Awakening: Why We Waited 150 Episodes to Talk About It

Awakening is an incredibly hard thing to define. It isn't what you think it is. If your mind can think of it, it isn't it.

Why haven't we talked about this, this directly in 150 episodes? And why isn't it something that we talk about as, say, a goal?

When people wake up, it is like one line of evolution. It's not all the lines of evolution. And so it can actually get people quite stuck. They've told themselves that this is a finish line, and then they hit it and they think they're done, but they're not done. Evolution doesn't stop. It just keeps on going.

I can't tell you how many times we've been running a course, or even before I was running them with you when I was just a participant. Somebody would have some big experience and you'd be like, "Oh yeah, I've seen that before. That's just a non-dual awakening." And then like no further context. And I'd be like, "Wait, wait, what?" And then you wouldn't talk about it again. What's going on?

Yeah, it's a thing. It happens a lot in our work. It doesn't happen consistently and we don't make it a goal of the work.

Yeah. And I wanna get to why that is.

Yeah, yeah.

But first I wanna back up a little bit 'cause we just introduced a bunch of terminology that a lot of people might not have. So like, What is awakening?

Awakening is an incredibly hard thing to define, and especially because in our vocabulary, there's a lot of ways people use the word awakening. Like some people describe it as a political epiphany. Oh, I had an awakening, right? So I'm talking about the thing that the Buddhists would call awakening or Christians would call Christ consciousness. It is a moment where your identity shifts. So no longer are you personal, you are universal. And so what that does is create a whole bunch of symptoms. They happen in different ways at different times. And the awakening, like anything else, continues to evolve. But some of the things that you would see is you can identify yourself as this vast awareness. And so there's a recognition that there's nothing to defend, there's nothing to be attacked, there's nothing to worry about. The problems start to dissolve, the self-critic, that recurring negative self-thoughts, or just even recurring thoughts that happen over and over again, they seem to fade away. So those are some of the symptoms of it. There's a lot more peace, access to peace is almost always there. So that's a way to describe it. But the way that I like to describe it, and there's lots of ways, I mean, there's tons of Buddhist texts on this and Taoist texts on this about how awakening develops and how it happens over time. I think it's different. My experience is it's different for different people. But I would say there's something called a head awakening, a heart awakening, and a gut awakening. And they have different, have different— there's different experiences that come with each of them. And for some people, the heart awakens first and the head awakens and the gut. Now they're all the same thing, so we're just parsing them to make sense of the evolution. But, but in some way, they're all part of that same movement. But just like you'd have a flower bed, some flowers bloom at different times of year and some flowers, they open every day and close, right? So there's just different ways that different people react to awakening.

Yeah. Yeah. So now I wanna, we've talked about awakening and I just wanna define another term we've used here, non-dual. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Yeah, non-duality is when, because you see yourself as universal, there is no subject and object anymore. Non-duality basically means that you're not seeing the world in form of me and other because everything is one. That's a way to describe it. And every religious tradition has some non-duality teachings in it. Like the Christian tradition has St. John of the Cross and has Meister Eckhart. And there's tons in the Taoist tradition and in the Hindu tradition. Like, it's— they're all over the place. Yeah. And the Sufi tradition is a great one for the Muslim tradition. There's a lot of non-dual teaching in there, often more heart-related than head-related. The Buddhist seems to be more head-related.

Okay, so tell me a little bit more now about like the head, heart, and the gut.

The head awakening, the best way to describe it is it comes usually from a couple different things. The first one is the deconstruction of the thought of I, like, what am I exactly? Exactly, right? So if I cut you in half, which is you?

This half is the podcaster and the other half is the husband.

Right, exactly, right? If I took away your husband, what's you? If you weren't a podcaster anymore, what would be you? If I cut your body in half, what's you? If everything about you has changed, your body, your cells, your emotional content, your thoughts between when you were 7 years old and when you are today, how is it that there's still a you that exists? How many yous have died and how many yous have been born? You know, so we don't really think about this idea of I, that there's a me, but what is that me exactly? And so that deconstruction, I think it's called vikar in the Hindu tradition. Ramana Maharishi was a great example of it, where there was a deconstruction of I, the question of what am I exactly? What am I essentially that has never changed? And oftentimes that's also called awareness. And so that's one way that head awakening occurs, is that another way is through meditation. Different kinds of meditation can create this head awakening. And another way that it typically happens is through seeing through all thoughts. So you'll see this happen with people whose job it is just to be in the world of ideas and So physicists is an example. I've seen this happen with quite a few physicists or philosophers where they have one idea and then they see the truth of a contradictory idea and then they see the truth of another contradictory idea. And all of a sudden they can realize that all of their thoughts have truth and all of their thoughts are false. And so they can't actually believe their own thinking. And in that non-belief of thinking, a head awakening can often happen, or it makes them very ripe for a head awakening. The question becomes, oh, if this thought isn't true, is true and isn't true, this thought is true and isn't true, this thought is true and isn't true, like, who's thinking? And like, actually, who's in control of my thoughts? I have not decided what thought to have next. Who's the I that I'm talking about? And so as you can start seeing through your thoughts, you start seeing through the creator of the thoughts as well.

Okay, so this is head awakening largely. I'm curious to go into a little bit more like the heart and the gut awakening.

Yeah.

So there's the sense of self, the sense of I that's seen through in the head awakening. What happens in a heart awakening?

So in all of them, the sense of self dissolves. And that's why our work creates a lot of this is because we're seeing through the sense of self. We're not doing it in the traditional meditation way, but we're doing it in many other ways. The sense of self with the heart awakening changes because of love, right? And it typically comes through the, instead of the disidentification of thoughts, it's the disidentification of emotions. So all these emotions are happening. And if you welcome them and see the truth of all these emotional experiences, oh, my anger is beautiful. My anger isn't real. My anger isn't true, but my anger is beautiful. My anger is true. Like to see through that, to be able to welcome all those experiences experiences and see the truth in them the same way you would with different thoughts.

Right?

Instead of saying, "That thought isn't true because of my identity. That thought is true because of my identity. That emotion isn't true because of my identity. That emotion is true because of my identity." No, it's like all of that is welcome. All of that is seen to be true and false at the same time. When that happens in the metaphor of the heart, what occurs is this this boundless love. There's just a tremendous amount of love because you're loving all the emotional aspects of yourself. You're also loving all the emotional aspects of everybody else. And when that happens, when you love, disintegrates self just as much as identification of awareness in the mind, right? If I love you, like those, those deep experiences of love that we have, even if those romantic, silly crush loves, or that long-term love with wife of 26, 27 years, hi Tara, you are not as solid. You blend, you see that you are them and they are you. There's a, they call it merging, right? But it's not that.

They call it transcendent.

Transcendent is another way, yeah. And that, it does the same thing. But instead of happening through the awareness of thought and sense of I, it's happening through the awareness and the welcoming of emotions. So that's one of the ways ways it happens. The other way it happens in the heart is through relations. Is, you know, when you start to see that in a group of people, what you hold isn't particularly yours, right? And you've got to experience this. You experience this in our groups a lot. But the way that most people would recognize this is, my wife and I, for 10 years, I worried about money and she was like, "It's okay, we can spend as much money as we want." And then one day I went, 'Ah, you're right, we can spend as much money as you want.' And she became, 'Oh my God, I gotta worry about money.' Or you're in an office and one person is the one that everybody dislikes, they leave, and now there's a new person that everybody dislikes. It's like, you get to see that like your consciousness isn't particularly your own. And if that's done in very specific ways, like we do in our courses where you get to see very specifically that Oh, I'm holding something for the group. And if I let it go, somebody else in the group holds it. If I can hold an emotion, and if I let it go, somebody else can hold it. If somebody else holds it, I can't grab it anymore. Like those kinds of relational things can also do the same thing to the heart, where you see through the identity of like, these emotions are mine, these thoughts are mine. You know, you just sit down in a group and you have a thought, say, "Hmm, I wonder if this group is gonna say that thought around a topic." And like 9 times out of 10, somebody else in the group will say it. And when you start recognizing that, that also can create quite a bit of a heart awakening. And so that's the heart. And then the nervous system awakening, gut awakening, that's like an incredibly complicated thing. And I think in some traditions it's called Kundalini and it can, It is, I would say, the most dangerous of the paths in the fact that, you know, I've seen people experiment in that realm, not really know what they're doing, then not sleep for, you know, a decade or something like that. And I've heard different gurus talk about the dangers of it. But the way that I would talk about the nervous system awakening is it is, The recognition that you're inherently safe. That would be the way that I would describe it, that the me against the world on the nervous system level starts to disintegrate. And the path that I know that is most useful and safe around that is the path of, of pleasure. What, like, how do I have pleasure in the small things of life? How do I take pleasure in doing dishes and breath and this conversation that we're having? How do I savor life? Because you can't savor, you cannot have pleasure if you're not safe. So oftentimes we're in a fight or flight with ourselves or with the world. And pleasure is kind of the antidote to that. And so, That's the thing that I see that really allows for what I would call the gut awakening.

And it is the nervous system expression of, "Oh, I'm not under attack." Or for those who like it a little spicy, there's the wingsuit base jumping path.

Right, also. Please explain that one. You know it better than I do.

Oh man. I mean, so a lot of times people have an awakening experience and then they look back on their lives and they're like, "Oh, I've actually had experiences like this before, something like it, maybe a taste of it." And the way that happened for me is, I look back on the first time I made a BASE jump, jumped off of an 800-foot bridge in West Virginia. There was a quarter million people watching. There's this whole—

This is your first time?

First time, yeah.

Cool.

And you know, you have basically 7 seconds of free fall to pull your parachute. And I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna go for 5." And it gives me 2 seconds of fudge, I'm good. And so I have like 5 seconds of free fall Somehow I was able to count the 5 seconds in my head and it actually was correct. I can't say how that occurred. But the experience that I had was the moment that I pushed off the edge, I felt like an inversion. There was like the space around me was just much bigger. The actual space was more dense. Like there was more granularity to the space. There wasn't a sense that I existed. It was almost like a blue screen of death or like some kind of like system crash of my consciousness, of the operating system. And it was just pure awareness. And it was like I switched off and then switched back on again. I had to reboot and then came back, deployed my parachute, landed, and then immediately called my sister. And I was just like, "I don't know what just happened, but something happened." And I'm not talking about jumping off a bridge. Something happened.

Yeah, and interestingly, I know a lot of folks who have had these awakening experiences because of, death, near death, the confrontation with death, and on the deathbed. Like a lot of that happens because it's easier to see through the sense of I when its end is imminent.

Right.

You know, it's like, well, what, what, oh, okay, whatever I thought I was is about to die.

Yeah.

So, and it's also really common for versions of it to happen in flow states. You know, artists often love their art because in their art, they're— if, if they're in their judgmental mind, then the art sucks. So on some level, what they're doing is they're training themselves to be in these flow states, and these flow states have less me in them. Whether you're using heroin to get to the flow state or whether you've learned how to get it yourself, getting into that flow state has a lot less me. There's less critic, there's less second-guessing, less judging, less doubt, all those things. And so that that same feeling. And that happens for a lot of athletes too, is those moments. And then they think that the way to get back to it is doing more art or jumping off more bridges.

Right.

Doesn't always work.

Worked a little bit.

Little bit, exactly.

Then I habituated to, like, I had to go deeper into the experience. I had to make it not necessarily more dangerous, but I had to keep it at my edge where I felt like I actually was at risk. Yes. Which ultimately what was really happening, what seemed to really be happening with me was that I was entering an experience where I really needed to be present and there wasn't space for an I anymore. And if I wanted to survive, I needed to be really present. And it turns out you can be that present here having a podcast.

Right, exactly.

You don't need to be nearly dying.

I would say even some businessmen have the same, business people have the same experience.

Or my brother when he got brain cancer, that seemed to be a massive flip, like heart awakening, his just gratitude flowing everywhere, every which way, while everyone else around him is freaking out. And he's just like, "Yeah, you know what? I have it so good right now." And we're like, "What?" Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I think that there's some prejudice, particularly in meditation circles, and that's been the most pronounced and the most explored version or path to awakening.

Yeah.

Right, which is that kind of, I'm meditating and seeing through the sense of self.

Yeah, which makes me ask the question that I think a lot of people are asking right now.

Yeah.

Why haven't we talked about this directly in 150 episodes? And why isn't it something that we talk about as, say, a goal or a practice or, hey, there's this thing called awakening and you do this work and you might get this thing or achieve or attain. What's behind the— That's a great question. Kind of sideways angle that we're going at it here.

Yeah, I would say that there's a number of reasons actually. The first reason is because going after it for some people is really a slow path. To know that it's there and then to try to achieve it is a lot of I.

I was just reminded suddenly of the time that you said, "Enlightenment, porn for perfectionists." Yeah, I forgot.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, God knows that I was in that state for a long time of like trying to perfect myself. And then this, once I reached this enlightenment, I didn't know what it was. The experience can't really be described, right? And it is without a doubt way bigger than you could ever imagine and way smaller and more insignificant than you could ever imagine simultaneously. And I remember listening to teachers talk about that and being like, Oh, shut up, give me something concrete. Um, but it's, it's, it is without a doubt something that is really hard to describe. And it's even more hard to describe because it happens differently for different people. The, the journey is different. And that we could do a whole episode on, like, the journey of how people wake up in the different realms and how to integrate it.

And we will.

Um, But so one of the reasons that I don't like going into it is because it gives people a goal to aim for, which can really slow down the process. So that's one of the reasons. The other reason is because when people wake up, it is like one line of evolution. It's not all the lines of evolution. And so it can actually get people quite stuck Like, I've seen people wake up and then get stuck in this, "Oh, I can access this peace anytime that I want." And so they just constantly access the peace like a drug, and then they identify with it. Even though they're non-dual, they're like, "I'm the awakened guy," or, "I'm the awakened woman." And then they're stuck in that aspect of it. And part of the reason that that happens is because they've told themselves that this is a finish line. And then they hit it and they think they're done, but they're not done. Like, evolution doesn't stop, it just keeps on going.

Every epiphany is a new rut.

Is a new rut. And it acts like, in the long run, awakening acts a lot more like walking. It's like, I'm walking, but I'm hardly aware that I'm walking. But when I first started walking, I'm like, I'm walking, this is walking right here, this is walking. It's the same thing. It's like, this is a way— I'm awake. Holy shit, I'm awake. What the fuck is going on? Uh, I don't know, maybe I don't want to be awake. And then 10 years later, it's like, oh yeah, that's still there. Hardly notice it anymore. And so, and there's continuing evolution, there's continuing expansion in the state of consciousness that you do notice, but that initial thing that you felt was, you know, has just become background.

Yeah.

And so, so to think of it as an end, I think is disruptive. Both getting to it and then once you've gotten to it, I think thinking that there's an end to it is disruptive for your further evolution. This is just natural. This is— waking up is a natural part of our evolution. We might get traumatized and get stuck in some stuff. We have to work through it. But if we're just naturally evolving, this is just what happens. It's as natural as learning to talk or learning to walk.

Yeah.

As long as, you know, you don't get your leg injured or you don't have a neurological issue, you're going to walk. And it's— I'd say it's the same thing. So to make it a goal is somewhat counterproductive in that way. But the other thing, you can be dysfunctional at any level of awakening. Right? So I've seen people who have— you see a lot of actually like gurus who started cults this way where they have this access to this nonduality. But they like haven't handled their emotional crap. They haven't handled their, they haven't handled like their interpersonal stuff. They haven't handled their nervous system stuff. And so they're constantly seeking safety or control or— Yeah. And in fact, when somebody has gotten into awakening and they believe that there's an end, it becomes harder to heal the stuff. And the description, I remember the guy who was teaching this to me, who's now passed, this esoteric guy, the way he described it was that when I have to go back and heal some stuff, he worked with a lot of monks and he would say, "It's like dragging them back into hell." Because when you hit that non-duality, oftentimes you can just supersede your emotions very easily. So your head, especially with the head awakening, you can just like, "Oh, I can access peace at any time. So I'm just going to," I'm just good. I don't need to deal with all these fussy emotions. But if you're gonna go back and work through your trauma so that you stop repeating patterns, or if you wanna work through the thing that's causing depression all the time in your system, 'cause there's quite a few people I know who have had this awakening that are depressed, then you're gonna have to go back into hell, what they consider to be hell, but it actually turns out to be heaven. It's just, they're great with all the thoughts and the awareness, but they're not great with all the emotions yet.

Yeah, and this is something that's very common. We see people coming to our work and if they've done a lot of meditation, of various types or from various ways, especially like a lot of like the Western, like kind of achievement lens on meditation. No matter what tradition you're in, is there, can make it. And this is where like having a goal, a goal is sort of like a subject-object experience. So you're layering that on top of a practice of non-duality, you're gonna have some distortion. And for myself, I had done a lot of like meditation app type meditation without a lot of like lineage or tradition around it. Like hundreds of hours of it before I started doing this work. And so it took a long time for me to kind of crack through, oh, if there's something going on and I'm uncomfortable, I might not notice I'm uncomfortable because I'll just go to the way that I'm not uncomfortable, which is really accessible. Like that place that I go to when I'm flying a wingsuit where I'm just like, yeah, we're just in the flow here. But in the flow can be deepened into I'm in the flow with the full, humanity, the full experience of my body. And awakened or not, you are a human, a mortal human, who has had certain experiences that have wired together love and abuse and pain in all kinds of different ways. Yes. That are still being neurologically and ontologically picked apart and repatterned through new experiences, which is another thing about this work that we do, which is very experiential. Not so, like this is, the podcast is the most talking we do. And having new experiences in a non-personal way, not accruing them to your identity, but letting it really deeply hit you, hit you as the universe, the confluence of the universe that you are, does a very different thing than just, learning something new and having a new idea about yourself that you're now filtering experience through.

Yeah, exactly. I think that's one of the, the, one of the books that hit me the hardest when I was on this path was a book called "Doing Nothing" by Stephen Harrison. And he just basically dissects every single modality of becoming a better person. It's like, it's just unwinds all of it. So you just can't believe anymore that you can like become this better person. And so oftentimes it's a deconstruction of beliefs, deconstruction of identity that gets there, not the construction of a new one. And a lot of modalities can construct a new, as can ours, you can use any modality to construct an identity. I'm an AOA person. I mean, you can construct an identity around going to Burning Man, for goodness' sake, right? So, or around being a podcaster or anything. So you can construct an identity around being awake. And all of that is what's up for grabs or what is going to be destroyed in the process of awakening.

Now, there's something interesting there about, that's a paradox of, being awake and having an identity about being awake, when being awake is not having an identity. But it speaks to sort of the contextual nature of it. You know, like my first, what I could call awakening experience that I would recall was very fleeting and very context-dependent. Right. Later on, I could look back at other experiences of being a child and looking at a leaf in a certain way and being like, "Oh, there's awareness. What is behind my eyes?" And having sort of a, What is going on with experience?

Right.

What's happening here?

Right.

And then that goes away. And so, like you said, it's a natural process, like waking up is growing up. And I think growing up, there are just many experiences that we don't make much of.

Right.

Because we don't have the context for it. And if we have a really big one, we might have so little context for it that we are freaked out and others around us are freaked out and we might even get maybe even like institutionalized or like some really—

Correct.

Crazy shit. And other cultures might see it as like, oh, this is an amazing thing that happened. Let's like hold this person for a year or two so they can become a shaman or like a medicine man or like run our rituals or whatever it is.

Yeah. I think, I mean, again, I could do a whole episode and apparently we will. Yeah. On just like the different things that happen when people do wake up and ways to integrate that experience and the different ways it hits different people. But the critical piece to me is that one of the things about awakening is that, that I spoke to a little bit, is that you don't, it isn't what you think it is. If your mind can think of it, it isn't it. And so there's words that you can describe, you know, whenever you're talking about it, I'm sure there's some of the audience that's like, "What?" Or when I'm talking about it, you see yourself as awareness or you see yourself as everything. Like, "What?" Like, there's no way to really, like, crystallize the experience of it in a way that the mind is going to fully understand. And the weird part is that it's not like a stagnant experience either, meaning A lot of people and I thought, once I get there, then I will be this way forever. I will be in this state forever, right? I think a lot of people meditate because they want to be in a specific state forever. Right? But that's not the way it works. You're like, you're going to be angry. Some people call it a stateless state. Awakening is a stateless state, because you can be angry, sad, mean, nice, wanting, jealous, all the things that humans are. And there's still this kind of underlying understanding that this isn't me that this is happening to. And so there's like a stateless state to it, but all the states can occur. And so one of the mythologies of awakening is that once I get there, then I will always feel good.

Right. Which is an avoidance of a background of fear. There's like, there's a lack of a gut awakening there, maybe perhaps. Right. If there's certain states that are safe and I'm seeking those, I want those. And if I do something, I'll get there, which is running.

Which is another reason that the AOA experience happens to give awakening to a lot of people because there's nothing in our teaching that isn't, you're welcoming this, you're welcoming all of this, everything that you're welcoming, the thoughts, you're welcoming the pain, the suffering, you're welcoming the, the anger, you're welcoming the fear, you're welcoming. So that, just that welcoming. And if you think about the meditation, particularly the way that I would say, like, it's what it was created for. A lot of people, and myself included, when I started to meditate, it was, how do I manage myself into an experience? I'm gonna sit here and then I'm gonna feel this particular way. I'm gonna not feel this particular way. I'm gonna stop all my thinking. I'm gonna only be present. I'm gonna whatever. I had like a list of things that I should be. And then there was literally felt senses of, oh, this is expansion. Oh, cool, I'm in a good place. I'm in an expanded place. This is it. I've done it. Oh, shit, I'm worried about it. It's gone away. Okay, just relax, relax. Okay, okay. Oh, I'm expanded again, but it's not quite as expanded as the last time. You know, like this was my meditation. It was, I was constantly in a management of my own experience. Experience, even though the teaching was be with whatever is, right? Just sit. And 10, 20 other ways to describe non-management of your experience. And so I think a lot of times meditation, you can spend a decade, I did, not a decade, but maybe like 5, 6 years using meditation to manage myself, which was hell. It wasn't It wasn't like the joyful, amazing thing that is now meditation in my mind, which is far more like hanging out on a beach and enjoying like a nice breeze. It's like, oh, I can just enjoy whatever experience I'm having.

I'm recalling one of our coaches has a spiritual teacher in China who was like, I'm not gonna teach you meditation yet. And then eventually she started teaching her meditation. She was like, "Your heart wasn't awake. Like, your heart wasn't open enough. If I taught you meditation before your heart was open, it would've slowed the process down." I'm paraphrasing poorly, which is why I'm not even mentioning the name of the person. But it's something like that. It's like, for me, when I started meditating, it was really helpful in a sense that I was able to bring in this tool on demand and calm myself, give myself perspective, some presence, become less reactive. Really beautiful. And I also, on a more subtle level, was using it to dissociate, to hold myself at some distance, some safe distance. Maybe I needed that safe distance before I could feel the— you need to have the capacity to create distance to feel safe going into an experience sometimes. So this can be a really helpful step in the process. And so I'm curious, like, what, in the meditative practices, what guidance would you have around meditating in such a way that doesn't create dissociation? Or maybe that's actually helpful in the journey, but—

Yeah, one part of the guidance that I would say is that whatever you're doing is probably necessary for you at this step and is going to dissolve. So the attachment to your style, your methodology, of meditation is not helpful. So enjoy it. Do what you're doing. Just note that the evolution is natural. I think that's one of the things that I would say. Besides that, I think a very good pointer in meditation is view. Can you be vulnerable with yourself while you're meditating? Can you be impartial about your agenda in meditation? Can you have empathy for yourself in meditation? Can you be in wonder in meditation? That modality while sitting is just as useful as it is the way we teach in the Connection Course, which is, you know, in relationship. So that is another one. And then the third one is non-management. I would say to— in meditation, the job is to not manage anything, to not try to control anything, which is impartiality. But I had emphasized that one.

Yeah.

And then maybe there's one more, which is another version of— these are all kinds of versions of the same thing— is just enjoyment. Like, what's required if you're going to sit still? What's the most enjoyable way to sit still? Like, how do you get the most enjoyment from your meditation? Often, and this, I don't think this is something that you want to do all the time whenever you're meditating, but it's a good one to do once a week is to like ask that question. Say, oh, here, I'm going to meditate. What's required for me to enjoy the heck out of this meditational experience? Because typically it's not a management. It is an unwinding of management that allows us to enjoy the moment.

I like the way that you just kind of went head, heart, gut there. Like view, mindset, non-management, like whatever's happening, let it happen. And then enjoyment with that, like safety.

Yeah, didn't notice that, but that's great. Yeah, that's exactly right.

Yeah. Yeah, and in a lot of the meditative traditions, they often say like what you're doing on the cushion is something to bring into the rest of your life. Chop wood, carry water. And it seems that what I've learned through you is the inverse. It's be in view with yourself and the water and the wood and chopping it. Right. And then as a bonus, you could bring that back to the cushion if you want, but you don't need to. You can just live your life with it. Yeah.

I mean, there is a lot of benefit to meditation. I am a huge fan. Obviously, I spent, you know, years and years and years of my life doing pretty much nothing but that. I find that it's not for everybody. It's just not the path for everybody. And so to offer different paths of seeing through self is really, really critical. And there, that any single thing that we do, business or relationships or raising children, is a path to seeing through them, seen through yourself. And I, and I, that's the part of that actually, like, when I feel it, I feel sad that I don't know. I, my guess is this was in all the traditions. You can see the signs of it, you know, skillful means in Buddhism is how do you work in such a way that allows you to deepen your awakening. So I suspect it's there, but somehow or another, this un, unnatural divide between what they would call householders and monks, between being in the world and being in a monastery. They're both necessary. You know, I spend a lot of time in silence alone every year. And I find that like a very necessary part of my path. I also find it really necessary to be very engaged and active in the world. And if I look at, you know, the Dalai Lama, apparently he needs the same thing or is doing the same thing. A lot of the monks that I know are doing the same thing. They need that balance between the two places. And so, but somehow or another, there's this legend or this mythology that being in the world somehow separates you from the path or separates you from your experience of wholeness or oneness.

Yeah.

And, and, and, but there is a downside to the way that we teach awakening. And I think that that's important because we're not teaching awakening because it just happens. It just naturally happens. A lot of people are taken off guard by it in our work, which is one of the reasons that I think having this conversation is an important one to have. And the next one that we have around, like, how it unfolds for different people. But it can be an incredible shock to the system. Like there's stages of awakening that happen that can just completely rock your world. And we get, geez, phone calls like at least once a week now, maybe once every 2 weeks of somebody who's in the work that has had some, had some sort of disruptive awakening experience where they don't know what's happening. Like you calling your sister up on the phone after, like, I don't, what the heck was that? Like, what just went down? And that's the downside of the way that we teach it is because there's not, as a probably an overcorrection to not having people seek it out and strive for it. We also haven't probably educated enough folks in it. I think it's really important for people to understand, oh, this is what's happening and it's normal. You know, that it's like, it happens, normal might not be the right word, but it happens all the time. And it happens, you know, it's just, I just had a—

It's natural.

It's natural. I just had a person who'd gone through it and had this awakening. Called me up and like, what the heck's going on? What did you do to me? And happened to be in that phase, his particular system and the way that the phase worked is that, you know, it was a very shocking thing and there was resistance and therefore there was a lot of pain. And at the same time, as you know, there's the intrigue, like, I know this is good, I want it, but what the fuck is going on? They were traveling around a lot. And so it was this weird moment where I was like, oh, I've got somebody here who can help you with the integration in Boulder. I've got somebody in Vancouver who can help you with the training. I have somebody in Austin. And this person was like, what? Like, it's just like, it's this common? I'm like, yeah, it's this common. There's like, I can give you people in most 50 states and I can give you like, you know, people who can help balance your system to make this transition smoother, and at least 20. And so I think that's a really important thing for anybody who's gone through it in our work to know, is that this is common. This is, this is part of the journey. There's not— this isn't a problem. And, and the reason to know that, I think, that makes it useful is because then there's less resistance to it. A lot of times when awakening happens, there's a resistance to it, as you would, and/or a lot of fear. Because your identity, what you know to be yourself, is changing. And so of course you're gonna be scared and of course there's gonna be some resistance. It's not what you're used to.

Yeah, you've spoken of Zen sickness in this way a couple of times.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. This is the same thing. You can see people, but as long as somebody has somebody who knows the terrain pretty well and then like let them know that what's happening for them is not unusual, it doesn't last long.

Yeah.

And then they almost always want it back. They're almost always like, "Wait, that experience at the beginning was so..." You know?

Yeah.

I think there's one other thing that's really important to say about awakening, which is, and we've touched on this before, but I think it's really important to say it generally is, you know, the chop wood, carry water reference is like, you know, before awakening, chop wood, carry water. After awakening, chop wood, carry water. My expression of that is before awakening, daddy issues, after awakening, daddy issues. And like, there's some way that we imagine an awakening that our humanity dies with us, dies with the awakening, but it doesn't. Like, if anything, we become more human. We're more sensitive, we're more aware. If anything, happens, there's this— there's one aspect where you can always go into the spacious awareness where you can become dissociated. But there's another thing, which is you just become a lot more sensitive to stuff that is not— that doesn't feel right. And if you don't go into dissociation, then you're stuck with basically a more sensitive system that just cannot put up with the same kind of crap that you put up with before. So on some weird level, it's like some bad habits will like immediately fade and some won't, but the ones that remain will become so much more uncomfortable, uh, will become like— you'll become so much more sensitive to the things that aren't in alignment with you. And I think that's another thing that with awakening, people aren't expecting.

Yeah, but that's also the other side of clarity.

Correct.

To have that sensitivity is to give yourself a strong impulsive direction. I don't mean impulsive in like obsessive compulsive or something. I mean like the impulse in me when I'm feeling sensitivity to something that's not right, that doesn't feel aligned with me, then, it becomes an automatic action rather than something I need to sit down, write a pros and cons list, check with 16 people and make sure I'm seeing it correctly. Just like, "Oh no, this doesn't work for me." And I'm gonna step into without considering that that's not who I've been before or part of my identity. It's just a different action I'm taking and it's gonna get a different result and I'm here for it.

Yeah, exactly. And the other piece that I want to speak to a little bit is, you know, there was a time when I thought, oh, awakening is something really to get to. And like the whole world would be better off if everybody woke up. It's like that kind of feeling and that, you know, the most compassionate thing you can do for the world is your own awakening. There's a whole bunch of stuff around this. And then once you awaken, One of the things you want to do is help everybody else get to awakening. And there's like a deep truth to that. Then there's also some, there's also a mythology to that as well, which is, you know, it's not a cure-all. It's not like this magic elixir that's gonna change everything. Though I would never trade that it happened to me. I don't know anybody who's done it, lived in it for a year or two and then been like, "Yeah, I'd get rid of this." So, like, that's not the case either. It's like, there's a weird way to hold it, which is like, this is a lovely thing and it doesn't have to be a goal, but it's naturally going to happen if I just keep on bringing awareness to myself. Any version of Seeing through the identity will lead you to awakening. And any version of seeing yourself clearly will start to dismantle.

Yeah.

Will start to dismantle your identity. It just can't not.

Yeah, and in my experience, there's also just this really beautiful sense that it's not me who's doing it. Like, anything that I've ever thought that I've done to lead towards it has been the result of experiences I've had and influences on me and—

Yes, always. All of them.

It's just, so there's a whole lot of grace that comes with any recognition of awakening. And when I say any recognition of, because it's not a sense of, oh, am I there? Am I not there? Like that question isn't alive in this place. It's just any amount of my acknowledgement feels just like a receiving.

Yeah. Yeah, that would be a great thing to say as a way to close this. So for the people who are in it, in some version of it, There's a lot of folks who get into this place where they're saying, "I know what you're talking about, but it's not persistent. What do I do?" And my answer there is to be really grateful for the moments that it's there. Savor the moments that it's there, and the rest will happen naturally.

And maybe even the moments that you think it's not there, question that. Just really look, see what you find.

Totally.

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you, Joe.

Yeah, thank you.

And thank you everybody for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend. We'd love for you to subscribe to us, rate us on your podcast app. The Art of Accomplishment is hosted by myself, Brett Kistler, and Joe Hudson. Munyi Kelly, sitting next to me over here, is our producer. This episode was edited by Future Voice Media.