Four Doorways to Awareness: Mindful, Loving, Inquiring, and Embodying Awareness

Understanding Awareness Beyond Doing

• 💡 The core idea is that awareness is not a 'doing' but a simple feeling of being, which becomes obscured when we identify with action.
• 🎯 We can approach this state by loosening identification with doing and exploring different "doorways to awareness."

Mindful Awareness: Expanding the Scope

• 🔬 Mindful awareness begins with a narrow focus, often the breath or a body sensation, and gradually expands to encompass more of our experience.
• 🌐 This expansion includes physical senses, emotions, thoughts, and even subtle sensations like intention, leading to an awareness so broad it includes the entire field of experience.
• 🧠 The ultimate goal is a non-dual awareness where the distinction between the observer and the observed dissolves.

Loving Awareness: Expanding the Heart

• ❤️ Loving awareness involves expanding the capacity to feel and allow emotions, similar to mindful awareness's expansion of observation.
• 🌟 It contrasts with the Vedantic "neti neti" (not this, not this) approach by embracing a Tantric "this too, this too, this too" perspective, extending love and appreciation to everything.
• ⚖️ This approach is beautifully summarized by the idea that wisdom tells us we are nothing, while love tells us we are everything, with life flowing between these two.

Inquiring into Awareness: Turning Awareness Inward

• 🔍 This doorway uses inquiry to turn awareness back on itself, asking "what is aware of this experience?"
• 🚫 The practice leads to a non-conceptual experience of not finding a distinct entity doing the looking, which is itself the experience of awareness.
• 🌌 This primordial "no-thingness" or open lack of a fixed answer is a way to access awareness.

Embodying Awareness: Coming Home to the Body

• 🏠 Embodying awareness focuses on inhabiting the body as a home, addressing areas of tension and grip.
• 🧘‍♀️ Through somatic practices, attention can shift from being centralized in the head to being distributed throughout the body.
• ✨ The result is a centerless awareness where the experience of the body and life is distributed, leaving nothing out.