From Adulthood toward Awakening

If you are stuck in your life in one way or another many forms of support are available, such as training, coaching, counselling and therapy. The good thing about these is that you will get a broader and more realistic view of reality, that you will develop more or better social and emotional skills, that you will be able to communicate more effectively and that you will learn how to deal with conflicts. It can also help you resolve unattended experiences and obstructing convictions that impede your inner growth.

The strength of coaching, counselling and therapy is that these will help you to develop a healthy, mature personality. That can be an enormous enrichment for your sense of life and for your daily functioning. It is the way to adulthood.

However, these fall hopelessly short as an answer to the deep desire of simply being happy, and of actually feeling ”at home”. From the viewpoint of that fundamental desire, only half of the work has been delivered. You may have learnt to feel better, to communicate better and to live in a more relaxed way and with more clarity, yet the feeling of “being unfulfilled” remains – that gnawing feeling that there should be something more, that somehow something is still not right.

Why does that feeling persist? It does so because you may have learned to function better and to deal with yourself and with your daily situations in a healthier way, but you have not investigated the underlying issues – the questions of life that sooner or later will become increasingly urgent. You still have not discovered your true nature. You still have not found “the way home”.

Once you have been freed from any reference and from any supposedly fixed point you could hold on to, once all your concepts have been dropped, once there are no more thoughts about how things should be, there will be plenty of room to experience reality as it is – right here, right now.

Letting go of our usual way of observing and of all acquired defence mechanisms – which had their usefulness but are no longer needed – will enable us to live in a conscious way: with a clear mind, an open heart and a relaxed body. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

In contrast to how awakening is often (wrongly) understood, namely as a form of nihilism and “withdrawing from real life”, the reality is that you come back to life. It actually is a kind of rebirth: the awakening to a profound experience of authenticity, combined with a sparkling, vibrant feeling of aliveness and presence.