With over sixty years of training and discipline, I know I cannot truly live in this moment until I suspend all past references and future expectations. My explorations into the vast stillness between objects of attention reveal that the sublime flow of relaxed attention varies from the focused concentration often associated with meditation. Pure and unfiltered awareness excludes nothing while allowing and embracing everything. With relaxed attention, the focus of mental activity naturally shifts from personal and spatial relationships into primal non-relational wakefulness, always right in plain sight.
What is self-evident is that my authentic life experience is naturally devoid of theory, regurgitated processes, or misguided intellectual understanding. Frankly, however, it was my exposure to some well-known but unconscious teachers in those same disciplines that was most helpful in me remaining mindful of the enormous difference between teachings derived from partially unquestioned information and beliefs, and knowledge derived from my own direct and unfiltered experiences.
Being fully present with the appearance of something as familiar as tension within our physical being is simply the cue to relax and surrender to the moment’s timeless repose. When attention yields to an unfiltered moment, the personal sense of self is conspicuously absent. That shows the value of staying receptive to the present by allowing for fresh responses to changing life circumstances.