Awakening

The path of freedom: recognizing the clear awareness that is our true nature

Awakening is the path of freedom. Every time we open up a deeper sense of our awareness, we're touching into a deeper ground that's free of some part of our experience—liberated from the attachment and contraction with it. For example, recognizing that we aren’t only our thoughts, means we can encounter awareness free from thought. That gives us a sense of openness and freedom, and it's from that freedom that we engage with the world. 

At our core is an essential freedom that is our birthright. It is the profound essence that we all share. This boundless, timeless, centerless ground of being is already awake, already free, already whole, already intimate with and responding to all that exists. The path of awakening is in part a journey of seeing all the things we’ve become identified with and attached to in life that is not that deeper ground. We come to know that we are that ground. 

There is sometimes a fear that awakening might look like leaving the world, the personal self, or the suffering behind. This is a misconception. Awakening is about becoming more intimate with life. It's paradoxical in that it's about opening to this deeper nature, which is universal. Yet, everything that arises in awareness is an expression of that ground – open, vivid, fluid, changing. In your deeper ground, you are this wide open field of awareness or presence. That's our essential nature. And when we orient from that recognition and view, we have a fundamental freedom. It’s not a disconnection from life rather a becoming one with all of life.

We are both this boundless openness and we manifest as life in this particular form as the human that we are. That recognition and opening, held in the right way and the right balance of wisdom and compassion, inspires us to care for the world in a very particular way, in a way that we're called to in this life. 

We often imagine the awakening journey as an individual endeavor, and traditionally it has been held this way. We realize now that we awaken both individually and collectively. As we become grounded in awareness, we share this with each other, reflect it to each other, and awaken our collective spaces together. We learn to share this ground in subtle and simple ways in every act of care we take in the world.