Andrew's
Awareness Diary

Saturday, May 20th, 2006

The other morning I was out walking and as usual, I heard the first sounds of birds as they ‘welcomed the day’. Whenever I hear these sounds, my chest swells, I get filled to bursting, I ’laugh’ out loud, filled with joy. The sound is inherently joyful as beavers are inherently dam builders. The awareness of the sounds resonates and evokes a tone or sound of awareness itself which is pure ‘joy’ or ‘elation’ or ‘exultation’, something to do with the innocence of the birds as they do what they do every morning, but each time it is ‘brand new’ and so ‘ancient’.

This lead me to consider the following: take notice of all that there is to be aware of. Sights, sounds, smells, thoughts, emotions, sensations, your own body. There is all of that and there is still something else, something that I cannot be aware of (like I am a thought or a tree) but which is there — awareness itself. Whole body awareness is maintaining a sense of this ‘something else’ while being aware of all that there is to be aware of, simultaneously. The constant embodying of a tone of awareness. So the aim is to feel my body as a whole, especially the face and eyes and keep in mind that any and every posture is the embodiment of a tone of awareness.

What I mean by this can be shown through an example — try feeling a deep sense of ‘awe’ and ‘wonder’ (as if you were looking at an incredible painting or up at the stars at night) while keeping a poker face. Can you do this? Why not? Because ‘awe’ and ‘wonder’ are not purely ‘mind’ or ‘mental’ or ‘emotional’ things — inner things. They are embodiments of inner tones of awareness. They exist ‘across’ inner and outer reality. Unless you allow your face to move and morph, you cannot feel the deep ‘awe’ that you want to. This is what Peter means when he writes about intensifying and amplifying tones of awareness. ‘Awe’ is a bodily event and a body is neither inner nor outer but both and more. ‘Awe’ is something the awareness body ‘does’, and the awareness body is both inner and outer. It just looks like the ’physical' body from the outside, and just feels like the ‘inner’ body from the inside. OK, so we can see that unless we allow our face and eyes to be shaped by the tone of ‘awe’, we cannot really feel it. This means that whatever posture you are in NOW, whether it be sitting in a chair reading this or looking at it on a screen, the WAY you are sitting is an embodiment of a tone of awareness. And, as Peter writes, if we are not really feeling our bodies NOW, can we be feeling ourSELVES? In order to really feel ‘awe’ we have to allow our faces to morph. The more we consciously feel that morphing, the more we feel our ‘awe’. Thus as we go about our everyday lives, the more we feel our bodies in every moment, the more we feel ourSELVES. It is ironic to me that the secret of feeling more ourselves, which sends most people to therapists to ‘talk about’, can be got through REALLY feeling our whole bodies as we go about our lives. But if I was to say that at work to a group of therapists it would be met with incredulity.