When I’m writing, I typically stay away from using the word “enlightenment” because I feel like it’s been given a limited purview.
Primarily, enlightenment gets linked into Buddhism, and a lot of people think about enlightenment as a purely mind-based experience. For me, this is too narrow of a term. When I occasionally use the term “enlightenment,” I mean it in a more holistic sense–encompassing the heart, body, mind, and soul. If I’m writing enlightenment–like today–I’m using it synonymously with “spiritual awakening.”
However, let’s use “enlightenment” today for an overview of the process of releasing ego attachments and realizing your spiritual freedom.
Human-powered/Non-AI Summary of Awakening and Enlightenment
I use spiritual awakening and enlightenment interchangeably.
- No spiritual tradition owns the path to enlightenment. Any path taught correctly can show people the way out of suffering.
- The intellectual mind is an important tool, but not the only aspect that needs to be enlightened.
- The heart, body, and the subconscious must be transformed in the process of realizing enlightenment.
- Enlightenment is available to everyone. You can be free of the suffering caused by your attachments!
For more thoughts, please read on. Below is a link to my starting out section for spiritual beginners:
The Broadness of the Enlightened Path
Spiritual awakening, enlightenment, moksha, nirvana, or Self realization among others is available to everyone.
Enlightenment, specifically, is not just something that happens in Buddhism. It is available to Christians, Jews, Wicca practitioners, Tantric followers, Taoists, Hindus, Muslims, atheists, agnostics, and anyone in general.
No tradition has a lock on the path to awakening/enlightenment.
Any tradition that claims to be the only way to realization, enlightenment, or God has lost their way.
God/the universe/consciousness didn’t create so many spiritual traditions and religions to booby-trap the spiritual world around us. These traditions, when taught correctly, encompass the many different experiences and pathways to return to wholeness/reality/freedom.
It’s like a big choose your own adventure, but all ways lead back to the truth.
That said, a lot of traditions get bogged down in dogma, creating social rules, self-soothing practices, and, in the worst cases, deeper delusions to control people for individual or group gain.
For that, it deeply grieves me that I can’t tell you that the tradition you’re focused on is helping you. You’re going to have to learn to do inquiry to see the truth the tradition you’re in.
Is it helping you to let go of attachments and see reality?
Or is it indoctrinated you to believe certain beliefs?
The Error of Enlightening Only the Mind
As I said, I don’t use the world enlightenment very much because people only tend to think about enlightenment in terms of the mind. An enlightened intellect is important. It knows when to get out of the way, how to unlearn behaviors and thoughts, how to do inner work, and how to see reality among many things.
The mind is a powerful tool.
But it has its limits, and an enlightened mind is not omniscient. Nor is it the holder of lots of intellectual ideas.
Realizing enlightenment is like learning to dance. It’s important to intellectually understand how to dance. But if you’re really doing it, your heart and body are involved.
Where people have get lost is when they think that the mind is the ONE AND ONLY tool. Subsequently, anything that doesn’t fit within their intellectual ability to rationalize, they discount and denigrate, blocking out a lot of life.
Unfortunately, a lot of life doesn’t fit within our abilities to analyze or perceive through the mind. Additionally, a lot of ideas and beliefs are creating a level of distortion that what seems rational is totally irrational.
The way people cling to money and make choices around it are examples. Money is a tool, but many people have the irrational idea that it is the goal to achieve. They define their “rational” choices around the illogical assumption that having money will bring happiness. Money buys opportunities, which may or may not excite happiness, and your heart is where all happiness lies.
Which is why part of what the enlightened mind does is learn to simply accept the vastness and unpredictability of life and that it can’t know everything.
Enlightening the Heart and Body
The enlightened or awakened heart and body have their respective languages and processes. So much moves for me when my heart moves, and it almost invariably drives that thing inside my skull crazy. Many of you already know the old saying that “The Heart has ways the Mind will never know.”
It’s true.
So too does the body.
The body learns and communicates through touch, action, movement, and such things. It’s part of why I’m a big fan for everyone to get some kind of conscious movement practice (yoga, dance, etc.) as well as a personal sexual practice. The body understands these things. You can feel lots of love, and you can know the truth about love. But when the depth of love hits down into the fabric of your body, everything really changes in how you act with yourself and others in the world.
With all that said, there’s a lot of attachment, pain, and trauma in peoples’ hearts and bodies. The heart and the body also inform how your subconscious creates perceptions about your entire life. If you’ve lived in a lot of pain, then you view life as inherently threatening, and your mind makes decisions about careers, relationships, eating, exercising, and more through this fundamental lens.
The body and heart have to release these attachments so that your mind can even begin to see reality.
In short, everything has to be enlightened.
How to Find and Release Physical Pain During a Spiritual Awakening
The Integrated or Embodied Awakening
Lots of people use terms like “integrated” and “embodied” around awakening. Quite simply, it means this integration of heart, body, mind, and soul.
For an example of unintegrated understanding, it’s like saying cigarettes are bad for you, but you still smoke. You are intellectually aware of the truth, and you can talk about it.
But in your heart, you still feel like you need them to feel good about yourself, and you obviously aren’t listening to your body when you’re coughing up half a lung from of smoke.
For you to awaken in this situation, cigarettes stop being an emotional support, and you can truly physically feel how bad they are in your body.
Integrating Your Spiritual Awakening
This becomes true of a lot of other things as well.
And enlightenment and spiritual transformation gets really fundamental.
How you breathe, eat, drink, rest, are active, and be in community are all parts of a healthy heart and body, as well as mind.
More and more, people are understanding that having these things be out of balance is part of the current mental health crisis.
So we’re now talking a lot more broadly than “spiritual enlightenment;” we’re talking about what it means to be a healthy and happy human.
Building a Body Strong Enough for Awakening
Anyone Can Be Awakened/Enlightened
There’s a lot more to this topic, so please peruse my spiritual awakening/enlightenment blog further.
Enlightenment: Give Up the Spiritual Chase
It’s so important to remind everyone that anyone can awaken. This isn’t only for really smart people (which is another reason I don’t use the term enlightened much–it makes it sound like you have to have book smarts to attain that space of awareness).
This space of awareness is always within you.
Everyone has it.
It is a big letting go process.
Let go of all the layers of expectations and desires and fears.
Let go into that space that you truly are.
It’s a scary shift for the ego, which is watching someone take all its toys away. But you never needed all those toys to begin with.
Actually, they became burdens that you tripped over or tried to constantly preserve from damage. They made you expend a lot of resources for, ultimately, very little in return. The ease and effortlessness that comes with awakening is beautiful.
You don’t have to be anyone other than who you are, although there is a whole deeper journey of discovery of who you are as consciousness and the transformation that follows.
The Art of Personal Transformation
But let’s end the blog post here with:
you are perfect.
