Does awakening to our True Nature heal our hearts and set us free? My experience is that awakening opens the possibility for healing, wholeness and fulfillment. It hold the potential. It necessitates the application of awakening’s love to wash over one’s heart and cleanse our wounds over time. Here’s the path I’ve followed to allow for awakening to truly heal me:
First comes integration of awakening. Consistently and patiently, I move from thought-identification as my identity (experiencing my thoughts as true) to presence-identification (I am the space in which all experience—including thoughts—arise). Plainly put, I am free from thoughts shaping my reality. I am liberated; and it feels liberating. When I can hear a thought and not treat it as anything but a thought, then I am free to choose from a range of thoughts or sit in silence. Exercising choice,then, is the next step.
Choice can build a life of fulfillment. Free of thought as truth, I can now be selective in the thoughts I treat as real as I re-create my relationship with and story of ‘me’. In other words, what do I want my life to be? What am I building with my thoughts and actions. How can I best use my liberation in the service of my needs, desires, ambitions and self expression. Because I am no longer a victim of negative thoughts, I can step out into the light, heal, learn and take on challenges that allow me to grow.
I continue to step away from thoughts that contract me and build with thoughts that heal me. Let me be clear, awakening brings me spacious, quiet, peaceful love. So I am not building my experience of myself with positive thought. Rather, I have walked away from thought as identity/reality. As the aware presence that I am, I am free to choose thoughts and actions that appeal to my true nature of love and fulfillment. I am no longer trying to get better, proving myself or suppressing negative self talk. I am simply being aware and choosing my thoughts and actions.
As I am more and more able to abide as awareness, I make good choices for myself. Habit patterns are no longer as compelling, although they do arise and call. I simply sit as awareness and allow old habits to call without answering them. This is further demonstration of being liberated from thought identification. I can notice a thought and let it go. The more I do that the more I can do that. The deepening of my identification as presence, not only gives me choice, but brings healing to the heart.
Living as aware presence is the fulfillment, the love we are seeking. Living as our True Nature of aware presence will heal our heart’s wounds. Aware presence heals the mind and the world because aware presence simply is, needs nothing and separates from nothing. Sitting as the aware presence that we are is sitting as love. Love unifies and heals. The only thing that keeps us from this state of fulfillment is treating thoughts as real. Thoughts separate. Awareness heals that separation.