“Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever.”
~Jack Kerouac
Awakening to your true nature means that you realize the absolute truth about yourself. You know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are not the limited, separate person who lacks, strives, needs, and defends.
You realize with every cell of your being that you are the endless peace that includes everything. You know that your true nature is love itself.
You don’t become anything different. The only change that happens is that you consciously recognize what has been true all along. Your attention was just too distracted to see it.
When you know this truth, you realize that you are, and always have been, effortlessly aware and at ease. While you’ve been busy resisting your experience, wanting things to be different than they are, there’s been an undercurrent of okayness with everything that you’ve simply overlooked.
Just take a moment to be still. Can you feel it?
Imagine that your whole life has been played out on a stage. You’re in the audience, maybe enjoying the drama, but you’re able to walk out of the theater undisturbed by it. The deepest part of you has watched your life story play out, but it’s pure. It has never been touched by anything that’s happened.
Knowing this, you’re in the world, but you don’t take it all that seriously. You see through emotions so they don’t grab you. You no longer spend energy defending, denying, or looking elsewhere for happiness. You’re simply here—fully alive in your humanity, fresh and innocent, free and receptive to what life offers.
How do you come to consciously know this truth? It’s revealed in its own time. But don’t wait until the clouds part and grace illuminates your true nature. Orient your whole life to living beyond your limited ideas of yourself and the world. Be persistent in your daily life by inclining yourself toward peace.
1. Be Deliberately Aware
Living unconsciously leaves you churning in automatic habits. You play out conditioning without really knowing what you’re doing or why. It’s an agitated way to be.
The medicine for this dis-ease is to be deliberately aware. Take some time every day to simply, consciously be alive to your present moment experience. It might look like:
- 10 minutes or more of daily meditation where you sit as open space, allowing your experience to come and go;
- Take a breath when you realize an emotion is present and welcome it, especially helpful when you feel stressed, frustrated, or defeated;
- At the end of every day, reflect on how habitual patterns caught hold – what feelings were behind eating that bag of cookies when you didn’t want to, working to get someone’s attention, ruminating about things that make you sad or worried?
Our culture beckons us to distraction and busyness. Whenever you remember, do the radical thing by just being still and aware.
2. Open Your Mind
Become very familiar with the beliefs you hold that structure and resist reality. Then play with letting them go.
What if you didn’t expect anyone to do anything? What if you forgot to believe that you’re fearful and unworthy? What if things are just fine as they are without your trying to control them?
Every day, keep inviting your mind to open…open…open. Let it be clear like the sky. Entertain the possibility that all this thinking is unnecessary.
3. Get to Know Your Body
Many of us live in our heads, consumed by trying to figure everything out. But there is a whole realm of your experience that you’re missing.
The experience of all emotions and unconscious habits includes sensations in your body. While you’re worrying about all the things you need to do, there are places in your body that are tense and contracted. If you feel sad, your body may be heavy, dark, or vacant.
Simply experiencing physical sensations supports you to break through automatic habits. Always include them when you become aware of programmed ways of being.
How do you do it? Notice and consciously experience the physical sensations that appear. When?
- When you realize you’ve been engaged in a tsunami of thinking;
- When you’re consumed by emotion;
- When you’re bored, lost, or confused;
- Anytime.
Open to all of your experience with great awareness. It’s delicious to be alive to what’s actually happening. And, if you stay with it, it brings you home to the ease of pure presence.
4. Don’t Know
How often do you show up like a robot, saying the same words you’ve always said, expecting the same reactions from others? Try this instead.
Show up fresh, without knowing what will happen. Make the space for things to unfold naturally, not as you expect them to.
- Stand before a loved one forgetting any history;
- Be with someone who triggers you with your mind on hold and your heart open;
- Be in a familiar environment, seeing it for the first time;
- Taste, touch, see, and hear things freshly;
- Wake up in the morning and spend a few hours not knowing what you’ll do or say;
- Open to the possibility of experiencing awe and wonder in the simple things of ordinary life.
5. Notice Awakened States
Knowing who you are is the experience of effortless relaxation, ease, peace, happiness, joy, creativity, and fulfillment. But there’s no need to wait. If you tell the truth, aren’t there moments of these experiences that naturally occur in your daily life now?
Awakening is already who you are—whether you consciously know it or not. So the simple act of noticing what’s already true aligns your mind, body, and heart with the source of all, which is life.
As you go through your day,
- Notice, and enjoy, when things go well;
- Recognize when your heart opens in the face of beauty, tenderness, and love;
- Be appreciative when creative ideas appear;
- Surrender your desires and dissatisfactions into peace and happiness.
Just like the true nature of a wave is ocean, your true reality is the infinite splendor of the universe. Remind yourself that nothing is personal to you—it all appears by grace. Then you’ll bow down in gratitude to everything.
What About You?
What is it like to come home to yourself? How do you return? I’d love to hear…
And if you’re reading this by email, please click here to comment and to visit GailBrenner.com.
