Emergence of Insight
When we sit and practice together, we learn to meet life moment by moment. We challenge our usual attempts to map out and know all of life. In other words, we learn to relax.
This kind of meeting life as a series of moments is one of the many expressions of awareness. Awareness is not a new, special way of thinking or philosophy, but a way of being that we cultivate with attention.
Awareness acknowledges the disorganized and outward-leaning scattered energy and harnesses it towards life itself. There is a kind of centering and anchoring within the stream of moments that add up to life.
We start to live inside what we're doing rather than approaching something from the outside. There’s less separation between us and the felt sense of life.
There is a radical “being with-ness.” There's a willingness to stop attempting to tend to where we're not and basically bow to what's happening and the present activity.
It's hard, at first, to make the choice. It really goes against the unfree, grasping, messy mind. Ultimately it's a great unburdening, a lightening of our load.
Sitting practice is a small segment of life where we can live life in this way, where all we're trying to do is live life moment by moment.
Over time, regular life starts to get the memo. Practice softens the ego-imposed responsibility to manage life and reality. It reorganizes our intention, and we start to live with greater presence.
This doesn’t mean we have to stop going to parties and give things up. It’s just that whatever we’re doing is recognized and appreciated as life itself—the actual answer to what the ego is exhausting itself trying to figure out.
And we don’t have to think through life as much. Presence creates the conditions for clarity and intuition to blossom. The next right thing appears when we’re not obsessing over all of the next things.
The next thing may be unexpected. Maybe there's a sudden energy to clean the closet, make bread, put the phone down (for a while), get a gift for someone, take a nap, apologize, climb a mountain, protest, get a glass of water. And briefly, before the mind interferes again, that thing is all that matters. Because it’s all that there is.
What’s the next right thing to do? Don't analyze the question through thinking. Sit down quietly with your eyes closed and wait as long as it takes for the answer to emerge.
The answer is clean, quiet, totally stable, and free from a mental position. Doubt may arise. Really? Cleaning the closet is what the universe is asking me to do with my life right now?
There's a part of us that thinks we're supposed to know the future. The wisdom in us recognizes our truer job description is to be present for the breadcrumbs, the next right thing. We trust that our broader vision emerges from here and now.
