One of the most significant growth that a being goes through is the growth towards finding a conscious balance, what I also call coming to a place of inner wholeness. This “balance” is about integrating the light and dark nature (yin/yang) component in your being; this integration brings you to a place of inner wholeness, which automatically translates into an external wholeness in your personal reality. Coming to inner wholeness is a journey of growth, and in many cases, this journey is instigated by a “wake-up call”. The wake-up call is usually in the form of some unrelenting fear or emotional suffering. The very reason one ends up in a place where a wake-up call is needed is because of being unconsciously imbalanced (either towards their light nature or dark nature) in some way; in fact, as soon as you start becoming imbalanced the wake-up calls start making their presence known in your reality (like alarm bells) but it’s just that most of us don’t heed to them until they become really loud.
When the wake-up call starts sounding, the usual reaction is to try and suppress it – the way we keep hitting the snooze option on our digital alarm clock, to continue sleeping. You can, of course, suppress your wake-up call in many ways, it’s just that your imbalance keeps aggravating as you fail to heed to these wake-up calls, until you reach a point where you can no longer avoid its blaring presence. A wake-up call is simply an indication that a “growth” is needed towards inner balance. In this blog, the significant focus is on the journey towards inner wholeness, and the wake-up call towards making this journey comes through when you become deluded through certain unconscious thinking patterns, leading to an imbalance in your state of being – the more you live in these patterns of delusion, the more imbalance you accumulate, and the stronger your wake-up calls become.
(There are also calls, towards growth in your expression, that happen even after you reach inner wholeness; it’s just that the calls are felt as “inspiration” rather than coming in the form of an imbalanced/negative situation. Growth is never ending and you constantly feel inspired to re-invent yourself in some way, eternally, by your very nature. Being stagnant is not an option in the life-energy that you are)
Identifying a wake-up call
Some very common wake-up calls that a human being experiences, as an indication towards finding inner balance, are as below
– An anxiety that seems to be unrelenting in its presence. The anxiety, as an emotion, may feel “unreasonable” (having no particular reason), or it could be instigated by some event/situation in your life.
– Obsessive fear/fears created by thoughts. Some fears seem to come up out of the blue, created by some random thought that you start obsessing about. Some fears may get created by a certain interpretation that you make, about a situation, which in turn become a form of obsessive pattern in your mind.
– An event in your life (including some bodily condition like a disease) that leaves you feeling emotionally broken, lost, confused or powerless
– A nagging feeling of being stuck
– An uncontrolled behavior/response-pattern that starts creating a dysfunction in your reality
– A strong desire, for a certain manifestation, that causes you to be restless, or be in a state of restless craving
In a nut shell, any form of suffering is a wake-up call towards growth. The above forms of suffering are common indicators of a required growth towards finding an inner balance, or connecting with your inner wholeness.
Responding to a wake-up call
The unconscious response towards a wake-up call is to try and suppress it in some way through “numbing” yourself – you can do that through keeping yourself occupied in some external distraction, thus avoiding facing the uneasiness within. Other unconscious responses include the below
– Blaming the circumstances/people for your condition, and using this blame as a shield to keep yourself from facing your inner imbalance that’s attracting this situation
– Blaming yourself, thus entering into a cycle of self-hatred, self-pity, guilt and regret
– Looking for quick fixes on the outside, like drugs, alcohol, “unconscious” spirituality (what’s also called spiritual entertainment, where you try to detach yourself, or numb yourself, through finding an escape through a technique or spiritual pre-occupation), relationships, activities, used as a means of staying in a trance of pre-occupation.
– Taking some extreme steps like ending your physical life through suicide
The conscious response is to understand that it’s just a call for letting go of certain unconscious patterns of living, and thus understand that it’s simply a growth call for you as a being. The situations that are part of the wake-up call will dissolve easily the moment you respond to the growth that’s required of you. Don’t worry so much about the situation, rather just look at what the situation is pointing out within you – your patterns of thinking, your emotional accumulation/momentum, your understanding of life and your mind momentum, are at the root of any imbalance, and the wake-up call is simply an indication of this imbalance.
“Inner work” is what is required to bring forth the required growth. A lot of people tend to focus too much on trying to change their external actions (through force) instead of first working on bringing their inner space to order. The simple truth is that the external will take care of itself if you get your inner space in alignment. A wake-up call can come as an external event, but it’s reflecting an inner imbalance in you. So, instead of fighting the external situation, start looking within to observe the inner patterns of negativity/imbalance that’s attracting this wake-up call.
Below are the steps involved in bringing developing the ability for a conscious response
– Find some space to be with yourself where you are not distracted by the outside (if you can find this space for 20-30 mins a day, it should be good enough)
– Use this space to first allow your focus/attention to relax its hold on the mind and emotions. I call this entering a state of relaxed awareness. It can take some time (may be a few weeks) before you get good at being in a state of relaxed awareness
– From a place of relaxed awareness, just sense the agitation in your mind or in your emotions (in your body) without getting hooked on it. The point of relaxed awareness is to ensure that you stay more like an “open space” rather being hooked/narrowed down on a thought or emotion. You don’t have to watch thoughts in a rigid manner, just allow yourself awareness to be relaxed and observe the movement of your mind/emotions from this place – there is an automatic observation, you don’t have to force yourself to observe.
– Observe patterns of thoughts running in your mind, observe emotions (like fear) coursing through your body, observe your mind’s pull, observe your need to control the mind, observe your fear towards the mind, observe the questions and doubts in your being (and your mind), observe the need for assurance, observe your discomfort towards the presence of intense emotions in your body (and your need to suppress them). Just allow the presence of all of this, and continue being an open space of awareness.
– Spend a few weeks just deepening in your ability to stay as a space of relaxed awareness. This ability is crucial towards bringing any dissolution to a pattern of imbalance/negativity. When your awareness is narrowed down on the thoughts/emotions there is no space for “response”, there is only “reaction”. The more relaxed, and spacious, your awareness is the more you ability to respond from a place of wisdom.
– Develop the ability to reach a place of total allowing, where you don’t feel the need to resist or suppress the mind, or emotions, and your awareness is open enough to allow their free movement. (You can read this post – Reaching a place of total allowing for more insight). The state of total allowing is all that’s needed to come to a place of inner balance, there are two reasons for this 1. It opens you up to connect with the intelligence of your life-stream (or your inner being, life-space, non-physical intelligence, spirit guides or whatever label you want to use) 2. It allows a release of accumulated mind/emotional momentum.
A state of total allowing is not a “passive” state, in fact it requires a lot of stability in your awareness to reach this state – it takes time, and it happens over a few months of deepening in your space of relaxed awareness. It also requires “understanding”, whereby you can let go of some resistances that you may be holding on to due to some deluded/misguided thought patterns, for example, due to lack of understanding, it’s possible for people to keep resisting dark nature aspects from arising freely in them (like resisting states of sadness, grief, sexuality, anger, fear etc) and thus prevent the movement towards inner balance. Of course, the necessary understanding/guidance starts coming to you as you just connect more with the space of total allowing – in that sense, the state of allowing becomes a channel through which intelligence can flow into your life and bring forth guidance, inspiration, understanding, as well as aligned actions, that eventually orchestrate the dissolution of the situation that acted as the wake-up call, plus they bring forth the creation of a reality that’s aligned with this inner growth.
My wife and I really enjoyed this article Sen. Thank you! I am curious about your thoughts on humor and our life stream. It would be interesting to see what you would come up with in an article. It seems like when I get into a dark energy space, things seem very heavy and very serious, it’s hard to be light and see the lightness and humor when I feel this way.
Anyway, thanks again for your inspired writings, I am very grateful.
Thank you for this, Sen. I’m currently in the midst of heeding my wake-up call and your post coincides perfectly for “some reason”. 🙂 I appreciate your presence and what you offer people here. Thank you again, brother. *namaste/gassho*
-chris, from berkeley
wow! thank you very much for creating this and showing people that the “strange experience” they are going through is actually just an adjustment — a normal & necessary one. a friend sent this to me without even knowing that i was going through this. perhaps he could sense it, eh?
i’m currently in the process of trying to recognize myself and look at my life from a standpoint that is accepting of myself. i previously blamed other people for my restlessness, boredom, and depression (among other things), and i’ve been coming to terms with the fact that i’ve been simply trying to suppress this monumental change inside of myself. i think it’s time try the long journey of “waking up”.
once again, thanks so much.
Genius Analogy in the first couple of paragraphs! Great article!
Thanks sen for that article. I wana say that everything you have written, resonates deeply in me. Especialy the place you were talking about ‘suicide’ being one of the way one tends to avoid facing the uneasyness..
I must say that am a testimony to that… What acted as a wake up call for me was ‘SOCIAL PHOBIA and DEPRESSION’.. Am an ambitiouse person (wana achieve alot of goals/dreams and all of those goals balls down to interacting and speaking infront of people) seeing my life working/moving in an oposite direction to my goals made me deperesed…
Then i tried all sorts of things like alchoholism, smoking weed e.t.c(but instead of giving me the result i expected, it exacerbated the problem more) i did alot of things – in search of solution but all was abortive, and that kept me more and more depressed. Until one day, i couldnt take it anymore and since i had exhausted all the options i had then – and none worked – i descided to end it all by commiting suicide….
I didnt knw wat happened then, but one thing was obviouse ”i didnt have the HEART to go on with the suicide, in as much as i wanted to end it all, MY MIND WAS ALSO AFRAID OF DEATH”’
THESE whole events increased my deperesion, then i said to myself “since i’v tried everything (as it seems then) and none is working, i don’t know what to do again, let me put everything in the hands of God, Gods time is the best”
i then stoped any further attempt to heal my imbalance with force and relaxed.
Then i found your website few months later.. And since i came across your website, everything about me changed. Even the release is hapening swiftly, (although it has not been easy)… Today am at the 4th month of the release, and i must say that it is happening exactly as you said.. Thanks sen..
Any comment/advice/explanation will be highly appreciated….. Sorry my english is not that good..
Wilfred, the mind (in its imbalanced perception) is always in a struggle, and thus keeps attracting struggle, until a threshold is hit after which the mind basically just “gives up” in exhaustion – this point of giving up allows for the space in which there is no energy to struggle, and this space allows for your “inner being” to start guiding you (since you are not lost in the momentum of struggle at this point). That’s what happened in your case.
Hey Sen, I got a few questions. I dont get how can a person with high mind momentum can be in a relaxed awareness aka allowing their mind/emotion without panic. I find myself sometimes scared of what comes up, I even sometimes finding myself even fueling the negativity more. I know I need to allow the thought and emotion, but at times its just intense for me to continue. I feel im approaching this the wrong way, its funny how confusing a simple pointer can be.
Sen,
Well done your articulate expression of your realizations. I have read most of your blogs and this concept of the “wholeness” resonates with my original forms of solutions, from the tac that I have taken in my unconscious lifetime. The tac that I have taken is to just write something for myself and read it back later and correct it. This continues as a realization process and it has been thousands of tiny realizations and revisions as a process over many years. I wanted to share my wake up call and the realization that I have resonated with. This process took me to write down and articulate my “wake up call” that I carefully contemplated and formulated because it resonated with my life.
“(How do I?) Awaken to that Being that is not devalued by the times contents and patterns, of the light or shadow of the archetypes contents and forms, in the memory archives, yet grows value, abilities and solutions, by improving with the positive growth aspects, of the harmonics and divisions, of higher reference times common to all things?”
The realization that I came to was in accordance with a reoccuring feature of my life and into my thoughts.
That of achieving the holistic resonance in all things without getting stuck on the positive or negative of the individual parts. The resonance of continually circulating the positive and negative of the individual parts was destroying my life. So I gave the mind the target to seek out and find the being in the formless form of the “wakeup call”.
That realization that I came to was the similar theme of a better understanding of holism, holons and synergy.
Holistic achievement is the bonding order of the effective application of the correct combination of concepts, which positively increases performance and direction and timing, and this integrated practice of natures systems combined, is many times greater than their individual strength and weakness and sum of their parts. Whole self has an existence independent of the parts, with forms of interactive communication providing dynamic processing. Relate to the existence of the independent identity of the whole consciousness of the optimal original energy solution of synergistic synthesis distributions.
All things have a whole and parts and the whole inspires the creation and continual improvement of the parts and evolution of the whole.
The wholeself has greater intelligence than the individual parts. Better to clear, identify and value with the wholeself, than the individual thoughts, emotions, words, actions, ego etc. The wholeself is the synergy of life and time dynamics.
All the negative creations that others have projected at me, please return them to the wholeself of the sender. All the negative creations that I have projected, I reclaim them to my wholeself.
The being of my wholeself, asks and allows my positive light divinity to heal and reconnect, integrate and develop, balance and transform my wholeself.
The actualization of the authentic identity and existence of my wholeself, expresses interactions of positive value creation, for the mutual benefit of realization of the connective synergistic synthesis distributions of all.
The wholeself resonates with the wholeness. The intelligence, divinity and wholly spirit within the wholeness, resonates with the frequencies of the integration and development of the wholeself – the connective synergy realization of the natural connection and alignment with eclectic consciousness. The communion of consciousness and unselfconsciousness.
Be clear to transcieve, identify and value with the whole being and resonate with the human kindness, intelligence and wholly spirit within the wholeness.
All of my life resonates with the wholly spirit of the Creator, that is life resonating with the creators consciousness of the mutual well being whole of the parts. The scientific spirit of the dissolution of the resistance of previous forms of incorrect content, for the continual improvement of the whole of life, through a flexible transdiscipline attitude to holistic growth, is a continual optimizing process, in order to clear, identify and value with the wholeself.
Essentially I am the synergy being of the greater intelligence of my wholeself or my whole being.
When I was immediately conscious of this independent identity I interacted with and appeased my little negative egoic self-made identities of thoughts and emotions, because I thought they would die and feel a loss of my lifetime makeup buddies that were ruining my life. I thought I would get stuck into crying for
loss of my minds thinking. I reassured my fragile ego of thoughts and emotions that from now on the whole being has the natural synergy of greater intelligence and to calm down and work harmoniously with it. To let the whole being perceive, imagine, evaluate and value. To clear, identify and value with my whole being.
I realized one faulty belief associated with this was the conscious realization that in my unconscious were the resonance of the words ” deal with the emotions first”. I now realise that after 30 years this had made me emotionally dependent- a train wreck.
Now I realize that it is best to deal with holistic person first. The whole person- the whole self – the whole being- the wholly spirit – the authentic identity and existence of all things is its wholeness.
Clive
Hi Sen,
I’m still in the process of deepening my ability to stay as a relaxed awareness. At the moment, I rarely remain in this state for 5 minutes before I’m unconsciously pulled into my mind’s train of thought. It takes a couple more minutes before I “wake up” and realise.
Just to clarify, when you mention initially staying open for 20-30 mins a day, are you referring to 20-30 mins of a seamless openness? Or 20-30 mins of going in n out of this state as per our current abilities? I’d just like to gauge how stable I am/how busy my mind currently is.
Thank you!
Hey sen, thanks for the post. It really answers alot of questions for me. I’ve been holding on to thought patterns and recently I noticed something strange about me, maybe its a wake up call, but does negative thought patterns result in wake up calls too or is it just strong negative emotions?
Why do we have physical form?
To experience life in the physical world and the bounds of time. Action and reaction, choice and consequence have little meaning if one is not bound by time. It is a chance to learn from our actions, to come to grips with our immortality, and probably many more things I can’t even imagine…
sen what is your view about the book “the monk who sold his ferrari”?
i suppose the heart attack was the wake up call for him.
Is the way of living explaind by robin sharma in book best to live life?
shoud we really follow that? i really feel that your views are almost similar as explained in the book..
Ajay, I read that book some years ago, mostly in bits and pieces, and the recollection I have is that there was a sense of “non-materialistic” and overly light natured aspect to it, which is something which did not resonate with me even at that point. Even the title reeks of “non materialistic” outlook, which is never the point of inner freedom. I am not sure if you’ve gained a clear understanding of what I talk about (a state of inner freedom), but it has nothing to do with living a light-natured “spiritual” life, it’s about living your natural expression in your human form by integrating aspects of light and dark nature from a place of inner wholeness.
hey Sen it’s been awhile now. wondering your thoughts on anger and stress? find myself incredibly stressed and angry regarding the point of everything(jobs, money, status, usual bs). i ordered brain ev and am giving that a try been doing transcendence for like 2 weeks ish. we’ll see i guess my meditations have been mixed lately . i’m allowing but i think i lost the faith or will to be truly allowing. just wondering i know this is all pretty standard these days but i seem to do good for awhile then get sucked into the trance of materialism and guilt/fear and don’t understand why or how.
Kenny, you may want to take some time to explore within to see through your past motivations which no longer resonate with your current awareness. In an unconscious state of being our motivations can be highly incongruous, or rather doing it for all the wrong reasons. The problem is not with the work, money or other aspects of physical living, but with the motivation/mindset that drives us – if the mindset is coming from a place of misaligned compromises, blind conditioning and unconscious behavior, there is bound to be a feeling of “what’s the point” to it. You need to look within and find out what exactly would you like to express or experience, while understanding what the reality on Earth has to offer, and light and dark nature involved in each of the reality. If you don’t like anything that’s on offer, on Earth, then you are either trying to get something “extraordinary” (like some purely light natured experience, which is not a part of reality) or you are simply not identifying with the attitude of complaining instead of contemplating and exploring. Being productive is an inherent nature in us, so you will have to find ways in which your aptitude and interest allow for a productivity. Beyond that you may look at what type of relationship(s) you would like have, in terms of friends, community or partner, or if you would like to be more isolated and enjoy your own space for a now. Materialism is not a problem, and it’s not a trance, the only problem is imbalanced motivations and in-congruent goals.
The motivations that worked from a place of unconsciousness does not work from a place of higher awareness, so you would need to redefine and explore your current mindset and what figure out what resonates with you. However, you also need to see reality as it is, instead of “fantasizing” about some extra-ordinary situation which cannot exist in reality – everything in reality comes with a light and dark nature, you can look at it as the limitation of life but it’s actually the very nature of life (its yin and yang nature). Alignment with life consists of aligning with this limitation/nature of life, that’s when you start getting grounded in reality. A lot of frustration comes from holding onto to some delusions or fantasies, and not willing to connect with reality as it is.
thanks for the reply . i’m not sure i totally understood all of it but it mostly feels like it makes sense. you’re right in that i feel like whats the point of doing anything if it doesn’t resonate with you or bring you any meaning or joy however things that do resonate with me don’t or at least i don’t know how they can earn me enough resources to support myself, wife and 3 children. for instance i love music and playing music but i feel as though everyone else who does it professionally has infinitely more talent and creativity than me. been meditatively inquiring on that line for some time with no …inspiration or answers. like i said confused and tense 90 % of the time.