“The goal was never to live permanently impressed by the Presence. The goal was to be able to live.”From Yoga del Descenso · Libro Puerta
There is a loss that at first can feel almost like bad news: peace no longer impresses you.
Not because it has disappeared. On the contrary, perhaps it has been moving around your life for so long that you stopped turning to look at it.
Before, a minute of inner silence could leave you thinking about it for hours. An especially deep prayer could change your week. And now something strange happens: you wake up, make the coffee, look for your keys, answer a message, and only much later do you realize that what would once have been the spiritual event of the day had been there since you opened your eyes.
Then a small nostalgia may appear. Did I get too used to it? Did I lose my reverence? Has it become less true because it no longer moves me the same way?
My answer begins simply: familiarity is not necessarily loss. Sometimes what stops surprising you has not become less deep. It has become more yours. Amazement says a great deal about how new an experience is, but it is no measure of the Presence. That it surprises you less does not mean it is worth less.
From event to a way of being
Think of when you learned to walk. There was a time when every step asked enormous concentration of you. Then something extraordinary happened: it stopped asking. Not because walking lost its value, but because your body made it its own.
Something similar can happen with the inner life. What once arrived as a special state can, with time, begin to be part of your usual way of being. Not always. Not in everyone. Not all at once. I call this new normality. It does not mean you have reached a permanent state, or that you will never again feel fear, mental noise, sadness or reaction. It means something more modest:
A way of being that once needed special conditions begins to need fewer and fewer conditions in order to appear.
The stillness that once depended on a retreat can appear in the middle of traffic. The presence that once seemed to need an hour of prayer can find you folding laundry. In the visits, peace was in the foreground. In the dwelling, it moved to the background. In new normality it becomes the ground: no longer something you look at, but something from which you live everything else.
The body learns to return
No new normality exists only as an idea. When I say that the body learns, I mean it in its simplest sense: organisms acquire habits, anticipate, adapt, and develop repeated ways of responding. Nothing more, and nothing less.
Perhaps for years your body learned to tense quickly, to breathe short, to expect danger, to stay sped up even when everything was fine. A spiritual experience does not erase that in one stroke. But if, for long enough, there are also experiences of stillness, of safety, of inner space, your organism can begin to grow familiar with other ways of responding. We do not need to claim that something invisible is reprogramming your biology. Something simpler is enough: your body can come to find a different way of being less and less strange.
And it is worth letting go of a fantasy: the belief that new normality means never going back. You can live from a new center and, on any ordinary Tuesday, react from an old version of yourself you thought had retired. You can lose your patience. You can feel fear again. The important question is no longer “has the old come back?” The question begins to be: “how long does it take to stop being my whole world?”
Before, a fear could occupy the house for weeks. Now perhaps it comes in, makes noise, moves the furniture, but there is a part of you that remembers the house is bigger than that room. That is why new normality is not measured by the absence of waves. It becomes visible in something quieter: the capacity to return. To return to the body, to the center, to the relationship, to the present. Not like someone rebuilding everything from zero, but like someone beginning to know the way home.
The danger of missing the miracle
The first experiences were intense precisely because there was contrast: silence against noise, peace against tension, presence against absence. That time was beautiful, and missing it is not a failure. But nostalgia says “that was beautiful”; it does not say “go and look for it again.” When the two get confused, the traps are born.
The first is chasing intensity again: looking for more sensation, more tears, more states, like someone who misses the thrill of coming home and, to feel it again, starts leaving. Do not confuse intensity with depth, or novelty with truth. The dwelling may feel less exciting than the visit precisely because you no longer need to knock on the door every time you arrive.
The second is declaring the process dead. When the novelty goes, it is easy to believe that nothing is happening anymore. But I will not tell you the opposite either, that if you no longer feel anything it is because everything has been integrated. What your case means is not decided by looking at the sensation. It is seen in your life, slowly.
The third is neglecting the house. That something has become more natural does not mean you no longer need to sleep, rest, have relationships, care for your health, tend to your limits. That the dawn no longer surprises you does not mean the house stops needing care.
When flatness is not peace
This is the most serious distinction, and I will tell you plainly. Not every decrease in intensity is dwelling. Not every silence is presence. Not every “I don’t feel anything anymore” means integration.
The new normality I am speaking of should not make you less present in your life. It may be less intense, less spectacular, but it is still alive. There is contact. There is the capacity to respond. There is interest. There is room to feel without having to be swept away by everything you feel.
Something very different is feeling shut down, disconnected, empty in a way that takes from you, with no interest in what used to matter, more and more isolated. That is not what I call dwelling or new normality. There can be many reasons for feeling this way, and I cannot tell you which one is yours. If that state continues, if it worries you or if it is making your life smaller, it deserves professional attention. I ask you this with affection: do not turn it first into a spiritual explanation. Living peace and shutting down are not the same, and seeking professional help does not interrupt your spiritual path.
When what seemed to be you comes into view
This familiarity can bring something more. If for a long time you stop needing every thought as proof of who you are, some things that once seemed solid may begin to feel less inevitable. They do not disappear, but they become visible. A sentence you inherited and never questioned. An old guilt. A need to be right. A fear that had been speaking with your voice for so long that you thought it was you.
When the background grows quieter, what was mixed together before begins to stand out more clearly, and you can recognize, perhaps for the first time: this is in me, but it is not necessarily who I am. Not because it is bad. Not because it has to be destroyed. Not because a divine part comes to erase a human part. But because now there is more inner space from which to look at it. It is not purification by violence. It is clarity that appears as coherence grows.
And if you ever miss the thrill of the first days, you do not need to judge yourself. There is no less light than before. You simply no longer have to lean out to see it.
From Dr. Zuluan Orion's book Yoga del Descenso · Libro Puerta · Part XII