Mindfulness for Busy People: The Art of Karma Yoga

In the bustling tapestry of modern life, how often do we prioritize our spiritual journey? For many, spirituality is a side pursuit, something to engage in when life is calm and stress-free. However, this approach can hinder meaningful progress. In this article, we'll explore why spirituality needs to be a top priority and how Karma Yoga can help integrate mindfulness into your daily life.

A busy life can be a spiritual life.

Appreciation Transforms The Ordinary Into Perfection

Compared to our not-so-distant past, we are all incredibly wealthy. Imagine for a moment a life without absolutely any possessions. You are out there in nature without any clothes, tools or shelter, left alone to find enough calories and protection from the elements every day of your rather short life. Today we are equipped with a lot more tools, possessions and wealth, yet we are also becoming more depressed than ever before. 

Appreciates having nothing

The Downside Of Wanting To Be Fast

Our whole economy is about efficiency. We want to do things in less time. Everything has to be done as quickly as possible. Time is money. But what is the cost of the thinking that things have to be done faster?

To Go Beyond Fear Means To Go Through

Do you feel that something is holding you back? Maybe it's subtle, but those are feelings of fear. Why are you not doing what you know you want to do? The only way to overcome fear is to go through it. In this article, we are going to explore just how the dynamics around resolving fears work. 

You are physically safe, and you need a better way to deal with fear.

Revealing The Beauty Of Every Moment

When we are talking about enlightenment as a way to become free, we really mean freedom from suffering. Self-Created suffering that blocks our view form the beauty that lies underneath every moment of our experience. In this article, we are going to explore five ways in which we suffer and the role of our immediate reactions and habitual judgements. 

Is every moment inherently beautiful?

1. Attachments to good and bad

The first thing that makes us suffer are our attachments. Our attachments are forcing us to categorize our experience into good and bad. The good things we want to attract and Theo bad things we want to avoid. This constant struggle is a source of suffering. Why are attachments leading to suffering? As everything in existence is impermanent, being attached to any certain way of existing, will lead to suffering, because we will eventually lose that thing. Our loved ones, money, possessions and our life. Everything is impermanent.

To resolve this source of suffering we can take a couple of steps. First is the recognition that fundamentally there is no good or bad. These are human categories in which we put our experience. The things don’t have these attributes in and of themselves. Like understanding your mother language, this is an automatic process which is very difficult to transcend. Try not understanding your mother tongue and you will see how hard it is to get past habitual, automatic interpretation. Something very similar happens with every experience.

After this realization the practice of mindfulness can follow. With many hours of training, we can stay absolutely present. This is done by constantly reminding ourselves to step outside of our judgmental mindset and into the observer mode. At one point the directing of our attention towards some aspects of our experience will be replaced with an open and restful presence. Our actions will flow unrestricted and we naturally respond to the events in our life without feelings of inadequacy.

The third step in this process is the acceptance of existing as a human being. Existing as the form that we are we have specific characteristics. One of which is this habitual judgmental categorization. Becoming aware of it is the most important step. It is not necessary to completely stop doing it. Operating in the world requires that we make decisions and judge our experience. All we have to do is to make it a conscious process.

2. Survival based judgements and actions

The second source of suffering is our habit of evaluating our experience in terms of our survival. We judge situations by their meaning for mental and physical survival. This pulls us out of being and into a stressful state with the need to survive. What has to survive? The illusion of being a separate entity, of being a human. This illusion can only survive as a mental idea. The idea of being a human with a certain life-time exists only as a mental concept. It there has to be maintained with constant effort. But we deny it and instead think we are real. It is hard to grasp how deep this lie runs in our psyche. But to keep us from detecting this lie, our mind needs to employ a strategy to keep us from discovering the deeper truths of our being.

Here consciousness is again the solution to the problem. Making those processes conscious and revealing our tendencies to act on survival based thinking is the first step towards freedom. With the realization of our survival activities we open up to the possibility of experiencing the transcended state of pure being.

3. Existence in time

When we go through our daily life, we usually do so in a highly rational state. We observe only very little in our actual experience and filter for what is relevant for our future. We make these judgements based on our past experience. This is troublesome because we are pulled into the emotional energy of our stories. Instead of resting in the always peaceful energy of the present moment, we are living out a story that seems to spread out in time. But this time is illusory and we are therefore living in a mental construction of our mind. More so than living in what is actually true and real in the present moment. The result is distorted view of reality. We mistake our own personal story for reality because that is where 99% of attention goes. Rarely do we experience moments of clarity, where all of our personal story drops away.

Again, consciousness and the development of our mindfulness muscle is the simplest solution. An object or reminder can be of great help for beginners. Either set a timer on your phone which reminds you with a certain interval that you want to be mindful. The trick is not to overlook or overhear the reminder because it has become a habit. At the beginning you have to work on really becoming mindful every time you hear the sound or see the cue.

As an alternative, I like to make an object part of my regular experience, which I then associate with the goal of staying aware in the present moment. An armband for example. In the first few days of wearing the armband you have to instill the habit of making the connection between the armband and mindfulness. You can even use it during your regular meditation practice as you object of awareness. Feel the armband on your skin and let the sensation be your constant reminder and anchor for mindfulness in the present moment.

4. Comparing yourself to others

We only observe the facade that others present to us. We never know what truly goes on inside them. I often find myself thinking that I am pretty good at judging others by their facial and bodily reactions. But I also think that I am equally good at hiding my true emotions from others. So which is more accurate? And can I really trust my judgments? If I am honest I would have to answer no.

But we always compare ourselves and our own life to our idea of the life of others. If we judge our life or current experience as inferior compared to that of others, we create those feelings purely based on our own mental construction.

Doing this gives us a certain kind of security. But it comes at the price of feeling inferior and this is only exaggerated by social media today. When most people only display their greatest moments on their Instagram feed, we compare our own lives to the greatest moments of others.

Conscious awareness is curative. Observing the mental constructs you create around the lives of others helps you to discern facts from illusions. The hard truth to accept here is that you will never know the internal experience of others. Personal experience will always stay personal and we cannot share this realm of experience other than what we can share through language and images.

Accepting the fact that there is only you in your experience has a liberating effect and may free you of the grip of mental constructs. I have found that experiencing them as a part of my reality but not giving them more weight than necessary had a positive impact on my well-being.

5. The illusion of happiness as a future state

We believe in the illusion that happiness has certain prerequisits that we need to fulfill before we can be truly happy. The exact opposite is the truth. But we will get there.

For example, we may have unconsciously created the idea of money being a requirement for happiness in our mind. Over the years we have unconsciously adopted this as fact, maybe from society or even our family. Therefore we subconsciously created a barrier in our mental space, that does not allow us to be fully happy before we have not reached our financial goals. But this is purely a mental construction as well.

This delayed gratification has a danger. We are building the habit of always needing some future goal (in this case money) to be happy. We may live a lifetime in the illusion of happiness just being right around the corner. Just that next goal seems to be needed to make us fulfilled. But as soon as we reach it, our habitual behavior to search for the next thing is much stronger than our capacity to enjoy our present experience. 

This is our default state. If we do not practice some sort of mindfulness or have had some luck in our upbrining, the tendency to always see our happiness in a future scenario is very strong. This default state is not to be mistaken with the best way to life. Working against it with a regular mindfulness practice is a wise move. The earlier you make it and the longer you practice it, the better the outcomes may be.

The Survival of the Mind

Psychological survival has become more important than physical survival and is the reason for most things we do. 

Modern times make it harder to become enlightened. Distractions are plentiful.

This is the hypothesis we are going to explore in this article and discover why survival is still the driving force behind most of our actions. Consumption, travel, entertainment and most forms of distractions beyond that which is demanded by physical survival is a direct extension of this drive to survive. Our need to survive indeed extends beyond securing physical survival. You might wonder what I mean by this and why this is the case.

If we dig deeper into the nature of reality, we find that all experience is an illusion. Including our physical body and the sense of separation between us and the world. By definition an illusion needs to employ some mechanism by which it becomes invisible to the one who is deceived. We could think of this illusion as a metaphysical entity with it's own drive to survive. In eastern traditions this illusion is called ego and is the center of our being. We are literally deceiving ourselves into being. How marvelous is that?

In our modern world, most work and most activities are far removed from immediate survival. And even though we have to earn money to survive, this is only partially true. Much of what we work for is not contributing to this end directly. Only to the degree that it feeds our own self-deception. 

But with that deception comes also a lot of trouble, suffering and the covering up of Truth. This illusion has an easier time to maintain itself when we are distracted of course. When we are not even asking any suspicious questions. When we are so caught up in what life presents us with that we are not bothered to take a closer look or become serious about discovering Truth for ourselves. From this point of view, all action could be considered distraction. There is nothing wrong with that, but we have to be aware that is also the root of all suffering in the world. With a firm realization of Truth there is no suffering. Fully realized beings perceive all experiences of life as the perfect manifestation of the infinite nature of reality.

To solve this issue I recommend following the practice of all-day-awareness. Training the mind to be fully present in every moment. With the full spectrum of sensory experience, without slipping into conceptualization and thoughts our mind is constantly coming up with. Over time this will quiet the mind and facilitate the state of no-mind. A state where the joyous nature of reality shines through in every moment. Beware though, there will be no you anymore. But then, you could say, there was no you to begin with. The veil of illusion will have been lifted.

The Philosophy of "To Have or to Be" by Erich Fromm

How is it possible that some people in our society feel an emptiness inside of them? Or a frustration with their life circumstances? That some are not happy?
Most of us don't have to struggle for survival. We are blessed to live in a rich world in which we have access to great experiences, technology we never had before and own better products than even the richest people could dream of only 100 years ago.

"To Have or to Be" by Erich Fromm

can give us insight into why that is.

On one level of abstraction, all experiences, whether through the use of some product or through a relationship with another person, are inherently unable to satisfy our deepest desire for unity and happiness.

Through a life-long conditioning we have been programmed to seek experiences to elicit the emotions we like and numb the ones we want o avoid. This misconception leaves us our ability to Be underdeveloped. While some people are naturally more present and in the moment, others are constantly caught up in mental stories, desires, fears and hopes. And therefore living disconnected from the only thing that is actually true. Direct experience. That doesn't mean, thoughts are not part of direct experience, but giving too much meaning to the realm of thought and concept can leave our ability to be present underdeveloped.

What does it mean to Be? 

Does that mean you have to become a monk and leave your life behind? No, that's a complete misunderstanding of what being present means.
Living in the Now, means to become a super-conductor for your experience. It means to grow your consciousness of all aspects of human experience. Including all of the negative emotions and experiences. Being completely present in each and every Moment without resistance is the ultimate goal. Life will then have become a seem less flow of experience in which nothing is inherently good or bad. No pain without resistance.

All day awareness

is the habit I have picked up years ago. The gaps in my ability to experience the richness of life has been growing over the years. Slowly but steadily. It is a skill. That sill, over time, lead to deep enlightenment experiences. Concepts about yourself and the world are slowly starting to fall away. They move from the center of your attention to the edges. And with this steady increase in consciousness and presence, a natural feeling of calmness and happiness seems to arise. Without it being the primary goal.
Setting long-term goal can and will still be part of your overall existence. But your happiness is no longer outcome dependent. Being is the state from which you can truly fulfill your Life-purpose. Indepence from outcome will become your new definition of freedom.

"To Have or to Be" will no longer be the question

At a certain level of consciousness you will clearly see that those are two different things. Whereas you were chasing waves before, you now have become the water. Waves and changes in what is going with the water are still nice, but can't fundamentally change what water is. So is happiness a quality that is on a fundamental level independent of any experience.

Which doesn't mean that your current manifestation as a human being doesn't have certain needs. In fact, those basic needs will have to be satisfied before your mind will even be able to transcend them and open up for higher States of consciousness. The model of Maslows hierarchy of needs still applies.

The Power of Yes: An Approach to Mindfulness

All Day Awareness or mindfulness in daily activity is the extension of formal meditation practice into your daily life. Over time I have found this practice to be extremely powerful in transforming my outlook on life, my happiness, my capacity to witness emotions, my ability to concentrate, my contentment in difficult situations, my ability to reason and in general my feeling of well-being.

Embracing all of (your) reality.

But there is an important aspect to this practice that I want to talk about in this article. And that is how to approach this state of radical openness of whatever arises in the present moment. 

When you practice awareness of the senses and your thoughts, automatically another function of your thoughts will arise. Your thoughts (or your ego) will try to hijack your higher state of awareness. You will start to hear comments about your mindful observer mode. Thoughts will try to take over this new position of being aware of the rest of your experience. This happens in really sneaky ways. If you are mindful you will hear a lot of commentary when you witness your current experience. Comments about other thoughts, about emotions, about sounds, sights and feelings. And those commentary thoughts will claim to be the observer, it is easy to identify with those commentary thoughts. Include those commentary thoughts also in your mindful observation. Treat them as any other sensations. This is difficult step and requires and additional level of mindfulness.

And the main reason for this article is the attitude with which we approach mindfulness. It is like the color of the filter through which we observe our moment to moment experience. As soon as an  experience has some special meaning to you, your mind is going to judge and comment on it. And with applying the right filter we can learn and embrace more of what we experience. And the filter I recommend is a Yes to all of your experience. 

What does this mean? Welcome everything. Be of no resistance to what appears in your consciousness. Be a superconductor. Let everything flow through you. Open the flood-gates as wide as possible. 

A Yes feels widening and freeing, whereas a No feels constricting and limiting. Allow yourself to feel also the emotions that are commonly labeled as bad. You begin to embrace the full spectrum of your humanness. Experience will become richer. You will learn that challenging emotions only become problematic when you try to resist them. We cannot change what actually exists. We can only observe and learn, so that we may create a different future. 

When you allow all emotions to flow through you, they quickly resolve and you can observe them with an open and genuine interest, like a scientist who wants to learn more about how his inner mind works. 

Learning by observation greatly helped me to understand situations and my resulting judgments and desires. Often times the root causes will be revealed, but without a rational explanation. Instead you will know in every moment the underlying emotions that triggered your current state of mind. This is a kind of self-knowledge that only observation and no rational talk-psychotherapy can teach. 

You always have the possibility to control the level of openness though. Should the emotions become too overwhelming ,for example when you are dealing with some serious trauma, you can still put the lid on. But as long as you remain firmly rooted in the presence of wide open awareness, you will feel that none of the content that appears can actually hurt you. Your identification with any content in your awareness will greatly decrease. You realize there is no difference between you and consciousness. There never was any separation. You are consciousness. And all that ever happens IS. Changing, fleeting, ultimately groundless and substance-less, self-aware appearances. On a deeper level of reality consciousness is not separated from that which appears. It is all just ISness as different forms and in different dimensions (as the sensory experiences and thoughts). 

Summary of the benefits to approaching your experience with a Yes instead of a No:

• negative emotions don't last as long the less we resist them
• as an open observer we are not longer fully controlled by our emotions 
• we gain the ability to do the best in more and more situations
• from observation we can learn where our current motivations are grounded in
• our experience becomes richer and we act more authentically
• we open ourselves up to have realizations about deeper aspects of reality
• we will feel happier with our moment to moment experience
• fears and worries have less of grip over us
• getting lost in mental scenarios about the future or past is less likely

Something To Be Inspired By

1000 Days Of Hiking To Enlightenment

I am pretty sure the above article will be a great inspiration for every spiritual practitioner.

She would be up for a long-distance hike every second.

Considering this monk started his 1000 days of hiking up and down a mountain, 100-200 days of every year, when he was 24 years old, reading the article strengthened my desire to do a long-term hike myself.

So far I feared to face and the pain and suffering involved in a self-supported, long-distance hike. But Stories like these show me that I, as a human being myself, probably have similar strength in me.

Doing a long-distance hike is not uncommon. Many people do it. But, as I know from myself, it is easy to get lost in thoughts most of the time. In order to raise your consciousness, the technique of All-Day-Awareness or constant mindfulness, makes all the difference. Not letting the mind wander and staying focused on the present moment is the goal. All the time.

These monks represent a state of mind that is truly worth aspiring to. So I recommend you read the article. And let me know what you think of hiking as meditation in the comments ;)

Someone else who is hiking and meditating: http://thewalkingmonk.blogspot.com/

Changes after years of practicing mindfulness / all-day-awareness

This article represents an update on my journey of incorporating mindfulness into my every day activities. Ever since I first heard about it in the context of lucid dreaming I tried to keep this practice up. Outside of my regular 30-60 minutes of daily meditation sessions, I am staying present with at least one sensory input. The intent it so keep the mind from wandering as this is known to decrease happiness.

Improves focus, but its usually not applied to the present moment...

When the mind wanders, it tends to loose itself in worries about either the past or the future. Both are illusions. They do not exist. Only the present moment and your current experience does. This is all obvious, but what does it good to remain in this present moment with awareness?

First I want to address the problem with constantly planning the future or worrying about the past for extended periods of time. There is nothing inherently wrong with those activities, but as every mental activity the are habit forming. And herein lies the problem. For most people it means living their whole lives in this mental state. You can always strive to achieve your goals and imagine living in a better future but when you are not at the same time cultivate the internal mind states that allow you to enjoy those better circumstances you will never arrive there. Recognize the depth of implications this has for you. You will forever be stuck in this state mind. Of not being happy with the present moment. Because you are practicing this during all of your waking hours if you do not become mindful of this habit and interrupt it. 

I want to give you an example that makes the depth of mental habits more obvious. In the case of your mother tongue you can see how habits of your brain are quicker than you conscious efforts. As all sounds, also you mother language does not have inherent meaning. Just as any foreign language does not make sense to you, so doesn't the language you grew up with. 

Now try to listen to your mother tongue in a way that you hear the raw sound but do not understand the meaning of the words. It is impossible. That is how strong habits are. Your brain attaches the meaning to the words without your conscious effort.

This shows you how difficult it will be for you to enjoy your life if you have not consciously practiced experiencing the present moment. Out of habit, your brain will constantly pull you out of what is actually happening. And then you will most likely be worrying about either the future or the past.

In essence, this practices brings you to the only place that actually exists. The present moment. And once you have replaced your mental tendency, to pull you out of the present moment, life becomes a beautifully flowing experience. 

In my experience this practice turned me into a minimalist in many ways. I now enjoy the simple things more. I prefer meditating over partying. The simple state of existing feels rich and fulfilling. Monetary and materialistic goals dropped lower on my priority list, much lower. 

Why? Because they are only necessary to cover up the insecurities one develops when constantly worrying about the future. 

Money? Is usually acquired in the hopes of quieting the worries about an uncertain future. 

Excessive Materialism? Is usually acquired in the hopes of a strong emotional experience, so that it momentarily quiets the monkey mind. 

Hiking With Full Awareness - Walking To Enlightenment

I recently booked a three week Buddhist meditation retreat for my three week vacation for this year. It was a combination of one week of teachings on Buddhist yogas and traditions, follow by one week of silent solo meditation and finished with one week of group meditation sessions.

This would basically be the most hard-core meditation experience for me so far. But I changed my mind and cancelled the reservation. This post is about my recent discovery and the reason I changed my mind about this retreat.

Enlightenment by immersion in nature and physical effort?

How To Do It

On the recent weekends and also in the evenings after work, I spend most of my time hiking. And I discovered it to be a joyful and effective practice, when combined with awareness of the senses. I tried to open up my awareness and stay present to whatever arises. Feeling every step, hearing every step, feeling the clothes on the body, hearing the birds, becoming aware of what arises in sight, sound, smell and touch. All at the same to time, as much of it as possible. This is a hardcore practice at first. In the beginning it feels very unnatural and you will quickly lose focus. It feels like to much to take in. And then comes a moment when your mind surrenders and kind of cracks open. You stay aware, you let everything arise and pass away without an afterthought. No distractions arise anymore and it becomes much easier to be present.

Somewhere in that (at first forceful) state of flowing with the present moment lies a powerful mechanism. I do not know where this mechanism works or how, but I seems to have to power to transform your whole outlook on life, how you feel, your degree of appreciation and your compassion. Sometimes you even reach moments of utter clarity and wisdom. Wisdom that everything just is as it should be and a feeling of love penetrates your being. This might sound already far out, but I was able to reach this state after only a few hours of seriously practicing this.

 

I discovered I could remain in this state of mind for a long time. As my body felt great from the fresh air and the natural surroundings, I was also enjoying the practice a whole lot more than formal sitting meditation. In a sense this practice is much harder and in another sense it becomes easier because it is more enjoyable. It is harder because of the initially overwhelming sensory input. This stage might last weeks and I just pushed through it and opened up my awareness more and more. Concentrating on more individual objects at every moment. Until it had to become an overarching resting in awareness. You only get so far with focus. It is a delicate and subtle difference, which is not easy to explain. But if you come to this point you will notice how it feels.

On the other hand walking meditation is easier because it is not so dull, boring and sometimes unpleasant. You do not fall asleep and your body does not become this big obstacle to your practice. It does not limit you in how deep you can go into the present moment.

Shortcut To Enlightenment

In Buddhist traditions, monks are known to practice walking meditation. Sometimes up to 15 hours a day  of this practice are done. And different lineages of the Buddhist teachings have different degrees of emphasis on this practice. There is even a practice which might be translated with “the fast track to enlightenment” and it involves hiking up and down a mountain for 1000 days. https://www.backpacker.com/skills/the-japanese-monk-who-hiked-a-mountain-1000-days-in-a-row

Those practices are certainly extreme, but enlightenment is also the most extraordinary state a human being can attain.

My Plan

Considering that my working time is already spend mostly sedentary in front of a computer, I was thinking that my free time is better spent moving and again sitting for most of the day. In that way I can combine physical exercise with my meditation practice.

I plan on hiking for one week at a time. The routes I have chosen are mainly in quiet nature areas, away from roads and traffic. I take my full camping equipment with me. This includes a camping hammock, an air-mattress and a sleeping bag. My focus will be on staying in the present moment with every action I do. Therefore I do not plan ahead the distance I want to cover. It will basically be hiking from dawn till dusk. Only wild camping will allow me to do this. Staying in hotels would limit the distances I can cover in a day. I like to have the flexibility of shortening or lengthening a hiking day.

Nutrition

There are also people who do fasted hiking. And as I am not at my thinnest at the moment, I know I have a few extra pounds of fat I can utilize and therefore I will not be concerned about food during the hike. I will still buy food whenever I have chance along the trail, but I will not intentionally take detours to buy food. I plan on eating mostly nuts (from the store) and fruit (along the way). And my walking speed will most likely not be super ambitious. The goal is awareness in the present moment, as mentioned. But as I know myself, I enjoy pushing through steep inclines and exert myself physically. And as I want to have the power to do this, I will eat according to my energy levels.

This may sound extreme as well in the light of vacations which are usually done with the intend of maximizing immediate pleasure. But for me this is more pleasurable than any solo meditation retreat, which I would do instead. And the overall goal here is not pleasure but increasing my awareness and walking the spiritual path.

Start With A Few Sensations

In case you have not tried walking meditation, I recommend you just try it out. Take a couple of hours where you can walk in nature exclusively and concentrate fully on all the sensations during walking. It takes practice to really surrender and until you can see the beauty of it. It also prepares you for daily life, more than formal sitting meditation does. At first, adjust this practice to what feels comfortable. Pick a few sensations and concentrate on those. Add sensation after sensation and focus on them at the same time. Let this crack open your awareness until your mind fully surrenders to whatever arises.

I will post updates after my tour on how it went and what I discovered.

Dream Yoga Practice - Two weeks of practicing awareness of the senses

Two weeks ago I started the practice of all day awareness again more seriously. I have been doing this practice before as well, but loosing track of it again and again. Basically starting all over again each time. But this time I have been practicing it almost continuously in my waking time for two weeks. And going this hardcore and committing to it fully has resulted in some noticeable changes in my perception.

In this post I will explain to you, what I did exactly and what the results have been.

How aware are other beings? - To me it looks like some deep thinking is going on here

When I first started out with the practice of all day awareness a few years ago, I focused on a maximum of three sensations at once. Quickly this became an easy task to do. So my mind started running awareness of the senses on auto pilot. And this time here I already noticed a difference. This time, for two weeks I committed fully to it and tried to make it as difficult as my mind could handle. Because the lesson #1 of the dream yoga guide on dreamviews suggested you can hold many more object in conscious awareness at once than only three. So I just tried to be fully present with as much sensory input as possible. This caused me to have a remarkable insight. I already knew from teachings that awareness is not the same as experience. But I did not know how to understand this.

When I tried to focus on as many sensory impressions in parallel as possible, my mind was struggling so hard to divide the limited awareness on the different sensory streams, that it gave up and separated awareness from experience. In other words, I could feel my awareness hovering above the sensory input. And know it is easier for me to tap into this awareness. Before this insight, I could concentrate my awareness on only one particular sensation (the breath for example). And it felt like this sensory experience was needed to stay aware. But awareness is different. You can automate to concentrate on the breath with little awareness. But becoming aware of everything you experience is so incredibly complex and overwhelming, that is not possible with concentration. For that to happen you need to concentrate on awareness itself and let all experience flow through it without conscious interaction.

Basically those intense two weeks of staying present of the senses showed me that awareness is not the same as experiences. Awareness is also not the thoughts that occur. But we identify usually so much with our thoughts that we think that is what we are. But at the core awareness is something different. I am thrilled to explore it further.

From here on I will definitely continue and intensify this practice. It is both challenging and incredibly rewarding. I will also train my ability to become conscious of awareness itself. This is still difficult for me. And when I need to be particularly focused, it is more difficult for me to feel awareness.

My feeling is that whenever this practice does not yield the results, you hope for, than you need to intensify it. There are always more sensory input you can become consciously aware of at the same time. Just becoming fully aware of all that you feel with your body is more than enough for month of serious practice. Add to that all the sounds at a busy place or of a multi-layered song and you have enough for a good year of practice.

Secondly to the feeling of having a separated awareness, this practice improved my regular meditation. Coming out of meditation and going into, already as much aware as you can, will lead to increased results. Before it was my habit to feel relieve when the time of meditation was over and drop down to a lower degree of awareness going about my day. But keeping the meditation (awareness) up as much as possible all of the time, will make results come much faster. This practice is at the same time rewarding because it brings the good feeling of being in the moment to every day experiences. I will give you an example: Yesterday I was sitting on the train and waiting at the train stations for a total time of 6 hours. Usually this would have bothered me (to say the least, as I do not like travelling that much). But the act of concentrating on every little sensation and not allowing myself to slip out of the present moment for very long resulted in a super clam and euphoric state. At end of the trip I existed the train and walked a few hundred meters to my apartment. On this walk I almost had to cry because of the beauty I experienced. Being super aware of my body (every normal sensation already felt incredible), the wind on my skin was blending in so beautifully with all the other sensations, it was a great.

And as I just started out with this practice, I can only imagine where this practice can lead to in terms of becoming more present. At first is counter intuitive and will require much conscious effort. But think about, how your life (if you are like me) your education has pushed you out of being and into analyzing, planning, focusing, thinking and operating. Your whole life you are spending in the future or the past. And you might think this is an exaggeration. But take some powerful psychedelics and find yourself catapulted into the raw present moment without a conception of future our past and you will appreciate how little you actually are in the present moment. And with this practice you can feel your way back in the present moment. I would guess it is a long way, but so are all other spiritual practices.

For my part, I can say this is the greatest practice I have come about so far in terms of practicality and enjoyment. I struggle with formal meditation for more than one hour in my regular schedule. But this practice I can do almost always. I find it the most difficult in conversations with other people. There I reduce it down to one sensation, to make sure I can also follow the content of the conversation. But this I have found improves my listening skills. I can fully listen, because I become instantly aware whenever I put my own thoughts on top of what is being said.

On the other hand this practice becomes more challenging during work, which requires being focused. But even then I sometimes find that I have unused mental capacity to keep some awareness of the present moment. Usually if my mind is let loose, then even during mental work, I tend to start day-dreaming unconsciously on the side.

I highly recommend this practice of awareness of the senses in addition to other spiritual practices. For lucid dreaming this practices has yielded mixed results. I cannot say for sure if it has increased my number of lucid dreams. But this is also not my main goal with this practice for the moment. In the lucid dreams I did have, I was satisfied with the stability though. 

With All Day Awareness You Listen To Your Honest Inner Voice

I have been in the habit of cultivating All Day Awareness for many years now. It began with a technique to facilitate Lucid Dreams and I practiced it vigorously for many month. I noticed that it became a habit. I was doing it for a great length of time every day without much effort. And even though I did not keep up the practice at that level in the recent past, I still notice a high degree of Awareness for the present moment. It is grounded in my direct sensory experience. And I am pulled back to it at regular intervals without conscious effort or a reminder.

This has recently led to a profound insight. Being highly conscious of ones direct experience at regular intervals does provide a lot of opportunities to asses and reflect ones actions and situations in general. This fleeting experience of the emotional state in combination with a grounded presence often reveals raw and honest truth!

I discover emotional triggers early on in their chain of reaction. It teaches how the brain constructs it's own problems into the world. I also learn very early if something is going wrong in general in my life. Or if my actions really reflect my true inner values.

This can be difficult in the moment, when you have to face every problem. On the positive side this gives me the opportunity to stop problems before they become to big to handle. And ultimately I believe it is easier for me to become fulfilled with what I do in life through this practice. Avoiding the development of serious life-issues, negative habits and being able to listen to the guiding inner voice are among the greatest benefits of practicing All Day Awareness long-term.

To start the practice I recommend setting an alarm on your phone at regular intervals. You can find apps in your app-store that do this by searching for "reality check" for example.

In addition to a daily meditation practice this can facilitate your personal development greatly. But be warned that this might force you to drastically change your life. Even if you right now think this might not do much for you and you are comfortable with what you are doing most of the time. Any action that is not fully aligned with your true values will be openly revealed by this technique. And if you stay aware you can not act against your own believes for very long. You can only do that by listening to and being absorbed in the inner voice that justifies the action while you are acting it out. And then you are most likely not fully present.

Full Awareness of the present moment is a good guidance and probably the best we have access to.