Inside and Outside

Montserrat, August 7, 2012

Excerpt from Emptiness Dancing by Adyashanti:

When you listen deeply, feel intimately, and allow yourself to experience this moment exactly as it is, the emotional and energetic bodies soften. Take a few minutes now to just listen to and become aware of your surroundings. As you let the sounds become known, also become aware of the scent and the feel of the space around you in and outside of the room so that your feeling sense isn’t confined to your skin and bones. Give yourself an opportunity to be open to the environment of sound and a sense of the space outside your body.

Notice that the more you relax, these sounds and experiences penetrate you and flow into you without defense. You will feel yourself softening and opening. Invite yourself into this openness. You may find that the sense of a barrier between the outside world and what’s happening inside your skin becomes very transparent, or you may feel as if you can’t find the boundary between the inside and outside. Experiences of outside noise and what is happening in your body become of the same quality. A feeling in your body isn’t really different than the sound of a car driving by or a bird in the trees. A feeling in your body is not really any more yours than the feeling of the space in the room where you sit. Notice that if you begin to take ownership of any experience, this starts to divide the world into inner and outer, mine and theirs, an outside sound and me. But essentially it’s all just experience, inside or outside, the same. Not mine and not other than mine.