Awakening Into Life

12/16/2025

Chapter 13: The Plasticity of Identity (Part II)

Every time you notice a thought without believing it, every time you stay present with a difficult feeling, every time you meet yourself with compassion instead of criticism, you're quite literally building new neural pathways.

Not by erasing the old circuits—that's not how the brain works. But by building alternative pathways and letting the old ones fall out of use.
Like a path through the woods that slowly grows over when you stop walking it and start taking a different route.

When you slow down, notice a thought like "I am unlovable," name it as a thought, investigate its history, and hold it in compassionate awareness rather than automatically believing it, something remarkable happens at the neural level: you recruit executive and monitoring systems to modulate that narrative engine.

You weaken the tight fusion between language, affect, and identity. You allow new associations and meanings to be encoded—literally rewriting the coupling between memory, meaning, and self.

The story of "you"—the narrative identity that feels so solid, so unchangeable—is a dynamic pattern of activity across interconnected brain networks. An emergent narrative built from conditioned associations that have been practiced into feeling like truth.

To deconstruct it is to alter those patterns through new experiences of attention, insight, and relationship. Because these networks are plastic, meaning and identity are not final verdicts. They're continuously editable drafts.

DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE FREE BOOK IN .PDF HERE: https://awakeningintolife.pulse.ly/urdcea1023

Bradley Bemis, LPC, is the founder of Awakening Into Life, a trauma-informed wisdom collective, integrating clinical counseling with contemplative wisdom and somatic practice. His path to this work includes three decades of combined military service, corporate cybersecurity work, a transformative awakening that fundamentally altered everything, and then full clinical training and licensure in Colorado.

What Does It Mean to Love Yourself? | Awakening Into Life What Does It Mean? To Love Yourself? A Guide to Awareness, Nervous System Healing, and the Plasticity of Self About the Book This book is an invitation. Not into a program, not into a belief system — but into the quiet, honest investigation...

12/15/2025

Chapter 13: The Plasticity of Identity (Part I)

All of this rides on neuroplasticity—your brain's capacity to change its structure and function based on experience.

Repeated patterns of attention, emotion, and behavior strengthen some pathways and weaken others. Every time you practice a pattern—whether self-criticism or self-compassion, rumination or awareness—you're reinforcing certain neural connections and allowing others to fade.
This is how your dominant narratives got laid down in the first place. Through conditioning. Through repetition.

Repeated experiences of shame, neglect, or criticism biased your memory systems toward certain patterns of recall. Language networks became tuned to particular phrases and evaluations that were used around you—"too much," "not enough," "broken," "weak." And the DMN stitched all of these experiences and phrases into a continuous, self-consistent story about who you are.

That story feels solid because its neural instantiation has been rehearsed thousands of times.

But here's the profound truth: because it's been learned, it can be relearned. Because it's constructed, it can be reconstructed. Because it's a pattern, it can be changed.

This is perhaps the most hopeful finding in all of neuroscience: the brain you have today is not the brain you're sentenced to forever. The identity that feels so solid, so unchangeable, is a pattern—and patterns can be rewired. Not overnight. Not through a single insight. But through the patient, repeated practice of meeting your experience differently.

DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE FREE BOOK IN .PDF HERE: https://awakeningintolife.pulse.ly/6h1pmzlbtd

Bradley Bemis, LPC, is the founder of Awakening Into Life, a trauma-informed wisdom collective, integrating clinical counseling with contemplative wisdom and somatic practice. His path to this work includes three decades of combined military service, corporate cybersecurity work, a transformative awakening that fundamentally altered everything, and then full clinical training and licensure in Colorado.

12/14/2025

Chapter 12: Fusion and Defusion in the Brain

When you're fused with a thought—when "I'm unlovable" or "I'm a failure" feels like absolute truth—your language networks, your DMN, and your emotional circuits are all tightly coupled together. The brain is treating those sentences as reality, not as events in the mind. Not as clouds passing through the sky of awareness, but as the sky itself.

Defusion—seeing thoughts as thoughts, not facts—involves a different configuration entirely. Research shows that when people adopt a more observing, non-identified stance toward their thoughts, several things happen: core DMN regions quiet down, executive control regions come online—the parts of the brain that can step back, observe, regulate, choose—and the relationship between these networks becomes more flexible, more fluid.

Defusion isn't just a mental trick. It's a neurocognitive mode shift. A literal change in how your brain is organizing itself.

Meditation and mindfulness practices—the kinds of experiential exercises we've been doing together—are systematic training in exactly this kind of mode shift. When you rest attention on your breath, notice thoughts as passing events, or open into that sky-like awareness, you're not just having a contemplative moment.

You're interrupting automatic narrative loops. You're training your brain to relate differently to its own activity.

Studies on experienced meditators show profound changes: lower baseline activation in narrative-generating regions, altered connectivity between the networks that create "self" and the networks that notice, regulate, and choose, structural changes in the brain's architecture—increased thickness in attention and awareness regions, reduced reactivity in threat-detection areas.

DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE FREE BOOK IN .PDF HERE: https://awakeningintolife.pulse.ly/vs1jidgghy

Bradley Bemis, LPC, is the founder of Awakening Into Life, a trauma-informed wisdom collective, integrating clinical counseling with contemplative wisdom and somatic practice. His path to this work includes three decades of combined military service, corporate cybersecurity work, a transformative awakening that fundamentally altered everything, and then full clinical training and licensure in Colorado.

12/13/2025

Chapter 11: The Neural Architecture of Self

Now I want to show you something that bridges the contemplative insights we've been exploring with what modern neuroscience reveals about how your brain creates that story of "you."

When you're caught in internal narrative—when you're silently telling yourself "I'm this kind of person," "That always happens to me," "I'll never change"—you're not just thinking. Several interconnected systems are lighting up simultaneously, working together to create what feels like a solid, unchangeable truth about who you are.

At the brain level, language, meaning, memory, and identity aren't four separate departments. They're an overlapping network of systems that constantly communicate. And sitting in the middle of that conversation is the default mode network—the DMN.

When language networks generate the sentences ("I'm broken," "I'm not enough"), semantic networks fill those sentences with meaning drawn from every past experience where you felt that way. Memory systems supply the specific scenes and evidence that seem to prove it's true. And the DMN binds it all together into a felt sense of "this is me."

The DMN is most active when you're not focused on an external task. When you're daydreaming, remembering, rehearsing conversations, replaying the past, imagining possible futures. It's the network your brain uses to "be someone" in a story across time. It's what creates the sense of a continuous "me" that existed yesterday, exists now, and will exist tomorrow.

It's the neural backbone of the narrative self.

And that same network tends to overfire in rumination, self-criticism, and depressive looping. Those patterns aren't just "bad thoughts." They're a particular configuration of brain activity—a well-rehearsed neural pattern practiced thousands of times.

DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE FREE BOOK IN .PDF HERE: https://awakeningintolife.pulse.ly/lxh9f2iffs

Bradley Bemis, LPC, is the founder of Awakening Into Life, a trauma-informed wisdom collective, integrating clinical counseling with contemplative wisdom and somatic practice. His path to this work includes three decades of combined military service, corporate cybersecurity work, a transformative awakening that fundamentally altered everything, and then full clinical training and licensure in Colorado.

What Does It Mean to Love Yourself? | Awakening Into Life What Does It Mean? To Love Yourself? A Guide to Awareness, Nervous System Healing, and the Plasticity of Self About the Book This book is an invitation. Not into a program, not into a belief system — but into the quiet, honest investigation...

12/12/2025

Chapter 10: The Map Is Not the Territory (Part 2)

Here's what modern neuroscience adds to this understanding: your brain is not a passive receiver of reality. It's a prediction machine, constantly generating expectations based on past experience.

Before you consciously perceive anything, your brain has already made a guess about what's happening—and then it interprets incoming sensory data through that prediction.

When trauma rewires these predictive patterns, your brain starts expecting threat even when you're safe. The predictions become skewed.

You walk into a room and your nervous system has already decided—before conscious thought—that danger is present. Not because danger is actually there, but because the prediction machinery learned to err on the side of survival.

The map isn't just not the territory. The map is actively constructing what you perceive the territory to be. And when the map was drawn during wounding, it keeps generating a wounded world.

The map is not the territory. The word is not the thing. The story is not you.

And recognizing this—truly seeing through the constructed nature of the narrative mind—is one of the most liberating acts of self-love available to human consciousness.

Because if the story is constructed, it can be deconstructed. If meaning is negotiated, it can be renegotiated. If your identity is linguistic, then the deepest truth of you exists before language, beneath language, as the awareness that witnesses all language.

This is what it means to love yourself. Not the story of yourself. Not the constructed identity. Not the inherited narratives.

But the vast, open, aware presence that you've always already been—the sky that holds every cloud, the awareness that illuminates every thought, the mystery that cannot be captured in words but can be directly, immediately, experientially known.

Right here. Right now. In this breath.

DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE FREE BOOK IN .PDF HERE: https://awakeningintolife.pulse.ly/c84jrb5g93

Bradley Bemis, LPC, is the founder of Awakening Into Life, a trauma-informed wisdom collective, integrating clinical counseling with contemplative wisdom and somatic practice. His path to this work includes three decades of combined military service, corporate cybersecurity work, a transformative awakening that fundamentally altered everything, and then full clinical training and licensure in Colorado.

What Does It Mean to Love Yourself? | Awakening Into Life What Does It Mean? To Love Yourself? A Guide to Awareness, Nervous System Healing, and the Plasticity of Self About the Book This book is an invitation. Not into a program, not into a belief system — but into the quiet, honest investigation...

12/11/2025

Chapter 10: The Map Is Not the Territory (Part 1)

Now let's bring this home.

You relate to your own internal and external experience using linguistic constructs. You create yourself and the world of your experience through language—at the level of mind—as a function of the prefrontal cortex and other meaning-making, memory-oriented, identity-building parts of the brain.

If language was essentially made up to create shared exchange—if it's a collective invention born of survival—and you are using this made-up language, based on the linguistic conditioning you were raised with, as your actual map of being... then everything you spend time pondering or saying to yourself, in your own mind, using language, is itself entirely made up.

Does that land?

This doesn't mean language doesn't serve a purpose. Obviously it does. Language is extraordinary. Necessary. Beautiful.

But when we mistake the words for reality—when we limit reality to the limits of language—we lose our own vastness. We live life through an illusory lens of linguistic interpretation.

A spiritual teacher once offered this metaphor: the way we use language is like going to a restaurant and eating the menu instead of using it to order food. There's no nourishment in the menu. And there's no nourishment in defining your reality solely through linguistic mental constructs.

DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE FREE BOOK IN .PDF HERE: https://awakeningintolife.pulse.ly/phpoo2zi92

Bradley Bemis, LPC, is the founder of Awakening Into Life, a trauma-informed wisdom collective, integrating clinical counseling with contemplative wisdom and somatic practice. His path to this work includes three decades of combined military service, corporate cybersecurity work, a transformative awakening that fundamentally altered everything, and then full clinical training and licensure in Colorado.

What Does It Mean to Love Yourself? | Awakening Into Life What Does It Mean? To Love Yourself? A Guide to Awareness, Nervous System Healing, and the Plasticity of Self About the Book This book is an invitation. Not into a program, not into a belief system — but into the quiet, honest investigation...

12/10/2025

Chapter 9: The Invention of Language

Now let's pierce through to another layer. What are these mental constructs? Where do these thoughts come from?

Have you ever stopped to wonder where language itself comes from? Not just your language, but language as a human capacity?

Language didn't fall from the sky. It emerged from necessity, from the most basic human need imaginable—the need to survive together.

Picture our earliest ancestors. Small groups, harsh landscapes, constant danger. Everything depended on cooperation. Cooperation required shared attention: looking at the same thing together and both knowing we're looking. It required shared intention: the felt sense that we're doing this together, on purpose. And it required coordinated action: impossible unless we can communicate in ways others can reliably understand.

Language was born from this necessity. Through generations of guttural sounds, gestures, facial expressions, ritualized signals. Patterns that worked got repeated, refined, passed down. What started as survival sounds gradually became something more stable.

But here's what I want you to really take in: the sounds themselves never held any meaning.

The word "tree" has no natural connection to trees. In another part of the world, the same object is arbor. Somewhere else, shajara. The signals are invented. The meanings are negotiated. Language is a symbolic system created through collective consent.

Meaning exists because groups of human beings agreed—across thousands of years—to treat certain sounds, shapes, and gestures as signposts for shared experience. We take the inner world—sensations, emotions, memories, the felt sense of being alive—and we place them into patterned sounds, hoping someone else will understand what it feels like to be us.

This is the miracle of language. It's also its limitation.

When you speak, when I speak, we're trying to make our inner worlds touch. We're building a bridge between two subjective universes using nothing but breath, symbols, and the hope that my words will land in your nervous system the way I intend them.

And when that bridge collapses? When we're misunderstood? It doesn't just feel bad. It hurts. Because miscommunication isn't just about words—it's about not being seen. And that failure strikes at something ancient in us, something that knows disconnection meant danger and belonging meant survival.

DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE FREE BOOK IN .PDF HERE: https://awakeningintolife.pulse.ly/fgppfntmyx

Bradley Bemis, LPC, is the founder of Awakening Into Life, a trauma-informed wisdom collective, integrating clinical counseling with contemplative wisdom and somatic practice. His path to this work includes three decades of combined military service, corporate cybersecurity work, a transformative awakening that fundamentally altered everything, and then full clinical training and licensure in Colorado.

What Does It Mean to Love Yourself? | Awakening Into Life What Does It Mean? To Love Yourself? A Guide to Awareness, Nervous System Healing, and the Plasticity of Self About the Book This book is an invitation. Not into a program, not into a belief system — but into the quiet, honest investigation...

12/09/2025

Chapter 8: Who Am I?

Let's try one more exercise.

Close your eyes and begin to settle into your breath, in the belly, rising and falling for a few moments. Just let yourself relax a little. Then ask the question, silently, in your own mind: "Who am I?" Observe what comes up.

What did come up for you? What did you notice, see, observe?

Now consider this—perhaps one of the most liberating inner insights available to human consciousness: when you asked yourself the question, you were aware of the question, were you not? And you were aware of everything that came up in response.

So you are aware of the question and aware of the response. The question and the response are both clouds in the sky of awareness.

Now do the exercise again. Ask "Who am I?" Notice the question, notice the answers... notice the noticing.

This is an essential act of discernment. This is where mindfulness comes into play.

Mindfulness, in the context I'm offering, means being mindful of your own awareness. To bring awareness to awareness as you navigate whatever you may be aware of.

It's not about identifying with awareness. It's about standing in awareness and holding the rest of our identity in loving awareness.

If you look closely at the mind as you contemplate this, the mind is usually attempting to reconcile an apparent contradiction. On one side, you are awareness; on the other, you are also whatever you are aware of. You are aware of it because awareness illuminates it. And you are it because you are experiencing it.

It's not an either-or proposition. Both propositions are mental constructs.
This is at the experiential heart of non-dual realization: the first part in a two-part process of recognition and embodiment. When you begin to see through the mental constructs and really witness yourself, the only final conclusion is mystery.

The Truth, itself, is silent and has nothing to say on behalf of itself—it can only witness itself and experience itself.

DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE FREE BOOK IN .PDF HERE: https://awakeningintolife.pulse.ly/fojk2bmm9d

Bradley Bemis, LPC, is the founder of Awakening Into Life, a trauma-informed wisdom collective, integrating clinical counseling with contemplative wisdom and somatic practice. His path to this work includes three decades of combined military service, corporate cybersecurity work, a transformative awakening that fundamentally altered everything, and then full clinical training and licensure in Colorado.

What Does It Mean to Love Yourself? | Awakening Into Life What Does It Mean? To Love Yourself? A Guide to Awareness, Nervous System Healing, and the Plasticity of Self About the Book This book is an invitation. Not into a program, not into a belief system — but into the quiet, honest investigation...

12/08/2025

Chapter 7: The Sky and the Clouds

Let's try a visualization exercise common in this kind of work.

Picture the sky—or better yet, go outside and take a moment with it. Notice its expansiveness from edge to edge along every horizon. Even if you are outside, imagine a bright blue cloudless sky and give it these same dimensions. The sky is empty in one manner—empty of clouds. There is just the sun warming you from above.

Now begin to notice or imagine clouds appearing. Think about how many different types of cloud formations there are—some can even be devastating, destructive.

These clouds represent our thoughts, our thinking, our narrative formulations and linguistic constructs.

Where does your sense of self reside? Where does your identity live? What are you identified with?

Are you identified with the sky of your own awareness, or are you identified with the passing clouds that come and go? This is cognitive fusion and cognitive defusion in action.

This recognition isn't just philosophical. When you genuinely rest as awareness rather than as the content of awareness, measurable changes occur in your brain. The networks that generate rigid self-narrative quiet down. The systems that allow flexible responding come online. You're not trying to eliminate the clouds—they'll keep arising. You're recognizing that your essential nature was never dependent on their presence or absence.

Let's also distinguish between awareness and attention. Notice how what you place your attention on, you become aware of. That is the experience of awareness. But here's the key shift: you are aware before your mind differentiates between awareness and attention.

When I say it's not about trying to become more present, it's about recognizing and acknowledging your very own presence. Being aware of awareness aware of itself, as awareness alone.

The mind can't get there—and that's one of the biggest sticking points. But we'll go into more depth on that later.

DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE FREE BOOK IN .PDF HERE: https://awakeningintolife.pulse.ly/qt4bpyyal5

Bradley Bemis, LPC, is the founder of Awakening Into Life, a trauma-informed wisdom collective, integrating clinical counseling with contemplative wisdom and somatic practice. His path to this work includes three decades of combined military service, corporate cybersecurity work, a transformative awakening that fundamentally altered everything, and then full clinical training and licensure in Colorado.

What Does It Mean to Love Yourself? | Awakening Into Life What Does It Mean? To Love Yourself? A Guide to Awareness, Nervous System Healing, and the Plasticity of Self About the Book This book is an invitation. Not into a program, not into a belief system — but into the quiet, honest investigation...

12/04/2025

Chapter 6: The Discovery of Awareness

Let's try something. Read this paragraph, then close your eyes and settle into your breath for a moment. In the belly. Just gently notice the rising and falling sensation. I'm only asking you to notice. Nothing more. Just notice for a few moments and then keep reading.

Now, one at a time, center your attention on each of your senses. Become aware of your hearing. Become aware of the taste in your mouth. Become aware of the odors in the air. Become aware of what you are sitting on. Then open your eyes and become aware of your seeing.
What did you notice? What did you become aware of?

When we are seeing, we are aware of the seeing, are we not? When we are sensing feeling, we are aware of the sense feeling. When we are smelling, we are aware of the smell. When we are hearing, we are aware of what's heard.

And when we place our attention, our awareness, on the mind, we become aware of the mind.

There is an experientially verifiable relationship between awareness, attention, and sense perception. When we layer on the mind, we layer on linguistic and narrative interpretation of sense perception.

DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE FREE BOOK IN .PDF HERE: https://awakeningintolife.pulse.ly/lfikoxp2gt

Bradley Bemis, LPC, is the founder of Awakening Into Life, a trauma-informed wisdom collective, integrating clinical counseling with contemplative wisdom and somatic practice. His path to this work includes three decades of combined military service, corporate cybersecurity work, a transformative awakening that fundamentally altered everything, and then full clinical training and licensure in Colorado.

12/03/2025

Chapter 5: Fused With Thought

I want to make something very clear: I am making no attempt to minimize or judge who you are, what you've been through, or how you got here. All that ever really matters is what we do from this moment forward.

The energy we put into self-blame, regret, shame, and fear—beating ourselves up endlessly and mercilessly—imagine being able to redirect that emotional bandwidth toward whatever this moment forward holds for you.

To live in the past, in the heartache, in the wounding, in the way it's shaped your entire experience of being, is a part of what's so exhausting. We are working so hard to protect ourselves from the stories that our minds and nervous systems tell us that we have nothing left for the very simple act of being present.

When most of us think about being present, what we really mean is some variation on "being able to place my awareness on the present moment." While this is a wonderful and worthwhile endeavor, this is not the kind of presence to which I am referring.

One of our biggest problems is rooted in how we hold our own basic identity. Within the structure of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is the wonderful formulation of "cognitive fusion" and "cognitive defusion."
Here's the basic idea—and it's directly evident when examined: our entire identity is an unconscious manifestation. We think, we feel, we hurt—and we tell ourselves stories, narratives about our experience that consume the actual experience.

Our relationship between language and meaning, between safety and identity, are all fused together. Our entire sense of self is fused with thoughts, with the thinking mind. And it's invisible because we are fused with it—because our reality, our identity, our very self, is locked in the gravitational orbit of a conceptual construct that the mind itself creates.

DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE FREE BOOK IN .PDF HERE:
https://awakeningintolife.pulse.ly/aeh1ay82vk

Bradley Bemis, LPC, is the founder of Awakening Into Life, a trauma-informed wisdom collective, integrating clinical counseling with contemplative wisdom and somatic practice. His path to this work includes three decades of combined military service, corporate cybersecurity work, a transformative awakening that fundamentally altered everything, and then full clinical training and licensure in Colorado.

12/02/2025

Chapter 4: When the Masks Begin to Slip

Now you have all of this to navigate—the personal trauma, the collective dysfunction, the economic insecurity. Life feels increasingly difficult. There's little meaning in the struggle. Everything you were promised—that elusive thing called "happiness"—always feels just beyond reach.

The masks begin to slip. You start to see that this isn't it. That "happiness" as we've been taught to pursue it might not be the best measure of a life well-lived.

Within each of us, there's a sense that something is missing, lacking, or lost. Some describe it as emptiness. Like you don't even know who you are beneath all your masks. You just know you're wearing so many that you've lost count.

That emptiness persists even when we have everything we thought we wanted. The longing remains—elusive, persistent, always there beneath whatever we've managed to acquire or achieve.

We try to fill that emptiness with the things of the world. We stay busy, distracted, striving to be more, be better, be perfect, be in control, be safe, be secure, be "happy."

But what is happiness, really?

Here's what I've come to understand: happiness is nothing more than a momentary pause in our longing. As soon as we obtain what we desire, we simply shift to the next want. We're caught in autopilot, driven by conditioned patterns, chasing satisfactions that never last.

Many of us find ourselves right here, right now, feeling trapped between impossible choices. Helpless. Hopeless. No options, no time, no energy, no hope.

And here's what I need you to hear: that hopelessness? It's not the problem. It's the doorway.

Because any real, transformative process—the kind that actually rewires your nervous system, restructures your sense of self, transforms your understanding of contentment—can only begin when you stop trying to escape the emptiness and start recognizing it for what it actually is.

This isn't about achieving happiness. This is about contentment—appreciative joy for what is, rather than endless longing for what should be.

That emptiness you've been trying to fill your entire life? That's not where we end. That's where we begin.

And these patterns of fighting ourselves?

They're often the internalization of how we were related to before we had words—we learned to treat ourselves the way we were treated when we were most vulnerable.

DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE FREE BOOK IN .PDF HERE: https://pulse.pulse.ly/k498tn3c4a

Bradley Bemis, LPC, is the founder of Awakening Into Life, a trauma-informed wisdom collective, integrating clinical counseling with contemplative wisdom and somatic practice. His path to this work includes three decades of combined military service, corporate cybersecurity work, a transformative awakening that fundamentally altered everything, and then full clinical training and licensure in Colorado.