How have you been relating to the day so far? Or the last hour?
Has it been a pleasant experience or an unpleasant one?
Or has it been nondescript, more neutral?
And to what might you have been attributing the cause or the source of why you’re feeling the way you do now?
At any moment, how we relate to our experience is defined by one of four levels of appropriation, what I call levels of mindful recognition*
Life Happening To Us or By Us
Maybe you’ve been operating from the sense that life has been happening to you.
For better or worse, your thinking, feeling and behaving has been a mere choiceless reaction to the external events and circumstances you’ve been facing.
Or maybe you’re satisfied that life has been happening by you.
You’ve been able to organise your thinking in such a way to make the best of an otherwise unfortunate situation.
Or you’ve applied a particular behavioural technique to influence a desired outcome. And that deliberate action is the cause of what you’re feeling now.
Often, this alternating perspective that life is either happening to us or by us is what feels most familiar.
Either we are in control of life or life is in control of us.
But through the practice of mindfulness, we can discover that there’s something a little more profound on offer.
Life Happening Through Us or By Us
As we learn to pay attention and build familiarity with the vastness of our awareness and how sensations, sounds, thoughts and feelings just naturally come and go all on their own, we can sense that what we experience is really an eternally unfolding, dynamic set of processes that are happening through us.
It’s at this level that we can start to appreciate the non-personal nature of our realities. And this is what helps us to cultivate a sense of ease and equanimity.
But there is a level of even greater freedom.
Rather than simply knowing that we’re aware, rather than looking at awareness, we can take the position of experiencing the world from the perspective of awareness itself—to be the condition in which everything is unfolding.
Life isn’t happening to you. It’s happening as you.
You’re not just conscious of the flow of your experience.
You are identical to it.
Now, if this seems ambiguous or a real stretch of the imagination, I just want to encourage you to practice looking in this direction.
Really settle back and see if you can find this position for yourself, even if it’s just a glimpse.
Thank you for reading. If this has resonated with you in some way, please do let me know in the comments and share this with a friend. And of course, if you haven’t already, subscribe to dharma⌁licious for weekly Buddhist-inspired insights and guides for modern day resilience and flourishing.
Be well. Please take really great care of yourself.
Paul 🙏
*These four levels of mindful maturity have been inspired by the work of The Conscious Leadership Group
