Awakened Doing
If you have awareness, then you can begin to engage in “awakened doing”?
Yes. Awakened doing is when you don’t create suffering anymore for others—or for yourself—by your own actions. It also implies that your primary intention, the focus of your attention, is on the “doing” in the present moment, rather than the result that you want to achieve through it. Joy flows into what you do, rather than stress. Stressful energy arises when you think some future moment is more important than the present moment, and the doing becomes only a means to an end. Many people look always to the end of the workday, or the end of the week, or the next vacation or a better job. Millions of people live in almost continual stress because they are not aligned with the present moment.
The imbalance between the male and the female energy.
Male energy doesn’t necessarily mean men, and female energy doesn’t necessarily mean confined to women. But male energy resonates more with doing, and the female energy resonates more with being. The world is out of balance because it is focused primarily on the doing, and there is a loss of the awareness of being. This is when stress and negativity arise: when people try to get things done and they no longer are centered within that aware space of being. You cannot feel your being anymore; you cannot feel the consciousness behind all the doing. So many women these days have internalized the imbalance and are also out of touch with being more focused on doing.
Both society as a whole and individual humans need to find some kind of inner balance between the ability to be still and the ability to do. Every human needs to look within to find some kind of balance. In the famous symbol of the yin and yang, the two sides are embracing each other. But in the middle of the white side there is a black spot, and in the middle of the black side there is a white spot. Even within the stillness, there needs to be the dynamic quality of doing so that you don’t go to sleep. And when you’re doing, there needs to be a stillness at the center. Otherwise you’ll lose yourself in the doing.
Give up defining yourself — to yourself or to others. You won’t die. You will come to life. And don’t be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it’s their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don’t be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious presence.
Don’t worry about what people think of you or how they label you. Live your own life, discover your own hopes, wishes, talents, desires, and dreams. Fall in love with who you are without having the need to define yourself by a single sentence or achievement. The human spirit is too intense to be captured in a few sentences.
