…being open to releasing our hold on habit-patterns of the mind, allows a broader picture to show itself.
In this three part series, Henry writes about the analogues to awakening. If you missed last week’s post, click here to read part 1 in this series.
Analogues…
Getting into the body and learning to relax, finding hidden tension patterns and having them release – that can open up new peace, energy, and new ways of being, experiencing, relating, as a more constricted experience within the body dissolves, and our sense of self expands more broadly. We discover that our view was too limited — and there is more in us than we realized. We were wrong about our limits, our boundaries.
Related, there is work on the emotional level. We may discover zones of resistance, or blocks on the path to peace. Through gentle persistence in allowing them, and perhaps guidance from professionals, these can open up and lead us to new vistas of self-forgiveness, forgiveness of others, and new love for life itself, and for our hearts which are intrinsically pure, and for others, whose hearts are also intrinsically pure. We may slip into a world where all we see seems to be suffused with love – a great compassion whose bounds are not apparent. Again – a new realm of well-being, revealed by breaking through some self-generated limitation.
Getting grounded in present moment awareness. To drop our habitual mental commentary and rest in the broad simple quiet of immediate experience – this can be a wide and wonderful new adventure, a taste of a world of peace and energy we did not previously know. Here again, we let go of a perceived necessity to interpret experience in certain ways, to believe certain assumptions, and instead open ourselves freely to what is arising. The letting go of what we thought we had to do or know, being open to releasing our hold on habit-patterns of the mind, allows a broader picture to show itself.
Likewise, there are deeper states of present-moment absorption. This can lead into strange and delightful collapses of space and time, where the ordinary categories of immediate sensory experience overlap and conflate, and our normal sense of things becomes broad and thin and highly expansive. This can be quite a powerful opening up of our awareness into very expansive states of mind…. but this is still not yet awakening…
Click here for part three — which explores awakening itself.