Radical Consciousness: Waking Up to the Shadow-Selves

She deliberately turned her awareness, like a laser, onto the feeling of grief. She found it in her body—a big, uncomfortable burning sensation that seemed to be stuck in her chest and throat.

Then she began to sob. But the sobs did not feel as if they belonged to the adult Sharon. They felt like the sobs of a very young girl. "The hardest thing at that point was to keep my attention with the feeling," she said. "It was so uncomfortable that all I wanted to do was get out of there. I took refuge in insights I remembered from my reading—identifying the psychological pattern, attaching it to my father, etc. Then I'd drag myself back to the sheer energetic feeling. It became a meditation—a meditation on the energy of this emotion."

As she sat there, the sharp edges of her resentment and grief started to shift and soften. Her chest opened. She felt her shoulders straightening. She realized that she'd had some kind of release.

"Of course, I'd known for a long time that my nobody-loves-me story was related to something that happened a long time ago, that it didn't have to do with any current situation. But knowing it on an insight level is one thing. Realizing it energetically is something else."

Ever since then, Sharon says, she's stopped taking it personally when people don't want to spend time with her. "I still get pangs of it sometimes. But that deep anguish, the swamp of hurt feelings, is just not there."

A great 8th-century teacher of Vedanta, Shankaracharya, famously said that as a fire burns down a forest that has been growing for centuries, a moment of illumination can burn the tendencies of a lifetime. (Actually, he said many lifetimes.) Your own awareness, your consciousness, has that illuminating power. Sometimes it takes more than a moment, sometimes months and even years of bringing awareness to an area of tightness and fear. But often a big shift happens in a few moments, as it did for Sharon. Each time we bring the light of awareness into the corners of our psyche, it is like turning on the light in a dark room. As we get accustomed to the feelings, we find we can leave the light on. The monsters and dragons reveal themselves as shadows. Then we don't have to do anything to get rid of them. It's as if they were never there.

Four Truths about Becoming Conscious
The tricky—and exciting—part about becoming conscious is that it usually isn't something you do just once. To stay conscious, you need to practice consciousness, rousing yourself every time you fall back into the trance of unconsciousness. When you find yourself in the trance, remind yourself of these four truths:

1. Your inner state alters your experience of reality.
2. Nobody else—not your friends, your soul mate, or the people who annoy you—can change your inner state more than temporarily.
3. Your "free will" is constantly being undermined by unconscious emotional drives, by beliefs and decisions you made in early childhood, and by all the fears and traumas that you've been stuffing into your unconscious.
4. The time to free yourself from all this is, well, now.