The Awareness Meditation, teaches you how to take a step back inside yourself and observe the workings of the human body-mind – the specific ways in which your thoughts, feelings, and sensations are connected and responsive to one another. By doing this, you will become decreasingly identified with these phenomena. You will no longer think of yourself as your body, thoughts and emotions. You will begin to see that Who you really are is the awareness that is witnessing the interplay of these events. You are not your thoughts. You are not the thinker. Thoughts happen all by themselves, as do feelings and sensations. They rise and fall away moment after moment after moment.
Seeing/experiencing this frees you from your habitual attachment to these phenomena and gives you the ability to choose whether or not to believe and act upon or against these previously tyrannical thoughts. You become the master of your own life. Mastering the Awareness Meditation means being able to enter into a state of unattached, open awareness whenever you remember to do so, and trying to remember to do so all day long.
Awareness Meditation
http://www.awakentheheart.org/files/Awareness.mp3
Find a comfortable sitting position with your back relatively erect. Take a few deep breaths. Bring your attention to the top of your head, and gradually, allow yourself to become aware of all the sensations that you are experiencing in your whole body, starting at the top of your head and working your way down to the tips of your toes.
Notice whether you are tense or relaxed, warm or cool, empty or full, buzzy or any other sensation – or no sensation at all. Don’t try to change anything you encounter; simply become aware of what you are experiencing in the moment. Let yourself be, just as you are.
When you have reached the tips of your toes, see if it’s possible to open the awareness to include all the sensations in your entire body simultaneously.
Now, open the awareness to include sounds – sounds inside and outside the room, in your ears and head. Sensations and sounds rising and falling away all by themselves moment after moment, and you don’t have to do anything about them except notice them. You can letyourself and the world be, just as they are.
Now open the awareness to include images – visual and mental images, moving across the screen of awareness. Sensations, sounds and images, coming and going, moment after moment after moment… And include in the awareness any emotions you might be experiencing. Once again, you don’t have to do anything with them except notice them, just as you are noticing the sensations, sounds and images – all of them happening all by themselves in the moment.
And finally, include thoughts in the awareness – floating through vast awareness like clouds across the sky. See them for what they really are: neurons synapsing in the brain. In this moment, you are free to choose whether or not to believe/ act on them. You can simply be aware of them the same way you are aware of the sensations, sounds, images and feelings. In this moment, you are not these phenomena – you are the one watching them happen all by themselves. In this moment, you are absolutely free.
Copyright © 2003 by Dale Goldstein, CSW-R