Hi,
Welcome.
Thank you for joining me for this meditation to help you discover the truth of yourself beyond all of the conditioning that has been applied to you in your life.
This meditation can be done as a standalone practice or it connects directly with the self-acceptance through authenticity course.
So you can use this practice as a bonus session for that course if you are interested.
Who am I?
Is perhaps the greatest question for humankind.
Who am I before all the family values were added to me?
Who am I within the society?
Who am I within the workplace?
Who am I in relationship to others,
To money,
To the systems that we have evolved?
So I'd like to invite you to just take your seat for practice.
And as you're setting up,
We'll just talk through things a little bit more,
Just settling your base and allowing yourself a kind upright posture,
Perhaps just tuning into the feeling of life in your body,
The felt sense of your body,
Which is the first aspect of truer awareness that we come to and that is available to everybody.
So one little bit of caution with this practice is that we must not mistake it for tearing the ego away.
That would be a very,
Very dangerous thing to attempt to do.
Instead,
What we aim to do through this practice is gently allow a questioning at the deepest level within our beings,
Around certain aspects of our object consciousness,
The parts that we try to fit together each day to try and figure out what a good life is.
So rather than trying to just deny those things or to tear the ego off,
We work in a much gentler way,
Which is,
We begin to discover who you really are,
The sense of your true self,
The way that life intended for you,
The way that you were here,
The way that you have felt all along.
And it's not even that this is beneath the surface,
It is all the way through you.
It's that part of you that has always felt like yourself.
All we're going to do in this practice is rest in awareness and allow certain questions to be held.
We're not even going to look for yeses and nos.
We're going to simply allow the resonance of the question to do its work.
So we've been sitting for three or four minutes now,
Just continuing your setup,
Softening the face,
Feeling the whole of your body,
A gentle upright posture,
And that first sense of awareness just in the body.
The body doesn't lie.
The body is present tense.
The space of the room around you,
Not even trying to have a meditation experience,
Just settling into your being,
Feeling that sense of clarity and congruence.
Notice how you're aware of your mind energies.
Notice how you're aware of your emotional energy.
And there's that thread of life all the way through you that just feels like you.
Not pushing or pulling,
Not fighting our thoughts,
But just seeing from the place that has always felt like ourselves.
And into this space,
We drop a series of questions.
Not looking for yes,
Not looking for no,
Not grasping,
Not pushing away,
But allowing the awareness to see the depth of the question.
Am I my family's values?
And just allowing this question to drop through you,
Not trying to change it,
Not trying to figure it out as a koan or a conundrum.
Seeing from that part of you that feels like you and seeing the heart of this question.
Are you your family's values?
Are you the family stories?
Are you the boundaries or lack of boundaries within that family?
Are you an extension of your parents wishes?
And you feel the truth of yourself beyond the question,
Beyond the family.
Are you your relationships?
Seeing from the heart of awareness.
And we're not trying to get rid of our relationships.
We're not trying to become inhuman.
We are actually becoming more fully human.
Realising our humanity is the journey itself.
So family,
Relationship,
Friendships,
We might say that this is one of the blocks of object consciousness.
It's something that we try to push and pull,
To move into position,
To get right,
To be pained by when it goes wrong,
That we have attachment with,
Co-dependence with,
Limerence with.
But we see from awareness that these relationships exist,
But then we see who we are within all of that,
That they are not all that we are.
Are you your country's values,
Your nationality,
The culture,
The politics,
Just allowing this to turn in you to be seen from awareness?
And it's very interesting to observe the questions that we won't allow ourselves to sit with.
The ones where there's a numbing out,
A clamping down,
An egoic reaction.
If any of these things arise,
Can you allow them just to be felt with awareness rather than judgement?
Letting go of getting a meditation right,
Of achieving something.
We're not trying to achieve anything in this practice.
We're just looking from that deepening or more open aspect of yourself,
Country and all that goes with that,
Borders,
Landscape,
Values,
Us and them.
And of course we may have been raised to consider ourselves open or more liberal or more this or more that.
Are we really that?
Or are they additions to ourselves?
Again this is not a challenge,
This is a knowing of the heart of your awareness,
Which then will actually stimulate your true morals,
Your true values,
Your true connections,
Your true sense of place.
Moving on,
Money.
Are you your money,
Your investments,
Your lack of money,
Your wishes around finances?
Are you the family tradition of your money,
The story of it?
Is it the thing that runs your life?
Is it something that you're afraid of,
The money in your bank,
Price of things?
Who are you in all of that?
And we see our habits of course and we see our trips and ways we have about us.
But we view from awareness,
Not detached,
Not spaced out,
Just viewing from awareness.
And again,
The realization of that which just is,
That feels like you.
Are you your religion or reaction against religion?
There's religion and there is its absence,
Our beliefs.
And of course there are religions,
As in churches which are cultural or uprisings of spiritual thought from around the world.
And there's the identification with that or the identification of not being part of that.
And then there's the things that perhaps are our truer religions,
Power,
Wealth,
Status,
Idea of ourselves,
Our football team,
Are those who you are,
Resting with yourself,
Feeling of life in the body,
Awareness of the room around you,
Not pushing,
Not pulling,
Feeling the clarity of yourself being revealed more and more because of this natural,
Unchallenging process of simply allowing questions around the objects of our identity and our final block of identification consciousness,
Object consciousness,
The pain body.
Or rather,
The proper word from Sanskrit,
Vasana,
Is far better.
Pain body,
Of course,
Always sounds like it's about pain,
But actually the truer version of it is the deeply worn grooves in your psyche that all of your energy runs into.
So this is a bigger sense of this thing.
What do we mean by that?
We mean your love model.
We mean the stories that you tell yourself about who you are,
The voice in the head that repeats the stories over and over to make sure you know who you are,
Always in relationship to others,
Us and them,
Pain stories,
The stories that we tell others,
The intensity,
The absence,
Traumas,
Internalizations,
Projections,
Programming.
So we don't give up.
We don't give up anything.
We are in our true natural awareness.
And we allow ourselves to see the objects of consciousness,
Or identity,
And it's all good.
But I want to meet you.
If we were ever to sit down together,
I want to meet you.
And to be met.
And I'm sure you feel the same that when you are with somebody,
You want to be seen.
And you would like them to be seen clearly through your own eyes.
This beautiful,
Sacred process of allowing the deeper questions,
Allow us to see better from our awareness,
But through our human eyes,
That allows us to receive each other,
To know the world and how it's made,
To know ourselves and both how we have been made and who we really are.
And then from there,
Your truer potential can be seen,
Envisaged in action,
Begun to be realized in the world instead of everything looking like accidents and reactions.
Letting all that go now,
Awareness of your body and the life of your body,
The life that you are,
That wholeness,
That sense of true natural self.
Just let me leave you with this closing thought,
That there is no rush,
That you can't just do this practice once and be rid of things.
That is not what we're trying to do.
We're not trying to get rid of anything.
Just day by day,
Throughout this life,
We allow ourselves to be who we really are,
At least in our meditation practice.
And this way,
The discovery of self,
The who am I practice,
Is perhaps one of the most effective meditations there is for this journey.
It's embodied,
It's full of dignity and beauty and gives us understanding of ourselves and others.
Thank you deeply for practicing with me today.
I genuinely bow to your loving heart,
To your awareness,
To the brightness of your being.
I look forward to sitting with you again.
Bless you.
