One of the biggest parts of our practice, then, is to neither indulge our feelings nor avoid them. We should just meet them with a committed openness so that we can witness them and therefore become free of our attachment to them. This doesn’t mean that we don’t feel anything. Becoming numb to our feelings isn’t the work. Being free of our attachment to our feelings usually means that they become both more instructive and more vivid. But, our relationship to everything that we feel becomes much less limiting. Whether our felt experiences are enjoyable or not isn’t the point. The important matter at hand is how we are able to function in the world with Awakened bodies and minds.
We really have two choices: we either show up in the world as a contracted reflection of whatever our experience might be, or we can be the expansive awareness of whatever experience arises. From the contraction, our feelings and emotions work closely with ego in order to move us through the world. In the contracted state, our feelings and emotions that are brought about by our personal experiences with pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, along with fame and shame, get to be the determiners of how we live in the world of circumstance. By contrast, from the uncontracted, Awakened context, our feelings and emotions are witnessed and experienced from a spaciousness forever beyond ego’s reach. When feelings and emotions, as well as ego’s management of them, can be watched instead of grasped, we are employing a mind and body that are Awake. This shift allows for us to watch our feelings and emotions from the impersonal perspective of the Big Self. To the extent that we can practice this nonattachment in relation to our feelings and emotions, this allows for a different kind of resonance and connectivity to arise with each moment thereby delivering us into a precious Ultimate Life.
