There are all these different layers and identities that you move through as you start waking up, it’s like you open up a new world from what you have been living and start trying out new things, new versions of yourself, new ways to heal, and it’s all a part of the process, all of it necessary, all of it real.
You moved through the modalities, the practices, the containers and the courses, the crystals, the coaching, the energy work, the emotional processing, the sacred rituals, and each one peeled back another layer of conditioning, another version of what you thought this life was supposed to be, because underneath all of it there was always this burning question, there has to be more to life than this.
And life itself was happening at the same time, motherhood, relationships, work, the ordinary and the heartbreaking and the mundane, none of that was separate from the awakening, even when it felt like it was pulling you away from it.
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But somewhere in all of that searching, a split opened up within you.
There were parts of your life where you felt it, that deep connection to yourself, that sense of being rooted in something vaster, that clarity, and then there were the other parts, where the reactivity came, where the numbing crept in, where you were the one complaining or avoiding or judging, where the depth you knew was within you felt completely unreachable, and you were left wondering how both of these could possibly be the same person.
You pushed against the mundane, against the ordinary demands of this human life, because they seemed to exist in a completely different world to the depth you could feel within you, and still you were chasing the high of the relief, wanting the connection without the lows, separating the inner work from the life you were actually living without even realising you were doing it.
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And somewhere along the way, something began to shift, not always dramatically, not always in a single moment, but awareness started arriving differently, more quietly, more present, no longer something you had to chase but something that was simply here.
And with that came something unexpected, the harder work of holding awareness and humanness at the same time, this relentless invitation to see more clearly, to expand further, and the realisation that you couldn’t always meet it, that sometimes you chose the old habit or the numbing or the avoidance with full consciousness of exactly what you were doing and why.
The thing about waking up is that you can’t go back, you can’t unknow this feeling, and so when you choose something from habit or simply from humanness and then judge yourself for it, it feels more disconnected than anything did before.
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This is where the real work lives.
Not in the resistance to the human parts of you, not in the hating that you can touch something transcendent in stillness and then have a house to clean, not in the shame of knowing better and choosing differently anyway, not in the exhausting standard that awareness seems to demand of you.
There was grief in realising that not everyone around you will wake up in this lifetime, even those closest to you, and that this cannot stop you, that dimming your light hoping they will come with you only stops the rest of the world from receiving what is uniquely yours to offer.