Awakening Course
The Elements of Experience
The Vision
The underlying goal of all my work is to help people wake up to a new paradigm, one where they can embody wholehearted ways of being that are aligned with true nature.
The 16 Elements of Experience map is a bit like a periodic table for awakened experience. It describes the underlying nature of experience and the ways that that can be opened to on an awakening path.
There are different routes through the map, depending on whether someone is awakening their individual experience, to Universal experience, or to where they are unified.
The practice approach combines Buddhist emptiness practices, shadow work, tantric embodiment, the archetypal realm, mysticism, individuation, a radically new way of relating to the heart, and more.
If you would like a more in-depth introduction to the model, I did a 40-minute introductory presentation on the Stoa, which you can watch below or here.
The Course
The course will be an introduction to the 16 Elements of Experience. Each step of the course will be a rich window into one of the elements.
It will also introduce practices that help you get in touch with each of the elements in your direct experience.
The course is designed for:
- Contemplative practitioners who are interested in adopting or transitioning to a holistic practice
- Spiritual teachers who want to understand how their teaching fits into a wider eco-system of experience and practice
- People who work in fields related to human flourishing (e.g. academia, healthcare, social enterprise) who want to gain an understanding of how awakening can support people and systems to become more oriented towards wholeness, integrity and well-being
The aim of this introductory course is:
- To introduce each topic and share the importance of its role in the ecosystem
- To give people a flavour of different practices that they may be interested in exploring further
- To demonstrate how these different aspects of experience weave together into a cohesive whole
The Map
More Content to Explore
An introduction to each element of experience, conversations with the course contributors — Recorded in Spring 2023
The Shadows and Golden Shadows of each of the aspects of experience and how to practice with these in mind.
A series on the Universal Heart — Taught online in June 2025
A series on the Universal Soul – Taught at Berkeley Alembic in May 2024
A conversation with Sam Hinds that includes an update on the course through the lens of Cosmic Intelligence — Recorded in March 2025
Contributors
As well as demonstrating the multi-dimensionality of experience through the framework, I also want the course to share different perspectives from a range of teachers who are experts in their particular subject.
Some of the core values of this model are truth, wholeness, connecting to something bigger than you, empowering people to open to the full richness of their inner world, and weaving all this back in with the collective. All of these teachers embody these values and are sharing the richness of their lived-in insights from a place of grounded and inspiring presence.
Layers
The content of each Element can be experienced through different layers, and the course layout and structure will reflect this.
There are three layers that the Elements can be experienced through:
- Individual: Body, Heart, Mind, and Soul practices in daily life
- Universal: connecting with the Universal Body, Heart, Mind, and Soul during retreat and dedicated practice time
- Unified: living as an expression of the cosmos, the map is based on the nervous system with bottom-up, middle-out and top-down starting points
To give an example of how a flexible layout of this might look for the course, here’s a cool, interactive User Interface designed and built by one of the contributors, Eli Pleaner.
Technical & Creative
The course will be an expression of both intellectual rigour and creative expression. Both of these are true: experience is already right in front of you, and the deeper and more efficacious your practice, the richer and more whole your immediate experience is.
For the technical side, we will share detailed and specific information that includes things like stages of development. For the creative side, we will invite you into an inclusive and immediate approach with practices such as meditating to music.
Pre-Requisites
The course is designed to show people the different aspects of human experience that it is possible to awaken. If you are on a contemplative path and want to use this course to deepen your practice, you will need a foundational practice before starting the course.
You will need:
- a meditation practice – you need to able to sit in contemplative silence in a meaningful way
- a transformative therapy modality – you need a way of working with challenging emotions
- a relational practice – a way of bringing your insights into your life and relationships
You can read more about complementary practices to this approach here.
Music Meditation
An example practice
Choose an element of experience that you would like to get more in touch with and create a playlist of songs that resonate with that theme for you.
You can also use one of these playlists: Spaciousness, Mysticism.
Find a comfortable place to sit or lie down and start by taking a couple of deep breaths.
When you start the playlist, pay attention to how the music inspires feelings, thoughts and energies in your inner world. You could feel your inner experience as an artwork that is being inspired by the connection with the music.
“Colours and shapes appeared behind my closed eyes.
Just the tip of my finger was so full of bizarre life,
I stroked it along the arm of the chair
And tears of overwhelm sprang to my eyes”From my poetry book Fierce Grace
Frames
The map has come from my direct experience of the underlying nature of experience. It is the infra-layer of experience rather than the meta-layer, which means that the map is emulating the underlying essence of experience rather than zooming out to give multiple perspectives.
One of the coolest aspects of this is that the map emulates the Indra’s Net quality of experience – each of the elements can contain all the other elements.
Indra’s net: an infinite net with jewels at each intersection, where each jewel reflects all the others.
Depending on which element of the map is held as primary inflects how the larger landscape is experienced. Here are a few examples:
- When you experience through the realm of the Subtle Body each of the elements becomes something that you can feel directly through energetic embodied presence
- Through the frame of Present Awareness, each of the elements are things that you can notice in your present moment experience
- Through Absorption, each of the elements becomes something that can flood the entirety of experience
- Through Mysticism, each of the elements is a portal into the Universe connecting more deeply to itself
I’ve used AI to create 16 example images of the map, one through the lens of each element. The images demonstrate how holding each element as primary creates a landscape with an entirely different shape and feel to it.
Part of the purpose of having different teachers with different areas of expertise contribute to the course is because each of them holds a key for unlocking a whole world.
Outcomes
This path is about understanding the true nature of both the Universe and yourself.
One aspect of this is awakening to being a part of a participatory Universe, where you are an expression of an alive and intelligent cosmos.
Here is a short description of how individual awakening looks:
- Body: being with the subtlety of direct embodied experience in the present moment; moving from dissociation to presence
- Heart: feeling a full spectrum of experience; moving from repression to wholeness
- Mind: coming out of rote ideas into seeing things as they are in this moment; moving from scripts to freshness
- Soul: embracing your unique experience and expression; moving from control to flow
A short description of awakening to the universal:
- Universal Body: everything is a flow of energy
- Universal Heart: the truth before words
- Universal Mind: atemporal intelligence that reveals itself fresh in each moment
- Universal Soul: cosmos
And here is a short description of how they unify:
- Bottom-Up: feeling embedded in the rich flow of life in both the physical and energetic realms
- Middle-Out: surrendered to truth, love and death
- Top-Down: feeling all life as an endless expression of meaningful cosmic emergence, including you
What Does That Feel Like?
How this awakened experience manifests will be subtly different for everyone – your awakening is in part realised by embracing your unique vibes.
Here are a few more creative expressions of some things you may find along the way:
- This Twitter thread, created by River Kenna, is a nice allegory of the path. The thread depicts a version of the path in story form, like a cute somatic-imaginal infused version of the ten ox-herding pictures from Zen Buddhism.
- This illustrated guide (PDF) brings to life some of the aspects of experience that you will be awakening.
- These vignettes of people with an awakened experience give an insight into integrated realisation and what it can look like for different people.
- This article by Joost Vervoort describes how everyone is a mystic poet and how this fits into systems change
Related Models
My framework can be modelled a number of different ways. Here is the most simple expression of it, with the qualities that are being cultivated through this practice.
You can read more about this and the other ways of understanding the framework on my maps and models page.
Updates
I am currently writing my book, ‘Being Buddha Nature’, which will provide the foundational knowledge for the course. We will develop the course after this has been released.
Sign up to receive an email when the book is being released.
This course intersects with The Imaginal Realm Project – a collaborative project exploring how the imaginal realm can be unlocked on a global scale.