When we wake in, we discover our individual human being as an innocent and wise “Being.” From here, the core stories and the old feelings of shame—“I’m not good enough,” “Something’s wrong with me,” “I’m unlovable”—are no longer convincing.

Instead, we’re also interconnected with all life, the same way a wave is inseparable from the ocean.

The Dzogchen tradition refers to four progressive stages of recognition, realization, stabilization, and expression.

You can wake up, but still not grow up.

Some people need to feel the fire at their backsides—the sting of heat and the fear of getting burned—before they’re willing to let go of old ego defenses and shift into a new sense of being.

Identity moves from ego to self to Being. This awake-identity process is only available when growing up and waking-up meet. The awake-identity stage of development allows us to detox our repressed emotional storehouses and rewire our brains so that we can respond to life rather than merely reacting.

Contemporary teacher of awakening, Adyashanti, describes stages of “head awakening, heart awakening, gut awakening, and root awakening.”

letting go of whatever they were holding onto, while continuing to show up and grow up in their lives.

The Relationship between Waking-Up and Growing Up It’s important to develop psychologically and to progress through levels of consciousness. Ken Wilber says, “Stages are how we grow up; states are how we wake up.”3 Wilber calls the way we progress through levels of consciousness “state-stages,” and the way of moving through our developmental stages