At some point along the way, we may become aware of a call to set aside the practices, teachings, and techniques, for just a moment, and rest. Something else is emerging, a longing to fully participate in the miracle of life that is already here.
A longing to stop doing, to stop trying to become a better person, to understand, accept, transform or heal; to stop trying to be at peace, and open to the completeness of this moment as it is.
It is a bit groundless here and can feel disorienting as we are so used to doing, interpreting, getting somewhere, and resolving something. Attending to our projects. Fixing ourselves. Remedying some fundamental flaw in what we are.
In this new environment, we become more curious about the space in and around our thoughts and emotions, rather than their content. Our center of gravity shifts from the contents of awareness to awareness itself. Awareness becomes foreground and contents become background. The bottom drops out from underneath us, as well as the top and sides. We’ve arrived home, but it is not the home we thought.
Our orientation shifts from healing and transformation – from getting from “here” to “there” – to resting in our true nature, in a compassionate tending to reality as it is, oriented in curiosity and the love of being alive. In some strange way, we sense that we are already healed, already awake in the immediacy of this moment. But how could this be?
We become aware of a primordial sort of trust in ourselves and in life. Nothing need be cultivated or generated, shifted, or transformed. Not for right now.
To stay with this much openness requires a new level of friendliness, kindness, and compassion. Without it, we’re not going to be able to practice intimacy with the vulnerability, explore the unknown, and stay with the groundlessness of having no reference point other that awareness itself.
Inevitably we will notice that we have left the freshness of now and traveled into past or future, images, memories, daydreams, and fantasies; it can feel somewhat like falling down a rabbit hole. But like Alice in her journeys into Wonderland, things are not as they appear.
When you notice that you have fallen, you could get curious, become fascinated with what it is like to become distracted and the gloriousness of even that… to touch the mystery of lost and found, and very gently return into the spaciousness of now.
Poster art by Tom Masse - http://amzn.to/2Epr2KZ
My next event is a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO.
