Or what is awakening or enlightenment?
What does that even mean?
Well,
It actually means that you're aware of everything that's around you.
It means that you're devoting yourself to going beyond your everyday routine on automatic pilot.
It means that you're living beyond those secondhand beliefs and the opinions you've adopted.
Waking up is really about living in a higher state of consciousness.
In other words,
About having a deeper awareness.
And some people think that it's just not possible,
It's not reachable,
But really it's not a faraway goal.
And it's not just reserved for some of us.
It actually can be your daily reality starting right here and right now.
I don't think people really seem to realize how all-important awareness really is.
Because to be aware,
Again,
Is to notice something that you didn't notice before.
It's kind of like when you notice that the room is a little warm and you turn the thermostat down.
Or your friend hasn't called in a long time and so you make a point to call them and see how they're doing.
Because without noticing,
Without that awareness,
There's nothing that you can change.
You can't change anything in your life unless you first acknowledge it and are aware of it.
That might really seem super obvious,
I know,
But I really think there's a depth and a power and a possibility in awareness that people still don't really seem to understand.
And what you can do with awareness can literally change every aspect of your life.
Because right now we're kind of trapped in this level of consciousness that fuels our confusion and our chaos.
And this kind of gradual development of bad physical and psychological and spiritual habits over the years definitely just kind of walls us in.
It's like we've created our own prison.
We get stuck in our habitual patterns of behavior and think maybe it's just not possible for us to change.
We settle into living each day as kind of like it's Groundhog's Day.
Over and over again,
We follow this fixed pattern and we don't deviate too far from it.
And so by and large,
We're not even noticing that we are living our lives like that.
We're just doing it without even questioning it.
And the bad news is that a significant portion of your day is actually spent being a robot of your routine and a robot of repetition or habit.
And worst news,
Many of us don't even know we're doing it.
In essence,
We're just wandering around through our days totally unconscious.
Do you really wanna live like that?
The Sufi poet Rumi asks,
Why do you stay in prison when the door is wide open?
I love that,
Because it brings me back to this idea that the process of waking up and paying attention to those patterns of behavior and doing something different has to become a continuous practice.
You can't just like meditate or get some mindfulness tips and be all set and life changed and everything's great.
It actually needs to become a lifestyle because there's so much unconscious behavior in so many of our existence.
We're all pretty fascinated by our mind's activities and that constant stream of expectation and desire and fear and hope and plans and dreams.
I think we've literally really become quite seduced by our own thinking.
But in comparison,
Awareness is silent and still.
It doesn't involve thinking and you can't watch it in motion.
But we pay very little attention to awareness,
Which leads us to this vicious cycle that the less aware we are,
The less we enact our power to shape our personal reality.
Because when you're consciously aware,
You're gonna make conscious choices.
But instead,
A lot of us seek escape from the world through scrolling through social media or binge watching a show we're not even interested in.
Maybe even eating when we aren't hungry or drinking too much or essentially just running away from what's actually staring us in the face.
Our unhappiness,
Our feeling stuck.
Seeking and finding escape has really diminished any motivation for awareness because we can just check out and not worry about it.
But the most basic spiritual practices have also become optional and people often meditate to escape worldly cares thinking that there's something higher out there.
But the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says,
Meditation is not an evasion.
It's actually a serene encounter with reality.
So meditation is not about escape.
And there is such a thing as living your best lifestyle.
It's an awakened lifestyle.
And when we awaken,
Nothing that's good and present in your life right now has to be sacrificed.
Waking up just expands every aspect of your life that's already good.
So what's really at stake is for us to make the decision to wake up here and now.
This is the first step in the direction of a future that's really gonna work instead of a present that threatens to defeat us.
