Content & Context

One of the goals of meditation is to recognize yourself as the ever-present space that your experience takes place within. 

I’ve always liked seeing meditation as the practice of shifting your identification with the content of your experience to the context of your experience. 

You can think of everything in your first person experience (thoughts, feelings, visual field, personality, etc.) as content that unfolds within a boundary-less aware space (context) and what you ultimately are is this boundary-less aware space.

You are both the content and the context of your experience simultaneously. 

We are actors in the play of life while also being the stage the play is happening on. A part of the drama and the whole thing all at once.

This discovery completely blew my mind when I first had it while meditating. “Holy shit I am this ever-present peaceful awareness I’ve experienced my whole life through!” It was so utterly simple and beautiful.

Discovering that you are the indestructible, imperturbable and unmovable context of your experience when you have been living as if you are only the content can be extremely liberatory. 

It felt freeing to me until I trapped myself with it.  

My unprocessed emotional pain and trauma caused me to use this new knowing as a way to bypass the painful and uncomfortable things happening in my experience. When the content got too uncomfortable for me I would escape to the realm of peaceful awareness to try and bypass it. 

This is a common phenomenon for people with emotional pain who take up a meditation practice. It’s why the term spiritual bypassing exists. 

This discovery that I was also the context of my experience gave my psyche a sneaky way to continue neglecting the parts of me that were in most need of love and compassion. There’s a painful irony in making the discovery that you are loving awareness and then using it to withhold love from yourself. 

I started to see that my orientation towards the context was fueling dysfunction in the content of my experience.

When I committed to my healing journey I became interested in creating right relationship between the content and the context. 

How do I use the knowing that I am peaceful awareness to help heal my trauma and love all parts of me? How does my knowing of the context aid me in healing the content?

This was a big shift for me. The context was no longer a way to neglect, deny, and escape what was happening in my experience. It was now a way to give love to all the parts of my experience and become more intimate with them. My recognition of being the context of my experience was now used as a way to become more embodied, more compassionate, and more connected.

In the beginning, my spirituality was about transcendence and negation more than anything else. An unprocessed pain fueled a desire to transcend certain realities in the human experience rather than tend to them with care and love.

The healing journey helped me see my spirituality as being about relationship.

It became about the relationship between my transcendent self and my humanness. The impetus to heal caused me to especially focus on the relationship between the love I know I am and the parts of myself I find hardest to love.

Spirituality for me went from trying to transcend the content to creating the right relationship between the content and the context of my experience. My knowledge of the whole became in service of helping the parts.

Creating right relationship between content and context is one of the most important tasks of the 21st century.

Part 2 coming soon….

Much Love,

Trace