What Does Not Come and Go
Spiritual experiences don’t really amount to a hill of beans, and yet so much of the spiritual path can quietly become organised around chasing them. The next opening. The next surge of energy in the body. The next moment of bliss, clarity, expansion, or insight that makes everything feel suddenly alive and meaningful.
Someone has a powerful meditation. Someone feels a rush of energy move through the spine. Someone dissolves into tears of love during prayer or sitting. Someone glimpses a vast stillness where the usual sense of self seems to fall away. These moments can be beautiful, sometimes profoundly beautiful. They can open the heart, soften the mind, and reveal something that had previously been hidden beneath the noise of ordinary life.
But every experience, no matter how luminous or sacred it may seem, shares the same simple truth. It arrives… and it leaves.
The body cannot hold any state forever. The nervous system moves in waves, and what opens eventually settles, what rises eventually falls. Bliss fades. Clarity dims. Energy quietens. Insight becomes memory. Even the most extraordinary spiritual states move through the system like weather passing across the sky.
And yet the mind remembers the brightness of those moments and tries to find its way back to them. It quietly builds the idea that awakening must feel like that. That the next retreat, the next teacher, the next practice might recreate the same opening, or perhaps an even greater one. Before long the path becomes a kind of spiritual tourism, travelling from experience to experience, from peak to peak, from one moment of expansion to the next. The subtle assumption underneath it all is that awakening is something that happens as an experience.
But this is where the point is so easily missed… all experiences belong to the realm of change. They are movements in time. They appear, unfold and dissolve again into the background from which they came. They are no more stable than a passing emotion or a shift in the weather. No experience, however profound, can be what you are, because what you are was present before the experience began.
Beyond the Passing States
When a powerful opening occurs, something notices it. Something is aware of the bliss, the stillness, the energy, the silence. And when the experience fades, that same knowing presence remains. The experience changes, but what knows the experience does not.
This is why chasing experiences eventually becomes exhausting. Each peak contains the quiet disappointment of its disappearance. Each moment of expansion is followed by the return of “ordinary life.” The mind begins to wonder where the magic went and how to get it back.
But nothing real was ever lost.
What was glimpsed in those moments was not a special state that appeared for a while. It was a brief thinning of the usual noise that allowed what is always here to become more obvious. The stillness did not come from the experience. The experience briefly revealed the stillness that was already here.
There’s a certain irony in saying all of this while I offer retreats, sessions, and transmissions. In a way it could sound like putting myself out of a job. And yet if truth matters… it needs to be said. What I point to matters far more than any role I temporarily inhabit.
As a seeker myself, there was something deeply valuable in sitting beside someone in whom this recognition was already alive. Not to chase their experience, but to move quietly alongside them, to attune to the light emanating through them, to feel, sometimes wordlessly, that another way of being was possible.
Presence has a way of communicating itself. Sometimes just sitting near someone who is deeply settled in Being can reveal more than any teaching. Something in the system relaxes. The mind softens its grip. The heart senses something familiar that it had forgotten how to recognise. But even that isn’t about borrowing someone else’s state… it’s about being reminded of what is already here.
This is why some of the deepest shifts on the path are not dramatic at all. They are not fireworks in the nervous system or dazzling visions of unity. Often they appear as something much quieter. A simple recognition that what you are is not something that comes and goes. Not a state to achieve. Not a feeling to maintain. Not an experience to repeat.
Just the simple, unchanging presence within which every experience appears and disappears.
Blissful experiences can move through it. Confusion can move through it. Joy, grief, clarity, contraction, expansion… all of it rises and falls within the same open field of being. Nothing that comes and goes can be the truth of what you are. And once this begins to be seen clearly, the whole chase for peak experiences slowly loses its grip. Experiences may still come, sometimes very beautiful ones. But they are no longer mistaken for the destination.
They are simply movements within the vastness that you already are.
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Thank you for walking alongside me ~ Imogen