Post four of fourteen, in section About Awakening
Awakening is the process of opening to more of your individual experience and the Universal experience in a direct way.
Lots of experience is opaque, exists in the subconscious, is locked away in shadows, or is beyond what you can imagine from your current paradigm, and unless you actively awaken the different parts of being through a range of approaches, then you will have a limited idea of what reality is or can be.
Some of the types of approaches that are required are parts work, working with your energy body, and meditation practices.
I use the Body, Heart, Mind, and Soul to describe the different aspects of experience that can be awakened. The process of awakening looks different in each layer and the outcome is also different.
As a simple example, here is how awakening to anger could look like in each layer:
- Soul: unfreezing deep aspects of experience through the soul retrieval cycle. For example, seeing that anger plays an important part in the ecosystem and recognising its importance
- Mind: being able to mentally cycle through different states that you are consciously aware of rather than being fused with the content. For example, being aware that you are angry rather than just becoming reactively aggressive
- Heart: learning to connect to the experience. For example, to share with others in an open and spacious way what is present in the gestalt of your anger or be present for someone else’s anger
- Body: Purifying the body-mind system. For example, processing any backlog of anger so that you feel more compassionate, present and grounded as a baseline
This corresponds to how each of the different aspects of Body, Heart, Mind, and Soul have awakening qualities that you are cultivating and parts that you can liberate. These relate to my triangle model.
- In the Soul aspect of experience, you are cultivating flow and liberating the underlying aspects of experience that cause you to be controlling
- In the Mind aspect of experience, you are cultivating freshness and liberating the underlying aspects of experience that cause you to be stuck in scripts
- In the Heart aspect of experience, you are cultivating wholeness and liberating the underlying aspects of experience that are repressed
- In the Body aspect of experience, you are cultivating presence and liberating the underlying aspects of experience that cause you to be dissociated
The diagram describes some of the symptoms that you are likely to experience once these qualities have been cultivated and before these underlying causes have been liberated.
Below the Level of Awareness
The diagram I created has been inspired by my experiences of sensing primarily through energy.
There are ways in which bodies are listening to, reacting to, and responding to their environments and each other all the time. This happens outside of conscious awareness – the energy already knows itself from the inside, before the mind is aware of what is happening.
Your entire embodied experience is built around this. For example here are some states you might recognise:
- Feeling safe, engaged, and socially connected. Your digestion can function, you feel relaxed, and can have an open, spacious sense of awareness.
- Feeling activated and like you need to defend something or fight something. Your attention narrows and your body is in a heightened state.
- You are in a state of deep surrender or collapse. There are places where your human consciousness don’t really reach.
The body is always subconsciously scanning the environment, interpreting what state it can be in and responding with something like one of these states. Importantly, picking up on these cues operates beneath and outside of your awareness, but it shapes your conscious idea of what reality is.
Some of the signals the body is listening to come from the environment around you – for example, whether you are in a safe, cosy place or whether you are about to be run over by a bus – but a lot of the time the things bodies are picking up on are social cues from other humans.
You are always learning from others what it is safe to feel and express.
An example of this is that if you’re brought up in an environment where healthy anger is not allowed to be expressed, you will adopt things like anxiety, numbness, freezing, and fixed ways of looking to avoid feeling it. Or you will express it in very aggressive and dominating ways. You haven’t had a healthy model of how it can be felt and expressed openly.
Your body and energetic system does not have those pathways available to it.
Shadows and Exiles
Shadows, exiles, and blind spots are parts of experience that you aren’t consciously aware of.
An example of a shadow is that someone who has learned that sadness is ‘bad’ will disown it inside themselves. Rather than be able to feel what is present, when sadness emerges, they will react incredibly strongly, dissociate, project it onto someone else, take it out on someone else, bottle it up, or do anything they can to avoid feeling that emotion.
The person who has disowned their sadness will build an entire model of reality that is shaped around sadness being excluded from their experience, and this happens on a preconscious bodily level.
Another helpful model for understanding this is Internal Family Systems Therapy. It describes the different parts of a person and how those different parts have different roles and statuses – managers, firefighters and exiles. Exiles are the parts of you that would be so threatening to feel that when something starts to activate it, your system brings online lots of managers and firefighters to avoid the exile being felt or expressed, and this takes you out of your True Self energy.
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
― Carl Jung
In the example above, if sadness is exiled and a person encounters a situation that makes them feel sad, the underlying energy of the sadness doesn’t disappear; it lives on in the person’s subconscious experience, and coping mechanisms are developed so that they can avoid being directly in touch with it.
When I am working with people one-on-one, I always make space to connect with people’s wholehearted emotional world. Often strong emotions like grief, anger, or joy can emerge.
Most people have not been held in a space where they can express the fullness of their emotions, and people will struggle to be in touch with themselves until this has happened.
The Process of Awakening
The diagrams below pull out the processes of awakening that are depicted in my model.
I will mention that there are some frameworks – such as the wake up, clean up, grow up, show up model – that describe similar processes as important facets of personal development but as separate things from awakening.
Understanding these processes as separate from awakening is ok, but it misses one of the fundamental points that I am describing in this post: the depths to which you have purified or integrated things will shape the insights and perceptions of reality that are available to you. They change your bottom-up experience of the world, and thus they change your understanding of what you are even waking up to.
It’s an interconnected system where, if someone has done no purifying or soul retrieval work, their perception of what they are waking up to or what awakening could possibly even mean will be entirely different from someone who has done a lot of this work.
It’s possible to go through huge paradigm shifts from processing emotions and moving energies. This can happen on such a fundamentally deep level that the world becomes an entirely different place beyond what you would have previously been able to conceive of. As this compounds, it can feel like moving through an entirely different world to the one you used to be in, in every way.
Just one example of this for me early on in my path was during a shadow work process where I opened to feeling such a deep sadness in me that I had a cessation-like experience, where I dissolved into the soul realm and came back with an entirely different understanding of the human experience.
Domination and Oppression
We live in a world where there is often subtle control, domination and oppression of different parts of different people’s experiences going on.
Even in a very well-meaning situation, people have limited resources on both a macro and micro level. It takes time, energy and resources to be able to hold the full truth of a situation, particularly a challenging one. How that challenge gets dealt with in a subconscious way depends on what sort of person you are.
Depending on the social situation that someone finds themselves in and the sort of person they are, two things can happen with a shadow.
- If the person makes themselves ‘small’ or lower status, they will turn the idea that there is something ‘bad’ or unacceptable in on themselves, leading to things like anxiety, depression and shame
- If the person makes themselves ‘big’ or higher status, they will externalise the shadow in order to not have to feel the wound in themselves, leading to things like control, judgement and blame
When there are dominating powers in the system, it creates a lot less space for other people to be able to be present with their truth. Everyone becomes subject to that person’s controlling behaviour, which stems from that person trying to avoid having to deal with their shadow.
The ideal in adult-to-adult connection is to be able to be open, present, and spacious even in the face of challenges, to not have fixed ideas about what other people’s reality is, and to be accountable for your own behaviour without taking responsibility for others.
Brene Brown’s framework of BRAVING (boundaries, reliability, accountability, vault, integrity, non-judgement, and generosity) from her book Braving the Wilderness is an excellent model for this.
Seeing That Freeze
All this information creates a complex picture of how:
- There are huge parts of you that are shadows or shut down that have never even crossed your conscious awareness
- Your system creates coping mechanisms to avoid being in touch with this more direct experience
- A strong aspect of what is understood by your (pre-conscious) biological system to be safe or not safe is how other people around you relate to that part of experience. And this shapes what you perceive experience to be.
It’s really important to recognise that a lot of awakening and meditation practices have the power to create more shadows in a person rather than a fuller and more honest connection with direct experience. Lots of practices subtly or overtly decide that parts of you or your experience are undesirable and encourage you to freeze them out.
Freeze is embedded in your nervous system but outside your conscious awareness. When there are large parts of you that are frozen, you lose the capacity to imagine states of being beyond your limited perception.
Unless your practice includes doing deep Jungian-style shadow work or some other form of soul retrieval, you will never change this dynamic within yourself, no matter how much meditation practice you do.
You can have the most expansive, spacious mind and deepest insights into emptiness possible, but you will still have incredibly fixed underlying beliefs about the nature of reality or experience underneath that.
A classic example of this is the meditator who has spent hundreds of hours on retreat noticing the impermanence and emptiness of subjective experience but can’t feel their own emotions, connect authentically with other people, or begin to imagine a reality beyond scientific materialism.
What Is Experience?
The dominant cultural narrative around what reality is is currently incredibly individualistic, logical, and patriarchal.
People tend to be very far away from being connected to things like their interconnected nature, their inner emotional world, or the more mysterious aspect of experience.
Modern meditation practices are mostly no exception to this. Becoming more aware is often considered to be purely about noticing what is already accessible to your conscious awareness, rather than opening up an active exploration into what is present in the depths of experience. So it misses out on huge aspects of experience such as the interconnected, embodied, emotional, and shamanic parts.
When spiritual practices do include more expansive perspectives on reality, these are often immature or underdeveloped. People adopt half-truths and take them as full truths because the amount of work it takes to cultivate a whole and true perspective while also holding space for uncertainty is often wildly underestimated.
Both directions – being overly controlling or rational and being overly loose and mystical – are subject to the dynamic where if you don’t explore your shadows, the shadows are going to manifest in ignorance and arrogance.
This is why it’s important that models of awakening and reality include an understanding of the shadow work process.
It is about being humble in an open exploration of what is present, rather than creating and holding onto an idea of the thing.
Leaving the Cave
I really like the allegory of Plato’s cave for describing a meaningful approach to awakening.
There are two phases of getting out of the limited mind’s ideas of what reality is or just being stuck looking at the shadows on the wall, which is a great metaphor for someone who externalises their shadow.
The first phase is just leaving the cave and getting into the world. This happens by getting out of your fixed perception of reality, which requires letting go of your mind’s ideas of what experience is and being open to what was previously in shadow.
This requires you to really get into your Body, Heart and Soul. To feel the direct experience of being in touch with these parts of yourself.
When I am working with people, I get them to connect to their immediate experience and realise that every thought, concept, emotion, and feeling can be located and experienced in the present moment.
For example, working with someone who has a desire to make progress on the spiritual path, we can bring the concept of ‘desire to make progress on the spiritual path’ into the present moment by locating where it shows up in the body, finding images or symbols it brings up, and feeling into what concepts and social structures it is connected to in their system. This shows the person how they are immersed in their embodied experience and gives us the capacity to work with these different pieces at different levels of their being rather than for them to take their projected reality as the truth.
Rather than working on the level of ideas, we are working in someone’s immediate experience.
The second phase is opening to the transpersonal. To avoid going back into the cave during this phase, it’s important that the opening to something bigger is a direct experience of the actual thing rather than an idea or projection of the thing.
It’s creating a direct connection with the Universal Body, Universal Heart, Universal Mind, and Universal Soul. This is an incredibly subtle process that takes a long time to understand and feel.
Conclusion
Meditation practice and awakening are about being able to meet more of experience in its fullness, whether that be mystical non-dual states or deeply personal aspects of yourself. It’s about broadening the range of experience that you are able to be present with and aware of.
A full practice or awakening requires you to work at all these different levels – Body, Heart, Mind and Soul – there is no single source of truth, or single root cause of all suffering.
It’s important to recognise that doing this work includes both connecting more fully or directly with the more beautiful aspects of experience and the harder parts of life. An example of a deep awakening is when you are able to stay connected to the qualities that you are aiming to cultivate in the practice (like mindfulness, joy, compassion, aliveness, surrender, and naturalness) even when experience is stressful or challenging in some way.
Sometimes cultivating these qualities can change your experience so radically that you are able to feel good in situations that would have previously felt impossible. If you can take a part of yourself that you would normally react to or freeze out and bring it home by opening to the real experience that is underneath, you can release a huge amount of stress and anxiety from your system and create a lot more ease and naturalness in experience.
Even when this is not the case and experience is still hard and painful, these qualities give you the capacity to show up to your life as a mature adult who can be present with the full range of experience and honest about what that entails for you. This allows more space to be present and overcome challenges, both as an individual and in connection with others.