The modules you focus on will depend on whether you are a total beginner at exploring experience (someone with minimal prior experience of mindfulness or similar techniques), whether you are aiming for awakening, or whether you are looking to integrate after an awakening. This flowchart shows how to navigate the modules, depending on your starting point.

Before diving in to these modules, however, you can use the Essentials modules to get an overview of the approach offered here.


Beginners

If you are new to inner exploration with minimal prior experience of mindfulness or similar techniques., begin with the Empowered Mindfulness module to cultivate what is known as access concentration, a baseline level of focus that is useful when exploring experience.

If you have found it hard to cultivate a mindfulness practice, begin with the Cultivating Practice module.

If you continue to struggle with cultivating a mindfulness practice, use the Integration module to explore the dynamics of resistance that might be making it challenging to practice.

If you still struggle with practice, use the Identity module to aim for awakening through inquiry. This is typically known as the Direct Path.

Aiming for Awakening

If you are already familiar with the basics of mindfulness and are aiming for awakening, use the Identity and Insight modules (Direct and Gradual paths).

There is no need to choose a single path, you can explore and combine them as you wish.

Combine with Experiential Opening to orient towards authentic experience.

Unblocking Awakening

Awakening is often precipitated by a deep desire to figure out one’s mind or one’s place in existence, often so as to stop struggling with existence and to relieve one’s suffering. If you have a casual attitude to awakening right now, an honest inquiry to one’s emotional life can help one to discover this drive to awaken. Use the practices in the Embodiment and Integration modules (+ the Psychedelics module if you choose) if this applies to you at this point in time.

Post-Awakening

If you have already had an awakening, use the Embodiment and Integration modules (+ the optional Psychedelics module). These become crucial at this stage, as we diffuse the unconscious emotional material that drives us back into identity and delusion. This is often called shadow work. Through this process we integrate different aspects of our minds and become increasingly whole.

As we progress in this emotion work, we can also investigate where patterns of resistance may be hiding in structures of the mind. The Cognition and Perception modules are important here. Identity can hide in very fundamental perceptual structures (for example, feeling separate from the world around you), and directly investigating these structures in experience can be invaluable. Such inquiries also unearth unconscious resistance patterns and so this Cognition and Perception work is not separate from the Emotion work.

Ultimately, we are left in a state of continual openness to experience, and we discover that the first moment of Experiential Opening is the same thing as the ultimate destination. Rather than fixating on some fixed destination, continually open to experience here and now at all stages on the path and you will be heading in the right direction.

Enjoy the ride!