The Art of Witnessing Experience

From the Kripalu Center archives

Whenever we attempt to process experience through the mind, we enter the world of duality. We are drawn to what we consider "pleasurable" or try to avoid what we consider "painful". This produces the feeling of "either/or": my experience is either good or bad, cold or hot, desirable or undesirable, and everything gets filtered back and forth between these two poles. Because we create this dichotomy it is then difficult to receive experience at its face value. Rarely do we dive beneath the surface of apparently contradictory or unpleasant sensations to harvest the full impact of learning’s in store for us.

Staying with what we think about what is happening as opposed to actually experiencing what is happening, means that we never really venture out of the realm of thought itself. This means we're stockpiling considerable tension through not processing experience through the appropriate channels: our body, physical sensations, our energy or our feelings. Gurudev summarizes the result: "All tension is the result of undigested experience: not allowing yourself to experience your experience fully. It is carried into the future in the form of blockage and tension in the body and mind."

The art of witnessing happens only when we're willing to bypass the mind's conditioning and get fully absorbed in whatever our experience relays, whether physical sensation, movement of energy or feeling states. By making the choice to be sensitive to our experience, we open the door for the full range of sensations to enter our life.

Learning to focus deeply on each sensation develops our capacity to concentrate, which brings about a state of internal absorption or witness consciousness. Witness consciousness is a special zone of neutrality where we are free both to participate and stand apart from our experience; we no longer fight what is. In a flash, we experience some intuition arising from our depths that cannot be known through the mind alone.

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