The Seeker’s Guide to Life by Andrew Sewell
A beautifully succinct summary of the journey of awakening, and into enlightenment. Read this to see what you’ve already travelled and what else might be available to you.
My colleague and friend Andrew Sewell shared this Seeker’s Guide to Life on LinkedIn and I absolutely loved it for its clarity of describing the journey — which of course is never quite as linear as this in reality, but certainly these component parts, woven together in the perfect way for you, are your path to awakening and enlightening.
I felt his summary beautifully captured the broad path I’ve travelled, and therefore what I help others travel. So consider this a map. And when you’re looking for a guide to walk the actual terrain of the path with you — make sure your guide understands both the map and the terrain for themselves. I feel very thankful to know both.
In Overview
Andrew’s steps first guide you back through the content of experience, to the recognition of who you are that knows all experience — awakening.
In step 5 there’s then a recognition of the nature of who you are. The more this is known, the more your awakening deepens.
Andrew then moves on in step 8 to the recognition that the human conditioning now becomes more easily cleaned up. The process I define as enlightenment.
I’ve added a couple of notes in italics along the way, including my labels for what Andrew’s describing. I realise that — if there was one thing I could have done differently on my path, which would have made it easier to navigate — that would have been to ask for each teacher’s definitions of their words. It really helps to know what we each mean by the labels we use.
Now, here’s Andrew:
The Seeker’s Guide to Life
It’s not possible to create 10 simple steps to lasting peace and joy. But if you could, here’s what they would be:
1. Recognise that you are not your thoughts.
2. Connect with the sensations of the body. The tingling, the heaviness, the tightness. Don’t add concepts to this, such as I’m angry, or stressed or irritated, or whatever. Also, don’t try to get rid of anything. Just breathe into the feelings and accept whatever arises.
3. Underneath your thoughts and perceptions (sights, sounds, sensations, etc), there’s pure awareness. This is your true nature, the only thing about you that never changes. Built into this is a sense of peace, stillness, quiet joy, contentment.
4. You can start to get a felt sense of this pure awareness by putting your attention on your hand. Can you feel a kind of low-level buzzing? It’s a background feeling of aliveness. It’s beneath any ideas you have about what’s going on or stronger sensations like aches or pains. The key thing is that it’s always there and never changes. (Andrew subsequently gave appreciation to The Complete Book of Awakening for this experiment from Exploration 4.1.)
5. The next step is to intuit that this pure awareness isn’t limited to your body. It’s an expansive stillness, silence, emptiness. And it never stops. Words are useless at this point. The truly mind-blowing thing to realise is that awareness at this deeper level is your essential nature.
*** If you’ve stopped reading at this point, or your mind is going wtf, I get you. Your intellect will default to resisting this. It’s hardly surprising.
6. Once you’ve had this realisation, your perspective on life fundamentally changes. It gives you a much more grounded way to be in the world. You hold things more lightly. You take yourself less seriously.
7. The mistake now is to think you’re somehow enlightened*. You’re not. Don’t change your LinkedIn job title to ‘Jedi’. Your imperfect human-ness hasn’t gone anywhere. There’s still stuff to do. (This recognition of self as awareness is what I define as Awakening. See the next point for what I call Enlightenment.)
8. Once you’ve recognised that your true nature is this pure awareness, it gives you more confidence and ability to work with your limiting beliefs and conditioned behaviour patterns. As you do this, you release more stuck energy. Life feels more playful. You often have a feeling that it’s good to be alive. (This is the part of the journey I call Enlightenment, as we lighten ourselves of stale, conditioned ideas.)
9. Life still has its ups and downs. You might get sick. You might lose your job. There might be all kinds of crazy shit going on in the world. One day you’ll die. But there’s less of a sense that you have to try to control any of it. You know you never were in control. It was a trick of the mind.
10. Your relationship to life has changed. Instead of trying to wrangle it to meet your expectations, you let life live through you. This means you work in flow more of the time. You see that you’re here to make a unique, authentic contribution. And you have more courage to trust this as it naturally unfolds.
What resonates for you in this?
Which of these do you feel you can ‘tick off’ as done, or at least see you’re in the process of?
Which feel brand new, and you’re not sure where to start, or what the purpose is?
Get in touch and let’s talk.
Much love, Helen
P.S. If you’d like to explore the map and terrain on your own first, buy The Complete Book of Awakening which expands on what Andrew wrote, and which guides you step by step through practical explorations for your own awakening. Go to your local Amazon and search “The Complete Book of Awakening”.
