Wake Up Now (24 page)

You seem to be suggest that psychotherapy
can be helpful in some cases to assist in the
process of deeper embodiment. What
should I look for in a therapist?

Once you’ve awakened to who you really are, you may understandably be suspicious of conventional psychotherapy because it can tend to reinforce the drama of the illusory separate self. At the same time, as long as you continue to be “hijacked” by old reactive patterns, certain forms of therapy may prove helpful in healing the split. For short-term trauma work, you might do well with a skilled, empathic therapist in your area who’s experienced in the practice of somatic experiencing or EMDR. For ongoing support in exploring the core stories and stuck places that have become especially apparent in the aftermath of awakening, I recommend someone in the emerging field of nondual psychotherapy. These practitioners have studied the nondual teachings, experienced some level of awakening themselves, and now incorporate
their realization in their work with others. Instead of seeing you as damaged and in need of repair, therapists with a nondual perspective see beyond the personality to your inherent perfection and support you in living from the truth of who you are; at the same time, they help you to recognize and explore the stories, beliefs, and emotional patterns that cause you suffering. For more information on the growing influence of nondual wisdom on psychotherapy, consult the anthology
The Sacred Mirror
(cited in the bibliography at the end of this book). (For information on the nondual therapy and spiritual counseling I offer by phone, visit my website at
stephanbodian.org
.)

Wake-Up Call

Embracing Your Demons

Set aside fifteen to twenty minutes for this exploration. Begin by sitting quietly with your eyes closed for a few minutes. Rest your awareness on the experience of sitting, and allow your body to relax.

Now connect with the limitless peace, spaciousness, and love of your essential nature, your true self. If you find this difficult, connect with the place in your heart where you feel unconditional love. Allow this feeling of peace, spaciousness, and love to expand infinitely in every direction.

Next, imagine that your small self, the little me who struggles and suffers, is in front of you. Alternatively, you may want to focus on a particularly troubled or conflicted part of yourself, a part that keeps
demanding your attention by repeatedly generating fear, anger, grief, or other constrictive emotions. Let yourself visualize and empathize with this little me.

Imagine yourself breathing in the suffering of your small self and breathing out peace, love, joy, and forgiveness. Allow this love and joy to fill the small self and heal its suffering. Continue to breathe in the suffering and breathe out the love and joy until you’ve absorbed the suffering of the small self back into the vastness of your true self. The apparent gap has dissolved, and peace, love, and joy are all-pervasive.

Even though this exercise may seem dualistic or contrived, it can have a powerful healing effect on the parts of you that may not feel so spiritually awakened or attuned. You’re embodying the truth you know yourself to be and healing the internal split between conscious and unconscious, awake and asleep. Embodiment is not complete until every part has been embraced and included.

All you have to do is find out your source and take up your headquarters there.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

When you act from the recognition that everyone and everything without exception is the divine expression, consciousness in manifestation, spirit incarnate, you’re living the awakened life. Wherever you look, you see nothing but your very own Self. You’re both the limitless openness in which everything arises and at the same time every part and particle of what is. All sense of separation has dissolved, and there’s just this single living, breathing reality.

Although this experience of no-separation is often called “oneness,” it doesn’t mean that you’ve lost the everyday sense of being an individual person and merged into some undifferentiated mass in which all distinctions have disappeared, as many people mistakenly believe. Quite the contrary, everyone and everything is crystal clear in its radiant uniqueness, yet you simultaneously recognize that this uniqueness and diversity is just the creative play and
expression of the Self, which is the single source and essence of all.

When you see everything as the divine expression, including what you once took to belong to you—your body, your thoughts, your feelings—you move with the flow of life instead of struggling against the current. Even saying “you move” is extra because there’s no separate you to do the moving or deciding, just the flow of life itself that moves through you, as it moves through the rock, the bird, the river, the tree.

In practical terms, you’re no longer arguing or bargaining with life in an attempt to get it to be different from the way it is, because you know it can’t be otherwise. “Not my will, but Thy will be done” is the mantra of the awakened life. Indeed, your will is no longer different from God’s because you’ve completely surrendered to what is just the way it is. Even words like
surrendered
make no sense—there’s simply no separation.

Needless to say, the awakened life is marked by ease, peace, joy, equanimity, and above all, love. Since everything is your very own Self, your radiant consciousness, your innate Buddha nature, you’re thoroughly intimate and in love with everyone and everything you encounter. In the limitless emptiness once inhabited by a self-image, the richness and indescribable beauty of reality blossoms, and you’re endlessly open, fascinated, moved, and delighted with how this reality is expressing itself right now. To put it another way, consciousness is delighting in itself in all its forms
through this particular body and mind. Relationships take on an extraordinary immediacy when you know that every person you meet is merely you in a different disguise. Hope and fear drop away as you realize that the illusory separate self has no control anyway, and everything is held in God’s tender embrace.

Not that life always works out the way the mind may want it to, now that you know who you are. This isn’t the New Age or the “best of all possible worlds” of Voltaire’s
Candide
. No, life unfolds exactly the way it does, in its own mysterious, at times intense and incomprehensible, yet strangely balanced and meaningful way, and you find yourself wanting it to be exactly the way it is. Ups and downs, successes and failures, health and illness—the river flows endlessly on, constantly changing, constantly in motion, while the unmoved mover, the source of all, is ever undisturbed and untouched by what occurs.

At the same time, you may continue to live a very ordinary life, with the same tastes, preferences, and personality quirks as before. The difference is that you no longer mistakenly identify with the personality, but instead recognize it as just a convenient vehicle or role through which the Self expresses itself in the world of manifestation. (The root of the word
personality
literally means to “sound through” and refers to the masks worn by the chorus in Greek tragedy.) Now that you recognize the inherently empty nature of reality, you no longer take your “personal” life quite so seriously. You both care and don’t care, you’re in the world but not of
it, and you greet every situation with a certain lightness and bemusement because you know it’s just the mysterious play of the Divine.

The more fully and deeply you embody the truth of who you are, the more consistently you live the awakened life from moment to moment. In this sense, complete embodiment is identical with the stabilization of the awakened experience. You see nothing but God or Buddha everywhere you look, 24-7, and your actions reflect this nondual vision. Some sages call this fully stabilized and unbroken experience of no-self/no-other “liberation” to distinguish it from mere “awakening.” Once you’re liberated, you can’t possibly treat others in insensitive, abusive, or self-serving ways, as some purportedly enlightened teachers do, because you can’t help but see them as your very own Self.

Just because you’ve awakened doesn’t mean you’re always living the awakened life, however. Most people live the awakened life episodically, for hours, days, perhaps weeks at a time before they once again become enthralled by the illusion of a separate self. This reidentification may be ever so subtle and go unnoticed unless there’s a deep commitment to the transformative fire of truth, but it has enormous ramifications. In particular, once you take yourself for a separate someone again, you start seeing the world from a self-centered perspective and falling under the trance of the old reactive patterns and core stories that used to run your life. For the awakened life to continue to live itself through you, you need to be dedicated to allowing the embodiment process (described in the previous two chapters) and
to actualizing the truth you know yourself to be in every situation.

Breathe and Reflect

Close your eyes and imagine yourself living the awakened life. How does it feel to go about your day seeing everyone and everything you meet as your very own Self? How do you act when you’re merged with the flow of life instead of resisting it? Spend a few minutes allowing this visualization to unfold. How does it affect your experience of life when you open your eyes again?

The term
awakened life
tends to conjure images of cloistered monks, wandering yogis, and spiritual teachers bestowing the truth on their devoted disciples. But those who embody the peace and joy of the awakened heart may just as readily be ordinary folks you meet on the street—the garbage collector, the housecleaner, the bank teller, the healer. That is, folks like you and me. Not everyone who discovers and lives from the light of his or her true self feels moved to teach or retreat from the world. Some just wake up spontaneously and go on living the same life as before—doing their job, taking care of their family, watching TV, going to the movies—with the significant difference that they no longer suffer or struggle with life and no longer experience themselves as separate from others.

Those who live the awakened life don’t generally draw attention to themselves with extravagant acts of compassion
or self-conscious words of wisdom. Instead, they tend to fade into the background because they’re so ordinary, so down-to-earth, so unobtrusive, so empty of themselves. If they do teach, they have no attachment to the role and status of teacher. As a young Zen monk, I visited a nearby Buddhist center to catch a glimpse of the great Tibetan yogi Kalu Rinpoche and found a half-dozen monks sitting around a table eating lunch. From their behavior, the way they ate and talked and interacted, I couldn’t tell the rinpoche from the others until someone pointed him out. I was deeply impressed that this illustrious master didn’t exhibit the slightest trace of pride or pretension. This ordinariness, I realized, is the true mark of the awakened life.

If you peer beneath the apparent ordinariness, however, you’ll find that, regardless of personality or life situation, those who embody the awakened life have certain qualities in common. For example, they tend to exude a peaceful, imperturbable presence, and their eyes tend to radiate a sense of infinite spaciousness and compassion, which reveals that there’s no one there looking, just consciousness or spirit gazing at itself. In action, they tend to move smoothly and harmoniously through life without internal conflict or division, quietly joyful, unobtrusively kind and empathetic, yet subtly disengaged and free of concern. Of course, these qualities can express themselves through an infinite spectrum of bodies, voices, and personalities. Some may be animated and energetic, others more quiet and introspective.

Even enlightened teachers and sages come in a wide variety of shapes and dispositions. The great Indian sage
Ramana Maharshi spent most of his days and nights sitting or lying in placid repose wearing only a loincloth, teaching largely through silent gazing or brief answers to his devotees, and taking daily walks up the holy mountain on which his ashram was situated. His eyes were the embodiment of the peace and love of the Self. By contrast, the renowned Advaita teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj ran a small cigarette shop by day and gave talks and answered questions from the seekers who gathered in his little apartment in Bombay at night. As he spoke, his eyes blazed with intensity, his hands gesticulated wildly, and his voice occasionally grew loud in his passion for truth.

My Advaita teacher, Jean Klein, was a cultured European gentleman who wore silk shirts and cravats and enjoyed good food, great art, and classical music. His public dialogues were generally punctuated by long silences between the words, and his teachings, delivered in a soft but deeply resonant voice, were articulate, powerful, and to the point. By contrast, my friend and teacher Adyashanti is a California native who used to race bicycles and climb rocks and now enjoys a good poker game and motorcycle rides in the country. His satsangs have a more casual, contemporary feel and are punctuated as often by laughter as by silence. Yet the truth they convey is identical to the truth conveyed by his predecessors.

In the end, the only conclusion we can make about the awakened life is that it assumes the form and personality of the person who lives it. You can’t imitate it or will it to happen; you can only wake up, live the truth of your
awakening, and notice how life lives through you. The awakened life is the ultimate fruition and expression of the process that begins with your initial awakening. As I said at the start of this chapter, when you act from the recognition that everything without exception is the divine expression, consciousness in manifestation, spirit incarnate, you’re living the awakened life.

Wake-Up Call

Let It All Go

Set aside ten minutes for this exploration. Spend a few minutes sitting quietly and enjoying your breath. Now reflect on your experience of reading this book, and consider all the beliefs and concepts about spiritual awakening you may have accumulated along the way. Perhaps you have a more clearly developed and articulated picture of how the process of awakening unfolds. Or perhaps you’ve just collected a few assorted insights and ideas.