Whatever you're doing,
Wherever you are,
Whatever you're feeling,
Whatever the content of your life,
Circumstances of this moment,
Just give yourself some space to soften,
To rest,
And to just feel the fullness of life.
It might not be a fullness full of everything you love and wish for,
It might be a fullness mixed with the good and the bad.
That's often what it is.
Take a moment to just settle in here.
Notice that even as life calls you to put forth great effort,
You can be relaxed with it.
You don't have to struggle with the struggle.
You can just struggle.
And on a more subtle level you can relax with the content of your emotions,
Of your mind.
Letting go of the fight,
Letting go of the resistance,
The reactivity to the truth of what's arising right now.
In this moment and every moment the thinking mind will have a tendency to run a commentary,
You know,
Just mapping things out.
I know what's going on,
Here's what I need to do.
Reflecting on the past,
I wish I'd said this or done this.
I wish things were like they used to be,
And so on and so on.
So we know what it feels like to hang out in the head,
The thinking mind.
See what it feels like to relax and allow awareness,
Your center of gravity to just drop down into the chest,
Into the heart.
And just feel how exquisitely alive you are and present.
Feel the way the sharp edges of the world tend to melt when you start to see through the eye of the heart.
While the thinking mind analyzes and dissects,
The intelligence of the heart unites,
Joins and integrates.
Like streams and rivers flowing into a single ocean,
Feel the way the different strands of sensory experience flow into and through the heart,
Linking you to everything,
Connecting you to everything and everyone,
Whoever was,
Who is,
Who will ever be.
Rather than evaluating this moment with your mind and deciding if you like it or not,
If it's useful or not,
Feel what it is to just take a posture of wakefulness through the heart and just feel,
Feel everything you feel.
Feel how much you care about your life,
How precious it is to you.
And by extension,
Maybe you can sense into how much you care about life itself,
The movement of life across this planet and far beyond for all we know.
Notice that as the heart wakes up,
As you feel into the subtle currents of what the heart knows,
And the heart knows realities that the thinking mind simply can't know.
Just feel what it is to know this moment and its subtlety,
Subtle currents through the heart.
It's said in the Hindu tradition that one of the basic qualities of reality is ananda,
Bliss.
My intuition tells me that day at the Zen Center in the gardens,
Hearing the Hallelujah echo through the canyon,
That my friend was intuiting and plugging into,
Giving himself to and invoking.
A bliss,
An ecstasy,
A joy,
Not that results from the personality getting everything it wants all the time,
But rather from relaxing into the simple feeling of being,
Feeling the energy,
Feeling the wakefulness of creation itself coursed through us,
Calling us to be alive,
Calling us to rejoice.
Mario.
