Awareness is innate. Like an infant pulling itself up on furniture and taking its first steps, one’s meditation practice simply brings into expression a capacity and knowing that is innate.

Compassion, equanimity, integrity, virtue, caring, kindness, wide-mindedness, and ease of mind are also innate. Every time one lives from and demonstrates these character qualities proves that they are already within one. Also, we experience that it is vastly easier to be kind than unkind, that integrity feels positive and true while posturing and falsity feel dirty and untrue, and that wide-mindedness offers and provides while small-mindedness or close-mindedness has little or nothing to offer.

This meditation calls our attention to the experience that we are having. Countless meditations do also. Why? For the same reason that no one has to teach a baby to walk. As the baby experiences standing and balance and daring and freedom, the baby knows what to do with each component and then with the whole result. The same is so with meditation. As we acknowledge what we are experiencing and put the “should” mind in the trash because it dismisses what is while looking for or desiring something else, we – like the baby – experience what is. The baby innately knows how to walk. Everyone knows awareness-compassion.

infants know how to walk 051119