Awakening Is Not Becoming Untouchable. It’s Becoming Intimate With Life
Why true awakening isn’t transcendence from pain, but the courage to feel everything, and choose consciously anyway.
“Awakened” is a heavy word in the spiritual world.
It’s spoken as if it were a trophy, something you receive after enough yoga classes, enough silent retreats, enough disciplined sadhana on a mat. I chased it.
Years ago, after my first yoga sequence in India, I devoted myself with the desperation of someone who believed her life depended on it. I practiced daily. I meditated until tears soaked my cheeks. Somewhere deep inside, I was secretly waiting to turn into a unicorn, untouchable, luminous, immune to the ordinary mess of being human.
I believed awakening meant I would finally float. That I would see all of life’s secrets. That boredom, confusion, heartbreak, and very human problems would no longer apply to me.
I thought awakening meant exemption.
The closest I’ve ever come to what the world might call “holiness” was standing just a few steps away from Dalai Lama in Northern India. I could feel his presence, quiet, vast, unmistakably alive.
I later learned his story more deeply. How he and others escaped Tibet while destruction and violence surrounded them. How they walked across frozen mountains in winter, some losing toes to frostbite, continuing for days chanting.
If that had been me, I know myself well enough to admit it would have taken me a lifetime to forgive the invaders of my kingdom.
And that’s when it landed.
His holiness didn’t come from floating above pain. It came from feeling it fully, and choosing forgiveness anyway. Not surface-level acceptance. Not spiritual bypassing. But a devotional, embodied understanding of suffering.
From where I stand now, awakening is far from becoming a unicorn.
Awakening is the radical intimacy of being alive.
It’s embracing the rise and the fall, the ecstasy and the ache, with the sobering realization that your soul signed up for all of it. Yes, all of it.
Why? Because the soul learns through experience.
Through friction. Through fire.
We shed beliefs that were never ours. We burn through illusions. And eventually, what remains is not perfection, but surrender.
Not collapse. Not passivity. Surrender to life as it is.
And yes, the wisdom often comes after you’ve been burned, not literally, but in the way it feels when you stop running from yourself. When you strip away distractions. When entertainment no longer numbs. When all that’s left is your own mind, looping its familiar stories.
Until one day, you question them.
Where did this thought come from?
Who is listening to it?
Who is steering?
This is where awakening becomes embodied. You realize you don’t have to be dragged by your thoughts, you can drive.
At first, you grip the wheel tightly. Then, slowly, your shoulders soften. Your breath deepens. And with breath, your nervous system shifts, into safety, into presence, into clarity. The road widens. Life feels less frantic, more navigable.
You begin to notice your own rhythm. Your own style of driving. You also notice, you’re not alone on the road. There are other drivers. Other journeys.
And wisdom is knowing distance: not too close, not too far. Enough space to coexist without losing yourself.
Some choose sovereignty, full agency over their body, their energy, their direction.
Others unconsciously choose codependency, loading others into their car, driving for everyone, losing themselves along the way.
Awakening isn’t about choosing right. It’s about being aware.
True awakening isn’t walking around preaching how others should live. It’s honoring free will, yours and theirs.
We all evolve:
From survival,
to pleasure,
to discipline and self-leadership,
to service and love,
to clear communication and authentic expression,
to deep contemplation,
and finally, to the acceptance that this body will end.
And still, consciousness remains aware, watching, choosing how fully to live.
So I’ll ask you what I ask myself, again and again:
Who are you, beyond the roles you were given?
Beyond society’s labels and expectations?
Who is aware right now as you read these words?
Who is witnessing the mind understand them? Who are you, really?
For the One Who Is Ready
If you’re no longer interested in spiritual performance, but in embodied truth
If you desire sovereignty, clarity, and a life lived from conscious choice rather than unconscious pattern.
I work privately with a small number of individuals ready to meet themselves fully.
This is deep calibration of nervous system, identity, and life direction.
If you feel the resonance, email me directly to apply: genozajoanne@gmail.com
We will begin there.
With love and devotion,
Joanne Genoza
Joanne Genoza
Joanne Genoza