AWAKE: It's YOUR Turn (A Documentary About Ordinary People and Extraordinary Transformation)

[Music] you walk to that precipice enough times that at some point you just really have nothing left to lose and you just jump off and something just let go it just fell away I was stunned I was stunned that life could be that beautiful that life could be experienced that directly there was no sense of body any longer the hands felt as if had swelled up to the sides of the house and it it was as if I had shot out of the head like a cannon like at the speed of light with just a caleidoscope of colors and there was just no sense of anything left behind it it just felt like my whole life just burst and that was totally fine it came with a lot of tears and a lot of smiling the mind went very very quiet the spirit went very very quiet the universe went very very quiet and there was a deep deep peace and a deep rest [Music] [Music] [Music] I remember walking by people and I could suddenly feel everything they were feeling inside I could feel their emotions I could feel their sadness and their grief and I was very young and so it wasn't a a mental understanding it was simply a feeling was very profound and I remember sort of tugging on my parents' hand as we were walking pointing back and and wanting to almost go to that person and perhaps Comfort them I don't really know and my parents gave the usual reaction of you know don't stare at strangers or let's go you know but I remember very profoundly that sense of sort of a boundlessness in the human Dimension uh an empathy that was so complete that I couldn't really tell whether it was me or them I think along growing up I sort of started to develop this something is wrong with me because I'm in the sensory experience I remember I would Trace I had a hard time um with conversation so I was dyslexic and couldn't understand what people were telling me and so when somebody would be speaking to me I would be tracing their face and I would be drawing and outlining their face with my eyes and with just like perceiving through the visual field and that tactile feeling sense and I just perceived that something was wrong with me because I didn't understand them but it felt so natural for me to to really just be in the sensory and felt experience I had run a theater company for about 20 years at the time and kind of had reached a place in life where um it seemed I had hit some kind of barrier and uh was pretty much done with the conventional life I just had done cycle after cycle after cycle and um didn't seem like life was going to get any better no matter what choice was made or what was acquired in life it just uh it seemed like a a freezing place before I became interested in the possibility of waking up I would say that I had pretty acute and pervasive anxiety I also had a lot of mood shifts pretty low moods and I was overall very dissatisfied with my experience of life and of myself when I was a child my biggest suffering was always around not being accepted for who I was I was kind of precocious and you just adults were frequently annoyed by me and most kids were annoyed by me too and so my way of being with myself was to spend lots of time alone in my room or out in the woods by myself and for me both of those places were very safe because they were quiet and I didn't have to think about who I was in my early adult life um I realize now that I was experiencing the world how I experienced it now and how I experience it now is through this sensory expression that is very alive in the visual sensory field I was at a place of pretty intense depression and had reached a state of such apathy that even the idea of suicide seemed like it was too much [Music] work I tried really hard to find a path that felt like it fit for me but I always would feel like no this isn't right no this isn't right so I was discarding teachers and paths and teachers and paths and for 20 years I chose atheism there is nothing nothing means anything we're all just dust so for most of my path I was not aware that there was a clear path towards an end goal that it was never like that for me all I knew and became more and more aware of was how deeply I was suffering and I felt like the more progress I made on in the process of introspection I would call it that that's what I knew I was doing just like observing my own psychology with some spiritual idea sprinkled into it the empathic experiences I felt periodically as a child were emotional in nature they had the the feeling tone of emotion but there was an added sense there of an infinite intimacy an intimacy that goes beyond the personal emotional experience so it felt right in a in a very ineffable way a very difficult way to describe it felt like this is where I'm supposed to go somehow when all you experience is suffering you have nothing to compare it to so it's the norm that was my experience with it so I didn't sense that there was a way out of it but I did really in a way I think energetically know that there was um that there didn't need to be a way out of it that that it was just more here like being here was this always a safe space so I think I knew that emotionally and energetically without conceptually understanding it um and that's what I always found myself drawing uh or painting or or doing something creative that felt like home so that was sort of my way in the moment to um see that there's more here than [Music] suffering there was a little bit of an interest in Buddhism although it seemed like it was still kind of running on a myth system you know similar to Christianity or something else where there was a figure head and it was basically saying if if you are a moral or ethical person and you do things in this way then you will just have a better life and what it seemed to be pointing to mostly was a life of Simplicity or you know less is more I would say I was seeking conventional successes achievements um I was seeking to meet the Milestones as a person and the culture that I lived in to the best of my ability and I thought that if I fulfilled um those milestones at it wly and and um achieved to a certain degree that I would feel okay that I would feel good but I would feel like I was Worthy as a person at some point I learned to meditate and through meditation I was able to find these moments of peace that were uncommon before meditation or before I had learned to meditate and they were fleeting they were momentary but they were something so I had the sense that there may be something in meditation or something available there that could open to something more peaceful or a more ongoing sense of peace and there were a couple of times when the sense of Peace became very prominent and lasted about one or maybe 2 days but both of these instances once the experience went away I was left in a sort of worst place afterward because I had felt like I had found the Garden of Eden and was kicked out every once a while there were moments of clarity in younger years it seemed okay if uh do the right thing here then that will perpetuate this sense of goodness or what is pure um and there was always some kind of connection with there's got to be more yet it just it just was so unclear that it always seemed to be applied to something external somehow I stumbled upon some sense of peace that felt like the only time I remembered relief in my life my adult life probably most of my childhood life and I just lost it so those probably were breadcrumbs to later insights but in the moment it felt pretty terrible that I had stumbled upon peace and then just could not find it again and then I we moved when I went to high school and we lived far enough away that in those days there was no social media nobody knew who I was I just picked a new identity and I decided that the cool kids looked like they were having fun so I joined in with them and that led to just more feeling feelings of being lost I didn't I didn't know anymore who I was I wasn't getting any closer to being myself and so this this was a through line for me all through my teens and then that led to drugs and drinking no it never really worked it worked for little bursts of time the sense of dissatisfaction would overcome me shortly after having the wave of um praise and um self-aggrandisement I would say so I it was It was kind of disconcerting to me that that that would happen that after after such a high feeling um deep satisfaction I would say in fulfillment that soon like the complete opposite would would replace that in my experience yeah that that created a sense of um confusion dysphoria and that built up over time um but it also made me very curious there there was something intelligent about that design that it was like the paradoxical nature of seeking like started to become revealed but it didn't it actually didn't deter me from continuing to seek um I think some part of me knew that there was a wisdom in exhausting the seeking apparatus like taking it to the very end taking it to the limit to where I was just completely exhausted [Music] I remember one instance as a child where I was laying on the grass at night with probably one of my sisters and maybe some other kids from the neighborhood and we were looking up at the stars talking about the vastness and I had had the feeling before of kind of Wonder with that but this went beyond Wonder this felt like I was completely absorbed into the sky I had just disappeared into the sky I was the the guy in some way and wasn't even apart from myself to be aware of it and say hey I become this guy it just felt like sky and something kind of backed out of it afterward in a way that felt like a little bit jarring almost maybe a little bit of fear but it wasn't a lot of fear at that point in my life and there was a sense of a memory but not a thinking memory there was a sense of an intuitive knowing that that is actually what I am somehow or very very intimate with that experience of just sky so that was one mystical type of experience I had as a child I was in my early 20s and energetically I just started opening up and feeling more uh receptive to energies around me and emotions around me so I when I was with people I would start to feel what they're feeling and I would start to um it was confusing to me um that all of a sudden I was feeling something that didn't feel like mine in a way that caused it like a deep dive into into more of an energetic suffering in a way because it was really a shock to my system to be that receptive all of a sudden and I think I was always receptive but it was a full on all of a sudden feeling everybody else's emotions and energies in a room you know at the time uh that I had these experiences of intimacy or these sort of mystical experiences as a child I didn't really draw conclusions or Parallels between them probably just because I felt so present in general I was just experiencing one thing and then the other when I went to college I had another chance to pick a new identity again still not ready to come out to be like who I really was still trying to be somebody who I thought I could be um and that's when I took a class called rajnish and Gandhi in college and this was in Oregon and at the time uh bwan Shri rajanish who's now Osho had started this giant commune out in the desert and I went out to rajnish porum for a weekend to see what it was like and I was completely uh something moved in me very deeply I I saw people who were being their authentic selves I just saw all the love and people wanting to be who they were to to know more about who they were and I saw men walking down the street holding hands for the first time in my life um and I realized that this spiritual path could be a way for me to end the pain I felt of about who I was there was a particular point in life where I had reached um just just a complete stopping point and didn't seem like there was much of a point any longer to really apply any more effort it was it was a strange place where it was a I didn't really care about anything and also didn't really have the energy to do anything about anything so I had um somebody invite me to a single day Meditation Retreat and even though intellectually it didn't seem like something that I wanted to do there was a very visceral sensation here in the gut it felt almost like a magnet pulling me somewhere and that was really new um it was very visceral and so I decided to go it's in a part of town uh the initial address is this place called Commerce City and it's a part of town that you usually don't want to go to and so there were thoughts of well is she going to sell me into sex slavery I had no idea what it was going to be like and upon arriving is actually a really nice part of town knocking on the door and you know um the person who opened it up had a it seemed to be an in Seeker Backstreet Boys t-shirt on you know with this fauxhawk and the first thought was oh this is the guru this you know usually when you're invited to a Meditation Retreat in Colorado you're probably going to end up in Boulder most of the time and so now what a gift to be here in this direct experience in this now experience with the expression of emotion which I find so stunning and not needing to pull away at all to be here as I am to be here as this is that is the invitation that Angelo invited me into that night that I took and lit with a fire because it felt like yes finally someone is telling me what I know on some level yes finally I have permission to be as I am it ignited something in me truth just has that ring to it it must have been within um the first two minutes of the guided meditation it felt as if uh there was no sense of body any longer the hands felt as if they had swelled up to the size of the house and it it was as if I had shot out of the head uh like a cannon like at the speed of light with just a kaleidoscope of colors and there was just no sense of anything left behind um and then it seemed like maybe that lasted for a few minutes and there was a a cue that the round was over and that had been about an hour of meditation and had no clue that that much time had passed it it seemed that the non-dual Insight had something to do with a psychological process coming to an end or being transcended and that was something that that was new in my Paradigm I I didn't know that that was a possibility and if I thought that that was I thought that it wasn't for me thought that it was only for Mystics or monks so I was taking a course in undergrad College on Zen and Japanese culture and one of the days that I was in class the professor was absent and we had a substitute professor and this substitute was actually a monk a Buddhist monk of some order or another I actually don't know what it was and he was talking about the principles I had heard about Buddhism before talking about suffering what causes suffering how to address suffering but there was something about the way he was speaking that was definitely different than anything I had heard before in fact he was not conveying knowledge he was conveying a possibility very clearly and it felt like a possibility that was open to me I was so struck by it because again it felt as if a different kind of information a different order of communication that I had ever experienced before was being offered so I immediately raised my hand and he called on me and I just said is this possible this that you're talking about this is this something I can do I can this can happen in this lifetime and I asked at that directly and he did this wonderful thing he stopped he took a couple steps forward and he locked eyes with me and he said there is no doubt and then he paused for a moment and he just went back about lecturing and I knew at that moment that he knew that I knew something was transmitted and he confirmed it for me and it felt very expansive there was something that that started to let go right there but it didn't completely let go it was the beginning of a of a road or a path of some sort and I could feel it deeply inside I could feel it very intimately so I would say that was the first time that I perceived that there's something Beyond this life of suffering that I had known but I damn well knew where I was going after this interaction with the Buddhist teacher who looked me in the eyes and said there is no doubt I had the distinct sense of a path of sorts a possibility that was real that was practical that was available that was instinctually obvious however something about the moment the conditions of my life at that point told me it wasn't ripe yet wasn't quite time for this just yet it almost seemed like too fragile to to grab that with with my mind to make it into a goal um it's like I didn't want to believe it without seeing it speechless I mean I'd really had no way to put words to what had just happened so that was when I knew that okay this is interesting I want to go deeper into this and so I would watch more videos and the room would melt away or would have these very just intense experiences that felt almost like a little psychedelic but they also felt very peaceful and like there was no there was no thoughts of what was being said it was just a message that was coming through and so for a while I would just watch you know like an hour's worth of videos every day and then finally um I I realized okay this this is the way this is the way I need to go so the night I met Angelo he told me something that really stood out to me and he said trust yourself you can trust your immediate experience and nobody had ever told me that before and in some way I knew that but I was juggling this I identity and this resistance to my immediate experience for so long since I was a child that everything in me at that point in my life was so like tender and ripe and it wanted it felt like my heart really wanted to burst into life but it didn't know how it didn't know what vehicle to drive it didn't know how to be expressive and I remember I told him my heart feels like it's breaking that it just wants to love everyone and it always has I got the sense that there was something more that there was a possibility to free myself to liberate myself from from the pain and the suffering that I was experiencing I I got a sense of that pretty early on and in in many layers so the first layer was more psychological when I realized that there were tools to work with thoughts accessible and the fact that I could introspect and look at my own experience when I did that it was like taking like a magnifying glass and parsing through to see what is what and and that um elucidated a lot of the the turmoil and the confusion and that that process itself brought some sense of calm to me and showed me that things aren't quite what they appeared to be the engagement of the unknown is a it seems to be a very subtle space it's not as bold as this Duality that we seem to be existing in it's something it's something almost under the surface or in between the lines it can definitely be felt there's no way around that it can it's an absolute sensation and the closer that we seem to get to a Sensational Space it seems to take us or unfold entirely on its own and in that space there's no thought there's no orientation there's really no comparison so stepping into that space um you might not even remember it but there will be a sense of there will be a sensation that you will always have your finger on the pulse of and that it's a it's the best guide we have and what started to become clear was that the obscuring mechanism for the hidden material was and is identity um and having that seeing that that's the thread like that that's the common denominator that's what keeps things seemingly like eclipsed or split off that's what creates schisms in the mind we could say that the collective human delusion the world of Mind identification world of confusion disorientation in the mind ultimately is a sort of stable or at least agreed upon form of disassociation so we already not only know how to disassociate we keep ourselves just a bit disassociated at all times that disassociation creates a sense of distance that sense of distance allows us to engage thought in such a way that we create a lot of what doesn't actually exist we fabricate quite a bit at that point in my life I wasn't practicing anything at all I was coming out of an 8-month depression and I was studying acting but I I didn't really have meditation practice I didn't know that I didn't have spiritual practice I didn't have devotional practice I didn't have God didn't have anything like that and I didn't know who I was my husband had moved away and I hadn't worked my life was put into the experience of being a wife and being a homemaker and that was really important to me in that time of my life and now my husband is gone and I don't know who I am anymore and so I had all this free time so I sat I sat on my balcony outside of my master bedroom just like I'm sitting now I just sat and my attention as I closed my eyes myt my attention went directly into my heart for whatever reason and I said who Am I and there was a singular um it almost became a mantra I don't need to know or I don't know anything and I don't need to know I don't know anything I don't need to know and that was a huge departure from the past where there was an addiction to knowledge I needed to know everything so I could position myself as the smartest person in the room uh it was a different space letting go of having knowledge over everything that immediate direct investigation of thoughts LED very rapidly to this dissolution of separate identity but leading up to that there was a sort of practice and the practice really was what I gleaned from this book The Three Pillars of Zen and it was a practice that I might just call one-pointed approach so I'll use the term moo or I'll use the Coan moo which is often used in Zen and the instruction given in the book was quite simple don't separate yourself from moo don't move away from moo 1 mm don't move away from moo one hair's breath until there's only moo there's only moo and I'd always wanted this and I didn't know ID always wanted this I always wanted to be so one-pointed that there was nothing stepping back doubting itself anymore there was nothing stepping back judging anything anymore I didn't know that until it happened though so that that magic of of just let there be moo really concentrated the mind enough so that I could see that thought mechanism and pretty rapidly deconstruct it into pure undifferentiated Consciousness if we take a bird ey view of the process at that stage like right before the first shift called an Awakening I would say that the main approach was self- inquiry like pretty standard self- inquiry in addition to a lot of emotional work but it was all intertwined and I think though like the Lynch pin was asking the question who am I yeah inquiry is your best friend when it comes to the unbinding process or spirituality or Awakening what I found through many years of trial and error is that there are a few components of inquiry that really supercharge it that make it work well number one is you can start with an intellectual question but you never want to end by looking for an answer from the intellect you want the question to lead you into the unknown somehow however that is and it's going to be a little different for everyone some people find it very interesting to ask who am I some people don't find that interesting at all some people find it interesting to ask well where am I some people find it valuable to ask who or what is aware of thoughts now again once we ask this question we have to be willing to go into the wordless we have to be willing to go into the pure experience so you could say that inquiry is like a transition point between the cognitive world and the world that is truly mysterious but subsequently we find that it's more real More Alive more juicy so be willing to go into that juiciness be willing to let go of what you think you know and find out what is to have someone validate first of all that that's a real thing that there are that the vast majority of um what runs my own experience is not directly conscious to me that it's hidden to have someone say like that's true and that could come out of hiding that could come out of the shadow that was that was very validating to me it made me feel um seen I guess and not crazy um not it helped me see that there was nothing wrong with me um it also helped me see that none of this was personal there were unconscious processes going on in my mind operating unconscious processes operating and the fact that I could touch into that was just so fascinating to me that the unconscious could become conscious through deliberate exploration examination I started to learn how to do it and and I would then do it all the time like every waking hour that I could that I wasn't too overwhelmed with responsibilities or too caught up in distractions like I would just inquire into my own experience um I guess inquiry is like the umbrella tool and I think what inquiry is really is just a method of examination really it's qu it's asking questions and those questions could take a myriad forms there's no right way to do that with any question with any approach to inquiry I would suggest giving it some time if it feels absolutely distasteful it's just not working for you maybe try a different question but if you hit on a question or an approach that seems to give you a little bit of juice a little something there maybe even a little fear don't switch stay with that one and sometimes it requires some kind of pushing some of that Warrior Spirit really really becoming one-pointed but don't beat yourself up if you can't do that all the time because you won't be able to sometimes you need rest and if it's just getting very heady or you're getting so frustrated it's just not going anywhere take a break rest you might start in an hour or 12 hours or 3 days and it'll feel very very different so look for the question that gives you a little bit of juice a little bit of opening even if it's just periodically and maybe even a little bit of fear or an emotional experience those are openings that's telling you that you're on the right track in contrast a question that just feels like it has no use to you it's no value it's not going anywhere try something [Music] different and it felt like I was dropping a penny into a wishing well it just stripped down deep into the depths of me until it was no longer conceivable and then as a spiral usually is the question came back who am I and it just faded away and then in the in the space between the words in the space between the question there was this opportunity for what was in the wishing well of my heart to Bubble to the surface so I started to get these memories of childhood these very painful memories and these very painful memories took me by storm they took my emotions it was so they evoked so much it was available it was like the the like a frozen lake like the lake wasn't Frozen anymore and whatever needed to arise from the lake into the sky came up and I just I don't know I didn't know how to practice so I just did what was intuitive and what was intuitive was to stop my inquiry and to move and lay on the bedroom and cry and process and feel and see and look at those memories and let my body respond and as soon as my body calmed down down I would get back up and sit on my chair and return who am I there was an intuition that kept coming up of um instead of moving away from whatever is just allow it to be so I think surrender is a complete willingness to be uncomfortable to enter the unknown if I didn't have someone to tell me was happening I would probably not have been able to detect it so it was also very poignant to have been like walking the path with the teacher and to have that teacher so clearly um discern when that shift started to happen because it was like he was also experiencing it even being like many miles away and not in the same physical location if I could say what it is that causes us to suffer underneath all of it it's resistance now the funny thing about this is you don't want to make an enemy of resistance when you learn this about yourself you really have to approach even resistance with kindness with understanding with acceptance you don't want to say no to the no you want to start by saying yes to the no another way of saying it is when you see a layer of resistance and you see another layer of resistance on top of that sort of like judging yourself a resistance it's important to start with that first layer and just let it calm itself down you know hold it don't push on it don't pull on it and see if you can't soften that experience a bit and get to know resistance understand it it has a a world viw it has a way of seeing things it has a life force so get to know it the more you get to know it the less it will resist and the less resistance there is the easier all of this is and so I at first I would start to look really hard you know I'm like oh oh there's my mind yep that's me oh but is there me I'm not sure I don't think so but I was like I was just very like this is a concentrating exercise and I realized no it wasn't a concentrating exercise and so I started to let go a little and I think I had heard that advice somewhere that you know just let go just let it be what it is um so I started to I would do inquiry and then I would do a little bit of just natural meditation I would go back and forth back and forth back and forth and so I did that for um a few months every morning for about an hour hour and a half it felt like I was opening a door that I always wanted to open but nobody ever told me how or gave me permission mission to even look that way and it was killing me to not look for one more moment so I had to I had to look I had to see I had to let my heart break I had to let my heart open felt like something was being revealed and I didn't really care what it was because again it's like it wasn't something tangible wasn't something that I could grab a hold of it wasn't something that I could even talk to other people about it was just a felt sense of what's real that's the that's the road map to surrender knowing you may feel some fear and you will come to a place where you know you can let go more uh and just trust it trust yourself trusting that you're not here to suffer and trusting that you don't have to be in control of everything if you let go you're really going to be okay fundamentally but you're going to feel some [Music] fear I was at a place where I felt particularly defeated both in the the relative life and in the sort of spiritual life meditation didn't seem to go any deeper there was a piece there but it wasn't really address ing my deepest promptings um every question would lead back to who am I and who am I is is a question that walks you to the precipice of identity and you walk to that precipice enough times that at some point you just really have nothing left to lose and you just jump off and I think that that's what happened to me I happen to pick up a book called The Three Pillars of Zen and in this book there are is a chapter where a zen teacher is in a Doan room or a private interview room with students working very directly with a called moo and other practices but they're working directly to help these people wake up or achieve this term that they used called Keno the more I read it the more it had the flavor of what that Professor had transmitted to me and then it started to kind of catch on fire there was something that wasn't just in that book this book was written in the 1960s uh but it was alive right now it was alive right where I was in the room I was sitting in in my heart in my mind in the body and in a place that has no place this aliveness felt ancient this possibility this transformation that was initially something that I felt like I was undertaking or engaging suddenly came alive itself it was beyond me it was more vast than anything i' ever experienced so it was as if the practicing suffering me that was desperate and trying to wake up trying to cross over trying to let go got smaller and smaller and smaller or less and less there and this completely mysterious ineffable Force became more and more and more prominent experience one morning Sunday October 16th I was out on my back porch and doing my morning meditation and my inquiry and the sun was coming up and something just let go it just fell away it was uh it was just this literally like it was this this all of the confusion all of the multiple identities all of the hard work of trying to figure out who I was just seemed at once really sad and really funny you and and I couldn't believe it like I couldn't believe how simple it was and how uh how profound it was how like just nothing it it was so many things all around like I nothing I'd ever experienced in my life before a blip like in time like something opened up it was like the what I imagined to be a timeline just like I had like a chasm in it I was like falling into that Chasm for that moment for that week that that um Blissful State lasted I was noticing thoughts and I was noticing first that there were a lot of thoughts which I had noticed in meditation before then I noticed that the noticer of thoughts was also a thought the one that said oh there's a lot of thoughts here that itself was a thought and then the one that noticed that was also a thought and all of a sudden there was no agent behind thought anymore there was no Center there was no essentially there was no me apart from anything and that opened up the this space of undifferentiated Consciousness where the thoughts and the the apparent differentiation of Consciousness became exquisitly uninteresting and then the nature of Consciousness became exquisitly interesting and that was it there was just that Consciousness just that absolute pure being and then all techniques all practices all intentions and all surrender fell away I sat on my balcony and after my meditation I opened my eyes and I remember feeling the sides of the chair and I remember standing up and putting my hands on the railing and I look out in my backyard where there's a tree and a bright big moon and all the cars passing on the sideways streets and I was there everything felt so close so intimate it was a subtle movement it was like a feather in the wind nothing could be aart the wind and the feather were one it was so intimate and I I remember somehow keeping such a gentleness to that I didn't jump for joy or feel ecstasy in that way he was just like yes here after meeting Angelo and returning home it was a it was as if the world had suddenly switched from something that was monochromatic to something that was extremely Vivid um a lot a lot of things happened uh the most the most Vivid thing was there was a sense of of being in in a Utopia for the first time in a long time there was just an overall sense of I am so grateful to be here uh and I didn't I didn't want to die anymore it was clearly beyond the confines of the mind of concepts of stories of narratives even of my own life my own physical life this was beyond and I knew it and I gave myself to it I let go and I let go and I let go and I let go and then the letting go let go and then there was nothing but letting go and then the Letting Go was this mysterious force and then there was no separation anywhere between anything there was no inside no outside no upside no downside no real no unreal it was absolute undifferentiated experience and that was the most profound Discovery I've ever made and it felt like that apparatus of identity of who I was command and control just crashed to the ground and all that was left was a big pile of rubble but at least that you know the big mess of it was there instead of what had been feeling unsurmountable before it it happened over a couple days I wouldn't say it was like one instant it was like a process of probably like two or three days where this was this shift was happening and it kept deepening and deepening and deepening it felt like a state of pure Bliss like it was just deeply enjoyable everything that my body mind and mind were doing it felt effortless felt like someone else was pulling the strings um and yet I was both like an audience of like in the audience of my own life and in the Center like at the same time um and I was like experiencing the passing of time and the flow of just physicality like so interwoven that's what it felt like and I looked in my hallway closet with all my clothes and all of my life had been all of the costumes of my life had been hung in there and I remember thinking whose clothes are these I could recognize that they were supposed to be mine but they didn't feel like mine in that moment they didn't feel personal in that moment it felt like a wardrobe like this was the clothes I was wearing when I was being someone and I had this long mirror at the edge of my closet and I looked in the mirror and it didn't look like me who am I looking at is what I thought what is this what is this that's looking out of my eyes and it didn't feel the same me that it always looked in the mirror and so I stood there and stared in the mirror for only God knows how long and eventually I went to bed it it just felt like my whole life just burst and that was totally fine like there was a deep knowing that that was totally okay all all of my frames of reference and orienting principles my value system towards life like that collapsed and it was just like being in the sort of Ashes of that for a while that that's what the the shift felt like didn't make me feel special I wasn't concerned about any of that the mind went very very quiet the spirit went very very quiet the universe went very very very quiet and there was a deep deep peace and a deep rest after it happened I remember thinking almost immediately I everything is different but I don't really remember what's Chang like what was different you know I how is this different from that I'm still here in this house in this job doing the things I did but everything feels different I would I I could taste colors I would look at a tree and just be like Tre tree me all same like and words were weird and it was it was just hard to it was hard to sort it out with my my mind did didn't want couldn't do the old things it did but it didn't really know what to do yet and it wasn't gone there was still a mind there making thoughts and doing you know like trying to make sense of it but also just completely at a loss cuz it was like it got put out of work or something and it's like just trying to hobble Along on three cylinders um so it was it was a little confusing but also really peaceful joyful uh yeah and that that lasted for probably a couple of months outwardly the family uh my partner had no clue anything had shifted yet in here there was no more stickiness no more tethering and the next morning I woke up it was as if nothing was ever asleep that quality of intimacy that I had only tasted that first night the night before was so profound it was like coming home and yet here I was in my bedroom with the normal sounds of the cars on the road the birds waking up the trees singing the colors everything so vivid here I was in my normal bedroom and yet it was all different so very different and everything felt as if it was inside me as if nothing was ever apart because the shifts kept happening the deepening kept happening I knew that this was the just the way it had to be um that there was progress like there was something on tring and unraveling and it was as much as there was so much to see it was also it was also one pointed like the truth was singular always despite the complexities of this unfolding it's the One Singular truth and everything converged on that all the time I would go to the grocery store and look for strangers just to give a hug and I would put my arms out like this and some people would say don't touch me and so i' would have like a hug energy from a distance and other people would Embrace and it was just this this non-stop embracing of people and experiences in just a really kind of playful kid-like way this child in me that was so alone in her brilliance by herself her whole childhood she was finally free to be as expressive as she possibly wanted it came with a lot of tears and a lot of smiling and what was really beautiful is my husband was he gets up a little later than me and he was just getting a cup of coffee when all this was happening and came out and just sat next to me out on the deck while there were tears streaming down my face and I I probably had a huge smile um and he just sat there and he didn't ask me what's going on or what you know I he knew I think I was stunned I was stunned that life could be that beautiful that life could be experienced that directly and it carried out into such a beautiful laughter such a beautiful expressive energy for eight months everything was so free I remember standing in the rain and dancing and not having a care in the world not having a care that I'm wet I should probably get dry I should probably get out of the rain none of those thoughts were there none of those cares were there it was just ecstasy dancing and rain it was rain dancing with itself absolute acceptance of all that is all that was within me all the parts of myself I didn't want to see or couldn't see the external world all the parent flaws of the world physicality the mystery the grittiness all of it was absolutely 100% accepted until that acceptance the quality of the acceptance was indistinguishable from Consciousness from beingness uh but it had the tone of [Music] love I often tell people who are approaching this this kind of shift this kind of Awakening that don't be surprised if it feels like some other force or some other dimension is coming in that is really Beyond you you and I say this just so that they're not too surprised or too terrified but I'm not going to give it a name it's not what I would call God it's not a specific deity it doesn't have a name it's too real to be named you you're made for this from from the moment of conception you were this there there is no separation there is no suffering in you can find out firsthand and that's actually the most important thing doesn't matter the words that are coming out of this mouth you can do this but if I could tell you what it felt like it felt like the first time I've ever felt love

Channel: Simply Always Awake

Views: 31,552

Keywords: awakening, spiritual awakening, spirituality, nonduality, non-duality, advaita vedanta, awake it's your turn, awakenings 2021, buddhism, enlightenment, non duality explained, nonduality teachers, self inquiry, simply always awake, zen, eckhart tolle, suffering, transformation, identity

Id: gw7zpKQK7HY

Length: 59min 21sec (3561 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2024