The Basics of Natural Awareness 101: Relaxing Effort

September 12, 2019

There are three deliberate mental shifts you can make during classical mindfulness meditation that can help point you toward natural awareness: relaxing effort, broadening attention, and dropping objects.

Relaxing Effort

Using effort in classical mindfulness meditation typically means working to bring our attention back to whatever is the present-moment experience. We rigorously and faithfully return our attention to our main focus, typically our breathing. The moment we notice we’ve gotten lost in thought, we deliberately redirect our attention back to our breathing. It can be very hard work. I’ve seen meditators covered in sweat, straining to be aware.

This type of overexertion in meditation is too extreme. In classical mindfulness meditation, we need to be balanced between effort that leads to clear seeing and too much effort that doesn’t really serve us. Some meditators experience a lot of self-judgment, believing that they’re not trying hard enough.

Classical mindfulness meditators typically report that focusing gets easier over time. They can stay aware of their breathing for extended periods, or they find that they return their attention to their breath more quickly when it wanders away. Some people call this ease effortless effort—an experience in our meditation practice where we are making an effort, but it doesn’t seem hard to do at all.

Relaxing effort to shift into natural awareness is a little different. It means that we rein in the tendency to try to put our attention on our breath or other objects, and instead we just be with the objects as they arise.

I think a common concern of many meditators is that if they stop trying, then nothing will happen. Meditators also worry that their mind will wander all over the place if they are not making any effort to do something with it. Well, just sitting down and not doing anything wouldn’t be natural awareness practice; it would be sitting down and doing nothing. So that’s not what we’re trying to do here. Dropping or relaxing effort is very different in that we are tuning in to the awareness that is already present, without trying hard to get there. We also don’t necessarily have a wandering mind because we relax effort on the heels of having worked hard to pay attention.

Think of shifting into natural awareness like riding a bicycle. Often we pedal really hard, but at a certain point, we stop pedaling and begin coasting. The bike stays upright, and we continue to head wherever we’re going, but we’re not working so hard. In fact, it’s usually quite exhilarating to coast on a bicycle. The coasting is dependent upon the earlier pedaling stage, just like effortlessness in meditation is dependent upon the effort you made earlier—particularly the effort to concentrate your mind.

So what does relaxing effort feel like in meditation? It feels like stopping the attempt to wrestle with your unruly mind, to bring it effortfully back to the present, and instead resting, relaxing, and exploring the awareness that is already present. It often feels like things are just happening on their own, and we’re witnessing them. It can feel immensely relaxing and joyful to stop the struggle. We may lose the effortlessness, and then it takes a bit of effort to return to it (such as deliberately returning our attention to our breath for a few moments—or, to return to our bicycle analogy, pedaling for a block or two), but for the most part we are coasting, not pedaling. This relaxing of effort is one way to access a natural awareness.

Try it now:

Relaxing Effort Practice

Start your meditation session by closing your eyes, if you wish, and taking about ten minutes to develop focus and calm by rigorously paying attention to your breathing. When your attention wanders, bring it back to your breathing with regularity and precision.

After ten minutes, see if you can simply pause the effort you are making. Relax a bit (and that may include relaxing your body), and notice what is happening without you trying to be aware. Is awareness present? Are you naturally aware of what is happening in your body or mind, without deliberately placing your attention on the object? Can you sense the way awareness is happening, kind of on its own, and how you are present without having to work at it?

If you notice yourself getting lost in thoughts, then make an effort to come back to your breath for a while. But then stop making an effort again and see what happens.

Continue reading the next steps, Broadening Attention and Dropping Objects.

This is excerpted from The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural Awareness by Diana Winston.

Diana Winston is the director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA Semel Institute’s Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) and the coauthor, with Dr. Susan

Smalley, of Fully Present: The Science, Art, and Practice of Mindfulness. She is a well‑known teacher and speaker who brings mindful awareness practices to the general public to promote health and well‑being. Called by the LA Times “one of the nation’s best‑known teachers of mindfulness,” she has taught mindfulness since 1993 in a variety of settings, including hospitals, universities, corporations, nonprofits, schools in the US and Asia, and online. She developed the evidence‑based Mindful Awareness Practices (MAPS) curriculum and the Training in Mindfulness Facilitation, which trains mindfulness teachers worldwide.

Her work has been mentioned or she has been quoted in the New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Newsweek; the Los Angeles Times; Allure; Women’s Health; and in a variety of magazines, books, and journals. She is also the author of Wide Awake: A Buddhist Guide for Teens, the audio program Mindful Meditations, and has published numerous articles on mindfulness. Diana is a member of the Teacher’s Council at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Northern California. She has been practicing mindfulness meditation since 1989, including a year as a Buddhist nun in Burma. Currently, Diana’s most challenging and rewarding practice involves trying to mindfully parent an eight‑year‑old. She lives in Los Angeles.

For more information, visit dianawinston.com and marc.ucla.edu.

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Posted September 12, 2019

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The Full Spectrum of Awareness

Diana Winston — July 13, 2021

Diana Winston is the director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center, where she developed the Mindful Awareness Practices (MAPS) curriculum. With Sounds True, Diana is the author of a new book, The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural Awareness, and the creator of a new audio teaching series called Glimpses of Being: A Training Course in Expanding Mindful Awareness. In this experiential episode of Insights at the Edge, Diana introduces us to what she calls the “spectrum of awareness” through a series of guided practices. She talks to Tami Simon about the various ways we can access and experience awareness, from narrow and focused to effortless and spacious—states we are constantly moving between. They touch on ways to deepen and explore awareness through “glimpse practices” and discuss how we can work toward making natural awareness our default state. Finally, Diana explains why tapping into the full range of awareness can act as a good antidote for those feeling stuck or restless in their meditation practice.

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The Basics of Natural Awareness 101: Dropping Objects

Diana Winston — September 12, 2019

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If you have not read the previous two steps, you can find Relaxing Effort and Broadening Attention on our blog.

Dropping Objects

When you’re practicing classical mindfulness meditation, probably the most important shift you can make to invite in natural awareness is to move your attention from objects to objectless-ness. Now what on earth does that mean?

Objects of meditation are, simply put, the things we focus on, such as the breath, body sensations, emotions, thoughts. An object can also be something outside us, like another person, sights, or sounds. Any kind of thing can be an object of meditation. Taking something as the object of our awareness is basic to classical mindfulness meditation, as you saw in the previous chapters. Focusing on objects and attending to them is generally how we live our life as well.

Objectless awareness, typically developed in meditation and uncommon in daily life, is when we focus less on the objects of awareness and instead focus on the awareness itself. There will be objects arising in our meditation—thoughts, emotions, sensations, for example—but since they are not the focus, they are less distinct, and we become aware of awareness itself. So instead of our anchor being our breath, for example, our anchor is awareness itself.

People tend to experience objectless awareness in three different ways: that in which everything is contained, that which knows, and that which just is.

That in which everything is contained. Broadening attention from a narrow focus to a more panoramic perception is closely aligned with the experience of objectless awareness as that in which everything is contained. You will notice me using analogies like “Our mind is like the sky, and everything in it is like clouds ﬂoating by.” This helps me convey the idea that awareness contains everything. So when we turn our attention to the sky-like nature of our mind, noticing the boundless space around things, we are noticing the field of awareness in which everything is contained. Some people experience objectless awareness in this way.

Think about looking out a window at a busy street. When we look out the window, we take in the full view in a relaxed way. Rather than specifically focusing on individual vehicles, we somehow are aware of everything that is happening simultaneously, and our vision seems to contain everything.

That which knows. The second idea that objectless awareness focuses on is a little tricky. Most of us are used to focusing on objects when we meditate, but what happens when we make the shift to noticing that which is being aware—to seeking the knower? Oftentimes this shift can feel quite joyful and freeing. Many of the practices in the book move us toward awareness of awareness, as you will see. If you start searching for the knower, what do you find?

The idea is that we can notice things, and we also notice the thing that notices things. We can take our attention from an outward focus on objects and turn it inward, as if we are reversing our attention—trying to move from that which we are aware of, to that which is aware of what we are aware of.

This is excerpted from The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural Awareness by Diana Winston.

Little Book of Being

Diana Winston headshot

Diana Winston is the director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA Semel Institute’s Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) and the coauthor, with Dr. Susan

Smalley, of Fully Present: The Science, Art, and Practice of Mindfulness. She is a well‑known teacher and

speaker who brings mindful awareness practices to the general public to promote health and well‑being. Called by the LA Times “one of the nation’s best‑known teachers of mindfulness,” she has taught mindfulness since 1993 in a variety of settings, including hospitals, universities, corporations, nonprofits, schools in the US and Asia, and online. She developed the evidence‑based Mindful Awareness Practices (MAPS) curriculum and the Training in Mindfulness Facilitation, which trains mindfulness teachers worldwide.

For more information, visit dianawinston.com and marc.ucla.edu.

Buy your copy of The Little Book of Being at your favorite bookseller!

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The Basics of Natural Awareness 101: Broadening Attent...

Diana Winston — September 12, 2019

The Basics of Natural Awareness: Broadening Attention Header Image

If you have not read the first step yet, you can find Relaxing Effort on our blog.

Broadening Attention

Your attention can be very narrowly focused or broadly focused. It can also be somewhere in between. You might notice the differences because you naturally adjust the breadth of your attention in life all the time. You are driving your car, and you focus first on your dashboard, and then you automatically shift to a wider peripheral sense of the road in front of you. You are talking with a friend, and you focus on her face, then shift to her whole body, and then notice the room in which you both are sitting.

We can think of the mechanism of attention as being like a camera. Sometimes you use a telescopic lens in order to focus on something quite narrow—maybe taking a close-up of a flower, seeing the intricacies of the stem and petals in detail. Usually we take midrange photos—of our kids, friends at the game, or whatever the selfie du jour is—employing a lens that is not too narrowly focused, but open in a general way. The far end of the spectrum would be when we use a panoramic lens to take an elongated, comprehensive photo of, let’s say, the Grand Canyon.

When we meditate, we can apply a narrow or panoramic attention. An example of using a narrow focus would be attending primarily to your breath (or any single object of focus). The panoramic attention would be when our attention is wide open—when we notice many things going on or just have a general wide view. When, for example, we listen to sounds coming from all directions surrounding us, this is a panoramic attention, or wide focus.

We can even apply an attention in meditation that’s somewhere in between these two. A somewhere-in-between attention might be when a few things are going on and our attention can encompass them, either simultaneously or consecutively. Our lower back is achy, and we’re trying to attend to the pain. And then perhaps we move our attention to a global sense of our body or to a part of our body that feels okay at the moment (typically our hands or feet), so that we’re not overwhelmed by the pain. (This is a helpful recommendation if you’re experiencing pain in meditation.)

Broad, panoramic attention tends to be the type of attention present when we do natural awareness practice. Because most of us gravitate toward a focused attention both in meditation and in daily life, opening up panoramically can actually invite in natural awareness. It counteracts our usual forward-focus tendencies and allows our minds to rest and reset, kind of like a brain vacation.

But broad or panoramic attention does not equal natural awareness; instead, shifting into broad attention will point us in the direction of natural awareness. That’s why many of the glimpse practices in this book focus on broadening our attention. Sometimes as we practice broadening our attention, we find ourselves thoroughly and completely aware, which is close to how I defined natural awareness earlier in the book. And it is also possible to have natural awareness without noticing broadly.

Try broadening your attention right now.

Close your eyes if that is comfortable to you. Start by narrowing your attention to a single area of focus in your body—your abdomen, chest, or nostrils. Try to keep this narrow focus for a few minutes.

Now begin to listen to the sounds around you. Start with sounds nearby, but then listen with an expansive ear. How far away are the sounds you can hear? Listen to the sound that is farthest out. Try this approach to listening for a minute or two.

Now notice your whole body. Can you fully feel your body seated here? Relax and unclench your belly. Imagine you could expand that sense of your body, feeling your body moving out in all directions, including above and below. Try being aware of your expanded body for another minute.

Finally, open your eyes and let your gaze become peripheral—wide open, noticing the space around you. Let your eyes be soft, but take in an expansive view. Keep your stomach relaxed. Explore this expanded view for a few minutes, resting here, and then notice what happens to your awareness.

Continue reading the next step, Dropping Objects, or read the previous step Relaxing Effort.

This is excerpted from The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural Awareness by Diana Winston.

Diana Winston is the director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA Semel Institute’s Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) and the coauthor, with Dr. Susan

For more information, visit dianawinston.com and marc.ucla.edu.

Buy your copy of The Little Book of Being at your favorite bookseller!

Sounds True | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound

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Vital Emotions at Work: An excerpt from Power of Emoti...

Karla McLaren — March 20, 2025

Emotions are Vital Aspects of Thinking, Acting, and Working

People once believed that emotions were the opposite of rationality, or that they were lower than or inferior to our allegedly logical processes. But decades of research on emotions and the brain have overturned those outdated beliefs, and we understand now that emotions are indispensable parts of rationality, logic, and consciousness itself. In fact, emotions contain their own internal logic, and they help us orient ourselves successfully within our social environments. Emotions help us attach meaning to data, they help us understand ourselves and others, and they help us identify problems and opportunities. Emotions don’t get in the way of rationality; they lead the way, because they’re vital to everything we think and everything we do. Emotions aren’t the problem; they’re pointing to the problem, and they’re trying to bring us the precise intelligence and energy we need to deal with the problem.

In [The Power of Emotions at Work], we’ll learn how to listen to emotions as uniquely intelligent carriers of information, and how to build healthy and effective social and emotional environments at work – not by ignoring or silencing emotions (you can’t), but by listening to them closely, learning their language, and creating a communal set of emotional skills that everyone can rely on. This work is not difficult at all, but it can be unusual in an environment that wrongly treats emotions as soft, irrational, or unprofessional.

The serious problems we’ve baked into the workplace don’t come from any specific management style or ideology, so I won’t focus on managers or leaders as if they’re uniquely powerful or uniquely to blame. These problems also aren’t limited to specific occupations or income brackets (though low-wage work is regularly dehumanizing and hazardous); these are long-term, widespread problems based on a failed workplace model – and on an outdated social and emotional approach that does not support (or in many cases, even comprehend) human relationships and human needs.

This book is the result of decades of exploration and study into how the workplace got to be so unworkable, plus decades of experience in how to access the existing genius in people’s emotional responses (in surprisingly simple ways once you understand how emotions and empathy work). With the help of the genius in our emotions, we can create emotionally well-regulated and worthwhile places for all of us to earn our living and spend our lives.

Luckily, we don’t have to do anything special to welcome emotions into the workplace, or even to make room for them, because emotions are and always have been in the workplace. They’re in the responses people have to workplace abuses; they’re in disengaged workers; they’re in workers seeking other jobs while on the job; they’re in workers who rightly avoid communicating upward about serious problems; they’re in low-wage workers who learn how to survive in hellscapes like call centers, fast-food restaurants, gig work, and robot-like warehouse jobs; they’re in living-wage workers who tolerate unhealthy workplaces because they can’t afford to leave their health insurance behind; and they’re in high-wage workers who may have to bow down to their superiors and compete with their colleagues to be seen as “winners” – and whose experiences of workplace abuse may not be taken seriously because they make so much money and therefore have no right to complain.

We can also see the emotions in our responses to workplace successes; in our healthy working relationships; in the ways we gather together to solve problems; in the ways empathic workers and leaders empower everyone around them; in the ways our colleagues support us when we’re struggling; in the ways businesses step up in times of loss; in the ways we create open communication and humane workflows; in the ways we teach each other; in the benefits, support, flexibility, and living wages we provide for our workers; in the honest sharing of business difficulties or financial losses; and in the laughter we share on great days and rotten days.

Emotions are everywhere in the workplace because emotions are a central feature of human nature. They aren’t removable, and in fact, trying to remove them is a huge part of what created the failed workplace model we have today. Emotions are crucial to everything we do and to every aspect of our work; therefore, we’ll learn how to listen to emotions, work with them, and respect their intelligence. And in so doing, we’ll build a better workplace – and a better world – from the ground up.

Karla McLaren, M.Ed.

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Bringing Your Soul Force to Work: Why Being Yourself C...

Tami Simon — March 20, 2025

Each of us has a somewhat mysterious inner power that could be called a “soul force.” In my experience, our soul force feels unstoppable, and it carries with it our uniqueness and what we care the most about. You could say it is the most essential part of us, that which we cannot be “talked out of,” that which demands expression.

Many people believe that this soul force, if it even exists, is not necessarily related to our work in the world. I am proposing just the opposite: that if we are to find our deepest fulfillment at work and achieve the highest potential in our career, in whatever field that might be, we need to engage and unleash this power.

What does it feel like to “work from our soul”? In my experience, there is a sense of drawing on a source of pure potential that is self-renewing and feels electrically charged. I don’t feel like I am working from a thin and limited layer of thoughts or strategy, but instead, there is a sense of being tapped into a charged energetic system of support and creativity.

Your Belly, Heart, and Head

For many years, I practiced somatic meditation, a type of meditation where we practice (among other things) inhabiting the inner space of the body and developing what’s known as interoception (being aware of internal bodily sensations). One of the things I discovered was the felt experience of three energy centers—the belly, heart, and head—that are referenced in many different systems of spiritual practice, and how these three centers can help us in engaging our soul force at work.

This might sound esoteric, but I actually think these three inner energy centers (called the “three brains” or “tan tiens” in Chinese medicine or “elixir fields” in certain types of qigong) are very discoverable and accessible to people who start to turn their attention inward.

To say more, when our belly center is open and energy is flowing through it in an unimpeded way, we can feel a sense of grounded power. We feel anchored and sense that we can weather the storms of life like a strong tree that is rooted deeply in the earth.

When our heart center is open, we can feel a sense of love streaming from us in every direction. This stream carries with it our care and concern for others. You could even say that we sense a stream of well wishes pouring out from our heart. Our work becomes imbued with a motivation to be of service to others and our world.

And when the center of our head is open, energy and information flow in through the top of our head in a way that often feels, at least in my experience, quite mysterious. New ideas come to us that can feel sparkly, such that even we are surprised by what is occurring to us. We become endlessly innovative in our work.

The Power of Letting Go

What does it take to awaken the intelligence of these three “inner brains” and allow the full power of our soul force to stream through these three energy centers? In my experience, what is required is not what you might expect. We don’t need to add anything to us. What is needed is a whole lot of letting go.

What are we letting go of? All of the ways we block ourselves, all of the ways we hold back. We are letting go of all of the ways we seek approval and are twisted up trying to appeal to others to be liked by them, the many ways we try to find acceptance and success via the unspoken and sometimes spoken rules of the status quo. We let go of twisting ourselves to fit a norm that doesn’t fit the truth of who we are. We let go of the mental construct of who we are so we can be the unique expression of the truth of who we are.

One year at Sounds True, we decided to give T-shirts out to the staff as part of our holiday gifting. Not a particularly original idea, but something we thought people would like. And our creative director put this slogan on the T-shirt: “Sounds True: Here for the Weird.” And I loved it.

Now, not everyone likes the word “weird”… but I do. A chapter was once written about me for a book on bringing your whole self to work, and the authors called it “Tami Simon: Flying Her Freak Flag.” I didn’t mind the use of the word “freak” either. The reason is that these are just words in popular culture that mean someone is willing to be themselves in all of their uniqueness and eccentricities. And that courage to step forward and be a brave truth-teller is something that I value.

Recently, I was in a discussion with a spiritual teacher about how interesting it is that we don’t become a blob of paste-like oneness when we drop deeply into what some people refer to as the “field of being,” the boundless, awake awareness that we share. Instead, we often become more uniquely expressive and can even appear a bit quirky. He shared his observation that it is our ego-construct, the veneer of “I’ve got it together,” that keeps us looking like copycats of others. When we allow that ego construct to lose its presentational grip, and perhaps even drop away, we make room for the emergence of our soul force, the innermost part of ourselves, to shine forth. We liberate our own “weird.”

As a leader of an organization, one of the things I have noticed is that when I present and speak from this innermost place without a lot of self-censorship, it naturally invites others to do the same. It is as if a “permission field” has been established. The company founder is telling it like it is—talking about what she learned in therapy this week, or something that occurred when talking with her wife (of the same sex), or a discovery that came through a sleepless night—and this sets up a new norm. This organization is actually a place where I don’t need to wear a mask at work; my truth-telling and uniqueness are welcome here. And this liberates a tremendous amount of energy and, dare I say, “soul power.”

What’s Your Genius Zone?

Several years ago, as the CEO at Sounds True, I found myself having difficulty figuring out how to best structure our organization (as our direct-to-consumer digital business began to grow rapidly with a different set of infrastructure needs from our traditional publishing business). I decided to hire an organizational consultant, Lex Sisney, the founder of Organizational Physics, whose expertise is helping midsize companies design to scale.

To my surprise, Lex started his assessment of Sounds True’s structural needs by having me do a deep-dive review of whether or not I was working in what he calls one’s “genius zone.” As I have come to understand Lex’s approach, part of what he believes contributes to organizational flourishing (and the ability to scale) is when people are in job functions that make the best use of their natural capacities and passions.

In a way, this seems utterly obvious. Like any good sporting team, you want people in the positions where they have the most natural affinity and talent. And when you have a whole team of people working in their genius zones, you have a much greater likelihood of having a winning team.

And yet as a founder, I have always had the attitude of “I will do whatever it takes. This isn’t about being in a ‘genius zone’; this is about getting done what needs to be done. All work is not enjoyable anyway, and just buck up and do the next thing needed.” This sounds very dutiful, and it is, but it is not the stance that creates the most high-functioning team, nor the most joy, nor the most soul engagement at work.

About a year and a half ago, I did an exercise where I went through my calendar for several weeks in a row and numbered every scheduled meeting on a 1-to-10 scale in terms of how excited I was for the meeting to take place. A very obvious pattern emerged: about half of the meetings in my calendar received the number 2 or 3, and about half of the meetings were an 8 or a 9 or even a 10.

The events in the calendar that received a high score related to interviews I was hosting, new partnerships that were being formed, and working directly with authors on new projects. The meetings that received a low score had to do with the business’s strategic execution in terms of finance, operations, and the coordination of various departments. This simple exercise presented a clear picture: I needed to shift my role and pass on a whole set of responsibilities so I could be free to focus on and expand the parts of my work that were exciting to me.

We have this notion that we need to trade what we really care about in order to make money. In a conversation with Rha Goddess, author of the book The Calling, I asked her about this. She said something to the effect of, “Why wouldn’t you earn the most money in your career doing what you are uniquely good at, what you excel at, what you uniquely have the ability to contribute?”

Her words landed. What if our greatest career achievement can only come from working in our area of natural genius, from letting go of all the ways we hold ourselves back and bringing our full soul force to work?

I believe that when we do, we find fulfillment at work. And also in life. And then, when our days come to an end, we find ourselves at peace, hands open and empty. We gave away all that we were given.

In support of your journey,

Tami Simon

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Love: The Shining of Being in Every Heart: A Message f...

Rupert Spira — March 5, 2025

Being is the shared element in all people, animals and things. Just as there is one universal physical space that pervades all individual buildings without being limited to them, likewise there is just one unlimited being from which everyone and everything borrows its apparent existence.

Just as the space in a room is not contained within its walls but is an apparent limitation of universal space, likewise the individual being that each of us seems to be is not contained within or generated by the body but is an apparent limitation of the one infinite being.

Infinite being is felt by each of us as the amness of our self. This feeling of ‘I am-ness’ is infinite being shining in each of our finite minds. Just as universal space seems to acquire the limitations of the four walls within which it seems to be contained, but in fact always remains the universal space,likewise infinite being – God’s being – seems to acquire the limitations of the body within which it seems to be housed, without ever actually ceasing to be infinite being. The apparent mixture of infinite being plus the content of experience seems to create a temporary finite being, a separate self or ego.

As a concession to the separate self or ego that we seem to be, most spiritual teachings give us something to do to become enlightened. This is like giving the space of a room a practice in order to become universal space. But the space needs no liberation, for it was never bound. The space inside is always and already identical to the space outside.

Likewise, our self needs no liberation or enlightenment. If we go deeply into the simple experience of being, we find no limit there – it is already infinite, already free. While thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations and so on have limits, these limitations do not pertain to our being.

Even to say being is mixed with experience isn’t quite right. Just as space remains unmixed with the walls that seem to contain it and the objects that it seems to contain, our being is never really mixed with experience. It always shines in its original condition: untarnished, unmixed, unlimited, unmodified. Inherently free and at peace.

Infinite being needs no enlightenment or spiritual practice. So, for whom are the teachings and the innumerable practices that have been elaborated in the various religious and spiritual traditions? For the temporary, finite separate self we seem to be. They are, as such, compassionate concessions –legitimate ones – but ones that ultimately perpetuate the illusion of a separate self. Therefore, the highest teaching is no teaching, no teacher, no effort, no practice – just the shining of being, the one being we all are.

Imagine that the vast physical space of the universe is conscious. If you were to ask the aware space in the room in which you are sitting about its nature, it may look at the walls around it and describe itself in terms of their limitations. And it would imagine that the space outside the walls was separate from it, and might engage in various efforts to know it or unite with it. But if instead it looked only at itself, it would recognize that it contained no inherent limitation. It would recognize that it is already the vast space of the universe. All its efforts would cease with that recognition.

Similarly, our apparently finite being, seemingly located in and bound by the body, looks beyond its limitations at the vast universe and ponders the nature of its reality. It may even engage in great efforts to know that or unite with it. But all we need do is look closely, to taste the nature of our own being. If we do so, we find no limitation there – our being finds no limitation in itself. Our being is already the one infinite being, the only being there is – in religious terms, God’s being. There is just that, just this.

This utter absence of anything other than itself – this absence of otherness, separation, duality – is the experience we know as love. Love is, as such, the shining of infinite being in each of our hearts. It is the taste of God’s being in us, as us.

Rupert Spira discovered Rumi’s poetry at age fifteen, sparking a lifelong journey to understand the nature of being. He studied Advaita with Dr. Francis Roles, explored Sufism, and drew inspiration from Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharshi, and Nisargadatta Maharaj. He also pursued an interest in ceramics, training with British pioneers before opening his own studio. Meeting teacher Francis Lucille in the 1990s deepened Rupert’s understanding, integrating the teachings of Advaita and Kashmir Shaivism. Rupert holds regular in-person retreats, as well as online retreats and webinars. For more, see rupertspira.com.

The Basics of Natural Awareness 101: Broadening Attention says:

September 12, 2019 at 2:00 pm

[…] If you have not read the first step yet, you can find Relaxing Effort on our blog. […]

The Basics of Natural Awareness 101: Dropping Objects says:

September 12, 2019 at 2:35 pm

[…] you have not read the previous two steps, you can find Relaxing Effort and Broadening Attention on our […]