Shift into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness

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

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? MARY OLIVER, FROM “THE SUMMER DAY”1

In fact, many of the opportunities for initial awakening come during periods of transition, crisis, loss, and chaos in people’s external and internal lives. This is a time when the ego-identification collapses because it can’t maintain control or handle life’s intensity.

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

You can be more developed in psychological structure-stages or consciousness-based state-stages, and many people focus on either meditation or psychology, as if one will somehow include the other naturally. We cannot see our structures of psychological development by focusing on internal meditation states. Your meditation experience will be interpr

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.

A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest

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.

culturally unacknowledged.