CHOICELESS AWARENESS - AND OPENING TO THE FLOW OF LIFE

CHOICELESS AWARENESS AND OPENING TO THE FLOW OF LIFE

I spent many years trying to get somewhere in meditation, I tried to be calm, I tried to feel good, I tried to have only positive thoughts. I tried very hard to get rid of all my "bad" feelings and have only "good" ones and I tried get into higher states of consciousness. God loves a trier they say, but it didn't seem to be doing me much good. Then I came across a teaching called Choiceless Awareness and I was intrigued. I was intrigued mainly because I was trying very hard to "choose" my experience and it didn't seem to be bringing me much calm and joy.

Choiceless awareness is the way of mindfulness and effortlessness. That doesn’t mean to say it is easy. It is a way of opening to experience rather than trying to control it. When we “practice” choiceless awareness meditation everything about ourselves is allowed to arise and to pass away in its own time and in its own way. It is a way of sitting loose to ourselves rather than frantically trying to manipulate and control our experience into what we want it to be, or how we think it should be.

What I realised by bringing choicelessness  into my mindfulness practice was  that I was aligning myself with the natural way of things. The natural way is for all things to arise and to pass away. What I had been doing for many years in meditation was to deny this natural flow that is life. I realised I was frightened of life. Life isn't something we can hold onto, and if we attempt to do this it creates stress and suffering, because we are denying a simple but profound fact of life – what arises, passes. We could say that meditation is waking up to the facts of life...that what comes into being will eventually pass away, but we don't want to hear this. We want to think that we are a fixed and separate being and not part of life, but a-part from life, even though we long to be at one with it. Our efforts go into maintaining this sense of a fixed and permanent entity and it uses up a lot of energy often leaving us exhausted.

We not only want ourselves to be fixed and unchanging (even though paradoxically we want to change) we want all that brings us pleasure and comfort in life such as possessions and reputation to do the same. When we hold onto things emotionally the result is pain because the law of nature is what appears also disappears. When we grasp after pleasure the possibility of pain is alway there. It is like picking up a stick - you pick up one end and the other end comes with it. You cannot have a stick with only one end. It is the same with pleasure and pain. If you attach to pleasure you will get pain too. However, if we can welcome pleasure and indeed enjoy it without grasping then pain does not arise. This is something we all have to work out for ourselves in our own experience - this is the stick with only one end - amazing isn’t it!!!

I remember for years how I used to have a view that to be happy and peaceful I had to keep any unhappy thoughts and any un-peaceful feelings out of my experience. What I was actually doing was repressing energy and aspects of myself that wanted to follow the flow of life, to arise into consciousness and pass away. Fortunately I came across teachers who had been through the same process and were kind and wise enough to pass on what they had learned.

What I realised is that peacefulness isn't something that I can create through choosing what to experience. I had to have the courage to open to all of my experience and to let it be. Letting it be means to allow it into awareness. It means to feel what I may not want to feel because I have a view that it's bad for whatever reason. Letting things be isn't passive. It means being gently curious about what is happening in the body, feeling all the tensions, all the tight areas, it means feeling the open and expansive parts too. We bring things into awareness and that's all we need to do. We cannot trust that life will always be what we want it to be, but we can trust in awareness of it. 

We cannot open ourselves in a flash - it takes patience, kindness and sensitivity toward ourselves. But if we are willing to be choiceless more and more as time goes on we will see a change. We realise that the peace we were striving for by trying to control our experience happens when we don't need to control our experience anymore. We can come to see that who we are is not limited to the contents of awareness but we are also the very spacious awareness in which they appear. 

We all intuitively know that there is something about us that is boundless, limitless and joyful. However, when we turn back to our experience we certainly don’t experience ourselves as boundless, limited and joyful. Often our experience is just the opposite. We experience ourselves as very limited and unhappy. However, the unlimited and joyful has not gone away, but has been covered over by views, desires and fears that we spend our time sometimes following and other times battling against. The unbounded and joyful is our true nature and is not a thing in itself.  It is like the sky, the sky exists but is not a thing in itself – it is the absence of things - but yet it exists. 

You cannot grab the sky and put it in your pocket nor can you bottle it, but it’s there.

The intuitive sense of boundlessness and at the same time the experience of pain and limitation is often referred to as the holy war. The more we open and listen intuitively to the call of the unlimited the more it manifests in our life. But we must also work with the limited. We must face the fears, desires and anxieties that we have as humans on this earth. This is where being choiceless is helpful. When we practice choiceless awareness we let go of any object or focus of meditation. We observe anything and everything as it arises. We observe any judgments and opinions and let them go by like clouds in the sky. We watch and listen to any uncertainty and doubts about how we are doing. We notice thoughts and bodily sensations as they arise into awareness and watch then change too. In other words we are choiceless about what we give our attention to. 

There is nothing that is given attention because we want more of it as in pleasant feelings or that we want to get rid of it as in unpleasant sensations. However, if the urge to get rid of something unpleasant arises that too is given space and allowed to follow its course. The practice of choicelessness is the opening to nature’s way. Nature’s way is that life appears in certain forms for a while changes and passes away. As this arising and passing away becomes clearer to us we see that there is no permanency to any of our experience and that none of this really belongs to us – it just happens. Just like the heart beats, the blood flows and the body breathes without any effort on your part.

Mindfulness allows us to sit at ease with the flow of emotions, thoughts and images that pass through our being. We see more clearly natures’s law – that all is changing moment by moment. But we also see something else that we had ignored all our lives – we begin to notice space. 

When I walk into a room what I notice are objects in the room. I notice curtains, carpets, chairs and maybe people. I notice the walls with pictures hanging and I notice the ceiling. What I don’t notice is the space. What I immediately do when I enter a room is to scan the objects. It is the same with my mind. What I notice about my mind are the objects - thoughts, images and memories. If I learn to notice the space of my mind which is the purpose of choiceless meditation it brings with it a sense of ease. This is because we begin to realise that there is “something” other than thoughts that we can rely on. It may not be something tangible like a chair or a house – which it must be said aren’t always that reliable – but is definitely there. This is an intuitive awareness of space. We can sit and think about this spaciousness for decades and we will still be no nearer understanding it. Once we begin to trust this spaciousness - which is our natural intelligence – we then start to loosen our attachment to thoughts and this is one of the greatest blessings we can experience.

Have a go at this:

Take a seat and allow all thoughts to enter your awareness. Observe all your judgments and opinions about them - more thoughts. Notice how some make you tense, some carry you away. Some may make you feel good and some make you feel bad. Be honest here and acknowledge all that is happening. Being choiceless doesn’t mean not having reactions to whatever happens it means being honest enough to admit what is going on. It is only through this honesty that we create the right atmosphere and be at ease with passing thoughts.

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Mindfulness and living life backwards

In Zen there is a law called the backwards law. What this means is that when you try to stay on surface of water you sink, when you try to sink you float. There is very little effort or indeed no effort in staying afloat, all you do is fill your lungs with air...easy really. When you try to hold your breath, you have lost it. If you want to breathe just don't interfere with nature. There is a saying in Sufism "if you want to save your soul, then lose it." 

But what does this have to do with mindfulness meditation? Well we all find ourselves in a bit of a pickle about life. We find ourselves feeling afraid, confused and insecure. We may prefer to keep these "beasts" at arms-length or better still just pretend they are not there. Another way out of the pickle can be to find the opposite. So our lives become a pursuit to feel ok about life, to blot out the anxious, insecure tremble we feel. We may try to get a "job for life", we may make sure everyone we meet likes us and is nice to us. Or perhaps we make sure we have a pension, and surround ourselves with things who people who make us feel secure and good. 

Another way we may tackle this problem is one of turning to philosophy or religion in order to make sense of this "strange old world."  We may take on certain beliefs, maybe that there is like after death, or that this is it and when we die there is nothing. Both are beliefs and these beliefs can be a comfort to us for a while but to be utterly free we must move beyond mere beliefs into the realm of uncertainty, and this is where most of us don't want to go. However, trying to feel secure by merely  taking on beliefs will in the end make very little difference. The cause of insecurity is that our efforts go into finding security...and there is no security. THIS IS IT - THERE IS NO SECURITY AND TO REALISE THIS IS THE ONLY SECURITY (Before I go on, I am not saying that a good job a pension and taking up religion are bad, just that we don't get from them what we really want) 
We may try endlessly and ingeniously to make intellectual sense out of life. Thinking through this way, thinking it through that way, but in the end hopefully we realise that thinking is limited. It is of a dimension that cannot comprehend reality, because reality includes thought, includes the rational but cannot be contained and understood by it. It is like trying to tie down water with string, it is futile. We can tie ourselves in knots trying to figure it all out. For some of us this intellectual pursuit becomes the reason for living...but in the end leaves us vulnerable and afraid. 

Imagine a flowing river. We wake up (self-consciousness) and see that we are afloat in this river and we are terrified. All our efforts go into holding onto rocks, which in turn are torn apart and dislodged by the river. We intuitively know this but so try ever harder to hold on, because we don’t know what else to do. What we hold to are, people, careers, self-identity, being nice, or not nice, being a rebel or conforming and reputation. Our rocks may be trying to get rich or rationalising that money is dirty. It doesn't matter because all the rocks in time will be wiped away out of our grasp. 

The way out of this dilemma is the way in. In other words we need to allow ourselves to experience the uncertainty. We can start with small things. For example, when you want something to eat just ask yourself, "Am I hungry?" I have realised recently that so much of my eating has nothing to do with being hungry and more to do with insecurity. To know this in the head is one thing but to stay with it whilst it's happening is something completely different. We can also notice when we get defensive about ourselves. If someone criticises you, notice your response and be brutally honest with yourself. "Goodness, I want to punch this person right now for saying that." Hopefully we don't of course, but it's this honesty and spaciousness that allows us to experience the insecurity, the rage we feel toward life. In meditation allow yourself to feel what you feel, joy, hatred, misery, bliss, sadness. When you allow things to be, something that is not of the ordinary mind begins to flow into our lives. It is wisdom and total security, or rather it's the capacity to allow the insecurity to be there and not be dragged into the story we create around it. In other words security comes by seeing deeply that life is 100% insecure. It is by becoming friends with this truth that we become comfortable with it and becoming comfortable with it is wisdom.


So remember the reverse law. If you want to catch a deer lay down in the grass and it may come out and kiss you on the nose. If you want enlightenment don’t chase it just drop your opinions about it, and if you want security then head straight for insecurity.

To learn the wonderful art of mindfulness see my website Mindfulnesscic.co.uk