Post five of fourteen, in section About Awakening
Your experience is being created through a combination of your body, heart, mind, and soul. Within that, there are some aspects of yourself that you are awake to and other parts of you that are shut down or in shadow.
There are different ways to approach awakening, and one is using compassionate embodied presence as a base, from which everything is a part of experience that can be brought into contact with your present moment experience.
This relates to my triangle model, which places the body at the base of experience and as the foundation of practice.
Immediate Experience
This approach is built on a sense of compassionate presence that is connected to the mystery of life while also being grounded in shared reality, and the place to start is through cultivating the qualities of presence, wholeness, freshness, and flow in the Body, Heart, Mind and Soul.
The approach is about creating space for the whole of someone’s being to be present. Your experience can be explored on the basis that everything can be accessed through the portal of the body and the subtle body in the present moment.
Here is a very simple example of how I include Body, Heart, Mind and Soul when I am doing shamanic journeying with people. I work with simple questions that welcome in all the layers of someone’s being:
- How does your body feel?
- How would you describe your heart? What emotions are present?
- How does your mind feel? Can we create more space for what is here?
- What wants to be expressed?
Going through the different aspects of experience gives a full picture of what is present for that person. When the wholeness of experience is brought into presence, it allows us to access deep and profound meditative states together without having to freeze out or ignore lots of experience.
Awakening Experiences
Big awakening experiences and shifts can have the tendency to pull people out of their body and disconnect them from their true self; however, it’s also possible to relate to these with the body as the base.
A big awakening or shift will go through all these different stages, too. For example:
Body: Feeling a big energy explosion in your root chakra
Heart: Feeling that this energy is connecting you to something bigger than you
Mind: Meditating on the subtle details of the sensations and making space for it to be present without attaching to it
Soul: Connecting with a sense of aliveness that it has opened for you, investigating any shadows or difficult emotions this brings up and finding ways to include this energy in your being
It’s possible to notice how all of these are experiences that are happening in your body in the present moment.
Integration
It is only once an awakening has filtered through all the layers of your being that it becomes fully integrated. Often it has to go through several iterations of each layer before it is somewhat complete or stable.
Body: You go through some kind of physical change in your being; this could include a physical process like crying, moving the body, relaxing or allowing energy to move through you
Heart: You open to and trust your emotions and felt senses without getting fixed ideas about what it means, so that you can connect with what is present in the moment
Mind: You can be precise about what is here and describe what is happening in experience without getting fused with it or repeating rote ideas
Soul: You bring the experiences into your deepest beliefs and meaning-making systems about yourself and the world in a way where it is now expressed through your entire being.
Outcomes
The outcome of a positive awakening might look something like this.
Body: more jhanic energy present
Heart: more connected to contentment
Mind: seeing your sense of self and world in a fresh light
Soul: embracing this experience to support a deepening of practice and life
The process needs to go through all the stages, or it won’t stick around.
For example, you can realise insights in your mind, but if you’re not willing to be open to feeling the emotional impact of them in the body, you will just cycle through them again and again. Or by bypassing the heart, you will create worldviews that repress huge parts of experience.
Or if you feel things in your emotions but aren’t willing or able to be open-minded about the truth of a situation, you will get trapped in the naive emotional story of it.
It requires all the parts to be aligned and included for the insight and change to be realised. This can take a bit of time to process.
When you consciously allow and incorporate all aspects of your being in this way, awakening can happen incredibly quickly.
The awakening process happens on different levels, in different parts, in different intensities, and over different time scales.
The different intensities and time scales overlap and intersect, and you could be in several different places at once, depending on where you are focusing.
For example, you could be going through something very heart-opening and emotionally intense in wider life, navigating a big awakening that you are very much in the body phase of and needing to work mainly on the mind section while in a specific practice session.
The purpose of having the body as a base is to bring a compassionate presence to whatever is emerging in this moment and be with yourself in that experience.
This process of awakening new aspects of yourself through embodying more experience can be beautiful, and it can also be challenging and destabilising.
One thing that can support this process is if you can be met in a space of compassionate presence by someone who has already integrated an aspect of experience. When teaching or shared practice is set up in the right way, people can directly lend each other the capacity to be with these different parts of themselves, and it makes the journey smoother and opens up more possibility.