Awareness and Our Emotions (Part 6)

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“When you completely accept this moment, when you no longer argue with what is, the compulsion to think lessens and is replaced by an alert stillness. You are fully conscious, yet the mind is not labeling this moment in any way... It is a shift from identification with form —the thought or the emotion— to being and recognizing yourself as that which has no form — spacious awareness.”

— Eckhart Tolle

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When thoughts and emotions are energized, they arise as resistance to the way things actually are unfolding. We experience things through a filter of "I like that" or "I don't like that." This filter is created when we believe we are a separate and limited self, which triggers strategies of denial and avoidance as we try to stop or change or deny reality.  But, as we expand our view and identify with our open, aware essential being, we see that emotions are a kind of echo of the separate limited self view.

So, as a way of understanding and investigating our emotions, it's important to understand that we should not resist them with will power or discipline. By avoiding our emotions, or getting rid of them, or suppressing them, we actually keep them alive. Feelings cannot stand being clearly seen for what they are. 'When we are willing to investigate them in the open space of awareness, where all experience is allowed, we can better see the whole universe of experience in which any emotion is a passing part. From that open view and with more clarity we can respond with wisdom not just reactivity.

Awareness and Our Emotions (Part 5)

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“I would define the ego as a concept originating from the “I am” experience, pure being without attributes, the absolute certitude we have that we exist.

When I conceptualize this experience, I name it “I” or “I am”.

There is nothing wrong with the pure concept “I am”. The ego comes in the moment I say “I am this or that”. The “this or that” superimposes a limitation onto something that, up until now, was limitless.

Francis Lucille”

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As the quote above suggests, when we allow ourselves only to objectify experience into me and you, us and them, seeing ourselves as being separate and distinct from everything else, we create a limitation that masks the eternal and infinite nature of true being. The solution can be as simple, and as challenging, as returning to our essential awareness and remembering that I AM is ever present and without limits.  Pema Chodron's captured this space of open awareness well when she wrote “You are the sky. Everything else — it’s just the weather.” This has particular importance as we grow in our understanding of emotions.

Awareness and Our Emotions (Part 4)

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“Inner peace begins the moment you choose not to allow another person or event to control your emotions.”

Pema Chodron”

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We've been talking about a couple of ways of investigating our emotions and the impact they have on our peace of mind and balance in life.  

On the one hand we can look for the "I" on whose behalf emotions arise. If we take a feeling like sadness, for example, we begin by wondering "Who or what is hurt or upset when I'm feeling sad?" We look to Awareness first and find that it is simply aware of thoughts, emotions, sensations and perceptions as they arise. It is empty of an objective "I" that is hurt or upset. We look to thoughts and sensations and find they they themselves cannot be hurt or upset, so again we find no objective "I" that is hurt or upset. Naturally, then, when this "phantom" self is seen for what it is, the emotions that arise on its behalf have no real function and can dissipate on their own.

On the other hand we can look directly at the emotions themselves as they appear. We quickly notice that they are made of thoughts and sensations that are"velcro-ed" together. The thoughts take the form of the story of "I am sad or upset because of . . . " If we unhook the story from the sensations and remove it or set it aside, just the physical sensations remain. Then, remembering that sensations come and go and since they are no longer supporting a story of hurt or upset, they dissipate naturally. And, what of the story that was created?  Returning to the story, we see it is a network of thoughts, beliefs, opinions and assumptions that also come and go.  When untethered from the physical sensations and unpacked from each other they also dissipate naturally. 

The good news is that there is an "I" that is always present, just covered over when emotions are present -- that "I" is our Awareness and Knowing of experience  -- it is the "I" that is our True Being - Our essential Self. We can rest in the awareness.

Awareness and Our Emotions (Part 3)

“All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present.

Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms of fear - are caused by too much future, and not enough presence.

Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.”

— Eckhart Tolle

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All of us really want to alleviate discomfort in the body by almost any means possible, like shifting our position, rubbing our neck, or choosing medicinal or not-so-medicinal options. But, the discomfort of emotions are different in that the bodily sensations that arise are "velcroed" together with our stories about the them. Emotions are also tied either to the past or the future -- not the present. So, unlike physical bodily discomforts, where we work get rid of them or distract ourselves from them, we need to be willing to investigate and understand our emotions directly for what they are. We have to be willing to invite them into the present moment and, with care and compassion, separate the stories from the sensations. And, since our emotions are really an ally to and serve the Separate Self, our freedom comes from recognizing that they are obscuring our True Self -- our open, aware and peaceful nature. 

Awareness and Our Emotions (Part 2)

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“If we have no peace,
it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”

— Mother Teresa

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Emotions are experienced as thoughts that are entwined with bodily sensations. They are also expressions of resistance to what is going on based either on fear or a sense of scarcity or lack. Learning to investigate the source and impact of emotions on our inner peace and equanimity becomes an important practice throughout our lives.

Awareness and Our Emotions (Part 1)

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“You need nothing to be happy - you need something to be sad.”

— Mooji

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We recently worked with a definition of awareness as being that knowing, space-like container "in which all experience appears, with which all experience is known and out of which all experience is made." (Rupert Spira) We each name this space-like field of awareness as "me." We say "experience happens in me." We also can come to know this awareness as our true self.

This is quite a change from the separate self most of us have been conditioned to believe ourselves to be.  This separate self has become the main character in the stories we create about all our experiences. So, it is important to continue investigating the truth of experience as we get glimpses into our true nature of open awareness. For the next few weeks we will spend time with a sometimes tender, but rewarding area of exploration and insight into our true self by bringing light to our relationship with our emotions.

Mindfulness and Awareness

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““We find common bonds in the shared details of the human journey,
not in the divergent conclusions we draw from those details.”
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— Parker J. Palmer

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Over the last few weeks, we've been sharing insights about awareness and we used Rupert Spira's interpretation of awareness as a framework. He considers awareness or "knowing" as being that "in which all experience appears, with which all experience is known and out of which all experience is made." Many traditions also tell us that this field of knowing is shared by all of us. This seems an important understanding. As the quote above suggests, focusing more on the shared field of awareness than the "divergent conclusions we draw" provides an opening of the heart from which compassion, love and joy naturally arise. It seems then that the intersection between our personal search for "wholeness" and the understanding of shared "oneness" remains a fruitful and skillful investigation.

Meditation and Awareness (Part )

“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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In our daily lives most of us are focused on navigating around and among all our learned and conditioned thoughts and perceptions about experience. The thing we often don't see or pay attention to is the full field of awareness in which all experience appears and disappears.

We've been discussing how that full awake awareness is actually our true self for which we are so often in search. When we are able to recognize and live from our own aware being, we find that the primacy of our preoccupation with external objective experience will fade. When we release our mistaken belief that those objects will last or satisfy our need for peace and happiness, we will find rest simply and fully in the open awareness that has been there all along.

Mindfulness and Awareness

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“Be still. It takes no effort to be still; it is utterly simple. When your mind is still, you have no name, you have no past, you have no relationships, you have no country, you have no spiritual attainment, you have no lack of spiritual attainment. There is just the presence of beingness with itself.”

— Gangaji

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At its essence, we know awareness as our awake, alive sense of being that is present before we decide to dislike what's happening and push it away or like what's happening and cling to it. We begin to know this essential, present awareness when we answer "Yes" to the most fundamental questions such as "Am I aware?" or "Do I exist?"  

We have seen in our exploration of awareness so far that it is both deeply personal and simultaneously universal and impersonal. On the one hand we strive for a clear, truthful view of our direct experience, while mindfully navigating all our learned and conditioned perceptions that often obscure our view.  On the other hand we also strive to be open to a more universal understanding of awareness as the awake, intelligent, object-less, transparent field of pure knowing in which all experience appears and disappears. So, we might say that in its essence and in the silence of being, we are each unique expressions or modulations of the universal consciousness we all share.

Happy New Year 2017

The notion of Happy New Year is interesting when we see that each moment is new. 

Now is always new if we're not looking through the lens of the past that fools us into thinking we already know what's what. Now is always new if we don't escape to any of the futures we imagine.

So, I guess the intention and resolution for now is to remember that the true self we think we're looking for is already and always here. If we get lost or distracted, we can just pause, come back and choose to know it again. From there, as life unfolds, we'll know what's what.

Peace,