Stage 8 is The First Awaken Stage

After Stage 7—Resolution, we have completely resolved the old energetic pattern that has been running our life. We’ve taken an inventory of our lives and sorted through everything, getting rid of all that does not serve who we truly are. All our anchors to defence are gone. We have purged and all that remains is us - in our pure nature - with only the things we absolutely love or need to support our peaceful and connected existence. With this strange and new sense of being cleared or void, we enter Stage 8 - Emptiness in connectedness.

It is only in this way that we move into the Season of Awaken. We may have been trying to get there by doing the right things and working really hard to be spiritual, all to no avail. Awaken is a place that cannot be achieved. Achieving is a Transform strategy. Awaken happens to us when we “just are”, simply because we have moved beyond our minds and are able to be. Stage 8 is the first stage of being.

All this time we have been busy either protecting ourselves from what we did not like in Discover, or moving towards goals and proving our value in Transform. Then we reach Awaken and we find out that we were infinitely valuable all along and that life is not hard. We feel expansive and full of possibilities. Because all the noise of the mind is finally gone, we sense a rhythm within us, one that was always there. We feel gratitude simply for being.

Joy and gratitude are the baseline emotions in Awaken. In Discover, our entire existence was focused on protecting ourselves from feeling emotions that we found unacceptable. The fear that someone or something would, or even simply could, make us feel those emotions ruled our lives. In Transform, the emotions we felt were more action and success oriented. We experienced, welcomed and sought after the feelings of excitement, certainty and courage as we strove for our goals.

The problems we had in Discover were viewed as things that were separate from us. We did not know where they came from, or we blamed someone or something for where we perceived they came from. Mostly, we just wanted someone else to fix them or take them away. In Transform, these same situations became challenges, which tested the soundness of our plans. We invited them in so we could make ourselves strong and unwavering as we continued moving towards our goals. In Awaken, every situation is now seen for the gift that it was, is and will be.

Time, which was working against us in Discover and was so important to reaching our goals in Transform, is now meaningless in Awaken. We realize that our past only has meaning in the way we remember it and, for the first time, we can see that every wound contains a gift which has brought us to this point now. The future is a place that our energy flows towards to attract what we need in order to feel this new rhythm and gratitude. We now have a knowledge that the serendipity that we experienced in Stage 6 is, in fact, how the world works.

In Stage 8 and the early part of Awaken we are accessing the Soul Energetic Intelligence. We experience our personal souls and see others as souls. We still access the Discover Intelligences (Emotional and Bio-Energetic) and the Transform Intelligences (Lower and Upper Mental Thought), but they are flavoured by the Soul Intelligence.

Since we are experiencing ourselves as souls, the sense of importance and self that we developed in Transform no longer matters to us. In Discover, we were petrified that anyone would think we were a worthless and unlovable “nobody”. In Transform, we set out to prove that we were a “somebody” with great value. In Awaken, we are perfectly happy being a “nobody”. Stage 8 is the place this first happens—where we feel the dropping away of the self and the emptiness in connectedness.