In This Episode…

“Spiritual awakening brings us into direct contact with reality. When we’re awake, our lens is no longer distorted, and our heart is no longer shut down and defended. We are now fully here, which means that our awareness is fully present, our heart or feeling sense is fully available, and all of our humanity is able to show up in each moment.” —Craig Hamilton

In this episode, Craig dives into a profound question: What would it mean to be fully in contact with life? Is it possible to meet each moment with a truly open heart and mind? Most of us understand the value of being open-hearted and open-minded, but years of conditioning often lead us to stay guarded, clinging to certainty.

Can meditation help us unlock the secret to genuine openness? Imagine living with an undefended heart, where the need for self-protection has fallen away, leaving us free to meet each moment of life with our whole self.

Craig explores this possibility and offers insights into how this shift is possible. He also leads a guided meditation to help expand awareness and dissolve old limitations, bringing us into a full-hearted embrace of the present moment.

We encourage you to listen when you can give yourself the space to be fully present and distraction-free, so you can explore this transformative practice.

If you’re interested in exploring more of Craig’s approach to meditation, you’re invited to tune in to a 90-minute online workshop Craig will be hosting called Meditation 2.0 – The Miracle of Direct Awakening. Register for free at: FreeMeditationWorkshop.com

Discover More about Craig’s Awakened Life Membership Program

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

We’re exploring an approach to meditation I call the Practice of Direct Awakening. This approach involves meditating in such a way that, in each meditation, we are directly stepping into spiritually awakened consciousness.

We’re not preparing for a future moment of awakening, or trying to gradually deconstruct the obstacles to awakening. Instead, we’re simply doing practices that access the deepest, truest part of who and what we are—right in the moment of meditation. There’s no postponement of our opportunity to live this life fully in each and every moment.

Having an Open Heart and a Spacious Mind

One way to understand spiritual awakening is to recognize that it’s about having an open heart and a spacious mind. This means that when we discover the enlightened consciousness that is our true nature beyond the mind and ego, we are fully in touch with life.

We come into direct contact with reality. Our lens is no longer distorted, and our heart, which is our feeling sense, is no longer shut down or defended. We are fully here with our attention and awareness, our heart and feeling sense, all fully present, allowing our humanity to show up in each moment.

Why Aren’t We Already Awakened?

When people start to tap into awakened consciousness and discover this possibility, they often ask: Why aren’t we just this way naturally? This seems like the most natural way to be.

In Vajrayana Buddhism it’s even referred to as “the natural state” because, in a sense, we discover what it’s like to be a natural human being. We are just being, flowing with life, spontaneously responsive to what’s happening, without distortion, without fear, without contracting away from life. Why wouldn’t that just be how humans are? We seem to function better this way.

So why aren’t we all already awakened?

It’s an interesting evolutionary question. If we’re supposedly well-adapted to our environment, why wouldn’t this adaptation have already occurred? After all, it’s the ultimate adaptation. As we discover awakened consciousness, we become much more effective and functional because we’re not making inaccurate meaning out of events.

Cognitive Biases & Ego Defenses

As human beings, what often gets in /our way is that we misinterpret things. For instance, someone says something and we personalize it. We impugn their motives or misattribute their intentions. We think, “They said that to hurt me,” and we create a story around it, even when that’s not what was happening. This distortion leads us to make bad decisions.

Or we encounter some difficulty. We’re trying to do something big—start a new project or an entrepreneurial venture—and we run into obstacles. We think, ‘Wow, maybe this isn’t really meant to happen, or maybe this isn’t going to work,’ instead of simply asking, “How do I solve this problem?”

We could go over the hundreds of cognitive biases human beings have, or the various ego defenses we use, but fundamentally, all these mechanisms get in the way of being a fully optimized, present human being who sees situations clearly and responds to them in a natural, holistically intelligent way.

What Keeps Us Defended Against Reality?

To simplify this, we could say that what keeps us from this natural state, this awakened way of being, is a defensive structure. It’s a defense system against reality, a distortion and defense mechanism inside us that was likely an evolutionary adaptation. It emerged over time and in many ways equipped us for survival in a threatening world, no doubt.

I’ve often said that the human ego, which is one way of describing the primary obstacle to awakening, is akin to a little evolutionary maladaptation built on top of a healthy evolutionary adaptation.

Our survival mechanism evolved and became very strong. Then, as a more complex sense of self emerged in us—an inner ability to conceptualize the self, to have a self-concept, self-image, and beliefs about ourselves—we developed a self-reflective consciousness. Our survival mechanism latched onto that consciousness and thought, “I need to defend this, too. I need to ensure this inner self-concept survives as well.”

So we developed this complex machinery of ego to defend our self-concept, our self-image and our worldview. Why is it so hard for us to accept truths that contradict our pre-existing beliefs? When you look at it, a big part of what’s troubling the world today is polarization. It has many causes and reasons that sociologists study, but part of it is simply that it’s hard for people to let go of their preconceived notions.

We have a complex defense system within us that attempts to keep us invulnerable. This system makes it hard for us to change. It makes it hard to see things clearly, making us prone to misinterpretation, misunderstanding, and reactivity, etc.

The system’s cognitive component includes these biases, and the emotional component is a defended heart that says, “I don’t want to feel that deeply; I don’t want to feel certain emotions.”

Stepping Out of the Survival Game

What if, as a spiritual practice or meditation practice, we took aim straight at that defense system and asked, “What would be the practice that directly pivots out of that survival machinery?” One answer might be cultivating an open heart and a spacious mind.

1. Cultivating an open heart, we let down our defenses and allow ourselves to fully feel—without prejudice, without contraction, without defendedness.

2. Cultivating a spacious mind, we no longer rigidly hold onto preconceptions or pre-existing beliefs. Our mind doesn’t need to be certain. It doesn’t need to be right, or to believe it, knows the truth. Our mental attitude becomes, ‘I don’t know. I’m open, I’m innocent, I’m receptive, I’m curious. I know some things, but even the things I think I know might not be true. How do I know they’re true?’

I’m holding everything lightly. I’m not believing the stories that my mind makes up in a knee-jerk way. I have a spacious mind—a mind in which thoughts can arise, but I don’t fixate on them or identify with them.

So, our direct awakening practice is to let down the defenses around our heart and open our minds to become a spacious, fluid process.

Guided Meditation: Open Heart & Spacious Mind

With that, I want to invite you into meditation.
Allow yourself to rest in this open-heartedness, softening the boundaries around your heart, allowing yourself to fully feel life this moment, undefended.

As you rest in this open-heartedness, I want to also invite you to allow your mind to become spacious. Which means just allow your consciousness, your awareness, to become vast, wide and deep.

Having a spacious mind means not getting involved with our thoughts, not grasping onto the thought stream. It means allowing thoughts to come and go, naturally, easily. So we’re not trying to control the mind, we’re not trying to force it to become spacious, we’re simply making a lot of room in the mind.

Allow yourself to rest in this openness and spaciousness in the mind.

This spaciousness has room for whatever the mind is doing, whatever thoughts are coming and going.

We all have a lifetime of momentum from getting involved with thought. We tend to spend our lives thinking, which means engaging with the mind. So when we meditate, it’s natural and common for us to find ourselves getting distracted from the meditation.

But rather than seeing that as a problem, or trying to figure out how not to get distracted, in this practice, you can simply make room for even the distraction. And as soon as you notice you’ve become distracted, and you’re thinking about something that happened this week, or what you’re going to do tomorrow, you just continue with the meditation practice as though you were never distracted at all. You carry on.

The moment you realize you’re distracted, you’re no longer distracted. You’re present again. So there’s nothing that needs to be done. You just carry on meditating, having an open heart and a spacious mind, being present in this moment for whatever occurs. You’re awake to it all, feeling it all.

Allow yourself to gently ease out of the meditation.

Developing a Tender Heart for Ourselves

In doing this practice, or any meditation practice, we also need to have an open heart for ourselves. Because meditation, if we engage in it for any length of time, can be challenging. We may find ourselves getting tangled up in knots with our mind. Sometimes, when we try to open our heart to feel everything, we end up feeling a lot more than we bargained for.

There are so many ways we often don’t have a tender heart for ourselves during our practice. We can get frustrated with ourselves, feel like we’re not doing it right, and become frustrated with the practice.

This practice, with its emphasis on the open heart component, can really help with that. When we engage in these direct awakening practices, we’re inherently trying to do things that are the opposite of how we’ve been conditioned. We’re conditioned to relate to life in certain ways, and here we’re attempting to do the opposite. This shift takes practice, and when we encounter difficulties, we often come down on ourselves or get frustrated with the practice.

Whether you have a deep and profound experience of an open heart and spacious mind, or whether you often find it hard or feel tangled up, just make room for all of that. We practice self-compassion, which means we have room for the entirety of our experience without judgment. We don’t make a problem out of anything that occurs during our meditation.