What Comes After Your First Glimpse of Awakening?

Amanda Wilson · 2026-09-15

### The Question Most Meditators Eventually Ask You've had that moment. Maybe during a retreat, maybe on a random Tuesday while washing dishes. The chatter in your head went quiet. The sense of being a separate "you" behind your eyes softened. And then... it faded. So what now? That's exactly the territory meditation teacher Loch Kelly explores with host Michael Taft in a conversation that digs into what happens *after* the first glimpse. It's a question a lot of practitioners bump into and rarely get a straight answer about. ### Waking Up vs. Waking With One of the most useful distinctions in the discussion is the difference between two kinds of awakening: - **Waking up** — recognizing openness, stillness, and the absence of a separate self. It's the classic "aha" moment. - **Waking with** — seeing appearances themselves as inseparable from awake awareness. This is sometimes called "one taste." Here's the thing. Waking up can feel like a lightning bolt. Waking with is more like learning to live in the weather that lightning created. One is a glimpse. The other is a way of being. As Kelly and Taft unpack it, the first glimpse isn't the finish line. It's more like the door cracking open. What you do with that crack — how you let it widen into daily life — is where the real work lives. ### Where Flow States Fit In The conversation also wanders into flow states, which is where things get practical for anyone who isn't sitting on a cushion all day. Flow — that absorbed, effortless state where time bends and self-consciousness drops away — isn't the same as awakening. But they're neighbors. Both involve a loosening of the grip of the separate self. Both feel spacious. And both tend to show up when you stop trying so hard to manufacture them. Taft and Kelly seem to land on something like this: flow states are a doorway, not a destination. They can point toward the deeper recognition Kelly talks about, but chasing flow for its own sake is just another thing to get hooked on. > "The glimpse is free. Living from it is the practice." ### Why This Matters for Everyday Life If you're a mindfulness professional — a coach, a therapist, a teacher — you've probably had a client or student come back from a retreat glowing, then deflate two weeks later. This conversation speaks directly to that. The takeaway isn't a technique. It's a reframe. The first glimpse isn't something to chase or replicate. It's something to *recognize* as already here, again and again, until it stops being an event and starts being a background hum. That shift — from chasing peak experiences to settling into ordinary awareness — is where the real transformation happens. And it's a lot less dramatic than most people expect. If you've ever wondered what comes after the honeymoon phase of awakening, this episode is worth a listen. Not because it hands you a map, but because it reminds you that the territory was never somewhere else to begin with.