The inner witness is able to notice whatever feeling is arising and can also be curious about it. What is this about for me? Why am I experiencing this now? What does the inner landscape of this emotion look like? Our meditation becomes a lens through which we can begin to observe the patterns of our thoughts in daily life. Cultivating inner awareness helps us grow in freedom as we begin to see ourselves more clearly.
The more we develop this inner witness aspect of ourselves, the more we are able to meet and better understand ourselves. It brings compassion to whatever we are feeling, and welcomes it in as a source of wisdom for understanding ourselves better. When we give emotions room to flow, rather than bottling them up, we find they often dissipate again. They ebb and flow like waves. In this practice we become present to the places of resistance, and we gently soften ourselves- bodies, minds, hearts- when we become conscious of the ways we resist our own deeply held experiences.
~Christine Valters Paintner
your span of years affirms your human authenticity….it’s really that simple….
inquiry for today~ consider how life affirming it is to simply be……..
As we progress, we will not take our pleasures and pains so seriously. Therefore the desires and the sufferings attached to them will diminish. When we do not so much identify with our descriptive selves, we will not have the perceptions and motives that otherwise lead us into moral faults. So those will disappear. Therefore, the work of prayer is not to seek these improvements directly but to seek to shift our sense of identity away from the whole type of self-concept that underlies both the undesirable and the desirable experiences- since they are always polarities of the same level of being.
The proper work of prayer is an effort to experience ourselves being “I” without being any of the descriptions.
~Beatrice Bruteau
