A Path to Spiritual Awakening: 7 Key Practices
In brief, spiritual awakening is a return to the natural state—what Zen/Chan refers to as the “nature of self” (自性) or what Buddhism refers to as “Buddha nature.” However, spiritual awakening is nothing religious but a phenomenon of the brain. This is my personal experience of the transformation at the cognitive and physical levels.
It is a process of disillusionment, or, as Chan describes, “dispel the cloud and see the sun behind.” The sun is always there but obstructed by the dark cloud. The journey begins with self-inquiry, a fierce act of dismantling the framework of the self, peeling away the layers of false identity that have been constructed over time— through upbringing, cultural traditions, societal conditioning, accumulated knowledge, or various beliefs. By removing these frameworks and beliefs, your true nature is revealed - a state where you can truly be yourself and find inner peace.
Practice #1: Reflective journaling
Awakening is a process of self-dismantling, breaking free from beliefs, frameworks, and archetypes to discover your true nature. It’s not about acquiring more knowledge or spiritual experience but rather about deprogramming and unlearning patterns.
This involved an intensive self-reflecting process through writing and journaling—sharpening awareness of your own thinking patterns and finding the connections through reasoning.
We’ll also take a deep dive into various fields by connecting the dots of neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and Zen/Chan. This approach helps to better comprehend the "self" and how it operates, ultimately untangling the mystery of yourself.
Practice #2: Cease the fight with yourself
The state of awakening, or the natural state, is one of undivided oneness. Self-conflicting thoughts create self-division within, and become obstacles that prevent you from returning to the natural state. This is why healing is an essential step on the path to awakening—by healing wounds and resolving internal conflicts, and it paves the way toward your inner peace.
The battles we fight within ourselves often manifest as conflicts with others. You have limited control over your external environment; you can’t rely on outer factors for your inner peace. Thus, the true resolution lies in ending the battles within.
Awakening is solely an introspective action—it means making peace with yourself and dropping the fights with others. As long as you're divided or in conflict with yourself, then you’re delaying the trip home and prolonging the suffering.
Practice #3: Mind-Body connection
The mind-body connection involves cultivating a deep relationship between your feelings and physical sensations. As you become more attuned to this connection, you might start to notice subtle feelings that you hadn’t been aware of before, allowing you to identify and connect the dots of potential obstacles.
Through practices like meditation or Qi/Energy work, you can deepen the mind-body connection. The connection also leads to a profound sense of interconnectedness with nature, the universe, and your surrounding environment. This awareness helps us realize the inseparability of all things—we are intrinsically linked and inseparable from everything around us. This realization naturally expands our empathy toward others.
The expansion of awareness also often reveals unconscious feelings or thoughts. It also helps us access repressed memories in the subconscious mind, which affects our behavioral and thinking patterns. By diving deeper into these subconscious feelings, thoughts, and beliefs, we can reconnect with our true feelings and allow our emotions to flow freely.
Practice #4: Listening
Listening and empathy are deeply intertwined, as true listening requires us to quiet our chatty minds, set aside our opinions, and begin to perceive with openness. Without this skill, we risk remaining in an echo chamber, hearing only our interpretations and reinforcing our existing thought patterns. Genuine listening allows us to step outside our mental frameworks and truly understand the journey and perspectives of others.
Listening is an important skill. Listening is to halt the chatty brain, halt opinions, so we could perceive new ideas and perspectives. Otherwise, we remain in an echo chamber where we only hear only our own interpretations and trapped in our thinking framework, rather than understanding what this awakening journey truly entails.
Practice #5: Non-attachment and let go of beliefs
As you begin the process of self-dismantling, the traditional markers of identity—such as gender, race, nationality, cultural values, religious doctrines, or societal norms—start to lose their hold on you. You come to realize that you are everything and nothing at the same time, shedding the associations that once defined you. While you still have personalities, personal appearances, and habits, they are like clothes you wear rather than the essence of who you are.
You become less attached to external facets, but this doesn’t mean you discard your career, personality, preferences, wealth, achievements, family, and friends. These are all parts of your external environment and the reality in which you live. Abandoning them entirely would be like visiting this world, an amusement park, only to sit on a bench, refusing to enjoy the rides and the laughter. Instead, engage with the world fully but without a strong attachment that defines your identity.
Awakening is not easy because it is the end of you, the drop of dualistic thinking, the collapse of the framework of self, the let go of beliefs that you hold on to dearly, a metaphysical death of you, and a rebirth. Thus, willingness is a huge determining factor.
Practice #6: Healing techniques
“I don’t want to feel depressed, anxious, or lack confidence, yet why do I have so little control over it?” As human beings, we long to be loving, peaceful, and joyful. However, the stubborn nature of the brain can often overshadow our will. Therefore, we employ various healing techniques to relax emotions and open up our hearts, including Eye Movement (derived from EMDR), guided meditation, hypnosis, self-analysis (Reflective Journaling), and Qi/Energy work.
Practice #7: Honesty, courage, and willingness
Nothing is more powerful than your willingness. Confronting the truth about yourself is no easy task. Just because one didn’t lie doesn’t mean one is honest. It takes tremendous courage and brutal honesty. Honesty cuts through the false identity, exposing everything by tearing apart deceptive facades. Honesty strips away the masks we wear, forcing us to confront our deepest, most genuine thoughts and the feelings we’re often too afraid or unwilling to acknowledge.
Awakening is a defying tendency, a reprogramming and deconditioning process. Yet, it’s human nature to avoid pain and the brain’s nature to resist changes. Confronting our flaws and internal conflicts can be incredibly painful. The mind resists change, clinging to familiar patterns and avoiding the painful roots of problems, often insisting, "I’m not wrong; this isn’t my fault." The brain starts finding excuses, hiding behind ambiguous reasoning.
To truly transform, one must be intolerant of self-contradiction and hate self-deception more than anything. Only when we have the courage to declare with fierce determination, "I am willing," can we open up and allow real transformation to occur.