Awakening is dedicated to inviting you into deep connection and a sense of belonging to yourself and to your life. By teaching you how to cultivate curiosity, compassion and trust, you become more present to your life, and in that presence, you are healed and you become a healing force in the world.
In Awakening, we cultivate both a curiosity about what is happening right now and a compassionate meeting of whatever is there. One of the core places we can learn this revolutionary way of being with life is through the challenges of our lives. Rather than seeing them as problems to be solved, we can see them doorways to be opened into the healing that we long for. Our challenges are tailor-made to help us see our conditioned, reactive self so it can be dissolved and we can again fully engage with life.
One of the challenges we work with is compulsions, for within our compulsions we can clearly see our reactive patterns. To some degree, we are all compulsive. By compulsive, we mean engaging in any recurring activity to manage our feelings, an activity that eventually ends up managing us. We can get compulsive in many different ways – overspending, overeating, overworking, over-planning, over-worrying, over-exercising, over-drinking, over-computerizing, or just “over-overing.” Many of us are compulsive without even knowing it. It isn’t until the computer crashes or the credit card is cancelled or the doctor says we can’t eat a high-fat diet that it becomes clear just how much a particular activity controls our lives.
Ultimately, our core compulsion is to struggle. We live in a story in our heads that is always trying to get us to do life, telling us we need to make ourselves and our lives better or different from what they are. In our endless trying, we have forgotten how to be. We have forgotten how to open to the marvelous and magical adventure of life. We have forgotten how to trust ourselves, to trust our lives, and to live in joy. So we turn to our compulsions to numb ourselves from all our struggles, only to find ourselves struggling with our compulsions. As we know all too well, this cycle wreaks a lot of havoc in our lives.
What would our lives be like if we could move beyond struggle and instead reconnect with the joy, wonder, and vitality of being truly alive? And how would it feel not only to heal our compulsions but also to be healed by them at the same time? By being healed, I don’t mean that compulsions would never resurface; rather, I mean that we would be able to experience the deep peace that comes from being comfortable in our own skins, knowing that we are okay, that life is okay, and that everything is going to be okay, regardless of what is showing up.
In Awakening, we work with our compulsions and the other challenges of our lives by being curious rather than controlling and by learning to respond rather than react. Compulsions thrive in reaction; they heal in response. Their gift is that they keep coming back until we learn how to engage with them, giving them the attention and the compassion they need to heal. In the light of our compassionate attention, not only do our compulsions lose their power over us, but they become a doorway into the healing that we long for.