Body
Form
Part two of two in Introduction
Maps and models can be invaluable in helping you get your head around awakening experiences and creating deeper levels of understanding.
It’s also important that maps and models are held and used flexibly; that there is an understanding that no single map or model holds the ultimate truth of reality. They are helping you get in touch with your own experience and to discover new aspects of experience.
The body, heart, mind and soul framework emerged from the essence of the different strands of experience being pulled out of me and clarified; it is the simplest and most effective way that I could describe the underlying nature of experience.
This page is a directory of the models I have created and how they relate to each other. Every model can be related to every other model and they intersect and build on each other to create a rich eco-system. Each one has a link to the page on the website where you can find out more about it.
If you have a very analytical and nerdy side you may love all this technical detail underneath the hood of my content and approach. If not, you can skip this page; you don’t need to be able to understand this to relate to my content.
If you would like to hear me talk in more detail about my models, here is a presentation that I did on the Stoa – A Model of Awakening: Wholeness, Integrity & Your Innate Mystical Nature.
The basic building blocks of experience
Over-unifying or over-complexifying of experience
I have created a framework for awakening that describes how everyone is a living body, heart, mind and soul eco-system. And on a Universal level this corresponds to how life is a combination of form, relationship, consciousness and cosmos.
The structure is here to represent the building blocks of experience. It is a model that allows you to get to the core of the different parts of yourself and work as deeply and directly as possible, while retaining a sense of perspective and orientation.
From a technical viewpoint of experience; the body, heart, mind and soul arise interdependently together. It’s not possible to experience a mind without a body. It’s not possible to experience a heart without a mind etc. Every part relies on every other part to arise in experience. These all combine together to create human experience.
A good place to start with connecting to these building blocks is by sensing into the different parts of you. This will give you an intuitive and conceptual base from which to work with the content that it is here and this will allow you to go much deeper, much quicker.
The body is about your physicality.
The heart is about how you feel and connect to things.
The mind is to do with clarity and how you perceive and understand things
The soul-realm is the story and meaning that holds your experience together
Experience looks and feels differently depending whether you are primarily engaging with it through the body, the heart, the mind or the soul.
With this in mind, I have created a model of experience through each of these lenses.
How your nervous system shapes your experience; ways of vibing
The idea that you can change your experience solely through how you perceive things
Awakening is an expression of the Universe that occurs through a human body. A few of the different ways it can be approached are:
This map focuses on the bottom-up way of understanding experience.
From the body, awakening can be understood as a physiological process that changes the nature of your being. In this way of understanding awakening you are doing practices that are clarifying your embodied presence. This is depicted in the diagram below in the green box.
Through practice you are essentially cultivating a greater capacity to be in the green ‘mode’. You are expanding the size of the green box over time, which changes how experience arises from the ground up.
There are different practices you can do that achieve this, for example emptiness practice or purifying practices, each of which have different mechanisms in the body and nervous system.
All of them require a conversation between the nervous system, the surrounding environment and the mind. Self energy from Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS) is a really nice example of being in the green.
I write more about this model in this blog – Unlocking Full Spectrum Experience. Importantly, with all practices you need to be careful that you are orienting towards the green and making sure that you are not subconsciously shutting down lots of experience and putting it into the blue in the diagram below. When aspects of you are stuck in the orange or the blue, your perspective on experience can become very narrowed.
It’s also important to mention that the states in the diagram below are meta-states. For example, it’s possible to be in the green while you are angry. The green meta-state points towards presence and connection with self and other rather than disconnection, dominance or disassociation.
It is particularly important to recognise the collective element of this. People who are systemically oppressed are often stuck in fight, flight or freeze; having their reality completely shut down or being in the constant stress of having to change themselves to fit the dominant narrative.
Nervous systems are hyper-attuned to the subtleties of status, so actually a huge amount of awakening work is being willing to look at this aspect very carefully, let go of egos and entitlement and work with the dynamic. Competing narratives is one of the most stressful things for people’s nervous systems (it is registered akin to threat of death) and so usually the lower status person has to submit to the higher status person.
Being able to hold and respect different narratives, is one of the most important skills for maturity and modern collective awakening; allowing people to stay in green or Self energy and be connected to their own experience even when it’s different or confronting for those around them.
It’s worth saying that all this is an incredibly complex and intricate multi-dimensional process, that has been boiled down to a very simple 2D diagram.
The diagram has been inspired and informed by polyvagal theory, which you can read more about here. The NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) is really good for working with the nervous system and you can read an introductory overview here.
The goal of my teaching
Spiritual narcissism and having fixed ideas of what each person’s spiritual path should look like
From the perspective of the heart, awakening is being able to connect with an ever-broader and ever-deeper range of experience in a direct, unfiltered way.
With this approach you are getting more intimately in touch with experience, whatever it is. It is built on a fundamental trust of both you and experience and is grounded in the idea that it is worth it for you to show up in truth and love.
With each of the layers, there is a meta-state that you are cultivating, which allows this intimacy with experience to emerge.
Body: Connecting with the body is about learning to be present regardless of the content of experience
Heart: Connecting with the heart is about learning to be open to a wider range of emotions
Mind: Connecting with the mind is about learning to see the emptiness of all perceptions
Soul: Connecting with the soul is about learning to flow with experience
The shape of the triangle is important. You are grounding your practice on a wide base of embodiment and wholeheartedness. A more narcissistic shape of experience would be wider at the top and thinner at the bottom. Your ideas about yourself would be bigger than the realities.
Often when people talk about self in Buddhism, a lot of what they are referring to are selfish, narcissistic traits, which tend to be the ones that feel unpleasant, rather than other types of self (e.g. Self energy in IFS).
It is worth saying that orienting towards the positive meta states only works when there is a critical mass of non-narcissistic energy in the collective system. For example, if the environment you live in has enough toxicity in it, people who are present and open will be oppressed and taken advantage of, making these ways of being essentially impossible. Most of the oppression happens subtly and under the radar.
This approach to awakening is partially about creating a critical mass of people who are present in their life in a more honest, embodied and alive way, because it creates a collective experience with more joy, truth and love in it.
Using the same approach to map the transcendental aspects of experience – Form, Relationship, Consciousness and Cosmic – the order reverses, like a double rainbow.
The widest base is the Soul i.e. soulful divine collective intelligence is where experience emerges from.
This puts the individual experience at the narrower end of the triangle, which again is the opposite of a more narcissistic way of relating to life.
Every model has its limitations. It is important to use them with common sense and it’s really down to you feeling into the best you can do in this moment and being honest with yourself about what is true in your experience.
As an example, the counter-force to the triangle model is that the opposites can also be cultivated in a positive way; the control of a formula one driver, the reification of a social sciences expert, the closedness of impeccable discernment and the disassociation from unhealthy dynamics, for example.
A map to depict progress with this approach to awakening
Awakening processes having too much of a narrow remit
This map gives an overview of an entire path, when relating to experience through my framework. Each box holds a rich eco-system of embodied insights and lived-in realisations. This will be explicated in my book, ‘Being Buddha Nature’ and through the awakening course.
Part of the mysterious and fractal nature of this model is that every box is able to contain every other box, like Indra’s net.
The objective for this path is to connect with every aspect of your being and integrate this into how you relate to the collective experience.
You can do the path in any order but the insights build in order of subtlety and complexity. If you miss out some stages at the start you may have built things on an unstable base and you could be cultivating shadows or blind-spots when reaching the later stages.
Each of the boxes is like a building block that adds to the triangle model above.
Here are some examples of how you can use the model to triangulate different aspects of experience.
The meeting of heart and relationship
Cultivating openness by practicing connection
The meeting of consciousness and mind
Cultivating emptiness by practicing investigation
The meeting of cosmos and mind
Cultivating emptiness by practicing expression
Before talking about ‘Buddhism’, it is worth saying that there are as many Buddhisms as there are Buddhists in the world. Every culture, tradition and person is putting together a unique combination of practices and teachings into their version of Buddhism.
Below, I have used my style of modelling to map Buddhist practice. For the sake of this demonstration, I have stuck to key aspects of surviving early Buddhism and teachings that are generally attributed to Gautama Buddha.
To reflect the teachings, I have stripped out all the soul layers of the model. Anatta, one of the core assumptions about reality in this model, can literally be translated as no-soul.
Some of the impacts of adopting this model are:
The counter-points to this, which are the benefits of this way of practicing, are:
As you can see, there are some serious limitations to the model that can become benefits in the right context. It can be incredibly useful to adopt this frame during practice time, retreat time or even for a portion of life. The simplicity allows for a deepening of practice that is incredibly hard to do while still including the fullness of life and the soul realm.
To have the option to choose this path within a context where you are aware of its benefits, as well as of its impact and limitations, is a valid way of practicing.
Non-self, suffering and impermanence are all rich and deep aspects of experience that are worth engaging with. It can also be super nice and resourcing to be able to have a break from the intensity of the world, which these realisations allow, if you have enough privilege to be able to live and practice in this way while still being safe and connected.
To claim that this Buddhist model is representative of what is most meaningful, most loving and most true in the world, however, feels like violence against the soul and takes quite a hefty dose of ignorance and arrogance to pull off.
There is a deeper layer of realness and truth that opens up when the soul realm is included. The benefits of including soulfulness in your practice model (beyond it just being more true and representative) are:
The biggest challenge is that it takes a lot of courage and humility to engage with the path in this way.
I will end this section with a story. Some years ago I visited an exhibition about Buddhism at the British Library, I was deep into practice at the time and searching for a spiritual home that felt aligned with my experiences.
They have a collection of some of the oldest written Buddhist texts in the world and one was on display. The translation was of a description of a teaching from Gautama Buddha affirming the importance of there being no such thing as a soul.
I stood in front of it for a long time and cried. The depth of loss to experience and the oppression of the more feminine, intuitive aspects felt immense beyond words.
It feels important to stand up for this in the world.
Full awakening
Exclusion and elitism in traditions claiming authority on experience
From the soul, awakening can be understood as becoming an expression of the greatest possible potential for true and meaningful experience.
This model emerged from the idea to map awakening without falling into the traps of mental reification of experience. The outcome is fluid, inclusive and nebulous. It is built on the rainbow colours and relates to the chakra system, but is not tied to it. There is a simplified version of the model below.
The soul is free from hierarchy and liner-time, which means that this 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.
Each of these layers takes a truly unfathomable amount of work to integrate fully. In order to get to a level of simplicity and clarity that is both true and wise, you have to have integrated all the complexity and darkness of an insight or paradigm – to have done the shadow work that means it’s not spiritual bypassing.
The core belief of this model is that everything is Buddha nature; this video gives a five minute description of what I mean by this – What is Buddha Nature
You can read more detail about the map and some ways to work with it here. For relating to the rest of my content: body is red and orange; heart is yellow and green; mind is turquoise and indigo; and soul is purple and black.
I have modelled the Body, Heart, Mind, Soul framework a number of different ways. Each of the models links to a post that describes that way of modelling.
a) Eight Factors of Good Spiritual Practice
What this model depicts: An updated version of the eight-fold path
Problems it addresses: More embodied, more relevant to the modern world
What this model depicts: A timeless expression of movement on the path
Problems that it addresses: The tendency to get hung up on linear progress
What this model depicts: How the different parts of experience impact each other
Problems it addresses: The importance of balance and how to cultivate it
What this model depicts: How the different parts of experience create different seasons, moods or vibes
Problems it addresses: Bringing balance to an over capitalist focus on growth, development and expansion
What this model depicts: Form and emptiness
Problems it addresses: Although there is plenty of inextricable crossover between form and emptiness they are not only entirely the same thing, they also exist separately from each other
This video gives a one hour overview of this and includes some of the dangers of not including both the physical and the immaterial in practice – Emptiness & Object Permanence, an Integrated Model of Reality
What this model depicts: A holistic overview of experience that includes Body, Heart, Mind and Soul
Problem it addresses: Taking what mindfulness says experience is as rote
The Divine
Where does experience originate from?
An important part of my framework is connection to a level of faith that the system is unfolding in a patterned and intelligent way, on both a micro and macro level. That there is an underlying fundamental goodness and intelligence that is in all of us and bigger than us.
This video gives an eight minute intro to how I relate to God – Relating to God
On a technical level it’s very intimately linked to time and I write more about this here – The Different Aspects of Time
There is a huge amount of information in these maps and models. How you relate to it will depend on where you are on your path.
It may be that understanding the meta-structure is useful or it may be that specific details that jumped out at you are what you needed to discover.
If you want to get into how to practice with this approach or some of the practical details of the models, you can start at the Table of Contents.
Don’t get so hung up on the maps and models that you miss out on the joy and connection that’s right in front of you – you never know what’s going to bring you the deepest opportunity to awaken, from having your heart broken to receiving unexpected Easter Eggs from the Universe.
The point of awakening is to see and embody the truth of experience so that you can act with more wisdom, love and courage, even in the face of difficulty.
My hope is that this information is inspiring or helpful for you in some way in your journey towards embodying your true nature, for the benefit of all beings.
All my content is open-source and available for free. If you have found it useful, please consider donating the cost of a book through Paypal (£10 – 20). I really appreciate your support.