“And I’ve been waiting…waiting forever for you. Are you awake now, too?”
Yeah, that’s another Wilco quote but don’t worry – I’m not talking about the genius of Jeff Tweedy again today. Today, I am talking about the process of waking up.
Have you had that experience where you are dreaming and suddenly become aware that you are dreaming? And then you start trying to wake yourself up? Because you realize that you’re dreaming? And you start trying to move your body so as to wake up but your muscle feel like they are stuck molasses because the brain has shut them off to protect you from hurting yourself.
After a few minutes you finally wake up and realize that you were actually still in a dream when you first realized that you were asleep. It’s not really a dream within a dream. But sort of.
That’s what the spiritual process of waking up for me has often been like. Sure there have been days when I felt like I was on fire and steeped in the magic. But there were also days when I felt like I was stuck in molasses and doomed to repeat the same preposterous mistakes over and over again.
The process can also be difficult watch from the outside. It can be so tempting to try to shake someone awake in order to speed their recovery. But this is almost always a mistake.
You can’t wake someone else up – spiritually speaking. For those of us who have chosen to be a seeker – or rather being a seeker has chosen us – our path can be lined with boyfriends, spouses, friends and other loved ones who, God bless them, were just not there yet.
It can be so hard to sit back and allow someone you love to have their own waking up process. We start to get excited when we see them start to twitch but a person often needs to wake up repeatedly during a lifetime. For someone of us, there is a dream within the dream within the dream within the dream. It takes years. And, of course, it never ends. That’s both the beauty and the curse, I guess.
We get to be present and feel all of these experiences – even when they hurt so good.
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Journal Prompts:
1) When were the times in your life when you have “woken up?”
2) How have you tried to rush through your process when you weren’t ready yet?
3) How have you tried to rush the process of others?
4) Who have you had to say goodbye to along the way?