Major Announcement: New Book Release (free download, no hassles)
I have been working directly with people for more than 11 years now in a growing variety of guidance and support roles—doing service work—being of service to those in suffering. And in that time I’ve worked with hundreds, if not thousands of people in individual and small group settings. There’s one question that comes up from time to time though—and that is “when will you write a book?”
I always explain that I don’t really have much to say… that I do have a couple of self-published things, but not too many of them are actually up or online anymore… that one day, maybe—we’ll see.
So here we go.
Welcome to a fully free, no-hassle PDF download of What Does It Mean? To Love Your Self?
No email capture. No sales funnel. No “sign up for my newsletter first.” Just the book, if you want it.
Who is this for?
This book is for the person who’s been doing the work—therapy, self-help books, meditation apps, journaling—and still feels like something essential is missing.
It’s for anyone struggling with anxiety that won’t quiet, depression that keeps returning, addiction patterns that persist despite knowing better, or trauma that seems to live in the body no matter how much you understand it intellectually.
It’s for the person who looks at their life and thinks: This isn’t who I want to be. I’m not showing up the way I know I could. The one who feels trapped between impossible choices, exhausted from self-improvement, quietly desperate for something that actually works.
And it’s for the person who senses—somewhere beneath all the noise—that wholeness isn’t something to be achieved. That maybe, just maybe, the healing they’re seeking has something to do with a different kind of relationship with themselves entirely.
What’s in it?
The book bridges two territories that are usually kept separate: the contemplative wisdom traditions that point toward the nature of awareness itself, and the modern neuroscience of trauma, attachment, and nervous system regulation.
It explores why we’ve normalized so much suffering. How our identities get constructed through language and conditioning. What trauma actually does to the brain and body. Why spiritual insight alone can’t bypass embodied healing—and why somatic work alone can’t address the deeper question of who we really are.
And it offers a path forward that holds both: the recognition of what you’ve always already been, and the real, necessary work of befriending your nervous system and widening your capacity to feel.
This isn’t self-help in the usual sense. It’s an invitation to stop requiring yourself to be anyone other than who you already are—while also taking full responsibility for how you show up to your own life.
Why free?
Because the people who most need this often can’t afford another $25 book. Because I’d rather it reach someone who’s struggling at 2am than sit behind a paywall. Because this work has never been about building a platform—it’s about being useful.
If it helps you, wonderful. If you want to work together more directly afterward, I’m here. If you never contact me and this book just becomes a quiet companion during a difficult season, that’s enough.
What’s inside?
The book unfolds in six parts, each building on what came before while circling back to deepen what’s already been touched.
Part One: The Question
This is where we begin—with the simple question of whether your life actually looks like the life of someone who loves themselves. We explore the water we swim in: the normalized dysfunction, the staggering statistics on addiction and trauma, the matrix of wounding that most of us have never been taught to see clearly. And we arrive at the doorway that most people spend their lives trying to avoid—the emptiness that turns out to be not the problem, but the beginning.
- Chapter 1: The Life That Says Yes
- Chapter 2: The Water We Swim In
- Chapter 3: The Matrix of Wounding
- Chapter 4: When the Masks Begin to Slip
Part Two: The Constructed Self
Here we turn toward the mind itself—how identity gets built through cognitive fusion, how awareness differs from what we’re aware of, and how language creates the very self we take ourselves to be. This section includes experiential exercises to help you recognize the sky-like quality of awareness that has always been present beneath the clouds of thought.
- Chapter 5: Fused With Thought
- Chapter 6: The Discovery of Awareness
- Chapter 7: The Sky and the Clouds
- Chapter 8: Who Am I?
- Chapter 9: The Invention of Language
- Chapter 10: The Map Is Not the Territory
Part Three: The Brain Builds the Story
Now we ground the contemplative insights in neuroscience. We explore the default mode network and how it creates the narrative self, what cognitive fusion and defusion look like at the neural level, and the profound implications of neuroplasticity—the fact that because your identity was learned, it can be relearned.
- Chapter 11: The Neural Architecture of Self
- Chapter 12: Fusion and Defusion in the Brain
- Chapter 13: The Plasticity of Identity
Part Four: The Body Holds the Truth
This is where we turn from mind to body—because insight alone cannot liberate you. We explore where trauma actually lives (in the nervous system, not the narrative), what the research shows about how wounding reshapes the brain, why spiritual bypassing is neurobiologically impossible, and how your earliest attachment relationships shaped the window of tolerance you’re working with today.
- Chapter 14: The Turn From Mind to Body
- Chapter 15: Where Trauma Lives
- Chapter 16: The Grooves That Hold Us
- Chapter 17: What the Science Shows Us
- Chapter 18: Why Spiritual Bypassing Is Scientifically Impossible
- Chapter 19: The First Relationship
- Chapter 20: The Window of Tolerance
- Chapter 21: Why the Window Matters
Part Five: Integration
Here the two paths become one. We explore why contemplative recognition and somatic healing aren’t separate journeys but two legs of the same walk. We examine what surrender actually means (and what it doesn’t), what responsibility actually means (and what it doesn’t), and how holding both creates the conditions for genuine transformation. This section includes detailed examples of what integrated practice looks like in real life—in relationship conflict, in trauma triggers, in moments of shame.
- Chapter 22: Walking on Both Legs
- Chapter 23: The Seduction of Pure Awareness
- Chapter 24: The Limitation of Pure Somatics
- Chapter 25: The Synergy
- Chapter 26: The Ground Supports the Sky
- Chapter 27: Surrender
- Chapter 28: Responsibility
- Chapter 29: The Living Dialectic
- Chapter 30: Three Qualities of the Transformative Process
- Chapter 31: Holding Paradox
Part Six: What Becomes Possible
This is where we arrive—not at a destination, but at a new way of being. We explore what actually shifts when integration takes root, what it concretely means to love yourself (not as a feeling but as a lived ethics), and how to hold the paradox of being already whole while still healing. The book closes with a parting reflection and an invitation to continue.
- Chapter 32: The Moment You Stop Fighting
- Chapter 33: What Actually Shifts
- Chapter 34: What It Means to Love Yourself
- Chapter 35: Coming Home to Paradox
- A Parting Reflection
…and who am I?
I’m Bradley Bemis—a Licensed Professional Counselor based in Colorado, and the founder of Awakening Into Life.
But that’s the short version.
The longer version begins with over thirty years in cybersecurity, including eight years of service in the U.S. Air Force. I held a CISSP certification for more than two decades. I built my career protecting complex systems, identifying vulnerabilities, understanding how defenses work and fail. I was good at it.
Then in 2014, something happened.
A profound shift in perception—what some traditions call awakening, what I experienced as the collapse of everything I thought I knew about who I was. The fundamental recognition of awareness aware of itself as awareness. Not as a concept or a nice idea, but as direct, unmediated experience. A shift that never left. One that has only deepened and become more embodied in the years since.
That recognition reoriented my entire life.
Within months, I sold all of my possessions and became a homeless ascetic for three months, living on the streets of Seattle. I worked with the local homeless and spiritual communities—a voluntary immersion into complete and total surrender. I wanted to know what remained when everything external was stripped away. I wanted to test whether what had been revealed was real.
It was.
When that period fulfilled itself, I moved to Florida and began doing small group and individual guidance work—teaching contemplative wisdom and supporting people in their own unfolding. That work continued and deepened over the years, eventually leading me to pursue formal clinical training so I could meet people not only in spiritual awakening but in the full complexity of psychological suffering.
Today I’m licensed to practice across Colorado as a mental health and addiction counselor. I hold a Master’s degree and multiple credentials: LPC (Licensed Professional Counselor), ADDC (Addiction Counselor Candidate), NMIT (Natural Medicine [Facilitator] in Training), NCC (National Certified Counselor), and CLC (Certified Life Coach).
What do all those letters mean? They mean I’ve been trained in evidence-based clinical approaches to anxiety, depression, trauma, and addiction, among other things. They mean I understand the neuroscience of the nervous system, the complexity of substance use disorders, the intricacies of attachment and developmental wounding. They mean I take the clinical work seriously—because I’ve seen what happens when spiritual insight gets divorced from psychological grounding.
But the letters only tell part of the story.
I’m also a nondual contemplative wisdom teacher, an inner presence and life purpose coach, and a psychedelic integration facilitator. My work bridges the clinical and the contemplative—what I call practical mysticism. Grounded healing that honors both the science of the nervous system and the mystery of conscious awareness.
I’ve been teaching embodied nondual wisdom since 2014 and working clinically with people navigating anxiety, depression, addiction, and trauma ever since completing my formal training. This book is what I’ve learned—from my own path, and from the privilege of walking alongside hundreds of others on theirs.
