Realization Process

“Enlightenment is a lasting transformation of our being,
involving our ongoing experience of life.”
– Judith Blackstone, Realization Process founder

The Realization Process offers a direct path to embodied nondual awakening. Through inhabiting the internal space of the body, we come into contact with fundamental consciousness—a unified, spacious field pervading our body and environment.

As this contact deepens:

  • We uncover innate qualities of being—power, love, intelligence, sexuality, and voice.
  • We dissolve constructed barriers within ourselves and between self and world.
  • We heal across psychological, relational, emotional, physical, and spiritual dimensions.
  • We experience a deep and stable sense of well-being.

Awakening to Your True Nature

“The body is our instrument of realization.
Enlightenment occurs in and through the body.”
– Judith Blackstone

“Enlightenment is the realization, the lived experience that fundamental consciousness is our fundamental nature. It is the experience of our own being as a vast expanse of unbroken consciousness, pervading our body and our environment as a single whole. Our own body and everything around us appear to be made of clean, empty space, finer than air, at the same time that they appear substantial and solid.” — The Enlightenment Process 

The felt-sense of awakening into our true nature

  • As we make deep contact with our self, we become present through the internal depth of our body.
  • We experience our own existence directly, rather than as an abstract idea.
  • We experience a sense of self-possession, a sense of there being someone at home.
  • We have an internal sense of volume, of taking up space.
  • We feel that we are becoming increasingly real.

The Direct Experience of Awakening

In enlightenment, our senses become unified. We experience life as patterns of energy, as translucent, vibrant forms, moving through a vast expanse of luminous stillness. These energetic patterns are registered by all of our senses at once. We have a single, unified impression of life that is seen, heard, touched, smelled, tasted all at the same time.

When we realize this most subtle aspect of ourselves, we experience a vast, unchanging stillness pervading our body and our environment. We feel that we ourselves are fundamentally timeless and changeless.

When we realize ourselves as fundamental consciousness, we experience ourselves as a separate transparency within the transparency that is everywhere. We are an individual light within the one light that is everywhere. We are a distinct form of emptiness within the all-pervasive emptiness.

Awakening and the Essential Self

We have the sense that we are finally becoming who we really are; not something new, but something we have always been but only barely known. This is the true, whole ‘I’ that has been hidden behind the partial, abstract ‘I’s that we usually mistake for our identity.

When we realize ourselves as fundamental consciousness, we know that we have not been irreparably damaged. We can actually feel that who we really are, who we have always, deep down, known that we are, has always been there, intact… This process is not about becoming someone different than who we are. It is about becoming more fully who we already are. It is about reclaiming our wholeness, our essential self, which has always been there beneath our constrictions and fragmentation.

Far from eradicating our sense of our individual existence, as many nondual approaches attempt to do, with the realization of fundamental consciousness we mature as individuals, at the same time as we realize self-other oneness.

This awakening does not eradicate our personality. It does not erase our unique characteristics… Our unique personality sheds its constraints and becomes even more freely and spontaneously expressed.

The Embodied Nature of Awakening

Fundamental consciousness is realized with our whole being. It is as much the essence of our love and physical sensation as it is the essence of our awareness. With the realization of this subtle dimension, every aspect of ourselves becomes open to, and unified with, the world around us.

The subtle core of the body is our deepest connection with our being. It is also our entranceway into oneness, our deepest and most subtle contact with everything around us. We arrive at our greatest distance from our environment and our oneness with our environment at the same time by penetrating into the subtle core of the body.

In order for us to experience this consciousness, we have to be this consciousness. We cannot experience it separate from ourselves. We can only experience it through deep contact with ourselves… When this consciousness reaches everywhere in our body, we are in contact with our whole internal form. And at the same time, we are clear-through open to our environment. This openness reveals the unified transparency of self and other, the vast expanse of being and emptiness.

The more we let go of the protective constrictions throughout our body, the more we open to and realize ourselves as the disentangled ground of fundamental consciousness.

Spiritual realization is not a matter of constructing something new; it is always a clearing away, a letting go of the holding patterns and beliefs that obscure our true nature. The more we let go of the protective constrictions throughout our body, the more we open to and realize ourselves as the disentangled ground of fundamental consciousness.

Clearing the Space

“Our fundamental dimension of consciousness,
the core of our being, has never been injured.”
– Judith Blackstone

“Our patterns of constriction are almost always unconscious. If they are repeated over time, they will harden in the tissues of our body and become chronic, unconscious holding patterns. These patterns then become our ongoing organization of ourselves, our design of openness and defense. They become the shape of who we are, for the rest of our lives, unless we make a conscious effort to release them. Some patterns of consciousness do not become frozen in our body; they become well-traveled grooves, patterns that we go into, unconsciously, whenever present events remind us of the childhood situations that initially produced them.” — Belonging Here

The felt-sense of clearing the space

  • We begin to let go of the ways we grip and hold ourselves.
  • Our body feels less rigid and more internally open.
  • Our breath becomes freer, quieter, and more present.
  • Our energy is less bound and moves with greater ease.
  • Our perceptions grow clearer and less obscured by the past.
  • We experience more space within the body, and more continuity with the environment around us.
  • Experience moves through us with less sticking.
  • We feel more balanced, more open, and more at ease.

“The more we attune to this most subtle, primary level of ourselves, the easier it becomes to recognize and release the holding patterns in our body. As fundamental consciousness, we gradually let go of our defensive grip on ourselves. Then we can receive the full vividness of each moment of our lives, without obstruction. We can allow the free, unguarded flow of our perceptions, cognitions, emotions, and sensations. We can experience each moment as a unified whole, inside and outside of our body at the same time.”

Body

“Another way of saying this is that we awaken to the dimension of fundamental consciousness throughout the internal space of our body. This involves letting go of our grip on our body from the essence of our being. It feels as if our essential self is letting go of our false self.”

“The objectified body drops away. And we let go of our grip on our body. In letting go of this grip, however, we drop into the body, all the way through. We become one with the internal space of the body.”

“Spiritual awakening is not just a matter of understanding—it involves self-attunement and the release of defensive rigidities in the body that block self-attunement.”

Breath

“As we realize fundamental consciousness, we experience a profound change in the way we breathe. We are breathing not just with our respiratory system, but also with the subtle core of our body. This core breath is more refined, smoother, and quieter than our ordinary breath, with a subtle electrical or ‘mental’ quality, as if the mind were breathing throughout our whole being. This subtle breath reaches everywhere in our body at once.”

Energy

“As we realize fundamental consciousness, our energy is able to move more freely through our organism. We are also able to experience a more subtle range of our energy system.”

“We can also experience subtle energy as a very small vibration within the whole field of fundamental consciousness, inside and outside of our body.”

“Our energy is constantly changing in response to stimuli, to our moods, health, and activity. All of this movement occurs in the stillness of fundamental consciousness, without ever changing or disturbing the stillness.”

Perception

“The realization of fundamental consciousness has a profound effect on the body. It produces a radical shift both in our experience of embodiment, and in the appearance and functioning of our body.”

“The body is the instrument of our perception. As our body becomes more subtle, our perception becomes more subtle, too. Enlightenment is thus a refinement of all our senses. It is a seeing through, and a hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching through life—that is, through the dimension of physical matter to the energy and consciousness within.”

Healing from the Core

“When we heal from the core, we know that we are essentially whole and well.”
– Judith Blackstone

“Healing from the core means discovering, not as an idea but as a lived reality, that the deepest ground of our being has never been wounded. In the Realization Process, healing happens through direct contact with fundamental consciousness as it pervades the body. As we release the constrictions that formed in response to pain, trauma, and overwhelming experience, we regain access to our natural wholeness, depth, and capacity for contact.”

Although we may feel that we have been severely damaged by circumstances in our past, we can reach the essence of ourselves, a dimension of consciousness that has never been wounded or conditioned. None of our innate functions—our creativity or our capacity to love or think or experience sexual pleasure, to name just a few—can be diminished by another person. We can only constrict our own attunement to these indestructible aspects of our own being. When we heal from the core, we know that we are essentially whole and well.” — Trauma and the Unbound Body

The felt-sense of healing from the core:

  • We have a felt sense of coming to life – of becoming fully born – within our body.
  • It is literally that we have been numb, in our sensations, our heart, and our awareness, and now we are waking from that numbness.
  • We regain those diminished parts of ourselves.
  • Our childhood pain and its effect on our present-day experience diminishes.
  • As we release bound energy of past grief, anger, and fear, we gain emotional depth and fluidity in response to the current events in our life.
  • We feel our emotions deeply, but we experience them as appropriate and as temporary, passing through the unchanging ground of our being.
  • We let go of our protective vigilance to the world around us.
  • We experience life as much safer than when we don’t live within the internal space of the body.

The Realization Process includes specific methods for releasing these holding patterns.

  • The first step is to become conscious of them.
  • The next step is to experience the purpose of the holding pattern, to feel what it is protecting against or what it is holding back, such as tears or anger. This allows us to become aligned with the volitional intention of the movement so that it is not something that is happening to us, but we recognize that we ourselves are moving toward this internal protective stance.
  • Once the protective movement becomes conscious and intentional, we can practice allowing ourselves to move into the pattern and release it. We can even access the static beliefs bound in the chronic patterns which trigger repetitive behaviors.
  • Usually repeated practice is required in order for the pattern to release completely.

“Our history of trauma, bound within our body, may haunt our present life as chronic feelings of sadness or despair, as distracting bouts of fury, or as spells of terror. But it can also be present as numbness, as a chronic static in our perception, as if we were always slightly removed from ourselves and our surroundings. This pain, whether it be conscious suffering or that slight sense of unreality, is often mistaken for our basic nature, something we just need to shoulder or ignore in order to move on. But it is not our basic nature. Just as an open hand is hidden within a fist, our true nature, with its innate capacities for happiness, love, and wisdom, is hidden within our pain and numbness. Just as we can open a fist to reveal a hand, our unbound, unconstructed being can emerge from our pain and breathe again. Within the complexity of trauma-based beliefs and constrictions, we can find our unbound body and the wholeness that is our birthright. We can experience ourselves as the one light, the undivided consciousness, that is the ground of our being and of all being.”

“We can cultivate compassion and gradually empty our minds of destructive thoughts and limiting beliefs, but if we still feel aversion to the world around us, or if we feel loathing for our own imperfection, we cannot truly release the fear and anger from our mind and body.”

Opening into Intimacy

“Spiritual maturity can be seen as the realization
of the fundamental unity of the relational field.”
– Judith Blackstone

“The oneness of the spiritual dimension is the underlying unity of all relationships. It can be described as a relational field, a fundamental continuity of self and other. In the spaciousness and stillness of our spiritual essence, we are truly in contact, truly intimate, with ourselves and with all of life.” — The Intimate Life

Intimacy is interrupted whenever the relational field is fragmented—when we lose direct contact with ourselves, and with the continuity of being that underlies all relationships.

Our fragmented, defended state is often formed in relationships with other people. In our defended body, we feel separate from the environment. Wherever we have bound pain in our body, there are gaps in our consciousness, gaps in our experience. We fill in these gaps with imaginary experience—the projection of childhood fears, aversions, beliefs, and unfulfilled needs onto our present life. We experience a world of shadows and threats that is cut off from a world inside of fear and longing.

However, as we let go of rigid or fixed organizations in the way we experience ourselves and others, we uncover a dimension of unity between ourselves and others. In the spaciousness and stillness of our spiritual essence, we are truly in contact, truly intimate, with ourselves and with all of life.

Authentic Intimacy

We relate authentically when we experience oneness with others—without losing contact with ourselves. The self that distances from others is a shadow of our true self. The connection we make by merging is only a fraction of our capacity for intimacy. Spiritual oneness is a deepened and simultaneous contact with ourselves and with our environment.

Contact

“Contact with ourselves means that we are in touch with the internal depth and subtlety of our own being. It is a contact that is neither conceptual nor emotionally reactive—it is direct, intimate, and quiet.”

“Contact is not only an inward experience but also a mode of relating to others. We can experience contact with another person when we feel in touch with them through the internal space of our body and the space of the environment at the same time.”

Direct Contact

“Direct contact is an experience of transparency between ourselves and another person or between ourselves and the world. It does not mean merging or losing our sense of self, but rather a simultaneous experience of our own internal depth and the presence of the other.”

Contact and Resonance

“Mutual contact in fundamental consciousness is not just the connection of one body with another—it is an experience of resonance, a subtle communication that involves awareness, emotion, and physical sensation simultaneously.”

“Direct contact is experienced as a subtle buzzing, a felt sense of resonance.”

“Mutual contact, experienced as mutual resonance, along with subtle flows of energy spontaneously emerge from within the core of each of us, when we are each situated within the core of our being.”

“The senses are also pathways of resonance and mutual contact. Through eye contact or touch, two people can attune to the continuity of love, awareness, or physical sensation that pervades them both.”

Mutual Resonance

“When two people connect from the subtle core of their bodies, they experience that fundamental consciousness pervades them both. Each is situated in the innermost depth of their own being while at the same time one with the other.”

“Love meets love, not in the space between two people, but within each person’s chest. Understanding meets understanding as a felt experience, a resonance within each person’s body.”

“A spontaneous resonance emerges between the two cores, like a vibratory ‘buzz,’ the essence of contact itself.”

The felt-sense of connecting authentically

  • We experience a deepened sense of intimacy.
  • We open to each other without losing inward contact with ourselves.
  • We feel more directly met, and more able to meet another.
  • Our contact becomes more subtle, immediate, and real.
  • Resonance begins to emerge within the relational field between us.
  • Limits to our contact and communication begin to dissolve.
  • Conflict can soften and clarify within the unified space of fundamental consciousness.
  • Our spiritual realization deepens through genuine contact with one another.

Embodying Wholeness

“”To become enlightened is to move from a
fragmented experience of life to a unified experience.”
– Judith Blackstone

“Wholeness is not a vague ideal, but a lived experience. It is a potential, inherent in our human nature. To be whole is to be conscious and in contact with ourselves everywhere in our body, to live within our body. When we inhabit our body, we experience ourselves as an undivided consciousness, a subtle, unified ground of consciousness, pervading our whole body and our environment, at the same time.” — Trauma and the Unbound Body

When we embody our wholeness, our thoughts, emotions, sensations, and perceptions occur as a unity. Our senses function as a unity. Our actions spring from a single source of understanding, emotion, and physical sensation. Even the smallest movement of our body, as we turn our head or gesture with our hands, carries the full breadth of our human capacities. So, for example, we can experience love and intelligence in our arms and legs; we can hear with our whole body, heart, and mind.

To be in contact with our body is, at the same time, to be open to our environment. Everywhere that we are in contact with ourselves within our body, we are alive and responsive to the world around us. This produces a lived experience of continuity and connection with everything and everyone that we encounter.

Yet, even though this fundamental, unified ground of our being is right here, as simple to reach as living within our own body, most human beings never experience it. Even though our basic nature is wholeness, somehow we become divided. This is because the traumatic events that occur in all human lives cause us to fragment and diminish our ability to live fully within our body.

There are two types of trauma: extreme events, such as severe injury or abuse, that impacts us with great force, and relational trauma that everyone faces, especially i childhood, when ordinary events may be too abrasive or confusing for to fully absorb them. In general, relational trauma consists of small painful events that are repeated over time, while extreme trauma can occur just once in order to have a lasting impact on us. Both types of trauma have a shattering effect on us. In reaction to traumatic events, both big and small, we constrict and fragment our body and withdraw our consciousness from tose parts of our body. We organize ourselves in ways that dampen the impact of intolerable experience or that restrain those aspects of our own behavior and personality that have brought us harm.

These patterns of constriction and belief form throughout childhood, in relation to our immediate family and to our peers at scool. We also constrict ourselves in reaction to abrasive sensory stimuli in our environment.

Although most relational trauma occurs in childhood when we have less perspective with which to assimilate events and less freedom to leave traumatic circumstances, as adults, we can also be traumatized by ongoing abusive relationships or by overwhelmingly painful events. Someone who is constantly denigrated, for example, by a spouse or boss at work may react in the same way as a child does to an abusive sibling or adult, by forming lasting beliefs about themselves and others and creating chrornic bodily patterns of contraction that express these negative beliefs or that protect against the full impact of the abuse.

Because children also mirror the patterns of constriction in their parents’ bodies, we embody not only our reactions to our own trauma, but we take on some of our ancestors’ reactions to their trauma as well. This is one of the ways in which trauma is passed down from one generation to the next.

When the mind is unbounded and free from all concepts, including time and space, the body is experienced as luminous and self-aware. Refining and integrating the breath/energy systems of the body and refining and unifying the senses allows us to stabilize in our nondual realization. We can experience ourselves as fundamental consciousness unwaveringly. The ongoing, effortless embodied realization is that we are of the same luminous essence, a subtle unified ground of consciousness, as everything in nature. We can experience a sheer transparency: a shining from within, as if each cell of the body is lit up from within.

Simultaneously, we experience that every part of our body, and every function of our body, has a feel to it. Our intelligence has a quality that we can feel within our heads. Our voice, or potential to speak, has a quality that we can feel within our throats. We can feel the quality of our power, or personal strength, within our midsection, and the quality of our gender within our pelvis. Our whole body is an instrument of experiencing.

Our actions spring from a single source of understanding, emotion, and physical sensation. Even the smallest movement of our body, as we turn our head or gesture with our hands, carries the full breadth of our human capacities. For example, we experience love and intelligence in our arms or legs; we hear with our whole body, heart and mind.

Thoughts, emotions, sensations, and perceptions occur as a unity. Our senses function as a unity. That is to say, we have a single, unified impression of life that is seen, heard, touched (felt), smelled, tasted all at the same time. The visible world is audible and the audible world is visible. For example, when we perceive the aliveness inside a branch of a tree, we experience that we are seeing-feeling-hearing it. The process of releasing our defenses and opening to fundamental consciousness reaps an unmistakable deepening of all our human qualities, such as our ability to love, to think, and to experience pleasure.

The felt-sense of embodying wholeness:

  • We experience life in a spontaneous and vivid way.
  • We heal the split between our cognitive abilities and our emotional experience.
  • Our energy moves freely through our body, without overwhelming us.
  • We gain greater access to our own thoughts, feelings, and sensations, as well as our own body’s wisdom.
  • We can cultivate our capacity for authentic love, understanding, power, self-expression, and sexuality.

Living Joyously

“Enlightenment is not something other than our humanness.
It is the fruition of our humanness.”
– Judith Blackstone

“To live in the spiritual dimension of life is to be able to truly enjoy ourselves in the innate and inseparable arenas of wisdom, love, and sensual pleasure. When people realize fundamental consciousness, they find that they can finally enjoy the full impact of their sensitivity and compassion for other people.” — The Intimate Life

The felt-sense of living joyously … Judith offers these descriptions:

  • We may be able to see the energy in our environment as movement, radiance, and color, to hear it as a subtle buzzing sound and to touch it as vibration and liveliness.
  • We may discover an internal intelligence at the basis of the body-energy-mind system, such that we know without thinking, we listen without hearing, and we see by sensing.
  • We may realize that our physical anatomy can be directed by the mind without effort, and so our whole body can soften.
  • We can know ourselves as the unchanging ground of our experience, within which specific cognitions, emotions and physical sensations occur.
  • We can experience our life itself, as existence itself. There is nothing abstract or impersonal about this feeling of life. For it is our own skin that awakens to touch, our own chest that softens and fills with love. Each moment of life registers with its full impact. Disentangled from the flow of life, we become more immersed in life. This is our most natural, relaxed condition.

Spontaneous music played by classically-trained pianist Christopher Smith after meditating with Roma

“Roma is the most amazing teacher. She has great skill at holding space, pushing and probing in the most kindest and gentlest of ways that can bring about such dramatic and subtle change simultaneously. Very few have the depth of experience, kindness, inclusiveness and generosity as Roma, whilst remaining true to herself.   It has been a truly wonderful and magical journey. Thank you.”

Louise Reader, DHP MAPHP (ACC) DIP PT

“Through her unending compassion, presence, and creativity, Roma creates a uniquely safe and supportive container for deepening and growth. I have particularly enjoyed and benefited from Roma’s dynamic teaching style – her ability to respond to the needs and shifts within the group with incredible sensitivity and grace. The space felt relaxed, and I found that Roma’s personal touches and clear passion for this work went a long way.”

Jason von Halle

“The very best teachers are not preoccupied by their title of teacher. The very best teachers are fueled by the student’s experience of unwinding contractions to experience the vastness of who we are. Roma is fierce in her commitment to enable her students and tender in her step-by-step instructions.”

Kathleen Clancy, Psychologist

“I can’t even imagine finding anyone else that I would trust to teach me these kinds of practices. My family no longer triggers me. Love and safety live in my body.”

Forrest Bennett, Computer Scientist

“You are the only person I named teacher. Our sessions bring me to where I want to be, where I feel that I belong. You give me the tools and the map and the courage to go down the path I know I belong. I’ve so much gratitude and trust in you.”

Be'erit Konforty

“Every cell in my body is being lit up by joy. My body calibrates to the light in your being. You are the mirror I never had to help me connect to myself. I see you as a teacher of the language of the soul.”

Louise Bielenstein, Coordinator, Stockholm City