CHAPTER 1
What Is Awakening?
Awakening is defined as a rousing or a quickening, andgenerally, to awaken is to arise from a sleep or dormancy. So it is not adiscovery or acquisition of something new or foreign, but an awakeningto our true self, which is already present. This is an awakening of ourspirit (which is already there and is us) from the natural slumber towhich it is subject throughout human existence. In the journey of humanexistence, the inevitable acquiring of many layers gives us a physicalidentity and personality. On such a course, we may end up shielding ourspirit, our pure and true self. So shielded is our spirit that it appears to bein slumber as we lose our connection with it and, like many, completelyforget about it. So our journey of awakening begins with peeling backthese layers to our core.
To convey this plight of our shielded human spirit, let's explorefurther by asking ourselves, what am I?
To answer this question, let's journey back to the point of our birth.When we were born, we emerged out of our mothers into this physicalworld as screaming, crying newborn babies or maybe quiet, slightly blueones for a short while. Nevertheless, we finally took our first breathsin this world. We were pure life in the form of a human newborn, nodifferent from a pure life that emerged out of a chicken egg or a horse,just different in appearance and physiology. All the cells in this pure livingbeing sprang to life. Our organs kick-started, the heart pumped itself, thelungs took in and expelled air, and our little digestive systems started toprocess the nourishing mother's milk. We could move; we kicked our legs,writhed, and opened and shut our eyelids. We yawned, cried, screamed atthe top of our lungs, and instinctively started to feed to grow.
What is this pure living energy surging through a newborn humanbeing? Like a television plugged into a socket with the power turned on,so too we are just pure life energy propelled into and through a physicalform. Then within a few days or weeks, we were given a name. With that,we had the start of an identity. Our identity continued to build. Ourfamily name, history, and racial background brought along with them aset of traditions and culture that we grew into over the proceeding years.The geographical and natural environment in which we grew up helpedshape us in the growing years. Our day-to-day life experiences also hadtheir effect. Our human brain with its amazing capabilities started firing,wiring, and establishing connections from the moment of birth based onall the experiences filtering in through our five senses.
The nurturing and love we received or did not receive from ourparents or caregivers, the pleasant or unpleasant, joyful or traumaticexperiences of events and people started to form our personality, character,thought patterns, outlook, and opinions. Once we started to speak wordsin a language, we could communicate and think in words. Further on,education, religion, and societal expectations continued to shape us. Thiscycle continued to build more layers, one on top of the other, as our livescontinued. The human brain, the most developed on earth, has the capacityfor memory, submemory, conditioning, feelings, analysis, and reasoning,and so it continues to store and build what we perceive as our selves.
The journey to know who we are starts with awakening to that pure,true original life that we started off with. Peel off those layers that wehave allowed to build on us through life, and there we are, in spirit. Itmay sound simple, but for many, this process is not easy to see or carryout. The stark reality of who we are beyond the physical and materialconfronted me years ago during the wet lab component of my studieson human anatomy and physiology for massage therapy training.Working on cadavers, it became amazingly obvious how blind we areto the reality that without the living spirit, the corpse is just a piece ofdead meat. The human race bases its whole existence, with its false senseof self and limited life span, on this piece of meat. All of life revolvesaround protecting, sustaining, and defining this limited anatomy of fleshand bones. Where is the focus on the real—that which is not born anddoes not die, which does not decay, but merely transforms, that which isunseen, the quiet and not all the noise?
Each individual's awakening experience is unique; some are gradual,others spontaneous. Some may be earth-shaking, others quietly sublime.Awakening is an experiential reality accompanied by a shift in ourinner consciousness. Generally, most awakening experiences have beendescribed as beyond words, sublime peace, joy, beauty, love, and bliss.Awakening is not a mental concept to be grasped. It cannot be faked,learned, or forced. When our spirit awakens, it is a personal reality thatnaturally brings about changes on every level of our lives.
Those of us who have awakened to the reality of our spirit lookfurther within ourselves. Before birth, where was I? Who and what wasI? Before birth, we were life in the womb. Before life in the womb, what/who was I? Some know that before and underneath our physical formwe are just pure energy, and they look further. Where does the energycome from? If we consist purely of energy, that energy must emanatefrom somewhere. We can still perceive and experience energy that is us,so we must be beyond energy. The depth of learning and discovery isinfinite, like the expanse of our outer universe. While there is a logicalanswer to the question of who we truly are, there is still a journey. Whenwe ultimately learn what we truly are, it cannot be described in words. Itis quite possible, however, to convey what or who we are not.
This poem flowed through me during one of my early morning jogsaround the river. These are words from our true self, our pure spirit.
I Am
I am Life,your pure essence, spirit, and seed of existence itselfthat lies within you,longing to awaken and flourish.
I am long before you and after you,never born, never die,timeless, without boundaries.
I am pure, unconditional love, wholeness,connectedness, freedom, bliss, joy, peace, stillness.I am That beyond the gross and limited,yet you are blinded.You choose the illusionthat you have controlthrough grasping and being caughtby all that is unreal and comes and goes.You think you are alive,but you barely know Life.You choose separation.
It is time to wake up!Have strength, courage, and trust to let go.Surrender the fearand all that imprisons you.
I am beyond mind, thoughts, emotions,ego, conditioning, desires, needs, attachments,memories, dreams, goals, forms, identities, ideas.Beyond all that arises.When all that I am not is released and let go,I Am.
Many just glimpse and dismiss.Trust and go all the way.Stay in That which is still and unmoving,watching and allowingcutting, peeling, learning,and the maturity naturally and totally unfolds.Trust in your awakeninguntil the final curtain draws.The illusion, limited, fragmented, contracted,is totally dissolved and evaporated.
The ultimate and unbound freedom and effortlessness.No more maintaining, seeking,searching, finding, growing, getting,coming, and going.No more striving, battling, fixing, struggling.No more ifs, buts, when, where, how.No more in or out.No more fear.No more living life, just Life.Pure, natural, infinite wholeness spills over.All is fresh, spontaneous, alive, spirited—limitless, pure beauty.All else just debris for dusting off.
Seeing without eyesTasting without tongueHearing without earsTouching without handsMoving without feet.
Total, whole, eternal, infiniteAnd such also is all that arises.No more questions. Home.No more you, I, us.No more words.
The next few paragraphs recount some of my awakening journeys thusfar in life. I don't care very much about my past, since the present is ouronly true reality. However, my past has brought me to where I am today.In sharing some of my life journey, my aim is to show that, like mosthuman beings, I have been entrapped in the web of suffering. This lifetimeis only one of way too many that I have decided to experience for theevolution of my soul. My life experiences have included a dysfunctionalchildhood and depression in teenage and young adult years that led to anattempt at ending my life and coming face to face with death in my earlytwenties. Total lack of self-worth led to a dependence on people and lateralcohol. My husband of nineteen years before our marriage ended was mycrutch in life, and alcohol crept in quietly through the back door.
After the suicide attempt in my early twenties, something withinme was profoundly shaken and shifted. I began a journey of searching,learning, healing, making mistakes, exploring, and opening up. I readevery self-help and spiritual book I could lay my hands on. I exploredChristianity (born-again and Catholicism) and a range of Eastern religionsand philosophies. I undertook a major journey in self-healing includingnew age workshops in rebirthing, inner child work, African drumming,qigong, yoga, and various types of meditation. I was a lost soul who hadventured into the dark depths of despair. However, being so lost alsospurred me into a series of awakenings and growth toward my spirit'sultimate freedom. My spirit's path remains a journey of endless profoundrealizations and continuous letting go of attachments to all that is not real.
A passionate involvement in martial arts in my young adult yearsled to internal energy arts, the path that most resonated with my soul.Hence, in my thirties and forties while fulfilling the role of a mother,caregiver, and dutiful wife, I was also learning yoga and yogic science,qigong, and especially meditation. This led to an initial awakening atabout age thirty when in one of my personal chi (energy) meditations,I was privileged to experience the reality of nothingness. I lost all senseperceptions of my physical body. I was just pure energy, tingling andbuzzing in expansion and vastness.
After that experience, when all that I had read and heard about ourbeing pure energy became my personal reality, nothing was the sameagain. Experiencing the reality of pure energy dissolved all physicalboundaries. Besides a peace beyond words, I suddenly felt a profoundsense of connection to all living things, from strangers in the streets tothe smallest ant. My daily life moved to a different level. I carried withinme that "ball" of peace through all the ups and downs of life. It was myfocus and anchor in life, and I was sustained by constant meditation.Sometimes in challenging and traumatic times, the ball of peace wouldshrink to the size of a pebble, but I was always able to inflate it againthrough consistent meditation.
At forty-five, having grown and matured, my spirit was strong.However, I felt a need to venture further within. I meditated with Zenmonks, looked into more written work by spiritual souls, often sat upinto the early morning hours listening to satsangs online with Mooji, andmeditated even more. One day after a lovely morning meditation and yoga,I was doing my day's work with immense peace, when suddenly, somethingprofoundly mystical happened subtly on the inside. Even as I was givinga client a bodywork treatment, fully awake and conscious, a suddenprofound inner realization led to a most extraordinary experience. I feltmyself disappear and had to pinch myself to see if I was dreaming. Therewas no me. I could not sense a physical me or my ball of peace, absolutelynothing. Then I experienced a flood of fear that persisted for the rest of theday and all that night. There was immeasurable fear, but there was no me.I was nonexistent, and all that was left was pure fear. I stayed with the fear,allowed and watched it, since I knew somehow this too would pass.
After sleeping with that fear, I awoke the next morning fresh, light,and renewed. Over the next few weeks, magical and mystical experiencescontinued. I did not feel like the same person, yet I was. I did not havethat ball of peace anymore. In fact, I was peace itself, no shape, allencompassing. For months, I woke up every morning in disbelief. Is itstill here? I would ask, and I couldn't help but wonder, What did I do todeserve this? I felt no distinction between the inside and outside of me,because there was no more door between the two. It felt like the end ofall comings and goings, sometimes having "it" and sometimes losing "it."I had no more questions, just the pure feeling of being home.
Everything and everyone looked and felt different, from a single bladeof grass on the ground to a flock of birds in the air. I was them and theywere me. Then the path of life took another turn, and I found myselfunable to speak or put anything into words until the birth of this book,which formed the words on its own within a span of two months. Nothingis the same anymore. I don't seem to live as a fragment in an illusion but asthe whole. My spirit does not get bigger or smaller. It is not sometimes theforeground and other times the background. The background is now thetotal ground. All of life is a meditation. It is most difficult to describe.
These are my awakening experiences. Our spiritual journeys andawakenings are personal and unique to us alone, as individual as ourfingerprints. Such is the beauty and gift of our spirit.
Reflection
Find time to be quiet with yourself every day, even if it is for justfive to ten minutes. This quiet time means sitting and doing nothing atall—no music, television, reading, writing, or talking. Keep your eyesopen without focusing on anything or keep them shut. If you knowhow to meditate, enter that space of stillness within. If you have nevermeditated, you may wish to try the breath meditation technique in theappendix of this book.
In the quietude, notice what it feels like within your body,underneath your skin, in your flesh, in your cells. Note all sensationsand keep your presence within your body. If the mind wanders and getsdistracted by thoughts, keep returning the focus to within your body.While you are fully present in your body, reflect on the words in thischapter with your heart. Do not analyze with your brain. Look within,feel, and ask, what am I and where is my spirit? But do not answer withyour mind. Just sit with that question inside yourself.
CHAPTER 2
Why Awaken?
We have a crucial need to rise above ignorance and fear byawakening to our true selves and then honoring our spirit's journeytoward ultimate freedom. On every level and for every reason, the needto awaken is our innate purpose. His Holiness the Fourteenth DalaiLama presents the state of humankind and the nature of our spirit ina beautiful poem, "The Paradox of Our Age." Humankind, both at thepersonal and global levels, is in dire need of a turning point.
On a personal level, we have only to look at ourselves and peoplewe know and love. How many people do we know who are struggling,suffering, and searching for peace? Are we truly happy? Do we evenknow what true happiness is? Why not? If we have the opportunity toawaken to true happiness, peace, and fulfillment, why would we notchoose to do so? Our spirit longs to awaken, grow, and learn in pursuitof its ultimate realization. Physical, emotional, and mental dysfunctionscontinue to grow; depression and anxiety are the underlying cause of theWestern world's plight. Depression, suicide rates, eating disorders, anddrug and alcohol abuse continue to rise every year. We can ignore theroot of our plight and choose to be prescribed loads of drugs to maskthe symptoms. We can sit around for years psychoanalyzing our pastand present and plotting a desired future. We can read endless self-helpand positive thinking books, which provide aid and inspiration. Butultimately, regardless of the techniques, therapies, and theories, nothingwill be sustainable if we do not awaken to our spirit, our true self.
On a global level, we need only turn on the television or radio,read the newspapers, or simply look around our neighborhoods. Thereis widespread violence, anger, destruction, and abuse of our own kind,other life species, and nature itself, all with roots in greed, fear, andanxiety. Globally, it is crucial that we wake up for the betterment of ourworld and the evolution of our consciousness.
To get to the root of our plight, we need to wake up from our spirit'sslumber. At some point in life, nearly everyone asks, What am I? Whoam I? What am I here for? How can I be happy, fulfilled, at peace? Howcan I stop the pain, struggling, and fear? For some, these questions comeearly and for some later. But sooner or later, we start to question andseek, some from a young age when our lives confront us with trauma andmajor challenges that strip us of comfort and security. We are exposed tothe rawness and jaggedness of this physical life from which emerges thelonging for understanding and transcendence.
Others may reach this point at middle age. With half our lives gone,caught up in routines and monotony, having conformed to society'sexpectations, and fulfilled all cultural, material, and filial duties, weask ourselves, is this all there is? Why is there still a sense of lacking or alonging for something beyond? Then there are those of us who live theillusion, oblivious and engrossed in ourselves and our possessions untilwe are confronted one day with the issue of life, suffering, and mortality.This could happen, for example, after we are diagnosed with an illness,we experience a tragedy, or death approaches for ourselves or a loved one.We are then confronted with the fragility of life and the impermanenceof our physical selves and our physical world. This is when we start towonder, search, and question.
This is when people may turn to groups, beliefs, and religions.Humans are collective and tribal beings. There is comfort, security, and asense of purpose in following, belonging to, and identifying with a groupbeyond the immediate nuclear family. As such, we often choose to givea belief system, religion, group, organization, or culture our faith andloyalty in return for security and a sense of purpose and belonging. Allmajor religions originated from the essence of divinity and universal love.However, we have shaped them into packages of beliefs, teachings, andrituals based on continents, races, and cultures. This has led to divisionsamong religions and belief systems.
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