The Hand Sensing Exercise
Eckhart on the Sense of Aliveness
How to get in touch with your inner sense of aliveness.
A simple exercise you can do anywhere any time is to get in touch with your inner sense of aliveness.
This inner sense of aliveness is your own conscious presence, your being-ness, the you that you really are, beneath your thinking and beyond your story.
The body is the vehicle for experiencing presence. You cannot experience presence in the mind. Thinking, in fact, is a distraction that pulls your awareness away from presence.
Here is a simple exercise presented in A New Earth, called the Hand Sensing Exercise:
Close your eyes and hold out your hand.
Allow yourself to feel your hand.
Ask yourself how -- without touching anything, without moving your hand and without looking at your hand -- you can know that your hand is still there.
Your mind might say it knows it's there, because it was just there a minute ago.
But there is another way of knowing. You can feel the inside of your hand, a subtle sense of warmth or tingling.
This is the subtle sense of aliveness.
This hand sensing exercise is wonderful for bringing your awareness to the present moment. Let yourself be only concerned with feeling the sensations in your hand.
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