The Grasshopper woke me up with this: “You spend most of your waking hours asleep.”

He could have easily said “all” instead of “most” and been just as close to the truth.

We are asleep to our ability to be awake.

I can cite three known times of being fully awake in my life. Two of them came at a Jerry Stocking workshop and the other was years ago outside a store that is now a Target.

What is fully awake? It’s hard to put an experience into words but I’ll give it a go. For me, fully awake was marked by a pin-drop quiet mind that had no agenda and an overall feeling of everything being taken care of.

I get glimpses of fully awake almost everyday and am more awake now than I have ever been. Arriving at awake is often accidental. It just takes some noticing to realize you are there. Has something ever taken your breath away? Perhaps you saw, heard or felt something that just made everything stand still for a moment. That’s awake.

The problem for me is wanting to distill what goes into that moment and by doing so, I go back to sleep. Rather than basking in it, I want to dissect the moment like a biology project. It quickly goes away when I do that, just like the content of a dream quickly disapates.

I suspect that we all have many awake moments, but fail to notice. Noticing is just being aware without comment. Just to show you how commentary is alive and well, attempt to do this exercise: Look around the physical space you are currently in and just notice what you see without comment. If you are anything like me, it takes some practice to just notice and not label the things we see.

There is a part of us that is aware and just notices and there is a part of us that just comments. It seems that when we are commenting, we are asleep to the part of us that is aware and just notices. Doing the exercise above will get you more glimpses of being awake and more of a sense that everything is taken care of.

If you really want expert help in experiencing being fully awake, I recommend that you get to a Jerry Stocking workshop. He will get you beyond words and then it’ll be up to you to continue the practice.

My sense is that awake is our natural state but that we’ve been away from it for so long that we don’t recognize it when it visits. Take time to become aware and in the process, just notice how often you become awake.

All the best,

John