Enlightened People Still Poop

There’s a quiet fantasy that many of us carry about awakening — that it will finally make it all go away. That spiritual realization will somehow delete our patterns, quiet our emotions, and free us from the sticky loops of thought and reaction we’ve been trying to escape for years. We imagine that enlightenment is a kind of divine reset, a clean slate, where karma dissolves and we rise above the mess of being human.

But awakening doesn’t cancel our lives.

It doesn’t exempt us from embodiment. It doesn’t remove our nervous systems or erase the ways our bodies and minds have been shaped by experience. Karma, the subtle conditioning and momentum that plays out through our thoughts, behaviors, relationships, and reactions, doesn’t disappear. It continues. What changes is not the presence of patterning, but our relationship to it.

The self we usually think we are — the one defined by memory, fear, desire, and identity — is not the real self. It’s a bundle of habits, a tangle of impressions animated by mistaken identification. Over time, that conditioning builds up like dust on a mirror. It doesn’t change what the mirror is, it just obscures the reflection. Awakening is the moment we realize there’s a mirror beneath the dust. That we’ve been relating to the dust as if it were the whole truth.

From there, the real work begins.

We don’t transcend our conditioning by pretending it’s not there. We begin to see through it. Practices like prayer, sadhana, and seva aren’t about fixing ourselves. They’re about remembering what we are beneath the layers. They don’t make us more worthy, they help us become more transparent to truth. They clear the dust. Not through striving, but through surrender.

Awakening doesn’t mean we stop feeling. It doesn’t mean we no longer have thoughts, preferences, or quirks. It just means we stop mistaking them for who we are. The body still hungers. The mind still chatters. Emotions still rise and fall. But now, they happen without the same stickiness. They come and go and the space that sees them remains untouched.

And that’s not bypassing. It’s the opposite. Bypassing says, “I’m enlightened, so none of this matters.” But real awakening says, “None of this defines me, so I can meet all of it with presence.” Enlightenment doesn’t exempt us from life. It includes everything, even our mess, and calls it sacred. We still pay our bills. We still get overwhelmed. We still poop. But being human is no longer a problem. It’s just not the whole story.

Awakening doesn’t give us a new self. It reveals that we were never broken to begin with. If we’re 5’8” and have always longed to be 6’2”, no amount of meditation will change our height. That’s not how this works. We don’t awaken into a different life. We awaken into a different relationship with life. One where we stop trying to make reality match our idea of freedom, and start to see that freedom was in the seeing all along.

The momentum of our lives continues. The conditions of our bodies, our histories, our situations — they don’t suddenly vanish. But they lose their grip. They stop being the measure of our worth. The very things we once tried to fix become the field of our liberation.

And this is what many of us miss: awakening isn’t a self-improvement project. It’s not about creating a better version of our conditioned selves. It’s not about becoming more optimized, more desirable, or even more peaceful. If anything, our external lives might stay exactly the same. So the real question becomes: If nothing outside of us changed, would we still want to awaken?

Because awakening doesn’t promise us a new life. It simply gives us a new relationship to this one.

And that includes the parts we’ve spent our whole lives trying to avoid. The personality traits we’ve judged. The circumstances we’ve resented. The flaws we’ve tried to fix. None of them need to be erased. They just need to be seen for what they are — temporary waves on the surface, not the ocean itself.

And this doesn’t mean we reject our uniqueness. In fact, the awakened view honors it. We don’t discard the people we’ve become. We recognize ourselves as instruments. Our particular nature, our temperament, our circumstances — they’re not obstacles to the path. They are the path. Like Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, our dharma isn’t to walk away from the battlefield, but to meet it with a purified heart. To engage our conditioned selves, not as identities to defend, but as tools to serve truth.

The highest service isn’t to become someone else. It’s to offer who we are, even in our imperfections, in alignment with what’s real. The momentum of our patterns doesn’t need to be escaped. It needs to be witnessed. Seen clearly. Lived consciously. When we stop trying to fight our nature and instead seek its highest, most sanctified expression, something softens. The veil thins. And the light beneath begins to shine through.

And all of this brings a surprising kind of peace.

Not because everything suddenly becomes easy, but because we’re no longer wrestling with ourselves. We stop believing that freedom lies in becoming someone different. We begin to see that our work is not to escape our lives, but to live them from a different place. The one who once clung to the story is no longer in charge. And what’s left is a quiet joy — not flashy, not ecstatic, but whole.

Like a fan spinning after it’s been turned off, our conditioning may continue for a while. The momentum is real. The patterns may still echo. But now, we’ve stopped feeding them. We’ve cut the power. Without identification reinforcing the loop, those patterns begin to slow. Gently, quietly, they start to unwind.

That’s the hope. Not that awakening removes the pain, but that it removes the illusion that we are the ones in pain. Not that it erases our conditioning, but that it reveals we were never bound by it. And from that place, even the most human things like confusion, sadness, craving, laughter, become part of the sacred unfolding. Part of what passes through.

Awakening doesn’t change the momentum of life.
It changes the one living it.