Introduction
to Body, Heart, Mind, Soul
Body
Awakening is about becoming present with the nature of experience itself. This includes who you are, what life is, and where these two synthesise into a non-dual experience.
True nature is more psychedelic and multidimensional than most people imagine, while at the same time, being in touch with it also connects people to a simpler and more direct way of being.
I use the Body, Heart, Mind, and Soul framework as a way of including every aspect of yourself in the awakening process. The ethos is about being present with the full spectrum of experience and aligning with the awakened version.
Practicing with the framework involves learning to meet all experience with courage, compassion, and clarity for your own benefit and the benefit of all beings. One of the strongest threads you will find running throughout my work is that facing your challenges, vulnerabilities, and darkness with a strong and open heart creates a greater capacity for honest presence.
The content on this website mostly focuses on getting in touch with the Body, Heart, Mind, and Soul on an individual level.
There are also the transpersonal aspects of experience—the Universal Body, Universal Heart, Universal Mind, and Universal Soul—and the way that the individual and the transpersonal become non-dual. I am currently writing a book and developing a course about this.
I am also currently researching how to teach this approach for collective awakening.
Body, Heart, Mind, Soul
Body, Heart, Mind, Soul is a framework that describes the multidimensionality of life and experience.
In spiritual and introspective practices, people can have a tendency to either grab hold of one aspect of experience and make that the ultimate truth or to check out into a superposition where the truth is unknowable. The Body, Heart, Mind, Soul framework opens the possibility for the truth to be both precise and flexible.
The content on this website connects you to the different aspects of your experience on an individual level. Each aspect has its own qualities to awaken and connect with. Also every person is unique, and how exactly this manifests will be subtly different for everyone.
It’s important to engage with all of the aspects of yourself at some point in your path because otherwise parts of you will be left in shadow. Whether you prefer to do deep dives into each one or cultivate a more balanced practice is up to you. This approach is about following your eros, awakening to truth, healing your trauma, and taking your natural shape in the world.
Navigation
Body, Heart, Mind and Soul behave like a fractal, where every element exists inside every other element endlessly.
This website is organised to emulate that fractal. The different sections of the website – practice guides, poetry, writing, and the whole being awakening framework – are linked to the body, the heart, the mind and the soul, and then within each of these sections, there is a body, heart, mind, and soul page. Some pages go another layer deeper and have body, heart, mind, and soul sections.
If you are interested in paying attention to the meta-pattern as you explore the content, you will find these symbols throughout the site to help orient you.
What Are the Body, the Heart, the Mind, and the Soul?
The framework emerged during a multi-year period of spiritual revelation. It was shown to me that there are basic building blocks or underlying currents that run through the universe. These have an individual expression within each being and a universal expression.
These four aspects of experience are continuously emerging, interplaying, and interdependent in ways that make experience extremely profound and complex, while at the same time being breathtakingly direct.
The best way to understand each of the aspects is to practice so that you can experience them firsthand. Feeling these different fibres of the universe within you gives you a direct understanding of them, rather than being stuck in the mind’s ideas of what they are.
To give you a taste, here is a very simple description of what each of them entails:
- Body: being with the subtlety of direct experience in the present moment; moving from dissociation to presence
- Heart: feeling the full spectrum of experience; moving from closed to open
- Mind: spacious, clear-seeing that includes the ephemerality and fluidity of experience; moving from reification to emptiness
- Soul: embracing your unique experience and expression; moving from control to flow
A good sign that you are really connecting to these things is that you start to feel more real, alive, open, and grounded.
A real awakening will permeate how you live your everyday life, what you understand reality to be, and how you treat yourself and others, rather than just being something you talk about.
As your practice develops and deepens, you may start to experience the transpersonal versions of these aspects of the universe:
- Universal Body: feeling embedded in the rich flow of life itself in both the physical and energetic realms
- Universal Heart: surrendered to truth, love, and death
- Universal Mind: experiencing the atemporal intelligence that reveals itself fresh in each moment
- Universal Soul: feeling all life as an expression of meaningful cosmic emergence, including you
I will share more about these in my upcoming book, ‘Being Buddha Nature: A Guide to Awakening’.
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