awareness

I recently received a comment from someone who isn’t quite as big a fan of A Course in Miracles as I am.

Hopefully… if we all look a little more closely at what we say and what we do (ultimately… at who we are)… we can all continue to learn and grow.

:-)

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“Thereof we cannot speak, whereof we do not know!”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Doesn’t sound too difficult, right?

Simply put:

If you don’t know about it, don’t talk about it!

Of course, that means most of us can’t talk about ourselves… because we don’t ever really pay attention to what’s going on.

We may pay attention to what we think about what happened… but this isn’t quite the same thing  :-)

When you really get this understanding, it will allow you to really take your meditation and your life to a completely different place (yet remarkably familiar).

So what does it mean to truly pay attention?

Awareness, meditation, mindfulness

So how do we really take a closer look at awareness?

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“I take concentration power to be one of the three core skills that constitutes mindful awareness!”

-Shinzen Young

We’re coming down to our last couple of posts in the 101 Proven Tips for Powerful Meditation series.

Even though we are nearing the end of the series, we have some very important information to cover… we must stay focused!

Focus (or concentration, or Specificity of our senses) is actually our topic for this post.

The world can often be rather vague… advertising pulls our attention in multiple different directions simultaneously… and the way we’ve been trained by our schools usually doesn’t give us any more ability to truly focus…

Moving through life can often seem uncertain and a bit blurry…

out of focus, meditation

If, however, you have been reading and playing with these tips, then you already know that it is very useful to let go of distraction… and now that you have let go of your distractions, you have already started to build your power of focus.

Learning to sharpen your focus can be one of the most valuable choices you make in your life… the skill of focus is a crucial benefit to any activity!

But What Do We Mean By Focus?

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This was one of my first posts that I felt really defined the site…

It hails back to December of 2007.

A2… Secrets of Mindful Relaxation

In that post, I discussed the core of mindful meditation… which also happens to be the core of virtually any skill you want to develop.

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Awareness and Acceptance are the core of bliss…

That’s the simple version… the more you develop your awareness, and accept your experience, the more your experience will transform into something magical, something that defies description… but for the sake of simplicity, we will describe it as bliss.

Much of day to day experience is serving primal drives with elaborate masks. We are social creatures…and as such, a large portion of our communications and other actions are geared toward achieving greater social approval. Big cars, big houses, and flashy clothes are all frequently used for greater social validation. Our consistent social behaviors are geared toward this as well: more talkative people get to make lots of friends and get their validation that way, while more aloof people get to appear ‘above it all’ or ‘out of reach’.

Social maneuvering is the enemy of relaxation!

With awareness, we can begin to notice these behaviors in ourselves. With acceptance we can notice our behavior without judging ourselves harshly for it. The most important part of your internal experience is the feeling… the physical sensations in and around the body. Be mindful of the internal images and internal dialogue as well, but keep in mind how these are leading the feelings, or being lead by the feelings. Without awareness, images, words, and feelings can become jumbled together… which leads to more unpleasantness of the experience… a greater degree of suffering. Awareness allows us to detangle what is going on internally, and thus better appreciate or alter our sense of self, and therefore our reality…

If you clean the windows occasionally, the world looks different!!!

Acceptance allows us to allow. The true unpleasantness of ‘negative experiences’ does not come from the experience itself, but from our resistance to it. If you begin to play with relaxing both mentally and physically, you will get a visceral experience of the flow of your life.

Keep in mind that acceptance doesn’t mean you can’t take action to change your situation… in fact once you begin to reduce/eliminate the resistance in your mind/body (it always feels like mental or physical tension to me… having one usually means both are present), you will find that you can change your situation much more quickly and efficiently.

Once you accept your experience of life, it becomes easy to change!

Formal practice (sitting meditation) can really help, but isn’t required. The best opportunities for this are already present in your life. What really annoys you? Who is it that you can’t stand? What do you see, hear, and feel internally when you encounter that which you dislike? What would it be like if you begin to bring a little more awareness and acceptance into your experience?

When you bring a little more meditation into your life… life begins to become your meditation!

keep smiling,

Ben

P.S. If you haven’t signed up already, get your free e-course in time for the new year!!!

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