THE STAGES OF AWAKENING
7 JULY 2023 (14 MIN READ)
Out of all the moments I could pick from my healing journey—such as the suicidal ideations, the drug addiction, the weeping every night for months—none were as miserable as the confusion I faced when I first woke up consciously. When I told others that I was hearing all sorts of voices, seeing all kinds of things, as well as shitting my brains out on the toilet all day, everyone either told me I was completely fucking insane or I had IBS. I was at a point in my life where I needed the most guidance, but the guidance that this matrix system set up was only there to convince me I was insane—to turn me into another cash cow for Big Pharma. At a human level, I understand doctors thinking that a person hallucinating could be clinically insane, so I forgive with compassion. But at the same time, I was actually the most fucking sane I had been in my life. In an insane culture, developing sanity can feel like insanity, but you will never find that sanity until you accept that everyone else is out of their fucking minds. In fact, to make us fit into the societal mold of insanity and shut the fuck up, they create pills to robotize us into being happily miserable. How else can you explain prescribing legal meth to 3rd graders? Doctors will defend their prescription by telling you their patients need it to be “productive” at school, but what the fuck does that even mean?
The reason my frustration is seeping through these digital pages is that so many people enter this beautifully horrifying stage of awakening, but quickly turn to the matrix agents of society to lobotomize them back into being a brainwashed cog of the machine. “Oh, you’re questioning your existence and don’t feel good about working in a cubicle? Here’s a concoction of mind-altering substances to help you out…” The only way society can change is if all of us enter this point of personal awakening and use it to change ourselves for the better, creating a collective shift in the process. Because of this, societal change begins and ends at the personal level. So, when most of us reach this stage that invites us to change our values and identity for the better, but are shot down and beaten into forgetting about it, society will only follow. This means that all the societal qualities that need to be healed will never go away. It’s time for this to change. Before I go on more expletive-filled rants about how to do this, let’s begin by defining what personal awakening actually means.
When you awaken, you are awakening to the truth inside yourself. This means unpacking all the lies you had been telling yourself about what it means to live a good life, as well as feeling all the repressed emotions that you couldn’t feel for so long. In essence, you are taking a journey away from self-deception into complete integrity with what is.
The reason why this process is so difficult is that all the lies we told ourselves were created to protect us from what we didn’t want to remember or feel about our past. So, uncovering the truth entails opening up a pandora’s box of repressed trauma and detrimental ways of thinking.
To combat the difficulty of waking up and offer an alternative to numbing out, this article is my effort to lay out the best strategy to handle awakening and come out fresh on the other side.
AWARENESS
When you wake up in the middle of the night, you only know you are awake because you gain awareness. In other words, you are no longer unconscious. That same line of logic can get applied to gaining awareness during the awakening period. This can look like becoming aware of a past trauma that has been unconsciously affecting your life without your knowledge. What was once rammed into the deep crevices of the unconscious has now come to light through awareness. In terms of how to find this awareness, sometimes things magically pop up into our minds without much effort. I have had sudden awareness of past traumas, but I have also located other ones with extensive research and effort. In terms of gaining sudden awareness over woundings in our system, there is a part I believe is divine. Some intelligence inside of us, whether it be our unconscious mind or our soul, gives us the material only when we are ready to see it. Funnily enough, this usually happens right before I attract something into my life that the wounding would have damaged had it remained unconscious. In terms of how we can utilize this truth, don’t repress or ignore it once it arrives at the forefront of your awareness, because the universe and our unconscious minds have a brutal way of beating us down until we do something about it.
In addition to being divinely guided, our awareness is also able to see more clearly once we release what is stuck in our bodies. When we repress pain or trauma, we falsely believe that it vanishes into the cosmos or some closet in the back of our minds, but it actually gets stored in the body. Thus, in order to access what was buried away, we have to go into our bodies and retrieve the truth. The best two ways this can be done is through somatic experiencing and consistent bodywork. Somatic experiencing is the art of getting in touch with the body. Through this practice, you learn to recognize when certain parts of your body are contracted and what is going on to make it that way. In other words, it is the art of communicating with your body, and the better one gets at this practice, the more they can become aware of what pain they have been repressing. In terms of bodywork, when our physical vessel has various points of severe tightness, especially in our backs and legs, it can impair our ability to communicate clearly with our bodies. It’s as if there’s a sudden log in a stream that is blocking the flow of water. When our body is flexible and relaxed, it is in the best position to communicate what needs to be placed in our awareness.
Now, and this is where things get more difficult, although the intelligence inside of you will make it known when you need to hear something, sometimes we can be too deaf to fucking listen. This is why I recommend people to be investigating themselves in addition to allowing information to come, because a lot of the time, our ignorance and pride will lead us to miss things it would benefit us to see. So, how do we investigate our unconscious wounding and bring it to our awareness? We need to combine the wisdom of our body with the cutting-edge perspicacity of our conscious mind. For how this plays out, you will need to immediately catch a trigger when it arises in your body. If you can, tune out all external distractions in that moment and isolate the uncomfortable sensation itself. Now, ask yourself two important questions: at what point in my life did I feel this sensation in its most intense form? And when did I think the exact way I’m thinking in order to protect myself from pain? Finding the answer to both questions, which will usually be the origin of the trauma itself, will spark the awareness in your mind and begin the process of awakening to that wound. Again, since awakening is becoming aware of what is true, the exact truth of why you feel the way you feel is the moment in history when that feeling was created. Awakening to that exact truth is what begins the process of healing.
Although this experience can be brutally intense, you were chosen to wake up for two reasons. One, that a higher intelligence believes you are ready to be awakened AND that intelligence needs you to be awakened for a higher purpose. Those who heal themselves become healers; therefore, what you are learning in your awakening process has the potential to save countless lives. Allow yourself to be the conduit of this transcendental love that is at the precipice of your unfortunate, yet fleeting suffering in the present moment.
To make the awakening process more bearable, both reach out to people who truly understand what it is you’re going through and surround yourself with people who love you for exactly where you’re at. Do NOT seek help from people who will gaslight you, call you crazy, and try to mold you into someone they think fits a societal mold of sanity, which is actually insanity.
After gaining awareness is where the real work begins, so get ready…
INTEGRATION
Although it is a big step, simply becoming aware of a negative pattern of behavior or wounding is not enough to change the behavior or heal the wound. In fact, most people get the download of the awareness, feel like they have done all the work needed to heal, and call it a day. The evidence of this statement is reflected by the mass popularity of psychedelics in the healing world, where a hallucinogenic trip will make you aware of what you have been hiding in yourself for so long. People will take said psychedelic, have a hit of awareness, and quickly move on to the next psychedelic experience to uncover more. However, the real work lies in integrating that knowledge over time in order to truly heal from it. Awareness creates the blueprint for us to walk through in our daily lives, but integration is the act of walking through that fire to the destination of healing that wound. So, how can we go about integrating our awareness?
There’s a big difference between being intellectually aware of something and being somatically aware of it. I believe that integration is completed when the piece of awareness is fully downloaded into the body. For example, consider a time where you were breaking a bad habit, such as stopping drinking. At first, you stopped because you intellectually realized alcohol was numbing you from feeling a certain wound and also because it was detrimentally affecting your life. Nevertheless, in the initial stages, your body could not give a single fuck about that realization and would pull you towards the alcohol as much as possible. At this point in time, the mind is opposed to alcohol but the body wants it by the bucket. In my experience with alcoholism, I only felt healed from the addiction once my body understood how bad alcohol was for me and began to feel repulsed by the sight of it. In other words, my body downloaded the code that began in my mind, which led to my whole being existing in accordance with the awareness of “alcohol is ruining my life and I want no part in it.” In terms of how we get to this place, three key steps exist: remind yourself of the awareness frequently, feel the repressed sensations in the body that are causing the wound, and lose the shame.
Since we have over 6,000 thoughts a day, it’s pretty easy to forget about the one we need to focus on the most for the time being. Due to this annoying reality, write out the piece of awareness you need to integrate on a piece of paper in big letters and put it at your desk. Also, writing it on a Post-it note and placing it on your bathroom mirror works well. Since our minds have been evolved to keep us in our comfort zones, they have the ability to make us forget about the awareness that will take us into an uncomfortable stage of growth, hence why we need to keep reminding ourselves of the truth. During the awakening period, people tend to get tons of pieces of awareness flooding into their minds at once, which is why it can be so overwhelming. Additionally, it makes it very challenging to focus on just one component and integrate it properly. The best strategy for this is to write out the other pieces of awareness into a journal to revisit at a later point. Why I’m emphasizing to revisit them later rather than now is because you cannot download more than one code into your body at a time. If you try to download 10 at a time, similar to downloading 10 movies onto your iPad before a flight, you will freeze and all the downloads will cancel. To summarize, frequently remind yourself of the piece of awareness and only focus on that point of consciousness until it has downloaded into your body.
When we suddenly catch a bad habit in ourselves, an avoidance mechanism, or a negative pattern of behavior based on a wound, we need to understand that universally beneath all of them is pain repressed in the body. And the only way to heal ourselves from them is to release the pain stuck in the body that is causing the disruptions. For example, let’s say you realize that you push away romantic interests the moment that they exhibit healthy displays of affection. Behind that piece of awareness is a mountain of emotional pain that the behavior is helping you avoid. You must let your body know, with love, that it is safe to feel those feelings and process them. Once the sensations have left the body with enough repetition, you can now move on to living a life outside of the wounding, where you can accept healthy love. Unfortunately, this is the most difficult part of the integration period, yet it is the most necessary, because outside of that pain is an abundance of beauty and a better life.
Lastly, don’t beat yourself up for your past ways of being. You cannot heal something that is still loaded with the frequency of shame. Whatever is stuck in shame from your past will keep revisiting your mind until you can coat it with love and forgiveness. In fact, those past “mistakes” you made are now invitations to connect deeper with yourself and learn how to heal. I can promise you that the gift of that is much larger than the cost of the mistake.
INITIATION
A part of the process I mentioned in the last section is feeling the repressed pain in the body that exists behind the problematic part of ourselves we have been unconscious to. However, it’s pretty difficult to just bring up all that pain in the moment and clear it quickly. The way that this pain actually releases is through gradual triggers over time, if handled properly. You will be initiated by the external world to feel the trigger over and over again. The correct manner to handle the triggers is to remove the external causation of the sensation and breathe into the wound itself. It’s as if you cut your finger chopping onions: would yelling at the knife and the onion make any difference? Or would it be best to tend to the cut with love and care immediately? The same goes for your internal wounds. Momentarily blind yourself to the external force and go within as fast as possible.
What makes this process frustratingly difficult is that the past patterns of thinking you once used to distract yourself from the trauma will flood back into your mind, which most of the time are super negative and demanding, as the darker the thoughts are, the more distracting they become. While the trigger is still intense, don’t fight the thoughts, as you will lose that battle every time. Let them float while you focus on the sensation. Once the sensation has dwindled down to a tolerable level, start flooding your mind with beautiful thoughts, such as “You got this” or “I’m so proud of the way you handled that.” Pay close attention to how much better you feel about yourself after handling a trigger in that manner, versus going back to past patterns of numbing, such as doom scrolling or lashing out at other people.
What helps me the most during the initiation phase is innerstanding that this process is the only way out. I can only clear myself of this wounding that has been negatively affecting my life by gradually feeling its triggers with love over time. Furthermore, I can only rewire my thinking patterns by clearing the stuck energy causing them and replacing the damaging thoughts with better ones.
Unfortunately, the work is not done here.
BOSS STAGE
In my experience, when I am at the tail end of the stages of awakening for a new point of awareness, my ego will throw a temper tantrum so intense that it will test all the Jedi skills I have developed over time. For instance, once I became aware of a go-to protective mechanism in me that was distracting me from my core wounding, my ego would send suicidal thoughts in my direction. That sounds like a pretty fucking sadistic move, but a suicidal thought is the most distracting one someone could have. The ego is so incessant on not letting you feel intense pain that it will send the most distracting thoughts possible to not let you feel it. Additionally, overcoming intense protective mechanisms entails having an ego death, as you have to kill off a fundamental side of yourself that you have developed over time. So, if a side of you is dying, then it makes sense for your identity structures to perceive it as death, hence why the suicidal thoughts will come back.
There are two reasons I call this level of the process the “boss stage”. One, is that if you beat this level and don’t go back to your old patterns, which you will be immensely tempted to do, you will have fully integrated the awareness and leveled up as a human being. Similar to Mario, once you beat the boss stage you enter a whole new world of exploration, but if you lose, then you are back to level 1. And two, all the skills you have developed in the stages of awakening—specifically the ability to tend to a feeling without having your internal dialogue and external projections pull you away—will be tested to the highest level during this final stage. The “boss stage” serves as a test of your internal mastery. Although it’s a huge pain in the ass, passing this stage will give you the undisputed title of a spiritual gangster.
