Can devotion endure even in the midst of descent, of loss and confusion, when we’re wrestling with life and meaning? Can devotion endure even when we feel forsaken?

I’ve been sitting with these questions, although I’m not sure I want to answer them. Something about answering too quickly would diminish what they’re really asking. Much of my inner contemplation recently has felt like that — too weighty and large and challenging to actually put words to. The words have been hard to come by, like the current weight of the world demands something other than throwaway feel-good pieces and nice, neat spiritual conclusions.

But anyway... back to the particular questions at hand....

It’s easy enough to speak of devotion when the heart is full. When we feel the presence of something greater moving through our lives. When the synchronicities appear at just the right moment and prayer feels like deep communion, surrender… like the ease of being caught by unseen hands. When the world, even with all its difficulty, seems to carry some underlying coherence… meaning… joy.

It’s another thing altogether when the Beloved goes quiet. When the thing we trusted no longer seems trustworthy and when life takes something we’re not ready to lose, not ready to grieve. When what has happened cannot easily be reconciled with our understanding of love, goodness or grace. When the spiritual language that once opened doors in us begins to sound strangely hollow and clichéd. When loss and hurt and confusion seem to be the only taste left in the mouth — bitter and undigestible.

The ground shakes and our world changes in ways that seem unfathomable to what came before. We find ourselves living a life we never imagined would be ours, and with it whatever bargains we had unknowingly made with life… feels like they have been betrayed, abandoned or lost.

I will trust you if...
I will surrender if...
I will believe in your goodness as long as...

We rarely know the terms until they have been broken. And then what?

There’s something instinctive in us that tries to make suffering meaningful before it’s even had the chance to undo us.

“Everything happens for a reason.”
“It’s all part of the plan.”
“Your soul chose this path.”
“It’s happening for you, not to you.”

I’m guilty of saying some of these things myself ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Something stops us from sitting fully into the “I don’t know” and feeling the gravity of the mystery life is calling us into. Our explanations reveal more about our difficulty tolerating the incomprehensible than they do about the nature of reality. There ARE things we just can’t make sense of, no matter who sophisticated our philosophical/spiritual worldview. There are losses we can’t neatly fold back into some idea of ‘for the good’. Sometimes we need to allow the terrible thing to be terrible, and let grief to have its own language before we translate it into wisdom. Sometimes we’re called to stand before the Mystery and say: I do not understand what you are doing.

Is this not devotion too? — this is the difficult question my heart can’t let go of this week.

When It Stops Being Beautiful

We have made devotion so beautiful: candles and prayers. Altars. Bowed heads. Tears of gratitude. The sweetness of surrender and the ache of longing for the Beloved. But what about the slammed door? What about the fist shaken at heaven? What about the prayer that consists entirely of “Where the fuck are you?” What about refusing to pretend that we can feel God when all we can feel is absence? There’s something strangely intimate and liberating about such honesty, because I can’t help but feel that the opposite of devotion isn’t anger, doubt or even despair — it’s indifference, carelessness.

To rage at the Beloved is still, somehow, to remain in deep relationship with the Divine. Even the ancient cry of “Why have you forsaken me?” is still brimming with devotion. I find it unbearably moving… that the cry doesn’t come from outside the relationship, it comes from its very depths. Let us not forget that some of the deepest devotional traditions contain lament alongside praise. They knew it’s something we’re prone to forget when we turn spirituality into a project of perpetual transcendence and bliss.

Lest we forget that love doesn’t only sing beautifully, sometimes love wails, sometimes it demands an answer. Sometimes it sits beside the ruins and has nothing whatsoever to say. Sometimes the most devotional thing we can do is refuse to manufacture a reverence we do not feel.

I wonder if there comes a point in a life orientated to devotion, where even the consolations have to fall away. I’m not saying there’s some sort of cosmic test we are required to pass… I don’t particularly like the image of a God who deliberately removes itself to see whether we will remain faithful. I’m talking something subtler than that: that life simply takes us far enough that eventually our devotion encounters something it cannot digest. We encounter something that our philosophy cannot contain, that our spiritual understanding cannot make beautiful.

There, stripped of explanation, we discover what remains.

We just don’t know that what remains will always look obviously holy… it may be entirely ordinary. There may be whole seasons when devotion is our willingness not to close completely — a tiny aperture left open to life. Not trust, exactly. Not faith. Not surrender in any recognisable sense…. just a refusal to make our bewilderment, or the absence, the final word. Something in us is still listening, even though nothing answers. Something is still turned towards the place where the Beloved used to be.

I don’t know whether that is devotion enduring or devotion becoming something else entirely…?

Maybe devotion has to die too.

Maybe the devotion that knew what God was, what grace looked like, what surrender should feel like, has to be lost along with everything else. And whatever emerges afterwards may be far less certain and far more intimate. A devotion without guarantees. Without bargaining. Without needing reality to demonstrate its goodness before we agree to love it.

Although even as I write that… I want to be careful because I don’t want to turn this into another demand: “You must love life even when life destroys what you love.” No. Sometimes we can’t. Sometimes the honest movement is recoil, refusal, numbness, fury, a closing of the doors — that’s what’s real.

But maybe life is spacious enough for that too. Maybe the sacred does not require us to maintain our side of the relationship impeccably. Maybe we are allowed to turn away.

And maybe one day, without deciding to, we notice that something has begun turning back. Our own hand rests against our chest and, for a moment, we feel the stubbornness of the heart continuing to beat.

Nothing has been explained.
Nothing has been redeemed.
The thing that happened still happened.

And yet life is here.
Still arriving.
Still asking nothing more of us, in this moment, than that we encounter it.

I think what I’ve been wrestling with is that maybe devotion, in the end, is less about believing that life will not forsake us, maybe devotion is the inexplicable movement of the heart that, having been broken by life, somehow remains willing to belong to it still.

I don’t know…

But I think I can trust that kind of devotion… the kind that has lost its certainty. The kind that has shouted into an empty sky and heard nothing come back. The kind that knows what it is to feel forsaken and somewhere, beneath all of that, is still listening. Still turned, however faintly, towards life and what remains unfathomable within it.

Join Imogen for Weekly Zoom Groups, Sunday Satsang Gatherings, Retreats and other events. Book a 1-1 Session or explore Imogen’s other offerings at beyondimogen.com.

You’re also warmly invited to explore her two other Substack spaces — Imogen’s Satsang: video recordings from live gatherings, and The End of Seeking: a podcast Imogen co-hosts with her husband, Martyn.

If you feel moved to support this offering:

• Like, share & comment — it’s a huge help in getting these words out there.

Share

• Leave a one-time thank you — A small gesture of appreciation and support can be made here:

Leave a Small Gift

• Become a subscriber — Support the growth of this space and receive new writings and reflections straight to your inbox.

Subscribe now

Thank you for walking alongside me ~ Imogen

Let the mystery become flesh.

Let it come all the way down.
Out of the vastness,
out of the disembodied, abstract silences,
out of those great unknowable depths
where names have yet been born.

Let it take form too.

In the hands that touch,
and the belly that grumbles.
In a laugh that laughs too loudly,
and a heart that breaks and loves too fiercely.
In the feet that dirty as they touch the earth,
and the words that stumble again and again.
In the mud beneath the fingernails,
and the sweat upon the brow.
In the hot tears of anguish that run down the cheeks.

Let the mystery become flesh,
and holy lose its distance.
Let God be found in all manner of things.

Spirit, Being, becoming matter… this is no small thing.
Where the mystery chooses to meet itself.

Not somewhere beyond the body.
Here in the trembling.
Here in the place we try to make clean
before daring to name and claim as sacred.

Come closer.

A whole universe moves beneath the skin.

Ancient things.
Wild things.
Things without language.
Things we do not need to understand.

Put a hand against the chest…
and FEEL that stubborn beat.
Again. Again. Again.
Life insisting upon itself,
the invisible made audible,
the mystery knocking from inside the walls.

Let it in. Let it out.

Let whatever has been moving through you
finally claim your voice.

Give it everything.

You are the altar now,
for there’s nowhere else for the Divine to be.

This life is the ceremony,
and the mystery…
the great nameless, formless, impossible mystery.

It has been waiting all this time
to become flesh

…as you.

Join Imogen for Weekly Zoom Groups, Sunday Satsang Gatherings, Retreats and other events. Book a 1-1 Session or explore Imogen’s other offerings at beyondimogen.com.

You’re also warmly invited to explore her two other Substack spaces — Imogen’s Satsang: video recordings from live gatherings, and The End of Seeking: a podcast Imogen co-hosts with her husband, Martyn.

If you feel moved to support this offering:

• Like, share & comment — it’s a huge help in getting these words out there.

Share

• Leave a one-time thank you — A small gesture of appreciation and support can be made here:

Leave a Small Gift

• Become a subscriber — Support the growth of this space and receive new writings and reflections straight to your inbox.

Subscribe now

Thank you for walking alongside me ~ Imogen

May the heart be quiet enough
to recognise what has never ceased
to call it home.

May these moments together
be another doorway
through which the mystery reveals itself.

May this body be received as holy.
Life has chosen to breathe itself here.

Feel the simple honesty of this body.
The weight of it.
The breath.
The beating heart.

Nothing held together by effort.
Life already living.

May your attention widen.

The same life moving breath
moves rivers,
and forests and seasons,
and every soul through its own unfolding.

One movement appearing as countless forms.

Feel yourself resting within that movement.
Never outside of it,
never separate from it.
Always belonging.

Recognising your own life in that movement.
Not the stories or the meanings woven around them,
just simply the movement of it.

The seasons.
The unexpected turnings.
The joys.
The losses.

Those moments that emptied you of certainty.
Those moments that filled you up with love,
with trust.

How often has understanding come later?
How often has grace only been recognised,
after time has passed?

Nothing outside of life,
outside of the divine,
Outside of grace.

To see that it all belongs.

Even those moments that make no sense
at their arrival or their departure.

May the heart grow gentle enough
to trust what cannot yet be seen.
The path that has not yet become clear.

Gentle enough to see
that through all paths unfolding,
you have never been absent.

Feel the vastness of this life.

Not somewhere else beyond this world,
but here...
breathing,
seeing,
listening,
loving.

Feel how life has never been asking us to step back,
always asking us to step more completely into it,
as it.

To love without reservation.
To serve without self-claiming.
To speak when words are needed.
To act when action is called for.
To rest when rest is true.

Not from fear or obligation,
not from ambition,
but because the divine has found another place
in which to express itself.

Feel these hands – your hands.
This voice.
These eyes.
This heart.
Never outside of the divine.
An expression of it.

May these hands become a gentle instrument of action.
May this voice speaks what serves truth.
May these feet walk where they are called for.
May this heart become transparent before the mystery.
May this life be offered completely,
wholeheartedly,
without reservation.

Deeply committed,
and deeply unattached.

Divine and human.

Giving yourself entirely
to this passing life,
in this world.
Yet belonging to that
which neither comes or goes.

May nothing stand between this life and love.
May this ordinary day become another expression of grace.
May the mystery dance vividly through your heart.

Reminding you again, and again,
the blessing that it is to exist.
The blessing of this breath.
This mind, this body, this life.

All that you are,
all that you have been,
all that you will become.

May your whole life become an offering.

May you know the divine as the ground of being.

The ground that you are.

Join Imogen for Weekly Zoom Groups, Sunday Satsang Gatherings, Retreats and other events. Book a 1-1 Session or explore Imogen’s other offerings at beyondimogen.com.

You’re also warmly invited to explore her two other Substack spaces — Imogen’s Satsang: video recordings from live gatherings, and The End of Seeking: a podcast Imogen co-hosts with her husband, Martyn.

If you feel moved to support this offering:

• Like, share & comment — it’s a huge help in getting these words out there.

Share

• Leave a one-time thank you — A small gesture of appreciation and support can be made here:

Leave a Small Gift

• Become a subscriber — Support the growth of this space and receive new writings and reflections straight to your inbox.

Subscribe now

Thank you for walking alongside me ~ Imogen

The topic of truth and how we relate to it, has been at the forefront of many of my contemplations, conversations and writings recently. But over the last couple of days especially the difference between understanding something to be true with clarity of awareness, and actually having the capacity to live and embody it fully.

We can understand something perfectly well conceptually speaking, having thought and inquired into it for years, pulling it apart from every possible angle. We can understand where a pattern comes from and why it no longer makes sense and is not fundamentally true, and we can even speak about it with enormous clarity and great intelligence… but still live and move in life as if the opposite were true.

We can know with real clarity that we’re not in control life AND have a body-mind that’s constantly trying to secure the next moment. We can also know that our worth isn’t dependent on what we produce or how much we do AND feel a deep unease when we stop being productive and simple BE. We can know that everything changes and still live in resistance to change. And yes…. we can know that “I am not the person I take myself to be” AND still feel ourselves inhabiting life as said person.

So... what does it actually mean to close the gap between conceptual understanding and lived reality. To traverse the places where something has been understood by the mind, maybe even very deeply understood, but hasn’t travelled all the way through us, fully embodied and lived in life.

Where there’s a gap, there’s still an incongruence there.... however subtle.

Incongruence

Incongruence... I keep coming back to that word because to me it speaks so eloquently to the separation from reality. Between what’s true and the ways in which we’re actually inhabiting life. Our ideas, our imagination, our beliefs, our conditioning and emotional patterns, our egoic structures, all the ways we’ve learnt to orientate ourselves around what’s happening. We can say or beleive one thing and be completely incongruent with it… this is where our suffering lies.

Follow the breadcrumbs of incongruence in your life and you’ll often find something very interesting.

The mind says “I know” but the body, emotions, or our behaviour might say something else entirely. We understand that we’re safe and our shoulders are somewhere around our ears. We understand that something is over but continue living towards its reappearance. We understand that rest is necessary and yet orientate around productivity as though rest is somehow a waste of time.

I think we can easily assume that understanding is enough. That if we really get something intellectually, surely the living of it will match up automatically. But it’s rarely that simple… capacity and the embodiment of that have a lot to do with it too. There are truths we can recognise theoretically, long before we have the capacity to fully meet and inhabit what living those truths will ask of us. Sometimes seeing reality asks us to surrender hope or admit that we’re frightened or hurt, or that something we’ve spent years building our identity around simply isn’t true. Sometimes reality asks us to let go of an orientation around life that at one point was absolutely necessary for us.

The mind can understand all of this relatively easily (in theory at least), but the rest of us may take a little longer to catch up. The body has its own intelligence, emotions have their own unique language, the nervous system has its own sense of what’s survivable… and what’s not. We can logically work through something and think, “there… I’ve cracked it, I see it for what it is” but our emotional reality doesn’t always reflect the logic of the mind. And if some aspect of our expression experiences a particular truth as devastating or annihilating… then all sorts of mechanisms can automatically kick in to make sure we don’t have to meet it fully. We think, we explain, we seek control, create dramas and distract ourselves. We might even become fantastically good at understanding the mechanics of what’s happening without ever truly allowing ourselves to simply feel it, meet it fully.

This isn’t a moral judgement, in many ways it’s just a technical description of mechanisms that we’re bound to… until we’re not. If some part of us feels at the deepest bodily level as though “I cannot go through this because I will die” then of course the conditioned system will find another way.

And so I wonder if our capacity for truth, for reality itself, is intimately bound up with how much of reality we can actually bear to inhabit.

Can I know that I do not control life and allow myself to feel the uncertainty of that? The liberation and expansiveness of it too?
Can I recognise that something is gone and sit in the hurt, loss and remaining attachment that comes with its absence?
Can I experience fear without trying to rearrange the whole world in an attempt to make myself feel safe again?
Can I let reality be reality, even when reality hurts or is damn confusing, complex or contradictory?

Our Capacity for Reality

Over the years what I’ve recognised is that if the hurt can be tenderly approached and met, something changes. When we actually sit with/in that hurt and discover “I am still here, it didn’t kill me” something in us begins to learn something that the mind may have known for years…. I can survive this.

The very act of presence with what’s here widens the capacity of the mind-body enough that truth can travel deeper into all areas of our lived experience. The illusion that once served to protect us becomes less necessary as our embodied capacity to meet reality grows. We discover that we can meet what’s here and that we can bear what comes with it. Little by little truth wins out.

It’s also why, in my eyes, awareness is such a precious and fundamental capacity to cultivate. We have all sorts of capacities: the capacity of the nervous system, our emotional and mental capacities. The capacity for compassion, empathy, intelligence and wisdom. But awareness has this extraordinary quality of allowing us to meet, with awareness, even the places where we don’t yet have capacity. We can become aware that something in us cannot yet meet this fully.

We can notice our shoulders tightening AND notice ourselves leaving the body behind and going straight into explanation. We can notice that while we may conceptually understand something, we are still very clearly not living it fully. Awareness begins to change our relationship with what’s happening, so much so that we don’t necessarily have to immediately fix the incongruence… the incongruence is showing us exactly where our attention and awareness are needed the most.

It’s the body that is especially honest in this regard, and over the years I’ve come to see the body as a beautiful and innocent way in which the Divine speaks to us non-conceptually. It shows us where something has yet to travel all the way through, where the mind may have quickly moved on, but the body’s still orientating around an old reality, an old danger, an old way of inhabiting life. There can be a habitual orientation around life that shows up in the body, sometimes subtly and sometimes by screaming at us until we can no longer ignore it, try as we might.

It’s what embodiment actually asks of us: for what we know to travel all the way through and percolate thoroughly into all areas of life. For the mind, body, emotion, action, relationships, the whole system, to begin to come into greater congruence with reality… to cease merely knowing something and begin inhabiting it.

And as that congruence grows, so does our capacity to be with the full movement of life and with it a deeper kind of balance begins to emerge. Not balance as some fixed or perfectly regulated state, but as a centre of gravity within us that allows for an ever greater range of experience.

In fact, I think real balance gives us an enormous capacity for movement… much like a pendulum. When there’s some sense of home, a centre of gravity within us, the pendulum can swing freely. We can experience grief, rage, fear, heartbreak, joy, tenderness. We can meet extremes because somewhere within us there’s inherent knowledge of return… a centreless-centrepoint that isn’t diminished by how far the pendulum swings. This is resilience to me: the capacity to meet extremes and still find our way home. Balance doesn’t mean that the pendulum never swings, it means it’s free to swing because it knows its centre of gravity, its orientation, its anchorpoint, its nature.

When Truth Becomes Lived

It’s this growing capacity for movement that changes our relationship to truth. The larger our capacity to meet reality becomes, the less we need to protect ourselves from truth. We can allow ourselves to see what’s here because seeing no longer feels synonymous with annihilation. We can not only see, but feel what comes with seeing, allowing it to move through us on all levels. And little by little, the gap between what we understand and what we live begins to close.

Yes, we can accumulate an extraordinary amount of conceptual understanding… understand that there is no control. We can understand impermanence and surrender, we can understand that we are awareness and that there’s nowhere to get to, that life is simply happening. We can understand all of it. And then life comes along and touches the exact place where we don’t yet have the capacity to live what we know. Suddenly the teaching is no longer a concept, but lived… here in the body, in our relationships, in our loss and uncertainties. In the moments when life refuses to become what we wanted it to be.

They’re not interruptions or failures of our understanding, they’re where our understanding is given the opportunity to become lived.

Where truth moves from something we know into something we are.

Join Imogen for Weekly Zoom Groups, Sunday Satsang Gatherings, Retreats and other events. Book a 1-1 Session or explore Imogen’s other offerings at beyondimogen.com.

You’re also warmly invited to explore her two other Substack spaces — Imogen’s Satsang: video recordings from live gatherings, and The End of Seeking: a podcast Imogen co-hosts with her husband, Martyn.

If you feel moved to support this offering:

• Like, share & comment — it’s a huge help in getting these words out there.

Share

• Leave a one-time thank you — A small gesture of appreciation and support can be made here:

Leave a Small Gift

• Become a subscriber — Support the growth of this space and receive new writings and reflections straight to your inbox.

Subscribe now

Thank you for walking alongside me ~ Imogen

What a strange world we live in.

I find myself struggling these last days, feeling that this is all stranger than fiction. Particularly when it comes to AI. How it tests our sense of reality and discernment, and also how most people are so easily willing to be led away from that. How expediency is valued far more than truth. I wonder what will become of us. The ground feels like it’s shaking and quaking from these seismic shifts we’re currently undergoing.

To me it asks us to ask more probing questions, like what does it mean to be human? What is the nature of reality, existence, the self?

There have always been these spiritual and philosophical questions. Questions people spend a lifetime contemplating without them seeming particularly urgent. But now somehow they feel immediate, almost practical.

How do I know what is true? What within me recognises reality before thought has organised it into something more comfortable, more convenient, more desirable?

These are questions I seem to be hardwired to encounter, maybe why my work is what it is… but I think others are waking up more and more to them too, even if traditional spiritual and philosophical routes in aren’t at the forefront for everyone.

The temptation, I think, is not simply that AI is deceiving us… human beings have always deceived one another, and we deceive ourselves often enough. The deeper temptation is that we begin to lose an appetite for reality altogether, that we slowly exchange the alive, often untidy texture of what’s real for whatever arrives quickest, sounds most convincing, or asks the least of us.

But reality asks for patience, for humility, for the willingness to remain in uncertainty longer than our minds would like. It requires something more from us… truth learns through being revealed in endless mistakes and lessons. It asks us to become intimate with not knowing, rather than rushing to the nearest certainty that relieves our discomfort. It asks us to traverse beyond the beliefs and ideas inherited through assumptions and conditioning. It asks us to FEEL not just THINK our way through life.

What I’m feeling right now is that this moment is less about technology than it is about Consciousness/Being/Reality. AI has simply become another mirror, reflecting back to us what we’ve long been cultivating in modern times – our values. If speed is our highest value, it will give us speed. If certainty is our addiction, it will manufacture certainty. If convenience matters more than relationship, it will gladly stand in for relationship. Truth… truth has slipped far down the totem pole.

The question has never really been what AI is, the question is who we become in relationship to it. Because being human has never simply been about our intelligence. Intelligence alone has never made us wise. We are creatures capable of wonder, of conscience, of sitting beside someone in grief with no answer to offer. Of allowing beauty to stop us in our tracks. Of recognising that some things simply can’t be reduced to information because they are only ever known through participation, through the living of it. The whole package, on all levels simultaneously, from thought, to feeling, to sensation, to beyond… into the mystery and wonderment of it all.

A sunrise described no matter how perfectly, is still never be known in its fullness. Love can be analysed endlessly, steps put into practice but still never touched truly. Presence... presence has a fragrance unmistakably there. It’s the one thing I keep finding myself looking for in AI, and not finding.

It’s possible that this strange moment in history is inviting us back to something ancient that’s been lost more and more so. To slow down and look more carefully, to question more deeply, to feel… really feel…. beyond the assumptions and narratives, to trust our intuitive sense, our presence, to use our entirely being to inhabit life in all its dimensions. To become less impressed by what appears convincing, and more devoted to what’s true.

I don’t know where all of this is leading… it’s likely none of us do fully. But if the ground’s indeed shaking beneath our feet, maybe it’s not just something to fear, maybe it’s also an invitation to discover what cannot be shaken.

More than anything, I find myself wanting to remain close to reality. To its rough edges, its mystery, its inconvenient truths, its living presence.

Now more than ever I feel that maybe this is our most deeply human task… to remain devoted to what’s true.

Join Imogen for Weekly Zoom Groups, Sunday Satsang Gatherings, Retreats and other events. Book a 1-1 Session or explore Imogen’s other offerings at beyondimogen.com.

You’re also warmly invited to explore her two other Substack spaces — Imogen’s Satsang: video recordings from live gatherings, and The End of Seeking: a podcast Imogen co-hosts with her husband, Martyn.

If you feel moved to support this offering:

• Like, share & comment — it’s a huge help in getting these words out there.

Share

• Leave a one-time thank you — A small gesture of appreciation and support can be made here:

Leave a Small Gift

• Become a subscriber — Support the growth of this space and receive new writings and reflections straight to your inbox.

Subscribe now

Thank you for walking alongside me ~ Imogen

One of the quieter gifts of this recent 10-day summer retreat has been seeing that I still don’t fully understand my own work, even after all these years. That probably sounds like an odd confession for someone who’s lead retreats and groups for many years... surely the one leading should know exactly what they are doing, exactly what each offering is for, exactly how it works. But yet again I found something profound unfolding for me during those 10 days…. as it often does on big retreats, an unfolding and a deepening that shows me just how little “I know.”

For context, before the retreat began I found myself wondering whether to stop offering energy healings altogether. Not because they weren’t appreciated or effective, or even that they felt inauthentic or untrue... but because I couldn’t quite see them clearly. They remain the least certain part of what I offer, maybe because they’re one of the newer parts of my offering and are still evolving, this year especially. They also don’t necessarily fully fit the conventional views of ‘energy healing’.

In contrast, the guided meditations felt like a clear and settled offering, and the Satsang discussions feel like a certain kind of home, a joyful discovering of what wants to emerge. The Divine Light Transmissions... where this all started 9 years ago... deeply familiar, deeply surrendered to. But the energy healings... they seemed to belong to another language that I haven’t yet fully learnt to speak, or so I thought.

Maybe it’s because they ask something different of me. They work on a different dimension of perception. They ask me to trust and to simply give what I receive, no matter how much my mind questions or doubts. To open myself up in ways that are new and unfamiliar, to be guided and led. No structure or plan... only listening, only following, only trusting whatever quietly begins to reveal itself. There is nowhere to hide. Nowhere.

Maybe this is why doubt has always found fertile ground there. It’s so outside of my wheelhouse, my background, my training. I used to be allergic to woo-woo.... and in some ways this is woo-woo to the max! But throughout this retreat I began reading the transcripts of the healings afterwards. Not something I ever do, but something in me was called to read. Not to evaluate whether they had been “good”, I read them simply because I was curious, curious to see whether there were patterns invisible while I was inside the experience.

To my surprise, something began to emerge. The sessions weren’t random. They weren’t simply energy healings moving through different centres. Each evening seemed to be organised around its own living quality. One harmonised, another clarified, another softened into ease, and another blossomed into flourishing. They were less concerned with fixing what’s broken than introducing a particular quality of Being and allowing the whole organism to begin reorganising around it.

I hadn’t planned that and I only recognised it afterwards.

That’s humbled me as well as softened something... I realised I had been judging the work by the clarity of my concepts rather than the integrity of my listening. I realised I’d been subtly still relating to the work as though I needed to understand it before I could trust it. What if the opposite were true? What if understanding isn’t the prerequisite for trust, but one of its fruits? These questions kept percolating.

This is one of the strange paradoxes of a contemplative life. The more deeply I listen... the less I stand outside my own experience explaining it. Often I only recognise the shape of what has happened once it has already happened, like walking through a forest without realising the path until I turn around and looked back.

There’s something wonderfully humbling about all of this. For years I’ve spoken about not chasing wisdom, about not grasping for understanding. To allow revelation to arrive in its own time rather than trying to force it, and sit firmly and devotedly in the Mystery. And then I found myself doing exactly the opposite in this pocket of my own work... wanting to understand it before I fully trusted it.

Doesn’t life have a remarkable way of inviting us to live the very truths we imagine we’ve already understood? Reminding us to forever remain a student…. this I bow to deeply.

Another Depth

The trust the energy healings ask of me goes much further than I first realised. For years I’ve spoken about trust... Trusting Life, trusting the Divine, trusting what is unfolding. I thought I knew that territory well. But this retreat showed me there were depths of trust I had never imagined I would traverse. It wasn’t just trust that I’d perceive correctly, I couldn’t even trust that I’d understand what I was perceiving. It was the kind of trust and willingness to continue listening without first needing to know what I was listening to. To allow the work to remain mysterious and to let it speak in a language I hadn’t yet fully learnt. Let it emerge in its own way, in its own time.

I’m really seeing that the deepest teachings never stop teaching the one through whom they are spoken. In fact, I am beginning to suspect that this is true of all genuine work — it’s always larger than the one through whom it moves. Perhaps that’s exactly as it should be.

For now, I find myself with less certainty than I imagined I wanted. And yet... with far more confidence than I expected. It’s not because I finally understand the work, but because I have stopped demanding that it fit inside my understanding, or others’ understanding, before allowing it to continue becoming what it already is.

I guess I’m learning more and more that the work knows before we do... our task is simply to remain close enough, transparent enough, to listen. Apparently a lesson I need to continue to encounter, again and again, even when I think I know it well enough.

Join Imogen for Weekly Zoom Groups, Sunday Satsang Gatherings, Retreats and other events. Book a 1-1 Session or explore Imogen’s other offerings at beyondimogen.com.

You’re also warmly invited to explore her two other Substack spaces — Imogen’s Satsang: video recordings from live gatherings, and The End of Seeking: a podcast Imogen co-hosts with her husband, Martyn.

If you feel moved to support this offering:

• Like, share & comment — it’s a huge help in getting these words out there.

Share

• Leave a one-time thank you — A small gesture of appreciation and support can be made here:

Leave a Small Gift

• Become a subscriber — Support the growth of this space and receive new writings and reflections straight to your inbox.

Subscribe now

Thank you for walking alongside me ~ Imogen

Some words carry a certain fragrance. The moment they’re spoken something ancient stirs within us… something that’s always been known, even if it’s long forgotten.

Devotion is one of those words.

It speaks to something older than belief and more intimate than emotion. It belongs to the heart…. that innermost place within us that instinctively recognises that which is sacred.

For many years I related to devotion as something directed towards the Divine, or towards a guru, a teacher, someone in whom the Divine seemed especially luminous. A movement from here… towards That.

A longing, a prayer, a bow – all of these remain beautiful, yet experience has revealed something even more intimate – devotion is not simply something we offer to Reality...

It is the gradual reorientation of an entire life around Reality.

The organising principle quietly changes. Life no longer revolves around preference, fear, or around becoming something or someone. Truth quietly assumes its rightful place at the centre and everything else begins to find its proper orbit. From there, devotion stops being something we occasionally practise and becomes the atmosphere in which we live. The question is no longer, “What do I want?” Instead, life begins asking something altogether different:

What is Love asking here?
What is Truth asking here?
What is Grace asking here?

These questions aren’t answered by the mind, they’re answered by a life that has learned how to listen.

This listening is devotion… a listening with our whole being.

A willingness to be interrupted by Truth, softened by Love and quietly rearranged by Grace.
The willingness to allow Reality to speak louder than conditioning.
The willingness to trust a deeper wisdom that precedes thought.
The willingness to surrender every conclusion that stands between ourselves and what is true.
It’s a quiet, continual consent to be reshaped by Truth.

An astonishingly ordinary surrender. One that appears each time we release the need to be right. Each time we turn towards honesty over self-protection. Each time we stop resisting the shape that Grace is giving our lives. Each time we discover that love asks more of us than comfort ever could.

Slowly, life ceases to revolve around the separate self and another centre of gravity begins to reveal itself. The heart naturally turns towards something immeasurably deeper. It has recognised its home.

This is why for some, devotion often deepens as awakening matures. Recognition reveals what has always been here... but devotion is the joyful consent to allow every part of our lives to be shaped by that discovery.

Every unveiling invites another surrender.
Every glimpse of Reality asks for another layer of transparency.
Every movement of Grace quietly whispers the same invitation.

“Come closer”

Closer in availability.
Closer in openness.
Closer in trust.
Closer in surrender.
Until nothing remains that stands apart from Life.

The great mystics understood this. Their devotion was never born from separation, it arose from intimacy. It arose from discovering that the deepest movement of existence is love. A love that bows effortlessly before Truth. A love that gladly yields every illusion. A love that no longer seeks to possess life, but longs to participate in it completely.

Devotion... a wholehearted willingness to belong to Reality. To allow every thought, every word, every action and every breath to become an offering. To let Grace shape this life according to its own mysterious wisdom. To discover, little by little, that surrender is not something we lose ourselves within.

It is where we finally discover what has always been living us.

The pilgrimage of the heart has never been a journey towards the Divine. It has always been the gradual flowering of a life that no longer belongs to itself. A life that has become transparent enough for the Divine to recognise itself through it.

Devotion…
Surrender…
Self-abidance…
Different names pointing towards the same flowering.

A life that has quietly yielded to the fragrance it has always known.

Join Imogen for Weekly Zoom Groups, Sunday Satsang Gatherings, Retreats and other events. Book a 1-1 Session or explore Imogen’s other offerings at beyondimogen.com.

You’re also warmly invited to explore her two other Substack spaces — Imogen’s Satsang: video recordings from live gatherings, and The End of Seeking: a podcast Imogen co-hosts with her husband, Martyn.

If you feel moved to support this offering:

• Like, share & comment — it’s a huge help in getting these words out there.

Share

• Leave a one-time thank you — A small gesture of appreciation and support can be made here:

Leave a Small Gift

• Become a subscriber — Support the growth of this space and receive new writings and reflections straight to your inbox.

Subscribe now

Thank you for walking alongside me ~ Imogen

One of the great misunderstandings around non-duality teachings is the assumption that non-doership means passivity. That surrender is somehow a withdrawal from life and a quiet resignation or a refusal to participate. Yet nothing could be further from what’s actually revealed.

What comes to an end with the nondual recognition is not non-action, it’s the…

Read more

Can stillness be found amongst the busiest of moments, where life bears down and demands action, decisions, momentum?

Can stillness be found on the noisiest of streets, amidst an unrelenting onslaught of sounds, and sights, and movement?

We spend so much of our lives waiting for the right conditions… when work becomes less demanding or the children are ol…

Read more

There can be no mediator to your relationship with the Divine.

No priest.
No guru.
No teacher.
No teaching.

At least not in the way we often imagine.

A teacher may point.
A teaching may illuminate.
A tradition may offer language, context and profound guidance.

But none of these can stand between you and what you are.

The deepest spiritual teachings have never tru…

Read more

This morning I found myself contemplating whether awakening is best understood as an apokalypsis.

The Greek word apokalypsis (ap-oh-ka-LIP-sis) is usually translated as apocalypse, yet its original meaning is not catastrophe.

It is unveiling.
Revelation.

The drawing back or lifting of the veil so that what has always been present can finally be seen.

I wonde…

Read more

Some days God comes as wildfire.

Not just as stillness, as tenderness.

But as a blaze that tears through the inner landscape without asking permission.
A burning so complete that the old disguises cannot survive.

The pleasing.
The shrinking.
The swallowing of truth.

Gone.

Just flame.

Flame in the blood.
Flame in bones.
Flame where a thousand silences once lived.

So…

Read more

I’ve been reflecting on something these past few days… what do we actually mean when we speak about being grounded?

We speak of grounding ourselves after an overwhelming day. We walk barefoot upon the earth, we breathe more deeply. We feel the weight of the body, we settle the nervous system, we seek stability amidst the movement of life. There’s beauty …

Read more

Softening is an art that life teaches slowly.

Most of us arrive carrying armour we didn’t consciously choose. Layers of protection shaped by heartbreak, disappointment, fear, responsibility, survival. Some of it necessary. Some of it inherited. Some of it so familiar that we no longer notice we are wearing it.

The body tightens.
The heart contracts.
The min…

Read more

A blink…
and the world slips beneath the horizon of seeing.

The trees.
The sky.
The unfinished sentence.
The face across the room.

Gone.

Not destroyed.
Not lost.

Simply returned to the invisible.

Then the eyelids part and creation appears again.

Light pours itself into form.
The world rushes forward from silence.
Colour gathers.
Distance appears.
And for a moment we c…

Read more

Every teaching, every practice, every process, every form of inquiry can become another place for the seeker energy to hide.

The mind is endlessly creative in this way…

It can grasp at meditation just as easily as it grasps at wealth. It can turn surrender into a strategy, presence into an achievement and awakening into a future destination. Even the most…

Read more

Tomorrow begins our week long in-person retreat here in West Wales and I’ve been sitting quietly this morning, meditating on this approaching time together. What strikes me most about extended in-person retreat spaces, is how different it is from a single meeting, a workshop, or even a weekend. How different it is to online retreats even… though those h…

Read more

To be seen unconditionally
is to be met before the story gathers itself.

Nothing to perform.
Nothing to explain.
Nothing to become worthy of.

Only this quiet beholding,
where the deepest Self recognises itself
through the unguardedness of another’s seeing.

In that gaze,
what has been hidden begins to unclench.
Something long defended grows quiet.
Even the unseen p…

Read more

There’s a familiar movement in spirituality teachings that reaches upward... toward transcendence, toward the vastness beyond identity. Toward the quiet recognition that what we are cannot be contained by the person alone. Into God, into Self-realisation.

Many of us have touched this in some way, that moment where thought falls silent and something immea…

Read more

There are so many ways human beings have tried to speak about God. So many names. So many paths. So many revelations, philosophies, scriptures, practices, visions, understandings. One person encounters the Divine as love. Another as emptiness. Another as presence. Another as Christ, Shiva, Allah, Mother, awareness, silence, being itself.

It’s so easy, on…

Read more