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Guided Meditation: Deliberately Initiating Awareness

So each time we sit, it's very helpful to initiate awareness in a deliberate fashion. If you think about how awareness is usually interwoven with all the things that come up in the consciousness—all the attitudes, all the emotions, the concerns—and awareness is simply attending to them. And so, especially in seated awareness, we start in a very deliberate fashion. It's almost like we're going to give ourselves a deep reminder of what the request of awareness is: that we're going to initiate quite deliberately the process that calls forth awareness. We're going to attend to it with intention. We're going to attend to it with a deliberate non-attachment to what arises. And along with that, we're going to attend to it with a thorough acceptance of whatever arises.

It's like we remind ourselves this is not manufacturing what's supposed to happen. It's simply creating a disposition that's available for what's happening. And as we initiate, we invite the positive factors of being that will support the awareness. And this commitment, establishing this as we begin, is sometimes called clearly knowing. Not so much knowing simply as a cognitive process, but including that. More than that, we invite our mental disposition. We invite our emotional disposition. We invite how we're holding the body. We invite how we're letting the breath happen. It's a combination of many factors.

We don't really need to know them and list them and then initiate them. What's very helpful for us is to establish a fertile ground that invites them to arise. And so as we go through the details—the details of posture, the details of breath, the details of open awareness—we engage it all very deliberately. It's like reminding something deep within you that this is a commitment that is part of who you are. It's part of what you are. And we let that commitment do awareness. We let it simply connect to what's happening.

We let it invite a steadiness, an experiencing of what's happening, rather than being lost in thought or thinking up what's happening with the mind in charge, having a running commentary on what's happening. Can we invite the body and the breath into a settledness that starts to soften that disposition of mind that wants to continue its narrative? We're not suppressing it. We're not resisting it. Just inviting the state of being, the deliberateness, and then deliberately inviting awareness of the body.

Noticing how it is. Does some part of the body feel creaky or stiff? And then, like a body scan, starting with where we make contact with our seat, and becoming aware of the lower back. Opening the front of the body, letting the spine lengthen in uprightness and ease. Letting the shoulders widen, like we're opening the heart, available to what may arise. And letting the head, the chin, the back of the neck lengthen. The head is upright. Feeling the deliberateness of this body sitting in the midst of everything that's happening.

And letting the breath happen. With each inhale, an attention that's inviting, maybe even encouraging the chest, the stomach, the abdomen to soften and open and receive the breath. And allowing a pause between inhale and exhale. And as we breathe out, the quality of releasing. And as we tune into this rhythm of breath, can it be deliberate? Can it be steady in a way that there's presence at the start of each inhale, presence in the pause, presence in the exhale, presence in the pause?

It's not an imposition. It's not an assertion of control. It's the simple act of sustaining awareness of breath. And actually, sustained awareness, inviting the clearing. It notices what arises. Notices when the attention stays in the body and the breath. Notices when it gets caught up in thinking or feeling, or some combination of thoughts and feelings.

Whatever happens, it's our being's effort, it's our humanness expressing its aliveness. Can that deliberate attention offer a kind of reassurance? Good awareness is the close ally of being alive. It deeply nurtures that cellular impulse to live. It understands the impulse to think and feel and let the mind get caught up inside.

Can you quite deliberately return to the steadiness of allowing the inhale, and pausing, and releasing on the exhale?

And if the thoughts are constructing a reality, just notice and acknowledge. Then let that awareness return to the senses, physicality, and sensation of breath.

And even if the thinking is tending to draw being up into the head, can the deliberateness of breathing invite it back down into the body?

Noticing Acknowledging Contact and Experience

Oh, there you are.

So this deliberateness of being, it finds its expression in our body often. It has a kind of a centering feeling to it. Sometimes we call it keeping us grounded. And then the very process of staying aware of the breath and keeping the breath soft and deep helps the breath to become an ally in how we're noticing. Is that deliberateness and centeredness, and the kind of authority or trust that it has, is that staying present? Or is the body tightening in some way? Either through fear, aggression, desire, all sorts of ways.

The core teaching is that these are not something that we're doing wrong. These are not qualities of being that need to be suppressed or eradicated. It's more to come into a deep understanding of what it is to be human, that these are human tendencies and that each of us has our own version of them. When they fall into a reactive mode, they make our life mysterious and difficult. When we go into reaction, we don't quite know what caused this reactiveness. And we don't quite know what it is to be reactive. It's just a surge of energy. It has all sorts of assumptions within it.

When we can draw towards that deliberateness, the very same process in the deliberateness can invite what's called clear knowing. Oh, when that happened, I had this fearful response, and my fearful response initiated aggression or aversion. So in our seated meditation, it's a wonderful opportunity for us to discover the subtle details of what it is to embody that deliberateness. It invites a kind of, Okay, this is what's happening. It invites a kind of confident acceptance. Okay, this is what's happening. It's pleasant, it's unpleasant. I'm feeling like there's a sensation of opening to this person. There's a sensation of closing away from this person.

With the deliberateness and the clear knowing, it gives us a sense of agency. And as it does that, something deep in us sort of recalculates. Maybe this is not a matter of life and death that requires a reactiveness that has an urgent immediacy. There's room to pause. Okay, yes, this is what's happening. The noticing and acknowledging become organic. How else would you approach a human life other than just being present for it, and letting what's happening register and be known?

It also invites the very practice of awareness. It invites it as an ally to our well-being rather than an imposition on something within us that's struggling to survive. We're struggling to survive, and then we come along and say, You should be aware. This is not good enough. You're not good enough. What you're doing is not good enough. It offers a different equation, a different consideration. Okay, this is what's happening. Okay, this is the response to it. Okay, this is the behavior that's coming up.

We start to cultivate a very interesting factor for ourselves: the confidence, the trust to relate to life just as it is. We start to create the trust to allow ourselves to have the feelings we're having. Okay, I'm really annoyed by that. And then if we embody that annoyance, it has a teaching. It has a description of existence. It reveals in its clear knowing: What about that is annoying? How in this moment does annoying feel appropriate? What kinds of impulses does being annoyed tend to create within me? And then noticing and acknowledging, they ripen. They become more possible of including more of who we are.

And then often we're quite surprised how generous and kind and thoughtful we are. It comes to us as a surprise that often that very negative emotion, that annoyance, was associated with defending something virtuous.

And then also the knowing allows us to notice and acknowledge the times when we hear some very difficult thing. The surge of COVID^[1] infections in India, and the lack of medical capacity to treat them. Something in us is hurt by that. Something in us feels connected to the human race in all the countries of the globe and doesn't want others to suffer. We feel it, and we discover, often to our amazement, our kindness, our concern. And then we hold all of that up: our instinctive kindness and our contractions.

In our deliberateness, it becomes less idealistic. I'm practicing awareness to be pure. I will be unsullied by the stuff of the world. In fact, we discover, Oh, this human existence is so multifaceted. There's so many ways we're all responding. I don't know if we could say we forgive ourselves and we forgive the world. I don't even know if we could say we accept ourselves and accept the world, until we also accept the turmoil of it all. Feeling pain by the lack of medical supplies in India. Feeling grateful for something inspiring that you read, for some exchange that you had. Feeling uneasy by something that happened in your life.

This kind of deliberateness that each period of meditation asks of us... the deliberateness that it asks of us moment by moment. Can we stay close to that? Can we find it in the simple activities of our daily life? Can we watch it resonate and respond to what arises in our daily life?

And this is the quality of shraddha^[2], confidence and trust. It's not that we know we're right, or that we have a mastery, or a compelling agency. It's more that we're learning to be part of that. In our awareness, we initiate something, and as it blossoms, it reveals, it expresses liberation.

And as we engage in this way, what comes up for us starts to appear more as a teaching. Even our own reactiveness. Hmm, look at the urgency with which I got caught up in that. We can feel the depth of the conviction, the determination of it. And even though we might not approve of it, we might find it's harmful for ourselves and for others, we can have some compassion for it. And we're not so surprised when it appears that others are having their reactiveness.

So this sense of deliberateness that invites noticing and acknowledging, sometimes it can just be almost factual. But if we keep inviting it, we start to see the thought patterns. We start to see the emotionality of our responses. We start to see the unexamined insistence of a reactiveness. But we are also inviting them into awareness. Awareness is becoming our ally. Awareness is becoming how we will live, how we will nurture this life.

Okay, thank you. Enjoy your day.