Growing Up, Waking Up

what I'm seeing in my sessions

[I put the podcast episode above ⬆️​ if you prefer to listen to this piece rather than read it! My podcast ‘Conscious | Unconscious’ is here on the Substack app and also on Spotify, Apple and a few more.]

Interesting things have been happening in my sessions over the past couple years.

Many of my clients are making a spontaneous shift from growing up to waking up.

I’ll talk about what that looks like in a bit, but first, a definition or two.

By growing up I mean, at least in a therapeutic context, healing the inner wounded parts. Some people refer to it as the inner child, but wounding is not always something that happens in childhood, so I tend to refer to them either as the wounded parts, or the vulnerable parts. Essentially, these are parts of us that were wounded in a time of vulnerability, when the individual lacked either the internal or external resources to feel supported.

Sometimes, these wounds were pre-verbal, so there is no memory. Sometimes, wounds are from past incarnations. Sometimes, they are ancestral - that is, they represent not personal, but intergenerational wounding that has travelled down family lines. For example, studies have shown that in the descendants of Holocaust survivors, the mechanism of production for the stress hormone cortisol is impacted for up to seven generations. I’ve even had clients with ‘memories’ that they think are their own, but when regression yields nothing, family interviews reveal long-hidden secrets.

As a therapeutic concept, growing up is really about being able to live better as a person in the world, with all of one’s sense of identity and meaning intact, as in

Joe is a middle-aged man from Idaho and when he was a kid, he and his mother were both regularly assaulted by his father, which led to CPTSD. He has made peace with his past, and the wounded parts are no longer dictating his self-concept, his reactions, his emotional experiences in the world. His life as Joe is better.

Normally people go to therapy or see practitioners or do any number of self-help practices in order to have a better life and experience more well being as a person - they desire some element of growing up. This is about supporting the personal self, the ego (there are many words), about supporting Joe. That is important. Joe’s suffering is real and he deserves love and support and a good life. The entire basis of psychology is to have a healthy ego, hence Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. We all need certain things in order to be happy, from food and security, to friends and a sense of meaning.

We need our personal self, or our egos, to be at peace in the world.

Where I might differ from others who are more rigorous in their understanding of non duality or contemplative traditions is in my belief that we need our egos. In contrast, in the Advaita Vedanta view, post-awkening is more along the lines of - I actually have no ego. I am nothing. I am everything. Nothing has meaning because nothing exists.

This is what I refer to as a ‘level confusion’. In one sense, in one state of consciousness, at one level of reality, that is true. In another state of consciousness, Joe is still Joe.

My experience is that the soul expresses through the identity, through the ego, and in fact, many many non-dual teachers, including Adyashanti and Bonnie Greenwell, have said that actually what happens when one is awakened to their true nature is a kind of descent of Wholeness into form. There is a palpable drop, so that the human is living more as a soul and less as a limited identity stuck in patterns of conditioning, including identification with the pain body or past wounding.

One’s self-concept, as Ken Wilber would say, transcends and includes a limited concept of self.

[I love comments, so if you have any questions about any of this, please ask me in the comments below so I can clarify.]

Waking up is of course awakening or knowing oneself as a soul, which broadly speaking means knowing oneself as unlimited in consciousness and thus innately connected to all. 

So normally, growing up and waking up are two separate conceptual frameworks and often, two separate endeavours.

Not everyone who wakes up, grows up! Not all spiritual traditions even care about growing up. In A Heart Blown Open by Keith Martin-Smith writes:

“Zen, for all its strengths, had huge blind spots. It was focused on the Absolute – on what is known as the Awakened Mind, but tended to ignore the relative, and too often that mean that the ego that was transcended stayed fractured and broken and neurotic, and when the practitioners finally realized their own ground of being, that realization was forced to flow through a twisted and neurotic ego.” (p. 270)

Martin-Smith wrote this (above) book about the Zen Buddhist teacher Jun Po Roshi, who by his own admission only grew up long after he woke up - long after he realized that his wounded parts were having a toxic impact on others. In fact, Jun Po Roshi’s contribution to Zen Buddhism in the West lies largely in bringing together these two strands of growing up, waking up.

[I highly recommend reading this book by the way. Jun Po Roshi started out life in domestic abuse and ran the largest drug ring in California for a time even as he had transcendent experiences and the capacity to guide others to awakening.]

Meanwhile, in therapy

Individuals work with their trauma in various therapeutic settings in order to grow up, to heal. They may or may not concurrently or at a later point cultivate their spiritual path with a spiritual teacher or guru or group, using a specific approach in order to deepen into that part of themselves which doesn’t have a restrictive identity, which isn’t only “Joe the middle-aged man from Idaho with CPTSD from childhood trauma.”

What I’ve noticed in the trenches

Now to what I’m seeing in my work. Many more people are spontaneously beginning to engage in a waking up process concurrently with their growing up process. Maybe this is part of the reason why I have decided to start writing about all these topics to begin with!

I want to call it out, to make sense of it, to get feedback and observations from others.

Something is definitely shifting en masse, and I am willing to say that it might be my own confirmation bias because I am transparent about my soul-centred approach to trauma. Also, I have been undergoing a pretty dramatic expansion of my own consciousness, and it’s possible that I am therefore attracting people, in the way that like attracts like, in the way that we’re always able to help others who are a little bit behind us but still proximate enough to be relatable. 

Whatever the case, my instinct, my intuition is that more and more people are experiencing awakening, and by that I don’t mean a strictly a non-dual awakening where the sense of having an ego falls away and they experience non-separation, connection to all that is, expansiveness of their selves and a dropping away of boundaries between themselves and the rest of the world and other people.

That may be on the cards (and okay, it’s on the cards eventually for all of us I believe, because that’s just how we evolve). In any case, I refer to a general kind of awakening where my clients begin to realise that the aforesaid is a possibility. It’s in their line of sight for the first time; there’s a realisation that they are more than their story or identity. They are a witness and observer to reality, and nothing is what it seems.

It plays out like this.

Stage 1: the Story.

There is a trauma history. There is an exchange of story and compassion and together in a framework of validation for very real suffering, we find reframes, tools, approaches to make sense of the past, to make peace with it, to have compassion for it and for self.

In other words, we do really engage with what happened. I call ‘what happened’ —> the story.

The story is what happened in the human life and all the ways in which the self has experienced, interpreted, and created a sense of identity around it.

Take Joe. Joe’s story is that he is a middle-aged man from Idaho and as a child, he and his mother were both regularly assaulted by his father, which led to CPTSD. That’s why he’s seeing me. That’s what we work with, with the intention for healing, as described above - so that Joe experiences self-love and self-worth and has tools going forward to support him to experience wellness. Part of that is being seen, listened to and heard - in other words, believing that the story is what is causing the pain.

Stage 2: the Story loosens its grip

It’s as if this story is a mist that has settled in on Joe for a lifetime. As he feels better, he learns how to live within the mist. Sometimes he needs special tools in order to see beyond it, or he needs special clothing to protect himself from the cold and damp it brings. But for the most part, he is able to function with it, sometimes and for lengthy periods, not even to remember it’s there - and it’s been there so long that he doesn’t really know what it is to not see the world through this filter.

Then a light appears that is so bright, like a thousand suns, like the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel during a near death experience, and the light is so pure, and so laser-intense, that it simply burns up the mist.

And suddenly, who Joe thought he was, he just isn’t any longer. What he sees is something new.

Joe can look at his pain story and say,

Yes it happened. Yes, sometimes I have a momentary sadness come through me (or even a big sadness, depending). Like the mist is so used to being there, that it visits now and again. But it’s not my mist. And it sort of feels like it is somebody else’s story. It doesn’t pinch me so much. It doesn’t feel like it’s all I am.

Suddenly, in a session, there is a sense that this story is not personal.

It’s not personal.

It was never personal.

And if something is not personal, you can’t claim to be a victim of it.

“What else is there?” Joe asks next, and his eyes seem to be asking another question: Who actually am I, if I’m not Joe from Idaho who experienced childhood abuse?

Good question.

Readers, what do you think?

Stage 3: Waking Up

It doesn’t end there. Joe comes in next session and he’s read a book, not one I recommended, but one he just came across. Somehow. A book like the Untethered Soul, or something by Thích Nhất Hạnh. Or he’s watched an episode of Gaia. Or the YouTube rabbit hole took him to a video about egos or awakening or non-dualism. Something has shifted. He’s aware that the landscape is much more vast then he previously experienced.

Now Joe is the Witness or Observer to his experience. He is not just Joe. His soul is calling out for Wholeness. His Being is freed from the mist of the story.

Joe is waking up.

Now we are off the map.

The process changes. The sessions change. There are still human stories and experiences, but the conceptual framework has enlarged in scope. There is a third party now in the space, a shared consciousness of sorts, an unseen helper guiding us both. This is just my experience, but it’s palpable.

This reminds me of the moment when the spiritual teacher Sadhi Bhagawati Saraswati realized herself as consciousness, and could no longer identify with story of who she had been.

“I” had been abused. Who? Which “I”? Certainly not the “I” who stood before him, not the twenty-seven-year-old. A young girl had been abused and abandoned. But that girl was no longer here. She was not the “I” who stood before her guru on a sweltering September 1998 day in New Delhi. I could no longer squeeze into her clothes or speak her lines convincingly. I could no longer play her on the stage of my life.

Hollywood to the Himalayas: A Journey of Healing and Transformation, by Sadhi Bhagawati Saraswati

All that is happening in my client sessions is flowing in tandem with my own massive shifting in awareness and consciousness. I am simply present for whatever is, but in this new territory, there is no map because more than in any other context I have experienced, the awakening process is deeply personal and often unpredictable, but ultimately, retrospectively, perfectly timed.

It makes sense. Just as an individual has accumulated ‘conditioning,’ so there is a natural order of release from previously held views of self.

And so personal material moves through the individual; purification and openings roll on and on like waves.

One last thing - there is definitely an element of relief. There is more ease.

Trauma as the central story gives way to the Great Mystery. What was once an impacted nervous system circumscribed by pain stories, yields to gentle curiosity in collaboration with the inner Witness.

There is softness, nascent joy, and most certainly hope.

I will share one more thing, unrelated to my work. In the past year, several of the young people in my life have been describing to me what seem to be non-ordinary states of consciousness, and beyond-their-years wisdom (I have 3 young adult children and 3 stepdaughters and my home often hosts 10-15 kids on a weekend - collectively these are the young people I refer to).

They are sharing their experiences such as:

• “Life feels unreal, like none of this is real.”

• “I feel like I should be in an ocean of consciousness and just exist, that the true me is just witnessing reality.”

• “I’m experiencing deja vu like literally 4-5x per day. I feel like something is real outside of time.”

• “Sometimes I feel detached from my body and life and just seem to be observing as if I’m not even in the same room, like as if I’m on the ceiling watching life unfold.”

I don’t personally gel with talk of 5D reality of Ascension terminology, probably because of my grounding in a more mindfulness/non-dual tradition, but I do note the ubiquity of material speaking to some kind of global energetic shift.

What do you think is happening? What have you noticed? Please comment and let me know!

*all images are AI generated by Dall-E unless otherwise noted.

For those who are interested in learning how to work with me, you can visit me here: michelle-dixon.com