Awareness Meditation Instruction: Introduction
The essence of this awareness meditation is training your mind in the ability to let go: allowing whatever arises within your mind to simply arise without blocking or grasping at what occurs— just to remain aware and awake for the given period of time that you have decided to practice. This is not blocking out the world, but it is learning not to fixate, which is the cause of much pain. The ultimate result, an open, spacious and relaxed mind, can be achieved by anyone, but the mind will trick us as we progress due to fear and habit. The key point here is not to improvise the instructions, which have been perfectly transmitted to us through the centuries.
Generally, going back to when we were children, we have been strengthening mental patterns of clinging to things and ideas, that we feel gives us security. Fundamentally speaking, we like pleasure and dislike pain, we tend to react to what we perceive and think with acceptance and rejection. The unseen habitual patterns of clinging to what we like and wanting to eliminate what we do not like entangle us in an unending struggle in our everyday lives and cause us unnecessary pain. When we begin to look into this mental process we begin to see our very old habitual patterns which is like lighting a lamp in a room that has been dark for a long time: it all becomes clear. In some sense, giving rise to awareness of habitual patterns can be uncomfortable at first, but we quickly begin to see how much of life we have been missing and our daily experience naturally becomes more brilliant and enjoyable as we learn to allow a natural flow to occur.
Key Point
- It is important to follow the instructions without changing them to make ourselves more comfortable
