The Power of Awareness
Sketch by Bob Schrei
The ground of our practice of SourcePoint is Awareness – with a capital A to emphasize its all-pervading presence, the Awareness that we take so for granted.
Every moment, we are aware. We see, we feel, we taste and touch, smell, think, perceive, observe, remember, we hear, we make choices. Our Awareness is operating always, but our learned tendency is to focus on what we perceive, not on the process of perceiving. We pay attention to and get caught up in those objects and experiences of our Awareness, not the Awareness itself.
Awareness is the common thread that weaves through every activity, every emotion, every belief. Through good experiences and trauma alike, our Awareness perceives, experiences, learns, and becomes conditioned to certain responses.
Through meditation and in our daily life, as we become aware of our Awareness, our focus shifts from the outer circumstance to the Awareness itself. And that Awareness is a universal experience. Everyone who talks, laughs, cries, has opinions, makes judgments, makes mistakes, experiences, learns, denies, every single being we encounter, human or not, shares the same Awareness we experience every single day.
The awareness of that Awareness is a unifying experience. It is harder to stand outside and judge. It is easier to set aside one’s own perspective, conditioned by one’s own experience. And, as we say over and over again, “getting out of the way” is an important ingredient in effective SourcePoint practice. So here getting out of the way isn’t an active exercise. It’s simply the shift of attention from one’s own conditioned experience and beliefs to that presence of universal Awareness within each of us.
Just try spending a day being aware of your Awareness. When seeing, be aware that you are seeing. We take it so for granted. Pay less attention to what you see and more to the incredible fact that you are seeing. When you hear, listen, with intense pleasure, to the sound, no matter what it is, and be aware of your Awareness. And so on. When thoughts arise, realize it is simply your mind doing what your mind does. Awareness is naturally spacious and all-encompassing and…. Its tendency is to fill itself up.
Let your day be a meditation. It’s so perfectly possible, without great strain or effort, because, all you are doing is noticing what is always there, what is always functioning, what is at the core of your being.
When you focus on Awareness, it expands. Or, rather, your awareness of Awareness expands. You become aware of the vastness, the spaciousness, the endlessness of it. You are aware of being held in a vast space of Awareness. In the Tibetan tradition they call it the Mother Awareness and the Child Awareness. From that space of Mother Awareness, your thoughts are like little children playing on the swings. You keep a close eye on them, to make sure they don’t get out of hand, but you let them play.
To become more aware of Awareness is to enhance your skill as a practitioner of energy medicine. The field we work with is vast and sentient, full of subtle nuances and variable frequencies. Again, the common thread, that which notes and observes all phenomena, is Awareness.
Through Awareness, we connect to the Blueprint. Entering into a state of greater Awareness with the intention of connecting to the Blueprint, it happens naturally, without strain.
©Donna Thomson and Bob Schrei 2014