EXPAND EVERYTHING
This practice brings together all the previous glimpse practices that involve the expansion of awareness. Remember, we usually focus our attention forward and narrowly. By opening to a more expansive perspective, we can sometimes find ourselves accessing natural awareness.
Get comfortable and close your eyes. Begin with expanded listening—listening out to the far reaches of your hearing. Once you’ve expanded your listening, open your eyes and broaden your vision. Let your field of vision be expansive, noticing the space between things and viewing peripherally. Then expand your body awareness. First notice your back body. Then begin to expand further out, sensing the field around, above, and below you in 360 degrees.
At this point, your senses of hearing, sight, and feeling should all be expanded. From here, you can begin to play with that expansion. Can you stay expanded but also feel embodied? Can you have simultaneous inner and outer awareness? What predominates?
When you notice yourself tensing, just relax your body. It might be possible to stay connected to only one field (sight, sound, feeling), or perhaps you can feel them all simultaneously. Be curious and know that you can’t do this expansion practice wrong.
Also notice: Who is being aware? Can you sense the awareness that is knowing the expansion?