Effortless awareness

Take your time to arrive where you are. Just a sense of, kind of turning inwards, a sense of resting back into yourself, back into your experience, your direct experience it. And in particular, landing into your body, landing into your embodied experience of sitting here in this location this morning, sensing the ground underneath you, where your body meets the rest of the world, and sensing all of the other sensations that make up your body. Your breath, feelings of different temperatures in different parts of the body, tension showing up here and there, and the small movements, tingles, fluctuations in the fingers, the toes, maybe elsewhere. And we have in our minds a kind of projection of our body, a kind of sense of our body with its anatomical shape and its function in the world. Not so interested in that in meditation, in meditation. Our body is this realm of experience, this field of sensation doesn’t really have a distinct shape, just descending into this particular space, the space of your embodied experience. And as well as these discrete sensations of temperature, breath, pressure, tension, we can get this general felt sense of the body. The body might be tired, might be restless, it might be tight, might be sort of vague, it might be relaxed. Notice, notice the general state of the body. There may be a word that sums it up nicely and appropriately, or there may not. It’s not to actually pin it down, but to just look in your experience, how is the body? And then how do you know if the body’s tired, if it’s agitated, how do you know what is it in your experience that’s letting you know this? And having really turned towards your experience of body and investigated it a little bit, just really setting a strong intention to really welcome your body in the way that it’s being experienced right now. Letting go of any need for it to be different, any need for tension, to relax, for uncomfortable parts to be more comfortable. Just care for it as it is, love it as it is, not as an object, not as a three-dimensional projection of a body shape, but as this kind of mysterious arising of presence, sensation of experience. Noticing that your body arises in the way that it does without your input. And the best we can do is to welcome, allow and meet it with friendliness, with warmth. And the body will also be reflecting our mood, our emotional state. You might notice the felt sense of the body is flavoured with a kind of vibration of anxiety or a kind of warmth, of joy. We might notice emotions showing up as this or that, sensation in the chest or the belly, a tightness or a movement or a spaciousness. So we can just take the time to meet this layer of experience well. Too welcoming, allowing, making space for our emotional life. This finding out where we are, this opening to the reality of our experience needs to be where we start from, so that we can bring all of ourselves with us into the practice. We can let go of any need to change our experience to get somewhere. It’s more that we’re trying to transform the way that we see experience, the way that we meet it, rather than to have this or that experience. So with this in mind, we can start to tune into the breath. And it’s easy to say the breath, it’s easy to say tune into the breath as if it was a easily definable object. Actually, in your immediate experience, the breath is a whole collection of sensations. There’s the belly rising and falling, there’s the movement of air through the nostrils, and there’s the way in which the breath reaches every part of the body. More subtly, we can feel the breath as a movement that the whole body partakes in. We’re going to move into a more effortless way of attending to experience and to the breath. And the way we’re going to do that is to notice, notice the sense of effort that’s present to whatever degree in the way that you’re tuning to the breath. So without giving much instruction, I’ve just said tune into the breath. And probably there’s some sense of trying to do that, of effort, of control. And what we want to do is relax this sense of effort, relax this sense of control, and notice that actually the breath is there anyway, and it takes no effort to notice that the breath is just coming and going entirely of its own accord. So instead of attention being this kind of flashlight that we shine on a particular region of experience, we can turn the flashlight off and notice that our experience is already sort of illuminated from within. Awareness is already present in a more global, pervasive kind of way. As we relax into this more global awareness, we’ll notice a lot more. We’ll feel a sense of the whole body, the internal senses and the external senses, the emotions, the mind, all arising together. And we’ll probably notice that a more focused attention sort of narrows down this more global awareness, it sort of shrinks things. This is not necessarily a problem, but right now we’re interested in releasing effort, letting go of this kind of habit of attention to draw a circle around something and highlight it. And this habit is very deeply entrenched, so it’ll carry on happening. And our practice is to sort of be sensitive enough to notice when a sharper kind of effort has crept in, we’re trying not to think, we’re trying to sort of hold on to the breath. We’re trying to feel some way other than how we’re actually feeling right now. We just kind of let this trying, let this effort dissolve back into the space of consciousness. There’s a sense in which we’re making a kind of effortless effort. We need to be engaged enough with our experience to notice when this more effortful, tense kind of attention creeps in. And we can notice that it often shows up as tension in the body, often in the face, the forehead, the jaw, maybe the chest or the shoulders. This kind of trying to do something, to be someone, to have some experience. We don’t meet this with any sort of resistance or pushing away. We don’t meet effort with effort. We just kind of hold it in space until its momentum runs out naturally. One of the most helpful ways to hold this sense of effort and tension so that it can naturally just play out and release is to bring a kind of compassion and warmth and friendliness. Compassion for the sense that we need to be somewhere else, that we need to get somewhere to be someone. Compassion for the need to focus on anything. Understanding that that’s effortful and effort is probably something that we have quite a lot of in our lives. This way of practicing can be a refuge, a place to soothe. We can hold the striving in a space of kindness, let it dance around, let it protest and let it eventually fade its own timescale into this natural openness that is actually always present. If we’re able to relax and sink back into something that can arise when we practice in this way, a sense of sort of groundlessness or disorientation without a solid anchor and a job that makes sense to the rational mind, it can feel like we’re not sure what we’re doing. If this sense arises, just notice this is just an experience and we can just hold it in this same compassionate awareness. Compassion for the one who’s disoriented feels groundless. And the kind of other perspective on this groundlessness is freedom, the other way to experience the same kind of thing, freedom from the tyranny of effort. You may feel this in a strong way, or it may be. You can just tune into a subtle sense of freedom, spaciousness. Things feel a bit wider, more open, and just noticing that and appreciating that carry on like this in silence for the last few minutes.