Realization Process

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

The Realization Process is a path of embodied nondual awakening—a way of coming home to the subtle ground of our own being and discovering that this same ground pervades the world around us.

As we inhabit the internal space of the body, we begin to experience ourselves not as separate from life, but as vibrantly alive, substantive, and secure—awake and responsive to the world around us.

This realization transforms how we live. We become more present in our bodies, more intimate with our own experience, and increasingly able to meet life from the depth of our being—disentangled from the flow of events, yet more fully immersed in the impact of each moment.

The passages below are direct quotes from Judith Blackstone’s books, offered as invitations into the direct experiencing of our true nature.

Awaken to Your True Nature

Enlightenment is the realization, the lived experience,
that unconditioned consciousness is our fundamental nature.

Although enlightenment is no more mysterious than many other human experiences, such as our ability to love or to create, it is more rare. It only occurs as we reach a particular degree of sensitivity or openness to life. Most books about spirituality focus on more common spiritual experiences, such as the ability to feel compassion for other people, or to be attentive to the present moment. Yet I have found that many people are capable, with some practice, of the experience described here. This is the realization, or unveiling, of a subtle dimension of consciousness pervading our own being and everything around us as a luminous whole. It is the experience of the luminous transparency of ourselves and our environment, and the fullness and vividness of being that occurs with it.

— The Enlightenment Process

The Light of Consciousness

The experience of our fundamental, unified dimension of consciousness is uncreated; it arises spontaneously as we relinquish our constraints on ourselves. Enlightenment is the laying bare of our own human nature, and yet it is extraordinary. It means to experience oneself and the world as made of the light of consciousness.

Enlightenment—the experience of one’s own nature as subtle, unified consciousness—is revealed through deeply inhabiting one’s body. Through this internal contact with our body, we come alive within our own skin, at the same time that we experience ourselves as open and unified with everything around us. This means that our tangible sense of existing in our distinct form develops as we transcend our distinct form. Although it seems paradoxical, we become more present and authentic at the same time as we become more permeable and transparent.

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 experience of living in the dimension of fundamental consciousness is a radical shift from a fragmented perception of “I” and “other” to an experience of our inner and outer life occurring in a single, unbroken expanse. Barriers between our self and our experience that we may not even have known were there dissolve, and we find ourselves in immediate, vivid contact with life.

Although enlightenment is a vivid, tangible experience of being alive, to describe it always sounds abstract, until you have experienced it yourself.

—The Enlightenment Process

The True, Whole “I”

As we realize fundamental consciousness, we gain the clearest and least contrived experience that we can have of ourselves and our environment. This does not necessarily mean that our interpretations of events will be correct, or that there is any absolute truth as to how events should be interpreted. Rather, our perceptions, and our experience of our thoughts, emotions, and sensations become clear, as if they emerged directly out of the clear space of fundamental consciousness.

Instead of diminishing the impact of experience through patterns of defense or fantasy, we can allow life to happen just as it is. 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.

— The Enlightenment Process

The Undivided Ground of Our Being

Fundamental consciousness is experienced as radiant stillness. The more fully we know ourselves as this undivided stillness, the more freely and fluidly all of the changing content of our experience—the movement of our thoughts, emotions, sensations, and perceptions—can flow and change.

As we uncover the undivided ground of our being, we come to experience the stillness of fundamental consciousness and the movement of life, at the same time.

Rather than feeling otherworldly or ethereal, the realization of fundamental consciousness emerges with a tangible sense of truth. It really does feel like awakening. But it is only awakening to our own nature that has been here all along.

We do not experience this ground of our being as an object. Rather, fundamental consciousness is conscious of itself. As fundamental consciousness, we know ourselves as fundamental consciousness.

— The Embodiment Workbook for Women

Being Ourselves

The practice of embodying our essential self is not about becoming someone different than who we are. It is about becoming more fully who we already are. It is about uncovering and expressing our authentic self. It is about living from our wholeness rather than our fragmentation. It is about being present in our life with all of who we are.

When we realize ourselves as fundamental consciousness, we do not disappear. Just the opposite. We come, increasingly, to a sense of truly being ourselves.

As the false self dissolves, we uncover our ability to see and hear with our own eyes, to really feel whatever we are touching. We uncover the ring of truth in our own voice. We have direct access to whatever we are knowing and feeling in each moment.

To know ourselves as the subtle ground of our being is a distinct shift from fragmentation to wholeness, but it is who we actually are.

— The Fullness of the Ground / Trauma and the Unbound Body

A Lasting Refinement of Consciousness, A Lasting Transformation of Being

There is a distinction between our ordinary mind before and after enlightenment. When we are enlightened, our consciousness pervades our own body and everything around us. This is a more subtle dimension of consciousness than the usual condition of our ordinary mind.

Enlightenment is not a momentary alteration of consciousness that one goes to and returns from. For this reason, it also differs from the state of being hypnotized, and the trance state. Enlightenment is a clear, alert, but very subtle perception of the present moment based on a lasting refinement of consciousness.

Some people do have their first entry into enlightenment as a peak experience, a kensho or satori, in which they are dazzled by the sudden shift into the unity of fundamental consciousness. And some have had sudden deepenings of enlightenment as well, in which they abruptly experience much more of the space of fundamental consciousness than before. But enlightenment itself is not a temporary, nor a particularly charged emotional state. It is a lasting transformation of our being, involving our ongoing experience of life.

There is a definitive difference between being in the dimension of fundamental consciousness and not being in it. Some people notice this difference suddenly, while others, once they do notice it, feel that they have been there for a while without registering or naming it. One may lose the realization of fundamental consciousness and get it back several times before it becomes stable. But once we do become stable in our realization, we continue to live there, while our realization very gradually deepens and expands. This means that our experience of fundamental consciousness gradually pervades more of our body, increasing our sense of internal depth and openness, and our sense of oneness with our environment.

— The Enlightenment Process

  • We experience ourself and the world as made of the light of consciousness
  • We become more permeable and transparent.
  • We become more present and authentic.
  • We come alive within our own skin.
  • We experience ourselves as open and unified with everything around us.
  • Barriers between our self and our experience dissolve.
  • We find ourselves in immediate, vivid contact with life.
  • We experience the stillness of fundamental consciousness and the movement of life, at the same time.

Clear the Space

Spiritual realization is … always a clearing away, a letting go of
the holding patterns and beliefs that obscure our true nature. 

As fundamental consciousness, we let go of our grip on ourselves and our environment. We allow ourselves to experience the clarity of our thoughts, and the full impact of our emotions, physical sensations and perceptions. This is freedom, freedom from our own constricting grasp on our body and being. It is disentangled from the movement of life, allowing that movement to flow without obstruction.

— The Fullness of the Ground

Unconsciousness

Fundamental consciousness is not something we create, it appears spontaneously as we reach a particular degree of sensitivity and depth of inward contact with ourselves. However, there is much that we can do to increase our sensitivity and depth of contact. The received nature of fundamental consciousness does not mean that it is separate from our own nature, from the core of our own being. After all, we receive every part of our anatomy, as well as our capacity to feel, think, and sense. Although this acceptance of life is helpful, even necessary for the openness of enlightenment, for most people it is not sufficient for uncovering the subtle, pervasive expansive of fundamental consciousness. There are unconscious bindings in our body, energy, and mind that limit our reception of the present moment, regardless of how attentive and accepting we are.

— The Intimate Life

The Body Contracts Around Experience

As children, we’re organizing ourselves in reaction to our childhood environment. So when we’re protecting ourselves against the unpredictability or the anger or loss that is going on in our childhood in each moment, we actually contract the instrument of our being. We contract our body in order to dampen the impact of that experience—both to dampen what’s coming towards us from the outside and to control our own responses, if those responses are not going to be met with love and empathy.

For example, we can’t keep ourselves from crying without tightening the anatomy involved in crying. We can’t keep ourselves from feeling anger without tightening our bodies. These are not just mental processes. These are processes that involve the whole body.

All of us—every single one of us—grow up with a particular organization of constrictions in our body. They are unconscious. Unless they are extremely severe, we can go about living perfectly ordinary lives in those constricted bodies. It’s the human condition.

—The Enlightenment Process

Constriction Obscures Reality

The rigid distortions of the false self become, over time, static patterns of tension in the body that literally trap us in their limiting patterns. They are densities in the tissues of our body. These densities obscure our realization of fundamental consciousness. They block our access to the vertical core of the body, and they obstruct our spontaneous, direct experience of life.

We can live almost entirely in our own world, thickly coloring everything we see with our imagination and with our desires, fears, and aversions. Or we can become increasingly open to the world around us, and increasingly attuned to fundamental consciousness as the ground level of our experience.

Another way of saying this is that as fundamental consciousness, we perceive life with less subjective distortion. It is a subjective experience of life, but relatively free from fantasy. We feel that we have become more real and that our perception of our environment has become more true.

Fundamental consciousness is the basis of our most direct, unfiltered contact with life.

— Trauma and the Unbound Body

Releasing the Body, Revealing the Ground

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. In order for us to experience this consciousness, we have to be this consciousness. 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.

— Trauma and the Unbound Body / The Fullness of the Ground

Holding Patterns Distort Contact With Ourselves and Others

We cannot truly understand human development – or the dimension of spiritual oneness – unless we understand how the body is involved in the process of spiritual realization. The body can be experienced as physical matter, as energy or as consciousness. Our most subtle and clear experience of the body is that it is made of consciousness. This is the integration of body and mind. It means that we have inward contact with the whole internal space of our body.

These holding patterns, especially those that are ongoing, impede and distort our contact with ourselves and with other people. They diminish our awareness, emotion, and sensation.

— The Intimate Life

Clearing Awareness

As we reach the all-pervasive dimension of consciousness, we realize that our awareness is an all-pervasive stillness. But within this stillness, our thoughts move freely and spontaneously. It is the nature of essential awareness to know.

Most people have defensive holding patterns and habitual ways of being that produce constriction in their heads.

Wherever we are in contact with the internal space of our body — wherever we inhabit our body — we become open to life.

— The Intimate Life

Clearing Emotional Binding

No one reaches adulthood without some degree of emotional constriction. We defend ourselves against feeling emotional pain by arresting the energetic flow of our emotions.

In this way, we actually hold old grief, anger, and fear within our organism. These bound emotions color our present experience.

As fundamental consciousness, we are, in a sense, deeper than our emotional binding. By finding this subtle dimension within the binding, we can more easily unravel the held pattern.

— The Intimate Life

Clearing Physical Constriction

Without the quality of physical sensation, our experience of the world lacks texture and tactile pleasure. Our intimacy with other people lacks sensual pleasure. And without this essential aspect of ourselves, our realization of fundamental consciousness is always fragmented.

Fundamental consciousness is a dimension of wholeness.

To live in the spiritual dimension of life is to be able to truly enjoy ourselves in the innate and inseparate areas of wisdom, love, and sensual pleasure.

— The Intimate Life

Fundamental consciousness is not something we create, it appears spontaneously as we reach a particular degree of sensitivity and depth of inward contact with ourselves. However, there is much that we can do to incraese our sensitivity and depth of contact. The received nature of fundamental consciousness does not mean that it is separate from our own nature, from the core of our own being. After all, we receive every part of our anatomy, as well as our capacity to feel, think, and sense.

The Body Contracts Around Experience

As children, we’re organizing ourselves in reaction to our childhood environment. So when we’re protecting ourselves against the unpredictability or the anger or loss that is going on in our childhood in each moment, we actually contract the instrument of our being. We contract our body in order to dampen the impact of that experience—both to dampen what’s coming towards us from the outside and to control our own responses, if those responses are not going to be met with love and empathy.

For example, we can’t keep ourselves from crying without tightening the anatomy involved in crying. We can’t keep ourselves from feeling anger without tightening our bodies. These are not just mental processes. These are processes that involve the whole body.

All of us—every single one of us—grow up with a particular organization of constrictions in our body. They are unconscious. Unless they are extremely severe, we can go about living perfectly ordinary lives in those constricted bodies. It’s the human condition.

—The Enlightenment Process

Constriction Obscures Reality

The rigid distortions of the false self become, over time, static patterns of tension in the body that literally trap us in their limiting patterns. They are densities in the tissues of our body. These densities obscure our realization of fundamental consciousness. They block our access to the vertical core of the body, and they obstruct our spontaneous, direct experience of life.

We can live almost entirely in our own world, thickly coloring everything we see with our imagination and with our desires, fears, and aversions. Or we can become increasingly open to the world around us, and increasingly attuned to fundamental consciousness as the ground level of our experience.

Another way of saying this is that as fundamental consciousness, we perceive life with less subjective distortion. It is a subjective experience of life, but relatively free from fantasy. We feel that we have become more real and that our perception of our environment has become more true.

Fundamental consciousness is the basis of our most direct, unfiltered contact with life.

— Trauma and the Unbound Body

Releasing the Body, Revealing the Ground

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. In order for us to experience this consciousness, we have to be this consciousness. 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.

— Trauma and the Unbound Body / The Fullness of the Ground

Holding Patterns Distort Contact With Ourselves and Others

We cannot truly understand human development – or the dimension of spiritual oneness – unless we understand how the body is involved in the process of spiritual realization. The body can be experienced as physical matter, as energy or as consciousness. Our most subtle and clear experience of the body is that it is made of consciousness. This is the integration of body and mind. It means that we have inward contact with the whole internal space of our body.

These holding patterns, especially those that are ongoing, impede and distort our contact with ourselves and with other people. They diminish our awareness, emotion, and sensation.

— The Intimate Life

Clearing Awareness

As we reach the all-pervasive dimension of consciousness, we realize that our awareness is an all-pervasive stillness. But within this stillness, our thoughts move freely and spontaneously. It is the nature of essential awareness to know.

Most people have defensive holding patterns and habitual ways of being that produce constriction in their heads.

Wherever we are in contact with the internal space of our body — wherever we inhabit our body — we become open to life.

— The Intimate Life

Clearing Emotional Binding

No one reaches adulthood without some degree of emotional constriction. We defend ourselves against feeling emotional pain by arresting the energetic flow of our emotions.

In this way, we actually hold old grief, anger, and fear within our organism. These bound emotions color our present experience.

As fundamental consciousness, we are, in a sense, deeper than our emotional binding. By finding this subtle dimension within the binding, we can more easily unravel the held pattern.

— The Intimate Life

Clearing Physical Constriction

Without the quality of physical sensation, our experience of the world lacks texture and tactile pleasure. Our intimacy with other people lacks sensual pleasure. And without this essential aspect of ourselves, our realization of fundamental consciousness is always fragmented.

Fundamental consciousness is a dimension of wholeness.

To live in the spiritual dimension of life is to be able to truly enjoy ourselves in the innate and inseparate areas of wisdom, love, and sensual pleasure.

— The Intimate Life

  • We begin to notice where we are holding, bracing, or constricting within our body.
  • We begin to feel how these patterns shape our breath, posture, emotions, thoughts, and perception of the world around us.
  • As these holding patterns soften, there is more internal space, ease, and breath.
  • Our environment appears more vivid and unified; we feel that we are perceiving our world clearly and directly.
  • Instead of living partially in the past, we can live more wholly in the present moment.

Heal from the Core

Just as we can open a fist to reveal a hand, our unbound,
unconstructed being can emerge from our pain and breathe again.

All of our constrictions are moments of our past that we have stopped in their tracks and held in that way, unconsciously. They are frozen moments of our past. But what is frozen can unfreeze, can become fluid. When we focus within these rigidities, we can free this moment and then inhabit those parts of our body that have been lost to us. Instead of living partially in the past, we can live more wholly in the present moment.

— Trauma and the Unbound Body

The Unwounded Core

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

As you focus more deeply inward, it is possible that you may uncover painful memories, or release painful emotions that have been bound within your body since childhood. Sometimes people feel fear of the unknown, of letting go of their protective grip on themselves, of shedding their constructed identity. The most common emotion is relief… crying with the relief of coming home to themselves, of fitting within their body, and knowing themselves as whole but also as deeply connected with everything around them.

— The Fullness of the Ground

Living Bound in the Past

As long as our body, energy, and consciousness are bound up in the past, they are not available for present experience. We are unable to inhabit our body, to fully pervade our body as our essential self, as long as these contractions or densities of memory and emotional pain are held in our body.

The bound emotional pain in our body also colors or ‘haunts’ all of our experience. For example, someone who is repeatedly criticized as a child may close the tissues of his body around his feeling of shame, in order to keep from feeling it. He may then hold an image of himself as a worthless person or a compensatory image of himself as a superior person, or both. He may form a rigid belief that if people get to know him, they will also be critical of him, and may then avoid close relationships with people.

Or someone who felt abandoned as a child may close her heart around her grief and cover this feeling with an attitude of apathy, or of sentimentalized love for others which is not, and cannot be, actually felt in her heart. She may also carry a dimly conscious belief that life is inherently sad, and that one can never be truly loved.

The human imagination provides a multitude of variations on the themes of defense, compensation, and belief. These patterns do not only produce fragmentations within our body, but also between ourselves and our environment.

— The Enlightenment Process

Releasing Distortions of the False Self

As children, we distort our true responses and needs in order to become the child that our parents will recognize and appreciate, and to protect ourselves from feeling abandoned, misunderstood, shamed, deprived, etc. The false self [a shifting of the center of gravity of inside to outside] does not develop in isolation. It is a distortion of the self in interaction with the environment—an entanglement of self and other.

The false self is a constriction of our whole being, including our mental and emotional functioning, and our physical body. This constriction creates gaps in our ability to experience life, which are “filled in” with false images, compensatory attitudes, and inaccurate beliefs about ourselves and our environment. These false images, attitudes, and beliefs, although unconscious or barely conscious, influence all of our life choices.

The bound emotional pain in our body also colors or “haunts” all of our experience. For example, someone who is repeatedly criticized as a child may close the tissues of his body around his feeling of shame, in order to keep from feeling it. He may then hold an image of himself as a worthless person, or a compensatory image of himself as a superior person, or both. He may form a rigid belief that if people get to know him, they will also be critical of him, and may then avoid close relationships with people. Or someone who felt abandoned as a child may close her heart around her grief and cover this feeling with an attitude of apathy, or of sentimentalized love for others which is not, and cannot be, actually felt in her heart. She may also carry a dimly conscious belief that life is inherently sad, and that one can never be truly loved.

The rigid distortions of the false self become, over time, static patterns of tension in the body that literally trap us in their limiting patterns. They are densities in the tissues of our body. These densities obscure our realization of fundamental consciousness. They block our access to the vertical core of the body, and they obstruct our spontaneous, direct experience of life. They keep us reacting to the world as we reacted—out of what was then necessity–in our family of origin.

— The Enlightenment Process

Reclaiming Agency and Self-Trust

By inhabiting the body, we can experience our own agency. Agency, the ability to know what we want to do and then do it, is an innate aspect of ourselves that we often lose when we are overpowered. We can also be overpowered in a slow, chronic way, by being told repeatedly that our own perception and understanding is not accurate or simply does not matter. We can be overpowered by not being heard or by not being valued. Whether the trauma is severe or mild and chronic, the result may be the same. We lose our ability to experience a feeling of wanting something, to know what it is that we want, and then to go toward it.

The loss of agency from trauma also stems from a sense of having failed oneself, of having allowed a terrible thing to happen to oneself. Whatever the reason, the self-blame that may occur with trauma may also rob us of our trust in ourselves.

— Trauma and the Unbound Body

Coming Alive Within the Body

As we release these organizations in our fascia, we have a greater sense of our internal volume, of taking up space. We gain more of our being, and this means that we actually feel more alive.

— Trauma and the Unbound Body

Reclaiming Wholeness

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.

— Trauma and the Unbound Body

  • We have a felt sense of coming to life—of becoming fully born—within our body.
  • We wake from numbness in our sensations, heart, and awareness.
  • We regain parts of ourselves that have been diminished or lost to us.
  • Our childhood pain has less effect on our present-day experience.
  • As we release the bound energy of past grief, anger, and fear, we gain emotional depth and fluidity in response to the current events of our life.

Open to Intimacy

To love life, and in particular, to love other human beings,
is one of the central ideals of every spiritual tradition.

Love is part of our own essential nature, somehow hidden or enfolded within us. Our desire and our efforts to love uncover our mysterious wound of separation from this authentic core of life. For this reason, our relationships can become spiritual pathways; they can help us realize the spiritual essence of ourselves.

— The Intimate Life

The Realization of Our True Nature Transforms All of Our Relationships

The spiritual essence of life is our most subtle, fundamental dimension of consciousness. It is experienced (or experiences itself) as vast space, pervading our own form and everything else that we experience, even physical space itself. It is therefore the basis of unity within our own being, our internal wholeness. And it is the basis of the unity of our own being with everything around us. It is an unbroken dimension, a dimension of wholeness and stillness that, when we attune to it, is co-existent with the movement of life. Spiritual realization is not just a matter of uplifting our mood or changing our behaviors and beliefs. It means that we enter into and experience ourselves as the spiritual foundation of existence.

We can therefore experience oneness with another person while remaining attuned to our own internal being. Spiritual oneness is not a loss of self in the other, not the merging of identities that is so often a problem for people in relationships. In the dimension of our spiritual essence, we grow simultaneously toward wholeness in our body and oneness with other people.

— The Intimate Life

Contact

Wherever we inhabit our body, we are both in contact with ourselves and open to our surroundings. We experience the present moment occurring within and outside of our body, at the same time. This deepened inward contact… also deepens and enhances our contact with other people, and with all of nature.

— The Fullness of the Ground

Connecting in the Dimension of Our Spiritual Essence

When we live in this dimension, we have a felt sense of both our internal experience and our oneness with the life around us. We can therefore experience oneness with another person while remaining attuned to our own internal being.

Spiritual oneness is not a loss of self in the other, not the merging of identities that is so often a problem for people in relationships. It is a unity and continuity of two individual people. In the dimension of our spiritual essence, we grow simultaneously toward wholeness within our own body and oneness with other people.

It is through inward contact with our own organism that we become capable of true contact with other people. Wherever we cannot contact our internal being, we are not available for contact with other people.

As we become more in contact with ourselves and others, we also become more open to the spiritual dimension of life.

— The Intimate Life

Love Asks Us to Deepen Our Capacity for True Contact

Love is one of life’s greatest challenges. It requires the ability for true contact. And contact requires us to be authentic and deeply in touch with ourselves. Every aspect of ourselves is capable of contact. We can contact another human being with our touch, gaze, and voice—and even with the subtle vibrations of our emotions, physical sensations, and awareness. We all crave this contact instinctively, for everything that it reaches becomes awake, alive.

The question addressed in this book is how we can deepen this capacity for contact, how we can become more adept at love. By love, I do not just mean love between intimate partners, but the warm, dynamic response of our heart to the world around us.

— The Intimate Life

The Deepest Contact

If we do not include relationships in our spiritual practice, we often lose our realization as soon as we encounter another human being. But if we have practiced relating with other people in fundamental consciousness, we can maintain our spiritual realization in our daily lives, so that it is not a temporary peak experience, but a lasting transformation of consciousness.

Fundamental consciousness is a relational field, a unity of self and other. Spiritual oneness is the absolute balance of inward and outward contact. It is the deepest contact we can have with our own self and with everyone and everything that we encounter.

It means that we are able to see through the surface of people and things to their essence. When we touch a plant, an animal, or another human being, we can feel the streaming of the life force and the responsiveness of the subtle intelligence and love within them. We can experience that our own essence of sensation, love, and awareness resonates with the same essential qualities of everything around us.

— The Intimate Life

Relating Core-to-Core

[There are] several ways that couples can enter into the oneness of fundamental consciousness together. One of the ways is through a subtle channel that runs through the vertical core of the body. This channel is the center of the chakra system in Hindu Yoga and is called sushumna. In Buddhism, it is called “the central channel.”

To find this subtle core of the body, you can focus inward towards your spine from the front of your body, as deeply as you can without strain. Finding the subtle core of the body requires not just depth of focus, but also subtlety. It is a subtle inward attunement to ourselves. It needs to be located through the “feel” of it. it has an electrical quality, a subtle vibratory “buzz.”

The subtle core of our body is both our deepest connection with ourselves and the basis of our oneness with other people. In the dimension of spiritual oneness, partners can relate with each other “core-to-core. ” This releases a flow of subtle energies between them, which provides a nonverbal foundation for communication..

— The Intimate Life

Experiencing a Mutual Transparency Together

Another way that couples can enter into fundamental consciousness together is by attuning to the essential qualities of this dimension. Fundamental consciousness can be experienced as emptiness, as the clear-through transparency of our own body and of everything that we experience in our environment. When two people attune to this pervasive emptiness together, they experience a mutual transparency of themselves and each other.

Connecting with Each Other Through Three Pathways Simultaneously

Fundamental consciousness can also be attuned to as presence. This presence aspect of fundamental consciousness is not simply empty; it is rich with the essential qualities of being. In this book, I divide the presence aspect of fundamental consciousness into three qualities: awareness, emotion, and physical sensation. These are ongoing, unchanging qualities; they make up the unchanging stillness of our spiritual dimension. Specific and constantly changing awarenesses, emotions, and physical sensations arise and end within this unchanging ground of our being. Awareness, emotion, and physical sensation are also the three major pathways of our contact with other people. As we realize the spiritual foundation of life, we experience contact with other people as a continuity of these three essential qualities. Most people have more access to some of these qualities than others. For example, they may be able to experience emotional contact with another human being, but physical sensation is more difficult. When two people feel out of contact with each other, or when they reach an impasse in their communication, it is often because they are each open to different aspects of contact. But fundamental consciousness is a dimension of wholeness. When we realize this subtle ground, we can connect with other people through all three pathways at once. Also, the process of two people opening to each other in the realms of sensation, emotion, and awareness can facilitate the realization of spiritual oneness for both of them.

Fundamental consciousness is a relational field. For this reason, a defensive constriction in the head limits our awareness, and it also produces a constriction throughout our whole being. Likewise, releasing a constriction in our head will deepen our capacity for awareness and produce more openness throughout our whole being.

Along with specific holding patterns in each of the three aspects of experience – awareness, emotion, and physical sensation – we also create artificial fragmentations between them. We separate our awareness from our emotions, our emotions from our physical (and sexual) sensations, and so on. As we reach the spiritual dimension of ourselves, we are able to perceive, think, feel, and sense at the same time. Each moment of our life registers as a unity of perception, cognition, emotion, and sensation. This enriches all of our interactions with other people. For example, our physical contact with other people is integrated with emotion and awareness. This enables us to have a more intimate relationship with another person.

The Pleasure and Fulfillment of Contact

In the dimension of fundamental consciousness, intimate partners begin to know each other, to experience each other, through the whole internal depth of their being. This is immensely satisfying, because it is the goal of our driving hunger for contact with other life.

This contact—the ability to feel genuine love for another person, to experience the mental excitement of two minds meeting and the pleasure of unguarded physical sensation—is among the greatest rewards of spiritual awakening.

We all crave this contact instinctively, for everything that it reaches becomes awake, alive. It brings a sense of aliveness, of meaning, and of participation in life itself.

In this way, relationships become a direct pathway into the realization of our own essence and the living expression of that essence in the world.

— The Intimate Life

  • When we attune to the pervasive emptiness of fundamental consciousness together, we experience a mutual transparency of ourselves and each other.
  • We experience a subtle resonance, a subtle vibratory buzz in the core of our body, that provides a nonverbal foundation for communication.
  • We experience spiritual oneness not as a loss of self in the other nor as the merging of identities but as a unity and continuity of two individual people.
  • We experience a mutuality of touch, a “touching back,” that is an automatic, spontaneous result of the meeting of two conscious beings.
  • We experience the mental excitement of two minds meeting and the pleasure of unguarded physical sensation.

Embody Wholeness

To be whole is to be conscious and in contact with ourselves
everywhere in our body, to live within our body.

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 or our legs; we can hear with our whole body, heart, and mind.

— Trauma and the Unbound Body

Being Whole

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.

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.

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.

— The Enlightenment Process / Trauma and the Unbound Body

The Felt-Sense

We experience ourselves as whole… an internal coherence occurs within our body… that we experience as internal wholeness. We know our edges, even though those edges are made of empty space. We know ourselves as a separate transparency within the transparency that is everywhere. We are in contact with our whole being at once… a felt sense of being—of living—everywhere in our body. To inhabit the body is to be at ease within our own skin.

 

 

 

 

Living Inside the Temple of the Body

If we say that the body is a temple then you are living inside the temple with nothing left out. Even your toes and fingers and nose are inside the temple. This means that you are making contact with yourself everywhere in your body at once.

Let yourself experience how you take up space living within your body. Let yourself experience your aliveness in your whole body. See if you can feel comfortable and at home within your body.

— Trauma and the Unbound Body

Taking Up Space as a Living Presence

As fundamental consciousness we’re able to experience our body as made of empty space as if we were an empty vessel. We are open to life in the same way that a window can be open, rather than shut. We are pure receptivity. However, we can also experience this same internal unified ground as presence – a palpable sense of aliveness, of our own existence. Having an experience of our internal volume, we feel that we take up space. We know ourselves as a living presence in the world.

This tangible sense of existing can help heal the fragility that we often feel as a result of trauma. It gives us the ability to feel that our own existence has equal ‘weight’ or equal potency to the existence of other people so that we do not feel displaced or overpowered by them.

— Trauma and the Unbound Body

The Innate Qualities of Being

As presence, we can feel that we are made of innate qualities of being. By innate, I mean unconstructed. We do not have to learn these qualities; we uncover them. The more inward contact we have with our body, the more richly we experience each of these qualities.

Each part of the internal space of our body has a palpable, distinctive quality. We can feel the quality of our intelligence when we inhabit our head. We can experience the quality of our love in our chest, even when we are not actively loving someone or something. We can feel the quality of sexuality and gender within our pelvis. Our personal strength or power has a quality that naturally arises as we inhabit our midsection. And we can even experience the quality of our voice, our potential to speak, when we inhabit our throat.

— The Fullness of the Ground

Separateness and Oneness

As emptiness, we can experience that there is no demarcation at all between ourselves and the space that pervades our whole environment. We experience ourselves as clear-through empty space. But as presence, we can also experience ourselves as possessing permeable but clear boundaries between ourselves and our environment. Inhabiting our body as a whole produces a felt sense of ourselves as a complete form, distinct from other forms.

This means that we are able to feel separate from the world around us and still be open and responsive. As this separate, internally unified form, we experience our individuality and our ownership of our thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions. We experience self-possession.

— The Fullness of the Ground

Whole, Intact, and Resilient

Inhabiting the body is also important for healing from trauma because it makes us more resilient to external stimulation, such as abrasive sounds or other people’s intense emotions. Instead of feeling that sensory or emotional stimuli impinge on us sharply, we have an internal depth in which to receive and absorb the stimulation. The ground of our being, as I have said, cannot be broken. The sounds and sights and the emotional vibrations of other people pass through this unbreakable ground without shattering or displacing us. Even as our reception of life becomes more vivid and more deeply experienced, we remain present and intact.

— Trauma and the Unbound Body

  • We experience that we are conscious everywhere in our body simultaneously.
  • This consciousness is contact. We are in contact with our whole being at once.
  • We have a felt sense of being—of living—everywhere in our body.
  • We experience ourselves as possessing internal volume—of being space and taking up space.
  • We heal the split between our cognitive abilities and our emotional experience.
  • Our energy moves freely through our body, without overwhelming us.

Live Joyously

Enlightenment is not something other than our humanness.
It is the fruition of our humanness.

It is not unusual for people to find themselves crying with the relief of coming home to themselves, of fitting within their body, and knowing themselves as whole but also as deeply connected with everything around them.  Or we may shed tears at the exquisite beauty of a world pervaded by luminous space.  There may be regret for the years that we have lived without this experience, but that is usually quickly supplanted by the joy of finally being there.

—The Fullness of the Ground

Living Nonduality as a Vivid Reality

Realization is not momentary—it matures into an ongoing experience of our fundamental nature. The content of our experience is encompassed and clearly revealed by the primary dimension of our being.

There is an accessible experience of an undivided ground of being that enables us to think, feel, sense, and act at the same time, as an undivided whole. Agency, desire, preferences, talents, and continuity over time remain. Even after we have begun our realization of fundamental consciousness, we retain our human right to sing the blues, even though we are increasingly capable of joy and peace.

The path emerges as we go, marked by the deepening currents of energy in our body, the freedom of our love, and the increasing transparency of our body and environment.

— The Enlightenment Process

To receive and respond to life with our whole being enriches and expands every aspect of our experience.”

“Our emotions flow deeply through us, sights and sounds, smells and tastes register within the whole internal space of our body.”

“We are both impacted more deeply and more resilient.”

The Fullness of the Ground

As we recognize ourselves as the stillness of spiritual oneness, all of experience flows freely through us. Each moment of life registers with full impact. Disentangled from the flow of life, we become more immersed in life. In this way, we become disentangled from the flow of life as we become more immersed in life. This is our most natural, relaxed condition.

Because our essence pervades our whole body, to become attuned to it means that we become alive throughout the whole internal depth of ourselves. In his novel Fup, Jim Dodge has a character say, “If you just stand still and feel for a moment you would know how everything yearns to be wild.” To live in the subtle, spiritual ground of ourselves is to arrive at our own wild existence.

There is a reality that we twist away from and that we can return to. This truth is a dimension of reality beyond the interpretation of meanings, beyond the workings of the individual thinking mind. It is the spiritual essence, the radiant, sentient transparency, pervading everywhere. When we can access this reality, we are truly in contact with ourselves, with nature, and with other human beings.

— The Intimate Life

Our Fundamental Nature as an Inherent Birthright

At the core of everyone and everything is radiant, unbroken consciousness, the root of the universe. When we live in this core, we experience the natural oneness of the body, the essential self, and the transcendent, all-pervasive ground of fundamental consciousness.

— The Enlightenment Process

You can uncover your fundamental nature as a single expanse of consciousness embracing and pervading all of the changing content of your experience. This realization is your birthright. It is your own self-nature. You have innately within you, seated “augustly and unmoving,” the Buddha’s body, wisdom, compassion, and perception. It is your own body, your own being, unveiled. And it is well within your reach.

— The Fullness of the Ground

  • We uncover a sense of authenticity, of truly existing, that is simultaneously separate—contained within our own form—and fundamentally unified with other people and everything in our environment.
  • We may discover an internal intelligence at the basis of the body-energy-mind system, such that we know without thinking, listen without hearing, and see by sensing.
  • 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.
  • Each moment of life registers with its full impact.