Awakening Amidst Contraction

I am amidst what I call a push workout. I'm training my shoulders and core on this particular occasion, performing a cycle of lateral dumbbell raises, abdominal crunches on a bench and a practice of release in which I'm working on core and spinal flexibility. 

Everything is *normal* perhaps too normal which proved to be the breakthrough. In my training I effortlessly fell into a Complete Surrender.

I'm not talking about the kind of surrender where you stop doing everything, allow your breath to naturally rise and fall as you drop all inner motion as you would on your meditation cushion or as I will at times practice between my sets. 

In this emergence of Complete Surrender I was in the midst of an intense set of dumbbell lateral raises. I was exerting, pushing, flowing into each movement when shockingly everything changed, Surrender enveloped my conventional way of being-in-the-world. 

From this Great Shift my eyes caught themselves in the mirror. As I stared deeply into my soft brown eyes everything was completely the same yet utterly different. The "I" that I conventionally understood was still there, same thoughts, same motions, same engagement with the intensity, yet for some reason my gaze fixed deep into my still eyes.

Amidst a contracting face and an intense extension of energy out into the world the subject from which I experienced life was all of the objects arising around me. 

My Witness was no longer confined to feeling life from within my particular body-mind. Instead I was feeling life through the dumbbells in my hands, I could feel the mirrors from their own interior.  

As my set continued onward, I felt the stair case behind me, the railing, the rack of weights, the wall wrapping around into the locker room.  Perhaps most odd and profound was the space from which all of these things arouse. I could feel this cool expansive space from it's own interior just as I could feel the growing burning radiance in my shoulders as I raised the dumbbells again and again. 

Awareness, liberated in it's essential nature, was awake and my witness (the witnessing faculty typically identified with my individual body-mind) had realized itself (the transcendent ever-present all-witnessing-witness). The subject and object had become one. As Wilber so eloquently says, "What you are looking out of is what you are looking at." 

As we approach the new year I offer you this one instruction. Give yourself to your discipline. It doesn't matter what discipline you've chosen, what does matter is how completely you've given yourself to it. This year, practice surrendering to what animates you. Practice it until Surrender practices you, until the Great Shift holds you anew with grace and beauty.

Peace in Stillness, 

~Rob