What Comes After Awakening? Loch Kelly on Flow States and 'One Taste'

Evelyn Reed · 2026-09-15

### The Glimpse Isn't the End—It's the Beginning Have you ever had a moment where everything just... stopped? Where the mental chatter quieted down and you felt completely here, completely open? Maybe it lasted a few seconds, maybe a few minutes. And then, just like that, it was gone. That's what meditation teacher Loch Kelly calls "the first glimpse." It's real. It matters. But according to Kelly, it's not the finish line. In a recent conversation with host Michael Taft, they explored what happens after that initial opening—and why the journey gets even more interesting from there. ### Waking Up vs. Waking With Here's where things get nuanced. Kelly draws a distinction between two modes of awakening: - **Waking up:** Recognizing openness, stillness, and the absence of a separate self. It's the classic meditative insight—seeing through the illusion that you're a isolated ego bumping around in a world of separate objects. - **Waking with:** This is where appearances—sights, sounds, thoughts, emotions—are seen as inseparable from awake awareness itself. Nothing is excluded. Everything belongs. Kelly calls this "one taste"—the realization that there's no gap between the awareness you're resting in and the world appearing within it. It's not about escaping experience. It's about fully meeting it. ### Flow States as a Doorway The conversation also digs into flow states—those moments when you're so absorbed in what you're doing that time seems to dissolve. Athletes call it "being in the zone." Musicians know it. Artists chase it. But here's the thing: flow states aren't just about peak performance. They can be a kind of gateway. When you're fully immersed in an activity, the usual sense of a separate self temporarily drops away. Sound familiar? It should—because that's the same openness Kelly points to in meditation. The difference is that flow states often depend on conditions. You need the right challenge, the right environment, the right mindset. Awake awareness, on the other hand, doesn't depend on anything. It's already here. ### Why This Matters for Your Practice If you've been meditating for a while, you might have hit a plateau. You've had glimpses, sure. But integrating those glimpses into daily life? That's another story. Kelly's work suggests that the real transformation happens when you stop chasing peak experiences and start recognizing the awareness that's already present—right in the middle of your messy, ordinary life. Not just on the cushion. Not just in flow. But in traffic, in arguments, in the grocery store checkout line. As Kelly puts it, the goal isn't to escape the human experience. It's to wake up *with* it—to let every moment, pleasant or unpleasant, be part of the awakening. So if you've been wondering what comes next after that first glimpse, take heart. The journey doesn't end. It deepens. And sometimes, it starts with something as simple as noticing: awareness is already here. You don't have to do anything to get it. You just have to stop overlooking it.