Building Our Muscle of Awareness

Welcome. I'd like to take a few minutes to open up a little bit more of the subtle layers of the philosophy of roadmaps of freedom and explain how we'll be taking these classes and practices from the physical practice of asana further and further down the line towards what I'm calling freedom. The start of the practice is really using the tangible object that we all have. I love it. One of my teachers is named Miguel Ruiz. He called it the most awesome action figure you'll ever own. We are with these bodies from start to finish and it is here. It is now. You can touch it. You can feel it both from the outside. People can touch you and you can feel your body from the inside. What greater tool than to begin a process of awakening and understanding yourself than the physical body? I happen to be very kinesthetically based. That's my genetics. It's one of the ways that I'm really able to communicate information both from my heart and from my mind. That's why I love yoga so much. This practice that we're doing, we're using these physical postures known as asana and using our ability to sense inside to see where things might not be flowing. We'll use the word energy. You'll see in some of the earlier practices especially where I detail some work on the wall to begin to help you feel where is my body in space? How does it feel when I do this? How does it feel when I do that? What we're going for is building the muscle of awareness. Yes, we want to build the body. We want strength. We want flexibility. With these asanas, we can help with pain that we may be going through. It's a wonderful practice from just a physical perspective. Can we take it further than that? Of course, that's what yoga is all about. We've got a thousands of years tradition backing this. Really it was about waking up as a whole being. To take it from the asana perspective, down that road we build the muscle of awareness. That helps us to begin going beyond just the physical and starting to sense that we have this whole mental world and emotional world that is part of our being as well. In my spiritual path, in my search, we'll call it, I've come across so many things, one process of which was, can I change the thoughts into happier thoughts, into better thoughts, into more manifesting thoughts, those sorts of things. I gave it my all and I noticed that it wouldn't stick as much as I would try and believe me, I tried. If anybody who knows me knows that I try things full out, I'd give it a shot and well, the thoughts would still go from positive to negative, positive to negative. I noticed this. I would search further to see if I could find a way to kind of calm the mental storm, shall we say. I think a lot of people are familiar with that. By the things that I see today, a lot of people are seeking help for that mental storm. I'd like to offer a different approach for you to try out. That's just what this is, just to try to see if it works for you. As we build the muscle of awareness through the power of the body, it's able to sense itself. Our awareness can become more discerning. It can see more deeply and into subtler layers, as I was saying earlier. The point of this is just to begin to watch thought, but not to change it. This is a lot of what pranayama is about in yoga, where we just watch the breath for a while without trying to change it. Just notice many waves or bumps or jerks, things like that, but we can also watch the mind. Again, not to change or manipulate it in any way. When we do this, something special happens. You begin to watch thoughts and recognize that that's really all they are. You can watch labels and stories, go right in front of the screen of awareness, if we'll call that. A lot of people have their screen of awareness kind of focused right in here. If we close our eyes and in meditation, we can watch these thoughts come and go. If we play a silly game and I say, behind closed eyes, you can make the word cucumber come. You see all the C's use MBER and all that. You can say, see a white picket fence, or you can see a mountain, or you can see the word love. You notice they're just made of letters and sounds. If we got a little bit more into it and I say, now look at the word stupid. Look at the word unworthy.

Only charged perhaps. But we can also see, wait a minute, they're just words. They're just words. And so the approach that I'm suggesting through this roadmaps to freedom is that if we begin to watch almost as a distant observer, some people have called it the witness, with our growing awareness, we can actually sit like the eye of the storm. And we can watch these words come and go and not to change them, but it's almost like we just watch them go by and we diffuse their ability to spark up all of that emotion. We don't take them personally so much because we recognize, wow, they're just thoughts. That doesn't make the thoughts all go away, all the negative thoughts. Again, it just allows us to rest a little bit more comfortably inside. And as we practice more and more comfortably inside, we become less reactive to the outside world because normally our reactive processes, they take us over and we're right into our reactions. And so what is freedom? Let me tell you or give you two stories of mine that will help relate the first flash of this that I had and that I've been working from ever since. One happened several years back after a breakup. Maybe some of us have had the experience of a breakup before. And the other was actually just the other day where things appeared to be going completely wrong. And my mind was all over the show. But for the first one, I remember lying in bed and there was a lot of emotion happening in my body. And of course, I was trying to work some of the old processes of fixing these thoughts and fixing these emotions and making them go away and stop, stopping all those processes when they were saying, nope, we're here. We're very present. This is what's happening. And there was a lot of woe is me thoughts. Nothing will ever be right again. Maybe some of you have experienced this once or twice in your life. But all of a sudden I looked outside my window. It was morning. It was a beautiful morning blue sky, not a cloud in sight. And the sun was just blasting down on this oak tree. And it just smacked me upside the head. I looked out and realized a sunshine. It doesn't really care. The birds are still floating and chirping out there. Leaves fall from the tree and it just for a moment opened up my whole awareness to see outside of the thoughts and emotions going on. It didn't make them stop necessarily. It just, it's like it pulled the plug on the personalness of it all. It was just a story that was running. And as soon as the awareness, let's call it stepped out of that story, it's like I could breathe again while all of that was happening. It didn't make it go away. I just recognized that the whole world was still happening and that freedom was there in the moment. And it's okay completely to have all that sadness there. It's a very tough thing to describe the exact feeling of what it's like when that awareness just opens wide into a completely free and open state while all that stuff goes on. And like I said the other day, there was a number of things that went wrong and I was going to be late for a meeting that was really important. And I found myself getting charged up in like people who I had to work with and deal with.

I wanted to make it all their fault and all this and that and it hit me again. I just stopped and I recognized, well the birds don't seem to be having these thoughts. The wind still blows and it blows freely and relaxed. Cars still going by. All these other people, not one of them is having these thoughts and they seem to be having a fine day. And so you're able to step out of all of the process, the grinding of the mind, the grinding of the emotions and just see, wait a minute, if they're still having a good day, how is it possible that they can be having a good day? Those birds having a good day. That dog still smiling there. Maybe this is just a perspective on the day that I'm having. And as soon as that, just that recognition happens, all of a sudden the sun will come through the clouds of emotion and thought. And those processes start to just dissolve themselves and the peace of the moment reveals itself. This is a moment by moment by moment by moment by moment practice. I get caught up in my thoughts all the time, but my ability to allow the sun through is becoming stronger and stronger and stronger. That sun being the awareness of the moment as it is without that covering of a certain thought perspective of anger, of sadness, claiming that that's what this moment is. So my invitation to you throughout these practices and seasons together with me, we're going to use the physical body to enjoy these asanas, to enjoy the feeling, the relaxation, the exhilaration, the challenges of all these poses, but at the same time just the doing of that will help us grow our awareness. And as we sit for some of the meditations, we'll be able to close the eyes and watch our mental processes and over time again, just see together. Thoughts come and thoughts go, none of them stay and there eventually we see them as like wisps of smoke. Where does that leave us? Right here, right now, every moment afresh and new with all the thoughts that may come and go, but we're able to react much more from a place of authenticity. And this is my final destination. What I'm calling freedom is authenticity and it's something that emerges in the moment as the moment. It takes practice, but I look forward to walking this journey, these roadmaps to freedom with you. Let's take a journey together. Namaste.