‘Awakening’ by Sw. Rahasya

Awakening
by Sw. Rahasya Advait, guest facilitator at Shakti Shiva Academy

 

Watch yourself when you emerge from sleep.

Ideally on a restful, undemanding morning and not on a morning when you are bounced out of bed by a nasty alarm, washed by instinct and boosted by caffeine.

But, even if that’s how your day started, if you can at that point pause and notice your experience as it arises.

If you are not well practiced in the meditator’s art of receiving the totality of your experience as one-suchness, let your awareness explore your experience part by part.

The increasing emergence of consciousness. Your sense of presence. The realisation of being awake and no longer asleep.

The cozy body-feeling, as it shifts from wanting to snuggle back to sleep to stirring, urges to move arising in it, even if just because it is time to pee.

 

 

The mind disengaging from the night’s dreaming, maybe holding on to something from the dream, maybe gratefully letting the memory of it fade.

Whether the awakening is gentle and you get to deeply appreciate the experience or if it is harsh and hurried, the change in your entire state – being, body and mind – is, in obvious and subtle ways, qualitatively different from sleep, or even the most immersive dream.

Like walking out of a cinema into the world.

 

I like regular “waking up” (or more truly, the insights available through such a morning meditation) as an analogy for the milestone on the path called “Spiritual Awakening”.

No matter how “sudden” many have described it to be, it is a process involving several distinguishable parts arising and merging in integrity (functioning together as one experience).

For most of us, the mind leads, and most teachers who’s work is to guide others to awakening focus on the mind and the provocation of Satori (momentary realisation).

For some, Awakening is first experienced (or more correctly, noticed) in the sensations of the body. In a moment of extreme discomfort and pain, and/or the polarity of that – deep and powerfully overwhelming sensations of extreme pleasure.

Rarely, but often enough to mention, Awakening arises first most noticeably (to others, not to oneself) in the Being. With no mental effort, automatic habits/patterns of thinking change, along with preferences in food, exercise, sexuality etc.

As with the daily experience of waking, Awakening is a transition of one’s whole condition of existence.

Awakening, however it is first experienced is a process.

It is a stirring, a quickening (to use a lovely old and very appropriate word).

It may be first noticed in one’s insight/thinking, one’s sexuality/body, or in one’s being/emotional systems.

It may start out by gently coaxing and teasing you out of a snuggled coziness. An increasing ecstasy, felt in dance, nature, lovemaking …

It may start as a harsh “Wake Up! call”. Perhaps a disturbing shift in sexual inclination.

Maybe a shock/challenge to the health of the body or mind.

It may happen under the guidance of the many teachers and teachings which aim for it.

Howsoever it starts though, it is a process which involves and transforms ones experience, and perhaps more importantly, one’s very ability to experience.

It is good to nurture and support all aspects of it. No small part of the quest consists in discovering and listening to one’s inner guidance.

And, though many spiritual teachings consider it the achievement of their objective …

And, though it is a rare happening, only arising in perhaps 2% of humanity …

It is a beginning, not an end.

What follows is the unfolding of the path (or plummeting down the cliff) to which one has awakened.

And that, Beloveds, is, of course, a whole other blog article altogether 😉

 

 

Sw. Rahasya Advait is regularly a guest teacher at Shakti Shiva Academy and can often be found importing his unique style of wisdom via Facebook Lives on Fridays. He is based on a hill top called “Little Tibet” a few hours outside of Cape Town, South Africa.  

He is the author of The Rocky Horror Tantra book and creator of Death Meditation audio guide.

 

You can find the Advait Tantra school HERE

Facebook Lives on Fridays – join HERE