How Does Awakening Change Everyday Experiences?

How Does Your Insight and Experience of Awakening Make a Difference When Challenges Come?

For some of us, there are still things to achieve and work towards in our everyday incarnation. In our relative lives, in our work and relationships, many of us still have things we want to achieve and to do.

Awakening to our deepest self on the level of the absolute doesn’t wipe out our journey on the relative level. For me, there are still many things I want to do in terms of my work, home life, travel and making use of my creative skills. And as all of that unfolds, I inevitably will (and do) face obstacles.

For example, this past few weeks I’ve struggled to find the motivation to do what needs doing in relative terms for some of my work. This is part of the natural ebb and flow of an ordinary human life. And while I certainly don’t enjoy these times as much as the times when I’m fired up with passion and enthusiasm, I do see that this too plays out upon the screen of completion, upon the page of pure awareness where even these relatively imperfect moments are perfect in their own unique way.

In many ways, awakening leaves one content with the way things are, even when they are not how we want them to be. Of course, I would choose to feel enthused rather than deflated… but actually, it’s clear that in many ways, these experiences simply come and go often of their own accord.

I can seemingly make an effort to bolster my motivation and to shift any stuck feeling… that has a relative truth to it of course. However, it’s also seen that standing upon the rock of the absolute, this period of feeling this way is no less valid a manifestation of life than it’s more appealing opposite.

So, to address the question.. I think the main difference is that there is much, much less resistance to what happens in life. As the saying goes, shit happens. Life happens. Sometimes it rains, sometimes the sun shines. Beyond those relative appearances, the screen of awareness remains complete and open and free. That is my deepest Self… and it does not stand in opposition to those experiences I don’t enjoy as much in the realm of an ordinary, relative life.

This is the kind of freedom on offer with awakening… freedom WITHIN the stuff we wanted to escape from. Freedom in the playing out of all the ordinary stuff of a human life. No more resisting what happens, but more flowing with it… and so, solutions appear on their own, in their own time.

I can feel immediately if I stand in the way of this. Immediately, there is tension and stress… If I get in the way of this natural process of life flowing how it does, I can feel the discord, the dissonance… immediately I see that I am arguing with reality (with the way things are) and that becomes painful.

Recognising that life flows as it does and not resisting that flow, ironically brings much quicker and more profound release and relief from these very ordinary and to be expected elements of the journey.