Loch Kelly returns for an exploration of the ways we can use the powerful practice of effortless mindfulness to connect to our true nature and live from an expansive place of loving awareness.
Links from this episode: The Way of Effortless Mindfulness | More Teachings from Loch Kelly on the BHNN
Awareness Has Your Back
Loch shares the Dzogchen practices of effortless mindfulness that he learned of while studying Dzogchen under Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche. He and Raghu talk about accessing our innate openhearted awareness – what Ram Dass calls loving awareness. Together they reflect on the realized beings that have the ability to open us to this place of awareness that exists inside ourselves.
“People with complex trauma, who are severely abused, the thing we work with to help them is to access their true nature. They can access it simply and it gives them immediate relief. Then they realize that is the loving self they have been searching for their whole lives and that is already here.” – Loch Kelly
The Way of Effortless Mindfulness (18:00)
What is the first step we can take in upgrading our capacity for awareness and opening to effortless mindfulness? Loch talks about the different doorways of practice that break our patterns of mind and awaken us to our true nature.
“Once you realize that that whole field of awareness is actually what is awake, that meditator is now an object of consciousness that is not needed to be lovingly aware, embodied or interconnected. You have then gone into a nondual meditative interconnection, which I am sure that is the nature of awake consciousness which Mingyur Rinpoche and Neem Karoli Baba lived in. A nondual interconnected field of awareness that wasn’t aware from a point of view like a mediator is.” – Loch Kelly
Tibetan master Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche shares wisdom for navigating the spiritual path on Ep.289 of the Mindrolling Podcast
Mindful Glimpses (24:55)
Loch leads us in a 5-minute awareness practice. He and Raghu discuss the shift in perspective we need before we are able to enter into the place of loving awareness. Loch reflects on the series of short glimpses of mindfulness that can lead us to effortless awareness much quicker than hours at a time of deep meditation.
Never Too Much to Bear (44:10)
How can effortless mindfulness help us cope with physical pain? Loch shares a personal account of using the practices of effortless mindfulness to manage extreme discomfort. He guides us in the practice of dropping from head to heart
