AWAKENING RESOURCES for A+E LAB

AN EXPANDED VIEW OF ENLIGHTENMENT & REALIZATION:

It’s been my experience that when we get too engrossed in one path or teaching, it’s quite possible that our spiritual path, which was once intuitive and alive, can become dry, stagnant, painful, linear or non-integrative. All elements are vital. Wake up, grow up, clean up, show up, + connect up.

• Wake Up (meditative, consciousness, liberative, emptiness, enlightenment, radical freedom)

• Grow up (full accountability & responsibility for our lives & decisions, moral, virtue, values, integrity, rites of passage, archetypes, understanding many perspectives)

• Clean Up (shadow integration, trauma, unconscious repressed material, emotional work, body, breathwork)

• Show Up (purpose, expression, leadership, creativity, service, work/vocation/calling)

• Connect Up (relational, connection, listening, communication, secure attachment, authenticity, boundaries, needs, polarity, intimacy, family, tribe)

In my experience, I have seen a great many people end up disembodied or disassociated with Buddhist/Advaita/Non-dual/Mahamudra/Zen/Meditative ‘Wake Up’ paths. Myself included.

Enlightenment teachings often present themselves as Supreme, often promise the whole enchilada, and assert themselves as the ultimate teachings in human development and achievement. In origin stories, ‘Enlightenment’ is often tagged as a catch-all term for ‘Happily ever after’ or ‘Then all of life was mastered.’ The teachings themselves often employ frames for the world & body as a dream, something to overcome, etc. These frames may, at times, be very useful tools to facilitate realizations of less and less fabrication - to cut through the noise of the fabrications. But unless balanced out, these teachings easily lead to unhealthy relationships, dissociation and other side effects.

• It’s possible to be steeped for years in a meditative path and not know how to truly vulnerably stand in the fire of a healthy passionate loving relationship or to still be ill-equipped to maturely bring your fullest gifts into the world.

• It’s possible to be postponing and avoiding very real traumas & suppressed emotions that if addressed directly with ‘Clean Up’ shadow/somatic work could transform the quality of life relatively overnight in a handful of sessions. These are no small leaps in the quality of life, and embodiment.

For many, the seductive promises of the Wake Up/Enlightenment teachings has partly become a license for avoidance in issues that present themselves in life: health, relationships, family, fulfilling one’s calling, and other forms of embodiment. That’s been my experience deeply involved in thousands of hours of meditation, and with many different teachings + communities. If you look at the community around a teaching, the proof is in the pudding. Know the tree by its fruits.

By its nature, the Wake Up path is pointing us to transcendent elements in our consciousness. In my experience, there are countless priceless benefits + boons to this vein of transcendent development. We are liberated from exclusive identification with personal frames and our worlds of fabrication. I would not say I’ve “arrived” and that gets to the whole idea of ‘arrival.’ What is your destination?

A NEW GENERATION WHERE WORLDLY LIFE & LIBERATED BEING WALK HOME HAND-IN-HAND:

One of the reasons I named this lab ‘Awakening & Embodiment Lab’ is because I have a deep intuition that we are in a different generation of waking up. This is a different time. In this generation, we are being asked to embody our unique particular form, story, life, and gifts - and this goes hand-in-hand with liberation, with awakening from the dream. They complement eachother. The deeper the roots, the higher the branches.

In Buddhism, It’s clearly stated that the highest purpose of having a body is to use this life for liberation. What about the purposes of being here, of the Infinite One incarnating in the first place? What about each of us being God looking out of specific eyes, with specific gifts, soul histories, experiencing love, heartbreak, facing injustices, expressing relative and ultimate truths, co-creating solutions to complex painful issues in the world, healing ancestral pain in our bodies and the culture, making love, having children and participating in the great wheel, creating art and beauty, enjoying life, pioneering new ways of bridging spirit and body, expressing spirit in the specific and unique way that is your soul’s expression?

Meanwhile, a timeless essence remains underlying it all. This paradox is awakening and embodiment.

UP + DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAINTOP: A TIME OF INTEGRATION

Historically, facing persecution, most spiritual pioneers and traditions NEEDED to isolate to the mountains and monasteries to be able to pursue their spiritual calling away from worldly life and threats. Aside from a few rare exceptions, spirituality evolved with vows of celibacy and poverty, requiring retreat from ALL worldly influences: sex, money, relationships, children, etc.

But today the landscape has changed. Spirituality came come down from the mountaintops and is now amidst the world, and it’s here to stay for the foreseeable future. This is a time of integration. Many teacher’s traditions left them ill-prepared for the trials and tests of worldly influence and power. In the last hundred years, it’s been sex, money, and power scandals here, there, and everywhere.

It’s a time of integration. We're asked to hold alot more polarities and paradoxes in order to integrate body and spirit, worldly life and spiritual life, sexuality, family, money, career, etc. with our Self that is beyond and within all forms. This is a modern task and I feel we're still integrating and evolving the best modalities, practices, and insights to proceed in this task.

It’s quite possible your calling is not as much to ESCAPE the realm of form or the ‘wheel of samsara’ (framed in Buddhist teachings as escaping the tormenting cycle of death and rebirth). If you listen to your own spirit, maybe your calling is to both to AWAKEN and EMBODY, to deepen your realization of the PARADOX of being alive, to crystallize your realization as well as your expression of yourself as the One Infinite Creator, clothed in this realm’s reality.

Liberation or ‘Awakening’ teachings can be seen and approached in that context, as a support in DEEPENING the paradox of existence - in stretching the embodiment as well as the awakening dimension, to both transcend and immerse at the same time, to expand and contract, to breath in and breath out, to die and be reborn again and again, to participate in the vast cycle and breath of life.

RESOURCES BELOW:

I continue to practice and receive gifts from both awakening and embodiment. I prefer teachings like the Diamond Approach, Rob Burbea, etc. that don’t reify one realization (no matter how void or empty or beyond beyond) as ultimate. Our branches ascend as our roots deepen. We realize directly 'We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”

It’s important to be aware of the dangers of many Wake Up traditions, be open to Integral development (using the 5 quadrants as an easy framework), and be looking for more integrative teachings/teachers operating in the bypass-prone Wake Up terrain.

As this is the one of the most misinformed & potentially bypass-y paths, it needs the best resources and so I have compiled some of the best most resources I can for you. This list is always evolving and open to recommendations. Some are accelerative, others more integrative. Ideally, all of these teachers would be transparent about the actual quality of their daily life. Some are more than others.

In one way or another, they all speak openly about the limitations & nature of their realization and offer grounded helpful criticisms of the all-promising mythology around enlightenment whilst still casting true light on the supreme beauty of self-realization.

SEEING THAT FREES: THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF ROB BURBEA

With his book ‘Seeing that Frees’ and I feel Rob Burbea ushers in a Spirituality 3.0 in terms of how to give people a meditative practice that is truly adaptive to their body, and that they’re able to unlock the deeper insights much more rapidly as a result of more intuitive guidance and teaching style.

THE DIAMOND APPROACH

Founded by a scientifically-minded nuclear physicist Hameed Ali and his friend Karen Johnson, this is a unique path and approach. Online retreats are rich, deep, and very inexpensive - and I recommend them more than the books, of which ‘The Pearl Beyond Price’ is a unique offering. The realizations they excavated go to the Absolute and beyond. Gabor Mate has spoken highly of Diamond Approach.

There is no one teacher, although Hameed made many of the discoveries (and authored 18 books) alongside Karen and his friend Faisal. Since its inceptions in the mid 70’s, a handful of teachers and the community itself carry and unfold a deepening collective Realization. This is a profound contribution to this list - because it also is a psychologically-grounded spiritual path, that honors the ever-deepening role of the psyche and personality in the context of realization.

There is so much to say about the potency and integration in this path.

USING GUIDED MEDITATIONS AS ENERGETIC ACCELERATION

This is a hack to deepen your meditation practice significantly. It’s basically piggy-backing on the energy of guided meditations to accelerate, guide, and deepen your meditation practice. I picked this strategy up from Frank Yang, who is linked to below. It’s golden.

MOOJI: EMBODIED ADVAITA TEACHER

Mooji’s voice alone, in my experience (and many), carries an awakening energy and vibration within it. Diving into his satsangs, videos, and teachings, his energy and embodiment is a pretty solid blueprint to me. He holds the energy well, but he often seems less of a craftsman to help fathom the insights, wisdom, and practices like Burbea and more a broad-stroke intuitive energetic approach trying to help the audience feel and have intuitive glimpses real-time. I would say to dive deep by listening to some of his guided meditations on his Youtube Channel, or just feel the energy you feel when listening to him.

THE THREE SPEED TRANSMISSION

The ‘Three Speed Transmission’ was developed by Kenneth Folk and it is a pragmatic way of understanding 3 different ‘enlightenment’ meditation approaches as gears in a car. You have three gears. When you want to deepen your practice, you go up a gear. When you lose traction and the mind starts to doze, you go down. It uses these 3 gears: 1. Vipassana (and other mindfulness practices), 2. Self-inquiry and investigating the sense of self, and 3. Abiding as the Self (ala Mahamudra and Advaita, etc.)

VIPASSANA 10-DAY RETREAT

Vipassana offers a profound 10-day experience which will open a door to very tactile deep insights into the nature of phenomena. Most of us have heard of it and even done one or two (if not, it’s so recommended) but this list wouldn’t be a true list of POWERHOUSE resources without it.

FRANK YANG: A YOUTUBE JOURNEY DOCUMENTING HIS WAKE UP PATH

In his late 30’s, Frank Yang is a Taiwanese fitness star who became obsessed with contemplative practice and filmed his meditative journey. He created an incredible fast speed mash-up video of the core moments of awakening experience until the moment of profound realization. Quite a rare honest character, and unique voice in this terrain.

13 FREE PDF BOOKS FROM TEACHERS VIA DROPBOX

Here we have ‘Seeing that Frees’ by Rob Burbea mentioned above. We have some Jed McKenna books and Adyashanti books and Rupert Spira and others. Many of these are less integrative perspectives.

BYPASS SUPPORTS:

Advaitaholics Anonymous: Sobering Insights for Spiritual Addicts by Shiv Sengupta

I haven’t read this book and so this is a sort of joke recommendation. But the name says alot. And the spirit of the blurb on Amazon is touching. Just a little reminder.

THE FIVE QUADRANTS:

With current technology, we live in a global village. Cultures + information are synthesizing at crazy rates. It has many effects and it’s not something we can easily control, at least not in the old ways. Amidst all that, I want to share one incredible effect.

New communities, ways of living, and bodies of work are emerging. A new emphasis is arising on embodiment. It turns out the body is a very complex terrain, with many worlds and ecosystems within it. It’s a big ship to steer. In order to get out of the addictive-avoidant habits of being stuck in the head + driven by unconscious reactions, we needed a vast array of tools and wisdoms. We needed new paradigms in order to maturely enter the somatic and emotional deep terrain. In the last 40 years, there is an ever-deepening synthesis of previously isolated developmental paths. There is a synthesis happening with so many worlds, people, and bodies of work: depth psychology and psycho-analysis, religious + spiritual cosmologies + practices, psychedelic healing and shamanic journeying, trauma + somatic work, self-development skills, creative arts + expression, and so many more. All synthesizing + becoming much more than the sum of their parts. It is a great re-membering right now.

Call it what you like: multi-path integration, regenerative wholeness, or integral development. In small growing communities around the world, culture is essentially digesting + embodying vast arrays of ‘ways to live, feel, relate, see, and know.’ We are beginning to get more comfortable with navigating paradox and holding contradictory wisdoms + approaches on all levels within us: deep in the body, emotions, core survival strategies, ancestral memory, mind, relational-body, work life, experience with the world, soul-levels, and higher. In the light of many views, knots are being seen + unravelled. Huge blind spots revealed. Biases exposed. We can become more and more whole. It invites a patience and falling in love more with the process than the destination. The fruits are real, and it gets easier as it goes. We can become more and more whole, like never before, and it’s so rewarding.

What is multi-path integration and wholeness all about? It’s a process of self-discovery and embodiment, not simply a set of distinctions, methods, and paradigms. It’s where the rubber meets the road. In our actual somatic inner space, we open up the hood of our car, learn the ways of our own operating, embrace them, and deep shifts happen. Healing happens organically. Wholeness happens. This is the kind of work we do in a one-on-one session of mindfulness-based assisted self-discovery. In the process, we are gently exploring what’s present in the moment. We are tracking mindfully what’s true in our body. We are able to safely uncover our actual blind spots, relational ecosystems, and deep strategies. These are the deep causal layers that unconsciously hold us back in relationships or projects. Using new wisdoms and skills, we embrace, soul-retrieve, and re-contextualize what was a previously unconscious self-replicating loop. This opens new paradigms. It’s liberating. It’s an embodied journey, where our life transforms.

As we discover this is possible, we get less and less satisfied with settling for just a journey in the head. It isn’t about hiding inside our old avoidances. We learn how to be loving, gentle, and patient with ourselves to take the journey into the body, into the core survival strategies and family constellations, into the unconscious beliefs held in the depths that relate with the familial. We learn to treat ourselves with skillfulness, self-love, patience, compassion, and self-forgiveness. As we do this, addictions and avoidances can gradually fall away. They were expressions of our unmet pain. As our roots go deeper, our branches reach higher into new worlds, even deep experiences of wholeness, and multi-dimensional cosmologies. New richer more nourishing ways of relationship become available. In this way, we become, in all areas of our life, the embodiment of our next deepest lesson. This is true ‘learning.’ And the learning continues.

It’s about making the path a lot easier. You don’t need to get your coat snagged on every doorway you walk through or step in a ditch around every new corner. The maps for ‘What is reality?’ get upgraded. The practices and ways of life get tons of vital context. This is where introducing the 5 Quadrants comes in. It’s one way of seeing some of the different crucial aspects of development, so we don’t get too one-sided. It’s an easy-to-reference supportive model. The patient loving journey of bringing it into the body + life is in some ways easier than it can look. Our curiousity and natural passion for life continues to awaken, and the new paradigms attract us on their own.

A very simple core framework to avoid bypassing & keep on hand at all times is:

5 QUADRANTS: WAKE UP, GROW UP, CLEAN UP, SHOW UP, CONNECT UP

• Wake Up (meditative, consciousness, liberative, emptiness, enlightenment, radical freedom)

• Grow up (full accountability & responsibility for our lives & decisions, moral, virtue, values, integrity, rites of passage, archetypes, understanding many perspectives)

• Clean Up (shadow integration, trauma, unconscious repressed material, emotional work, body, breathwork)

• Show Up (purpose, expression, leadership, creativity, service, work/vocation/calling)

• Connect Up (relational, connection, listening, communication, secure attachment, authenticity, boundaries, needs, polarity, tribe)

Above quadrants revised from a Ken Wilber - Integral Theory model

“What if you could go from kindergarten level personal growth to college level, graduate level or mastery level personal growth? When you get to those levels, you start getting obsessed with Ken Wilber’s work.” ~ Vishen Lakhiani - CEO of MindValley

As I mentioned above, many different disciplines of ‘human development’ have been isolated for hundreds or thousands of years. In one-on-one sessions, we are integrating and finding pathways to open up these many different quadrants within us. It happens naturally, organically, as we safely explore whatever is alive for us in any area of our life and connect the threads of how that interweaves with any somatic patterns. In the organic process of exploring and soul-retrieval that happens, entirely new doors open up. The 5-quadrant model of synthesis and integration is built into the work I do. We naturally travel throughout the 5-quadrants in the exploration process. We find new distinctions, heal emotional wounds and patterns, receive insights, work and relationships are invigorated, and new choices arise as we work together. It’s a path of discovery.

On a larger level, this same integration is happening around all the world between these isolated practices, approaches, communities, and philosophies. Without the interconnectivity of modern communication, history is a story of very isolated approaches. A few isolated deep thinkers here or there forging ideas and writing books for the culture. Religious and spiritual communities hiding in monasteries or ashrams in the mountains. These modern branded islands around this modality, this skillset, this approach, this teacher’s work, this practice, this community. These different thought-camps often can seem to be at odds with eachother, vying for superiority or influence. But they’re all trying to support different aspects of the same bigger picture.

IT’S A FUNNY THING...

• Emotional release & trauma work people condemning meditation communities as disembodied bypassers.

• Western psycho-analytic and depth psychology communities refuse + judge the woo-woo eastern mysticism that unbeknownst to them inspired the founders of their tradition.

• Meditation communities often condemning the world, their desires, & most of all the other camps & basically everything as passing and unreal.

• Inspired self-development communities, who are developing their healthy ego, seeking 'success' condemn depth psychology and emotional release work as being lost in tunnels of endless introspection.

• And finally, relational communities see all the go-getters, the always-in-process trauma-work people, and the detached enlightenment people...and they just want to give everyone a big hug and be like, "WTF guys, all you really want is connection and love."

Everyone has a piece of the truth. And it CAN be integrated in our own experience. All these aspects of our life are like streams flowing into rivers into the ocean. The ocean is the integration of knowing how to navigate our whole system and embodying that familiarity on many levels: emotionally, mentally, financially, physically, morally, relationally, creatively, vocationally, and spiritually. The 5 Quadrants model is just a simple reminder to not become one-sided:

Wake Up, Grow Up, Clean Up, Show Up, Connect Up.

In one way of looking, the world is just a giant laboratory for growth or lack thereof. It’s easy to only see part of the picture. On the path, it’s all too common to end up being just one of the blind men in the famous “Blind men & the Elephant” parable:

A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said: "We must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable". So, they sought it out, and when they found it they groped about it. The first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said, "This being is like a thick snake". For another one whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person, whose hand was upon its leg, said, the elephant is a pillar like a tree-trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said the elephant, "is a wall". Another who felt its tail, described it as a rope. The last felt its tusk, stating the elephant is that which is hard, smooth and like a spear.

In some versions of the story, they begin to quarrel about their different perspectives and come to blows. In other versions, they reconcile their different perspectives and resolve a bigger truth from their shared truths. This is what each of us does in our own body as we explore our inner terrain, integrate our parts, heal our family constellations, ground our spirit and soul, navigate our knowing and intuition, and embrace the path of integration.

WHOLENESS + MULTI-PATH INTEGRATION:

As we explore sessions into one-on-one assisted self-discovery, a deep awareness of all the parts of us and paradigms within us comes online. We experience transformations and synchronicities. We experience this for ourselves. Our curiosity comes online. Our life transforms when we begin to integrate the parts, survival strategies, paradigms, and beliefs inside of us that are at odds. Each deep authentic step is important.

As we become more curious of all that is happening inside of us, a powerful intention is to open up to resources that resonate with a paradigm of wholeness or embracing a multi-path development: wholeness + integration. ‘Wholeness’ and ‘multi-path integration’ means there’s an emphasis on embodiment - which means maturely working with our core emotions, relationships, survival strategies, and authentic somatic experience so that a new reality can integrate at the level of soma, living practice, relationships, work, and our life. Wholeness and the emphasis on integral embodiment can serve as a guiding ethos, as a litmus test of what kinds of resources and experiences we curate in our life.

A Few Words + Thoughts to Support the Journey

Let’s explore the intention of wholeness a bit, and different ways to support embodying it more and more. It essentially means that we hold open a multi-path growth mindset, a curiousity to learn, discover and uncover the paths of being that most nourish the core of our daily life, relationships, and work. The sessions I offer are a very deep pathway into this embodiment. One-one-one assisted self-discovery sessions are relational, somatic, and allow the deepest layers + patterns to be explored and healed and liberated directly, with alot of safety and warmth. These sessions opens a portal to the curiosity and learning process around total integration. How do we support this journey? It helps to have continued resources and frameworks to begin to embody and work with: courses, communities, sessions, and approaches. Ideally from people who already integrate + synthesize MANY different aspects: relational, vocational, emotional, psychological, physical, spiritual, etc.

We can use the 5 quadrants (shared about in another post) and ask the question: What domains of development are most needed right now? Let our intuition guide us. Maybe it’s relational skills (attachment theory, NVC, Personality Patterns, Drama Triangle) or emotional healing (EFT, express and release) or maybe a regular meditation practice - ideally a more integral relationally-aware meditative tradition. Maybe it’s none of the above, and something else comes. Maybe we get a calling to make a new friendship with a certain person and it’s coming from a sense of our capacity to grow from the connection.

Maybe we feel called to read a survival strategies book like, for example, the 5 Personality Patterns by Steven Kessler - getting two copies, one for us and one for our partner or family member. Then talk about and laugh about all the insights. Maybe we feel called to have a couple friends all get a 14-day free trial at OneCommune at the same time and take Marianne Williamson’s ‘Relationship’ course or take the first 14 days of ‘Light Watkin’s 21-Day Meditation Challenge.’ Haha! To integrate our insights and keep track of them over time, it can help to take up a journaling practice. I journal insights daily in EverNote on my phone. The idea of ‘multi-path integration’ is like a guiding star, an intention to be curious in the growth journey, to embrace the full range of what’s inside and outside of us, and help it to all be held, balanced, and rhythmically experienced in greater harmony and wisdom. Maybe we feel called to write something like this intention: ‘I fully call in the journey of integration + wholeness + embodiment in my life, in all ways. Please reveal the most supportive path forward and the resources. Please guide me to unravel any key patterns or obstacles with utter clarity. Please bring whatever insights, lessons, people, teachings, guides or resources I need for that healing journey, and let the signs be absolutely clear for me so I can follow it.’ on a small piece of paper, put a tealight candle on it, and light it everyday. This is powerful psycho-magic to initiate this process within us. As the old dies in us, new orders emerge. As we embrace and transfigure our core survival wounds, it deepens our roots and, in turn, our branches are able to reach higher.

• Life becomes a more and more living rite of passage, guided by the intention for wholeness, embodiment, and multi-path integration, with the support of our resources, community, and insights. It can be challenging at times but also generous, celebratory, and abundant as well. This intention, if placed at the center of our wheel of life, becomes an tremendously inspiring way to live, work, heal, love, and discover!

• One of the powerful aspects of growth to integrate is paying attention to how to live + navigate from prayer, intention, and vibrational principles as well as tracking the way this actually works. When we begin to practice the toolsets around intentions + prayer, we are able to begin to track a real relationship with higher resources: responses, karmic movements, and synchronicities. We gain access to an enlivened field where intuitions guide us, where non-linear intelligence provides us with deeply practical support.

• Getting familiar with many aspects of total integration, we are able to get good at reading ourselves, our relationships, and our environment with greater clarity and intuition - and use this context to take an outer-inner journey of ‘in tandem’ development.