Shift Into Freedom - Book Summary
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"Shift into Freedom" by Loch Kelly presents a practical approach to awakening based on an ancient Tibetan tradition (Sutra Mahamudra).
It is practical and written clearly for anyone to understand, especially those new to these concepts. I found it easy to experience awake awareness, or enter into a meditative, open, relaxed, connected state while reading the book. Something that I noticed happened only when I read The Power of Now (Eckhart Tolle) and The Surrender Experiment (Michael A. Singer) so far.
Most suffering stems from ego-identification—mistaking ourselves for a separate self in our head looking out through our eyes. Kelly offers a three-stage awakening process: waking up (recognizing awake awareness), waking in (embodying this awareness), and waking out (living from open-hearted awareness).
There are four expressions of awake awareness according to Kelly:
Local awareness: Unhooking from thought—stepping out of thought identification and descending into the body
Spacious awareness: Formless, knowing space—our fundamental ground of being; it's always present and accessing the sensation of spaciousness is an ability that can be honed with experiential understanding.
Awake awareness embodied: Nondual* realization that awareness is also form. Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.
Open-hearted awareness: Unconditional love and interconnectedness to everything and everyone. The realization of the fundamental interconnection between you and everything else that exists.
We often get exposed to a kind of mindfulness that requires effort and attention. Scanning body parts. Following the inhalations and exhalations. And similar forms of focused awareness practice. Effortless mindfulness operates from awake awareness itself—naturally aware without our help. This shift from "being aware of" to "being awareness" is central to Kelly's approach.
Awareness is always present as long as life is present. Accessing it is a matter of unhooking from ego/thought identification in favor of a light, sustained, spacious awareness (relaxed and alert at the same time). Such a state can lead to living from or as Being, where decisions make themselves because you are fully connected with Reality. In such a state, fear, hope, and other emotional or thought identification patterns dissolve in favor of reality as it is.
To practice, Kelly emphasizes small glimpses many times throughout our days. The book is filled with glimpse practices, many of which are also available in audio format on the Waking Up app (use this link to get one free month). The small glimpses help us experience firsthand the meaning of such deceptively abstract concepts. Once we experience them firsthand, they become part of our Being, and we get one step closer to living from Being.
It is a constant practice of removal, not addition. Awake awareness and all its manifestations are always there as an inherent part of life. Accessing them is a matter of reduction, cutting off, relaxing into the moment.
This is a practical book. Follow the glimpses and continue practicing. The impact of such states can be life-changing, particularly if you are an average current Western person going through life with such a tense body and mind that could explode at any moment. Certainly, it is not the end-all and be-all, nor something you should do. A glimpse which—particularly if you have never explored these concepts—can open the door to many more.
*Nondual: transcends the separation between subject and object. Awareness and form are not separate entities but different expressions of the same reality.
