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.
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’ 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 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.