Buddhism's Meditation History with Spacious Awareness

 Life isn't a series of many moments, but one moment that is always changing. 
- Joe Duncan

It is rather well known that meditation has ties that date back to the beginnings of Buddhism. At the core of Buddhist meditation practice is living in spacious awareness that this free from prejudices. The purpose of spacious awareness meditations is to release tension and stress, cultivate calm, focused attention, and waken awareness; an awareness where all events, thoughts, feelings, sensations, and sense of separation dissolve as impermanent and insubstantial. 

I am excited for this month's meditation video not only because it has direct ties back to Buddhist meditation practice, but it also one of the more advanced meditation practices. It allows you to investigate the environment that surrounds you with your senses. It is also a practice that is easy to do on your own, or without a guided video, just using the phrase "I am aware of...", closing your eyes, and saying aloud in your head the various things in your presence that catch your attention. You may be surprised how and what is present for you. 

While doing some research on spacious awareness of this month's blog post, I came across this really interesting article and graph about the practice of meditation and how it relates to "view" and "conduct".

• The view is the freshness that comes from unlearning misconceptions and habits, and from the widening and deepening of our perspective
• Conduct is all about bringing the wisdom perspective to life

Meditation leads to familiarizing ourselves with the natural harmony of view and conduct in our innate wisdom nature - the basic goodness. Meditation harmonizes the view and conduct, bringing the awareness of view and attention to conduct to our lives. 

It cannot go without being said that there is a lot more to the history of meditation, Buddhism, and how it has been colonized to how we understand it today. I hope to cover this more in the future, but for now, I wanted to just share the connections between meditation and spacious awareness. See the citations down below to read more about what was discussed in this month's post, and while you're there, do not forget to check out the absolutely beautiful poem, Planet, by Catherine Pierce that reminds us that spacious awareness does not mean just awareness of ourselves but of the entire world around us. 

Stay Beautiful,

Sadie

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Schoeninger, K. (no date). Calm Spacious Awareness-Guided Meditation. Retrieved on August 21, 2020 from https://clearquietmind.info/2019/01/29/calm-spacious-awareness-guided-meditation/.  

Yogi Prabodha, J. (no date). The Essence of the Buddhist Practice. Retrieved on August 21, 2020 from https://www.wayofbodhi.org/life-and-meditation-in-spacious-awareness/.

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Planet by Catherine Pierce

This morning this planet is covered by winds and blue.
This morning this planet glows with dustless perfect light, 
enough that I can see one million sharp leaves
from where I stand. I walk on this planet, this hard-packed
dirt and prickling grass, and I don't fall off. I come down
soft if I choose, hard if I choose. I never float away.
Sometimes I want to be weightless on this planet, and so

I wade into a brown river or dive through a wave

and for a while feel nothing under my feet. Sometimes

I want to hear what it was like before the air, and so I duck

under the water and listen to the muted hums. I’m ashamed

 

to say that most days I forget this planet. That most days

I think about dentist appointments and plagiarists

and the various ways I can try to protect my body from itself.

 

Last weekend I saw Jupiter through a giant telescope,

its storm stripes, four of its sixty-seven moons, and was filled

with fierce longing, bitter that instead of Ganymede or Europa,

I had only one moon floating in my sky, the moon

 

called Moon, its face familiar and stale. But this morning

I stepped outside and the wind nearly knocked me down.

This morning I stepped outside and the blue nearly

 

crushed me. This morning this planet is so loud with itself—

its winds, its insects, its grackles and mourning doves—

that I can hardly hear my own lamentations. This planet.

All its grooved bark, all its sand of quartz and bones

 

and volcanic glass, all its creeping thistle lacing the yards

with spiny purple. I’m trying to come down soft today.

I’m trying to see this place even as I’m walking through it.