A lot of people go through physical discomfort on the spiritual path. In awakening, this can become very intense. The ego’s common action to blame everything on an outside source, and ironically it often blames the awakening. Many people think that somehow God is punishing them or that the awakening has brought in all this pain. But it has not. What it has primarily brought is awareness.
Consider that your whole life you’ve been walking on a broken leg. But you’ve been numb. You’ve been on painkillers the entire time. So maybe you noticed that you walked funny, but you put no attention there. You were too busy. Oh yes. You were so very, very busy that you had no time for yourself. Then imagine one day, you ran out of painkillers. Could you imagine how excruciating the pain would be and how extensive the damage would be?
That’s kind of what a spiritual awakening does. It takes away the painkillers (which at the very least is ignorance) and brings awareness to all aspects of you, including your body.
Striving for Denial
Denial, in and of itself, is a form of active ignorance. This is where many people go during awakening. They may try to ignore what’s happening, and they may return to whatever their favorite painkillers of choice were before–relationships, work, exercise, thrill-seeking, drugs, alcohol, and so forth. But for those who truly are awakening, it won’t work. It will make life so dark and miserable that you could become dangerously depressed. Awakening can already be a challenging time because to embody this awareness and live from it means that you’ve got to do a major house-cleaning. Sure you can still close your eyes, but the light in the house is now on.
As a quick aside, this is one of the central ways that I differentiate an awakening from a spiritual opening. A spiritual opening is like me shining a floodlamp in through your window–assuming the blinds aren’t firmly closed against it. Awakening is like the light switch is turned on in the house. So you see, one is an external influence and the one is an internal circumstance. It’s very, very different, and for those of you awakening, you know it to be true.
The Body Begins to Purge
But despite many people’s attempts to deny what is happening, suddenly the body may not be functioning the way it used to. You may be feeling pain and discomfort in places you didn’t know you could feel pain and discomfort. Unfortunately, many unconscious egos try to claim that they are having spiritual awakenings these days (which is really ironic–the unconscious thing proclaiming it is conscious), so I always like to emphasize that all tools in this world are spiritual. That includes going to the Western Medicine Man/Woman, and after checking in with the MD and getting the “Gee, there’s nothing wrong with you speech,” then it’s safe to say that your physical ailments are part of embodying awakening. But until that point, be extremely cautious about what you choose to blame on spirituality. It has the potential to get you into a lot of trouble.
Of course, you should always be checking in with your inner knowing and cultivating that space. Without intuition, you can really feel like you are lost without a compass as the body starts to “throw up” (sometimes literally and not just metaphorically) all the energetic junk that is in your system. Every hit you ever endured or gave out is in your body, and there is a reckoning that is happening within you. If you have abused it and beaten it into some kind of socially-approved body shape, then you’re going to be hearing a lot from your body about how it really wants to eat, sleep, exercise, and look. Because your body has no interest in conforming to an idea. It simply wants to be naturally as it is.
The Long Trek Back To Your Natural Body
Could you imagine a pine tree leaning over to another pine tree and saying, “Do my bottom branches make me look fat?” Of course not. You are already laughing. Maybe you can see the visual in your minds. It’s ridiculous, yet that’s what we do to ourselves. We look, judge, and evaluate ourselves constantly, and these thought patterns are extremely unhealthy. Whether you’re super athletic or super over-weight, your body is only interested in returning to a natural equilibrium, whatever that is for you. And if it’s not your life path to be super athletic or super over-weight, then you are very likely to go through some dramatic changes, which will challenge your ego greatly.
Because that’s almost always the first big hurdle in the way: the ego. All these ideas about who and what you are are so problematic. When you let them go, then you can start to grow. And here’s the next thing, each part of your learns, heals, and embodies awakening in its own way. So many of you are at that point where you’re saying, “You’re right, Jim. I am not all those lies. I do what to embrace my body as it naturally wants to be. So why is this still so painful?” Because the next level of integration and healing has begun.
The Many Layers of Healing
As I’ve mentioned in other blogs, healing goes through multiple layers in us. It’s all taking us back to union within ourselves–the most important division and war of them all that needs to be healed. So as the mind is pacified and a gentler ego structure is created (kind of like scaffolding around a building, although a lot of this is really more about sacred destruction at first.), the next layers down can begin to surface their issues, be seen, and be re-united with the whole of you. If you have really been getting to know yourself (“Know Thyself” is such a key mantra on this path), then your mind will become a tool to help you further be and delve into what is arising.
A lot of the times, the issues that arise in the body are the same ones that you’ve dealt with in your head and your heart. So if you were severely beaten as a child, you had to accept this intellectually and forgive all parties involved in your heart. Now you can deal with the trauma that is stuck physically and energetically in your body. For some people, it will be like reliving the trauma, but from this awareness, you can be in a space where you can release it. You don’t need to hold onto it as part of a victim identity or another identity. For those of you with clear visualizations of your energy, it may look like someone is pumping black sludge out of you, and the whole process may be very exhausting. To go this deeply inside and pull out stuff that has been influencing how you act and interact with people your whole life can take an immense about of energy. If it ever gets too dark, be sure to find a good and safe healer to help. We all can use a little help from time to time.
The Power of the Awakening Pressure Cooker
Additionally, there’s something about the awakening that is also like opening a flood gate. So with all this awareness flooding your whole body, it’s also got a kind of weight to it. It’s showing you where you are stuck. I can’t tell you how much of the last several years of my life until recently have felt like being in a pressure cooker. It felt like being crushed from all angles, but what was being crushed was my resistance. My resistance was causing the pain. It was like damming a river. In my body, a lot of the pain that I felt I honestly had no idea what it was at first. Even as I knew intellectually what some of it was, there was only so much meditation, yoga, sexual energy cultivation, and so forth that I could do. After doing my part, the rest is really up to the intelligence of this awareness and God (because in this space the two are becoming one within you; that is how you become part of this world, but not of it).
So you may feel like you are under enormous weight at times. Don’t resist. Let go into it as much as you can. You still may feel pain, but if you resist, you will feel way more. Keep checking in with your inner knowing about what you need. If it is hard to hear this part of you, then you still have more work to do on fear and the ideas that you are believing in. All ideas are meant to help us and serve the divine. An idea for the sake of having an idea is also more useless rubbish and needs to scrubbed out of the mind. In this way, I’m never interested in any of you remembering everything I say, believing in everything I say, or doing anything I say. Remembering or collecting all my blogs is another way of cluttering up the space because ultimately you have all this wisdom in you. You didn’t come to this blog to hear my wisdom; you came to hear your own.
Dissolving the Blocks and Physical Releases
Every time I’ve had a block and unconscious story release, I’ve felt so much better. It made me feel more and more amazing in ways I could never have imagined. Just as some of you have no idea what I’m talking about, I could have read this blog post 10 years ago and been like, “Ah, okay, dude. I want whatever you’re drinking.” But there’s no outside substances involved in this. It’s an all-natural, inside job, and for me each level of healing and release brought more awareness of my body, relaxation into my own skin, and ever more flexibility. The embodiment process really reinforced how interconnected everything was for me.
As I mentioned in The Process of Healing Pain From Your Energy Body, this goes in cycles. You will expand out past the dissolved issue until you hit something new. You will keep going in these intense cycles until you come to whatever your natural cycles of growth and contraction are in this lifetime. Everyone needs time to rest, and there are certainly times for growth. In the old ego mind, we were forcing things into constant growth, which can be another reason why so many of you are so exhausted during the embodiment of awakening. It’s not just the shift occurring inside; it’s the accumulation of years of fatigue that have finally come up to your awareness in blinding exhaustion. Seriously. You may just be that tired.
With each release, you may be amazed at what your body feels like. It may also highlight how dense and uncomfortable the rest of your body is. This is another irony of the path. Consider if you are an iceberg that has never moved. The initial crack is greatly traumatic, and a little running water can feel extraordinary at first. But as things continue to dissolve, the ice grinds against its other parts. This feels terrible, and it’s another reason the old unconscious ego wants to run away. It can’t imagine that this intense inner friction is a good process, but it is. Eventually, more ice keeps melting in the heat and intensity of your awakened awareness. It is doing it naturally, and whatever you can do to just be with it and allow it at times truly is the “fastest” way to embody this. I use “fast” very loosely because there is no timeline in this. There is only whatever you need and however fast you need to go, and that is part of trusting and having faith in your own natural process.
One Last Thing
Don’t abuse your body. Don’t push it and yank it into ridiculous yoga poses or do anything overly intense unless you are guided to. Physical abuse has been the norm for many, many people. And even if this doesn’t apply to you, I simply encourage you to remember that the body is sacred. It is your one beautiful vessel for this lifetime. Let it have it’s own shift in its own perfect timing so that you can get to see and feel what it is like to be fully grounded in a physical body full of divine awareness and love.
