Awareness Is Knowing | Flow Line Face 102726
Art and insight emerged through the “flow lines” active meditation creative process:
Awareness Is Knowing
“Awareness is the knowing that recognizes where our attention is, when it has drifted, and when we have returned.”
A central part of the Love and Truth practice is learning to develop awareness. The daily alignment exercises begin this training, and active meditation carries it into ordinary life.
Consider a conversation. Someone may appear to be listening while their attention is somewhere else entirely, lost in thought, preparing a response, remembering the past, or anticipating what comes next. We immediately feel the difference when another person is truly present.
The same principle applies throughout life.
While walking, awareness can remain connected to immediate experience: the feeling of the ground beneath the feet, air moving across the face, a dog barking in the distance, the smell of food coming from a nearby home. Nothing extraordinary needs to happen. The practice is simply to be present enough to know what is happening while it is happening.
This quality becomes essential to alignment.
During a breathing exercise, for example, attention may begin with the breath and then drift into thought. There is nothing wrong with this. The important moment is when we know that we have drifted. That recognition is awareness. We notice, without criticism, and return attention to the breath.
The practice is not perfection. It is recognition and return.
As awareness develops, we begin to recognize more quickly when we have moved into automatic reaction. We notice tension forming in the body, emotional contraction in the heart, repetitive thought in the mind, or the subtle loss of presence that occurs when attention becomes absorbed in unconscious habit.
Through daily alignment and active meditation, we learn the felt quality of an open, relaxed, and alert state of presence. Because we become familiar with alignment, we also become more capable of recognizing when we are moving away from it.
This knowing gradually becomes more refined. We discover deeper levels of openness, greater ease within the body, increased receptivity of the heart, and clearer attention within the mind.
Awareness is therefore not another thought about experience. It is the capacity to recognize experience as it unfolds.
The more this capacity develops, the less time we spend unconsciously carried by habit and the sooner we can return toward coherence.
Love and Truth is learned in this way, not only by understanding its principles intellectually, but by recognizing them directly within our own experience.
Notice when attention drifts, recognize what is happening within body, heart, and mind, and simply return; the knowing that makes this return possible is awareness.
