Sensitive Will

To understand sensitive awareness, it helps to start with noticing what awareness is like in our ordinary automatic mode of living. With the automatic energy we are not in contact with our senses, inner or outer. Thoughts may be bouncing around our mind and driving our behavior, but we are immersed in and hardly aware of the thoughts as thoughts, like a fish in water. Emotions may be reacting to thoughts or events around us and driving our behavior, but we are immersed in and hardly aware of the emotions as emotions, like a fish in water. Physical impulses drive us with little or no awareness on our part. Everything just seems to happen. It is an autopilot life. We live by habit and reactions and minimal presence.

Contrast that with sensitive awareness, with tasting our food, knowing our thoughts, feeling our feelings, and being in contact with the inner sense of our body. We live with choices and choosing, because we are aware of alternatives, possibilities. With the sensitive energy in our mind, which we call thought energy, we are aware of our thoughts as thoughts and aware of their meaning. Rather than being lost in the thoughts, we are aware that the thoughts are passing through our mind. We are not completely identified with them. We know they are not necessarily "our" thoughts, not necessarily what we believe, that they are usually just random or reactive associations bouncing off each other automatically. With thought energy, we know our automatic associative thoughts as akin to noise in our head. With thought energy, we can think intentionally. We can plan. We can solve problems. We can contemplate an issue. We can choose. This gives us, our will, a little more room to operate, a little more freedom than we had in the world of automatic energy.

With the sensitive energy in our emotions, which we call the feeling energy, we are in contact with our emotions as emotions. We know what we are feeling, even if it has arisen automatically in reaction to something. Nevertheless, if we feel our emotional center, the core area of our chest, we can intentionally induce a warmth of feeling there. This is a readiness to feel what we need to feel, appropriate to our situation of the moment. With the feeling energy, we are not taken for wild, emotional rides. Instead of being driven by automatic, reactive feelings, we have a little more room to operate, a little more freedom. We are there in our feelings, without being lost in them. We can feel into our immediate situation and be more wholly present thereby. We can feel, even intentionally, the warmth and joy of being with another person. We can allow ourselves to be there with them emotionally. We can set aside the emotional impulse to hold back, protect, or hide. We can be human among humans. We can be our total selves. We can live with heart.

With the sensitive energy in our body, which we call sensation, we are in contact with our body directly, not just though some mental image of our body. The act of intentionally coming into contact with our body, which arouses the sensitive energy, is called sensing. This an important and fundamental spiritual practice with many benefits. Most notably, our body is always in the now, and by being in contact with our body through sensing, we are in the now. All spirituality flows out of the now. All spiritual heights are only encountered through the now. Living life fully is only in the now. Sensing our body, particularly sensing our whole body, creates a foundation for deep spiritual practice, including opening to and generating higher energies.

The practice of sensing consists of putting our attention into parts of our body to build up the sensitive energy there, and then being in the sensitive energy in our whole body. This practice is open to us at any time of the day. The sensation can grow strong, so strong that the experience of the sensitive energy in our body is as strong as or stronger than the experience of our physical body itself. Sensing is a choice, an act of will. The more complete our intention, our will to sense, the stronger it is. Sensing grounds us in the present moment and opens the possibility of being present, of living the vivid life of presence.

For this week, please experiment with the sensitive energy, to see how it works, what strengthens it, what weakens it, how it manifests in the different centers of body, heart, and mind, how it can awaken us spontaneously, and how to live in it more. Notice the difference that the sensitive energy makes in your freedom of will.

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