Shar's Awakening Timeline - Transcript of Video

Pre-awakening Phase:

I would say pre-awakening is the first stage where you're just starting to find out about awakening, and so for me it was in my 20's. I really had no clue what awakening was; I'd never heard of it, and I started to get little seeds of enlightenment that were being planted. I had a friend who gave me Eckhart Tolle's book The Power of Now, and when I read it, I could feel that there was something very important about it.

I had a Buddhist monk come up to me in a park and give me a card that said Oneness, and I could intuit the importance of the message, even though I didn't know what Oneness was. These strange things were happening to get my attention, to see that there was something that was going to happen in the future.

During this time I really just wanted an ordinary life. I was trying to create different identities and failing at it. Each identity I created wouldn't work out for some reason and I would be left back at the beginning, wondering what to do next. Then I'd create a brand new identity, which would also fail, and that became part of my awakening path. This constant failure or inability to create an identity was very painful for me at the time. I just wanted to be ordinary and what I considered normal, and have a normal life. I felt like life just wouldn't work out for me in the same way that it worked out for other people and I didn't know why.

I know now that it was because my life was always about awakening that it was my destiny, but at the time, it was very frustrating, that no matter how hard I tried, nothing seemed to work. So that is what was happening in what I'd call the pre-awakening phase in my 20s. I'd say the main contemplations I had around that time were: how can I be happy and reading lots of self-help books. I was interested in self-development and becoming a better version of myself, and also what my life purpose was, and what was the meaning of life? Then some deeper questions started to arise like what happens when we die and I started to follow some spiritual teachers who talked about life after death and why we incarnate, the purpose to life and that type of thing.

This led me to what I would call a Dark Night of the Soul when I was 30. At that time, I had created an identity as a business owner and everything was wrapped up around that and the business had failed. I felt like I'd lost everything and I really didn't know who I was anymore. I was depressed and struggling to create a new identity. I was so burnt out and was unable to put myself back together in the same way. I was questioning: why am I here, why won't anything work? I was very lost, and disillusionment was the feeling around that time.

Transcendence phase:

That was really a turning point for me. I wouldn't exactly call that the start of awakening, but that's where awakening really found me and where I started to pay more attention to it. It was like a wake-up call, and where I went into what I would call the transcendent phase of awakening, where you're able to transcend the personal story. You go up and out of it and get glimpses of reality, and when you meditate, you can go into very deep meditative states, going beyond all of your trauma and karma and all the content that's in the body. You can start to understand what reality is and what awakening is about.

It's a really beautiful phase of awakening and so after the dark night I really started to go deeply into the transcendent phase of awakening, and this phase went for about eight years. During that time, I became interested in psychology and learning about family dynamics and that type of thing, so I went from self-help to more into learning about psychology. I became interested in healing the body as much as I could and also the energy body, so I was doing things like getting Reiki, and acupuncture. There was an intuition to prepare the physical and energy body for what was about to come in the next stage of awakening. So there was a lot of healing going on, on that level. I started to notice any coping or avoidance strategies that I had at that time, that pulled me away from being present or from being able to face truths or traumas; they started to become obvious, and began to let go.

I had a lot of awakening experiences, probably the majority through this 8-year period, where there were big visuals either as I was just walking around or even when I was working, spontaneous visuals of reality. Then the realisation off the back of it. All different kinds of realisations to do with reality, I am emptiness, I am everything, I am nothing, nothing matters, everything matters. There were so many experiences and realisations happening, sometimes daily, and it was pretty wild.

I  found it quite easy to meditate once I learnt how to during this phase, and could go to very deep states of meditation because I was transcending the content, and I had a lot of content. There was a lot of early childhood trauma that I was unknowingly avoiding facing, and I was bypassing it and transcending it in meditation. That felt really good to get away from how bad I felt and how much I was suffering.

I think neti-neti practices arose naturally during this stage, so neti-neti means not this, not that, so it's figuring out what you're not, what is the illusion. I naturally just started  to inquire in this way and realise, I'm really not that thought or that's just a belief. That happened very naturally, this sort of unfolding ongoing neti-neti practice, where I realised what I wasn't. This was ongoing over the eight years. I started losing interest in some of my hobbies and the things that I enjoyed. I was becoming more focused on awakening, but not completely during that 8 year period.

My attention, instead of being spread across a number of different things, was starting to be focused closer on just awakening. I could still create identities during that eight-year period and I certainly tried, but I continued to fail and that built up momentum, where it became more and more frustrating. More suffering was coming from trying to create these identities and it was becoming quite distressing to create an identity. As that eight years was coming to an end, I started to put down that desire to create a new identity. I started to get that it wasn't going to work no matter what I did, and that perhaps what I had been looking for all this time was not a job in the world or a business or however I had understood it, that perhaps what I was seeking was this awakening. I was still pretty confused about what awakening was. I was following my teacher Adyashanti who I followed for about seven years online, and doing my practices, which were meditating, and some inquiry work. This led me to the end of the transcendent phase, where it just felt like something was missing or there was something deeper with awakening, further that I could go. So I started to steer all my attention onto awakening, and it became what I was most interested in. I lost interest in trying to be something in the world.

So this was the transition point for me, where I was  going from being something in the world to the undoing phase and the returning home phase, which is what I call the end of the transcendent phase. So here I was on board with awakening at this point, but I wouldn't say I was 100% committed. There was still fear around what that would look like to give myself completely to the process, but I was no longer interested in creating any new identity or or being something. Then, around this time, I had what you could call a first identity shift, and this could really be counted as the start, the official start of awakening. So even though I'd been in the transcendent phase for eight years, in that phase you're not really letting go of much identity. What you're doing in the transcendent phase is that you're going beyond it, you're transcending it, you're bypassing it, which feels great and is a well-needed first part of awakening, so that we can understand the big picture and understand what reality is.

Embodiment Phase:

But for awakening to continue, it needs to be embodied in the actual form and the identity needs to start to surrender. Who you think you are, the false self needs to start to let go and so this was the transition for me where I went from the transcendent phase into the embodiment phase. This is where you're starting to embody the truth that you realised in the transcendent phase, and what happens at this checkpoint is the identity starts to let go. The things that make up the identity start to dissolve, and this phase of awakening is quite a lot different. Overall, I  would say I was in the embodiment phase for about five years. So it initially started with a mind awakening shift where the mind stopped being able to attach to thoughts, something unhooked, and I could no longer believe any thoughts. That lasted for about 3 days. I didn't do any process, it was spontaneous, it was just a grace that happened. Then the mind started to operate in the old way again, the trance started activating on the third day, and I could notice that happening. I realised that it wasn't a permanent shift, and this mini mind awakening helped me to understand how the mind wakes up, what a mind awakening actually is and where this was heading. This mind awakening really was the transition for me between the transcendent phase and the embodiment phase, and was the checkpoint where everything changed.

Shortly after that I went on my first silent retreat and had many big experiences around that time. I started having what I call void experiences, where you disappear completely. So I'd just be walking with a cup of tea, and I would just disappear completely, and then everything would come back into form again, and I would find I'm still just walking along. So I started getting more void experiences as I was transitioning into this phase, and this got me more interested in awakening, but it was quite difficult because when the identity starts letting go, your life starts changing. Things start dropping away, attachments start dissolving, it's quite a challenging phase of awakening, probably the hardest part. So you can lose things, and you can be scared about that, and all the changes that are happening, so it can be quite intense. I was trying to get used to this new phase and the intensity of it and things were going very fast, where in the previous stage they seemed to go slowly.

So when the temporary mind awakening happened, I could see, I'm not the mind, I'm not the thoughts, that's not who I am. Other ways that you could interpret this are, I'm not ego, or I'm not the separate self. So with that shift I had that deep realisation that I am not the mind and then I was interested in finding out, well, who am I then? But I wouldn't say that question was particularly important to me at that time.

There was a lot of yo-yoing going back and forth between feeling like I've got there, I feel like I'm awake again, the mind has let go again, and then oh no, it it's all come back again. This yo-yoing would happen back and forth and get deeper, so it was like I would reach a deeper state of emptiness, and then I would get on the flip side, a phase of feeling very unconscious and going into unconscious material. So I sometimes say it's like the higher you go or the deeper you go, then the deeper you go into your unconscious content. It gets so deep, so that was quite challenging, and sad each time you feel like you've lost it. That continued to happen like that for years, and in the meantime, I really started to unpack the identity.

I started to get interested in doing work to heal the trauma that was stored in the body and getting help with that, and looking at the repressed emotions I had. I was quite emotionally numb, and so was learning all about emotional work and how to express emotions, and how to feel again. During this phase of awakening, it became challenging to meditate. All of a sudden I felt like I was stuck in the body and that I couldn't transcend anymore, and that was painful because I had a lot of trauma in the body. So it was suddenly very difficult to meditate, because I was doing it in an embodied way, and that's crucial for awakening to progress, to be able to do that, but it didn't feel very pleasant, especially initially.

I got used to it over maybe six months or so, of how it felt to be in the body, but I didn't realise I'd been living in such a disassociated way before that, and all of a sudden I was completely in the flesh and that was quite uncomfortable for me. Learning about the body was a big part of this stage of awakening. I learnt about the body's wisdom and how the body communicates. Learning about intuition on a gut level, when the body's saying yes or no, and really starting to access presence in the body rather than accessing awareness in a transcendent way. I could feel the felt sense of existence, of awareness, in the body now, and there was a lot of meditating on that to allow it to grow.

I was getting my first taste of existential aloneness during this time, which I won't go into in too much depth. I've got another video on that if you're interested, but that was quite painful accessing the deep layers of realising that there's no one else here, and I found that quite sad. So I started to access the aloneness around this time and started to wonder, who am I? If I'm not all this, I'm not the mind, I'm not all this content, all the neti-neti type practices just stopped naturally because I realised I'm not any of that. I know what I'm not, that much I understand, but now I want to know, who am I? So very naturally, that question started to arise in practice, and so this went on in the early part of the embodiment phase for about two years.

Then I went through another transition where I would say this is where I really got on board with awakening 100%. So this is where my entire life got flipped upside down and this period went for three years before I woke up to Unity Consciousness. So this was the most intense part and it started with me having life events where I lost everything. But this time I had gone far enough with awakening to understand that this was happening for awakening purposes, so I didn't feel lost like I did 10 years before when I had the Dark Night of the Soul. This time, I knew it was about me letting go of attachments and that it would help awakening. So, although it was a very difficult time, I was on board with it and was willing to do whatever it took to complete the process. This transition was where I became fully committed to awakening. I knew that this was what my whole life was about, and nothing else mattered. So I had this transition where my life had this big overhaul, and then at this phase of awakening I was purely just working on awakening and healing. I was getting trauma therapy to work on healing my childhood wounds, I was doing meditation and practices every day - that's all I was doing. I was completely unravelling and doing very deep healing work. Very deep realisations were happening again, so all the earlier realisations that you have in the transcendent phase, they come back around again, but spiral deeper.

So the realisations were getting deeper during this stage and most of the identities had pretty much dissolved, because everything had been stripped from me. It seems that at this phase, any kind of spiritual identity that you have, such as being a spiritual seeker, dissolves too. There was a real maturing process that was happening. I was getting in my adult energy, in all areas of life, and evolving on a human level. There was a lot of just silent sitting in meditation. It was really about resting in my being, as deeply as I could for as long as I could. Silence became very enticing to me. I just wanted to be silent, as much as possible.

It was very active in this embodiment phase for the first four years, with so much stripping away every day. One of my main practices was to not avoid anything, so I took any opportunity that happened in life, any trigger, anything at all, to go into it and see what's the wound there? Any dream that I had, I examined, why did I have that dream? I explored absolutely everything and I wouldn't let anything slide past. I wanted to know why that content was coming into awareness; what needed to be healed, what was the illusion? That was one of my main practices at this time. It was very intense like that for about four years and then in that last year things started to calm down.

End of Seeking:

There was a real shift in energy where things started to slow down and what was happening was I was starting to put down seeking. This was not coming from a place of despair, but a place of, this is finished. I came to terms with, maybe awakening will never happen, I did my best, I tried everything I could, and I'll just have to live with it. I felt so much better because I'd healed my trauma. I was much happier and at peace just naturally anyway, so I thought it doesn't matter if awakening happens. If it is meant to happen, it will happen, but now it's time to stop the search. So at that stage I wasn't  following any teachers or anything like that. I was doing silent sitting, as I was being called to silence and doing that as much as I wanted.

I wanted to get on with my life and started to become interested in other things, and this was really where I put down seeking. Things were very calm, slow and gentle around this time, and all the rapid processing had really slowed down. Life was getting quite enjoyable. Then I went through the final push that got me through to having the mind awakening and then shifting into Unity Consciousness, which happened over a couple of months. I won't go into that because I've made another video on all the different things that happened. It was quite involved, but basically, this was where I started to let go of the illusion completely. I was having core identity realisations, such as I'm not a person, I'm not a woman. So what I would call core identities were being released and I deeply experientially understood the realisation that I am awareness. It was so obvious at that stage, it was becoming a lived experience in the weeks leading up to the permanent mind awakening.

Mind Awakening:

On the day it happened I received transmission from watching an Adyashanti video on YouTube. I intuitively felt like I needed to watch something and when it started, everything dropped away and I realised 'I am that'. That which I can't understand or describe, that's what I am. It was very beautiful, and everything dropped away for the entirety of the video. Later, I went for a drive and the mind started to empty out, it drained out completely and went for perhaps 10 or 20 minutes. It felt wonderful, to the point where initially I couldn't even talk. I couldn't form a thought, it was so empty. That was the permanent mind awakening and for me the mind awakening stage lasted two days before unity. Some people are in that permanent mind awakening phase for months or years, but for me it was two days. I would say words that describe this transition are rebirth, it felt like I'd been born again, or perhaps born for the first time. My world felt like it was flipped upside down or that Consciousness had been flipped upside down. I felt like a baby Buddha, so it felt like, although I'm awake now, I'm really just a baby, and have so much more to go. Now I need to learn how to navigate the world and grow from this place, in this different way of perceiving. The mind was naturally not able to attach to thoughts, and there was no interest in what the mind was saying. It was very peaceful. The majority of the psychological suffering ended and it actually felt like a burden lifting off my shoulders. I could actually feel the the weight of it lifting off, and that's how it remained. Just to get to this point is so liberating and freeing, but after two days it changed again, and this is where I shifted into Unity Consciousness.

Unity Consciousness, Permanent Heart Awakening:

I went to my zen class, and we were sitting in a small group, meditating. As soon as I started the meditation, the spiritual heart opened, and included in it the room, the universe, all the universes, absolutely everything, the heart realised, I am everything. Then the two permanent realisations were working together - the mind realising I am emptiness, and the heart realising and I am also everything. At the beginning of Unity it's really wonderful. I had a few months of it being in complete bliss, and seeing yourself in everything around you is so lovely. Unity is its own journey, and I'll talk about that in a different video.  

Unity is the best part of awakening, it's really beautiful. There is one more shift to go, which is sometimes called the 'no self' shift, and that's when the self-reflective function of the mind ceases. So in Unity, you're working towards that shift if it's your destiny in this life, but this is a time of being in the world. You've healed most of your karma and so you're not attracting difficult situations, and you're in a state of peace and happiness.

So it all started with me trying to find happiness in my 20s, and in the end, I did find it. I had no idea that's where that search would lead me, but I found true happiness. It's well worth all of the difficulties you have to go through to feel this every day.