Inner Work

For the week of: April 16, 2001

Doors

An apparently simple, but highly informative and useful practice consists of being present whenever you pass through a doorway. This applies to any and all doors in your home, your place of employment, your car, stores, and so forth. Begin your work at this by sensing a limb as you pass through a door. For the next door, switch to sensing another limb. If you can sense the whole of your body, then practice that as you walk through doors.

During the next week, practice sensing your body as you pass through doorways. You need not stop in the doorway for this. Instead let the doorway remind you to start practicing awareness of sensation in your body, which you can continue after you have gone through the door.

As with this whole class of wakeup-trigger, inner work practices, when you realize that you have forgotten a doorway, then rather than succumb to frustration, just practice sensing then and there. That way the forgetting and later remembering becomes part of the practice. At that point you also renew your intention to sense at the next door, one door at a time, for one week

We need to create such reminders in our life, reminders to be present as fully, deeply and frequently as possible. The ubiquity of doors, coupled with the fact of our physical movement through them, makes them an excellent reminder.

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