Eli Jaxon-Bear

Jaxon-Bear is also principal teacher at the Leela School of Awakening, which was established in 2016 as a separate educational non-profit organization. The Leela School offers a A.C.H.E. accredited training and certification in therapeutic intervention and hypnotherapy, with branches in Ashland, Oregon, Sydney, Australia and Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

In 1990 in India, Jaxon-Bear met the spiritual teacher Sri H.W.L. Poonja, called "Papaji" by his followers. A few months later, he took his wife, Antoinette Varner, to meet Papaji. She too became a devotee and Papaji named her Gangaji. Subsequent to the meeting with Papaji, both Jaxon-Bear and Gangaji were allowed to teach satsang in the West, and given conditional permission to publish Wake Up and Roar. A full account of Jaxon-Bear's early life and spiritual path until he met his teacher Papaji, can be found in his detailed memoir, An Outlaw Makes it Home: The Awakening of a Spiritual Revolutionary (2018).

Jaxon-Bear's eighteen-year spiritual path began after the 1971 May Day Protests, when he became a federal fugitive during the Vietnam War. In his own words, an awakening experience led him on a spiritual search that took him around the world and into many traditions and practices. In 1978, Kalu Rinpoche appointed him the president of Kagyu Minjur Choling, the first Kagyu Tibetan Buddhist dharma center in Marin County. In 1982, he was presented with a Zen teaching fan at Cho Sho-ji Zen Temple in Beppu, Japan. Through the 1980s, Jaxon-Bear ran a clinical hypnosis and neurolinguistics certification program at the Esalen Institute. Also during that time, he studied the wisdom teachings of the Enneagram. His first writings and teachings on the Enneagram emerged in 1989. He was a keynote speaker at the first International Enneagram Conference at Stanford University in August 1994. His talk was entitled "The Enneagram and Self-Realization".

Eli Jaxon-Bear (born Elliot Jay Zeldow, 1947) is an American spiritual teacher and author. He lives in Ashland, Oregon, with his wife and spiritual teacher Gangaji. Before he met his teacher, Sri H.W.L. Poonja, in 1990, Jaxon-Bear was best known for his work on the spiritual dimension of the Enneagram. Following his meeting with Poonjaji he continued to teach, carrying his teacher's message of spiritual liberation to the West.

Jaxon-Bear was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1947. In 1965 he was part of a group of students who went to Montgomery, Alabama, to take part in the civil rights marches. Later he wrote of this experience, "Getting on the bus represented a much deeper commitment than simply enduring a few weeks of dangerous adventure. Finally, I had to give my life fully to getting on the bus for freedom without a thought of getting off." He graduated in 1968 from the University of Pittsburgh and became a community organizer in Chicago and Detroit. He was arrested during the Democratic Convention in the summer of 1968. Freedom of Information documents show that the FBI began a file on Jaxon-Bear after his arrest. After six months of working in a steel mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania, he was awarded a fellowship for a doctorate at the Graduate School for International Studies at the University of Denver. He was part of the student strike committee that shut down the university in 1970.