Deschutes Public Library

Awake where you are, the art of embodied awareness, Martin Aylward

eng

index present

non fiction

Awake where you are

1236259800

Martin Aylward

the art of embodied awareness

"Meditation is an intimate engagement with our lives, not something to do-it is adeep familiarization with experience, irreducible to a mere technique. All the talk of mind-training and mindfulness can make meditation sound a bit, well, mind-y- which is to say-a bit mental! All the language and descriptions of "working with the mind" can exacerbate our already chronic tendency to mentalize or abstract our experience, whereas we really need to gather our attention into our immediate, visceral, somatic 2 AWAKE WHERE YOU ARE experience-into this sensory body where all experience is actually happening. This book will lead you into the whole body of your life using embodied presence (the meditative quality we commonly call "mindfulness," but which we might think of here, more as "body-fulness") However much you train your mind, meditation has to be a visceral process more than a mental exercise-if it is not grounded in the body then there is no integration. If you are not here, you are lost. Each chapter addresses some feature of this body-ful practice. Taken together, they unpack and explore Buddha's exquisite yet initially mysterious statement that the whole universe arises and passes right here in this body. From our sensory experience, through our instinctual drives to our mental processing, emotional reactivity and relational patterns, we'll explore how to live more freely and love more fully-how to inhabit your body and your life. This book is not another in the burgeoning collection on "how to meditate." It is a guidebook for an embodied life-an invitation to be with yourself under the microscope of meditative awareness, to meet life up close up and close in-to settle into the visceral theatre of here-ness,right where your life is playing out. We'll also explore all the habitual obstacles to this process: the demands upon, defences against and distractions fromour immediate, sensory life. Our busy-ness-our screens and devices-our overly goal-orientated lives, our reliance on stimulation and entertainment, consumption and comfort-our myriad strategies of avoiding ourselves- of going up and out into unnecessary and unhelpful drama and disconnection. This book will consistently invite you in and down-back into embodied presence. Intentionally, attentionally inhabiting your felt experience takes you "under your skin," beneath the descriptions, interpretations and reactions that usually clutter the mind. Deeply embodied meditative practice is utterly transformative, beyond the prosaic vision of some mindfulness approaches-beyond A Journey to Inner Space 3 stress-management, beyond better sleep and being more "in the moment"-to a vision, and a real possibility of a liberated life. I've tried to write in the way I teach, in which I always have two aims. Firstly I want to meet you, the reader, right where you are- referencing experiences you recognize, situations you find yourself in-patterns that are all too familiarly human and ordinary-the stuff of your everyday life and mind. Secondly (and I know it sounds contradictory to the first point, but that is the delicate art of teaching), I want to simultaneously point you beyond (possibly unimaginably beyond) where you already are. The teachings and practices I offer, and which in turn were offered to mer by my own teachers, point to a totally free human existence-free of reactivity, free of fear, free of pettiness-free to live, love and know your freeness of being, unshakeably. If you only explore what you already know, you end up reinforcing your own mental content. If I only point you beyond where you are, then transcendence becomes avoidance, or spiritual bypassing. Real transformative work happens when you do both simultaneously. You meet yourself in order do see right through you-explore your material in order to drop it. My aim then, is to lead you into your own life-right in, into your physical body where it all happens-into an intimacy you may have tasted occasionally, or maybe have never known-into a quality of listening instead of knowing, of sensing rather than reacting- into the embrace of the whole universe, which is unfolding here, in this very body"--, Provided by publisher