Awareness is always right here and now. It is immanent and expansive, yet it often alludes the untrained mind that wanders discursively from one thought stream to another chasing narrative that wraps itself around our imagined and projected realities. To truly be aware requires some degree of effort, stillness, and calm. Even under stable and focused conditions, we may just catch a glimpse of it, no less get a sustained look, even though it may be entirely out in the open. To clearly see it, we must be attentive, alert, curious, and motivated. Grounded in the present moment, we invite awareness silently and skillfully regardless of what we are thinking, feeling, or doing.

It is the essence of pure awareness that allows for a shift in our relationship to what we are experiencing. It is this shift in relationship to our present moment experience that gives us a greater degree of freedom in our attitude and in our actions in any given situation. In our practice, we come to discover awareness to be larger than our perception or sense of what we are experiencing. There is the space here to hold all we know and don’t know openly and freely. Events in the expansiveness of our awareness arise and fall streaming without judgment- and without attachment or aversion. States of mind and body simply need not define us. We need not be our anger, fear, pain, etc. 

It is our relaxed alertness that gives rise to awareness at the moment we initiate contact to events of mind or body as they are happening and as they are. It is this form of meta-cognition- our awareness of awareness- that frees us from “personalizing” the events we are consciously experiencing- even if it is just for a brief moment.

We all have the capacity to bring awareness to whatever is happening, to moments of conflict and to moments of harmony, and to moments so neutral we might not notice them at all. In each moment, we can examine for ourselves whether in bringing awareness to that moment, whether or not it affords new and larger ways of seeing and being with what is. Here and now, the gentle observer may meet the world in new and more expansive and appropriate ways by embracing it fully. It is this willful intention to embrace what is and then work with it that takes great courage and presence of mind.

Present moment awareness is coming back home to ourselves. It is mindful intelligence– the knowing and the wisdom of our essence as human beings. Remembering and resting in awareness, there is space to let go and to let be over and over again. Mindfulness practice opens us up to our awareness, and the devotion to continue with regularity sustains and refines our inner capacity for it. Here and now, we can see our thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations liberate themselves. It is in this freedom that we can meet anything and everything with greater openness. We can hold the challenges we face now with greater fortitude, patience, and clarity.

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