Waking Up and Growing Up
Despertar y Madurar
A reflection on how spiritual awakening and psychological maturation are distinct yet interdependent processes, and why one need not wait for the other.
Waking Up and Growing Up
A reflection on how spiritual awakening and psychological maturation are distinct yet interdependent processes, and why one need not wait for the other.
What matters is not to take from this teaching the idea that until all trauma is worked through, only then will awakening happen. That is what the mind will do with this information.
Two parallel processes
The best way I can describe it is that there are two processes. You can call one "waking up" and the other "growing up." Growing up has to do with maturing as human beings, and processing trauma is a requirement for that maturation. But growing up is an infinite process. It will never end.
Waking up can happen before a great deal of the growing up has taken place. Then the two go hand in hand. There is a limit to how much you can grow up without waking up. And waking up also has stages. One can wake up to a certain deeper stage and then work on integrating that, growing up with that newer insight. These two processes work together.
Teachers who still have growing up to do
It is not uncommon (actually, it is more common than not) for people who wake up very deeply to still have a lot of growing up to do. Historically and in the present, among teachers and practitioners who have genuinely woken up, there is often a great deal of growing up that can still happen.