Trusting Your Way

There are SOOO many different ways of doing this work of holding space and guiding & supporting others. And so many ways of awakening to our nature and integrating and embodying that fully in the human expression that we are. Infinite ways of Being. If I could ever impart anything to anyone - It is to trust YOUR way. To not assume that just because there's someone, a teacher or such, that seems amazing, and they have all the answers and they are doing it the way you aspire to even, that their way is the "correct" way (for you). Do not diminish and take for granted the wisdom that you hold, through your life experience, through your body, through the embodied spark of consciousness that you are, the particular flavour and footprint of your life. That this is actually what life has gifted this world and birthed into existence and it's not a mistake at all. We cannot dishonour life or ourselves by assuming that there is any part of who and what we are that is incorrect. And in that way you can use other people as a model and a mirror, but never step away from the…

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‘Beyond Imogen’ Interview by Renate McNay

So I did a thing and here it is… an interview with Renate McNay for Conscious TV.
 
It’s honestly something that was scary and uncomfortable for me from the get-go, sending my comfort zone running out of the building for its dear life because this thing was not something that I’d ever imagined or wanted for myself. But life these past years has very much been about stepping out of the way, taking the handbrake off and TRUSTING life fully.
 
And guess what… I actually ended up really enjoying myself ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
I want to thank Renate for so gently and kindly supporting me through this process, making it so easy and enjoyable. I’ve loved getting to interact and know you a little these past few months, and I’m honoured to join the ConsciousTV family.
 
I hope you all enjoy it <3

 

Transcription

Link to transcription on ConsciousTV – http://conscious.tv/text/161.htm

Renate: Welcome to ConsciousTV. My name is Renate McNay and my guest today is Imogen Sita Webber and we are still in the corona time and Imogen is in Wales and I’m in Oxfordshire. So, it’s a completely different experience, interviewing on Zoom, not quite sure about it – so let’s try it.

Imogen: Yes

Renate: So, I’d like to start with a little bit looking into your story and how you became who you are now, a spiritual teacher, well, you call yourself a spiritual mentor. And Imogen is also a writer, a brilliant writer, there’s lot of wonderful things to write on your website and you give Divine Light Transmission, and we find out a little bit later what that is. And, so you grew up with the understanding everything is consciousness. (more…)

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Conversations & Questions: 21/04/20

Q: How does one receive a transmission? How does one receive anything? Practically speaking nothing need be 'done' to receive a Divine Light Transmission (Shaktipat), other than a general 'yes' and open-heartedness to life's possibilities - I'd say this is true for receiving anything, from love to physical gifts and help, or even hard lessons in life. To receive is to be open and humble to receive. A Divine Light Transmission doesn't require your belief or faith per se, more an openness (even just a little will do) that goes beyond non-belief as this can deliberately close you off energetically to the potential spiritual growth that can come through a transmission - or any other form in life for that matter! I myself was incredibly skeptical, but still open to the possibilities transmissions before my own direct experience became the testimony for its potency and lasting transformation in my life. It took me by surprise, and often still does... But I get the sense you're asking a different kind of question here, a deeper more existential one that requires a more nuanced response. Transmission from the non-dual view of reality So... how can one 'receive' a transmission if this is…

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Conversations & Questions: 17/1/20

Did I Miss My Chance for Awakening?   Q: I feel like it's too late for me, I missed my chance of awakening. Too late... too late for what and for who? These are fears born of the mind, see this and you shall be free of this fear. "Too late" suggests awakening only happens in certain circumstances under certain rules and conditions, that you only get one chance at it, or that it's only available for a finite few who deserve it. These are ideas and implications built from the mind (or learnt from others) about what awakening is or isn't and allowed to run free with the fear of 'missed chances'. But awakening doesn't happen TO the person, awakening is FROM the person. It's not anything the person DOES to achieve. It is the seeing through the facade of the person and in many ways it's Grace that places that insight in the heart of you. Awakening is the description of consciousness waking up to itself, of consciousness knowing itself. But you are already consciousness whether your mind sees this or not. It really only comes down to a pernicious belief stuck in the mind and taking false…

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Conversations & Questions: 19/09/19

Post-Awakening Integration &  Releasing Old Conditioning   Q: I’m fearful of what will happen as I continue on this journey of awakening. It’s coming up right now because working with you these past weeks I finally experienced a shift into Unity Consciousness and see the integration deepening as well. But the fear is mainly there because after my initial shift into non-duality a year ago I had a pretty traumatic time of instability and integration where I couldn’t function in the world very well. I don't want to go back into that unstableness and overwhelm that came with that first major shift. I’ve felt this sense of “My God what is coming next, what if it’s like the other time?” And while it’s not been like that at all this time so far, I still have a little bit of fear of “how will this be?” I feel I can't make plans because I don't know how I will be in the coming weeks and months and this scares me. That you will hit against a major period of instability is an assumption and definitely not a certainty at all. What I can say is that you will go through…

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Conversations & Questions: 28/1/20

Post-Awakening Expectations and Staying in the 'Only Don't Know'   Q: I can’t say that there have been any significant noticeable changes from Cosmic Consciousness to Unity Consciousness, is this common in your opinion? I guess it's hard not to be waiting for some unmistakable shift? Imogen: Yes, looking for certain experiences or markers post-awakening can get really tricky and can be counter productive, particularly if your awakening has been a slow unfolding process over many years like yours has been. It could be likened to you sitting in a warm bath and getting used to it, thinking it's gone cold, then when you wiggle your toes you recognise it's not cold you just adjusted to the heat. Here's maybe a tip for you.... Get curious, play and explore; in doing so you bump into life. Look more at the absence of stuff (triggers, old habits and patterns, old concepts and assumptions that have fallen away or been seen through) rather than a particular experience. Also those around you can be a wonderful mirror to show you what has changed in yourself. Awakening is not an adding to, but a desolation of old conditioning, concepts, false identifications, and misunderstandings of…

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Conversations & Questions: 14/11/19

Q: Can you tell me how to get rid of attachment and aversion? It's not about eliminating (getting rid of) anything but seeing that it's all arising in you - consciousness. This is awakening. Experiential focus or identity is shifted from the foreground (phenomena) to the background (consciousness). When this is recognised to be true in your experience the need for elimination of ANYTHING disappears. All is accepted as an arising in you, and this is true freedom. From this, peace is found and suffering is eliminated. Suffering is the lack of acceptance of WHAT IS. Let me give an example to illustrate why this recognition is actually the most fundamental recognition of awakening. Just as the clouds appear and disappear in the sky, phenomena (thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc.) are appearing and disappearing in you. Is the sky any less the sky just because it has clouds, or a storm in it? No. Are you any less YOU if there's something arising in you? No. We become either attached or averse because we mistake the phenomena for ourselves. We believe we are good or bad, right or wrong if we have certain experiences (phenomena) showing up and so we try…

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The Elephant in the Room

GETTING PERSONAL There's so much of my spiritual path/story that I haven't yet shared on this blog or social media. Not because I feel the need to hide it, I'm not particularly attached to privacy even, but because I'm still living it each and every moment. The implications not yet seen, the fullness of understanding not yet known. And yet the more I walk this path, this world, the less and less the need to understand, the need for certainty seems to matter to me. These days I find the words are there less and less. The *need* to communicate less and less. But somehow these last few weeks it feels like there's an elephant in the room that I've not been addressing, in the past few months its been somewhat stopping me from publicly writing more than a few snippets here and there. More and more my private writings seem to be addressing this. There's been a shift in my focus, but somehow to talk of it I feel the need to contextualise it with my story a bit more. Two and a half years ago I experienced a life shattering shift (just over a year after the first…

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Awakening Is Not Like Baking A Cake

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you have to do XY&Z in order to realise the Self…. as if it's like a cake that you put all the exact ingredients in the bowl in the right order and put it in the oven and ping, you have yourself a perfect cake. Except it doesn’t work like that, that's the mind’s imaginings of what it is. What I’m talking about is prior to the mind, and therefore can’t be grasped by the mind. Anything the mind thinks it knows or understands about this is just the mind imagining what it thinks. It’s not an adding to, it’s not a changing of, its a realisation of that which you cannot NOT be, that which you already are, that which you always were, that which you always will be whether you realise it or not. It’s like waking up from a dream; before… you were in the dream and you didn’t realise that you were dreaming, but you were. Then you wake up and realise it was a dream. It doesn’t change the dream, the dream is still there, playing out at it was, but you realise you…

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Living the Obvious

Life has become about living; living not in past regrets or future worries but life lived in this moment... None of the second guessing, the questioning, the “is the right thing?”, or shoulds and should nots. The age old - before awakening, chop-wood-carry-water and after awakening, chop-wood-carry-water is so so true it's laughable. Being a seeker you imagine some different 'state' where everything will be beautiful and blissful – life will be perfect. Well… life is perfect, but not in that way, perfect in that it IS. It’s happening exactly as it is, nothing to do, nothing to change, nothing to be; even in amongst every imaginable phenomenal occurrence. That’s where the miracle of life is to be found, in the very ordinariness of existence. You are, and always have been exactly what you seek. You are the freedom that was/is always here, it’s only a matter of seeing through the trees of ‘personhood’ to see that the ‘person’ that you take yourself to be is such an incredibly limited and narrow view of you. We take ourselves to be the body; the body that has changed, morphed and grown since birth, the body that will die. We take ourselves…

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You Are Aware

You are the awareness that’s witnessing the comings & goings of life. You have no qualities, no attributes other than you are aware – you’re not an object that can be described. There’s nothing that can show up that can disturb you - for you just ARE. Notice that you're observing even the thought or feeling of an 'I' that wants to identify what's showing up and why it's showing up. In this recognition you realize that anything can show up, nothing can be avoided or gotten rid of, life doesn’t need to ‘look’ a certain way, because you are simply aware. You are that awareness, you have always been awareness, you cannot NOT be awareness, for you are aware. Notice that all that I say is not a prescription for something to do, rather is a description of how it is; you need no instruction or ‘practice’ to be aware. And so you say “but it’s not always like this”, but it is… are you not always here, always aware? Do you-awareness need anything, does the feeling of peace, space, bliss or lack of thoughts need to be there in order for you to be aware? Are you not aware even when sadness or anger…

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Go Beyond the Qualities, to the Recognition of You

When you experience an awakening – the recognition of the primordial nature of awareness, you’re centerless center; often what comes with it are things such as relief, spaciousness, invincibility, freedom, few thoughts and even bliss. It’s quite easy to then start identifying with those qualities as something that has to be present to indicate your new found ‘awakening’.

This can lead you down the path of trouble, because as you go about your life you’ll naturally start to bump into the different flavours of living, some nice and some not so nice. You might start experiencing what you might call ‘afflictive thoughts’ or intense feelings & sensations. Maybe the feeling of invincibility and spaciousness feels like it has lessened or disappeared. This can lead you feel that you’ve lost ‘it’. You then try all that you can think of to get back to those wonderful qualities that you experienced; all the while trying to avoid the shitty thoughts and feelings that are coming up. (more…)

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The Collision That Changed Everything

Two years ago today I collided with the Self, setting in motion the falling away of life as I thought I knew it to be.  I was smacked over the head with the realisation that who I took ’Imogen’ to be was false. There was in fact no identifiable 'solid' form of Imogen that could be found. It’s been quite a journey, a journey to realise that what I sought was always here, looking out at the unfolding of an apparent journey. Although I now see that that collision was ultimately a fleeting experience it was so dramatically felt that it changed everything. It changed my casual interest in spirituality into a search that left everything else in its wake. The abiding realisation of non-duality came about a year and half later. It’s been a constant learning and discovering of what it looks like to move in this life as a passenger rather than believing the illusion that I'm the driver. I’m still discovering the implications of this realisation and while all this may sound so far off and mystical, know that what I’m pointing to is in fact your very nature and you’re never NOT this. It’s just a matter…

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The “I’ve Got It” Trap

It’s so easy to fall into the spiritual trap of feeling like you’ve ‘got it’. After spending many years doing spiritual practices there may be a deepening and deepening understanding of what’s being spoken of and pointed to. This intellectual understanding coupled with spiritual or awakening experiences, and life can start to look a hell of a lot rosier. Maybe you’ve gone through some tough times, some mind attacks and such, and coming out the other side everything feels lighter and more blissful, the annoying person who cut in line isn’t bothering you any more. It’s like the contrast of that tight constricted suffering compared with the light airy, no troubled feeling comes as such a relief. And when it lasts for longer and longer with more frequency and with less and less trouble you can’t be blamed for thinking ‘I’ve got it’. (more…)

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