About the Waking Down in Mutuality Process

A word about these concepts:

Waking Down is done in Mutuality with the larger community so that actual comprehension of it is only possible in that context.

It is by nature an experiential teaching and it is not something that can be understood simply by learning the terms associated with the process. We suggest that you use the descriptions below as starting points for explorations in mutuality with others in the process. We especially encourage you to ask various WDM teachers about their own personal experience of what you read here. In this way they can pass on to you what is in essence their unique oral commentary, one which eludes the written word and can put living flesh on the dry bones of concepts. This is at heart a teaching conveyed in relationship.

Realizing your Self Beyond Limits: "Waking"

The exploring, ever deepening recognition and claiming of your nature as Consciousness. Our Conscious nature is free of limits, yet in intimate relationship to life and it’s limits.

The clarification of our unlimited Conscious nature paves the way for the recognition of the underlying unity of that formless Consciousness with all limited, lived existence. That Paradoxical Unity of the finite and infinite is known as Onlyness . Awakening to this paradox of Onlyness is known as “the 2nd birth”.

In this form of embodied awakening your sense of identity shifts from exclusive identification with your separate finite, human body/mind to an expanded identity as both infinite Consciousness and the limited human self, now with a distinct sense of being non-separate from the entire cosmos.

WDM is a path of spiritual awakening and unfolding but this form of awakening does not imply or require perfection or extensive purification.

Embodiment: Dropping Down into the Feeling Heart: "Down"

The exploring, ever deepening recognition and claiming of your own unique bodily human life.

Ultimately falling into, and living as, The Vulnerable Sensitivity at the Heart of Life; the Core Wound, which is the paradox and rawness of simultaneously being both unlimited consciousness and yet also finite matter.

This awakening into non-separate embodiment makes it possible to uncover wounds and shadow material that was previously too difficult to access.

Investigating emotional broken zones to free up trapped energy and attention and thereby become fully alive and freely self-expressed.

The capacity to experience uncomfortable feelings increases our capacity to experience nurturing and pleasurable feelings as well. This “stretching” brings us in touch with a more authentic sense of ourselves and a deeper sense of life in general.

“Down” work includes embracing every dimension of our human lived existence. All of the energies of the body, whether they are: subtle/soul, emotional, sensual, or sexual are all included in this integral embodiment.

Embracing and becoming the messy, juicy, delightful, uncomfortable, joyful and sorrowful mystery of this incarnate life.

The Art of Awakened Relating: "Mutuality

"The exploration, ever deepening recognition and claiming of your nature in relationship with “others”. Deeply acknowledging the way in which we live in a world of others.

Teachers are available and vulnerably revealing of their humanness helping to create a container for deep love and trust to grow.

By interacting with others in mutuality we avoid the tendency to isolate into our own subject sense of things, which can be a liability in our awakening and personal shadow work. We have the chance to “test” our new sense of ourselves in the field of relationships and be reflected back to ourselves.

Mutuality encourages vulnerable self-expression: daring to speak our truth, even when it might be unpopular.

It also involves holding of others in respect: profound conscious listening and reflecting.

Recognition and calling forth of the divinity in one another, as well as interactions that bring us into encounters with our old patterns further integrates both the “Waking” and “Down” dimensions in each other and ourselves.

This is an essential part of our process of transformation and integration. There is a catalytic factor that happens in the triangulation of awakened relating that is hard to quantify and is quite mysterious. When two or more people share from the heart in honesty something bigger (more than the sum of the parts) happens.

The Problem with Seeing Life as a Problem: The "Hypermasculine" tendency

It is the historic human attitude of distrust of life, driven by the feeling that “it's not okay yet” and "it's not enough", and the habitual stance of seeing life as a project.

It is our tendency to try to conquer the life of limits (improving life and self) or to try to leave the life of limits (transcending life and self) in an effort to avoid feeling and truly acknowledging those limits.

Contracting feeling and attention from our actual bodily experience (disassociating) we live in our heads and superimpose formulas on ourselves, other people and life itself, in order to overcome the limits we perceive.

There is nothing to do about the Hypermasculine tendency other than to notice it as we see it arise, Greenlighting it and being with it as it is.

Trying to fix or stop the tendency of seeing our situation as a problem would only be another version of the tendency itself.

The Hypermasculine is our way of avoiding the vulnerable sensitivity at the heart of life, thus avoiding becoming conscious of and conscious as that vulnerability.

The Rot is the unwilled way that the Hypermasculine unravels so that we drop into the core wound.

Melting into limits: The Way we Change Effortlessly: "The Rot"

The experience and stage at which we become awakened to the fact that our old ways of dealing with things is no longer working and we are helpless to do anything about it, or doing anything else seems like another version of what we are experiencing already.

The Rot is the unwilled way that the hypermasculine unravels. The Waking and Down dimensions explored in the context of Mutuality indirectly allow the Rot to become a productive transition, without any need to “fix” or change. The recognition of the value of this rotting and the removing of all sense of stigma from it is a key to trusting our own process.

We essentially rot out of the hypermasculine tendency into the core wound until it becomes conscious as the paradox resulting in the second birth.

The Vulnerable Sensitivity at the Heart of Life"The Core Wound "

A fundamental split at the core of one’s sense of self that is experienced as existential angst or feelings of confusion, separateness, and insufficiency.

It is experienced (innocently) because we are both finite, limited human beings AND infinite Consciousness, occurring in a paradox of simultaneity that is non-logical and cannot begin to be fully felt and lived until the Second Birth.

This rawness is not the result of any of our personal or childhood issues but is rather the feeling of vulnerability at the core of incarnate existence. It is not an indication of anything wrong or sinful but rather that we are aware of limits because we (at some level) intuit the limitlessness of the infinite. This unconscious comparison is the Core wound.

Resistance to and avoidance of this core sensitivity has unconsciously been the motivating factor of much of progress of humanities development.

The more this is made conscious the more there is love and compassion for both our situation and the situation of all sentient beings. The more conscious our embrace of this situation the more at home we as the vulnerable sensitivity at the Heart of Life and paradoxically, the deeper our sense of fundamental well-being.

Emerging as Living Paradox: "The Second Birth"

A life transition in which there is a permanent and fundamental shift of your sense of what you are such that you experience yourself paradoxically, simultaneously both unlimited and limited.

This is a dropping into the vulnerable sensitivity at the heart of Life, such that we become more and more conscious of actually being (rather than just observing or feeling) that Sensitivity itself.

This shift can happen suddenly or gradually.

The center of awareness shifts from head (mind) to the heart (feeling) where it fuses into feeling-union with the body/mind, becoming self-aware and experiencing its existential nature as the same in essence with all that is.

The Pull to Fellowship through Awakened Relating: "The (2nd) Emerging Life Disposition"

Being in a receptive disposition to continuing transformation through availability to the Field of Self and Other.

Living life rooted in the recognition that awakening companions catalyze your growth and development.

This impulse toward living life in mutuality is conducive to awakening to your Conscious nature, having your Second Birth awakening and further emerging realizations as well. It is a lifestyle choice that creates a life of continuous deepening, transcendence and integration.

© 2011 by Krishna Gauci, who gives everyone the right of free use