Martin Aylward - Awake Where You Are: The Art of Embodied Awareness

M ost essentially, we all want to be free; to know and taste an authentic freeness of being. With only the vaguest sense of what it might be, we search in vain, hoping to find it in our connection with people, places, and experiences. Our freedom of being wont be found in any particular experience, but we keep on hoping. Some of us get seduced by the momentary thrill of exhilaration, which has a passing whiff of freeness. It might be through sport, or sex, or anything else that gives us a good dopamine hit. Others are less motivated by the gratification of pursuing pleasure and are rather trying to get free of themselves by outrunning our pain, hurt, and confusion.

Yet all the while we are pulling for pleasure or pushing against pain, there is inevitably some pressure, some conflict and friction. What is, isnt enough. Whats now wont do. I have to get somewhere, get something, become someone, prove something. And then... maybe. Hopefully. Once Ive gotten, made, created, resolved, controlled, attained, and eliminated enough, maybe then Ill feel free, Ill be at peace, Ill be OK.

And thus we run on the hamster wheel of samsara. Have you ever watched a hamster on its wheel? It looks very earnest. Convinced it is really getting somewhere. Humans too. We pursue pleasure and run from pain, we demand and defend and distract ourselves in depressingly familiar circles, and the hearts longing for freedom goes tragically unmet, unacknowledged, unfulfilled.

Free from our habits and conditioning.

Free from the blinders and prejudices that color how we see others.

Free from our fears and neuroses, our secret shames, our jealousies, comparisons, and judgments.

Free to meet life as it is in each moment.

Free to love ourselves, while still holding ourselves accountable.

Free to love others, even when we dont like them.

Free to love life, so much so as to lose ourselves in its embrace.

Free to open our hearts to the world with its boundless beauty and tragedy.

Free to die with a heart wide open, whenever that time comes.

That is the path you are invited to walk. It is a path that has been sought, discovered, and explored by people all through history by those who wouldnt and couldnt settle for convention and conformity, by those who have dared first to dream, and then to commit, to find and follow a path that leads us from a narrow vision of self and world, pleasure and pain, gain and loss, into unimaginable vistas and new realms of freeness.

It is a path in my case, that has several inroads first and most formally my thirty years exploring in various spiritual practices and traditions, mostly Buddhist but with very porous boundaries second being a partner and parent for the last twenty-five years, practicing in the up-close and intensive laboratory of family life. And most essentially, of course, the path of being human, with its mystery, wonder, and possibility, daring to listen and respond to the longing of the heart for genuine fulfillment.

I always wanted to be free.

I couldnt always articulate it as that, but even as a child, the pulls and pushes on my psyche were all tugging at that most essential of longings to know a free moment, an unconstrained experience, a liberated life.

First of all, it was swimming. Childhood asthma made me clumsy and breathless when exerting myself on land. While friends played football or cricket in the street where we lived, I stayed indoors and read fiction, which itself felt like an entryway to a freer world of imagination. And then I went to my local swimming pool and discovered a whole new world a realm of freeness, the feeling of ease and grace of my body in water how a flick of the feet could propel me along, the way I could make the noise of the world vanish by holding my breath and disappearing under the surface. Those moments in the water were like a sudden swing toward the true north of freedom, and looking back now I can see how that first taste was already setting course for the compass of my heart.

Theater was the next big passion of my youth. All through teenage life both school and home felt mostly oppressive. Education seemed to bypass the passions and inspirations of the heart in favor of dates, details, diagrams, and dullness. Home was loving, stable, and safe, but whereas my parents were conservative and conformist, I yearned for different, other, foreign, and exotic (ciphers, all, for freeness). Theater gave me a chance to explore inner life, to play and experiment with ways of being the freedom to take on a role, to become another, most essentially to find a freedom from myself. I was hugely fortunate to have several helpful mentors, at school and at the weekend theater group I attended. In the midst of my middle-class, middle-England, middling life, here were people suddenly with breadth of vision, with artistic sensibilities, with strong political convictions, with expansive, inclusive, and evocative views on life and art and possibility.