Healing and Waking Up Are Hard
Why? Because parts of your mind don't want you to.
Let's start with awakening. On most spiritual paths, awakening requires not just questioning your parts' beliefs but their existence. Some paths go further by teaching you to ignore, vilify, or purify your mind and its parts. It shouldn't be surprising then that parts rebel against your efforts to awaken.
How they rebel can be creative and subtle. Parts can be expert at rationalization, for example. One way they do this is by believing you're already awake and spiritually mature. In doing so they stop any further efforts to examine your experience or question your beliefs and actions. The prevalence of spiritual ego parts is one reason why so many "enlightened" teachers abuse their students.
Parts can also distract you from awakening. Parts can block access to your true awakened nature. Parts can convince you awakening is too hard, not worth the effort, or you have more important things to do. And so on.
This is one reason why I think IFS is an important tool. Not just for healing but awakening. IFS acknowledges parts, their concerns, and their value. And IFS provides a structured process for helping parts willingly let go of their beliefs, roles, and pain.
While I'm skeptical that IFS alone can reliably help you recognize your pure and essential nature, it can help you partially unblend from parts of you that had been blocking access to your true Self. Using IFS to assist with awakening could be especially useful if you have distrustful and deeply conditioned thinking or intellectual parts. From what I've seen, people with these kinds of parts struggle to understand non-dual, direct, or effortless approaches to awakening, because their thinking parts are trying to conceptually understand what is ultimately non-conceptual. Dualistic, gradual, or effortful approaches to awakening try to solve this problem by helping you first cultivate concentration, morality, and wisdom. The implicit hope being that with dedicated training your thinking parts will gradually relax until you eventually recognize or become your essential Self. But many on dualistic paths have been training for decades to see what can be recognized in an afternoon with good non-dual pointers. I suspect that combining IFS with non-dual approaches might serve as an effective bridge for those who find non-dual teachings challenging to grasp or apply.
But while IFS may help to make awakening and healing easier, I still wouldn't call it easy. Depending on your history, you may have parts that are highly polarized and distrustful. You may have parts that have beliefs and roles that are deeply conditioned. And you may have parts that are deeply traumatized and stuck in past events that are painful to revisit. Working with all of this and more is essential to healing with IFS. But doing so is obviously hard.
However, those who can access pure Self will find that healing with IFS is easier than it would be with only partial access to Self. This is because parts heal when understood and embraced with compassion, care, and curiosity. And while these qualities can be unlocked with partial access to Self, much more is available when you're embodied as pure Self.
So while healing and awakening are hard, I think it could be much easier when using some combination of IFS and non-dual spiritual paths. What this combination might look like will require some experimentation and innovation. I'm interested in contributing to this exploration, and I encourage those who are also interested to join me.
Trauma and spiritual ignorance are contagious. As is happiness, peace, and freedom. If our generation can find the courage to heal, awaken, and grow our knowledge, we'll make it easier for the generations to come.