Losing Oneself

Tag: Jon Kabat-Zinn

  • becoming the passenger

    Yesterday I blogged about Jon Kabat-Zinn’s term awareness-ing and how awareness is inseparable from experience.

    Going through the transcripts of my post-dancing conversations with Katye Coe, I note that I was starting to use this term. In this extract below I am trying to describe two things. First is the shift from the feeling of awareness-ing to the feeling of becoming a passenger in the improvisation. Second is the question (while ‘awareness-ing’) of why some kinds of movements and not others.

    I haven’t edited the text just to keep the sense of how messy it is talking about these things. The text is from 14 February 2024.

    I think I’d probably say two things. One is the shift from the feeling as if I’m tuning into my body … surfing or allowing awarenesses or things that are happening in my body: friction, temperature, tension, tone, tingling etc … which is like a wash of yeah very open sense of awarenesses like I’m awareness-ing. The shift from that to what you’ve described Charlie Morrissey as describing it as being the passenger. That … it’s such a stark starkly different sensation.

    And I should be clear that the sort of awareness-ing … it doesn’t feel like I’m reaching or wanting this other thing. So yeah that shift which is so stark and so clear … and so surprising and and weirdly, it’s not as if I’m aware that I’ve gone into it or gone from one to the other.

    And I think I can see it [the transition] in you and it’s shockingly different. But if you were to ask me what is it that I’m seeing that’s different it’s not even about the quantity of movement that’s … sometimes but not necessarily. So that … and then the other thing is yeah, this thing that we talked about last week, I think which was why some movement and not others, why some movements and not others. As part of that awareness-ing, that process of, of being in awareness.

    – Simon Ellis (in conversation with Katye Coe, 14 February 2024.

  • selfing and awareness-ing

    Back in February on this blog I quoted Sam Harris re selfing one’s experience. Now here’s Jon Kabat-Zinn on awareness-ing:

    The real practice is life itself. And coming to all of those senses in hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, and also we could say minding. Which is another way of saying awareness-ing.

    Selfing. Awareness-ing.

    Here’s Harris again on awareness:

    We tend to imagine that awareness is inside of us, and the world is outside. But just look with your open eyes. Everything you see is a modification of awareness. As a matter of experience, there is no inside and outside. Everything is in the same place. What you take to be a world, and your body in it, and thoughts, emotions, your mood … the amazing truth and it’s the truth of your very being, is that you have never noticed, even for an instance, anything outside of awareness.

    Although Harris doesn’t use Kabat-Zinn’s term awareness-ing his short text captures the active nature of awareness. That it is the only lens of experience; that there is nothing outside of awareness-ing.