All of us on the spiritual
path have used meditation or yogic techniques to try and change our experience.
And those tools are great when they are used with a specific intention to
create more freedom, bring healing, and balance. But something in us still
seeks, sensing that there’s more than that.
We are seeking the Real. To
know ourselves as what we truly are, which requires us sometimes to let go of
all our fancy techniques and just Be. From Being we can discover the Real.
And how do we do that, how do
we “just be?” Sounds impossible to the mind, but is actually quite simple. The
doorway to Being, to a pure experience of this moment, is something called
Appreciation.
Here’s a meditation: Wherever
you are, just look at what’s around you. The table and chair you may sit at,
appreciating the work that went into making it, how many different people may
have touched it or contributed to allowing it to be here.
Feel the quality of the air,
the temperature, and appreciate how that feels. How nice it is to feel warm, or
if you are outside, how refreshing it is to feel the crispness of the outdoor
air on your face.
Look to nature, and
appreciate how miraculous it is that everything appears as it does – how a tree
just knows how to be a tree. How a daffodil just knows how to bloom into a
daffodil. As if there’s a mysterious intelligent force calling it all into
being.
We may be able to dissect it
and see the genes that cause it to look that way, but we’ll never know why or
how. Appreciating that mystery at the heart of Life is as close as we can come
to touching the truth of it.
Now just sink into it, give
yourself over to that mysterious force and appreciate how your appearance here
is also a miracle beyond comprehension. How is it that there is a body with
someone called “you” in it to even think these thoughts, see through these
eyes, and take in this unfathomable mystery?
Suddenly Life becomes so
beautiful, the heart opens, and we experience union with All. We are all
expressions of the same mystery. The same intelligence that guides the blooming
of the daffodils guides our own life. We just have these things called minds
that spin elaborate stories and assign meaning to things causing us to forget
the perfection and mastery that is already at work within us and everything.
By just sitting and
appreciating the beauty, the miraculous, and dropping our compulsive need to
try and make this moment into something that suites the storyline we tell
ourselves, we can fall back into harmony with that perfection again.
It returns us to that
child-like state of wonder that so many of us loose in the process of “growing
up”. It’s how we reclaim our innocence again, by just being willing to let each
moment touch us with its own gifts, whatever they might be, and allowing those
gifts to inspire in us whatever actions we should take next.
For example, you wake up in
the morning, appreciating how it feels to be relaxed and rested, noticing the
sensation of a full bladder, appreciating how amazing it is that the body can
communicate that to you, and allowing that to inspire your action to get up and
go to the bathroom. Then you might notice some hunger and know that it’s time
to eat.
Anything that you are meant
to do will come to you out of each moment. If you are doing your finances and
notice that the things you would appreciate doing you don’t have the funds for
in this moment, then that may inspire you to work on ways to increase your
income flow.
Another way to think about
innocence is the absence of fear. Stress is a byproduct of fear. Fear of
failing to meet our own and other’s expectations. When we live inspired by the
moment in this way, there’s no room for fear, because fear is generated in the
mind based on thoughts that are only projections of an imagined reality.
Living in alignment with
actual Reality – which is just whatever is happening right now, minus the story
we tell ourselves about it – allows there to be peace and creativity flowing
into endless solutions for any perceived problem that may come our way.
It’s no use trying to stay in
this “state” of pure Being, rooted in the moment because that again would be
the mind trying to control our experience, trying to escape the feelings of
fear and insecurity that come from believing the thoughts in our mind. The key
is to stop trying to do anything and just appreciate what is, as often as we
remember to.
When painful emotions come
up, just appreciate those flavors, that you have the ability to feel at all,
and welcome them as gifts. Welcome your hate and resistance as a gift, and let
those experiences inspire in you the actions that will allow you to love and
know yourself more deeply.
This is how we come out of
the spiritual ego and really begin to Awaken to the essence that we are, which
is unnamable, and beyond any distinction of spiritual or un-spiritual. It’s
just Real. We can know ourselves as that, as what is Real by just appreciating
what already Is.
Deep Peace and Miraculous Joy
to you, wherever and however this moment finds you.
~Jessica Anne Agnew
