8 Practicing the Awakening meditation together with a bit more instruction

Practicing the Awakening meditation together again.  This time a little longer.  Continued instruction....just to make sure we are confident in our meditation.  We, also, talked some about not leaving our center which is the radiance that we are.  From awareness we simply let everything be and experience it as it is.  Acceptance really.  As we stay in Awareness everything else burns away until all there is is radiant awareness and connection to all around.  Oneness.  "The Father and I are One"

These podcasts are meant to supplement your personal path of awakening whatever that might be. They are a compilation of what I have found to be the most helpful over the last 50 years on my path of awakening. I feel these podcasts are most powerful when listened to in sequence from podcast one forward because each is built on the last.  Though they, also, all stand on their own.  Since we are each a bit different, if anything does not resonate, please disregard it and follow your heart. All my podcasts and website are free. Enjoy!

Though I am a psychotherapist, and these podcasts are offered to be spiritually helpful, they are not psychotherapy.  If psychotherapy is ever needed, please reach out to a psychotherapist.

www.williamecooper.wordpress.com for more support.  You may, especially, enjoy the short contemplations and the resource page which gives you some supportive material.

Transcript

William: 0:00

Hello, this is William Cooper. I hope you're doing well. Welcome to Awakening Together. Today, yes, I think I'm going to talk a little bit more, but we're going to do meditation, really. Let's do this first. Tighten your fist. We did this before at one of the earlier podcasts. Just tighten your right fist really tight and your forearm real tight and your right arm really tight, tight, tight, tight, tight, tight, and let it go. You feel that? You feel a mixture, a mixture of kind of relief and calmness. Your whole body starts to calm and the tension. It's a mix between feeling very good and tension leaving. Meditation's a little bit like that sometimes. At the core of meditation, you, awareness, which is you, and awareness is happiness, by the way, your being is happy, love, peace, just as we talked about before. But imagine in meditation, looking at the world from there, you just awareness, aware of everything else. And as you're aware of everything else, it slowly melts away. So what's the outcome of all this? Well, once enough melts away, all that there is left is mainly awareness without the blocks and the barriers by blocks and barriers. I mean, thoughts and emotions, psychological thoughts and emotions, and the resulting tensions in your body, psychological thoughts and emotions only happen when they have tension underneath them, which only happens when you're separated from yourself. It's a warning sign, a sign of a bad state of affairs. If you're thinking and thinking and feeling and feeling and needing to exercise to get rid of the stress or watch TV or drink warning signs, red flashing warning signs, be careful you're cut off from yourself. Meditation reverses that because the end product is you let everything go. It melts away simply by you not getting involved in it, feeling it, not repressing it, letting it run its course. And then it discharges itself automatically. It bleeds out of your system. And when it's totally gone, all there's left is light, the light of you, the love of you. When you don't have barriers, you connect to everything around you. You feel the love of a tree. You feel the bliss of your desk when you touch it, because remember all of creation is made of the same God stuff. It's made of bliss, love, and peace. It's just congealed down into molecules, which then are turned into wood and trees and dogs and cats and parrots. Yeah. So when you're not blocked, there's a direct connection and you feel that peace and love and radiance. You are peace and love and radiance, and you are connected to peace and love and radiance all around you. When you walk, you feel light coming up through your feet because you're connected to that, which you're walking on and it's all light. So you feel it coming up from the ground. You feel it as you look around and connect to everything around you. So after some time, when you've been successful at meditation and all these barriers have melted away, you don't really have to meditate anymore because it was simply a tool to help melt the blocks. Once the blocks are melted, you're just connecting to everything very deeply. So your life is one of connection and happiness. You are happiness and everything that you connect to is happiness. So that's what our, our goal is. That's where we're going. Now let's do a little meditation together and try it out for size. Remember this is a process. It doesn't happen overnight, but we got to start somewhere, right? So let's do it for three minutes. Remember the awakening meditation, the one that melts all these barriers away is performed like this. You are the awareness. So you just sit and watch everything. You hear everything, you feel everything, but you don't get involved in anything. You have your eyes closed. You don't try to relax or do anything. You just let it run its course. If you're not relaxed, you're not relaxed. Relaxation has nothing to do with meditation. Contrary to what you may have heard. It's a product of meditation because as everything melts away, of course you're more relaxed, but you don't try to be relaxed. That's only when you're trying to counteract something, which is really not what we're after. That's a little bit of a middle ground. It's helpful, but it won't bring you to awakening because it's simply counteracting attention without dissolving the tension because you're tense. You do a relaxing meditation to help your body relax. But the next day, the underlying reason for the tension is still there. So you've got to do that kind of meditation again and again and again. That's not what we're after. Okay, so let's do this awakening meditation in a moment. You just close your eyes. We'll do it for three minutes and just watch. Be aware. Feel everything that's going on without trying to control it or just simply be aware of it. Here we go. Close your eyes and let's meditate. Okay, when you're ready, you can open your eyes. And how was that meditation? Good, I hope. Did you notice lots of thoughts or none at all? Was it just quiet radiance? Well-being and happiness, almost like a light made of happiness and radiance. That's your true self. That's you without blocks. If that's what you felt at this point, I'd say, wow, good job. You're kind of far along with this. But most won't feel that. Most will have a cacophony of thoughts. Thoughts going everywhere. It's that rubber band unwinding wildly. The thoughts are fueled and the emotions are fueled by an underlying pain of separation, hurt, fear, and anger. Those are put together with a tension, the tension of separation from your own self. So that mess is what's unwinding and melting as you just sit there and don't get involved. Of course, the urge will be get to be getting involved and trying to solve the thoughts or jump into them because that's the addiction that will pull you away from feeling the pain of separation at the very bottom of the pile. So that's what you want to resist doing. As you resist doing that, and you simply stay as awareness, watching and feeling, but not jumping into it all. What happens? Your neural networks that are habituated to jump in to all these thoughts and emotions and problems, those neural networks begin to let go and release and with them the separation. And once the, and as the separation releases, the tension releases, and as the tension releases, the hurt, fear, and anger releases. And therefore the emotions and thoughts release and they disappear. And what are you left with? Radiance and happiness. That takes a while because it's been a while building up the separation, right? So that's meditation. I hope you've got the rough idea of it. Yes, we'll be coming back and doing some more along the way because it's so crucial. Oh, I should tell you this. If you don't stay in the place of being awareness, I mean, that's who you are. If you leave yourself during the meditation, you're not meditating. Are you? You're just jumping into the midst of your thoughts and emotions. And you're doing what we do all during our so-called life. And I say so-called because it's not our life. It's our habit. So it's not really meditation. It's okay. Because you'll notice a lot of the times in meditation, you just get lost in your thoughts. I mean, you're just, you're lost in them. And when you find yourself that way, you just bring yourself back to yourself, you as awareness, and then start watching them again. You just start again. That's fine. What's happening is you're beginning to build up or you're beginning to find your new center of gravity as staying with who you are, rather than jumping into the fictional thoughts, just like jumping into a TV program that's very good and captivating and identifying with the characters. But it's not your life. It's just a TV show. It's not your life. It's just thoughts you've created and emotions you've created. So you want to stay as awareness. And once you do, all of this debris will slowly start to burn off like a fog. You as the awareness are like the sunshine. You don't have to force it. It's just automatic just by you watching. That's the sunshine. It may not feel like it, but it is it will dissolve at all. As we continue, we're going to talk about this deeper and deeper and deeper. Because that will take your awareness and your consciousness deeper and deeper and deeper to see is to be free. Okay, this one's been a little longer than normal. So let's just say goodbye now. And I look forward to talking to you again soon. We'll pick up with this and the next podcast. Talk to you soon. Bye.