The following is excerpted from In Touch: How to Tune into the Inner Guidance of Your Body and Trust Yourself. Published by Sounds True, April 2015.

Self-recognition
We cannot understand, love, and welcome others without first knowing and loving ourselves. –Jean Klein

Our body’s deep sensitivity is calling us home. Yet home is not somewhere, some when, or something other than what is already wholly present now. Our true nature is not some inner state that will be found in the future. It is always here and now, unbounded by space or time. It can never be objectified. Further, the heart of the one who is looking—the apparent separate self—is what is being looked for. Nisargadatta Maharaj said it most succinctly: “The seeker is the sought.”

This wisdom teaching is very puzzling for the linear mind that thinks in terms of someone attaining something. A student of the Indian sage Ramana Maharshi once asked for help to find his true nature. “You are like a man standing in his living room, asking how to get home,” Ramana replied. We are already home—we just don’t realize it. Infinite awareness is shining through your eyes as you read this—you are not who you think you are. Take a moment to open to this possibility.

Our body’s inner knowing is pointing us toward this self-recognition. Certainly being relaxed, grounded, aligned, spacious, and openhearted makes day-to-day living much easier, but there is a deeper invitation at work within each of us—to wake up. Self-recognition and awakening are different ways of describing the same thing. At some point we realize that we are not the limited being that we consciously and subconsciously take ourselves to be. We see that none of our stories and images about ourselves are actually true. This initial recognition can feel as if the clouds have briefly parted, revealing a vast, open space.

When this happens, the veil of personal identity temporarily lifts, and we know ourselves as open, awake awareness. We are in touch with our natural lucidity. In rare instances this awakeness is sustained after the first contact. In most cases, however, the conditioned bodymind reasserts itself, and there is a return to one’s familiar identity. Yet a taste of this homecoming remains. It is like someone who briefly awakens from a dream and then falls asleep again; the wakefulness is never completely forgotten. It continues to vibrate on the periphery of the dream, in the background of who we imagine ourselves to be. Our lives start to reorient around this clearer sense of who we really are.

As a result, we may begin to slow down and start paying attention to our actual experience. We may tune in to the sensations of our body or start to notice moments of silence between thoughts. We may question our limiting beliefs and emotional reactions and become interested in the process of how we bind and blind ourselves. Or, as Adyashanti puts it, we become interested in “the pitfalls and cul-de-sacs that un-enlighten us along the journey.”

“How do I unenlighten myself?” is a subtly different question from “How do I awaken?” The former presumes that we are obscuring a natural wakefulness that is already here. Rather than wondering how we get there, we can inquire, “Is it true that what I seek is not already here?” I invite you to sit with these questions and feel what they evoke. Something in you will respond if you don’t go to your thinking mind for an answer.

Awakening does not come from moving forward, but from falling back. It is a letting go into the unknown. In Zen it is called “the backward step.” We start to track our experience backward. For instance, you can evoke the sense of “I am” and then follow it back to its source—a classic form of self-inquiry. What happens if you focus your attention on the thought “I am”? Can you sense where and how it localizes in your body? If you follow it inward, where does it draw your attention? Or you can feel the deep yearning of the heart to come home and follow that yearning back. These kinds of intuitive inquiries
lead us out of the certitude of the conditioned mind into the unfamiliar territory of “I don’t know.”

The mind may think that “I don’t know” is the wrong answer to the question “Who or what am I?” Yet, in fact, “I don’t know” is the most accurate and honest answer. When we deeply investigate all of our placeholder identities, such as being a man or a woman, an American or a German, a white, a brown, or a black, a hetero- or homosexual, they fall to the side like name tags scattered on the floor at the end of a convention. The simple truth is that we actually don’t know who we are. Gradually we learn to relax into this not knowing. As Jean Klein once told me during a private interview, “Abide in the heart, not knowing.”

At some point, having made ourselves available, we are taken by grace. This taking may be sudden and clearly recognizable or slow and barely noticed—a waterfall or a broad river gently meeting the ocean. Whether sudden or gradual, there is a gravitational shift of identity from form to formless, from being someone to being no one, from being an object bounded by time and space to being open, awake, and infinite awareness. There is clarity, with no one left to claim it as his or her own. It marks the beginning of a new chapter of life.

to read more of this article, go to:    http://realitysandwich.com/315005/self-recognition-tuning-in-to-the-inner-guidance-of-your-body/