There is a very special kind of person who begins something like RUIA already halfway convinced they don’t need it. Not because of arrogance, or laziness…but because they have already done so much of this before. The self-awareness prompts, the reading, and the worksheets. All of these have been collected together like pressed flowers, each beautiful but no longer alive.
I was that person.
I went into the Awareness stage expecting to learn surface-level things about myself. For instance, the porosity of my hair, the texture of my skin. The way my body tenses up or relaxes. Where do I actually feel emotions in my body? Why can’t I seem to remember what I understood from a philosophy theory, but can recite line by line, the inner monologue of my favorite dark romance villain?
I expected to become a more attentive observer of the gateways. However, I did not expect to meet my inner critic here. I did not expect to identify three dominant patterns in the way I think. I certainly did not expect to have a first encounter with what actual stillness within my body feels like.
There was an experiment in stillness during the fourth week, part of the physical pillar, that made me realize what I thought was rest was anything but. I realized when I lie down to rest, I don’t rest at all. I relocate. I move the entire operation of my mind to a more horizontal “lying” position, and I call that recovery.
The moment I closed my eyes, my mind opened its own. Not even anxiously, rather naturally, which was a surprise for me. There was no guilt, no restlessness that felt like dread, just a sort of ease that comes from habit.
My mind didn’t go still; it read the stillness as an invitation. Replayed conversations. Imagined scenarios. Daydreaming. Someone’s expression from three weeks ago, reconstructed in high detail and definition.
And I lay there, in what was meant to be rest, narrating events that were gone or those that I was hoping for.
But then, and this is the part I keep returning to, something new happened.
I fell into my body.
As I lay there to rest, consciously this time, as the instructions stated, something wonderful happened.
One moment I was drowning inside a thought, and the next moment I was inside my legs. The heaviness, the specific weight of bone and muscle that I carry everywhere and rarely actually feel. The warmth where my back presses against the mattress. The tiny bubbles of air that barely moved across my back and skin, warming it up.
I twisted my ankles almost like a second habit, my knuckles. That’s apparently something I do when I become too conscious of my physical presence. I reach for these small movements as a sort of compensation. (Did this mean I wasn’t as comfortable being in my own body as I used to think?)
As the session progressed, my nerves became hyper-aware of the sensation of my legs. It wasn’t painful exactly, but it did border on it. I realized that the body, when you finally give it your full attention, doesn’t whisper. It releases a flood all at once. It says everything at once, years of undelivered messages, all arriving in the same moment. And for me, it always started from my legs.
I also noticed that I sleep faster when I’m in my body than when I’m in my thoughts. The mind, for all its speed, keeps me further away from rest than stillness.
The body, it turns out, knows how to let go. I’m the one who keeps interrupting it.
Awareness is not interested in the story that you’ve been telling yourself, about yourself.
What I found in this gateway is something that I’m still sitting with. Something I can’t summarize, because I’m still arriving at it.
But I will say this.
Whatever you have decided you’re not, or whatever room within you’ve walked past without opening…the Awareness stage has a way of standing you in front of that door and asking you to stay there a little longer than is comfortable.
This is what the first month inside RUIA’s Physical pillar did. Not the exercises and tasks themselves, those are the curriculum. But the territory they help you move through.
In short, my experience was this:
I thought I knew my body. I thought I loved it and was in constant conversation with it. What I was doing, it turns out, was conducting a very sophisticated survey of something I wasn’t quite actually inhabiting. I was watching myself from a distance. Just close enough to believe I was there, living in it.
The work of this month was becoming aware of this distance. From the lens of what rest means for me, to the relationship with my body over the years. From mapping different aspects of my bodily functions to watching patterns emerge that I was otherwise oblivious to.
Not to close the distance, but rather seeing it as something that exists.
That is all the Awareness stage asks of you in all these three months.
And that, somehow, is the hardest thing. If any of this feels familiar, the RUIA curriculum is open. Begin your initiation [here]