I don’t use the word enlightenment because the term itself is very loaded. To many people it implies a kind of Big Bang after which you are eternally in a steady state called enlightenment. While in fact the actual experience is a kind of opening in spaciousness, here and now, which allows anything to come and go, with no resistance. It is not a state, it is just relaxing into a natural ease of being. It’s already here. When people use the word enlightenment, it implies some point in time that you hop into or it happens to you and then you are there for ever more … I don’t think this is a good way of thinking about it.

It is only in this profound relaxation into your simplest being — just being, just having tea, just talking, just seeing and hearing — is the treasure we’ve been searching for.

What I teach is realization, not meditation. In realization, you live in what is so-called meditation. You live in this sense of beingness, in wakeful, present awareness, which any good meditation practice worth its salt is trying to get to.

I’m suggesting that you recognize that that’s really all that’s going on anyway, and just hang out there. From that perspective, you don’t have to call it meditation, and we certainly don’t call it practice, because the very word ‘practice’ implies a goal, a future.

We’re speaking about that which is not in the future, there is no future. It is fully present right now and is always just here, just now. It’s a way of being — living as meditation, living as presence.

–Catherine Ingram

[via whiskey river]