Introduction
to Body, Heart, Mind, Soul
Body
I teach awakening to the true nature of experience. The true nature of experience is more mystical than most people imagine. At the same time, being in touch with it also opens people to a simpler and more direct way of being.
I use the simple framework of Body, Heart, Mind, and Soul as a way of describing the true nature of experience and as a means for people to practice in a way that includes every aspect of themself in the awakening process.
Practicing with the framework involves learning to be present and awake to the full spectrum of experience for your own benefit and the benefit of all beings.
Coming into alignment with true nature can open up ease, spaciousness, joy, and thriving, and it can also mean you encounter the challenges of life more directly. One of the strongest threads you will find running throughout my work is that facing your vulnerabilities and the darkness with a strong and open heart creates a greater capacity for wholehearted presence.
Body, Heart, Mind, Soul
Body, Heart, Mind, Soul is a simple framework that describes the underlying nature of life and experience.
Many spiritual views on reality either grab hold of one aspect of experience and make that part the ultimate truth or encourage you 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 multidimensional and precise.
The content on this website is an invitation to connect to the different aspects in your individual experience. The world needs people who are wholeheartedly present, awake and resourced, and these are some of the foundations for that.
Each aspect of experience has its own qualities to connect with — awakening the body is very different from awakening the mind, for example. 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.
My approach is very ecosystemic; there isn’t a single linear development process that everyone will follow in exactly the same way, but if you want a linear order to read the content on my website, you will find that laid out here.
If you would like an introduction to each of the elements, I created a series of recorded conversations with my friend Nathan Vanderpool.
The content on this website takes you deeper into each of the aspects of experience, and different pages and sections of the website relate to different parts. If you want to notice the different elements as you explore the content, you will find these symbols throughout the site to help orient you.
An aspect of the Body, Heart, Mind and Soul framework is that it behaves like Indra’s Net, where every element exists inside every other element in a fractal, and this is often reflected in the content and structure of my work.
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 simple and 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 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 good sign that you are really connecting to these things is that you start to feel more real, alive, open, and grounded.
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 perceive differently.
There are also the transpersonal aspects of experience that can be understood and experienced—the Universal Body, Universal Heart, Universal Mind, and Universal Soul. As your practice develops and deepens and you become more open to life, you may start to experience the transpersonal aspects of experience.
- Universal Body: feeling embedded in the rich flow of life in both the physical and energetic realms
- Universal Heart: surrendering 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 and the way that the individual and transpersonal synthesise in my upcoming book, ‘Being Buddha Nature: A Guide to Embodied Awakening’.
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