My brain does not want me to be liberated.
In the last week, I've been doing more open awareness in my meditation, both in formal and informal practice. I noticed yesterday that I feel panicked when I'm just being. It is my mental habit to be predicting or ruminating. Who knows what will happen if I were just to be? This uncertainty is painful to me, so the mind and body contracts, hoping to pull me back into this comforting pattern of worrying and re-visiting.
To get out of this pattern, I have to make a conscious decision to surf the anxiety when it rises up. To be curious about it, and in that moment of curiosity to expand. This is a radical decision, to stop worrying and remembering. To just be in the present moment. To trust in awareness.
That leap of faith is the only way to be truly free. But it has to actually lead to liberation. If the awareness, the groundlessness is the destination, the liberation, then the leap cannot fail. It's a virtuous loop.
We have to get comfortable skiing in fresh snow.
