Post four of thirteen, in section About Awakening
Awakening is the process of opening to more of your inner world and the outer world 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 your 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 nervous system and meditation practices.
Awakening is always happening through a human body, in relationship with the Universe, and humans are incredibly complicated systems. As is the Universe. But a simplified version of what Awakening is biologically, could be described in the diagrams below.
Even within this model, there are a number of different ways to understand the process of awakening and the different outcomes that can occur from contemplative practice.
There are the processes of:
- Being able to mentally cycle through different states that you are consciously aware of, rather than be fused with the content – e.g. being aware that you are angry, rather than just becoming reactively aggressive
- Unfreezing deep aspects of experience through the soul retrieval cycle – e.g. connecting with your anger in a healthy way if you have previously learned that this is an unacceptable part of experience
- Purifying the body-mind system – e.g. processing stored anger so that you feel more compassionate, present and grounded as a baseline
As well as these processes, the different aspects of body, heart, mind and soul have parts of experience that you can cultivate 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 emptiness and liberating the underlying aspects of experience that cause you to reify experience
- In the Heart aspect of experience you are cultivating openness and liberating the underlying aspects of experience that cause you to be closed
- 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 and informed by Polyvagal theory, which you can read more about here.
Polyvagal theory describes ‘neuroception’ – the ways in which bodies are listening to, reacting to and responding to their environments all the time, and how it happens outside of conscious awareness. Below the level of awareness, bodies are sending and picking up on subtle signals constantly.
Your entire nervous system is built around this, and it responds to signals and sensations in three main ways.
- The ventral vagal parasympathetic comes online when you feel safe, engaged and socially connected.
- The sympathetic comes online when you are activated and need to be ready for action.
- The dorsal vagal (which is a subset of the parasympathetic) comes online when you are in state of deep surrender or collapse.
The body is always subconsciously scanning the environment, interpreting what state it can be in and responding by being in 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 these signals come from the environment around you – for example, whether you are in a safe, cosy place or 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, freeze 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.
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 pre-conscious 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, fire fighters 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 fire fighters to avoid the exile being felt or expressed.
“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-to-one I always make space to connect with people’s whole-hearted emotional world and often what emerges is some grief. Most people have not be held in a space where they can express the fullness of their emotions and grief is usually the key to the floodgates opening. After going through this process people report feeling more in touch with themselves.
The Processes of Awakening
The diagrams below pull out the processes of awakening that are depicted in my model – cycling (or meditative insight), soul retrieval and purification.
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 to awakening.
Understanding these processes as separate to 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 the 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 to someone who has done a lot of this work.
An example of this is that when I started out on my meditative journey, I couldn’t have possibly imagined where I have ended up. I went through so many huge paradigm shifts and processed things on such a fundamentally deep level that the world became an entirely different place every couple of weeks, beyond what I would have previously been able to conceive of. As this compounded, it felt like moving through an entirely different world to the one I used to be in.
This started from the experience of what I call my stream entry. It was during a shadow work process where I opened to feeling such a deep sadness in me that I had a cessation-like experience into the soul realm and came back with an entirely different understanding of the human experience.
It’s really important to recognise that in order to grow you have to be willing to go through the process of not knowing, meeting your shadow, wading through all the shit, developing discipline, cultivating knowledge, practicing skills and refining your art.
It’s also not a linear process and people will bounce around in different areas at different times, related to different parts of experience. The more stressful or scary something is, the more likely you are to be on the left-hand side of the spectrum in the diagrams below, at least in part because your nervous system is more likely to be in fight, flight or freeze.
Domination and Oppression
Shadows are an innate part of experience. There are always parts of experience that remain obscured or filtered out.
In an ideal world everyone would be able to hold this with skill and compassion.
We don’t live in an ideal world so there is often subtle control, domination and oppression of different parts of different people’s experience 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 resource 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 turn that bad behaviour out on the world and enact it, 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 generous) 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 experience and reality is is incredibly individualistic, logical and patriarchal. [1]
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 experience.
The approach of becoming more aware of already conscious experience is completely blind to huge aspects of interconnected, embodied, emotional, psychedelic, archetypal and karmic aspects of experience.
There are huge swathes of experience that almost never get talked about or opened up during practice, because they are assumed to not be there by the limited mind.
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 things like the embodied experience. It is about being immersed in being an embodied expression of the real thing, 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 my 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.
The first one is just leaving the cave and getting into the world. It’s about getting out of your fixed perception of reality. This requires you to let go of your mind’s ideas of what experience is and open to something else.
It requires you to get into your body, heart and soul. To feel the direct experience of being in touch with these parts of yourself. Not the mind’s ideas of them, the actual expression.
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 a client 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 being on the level of ideas, we are working in someone’s immediate experience.
The second phase is opening to something bigger than you. To avoid going back into the cave during this phase, it’s important that opening to something bigger is the direct experience of the actual thing, rather than the idea of the thing. This phase builds on the first phase by focusing on connecting to immediate experience, but opening this wider than your personal experience.
Examples of this are non-dual experiences, connection to the Universe or the Divine, energetic experiences, mystical experiences, formless realms and more.
This is an incredibly subtle process that takes a long time to understand and feel.
Conclusion
Meditation practice and awakening is 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. It’s about being present instead of sleep-walking through life, having very fixed ideas about reality or sweeping things under the carpet.
A full practice or awakening requires you to work at all these different levels – body, heart, mind and soul; and through all these different processes – cycling, soul retrieval and purification. There is no single source of truth, or single root cause of all suffering.
It’s also important to recognise that doing this work can include connecting more fully or directly with the more beautiful aspects of experience but it also needs to include the harder parts of life. It usually includes connecting to more spiritual parts of experience, but it also needs to include the mundane parts of life.
If you are a heady type, you probably need to learn to put down all your ideas and actually feel some proper emotions. You will need to really let go of the copes and ideas that you have learned that subtly undermine your emotional world and really just feel sad, for example.
If you are an emotional type, you probably need to learn to put down your emotional stories and just notice that they don’t actually have any bearing on reality. There is a perspective that is larger than your emotions would like you to believe.
With all these approaches, practices and tools, you need to learn to be able to go through the difficult things – to develop the maturity and capacity to be with the things that hurt or are hard. To allow things to be imperfect, to process your emotions and to see challenge as an opportunity for learning or expanding. Rather than to run from pain or ignorance, turn it back out on the world or numb it out completely.
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, naturalness) even when experience is stressful or challenging in some way. They are meta-qualities that describe how you hold experience, rather than descriptions of necessarily feeling happy or good. Staying connected to these meta-states or qualities, even while life is hard, is the real test for being awake and present in your life.
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, but 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 overcome challenges and face hard truths, both as an individual and in connection with others, as well as to contribute to a meaningfully better world.
There is a lot of healing that can happen in this process. Especially when it is done in healthy environments. 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.
Ultimately, it is creating understanding, acceptance, safety and welcoming of all experience, that is the route to awakening, whether that be in your individual experience or how people interact as communities.
[1] This is described quite nicely by Iain McGilchrist’s work on the right and left hemisphere’s of the brain. The left hemisphere qualities, which are dominant in our culture, are more likely to be symptoms of lots of repression – dissociation, closedness, reification and control. The right hemisphere qualities, which are more oppressed, are more in line with the inclusive qualities I am describing as worthwhile to cultivate – presence, openness, emptiness and flow.