The Sacred in the Messy Humaning
What if awakening isn’t about transcending our humanity—but becoming more fully alive inside it?
We are often taught, subtly or explicitly, that awakening means rising above the messy parts of ourselves. Become less triggered. Release your wounds. Let go of your ego. Find peace. Choose love.
All of this holds wisdom. And yet I wonder if, somewhere along the way, we began confusing awakening with escaping the human condition itself.
I hold this Ram Dass quote close to my heart: “If you and I are to be free, there is nothing we can push away.”
Nothing gets pushed away.
The furious part.
The terrified part.
The part that wants too much.
The part that needs.
The part that judges.
The part that would rather burn it all down than feel powerless again.
We don’t have to put every part of ourselves in the driver’s seat. But freedom asks us to stop exiling parts of ourselves from our humanity.
What if the sacred isn’t waiting for us on the other side of that? What if it is woven into the raw, ever-evolving experience of being human?
The shadow. The nervous system. The places we protect. The things we dare not say. The relationship where we’re triggered as hell. The song that powerfully mirrors our own truth.
The sacred is in the messy humaning.
What Our Bodies Know
Long before we have language for our experiences, our bodies are learning. As children, we know in our bodies that survival and belonging are inseparable.
We learn what keeps connection close and what threatens it. When to speak. When to disappear. When to please. When to fight. When to perform. When to become very, very easy to love.
These aren’t character flaws. They are strategies—often ingenious ones, developed in service of protecting what mattered most to us as children.
And they work. Until they don’t.
The strategy that once helped us belong can later make intimacy difficult. The vigilance that once kept us safe can make rest feel dangerous. The ability to anticipate everyone else’s needs can make it nearly impossible to know our own. The part of us that learned not to make trouble may become the adult who cannot say, This isn’t okay with me.
This is where I think the work of awakening becomes much more interesting. Because the question isn’t simply, How do I get rid of this pattern?
It is: What is this pattern protecting?
The River Beneath the River
Our lives have currents beneath the visible surface. We say we’re angry, but underneath the anger may be grief. We say we don’t care, but underneath the distance may be longing.
We say our partner is the problem, while something inside us fears being unseen, controlled, abandoned, or engulfed. We say, I’m fine. But our bodies hold chronic resentment.
A river runs beneath the river—deeper currents that pull us into the patterns we repeat, the protections we reach for, and the stories we tell about ourselves.
Our high-stakes relationships are often where those currents become impossible to ignore. This is why relationships can be such extraordinary laboratories for consciousness. Not because they make us spiritually evolved. Because they reveal us.
The person we love presses the places we have worked very hard not to feel. The disagreement reveals where we leave ourselves. The rupture reveals what we believe about our worthiness. The moment of vulnerability reveals how much we can stay in the fire when we can no longer hide behind our strategies.
And often we discover that the thing we have been calling a relationship problem is also an invitation:
Look here. Something is asking to be seen.
What If We Stopped Judging the Patterns?
I don’t believe our patterns need more judgment. Most of us already know how to judge ourselves.
We need something more courageous: curiosity, compassion, and the willingness to be with it longer than is comfortable for most of us.
Sometimes staying present means telling the truth. Sometimes it means saying no. Sometimes it means allowing someone to be disappointed in us. Sometimes it means repairing what we have broken. Sometimes it means leaving.
And sometimes it means staying long enough to discover that the thing we were fighting against was actually a part of ourselves asking for care.
Awakening, then, may have less to do with becoming peaceful and more to do with becoming available—to what is true, to what hurts, to what wants to emerge, and to one another.
What Lies Beneath Protection
Something else lies beneath our protections.
Not just pain. Not just fear.
Power.
Unearthed power.
The voice we learned to silence. The desire we learned to dismiss. The anger we were taught was unacceptable. The vulnerability we feared would get us rejected. The knowing we had before our minds convinced us otherwise.
When we stop organizing our lives around protection, something becomes available. Not a perfected version of ourselves. A more alive one.
And perhaps this is one of the great invitations of awakening: not to transcend our humanity, but to bring the sacred voice of fierce love to it.
To come fully home to ourselves.
Staying in Each Other’s Care
This becomes especially important in relationship. Because I don’t believe awakening is a solitary project.
We become ourselves in relationship. We are wounded in relationship. And, when we’re fortunate enough to have the right conditions, we can heal in relationship too.
Not because another person completes us. But because another person can sometimes hold up a mirror when we can no longer see ourselves clearly.
This requires something more than communication skills. It requires the willingness to stay present through discomfort, rupture, and vulnerability.
To say, This is what is happening inside me. This is what I need. This is what I’m afraid to tell you. This is where I left myself. Can we find our way back?
That last question may be one of the most sacred questions we can ask.
Not: How do we avoid rupture?
But: How do we return?
When the Truth Becomes a Song
I bring these same questions into my songwriting. Because sometimes we can talk around a truth for years and then a song says it in three minutes.
What aches. What hides. What demands to be witnessed. What we couldn’t say out loud.
The song becomes another kind of river—a place where what has been moving underneath finally reaches the surface.
Perhaps that is why I don’t experience my relational work and my art as separate worlds. Both ask the same questions: What do we protect? What are we afraid to say? What wants to be reclaimed? What becomes possible when we stop abandoning ourselves, speak our truth, and stay in each other’s care?
What If Awakening Is Becoming More Human?
Maybe awakening isn’t about becoming less human. Maybe it is about becoming more willing to inhabit our humanity fully.
To feel what we feel. To tell the truth. To meet our shadows without making them our identity. To reclaim what we had to leave behind. To love without disappearing. To stay when the storms are rocking the boat.
Maybe the sacred was never asking us to rise above the mess.
It was waiting for us inside it.
So perhaps the invitation isn’t to become someone who never gets triggered, never loses their way, never hurts, never ruptures, never needs.
Perhaps it is to become someone who can return.
Return to the breath.
Return to the body.
Return to the truth.
Return to each other.
If something in these words stirred something in you, I invite you to get curious. What are you protecting? What truths have been inside and kicking? What might be possible if you brought tenderness and curiosity to them?
TAKE ACTION: Today, share one small truth you’ve been holding back with someone you trust. You might begin, “What’s really happening for me is…” Let yourself be honest without needing to explain it perfectly. And if you need support, know I'm here.
With love and holy fire,
Fereshta
