Samāveśa: Endless Immersion in Living Presence
Beginning Outside
Two truths about cultivating a spiritual practice:
We all begin somewhere.
We all begin again.
And that beginning place can be hard. No matter how many times you return to it.
In that beginning place, you may find yourself alone. Disconnected and desperately trying to find your way into practice, into your sadhana, into presence.
Often, our mind, manas, and its tempting capacity for thoughts keeps us separated from exactly what is happening all around us, all of the time. It keeps us in a differentiated reality, where we can feel ‘stuck’ outside of our practice, outside of awareness.
And this is where you begin. Outside. But if you want to get inside, you keep showing up. You commit to returning to sit, to listen until, with time, you catch glimmers of recognition. You find new ways to slip in. You see yourself reflected in the ripples of light across a vast ocean and you sense that this reflection comes from within the waves themselves. From within yourself.
Softening into Awareness
Sadhana is essentially a means to trust more and more and more in that rippling level of reality where everything is unfolding just as it is. It’s the subtle art of softening into awareness so that you can experience yourself as awareness, not differentiated or separate by any means from everything that unfolds moment by moment. So even when you slip out, come back and wait. Listen. Widen your perception. As you soften into what is right there, right here, you allow more and more awareness to join you.
Narrow in on the awareness. Become more aware of awareness, more aware of the holding.
When you see more, taste more and soften more, you are building your capacity to hold more of your experience.
There is always space. There is always an invitation to soften. Whether you are meeting your morning practice, meeting that difficult conversation or meeting the traffic jam that will make you late, remember: widen your perception. Invite awareness in. And soften, soften, soften into the holding. When you soften into the vast, limitless and unconditional holding of awareness, you no longer have to hold anything.
You are carried on the currents of presence.
Your True Nature
And those currents carry you away from the perpetual stuckness of that beginner place. When your body and mind trust how to slip in and trust the way that beingness slips in, you come into a felt sense relationship with the living ocean of presence that is always all around you.
There is a word for the return, the repose, the reintegration with that endless living ocean of presence: Samāveśa.
This Sanskrit word is beyond definition, rationalisation and concept. It’s a word, a place, that once experienced, once embodied, is seeded into the layers of your being. The experience of Samāveśa gives you greater and greater capacity to reside within that place, to return to the place of return. This is all you are ever really doing when you sit, practice or find your way to slip in; you are reintegrating with the living ocean of presence. Which is your true nature. Your undifferentiated reality.
Finding Your Way Back In
Sadhana simply builds your capacity to meet yourself, and everything, there. Practice is a means of extending your residence there. So that even when you’re back in your beginner’s seat and unable to find a way in, you can still trust that you will. You can still trust that you’ll find your way back to that vast, limitless space where there is no beginning and no end, no disconnection and no stuckness. Where everything flows exactly as it is. Where there is no choice but to live from and within Samāveśa.
This is why we begin. This is why we begin again and again and again.
To begin again in community, join us in The Remembership.
