When the suffering of daily human life catches up to us, we may find ourselves asking in exasperation,
“What’s the point of it all?”

This is exciting stuff, not to the egoic “little me” which considers human life to be all important, very serious and downright frustrating, but to the Awakening aspect of the Truth of Who We Are. This Truth is bursting with delight.

Delicious is the thinking mind’s return to the Heart. What joy Awareness finds in the mind’s return to its true source in Being.

This existential question is a signal of “ripeness”, like the hibernating bear stirring from deep winter sleep, hungrily stumbling from its cave to search for food. It’s the arising desire, willingness and openness for the Absolute Truth where nothing else will suffice. As this quest for Truth rises to the surface of our active attention, our very own Awakening of Consciousness grows with earnest intensity.

The egoic “little me” says: “daily life is hard, it’s one damn thing after another, ‘I’ just can’t get ahead, nothing I plan works out, this just isn’t fair, life shouldn’t be this way, I can’t take too much more of this, I just can’t do this anymore, why, why, why,
I hope “I’ die soon, I don’t want to be ‘here’ anymore, if I can just hold on until I get to Heaven,” and on and on the thinking mind’s rationale goes.

The very egoic mind that is unhappy will try to explain, justify and prove that Life is the why, the reason for its unhappiness.
This explanation is an overlay over Life, the innocent ignorance of trying to assign a cause for its own dissatisfaction.
We can sit through this existential pain, bring the pain to stillness. If the ego’s explanation won’t “let us go”, we can bring
the explanation to stillness. We can bring the egoic mind, its question(s), and the feeling of frustration to the Silence of the Present Moment. Whichever we choose, stillness is where we discover what cannot be explained by the thinking mind.

Can an insane entity like the egoic mind offer a sane explanation? The sanity, Truth, is untouched by egoic mind and is ready
to fully engulf our active awareness. In Stillness, revelation of the deepest, broadest Truth awaits direct experience, the bypass of egoic mind. It’s only awaiting our still invitation. Will we invite It, allow it, to arise within so It can show us our very Freedom?

How to access the Silence or Stillness of the Present Moment? There are many techniques, we may try as many as we feel drawn towards. While we practice a technique, we’ll feel its resonance and whether it’s working for us. Our choice of tools matters not, for they all serve to point our conscious awareness towards the door of dawning recognition of Being.

Some examples of tools or techniques are the practices of Mindfulness, Meditation, Centering/Contemplative Prayer,
feeling the inner energy body, following the breath or pranayama, sitting quietly in nature, using mantras or yantras, etc.
For very active minds, movement-centered practices assist with stilling the thinking mind such as yoga or T’ai Chi.
For other busy minds, journaling can “get it all out” on paper to slow the thinking mind’s churning momentum.
There are many more. Eventually the time will come when even a technique is surrendered as “That which cannot be named” (not Valdemort, but our truest essence) comes to the foreground of Awareness.

“But what about our conditioning, our habits, our human dysfunction?” the mind might ask.
“Don’t we need to take care of those first, make them go away?” The beauty of Being is that our essence is not affected by conditioning. As we go directly to our Source, conditioning will eventually lose its momentum. Trying to tackle conditioning
first is like chipping away at an iceberg with a grapefruit spoon. Going to our Source is to realize the iceberg wasn’t the
problem we thought, yet if it needs to dissolve as part of our growth, the process will proceed with appropriate action.

If habits or human conditioning are creating severe dysfunction or suffering in our lives, we’re welcome to use counseling, recovery or any other method to regain the stability of ease in daily living. These, too, are tools. Use any, use all,
in combination with stilling the thinking mind. Some chores require more than one tool, ever try to clean a home or a car
using only one tool? There’s the vacuum cleaner, the broom, the mop, the sponge, the scrub brush, the antibacterial cleanser, the wheel cleaner, the dust rag, the water hose, the bucket….

If we ask why the removal of conditioning seems necessary, we’ll often detect the hope for peace.
Why wait for conditioning’s momentum to end before we can enjoy the Peace already Here, Now?
OH, there’s so much in store for us, already Present, peeking out, relishing our discovery and Its whispering to us…come, come to the Silence, the deep and innermost Silence within our Heart!

With You as Awakening Unfolds