Numinous Nonsense

On my last retreat (over the holidays) I spent most of my time there “doing” a practice that you could call choiceless awareness. Much like the practice of “just sitting” or shikantaza in the Zen tradition, it is a practice of non-doing. Here are some thoughts I jotted down after the retreat:

Choiceless awareness is a practice of doing nothing. Any effort to change things, go somewhere else, or in some other way manipulate or control experience is dropped. When it does arise, as it will, in the recognition of it, it is self-liberated of it’s own accord. The practice then is to trust experience, and to that which is also beyond and yet includes experience. Trust and all shall be revealed.

Choiceless awareness has become pretty much all I “do” when I sit down lately, and although I was transitioning to this practice over the past several months, this last retreat really unfolded in such a way that anything with more structure or effort would probably just obscure what is so apparent: that things just are as they are. And so, one sits, walks, and goes about their life and does so without as much of a need or pull to construct boundaries. This moment, it turns out, is enough.