Sitting

At a certain point, perhaps the pinnacle of boredom with life or the pit of despair, or even the height of ecstasy, you may see that all you have been doing, one way or another, is avoiding yourself.

Every activity has been a dodging of who you are. You may have been keeping yourself busy while your life passes you by.

Sometimes you exhaust all avenues and end up with nothing fulfilling enough to satisfy your sinking spirits, nothing real enough to keep you going, nothing convincing enough to overcome the enormous argument that something inside you is having with the way you are living.

Those avenues are all avoidances, beautiful, beguiling and businesslike, and that something inside is who you are.

It knows something that you don't but are bound to find out, even if it is only in your dying moments. It can be put off for a lifetime but eventually you will sit with it.

Perhaps and preferably, you will face it sooner rather than later. You will sit somewhere silently and just let it be.

You will not reach for the TV remote, not get up to work, not drink, smoke or have sex. You will not bury yourself in a book, not clean the house, and not tackle that endless to-do list again.

You will not shop, eat or even listen to music. You will stop talking, stop pushing, stop trying. For once, you will just sit.

Sit with yourself. Let yourself be. Let life be. Do not run away, do not resist.

Do not act on the urge to get going again. Do not. Just sit.

It can feel like hell at first but when you have avoided so much that avoiding feels worse, sitting is all you have left. Then even hell is a welcome relief.

It is the doorway to life that you have turned away from, now opening.

Sitting with yourself is the start.

Discomfort

The more aware you become, the more sensitive you will be, and the more attuned to discomfort you will be, too.

Of course, your relationship with discomfort will then evolve.

When you are unconscious, your discomfort will rule your life. You will act on it without being aware that you are doing so or even feeling it.

You will be identified with and lost in the layer of your being where urges and actions are synonymous. You will also be susceptible to manipulation, deliberate or otherwise, by others, the media, social forces and the like.

Discomfort is part of life and the more accepting you become generally, the more at home you will be with the tides of duality. You will not resist them and you will not be swept by them either.

You will be increasingly centred. The world will carry on around you and you will be the inner silence. The wheel will keep turning and you will be the hub.

From here you will allow energies to move, to build up and release. You will understand discord and euphoria to be different states of the same flow, the same discomfort, and you will attach yourself to neither. You will just watch and allow. You will be free and wise.

The trick with discomfort is to be aware of it first, then to let it go. Nothing lasts forever, or even for very long, so there is no need to panic, fight or try to change what you perceive as circumstance.

Just let it be and let it move through. Immediately as you do, it will feel different and begin to shift. Sooner or later, it will reveal its potential.

See it, sit with it detached from it, and discomfort will turn into transformation.

Watching

Watch yourself. As you go about your day, watch what you do. Be the doer but be the observer, too.

Gradually, the observer will become more prominent until the weight has shifted from the unconscious self to pure consciousness. Watching will put you in touch with presence.

Watch your thoughts. They are not you, although you have identified yourself with them for so long.

They are little impulses of energy, pictures on a screen, mental sounds and words, but they are not your consciousness. They float or flash within your consciousness but you are the container not the contained. You are the observer, not the observed.

Watch your feelings. They are deeper than thoughts but they are still the object when you are the subject. Watch them come and go. Watch them rise and fall, go up, down, left and right.

They are e-motions, energy in motion, but they are not you. They are intense, experientially overwhelming sometimes, but you are the awareness that transcends them. You can enjoy and use them and, through them, know yourself, but you are not their slave.

Watch your habits and learned reactions. Watch your susceptibility to the influence of others, plus the insecurity and self-doubt on which it is based.

Watch the part of you that gets irritable and can be pushed and pulled around by circumstance. See the part of you that seems separate from existence.

Watch more and more, and bring yourself back to watching every time you remember to.

Use opportunities when you have to wait for whatever reason to become more of the watcher and turn 'wasted' time into the most profound spiritual growth.

Watch yourself in everything you do because the one who is watching is the real you.

Surfing

I have never surfed in the sea, so I am speaking metaphorically with no existential authority about the metaphor.

Just thought I would make that clear upfront. If that precludes me from sharing my insight in your eyes, perhaps now is a good time to swim to shore. I am going to take the risk and keep writing.

Writing is, in many ways, like surfing.

You make your way out into the ocean, which is the great universal sea of consciousness. You are vulnerable but, somehow, through surrender to the whole, and through awareness, you are able to stay afloat.

You are alone but all one, both at once. It is not up to you whether you surf or not but you head out and prepare yourself anyway. It’s very likely that sometime you will be in the write place at the write time and a wave will find you.

You know how to surf to some degree, no matter your level of experience, and you are at the same time clueless, also regardless of your ability. It’s paradoxical but creative tension is your territory.

Sometimes something happens immediately, or you even head out seeing beforehand that there is motion in the ocean.

Sometimes there are no swells to speak of, so you wait. You float and feel and let yourself merge with the enormous mystery.

Then, when a wave swells, you spring into action, stand up on your keyboard and, using your skill, instinct, and alertness, and in boundless and humble delight, you ride it home.

Surfing must be like writing in many ways. You can’t predict it, you can’t control it, but you can work with it.

You need all your wits about you but it’s not you who does it. You are always learning. If you think, you fall, so you have to flow. It’s a way of life.

Now and then you find yourself on a crest.