The Body, Heart, Mind and Soul framework is intended to break the idea that awakening or experience can be pinned down to a single source; it’s co-created through all these different parts of you and the Universe.
This map depicts how the body, heart, mind and soul framework looks through the lens of the soul. You can find other ways my framework has been mapped and modelled here.
This map and exercise were created in collaboration with Kaloyan Stefanov.
Maps
Maps can be counter-productive in the awakening process, if held with any rigidity. They can create reified ideas, where you start to only see the map instead of the experience that is right in front of you.
Maps can also be incredibly useful for helping you to understand and feel into experience with more clarity and sensitivity; to become more aware of what is going on; to learn from other people and traditions; and to make more space for the full range of your experience.
This map describes different layers of experience, using the rainbow colours (plus pink and dark) as the structure, and pulls them out as separate threads. Clarifying and distilling different aspects of experience and awakening.
It can be used on an individual or systemic level to understand experience better.
Rainbow Map
We used a rainbow to map experience. There are a few reasons for this:
Visible
Rainbows are created from the visible spectrum of light. The purpose of this map is to make aspects of experience that are normally invisible visible.
A rainbow is the underlying mechanism of everything we can see — its components make up the visible spectrum of light, but they themselves aren’t usually visible. In this way the colours of the rainbow are an excellent metaphor for showing people the ingredients of experience in a clarified way.
Ephemerality
Rainbows are ephemeral. They appear and disappear; you can never reach or find the end. They are created from reflections and refractions. In the same way, this map isn’t designed to be an ultimate representation of reality – it’s a transitory expression of an underlying truth.
Replicable & Unique
Rainbows are something that happen all around the world. The potential for them to arise occurs anywhere there is light and something that can refract the light. They are both entirely replicable, and at the same time, each rainbow will be unique depending on the conditions it arises in. This reflects how awakening is possible and replicable in everyone and, at the same time, will be different for each person.
Separation & Unity
Separation is a vital part of clarification; we have to be able to distinguish things from the other things around them in order to know them and feel them. Separating the layers of experience into the colours of the rainbow creates a lot of clarity about different aspects of experience, but it manages to do this without creating fundamental separation or exclusion. Rather than saying it’s this but not that, it’s teasing out the spectrum of different aspects of experience that can also all blend back into one.
Opening to the Full Spectrum
The purpose of this map is not to divide experience into right and wrong, good and bad. The objective with this approach to awakening is to open to receiving and being present with as much of the full spectrum of experience as is feasible. The purpose is to create more freedom for the full spectrum of the Universal experience to express itself cleanly, with less distortion and projection.
Intuitive Understanding & Inspiration
The spectrum of light is baked into the Universe. Colours and rainbows are used as a framework to understand experience in many ways. While understanding my own experience and creating this map, I was influenced by some existing maps and theories, including the chakras and the altitudes of development.
How To Use It
There is almost endless information that could have been included in this map. Most, if not all, of the layers have entire traditions dedicated to them.
We have distilled the information down to something very simple. The invitation is to feel into what the layers mean for you and how you express them in the world. The map is like a launch pad or a landing pad for your own explorations.
We have included a tantric exercise below the map, which we have found is the most direct way of working with the map. In this exercise you are engaging directly with the ways that you are likely to be out of alignment, processing the emotions around this and orienting towards a clearer expression.
The map is not intended as a representation of linear development; the idea is that you will cultivate different depths in different parts at different times.
One aspect of my approach to awakening is that it is in part through facing your challenges that you awaken more deeply. To get stronger, you need to lift weights, or to learn, you need to study hard things. In the same way, if you want to be present and aware, it is important to be willing to face the difficult parts of experience. This works best when it is balanced with a healthy dose of resourcing and opening to deeper layers of goodness as well.
The aim is to open to more wholehearted truth and joy, including in the face of adversity, rather than to beat yourself up.
Practice can include things like developing concentration, increasing awareness, growing out of your comfort zone, shadow work, releasing tensions, cultivating more positivity, connecting more deeply with your own experience, expressing yourself more fully, learning to take better care of yourself, having blissful experiences, losing your sense of self, or opening more to the experiences of others. It comes from the full range of experience.
It can also be helpful to recognise that the process of awakening is a life-death-rebirth cycle. People are continually going through this cycle on an individual and collective level. Some parts are pleasant, some parts are unpleasant; the idea is to face as much of experience as you can with an open, courageous and spacious heart for the benefit of yourself and others. To orient towards truth and love, rather than ignorance and indifference.
This is deeply situational and requires patience, skill and capacity to feel into what this means and what is needed in each moment. How to do this is different for each person in each moment.
One of the biggest strengths of this map is that it helps people avoid getting stuck in one way of looking at the world. It helps people notice that good guidance, both on an individual and Universal level, depends on which aspect of experience you are relating to at that moment.
Ignorance & Exclusion
An important element of this map is that it depicts how shutting parts of yourself or others down can cause a lot of suffering.
Most spiritual traditions have shadow aspects that subtly ignore or exclude large parts of experience. These parts of experience don’t go away, they just become squeezed out into the shadows and will often get expressed in unhealthy ways. Depending on the culture and the person, it could come out in unhealthy behaviour or be a source of shame.
A tradition or practice doesn’t need to include all the aspects of experience, but it needs to be open about its limitations and the contexts within which it is relevant. Otherwise, it creates a cultural shadow around important aspects of experience.
People often talk about reducing separation or suffering through spirituality, but I believe it can be just as important to focus on reducing ignorance and exclusion. There are healthy ways of being separate from each other, but subtly ignoring large parts of experience is not very good for integrity, truth or love.
The antidote to this is a radical openness and honesty about what is being included and excluded, in both a collective and individual setting.
It’s also really valuable for there to be spaces where there is an orientation around including the full spectrum of experience from a whole-hearted and healthily interdependent place.
The tantric exercise below the map will help you explore and discover some of the aspects of experience that might be caught up in shadow for you personally.
Collective
The map includes the collective aspect of experience and what this is like when it is awakened.
An awakened collective requires its leaders to have depth, courage and capacity. It also needs a level of maturity from everyone involved and a minimum amount of resources – people need to feel confident that their basic emotional, intellectual and physical needs can be met. This allows people to open up and connect authentically, rather than be in self-preservation mode.
What I am describing as awakened collectives are different to typical spiritual communities. Rather than forgoing a sense of individual identity to merge with a greater whole, an awakened collective is about being able to connect with yourself, others and what is greater than human in a full-spectrum way.
To be able to show up in this way, it’s important to recognise that being in connection can’t always be about being positive or connected in some lovey-dovey way; a truly open collective has to be able to have the capacity to hold people’s difficult emotions, to accept feedback and negative thoughts, to navigate difficult conversations, to do meaningful things in the world, to support self-responsibility and for people to be willing to face challenges as individuals and together.
It is rare to find a community or collective with this level of maturity, but it’s important that we include and aspire to this as part of what awakening is and can be.
Key
There are two layers for each of Body, Heart, Mind, and Soul. For each of the layers of experience, you will find the following distilled information.
Archetype, Colour & Aspect of Experience it Relates to
Individual
What’s being awakened in the individual
Universal
The Universal aspect of experience that is in all things
Unified
When the individual and universal synthesise into a participatory experience of the Universe
Collective awakening
How an awakened collective functions
Craving
The place where this energy can get stuck in craving and anxious attachment
Aversion
The place where this energy can get stuck in aversion and avoidant attachment
Healthy sign
What this looks like when wholeheartedly embodied
Animal / Red / Body
Individual: All experience happens in the present moment
Universal: Everything is an energetic expression
Unified: Fundamental belonging
Collective awakening: Everyone is connected to Self energy
Craving: Addiction
Aversion: Dissociation from the bodily experience
Healthy signs: Able to pause and be present, able to be in energetic layer
Lover / Orange / Body
Individual: In touch with eros
Universal: Everything is a creative expression of life-force
Unified: Inspiration
Collective awakening: Harnessing the inherent creativity in each person
Craving: Fear of death
Aversion: Fear of life
Healthy signs: In touch with fundamental pleasure, feeling your unique hum in collaboration with others and the Universe
Warrior / Yellow / Heart
Individual: Interdependent origination
Universal: There is no single source of truth
Unified: Interbeing
Collective awakening: The dignity of experience is honoured
Craving: Inability to stand up for self
Aversion: Controlling or manipulating others
Healthy signs: Honesty, accountability
Poet / Green / Heart
Individual: Sincerity
Universal: Everything is an expression of Universal love
Unified: Wholeness
Collective awakening: Integrity with self and others
Craving: Overgiving
Aversion: Turning away from grief, repressing anger, unaware of emotions
Healthy signs: Agapic love, resilience
Mage / Turquoise / Mind
Individual: Connected to the subtle realms
Universal: Meaning and resonance are an organising force of reality
Unified: Imaginal Causality
Collective awakening: Self-managing
Craving: Spinning stories, not saying what you mean
Aversion: Hiding things, insensitivity
Healthy signs: Authenticity, clarity
Sage / Indigo / Mind
Individual: Aware of thoughts as thoughts
Universal: Endlessness
Unified: Non-duality
Collective awakening: Experiencing the emergent, complex system
Craving: Pinning down, attachment to ideas
Aversion: Lack of intellectual rigour
Healthy signs: Open-mindedness, discernment
Mystic / Purple / Soul
Individual: Mystical experience
Universal: Everything is the cosmic story
Unified: Cohesion
Collective awakening: Recognising the sacred
Craving: Spiritual bypass and rejection of the material realm
Aversion: Nihilism, scientific materialism
Healthy signs: Alignment, self-esteem
Heartful Demon / Dark / Soul
Recorded guidance to explore your heartful demon, by Joost Vervoort
Individual: Individuation
Universal: Struggle and separation are key ingredients of life
Unified: The story you were given
Collective awakening: Capacity to be present in challenging situations outside of the drama triangle
Craving: Blame and hopelessness
Aversion: Toxic positivity
Healthy signs: Genius, wisdom
Sympathetic Joy / Pink / All Aspects
Individual: Amor fati
Universal: Rightness of the whole
Unified: Enjoying the adventure
Collective awakening: Surrendering to the truth
Craving: Certainty, guaranteed safety
Aversion: Control, focusing on status
Healthy signs: Resilience, trustworthiness
Buddha Nature / Light / All Aspects
Individual: Awake to experience
Universal: The entire Universe in its awakened nature
Unified: Buddha Nature
Collective awakening: Accepting all beings in their wholeness, including yourself
Craving: Perfectionism
Aversion: Excluding large parts of experience
Healthy signs: Benevolence, clear-seeing
Alignment Exercise
It takes time to come into direct embodied contact with truth. You have to develop the skills that are needed to get out of the way of experience without collapsing.
One aspect of this is that you need to remove the trauma and reification that is getting in the way of you and your direct experience. Unprocessed material distorts your behaviour, feelings and perceptions of the world and stops you being able to see and embody true nature.
This exercise gives an alignment statement and some trigger phrases for each of the layers of experience to make this process conscious.
The alignment statements help you orient yourself towards the awakened state. The trigger phrases help you notice ways in which you carry pain or trauma within you and give you the opportunity to either process it or create some spaciousness around it.
Trigger Phrases
When you are carrying trauma or challenging karma within you, it will shape how you see and experience the world. If you aren’t able to recognise the distortions in experience, they don’t go away, they become shadows. Clarifying, purifying or simply acknowledging and accepting your shadows is an important part of reaching the awakened states of each layer.
The triggers in this exercise are there to represent a distillation of some of the painful messages that you might carry within you. They are barriers to you being in touch with the truth of awakened experience.
These painful messages aren’t always received explicitly from anywhere or necessarily even consciously in you. Everyone carries feelings, ideas, energies and stories on a more subtle layer, and the purpose of the exercise is to connect to this more energetic subconscious realm to see what resonates with what is inside you, rather than going into stories.
Some of the trigger phrases will feel more acute for you than others. This indicates that there is something there that you need to process. Painful messages can get stuck inside of you from a wide range of sources; you may have received them as a child, some are baked-in to the way our societies are structured, and some may be things you have encountered as an adult.
One of the reasons that everyone carries pain is because of a lack of resources. When there isn’t enough love and physical resources for everyone to be safe and free – on a familial, societal or Universal level – unhealthy and painful codependent patterns are created. Different people get caught in different roles around this, enacting or absorbing the impact of these unhealthy patterns.
The trigger phrases are all written in the format of being directed at ‘you’. The ‘you’ in this depends on the frame and context. You may experience this as:
- directed in towards yourself from yourself – inner critic
- directed towards you from others – victim
- directed towards others from you – perpetrator
Everyone will have a natural tendency towards one of these modes but can experience all of them at different times.
The idea with this alignment exercise is not to strive towards perfectionism but to feel what is present.
You are not trying to get rid of the feelings or experiences in the trigger phrases but to remove the charge or blind spot around them. Connecting to the difficulties in a spacious way can dissolve or purify some challenging parts of experience. For others, introducing more spaciousness creates more optionality around the experience. For example, if anger arises, rather than just acting out the anger blindly, you can feel it, take some time to consider what is important in the moment, and act from that place.
By creating more spaciousness and acceptance in yourself around challenging emotions and perceptions, you will also increase your capacity to meet others in their truth and wholeness when they are in that place.
Alignment Phrases
The alignment phrases are meant as a compass. A way of orienting towards truth, love and clear expression. The idea isn’t that you need to be aligned all the time, but it can act as a compass for what you would like to orient towards. You can use the alignment phrases to think about what you want or need to cultivate more of in your life and practice.
They are also helpful to adopt as a baseline or starting place. Moving from the place of being already whole allows for a more honest and compassionate presence when you are facing your challenges.
If you can adopt a perspective of wholeness — where everything is an expression of Buddha Nature or everything is a natural part of the expression of the Universe unfolding — then it allows you to feel how there is nothing fundamentally wrong with you because everything is an aspect of Universal expression. This way of looking can create more space for honesty and openness.
In order to adopt this perspective, you need to start at the end. You can start from adopting a perspective of total alignment and awakening. You can open to the already fully awake nature of the Universe.
To do this, you can use the alignment phrases from the White layer, which incorporates the full spectrum of Awakened being:
‘I feel valued and accepted in the world. I feel whole and like every part of me is welcome. I feel confident and motivated that being present will create more truth, love and dignity in the world. I sense the Buddha Nature that everything emerges from, and I can move from this place.’
It’s important that you are able to grok this sentiment, even in a very small way, before working with this content, otherwise it can just become an exercise in beating yourself up.
If this feels inaccessible and you want to build up to this, then you may need to do some more practice to resource yourself, such as jhana or heart practices, and develop skills for relating to challenging material, such as embodied therapeutic practices. This will give you capacity to disentangle trauma and clarify the truth of experience rather than get caught in loops.
When working with the trigger phrases, you want to drop them into your practice when you are feeling safe and resourced, from a place of radical compassion. Noticing their impact on your being and what needs to be recognised or felt.
With the alignment phrases, you may want to choose one or two key phrases that feel important to work with in practice or life and find ways to orient towards them. This may be a simple remembrance to orient this way, or it may include making changes to your life and behaviour.
This video describes how to work with them and gives a short guided meditation with one of the phrases as an example.
The Phrases
Red
Triggers: “You don’t matter. You aren’t respected as a whole human being. You aren’t allowed to exist separately from me.”
Alignment: “I feel grounded and centred. I feel connected to myself, the environment and the people around me, and I can be present. I respect the laws of nature and the basic value of beings, including myself.”
Orange
Triggers: “It’s too dangerous or threatening for you to be yourself. Your desires, including sexuality, are unreasonable. You have to fight for your space to be yourself.”
Alignment: “I welcome that I will die one day and that I only have a short time to experience this life. I am in touch with my eros and my desires. I enjoy putting my creative expression into the world in collaboration with others.”
Yellow
Triggers: “This shouldn’t be happening. You need to do what I say, or something really bad is going to happen. I’m not interested in you, I’m only interested in what you can do for me. Your experience is only worth what it can do for me.“
Alignment: “I respect the dignity and will of others, and I set healthy boundaries for myself. I value myself and my contribution to the whole. My will is aligned with the will of the Universe.”
Green
Triggers: “You are unloveable. You don’t feel or love correctly. There is something wrong with you.”
Alignment: “My heart is open to feel the full range of emotions. I care for myself, others and the world, and I am open to receiving love. I enjoy sharing my true self and gifts with others.”
Turquoise
Triggers: “You shouldn’t say this or be like that. You need to hide your true thoughts and feelings.”
Alignment: “I express myself with integrity and stand in my truth. My words are kind, even when I have something difficult to share. I welcome the emotions, thoughts and expressions of myself and others.”
Indigo
Triggers: “You are able to have the ultimate perspective. You are able to act as the final arbiter of what is good and bad. There is only one truth.“
Alignment: “I can access a wider perspective than my own self-view. My mind is open to new perspectives and vision. I can discern what is true for me without needing to dominate others.”
Purple
Triggers: “Your life isn’t important. Your story doesn’t mean anything. Your deepest values are unreasonable. You’re not wanted.”
Alignment: “I feel connected to the Universe and know that I am an expression of it. I trust its mystery. I am here to contribute my experience to the whole, and I appreciate other people’s contributions. I am in touch with my deepest values.”
Pink
Triggers: “You need to know what’s going on. You need to be in control. You need to get it right.”
Alignment: “I surrender to being part of the greater whole and enjoy going on the adventure of life.”
Dark
Triggers: “This is your fault. You’re making a big deal out of nothing.”
Alignment: “I recognise the depth and seriousness of the inherent challenges of life. I can remain open-hearted in connection with the darkness and sadness of life, and I feel how this can be both grounding and a source of inspiration.”
Light
Triggers: “Your experience isn’t valid. You aren’t good enough. The Universe is a cold, uncaring place.”
Alignment: “I feel connected to wholeness. I feel confident and motivated that being present is meaningful. I sense the Buddha Nature that everything emerges from, and I can move from this place.”
Explore Further
You can explore how you can work with the layers of experience more deeply with my Body, Heart, Mind and Soul framework:
- Red and orange – cultivating presence in the body >
- Yellow and green – cultivating wholeness in the heart >
- Turquoise and indigo – cultivating freshness in the mind >
- Purple and pink – cultivating flow with the soul-realm >
Explore Your Whole Being
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