Awakening Into Life

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.

12/01/2025

Chapter 3: The Matrix of Wounding

We're not just talking about individual experiences, though those alone would be enough. We're talking about trauma that moves through us like water through a riverbed, carving channels across every dimension of our being.

Epigenetic trauma, written into our very DNA, passed down through generations like an invisible inheritance. Generational trauma, the unprocessed pain of our ancestors living on in our nervous systems. Developmental trauma, those early ruptures in attachment that shape how we perceive love and safety for the rest of our lives. Cultural trauma, the collective wounds of entire peoples—colonization, slavery, genocide, displacement—still reverberating through our social fabric.

Relational trauma, the thousand small betrayals and abandonments that teach us not to trust. Psychological trauma, shattering our sense of self. Physiological trauma, stored in our tissues, our fascia, our very cells. And yes, catastrophic trauma—those Big T traumas that split our lives into before and after.

But also the little t traumas. The daily erosions of dignity. The moments of not being seen, not being heard, not being held when we needed it most. The accumulation of dismissals and diminishments that whisper, over and over: you don't matter, you're not safe, you're not enough.

These aren't separate categories. They're interwoven, compounding, creating a matrix of wounding so complex that we can barely map it. Big T and little t traumas—these are the waters within which we swim. We don't have trauma; we're marinated in it.

This compounds when we consider that roughly 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, never accumulating enough to feel truly secure. Economic precarity isn't just stressful—it keeps our nervous systems in chronic activation. Your body is doing exactly what it's designed to do: signaling that you're not safe.

Because in many ways, you're not.

12/01/2025

What some people dismiss as “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is, in psychological terms, far closer to moral injury.

Not because anyone is “overreacting,” but because the nervous system responds predictably when a person, group, or society is forced to witness sustained violations of core moral expectations—truthfulness, decency, responsibility, non-harm, shared reality, and democratic norms.

Moral injury arises when:

• We witness acts that betray fundamental ethical commitments.

• Leaders normalize cruelty, dishonesty, or the erosion of rights.

• Collective agreements about reality are intentionally destabilized.

• Vulnerable groups are targeted or dehumanized.

• The social contract is violated by those entrusted to protect it.

• People are asked to tolerate what they know is wrong.

In other words:

Moral injury is the wound that forms when your internal compass remains intact while the world around you rewards moral collapse.

The body doesn’t experience this as “political disagreement.”

It experiences it as:

• Violation of shared values

• Threat to safety, community, and identity

• Loss of trust in institutions meant to uphold justice

• Helplessness in the face of systemic abuse

• Contamination: being forced to live inside someone else’s corruption

• Cognitive dissonance between truth and propaganda

So when supporters mock criticism as “derangement,” they’re essentially saying:

“Your nervous system shouldn’t react when I normalize behavior that violates every ethical framework humans rely on.”

But your system reacts because it’s healthy, not broken.

Your response isn’t pathology—it’s integrity. It’s the refusal of the psyche to become numb to cruelty, lies, or authoritarian drift.

Moral injury is what happens when conscience does its job in an environment where too many have willingly abandoned theirs.

And in this frame—where accountability matters and willful ignorance is a choice—this distinction is critical:

• TDS is a phrase meant to shame, silence, or delegitimize.

• Moral injury is a clinically accurate description of the psychological and somatic impact of witnessing ongoing ethical violation.

One is a deflection.

The other is a diagnosis of the culture.

And anyone working as a therapist should know the difference!

~Bradley

A Manhattan psychotherapist claimed that "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is a real "mental health epidemic" that's disrupting peoples' lives.

11/30/2025

"WHAT DOES IT MEAN?" "TO LOVE YOURSELF?"

A Guide to Awareness, Nervous System Healing, and the Plasticity of Self

Chapter 2: The Water We Swim In

We've normalized dysfunction to such an extent that we're lost, grasping at others, grasping at life, reaching for something—anything—to save us, all while trying to play it cool. Most of us are quietly exhausted with where we find ourselves.

So how do we cope? How do we survive an environment that feels fundamentally unsafe?

We medicate.

We spend more per capita on prescription medications than any other nation—roughly triple what comparable countries spend. But the real story isn't just the pills.

When we expand our understanding of "medication" to include all the ways we compulsively seek comfort—prescription drugs, alcohol, cannabis, shopping, scrolling, working, eating, exercising, or any behavior we can't stop despite consequences—nearly half of American adults show signs of addictive patterns within any given year.

We are, by any measure, a society desperately seeking relief.

And here's what we know with absolute certainty: the correlation between trauma and addiction is exponential. About 64% of people have at least one adverse childhood experience. That single ACE doubles to quadruples the likelihood of substance use.

An ACE score of 4 nearly doubles the risk of heart disease and lung cancer. The likelihood of alcoholism increases by 700%. Individuals with an ACE score of 5 or higher are 7 to 10 times more likely to use illegal drugs and become addicted.

The relationship between our wounds and our coping isn't just significant—it's staggering.

And we haven't even begun to explore the full landscape of trauma itself.

DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE FREE BOOK IN .PDF HERE: https://awakeningintolife.pulse.ly/iopeydv3mr

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. He holds a Master of Science in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, and has been serving clients, in a variety of helping and support roles, since 2015.

What Does It Mean to Love Yourself? | Awakening Into Life Awakening Into Life Home About Book Services Start Here What Does It Mean to Love Yourself? A Guide to…

11/29/2025

"WHAT DOES IT MEAN?" "TO LOVE YOURSELF?"
A Guide to Awareness, Nervous System Healing, and the Plasticity of Self

Chapter 1: The Life That Says Yes

If I came up to you on the street, clipboard in hand, and asked, "I'm doing a research study—do you love yourself?" what would you say?

First, that would be somewhat unsettling. But once we moved past the initial awkwardness, what do you think most people would answer without even thinking?

"Yes," right?

"Wonderful," I'd respond. "And does your life look like the life of a person who loves themselves? I mean—truly, deeply, all of it—do you live a life that says yes to love and yes to you?"

That's the question I'm really asking here, in the quiet space between us.
I'm not talking about religion, or saviors, or scriptures. I'm not trying to sell you anything. I'm talking about more than ten thousand years of contemplative inner science colliding with modern psychology and the wholeness of our humanness.

I'm a therapist. Every day, I sit with people struggling to make sense of their pain. And the question that drives both my personal and professional curiosity is simply this: Why this?

Of all the possibilities we could create as human beings—of all the ways we could organize our lives and our societies—why have we chosen this particular configuration? Why have we normalized so much fear, so much pain, so much trauma that it's become the very air we breathe, the water we swim in, the lives we live?

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

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. He holds a Master of Science in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, and has been serving clients, in a variety of helping and support roles, since 2015.

11/07/2025

New Article: Is This Therapy or Spirituality?

When you see "nondual awareness" alongside clinical credentials, it's natural to wonder: which is it? Here's what's actually happening: every major evidence-based therapy developed in the last fifty years—CBT, DBT, ACT, IFS—along with breakthroughs in neuroscience and psychophysiology, keeps arriving at the same insights contemplatives have taught for millennia. This isn't about mixing therapy with spirituality. It's about recognizing that when therapy works, it's facilitating the same fundamental shifts in consciousness that contemplative practices have always cultivated. We now have the science to prove it.

Read the full article here:

Is This Therapy or Spirituality? | Awakening Into Life Is This Therapy or Spirituality? What Happens When All of Modern Psychology Points Toward Ancient Wisdom A contemplative look at the…

11/05/2025

For the last couple of months I've been hard at work on a complete update to my website - and we're getting close to making all of our services fully accessible through the site.

This week, I'm releasing a chapter of my forthcoming book, Awakening Into Life. This chapter focuses on 'Loving Yourself, Trusting Yourself, and Honoring Your Own Journey'. Come on by and grab a free copy - no pay walls or information collection... just a clean .pdf file for you to peruse.

https://awakeningintolife.pulse.ly/nkkutjs9d4

Bradley Bemis, MS, LPC, ADDC, NMIT, NCC, CLC is a Licensed Professional Counselor, Professional Life Coach, Contemplative Wisdom Teacher, Psychedelic Integration Guide, retired cybersecurity architect, and military service veteran, whose life’s work bridges healing, awakening, and embodiment.