Waking up isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s often likened to waking up from a dream and realizing that you weren’t really flying over Niagara Falls but in fact you’ve been lying in bed the whole time. The inference there is that it’s better to be awake than asleep, because people who are asleep don’t know they’re asleep, which makes them out of touch with reality.

Ah, yes! Reality! The elusive Holy Grail of waking up practitioners. It holds the promise of REALLY being present, REALLY being aware of ourselves and where we are and what we’re up to. And finding a way to make peace with all of it, even as we see the illusory nature of the self.

This is one of those promises that sound great at first but when you dig a bit deeper, has some darker implications.

Let me explain using the analogy of a sleepwalker. Some traditions claim that we humans are very much like sleepwalkers – we’re walking around doing stuff but we’re not awake. As a result, we’re quite confused. We aren’t aware of what’s actually going on.

The promise of mindfulness and meditation practices is that they’re going to help you to wake up, so you can be made whole, you can be a realized being.

But what if, while you’ve been sleepwalking, only half awake, you’ve wandered into a truly shitty situation, like a nest of rattlesnakes in Death Valley without any water? How exactly does waking up help?

Waking up is well and good if you’re becoming aware of a reality that contains the usual amount of suffering. But a lot of us sleepwalkers awaken to find ourselves in a very nasty place. We don’t like what we awaken to one bit. We awaken to find we’re alcoholics or drug addicts. We awaken to find we have no friends. We awaken to find we’re 100 pounds overweight.

We awaken, in short, to find that we’re HURTING.

The good news is that because we’ve awakened, we can start taking more effective action and start to improve our situation. But at the moment of awakening, what we really have is a whole lot of hurting. And we may realize that the whole time we were sleepwalking, life was just getting worse. We’ve made a right mess of it. And that can hurt – a lot.

So my message today is two-fold: number one, the practices that help you to wake up are useful and I recommend that everyone practice them. Number two, don’t expect it to be all good stuff. Waking up hurts. When you awaken, you awaken to all of it. All the beauty and all the ugly. All the wonder and all the disappointment.

Be prepared!

You may not like what you awaken to when you start these practices.

At the same time, yes, it is better to be awake than asleep. More on that in another post. Be well.