Much of the suffering people report during an awakening comes from the brain spinning out about what it means for their future, not from the sensations themselves. Joe’s counterintuitive instruction is to get out of your head and actually enjoy what’s happening in your body — there’s freedom and opening occurring, and leaning back into it does more for integration than any amount of analysis.
“Super important if you can during this process is to enjoy the sensations like get out of your brain about what it means for the future of you and just notice that there’s like a lot of freedom happening in your body… How do you lean back and like deeply enjoy that experience will be really good for the integration process as well.”
Part of fear, Joe notes, is just excitement without the breath. The bodily intensity — the shaking, the washing-over sensation, the sense of being breathed rather than breathing — is the same energy whether you frame it as terror or delight. The initial experience also “never lasts as long as you think,” and the resistance is usually what stretches it out. For the more energetically sensitive, grounding is essential: attention into the feet, being physically held, nature, slow movement, sensual experience.
Almost everyone who integrates an awakening ends up wishing for that initial moment back, even though it was scary at the time — evidence that the fear was never the truth of it.
Related Concepts
- Your stance toward awakening shapes the experience more than the awakening itself
- Fear constricts while excitement expands — same energy, different relationship
- Be in the unknown during identity shifts
- Pleasure is the safe path to the gut awakening
- Awakening doesn’t erase your humanity — it makes you more sensitive
- What shifts in awakening is the doer, not your capacity to function
- Meditation can become a form of self-management and dissociation