In This Episode…

“Meditation is ultimately about getting out of the way so that a greater intelligence and a higher set of capacities can begin to show up within us. We meditate so that we can unlock a deeper care, a deeper strength, a deeper willingness to trust and ultimately a completely different order of consciousness than anything we can cause through our willful effort. As we awaken, this higher consciousness then begins to express itself in all kinds of ways organically and naturally in every aspect of our life.”
—Craig Hamilton

In this episode, Craig explores a challenge many of us face—how to bridge the gap between meditation and daily life.

When we meditate, we step outside the usual flow of life. For a time, we pause, let go, and rest in stillness. In those moments, we may touch something vast—something free. But as soon as we return to daily life, we often find that everything shifts. Responsibilities pull us in, challenges arise, and the ease we felt in meditation can feel suddenly out of reach.

Many of us try to bring meditative awareness into everything we do, hoping to sustain a sense of clarity and presence. But no matter how much effort we make, it often feels unnatural—like trying to hold on to something delicate in a world that doesn’t quite accommodate it.

So how do we bring awakening into action? How do we allow the deeper intelligence we touch in meditation to move through us effortlessly, shaping how we respond, engage, and act in the world?

In Awakening in Daily Life, Craig offers a fresh perspective on this dilemma—one that goes beyond trying to impose meditative states onto life and instead reveals how awakening can naturally express itself in what we do.

For a deeper experience of Craig’s approach to meditation, consider joining our Awakened Life membership program which offers in-depth guidance, a meditation workshop, and a live online retreat with Craig. Register today to receive your first month for 50% off at AwakenedLifeMembership.com.

If you’re interested in exploring more of Craig’s meditation experiments, you’re invited to tune in to a 90-minute online workshop Craig will be hosting called Meditation 2.0 – The Miracle of Direct Awakening. Register for free at FreeMeditationWorkshop.com.

If you would like to share your experience of the podcast or have questions about Craig’s teachings, please feel free to email us at support@craighamiltonglobal.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

So here we are, talking about what it means to live an awakened life—to unleash the infinite into every aspect of our life. This question of how to transform our life outside of meditation is central for all of us because we live our lives outside of meditation.

Unless we’ve truly left the world behind—spending our entire day, our entire life, on retreat and in meditation—most of our time is spent engaged in activity. That’s where our lives unfold.

So we want to transform that—not just have deep spiritual experiences in meditation that we then forget about or that have no influence on how we live. This question arises particularly when we begin to have profound experiences in meditation.

Bridging the Gap Between Deep Experiences and Active Life

When we start to penetrate into spiritual depth and have experiences of awakening, we realize something deeply significant is happening. But then, as we go through our day, we often notice: I’m still reacting to things in the old ways. Or it often shows up as, I’m losing touch with the depth I discovered on that retreat.

And at some point, maybe midweek at work, we wonder, What happened to that clarity? It felt so profound. Then we go through various reactions, trying to figure out how to get back to it.

The essential point is that if our practice is working, we’re experiencing a deeper, truer reality, and it’s natural to want to embody that depth in every part of life. So today, I’m going to talk about this in a number of ways. I’ll explore some of the approaches we try that don’t really work, and the ones that do.

Spiritual Awakening Is About Transforming our Entire Life

To start, let’s step back and reflect on something fundamental: spiritual awakening itself has only ever been about transforming our entire life.

Spiritual awakening, if it’s working, is only about a revolution in consciousness that shows up in every aspect of our life; our relationships, our work, how we engage with every moment. That’s what awakening is only about. But many of us, somewhere along the line, have been conditioned to think of it as an inner event—something that happens within and then has to be translated into our outer life. And meditation can sometimes reinforce this.

In meditation, we “go within,” focus on our inner experience, and undergo transformations in how we relate to life. Naturally, we then see that as a separate domain—something that happens inside and must be moved outside somehow. This makes it seem like two different processes: awakening itself, and then the process of figuring out how to translate that awakening into action.

Common Ways We Try to Bridge the Gap

Many books have been written about this, and our contemporary spiritual culture reinforces the idea. And there is a certain truth to that way of looking at it. There are ways we can approach daily life that help us facilitate bringing higher consciousness into our lives. But there’s a much deeper way of looking at this, and that’s what I want to explore today.

1. Holding On to Higher States
One thing I see many of us do when we try to bridge this gap, which would be a good metaphor for what we’re talking about today—bridging the gap between what we’ve discovered in our deepest moments and our day to day reality—is try to hold on to a higher state of consciousness we experienced in meditation. This is a very natural response.

Meditation gives us this rarefied opportunity to step outside the flow of life and allow consciousness to deepen. And naturally, sometimes we have profound experiences—maybe a sense of detached freedom, an expansive clarity, or a deep, sacred love bubbling up. Or we might feel an overwhelming sense of inner liberation—I’m free! The bondage I used to feel is an illusion.

Whatever form of higher consciousness we experience in meditation, we try to sustain it as we move through the day. But most of us find that it just slips through our fingers. No matter how hard we try, we can’t force a higher state of consciousness to linger. States come and go.

2. Conceptually Applying an Insight
Another common approach is to conceptually apply an insight we had in meditation.

For example, we might experience nonduality or oneness—I had the experience that all the boundaries of self disappeared, and I’m just I’m everywhere, and I’m every one and there’s no separate I. That was just a construct of my mind. I’m actually just part of this unified whole, I am this unified whole. And, and then we try to not so much hold on to the experience, but we try to conceptually now work out, well, then how should I live, based on this insight I had into the oneness of it all?

We might stop using the word “I” because it seems contrary to our realization.

So we will do things like we’ll stop using the word “I”. You’ve probably known some spiritual people who did this. They don’t say I or me anymore, because somehow that seems counter to the meditative insight they had. Or we wonder, well, if we’re all one, does that mean I should just give away everything I have to everyone else? Because who am I to have possessions?

Hopefully, none of us have gone that far. But hopefully, you have become more generous. Still, this conceptual approach doesn’t fully bridge the gap.

3. Applying Meditation Instructions off the Cushion
Another thing we often do is try to carry the inner postures of direct awakening that we’re working with into our daily activities.

For example, in meditation, we practice letting everything be. So we try to apply that to life by not making a problem out of anything that happens—just allowing. Or we try to not know anything, even when we need to strategize or make decisions. But you can probably see why that doesn’t work. Meditation postures are absolute, and they can’t be applied directly into daily life. So we find that doesn’t really work either.

4. Enlightened Behavior Modification
The last thing I’ll name is that we often try to do “enlightened behavior modification” on ourselves by trying to practice being the kind of person that we think would be more enlightened. We try to be more loving, more innocent, more wise. And while that’s not a *bad* thing—the world would be better if everyone did it—it still doesn’t truly bridge the gap.

Engaged Inquiry Practice

None of this is to say that we can’t bring spiritual practice into daily life. I’m going to give an example of one way that is a real form of daily life practice that you can work with and take directly into your life that I call Engaged Inquiry Practice.

For each of the meditation postures we work with, there’s a way to extend it into life—not by forcing it into action, but by discovering its analogous expression in daily experience. Here’s what I mean.

1. Letting Things Be
So a moment ago, I was saying you can’t truly just let things be in daily life, because that means not doing anything. If you’re out in the world, you have to do things. So you’re not letting things be, you’re engaging and you’re trying to make things happen.

The inner posture of allowing and letting things be doesn’t mean doing nothing in life. It translates into fluidity and flexibility—responding rather than resisting, flowing with what arises rather than trying to control it all.

Instead of imposing your agenda on everything, you’re more responsive to what’s happening rather than resisting it or insisting that it shouldn’t be that way. You move and flow with life rather than trying to control everything that happens. While this isn’t the same as simply letting things be in meditation, it carries a similar gesture—one that can be expressed through action.

Letting things be also has an analogous expression in truly facing reality—seeing the truth, confronting everything, and not avoiding what is. We are deeply conditioned, with ego defenses and cognitive biases that prevent us from seeing clearly. But we can actively work to change that—to question our biases, challenge our assumptions, and become more present with reality. In this way, letting things be becomes not just a meditative posture but an active practice in life.

2. Not Knowing
The inner posture of not knowing doesn’t mean refusing to think. In life, it shows up as humility, open-mindedness, and genuine curiosity—being more interested in what we don’t know than in clinging to what we think we know.

Or you could take another posture, the posture of innocence, of not knowing, of not needing to know, of letting go of the need to know. Again, it doesn’t work to apply this absolutely in life, but there is a practice of being—what you might call humility, open-mindedness, and even curiosity—that is analogous to this deep meditative posture of innocence. We enter life striving not to relate primarily from our preconceived ideas.

Instead, we become more interested in what we don’t know than in what we already know. We remain humble in the face of the unknown, and that humility makes us more capable of seeing clearly and recognizing what is true.

3. Immediacy
The meditation posture of immediacy—fully embracing this moment—translates into no longer waiting for the “right” conditions to live fully. Instead of postponing life until we feel more prepared, we recognize: I have everything I need right now to meet this moment completely.

We could look at this posture of immediacy as no longer waiting for some future moment when we will finally let go and embrace our true nature. It is the practice of this is it—of giving everything to this moment. You’ve probably explored this in meditation, but there is also an outer posture of immediacy that we can bring into life—one where we stop waiting for circumstances to align in just the right way before we fully show up.

We often tell ourselves that we need to feel fully healed, fully calm, or more prepared before we can step up. But instead, we can take the posture that I have everything I need right now to give myself fully to the life I’m living. I’m going to stop holding out for some other time when I’ll finally feel “ready.” It’s like stepping up to the plate now—with the person I am now, with the insecurities I have now, with the doubts I have now, with whatever level of ability, training, and capacity I have. I take the position that I am already the person I need to be to meet the life I’m in.

And so, I stop holding back. Through this practice, we begin to see all the ways we have been holding back, how we’ve been waiting instead of giving everything to life—just as we’ve explored in meditation.

So, these are just a few examples of Engaged Inquiry Practice—where we’re not trying to stay in meditation throughout the day, nor are we attempting to directly apply absolute meditation postures in daily life. We’re also not trying to hold on to awakened consciousness in some conceptual or even purely experiential way.

Instead, we are working with it, discovering it, exploring it. We’re asking: What is the parallel? What is the analog? What is the gesture in life that aligns with this deeper truth—this inner meditative awakening posture?

And that is a form of practice that can support our awakening. It can help stabilize it to some degree and can help us begin to bridge that gap. I encourage this approach—not as a rigid method, but as a way of deepening our engagement with awakening in daily life.

I’m not offering a full course on this here, but if this way of practicing resonates with you, I do have other programs where we explore these principles in greater depth.

Transcending the Materialistic Paradigm

But again, from the point of view of awakening itself, there is a deeper and greater truth than simply occupying myself with trying to come up with 20 different things to do each day in an effort to be more enlightened.

I think that is probably a byproduct of the culture we live in. We live in a relatively materialistic culture—let’s face it. And part of materialism isn’t just I want more stuff—it’s that we place our value and invest our belief in a certain level of reality. A gross level of things. And by gross, I don’t mean icky—I mean tangible, substantial, material.

This includes the idea that I can make everything happen, that I am the powerful one, and that it’s through my conscious actions and choices that the world moves forward. That’s part of the materialistic mindset. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing—after all, in life, this belief empowers us. It’s what drives us to take action and create change.

Embracing the Paradigm of Awakening

But awakening and unleashing the qualities of awakened consciousness doesn’t fundamentally work that way. There is an element of it that includes effort, but there’s a much deeper element that has to do with getting out of the way so that a greater intelligence, a greater set of capacities, a deeper care, a deeper strength, and a deeper willingness to trust can come through.

There is a completely different order of consciousness and being—one that isn’t something we can cause through sheer willful effort. Instead, it comes through us and expresses itself organically and naturally in our lives when we are truly committed to our practice. If we’re really going all the way with our meditation and direct awakening, then we are unleashing something far greater—something that, in many ways, has always been beyond our control.

Again, both are relevant. That kind of self-directed, personal change process is important in life—it is relevant. You can probably sense that I’m walking a delicate line here because we don’t want to undermine the fact that we are empowered actors. We can consciously choose to live more awake, more loving, more present, less reactive, and less conditioned lives. There truly is a dimension of spiritual life that includes this.

But what I’m really trying to highlight and underline here is that even all of that can only work to the degree that we are awakening—to the degree that we are becoming stabilized in awakened consciousness through radical surrender in our spiritual practice. It’s not just the foundation upon which we build a house. It is the source.

So I think that’s the paradigm we’re really trying to get behind. It’s not just a foundational step that we take before moving on to other things. It is the source. It is the practice—the fundamental, radical practice of stepping into the mystery, of letting go of the known, of leaving behind the agendas and perspectives of the ego, and stepping into a holistic, integrated super-consciousness that is our own deeper nature. That’s the point of spiritual life.

That’s what we’re really here to do. That’s the practice. And to the degree that we do it wholeheartedly, consistently, and in a sustained way, that’s what will truly unleash the kind of transformation we’re after. Even within that radical awakening, all of these other pieces we’ve discussed—the more self-directed choice to align with awakening—will only work to the degree that we are unleashing the infinite through radical, direct awakening practice.

So, to bring this back home: Living an awakened life only happens when we are genuinely stabilizing awakened consciousness. And the most important thing any of us can do to stabilize and awaken consciousness is to practice spending time in the postures of awakened consciousness—every day. And not just every day, but in deep, sustained practice as well.