Eleanor Claire Johnson

The Practice

Feeding Your Demons

Facilitated by Eleanor Claire Johnson.

What this is

“'Feeding Your Demons' is a remarkable healing modality that helps lessen personal suffering, and helps us to recognize and transform the deep-seeded patterns and triggers that so often undermine the quality of our lives. It helps us to better understand our relationship to fear and negative emotions, while teaching us how to move beyond blame.”

Eleanor Claire Johnson

What a demon is

Nothing supernatural is meant by the word. A demon, in this practice, is an inner obstacle, a force inside a person that consumes energy and narrows a life.

It might be fear or anxiety. Anger. Addiction. Perfectionism. Self-criticism. Chronic illness. Grief. It might be an inherited pattern, carried from one generation into the next without anyone choosing it.

The practice does not try to defeat these forces. It asks what they need, and gives it to them. What has been fought becomes an ally.

The lineage

Feeding Your Demons is the practice created by Lama Tsultrim Allione, founder of Tara Mandala. It is her adaptation, for contemporary practitioners, of Chöd, a Tibetan Buddhist practice originated by the eleventh-century yogini Machig Labdrön, who lived from 1055 to 1145.

  1. Machig Labdrön

    1055–1145

  2. Chöd

    Tibetan Buddhist practice

  3. Lama Tsultrim Allione

    Contemporary adaptation

  4. Tara Mandala

    The practice's home

  5. Eleanor Claire Johnson

    Trained facilitator

Feeding Your Demons is the work of Lama Tsultrim Allione and Tara Mandala. Eleanor Claire Johnson is a trained facilitator of the practice. This website is not affiliated with or endorsed by Tara Mandala.

The five movements

  1. Find the demon.

    Begin with the felt sense rather than the story. Locate where the difficulty lives in the body, and stay there long enough for it to declare itself. Give it form: color, shape, texture, temperature.

  2. Personify it, and ask.

    Let the energy take a shape in front of you, and address it directly. Ask it three questions. What do you want from me. What do you need from me. How will you feel when you get what you need.

  3. Become the demon.

    Change places. Sit where it sits, and answer the three questions from its side, in its voice. What surfaces here is rarely what was expected.

  4. Feed it, and meet the ally.

    Return to your own place and offer the demon what it truly needs, without limit, until it is satisfied. What remains when it is fed is an ally, and the ally has its own answer for you.

  5. Rest.

    Let the whole construction dissolve: demon, ally, offering, and the one who offered. Remain in open awareness for as long as it lasts.

This may be for you

  • People meeting a pattern they have not been able to think their way out of.
  • People carrying grief, or inherited family wounding.
  • People who have done therapy and want something that works below the level of explanation.
  • Artists and practitioners working with their own shadow.

This is not

  • This is a contemplative practice. It is not psychotherapy, and it is not medical or psychiatric treatment, nor a substitute for either.
  • It is not a crisis service, and there is no on-call support between sessions.
  • Anyone in acute distress should be working with a licensed clinician. That care comes first; this practice can sit alongside it, but never in its place.

Working with Eleanor

Sessions are one to one. She works as what she calls a holder of sanctuary: the practice belongs to the person doing it, and her role is to hold the space and guide the sequence.

She has been a serious practitioner for nearly fifty years.

A thirteenth century sculpture of the contemplative life, north portal of Chartres Cathedral.
Cathédrale de Chartres. Vie contemplative, elle se recueille. Portail Nord, XIIIe siècle. Photograph by Étienne Houvet.

To be confirmed

Format
To be confirmed by Eleanor.
Length
To be confirmed by Eleanor.
Fee
To be confirmed by Eleanor.

The ground she stands on

  • Took refuge vows with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama in 1987.
  • A devout daily practitioner of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism.
  • Completed an eight-month retreat in Bodhgaya, India in 2001, at the request of her root lama, His Eminence Choeje Ayang Rinpoche.
  • Completed a one-month retreat at KTD Monastery, Woodstock, New York, in the fall of 2022.
  • Since 2016, periods of silence in Benedictine and Dominican cloistered monasteries, in the Catholic tradition of the Liturgy of the Hours.
  • Continues her studies with Thomas Hübl in The Academy of Inner Science, and with Iain McGilchrist.
  • Works with scholars and teachers researching consciousness, shadow work on the spiritual path, and psycho-spiritual-historical processes for integrating intergenerational and cultural wounds.

Inquire

Write to Eleanor

Tell her a little about what brings you. She reads every note herself.