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Soon after I was married, I found myself busier than I’d ever been before. Working two part-time jobs, commuting to acupuncture school, and studying for my state licensing exams, I needed to feel some sense of quiet inside. So I decided to hold the question “Where is rest?”

The answer didn’t come to me in words; instead, I discovered that just asking the question elicited a sense of stillness and peace. Once my mind became calm, I could rest in the busyness.

My interest in stillness didn’t start, or stop, there. Since childhood, I’d wondered about the words from Psalm 46 that we learned in Sunday school: Be still and know that I am God. So when I began hearing Eastern teachings, I was intrigued by concepts such as samsara (continuous movement) and nirvana (cessation).

In the East, an image that’s referred to as the “wheel of samsara” has been used for centuries to depict the continuous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, and the conditions that cause suffering. The conditions of ego that power the wheel are sometimes called the three poisons. They are desire, or attachment; hatred, or aversion; and ignorance, or illusion. When one’s life is lived free of these conditions, one is said to be freed from the wheel of samsara.

In my own experience, the first two conditions, attachment and aversion, are best remedied by addressing the third condition, ignorance. You could say that the root condition of suffering is ignorance of our true nature, ignorance of knowing ourselves as spirit. Attachment and aversion, then, cause day-to-day suffering.

Stillness, I have seen, is both the treatment for ignorance and the ultimate antidote to samsara. When your mind is still, you get a rest from the push-pull energies that drive the ego and cause suffering. In stillness, the energies of attachment and aversion can unwind. The sense of a “me” who desires can relax out of the center of experience and ultimately dissolve. That is the harmonizing quality of stillness.

To get a dose of what life is like divorced from stillness, try this experiment: Think a thought that has “push” energy, such as “I don’t want to go to work” or “I don’t want to have that difficult conversation.” Or think, “That shouldn’t be.” Now check in with your body. Can you feel it registering aversion? It may feel like there’s a hand in your gut, pushing away.

Next, consider a “pull” thought, such as “I want to meet someone who will love me” or “They should do what I want. ” Hold that thought, and then pay attention to your body. Do you feel a grasping fist in your gut? Tension in your shoulders?

Either way, push or pull, your body beautifully lets you know which thoughts will cause you constriction, inner division, or feelings of separation. It would seem, then, that if you could stop divisive thoughts, you’d be at peace with whatever presents itself in each moment.

But wait . . . having trouble finding the “off” switch? Yep, thoughts keep coming. The more you try not to think, the more aversion arises. And the more you try not to have divisive thoughts, the more attachment arises. Both efforts take you further away from experiencing peace.

A Better Way

But there is an alternative to push-pull thoughts. Again, using your body as a thought meter, feel your gut as you contemplate the phrase “Thoughts simply arise.” Let the words permeate your body. Do they make you feel more peaceful, or less so? My guess is that you feel more peaceful. Perhaps you can sense relaxation as you let go of assigning credit or blame for having a particular thought. When you align yourself this way with what life is presenting—with reality—the experience of inner division gives way to peace.

Thoughts themselves don’t create division, separation, and suffering. Rather, investing thoughts with belief, identifying with them, and taking them personally are what fuels the wheel of samsara.

When you identify with a thought, that creates a fixed position in time and space—like a star in the night sky. As you identify with more thoughts, you create more fixed positions, until you have an entire constellation of ideas and beliefs. The lines of that constellation continue to grow and overlap, creating something that begins to look solid, like an object. Those fixed points create an illusion of an individual “me,” with its own boundaries separating it from the whole.

You can live your whole life in ignorance, not knowing that suffering is a result of believing the thoughts that suggest you are separate from the whole. But if you examine your push-pull thoughts, discover which beliefs you’re investing in, and question them, you can slip into stillness and become your own medicine—the perfect antidote to the poisons of ignorance, attachment, and aversion.

What Is Stillness?

Connect with the quiet at the center of your whirling energies.

Begin by sitting comfortably. Close your eyes, breathe deeply, and let your body settle, inviting relaxation. Observe your body as you allow it to cease moving. Lean softly into your experience and give it your whole attention.

Now drop this question into the space between your muscles and bones: What is stillness? Let your body experience the answer. Let the body’s response wash into every part of you, from the top of your head down to the floor or chair where you are sitting. As your body quiets and softens, notice the stillness gather and settle.

Maintaining a steady and intimate quality of attention, let the stillness widen and let your senses open globally to the outer world. Notice the space of your awareness and let it relax outward. Let sounds in the distance enter the space of your awareness, but don’t strain to hear or to make note of them. Notice any sounds that arise closer to you, between the edge of your body and the outer shores of your hearing.

While continuing to soften into stillness, rest a portion of your attention on the surface of your body, allowing it to stop there completely, allowing the stillness saturating you inside and out to soften any sense of boundaries between your body and the outside world.

Let any sense of a “me” who is aware relax out of the center, letting stillness dissolve all attachment, all effort.

Originally published in Yoga Journal

© Mukti Gray 2016

In last month’s newsletter article, “Living Spiritual Autonomy,” [November 2021] I shared that this article would further explore the embodiment of spiritual autonomy. As a point of reference, I again offer Adyashanti’s definition for spiritual autonomy, taken from his “Taking the One Seat” course: To be a simple force of nature, a selfless and creative expression of the whole, possessing an independence of spirit capable of manifesting the enlightened condition in daily living for the highest possible good.

In Buddhism and in Zen, in particular, there is a directive: take the one seat. In this pointer, we have the key to embodying spiritual autonomy. It’s a pointer that conveys simplicity, while also speaking volumes to body, mind, and spirit.

Along my journey, this pointer has been an encouragement to first seek to know the one most important direction for living and then to see that my sense of self and Self is established in that. As I know it, this most important direction has been to align with life, as life. From a more personal perspective, this has meant dropping the arguments about what I want and don’t want, and navigating away from this push and pull toward a discovery of foundational stillness. It has meant that I’ve needed to align “my will” with “God’s will”—and God’s will, simply put, is: whatever is happening. In sensing this alignment with what is, I discovered that what I wanted most was to not want, and to be at home in what is. This discovery and shift helps free vision to see what is, to see the moment, more clearly.

It has meant “my life” and “my being” sync to a greater orchestration of life and totality of being, to the One expressing as beingness. Being or beingness is the primordial expression of what you are and we are, what life is, what the moment is. The more we shift from the mode of grasping at life to fill a sense of internal lack to the mode of giving ourselves to life, joining in the moment . . . the more we know the wholeness of being. This is the human’s journey to awakening and the embodiment of that awakening.

Realization is not just about a person’s journey to awakening. It’s also a journey of immaculate spirit, empty of the qualities and conditions of form, waking up to itself within you, and recognizing Itself as all of form through you. This is Emptiness waking up to its expression as fullness in being. This is spirit’s journey of awakening and its embodiment.

Together, the journeys of spirit and human are: the totality finding Its place—known and expressed through the individual, and the individual finding its seat, its home, in the totality: the One in the one, and the one in the One.

Copyright © 2021 Mukti Gray.

When Adya first began in his teaching role, I decided to attend his evenings of instruction. Little did I know that my meditation practice, which had been largely oriented inward in techniques of concentration and intimate listening and sensing, was about to change dramatically.

He spoke on many of the topics he does today, including “awareness,” “letting everything be as it is,” and of essentially putting first things first. I clearly remember an example of the latter when he said, “Instead of always asking what to do and how to live your life, might you ask, ‘Who is it that is living this life?’”

With each topic, I was learning to ease my way out of identifying as the one in the driver’s seat, as the one at point A focusing on and steering to point B. I became more cognizant of a sense of awareness that did not identify as the driver or the seeker, meditator, or doer. And as significant and foundational as all of this was, I believe what may have been the most revolutionary to my meditation practice and spirituality as a whole were his simple instructions on global listening.

Are you familiar with global listening? Really familiar? The kind that begins with a listener listening to sounds and gives way to non-separation, to a seamless being of existence? If you feel that auditory skills are not your strength, not to worry, for global listening is more of a global sensing and engages all skills of being actively present. Unlike many other inward approaches to meditation (sitting, standing, or living meditation), global listening also avails itself of an outward approach.

Please join me now, as I point to global listening as I have come to know it. See how you come to know it in yourself, as your Self. To begin, I recommend you find a comfortable seat and invite your body to come to rest. Briefly observe your body, as it shows you what it inherently knows of settling.

Now, let your attention widen into the room and become more acutely aware of the sounds around you. At first you may notice thoughts, and the labeling of sounds such as “fan,” “breath,” “cat.” See if you can settle into listening in a soft, receptive way. You may pause to invite your body to settle once again. As your body relaxes and softens, and holdings of energy and tension settle downward creating greater ballast, you may notice that your attention in the space of the room becomes receptive more easily. The functions of tracking and labeling sounds relax further. Mind and attention become clearer. This phenomenon is much like silt in the body of a pond settling and the pond water becoming clearer.

As attention softens, you may also become aware of life beyond the room, perhaps hearing “car,” “bird,” or “wind” even without the mind labeling them . . . more bubbles, more notes in the song of the moment. Continue on in this way, listening to life, not only with your hearing but with a global sensing, a being with, much like when your senses settle into harmony with nature when you lie down on the beach or grass at your leisure.

Now pausing this guided exercise, I want to point out for this article that what I call “spatial mind” often assigns location to sounds in different areas of the room (and beyond the room) when globally listening and sensing, especially at first. Spatial mind also often places your sense of physical self or your sense of separate ego-self at the center of its spatial map. As you continue to be receptive to sounds in the room and beyond the room, less attention and energy will go to the separate ego-self at the center. (Wink. Don’t tell the ego, but this is much like a parent, skilled in the art of distraction, who eases a small child from distressed self-concern by pointing out wonderful things to see and hear in the environment.) The sense of self at point A listening to sounds at points B, C, D, etc. gives way to a sense of self locally listening to the outer world as a whole. This may initially feel like point A, bounded by the physical body, listening to the larger body of life, free of edge or boundary—a global point B, one could say. Yet, as the tensions and energies of one’s physical body settle downward in the system, the local physical body becomes more still, like the earth. One’s mind becomes more clear, like the sky. The inner body harmonizes with the outer, larger body of life.

If a remaining sense of the observer or meditator remains at the center of experience, you can ask if it might too recognize its arising as another arising in the song of the moment, that it too might soften and receive the harmony of life’s unfolding, appearing as arisings in movement and as settlings in stillness (point A giving way to B, and B to A).

In closing, I encourage you to continue to discover the power of global listening and sensing. We are never more present than when we are deeply and intimately listening, and yet, curiously, our sense of ego is never more absent. Intimate listening, sensing, and being allow the distancing of ego, with its grasping toward and pushing away, to come to rest and yield its hindrance to the vital, clear expressions of life and living.

Copyright © 2021 Mukti Gray.

Enlightenment is consciously being that which is entirely unmoving and yet moves all things. In order to know what is unmoving, consciously, one must end all investment in movements of mind and attend to what is always and already stopped.

When one no longer invests in movements of mind, the searchlights of your attention withdraw back to source. Abiding as source is true stopping.

This return to source—whether by letting energies withdraw and recede from outer attentions or by tracing movements of mind back to their origin—is the way Home.

Often in spirituality, there are teachings that assert the need to focus attention on given objects of perception. You may have been taught to focus your attention on a goal, a mantra, your breath, the third eye, the hara, or on sensation, but it is the very assertion of focus and the assertion of the focuser, the “me,” that keeps you forever at a seeming distance from the root of attention: your Self as pure Awareness.

In your natural state as Oneness, there is no need to focus in order to discover yourself-any more than point A can know itself by focusing on point B. Point A can only know itself by letting all focus, attention, and searching subside back to its origin.

This is an open invitation for a simple resting, a return to the ground of being you have always known.

© Mukti Gray 2016

Devotion is an offering of time, energy, and attention that requires one to give and even to pour out. And while the extended hand is giving, so to speak, it cannot grasp. Grasping arises from a sense of egoic self that is based in lack. True devotion is never founded in lack and therefore has the power to deliver one beyond the strictures of ego-identification.

Devotion to truth becomes possible when one drops the focus on egoic desires and deficiencies, allowing for a direct encounter with what remains in their absence. This direct encounter is a shift from the illusory to the true and real.

At first glance, a desire for the true and real may appear like any other desire that is based in lack. But on closer examination, and by inquiring “What is this?” one can discover that the desire for truth arises as a movement of Consciousness to know Itself. When you turn your attention within and trace the desire for truth back to its root origin, you can experience your human consciousness returning home to the very seat of Consciousness Itself.

This return can be catalyzed all the more when one’s inquiry or fresh curiosity is imbued with devotion. An attitude infused with sincerity when inquiring “What is this?” presents more like “I don’t know (the truth, or where this desire for truth comes from), but I intuit that such knowledge is available, and my heart is fully open and committed to receiving it.”

It is this very openness of heart that gives power to devotion, as openness gives space for fullness to reside. Such fullness is not only a counterpoint to all lack; it is a movement toward unity and wholeness. In unity, self is revealed as the One, the same One expressing as all of life.

© Mukti Gray 2024

When we’re relating with someone, it can be like Spirit to Spirit, or essence to essence, or heart to heart. But it can also be like connecting in stillness, connecting in a listening space, or a space where whatever is going to occur unfolds and appears to you. It’s as if you’re sitting back a little and just letting the whole interaction unfold to you. You’re in the front row seat, and they’re in the front row seat, but it’s more like a co-arising, and you’re letting what unfolds appear to you both as it’s unfolding.

Sometimes when people think of connecting, they might think at some level that their body and spatial energetics are moving toward and connecting, like moving forward or out. You can experiment with resting back and in, having that inward landscape be the connecting tone of what’s happening. It hinges on a sense of identity, not as the person connecting, but as the aware space that connects all things and expresses as all things.

There’s something that I call spatial mind. It’s a little bit different than thinking mind. It’s that part of us that references “big,” but it also references close or more proximal. It references out and in, just any directional kind of referencing. This is not only a referencing of the mind, but it’s a referencing of the heart and the entire body.

A common situation is in nature where people can feel like their whole energetics open into the woods or the beach, or wherever it is, and it feels like their energy body can relax and be as big as it wants, because it’s so soothing. You want to drink in the vitality of nature—not that you’re thinking about all this, but that’s just what the system is doing. It’s not only relaxing and connecting; it’s taking in and feeling the nourishment of it all. There are certain settings where our system feels more comfortable to do that, or we actually want it to do that or encourage it to do that in unconscious ways that we might not be knowing. Some people have a definite preference for being big and open over not attending to that.

In my experience, when I started focusing more on the hara and on the earth, a lot of this came into balance on its own. You might want to do the exercise about sensing the breath coming in and out, down in the lower abdomen, or the exercise about growing roots into the earth. I also have a free meditation online called Iron Mountain that gives you some basic principles about sensing what it is to feel more energetic ballast. You can contemplate that as a complement to what you've already developed.

It can feel really good to be in your body and be anchored, and your body will be happy. It will be like, “Ahh! She’s at home in me, and I’m being resided in.” It can feel really good. Most people report, “Wow, I haven’t felt this before. This feels great.” Sometimes it can be challenging coming back into the body, if the body is associated with past difficulties or trauma, but as it becomes more comfortable to settle in the body, it can feel really good.

That rooting will have a conserving effect, like self-resourced energy. You’ll feel more resourced in your local body, in your local self. It will conserve some of the energy that may be mapping to the sense of being vast, or maybe even having a slight preference for being vast. The goal, which is something more sustainable, is to know yourself ultimately as That which is not vast or small. It can appear as those things, but you really sense the place where identity doesn’t land so much.

Sometimes it’s helpful for the body to bring these different expressions online, such as “up and out” and “down and in,” so that all of the instrument is at the ready and available for freely flowing into these different expressions that all complement each other. After you bring it online and these things become resident in your architecture—like what it is to ground and what it is to open—once they’re all known in your being, then you can kind of forget about it, and Awareness just uses the instrument however it does. The referencing becomes a body memory, like riding a bike or driving a car. Once you’ve done it enough, you’ve got it and it’s in your body memory.

From Mukti’s Got Juice? Online Course, 2018

© Mukti Gray 2018

When you look through the eyes of Spirit, or listen from the sense of your Spirit nature, that very nature is always and ever receiving, available, and allowing things to be as they are, because it’s incapable of resisting or denying what is. That very perspective, that very aspect of what we are, can be invited forward into our experience when we contemplate and sense what it actually is to allow everything to be. What is it to allow that which is already in alignment with what is, to come forward in our experience? What is it that is already present that is not in resistance to what’s happening? This is a good inquiry to live with.

In that regard, there is an evoking or inviting into a more prominent consciousness or awareness the quality of seeing through the eyes of Spirit. This quality of seeing is expressive of our eternal nature. It has a sense of eternity, that which is always and ever present for the whole of our experience—the highs and the lows, the difficulties and the joys. That which is being evoked, which expresses as the eternal, functions through our body-mind instrument in the capacity of seeing, as well as hearing and sensing and feeling. It gives us a sense of seeing things more clearly, with a lot of the overlay of our interpretation of what’s happening receding to the background or being supplanted, so that this more quiet “allowing” seeing can predominate.

This can be challenging in moments when we really don’t want things to be as they are, and we might be investing a lot of energy in that resistance. It’s difficult sometimes to shift into a different energetic that might allow the sense of our eternal seeing to move forward, but as you sit with a pointer like this, it just naturally becomes easier to invite that quiet seeing forward in more and more situations.

This inviting is like a muscle that can become stronger and stronger. That’s where it begins to touch upon a sense of faith, a kind of strength in feeling a more steadfast commitment to wanting to see things more clearly as they are. It’s a faith in the intelligence of life, the unfolding of life, and how life is in service to itself in many ways. We may see examples to the contrary, but the challenge is to see where this is true, where life seems to be finding its way and has a certain order, an intelligence, that moves differently than we may have observed in realms of resistance and conflict.

This quality of faith, this intention to see things more clearly as they are—versus investing in how we wish they were or wish they weren’t—can be expressed as a steadfast commitment. The very commitment to see things as they are creates a sense of our own compass being pointed toward this intention. It can be an organizing principle that gives us a sense of alignment and energetic strength that helps us walk into the unknown before us, where we have at least this clear intention that helps guide us in the waters and territories where things may not be clear.

Part of that intention to see things more clearly as they are is a willingness to not have to always know in our minds, but to have a real commitment to knowing what’s important in our hearts and our beings at the level of our deepest intentions for living.

In addition, one of the aspects where faith and “allowing things to be as they are” sync up is continually sensing into the nature of what’s occurring, and the nature of what’s occurring within myself, especially with respect to noticing grasping or aversion that might create egoic mechanisms that obscure a sense of what is.

When you’re discovering a sense of faith that is based in really being in alignment with what is, a big part of that is becoming conscious of where that breaks down, where these resistances and graspings come into play. The more conscious you are of these overlays, the more you have a sense of choice to navigate differently, to take your hands off the steering wheel, so to speak. To take our hands off the steering wheel looks like a clear depiction of navigating life without a sense of control. That’s a real picture of faith. That’s the vantage point of our Spirit nature.

When you have the intention to see more clearly, one thing you can do is to register these things in an energetic way. You may become conscious of the thoughts, such as “I don’t want this,” “This shouldn’t be happening,” “I don’t like this,” “No, no, no.” Or “Gosh, I really want this and this and this, not that,” or “This is what I prefer, and it isn’t happening, and I’m concerned about it.”

You can not only become conscious of the narratives of grasping and aversion, but also how that translates energetically into the body with clenchings or a sense of no, where you feel like you have your foot on the brake in your gut, or your shoulders are hunched up to your ears. Or it could be the opposite, like insatiable hunger with an addictive quality to fill, fill, fill a sense of lack. To become more conscious of these energetics and how they register in the body is a great way of receiving input or indicators that can help you find a different way of being that is not founded in the paradigm of grasping and aversion.

Sometimes if I feel a quality of anxiety or overwhelm, I’ll ask myself, “What is it that I’m really wanting in this situation?” That can be a very open question, and it can have many answers. I’ve found that when I register grasping or resistance in my body, especially below my neck, I sense, “Okay, there’s some part of me that wants things to be different than how they are, and that’s why I’m feeling these energetic signatures in my system.”

Then I’ll ask myself, “What is it that I’m sensing is happening, and what is it that I really want to be happening?” When I ask myself that question, the answer that comes at the deepest level is that I either want not to want, or I want to have a deeper sense of faith in life. It’s faith in life’s intelligence, faith in how life might unfold, faith in other people’s process and their nature, and their process of learning and becoming more conscious. It’s also faith in my own nature, and faith to move toward a more conscious, refined expression.

When I reconnect with that desire, it really spells out a clear intention of how I might have a deeper trust in life. I feel that trust as a relaxing out of trying to control. It can be a kind of settling that registers low down, like landing right back in life, and being present, and looking afresh. It’s a sense of resting down and arriving back right here, even if it feels difficult. It’s sensing anew the possibility that life has an intelligence that I don’t have to be responsible for, that I don’t need to control and lead. Maybe I can free up those energies so that I’m instead more available to receive what’s happening and respond. For me that’s faith, a faith in the process of being able to see more clearly, and to sense that the very seeing has a wisdom that can respond in a way that feels less like leading life and more like having life live through myself. I encourage you to explore that as well.

From Mukti's Allowing Faith ~ The Spirit of What Is, 2019

© Mukti Gray 2019

On this New Year’s Eve, many people the world over will be joining in a chorus of “Happy New Year!” And I imagine just as many are asking how happiness might be revitalized once again. In this new year’s dawning light, I invite you to join me in exploring the nature of happiness, its foundation, and its furtherance.

I imagine most would agree that the happiness we wish for one another is a pleasing state, one of contentment, fullness of being, and even joy. Whatever its degree, from ease to elation, I propose that happiness is founded upon sufficiency, not lack.

It is a core orientation to lack, in oneself or in others, that perpetuates dissatisfaction. Habitually rejecting what is within us, or before us, and seeking “more, better, and different” perpetuates struggle, opposition, and the sense that life is inherently problematic.

When I first heard Adya speak of the nature of egoic seeking, my ears perked up. He conveyed that when a seeker obtains the object of their search, they are only temporarily happy. He proposed that such happiness is due to the absence of seeking in the moment of finding, and not due to the object gained.

The point is to question the dynamics of seeking as well as one’s identity as a seeker. You may find that happiness is fundamentally linked to an absence of the seeker-identity, as well as to an absence of egoic identities in general. Seeing these workings clearly brings new possibilities for responding in moments of resistance and seeking.

Within seeing itself is awareness free of struggle. To reside in freedom from struggle, one must stop. Let personal thoughts, feelings, and the circumstances be, and open to the inherent allowance of pure awareness, which is already free of wrongness and lack.

Return again and again to commune with the sense of what remains, free of unconscious patterns and notions of self. The initial doorway is awareness, free of struggle. At first awareness may appear overly simple. Over time, its allowance and freedom register more and more fully in your mind, heart, and body—your whole being. Embodied awareness is the ground of true satisfaction and, yes, even happiness.

I hope you hear my good news. You are not the seeker. Your true identity and happiness are not bound by the temporal world of gain and loss. Your essential nature is not bound in wrongness and lack. The ground of being, your being, is ever-present, just behind your thoughts, feelings and struggles. It is eternally open, allowing, free, sufficient, and whole. Your communing in and as your eternal nature is my unceasing wish for you, my wish for your happiness.

© Mukti Gray 2023