The Direct Way: Thirty Practices to Evoke Awakening

Taking the one seat begins with taking complete responsibility for your relationship with your experience. I didn’t say “taking responsibility for your experience,” because you don’t create your experience as much as it happens to you.

Practice Twenty-Two •Today, simply notice how your relationship with a given experience, or even with your mind, determines your quality of being. •Pay attention to how your relationship with your experience is changeable. You can be upset that your mind is racing at a hundred miles an hour or you can acknowledge, “Okay, my mind’s racing right now.

These are pathways through which insight can move into us, be embodied in our humanity, and then acted in the world of time and space. This is what spiritual awakening is all about. This is what enlightenment is about. It’s not about having big experiences. That’s part of the process and those experiences can be life-changing, but at some point it

We all have what you could call an energetic body, and the more present we are, the more we feel this subtle sense of aliveness. If you become truly present right now—and I don’t mean straining to be present or making effort, but simply opening all your senses, relaxing into a more open state of being—you’ll feel a subtle sense of presence.

You may feel hesitant about this, or fearful. You’ll encounter different emotions each time, so let them arise; open your heart to those too. Open your heart to your fear, open your heart to your anxiety, open your heart to old thought patterns that insist you have to protect your heart at all times. This is important, because being in a state wher

Inherent in the view of enlightened relativity is the understanding that spiritual insight is only as relevant to our human lives as our ability to embody it in our humanity and everyday living and relating. If we imagine that spiritual awakening is about having a powerful experience that we put in our pocket and then go on with our life with a sen

In other words, your relationship with a current experience will determine how the next moment unfolds. It’s a way of removing or taking back a projection, so that we’re not making people responsible for how we feel, we’re not making life responsible for how we feel. Instead, we’re noticing that it’s our relationship with any moment that determines

human capacity to embody the infinite in our human lives. Since there is no end to this process, there is, as the Zen saying goes, “No anxiety about imperfection,” and, I might add, no egocentric orientation toward achievement or final goal. We are always and already complete Buddhas in our absolute Ground and constantly becoming Buddhas in our hum

We can’t dictate our next experience or even what the next thought is going to be, but we can become conscious of our relationship with whatever experience happens. So it’s important not to mistake taking responsibility with blaming yourself for how you feel. Nor are you to blame others for how you feel at any given moment. Rather, taking responsib