3 Examine the nature of unborn awareness.

Translation: why + who = why, nothing

We live in an age where there is so much possession, so much me & mine, that we have become colonizers of our own mind and sensorial experiences.  This approach also makes us territorial, which can risk solidifying us versus them.  We believe we are our mind.

When I get stuck with a slogan, I find it helpful to harvest back – see what the previous named that can ground my understanding of the next.  The previous slogan reminds us all that we experience is quite temporary; real for that moment, but temporary. Remembering this temporality opens an opportunity to become curious of the spaces in between the mind conjuring and the moments before and many befores before that.  

This is what we refer to when we speak of unborn, it’s like the before times that no one can speak to because no one was witness to the beginning of the beginning. Before you took personal possession of every aspect of your experience, where did your mind live? Who was conjuring those thoughts?  What happens when we keeping wondering, without analysis or judgment, of the who who is perceiving things? 

Small children are the best at this practice.  Adults may judge children as erratic as they flit from this to that, but they are noticing what is occurring in mind and then acting from that space. This is awareness, the part of you that is perceiving things.  Children are often perceiving and letting go; adult perceive, possess, and protect until it’s taken as one’s person.  

I use poetry to keep my analytical-oriented mind busy enough to feel any number of human experience as deeply as I can.  It reminds me of the nuance of life I might be rushing past.   In my yoga class, I love that my instructor reads a poem during savasana (typically last resting pose you do, unless you are doing yoga nidra which feels like an entire class of savasana! It’s my favorite practice to teach but that’s for another post).  

She read Rita Dove’ s Dawn Revisited (please do your homework if you don’t know who she is).  I keep reading it over and over.  It is just a powerful demonstration of presencing and of the quotidian.  

This is what is means to observe the mind.  

We can ask why indefinitely and eventually we come to nothing, a rootless (unborn) space.   For some this might be unsettling, much like any space of unknown can conjure, but, if you take a few more breaths with it, that kind of nothing has the potential to meet us with awe and wonder.  

Many times earlier on my healing journey I thought if I could just figure out why this person was abusive or why someone was absent or why I was singled out in class or why Black folks are treated as they do or why intersections are threatening to others or why… then I would have control and be able to do something different (in my favor, naturally). But the whys were endless, and, ultimately, there was no ultimate why.

We are starting to enter the sticky of these slogans.  By sticky I mean it is easy to roll with any of these statements that resonates and let it become the blueprint to working all situations. Consider,  it is quite kind to allow this information to integrate little by little and see what in our lives helps you better understand it.

It’s a funny sort of path – being in practice like a child but with the wisdom of an adult.  I trust, though, that being in this kind of practice allows the flexibility of mind to create enough space for the multiplicitous ways of arriving at the same intention.  We need a wider path with a more human view, don’t we?  We need to cultivate a mind free of deception.

Thank you to those who continue to read and practice with me.  I am so grateful to hear from others of their experience and have connection with others who are moving at the speed of Spirit.

This feels like a good moment to pause and do some spiritual maintanence.  I will be pausing for the month of July.

I am with you in the gap.