Rising to Be Whole

Rising isn't adding more tools; it's removing body-held blockers. Feel shame, fear, anger instead of fleeing, and tension clears-baseline lifts; awareness and wholeness return now.

Most people who feel stuck assume the solution is to add something.

Add a practice. Add a teacher. Add a substance. Add a new story about themselves that explains why they are the way they are.

It’s a reasonable guess, because it’s how you fix most problems. If your laptop is slow, you add RAM. If your business is flat, you add distribution. If your social life is empty, you add dinners.

But inner stuckness is weirdly inverted. The feeling of being blocked is often not a lack. It’s a presence.

Something is in the way.

And what’s in the way is usually not an idea. It’s not even an opinion. It’s a set of bodily “holds” — shame you never let surface, grief you diverted into productivity, anger you turned into sarcasm, fear you disguised as certainty.

This is the oldest discovery in philosophy, but it keeps getting rediscovered because it’s so easy to miss. We live in the mind, so we look for mental solutions. Yet the thing that blocks us isn’t primarily mental. It’s somatic. It’s in the body.

Merleau-Ponty’s whole point in Phenomenology of Perception is that the body isn’t a vehicle we ride around in. It’s the medium through which the world shows up at all. If that medium is clenched, your world is clenched too.

So “rising” isn’t mainly a matter of climbing upward toward some higher truth. It’s often a matter of removing the interference that prevents truth from being felt as true.

The brain as a bouncer

There’s a line of thought—half neuroscience, half metaphor—that psychedelics reduce certain kinds of top-down control. People report “ego dissolution,” and some brain measures show decreased activity in hubs associated with self-referential processing. The experience is often described as clearer, not foggier: less “me,” more “what is.”

Philosophers were describing versions of this long before fMRI.

William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, treats mystical experience not as a weird exception, but as evidence that consciousness has “doors” and “filters.” The ordinary mind is a kind of gatekeeper. It selects, prioritizes, suppresses. It has to, or we’d drown in reality.

That gatekeeping function is useful. But it has a shadow: once the gatekeeper learns to suppress pain, it often suppresses truth along with it.

You can think of the brain as a bouncer at the club of awareness. Its job is to keep you functioning. It doesn’t ask “Is this true?” It asks “Is this safe?”

When you’re small—when you’re a child—your bouncer is inexperienced. You’re closer to raw perception. This is part of why children can learn so quickly: they don’t protect a rigid self-image yet. They’re flexible.

As you grow, you acquire an ego. Not in the insult sense. In the structural sense. You acquire a story that says: “This is who I am; these are the emotions I am allowed to have; these are the ones I am not.” That story is stabilizing.

It also creates the block.

Heidegger, in Being and Time, calls one version of this “falling” into the everyday: living in the default mode where the world is pre-chewed by social expectations and by your own habits. Rising, in that framework, is a return to what’s more original: direct contact with your own being.

But Heidegger’s language is heavy. You can translate it into something simpler:

Your ordinary self is a set of defenses.

And defenses don’t just protect you from pain. They protect you from wholeness.

The trap: making rising another external fix

Here’s the part that’s almost comical: once people hear this, they immediately try to turn it into another outside solution.

They’ll say, “Okay, so what technique do I use to remove the block?”

And there are techniques. But the more important thing is the direction of travel. Because if you approach “inner work” with the same outsourcing reflex—“someone give me the correct method”—you rebuild the very structure you’re trying to dissolve.

Spinoza is helpful here, because he makes emotions mechanical in a good way. In the Ethics, he treats affects as changes in our power to act. When you’re gripped by sadness, your capacity shrinks; when you move toward joy (in his precise sense), your capacity expands. You don’t “win” by moralizing. You win by understanding the causal chains and increasing what actually increases your power.

But there’s a catch: understanding is not just intellectual. If it were, smart people would be the most liberated people. They’re not.

Spinoza’s “adequate ideas” are closer to what it feels like when something clicks all the way through you, when mind and body stop disagreeing.

That’s what the block prevents.

What the block actually is

It’s tempting to describe blocks in poetic terms: “misalignment,” “low vibration,” “not being in your truth.”

Sometimes that language is useful. But it can also become a way to avoid specifics, and specifics matter, because the body is specific.

A block is often:

• a chronic tension pattern (tight jaw, lifted shoulders, braced belly)

• a reflexive emotional avoidance (numbing, joking, scrolling, arguing)

• a narrative that preemptively cancels certain feelings (“I’m not the kind of person who gets jealous”)

Nietzsche would call a lot of these patterns ressentiment—not just resentment, but the alchemy by which you turn your own pain into moral superiority. In On the Genealogy of Morals, he shows how people transmute weakness into virtue to avoid admitting they’re hurting.

That’s a mental maneuver. But it lands in the body. It becomes a posture.

A posture is literally a bodily position. But it’s also a psychological stance. The metaphors are not metaphors by accident.

When you say someone is “guarded,” you usually mean it in a personality sense. But the guard is physical. It’s in their breath. It’s in the way their attention skims instead of lands.

Rising begins when you stop guarding.

The surprising method: subtraction

The key move is not to “become better.” It’s to stop doing what keeps the block in place.

That’s why “throwing away blockers” is the right phrase, even if it sounds harsh. You’re not adding holiness. You’re removing interference.

Simone Weil wrote that attention is a kind of prayer. What she meant is that real attention—unforced, unpossessive—is already a form of contact with what’s real. But attention is hard when you’re defending yourself. So the work becomes learning to attend without flinching.

The most practical way to do that is embarrassingly simple:

1. Notice the moment you want to escape.
   This is the moment you reach for interpretation, distraction, or fixing.

2. Locate what you’re avoiding in the body.
   Not “why am I like this?” but “where is it?” Chest, throat, gut, face, scalp.

3. Stay with the sensation long enough for it to move.
   Most avoided emotions feel infinite because you never let them complete. If you let them complete, they often change shape.

4. Let the meaning arrive afterward.
   Meaning comes more cleanly after the body stops resisting.

This is very close to the Stoic idea that freedom is internal. Epictetus doesn’t say “become invulnerable.” He says: separate what you control from what you don’t. The modern version is: separate what you can feel from what you can’t prevent.

You can’t prevent a wave of grief from being part of human life. You can prevent yourself from feeling it, and that’s exactly what turns it into a long-term block.

Why the mind resists this

Because the mind confuses feeling with dying.

That’s not a metaphor. To a nervous system, certain emotions register as threat. Shame can feel like social death. Grief can feel like annihilation. Fear is fear.

So the ego’s job becomes: keep the organism coherent. Keep it functional. Keep it safe.

If you’ve ever watched yourself get “triggered,” you can see the ego in action. It doesn’t calmly debate. It mobilizes. It recruits arguments. It tightens the body. It narrows your perception until you can only see the enemy.

That narrowing is a survival strategy.

But it’s not the same thing as truth.

This is why some people, when their usual defenses drop—through meditation, exhaustion, love, or psychedelics—report a state where questions like “Should I be happy?” or “What should I do with my life?” feel oddly irrelevant. Not because those questions are stupid, but because the anxious self that asks them has temporarily dissolved.

What’s left is a simpler state: presence.

The point isn’t to chase that state. Chasing it becomes another block.

The point is to notice what prevents it from being your baseline.

Rising is a baseline shift

People expect “rising” to look like constant bliss. That expectation is itself a defense: if rising has to be dramatic, you can postpone it until you have the perfect conditions.

In real life, rising looks like:

• fewer compulsive reactions

• less need to prove you’re right

• more capacity to sit in discomfort without immediately reaching for relief

• more contact with other people, because you’re not protecting a fragile inner structure

This is exactly what you’d predict from Spinoza: you’re increasing your power to act by reducing inner conflict.

It’s also what you’d predict from James: you’re widening the “fringe” of consciousness by making the filter less panicked.

And it’s what you’d predict from Merleau-Ponty: you’re restoring the body as a clear medium of perception.

Rising, in other words, is wholeness becoming less blocked.

Your ego is a constraint system. It keeps you coherent. If you drop it indiscriminately, you don’t necessarily become enlightened. You can become messy.

So the goal isn’t to annihilate the constraint. The goal is to remove the unnecessary constraint—the constraint that exists not to protect life, but to protect a story.

This is why the real work is not dramatic ego death. It’s selective unclenching.

The real enemy: spiritualization as avoidance

The most common mistake people make in “growth” is to use spiritual language to avoid ordinary pain.

They’ll say “I’m releasing” when they mean “I’m suppressing.”
They’ll say “I’m in acceptance” when they mean “I’m numb.”
They’ll say “everything is love” when they mean “I don’t want to admit I’m angry.”

Nietzsche would have a field day with this. He’d call it a moral costume.

But you don’t need Nietzsche to see the problem. You can see it in your own body: if you claim you’re peaceful while your jaw is locked, you’re lying. Not morally—somatically.

The body is brutally honest.

That’s why “throw away the blockers in your body” is such a clean instruction. It bypasses ideology. It asks a simple question:

Where are you bracing against reality?

And then it asks you to stop bracing.

Why this makes you whole

Wholeness doesn’t mean you only feel “high frequency” emotions. That’s another form of vanity.

Wholeness means you can contain the whole spectrum without splitting yourself into “acceptable me” and “unacceptable me.”

A lot of suffering comes from that split.

You can see it when someone hates traits in others that they secretly fear in themselves. They’re not reacting to the other person. They’re reacting to the part of themselves they tried to exile. The world becomes a mirror full of enemies.

When you integrate the exiled parts, enemies turn back into people.

This is also why rising tends to make you kinder, in a non-sentimental way. Not because you become morally superior, but because you have less inner need to defend an image. Defense is what makes people sharp.

Heidegger would call this a move toward authenticity. Spinoza would call it increased power. James would call it an expanded consciousness. A Buddhist would call it less clinging.

Different vocabularies; same mechanism.

The punchline

If you want to rise, you don’t need to become a new person.

You need to stop being divided.

And the division is held in the body.

So the work is not mainly philosophical. Philosophy helps you name the terrain. But the actual step is physical in the simplest sense: you feel what you’ve been refusing to feel, until it no longer needs to be held down.

You throw away the blockers.

Not by fighting them.
Not by “fixing” them.
Not by making them into an identity.

By letting them pass through.

That’s what wholeness is: a system that no longer spends most of its energy on internal suppression.

And when that energy is freed, something that used to feel “spiritual” starts to feel almost practical.

You can think.
You can love.
You can see.

Not because you reached a higher realm.

Because you stopped flinching from the one you were already in.