Awareness Already Accepts
La Conciencia Ya Acepta
A student describes her pattern of rejecting parts of her experience while simultaneously trying to embrace them, and the teacher points to the acceptance that is already inherent in awareness itself.
Awareness Already Accepts
A student describes her pattern of rejecting parts of her experience while simultaneously trying to embrace them, and the teacher points to the acceptance that is already inherent in awareness itself.
I liked when you talked about being in touch with the system, about giving welcome to all the parts. I try all the time to place things in a space in my brain: "This is bad, so you stay there. Pay attention to what you need to change, what I need you to do better." I place that, and at the same time I resist that resistance. I never had this point of view before, and it struck me as very interesting. Most of the time I am rejecting more than embracing. Sometimes I don't even know that I'm embracing something, and then I reject it, and then I fight it. That is what I discovered in your meditation. It was something very new. I offer this because I have never been so open to that.
Even what you're describing, where you push something away ("this is bad, I push it away") while trying to embrace it at the same time, that creates a push and a pull, a push and a pull.
The push-pull as mental structure
But even the push and the pull is a mental structure, because the attempt to embrace something is itself a mental structure. For example, if you pay attention to your breath right now, when you're aware of your breath, do you need to embrace it?
No.
If you're aware of breath, it is already fully accepted, fully embraced. When you're not aware of your breath, it's in the background. So if you're experiencing a resistance, the experience of the resistance is fully accepted. The experience of the push and the pull is a mental structure, and as you recognize it, as you have awareness of it, there is a full acceptance of it.
This is not something for you to do. It is not something you can do, because it is already being accepted. The fact that you are aware of it is the acceptance of it.
Identifying with the struggle
I'm pointing to a subtle shift in perspective. Usually we identify with that struggle, and the mental structure that is struggling becomes "I." Actually, that is the nature of this "I." It needs to find an infinite struggle, a push and a pull that has no resolution. It is a very clever mechanism: find something that has no answer, no resolution, and create the struggle to resolve it. That creates a constant agitation, a push-pull, and then we identify with that. It becomes the center of what I am.
What I'm pointing to is this: the more you see this, by seeing it, it is already accepted. And I'm using the word "acceptance" not as a thing you do, because then it again becomes absorbed by the mechanism of "I'm going to do something to get somewhere." It becomes the noble objective of a spiritual quest: to once and for all accept this. But what I am trying to accept is a struggle that is self-created.
An invitation to trust
There is an invitation of trust here. You can try the process you've been engaging with, or notice it a little differently. It might take time for that exploration to have an effect, for something to become clear, for something to be freed. You can consider it a leap of faith, or an exploration in trust, or simply an experiment: what if you try something different?
All of this is paradoxical, because now I'm proposing a process. But really it is about noticing that what you are aware of is one hundred percent accepted by something in you that is deeper. You, in a sense, have no ability to accept. You can only recognize that acceptance is already part of your nature. It is not something you can do or not do.
Something is already embracing it
If you experience resistance now, if you experience pain, if you experience struggle, something is fully embracing it. I could describe it more directly by saying: beingness, awareness, consciousness. It is fully aware, fully conscious of that.
What I'm saying is really simple. But there is something in us that doesn't want to see it, doesn't want to recognize it, precisely because it is so simple, and it would undermine the whole process of the push-pull that we, in a sense, want and like and are addicted to.
What happens when we start seeing this is that we get stuck in between two perspectives: the old one and something new, something that has tasted this freedom. And it is just the same thing going deeper and deeper. When we first realize, "Oh, this is just a thought," something happens. We disidentify, and we taste a kind of freedom. That process can go deeper and deeper, all the way to the resistance itself, the struggle itself.
I hope that's helpful.
Yes, of course. Thank you.
The question that reveals the position
You can ask yourself at any moment: right now, is there anything I'm not fully accepting? That question will force you to take a position. If you say yes, you are identifying with a position. You will have to say, "This is not okay, and so I can't accept it." But that's a choice.
And now all of that (the taking of a position, the identifying, the rejecting) is being fully accepted by what you are. You are aware of all of it. What is aware of it is not rejecting it.