Awakening--Returning to the original state

I was going through a huge stress about something that my whole body tense up and ache all night long. The despair was almost equal to the destruction of this life.

I have had this type of dooming worry before, the sense that all will turn against my advantage, and that all grace, hope, diginity will be rubbed from me. The severity and intensity depends on what might be about to happen.

At such moment of high worry, it feels like every fiber in my body was dreading, refusing, and simply do not want to go forward. It felt like every little bit of me was against my own existence. How wonderful if I was not I. How wonderful if I simply did not exist.

The biggest example of this was bearing the whole burden of my story of losing my ex-boyfriend.

This time, although it lasted just about one night and one day, the intensity was such that by the time the issue was seemingly resolved, that familiar substantial feeling re-appeared in my solar plexis. as if something in me gather and congregate again.

After the experience of original state comes back, I started to sit down and organize and clean up my messy desk. I picked up, looked at, and examine every single item with care and love and tenderness, as if I can be with them and do this forever. Time and space were not important or relevant.

I went home to make something to eat. Normally I ate in front of the TV. But this time, I brought my food and sat down in front of my bedroom window to eat my dinner slowly, which I haven't done for years. This bedroom window was where I sat for hours every night during the height of my awakening. It just felt right. I just wanted to sit there.

When I noticed that this old familiar experience has just returned, it was a surprise. Why am I having this familiar experience? What did I do? Am I having an awakening in a smaller scale?

Before my first awakening, I had had big stress happened to me too, When it is resolved, it was just a relief and I move on to the next thing. After the awakening, there has been perhaps only one or two huge stress that could defy who I am, or cause me to lose everything. When I slowly crawl out of the deep hole, I experienced similar peak experience in a smaller scale, 10 times less intense, and 10 times less distraction than my first awakening.

For me, because I have worked through most of my issues and attachment, I am able to notice and recognize the original state very quickly, anytime after a major stressful event.

What happened was that we have attached our self identity to an external target.

When we are confronted with the loss of this external target, it is like we are losing our self-identity. We felt the threat in every fiber of own body and being.

When the threat goes away, whether we give the target up with great pain and hence no longer experiencing it as a threat, or by regaining the target with ecstasy, a peak experience is resulted.

If it turns out that we do not actually lose the target, the peak experience is distracted by the target. We are conditioned to believe that the target equal to peak experience. All the wonderful body sensation, emotional attachment overwhelms the deep sense of inner energy. All we feel is the surface. When one day we forever lose that target, we are left with the craving of the target, the body sensation, and the emotional attachment that we can't let go.

First the suffering come as losing something we really want, disbelief, denial, anger, and when we decide to surrender and accept, the suffering comes as peeling off the layer and layer of attachment on the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual level.

After all are processed and die down, we can then feel and sense that deep inner peace and our original state. This is where surrendering and acceptance lead to, after a great suffering and an extremely difficult process. 

This is a time of total surrender, recognition, back to self, loss of pain/pressure/physical sensation, regain of inner awareness, return to our original state. At such time, I am in total connection with inner energy, the total focus and freedom, with no suffering and no distraction.

I have noticed this a few times. Whenever stress goes away, the state of deep peace and tranquility return right back to that deep peace and tranquility.

I can now see the mechanism of awakening. I have learned this pathway by noticing and discovering this familiar state of being. The pain is not any less each time I have to depart from something important to me. However, I am able to always trace back and return to this deep peace and tranquility of that original state.

Awakening is free from suffering. The less we rely on something else, the closer we are to total freedom.