Want to Love: Wake up to Now

Love is everywhere, and we forget or don’t see it.

Why?

Because we are asleep to the moment.

Why?

Too long a discussion for now, and all will be revealed (by your searching your moments and your life and your patterns and having lots and lots of “games” to discover the real you inside the habitual you).

And for now, the sleep of our lives can radically and easily be discovered by coming into this very moment of life on Earth.

Present to what?

We are in a body.

We are able to move and reach out. This is life. We can walk down the hall and chop up vegetables and plant gardens and hug a friend or a dog or a lover. (Most of us can; those who can’t realize how lucky and blessed the rest of us are)

Feet and legs are down nearer to the Earth, meant to move us around

Arms and hands and fingers can reach out and move life in a way that is fun or not fun, and useful or not useful, or amazing or habitual.

So, here’s the simple and radical and undeniable deal: we can always be present to our arms and hands and fingers and we can always be present to our feet and legs and toes.

If we are on Earth, we can always be aware of our relationship to gravity. 

Are we standing?

Feet will feet the Earth pulling us down, and our skeleton either doing or trying to do what it is meant to do: create weightlessness in the rest of our body, by pushing strong and easily and radically alert into the ground.

We can be “grounded” at all our moments to how we are relating to gravity.

Sitting?

We can feel the chair/ bench/ stool/ couch/ log relationship to our pelvis. One pushes down. The other pushes up.

Toes, and feet and legs ending in the hip joints in the pelvis, and always, always on Earth we can feel our connection to gravity.

This is one very real way to wake up to the now.

And the hands and arms and fingers.

What is the shape our arms are taking.

What are our fingers touching.

What is the difference hand to hand.

Hand it to yourself: paying attention to your hands and fingers and arms. Imagine how important an awareness of our arms and hands and fingers was at one time to the survival of the species.

This is us.

This is Life on Earth.

This is still vastly  IMPORTANT TO OUR LIVES AND BRAINS AND BRAIN/BODY SELVES.

IN THIS MOMENT 

This is not only hugely interesting and available to our deeper and more natural and pre-verbal selves, this is AVAILABLE ALL THE TIME.

At a boring or interesting meeting? Arms and legs, there with you to be delighted in with awareness.

Driving a car, washing the dishes, making love, reading this right now, writing some text or Facebook nonsense or profoundity: fingers and toes make it and you more real and vivid.

Lost in thought and want a counterbalance: come to your arms and legs.

 (BONUS: INSOMNIA ALTERNATIVE:
Awake at night and want to pass away the hours in comfortable, almost blissful presence? Sense your arms and hands and fingers and pelvis and legs and hands and fingers.

Add on breathing.

Enjoy the warmth of your bed.

Compare what feels better: sensing yourself or whatever slop your mind is “thinking” about.)

And in the day, talking to other people. It’s almost a rule that we go into a kind of sleep pattern, and forget the present of our here and now bodies.

It doesn’t have to be so.

Try it, try it, try it, enjoy it, enjoy it, enjoy it: wake up to your arms and legs and fingers and toes as you are talking to, and better yet, listening  to another person.

This will change everything.

From slave to free.

Sound “too dramatic?”

Don’t believe me.

Never believe anything but your own experience. 

And notice that vast difference in being aware in arms and legs as you are talking and the usual state of being lost in our “thinking.”

The next level of waking up:

Follow your breathing.

Smile.

And only after the safety and grounding of arms and legs. Because breathing, though extremely calming, can also be deeply affected by emotional currents.

Smiling is a whole game, the happy no matter what game.

I hope you want that game.

Happiness is not the goal. It’s the way to know you are awake. And more on that as we stroll and romp and dive into transformation.

So, if you want an advanced starter level of the sort of presence that can lead to self love and other love, have these four areas in awake and aware:

arms hands and fingers

legs pelvis feet and toes

breathing in or breathing out

smiling or not smiling

That’s “hard.”

So what?

The alternative is a life of habit and suffering and quarreling or business or numbing out.

The usual shit life.

If you wanted that you wouldn’t be reading this book.

ENOUGH! Go take a walk and enjoy nature and two or three or four really great places to be having your awakened attention.

This is the beginning of a new and more amazing you.

Savor this.

Now.