Relating from awareness

How do you know when you are relating from awareness? 

You take joy in her company without being possessive. You are open to him but you are not engulfing. You understand who he is, without judgment. You stand by her when she is pain, with
out taking control. 

With those you are close to, no matter how much time has passed, you pick up right where you left off. 

Love and friendship are about now, not then. More...

This article by Ken McLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

There are different approaches in different traditions because people have different capabilities. Some can just sit and drop into awareness and that's their form of practice. Others, by developing such emotions as loving-kindness or compassion or devotion, are able to drop into awareness and rest there. Most of us have to work with how we experience the world, and train ourselves--and often the training is long and rigorous--to let go of thinking.

From: Unfettered Questions

This article by Ken McLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Touch the awareness that is always present

Touch the awareness that is always present, even in the worst of times. We carry stories about who we are and stories about who others are and, in the moment of interaction, we regard the stories as facts, as how things are. They aren’t facts. They are only ideas and projections arising in the moment. They distract us from what we are actually experiencing. To stop the projections, we drop the stories about who we are, who they are, how we are meant to be, or how they are meant to be. We drop everything and open to what we actually experience, the play of physical and sensory sensations, emotions and feelings, and thoughts and ideas. We open to the whole ball of wax, the whole mess, until we can rest in the clear empty awareness in which the whole mess arises. It’s there. It’s always there, just as silence is present in sound, and space is present in form. When we touch it, we know what to do and how to do it.

This article by Ken McLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.