The experiential guide to making awakening real.
The thing about awakening is that it’s a personal journey. No one can wake you up, but you. Yet in all the noise and chaos, that’s not the easiest thing to work out. The Complete Book of Awakening puts the control back in you hands, and offers a springboard into awakening.
Helen and Sara are both experienced guides in this field. They both have an innate understanding of how to bring the classic teaching to a modern audience in a simple, clear, modern, scientific way. They support your own exploration , at your pace, in a series of elegant experiments that turn mainstream assumptions on their head.
All the links for the book:
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Join our waitlist to stay informed about future Book Groups – with no commitment. These groups are a supportive series of workshops following the book. We answer your questions and support your exploration.
More than a Book Group! Realising Awakening is a 12-week live and interactive workshop, putting the power of self-realisation back in your hands.
- Our self study course is live, and you can join any time. If you upgrade to the live book group within a year, we'll discount the cost of the self study course.
Authors' Note
Welcome to The Complete Book of Awakening!
When we started writing at the beginning of 2022, the working title was ‘The Little Book of Awakening’. But it turned out to not be so little. For which we make no apology – the completeness of the book is a vital contribution to the journey we are embarking on together. We’re exploring the foundations of stable, secure happiness, and we didn’t want to leave anything out.
Awakening, put most simply, is the recognition of infinite, eternal awareness as our true self. In practice, it often isn’t that simple. There is a process of clearing the muck off the lens of perception. Which is why we have written this book.
This book is for you whether you are totally new, mildly curious, frustrated that the glimpses you’ve seen are fleeting, or you want to settle further into an established understanding. There’s always something new to see, or a new articulation of what’s already been seen.
Of course, in one sense you are always awake, and can’t ever be otherwise. But, like all of us, you have the capacity to live as though asleep. The awakening process brings your essential awakeness, and the inevitable feeling of happiness that accompanies it, into the foreground of your life.
We’re here as friendly and experienced guides in your exploration, to remind you of what you are looking for, why, and how you might find it. We don’t expect you to simply believe what we suggest – please do check it out for yourself, in your own experience.
To engage with this book, you want to count yourself as generally emotionally well and functional. Things might not be what you think of as perfect, we all have normal ups and downs in life. But if you are experiencing a mental health crisis, please speak to a licensed professional in that field – it is never a failure to ask for help. It might simply mean that this book is one to keep for later.
If you are unsure, please get in touch with us at info@thoughtfulraven.co.uk, and we can help you get a sense of what might be most useful.
Our aim in our writing has been to bring a modern, fresh, experiential approach to a classic tradition. We’ve stripped away religious elements and insider language. And we’ve done this to get to the core of what you’ll find in pretty much every religion, philosophy, or personal development methodology.
What we offer here is a workshop in a book. Or rather, a series of workshops. Something you can follow at your own pace, in your own way. We also invite you to head over to thoughtfulraven.co.uk, where you’ll find links to our book groups, workshops, all our free online resources, and a few other books to spark your curiosity.
We look forward to seeing you there.
Much love,
Helen and Sara x
How the Book Came into Being
Helen begins the story of the book coming into being:
I’d been going to write a book about how the conceptual, scientific explorations into the nature of matter, consciousness and the human experience were coming to the same conclusions as those in the spiritual exploration.
I began. Downloading a whole load of content collected through my years of exploration in this. Excited at what could be possible.
It was when I reached the Philosophy section that the brakes began to be applied. I realised that I needed a much deeper knowledge of Philosophy to be able to translate it all back into an accessible version. You know that thing where, if you know something deeply enough, you can explain it to a five-year-old or your granny; I came to see I didn’t have that. And I didn’t want to have that. I didn’t need more conceptual knowledge, and I wasn’t sure anyone else did either.
Around then, my teacher at the time asked me: “But what do you know for yourself?”
I was struck by how I could identify all these conceptual ideas and theories I’d collected from others, and I knew the big moments of shift I’d experienced for myself, but I was missing a clear, unshakable, direct experience for myself.
This took me on a new path of exploration; following guidance from my teacher to see my essential nature directly for myself, while at the same time receiving energy transmissions from him to dissolve the belief in separation.
Then the idea came! To step away from conceptual ideas, and instead curate all the direct and raw experience explorations that I’d benefited from over the years. Bringing them all into one place so that others could test what they know for themselves too. So that others could also stop relying on the nice-sounding words from guides, coaches and teachers who I thought had something I didn’t.
And to actually show what, “Look within,” means.
If my experience was needing something more practical than just that instruction, I was sure other people felt the same.
So, fundamentally, as often happens with writing, I wanted to write the book I would have loved to have earlier in my exploration!
And then Sara reappeared in my life. We already knew each other a bit, and I was drawn to attend an ‘introduction to nonduality’ webinar she was hosting.
And there opened up the next step on the journey. I saw Sara’s approach to the exploration was exactly what mattered to me too – practical, everyday, and absent of spiritualist or religious ideas. And with Sara’s greater years than mine in sharing with others, I could see that she would bring a level of expertise and rigour to the book that was important to me too.
And so, the partnership began.
Sara continues the story from here:
I’m still not sure how we went from Helen saying, “I’m going to write a book,” to “We’re going to write a book.” But there we were. One common idea of making nonduality accessible and practical, without losing the truth of it. And a collection of notes.
Over the following months, we went backwards and forwards, one writing, the other editing, then more editing, more writing. I quickly realised it was no longer a ‘little’ book, by any definition. What mattered more to both of us was the finished work being ‘complete’.
The funny thing was that we started to forget who’d written what. I’d argue strongly to remove a phrase, and Helen to keep it, only to find out I’d written it in the first place. Or the other way around.
From the beginning, it was important that we knew the impact the book could have. Our very first Book Group was gathered and started reading the Introduction – while Part Three was still being finished! Fortunately, even in its early form, the book achieved everything we had hoped for and more. We didn’t need to see scores from the NETI Quiz to know, our group showed us with how they showed up every week for three months.
As we’re wrapping up the first edition, we know not every word is perfect. But it’s better than perfect to have a real book in people’s hands. And it’s better than perfect to know this book is a key to the door of possibility.
We wrote this book for our younger selves, and we wrote this book for you, dear fellow explorer.
And introducing the companion journal
The journal is structured exactly the same way as our self-study course and live book group.
All the questions from our explorations are there, with extra prompts, and lots of space to note insights or even doodle around a watermark.
You can see how to purchase the journal in the “buying options”.
- The brand new Thoughtful Raven Community is now open for membership!
