Week Thirty-Three: Willing Awareness

During several of my walks across Central Park this week, two words kept moving through my mind: willing awareness. As I got in touch with these words, I discovered that they didn’t refer to an effortful act of will, but instead to a process of willingly allowing, inviting, engaging awareness. As I experienced a basic willingness to be aware, I immediately felt a “movement toward.” The feeling of willingness itself seemed to reach out toward whatever captured my attention. Willing awareness felt to me like an invitation to actively reach out, or into, a more conscious and open experience of noticing what was going on in and around me. Then, I wondered where I may be unwilling to be aware, where I pull back from what’s going on in and around me. I experienced a tangible physical difference between being willing to be aware and being unwilling. And, I must say, the quality of being willing felt a lot freer, more open, and more comfortable than the experience of its opposite!

For this week’s experiment, I invite you to explore your relationship with willing awareness, with being willing to notice what’s going on in and around you. During the week, pay particular attention to any moments when you move toward what’s happening in you and your world. Notice what it’s like to choose to open yourself to whatever awareness is moving through you, even if you’re in the midst of a difficult or challenging experience.

Also, as always, notice those moments when you discover that you are unwilling to be aware, when you move away from a full experience of what’s going on in and around you. There’s no right answer here, as usual. Instead, this experiment offers an opportunity to track more consciously your relationship with your own awareness. Remember that the benefit of being willing to be aware is that each moment of knowing what you are doing, feeling and experiencing offers its own moment of choice.

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