-out and richly illustrated, and the work described involves energy, chakras, colour and sound, heavily based on visualisation and meditation that involve all aspects of our identity and our body.
Her latest book, Emergence of Consciousness, is quite different; it is oriented towards seeing the ego for what it is—the good with the bad—and working to release its control. One of the main techniques involves writing farewell letters to people you are close to or have been involved with, as if you were dying and this would be the last contact you would have with them. These are literal letters that act as a release of unspoken bonds or chains. They are read out loud and shared within small family-like work groups. This letter-writing exercise originates from the curriculum of the death and rebirth module at the school, where it developed from an individually focussed practice, as in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, to a group dynamic. The entire process results in a death and rebirth experience, where, through insight, you let go of old attachments, forgive yourself and others, love more fully, and as a result, begin to live in touch with your true essence.
But this only skims the surface. In this intensive experience you go over your life’s events many times with the group, revising and refining, inviting ego death and beckoning spiritual connection with the Self within. It’s best suited to a committed group setting of people who help one another, but it can also be experienced outside the school with supportive friends. “Our first step is always to connect with that part inside you—an eternal, yearning flame, a burning fire within. Once you connect with that you are on your way home. You discover that is your strength and the real source of transformational power. But this work is extremely difficult to do alone, because the unworked ego is very tricky, and we cannot always spot its manoeuvres. The important collateral of this kind of thinking is to form communities of equals in transparency. We need one another to keep us in intelligence, in love, in truth and authenticity. You can’t do it alone. I hope the book encourages people to work through it together.”
And just reading the many sample letters that the book is filled with, you find that they allow you to get a real sense of what’s being attempted and make some progress yourself in letting go of the ego. In them, Zulma walks us through the attachments and patterns that hold us back.
Of course, letter-writing is an established therapeutic process in many traditions, but Zulma points out that nothing is like the fullness of the experience provided by the school.
“The letters in a way are just an excuse. Other people have gone through processes involving letter writing, but none of these are like this one. We go into a deep, full regression, a total immersion into the experiences of our lives with each letter. It’s very, very, very careful work. You touch bottom and surface again, renewed into a space of true forgiveness. You forgive yourself and you understand your phobias, problems, projections and fears, which are more than likely remnants of childhood traumas.”
The school offers a comprehensive five-year training program, and students may choose to terminate their training after the first three years of basic material, upon expiration of the original commitment required by the school. You can take a break after three years and then proceed with the additional two. “There are four modules a year. Two are five days and two are fifteen days. We ease people in gradually with the first two years chipping away at our rigid, self-protective beliefs.” Online study groups are led by trained tutors throughout the entire learning process.
The courses require a rigorous application process, and places are awarded free of charge to students by the grant-giving foundation LightEn.
“In the school today, I am training people who will train others. It’s not a personal or private affair. People are carefully vetted before being accepted. The number one requirement is that they be already in service, and that they are of an age that can continue to render service in a new light. We need people to take this posture and the perspective that comes from our work into their own fields of work. Sometimes we interview people twice, with several screenings in between. Sometimes, even after being accepted, people may be turned back. And then there is the energetic kind of screening where we diagnose energy distribution to determine how they use their energies and their chakras at the three different levels of personality. We also consider the astrological and numerological aspects of the person. Throughout all this, I pride myself on the personal touch where everyone is approached and recognised individually.”
For the rest of us there are online talks, two wonderful books and the reassurance that someone out there is doing this vital work. Using the books and talks, we may be inspired to form a community that can begin to change the world.
I asked Zulma about shamanism and psychedelics, which likewise offer transforming revelations, and I wasn’t surprised by her response.
She told me: “People have to commit to not taking any drugs, practice meditations that might be too rigid rather than flexible, or undergo psychiatric or psychological treatment when they are on the course. In other words, they need to be drug-free and without mental constraints as much as possible. I don’t think people can make long-standing breakthroughs with ayahuasca. It provides a kind of movie – a fantasy – rather than revealing any essential truth. Some meditation techniques work contrary to the liberating principles we work for, creating dependence rather than clarity and discernment. You have to do the hard work yourself, and this is at the core of the initial commitment.” For me, Zulma teaches the classic philosophy in the classic way.
It’s about love: love through service. “Some people think love is being nice and thinking kind thoughts, but as I see it, love is intelligence. The ability to say no and to say yes, with discernment, awareness and care.” This is a much-missed ability nowadays, which requires sensitivity and sensibility, two factors that are often overlooked but emphasised by Zulma.
It’s teaching that leads to self-realisation. At no point does she talk about acquiring success, wealth, or popularity. Her teachings give us that which most of us wish for deep down, “It’s the death of the illusion of separation. My hope is that, if nothing else, my books will help people get over their phobia of death and isolation. We are actually dying every moment. Every time we go to sleep, we die, and every breath is a dying and a rebirth. Unless you truly befriend your Spirit Self – that genuine spark within you – you will not gain true authenticity or find happiness. Nothing external will help you. Realise that you are the only creator of your world. Light, Truth, Joy, emerge from within.”
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MEET THE AUTHOR
ZULMA REYO is a spiritual teacher, visionary, and author, whose transformative work bridges ancient wisdom and modern thought. An educator, writer, and speaker, Zulma has been teaching her Inner Alchemy Programme for decades and to great acclaim. An expert in various psychotherapies, world religions, mystical traditions, and energetic practices, she trains students from around the world at her School of Consciousness.
On the web
www.zrsoc.com
BOOKSHELF
EMERGENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS – DEATH OF THE EGO
BY ZULMA REYO,
published by LightEn Publishing,
Illustrated Hardback (184 pages)