Awakening - The Basics

The Alchemy Experience

Are you awakening to your experiences, or will you hit snooze yet again?

“We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.” – Tich Nhat Hanh

There are comprehensive books written on the subject of awakening, so let’s not pretend that this article, nor the connected podcast will be the same. However, the intention is to present a basic understanding that anyone experiencing an awakening can resonate with. Actually there are almost 100 hours of recordings in the form of The Alchemy Experience Podcast that address a variety of human experience that in essence tie back to this topic; awakening.

Simply put, awakening is the process or a moment of self-realisation; realising who one is and what stands for. As we have these “awakening moments” in life we are constantly posed with the choice of the direction to go; accepting the growth and using it to our advantage, or continue to be blind to ourselves and remain incumbered by our core wounding. Every experience we have in life is, in fact, opportunities to awaken. The big ones are when our options become so slim that we really only have one choice; to wake up. In my experience, a massive awakening can be compared to a near death experience, at least insofar as the mind’s experience is concerned. When we come up against that moment of rock bottom where the only choice is to shed the identity we have cultivated in our lives, that identity essentially dies and thus your idea of yourself dies with it. It is the external locus of evaluation that strips away and we are left with seeing ourselves without those layers for the first time. This experience is nothing short of horrifying to begin with since we spent our lives up until this point hiding from ourselves, but now we are forced to see the naked truth of who we really are.

All the props and actors that show up in our experiences are there allowing us to experience ourselves. In an awakening situation the trigger can be of a related to a number of things, e.g.:

• Environmental issues
• Ecological destruction
• Mental health challenges
• Existential
• Social injustice
• Power paradigms

Of course these are merely some examples, but the point is that we start to question our own role in the external world around us and start seeking our purpose that is greater than ourselves. We question, review and discover our relationship with, e.g.:

• our planet earth
• animals
• plants
• other humans
• energy
• consciousness
• karma
• conditioning

Through the process we have moments of exceptional bliss and insight, that tend to, in my experience, diminish as some of our old subconscious patterns and habits re-emerge. However, we cannot ignore, nor forget those moments and the next part of the journey is seeking our way back to experience those moments.

At the end of the day we, individually, choose how we perceive our own experiences, and in turn decide the purposes of those experiences.