When men go away on retreats or partake in similar spiritual gatherings, we often experience a shift in awareness or a sense of peace more profound than anything we've known before.
After a deep retreat, men come away with a better understanding of what matters most to them in life. However, upon returning home, they may realize this conflicts with their current living circumstances and whom they associate with. It feels like the people, relationships, careers, and families they have seem to be trying to sabotage that positive inner place they've finally found.
This may ring true for you, and my question is: when you find yourself in such a situation, how do you rectify this? How can you meet your desire for solitude and still sustain a livelihood?
How can you artfully transition from your present occupation to a new one? Once you've had an intense experience that fundamentally changed some aspect of your being, how do you integrate that into your life and begin to live more fully from this perspective?
Suppose you feel a need to change structures, routines, occupations, and relationships due to your awakening. How can you do that with integrity, grace, and ease rather than panic and distraction? How can you test the applicability of your insights in real-world practice and do so with humor and curiosity that can deepen and stabilize your overall spiritual realization?
Nothing real can ever be threatened
Energy and matter can be transformed back and forth into each other, but they cannot be destroyed. The total amount of energy and matter in the Universe remains constant, merely changing from one form to another. E=mc2
The first thing to recognize is that anything real can't be threatened because it exists. It does not need to project itself into the future and isn't dependent on the past. If it's real, it's occurring right here, right now.
Realizing this can help you gain a sense of peace as you navigate the turbulent waters of integrating insights that may have shattered your previous worldview. The heightened moments of spiritual awakening can never be threatened if they are in fact real.
So trust that the part of you that resonates with your powerful experience is always present. It may not be as accessible or as emotionally vibrant as it was in that moment, but it is there.
Relationships are the ultimate test of any spiritual realization
The second thing you must remember is that you and life aren't ever static. You can't hang on to any particular kind of spiritual peak or realization; there's a winding path of spiritual realization that you must follow, which is about being in and of the world, no matter where you are or who you're with.
There's never a time when you aren't in some relationship with life.
The rubber hits the road with your inner spiritual realization when we talk about learning to navigate careers and relationships without experiencing regret or doubt.
Regret and doubt are two sides of a massive, self-destructive pattern of getting lost in an emotional churn, hoping there's a pathway ahead to solve it. Trying to steer your life by avoiding regret and doubt is a surefire way to become stuck and stagnant.
Intimate relationships are particularly tough because there's a perception of reality that you have which others aren't able to experience in the same way. Your point of consciousness, your perspective, is different from everyone else's even if you're viewing the same thing or partaking in the same event.
This applies directly to intimate or romantic relationships. In a relationship, each partner will witness different things because our thoughts and experiences are filtered through our unique minds, bodies and sensory apparatus.
The exact colors we perceive are different from what others experience. Check out the color debate that broke the internet. What we see is unique to us. Our perceptions are not direct representations of reality. We only see through the filter of our neurology, which is processed by our mind, and that only seems to be a direct perception of the world.
Your reality is only known through relationships—your consciousness, your body, your senses, in relation to what seems to be outside of the awareness trapped inside your meat body. It’s all your consciousness, however.
So how can you incorporate your changed perspective into a significant aspect of your life, such as an intimate relationship, after such a powerful awakening experience?
Stabilize, then integrate
The first level of this practice is to stabilize any chaos you're creating in your life, which has arisen because you now see things differently. Remember, any profound spiritual realization needs to be founded in the understanding that it's not just you and you alone; you always affect everything and everyone around you. Therefore, you must include your family or household in your realization – they're still connected to you. Any issues you have with them are inside you, known through your awareness. They likely are not aware of what you are perceiving and thinking.
The next level, and the more profound practice, is to take your new, deeper spiritual insights and actively apply them to the stickier feelings of anger, jealousy, betrayal, etc., you now feel around the existing structures in your life. Take the insights you gained from your life-expanding experiences and integrate them into your normal, everyday living and practice.
Total life integration is the goal of any spiritual experience or lesson learned
This is what spiritual awakening is about. It's not a delusional opportunity to check out and leave everything behind, although moments in time of being alone are necessary to help us reestablish and reorient ourselves. Ultimately, it's about taking whatever we learned about who and what we are and bringing it back into normal living.
That's where you get the actual value out of any program or retreat you may experience.
If any of this resonates with you – maybe you've recently returned from a retreat, and you are struggling with feelings of anger, hopelessness, or frustration with the way your normal life is proceeding – then I invite you to check out my upcoming program, Living Tantra for Men.
This new program is about using deep insights and awakenings in the service of tangible action, integrating your new freedom and perspective into the chaotic realm of normal living.
You will do this in the company of other men who are walking this path of depth. You can be in the world and remain free and happy. You can rest as open awareness and experience freedom no matter the external events of the world.
It’s challenging to see and do this by yourself.
Witnessing and being with other brothers walking this path lightens the load and loneliness of awakening.
Being challenged to apply what you have received and translate them into tangible accomplishments, witnessed by others, is how we take personal spiritual insights and gift the whole world.