In my experience everything just went BLANK. I couldn't even remember what day it was and it literally scared the crap out of me. It happened the first three times and then it stopped. After that I must have just became used to it. He's not kidding when he says even though he has mentioned this it will still be very surprising how intense. It's so worth it though!!!! Looking back it was just another part of the pathless path!!! Good Luck everyone!!! Prayers to all who is attempting to awaken. Namaste 🙏
Had my first experience of that fear barrier a few nights back. I literally had no reference point and felt I was falling through space. I thought it would be a breeze given that I've heard about this barrier countless times but yeah. Scared the shit out of md
@@knishiyama excellent.. in those moments even the really thin perception of falling through space, nothingness, etc can be recognized as thoughts/constructs… so what is beyond vast empty nothingness????
@@knishiyama That is the experience of falling through the Black Hole of the Self or Portal or void passage. The less fear and censorship thoughts you have while it is happening the farther you will go each time. Seemingly.
I cant get past a certain point in my meditation because it feels like exactly what you described. Like I'm going to completely lose my marbles and delve into madness
It’s important in that moment, when it comes, to see that the orienting thought is “I could go insane if I let go” it’s a fear disguised as a monitor of experience. You might be surprised how easy it is to let go of the fear perception when you recognize it as such :)
If it helps...the "stuff" emotions/thoughts are made of are never there to hurt you...like a movie..the contents of the movie may be scary, but the stuff is just light on a screen. If you can recognize that lack of intent to harm from the "stuff", then the content can be anything....I've been through my own madness a few times...feel for the "stuff" or "signature" or "frequency" of thoughts and feelings....once learn to recognize it, you can always know it's just stuff with a story. Or you can always take a break and come back. What's the rush? :) ...maybe that could be a Koan👍
Oh and while the barrier feels VERY real...the "trick" is really that the mind believes there is something to get past ..that there is a task to be done. Of course you still have to sit...and don't try to make unbelieving into a task...but maybe this understanding may make "getting past" something less of a task too.
“Another way of talking about it, is it’s just the body’s physiological response to what it perceives as a certain kind of dying.” This feels right. I’ve recently gone through this with doubt months after my initial awakening. It was overwhelming. It felt like the ego was using everything it had to pull me back into rumination. It’s like it was fighting to survive. The resistance to it and the struggling against it was what kept it alive. As soon as I through my hands up and gave up fighting it. As well as see that it (the ego) was using my beliefs that was laying under the surface that had been ingrained in me since childhood to create this doubt.
I got to a point where it felt like "I" was just going to explode like the big bang. Such a mind blowing experience. I didn't go past it, the fear barrier was just too intense. I was scared I would never come back, or even if i did go through, that things wouldn't be the same, or have the same human beauty behind them. I dont know what to do anymore.
In my experience, you will probably investigate in the same way at some point in the future. It can be surprising and disorienting for a while. Usually tho at sone point it clicks and you just know what to do. The willingness to go through is just seen as natural and simple. Then it’s often not nearly as formidable. Just be patient then reapproach when it feels relevant
I had pretty tough time with no financial stability, studying and working hard simultaneously, don’t sleep enough etc So I got used to be a very productive person, write to-do lists for both work and personal tasks, year goals etc. My core fear is about loosing control on my career and well being. Even a death doesn’t scary me as much as this
Take your time with it. Fears of loss of control and desire to surrender can both exist. Slowly make space for both. Neither experience is wrong or right :) seeing through this last piece may help. Psychological work. Awakening work. Both may help and both have importance. Take your time. You're in good company
As a child, from 6 to 15 I experienced episodes of terror that I could lose my life or mind. I had no one to connect with or understand. I'm 68 and have been on the path for many years and have been curious about those episodes, (trauma program) that's still in the body. I finally experienced this on a medicine journey as an adult and was completely paralyzed for 20 min!! The mind is going to stay safe but I continue to welcome this experience to move this energy thru to.....Thank you!
If you’re still dealing with the “fear barrier”, it’s because you’re meeting with the energy that’s been burying your fears. You don’t need to, but I would hold onto that feeling, so you can sit with it and plant a seed of understanding. If it is a “falling” feeling, embrace it. I’d highly recommend Zone Theory by Tim Nagrume Heidecker. I’ve learned to fall into this energy and it’s been a tremendous help.
This helped me reengage with the experience of letting go of ego/identity. I was lost. I've been feeling like letting go is like walking out my door with no clothes on. I got lost in fear. THANK YOU. Clothes and covering up are constructs. What/who needs covering up? This is freeing. Liberation equals equanimity.
Thank you so much for clearing up the question I had about “missing my chance.” I don’t know exactly how I got to that point before and that’s another reason I feel I missed out. At least now I know when I come to that place again what to except the fear to be like and know it’s ok and normal and I will be able to relax into it instead of tense up and freeze. Thanks again for helping with this crazy thang.
At the end of my meditation retreat a few days ago, I had existential terror ouuzing out of every single cell of my body. I was in physical agony for hours. The organs and internal system in my body became rewired and moved as the fear "shedded". It felt like I lost a ton of weight that I was unconsciously carrying. The body was cracked open from decades of contraction, decades of holding fear. Afterwards, there was a lightness, a pure empty feeling. I can intuit the energy forming as a thought contracting in my forehead, and automatically by default it releases now back into openess, rather than contraction. This is the same for any contraction in other parts of my body like the gut or jaw. Now it's time for the nuts and bolts part of the work, to conciously rewire my mind, which synronizes with the physical alignment of the body. The aim now is enough repitition, to effortless autopilot.
That's wonderful to hear. I'll just offer this... this can go deeper in the immediate. I wouldn't recommend planning out what to do and how this will go or deepen at this point but rather just immerse yourself in that formlessness... a window is open. But in the grand scheme, it doesn't really matter, i'm sure that is clear to you now ;)
Thank you so much for addressing this. This just happend to me...I feel I am dissolving in meditation and felt for a short time that I had to die. My heart was breathing so strong. I still feel so weird😢. I have been doing intense purging the last month.
Terrific, saturated in terror, 'Just' regular part of the path! The glimpses of the 'otherside' seem so sublime Me self would stay 'there'? Pls keep telling us, there are OTHERS All around me seem ruthless consumerism dif dimension unrelatable...guess I am judging
All around me, I see only one thing. Let's call it consciousness. The oneness fades into Nothingness. See all as consciousness, the same one thing... yourself, others, and all that appears.
In 1988 I had already been meditating many years and was quite proud of being a strong meditator. I was convinced I could face anything that arose in meditation until I was suddenly confronted by what I called a 'wall of fear' one day while in deep meditation. The experience not only horrified me, I was embarrassed and humbled. I was really shook up and confused for a long time In retrospect it was obvious I was at the precipice of completely letting go, although at that time I didn't realize that that's what it was. I retreated in terror and didn't really know why until 12 years later when certain circumstances led me to discover that I wasn't who I believed myself to be. When I investigated my identity through self-inquiry I was able to see the 'me-entity' for what it was, just a conglomeration of stories of 'me' that I had kept uppermost in my mind. And a significant portion of my ego identity was wrapped up in the belief I was a separate entity who saw himself as 'meditator on a spiritual path'. Not only did I see that I realized something critical - the presence of consciousness that had been overlooked in favor of attention remaining fixated on ego identity. It was then that my understanding of the fear experience in 1988 'clicked' into focus - that fear was the ego trying to protect itself. The 'seeing' of true nature that I had realized 12 years later allowed me to finally let go of my identity that had been in place most of my life. After that fear has just melted away. Realizing one's ever present consciousness/presence is like WD-40, it erodes and eventually dissolves the crud and rust that keeps the attachment to the ego identity intact until attachment finally falls apart. The ego can reappear at times, but it never reconstitutes itself into a believable character that tries to drive life in a preferred direction. Consciousness is finely attuned to what's happening as it happens.
Thanks for the reflection. It plays out so differently in different people and yet these rites of passage are generally consistent motifs along the path less path :)
This is what volunteering to go on a roller coaster or a zip line etc. is all about. Should one remain on the platform, fear will always take control. Should one open themselves up to the fear and the exhilaration, one may see at the end that they are a rider on a ride and it is exactly the unknown that is to be experienced (Even if the ride should fail). You give up control to volunteer for the experience. What happens, happens and then; and then we move on. 💛
@@nat998 I found something interesting while watching a video. Well, I noticed an interesting coincidence anyway. John Hawkwood 1323-1394 . English soldier and mercenary in Italy where he found his fortune by switching sides and drawing away enemy combatants to join his band of mercenaries. I mentioned this because I was watching a video where the guy was saying his name in accented english and it sounded like awkward. Now, I looked up John Awkward. no dice. I did find Hawkwood. My brain said wait a minute: searched first time word awkward was used; 1340. Awkeward. Awke meaning in the wrong direction and the suffix ward meaning in the direction of. I offer that John Hawkwood inspired people and situations to go "Hawkward" and thus inspired the phrase in his home country. Whaddya think of this nonsense?
Fear just wants to be felt, to be allowed to exist. The problem is thinking about the feeling of fear. How do you frame the fear, bad, scary or exicting?
Everything I say is contextual so take that into consideration here but I would say at this point in the game I wouldn’t recommend trying to reframe anything. That’s more like rearranging concepts. The key with the first and essential true shift is to fully go beyond concepts.
@@nat998 @Simply Always Awake I wanna hear it from the person who said it. Not what other people thinks it means. "Fear wants to be felt" is a pretty ambiguous statement
Edit: read your other commends and I'll try to get into it and get used to it by repetition... --- I think I've met this once, and the feeling seemed beyond thought - I lost all sense of identity, of where I was, the boundaries of the body seemed to have been erased like a circle's edges leaving just space, no memory or distraction, senses withdrawn... But the fear was so great, it was like a certitude: "if I keep going, I won't come back." Again, there was no sense of identity, and this was not a thought. I'd call it intuition, but that's just my worded interpretation of what I felt, not what happened. It's like the moment you're on the edge of the peak of a rollercoaster about to take a plunge, except you have no safety belt/bar, and the height down below seems limitless, dropping into the unknown in an instant... My relationship to meditation changed after this to be honest, I didn't go "knees-deep" since then 😅 Been doing just 10-30 minutes 2x daily of sitting practice since. But after this video I wonder if I can trust it more. Intellectually I may understand that it is just a "fear barrier", but that felt visceral. How do I ignore such a strong response that feels so "real" like I should "obey my instincts"? It's easy to observe a thought objectively, pain less so, and this feeling, I can't imagine how I am to see through it. Especially because at that point I didn't have any say in what was going on, no controlling or directing anything, it lasted for as long as it lasted and "threw me out" when it wanted. I hope this makes sense.
@@SimplyAlwaysAwake thank you, I will "try" to "surrender my way back into it" and see if I get used to this feeling... I don't seem to recall how it happened, because I wasn't really intending to get there, and maybe this is a key point. 🙏
This video is perfect for me, tonight multiple times I got to the point where it felt like my entire head and neck was flexed really tightly, but I just kept feeling, it wasn't scary but it was painful physically. And other times the same thing, but with my abs. It does seem like as thought seeps back in the pain goes away. I honestly don't even know if I'm just flexing my muscles or not. I asked you this before I think. It usually starts from the middle of my forehead or inside my head. Another thing, unrelated, I sometimes get this random excited feeling in my throat, and it's like when I try to feel it the worse it gets, and then thoughts take it away. Does any of this make sense, or am I talking crazy?
I can't get past the fear of death(but not only a complete death but also decline in physical condition such as illness and disability) no matter how I try. And I understand that in order to wake up you need to allow yourself to die, and get past that fear. This is the biggest barrier for me now(at least I perceived it as such) and I'm really struggling with it!
Fantastic video, thanks very much, I wish I had seen it before my Vipassana retreat were I had the breaking through experience after 8 days of sitting , only to find it morph in to utter terror shortly afterwards. You mention to "lead yourself back to that place", but this can be harder in a non retreat atmosphere. I have been practising inquiry and getting in to stillness more of late...will that lead me back eventually?
Here is another inquiry, what is a stillness that does not require being still? Put that into practice, moment to moment, for a while in your regular life.
@@SimplyAlwaysAwake Thanks for this, any suggestions on how to "hone" my practise....were you suggesting I hone my inquiry practise or go back to Vipassana.
@@johnb2138 well I describe the one pointed approach in the second to last chapter of my book. I also discuss it in sone videos but off hand cannot think of which. It’s really up to you if it feels like something you are inclined to do.
@@SimplyAlwaysAwake Thanks, I'll re-read that chapter, and yes I'm totally inclined, I plan to try and really turn up the heat on my practise for the next 3 1/2 months until the retreat. Thanks again.
Thanks Angelo-another perfectly timed video. I’ve heard the greatest percentage of the DNA they call ‘junk’ is coming on line now as quantum to enable more of us to come to these places you point us to. HaHa quickly got back into a concept after a fear barrier in meditation to days ago. Thank you for your soft spoken, easy on the ears, no nonsense signaling and your patience.
Thank you! I recently had an experience of intense fear/panic in the night, more intense than anything I have experienced before. There still seemed to be an observer there telling me that there was nothing I could do to get out of it, that it had to run it’s course. Is it typical to have an observer during the processing of repressed material?
@@birgit8996 Thanks! It is odd as I think about it now, that when the Observer was saying I needed to let it run it’s course, who was that “I” it was talking to-? There really wasn’t one-
Great video. Really speaks to me. Thank you! I would love to know why you, Angelo, believe sooo many people are "awakening" at this time in our history?
Angelo, can you have the "moment" and not even realize you had it? I took a nap earlier and I am... different now. I almost feel high. 3 yrs ago I would not have known how being high felt but I tried some gummies. I have not had any gummies in months because they seem to effect me now with fight or flight mode.
My problem with the fear going forward is that I watched some videos on RUclips about kundalini awakening and how it can make you feel like you're on LSD for the rest of your life. Should I be concerned about any after effects upon awakening? I have a 2 month old newborn to take care of, I can't afford to have my mental faculties compromised for too long.
do you also speak about the attachment to other people (your loved ones/feeling to lose the most important people in your life)...feels like I need to let go of everyone (in form) and everything...sh...like a little child losing its parents...yes existential...did you experience it also like losing your loved ones???
When I focus my awareness on the place that notices, I get a feeling of anxiety in my chest, and if I continue to sit with it, my breathing gets laboured. Is this likely the fear barrier that Angelo refers to?
Bro now I see thoughts as thoughts and I'm not identifying. It's new, cause I now see thoughts appearing and I'm not bound to them. They sort of arise in me. I'd normally be somehow attached to them, weird thing, but now for some part of the thoughts that's not the case. Now I'm up against the scary thoughts about what have I done and about losing myself and about being empty. I mean those are still thoughts and there's nothing really happening
@@SimplyAlwaysAwake well maybe it does 😈 its been more complex than just a feeling, it was the whole web of thoughts fueled by fear and other deficiency, and thoughts that catch me, like personalized ones. It was so intense and I was just fed up with this bulshit suffering that I went back to disidentifying and bro that eliminated like 85% of suffering 😳 And the crazy thing is that the worries that I had about going deeper became irrelevant. So at one moment they're super believable, but at another they're like nope it's not worth it and actually I don't care anymore. This disidentifying is giving me some super powers and it does feel like I'm becoming more integrated, which is crazy! Because I thought that the thought me was me and that I had to somehow integrate my wants and needs, but they seem to come naturally and are obvious from that state of clarity and presence or me, the mind is what's making this whole thing complex and messy 😁
Are there different big fear barriers? Because there is one where it feels like being sucked out of the body and fear of death ( ego death perhaps) and also another I’ve seen when in the absolute if you keep going, one will literally walk out of the body resulting in physical death. I’ve been close to both but the last one would be a quiet and peaceful walk to death and the other I would say is the ego death. If I’m interpreting these correctly you are talking about ego death in this video right? I would hate to mix the two up😂😂😂 actually there is only awareness in the first and not the second. So maybe it’s not ego death but awareness death.
Wow, Yeeta! The 2nd type of death experience sounds very intriguing, as it's not the first I have heard of it. It's been described as a literal vanishing out of this dimensional plane. Makes sense from the understanding of higher energetic density consciousness, as pure infinite consciousness itself - unbounded by limitation. I would say that yes - this video- is relegated to the "ego death" (which is huge) as it's the ego defence barriers (primal fears) that keep the veil of separation going. Thank you for sharing your experiences and insights! 💛😃
@@nat998 yes I think it’s the breaking through those ego barriers that can be terrifying. The other not so scary but It’s like one could walk right out of meditation through a barrier ( which would result in physical death) I have heard of monks doing it and after seeing it for myself it’s totally plausible, if one were to cultivate it a lot, it would be an amazing way to go when ready. Please don’t take this in any dark way, I think it’s fascinating 😊 Angelos videos and this channel and all the amazing people I’ve had conversations with ( including yourself) have really clarified the difference between these two barriers. At first I was like HOLY HELL you want me to go through there, I then realised he meant the ego barrier.
@@Kim-sherie I definitely don't see it as a dark idea. Death and dying is beautiful because it's a fundamental and very organic biological process for all the changing life forms. All things must pass. It's only natural. Life goes on. It's Life's ultimate 'pointer' towards reunification with Root Source-Wholeness. Without self awareness of the illusion of mortality, there's no impetus to transcend or 'know yourself'. Gift from the Universe 🙏. To simply vacate the human vessel would indeed be a wonderful way to transmutate Consciousness from localized self to Infinite Awareness. How grand 😃🙏 I echo your sentiments about this channel. It's been only a pure joy getting to hear the experiences and stories from fascinating people (such as Yourself!) and I've personally discovered so much so far. Thanks for your being here, and for sharing your stories. ❤️🙏✨
@@nat998 I think anyone who’s had any kind of prolonged suffering views death and birth the other way around to the majority. Death is actually birth away from suffering and well birth is the birth of suffering. Angelo is helping a lot of people out there to see that there is death( freedom from suffering) in this life. Giving up on life is not freedom, acceptance and suffering of life is not freedom. But liberating oneself in this life is freedom.
@@Kim-sherie Yeeta, I couldn't agree more wholeheartedly with all that you said! Beautiful! ❤️🙏 Liberation is a remembrance of who we truly are, and therein lies the peace that passeth...
Yes! How does on quantify an emotion? label it? scale it from on to ten? Consider the quantity of ten minutes. Why is 10 minutes important? What is so significant should they be "lost'? Why do we have emotions? where do thoughts come from? What is instinct, really? What makes the quantum world possible? We just do not know. Everything is vague and assumed should one question like this. 💛 Let slip the sand and relax on the beach.
@@humanbeing4995 yeah, okay. You could say nothing means anything and let go of everything, but thats basically the same as death so why not just kill yourself? Even when trying to approach some sense of oneness, or awakening to other possibilities you can't experience, you have to start somewhere. Some grounding point. Just as our bodies are the grounding for our minds which is the grounding for our thoughts which is the grounding for loosing that need for a sense of grounding. Its all a fractal, repeating pattern when you go out far enough. You need to examine something to get anywhere, including letting go of fear, or w/e. Its not an impossible task and if you think it is you're limiting how far you can get.
@@humanbeing4995 well, I can label emotion and quantify it in a lot of different ways, which helps to understand all the ways it can't be quantified at the same time. Emotions are a physiological process, a chemical chain reaction that causes you to react and change behaviors rapidly without overloading your brain with conscious thought about every single action. Emotions are an evolutionary process that helped to activate our limits in many given events while without them it would be only possible to maximize a single or few attributes or behaviors without sacrificing too much energy or behavioral adaptation. Emotion helps to form social bonds which are necessary for competitive behavior against other opponents which would overwhelm you otherwise with superior intellect, reaction, or strength. Emotions are a flow of energy through the body, each fairly unique to the given situations in which they arise. Anger for fight, fear for flight, love for tenacity, excitement for energy, and so on and so fourth. You see its the opposite. You don't want to lose all defining features of something to understand it. You want to give it absolutely as many as humanly possible, at which point you start to see one thing bleeds into everything else and its at that point you lose the boundaries once you understand and then you can let go. Otherwise your biological processes are more than likely going to over-ride any attempts to let go of a thing you were meant to have. Everything is vague and nothing is vague. Kinda depends on how you look at it. But one things for sure you're not going to help anyone get anywhere if you don't have something to ground your ideas to. Otherwise its just sophistry and high minded nonsense that doesn't get anyone anywhere other than running in place imagining you've achieve something by doing nothing. Its not helpful advice.
@@nickmagrick7702 That's a great start, the clinical definition of emotion. Now, tell me how you feel in a manner that I will truly understand exactly as you feel. See, the definition is merely a concept without any actual experience. Being left handed can never be fully understood by being right handed, the smell of most flowers cannot be communicated so that another person who has never smelled that flower can go out and find it by it's fragrance. The virtue of illusion is alive in concepts for they are of themselves so. All knowledge is based here and in this Socrates is still the wisest, even if he is a fiction of Plato. A dictionary is a list of words that are defined by the words within the tool itself, each requiring personal experience and a working knowledge of the language, without these things it's illusion of control is exposed.
@@humanbeing4995 you can't understand exactly how I feel any more than you can see exactly as I see through my eyes. The physical components arn't there. You can however approximate and equate the sense of feeling so that they are understood to be the same thing, the same as how we both look at the color blue and can identify it as the color blue, even though we are seeing two different things on a purely objective level. Emotions are just more complicated and harder to convey. Yes the definition is just merely a concept, which is why grounding to something you actually know is so important. We both, probably, know what fear and joy feels like, and don't need an overly complex wordy definition and scenario in order to be able communicate the ideas effectively to each other. I disagree the whole left handed not being able to understand a right handed person example. I think thats fairly easy to get. Do you mean virtue of illusion, or illusion of virtue? You could say all reality is an illusion in some sense, but thats to completely disregard that the real as well. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Socrates is a fictional work of Plato? Never heard that theory before. And yeah, sure, dictionaries are simply constructs and metaphors that define the real. But then why do we still need to use it? Theres a reason it exist, it helps us to ground something in meaning to better plan out the future and to offer as scaffolding for complex ideas that would otherwise be impossible to hold all of them in your head at once. Describing fear and emotions, is much the same way. And equally important in the same way. You almost kinda came full circle to my point, you were just right on the edge of it.
In my experience everything just went BLANK. I couldn't even remember what day it was and it literally scared the crap out of me. It happened the first three times and then it stopped. After that I must have just became used to it. He's not kidding when he says even though he has mentioned this it will still be very surprising how intense. It's so worth it though!!!! Looking back it was just another part of the pathless path!!! Good Luck everyone!!! Prayers to all who is attempting to awaken. Namaste 🙏
Had my first experience of that fear barrier a few nights back. I literally had no reference point and felt I was falling through space. I thought it would be a breeze given that I've heard about this barrier countless times but yeah. Scared the shit out of md
Thx for your reflection James. You describe it well
@@knishiyama excellent.. in those moments even the really thin perception of falling through space, nothingness, etc can be recognized as thoughts/constructs… so what is beyond vast empty nothingness????
@@knishiyama That is the experience of falling through the Black Hole of the Self or Portal or void passage. The less fear and censorship thoughts you have while it is happening the farther you will go each time. Seemingly.
@@SimplyAlwaysAwake oh wow. Thank you
I cant get past a certain point in my meditation because it feels like exactly what you described. Like I'm going to completely lose my marbles and delve into madness
It’s important in that moment, when it comes, to see that the orienting thought is “I could go insane if I let go” it’s a fear disguised as a monitor of experience. You might be surprised how easy it is to let go of the fear perception when you recognize it as such :)
If it helps...the "stuff" emotions/thoughts are made of are never there to hurt you...like a movie..the contents of the movie may be scary, but the stuff is just light on a screen. If you can recognize that lack of intent to harm from the "stuff", then the content can be anything....I've been through my own madness a few times...feel for the "stuff" or "signature" or "frequency" of thoughts and feelings....once learn to recognize it, you can always know it's just stuff with a story.
Or you can always take a break and come back. What's the rush? :) ...maybe that could be a Koan👍
Oh and while the barrier feels VERY real...the "trick" is really that the mind believes there is something to get past ..that there is a task to be done. Of course you still have to sit...and don't try to make unbelieving into a task...but maybe this understanding may make "getting past" something less of a task too.
“Another way of talking about it, is it’s just the body’s physiological response to what it perceives as a certain kind of dying.”
This feels right. I’ve recently gone through this with doubt months after my initial awakening. It was overwhelming. It felt like the ego was using everything it had to pull me back into rumination. It’s like it was fighting to survive.
The resistance to it and the struggling against it was what kept it alive. As soon as I through my hands up and gave up fighting it. As well as see that it (the ego) was using my beliefs that was laying under the surface that had been ingrained in me since childhood to create this doubt.
I got to a point where it felt like "I" was just going to explode like the big bang. Such a mind blowing experience. I didn't go past it, the fear barrier was just too intense. I was scared I would never come back, or even if i did go through, that things wouldn't be the same, or have the same human beauty behind them. I dont know what to do anymore.
In my experience, you will probably investigate in the same way at some point in the future. It can be surprising and disorienting for a while. Usually tho at sone point it clicks and you just know what to do. The willingness to go through is just seen as natural and simple. Then it’s often not nearly as formidable. Just be patient then reapproach when it feels relevant
@@SimplyAlwaysAwake thank you as always, simply always. 🙂
I had pretty tough time with no financial stability, studying and working hard simultaneously, don’t sleep enough etc
So I got used to be a very productive person, write to-do lists for both work and personal tasks, year goals etc. My core fear is about loosing control on my career and well being. Even a death doesn’t scary me as much as this
Take your time with it. Fears of loss of control and desire to surrender can both exist. Slowly make space for both. Neither experience is wrong or right :) seeing through this last piece may help. Psychological work. Awakening work. Both may help and both have importance.
Take your time. You're in good company
@@pandmantom Thanks friend, appreciate your reply
As a child, from 6 to 15 I experienced episodes of terror that I could lose my life or mind. I had no one to connect with or understand. I'm 68 and have been on the path for many years and have been curious about those episodes, (trauma program) that's still in the body. I finally experienced this on a medicine journey as an adult and was completely paralyzed for 20 min!! The mind is going to stay safe but I continue to welcome this experience to move this energy thru to.....Thank you!
If you’re still dealing with the “fear barrier”, it’s because you’re meeting with the energy that’s been burying your fears. You don’t need to, but I would hold onto that feeling, so you can sit with it and plant a seed of understanding. If it is a “falling” feeling, embrace it. I’d highly recommend Zone Theory by Tim Nagrume Heidecker. I’ve learned to fall into this energy and it’s been a tremendous help.
This helped me reengage with the experience of letting go of ego/identity. I was lost. I've been feeling like letting go is like walking out my door with no clothes on. I got lost in fear. THANK YOU. Clothes and covering up are constructs. What/who needs covering up? This is freeing. Liberation equals equanimity.
Wonderful !
Thanks
Welcome
All of your videos are timeless gem 💎.
Thx for tuning in
Thank you so much for clearing up the question I had about “missing my chance.” I don’t know exactly how I got to that point before and that’s another reason I feel I missed out. At least now I know when I come to that place again what to except the fear to be like and know it’s ok and normal and I will be able to relax into it instead of tense up and freeze. Thanks again for helping with this crazy thang.
At the end of my meditation retreat a few days ago, I had existential terror ouuzing out of every single cell of my body. I was in physical agony for hours. The organs and internal system in my body became rewired and moved as the fear "shedded". It felt like I lost a ton of weight that I was unconsciously carrying. The body was cracked open from decades of contraction, decades of holding fear. Afterwards, there was a lightness, a pure empty feeling. I can intuit the energy forming as a thought contracting in my forehead, and automatically by default it releases now back into openess, rather than contraction. This is the same for any contraction in other parts of my body like the gut or jaw.
Now it's time for the nuts and bolts part of the work, to conciously rewire my mind, which synronizes with the physical alignment of the body. The aim now is enough repitition, to effortless autopilot.
That's wonderful to hear. I'll just offer this... this can go deeper in the immediate. I wouldn't recommend planning out what to do and how this will go or deepen at this point but rather just immerse yourself in that formlessness... a window is open. But in the grand scheme, it doesn't really matter, i'm sure that is clear to you now ;)
@@SimplyAlwaysAwake thank you for your advice!
@@talkswithtomas3966 welcome
Thank you so much for addressing this. This just happend to me...I feel I am dissolving in meditation and felt for a short time that I had to die. My heart was breathing so strong. I still feel so weird😢. I have been doing intense purging the last month.
Thank you, incredible.
Welcome 🤗
Terrific, saturated in terror, 'Just' regular part of the path! The glimpses of the 'otherside' seem so sublime Me self would stay 'there'? Pls keep telling us, there are OTHERS
All around me seem ruthless consumerism dif dimension unrelatable...guess I am judging
All around me, I see only one thing. Let's call it consciousness. The oneness fades into Nothingness. See all as consciousness, the same one thing... yourself, others, and all that appears.
Yeah, not a great selling point for awakening, but I don't pull any punches, bc why tell only half the story :)
In 1988 I had already been meditating many years and was quite proud of being a strong meditator. I was convinced I could face anything that arose in meditation until I was suddenly confronted by what I called a 'wall of fear' one day while in deep meditation. The experience not only horrified me, I was embarrassed and humbled. I was really shook up and confused for a long time
In retrospect it was obvious I was at the precipice of completely letting go, although at that time I didn't realize that that's what it was. I retreated in terror and didn't really know why until 12 years later when certain circumstances led me to discover that I wasn't who I believed myself to be.
When I investigated my identity through self-inquiry I was able to see the 'me-entity' for what it was, just a conglomeration of stories of 'me' that I had kept uppermost in my mind. And a significant portion of my ego identity was wrapped up in the belief I was a separate entity who saw himself as 'meditator on a spiritual path'. Not only did I see that I realized something critical - the presence of consciousness that had been overlooked in favor of attention remaining fixated on ego identity.
It was then that my understanding of the fear experience in 1988 'clicked' into focus - that fear was the ego trying to protect itself. The 'seeing' of true nature that I had realized 12 years later allowed me to finally let go of my identity that had been in place most of my life. After that fear has just melted away.
Realizing one's ever present consciousness/presence is like WD-40, it erodes and eventually dissolves the crud and rust that keeps the attachment to the ego identity intact until attachment finally falls apart. The ego can reappear at times, but it never reconstitutes itself into a believable character that tries to drive life in a preferred direction. Consciousness is finely attuned to what's happening as it happens.
Well said. Thank you.
Thanks for the reflection. It plays out so differently in different people and yet these rites of passage are generally consistent motifs along the path less path :)
I love your stuff. Clear and with common sense, in the sense that you can communicate concisely and relateably. So many make things more confusing
This is what volunteering to go on a roller coaster or a zip line etc. is all about. Should one remain on the platform, fear will always take control. Should one open themselves up to the fear and the exhilaration, one may see at the end that they are a rider on a ride and it is exactly the unknown that is to be experienced (Even if the ride should fail). You give up control to volunteer for the experience. What happens, happens and then; and then we move on. 💛
@@nat998 Days of future passed is every Tuesday for me, lol. I love the Moody Blues.
@@nat998 I found something interesting while watching a video. Well, I noticed an interesting coincidence anyway. John Hawkwood 1323-1394 . English soldier and mercenary in Italy where he found his fortune by switching sides and drawing away enemy combatants to join his band of mercenaries. I mentioned this because I was watching a video where the guy was saying his name in accented english and it sounded like awkward. Now, I looked up John Awkward. no dice. I did find Hawkwood. My brain said wait a minute: searched first time word awkward was used; 1340. Awkeward. Awke meaning in the wrong direction and the suffix ward meaning in the direction of. I offer that John Hawkwood inspired people and situations to go "Hawkward" and thus inspired the phrase in his home country. Whaddya think of this nonsense?
@@nat998 "You're here today, no future fear. This day will last... a thousand years; if you-want-it-to"
drop an e over the centuries both in hawke and in awke and it makes sense to me.
@@nat998 Oh, also Bill Withers "Use me" if one were to disregard that he sings of a lover and instead sings of "The Dream", the nothingness.
Thanks Angelo! You're super awesome!!
Welcome :)
You're a blessing Angelo! Thanks for your powerful grace and encouragement ❤
You're very welcome
Thanks for sharing this. 🙏🎯♥😶🙏
super helpful - thank you
Glad it was helpful!
Your videos are invaluable. Thank you so so much for doing what you do
Welcome!
Fear just wants to be felt, to be allowed to exist. The problem is thinking about the feeling of fear. How do you frame the fear, bad, scary or exicting?
All fear is the fear of death. Be willing to die.
what do you mean fear wants to be felt?
@@nickmagrick7702 not repressing or suppressing feelings... 💛
Everything I say is contextual so take that into consideration here but I would say at this point in the game I wouldn’t recommend trying to reframe anything. That’s more like rearranging concepts. The key with the first and essential true shift is to fully go beyond concepts.
@@nat998 @Simply Always Awake I wanna hear it from the person who said it. Not what other people thinks it means. "Fear wants to be felt" is a pretty ambiguous statement
Edit: read your other commends and I'll try to get into it and get used to it by repetition...
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I think I've met this once, and the feeling seemed beyond thought - I lost all sense of identity, of where I was, the boundaries of the body seemed to have been erased like a circle's edges leaving just space, no memory or distraction, senses withdrawn...
But the fear was so great, it was like a certitude: "if I keep going, I won't come back." Again, there was no sense of identity, and this was not a thought. I'd call it intuition, but that's just my worded interpretation of what I felt, not what happened. It's like the moment you're on the edge of the peak of a rollercoaster about to take a plunge, except you have no safety belt/bar, and the height down below seems limitless, dropping into the unknown in an instant...
My relationship to meditation changed after this to be honest, I didn't go "knees-deep" since then 😅 Been doing just 10-30 minutes 2x daily of sitting practice since. But after this video I wonder if I can trust it more. Intellectually I may understand that it is just a "fear barrier", but that felt visceral. How do I ignore such a strong response that feels so "real" like I should "obey my instincts"? It's easy to observe a thought objectively, pain less so, and this feeling, I can't imagine how I am to see through it. Especially because at that point I didn't have any say in what was going on, no controlling or directing anything, it lasted for as long as it lasted and "threw me out" when it wanted. I hope this makes sense.
That’s it, you describe it well. Definitely not a thought. Maybe I shouldn’t call it a fear barrier but a rite of passage. 😊
@@SimplyAlwaysAwake thank you, I will "try" to "surrender my way back into it" and see if I get used to this feeling... I don't seem to recall how it happened, because I wasn't really intending to get there, and maybe this is a key point. 🙏
So after the breakthrough, how do you function in society- with your family, work, etc ?
Usually very much ion a flow state at first. Then a lot of emotion work is prudent :)))
Hildy, an old saying, Before enlightenment, carry water, chop wood. After enlightenment, carry water, chop wood. Peace to you.
This video is perfect for me, tonight multiple times I got to the point where it felt like my entire head and neck was flexed really tightly, but I just kept feeling, it wasn't scary but it was painful physically. And other times the same thing, but with my abs. It does seem like as thought seeps back in the pain goes away. I honestly don't even know if I'm just flexing my muscles or not. I asked you this before I think. It usually starts from the middle of my forehead or inside my head.
Another thing, unrelated, I sometimes get this random excited feeling in my throat, and it's like when I try to feel it the worse it gets, and then thoughts take it away. Does any of this make sense, or am I talking crazy?
You will figure it out. Everyone's journey is unique.
Angelo, I feel like I've had a breakthrough, but I don't have the language to discuss it!
I can't get past the fear of death(but not only a complete death but also decline in physical condition such as illness and disability) no matter how I try. And I understand that in order to wake up you need to allow yourself to die, and get past that fear. This is the biggest barrier for me now(at least I perceived it as such) and I'm really struggling with it!
I love this.
Gracias! 🙏
Fantastic video, thanks very much, I wish I had seen it before my Vipassana retreat were I had the breaking through experience after 8 days of sitting , only to find it morph in to utter terror shortly afterwards. You mention to "lead yourself back to that place", but this can be harder in a non retreat atmosphere. I have been practising inquiry and getting in to stillness more of late...will that lead me back eventually?
Likely yes although honing it into a one pointed approach can definitely accelerate the process
Here is another inquiry, what is a stillness that does not require being still? Put that into practice, moment to moment, for a while in your regular life.
@@SimplyAlwaysAwake Thanks for this, any suggestions on how to "hone" my practise....were you suggesting I hone my inquiry practise or go back to Vipassana.
@@johnb2138 well I describe the one pointed approach in the second to last chapter of my book. I also discuss it in sone videos but off hand cannot think of which. It’s really up to you if it feels like something you are inclined to do.
@@SimplyAlwaysAwake Thanks, I'll re-read that chapter, and yes I'm totally inclined, I plan to try and really turn up the heat on my practise for the next 3 1/2 months until the retreat. Thanks again.
Thanks Angelo-another perfectly timed video.
I’ve heard the greatest percentage of the DNA they call ‘junk’ is coming on line now as quantum to enable more of us to come to these places you point us to.
HaHa quickly got back into a concept after a fear barrier in meditation to days ago.
Thank you for your soft spoken, easy on the ears, no nonsense signaling and your patience.
Thank you! I recently had an experience of intense fear/panic in the night, more intense than anything I have experienced before. There still seemed to be an observer there telling me that there was nothing I could do to get out of it, that it had to run it’s course. Is it typical to have an observer during the processing of repressed material?
It helps to see through the observer....what does he look like.....what material is he?
@@birgit8996 great suggestion, thanks!
You can also look, who knows from the observer❤
@@birgit8996 Thanks! It is odd as I think about it now, that when the Observer was saying I needed to let it run it’s course, who was that “I” it was talking to-? There really wasn’t one-
Exactly...just the thought...I have to let it run its course!
No observer😊
Great video. Really speaks to me. Thank you!
I would love to know why you, Angelo, believe sooo many people are "awakening" at this time in our history?
Angelo, can you have the "moment" and not even realize you had it? I took a nap earlier and I am... different now. I almost feel high. 3 yrs ago I would not have known how being high felt but I tried some gummies. I have not had any gummies in months because they seem to effect me now with fight or flight mode.
My problem with the fear going forward is that I watched some videos on RUclips about kundalini awakening and how it can make you feel like you're on LSD for the rest of your life. Should I be concerned about any after effects upon awakening? I have a 2 month old newborn to take care of, I can't afford to have my mental faculties compromised for too long.
do you also speak about the attachment to other people (your loved ones/feeling to lose the most important people in your life)...feels like I need to let go of everyone (in form) and everything...sh...like a little child losing its parents...yes existential...did you experience it also like losing your loved ones???
When I focus my awareness on the place that notices, I get a feeling of anxiety in my chest, and if I continue to sit with it, my breathing gets laboured. Is this likely the fear barrier that Angelo refers to?
You know where I dont think about fear?
Kudos.
if you break the fear barrier, does it cause the people around you to start screaming as you move past them?
No.
@@Koort1008 arn't you fun.
😂... not exactly but you will be in a perpetual scream, yet you won't hear it, only everyone you encounter will :0
The world moves through me. I am stillness.
Bro now I see thoughts as thoughts and I'm not identifying. It's new, cause I now see thoughts appearing and I'm not bound to them. They sort of arise in me. I'd normally be somehow attached to them, weird thing, but now for some part of the thoughts that's not the case. Now I'm up against the scary thoughts about what have I done and about losing myself and about being empty. I mean those are still thoughts and there's nothing really happening
Awesome 👏
@@SimplyAlwaysAwake this is not fun!!!
@@Ballsmasher69420oh lol , it gets to be more fun, I promise , just feel the sensation of emotion as directly as possible and let it move through
@@SimplyAlwaysAwake well maybe it does 😈 its been more complex than just a feeling, it was the whole web of thoughts fueled by fear and other deficiency, and thoughts that catch me, like personalized ones. It was so intense and I was just fed up with this bulshit suffering that I went back to disidentifying and bro that eliminated like 85% of suffering 😳 And the crazy thing is that the worries that I had about going deeper became irrelevant. So at one moment they're super believable, but at another they're like nope it's not worth it and actually I don't care anymore. This disidentifying is giving me some super powers and it does feel like I'm becoming more integrated, which is crazy! Because I thought that the thought me was me and that I had to somehow integrate my wants and needs, but they seem to come naturally and are obvious from that state of clarity and presence or me, the mind is what's making this whole thing complex and messy 😁
❤
💗... life and love; living and loving = living truth 🙏
@Nat
Beautiful words,...... for the unspeakable "truth"❤
@@birgit8996 🌹💗🙏✨
how to get to the fear barrier?
Are there different big fear barriers? Because there is one where it feels like being sucked out of the body and fear of death ( ego death perhaps) and also another I’ve seen when in the absolute if you keep going, one will literally walk out of the body resulting in physical death. I’ve been close to both but the last one would be a quiet and peaceful walk to death and the other I would say is the ego death. If I’m interpreting these correctly you are talking about ego death in this video right? I would hate to mix the two up😂😂😂
actually there is only awareness in the first and not the second. So maybe it’s not ego death but awareness death.
Wow, Yeeta! The 2nd type of death experience sounds very intriguing, as it's not the first I have heard of it. It's been described as a literal vanishing out of this dimensional plane. Makes sense from the understanding of higher energetic density consciousness, as pure infinite consciousness itself - unbounded by limitation. I would say that yes - this video- is relegated to the "ego death" (which is huge) as it's the ego defence barriers (primal fears) that keep the veil of separation going. Thank you for sharing your experiences and insights! 💛😃
@@nat998 yes I think it’s the breaking through those ego barriers that can be terrifying.
The other not so scary but It’s like one could walk right out of meditation through a barrier ( which would result in physical death) I have heard of monks doing it and after seeing it for myself it’s totally plausible, if one were to cultivate it a lot, it would be an amazing way to go when ready. Please don’t take this in any dark way, I think it’s fascinating 😊
Angelos videos and this channel and all the amazing people I’ve had conversations with ( including yourself) have really clarified the difference between these two barriers. At first I was like HOLY HELL you want me to go through there, I then realised he meant the ego barrier.
@@Kim-sherie I definitely don't see it as a dark idea. Death and dying is beautiful because it's a fundamental and very organic biological process for all the changing life forms. All things must pass. It's only natural. Life goes on. It's Life's ultimate 'pointer' towards reunification with Root Source-Wholeness. Without self awareness of the illusion of mortality, there's no impetus to transcend or 'know yourself'. Gift from the Universe 🙏. To simply vacate the human vessel would indeed be a wonderful way to transmutate Consciousness from localized self to Infinite Awareness. How grand 😃🙏
I echo your sentiments about this channel. It's been only a pure joy getting to hear the experiences and stories from fascinating people (such as Yourself!) and I've personally discovered so much so far. Thanks for your being here, and for sharing your stories. ❤️🙏✨
@@nat998 I think anyone who’s had any kind of prolonged suffering views death and birth the other way around to the majority. Death is actually birth away from suffering and well birth is the birth of suffering. Angelo is helping a lot of people out there to see that there is death( freedom from suffering) in this life. Giving up on life is not freedom, acceptance and suffering of life is not freedom. But liberating oneself in this life is freedom.
@@Kim-sherie Yeeta, I couldn't agree more wholeheartedly with all that you said! Beautiful! ❤️🙏 Liberation is a remembrance of who we truly are, and therein lies the peace that passeth...
honestly, I felt like you spent almost 10 minutes describing nothing concrete. Everything was in vague terms.
Yes! How does on quantify an emotion? label it? scale it from on to ten? Consider the quantity of ten minutes. Why is 10 minutes important? What is so significant should they be "lost'? Why do we have emotions? where do thoughts come from? What is instinct, really? What makes the quantum world possible? We just do not know. Everything is vague and assumed should one question like this. 💛 Let slip the sand and relax on the beach.
@@humanbeing4995 yeah, okay. You could say nothing means anything and let go of everything, but thats basically the same as death so why not just kill yourself?
Even when trying to approach some sense of oneness, or awakening to other possibilities you can't experience, you have to start somewhere. Some grounding point. Just as our bodies are the grounding for our minds which is the grounding for our thoughts which is the grounding for loosing that need for a sense of grounding.
Its all a fractal, repeating pattern when you go out far enough. You need to examine something to get anywhere, including letting go of fear, or w/e.
Its not an impossible task and if you think it is you're limiting how far you can get.
@@humanbeing4995 well, I can label emotion and quantify it in a lot of different ways, which helps to understand all the ways it can't be quantified at the same time.
Emotions are a physiological process, a chemical chain reaction that causes you to react and change behaviors rapidly without overloading your brain with conscious thought about every single action.
Emotions are an evolutionary process that helped to activate our limits in many given events while without them it would be only possible to maximize a single or few attributes or behaviors without sacrificing too much energy or behavioral adaptation.
Emotion helps to form social bonds which are necessary for competitive behavior against other opponents which would overwhelm you otherwise with superior intellect, reaction, or strength.
Emotions are a flow of energy through the body, each fairly unique to the given situations in which they arise. Anger for fight, fear for flight, love for tenacity, excitement for energy, and so on and so fourth.
You see its the opposite. You don't want to lose all defining features of something to understand it. You want to give it absolutely as many as humanly possible, at which point you start to see one thing bleeds into everything else and its at that point you lose the boundaries once you understand and then you can let go. Otherwise your biological processes are more than likely going to over-ride any attempts to let go of a thing you were meant to have.
Everything is vague and nothing is vague. Kinda depends on how you look at it. But one things for sure you're not going to help anyone get anywhere if you don't have something to ground your ideas to. Otherwise its just sophistry and high minded nonsense that doesn't get anyone anywhere other than running in place imagining you've achieve something by doing nothing. Its not helpful advice.
@@nickmagrick7702 That's a great start, the clinical definition of emotion. Now, tell me how you feel in a manner that I will truly understand exactly as you feel. See, the definition is merely a concept without any actual experience. Being left handed can never be fully understood by being right handed, the smell of most flowers cannot be communicated so that another person who has never smelled that flower can go out and find it by it's fragrance. The virtue of illusion is alive in concepts for they are of themselves so. All knowledge is based here and in this Socrates is still the wisest, even if he is a fiction of Plato. A dictionary is a list of words that are defined by the words within the tool itself, each requiring personal experience and a working knowledge of the language, without these things it's illusion of control is exposed.
@@humanbeing4995 you can't understand exactly how I feel any more than you can see exactly as I see through my eyes. The physical components arn't there.
You can however approximate and equate the sense of feeling so that they are understood to be the same thing, the same as how we both look at the color blue and can identify it as the color blue, even though we are seeing two different things on a purely objective level.
Emotions are just more complicated and harder to convey.
Yes the definition is just merely a concept, which is why grounding to something you actually know is so important. We both, probably, know what fear and joy feels like, and don't need an overly complex wordy definition and scenario in order to be able communicate the ideas effectively to each other.
I disagree the whole left handed not being able to understand a right handed person example. I think thats fairly easy to get.
Do you mean virtue of illusion, or illusion of virtue?
You could say all reality is an illusion in some sense, but thats to completely disregard that the real as well. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Socrates is a fictional work of Plato? Never heard that theory before.
And yeah, sure, dictionaries are simply constructs and metaphors that define the real. But then why do we still need to use it? Theres a reason it exist, it helps us to ground something in meaning to better plan out the future and to offer as scaffolding for complex ideas that would otherwise be impossible to hold all of them in your head at once. Describing fear and emotions, is much the same way. And equally important in the same way. You almost kinda came full circle to my point, you were just right on the edge of it.
Perhaps the fear is the absence of God. Perhaps the portal to non-existence. The pathway to hell.
Is there anyways to be in touch with you ? Like Whatsapp or instagram?