Relaxed Awareness

Right this moment, I see that the limbs of the trees are dark and bare against a bright gray morning sky, yet I can dwell among the jeweled leaves in this photograph. My heart can open to the beauty and sensation of the curving canopy arching over the street, and revel in a sense of wonder and gratitude. Yet I am actually sitting at a computer, typing, aren't I? Feeling the starkness now of damp tree limbs silhouetted against the clouds, I begin to crave a hot cup of tea. These feelings, reactions and observations are the product of mind, my own mind! Patanjali, the author of the Yoga Sutras, speaks of the constant fluctuations of mind and offers a systematic study of human experience through yogic practices that can see beyond these radiating fluctuating waves into the core substance of being.

I live in this contemporary world, that of alternate side parking and washing machines, store bought packaged products of every kind and instant messaging. Yet my goal in this moment, and in my life it seems, is to seek out this substance of being. Sounds completely impossible but in any given moment my own breath can make this available to me. I have to pay attention. The kind of attention is something that I am actively evolving, honing, enabling. Whether through physical yoga practice, or meditation, or deciding what will be dinner, or noticing my husband's breath in the middle of the night, this kind of attention can open the possibility of relaxed awareness and access to being fully present.

Relaxed awareness falls into place naturally when the grip of judgment is loosened, so I am not attaching to outcome or object, and my mind can observe the widest range of details and all my reactions to the details freely. I see the glorious canopy above me, and the stark limbs; I feel the rising spring sap and the cold chill of snow on the branches. Do I attach to meaning? Do I hold tight to a preference of one over another? Must I put values on the sentimental qualities of longing and loss, of joy and rejuvenation? I can feel anything and all of that, yet still be free. This freedom doesn't inhibit commitment, since even that is conditional and within the context arises naturally too. It seems that commitment relates to where I turn my attention (as in a yoga posture I can focus on my ribcage or my feet and change the whole experience). Does this make me dull and monotone, without intensity or specificity? I think not. The water of the self remains responsive to the wildest sea, the choppy whitecaps, the smallest waves, the subtlest ripples in the pond; and with all of this available my experience of life is enormous!

All that is solid melts into breath

The breath has a way of discovering space, just as the air itself seems to find the smallest crack or most enormous canyon. It has been seeming to me lately that my practice and my teaching are growing from this discovery. Directly. My ability to notice the breath, or be aware of it, has encouraged an internal investigation among all my own cells... and this branches out into everything I do.

So when I take a yoga class, I follow directions, just like my students do in my classes. Yet what I experience is my breath slipping under my shoulder blades, no matter whether the teacher says "lift your breastbone" or "press into your heels" or "reach for the ceiling." In some cases there are other sensations, the pulling and twisting, the pressures, and collapses of interior spaces or bones, or muscles, or ideas. I walk on the sidewalk feeling signals from all the points of the body, full of reactive chatter, and the breath quietly expands beneath my ribs, swinging my pelvis just a little this way, and releases my throat as my pelvis quietly swings just a little that way on the exhale...

I am beginning to understand something.
It starts with noticing.
Expands into observing and alertness around what I notice.
Then I sort and contemplate the rising ideas and reactions, eventually letting them all slip out on the exhale.

And I begin to notice that I am understanding something.
This expands into examination and inquiry into what I notice.
Eventually I release what I think I understand and experience my breath quietly slipping between the hairs in my nostrils.

When I can no longer enable my breath to investigate and expand my awareness, I believe I'll be ready to leave this body and try something else.

And so, as usual, I bow to that which sustains me. Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya.

Being: A Balancing Pose of Bones & Breath

Lately I've been balancing in an open space, where ego defines the self and awareness enables no self. It has been hard to rationalize writing in this blog, as though I hold some kernel or seed, acting to share its potential and growth by posting in cyberspace. This tends to lean a little too far towards ego and I lose my balance. Yet I seek experience in my body -- the practice of yoga, the making and eating of meals -- to validate an existence that is totally normal and real and designed around accommodating ego. Then I meditate and sometimes lean a little far into no self, finding a vastness continues to open that is still unfamiliar and surprising.

The temptation to meditate is leading me towards compassionate action as well as withdrawal from the senses. Walking, teaching, studying, interacting, I can operate from vital energies emerging from that vast open space. But I remain an individual ego - opinionated, full of feeling, clutching at experiences and reveling in reactions.

In these days of lengthening darkness, I cherish those boundary moments when deep awareness saturates, and there is no understanding at all of a defined named sort. Dawn and dusk seem to embody this sensation even as the brightness of day and the layered shadows of night thrill me. I continue to revisit the moment in the hospital when my father and I mutually arrived at the boundary between his living and his dying. It was wide, vast, endless and precise. Universal and personal. Everything was present - fear, love, unknown and known, hope, grief, but the deepest sense was vastness and utter connectedness.

So I've neglected the blog. This has also been clarifying since I let go of defining it. I have been keeping a journal of notes that speak in words - telling of experience or observation or feeling or idea. Journal perhaps acting the role of non-judgmental, all-accepting intelligent parent. Journal as wise, kind, compassionate teacher. Journal as interested and disinterested, informed companion. Not much influence on what arises, the blank or scribbled open page.

Shadows in August

The clouds slid across the hills yesterday in the form of shadows fluid and dark. I could see this dance of darkness and light changing the tree and earth surfaces in my view, yet being under the cloud shadows was a different story. The intense heat of the August sun halted and the coolness in the breeze stepped forward. Colors changed, and for a moment there were thoughts of those possible predicted thunderstorms. Fleeting, soundless and insubstantial, the clouds continued moving; tall grasses rustling in the sun. This is how we live, here in the shadow, here in the sun. We notice and we don't notice and each moment is just this.

So it is with the day lilies that open their blooms for one day. Clusters on a stalk promise blooms tomorrow or next week until the day comes when it is the last lily bud on the stalk. The bees find their way to the open blooms, the deer nibble off buds with no care for the bloom that is forever lost to sight. Lilies come and go, clouds shift, shadows come and go. Summer months that appear and beckon on the horizon from mid-winter are here and gone too.

So I am here in this moment at the computer, seeing the shadows move, watching the sun illuminate that particular clump of trees and blooming goldenrod, picking the blackberry seeds out from my back left molar. Not dead yet, no longer a child nor childbearing, seeking still a way to express the love I feel and comfort myself as a human being by sharing this moment in a blog post. Easier just to appreciate the raucous sound of the jays, and the fluttering dance of maple leaves in the sun.

Here Today, Here Now

I am puzzling over the odd illusion that I get things done, that there is an endpoint, that I do something until it is finished. There is great resistance in me over giving this idea up, yet I clearly see it as "an idea." Even in the setting of a goal there is really only the doing. I might finish a meal and wash the dishes but I am not done with eating. I may weed the garden but I am not done with gardening. I may hold headstand for a specific number of breaths but I am not done with headstand.

The lessons of the summer continue with every poppy and daylily bloom.

Living fully within the constraints of this very moment, not reaching into the future, nor grasping at the past, seems to require releasing this idea of "being done." It is not the same as leaving things unfinished, nor does it mean not accomplishing anything, but rather truly letting go of results. I think humans quite naturally construct beginnings and ends for emotional and psychological convenience and to feed the illusion of certainty that we find so comforting. It is a huge shift to loosen my grip on this way of understanding. Once I see it clearly, it seems to have pervaded everything.

Moments of being offer me great freedom from this clutching. In those moments when I can fully be in-the-being mode rather than in the doing-to-get-done mode, there is even greater happiness than from the illusory constructs. But my oh my how I do fight against this! That is where practice makes all the difference. Plodding along, moment by moment in meditation or a yoga session or in the garden, or the kitchen, or with a list, or in conversation, or contemplating my calendar, I can actively see my tendencies and practice loosening the grip.

Wild Raspberries

This deal we make to take human form does not exempt us from the cycle. Just as with the wild raspberries, some dry on the twig, some half eaten by a bird or slug, some flower and never bear fruit, some ripen and fall, some ripen and rot, some get plucked for jam, and as the canes die and the summer storms rage, there are those not yet ripe, those pink and hard, those purple and dropping, those red to perfection.

I do not care which I am, but understand these raspberries: bushes thick, brittle and thorny; berries fragrant from a good distance in the hot sun.

Just as I understand these raspberries, I find myself to be that oriole waiting in a nearby thicket for a safe moment to swoop in and feast.

Separately We Seek & Seek What Exactly?

We meditate and struggle to find awareness. In fact what is being asked or sought? Aren’t we simply asking to open the mind; making the time, taking the time, to cultivate focus in order to cultivate open mind? Perhaps not knowing anything about what that is, and that, in and of itself, doesn't matter.

I think meditation is this gift of time to watch oneself be. To experience being, to find out something about awareness and see reactive mind in action. To see our own habitual postures, attitudes, judgments. To notice and drop the frantic (and constant) grip on thinking, judging, making oneself into something. So scary, and full of judgment cycles, to drop that grip -- until it happens and the world does not collapse.

Why do it? Approach this question of cultivating awareness in order to do or gain what? For a while we imagine there is a goal or specific benefit. Do we want to target and pin down the self as someone or something? To allow for self acceptance and find peace from the constraints of judgment? And just how does that result from this gift of just sitting and observing the self, of training the mind to focus?

Perhaps the simple act of consciously sitting the self down, or walking or laying the self down, with all it's burdens and stories, is enough. This is already the success being sought. The step is the goal.

So maybe by breathing in and saying "breathing in, I am breathing in" we allow space for a subtle structure in which we discover in ourselves that we can cultivate awareness without gripping.