Relaxing into awareness

We can begin to become aware of a bit more of our embodied experience. And this happens in a couple of ways. We can send attention to different places, different aspects of our experience, and we can just sort of relax into a wider awareness — like the difference between focusing visually on something and your peripheral vision. Sometimes the surveying of the body with attention can help to establish that peripheral vision, peripheral awareness, a bit more deeply. So notice your toes and your fingers. See if attention can hold them both at the same time — all four feet and hands — sensing the movements of energy, the tingles, the sensations in these parts. And then just doing a bit of a tour of the body and finding the areas with most and least tension. It might be easier to find the areas with most tension. And then the areas with least tension — you might have to check a few places: the cheeks, the thighs, maybe the palms of the hands. Notice the felt sense of tension when you encounter it. It could feel like a kind of pulling, or a pressure, a sort of shrinking. And relaxation feels like just an absence of this — a spaciousness, an openness, a pleasant blankness. So, having brought some deliberate, more focused attention to the body in different ways, see if you can rest back into this wider awareness. And it’s not contradicted by focused attention — just like when you’re looking at something, you can focus on one thing and still take in everything else. We can drop all intentionality from where focused attention goes and really pour ourselves into this wider awareness. One way we can think of attention is kind of in the same way that tension in the body is this pulling, contraction, shrinking in a part of the body. In a way, attention is a kind of shrinking — a pulling, a contracting — of awareness, of consciousness. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We need tension in the body to move the muscles and do things. And we need attention in our consciousness to do certain things as well. But as we relax into this softer, wider awareness, attention can be less pointed, and it can feel like the sense of the body becomes a little bit less body-shaped. Different regions of the body, with different sensations, sort of swirl in and out of being known — being met by awareness. Right now, what we’re trying to do is lessen the extent to which attention hides this wider awareness. When attention is very — I don’t know — spiky, very effortful, it tends to hide this peripheral awareness from us. And we can relax attention back into awareness. Attention will still flow from this to that, and we don’t need to harness it and tell it to be here and not there — not for this practice, anyway. Maybe we can also sense that in the wider awareness, in this peripheral awareness, there’s a kind of ease and a sort of transparent quality — a kind of agenda-less quality. In our practice we’re often trying to be aware without judgement. You can notice that awareness itself is already free of judgement. It’s the movement of attention that creates objects — that spurs judgement, labelling, and agenda — complexity. Awareness is free of all of this by itself. It’s just the kind of background illumination behind all experience. And as such, we don’t need to try to stop judging, to stop labelling. We can actually just rest back into this consciousness — this sense of consciousness that is already kind of prior to all of that. It’s possible that at times, resting into awareness like this becomes a bit vague, a bit fuzzy — a little bit like we’re resting back into a nice but disconnected place. And if this happens — or when this happens — it’s just like we need to turn up the brightness on this awareness. It’s not so much that we need to focus here or focus there, but to tune in more clearly to this sense of knowing, the sense of illumination — the light by which the body is known. Tune into the body as a whole space of experience and let it be vivid, let it be bright. This doesn’t so much take force, it doesn’t take effort — it takes a kind of engagement and interest, the willingness to be here. So we’re navigating this path where, on one side, there’s the tension of effort and focused attention — which we’re trying to relax when it arises, resting back into awareness. And on the other side, there’s a kind of vagueness or dissociation that can arise. And we apply more wholeheartedness, we brighten the presence. So we navigate between these two poles and find the middle path, which can allow this sense of awareness to deepen, to open more, to become more expansive. When we tune into awareness and find it to be free of judgement, to be all-embracing, we notice that judgement requires a kind of distinguishing of this from that — slicing up of experience into objects. This is something that attention does, and will keep doing while we’re practising like this. But we can sort of watch it from a different level — from a level without that slicing and dicing and labelling and categorising. So we can see how the mind creates objects. Attention moves here and there and distinguishes this from that. That doesn’t need to be mutually exclusive with this awareness — it doesn’t need to take away from it in any way. Although awareness itself can’t judge, it can be infused with kindness, compassion, warmth, open-heartedness. This is interesting and important. Judgement requires this creating of objects. But kindness can just be there in the fabric of awareness — in the way that everything is met. It’s a simpler and more natural quality. And it’s not like we have to put kindness there — to find kindness and then dissolve it into awareness like a sugar cube into a cup of tea. It’s more like we just pick it out — like it’s already there. Almost like a certain frequency that we can just become aware of. It’s not an object. It’s not here or there. It’s not this or that. So we just encourage kindness, love, compassion — these are all just different flavours of the same kind of thing — encourage these qualities, this quality, to be the ground of experience, so it holds everything. So awareness and love are sort of mixed, like water mixed with water. This isn’t love in the sense of really liking something. It’s a kind of deeper, more unconditional sense of love — Love. So we just rest in loving awareness, relaxing the movement of attention and affirming this brightness of presence and this willingness to show up. We’ll just practise like that for the last couple of minutes.