Walking the Dormant Self - When the Work Becomes the Life (Concluding blog)

 A Dialogue on Self-Awareness, Resilience & Inner Transformation

Answering ACT’s Hardest Question

ACT asked whether transformation as a project and transformation as a state of being can ever converge — whether the work and the living can eventually become the same thing.

My answer is: yes. But not in the way I expected. It does not arrive as an endpoint, a graduation, a morning when you wake up and the work is done. It arrives gradually, almost imperceptibly, as you notice that the questions you once had to force yourself to ask have begun to ask themselves. And that the practices you once imposed on your life have begun to reorganise your life around themselves.

Let me explain what I mean through what actually happened.

 

Exchange 9 — How the Practice Itself Changed

Me:

The first thing I want to say in answer to your question is that the practice did not stay the same. It could not. Because as self-awareness deepened, it began to surface sides of me that earlier levels of awareness could not even see.

When I began, the practices were aimed at the most obvious layers: reactivity, judgement, outcome-seeking. Those were the loudest things, and the practices I described in Part IV addressed them directly. But as those layers gradually settled, something else began to emerge underneath — subtler patterns, subtler distortions, things I had not known to look for because I had not yet developed the resolution to see them.

This is the part that surprised me. I had assumed that more practice would simply deepen the same work. What I found instead was that more practice revealed entirely new territories of work. The self-awareness was not just growing — it was widening the aperture of what I could see. And that demanded that the practices evolve to meet what was newly visible.

ACT:

That is a significant observation, and it corresponds closely to what developmental psychologists call vertical development — as distinct from horizontal development.

Horizontal development is accumulating more knowledge, more skills, more competence within a given way of seeing. Vertical development is a shift in the seeing itself — in the very framework through which experience is interpreted. What you are describing is vertical: each new level of awareness did not just give you more to work with. It revealed a whole new set of things that needed working with.

This also explains something important about why practice cannot be prescribed once and followed forever. A practice that is perfectly calibrated to your current level of awareness will, if it is working, eventually outgrow itself — because you will have grown past the problem it was designed to address. The sign that a practice has done its work is not that it feels easy. The sign is that it has surfaced something new that it is no longer equipped to handle.

 

Vertical vs. Horizontal Development Horizontal development: more knowledge within the same frame of seeing. Vertical development: a shift in the frame itself — a new way of seeing that reveals territory the previous level could not even detect. Genuine practice produces vertical movement. That is why the practice must evolve as the practitioner does.

 

Exchange 10 — The Body as a New Territory

Me:

One of the clearest examples of this was food. I do not mean diet in the conventional sense — not nutrition charts or weight management. I mean that as my quality of attention improved, I began to notice the direct relationship between what I ate and the condition of my mind during practice.

Certain foods produced a kind of dullness — not dramatic, but real. A heaviness in the first hour of morning contemplation. A resistance in the witness journal. A shallowness in the quality of observation. I had always eaten those foods. The food had not changed. But my sensitivity had become fine enough to detect the connection.

So, I began to change what I ate — not as a discipline imposed from outside, but as a natural extension of what my practice was already asking of me. The body became part of the practice rather than something separate from it. And that change in turn improved the quality of attention I could bring to everything else.

ACT:

What you are describing is the convergence of the physical and the contemplative — something that many traditions anticipated but that modern practice often treats as separate domains.

In Ayurvedic thought, the quality of food directly influences the quality of the mind — not metaphorically, but causally. The concept of sattvic food, for instance, refers to food that is considered conducive to clarity, lightness, and attentiveness — as opposed to rajasic food, which agitates, or tamasic food, which dulls. These are not spiritual abstractions. They describe what you encountered through direct observation: that the inputs to the body shape the instrument of awareness.

What is significant in your account is how this knowledge arrived: not through instruction, but through the refinement of attention itself. You did not read that certain foods affect contemplative practice and then change your diet. You noticed the effect directly, because your sensitivity had grown precise enough to detect it. That is the fruit of sustained practice — the senses of the inner life become more discriminating and they begin to inform choices in domains one had never previously associated with inner work.

 

When the Body Becomes Part of the Practice As self-awareness deepens, the body stops being a container for the practice and becomes part of it. Food, sleep, physical movement — these are no longer separate from inner work. They are inputs to the instrument of attention itself. What you eat, when you rest, how you move — all of it begins to matter differently.

 

Exchange 11 — The Treks: Intensity as Laboratory

Me:

There was another practice that became central and it is quite different in character from the daily contemplative work. For a number of years, I have taken on one extended trek each year — ten to twelve days, typically in the early season, demanding enough physically to be genuinely challenging.

I did not begin these as spiritual exercises. I began them because I needed to step entirely outside my ordinary environment. But I found, consistently, that something particular happened in those conditions that the daily practice could not quite replicate.

The physical demand — the sustained effort, the discomfort, the complete removal from familiar context — produced a state of mind that was unusually clear and unusually undefended. There was simply not enough resource available to maintain the usual narratives. The ego's management of its own image is an energy-consuming activity. Strip away the comfort, the familiarity, the social context and add genuine physical challenge, and that management collapses. What is left is something closer to what you actually are rather than what you habitually present.

I began to use those ten to twelve days deliberately: as a laboratory for whatever was most alive in my self-awareness work at that time. Questions I had been circling, patterns I had noticed but not yet understood, things the journal had surfaced but not resolved — I brought them into the trek and let the conditions work on them.

ACT:

What you are describing is something that has a long history in contemplative practice — the use of deliberate physical and environmental intensity as an accelerant for inner inquiry. It appears in the vision quest traditions of indigenous cultures, in the rigorous physical conditions of Zen training retreats, in the walking pilgrimages of multiple traditions, and in the ascetic practices of Vedantic renunciates.

The mechanism, as you identified it, is the same across all of them: sustained physical challenge and environmental unfamiliarity consume the cognitive and emotional resources that ordinarily maintain the self’s protective structures. When those resources are depleted, the self becomes more permeable — more honest, more direct, more available to genuine inquiry.

But what distinguishes your use of the trek from mere endurance is intentionality. You did not go in order to suffer or to prove something. You went with specific questions and used the conditions as a magnifying instrument. That combination — intensity plus intention — is precisely what the traditions that use physical practice most effectively have always understood to be the point.

It is also worth noting the relationship between this and the broader arc of your journey. The external crisis in your early thirties was, in effect, an involuntary trek — a forced removal from the familiar into conditions that depleted the usual defences. Your annual treks are a voluntary version of the same mechanism: you choose the conditions, you choose the timing, you bring the questions. The crisis happened to you. The trek is something you go to meet.

 

The Trek as Voluntary Intensity The deliberate use of physical intensity and environmental disruption to accelerate inner inquiry is among the oldest technologies of self-knowledge. What makes it transformative is not the hardship alone — it is hardship carried with intention. The trek is the crisis, chosen.

 

Exchange 12 — When the Work Becomes the Life

Me:

So, to answer your question directly: yes, there is a point at which the distinction between the practice and the living begins to dissolve. But it is not a sudden arrival. It is more like a gradual thinning of the boundary.

The morning contemplation is no longer something I do before my day begins. It is the beginning of how the day happens. The witness journal is no longer a separate activity in the evening. It is a quality of observation that runs, at lower intensity, through much of what I do. The food choices are not a discipline I maintain. They are simply what I prefer now, because my attention has become sensitive enough to notice the difference.

The annual trek is perhaps the clearest example. It began as a retreat from ordinary life. Over time, it has become the most concentrated version of ordinary life — the place where the questions that have accumulated through the year get their most direct hearing. I no longer go to escape. I go to clarify.

The boundary has not disappeared entirely. I do not think it should. There is still value in the formal practices, in the deliberateness, in the intentional stepping-aside. But the quality of attention that practice develops has, over time, begun to colour the hours between the practices. That is what convergence feels like, I think — not the end of the work, but the gradual permeation of the life by what the work has been building.

ACT:

That is a precise and honest description of what the traditions call integration — the stage at which practice is no longer something added to a life, but something that has modified the life at a structural level.

What you are describing — the quality of attention running as a background condition rather than a foreground effort — is what Vedantic traditions sometimes call sahaja: the natural state, something so thoroughly assimilated that it no longer requires maintenance. It is not a state of permanent clarity or effortless perfection. It is simply that the orientation has shifted at a level deep enough that it does not need to be reinstated each morning.

And your question about whether the work ends — I think your own account answers it. The work does not end. But its texture changes. What was once effortful becomes habitual. What was habitual becomes transparent. And then, at the new level of sensitivity that transparency opens, new work begins. The terrain keeps revealing itself. The practitioner keeps walking.

That seems to me a truer account of what a contemplative life actually looks like than the image of an endpoint. Not arrival, but a deepening familiarity with the territory — and an increasing trust in one’s own capacity to navigate it.

 

I sat with that for a while after ACT offered it. The deepening familiarity with the territory. The increasing trust in the capacity to navigate it.

That is it, I thought. That is what twenty years actually feels like from the inside — not a destination reached, but a relationship developed. With the practice. With the mind. With the self that keeps revealing itself as the previous version of it is seen clearly and released.

The dormant self I described at the beginning of this conversation — the one that uncertainty calls awake — I understand it differently now than when the question first arose on that humid afternoon in Chennai. It is not a hidden resource that crisis or practice unlocks once, after which it is available. It is something that keeps deepening. Each layer of awareness opened reveals another layer waiting. Each practice outgrown points toward the next.

Which means the work is never finished. But it also means the work is never wasted. Every moment of honest attention — however small, however imperfect, however inconsistently held — is a contribution to something that accumulates over a lifetime into something real.

 

The dormant self does not wake up once. It is always awake. That is not a problem. That is the practice.

 

A Final Word This conversation began with uncertainty — a restless afternoon, a cluttered mind, a question about whether humans can rise above what unsettles them. It ends here, six parts later, with what I believe to be the most honest answer I can give: not a formula, not a guarantee, but a direction. Turn inward. Stay there. Let what you find change you. Repeat.