Dear friends, All fall we have been inviting presence by practicing sensing our embodiment in the present moment. This is sometimes called the practice of self remembering. We start with the most basic sense of ourselves as our physical body. And then with practice we discover that we are remembering something far more fundamental, sometimes quite subtle at first. We begin to remember that we beings of presence.
On Monday we focused our attention on presence. We explored the movement from forgetting, distracting, even rejecting, to the present moment meeting ourselves with acceptance and kindness. As we land, as our attention begins to relax into our experience, whatever it is, we notice that our presence, our awareness, our consciousness holds our experience, and is the very presence we long for. Our presence, gentle, subtle touches our experience. We relax, we become curious, we awaken just a bit. Experience begins to unfold, to move. As we welcome this moment we discover that the nature of presence is different from the presence of our conditioned self, the ego. The ego is always restless, grasping avoiding, frustrated, helpless, resisting. This is the root cause of suffering.Presence simply is, simply holds, allowing the essence of kindness and generosity. It is so part of us, so close that we miss it. We get entangled in the struggle of ego. We believe this is the sum total of reality and we unavoidably suffer.
Practicing presence is a gentle practice of relaxing and waking up to what is!
Here is what D.H. Lawrence has to say:
When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us so that we do not know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in,
passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.
No comments:
Post a Comment