Far Above the Moon; My Year in Space

[jenmarie02]

I would like to share my mindfulness story. For the past few years I have been exploring space — as a dimension of simply being, and being in an expanse that is a tool for liberation — free, available, and unoccupied. This includes exploring the parts of human experience that are largely deprived of space; the off-limits, the restricted, the taboos — particularly those around motherhood, aging, sex, and death. By pursuing these topics and letting them expand, I desired to see where I stood with them, and hopefully stumble into some new ease or comfort — some spaciousness — in the process. This led me to mindfulness and meditation, and in my story I share how through meditation I encountered space not just as a concept, to be picked apart by my rational mind; but also as an experience, a secret room that exists within my mind. I'd be honored if you read my story - link below! Thank you.

https://medium.com/@jenmarie920/far-abo ... 4e866e1c1b

[JonW]

Thank you for posting, Jennifer. A truly beautiful piece of writing.
It brought to mind one of my favourite quotes, from Han Van Den Boogaard:
'Total attention is looking and listening without taking yourself along, without creating a centre from which things are looked at and experienced. Nothing’s being experienced because there’s no centre to experience, to interpret or judge that which appears, nor is there an environment – no story in which the experience could take place. Concentration narrows and limits but attention, total attention, includes everything and excludes nothing. It can’t be superficial because it also includes the unknown in which the superficial is moving around. It exposes the incomplete, which is always unreal. It’s the whole that’s being seen as the whole.
Attention is Emptiness. Emptiness doesn’t know inside or outside. It only knows the whole. The one who is experiencing is that which is being experienced…Form is nothing but the perception of it. The one who perceives is nothing but an assumption, an unnecessary addition. It’s been contrived as an extra eye with which the mind is supposed to see itself. This extra eye is nothing but a phantom.
'What I am has no qualities. I can only be seen as absence, and therefore ‘Emptiness’ may qualify as the only correct denomination for what I am. This Emptiness is the ‘place’, the ‘space’ in which all phenomena appear, and every appearance is a mirror that reflects back who or what is looking. I am everything that has a form, because form is my seeing of it. Form and seeing are in no way separate. They are one whole, the Whole. There’s just seeing and undivided attention makes it clear as the sky.'

All best wishes,
Jon