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

Why stop there?

next-level practices—awareness of awareness, effortless mindfulness, and heart mindfulness—offer similar benefits in terms of stress relief and focus, they’re primarily designed to relieve the root of suffering caused by ego-identification and to help us access our natural potential for joy, wellbeing, and living from an embodied flow state.

Contemporary teacher of awakening, Adyashanti, describes stages of “head awakening, heart awakening, gut awakening, and root awakening.”

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? MARY OLIVER, FROM “THE SUMMER DAY”1

The Relationship between Waking-Up and Growing Up It’s important to develop psychologically and to progress through levels of consciousness. Ken Wilber says, “Stages are how we grow up; states are how we wake up.”3 Wilber calls the way we progress through levels of consciousness “state-stages,” and the way of moving through our developmental stages

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.

Instead, we’re also interconnected with all life, the same way a wave is inseparable from the ocean.

You can wake up, but still not grow up.

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.