I woke up this morning feeling especially anxious and haven’t been able to shake it all day. Any insight you can offer?
You’re churning. New thoughts, new dimensions of understanding are bubbling to the surface and disrupting old patterns. Not comfortable, we know, but necessary to the changes you are undergoing. You’ve been pondering this notion of awakening and the meaning it has to you in your life and on a deep level, you understand that awakening means the letting go of all the familiar associations you have to people, places, and events, that guide your current interpretation of your experience.
A time of such transformation is a time when one will look at the world with new eyes, eyes untainted by history or preconception. You are a being who makes meaning through context, constantly piecing together the clues and indicators to make sense of the world you inhabit. You look for cause and effect. You seek connections and inter-relationship in order to thread together the sequence of one moment of awareness to the next in a way that you can feel comfort in the predictability of events. You strive to make things make sense in order to make the world feel more safe. The fear of the unknown has you doing all kinds of contortions of mind to maneuver experience into a neat little box.
Through clinging to this form of “reason”, many true connections cannot be perceived because they do not fit into the context you have created for your interpretations. Awakening is release from the box; seeing the world anew, seeing connections as they truly exist and doing so without expectation of the next moment’s events. In being fully present and awake, you are freed to be purely responsive to the truth of the moment. As a result, that response is one that may otherwise have evaded your awareness entirely.