"Now, it is clear that we cannot resolve any human problem... without understanding ourselves, and the understanding of ourselves is possible only when we do not condemn or justify that of which we are aware. To be aware without condemnation, justification or comparison, of every thought, of every mood, of every reaction, does not demand the approximation of an idea. What it does require is... going into it fully, completely. Most of us... would rather escape... through an idea, through approximation, through comparison or condemnation, and... we never solve the issue in front of us." -- Jiddu Krishnamurti, lecturing in Paris, 7 May 1950.
The redditor on r/Krishnamurti asked, "How do you, personally, practice choiceless awareness?" So I answered the only way I could, which is based on my own experience of it:
While I began (45 years ago) with the interoceptive body inventory meditation that was popular then, and later moved on to various forms of vipassana insight's unrestricted awareness of whatever just is, it wasn't until I had 1) read many of Krishnamurti's and other author's books on this list, and 2) learned in 2013 how to use the 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing that I began to actually understand experientially what K. was talking about when he used the term "choiceless awareness."
See also More on Krishnamurti's "Choiceless Awareness."
Or just get THE BOOK.
Additional Resources on this Topic
"HOW," the 5 Stages & the 10 StEPs (in ProcessFiend's reply to the original post on that reddit thread)
The 10 StEPs + SP4T
Understanding & Recovering from the Consensus Trance using the 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing
How Self Awareness Works to Digest Emotional Pain
Acceptance (in not-moses's reply to the original post on that reddit thread)
While I began (45 years ago) with the interoceptive body inventory meditation that was popular then, and later moved on to various forms of vipassana insight's unrestricted awareness of whatever just is, it wasn't until I had 1) read many of Krishnamurti's and other author's books on this list, and 2) learned in 2013 how to use the 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing that I began to actually understand experientially what K. was talking about when he used the term "choiceless awareness."
Whatever comes to awareness via vipassana observation comes to awareness, and I allow it to be noticed, acknowledged, accepted (as being), owned, appreciated (for why it's there), "understood" (as K. used that words so many times) and then allowed to be felt interoceptively as what seems to be "neuroemotional energy" sometimes equating to the Fight / Flight / Freeze / Faint / Feign (or Fawn) Responses that can lead to Fry and then Freak if left unprocessed. Which is why one needs to practice interoceptive meditation -- perhaps assisted by those 10 StEPs in the manner described at the link below about the 10 StEPs + SP4T -- on a regular basis: Do that and CA not only becomes available when one is emotionally triggered... it becomes increasingly habitual and automatic.
Having read about K.'s "process" in several of his own and others' books (including Jayakar's, Holroyd's and Vernon's, all listed right here), it does seem to me that what K. himself went through may have been the painful release of emotional or autonomic "blockage" (or repression or even dissociation) similar to what I experienced for long periods of time in the 1990s and early '00s. And later on learned a lot about from reading gobs of material by all those mentioned in the first paragraph of this earlier post on reddit.
But that process is only painful when we resist it, when we fight it, when we don't want it. Because just allowing the feelings (or, for example, grief, anxiety, shame, guilt, worry, remorse, regret, resentment, rage, etc.) to be there in "choiceless awareness" turned out -- for me, anyway -- to be the key to working through Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief processing with a minimum of "resistance" thereto (noticing that as well).
Or just get THE BOOK.
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Additional Resources on this Topic
"HOW," the 5 Stages & the 10 StEPs (in ProcessFiend's reply to the original post on that reddit thread)
The 10 StEPs + SP4T
Understanding & Recovering from the Consensus Trance using the 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing
How Self Awareness Works to Digest Emotional Pain
Acceptance (in not-moses's reply to the original post on that reddit thread)
thanks for this information. emotion handling
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