Centre everywhere, circumference nowhere
You may have heard of the app from Sam Harris: Waking Up - a meditation app, but so much more with podcast style interviews, content focused series, guided practice and lectures.
I really like it, tho using it less so than the first year I got it I admit. I love the daily prompts for reflection - this was yesterday's:
"Real meditation is not a state of mind, it's the recognition that every experience is indivisible from consciousness itself"
To me it says, in short, from the point of conscious awareness, there is no division or seperation - but a seamless unfolding moment to moment.
What I’m increasingly noticing is everything I experience — thoughts, emotions, body sensations, sounds, even confusion, doubt etc. — is not separate from awareness itself.
No matter what arises in the external environment it already inside this awareness of mine.
Why does this matter?
Well, from this point I am only ever reacting to my inner experience of the outer environment - my interpretation.
Any agitation or discomfort, challenging thought or emotion - yes, they may be triggered by the external, but I am only ever reacting to my percpetion, my mind, my inner world.
Nothing is ever “happening” outside of my awareness.
Still, why does this actually matter?
From this space everything is happening in me and not to me. This was a powerful shift for someone who regularly played the victim card, blaming the hand I was dealt and everything out there. This is empowering as I began to see I have control over my inner world and can work to shift my percpetion of twhat’s happening out there.
From here - where everything is unfolding in my own awareness - there is real tangible evidence of being in the flow with how things are - not pushing things away or striving for them to be how I want them to be. This is not some far away state that you have to work towards, flow state then is our natural state - it’s just underneath the constant push and pull of the mind.
From this space I can see that I don’t need to identify with the contents of my experience & it does not define me. If I am the space in which all of the content is arising - I see & experience it is constantly shifting and changing, ever evolving and this means so am I. I need not create unnecessary stagnation of the flow by holding onto things or judging them or resisting them.
And finally from this space, I can take off the mask. The different ways in which I show up to different situations because I think a different version of me is required to fit or be accomodated, is disolving, because there is no seperation, rather a seamless moment to moment experience inviting me to simply be all in.
So meditation - the act of paying non-judgmental attention, being fully alive to our experience - can be the practice which dissolves the barriers that the mind has created that inhibit our access to this ever present flow.