Seems to me these days there's nothing I want more than to be 'open' to Life. I want to love it, experience it as fully as possible, savor it, be blessed by it and add my blessing to it. It also seems that simple awareness is the key that opens 'me' to this 'thing' I want.
"Simple" should be set in quotes. "Simple" Awareness is woven of many threads. It's only simple as we become weavers.
Blaise Pascal, a wise soul and a great writer, supported himself by writing pamphlets--basically magazine or popular blog posts of his day. He once famously said to his publisher--"Sorry this one is so long...I didn't have time to make it short." Simplicity is a learned skill, and both learning it and practicing it takes time and intention.
Every time we purpose to be aware we see the many things that distract us. The many processes of our 'automatic brain' are a wonder of our evolutionary minds. They enable us to do a pretty good job of navigating life on automatic pilot. The only downside is that being on automatic pilot is the opposite of being CONSCIOUS.
Ah, but it's so natural to be on automatic pilot. It's effortless! Effortless, continual, familiar, habitual--and our brains come with all the wiring already in place to run automatically. But once we taste LIFE we begin to realize automatic life is not what we most deeply want. And what keeps us in the game of cultivating a life that opens to LIFE is Awareness.
So...wanna be deeply happy? Yes! says my soul, even as massive areas of my brain cry, Ow! This is hard--we're not wired to run this way!
And it's true. Awareness Practice rewires our brains. Slowly. And not all that effectively. Our 'Aware brains' will never run as effortlessly or as fast as our auto-brains.
And our auto-brains will never bring us to the peace, wisdom, and joy that Awareness will.
So...it's worth cultivating awareness (slowly, patiently, relentlessly)--the rich and deep kind of awareness that opens us to LIFE. God willing, over the next week I hope to note some of the qualities of awareness, the threads we learn to weave together, so that AWARENESS becomes more natural, more effective, and just plain more fun in our everyday lives.
