Waking Up

Remember what it’s like to slowly and languorously wake up in the morning?  First hearing little bird sounds or kid sounds or a neighbor mowing the lawn, feeling the smoothness of the sheets against your skin and the way your pillow is just right, tasting the "morning taste" in your mouth, then smelling the fragrance of hot coffee or cooking bacon, slowly opening your eyes and adjusting to the dimensions of the shapes and the shades of the colors around you, then you arch your back and streeeeetttch your body out, little by little, limb by limb, feeling the deliciousness of coming alive again! Ahhh…what a glorious way to wake up! This way of waking up tends to set the tone for the rest of my day.

Then, of course, there is the other way of waking up, which is really like being less asleep…not really awake, not really asleep, shutting down to any external stimuli because it takes all my concentration to make the next move (feet on floor, stumble to the toilet, wash face, etc), all the time wishing I could go back to bed and to blessed oblivion. This way of waking up tends to set the tone for the rest of my day.

Waking up spiritually is the same – turning on each of the senses, tuning in to my body, and stretching out into the world, while still being at home in myself.  Turned on and tuned in! Easy peasy.

Well, it’s simple, but not necessarily easy for me to switch from asleep to awake, especially when I have gotten used to groaning about lumbering out of bed, proclaiming to all and sundry that I’m not a ‘morning person.’ It started as a habit which turned into a deeply dug rut, like a grave with the ends kicked out (I can’t remember who said that, but I remember "grok-ing" it completely). I could say the same about my habit of believing that I don’t belong in this world the way everybody else seems to belong, or that I have to prove that I am good enough to be cared about, or … or… or… To continue in that kind of slumber, I have to ignore or skew the incoming data from my senses, so that I can stay encapsulated by my own habit, call it an addiction to my own ego-driven matrix of fears and illusions, walling out Reality, wallowing in my self-generated misery.

And all the time, Life is there, waiting for me to wake up to it. It’s never not there. It takes me turning on my senses – noticing what is really there for me to see and hear and smell and taste and touch  – then tuning into the power of NOW (as Eckhart Tolle says). Life awaits me – relentlessly present.  And when I’ve had enough sleep, or am bored enough of my own little, limited world, or something catches my heart, then I can streeeeetttch out into living (always with the option of re-choosing the rut, of course – even though it is not as likely to be as comfortable as it once was).

BTW, there was a woman in one of my More to Life Weekend trainings who, at the end of the weekend, said she came because she had heard that the More to Life Weekend was an experiential version of Tolle’s latest book, A New Earth, Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. She got it was. YEA!