So yesterday and today, my intent was “whole body awareness” during zazen. Back to the drawing board, so to speak, following my teacher’s instructions.

Whole body awareness can be construed as awareness of the whole body and awareness with the whole body. And both — at the same time! And probably much  much more.

I take this instruction to mean expand awareness. Go wide. Go deep. Go broad. Extend awareness.

And include the body in awareness — this is not a purely mental exercise.

And keep it as whole as I can. All of a piece. Bring awareness to the foreground. Let attention to anything less than the whole recede to background.

Easier said than done. Still, a willingness to allow as much awareness into my consciousness as possible is worthy! It is worthy! Step back and allow!

Today I noticed opening my hearing to all sounds, external and internal, and the silence in which sounds float, and letting the sounds and the silence in which they arise fill and flow through my body.

Today I noticed the physical sensations of my physical body sitting on the zafu.

Interestingly, today was one of the most pain-free days I’ve had. Early on I felt some tightness in my left SI joint, with curiosity about it. Did it have a strong message for me today? No.

After a long while of sitting, I felt aching at the back of my hips, and 30 seconds later the bell rang.  

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I am still curious about that experience I had a week or so ago, of the me-shaped hole. I felt energy all around my body, pressing on me, yet I sensed my body as being light, full of space.

It was a different way of perceiving myself in relation to the space around me. Usually, I’m heavy and the air-space around me is light.

Was I discovering that my habitual ways of thinking of “me” are just habit, not truth? Was some nimble, flexible part of my body-mind system at work here, leading me somewhere, showing me something?

I liked it. And, it was whole body awareness.

What a contrast! Yesterday morning I sat at home on my zafu. Quiet, filtered sounds from birds and traffic.

This morning I sat zazen in a tent. 3-D surround sound — birds (cardinals, woodpecker, and so on), people (mostly male voices), noises of people breaking camp, dogs barking, distance traffic, trains.

For a while, birds were talking in a circle around me.

Meditation enhances my sensory awareness. Sometimes when I’m not sitting, I am surprised by moments of deep presence in a sensory experience.

I experienced that last night, nightwalking through the woods, being aware of moving through living space, alive with moving atoms and particles, through plants emanating a subtle phosphorescence.

Unable to rely on focused vision, yet still being able to walk the winding path through the trees in the dark. In these moments, time runs differently.

In these moments, being alive is simply amazing.

These moments make the pain of sitting worth it.

I sat zazen this morning groggily. Awareness moving from the soft, slow waking mind into the flesh-and-blood body.

My body scan was disjointed. I started at my crown … and then realized my attention was caught up in something not present. 

What happens in the … ? I am so curious about this, and I have not yet been able to “catch” that moment!

Every day it’s different. I’m not sure there is such a thing as progress, really. Today zazen didn’t seem much different than the first week of this year.

There are skills to be learned, certainly. Like coordinating the body scan with the breath. I inhale and exhale while paying attention to my head, scanning its parts. Repeat until my head feels well-scanned (whatever “well” means that day). Then breathe with attention on my neck. Move on to chest, abdomen, back, upper arms, seat, legs, feet. Change this order up but generally move down the body one area at a time, breathing and attending.

That’s a skill for body scanning when my attention is wandering. When my attention isn’t wandering, I can scan my whole body almost uninterrupted. I feel pleased with my focus then.

And then it’s on to the next moment of awareness, and the next, and the next.

It also takes skill to sit for 30 minutes without moving, and you gain that skill by doing just that. You experiment and find the posture that works best for you. Right now I’m liking half lotus a lot.

It comforts me to believe that the more I sit, the better I get at it, although more experienced meditators say that pain is part of the experience. It’s definitely not a linear progression, though.

I’ve had what I consider to be one insight about the nature of reality. And it occurred like this: in my ponderings about “whole body awareness,” I had a new thought: what if everything is awareness?

That seemed radical and revolutionary. I wanted to suppress it because if it was true, it meant change. (Okay, I’m lazy.) It kept resurfacing into consciousness, though, so I almost casually examined it, tried it on, tried to find if there was any way it could be not true. I couldn’t, so I accepted it as truth.

And then change began rippling through my life, although I’m not really more skilled at sitting. The variety of sitting experiences just expanded, that’s all. Some days, breakthroughs. Some days, groggy monkey mind.

Yesterday as I was nearing home after being away for the weekend, I experienced a state I’ll call “returning”. As I drove into my neighborhood, I suddenly became fully aware of having disconnected from my accustomed locations for a weekend.

I noticed a dance going on inside me between the strange and the familiar as I drove. It didn’t last very long. At first the commercial establishments on E. Cesar Chavez Street seemed nondescript, like they could be in any city, but very quickly I noticed an emotional lift, a connection, an attachment. This is my neighborhood, my turf, part of my world.

Nothing had changed in my neighborhood. It was me who had changed by going away and by returning, and by all the life that happened in between.

I wonder about all the countless times in my life that I have left and returned and did not notice this state the way I did yesterday.

My memories tell me that when I have returned, I have felt deep gratitude for the comfort of the familiar. I just never noticed that little dance before.

So. The retreat was wonderful. If you are interested in conscious dying, end-of-life decisions, home funerals, green burials, Texas law, how to prepare a body for viewing and burial, I recommend this workshop. Go to http://consciouslivingdying.com/for info.

In hindsight (hindfeeling?), it felt like a lovefest around the topic of dying. Each of those present contributed so much! Just by showing up, being who they were, sharing their experiences and personalities, feelings and thoughts, stories, even the Deadutantes! My circle has widened.

In my sitting, I have begun to converse with my pain. I feel it, and then I really feel it, even as it shifts. I ask it, “What are you about? To what do you want me to attend?”

At first the responses were about the difficulty of sitting still for 30 minutes. Yes, I know.

Then a bigger story about my body: You have persisted for 14 years at working on your body, discovering along the way that healing from that car wreck was complicated by previously existing scoliosis you had for decades. You have worked hard and found the right bodyworkers. After finally getting your spine aligned, now it’s down to the hips and adhesions. You have been cheerful as you moved, seekingly, from numbness to disorientation to pain and misalignment to more and more awareness. You received wonderful gifts along the way, like yoga and meeting healers and learning about anatomy and the body-mind.

This morning the pain’s story was simple. I feel sadness. I acknowledge it.

It’s been really hard.

I feel sad. And now, finally tears come.

What a strange day. Cold, snow expected. Did not get up early and meditate. Instead, I stayed warm in bed longer, then showered, dressed, and went to work.

Steady busy at work. Came out of a meeting to see snow falling. Glances out window while working, getting tea, talking with colleagues.

And then, it was too beautiful not to just stop and gaze out the window. We don’t get snow often in Austin, Texas, USA. Once every few years, and that usually doesn’t stick to the ground.

So I sat with my soup at lunch and stared out my window.

Snow is mesmerizing. The air seems much more three-dimensional when it snows than when it rains.  It seems to me that each snowflake being different, plus its lightness, make its fall from sky to earth unique.

Looking at snow falling is like watching a thousand tiny dances through the air. Some dancers are big and fat. Some are tiny.

I felt very connected to space, to the space between snowflakes, and to the space between you and me, to the space between everything. It holds it, us, all together, has a marvelously fluid nature, and is not water.

Then more work, colleagues leaving early, emails about nonwork issues such as how to plug a meetup and green cards. Work dismissed early, my skeptical mind rolling its eyes while inwardly exclaiming “whee!”

Home, sat, noticed sleepiness. Feeling peaceful, blissful, and now ready to go back out to a coffeehouse and do a little work before dark and possibly slick roads.