Loving Awareness Practice

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LOVING AWARENESS PRACTICE (LAP)

LAP is a way of working with ‘Pain’ (any uncomfortable thought or emotion - or even physical pain). 

Begin by invoking Grace & Guidance, and set intentions to grow in your capacity to bring love to suffering, for yourself and all beings.

 “Ask and you will receive. . . “

Step 1:  Bring Awareness to the pain:

A. Acknowledge it, don’t criticize or resist it.

B. Feel it, don’t become it.

C. Explore it:

~ Where is it in the body?

~ How intense is it — Intensity Scale 1-10

~ When you are fully feeling this pain. . . how old do you feel?

~ How far back can you remember feeling like this? What does it remind you of?
~ Does this seem to be a theme in your life?

Step 2:  Drop back into the Heart of Awareness

A. REA: ~ Relax the body

~ Expand your energy field

~ Align with Higher Consciousness

B. Let Awareness pull back into itself to experience its own nature:

~ Calm  ~ Spacious  ~ Still  ~ Quiet, without thought

~ Free of fear ~ Engaged but unconcerned ~ Transpersonal 

~ Boundary-less ~ Containing all things  ~ Utterly Love

C. Feel yourself to be the vast open sky of pure Awareness, Power, and Love that holds everything that you’ve ever thought or felt in its inclusive embrace.

Step 3:  Bring the Love—Power of Awareness to the pain

Identified as Loving Awareness, transcendent and tranquil in nature ‘come back’ to the pain and infuse it with the Light of Love: 

~ Feel the flow of loving-kindness pour into the energy of the pain. 

~ Drop agendas and preferences.

~ Be present, patient, and kind with the pain, like a loving parent would be with the pain of their child.

~ Let the pain run its course, even if that means that it intensifies and expands.

~ Keep your breath moving: slower, fuller, deeper, but not so much as to distract you from your focus. Think that you are washing the breath through the pain. 

~ Let the pain dissipate — like a drop of red dye dissipates into a swimming pool.

~ Hold the intention for the energy of the pain to return to Source Consciousness.

~ Use invocations such as: “Let Divine Love & Grace flow to this energy and to its origin across all lifetimes.” Or “Whatever I am feeling is healing as I hold it in the Light of Love.”

~ Be the ‘sky’ of Loving Awareness, watching the ‘clouds’ of painful energy move through.

Step 4:  Rest In and As what remains

As the pain dissipates and empties out, which it will if you give it Love and Patience, you will become aware of the qualities of Loving Awareness that have always been present, but were hidden behind the energy of pain that you’d been avoiding. BE THAT.

There is a very important point that must be made regarding this practice:
One must give up all expectations that this practice will ‘get rid of’ uncomfortable energies, as this indicates the agenda of the ego. Love has no such agenda. Love includes. It is the vast open heart space that holds everything, even the uncomfortable emotions showing up as one’s experience at the moment. Love loves this moment as it is with all its juiciness and discomfort, all its separation and drama — Love loves it all. This is so tricky. Mind may be participating in the process, all the while subtly pushing its agenda to feel better by getting rid of the pain or discomfort. The indication of this is that the target emotion does not release, and frustration grows, and mind says, “well, this just isn’t working for me.” When love is really online, there is a very real sense of acceptance and loving-kindness towards whatever one is experiencing. There is no urgency whatsoever for the experience to be different or ‘better.’ So the big shift here is when one gives up the agenda for one’s experience to be different, let’s go of identifying as the one who is suffering, and comes to identify as the Love-Power of Awareness itself, holding all experience within its inclusive arms.