Awakening: Ultimate Healing

(Please note, this course is designed for all levels. We invite you to dive in, whether you’re new to meditation, or many decades down the path…)

There are many meanings of the word awakening. We awaken each morning to a new day. We awaken to new ideas, new perspectives, new understandings of our psychology, our relationships, and of moral, ethical, political issues we may have been blind to.

In the Original Love program, we highlight four main kinds of awakening:

1. We awaken to the peace and love of the mindful witness within us all, an innate awareness that can hold our troubles in peace and warmth. 
2. We awaken to many forms of support that are already holding us, supporting us, and to the fact that we may have been hesitant to trust them, to trust our innate goodness and worth, which allow us to be more open to support.
3. We awaken to the innate effortlessness and richness of flow states in our very being, known as samadhi in the meditation traditions.
4. And then there is the big kahuna, the life-changing shift that is always available, in every moment – awakening to boundless openness, boundless peace, the “original love” that is the very heart of who we are and what we experience.

This is the meaning of awakening that Zen espouses. It’s a profound shift in perspective that opens us up to an underlying, unconditional love – or “original nature,” as Zen calls it.

We discover that our sense of being a separate self has been a kind of illusion, and that we are intimately part of the entirety of the cosmos, of the very act of creation happening in every moment.

Why does this matter? In a sense, it’s the ultimate healing. It resolves all our troubles, it reveals who we really, most deeply are.

At the same time, it can make other kinds of growth much easier. It gives us space – limitless space – in which to heal our trauma, our relationships, and ultimately our society and culture. It resets our values, it opens up compassion, it makes the possibility of a compassionate culture and world that much more real.

So what are the downsides? In one sense, there are none at all!

But in another there may be – first, it’s not a predictable, guaranteeable experience. Second, it is kind of a cure-all, and kind of not. For many, it opens up a path of healing, whereby we find we need to do a lot of work to bring the reality we have seen into alignment with our everyday ways of experiencing.

And third, it can create an unhealthy power-dynamic, or even hierarchy, whereby some have glimpsed this and others have not. The fact is, no one is more, or less, part of the wholeness of awakened reality. We are all it. No one is left out. No one has more access to it. 

Actually, no one can help us with it! It is who we already actually are. 

But, we can do one thing about it: gather together and practice in gentle, patient awareness, in an ever-growing sense of not-knowing, of becoming ever more comfortable in a deep, loving uncertainty. We release what we think we know, and find it’s safe to do that, we are held regardless.

This is what we will be doing in our upcoming six-week course on Awakening: Ultimate Healing, that starts Sunday October 9th. Six Sundays, six blessed weeks of shared practice…

Questions about the course? Please feel free to email Jeremy, the Original Love Program Manager.