Love, Confusion, and the Full Awakening
Amor, confusión y el despertar pleno
A student describes a powerful opening into love, followed by confusion about whether full awakening requires abandoning ordinary life or integrating it, and how to avoid the trap of spiritual identity.
Love, Confusion, and the Full Awakening
A student describes a powerful opening into love, followed by confusion about whether full awakening requires abandoning ordinary life or integrating it, and how to avoid the trap of spiritual identity.
Everything we've been talking about leads up to what I want to touch on. Last week I had this beautiful opening. After our call, I was crying and crying, gushing in love. Everything was love, everyone was love. It lasted the entire day, and the next morning it was still here. It's always here. And it's obvious it's not the same orgasmic explosion, and that's okay. But everything that's not that is still loudly wanting to be seen and felt.
I've been enjoying having this love welcome all of that: welcoming the intense fear that comes, the intense anger towards people I love. It shows all the contrast to what's not this explosive love, and it's uncomfortable too. I find that opening with love to it has been the sweetest thing, when I remember to do that. Sometimes I don't remember. Sometimes I just get caught up in the thing.
Welcoming what was avoided
When we were talking about the "avoiding life" topic, I deeply resonated with that. It feels like that's what's been happening. Yesterday was about going to address all the life things, and I did that, but there was a lot of tension. It's uncomfortable when the energies arise around wanting to control things, wanting a certain outcome. That attachment to outcome arises along with the things that have been avoided, because the reason they were avoided in the first place was to escape that tension. So it's all coming back. It's all okay, and it's uncomfortable, and there's exhaustion in the body from that push and pull.
The confusion about renunciation and awakening
My mind had so many objections come up through our talk today. Most teachers don't talk about this. Most teachers really say go full on. And all the awakening stories I know of are about people who woke up because they gave their entire life to this and did ignore the life things. So it's still confusing to those parts of the mind, even though I don't really need it answered, because on a deeper level I agree with you and I think that is the way. But there are still those mind objections: it didn't seem like balance has been the path for most people that wake up.
What you're speaking to is more the tantra, embodiment path, which is also beautiful. But in my experience, those are all my friends: people who do tantra or yoga or whatever. They're embodiment teachers. If I ever talk to them about non-duality, they say, "Oh, yeah, totally." They can agree, but it's very clear they're not living it. They're more identified with being a tantra teacher or whatever label. It's very spiritual, and they can say all the spiritual things, but I don't feel like I'm with someone who's free of identity. It just feels like another identity.
So that's also where my mind gets confused. It was clear to me that I don't want to just do that, even though I do love tantra and embodiment and being in the world in that way, integrating spirituality with the body. But it had never led to the full awakening I was really looking for. So there's still this confusion: how do I not get caught in that trap again?
Some things really depend on how we talk about them. When I say what I was talking about today regarding balance, somebody who is doing tantra, or somebody who's a yoga teacher focused on embodiment, could be a hundred percent on one side. It could be just as one-sided as an entrepreneur creating a software business. The two aren't very different. So I would agree: somebody who is only focused on psychological, physical, and energetic healing is going to be leaning to one side, even if it has a spiritual flavor. Even the self-knowledge that psychology focuses on is still all about engagement in the world, in my perspective. Because it all has to do with time. You can't embody if there is no time. If there is no space, there is no body.
Yes, exactly. It really is an energetic thing. When I'm around them, the energetic quality is of a person, not of silence. And yet if I talk to them about any non-dual teaching, they just say, "Oh, totally, totally."
Right, but that's a very surface-level, intellectual agreement.
What balance actually means
What I'm talking about when I say "balancing" has to do with what I refer to as the base, the reality that is now. That's one of the sides: awakening to that. Now, when you said the people you know have awakened because they neglected one side and focused only on the other, I wouldn't be so sure I'd agree with that. It has to do with interpretation: what they were focusing on, how they lived their life, what had happened prior. Some people you only know once they start teaching. They talk a little about their past, and it seems like they were only focused on one aspect. But if you know them better, you start to see how they had completely focused on the other aspect as well, either in the past or alongside their practice.
So let's take it with a grain of salt. And there's another aspect, which has to do with what you call awakening. You could be referring to a first initial shift. But what I'm talking about is the full thing. The full thing goes past initial awakenings, and it also goes past anything that has to do with shadow work, for example. It's really what comes at the end of the process.
I think I feel what you're referring to. When I say awakening, I also mean the full thing. I've had many awakenings a long time ago. I was asked to teach at that time, and I'm so glad I didn't, because I had a sense that there was more. For me, it has been a process of all the shadow work and everything that's been in the way of whatever this full awakening is.
The teachers I'm referring to are the ones who, it seems to me, have had the full awakening, and their story was really that it came from being fully devoted to this. Like one teacher who spent three years in the jungle with her teacher, fully immersed, without any of her regular life things.
The fuller picture behind the stories
If you look more closely, it just happens that she was very young and very gifted. She talks a lot about her dyslexia and downplays her intellect, but she's really brilliant. She was a writer, and she still is. She had some of her work selected for very prestigious recognition in the UK, and that was before she did all of the spiritual work. So she was just very gifted.
That's somebody who isn't neglecting life. She got to a point where she realized all of what she wanted in her ambition as a writer had already happened. It just happened very young. So she wasn't neglecting that aspect of herself. Her calling was writing. She was a writer. She didn't neglect that. In fact, she went back to it. But she put it on pause because she had reached a point of very high accomplishment. There was a very famous British actress who had chosen her screenplay to put on in theater. I don't remember the details now, but this happened when she was about twenty-two years old, and that's when she felt something like, "This doesn't feel that good."