THE MOST AWAKE I'VE EVER BEEN WAS WHEN DOING THE DISHES

WHY "AWAKENING" ISN'T A MOUNTAINTOP, IT'S A THURSDAY 😉

Hi dear one.

For a long time, the word awakening made me want to leave the room. It had been used to sell me candles, workshops, incents and crystals. Don’t get me wrong, I still love all that, but it stopped being connected to awakening.

Someone was "on a journey."

Another was "doing the work."

A guy I met had just gotten back from retreat and come back changed, for a little while anyway.

It all sounded lovely and felt like nothing.

And yet, underneath all that noise, there’s a real thing the word is pointing at. I know, because I spent a good chunk of my life without it, and I didn’t even notice I was missing it. That’s the strange part about being asleep, you don’t know you’re asleep. You think you’re awake. You’re just dreaming with your eyes open.

The autopilot problem

Here’s the version of asleep nobody shares. It’s not dramatic. It’s mundane.

It’s driving home and arriving with no memory of the drive.

It’s eating a whole meal while staring at a screen and not tasting a bite.

It’s saying “good thanks, you?” on reflex before the other person has even finished asking.

It’s a Monday becoming a year becoming a decade, all of it on a kind of low hum, where you’re technically present for your own life but not really in it.

That’s the sleep I mean. Not unconsciousness, on autopilot. The mind running ahead to the next thing, replaying the last thing, narrating, planning, worrying, scrolling, anywhere and everywhere except the one place you actually exist, which is here. The body shows up. The attention clocks out.

I lived like that for years and called it being busy. Being responsible, even. It felt productive, it was mostly just absent.

What it isn’t

So let me say clearly what waking up is not, because the version we get sold, I think is a scam.

It’s not a destination.

There’s no mountaintop where you arrive, enlightened and stay happily forever.

Anyone selling you a permanent state of bliss in four easy instalments is selling you a story.

It’s not an aesthetic.

It’s not the sunrise photo with the inspirational caption.

You can have all the right props, the meditation cushion, the journal, the playlist and still be completely checked out. I’ve been the most spiritual-looking and the least present I’ve ever been, at the exact same time.

And it’s not pleasant, necessarily. The things that have actually woken me up were rarely the nice ones.

A loss.

A real scare.

A relationship ending.

A moment standing somewhere I’d stood a hundred times before and suddenly actually seeing it.

Real awakening tends to arrive less like a nice warm bath and more like cold water to the face. Which truly is the point of cold water. 😊

A few touches from Bali, where I live

Living where I do has changed how I think about all this, in small ways that snuck up on me.

Every single morning here, all over the island, people place tiny handmade offerings on the ground, a little woven tray of flowers, rice, a stick of incense. By afternoon they’ve been stepped on, rained on, eaten by dogs and birds and the next morning new ones appear. At first, I thought it was about the gods. And it is. But living among it, I started to see something else in it too, it’s a built-in pause. A daily, deliberate act of attention, woven into ordinary life so thoroughly that you can’t sleepwalk past it.

I’m not romanticizing it, it’s a real spiritual practice, not a wellness hack, and it’s not mine to borrow. But it taught me something by example. These small rituals of noticing aren’t a break from life that you take twice a year on a retreat. They’re stitched into it, every day, in the most beautiful moments. The sacred isn’t somewhere else. It’s in the rice on the ground.

Mostly it’s just remembering

Here’s the least glamorous truth I’ve landed on, and the one I’d actually stake something on, waking up is not a one-time event. It's a practice you come back to again and again, never perfectly, and that's exactly as it meant to be.

You wake up. You pay attention. You feel, for a moment, the amazing fact that you exist at all. And then, five minutes later, or maybe only five seconds, you’re back on autopilot, planning dinner, half-listening, gone again. So, you wake up again. That’s it. That’s the whole practice. Not a single heroic enlightenment but ten thousand small returns. Noticing you drifted off, and coming back. Noticing again. Coming back again.

It sounds almost too simple to bother with. But try it for one ordinary day, really be in the shower, taste the coffee, look at the face of the person talking to you instead of through them and tell me your day didn’t have a different length, texture and feel to it by the end of it.

Attention is the rent we owe our own lives, and most of us are decades behind on payments.

Waking up together

There’s one more piece, and it’s the part I think gets left out of the find-yourself version of all this.

When you’re asleep, you’re alone. Autopilot is a deeply self-centered state, you’re trapped inside your own head, running your own loop, and other people barely register as real. They’re obstacles, or audiences, or background. But the more awake I get, the less the whole project feels like it’s about me at all. It turns out you can’t really see another person while you’re sleepwalking. You have to be present to actually meet someone. Presence is the doorway, and connection is what’s on the other side of it.

So I’ve come to think waking up isn’t a private spa treatment for the soul.

It’s how you finally show up, for the people you love, for strangers, for the world that’s been right in front of you the entire time, patiently waiting for you to look at it.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep. - Rumi

The gentle part

If you’ve read this far half-expecting me to tell you you’re doing it wrong: I’m not. We’re all asleep most of the time. I still drift off all the time. The goal was never to stay perfectly awake forever, that’s just one more impossible standard to feel bad about. At least for me.

The goal is just to wake up a little more often than yesterday. To catch yourself on autopilot and gently, without drama or judgement come back.

No retreat required.

No new wardrobe.

No candles and incents.

You can start in the next thirty seconds, right where you are, by doing nothing more than noticing that you’re alive and that this, this ordinary, unrepeatable moment, is the whole thing.

That’s all awakening ever was. Not a place you get to.

Just remembering to be here, while you still are.

Take a deep breath. 🙏

Until next time stay grateful and curious.

Light and joy

Kim