August 14, 2024
Growing Up and Waking Up in Spiritual Practice
Crecer y Despertar en la Práctica Espiritual
This session explores the distinction between 'growing up' (gradual psychological and emotional maturation) and 'waking up' (timeless spiritual awakening), and how confusing the two can keep practitioners stuck. Through guided self-inquiry and dialogue, the teacher addresses how partial awakening without integration leads to stalling, and emphasizes trusting direct experience over intellectual understanding. Students explore themes of genuine curiosity, conditioning, trust, and bringing attention to the body and emotions as part of the inquiry process.
teaching
Growing Up and Waking Up
A reflection on the distinction between two dimensions of spiritual development: the timeless nature of awakening and the gradual, embodied process of maturation, and how confusing the two can keep us stuck.
dialogue
Partial Awakening and the Work That Remains
A question about how spiritual teachers who have genuinely awakened can still behave harmfully, and how the relationship between growing up and waking up explains this.
teaching
When Waking Up Meets Growing Up
A reflection on the point where spiritual awakening and psychological maturity converge into something complete, and on what remains after that integration.
meditation
Where Am I
A gentle exploration of where the sense of "I" actually lives in your direct experience of body, sensation, and knowing.
dialogue
The Wall You Were Trained to Avoid
A student describes the disorienting gap between the clarity felt during guided explorations and the powerful pull of conditioned identity, and asks how to navigate that tension.
dialogue
The Knowing That Knows the Difference
A student reflects on how obstacles dissolve through trust, and the teacher explores what it means to marinate in a deeper knowing that is prior to intellectual certainty.
dialogue
Trusting the Rhythm of Curiosity
A student asks whether genuine self-inquiry can be forced through discipline, and whether curiosity has its own natural timing that must be trusted rather than controlled.
dialogue
The Need Beneath the Reason
A student reports feeling blank in self-inquiry, and the teacher guides them toward directly knowing the felt sense of a recurring "need" rather than rationalizing or immediately acting on it.
dialogue
When Seeking Becomes the Problem
A question about the apparent contradiction between cultivating a desire for awakening and the common teaching that such desire is itself a form of clinging.