Inner  Frontier
Fourth Way Spiritual Practice

 

Inner Work


For the week of: November 10, 2003

Left-click for MP3 audio stream, right-click to download


Inhabiting Our Life

If we were to honestly assess our life, we would see that our days pass largely without our real participation. How much of your day do you feel yourself to be present? How often can you honestly say, "I am here." Not that just my thoughts and daydreams are here, along with my aches and pleasures, my emotions weak and strong, and my habits, but me being here in the midst of all these inner and outer events.

As you sit reading these words, bring yourself here, come into contact with your body, your eyes, your mind and ask, "Who is reading this?" "Is it just my body and mind doing the reading, or am I reading this? For this one moment, I can inhabit my body, my life! I can feel myself being here, present, alive."

Inhabiting our body through sensation helps us come toward presence. Being in our consciousness, the context of all experience, brings us into the realm of presence. But to actually be present means that "I am" here. This "I am here" is not some far off, high spiritual experience reserved only for monks and nuns and other special people. Through your attention and your own choice, you can, at any time, at this time, cut through all the wheels turning within you, and be here, really be here. When you are here, you know it, in a simple and direct way. Then by contrast you can recognize that in the immediately preceding moments you were not, you were only half-alive. There was only a haphazard collection of automated processes of thought, emotion, movement, and perception occupying your organism, owning you.

For this week, work at coming fully into presence.

 


     

About Inner Frontier                                    Send us email 

Copyright © 2001-2024 Joseph Naft. All rights reserved.