Every encounter that we have throughout our lives acts as a mirror back to our Self. In this way I can’t help but be grateful to all those I have met along this journey, this pathless path. As difficult as it sometimes is to admit, I especially have enormous gratitude to those encounters that have shaken and disturbed…
Post-Awakening Expectations and Staying in the 'Only Don't Know' Q: I can’t say that there have been any significant noticeable changes from Cosmic Consciousness to Unity Consciousness, is this common in your opinion? I guess it's hard not to be waiting for some unmistakable shift? Imogen: Yes, looking for certain experiences or markers post-awakening can get really tricky…
The arrogant one The fraudulent and untruthful one The one with complete lack of integrity The narcissistic and the deluded one The selfish and self-centered one The unjust and angry one The petulant and unreasonable one The unkind, uncompassionate and unloving one It is our job to make friends with all these aspects of our self and not…
While faith has a political dimension Party politics is deeply divisive The faithful of whatever stripe Must cleanse their hearts of such division Individually we must include the ‘other’ Warts and all If our hearts are filled with self-righteousness And moral certainty Of the kind that condemns the other That abandons the other As fallen And unworthy Of love…
To meet others we first have to be willing to meet ourselves. To meet ourselves doesn’t just mean to meet the bits we like or are proud of and ignoring those aspects that we wish weren’t there. To meet ourselves means to meet it all, embrace it all, learn to love and accept it all. How can we expect…
In all that I write and share I only ever want to invite you to explore, discover and ultimately accept the entirety of your experience. To standing in YOUR truth, YOUR self... not mine and not anyone else's. To encourage and support you to see more and more of the beauty of your expression, even when that expression isn't…
It's those moments where we are hardest on ourselves that actually call for the most kindness, for the most understanding, most forgiveness, the most self love. But sometimes that feels like an impossibility, the moment feels too heavy, too overwhelming to bring kindness into the equation. It feels like too much of a leap and too far to go.…
When you find a friend where there is no pretence, no mask, no holding back. A friend that you can laugh and cry and shout and be with no matter what flavour of you is shining through. A friend who can see you at your messiest but still see your beauty and your love. A friend who is a…
Fear is a call into the unknown beyond the known, and the mind hates nothing more than the unknown. The mind is the realm of the known, the content of life, but our essential ground of Self is beyond that, it's prior to the known content. It's not the object, it's the subject - the seer, or awareness of…
Q: Can you tell me how to get rid of attachment and aversion? It's not about eliminating (getting rid of) anything but seeing that it's all arising in you - consciousness. This is awakening. Experiential focus or identity is shifted from the foreground (phenomena) to the background (consciousness). When this is recognised to be true in your experience the…
Don't be tempted to listen to another's heart as each heart has its own way, its own movement that when allowed to fully shine sings its own song. Your song is unique and makes you YOU. No wrong notes, no right notes... just YOUR notes. More often than not all it takes is simply getting out of your own…
If there is to be a global awakening then awakening itself needs to be democratised. Meaning everyone needs to recognise that FREEDOM IS FOR THEM, FREEDOM IS FOR ALL. Individuals of all shapes and sizes, in all walks of life are waking up, are discovering their true nature in an abiding way. And whether we have to reject the…
There's a tendency to avoid dealing with the subject of mental health in some spiritual traditions and teachings. To poo poo inner work and growth, to try to meditate away 'negative' emotions, reactions, thought patterns and conditioning. But spirituality and spiritual awakening is not a panacea, it is many things and in some ways a lot of the "problems"…
Letting go of a specific image of safety and security is so tricky. But life calls this of us again and again when we get too comfortable putting our stability and sense of security into objects and ideas that in their fundamental nature can't provide that for us except temporarily. Can you find your home, your safety, your…
One of the biggest helps for me to move beyond my conditioned responses and traumas and to heal and integrate them has been learning how to cope with strong and intense emotions - which for the record I was pretty fantastic at avoiding for most of my life! I would say that when all the strategies for avoiding no…
I have a secret to tell... I sound like I know what I'm talking about but in truth I live entirely in the unknown No stakes to place No walls or ceilings or floors to hang on to life is a free-fall of continuous newness It's a leap of faith and trust and it's the ever present continuation of…
Life is not some beast to be tamed, a project to be mastered, or your b$*%h to be controlled. Life is a gift. The gift of Grace. And with this recognition I bow to the feet of life in gratitude. Grace courses through us in everything we touch, in everything we experience. There is nothing that isn’t Grace. “It’s…
Do not shrink into smallness Let yourself roar and feel fully into your inherent power. Your power is found in the courage to be you, to fully present ALL of you. To cease with the judgements and accept all of your wholly divine messy humanness as your own. To not second guess and hide yourself for fear of shame…
In relationships we have to trust and we have to communicate. It's a constant leap of faith to say the things that we think they won't want to hear and we won't want to hear the answer to, to constantly face the fear of rejection and hurt. But if you do take that leap of faith and trust, then…
When we show ourselves to others, fully open and vulnerable with our hidden tender aspects, without self censoring and hiding, we step into the conversation, into the relationship in a new way. Through this we also invite others to free themselves of their constraints and speak their tender truth too. It's a true gift, the gift of openness and…
When we experience a strong emotion or felt response to life there is a call to be present, a call to sink into it. It's not the moment to run away and avoid. It's not the moment to reject and try with all your might to change the course of life. Life is giving you a gift, an opening,…
It’s true that we have be willing to stand behind our truth as we see it, to defend, to justify, to explain. But also more importantly we need to learn to change our minds, to let go of our blind loyalties to people, ideas, views, and positions as we go along, and keep doing it. We need to be…
There's grief in awakening. Grief at the loss of autonomy, grief at the loss of purpose and meaning. Grief at the loss of knowing and certainty, however deluded they were. There's grief over losing one's power, and one's familiar identity. There's so much loss in awakening. When it dawns that there's nothing we can keep, nothing can be retained…
We’ve lost the focus of a spiritual centre in communities and culture today. Don’t get me wrong I am not advocating for religion in its traditional sense, but what I am noting is that life used to have a balance of both the practical or material and spiritual. At the heart of our communities used to sit a church…
Many of us have experienced trauma and hurt from abusive, harmful or dysfunctional relationships of all descriptions and types in our lives. I bow at your courage to try and move beyond it and heal. Equally if you’re not quite there in your journey that’s okay, I honor that too. I feel conversations about this topic are so vital…
Sometimes I think this is a twisted culture where it’s so hard to be who and what we are, express ourselves naturally with our community. Instead we’re trained to take our essence and modify it and package it so we can sell it to each other. It’s not so easy to share our gifts and talents freely in natural…
I find it funny that the further into this journey of life I get into the less and less 'spiritual' I become. Granted, I never self-identified as particularly spiritual, but at least outwardly I certainly was a card-carrying member of the 'spiritual seekers brigade'. I was brought up surrounded by spiritual types, I meditated from aged 6, I want…
I was asked the other day how I deal with being around others, particularly when there's a level of pretending or not speaking your truth that seems to be required of you. --- I too know all too well this feeling of suffocation in the company of others. The subtle unsaid permissions of what you can say, which topics…
There’s so much focus on enlightenment and awakening in the abstract. In the projected ideas and ideals of what people, seekers, see in their idolisation of gurus, teachers and enlightened sages. In the goals and focus of wanting never-ending bliss and happiness, and superhuman abilities and powers because they think that’s what it’s all about. The person becoming bigger…
One field of consciousness appearing as everything. As a seeker I was always sensitive to spiritual 'presence'. I noticed it in groups of TM meditators, watching Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on videos, yagyas, and the darshan of sages I met, even in certain places such as Arunachala. The energy was there, call it what you will; Shakti, presence, transmission. Back…
The only way forward and through this life is to embrace our humanity, not run from it. It's no good hiding in "nothing is effecting me" and "I am beyond it all." While true on an absolute level, it doesn't account for the lived, embodied experience of being human. To be beyond it all is to accept it all.…
What are we but a self-knowing energetic field of consciousness? And what is nature of energy if not a quality(s) of consciousness? Self-examining our nature, that is, exploring consciousness with consciousness naturally results in the discovery of our formless nature. When we settle in to the direct observation of our essential subjectivity we find that we don't find any…
Our trouble starts when we privilege thinking over direct experience. When this becomes an ingrained habit of relating to the world and ourselves even the suggestion to drop out of the mind and into the non-conceptual being can be violently resisted. But for the sake of our peace and freedom we must learn to let go. Attachment to views,…
In my last post I said that that when it came down to it most people didn’t actually want to wake up. Someone asked for my thoughts on why that might be the case. This was my reply... In terms of why most people don't really want awakening/liberation, I'd say that this freedom requires (and is) a willingness to…
There is a mask that we've all experienced. Many even have several masks, each for a different set of circumstances, a different set of people. The mask that you wear for your boss is not the same mask that you wear for your grandmother, which is not the same mask you wear for your friends. All a partial view…
Sometimes it seems there’s a whole generation of people who are perpetually triggered and always tense. They live in a state of constant reactivity. They’ll often report the reasons are things like systemic injustice, racism, sexism, etc. And so their anger and agitation is justified. Maybe so. As a generation Millennials (and Gen-Z) are not unique in their exposure…
What if your true Self was something your mind rejected, found disgusting or worthless, what then? Would you spend your whole life rejecting what is at the core of your Being? Or would you give up the constant resistance and accept what the mind won't? It's exhausting to be in resistance to what is. What is it in you…
Awakened mind is the impersonal sentience and not the contents of awareness. Even the sense ‘I am’ is known by this awareness. But who can say how this thing works? Getting into a technical analysis of the structure of consciousness and the nature of awakening becomes an exercise of intellect, and therefore true enough on that level but not…
We deny our humanity. We hide in the ideals of 'The Absolute' and yet it's the absolute that contains all of humanity. It's the absolute (field of awareness) from which all of this springs. Does awareness have such distinctions? Does awareness *need* life to look a certain way. No! That is the small limiting notions of the human mind,…
In my travels it's become very clear to me that to talk about acceptance is to talk about love, and to talk about love is to talk about acceptance. They are one and the same. They are the key to peace and freedom. They are the key to the recognition of your own nature. They are the key to…
You have all the tools, all the things you need in life. You are not lacking in anyway. You are not broken, you just need to accept all that you are... accept even the seeming imperfections into the wholeness and you will see that your light was there all along... hidden under the rock of self doubt, strategies and…
What is the ground of your experience? Is it the world? Is it the body? Is it the thoughts? Is it the sensations? Or is it the simplest form of non-conceptual awareness, aware of all of *this*. Search for the gap in between the content. This is your clue. This is the breadcrumbs of awareness leading you back to…
Is nondual spirituality nihilistic? Desirelessness, powerlessness, emptiness. Sacrifice, surrender, formlessness. Are these more fundamental than, say: fullness, all-possibilities, bountifulness, unboundedness, bliss? It’s all well and good focusing on the qualities of mind required for the apprehension of silence. But this emptiness is full, this fullness is empty. All around me I see fullness, I see rich intelligence and abundance…
When the awakened view dawns it becomes apparent that everything we experience points to it, and always did. It’s the recognition that each moment is a Dharma Gate, the opportunity to realize the nature of what-is and it becomes fascinating and fun to see how the consideration of any given domain or field of knowledge offers an opening to…
Many of our words and concepts, we think we know what they mean, when often our understanding hangs short of the great depths of being that we miss. Our recognition stalls at the conceptual and clings there instead of plunging into the open experiential oneness that upholds and contains all. So words like ‘love’ can be like objects,…
How much of our time do we spend bracing ourselves against the possibility of someone else's reactivity? When we fear to break a rule or make a mistake, how often is that apprehension based on the anticipation of having to deal with someone's anger, sadness, or disappointment? Bumping into people's reactive emotions is unpleasant and depending on how much…
We are all figuring out life best we can, in our messy and imperfect, perfectly human way. Life includes in it the whole spectrum of experience and there's no guidebook or rule book, there's no one way to live life. A lot of the people I meet along the way are looking to others to give them answers. But…
"We are already enlightened" This statement seems overused in many spiritual circles and is in serious danger of creating concept fatigue. It's been placed up on the spirituality pedestal as something teachers, gurus and seekers alike say but for many it has become an abstract ideal to aim to understand but never truly a reality to reach. So what…
Spiritual awakening is a bit like the creative process, because when you engage in meditation or introspection or inquiry, if you're motivated by money or getting you want or anything like that it pollutes the process. It's more important to be open and to play and be curious, to be intuitive and fearless rather than be wondering what you're…
The ego constricts around a more-or-less fixed mode of being. So when the ego is transcended and the constrictions are released, then the manifest being reorients to a more natural, unconstrained mode. And we don’t have any real idea what that might look like. During the ego’s reign fundamental embodied modes of intelligence may well have been completely subsumed,…
In the age of the Internet the possibilities are endless. So how does this apply to Enlightenment and Self-Realization? What does it take to wake up? #BootstrappingEnlightenment – Take advantage of what you've got, don't focus on what you haven't. It's all here for you. Ask us questions in the comments down below... Transcription: Okay, so I have this…
The teachings of nonduality can sometimes seem to be somewhat abstract, or removed from one’s lived experience, or even rejecting of it. It may be that these teachings, being so uncompromising about the causes of suffering and its remedies, seem to disregard the human-ness of life in favour of a cold, relentless discrimination. But the truth is that the process…
The impulse to spiritual practice is the impulse to awaken so even if practice is wrong or poor or difficult or ineffectual it's never misguided, and in the worst cases it can be redirected or transformed to better express the core impulse. All the prayers and mantras and chants are well and good but the urge to practice goes…
I was sitting outside a café with friend some time ago, and we were talking about ‘consensus reality’ as he put it. He was wishing that he could be free of its influence. I sympathised with his POV but pointed out that we aren’t actually bound by it, and it’s enough to recognise one’s existence as prior to the…
In my life journey thus far I’ve had to transgress two* major spiritual paths/groups/movements that were both whole-life encompassing – Guru, lifestyle, friends and family, home, job, it felt like a lot could and would be lost. It’s was for sure a very difficult thing to navigate but I feel it’s important to share and talk about as I…
True humility comes when you run out of strategies and realise that you're powerless Surrender comes as a result of this It's something that happens not something 'you' do This is the difference between prescription and description in spiritual teachings The seeker hears prescription Because it can only understand what it hears in terms of itself It's personal It's…
The feeling of nothing to hold on to, of no solid ground, of no control and no stability, can bring terror to the forefront of our experience – particularly when we find ourselves in resistance to this free-fall. And yet when you realise that this free-fall actually brings with it the total freedom of no limits and no boundaries,…
This exploration of life requires great vulnerability, earnestness, openness, radical honest and deep inquiry. It's a truly destructive process, one that burns everything that you are not with such a fire that not even a whisper of the false is left. But what this can mean is that which we hold so dearly, so tightly, for so long doesn't…
Life is such and unbelievable gift, how often do you stop and smell the roses? Appreciate the little simple ordinary moments? Without reference to the past or thoughts to the future. We miss the beauty of the moment so easily. Ordinary life has become so throwaway, so undesirable. Instead marked with the next glamorous instagram shot, the next big…
What magic comes from Silence? All of it Can’t you see it all comes from Nothing? I’m a voice crying out from the wilderness “It doesn’t matter!” None of it matters Perhaps What matters Is that we suffer Or that suffering is Can be What do we do with that? What can we do? More questions Find the one who asks…
The process (of awakening) requires us to face the most profound fear of our own annihilation or destitution To face that fear and continue is the challenge of awakening In the end there’s nothing we can do We either come to the edge and let go or we don’t Rather, it will happen or it won’t There is an…
This is new It’s all new Memory serves up similar visions That give the impression That you’ve seen it before That you know this But it’s all fresh So stay awake You don’t know what’s coming The bleeding edge Face first into the ocean spray of existence The sharp breeze Wake up! The hum of Being Alive, alive This is no…
If you’re serious about self-discovery, if you’re serious about the truth, then you have to be willing to give up everything you think you know. You have to be willing to question and look at every assumption and become like a clean slate. Because untruth and suffering hides under the rocks of unexplored assumptions. Here the most important thing…
Nothing exists in isolation So many conditions that we take for granted For any single thing to occur The existence of a universe is required And everything that ever was Funny that So stay out of it You’re doing less than you imagine Nothing at all in fact What a beautiful day Of course the universe doesn’t exist That’s…
Drop it all Leave it all alone And if you’re still having trouble It means you’ve picked it up again Simple? Yes it is Do I need to elaborate? After that is there any more to say? Is that the final answer? The only instruction? Maybe Any more would be just to assuage doubts Like, “Yes, drop *everything*” “Even…
It’s often the case that nondual understanding in the dualistic mind is the product of ‘secondary mind’, the logical, analytical mind, and not a wisdom emanation from Pure Mind. True wisdom is born directly from Self-nature without reference to understanding. It’s the difference between knowledge born of Self-recognition, and the cogitations of the functional mind and it’s rationalistic outputs.…
This morning I came across a beautifully articulated post on Facebook by Unmani (one of many I might add). She recently unexpectedly lost her husband and has been sharing openly her journey/processing throughout this difficult time – it’s beautiful, raw and brave and I see that this is very much what she is being called to do, for the benefit of…
If we stop giving the mind attentional objects then it will tend to settle into its own non-conceptual, silent nature. It’s simply a case of remaining in an open and non-grasping posture. The mind wants to settle, remaining always in a state of engagement is exhausting. Openness and non-grasping are a relief. But there are a couple of ways…
I’ve been concerned with identity politics and PC culture lately. I don’t quite know why, maybe it’s that I’m seeing in the outside world, in groups, the same kind of dynamics of fear, control, and suppression that the ego uses on a personal level. I’ve been noticing that my attention has been liberated from the narrow introspective view that…
GETTING PERSONAL There's so much of my spiritual path/story that I haven't yet shared on this blog or social media. Not because I feel the need to hide it, I'm not particularly attached to privacy even, but because I'm still living it each and every moment. The implications not yet seen, the fullness of understanding not yet known. And…
10 years ago today Maharishi Mahesh Yogi died. I remember the day clearly, we were in the Dominican Republic on a holiday marking our 1st year wedding anniversary. I turned on the TV (probably the only time I did) to see it on the BBC news tick-a-tape completely out of the blue – “THE BEATLES GURU DIES”. At the…
Is there evidence for the existence of an outside/objective world separate and independent from the awareness in which it appears? We can see that the awareness itself is malleable to an (presumably) infinite degree. Or not. Are there limits to the plasticity of relative arising? Is there a higher and lower limit, a range of phenomenality? Is there a…
If we saw the world at different scales we’d have quite a different experience and conception of reality. If we saw it at the atomic scale there’d be a lot of empty space and atoms but no material objects as such. Looking beyond atoms we’d see vibrations of the underlying field. Layers.. People at levels of consciousness report similar…
To awaken you have to be ready. But there’s nothing you can do to make yourself ready, because you’re not doing anything, because the you you think you are doesn’t exist. So it’ll happen when it happens. Not a moment too soon, not a moment too late. So do or don’t do, it’s all as it should be. This…
What is Enlightenment, Moksha, Buddhahood, Liberation? It’s the obliteration of the Ten Fetters, the complete dissolution of the occluding mental densities that give rise to avidya. It’s the destruction of the ‘thicket of views’ that confuses and confounds the realization of Self and of life in the Natural State. It is ‘what remains’ when the cloud of unknowing passes.…
I have gone from living the (American) dream… good job, beautiful house, wonderful friends, two beloved cats, more stuff than we could ever want or need, plentiful money, gorgeous and loving husband – I wanted for nothing… and now I have nothing (except the husband of course 😜 I’ve still got him thankfully). We have no home – not even a…
Again and again life has recently been showing up with this question of what is compassion? What is love? Compassion can look like a lot of different things, but for the moment I wanted to talk about compassion for those around you that act in ways that you don’t understand, don’t like and don’t find their behaviour to be…
Beginner’s Mind is very helpful in Self-inquiry. What that means is you let go of all of your concepts, all of your learning, everything you think you know – just drop it for now. Put it in your pocket, tuck it away and come at the observation and inquiry with a fresh, open, empty mind. In this way you…
It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you have to do XY&Z in order to realise the Self…. as if it’s like a cake that you put all the exact ingredients in the bowl in the right order and put it in the oven and ping, you have yourself a perfect cake. Except it doesn’t…
What is This? Who am I? What am I? What kind of answers am I looking for? What could satisfy? Questions are beautiful, more illuminating than answers. Questions stop the mind. So if I told you “you are consciousness”, would that help? Would you be satisfied? Would your suffering diminish at all with that piece of information? Perhaps you…
The seemingly simple task of describing a path from ‘a’ to ‘be’ unravels the very notions that uphold the conditioned view. It’s impossible to find a starting point, there’s no beginning. It seems like a cliché but it’s true, any given point is arbitrary, no ‘event’ is original, always there is a preceding moment. So where could I begin…
We tend put value judgements on what we want any given moment to look like, and so when the present moment doesn’t look like how we want then we seek to change it; we seek for the ‘good’ to stay and the ‘bad’ to go. This futile seeking to change the here and now causes immense suffering because life…
Your life is not your responsibility, you’re not doing it, you’re not ‘living’ your life, if anything life is living you. It’s important to recognize this. The burden of activity is not yours. Doership is a concept that has been imposed on the uncaused nature of life. Even the notion of a cosmic, supreme doer is an imposition. We…
That we believe ourselves to be a person is completely taken for granted. We don’t even think to look into this, to question its veracity. We’ve been conditioned to stop short in our curiosity about our nature. Go all the way. Use your discrimination and intelligence to fathom what’s true. I can set you down the right track, many…
There’s an assumption that when I say “you are awareness/consciousness” that I’m talking of I-personal/ego/individual I/you. Firstly I want to clarify that when I speak of I/me/you in conjunction with awareness I’m talking of the non-personal ‘I’ that is consciousness. That is awareness. The you (big Self, I-I) that IS awareness-consciousness. It seems to be common that when someone realizes that…
Trust, rest, all is well. You are home, always. This is it, believe it or not. Hope is for fools. Running, chasing, holding, grasping, needing, wanting. This is it, be here now. Let the hope fall away, need be gone, cherish what is, here, this. Simple, silence, source. Time? Gone too. Space? Just this, no inner, no outer, no…
Have a practice. Take time out each and every day to sit in the cave of your interior and wait and watch. This is where the dragons are and this is where the gold is. It is the cave of the unknown and that is the place of fear. It takes courage to enter and to face whatever comes.…
Wow I feel like a lion has been unleashed. This brutal honesty in service of truth that cuts with the precision of a well known blade is quite a surprise to me. This sharp intellect that can spar and duel with words unknown to me, spilling out like nobodies business. There’s still a tendency that’s been around all my…
Why do we practice, why do we seek? Is it to attain or achieve some conceptual goal we call Enlightenment? Or is it to recognise that in every moment of our existence we are inescapably aware, we are here, we exist? In fact we are awareness itself, we only have to look right now to see the fact of…
The problem of human suffering is the problem of misapprehension. Our ideas about the nature of the world are at odds with the reality of it. The key mistake is that we take ourselves to be separate individuals existing in an objective world. We believe that our sense of I-ness originates in the physical body and in that body…
The recognition of our nature as non-conceptual awareness — spiritual awakening — is relatively simple. But the consequences of this recognition typically have challenging implications for our human-ness, conditioned as it is around the ego-belief. Awakening is rarely the end of the story. A reconstruction of the lived experience and outward expression in light of the newly acknowledged awareness-identity is inevitable, but it…
Life has become about living; living not in past regrets or future worries but life lived in this moment… None of the second guessing, the questioning, the “is the right thing?”, or shoulds and should nots. The age old – before awakening, chop-wood-carry-water and after awakening, chop-wood-carry-water is so so true it’s laughable. Being a seeker you imagine some different ‘state’…
My only aim is to help you recognise yourself as boundless, ever-present awareness right here and now, and to recognise your essential wholeness and completeness. Your true nature is easeful, lack-free Being; freedom and peace is who and what you are. Your awareness-nature is where you’re looking from, feeling from, sensing from. Look for yourself, identify yourSelf this very…
The image of relationships and enlightenment don’t normally go hand in hand. The stereotyped image of the ‘enlightened monk’, shunning the material householder life is something that’s been around in spiritual traditions for a long time. So out of this there comes the common misconception that you can’t be in a relationship and be successful on the ‘spiritual path’. But…
I’m pretty much an open book these days, but I’m not some kind of spiritual google that people can ask any amount of questions and I give them the answers. Someone on twitter recently asked me “…does that mean people have no individual purpose?” A perfectly normal and unassuming question as questions go, but all of these questions, do…
The utter humanness of existence cradles in it every possible emotion, sensation, feeling & thought. We can’t run from that, we can’t hide from that, we can’t avoid or resist that, and nor should we want to. It’s our human experiencing that reveals the ever-changing world of perception that we live in – our ‘world’ is constantly being born and…
This is not the bliss of happiness; the fleeting bliss of phenomenal experience, that shows up when nothing is rocking the boat, the bliss that’s dependent on the content of life being wonderful. It’s something deeper, something more fundamental, something ever-present. It’s like an immovable mountain; the very ground you walk on. It’s peaceful beyond the word peaceful. It’s the very fabric of you. I didn’t…
You are the awareness that’s witnessing the comings & goings of life. You have no qualities, no attributes other than you are aware – you’re not an object that can be described. There’s nothing that can show up that can disturb you – for you just ARE. Notice that you’re observing even the thought or feeling of an ‘I’ that wants to identify…
There’s nothing more than this…. and yet people spend their lives convinced that they’re missing something, not getting something, not where they’re supposed to be, not doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Pretty much focused on everything BUT This, what IS, the present-moment experience. There’s something in the mind that’s compelled to go with the seeking energy for…
When you experience an awakening – the recognition of the primordial nature of awareness, you’re centerless center; often what comes with it are things such as relief, spaciousness, invincibility, freedom, few thoughts and even bliss. It’s quite easy to then start identifying with those qualities as something that has to be present to indicate your new found ‘awakening’. This can lead you…
We take the fleeting objects of our perception to be solid & persistent – even eternal, and we build our identity based on these beliefs. This illusion can work for a while, but at some point when we find that the ‘solid’ ground we walk is not so solid after all, we tend to hold on for fear of…
Two years ago today I collided with the Self, setting in motion the falling away of life as I thought I knew it to be. I was smacked over the head with the realisation that who I took ’Imogen’ to be was false. There was in fact no identifiable ‘solid’ form of Imogen that could be found. It’s been quite a…
The obsessive need to understand enlightenment or anything for that matter, is the very thing that’s stopping you from experiencing this present moment in its fullness. When resting in the present moment it’s seen that there’s nothing missing and no needs are unmet; there’s no understanding that you need that could add or take away from what you essentially are.…
Anything other than the recognition that you are formless awareness is born of the mind. There’s nothing that can adequately capture the indescribable awareness that you are. To try and do so will always fall short somehow. But it doesn’t mean that these pointings can’t be useful, that they can’t lead you to the doorstep of recognition, it’s for…
Why do we focus on the ‘story’ of all of this? It’s like the story is taken to be so real, it’s seen like a path that has to be followed. That one action led to another, and another, and another until all the actions culminated in “this is how to it was done to reach this outcome”. It…
It’s so easy to fall into the spiritual trap of feeling like you’ve ‘got it’. After spending many years doing spiritual practices there may be a deepening and deepening understanding of what’s being spoken of and pointed to. This intellectual understanding coupled with spiritual or awakening experiences, and life can start to look a hell of a lot rosier.…
After so many years of the word Enlightenment being banded around by spiritual gurus, new age folk and self-help aficionados, I find myself feeling that the word is just seen as another concept that’s predicated on a ton of other concepts about life. It’s an idea that keeps hold of the mind’s interest in working towards the idea of…
We spend our lives gathering information like trading cards, it’s our currency. Knowledge of how to do things, knowledge of what social etiquettes to follow, knowledge of dates, facts and figures. Knowing anything and everything gives this sense of security and comfort. “I know that” means that you are someone to be trusted, someone to listen to. After all…
I was talking to a dear friend the other day about how to be present for others. Everyone’s had the experience of sitting with someone but not really being present to what they are saying. You are physically there but there’s a sort of ‘half listening’ that’s going on. There’s also the commentary or stream of thoughts going on in your mind.…
I had a recent conversation that brought into focus how important it is for someone who overthinks to get out of their head, and allow whatever feeling or sensation that occurs to arise and to just feel it. Don’t analyse it, don’t name it, don’t judge it – just feel it. The very act of focusing in on the…
I’m so deeply and profoundly grateful to the life that has put me in the way of some amazing lessons. Lessons that have come from many different sources and many different teachers. I see now that these teachers have each come forward at the perfect moment to ultimately teach me that I am beyond all teachings, that I am…
