My journey in the last 9 years was about deep embodiment, or taking all the spiritual knowledge and insights and integrating them into my daily life.
I already knew before then that I cannot run from myself, because… sure enough I was taking my mind with me wherever I went. But still I had a tendency to try to escape to what I called LIGHT, or blissful states that I found in meditation and different spiritual practices. At the end of 2017 a crucial brealthrough occurred for me: I discovered that I do not need to escape to Light because, at the deepest spiritual level I was already the Light. All I needed to do was to bring that light of consciousness into everything that was still unconscious in me. I desribe that shift and its meaning in a little more detail in my book “The Return to Feeling”. I will now quote a part of chapter 15 of that book called “Escaping into Spirituality”:
For many years, my spiritual path was based on escaping into ecstatic raptures that I equated with enlightenment. Thanks to these experiences, I became aware that I was not the body, but pure consciousness. I am grateful for them, because through them I understood that there is something beyond the matrix made of thoughts, emotions, and matter. This, however, as it turned out, was only the beginning of the journey.
My life at that stage took the form of an emotional sine wave – from ecstatic experiences of joy and bliss in meditative states and during the courses I was leading, to extreme sadness and pain upon encountering the density of matter in everyday life.
The experience of pain was not unnatural. It arose from the first glimmers of openness to feeling. By becoming aware of the contrast between the world of spirit and the world of matter, I understood that beneath the entire human experience lies pain and tension that we are afraid to feel. I could no longer hide the pain beneath a cover of pleasure and other numbing agents. One could say that my pain threshold had lowered. What I would have once dismissed as insignificant now struck me with its intensity. And that was my call to awakening. Instead of fooling myself that pain was not pain, I had to face it.
My problem was not the experience of pain itself, but the way I dealt with it. Instead of feeling the pain, I chose to escape. You might call it a spiritual escape or a spiritual bypassing. And so transcendental experiences became for me a kind of “divine drug” to which I had to keep returning. Until the moment I realized that I was caught in a looping mental experience from which there was no way out.
At a certain point, an understanding arose: since I could not escape from pain, perhaps I should move toward it, perhaps I needed to embrace it, feel it, and in this way transform it. And so another quantum leap occurred in my consciousness. I saw that the path to harmony was not an escape from what is disharmonious, but such a level of non-judgment, non-resistance, and acceptance of uncomfortable feelings that there would no longer be anything to run from.
This also meant looking honestly at myself and at my relationships. I had to admit to myself that my meditations, insights, and raptures were not fundamentally changing the quality of my everyday experience. There was a lack of harmony in my body, and unhealed conflicts in my relationships continued to take their toll.
And then something shifted. When I returned once again from one of “my spiritual journeys,” I heard the heaviness of matter (which was really composed of my own thoughts and emotions) speak to me clearly and unmistakably: “Enough running! Embrace me!”
And so began the journey toward full and conscious feeling, toward embracing my own shadow and, in this way, bringing enlightenment into the body. I stopped seeing the body as a burden to be freed from. From that point on, the body became my primary tool of spiritual practice, perfectly reflecting the quality of my thoughts and urging me to deepen my love for myself. I already knew that any conflict meant an absence of love. Liberation from conflict was perfect love – the loving of everything I had rejected until then.