I have spent the last few years exploring different techniques, and now it seems time to leave the more elaborate tools – for a while, at least – and go back to simplicity.
Much of that is what I have written about regularly here….
Allowing and being with experience, as it is, with kindness and heart. Noticing resistance to experience, and impulses to hold onto it, and allow that too with heart and kindness. Noticing any content of experience – including pain, resistance, impulses, a sense of doer, a sense of observer – and allow it all as it is, with kindness.
Noticing the symptoms of beliefs. Noticing the belief. Noticing what happens when the story is taken as true. Noticing what may happen if it is seen as just a story, an innocent guide, with freedom to use it or not as seen helpful or appropriate. Noticing the validity in its reversals.
Noticing attractions and aversions. Noticing the qualities over there – in the wider world, in others or in the past or future – there is a draw or push towards. Noticing those qualities already here now. Feeling it. Seeing it. After a while, finding a genuine appreciation for it, already here now.
Noticing the symptoms of beliefs, and then the – often very slight – fear behind it. Noticing how there is an attempt to find a sense of security and safety by resisting the fear and going into beliefs, into taking stories or images as true. Noticing what happens when that fear is recognized, felt, allowed as it is, with heart. Noticing how the impulse to go into beliefs falls away. Noticing the sense of coming home.
Noticing what appears substantial and solid in immediacy and take a closer look. Noticing how the sense of substance comes from an overlay of images, of labels and interpretations of something as substantial. Noticing that the pure perceptions, and the imagined overlay, are awareness itself. Ephemeral. Insubstantial. The play of no-thing appearing as something.
Noticing what appears most as I. For me, the doer/observer located in the head area. Noticing that the sense of an “I” is content of experience, as any other content of experience. Noticing it is living its own life – thoughts, decisions, actions, all already happening on its own, on its own schedule.
Noticing the overlay of images. The overlay of labels, interpretations, stories. Noticing the effect of taking some of it as true and substantial. Noticing the effects of noticing it all as happening within my own world of images.
Noticing what is. The awake no-thing all happens within and as. The field that is free to show up in any way it does here now.
Of course, these are also tools in their own way. Reminders. Pointers. But there is a sense of simplicity around them. Less contrived.
And that itself is a reminder. These tools feel less contrived because they point to something that is not clearly recognized here yet. When there is more familiarity with the terrain they point to, these tools too may feel a little contrived. Or not. Who knows.
……………..
outline….
- letting go of techniques
- good for a while
- then let go
- only the most simple pointers / reminders….
- notice symptoms of beliefs
- allow experience as is, w. heart
- notice what appears substantial as what it is
- notice what I am