The background stage of awareness generally remains unrecognized, quietly out of view. It is like the page upon which words are written or the screen upon which a movie plays. It is the context within which the contents of awareness- thoughts, feelings, and sensations- arise. It is easily overlooked even thought it is implicit in any experience. We cannot experience anything without awareness, yet when we try to objectify awareness, we can’t. Looking for and trying to define it is like the eye trying to turn upon itself; what is seeing cannot be seen. Attention is like a wave on the ocean of awareness. At some point, either because we have an intuition of this source or because we are seasick from the waves (suffering from our attachments or identifications), we become interested in following attention back toward its origin. This exploration may take the form of an intense, heartfelt inquiry- “What is this that is aware? Who am I really?”- or a simple, meditative resting in silence. It is more of an orientation than a technique.~John Pendergrast

we forget how to receive….how to expand gently into the recesses of integration…..what does that look like? how can we be as graceful as the dawn and the dark?

What is not yet clear can be directly sensed in the body. And there is a special level, a special kind of space, a special kind of attention that most people don’t know, to allow the body to form a wholistic sense of some problem. It includes everything one knows, but it is always a single whole, a single sense.~ Eugene Gendlin

wandering amok

Why is there being rather than nothing?

That is the question.

~Martin Heidegger