The Refuge of Awareness

Meditation is a very simple concept, yet many people find it very difficult. The essence of meditation is awareness: knowing what you are feeling, doing, seeing, and hearing. This can be as simple as knowing you are sitting in your living room looking at a plant and hearing the outside rush of cars on the road below. The key is that you are paying attention. You are aware of the world as it occurs around you, rather than being swept up in thoughts or feelings about the past or imagined future. 

Awareness can be a true refuge. Awareness is the sky and your thoughts, feeling, and reactions are like storm clouds. No matter how intense the storm, the sky remains as a steady, vast, unchanging space. Acknowledge the storm, but stay with the sky. Awareness is available at all times and we can practice connecting and resting in it, thereby strengthening our capacity to experience ourselves and the world in the present moment. 

When it comes to awareness, we wear two different types of glasses. The first, most common and most frequent, are the glasses of normal awareness. The normal awareness that guides our everyday activities is cluttered. We go about thinking of what we want or how things should or shouldn’t be or what to do next. The second, and more uncommon, is meditative awareness. Here, we work to remove these filters and reduce our projections. We face inward and recognize awareness as a quality of the mind itself. When we navigate the world, there is less clutter. We think less about what should or shouldn’t be or what comes next. We get less caught up in reactions or pulled into fears about potential obstacles ahead. In meditative awareness we sit within the quality of awareness itself as we access a clear state of mind that allows us to see things with less filters. Expectations and memories fade away and the present world becomes increasingly clear. 

We typically move readily between both states of awareness, resting most often in normal awareness. Practices such as meditation and mindfulness are helpful ways to connect with meditative awareness so that our natural capacity to hold this type of awareness becomes strengthened. As a result, it is possible to reduce our reactivity and ideas about the way things should or shouldn’t be. In this state of awareness, it is most possible to see and accept things as they are, either clearly seeing what action we should take, or better understanding the way our mind creates a world of problems around us.

Dr. Thomas Lindquist, Psy.D.

Licensed Psychologist

Contact: t.lindquist.psyd@gmail.com