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In our practice of mindful awareness, instead of thinking about life, we drop below the level of words into the direct experience of life.
If we choose to bring our practice of awareness to the immediate experience of life in the body, it requires of us that we shift our attention from our usual focus on trying to be comfortable every moment, and instead become curious about our actual experience.
What is amazing and liberating is that as we gradually begin to drop out of our ideas about life into directly experiencing life—sensing life instead of thinking about it—we begin to discover that all this activity is energy. Thoughts are energy. Waves of emotion are energy. Sensations in the body are all energy.
We begin to discover by our own direct experience that our essential nature is this flow, this river of aliveness. We are not as solid as we seem. We are made of energy, a field of energy in all its changing forms. And the nature of energy is to flow; it is by definition alive.
As we practice awareness, we learn to bring a quality of attention to our moment-to-moment experience in which there is not so much demand and not so much expectation. We develop a capacity to meet life with awareness that is spacious and inclusive. We discover that the energies which we have imagined to be so solid, so seemingly permanent, are not separate in the way we have imagined. We begin to experience our bodies as a flow of changing elemental sensations: spacious, solid, warm, cool, vibrating, pulsating.
In the language of the Buddha, this is anicca, change, impermanence. My teacher’s teacher, the Burmese master U Ba Khin, focused his teaching right here at this point. He said if we just notice that an experience is pleasant or unpleasant or something in between, and then—instead of following the story—if we stay with the energy level and follow the changing sensations, we can have a taste of freedom.
By staying with the sensations, breathing with and feeling into them, we can begin to live in the unfolding present. As we relax and live more in the direct experience of life in the body, there can be an unwinding of the accumulations of conditioning in the body.
This brings us to the heart of the practice of awareness in the body: who we think we are begins to loosen up. Just as we discover that the sensations in our bodies are energy, we also begin to discover that anger is energy; fear is energy; sadness, grief… all the waves of emotion, and all the stories are a flow of changing aliveness.
I invite you to take a moment—just now—to allow yourself to sit and breathe and feel the direct experience to which these words are inviting you. What do you notice about your capacity to relax into the moment and feel the flow of aliveness in your body?
Joanna Macy, one of the wise women in our tradition, reminds us that all of our sensations are signs of life, which tell us of our true nature and our deep interconnectedness.
Our moment-to-moment experience of life in the body tells us how inseparable we are from each other and from the natural world. We are made of the same elemental energies as the forests and the hills and the oceans.
What connects us to all other beings on our small planet is so much more fundamental than what may appear to separate us. We are all dependent upon a certain delicate balance of energies. However our views, opinions and life stories may seem to divide us, who we really are always comes back to this elemental level.
When I heard this teaching, a deep loneliness in me was healed: I realized that I belong here—I am made of the same stuff. I began to recognize that at this primary level of reality, I am never alone.
So much of our suffering comes when we lose touch with this elemental connection and forget that we are inextricably woven into the web of life.
Returning to the intimacy of sensing life in our bodies, we relax into a field of changing energy and aliveness, which is always available to our direct experience. We discover that through this entry point, we can rest in our true nature in any moment.
2010 Unpublished manuscript, Julie Wester.
Julie Wester is a member of the Spirit Rock Teachers Council. Dedicated Practitioners’
