Awake at Every Level

Let’s explore what a nuanced and all-inclusive vision for true well-being and sanity can look like. This essay is for those who no longer wish to settle for partial views on healing, growth, and awakening - and for partial lives!


Why Healing and Shadow Work

Shadow work is so much more than facing our “dark” side or “negative” qualities. Exploring our shadow grounds us in our deepest humanity.

We can talk endlessly about unconditional love and other such fantasies without maturing at all as human beings.

Quality shadow work helps us own our projections by getting us directly in touch with our emotions and pain.

We don’t get rid of our so-called “negative” qualities but explore them so deeply that they lose their grip on us. We digest and emerge from the pain that animates the behaviours of ours that don’t align with our sense of inner integrity.

Being in touch with the high and the low, with the dark and the light, with the dying and the undying allows us to cut through our us-versus-them viewpoints and either-or attitudes.

We move from my pain to our pain to pain in our exploration of what it means to be human as we open to a kind of Love that is vaster than pain can ever be.

This is how we restore the dignity of being alive! This is how we shift from suffering to freedom! This is how we claim our true home at the heart of humanity.


Awakening at the Personal Level: This is our most fundamental level of being. Waking up at this level is to recognize our uniqueness and healthy autonomy, instead of unquestioningly following our cultural and gender conditioning.

Who am I really? What do I really want? Am I able to honour my true desires in life? If not, why not? Am I slave to my fears, self-doubt, and feelings of unworthiness?

Am I aware of my shadow? The shadow is everything you had to disconnected from for reasons of survival at a young age. It often includes repressed emotions as well as capacities of our humanity we don’t feel connected with. A big part of our shadow consists of the wounded child in us who carries both our early wounding and our conditioning (which was an automatic reaction to that wounding).

The more you explore your early wounding as well as your personal shadow, the more you can get in touch with any intergenerational wounding/ trauma you might be carrying. Turning these wounds into connected and joyful living is the essence of transformation.

How would it feel to explore my pain and shadow with a guide?

Dangers: Hyper-focusing on the personal can cause us to get lost in the dramatics of “me and my life.” It can also cause us to blame ourselves as well as to become exaggeratedly independent so that we don’t get hurt (again).


Awakening at the Relational Level: How do I show up in my relationships? Can I speak up and express my true desires with my family members/ friends/ romantic partner?

Can I receive feedback and healthy confrontation? What happens in me when I get defensive? Can I share that with my partner? What prevents me from being more respectful and loving in my relationships?

Am I aware of the relational shadow that I am co-creating with my partner? Just like we have our personal shadow, relationships have shadows too. What are we together not seeing about our relationship and Life in general? How do we contribute to each other’s suffering by enabling unhealthy patterns?

Establishing true safety and trust is essential for any relationship. How would it feel like to get into some quality couples work and receive the guidance of a professional?

Dangers: Hyper-focusing at the relational level can cause us to blame others for our suffering instead of taking responsibility for how we feel. It can also cause us to feel desperate (and to become controlling) such as when we demand our partner to listen to us, to support us, etc.


Awakening at the Social Level: Am I aware of the social and collective contexts within which my life is unfolding? What are the current challenges of the city/ country I live in? What are we going through these days as humanity as a whole?

Can I watch the news with at least some compassion in my heart for the suffering of so many? Can I stay in touch with our collective pain without getting too overwhelmed by it?

Am I aware of the dysfunctions of the social systems that I’m a part of? Is there anything I can do to remedy these dysfunctions?

Dangers: Social groups and movements often have great magnetisms and also big shadows. Make sure your healthy autonomy (and common sense!) is not being compromised. Blaming entire groups of people for our suffering is very different than challenging their unhealthy/ hurtful/ unfair behaviours.

Let’s dig even deeper.

Awakening at the Mental Level: Am I aware of the magical thinking tendencies of the child in me? Can I differentiate between pre-rational (blind beliefs and assumptions) and trans-rational (insight, intuition) capacities of my being?

Believing that just because I think “positively,” good things will happen is magical thinking. We are simply not that powerful!

On the other hand, our thoughts influence our quality of life a lot more than we can imagine. Being identified with our thinking to the point of not being aware of our thoughts is to live in a nightmare within the suffocating prisons of our own minds.

When we are awake at the level of the mind, we feel spacious and see thoughts and images for what they are: Mere representations and abstractions. When this is seen, thoughts no longer feel sticky and we don’t fixate at the mental level. Clarity and stillness of mind are the gifts of this level of our being.

Dangers: A clear and free mind can still be a place of hiding and fixation for us, especially if we’re not in touch with how we feel.


Awakening at the Emotional Level: Emotions constitute our feeling core which is also the hub of our relational level. Waking up at the emotional level requires that we get in touch with all our emotions and work through our resistance to feeling them deeply.

As we do this, we energetically expand and deepen - we feel more grounded in our being and more comfortable in our own skin. Here, you might encounter much numbness and reactivity, much pain and frozenness, but it is essential that you continue working your way through emotional pain. Thaw until raw.

Fear, shame, guilt, sadness, grief, anger, rage, hatred, envy, jealousy, self-doubt, etc. - these emotions are just as human and natural as our hands and lips are. The more we explore these difficult emotions, the more deeply we get to experience our true joy and happiness, our innocence and beauty, as well as our healthy power and natural dignity.

Dangers: Fixating at the emotional level causes us to get lost in our emotions. When we feel thus lost, it is very easy to lose perspective and dramatize (and multiply!) the pain we are in.


Awakening at the Spiritual Level: Who and what are you before you even knew your name? Try to answer this question without referring to any ideas, thoughts, memories, and images. The best answer your mind can come up with for this is: “I don’t know.” Stay there.

What is the most irreducible truth of my being? What is the very fabric of Life? What is God? As you inquire into these potent questions, see if you can keep your mind out of it. Sense into this.

Spiritually speaking, what you can be aware of you cannot be. You are aware of your thoughts, emotions, etc. so you cannot ultimately be those.

What you are is also what everything is and it is already whole.

Do you have a spiritual practice? What do you take to be the most sacred in Life? What matters to you the most? How would it be to align your whole life with that?

Dangers: Fixating at the level of Spirit can cause you to neglect other levels. The ultimate freedom becomes the ultimate addiction very easily if we hide from Life using our spirituality.

Spiritual communities and traditions tend to have big shadows. Make sure you maintain your healthy autonomy and become the most mature student/ follower that you can be and keep your eyes open.


Awakening at the Physical, Sexual, and Financial Levels: I find that it is worth mentioning these levels of our lives too considering how fundamental they are to our practical, day-to-day lives.

Physical: Truly honouring and taking care of ourselves physically includes much more than regular exercise and healthy eating habits. The body is not merely a “container” for who and what we truly are!

We are not “in” a body. What we truly are is expressing itself directly as a body. The body longs to be known deeply and to be honoured fully.

Sexual: At the sexual level, you need to be very honest with yourself about what you expect sex to do for you. A lot of people expect sex to make them feel better or more secure, to make them feel wanted. These are needs to be fulfilled at the emotional level!

Confusing and trying to collapse levels always backfires. Each level has its own domain. If you want to feel more loved and wanted by your partner or safer in your relationship, then explore these issues at the personal, emotional, and relational levels instead of expecting sex (which is part of the physical-biological level) to fulfill these emotional needs.

The most natural and most fulfilling expression of our sexuality spontaneously flows out of us when we expect nothing from sex and instead come to it already loosened and connected, already grounded and at peace.

Financial: Money and asking for it, earning, saving, and spending it - these tend to be big challenges for a lot of people. Some of this has to do with feelings of guilt and unworthiness.

We also tend to have big fears and worries around not having enough money. These fears often originate from survival anxiety as well as residual intergenerational traumas from times of war and famine. Keep exploring every level of your being and keep clarifying your relationship with money.



Awakened Living: Honouring Life Fully

Being in touch with Life at every level of our being is to honour and embody everything that we are. Life can be extremely challenging at times no doubt, but the deeper we dive, the more connected and sturdy we feel and the less we mind surface turbulence.

It is entirely possible to be at peace within even when we engage with Life from a place of tremendous passion and genuine concern for the well-being of ourselves and others!

To this capacity of ours, I bow.


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