RESTING IN AWARENESS

(On my way to write this entry, I had to practice what I was planning to write about. For some absurd reason known only to the demigods of the blogosphere, I was unable to access Blogger as I have done for, now, literally, years. The cybergod, Google, kept stepping up and intervening, demanding email addresses and passwords that had gone unused for more years than I could remember. And evidently didn't. So I got tied up in one of those infuriating back-and-forths involved in resetting user names and email addresses and passwords. It you're reading this, you surely know what I am talking about).

But here I am. Or I should say, anyway here I am, perhaps a better man for the experience because it sorely tested my ability to rest in awareness. In fact, if I must confess it, it not only tested, it found the limits of that ability--and fairly easily transgressed them! For a few moments, I surrendered to an attack the screaming heebie-jeebies.

What I was about to write was a brief entry about the experience--the goal!--of "resting in awareness." It is, when I manage to achieve it, that moment when all thinking, all judgment and emotion, all ego and all past and future fall away and I'm left in a state of pure contemplation of what-is-now.

The path to that experience is long and easily distracted. It is also fortunately, after years of practice, a familiar one. My companion along this path is, naturally, for me, the breath. The "resting" part comes with the relaxation that accompanies a sustained awareness of the outbreath--the full length of it. For a body filled with the tensions of long-held attitudes and the daily stresses of a life lived in the contemporary world, it is a long and sometimes arduous process simply to let go.

The "attention" part, its partner, comes with the mind-sharpening inbreath--again, the full length of it. I watch every moment of its progress as it permeates the body, asking it to awaken even the remotest molecule until it seems to tingle with the energy.

When I'm successful, the whole body-mind feels fully alive, alert, attentive. With time, patience, and persistence I find it a simple (but not easy!) matter to bring the two together: breathing in, breathing out.  "Resting" in "awareness".

This can take time, but I have found that the process I describe can also be condensed into a millisecond, on demand, when a flash of anger rises on the instigation of some insignificant event; when grief overwhelms; or pain stabs. It helps to know that resting in awareness can help in such a circumstance, and sometimes even heal. The hard part, when suffering arises and threatens to block out everything from my mind but its own reality, is to remember this simple truth.

(Case in point: my first paragraph, above!)