Meditation on Availability

What is Availability?

For most of us, being available means allowing other people to reach us 24/7 by having your phone turned on, reading e-mails and so on. But what if you could make yourself more available to experience reality? Well, what does it mean to experience? Experience is basically information from your suroundings, your body, and your brain, that is available to your perceptive system. Being available has to do with being open, taking in information without any protective barriers.

What is keeping you from being available?

There are many barriers that might limit your availability. Much of the information we are exposed to feels uncomfortable or unpleasant in some way, so we protect ourselves from it. Here is 3 of the most common barriers we put up:

1. Distractions: We tend to distract ourselves from pain and discomfort with various work and entertainment; TV, social media, phonecalls, e-mails, exercise, talking to people, sex, alcohol, food, etc.
2. Set beliefs and conditioning: For information to reach you it is filtered through your particular reality filter. For the information to be experienced it must fit with your ideals, beliefs, moral values, religious views, habits and conditioning from early childhood. When you keep a firm hold of something; clinging to your ideas and plans with an unwavering and relentless resolution you tend to produce a lot of suffering, not only to your self but also to the people you love the most.
3. Memories and past traumas: If you have bad memories about certain experiences you tend to avoid anything that is even remotly similar to your negative experience in the past. Great emotional stress and traumatic experiences might still dwell in your body as knots of fear and resentment.

Why do you want to be available?

Being willing to experience your pain is actually necessary to heal psychological traumas and fears. Most of your suffering is caused by fighting against painful experiences. When you stop fighting it, you are willing to feel it and also begining to heal it. The painful but necessary process of healing is something many of us have to be willing to go through when we first start a meditation practise.

Being available also means being ready to recieve all the small blessings life offers you every day. When you learn how to feel, the smalles things will reveal their true nature. Just the experience of making a sandwich in the morning can be profoundly meaningful and bring you tears of gratitude and joy.

Your willingness to experience pain makes you very resistant to evil. You can endure great trials with integrity and peace of mind. It is easier for you to reach your goals becouse you no longer care so much about instant gratification.

How to bring down your barriers

The best tip I have is to begin a meditation practice. Sit down for 10 minutes in the morning or whenever you have the time, and focus on being present. See if you can open up to all the information that is reaching you in this moment; the feeling of breathing, the sounds around you, the sensations in your body, the thoughts coming up in your mind.

Imagine yourself as a statue in the kings garden (the king being "God" or "The Universe"). When the King is walking in his garden, enjoing his statues, he is waking some of them up to dance with him. You are just a statue, so all you can do to gain his attention is to make yourself available. So you focus on being present in your space, if birds and animals play on you, you accept it. If the wind and rain is tearing you down you accept it. And if he some day pass you by and it pleases him to wake you up, you accept it.

In your meditation you do not have to struggle to make something happen. You only have to be willing to witness everything you experience. Allow the outside sounds to reach you, allow your thoughts to come and go, allow emotions to come and go, allow your body to feel all aches and pains that comes and goes. Notice that nothing lasts, all experience is fleeting. There is no reason to grasp hold on some experiences or pushing away others. Their nature is to appear and disappear. You are the eternally still and patient witness of it all. So be brave, find the curage to open up to all experience even the painful ones. It doesent matter if you like it or not, so you might as well experience it conciously and understand it, instead of just enduring it and distracting yourself from feeling it.

If you want to kickstart your awarness you can always try psychedelic drugs. I have had great healing benefits from my experiences, and unless you have psychological problems it is not as dangerous as everyone wants you to believe. But it is definitly like jumping off a cliff with no safety net, so be careful, and I would not recomend it without the right preparations.