Discovering Awareness Blog

Boulder, CO

How often can I practice awareness in a busy life? Awhile ago I asserted that that “If I want or need to practice awareness, there isn’t an hour when I can’t find a minute; a day when I can’t find an hour; a month when I can’t find a day; or a year when I can’t find a week.” This sense of space and possibility gave me great peace when I was in a job that kept me way too busy. Now that I have control of my time, it’s less urgent but still comforting.

I also likened awareness to a skill that can be practiced at many levels: from occasional to professional, like a person who enjoys a stroll in the woods or an explorer headed for Mount Everest. And everything in between. Or like a person who takes a few minutes now and again to really smell the roses or a monk who awakes at 3AM every morning and spends six or more hours a day in formal meditation practice.

There is no good, better, best in any of the above. Getting goal oriented isn’t usually helpful in discovering awareness. There isn’t anything to be achieved or won or bagged. The universe doesn’t care if you are a full time monk or an occasional practitioner or even a non-practioner. You shouldn’t either. If you want to discover awareness, go ahead at your own pace. If you don’t, forget about it.

All this is prologue to something I am about to do that draws blank stares of amazement from my friends who ask what’s up? Marie and I are driving to Old Snowmass, Colorado for a seriously intense retreat. It’s ten days of silence, meditation and vegetarian food in a gloriously austere setting of a Trappist Monastery. There will be about 20 of us, we’ll sit for three 90 minute sessions a day, eat meals in silence and help with a few chores. Ten days of seriously intense awareness. It’s the “week in a year”. It’s closer to Mt. Everest than to a stroll in the woods. My friends are amazed that anyone would want to be silent for ten days. I do it because I want to and, in a way, I need to. I can’t really explain that. The closest I been able to come is “I’m going for ten days of peace and quiet.” Some of the time, that helps a little.

For you, dear blog reader, I’ll say a little more. I choose this seriously intense path fro a couple of reasons.

It feels like an adventure into unknown yet familiar territory maybe like a hike in the Alaskan wilderness, a hike I’ve been on before but still holds mystery, beauty and adventure. It will deepen and sharpen my skill. I’ll practice silence, awareness, spaciousness and gratitude.

I’ll practice compassion for myself and for the others in my immediate vicinity. There is nothing like ten days together to bring out the edges that rub one another the wrong way. The singer, poet and sometime zen monk, Leonard Cohen, explained that monasteries work on monks the same way pebbles carried in a soft bag work on each other, eventually wearing away the rough edges leaving them smooth and polished.

Also, the deep quiet and soft acceptance of self and others allows a gentle healing and awareness to occur naturally and effortlessly. My image for this is in a video from our wilderness trip in Alaska. Several huge humpback whales passed within feet of our little boat on a perfectly clear, bright and calm sea. As the leviathans surfaced and returned to the deep, they left in their wake an immensely powerful roil that slowly dissipated as the sea returned to a mirror-like calm.

These are my hopes and dreams as I head to Snowmass.

Boulder, CO

One of my friends who loves practicing yoga related an experience that is a little zen poem.

She was in an early morning class and the instructor was introducing a new and challenging posture. After demonstrating the move, the class struggled as they tried to move into the new position. Limbs shook, muscles quivered, joints strained as the class tried and tried. The instructor gave small corrections to help each member of the class into the position insofar as the limitations of their bodies would allow. Satisfied, the instructor added in a quiet voice to the entire class, “Now, imagine replacing effort with awareness.”

Awareness of your body as it is, in the present moment, without judgment or evaluation.

When I was a lad, my stern father would see me struggling with something and bark, “Relax!” Of course I never could. Now I’ll change my ego’s command into a soft voice that says, “Now, imagine replacing effort with awareness.”

Got it?

“Be careful of what you wish for, it may come true.” goes the old saw.

I say become aware of your wishes, hopes and dreams. What are they, right now?
Can you observe them without judgment or evaluation?

Lately, I’ve been haunted by the end of winter and the birth of spring. I want to attend to this annual miracle. When I was eighteen and a freshman at MIT I was struck enough by Housman’s poem “The loveliest of trees, the cherry now” to memorize it and recite it to myself or anyone who’d listen every year since. It’s been fifty years, fifty springs so for me the crucial line should now read:

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty Three springs are little room
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Now my dream is to savor the bloom. In Pablo Neruda’s love poem (written when he was about eighteen)

I want to do to you what spring does with the cherry trees.

And so, aware of my dream, Marie and I booked a trip to Washington, DC for April 2-4 when the thousand cherry trees surrounding the Jefferson Memorial and the Tidal Basin will be in peak bloom. It’s an impulsive trip based on deep awareness of wishes, hopes and dreams. Also longing.