Shift into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness

most types of meditation currently studied are only the introductory practices from traditions in which awakening is the goal.

culturally unacknowledged.

The Dzogchen tradition refers to four progressive stages of recognition, realization, stabilization, and expression.

Why stop there?

You can be more developed in psychological structure-stages or consciousness-based state-stages, and many people focus on either meditation or psychology, as if one will somehow include the other naturally. We cannot see our structures of psychological development by focusing on internal meditation states. Your meditation experience will be interpr

Waking-in is where waking-up meets growing up.

Identity moves from ego to self to Being. This awake-identity process is only available when growing up and waking-up meet. The awake-identity stage of development allows us to detox our repressed emotional storehouses and rewire our brains so that we can respond to life rather than merely reacting.

Some people need to feel the fire at their backsides—the sting of heat and the fear of getting burned—before they’re willing to let go of old ego defenses and shift into a new sense of being.

Upon initially waking-up, we are free of much of the internal suffering of egoic craving, aversion, worry, and depression. However, we can get spaced out, remaining detached from the ability to live a fully embodied human life. Until you can continue to wake in and wake out, you can remain ethically relative and emotionally detached.