Awe

    

 

The scope of attentive awareness represented by the ekagra mind (single-pointed attentiveness), leads to what psychologist Abraham Maslow called “peak experiences”-moments wherein one experiences the inherent unity of being in harmony with a higher principle than one’s own individual ego.

Gitte Bechsgaard, The Gift of Consciousness

 

Presence is the true refuge.

Tara Barch, True Refuge

 

Awe is a doorway into the soul, the deepest part of ourselves, which connects us to a more expansive and integrative experience of life.   We enter into awe from the heart not the head when we are relaxed, open, and tender. 

 

Moments of awe come unexpectedly.  If we are not sensitive to these experiences, they can pass unnoticed.  They come when we become absorbed in the life around us as it is unfolding, the setting sun, the infant’s grasp of a finger, birdsong, the scent of rain.   The moment passes and we come back to ourselves.  But there can remain a trace of the experience like the vibration of a wave on the water’s skin that begins to change us.    

 

A few years ago I was staying in a small cabin on the Olympic peninsula at edge of the wild Pacific ocean.  I was walking along the beach at sunset.  There was a turbulence of unruly waves pounding the shore which was strewn with the remains of massive fir trees piled like toothpicks along the jutting headlands.  It was early June but chilly in the wind.  The sky was turning from cornflower, to mauve, to that intense purple and I caught out of the corners of my eye the red sun pressing into the edge of the horizon.  And for a moment I was lost in it the crash of the waves disappearing, other people, the salty wind on my face.  I was drawn to the golden orange light that seemed like a doorway opening into an entirely different world.  I felt invited to slip out of my body into this new place as easily as I might be drawn to a new lover. The moment passed, the sky darkened, my skin grew cold but something of the experience remained with me.  Years after when I was grieving an unexpected loss of a friend, the experience came back to me.  The memory of that moment made me feel whole even in the brokenness of the grief offering a larger spaciousness within which to expand out into, an inner threshold inviting me into a place of love and respite.

 

Awe peels away the veneer of things, people, situations so we might get to the heart of what is really going on.  The face beneath the face, the hand beneath the hand, the pulse of the heart beneath the beating heart.  Like turning a radio dial, we tune into this deeper experience of life when we align ourselves with the greater flow of prana (energy) within and around us and enter a quiet state of awareness and presence.