Catalyst of Awakening

Eli Jaxon-Bear is a beautiful teacher.  He was a totally unexpected catalyst of awakening for me. I sat at his (and Gangaji’s) feet once, exploding with astonished laughter and tears. No words could possibly express or explain what I’d dipped into…he just smiled and smiled, nodding.

After a few months, the bliss of that recognition seemed to sink below the mental tendencies that had seemed to reassert themselves. Naturally, I started grasping for that experience again – I tried to replicate it and desperately tried to ‘find’ it within me again – as something to hold onto. But it is so clear now that that ‘searching’ is a step in the wrong direction. It is the mind looking for an object to hold onto – to claim and know and be ‘secure’ in. This searching is rooted in the belief that ‘awake’ is something other than what I essentially am.

What’s alive in YOU is so beyond what the mind can fathom or ever describe. In moments of forgetting, I find it helpful to just rest my attention on whatever it is that is alert in my being – what is conscious? Just rest there – no searching, no analyzing, no trying to figure out something as though it is cryptic or hidden. Just a rest in that silent alertness.

Stay there.  <3