A New Awakening

A personal reflection and invitation inspired by Richard Rudd

Richard Rudd’s (the founder of Gene Keys) recent transmission on The Three Great Truths of Awakening deeply resonated with me. His words articulated something I have been sensing for a long time: a movement from awakening as transcendence toward an awakening that is whole, embodied, relational, creative—and deeply in love with life itself.

I want to share some of the key messages from his transmission as an invitation to contemplate them together.

And I want to invite us to contemplate them not only through intellectual understanding, but through lived experience. If you stay with me with a little patience and curiosity until the end, you will discover why and how.

1. Awakening is not only waking up

Richard draws here on Ken Wilber’s distinction between waking up, cleaning up and growing up.

A profound awakening or non-dual realization does not automatically transform the whole person. We can touch the Absolute and still carry emotional immaturity, trauma, relational difficulties, ethical blind spots, unintegrated desires or spiritual inflation.

A state of realization is not the same as whole-person transformation.

What happens after an awakening experience matters.

Can we integrate what we have seen?
Can we meet our shadows?
Can we take responsibility for what is happening inside us —and for how we affect others?
Can we become more mature in relationship?

This is what cleaning up and growing up invite us into.

Awakening is not a status we attain. It is an ongoing process of becoming more whole.

For me, wholeness means integrating the different parts, dimensions and realms of our existence—without dismissing, resisting or bypassing the difficult or dark places: our wounds, our traumatized parts, our fears, our “demons”.

As Richard puts it:

“It is not only about waking up. It is also about cleaning up, growing up, integrating—and becoming capable of love without domination.”

2. Awakening is both vertical and horizontal

Much of classical spirituality has emphasized the vertical axis: moving beyond, toward transcendence, stillness, ascension, essence and the source.

This depth is precious. But on its own, it can become detached from the richness and complexity of human life.

This is where horizontal awakening becomes essential.

Horizontal awakening is broad, slow and inclusive. It asks not only: How can I transcend?

but: How can I be with life? With all that is?

It can include paradox and ambiguity, including relationship, community, creativity, sexuality, desire, pleasure, grief, business, work, aesthetics, art, poetry, embodiment, ritual, music…

It allows the richness of life to enter the field of awareness. The inner landscapes, the ancestral intelligence, the earth wisdom… As Richard puts it:

“The vertical gives the depth. The horizontal gives the breadth.”

And:

“Vertical reveals the source, horizontal teaches us how to live from the source inside the source.”

Full awakening requires both.

This rebalancing also invites a spirituality that is less hierarchical and solitary, and more relational, receptive, embodied, inclusive and ecological.

“Real awakening wants to be shared, it wants to be alive, it’s participatory.”

This is one of the places where I feel Biodanza has something precious to contribute.

Biodanza is not merely a philosophy we understand. It is a reconnection with what is alive and an invitation towards greater integration through the body, movement, music, encounter and lived experience. (For more personal experience please refer to my previous article “What is Biodanza?”)

It is a way of living—a bio-centric way of relating to ourselves, to one another and to the world, with life itself at the centre.

It allows horizontal awakening to become a lived experience.

3. Awakening includes Romance

The third truth opens the deepest possibility for me.

Awakening includes Romance.

Not romantic fantasy, or sentimentality, or idealizing another person, but what Richard calls:

“Profound, sensual, aesthetic, creative and mythic intimacy with life.”

This shifts the orientation of awakening.

Instead of moving away from form, we enter into an intimate relationship with form.
Instead of merely witnessing reality, we participate in it.
Instead of escaping samsara, we awaken inside samsara.

I cannot find more beautiful words than Richard’s own:

“Life is not only observed, it’s courted.”
“Reality is not only witnessed, it’s entered into, it’s made love to.”
“Awakening is not only freedom from form, it’s a love affair with form.”

Romance, in this sense, is first and foremost meeting life fully and intimately.

It is allowing ourselves to be touched by life—and to touch life in return.
It is entering into a love affair with life itself.
It is inducing the communion, of the Lover and the Beloved.
It is to love beauty and mystery, sensuality and creativity – and also the imperfection, grief, uncertainty, polarity and loss… to love the whole of life…

Romance invites our love for life to become large enough to include the whole of it.

And the Sacred is not somewhere else.

It is here.
It is now.
It is what is.

Creativity: the doorway through which Romance becomes visible

Richard places creativity at the centre of Romance—not as performance or productivity, but as a way of participating with life force itself.

“Participation with life, with the life force, co-creation.”

“Shaping beauty, making deeper meaning, letting the invisible become visible, letting the soul take form.”

Every genuine act of creation becomes a conversation with life.
Every movement can become an act of participation.
Every encounter can become a creative event.

And this is where the vertical and horizontal meet: the depth we discover within becomes something we embody, express and share.

This is why I feel so drawn to exploring these ideas through Biodanza – not intellectually, but experientially:

Contemplation through movement.
Awakening through dance.
Silence lived inside music.
Intimacy with life experienced through the body.
Creativity flowing through expression.
New way of relating discovered through encountering.

These are experiences I want to open a space for.

The courage to hold polarity

This point resonated also deeply with me.

A new awakening does not mean escaping polarity by declaring that everything is “one.”

It asks for something more mature:

Can we remain present inside complexity?
Can we hold opposing truths without immediately rejecting one?
Can we stay with what has not yet been resolved?

Richard says:

“It takes a huge courage and maturity to actually enter into polarity and to contain it, to really explore it.”

And:

“We have to be able to hold paradox.”

Transcendence and tenderness.
Stillness and sexuality.
Emptiness and aesthetics.
Meditation and contemplation.
Mythic imagination and creativity.
Freedom and Romance.

Not either/or. But both/and.

This is what wholeness asks of us.

From freedom from life to freedom for life

When I place these three truths together, Awakening becomes a movement deeper into life.

The vertical gives us depth.
The horizontal gives us breadth.
Cleaning up and growing up give us integration.
Romance gives us presence, intimacy and tenderness.

And freedom creates the space for all of this.

In that sense, Freedom is no longer freedom from life. It is deeper participation in life.

For me, it is connection with life.
Authenticity in life.
The courage to become and to be.
The courage to clean up, grow up, show up and stay present.
It is listening to the natural intelligence of the body: knowing when to slow down, rest, breathe, act, move or let go.
It is becoming more available to life.

Biodanza embodiment journey of awakening

These reflections are the inspiration for the Biodanza retreat I am co-creating with Rodrigo Toro:

Freedom & Romance – Life Is the Beloved

For me, this retreat is an invitation to explore these truths through embodiment.

Not only to talk about horizontal awakening, but to experience it.
Not only to understand Freedom & Romance, but to enter into an intimate relationship with life.

Through vivencia, movement, music, encounter, creativity and presence, we will explore what becomes possible when awakening moves down, in and together:

into the body,
into relating,
into intimacy,
into creativity,
into sensuality,
into the earth,
and into life with all what is alive.

True freedom makes us more available to life—to love, relationship, beauty, mystery and the fullness of being here. And Romance is happens when we enter that space fully and intimately.

With freedom and Romance, life becomes the Beloved.
And Love becomes a deeply embodied somatic experience.

If these reflections speak to you, I warmly invite you to join us for

Freedom & Romance – Life Is the Beloved.

To fall in love with life fully, deeply and tenderly.