So I’ve started to bring more curiosity and openness to how I wake up. What thoughts am I first aware of? Do they come with or cause any emotional affect in the body? Or am I driven to thoughts to distract myself from some emotional discomfort already present in the body? And whatever I notice, can I meet it with equanimity, just allow it without any resistance, agenda, or need for it to go away or be other than it is?
Meditation is ultimately about dropping as much of the framework or understanding as we can, and beholding directly the mystery of existence. The more we shed our ideas about what the world is, the more intimately we can encounter it.
Writing about it now makes it sound much more dramatic than it was at the time. It was special, but also so utterly ordinary. Life was just happening as always, only without all the extra noise—the stream of thoughts constantly objectifying experience into solid and separate things. The story of separateness. The narrative is so deeply embedded in the noise floor of our experience that we don’t even hear it anymore. Until it drops away.
Our dominant culture in the West seems almost devoid of ceremony. If there is a ritual, it would be in unboxing an Amazon package. We gulp our coffee. I sit in Zazen, too often, not in reverence for the eternal position, but as an item to check off on a daily list of them. The connection to the eternal, the collective wisdom of our ancestors, is frayed.
I feel like I was placing my faith in spiritual teachings and teachers, trusting that they had knowledge or insights that I needed, all the while overlooking my own inner wisdom as to how I should actually live my life.
This far-off idea of awakening, with its promise of everlasting peace and fulfillment, was distracting me from waking up to my life as it is.
I now understand awakening as a process of coming more into reality.