Aliveness

From Embracing the Now by Gina Lake at www.ginalake.com

When you are in your body and senses and not in your head, or mind, you experience a sense of aliveness, which is felt as a subtle energetic vibration, or tingling, and a sense of being alive, illumined, and aware. This is how who you really are is experienced by the body/mind. This aliveness is the felt sense of who you really are and what you experience when you are in the now. When you are aligned with who you really are and not identified with the ego, you feel this aliveness, beingness, Presence energetically, and it is very pleasurable.

The fact that who you really are-essence-can be felt energetically is very handy because this makes identifying when you are aligned with essence and when you aren't easy. It can also help you align with essence when you aren't. For instance, when you find yourself contracted (i.e. suffering), you can search for this sense of aliveness, which is always present, and focus on it; and no matter how faint the experience of it is, it will increase as you pay attention to it. This felt sense is a way of accessing essence in every moment.

The more you notice this aliveness and pay attention to it, the more obvious it becomes. The sense of aliveness can become very strong, and when it does, it acts like an anchor, grounding you in the now and helping you stay there. The sense of aliveness can drown out the ego's mind-chatter, relegating it to the background. As you go about your day, the aliveness becomes the foreground, and the mind-chatter becomes the background.

When you are grounded in aliveness, you experience a deep calm and peacefulness, which allows you to move through your day with equanimity. The peacefulness of this aliveness is unflappable, unless your emotional body gets triggered by some belief you've identified with or by someone else's. When this happens, the aliveness is still present and can bring you back into the now if you give your attention to it rather than to the thoughts and feelings that have been triggered.

Not buying into your thoughts and feelings doesn't make you less human. Being aligned with the aliveness instead of thoughts and feelings is just another way of being in the world as a human. It's not the most common way yet, but a viable and much more functional way.

Being aligned with essence instead of the egoic mind is the next step in humanity's evolution. We will all eventually evolve (awaken) out of the egoic mind and live from essence. The emotions will still exist in potential, but they won't run roughshod over the body/mind. Equanimity, acceptance, and love will be the most common state rather than discontentment, striving, contraction, and fear. Certain individuals are heralding this shift in consciousness now and helping to bring it about. The potential to live from essence exists in everyone, but only some will choose this at this time. The more who choose this, the easier it will become for all of humanity to make this shift.

If you are reading this, then the motivation is likely there to make this shift. Paying attention to the feeling of aliveness in as many moments as possible is one of the most useful tools for awakening. Of course, "you" aren't the one who does this. The "you" that chooses to give your attention to aliveness is essence, as it works to awaken you. The "you" that you think you are (the ego) will fight this all the way. Essence is the awareness of the whole drama between the ego and the "you" that is awakening.