June 16, 2020
The Key is Awareness
By Amba Gale
We have been shaken out of our slumber and woken up into a land of unfamiliarity. The “wake up wind” has been a tsunami in our house. Everything is erupting and life is radically changing, on a daily basis. We are in a time of a great transformation, on an individual level, a collective level, a planetary level. Life will never be the same as it was pre-pandemic. This is, indeed, a threshold crossing.
It is also a time of easily becoming reactivated, where our emotions swallow us up – anxiety, fear, grief, worry – where the emotions grip us. We become our body-mind, consumed by those automatic pressures that have overtaken us. And the more we resist them, the more they do not simply let us be.
This is a time, more than ever, to cultivate a discipline of Awareness, a practice in which we take ourselves in hand and make a shift in awareness from being our emotions, our thoughts, our prejudices, our opinions, our story, to watching it all, observing it, noticing it, “taking a step backwards” as one of my teachers from Ireland likes to say. In our meditative or reflection time each day, if we cultivate a practice of observing, we become aware of what our thoughts are, separating ourselves from them. I like the practice of allowing my awareness to follow my breath, and cultivate a deep appreciation for simply, following my breath. Or, if I am particularly emotional, I allow the emotion, vs resist the emotion. What is it? And I label it, and come back to my breath. And every time a thought starts to take me away with it, or an emotion engulfs me, as soon as I notice that, a come back to my breath. If you have not tried, this, I invite you to.
And, when I open my eyes in a space of awareness, I find that am free to think more clearly. And, I am free to stand for, once again, what is most meaningful to me. From my stand, actions naturally follow. I find that I can empower others. I find that I can cultivate kindness and generosity of spirit. I am connected. A stand taken from a freedom and sense of spaciousness, is not positional, is not righteous, it is a freedom to be and to reconnect with our own integrity of being.
What do you stand for?
Wake Up Wind
You awake one night,
wind howling in a haunting cry,
disturbing even
your gentle house,
rattling windows,
shaking you out of my slumber,
as if to arouse me from my sleep,
as if to warn you
about complacency
and the deep deadness
that arrives
from a life of too much familiarity.
