When we cease to try and surrender to awareness, the world takes on a different light…

‘Ceasing to try’– ceasing to be anywhere else but here and now in this moment… sitting in stillness in the quiet and calm of awareness. Nowhere else to be and no one else to be. Sitting in stillness with this ‘choiceless awareness’ is in direct contradiction to the core of our conditioned ‘self’- to be anything less than doing, striving, controlling, imagining, thinking, etc. We are constantly in motion- ever so busy trying to intervene and influence the outcome of our moment-to-moment living. More often than not, our outer measure of doing and acquiring can routinely leave us short of fulfillment… a vacuous and repetitive cycle.

In just being in our own ‘‘breathing space’, the ‘emptiness’ of this mind-body process allows us to simply be where we are- to be ourselves without pretense or expectation to be anywhere or anything else. Just being ourselves- openly & authentically- is inherent to our practice- and allowing our moments in ‘choiceless awareness‘ to flow forward to reveal the light of their truth- reflective and pure- and absent of self-conscious thought, opinion, judgment, etc.

Here where we sit quietly breathing & observing in the middle of our direct mind-body experience, we look for nothing as the witnessing of self-observation reveals what emerges and becomes on its own.  The energy of our intention to simply sit and watch brings forth what shall come to be known in this ‘choiceless awareness‘. Nothing but to be with ourselves, and with whatever comes to be in our just being in the here and now.

With gentle attentiveness and relaxed alertness, we focus in our arisings while remaining aware of their surroundings. To let be, life has an interesting way of breaking into our awareness to reveal the quality of our response to it. In the process of awakening, we merge with refined sensitivity into the act of witnessing or ‘awarenessing”– focused yet expansive as we ‘dial in’ and ‘dial out’ with the dynamic of our conscious arisings. Gentle yet determined, we remember even in our streams of unconscious endeavors to come back again and again to being wakeful, and to seeing how our mind states can be both fuel for our suffering and our happiness.

Today, doing more and having more are strong societal measures of our success, but inwardly we are still rather paupers in the fulfillment of true happiness. The longings of heart still burn deeply in our consciousness, but yet this frontier seems overlooked for the sake of pursuing the conventional and the conditioned. We communicate with such eloquence and opulence of speech, but yet the words often manifest as empty rhetoric. Our relationships suffer as we are so busy tending a field of burgeoning technology rather than the inherently rich soils of shared and collective consciousness. Just being allows us to step back into the expansive frontier of the human psyche. As meditators, we are like “psychonauts” (R. Thurman) exploring and examining the unknown of our expansive minds for the sake of humanity.

The radical shift in our individual consciousness is to be more at home within ourselves… to be sensed, felt, and shared with the collective consciousness of others. The challenges to living more fully, with deeper happiness and less suffering may lie within the depths of our consciousness. It is through the light of awareness that we begin to illuminate and penetrate our life’s obscurities. Just sitting & being may not seem all that important or meaningful- but for many who routinely do- it can be a real life changer.

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