Meghan Roekle on Realizing Oneness & What Happens After a Spiritual AwakeningApr 28, 2021
I want to introduce you to Meghan Roekle.
I met Meg a number of years ago and had the immense privilege of witnessing her unfolding realization and awakening process. She, unlike myself, has been in a slow burn of realizing Oneness.
Some backstory: Meghan trained in Clinical Psychology, got her PsyD, and has been working as a therapist since 2001. She has spent her life in search of truth, not simply focused on a spiritual awakening, but also the deeper realization of what creates wholeness, why and how we act, and what are the deepest truths behind all that.
In pursuit of this, she worked and studied in a variety of settings over the years: as a teacher inside of academia, as a practitioner of integrative health, as a researcher pursuing healing traditions in the fields of philosophy, energy/bodywork, art & literature, and spiritual/non-dual teachings.
Meg loves this quote: “The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground.” —Chogyam Rinpoche
In May of 2019, Meg started offering one-on-one sessions for our community. She has stepped in to offer her time and devotion after my own private practice started evolving me into a specific niche of people: those who are influencers or already working with clients/students and are in need of advanced mentorship.
Meg has a lot to offer our community.
In her own words:
“There are ways to surrender to this free fall, and this is what I am offering—a process of dropping into the natural flow of life, into the spacious presence that is already here, already holding us. We can release ourselves from our mind’s grip, and from the pain and stress, we feel when we believe our thoughts. We are already home, already safe—but we must teach our wounded bodyminds that this is so.”
I’m excited for you to discover Meg for yourself. You can book a session with her anytime you need some support! And please enjoy this conversation, where Meghan sat down with her friend Jimmy Jacobs to answer the question: What is awakening?
Abbreviated transcription from the Closed Caption:
Jimmy: What would you call awakening?
Meg: So I’m gonna use my teacher Kiran Trace, her definition, which is ultimately the inability to identify as a separate self anymore. So it’s sort of like that mechanism gets turned off. It can be slow or it can be sudden for certain people like for her or for Eckhart Tolle or Byron Katie, but for me, it’s been a slow turning of that mechanism off.
And so for me, like sitting here right now, there’s a sense of oneness or contentedness and a sense that there isn’t a separate self-moving. Now there’s still belief systems and I’ll still get hooked on little thoughts that I have to do something or be somebody or all the tiny movements that imply a separate self-running this body, I’ll still get hooked, but overall there’s a recognition or a realization that its not true. This body, this life, is being run by life, by what we were calling God’s silence, or oneness, love, you know, same same.
So awakening is really the direct realization of that. And it’s not theoretical, it’s not intellectual, it’s not mental, it’s an embodied knowing or sensing that that’s just the case and it’s always been the case. This didn’t happen for Meg; Meg didn’t “wake up”. Awareness recognizes itself as itself. Really, “Meg” falls away, even though we still use names and we still use subject/object language and all that.
But breath is such a good pointer because it’s so obvious that we’re not breathing our breath, that breath is just breathing us, or we’re not growing our hair or pumping our blood. So it’s actually extremely obvious that there’s no little homunculus in this body running the show. But somehow, we all get this programming that there’s a separate self in here running this thing. It is very painful. And then we have programming on top of that separate-self concept that says, “This person is not good enough, should be this way, should be that way, is doing it wrong!” etc.
Jimmy: Is this the same thing as when somebody talks about enlightenment? I’ve heard the term like “abiding non-dualism? “
Meg: Yeah, I don’t tend to use the word enlightenment, it is such a heavy word, and even non-duality—I like that term, but it’s not very familiar. Awakening is just kind of a clean word. But any of these words can be taken up by the mind and then made into a thing for a self to do.
This is where the whole spiritual search comes in, and why I don’t like “spirituality”. It’s often about a separate self trying to get awakened and trying to be a good person or a spiritual person or a caring person or a blah blah blah blah blah! I’m not a believer.
Instead, this is something you can stand on, like it’s true, it’s just truth. Truth is truth. Reality is reality. And we need no belief for that. We can throw all that out. Which is actually such a relief. To uphold a belief is fucking impossible! I went into psychology for that reason, and I was interested in philosophy. I was never really interested in religion because they all just seemed like shysters to me.
But ultimately, I came to have glimpses, initially through Byron Katie’s The Work, which is an inquiry where you’re taking awareness and you’re questioning your mind. So you start to get glimpses of life without beliefs. What occurred for [Byron Katie] post-awakening, was there was no concept of a separate self, there was just joy. What she calls The Work, which she created because thoughts started to come back, even though she had all this spacious awareness. She could look at the thoughts and she could see the thoughts were really the source of her suffering. So for her, the work is just taking one thought at a time and putting it up against four questions to examine what is really true.
So I started to do her work and got these glimpses of pure ease and everything running exactly perfect as it should. I needed to do nothing and life is running itself perfectly and I can just relax. These kinds of things occurred in grad school and in these different pockets in my life where I would have moments—but then my beliefs, subtle ones that I haven’t seen as well, and the pain in my body was still there.
The issue with psychology and with spirituality is they don’t really incorporate the body, and really it’s the body that heals. The body needs to awaken. The body needs to open to oneness, it needs to be sensed. And so I did a lot of Byron Katie type of inquiry and I’d have these glimpses, but they were non-abiding because the body wasn’t included. So it was just these sort of momentary glimpses until I was up against a trigger again. And then a program would run and I would feel separate again and I would feel confused and I would do things in my life that weren’t in alignment, like marrying my very sweet ex-husband, and these kinds of things. Because there are still programs running that I’m unaware of and that aren’t healed through the body.
After that, I started to get into all these non-dual teachers, and really still attempting to kind of go through the mind, still trying to sort of “get awakening”.
Jimmy: You know, I loved to pontificate, and I’d love to think, and I’d love to talk about all these sorts of things, and with those experiences, you go home with this idea that you know what non-duality is: it’s that we are all one thing.
Meg: I’m gonna use Kiran’s language again—she’s got a lot of great languages to describe this, she is very straightforward and practical—she would say there are different Dimensions. There is the third dimension, tables and lamps, and what looks like separation. And it’s very reliable as form. Like, the wall is the wall, and it’s separate, it has a boundary and a separation from your body, and from the couch, etc. And that’s true in the third dimension, but there are other dimensions. Like quantum mechanics—the physicists have said the closer you are to the heart of things, the more it’s all space or dark matter. Form, or this stuff, is really a bunch of space, and then light that moves in these really wild ways, and it’s all connected. You spin a proton in Tokyo and its matching proton spins in New York, and all kinds of cool things like that.
And other dimensions—zero dimension is silence and it is also here, and it can be seen. Actually, some people see it—for instance, Kiran sees it. It’s just like a lot of light and space and it’s obvious there’s no separation. I’ve had glimpses like that too, where literally, through my eyes, I see what I call a light soup. Which was just one vast lit-up non-form, kind of like just one continuous movement.