And just allowing ourselves to rest in this awareness, this bigger basket that holds it all.Īnd now in one last jump, let’s allow the field of awareness to expand infinitely to allow the mind, heart to be boundless, hugely spacious, as big as the sky or space itself, with no beginning and no end, no boundary, no circumference, no periphery. And any emotional currents, eddies or whirlpools that may arise in the mind or in the heart, accompanied or unaccompanied by images and thoughts, memories or fantasies. ![]() So allowing the field of awareness to expand even further to include thought, the thought stream, the bubbles of thought. Sitting, breathing, feeling, hearing, knowing and why exclude thinking, since it’s going on anyway. So just allowing it all to be present without separation in this moment, and to rest in awareness of the experiencing of it, of it all. And it’s not separate, although we can isolate any feature of it. And we can naturally allow a field of awareness to include of course, not just the sensations associated with breathing or the touch of the air on the skin, but any sensations and all sensations in the body right here as we sit.Īnd so in this moment, with the field of awareness expanded this far, we have sounds and the spaces between sounds, we have the breath and we have the air, and we have sensations in the body. That’s a lot, and it is all happening in this one moment. And expanding the field of awareness whenever you care to, to include the air caressing the skin, the air that is the breath, the air that carries sound, and resting in the knowing of the air and the breath again through the sensations in the body, since it is only through the senses, including mind, that we can know anything. Being the hearing right now, in this moment.Īnd of course if there are thoughts that make their way in, letting them be known because awareness can include the knowing of thought. So resting in hearing, being the hearing, without necessarily creating any distance between a you and what is being heard. So in this moment, resting in awareness, perhaps at first allowing the field of awareness to feature the soundscape, which is as we have experienced over and over again, always here, presenting itself to our ears comprising everything that presents itself in the form of sound and the spaces between sounds. ![]() In other words, no awareness at all, merely obsession or dullness. Or on the other hand, to fall into utter rebellion. Since awareness actually is, and always has been boundless.īut as we know from our own efforts, in minds that have not encountered training and mindfulness, awareness does tend to contract and nucleate around particular arisings, especially events that have emotional charge for us. And then it tends to fixate and either be very narrow, or very self interested and self centered. ![]() We no longer choose a focus for awareness, but allow the field of awareness to be boundless. Since awareness actually is, and always has been boundless. In the sense that we no longer choose a focus for awareness, but allow the field of awareness to be boundless. So the final expansion, if you will, within this framework is to abandon the framework. Or if on occasion we fall into identification and separation into a subject-a me-and the objects I am observing, either inwardly or outwardly, then awareness is capable of recognizing that as well and re-establishing the knowing itself, beyond any separation, beyond any identification, beyond the personal pronouns, beyond I, me, or mine, beyond thinking altogether. ![]() It can recognize and embrace seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching, as well as those activities of mind we call thinking and feeling, and it can rest in a non-conceptual direct knowing of any or all of these aspects of human experience, beyond thinking, without separation or identification. And this awareness can be either narrow or broad, depending on the circumstances it can recognize and embrace any and all sensations within the body, including the breath sensations. Through our practice of mindfulness, we have been cultivating an awareness that can become more and more stable and vivid, especially the more we practice with wise effort and intentionality.
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