Handshake IV

We are working through the 5 points of Handshake Practice (Compassionate Presence to Feelings).
Recall that the first three points were:

1. Remember Who You Are! (your true nature is innate awareness, openness, and compassion)
2. Mind Your Body (dropping the story line and being fully present with the sensations in the body)
3. You Are Not Your Feelings, You Are Not Your Thoughts (recognizing the broader awareness that holds our thoughts and feelings as part of our total experience, allowing us to be present to them without completely identifying with them)

Now we come to point four: Rest in Space (Spaciousness of awareness in the mind).

Here are Tsoknyi Rinpoche’s words on this point.

In time, we also begin to notice gaps between thoughts and feelings — barely perceptible moments in which there is simply no thought, no feeling, just pure, open awareness. As these gaps grow longer — and a little less startling — we can begin to rest within them. For a brief second or so, we can have a direct experience of what in the Buddhist tradition is known as the essence of mind, or the nature of mind: a luminous, limitless awareness that is not chopped up into subject and object, self and other, perceiver and perceived.

All distinctions between “the looker” and what was being “looked at” fall away, and for an instant we experience complete lack of separation between everything we feel, see, smell, and so on, and the awareness that sees, smells and feels. Our hearts and minds are completely open, and the spark that is our Buddha nature leaps up into a brilliant flame.

This awareness comes to us gradually and often without warning. If we don’t understand the nature of the experience, it can be easy to bypass the experience completely as just a “glitch in the fabric of space-time.” However, once we know what to look for we can bring our mindful awareness to the direct experience of our true nature, innate wakefulness and openness. This experience of the nature of mind cannot be forced or produced by a technique. This experience results from the dropping away of our habitual patterns of clinging to our thoughts and feelings. The experience is an “accident.” However, as one teacher says, “Meditation makes you more ‘accident prone!’”