Nondual awakening is a jump for sure, a transition. And no matter how thin or diminished was the egoic operating system beforehand, when it’s gone it’s the establishment of a new way of being. But in practice it can take a while for the new Awareness OS to penetrate every level of being.
Even after the awareness nature is established, it can still take time for the body-mind to adjust to the new holistic perspective. One’s behaviour adjusts and normalises to the orientation of the boundless being instead of the narrow needs of the ego-self. Old habits driven by grasping and fear fall away after awakening but the residue takes time to disperse. Relationships, life situations, occupations, preferences, etc. All these are woven into the personal constructed world that the ego built, that the awakened Self inherits.
So there’s often a post-awakening reckoning that must unpack. It’s a bit like inheriting a house that was occupied by someone else. It’s full of the artefacts of their life that you’ll not want to keep or be able to live with. In time you make the house your own – bit by bit – by clearing out the unwanted and bringing in what resonates for you.
So post-awakening integration or embodiment is something like the process of awareness progressively inhabiting all that constitutes the manifest human being.
Another way of looking at this is that post-awakening there can still be areas of experience that are ‘excluded’ from one’s boundless nature. These are hangovers from the egoic tendency to divide and separate experience. But post-awakening these exclusions tend to present themselves to the always-on awareness that you are, to be seen and thus included as also Self.
It’s this loving, accepting embrace that includes everything that it knows and experiences that leads the way from initial abiding awakening to full Unity Consciousness.