The Raw Pulse of Life

We don't always realize we're doing it. We sit. We breathe. We watch. And somewhere along the way, the practice that once opened us starts to close us.

Stillness becomes a shell. Awareness becomes surveillance. Presence becomes performance.

It's subtle. The watcher begins to look holy. The gatekeeper sounds like wisdom. We think we're cultivating awakening, when in truth, we're holding life at arm's length.

It’s tidier to stay in solitude than to risk being touched. It’s easier to observe than to be stirred. Easier to reflect on impermanence than to feel the sting of it when someone doesn’t look back at you, or looks too long.

But we’re not here to stay clean. We’re not here to stay untouched.

This path is not about perfection. It's about contact.

We can use contemplative practice to avoid the very thing it’s meant to lead us into: intimacy. With sensation. With each other. With the trembling truth of our own unfiltered experience.

And yet, there is another kind of doing—one that arises not from grasping or fear, but from deep attunement. It doesn’t arise from the mind’s efforts to be attuned, or from a belief that you should do something in order to be good, clear, or right.

It arises because something in you ripens and leans toward the light. Like a flower does. Without strategy. Without certainty.

It’s subtle. Often wordless at first.

You can’t force flowering. But you can cultivate the conditions for it:

Stillness. Spaciousness. Sensitivity.

Even your longing to "do this right" can soften. Even that is a petal opening. Let it open on its own time.

This kind of doing comes when you’re quiet enough to listen inwardly without demanding answers. When you stop scrambling toward life and instead begin asking what wants to move through me now?

It often begins not as an impulse to act, but as a feeling-tone. A movement of breath. A shimmer of resonance. A slight pull toward something—not from lack, but from love.

It’s not driven. It draws you. It doesn’t shout. It hums.

And it can be so gentle you miss it if you're trying to be productive. It might be something like:

• The sense that you need to move your body in a certain way—not to exercise, but because your bones are asking to feel the sky.

• A nudge to write something—not for social media, not for a brand, not for a book—but because it came and sat beside you and asked to be written.

• A curiosity about a certain plant, or sound, or person, or place. Not a craving. Not even a reason. Just a quiet magnetism.

This is what real practice makes possible—not distance from life, but depth of contact with it.

Not sterilized stillness, but the raw pulse of life moving through a body that is no longer afraid to feel.

And yet—sometimes, even in sacred spaces, the process is quietly shamed. The messiness of becoming. The ache of not yet knowing. The disillusionment that keeps arriving in waves. We’re told we’re supposed to see through it all. We’re told to stay as awareness, to let the thoughts come and go. But something in that can feel so vigilant.

That can’t be freedom.

Because what you start to realize is that this watching—the subtle monitoring of your inner experience—can become a kind of hypervigilance. A quiet trauma pattern dressed in spiritual language. It says: “Let the thoughts come and go,” but really means, “Don’t touch them. Don’t feel them. Don’t move.” It says: “Stay as the witness,” but feels like: “Don’t be too human. Don’t engage.”

This isn’t awakening. It’s dissociation woven into discipline.

And here’s the deeper truth:

Awakening doesn’t mean being composed. It doesn’t mean transcending your humanness. It means becoming so intimate with life that even the watcher dissolves. It means letting the surveillance rest—not because you’ve conquered the mind, but because you no longer need to be on guard inside yourself.

We can afford to be touched. Not just spiritually, but somatically. Not just conceptually, but wholly. And we can have the courage to touch life in return—to reach out, to engage, to respond with tenderness and truth. Intimacy is not only what we allow in, but what we offer back.

We came here under a holy contract to be a human being—not just to let life pass through us as we remain unaffected, but to be a participant in life. To surrender in our action and our inaction. To meet life, and to let life meet us, fully.

We are not here to transcend. We are here to be with—awake, vulnerable, alive.

This is the path. And it hums.