by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Sometimes Life Will Shake You But Only Ever To Awaken You
If you find yourself going through ‘it’ right now – whatever “it” happens to be – then take a breath because this article is for you:
The “it” in your life at present might look like loss, betrayal, a crisis of identity, a relationship break-down, health challenges, disillusionment, a job collapse, or simply the gnawing sense that nothing feels solid anymore (because you’re living in the Void).
Whatever the case may be, the end result is the feeling that life is shaking you at your core which is calling into question long-held beliefs, exposing illusions, and testing what you really think about yourself, the world, and even reality itself.
Maybe not the best situation to find oneself in but here’s the ‘good’ news:
If life is shaking you and you’re “going through” something then it means that you’re currently engaged in a process.
This is good (even though it might not seem like it) because it means that you’re not STUCK which is a far worse fate and one where many people find themselves locked behind immovable old identities and trapped forever in the past.
The fact that you’re being shaken is EVIDENCE of change in motion and it shows that something inside refuses to remain stagnant and simply just accept the way that things appear to be.
In other words, “going through it”, means that something is insisting on growth, waking up, and becoming more real.
Sure, what you’re going through might sometimes feel unbearable and at times it may feel like everything is falling apart but it’s just a part of the human condition and the journey of growth into wholeness.
Many great souls, writers and seekers before you have gone through their own storms and come out transformed on the other side and this is the same two-step process you’re currently going through:
- Being Shaken
- Then Awakened
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Shaken & Awaken: What We’ll Cover in this Article
- Sometimes Life Will Shake You But Only Ever To Awaken You
- What It Means to Be Shaken
- What Is Realness and Why It Can’t Be Lost
- Why Resistance to the Shake Hurts More Than the Shake Itself
- The Metaphor of the Tree in the Storm
- Awakening: What It Looks Like
- How to Engage The ‘Shaken and Awaken’ Process in a Real Way: Practical Steps
- Example: A Mini Illustrative Story
- Why This Matters for Yourself, The World, & Reality
- Some Cautions (Pitfalls to Watch Out For)
- Shaken & Awaken: Some Closing Encouragement
What It Means to Be Shaken
To be shaken is to be provoked, dislodged, or confronted in some unexpected way:
It is life’s way of jarring us out of complacency, illusion, auto-pilot, or identity comfort zones and – even though it’s a totally natural process on the journey back from unreal to real – it can rattles our foundations the very core of our being.
When you’re shaken you’ll start to experience these kinds of symptoms:
- Old beliefs crack: The beliefs you held about yourself, your life, your future, your worth, or how the world is ‘supposed’ to be all begin to fracture as your ideas meet reality itself.
- Comfort zones become intolerable: The things that once gave you security no longer feels safe or true.
- You feel raw, vulnerable, and exposed: Long lost feelings that you suppressed or ignored may well surface – like fear, grief, rage, confusion, or despair.
- Questions arise that can’t be ignored: You’ll start asking yourself some of the bigger questions like: Why am I here? What is real? What is true? What do I really believe? What identity is really mine?
- A sort of “deconstruction” sets in: You find that the things you built your life around (roles, labels,, and narratives, etc.) may start to crumble or at least begin to feel hollow as you realise they were part of the performance of your life instead of your presence within it.
In that shaking, you might feel disoriented or even betrayed by life itself:
You may ask “Why me?” or “How did I end up here?” but beneath the trembling is a deeper impulse: the impulse toward authenticity and toward waking up to what’s REAL.
The ‘good’ news here is that if you can learn to understand what is going on beneath the surface, then you can switch from a stance of fear or resistance – which often prolongs suffering (because what you resist persists) – and shift into a stance of curiosity, surrender, and real engagement with life as it actually is (as opposed to what your ego needs it to be).
What Is Realness and Why It Can’t Be Lost
One of the foundational truths you must hold on to when being shaken by life in this way is this:
“What’s real is always real.”
(Write that down and stick it on your fridge or something).
This is just a reminder that you can’t lose what is truly yours because what’s ‘yours’ is WHOLE and so can’t be added to our subtracted from.
What this means in practical terms is that the process of being shaken and awakened does not rob you of your essential being or your core realness – instead, it simply exposes and purges what is unreal, fragmented, and false.
You can look at it like this:
- What’s real about you – your essence, inner consciousness, or AWARENESS – can’t be shaken away no matter how hard you get shaken (though you may forget it for a while, doubt it, or become disconnected from it).
- What is false and unreal – like your illusions, masks, identities, expectations, and outdated wounded narratives – may fall away, sometimes violently, in the shaking but you only lost a PERSPECTIVE or INTERPRETATION, not the reality of things.
- The shaking is not evidence that you’re failing but evidence that the illusions are being weeded out.
To trust the process is to trust that you are not being dismantled arbitrarily and to instead choose to believe with patience that you’re being refined instead of defined.
The seemingly broken bits are not your true core because they were borrowed, constructed, and cobbled on so you can let them go.
This is analogous to how, in alchemy, heat and pressure melt impurities so that the refined metal remains or how storms may tear leaves from a tree, but cannot uproot the trunk and roots – unless those are already compromised.
Why Resistance to the Shake Hurts More Than the Shake Itself
Here’s a paradox about this human condition thing we’re all dealing with:
It’s not the shaking that hurts us most but our resistance to it.
When you resist – which means that you choose to cling to the old, panic, deny, push against the pain, hold fast to ego identity, or grasp at illusions – then you turn your own refining process into a battleground and the harder you resist truth, the more painful the friction becomes.
A phrase I always love to throw out there in coaching sessions is that:
“The truth will set you free (but first it will piss you off and make you miserable)“.
(From Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness).
That bluntness comes from acknowledging that truth often demands disillusionment, upheaval, and the dismantling of familiar and comforting lies or illusions.
In other words: misery is often not from the shaking itself, but from trying to hold on to what is no longer alive, no longer serving us, and no longer real (because it never was – it was always just a fragment whereas the truth itself is whole).
When life shakes you, it means that the TRUTH is always sweeping back into your life, and so you might fight to preserve comfort, certainty, identity, or tell yourself stories to avoid feeling the hurt. You might dig in your heels. But every time you resist, you extend the pain, because you prevent the process from doing its purifying work as you cling on to what you thought was instead of what actually is.
What all of this means is that a big part of awakening is learning to lean into the shake – to trust the process, to allow old structures to fall away.
In other words, to let go of trying to control what can’t be controlled and to let life do what life wants to do which is to refine, deconstruct, and illuminate.
The Metaphor of the Tree in the Storm
Here’s a metaphor that can potentially help with all this:
Imagine a grand old oak tree standing in a forest during the autumn. Suddenly, a violent winds arrives and starts shaking the branches and whipping the leaves. Even though the tree loses many leaves, some small branches break, and the canopy thins out, the trunk and roots remain strong, anchored and firm in the earth.
In itself, no tree wills to be damaged by storms but storms reveal what is strong and permanent as opposed to what is frail and superficial. The leaves that fall were not essential; the core remains.
In your own inner life, your relationship with your own realness is like that tree:
The autumn storm is the shaking process and the leaves represent illusions, conditional identities, old stories, and the fragile self-conceptions of the egol.
The trunk and root represent what is real, what is eternal, and what is deeper and more lasting than your day-to-day labels.
If you can stand (or learn to stand) through the storm, you learn a new kind of rootedness – one grounded in realness, not in brittle illusions.
Yes, someday the tree also dies but if it truly wants to flourish whilst it’s here then it depends on resilience, depth, the capacity to let go of what must go, and strength to stay rooted in what is essential.
Awakening: What It Looks Like
If ‘shaking’ is the clearing and cracking open, awakening is what comes after – or occasionally simultaneously – when you begin to live in the light of a more REAL version of yourself.
Awakening is:
- Greater clarity: You see distortions, illusions, and unhelpful and unreal patterns more clearly and begin to perceive more truth in yourself, the world, and reality itself.
- Unmasking of false selves: You finally start to drop the roles and masks that no longer serve you.
- Honesty and integration: You own all parts of yourself (‘light’ and ‘dark’) more fully as you stop hiding the real you in the Shadow Territory behind the mask of ego.
- Inner alignment: Your actions begin to align more with your deeper values – instead of just with whatever seems ‘acceptable’ or safe.
- Deeper sensitivity to reality: You sense things more deeply, feel more, and know more (whilst having reality confirm this with actual evidence as you build a sense of flow and start getting results in life).
- Humility and surrender: You come to accept that you don’t have all the answers and so you become a student of life instead of unconsciously trying to ‘teach’ everybody to see things the same way you do.
None of this means total freedom from pain or challenges but it does mean that you start to respond to these things differently:
As you awaken to your own awareness, the storms still come, but your centre is more rooted and the shaking is less terrifying because you know what is real and what’s not so you can fully trust that process.
How to Engage The ‘Shaken and Awaken’ Process in a Real Way: Practical Steps
You don’t have to be a passive passenger while life shakes you around – instead, you can engage with the process consciously with awareness, courage, and trust.
Here are some practical ways to do that:
1. Name and Acknowledge the ‘Shake‘
The first step is simple but powerful:
Admit to yourself what’s happening.
Say it plainly (“I’m being shaken right now”) and stop pretending everything is fine when it isn’t.
Denial only keeps you trapped in confusion but the moment you name what’s real, you start to reclaim your power and move from unconscious reaction to conscious participation.
2. Breathe, Ground, and Anchor Yourself in Presence
When life feels unstable, your breath is the doorway back to reality because it regulates your nervous system.
What this means is to come into your body. Feel your feet on the ground. Breathe through your nose and into your belly.
Presence is your anchor when everything else is shifting (like that tree staying rooted in the storm and only losing its leaves).
You may not be able to control what’s happening, but you can always come home to yourself in the moment because what’s real is always real.
3. Watch the Story You’re Telling Yourself
Most of our suffering doesn’t come from reality itself but from the story we tell ourselves about it.
What this means is that you need to pay attention to your inner narrative:
“This shouldn’t be happening”
“I’ve failed”
“It’s all falling apart.”
(All of these are just examples of self-limiting beliefs that stop you growing with life and force you to work against it).
Ask yourself if the stories you’re telling yourself are actually true:
Are they helping you or hurting you?
Learning to see through your own mental commentary stops you from adding unnecessary layers of pain to an already difficult process.
4. Choose Curiosity Over Battle
Instead of fighting what’s happening, start asking better questions. What is this showing me? What truth is being revealed? What am I resisting? When you approach your situation with curiosity, you stay open to discovery. When you approach it with resistance, you stay stuck in friction. Curiosity opens doors; battle closes them.
5. Practise Surrender and Letting Go
Letting go isn’t the same as giving up (though a lot of people fall into the trap of thinking this is the case) – instead, it means trusting yourself and life enough to release your grip on what’s no longer serving you:
Maybe it could be a role, an expectation, a relationship, or a self-image but – whatever it is – allow it to fall away whilst reminding yourself that what’s real is always real and that the things that can’t stay will leave anyway (letting go instead of holding on simply makes their departure less painful).
It’s through letting go like this that space is created for what’s more real to (re)emerge and for you to find a solid foundation on which to build your life.
6. Find Support
Nobody awakens alone so seek out the people who can help you stay rooted in the truth (not your interpretation of it but an actual experience of it) – friends, mentors, coaches (*cough*), counsellors, spiritual companions.
In short, you want to be around those who value honesty over comfort whilst remembering that iron sharpens iron.
The process of being shaken can feel isolating but you are not meant to carry it all on your own and the right kind of company helps you stay awake rather than collapse into despair.
7. Cultivate Practices That Connect You with Realness
Make time each day for things that bring you back to your centre:
This might be silence, journaling, meditation, time in nature, mindful movement, creative expression, or reading something that redirects you towards the truth.
These are not distractions but disciplines that anchor you in your own pure signal rather than all the noise.
8. Integrate Through Small, Real Actions
As insights arise, don’t just keep them in your head….make sure that you act on them – even in small ways (because action is the only ‘cure’ for anything).
Speak truth where you once stayed silent. Make one brave decision that aligns with your deeper values. Just do something as long as it’s real and not ego.
Embodiment matters and real growth happens through action, not just awareness (with acceptance thrown in between for good measure).
9. Embrace the Mystery
You won’t understand everything as it happens and that’s okay because we’re not capable of understanding everything even if we want to.
Some lessons only reveal themselves in hindsight so stay humble and open and just keep learning and moving with what’s in front of you.
As the old saying goes, life is not a puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be lived and so the more you relax into that truth, the less you’ll feel the need to control every outcome.
10. Reflect on What Remains True
Finally, keep returning to what is unshakeable in you:
Check in with yourself regularly:
What has stayed the same through all of this? What still feels real?
These reflections help you distinguish between what’s passing away and what’s eternal whilst reminding you that – despite everything – something within you remains steady, alive, and whole:
Your realness.
Example: A Mini Illustrative Story
Let me share a small parable to help all this sink in (this is turning into a pretty long article):
Imagine someone named Anna who built her identity around being successful, admired, and in control.
Her life was going perfectly until the bottom fell out and she lost her job, her relationship shattered, and she fell ill. Everything she thought ‘defined’ her seemed gone.
At first she resisted and ended up fighting depression, scrambling to re-establish control, denying the emptiness of the Void, and clinging to old patterns. All this resistance serverd to do, though, was to deepen her suffering.
One day she paused and finally admitted to herself:
“I am being shaken from my ideas about myself (ego)”.
To deal with this, she began to implement practices in here life like breathwork, writing, quiet time in nature, and allowing herself to feel grief and fear.
She asked questions: “What was I using to hold myself up?”, “What identities are no longer true?”, or “What is deeper than all this right now?”
Slowly, she began to see that her true value was not in success or role but in BEING itself:
She discarded illusions and reoriented her life around deeper values like connection, service, and meaning.
Of course, she didn’t become unshakable – the storms still came because they always do – but now she stood more solidly in her realness, and fewer illusions threatened to uproot her.
Her “awakening” was not spectacular or some momentous event – it was quiet, subtle, and mostly internal – but it changed everything about how she lived forever.
Why This Matters for Yourself, The World, & Reality
Why invest in going through this whole process of the shake and awake instead of dodging or denying it?
Well, it’s because:
- You become more real, more authentic, and more present instead of being a ‘performer’ hiding behind a mask.
- You gain deeper wisdom (understanding about how reality ‘works’) because you learn from life, not just from ideas or concepts.
- You inspire others who witness your integrity and by extension become more real in their own lives.
- You become less vulnerable to false identities, external validation, and projection.
- You contribute to a world that needs people who have tasted something REAL so they can make the world more real.
In short: the shaking is not a punishment, but a portal and the conduit through which deeper truth flows as you reach the awakening.
Check out Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you’d like to go deeper into your own realness and a sense of flow in your life.
Some Cautions (Pitfalls to Watch Out For)
- False acceleration: Trying to force awakening before the shake is done is always a mistake because you may skip essential stages of grieving, deconstruction, or integration.
- Spiritual bypassing: Trying to pretend everything is fine, bypassing the pain, or acting like you’re always ‘healed’ even when you’re wounded inside.
- Rushing into new identities: You don’t want to try and build new houses while the foundations are unsettled. Give the shake its full space to clear the ground before you build.
- Isolation: Going solo without mirrors, counsel, or safe companionship can lead to distortion and despair so try to find somebody to walk by your side (not above or below you).
- Loss of boundaries: In the name of openness, you may surrender your boundaries and get entangled in unhealthy dynamics because you think you’re so ‘spiritual‘ (or whatever) that you can handle things you don’t need to handle.
Shaken & Awaken: Some Closing Encouragement
If you are “going through it” – right now, today as you read this – if life is shaking you to your bones – I want you to know this:
You are not lost. You are doing the very work of becoming more real.
The ‘shaking’ is not your enemy but your refining and the ‘awakening’ is not a promise of a smooth life, but of a more real life.
In the storm, plant your roots deeper and let the wind do its work:
Choose curiosity over panic, surrender over resistance and trust that what is truly yours cannot be taken away because what’s real is always real so let life carve away the illusions, so you may stand more fully in your realness.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re currently going through it and you want to learn to discern the real from the unreal and take action that changes your life for the best then book a free coaching call with me.
Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.
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