There is a particular kind of autumn in KwaZulu-Natal that the rest of the world perhaps doesn’t quite understand. No dramatic blaze of red and gold. No sudden stripping of trees. Just a quiet, almost imperceptible softening – a gentle exhale of the earth, warm still, but somehow different. Lighter. As though something that was held has been released without fanfare.
I have come to think that this is what awakening actually feels like.
Not a thunderbolt. Not a mountaintop revelation. Not the dramatic before-and-after that the personal development world has spent decades promising. Just a quiet shift. A softening. A moment where something you have always carried suddenly feels, inexplicably, lighter.
I know this because I have lived it.
For over forty years, I have worked in the field of personal development. I have studied, trained, taught, coached and explored the landscape of the human mind with genuine devotion. I have sat with thousands of people in their most tender and turbulent moments. I have read the books, attended the seminars and earned the certifications. I believed, as most of us in this field believe, that I understood the territory of human transformation reasonably well.
And then, one day, I heard six words that stopped me completely.
You are not broken and do not need fixing.
I had heard variations of this sentiment before, of course. But this time something was different. This time I didn’t just think it – I felt it. In my body. In my bones. In some quiet place beneath all the years of striving and studying and self-improving. And in that moment, after four decades of dedicated work in the very field of human potential, I understood something I had somehow missed:
I had spent years helping others find their freedom while quietly, persistently believing that I still needed to earn mine.
That was my awakening. Not a programme. Not a process. It presented as a felt sense of truth that arrived, unbidden, and changed everything.
The understanding that cracked me open belongs to a framework known as the Three Principles – the life’s work of Sydney Banks, a Scottish welder, who experienced a profound spiritual awakening in 1973 and spent the rest of his life articulating what he had understood about the nature of the human mind.
The principles are elegantly simple: Mind, Consciousness, and Thought. Mind as the universal intelligence behind all of life. Consciousness as our capacity to experience. And Thought as the creative power through which we shape our perception of reality – moment to moment, breath to breath.
What neuroscience is now confirming, Sydney Banks understood intuitively half a century ago: that the brain is not fixed, but fluid. That our neural pathways are not our destiny. That the mind, when freed from the grip of fear-based, habitual thinking, returns naturally to a state of coherence – clearer, calmer, and capable of extraordinary wisdom.
In other words: the peace we are searching for is not something we build. It is something we return to and come from.
Dr David Hawkins, the psychiatrist and consciousness researcher, mapped the levels of human consciousness on a scale that moves from the densest states: shame, guilt, fear, grief, through to the lightest love, joy, peace, and what he called enlightenment. What is remarkable about Hawkins’ work is how precisely it maps onto what we now understand at the neurological level.
When we operate from the lower levels of the scale – from fear, judgment, chronic stress – the brain locks into survival mode. The fight-or-flight response floods the body with cortisol, narrows our thinking and keeps us, as Hawkins would say, in a kind of waking sleep. We are alive, but not fully. We are functioning but not flourishing.
This is not mysticism. This is biology. It is also, simultaneously, the most profoundly spiritual experience available to a human being.
Sydney Banks once described his work, and the work of those who followed him, in a way that has never left me:
“We have the most wonderful job in the world. We find people in various stages of sleep. And then we get to tap them on the shoulder and be with them as they wake up to the full magnificence of life.”
I have read many beautiful things in forty years. This remains among the most sublime.
This sentiment reframes everything. It means that the people who come to us exhausted, confused, stuck, or lost are not broken. They are not failing. They are simply – and this is said with the deepest tenderness – asleep. Caught in the dream of their own thinking. Living inside a story that feels absolutely real and quite permanent, not knowing that just beneath it, undisturbed and waiting, is the full magnificence of their own life.
The tap on the shoulder is not a technique. It is a presence. It is what happens when one human being who has caught a glimpse of their own freedom sits with another human being who has forgotten theirs – and simply, quietly, points toward the light.
This autumn, as KwaZulu-Natal exhales into its warm and gentle seasonal softening, I find myself thinking about all the ways we make awakening harder than it needs to be.
We turn it into a project. A curriculum. A series of steps to be completed before we are allowed to feel whole. We read another book, attend another workshop, and add another practice to the morning routine – all in the quiet, unexamined belief that wholeness is something we have not yet earned, something that lives just beyond our next achievement, the next insight, the next version of ourselves.
But what if wholeness has always been here?
What if – as the Three Principles suggest, as neuroscience is beginning to confirm, and as every genuine wisdom tradition has whispered across centuries – the awareness we are seeking is not outside us, waiting to be found, but inside us, waiting to be noticed?
What if awakening is not an arrival, but a remembering and a returning?
I currently work with people who come to me carrying the weight of decades. Women who have achieved everything the world told them to achieve and still feel, in their quiet moments, that something essential is missing. Men who have built careers and families and lives of genuine substance and still cannot find rest inside themselves. People of every age and background who have worked hard, tried earnestly, and yet still carry the nagging sense that they are, somehow, not quite enough.
To every one of them, I want to say what those six words said to me:
You are not broken and do not need fixing.
You are not a project to be completed. You are not a problem to be solved. You are a human being – with a mind that is, at its deepest level, designed for wisdom, for peace, for clarity. The noise you are living inside is real, but it is not permanent. It is thought moving through consciousness, creating the experience of your life – and thought, by its very nature, passes.
Beneath it, always, is the stillness. The coherence. The You that existed before the story began.
You do not need to climb to the top of the mountain.
You simply need to look down and notice that solid ground has been beneath your feet all along.
