The Details vs. The Mechanism

One of my teachers, Michael Singer, likes to remind his students that we’re spinning on a ball of dirt around a star that’s 93 million miles away. It’s hot out? That’s the star’s radiation warming our planet enough for life. It’s raining out? That’s the star’s impact on weather systems that allow life to flourish.

By zooming out a little, we begin to appreciate the mechanism instead of being distracted by our judgments, opinions, and insecurities about the details. 

When I get hooked by a thought or a feeling, my attention focuses in on it, and I suffer. When I can back my awareness off the detail and witness the mechanism, I get free again.

Regardless of the details of my experience - a particular feeling or thought, a memory or a projection into the future - the mechanisms of human being are beautiful.

For me, meditation isn’t trying to attain the absence of thought or feeling. One way I meditate is by relaxing my awareness beyond the boundaries of the details - I'm practicing witnessing the mechanisms. 

The mechanisms of being human are beautiful, powerful, miraculous. That we think, that we feel, that we move. Beautiful, powerful, miraculous.

It’s backing up from a single brush stroke and seeing the whole painting on the canvas. It's moving back from a single leaf to see the tree.

There’s freedom, peace, and insight in backing off the details a little to recognize the mechanism at work.

What I most want for myself in this life is an experience of being unconditionally in love with being alive. So my explorations, studies, and practices are usually in service of that desire (and my purpose: elevating the well-being of all life, no one left out). Uncovering the mechanism behind the details of my experience is one of the ways I find myself accessing more love in my life - witnessing and then expressing gratitude for the mechanisms, I get to fall more deeply in love with being alive.

Much Love. ❤️

(As always, 100% human-written.)