Before Enlightenment, Chop Wood, Carry Water. After Enlightenment?…

There’s a Zen saying you probably know that gets quoted a lot in spiritual circles: before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. 

To me, this used to mean, the content of our lives (chopping wood and carrying water) remains the same, while our awareness has transformed, and this is the end of the story.

And yet, in my lived experience, that understanding misses something vital.

What it doesn’t really speak to is what happens after awakening — in the body, in the nervous system, in our emotional and relational lives. It doesn’t speak to the long, subtle, and often confronting process of embodiment. 

I used to believe - and I know others have shared this belief too - that once awakening happens, everything should be fine. That the sense of separation dissolves and, with it, all our unresolved patterns, wounds, and sensitivities. That life somehow smooths itself out. Even to the point of permanent bliss and resolution - why not?! 

When that didn’t happen, I remember feeling confused and ashamed. Was my experience actually real? Did I miss something?

But awakening and embodiment are not the same thing.

Awakening, in its simplest sense, is the recognition of what we are beyond the personal story. The end of a certain kind of seeking, the end of ‘who am I’. A deep knowing that what we’ve been looking for was never missing. Something genuinely fundamental shifts here, and that should never be minimised.

And yet, for many of us, awakening is not the end of the journey — it’s the beginning of a new phase. One that is less talked about.

After awakening, life often turns our attention back toward the human. Old emotional patterns can surface. The nervous system reveals its conditioning. Unmet needs, early wounds, and relational habits that were once hidden can become impossible to ignore. Not because something has gone wrong, but because awareness is now present enough to include them.

I have in the past definitely found myself wondering that if there is still healing to do, then perhaps awakening hasn’t truly happened. But what I’ve experienced, again and again, is that awakening tends to illuminate what has not yet been integrated.

I’ve realised that the body doesn’t instantly reorganise itself just because awareness has recognised itself. And of course, the nervous system doesn’t unwind decades of patterning overnight. Equally trauma doesn’t dissolve simply because it’s seen through conceptually. These systems have their own intelligence and their own timing.

What I’ve noticed is that healing doesn’t stop after awakening; it simply unfolds from a new, more open space. There is no longer the sense that something is fundamentally wrong, or that healing will finally make us whole. Wholeness is already known. Healing now happens because life wants to move freely, honestly, and without unnecessary contraction.

Post-awakening, I feel more intimacy with life: a greater attunement to energy, to impact, to what feels nourishing and what doesn’t. A deeper vulnerability. A clearer sense of when something is out of alignment.

At times in the past I had a tendency to try to avoid this embodiment stage by clinging to ideas like “there’s no one here” or “everything is already perfect.” And again, at one level, that is true. But when those ideas are used to bypass the body or the emotional life, something remains incomplete. Awakening that doesn’t descend into the lived, human experience often stays abstract.

Embodiment asks for something much quieter than transcendence. It asks for patience. For kindness toward the body. For a willingness to feel what was once avoided or overridden. It often asks us to slow down, to receive support, and to let the truth we’ve realised reshape how we actually live.

So yes, ‘after enlightenment’, we still chop wood and carry water. But we do so with a different level of honesty. Often with more tenderness. And sometimes while tending to the places in us that awakening has made visible, rather than erased.

Awakening ends the search for truth. Embodiment is the ongoing art of living it — in a body, in relationship, in this imperfect and beautiful human life. Awakening without embodiment can feel profound but incomplete — the clarity exists, but the human systems may still resist or react.

Embodiment without awakening can feel like self-improvement or mastery, but the deeper existential recognition is absent.

‘Enlightenment’ in some Eastern texts, translates as ‘awakening’, but in lived experience, we can define true enlightenment as both awakening and embodiment. An ongoing process to be lived.

I would love to hear your own view and experience of this.