Witness your life

“The witness that’s useful in our spiritual work has a totally different quality. It isn’t judging—good, bad, it’s all the same. This witness isn’t trying to change anything—it’s just seeing it all. It is the completely uncommitted; it’s not committed to your enlightenment, it’s not trying to get you ahead, it’s simply witnessing, nothing else…

To develop that kind of witness, you have to have a little elbow room. That’s why one of my first instructions for sadhana would be “Give yourself some space.” Don’t always be filling up your time and your mind with content; create a spacious environment for yourself, one that makes it easier to step back and notice your trip.

Then do just that. Notice it. Don’t judge it, don’t try to change it, don’t do anything at all except to notice it. You will find that a lot of your stuff has only been able to survive unnoticed; the minute you begin to bring it into the light of that “I” that is just looking at it all, it starts to change—without your ever having done a thing! All you did was to start identifying with a different part of your being, a part you could use to watch all the rest of it.” —Ram Dass, Paths To God: Living The Bhagavad Gita