The Gut Awakening and the Loss of a Personal World

A while back, I wrote a post about the grief of oneness. At the time, I didn’t realize this was the gut coming online. The oneness that’s felt through the gut is different from the head or the heart. It isn’t the clear, spacious understanding that often comes with a head awakening, and it isn’t the sense of interconnected love that opens through the heart. It feels more like being stripped of everything personal. Like the absence of a separate self. A felt sense of non-existence. At times this has been an emotional and challenging stage to move through.

The gut seems to carry a deeper layer of loss. To truly embody it, there’s a letting go of what feels personal and sentimental. In its place, a different kind of intimacy begins to emerge. One that feels impersonal, yet embodied, alive, and deeply peaceful.

The grief comes and goes. Once in a while, I notice a lingering wish to live in a world shaped by meaning and personal significance. It can feel like something precious is being lost. Then, slowly, there’s the remembering that nothing real is actually disappearing. Only an old way of relating. When the grief is allowed to be felt, it naturally moves through and the perspective shifts back to peace and presence.

As the gut settles, it brings a peace unlike anything I’ve known before. There’s a profound intimacy with each moment, yet it feels impersonal. Nothing feels owned, it feels more like experience meeting experience, without a centre.

Sometimes I still try to pull up the past or reach into the future, hoping to find something solid to hold onto. An attempt to use memory, projection, or meaning-making to create a sense of importance, continuity, or security. Yet each time, this strategy no longer works. It belonged to an earlier structure of self, one that’s fallen away.

What remains is a simpler meeting of each moment as it is. Allowing direct contact with what’s arising, and letting it dissolve again. Not through effort, but through flow. Sometimes there’s a full, embodied merging with experience. Other times, a quiet witnessing of what’s unfolding. Everything moves through as waves. The waves varying in size and texture, each carrying its own qualities. Non-personal, yet alive, unique, and accepted.

It’s as if there is no path, only movement. No trail behind and nothing guiding ahead. Just this moment, uncluttered by past or future, stories or sentiment. What falls away creates space to move through life freely, unburdened and alive.

The loss is one of illusion, yet it sneaks up on me when I try to use the old scaffolding to move through this new way of being.