In this talk, Christiane Wolf explores the practice of “I am loving awareness,” inspired by the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, and how it can help us relate to ourselves with greater kindness and compassion. It offers a gentle reminder that love is not something we have to earn by becoming better or more perfect. Through practice, we can learn to hold difficult experiences with greater tenderness, and remember that we are more than our struggles or circumstances.
Ram Dass coined the phrase, “I am loving awareness,” as part of his practices. It invites us to explore an important question: What happens when we bring love and kindness to our awareness?
When I first heard the term loving awareness, I wondered, what are we doing? Are we just sugarcoating awareness? Isn’t awareness neutral? So what are we doing when we’re calling it loving awareness? Aren’t we taking sides?
I recently heard Jack Kornfield speak about this question. One thing he emphasized is that the Buddha always taught to the people who were in front of him, seeing what they needed. A good teacher speaks to the people in front of them, speaks their language, and gives them what they need.
We are living in a culture where we are obsessed with optimizing and being effective, and we’re really hard on ourselves. We have a lot of self-hatred, self-shaming, and self-criticism. And when we bring awareness through that cultural conditioning, the mind can actually corrupt awareness.
Have you noticed that?
Awareness can become a surveillance tool. You notice that your mind has wandered, and immediately the commentary begins: You’re doing that again. I can’t believe you just did that again. Your mind wandered again? What’s wrong with you? You can’t even be with your breath for a minute. How long have you been doing this?
Our mind can misuse being more aware to point out more of our flaws, to show us how we need to get better, try harder, and fix ourselves. But that’s not helpful, and that is not the point. That never was the point.
We need to make it clear that the purpose of practice is not to highlight our flaws even more. We need to counterbalance that tendency.
One of the things I love about the Buddhist teachings is that they are so commonsensical. Think about your own experience. When something difficult is going on, and there is more kindness, love, and friendliness in your awareness, is it easier to be with? Or is it easier when none of that is present?
When we have access to love, kindness, and compassion, it is easier to hold the difficult things. Has that been your experience?
This is one of the reasons we practice loving-kindness. When we practice loving-kindness regularly, it can become easier to be with things as they are. What are we doing? We are adding love to awareness. We’re adding compassion to awareness.
We could also call it compassionate awareness, because compassion is love when there’s pain. So why are we not making that explicit? Why not remind ourselves that we’re not just paying attention, but that we want to pay kind attention?
Ultimately, we need both. We can debate whether love and awareness are separate or whether they are the same thing. Some people distinguish between them, while others see them as inseparable. But it doesn’t really matter whether you’re a “lumper” or a “splitter.” What matters is your experience, and having both is helpful as we deepen our practice and deal with life as it unfolds.
Ram Dass, whose name was Richard Alpert before his spiritual journey, was a Harvard psychology professor who was searching for the meaning of life and truth. He became deeply involved with psychedelics and eventually went to India, where he met his teacher, Neem Karoli Baba, also known as Maharaj.
That meeting was a turning point. Maharaj became Ram Dass’s teacher and gave him the name Ram Dass. Ram Dass described the experience of being with Maharaj as one in which he felt completely seen. When Maharaj looked at him, Ram Dass felt that he could see him completely, with all his flaws and everything, and love him anyway.
Isn’t that what we all want? We all want to be seen and loved for who we are—not for what we’re aiming for, not for what we’re pretending to be, but with unconditional love.
Jack Kornfield once told a story about Ram Dass being told by Maharaj that he needed to return to America and teach. Ram Dass resisted. He didn’t feel ready or worthy. He felt imperfect and full of doubts.
Maharaj stood up, slowly walked around Ram Dass, and looked him up and down. Then he said, “I don’t see any imperfections.”
Ram Dass went on to teach. And that experience became part of his practice: he wanted to live in the place where Maharaj lived, where he could be present, really see people, love them, and help them feel that love. And he wanted to experience that within himself, too.
When things are going well, it’s easy to say, “I am loving awareness.” When things are difficult, it’s harder. But loving awareness isn’t something we have to become. It isn’t something we earn when we’re worthy of it, or something that will arrive if we practice long enough or hold awareness in exactly the right way.
It’s not that someday, when we’ve done everything correctly, the love will come in.
You are already loving awareness.
We have to remind ourselves of that. We have to remember.
The repetition of a mantra can be really helpful. When we’re caught in stress with our boss, for example, we can become identified with that experience. Or when we’re taking care of a parent, we can become identified with the role of being that child. In those moments, we can remember: I am loving awareness.
What happens when we do that? We step out of that identification and remember that we are so much more than the role, the stress, or the experience we’re caught up in.
One way Ram Dass taught this practice was to bring awareness to the heart area and repeat the phrase, “I am loving awareness. I am loving awareness.”
We change through practice and repetition. When we’re new to a practice like this, the mind may come up with all kinds of excuses about why we can’t do it, why it couldn’t possibly be true. It might feel fake, as though we’re lying to ourselves. We may not be used to relating to ourselves in this way.
Loving-kindness practice can take time. It took me years to really appreciate it. But the rest of our life is our practice.
We keep returning to the possibility of meeting ourselves with love, especially when we’re struggling.
Ram Dass continued practicing “I am loving awareness” after he had a severe stroke in 1997, which left him partially paralyzed and struggling with words. Before the stroke, he had been a wizard of words—a Harvard professor who could talk your head off. Suddenly, he had lost much of that capacity.
He returned to his practice and remembered that he was not his body. He was not defined by being a talented speaker or a highly intelligent person. He was loving awareness.
He kept practicing this over and over. People who had spent time with him often described his presence as love. Even in an online retreat, you could see him on the screen, and he was just beaming love. It didn’t really matter what he said. You could feel it.
Of course, his life after the stroke was difficult. He experienced illness and needed care in ways that none of us necessarily want to be cared for. There were struggles. And yet, through his dedication to practice, he was also able to find freedom.
He could remember: This is not what defines me. It never has been.
To some extent, we’re all confronted with this. We all live in a body, and we live in a world where many things are difficult and painful. We have friends who go through hard things. Our circumstances change, sometimes dramatically.
Having a practice like loving awareness gives us a tool. It helps us pivot out of the identities we become caught up in. That doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the good things in life. It means we can remember that we are more than any one experience, role, or circumstance.
As our minds become quieter, we can begin to see how we are continually creating a sense of ourselves. Something happens, and an opinion arises. We decide that something is good or bad, that we like it or don’t like it. And with that comes a contraction. We can begin to see how predictable these patterns are: Oh, here we go again.
Sometimes we have very strong opinions about what is happening. Other things simply flow through. Retreat can give us an opportunity to see this more clearly: to notice how we create and recreate ourselves, and to recognize the awareness that is here beneath all these changing identities.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have more space around all the different identities we’re carrying? They will change over time, regardless of what they are.
Ram Dass eventually called his experience after the stroke “fierce grace.” To move from being healthy to living in a paralyzed body, needing help around the clock and struggling to speak, and to call that fierce grace—that is a powerful practice. I’m sure it took time for him to get there, but I think it is a testament to his practice that it was even possible.
Ram Dass described his practice this way:
“I have a practice in which I say to myself, I am loving awareness. To begin, I focus my attention in the middle of my chest on the heart-mind. I might take a few deep breaths into my diaphragm to help me identify with it. I breathe in love, and I breathe out love. I watch all of the thoughts that create the stuff of my mind, and I love everything. Love everything I can be aware of.
“I just love, just love, just love.”
This is a practice of remembering. When we get caught in self-criticism, stress, or the identities we carry, we can pause and return to the heart. We can remember that we don’t have to earn love by becoming a better version of ourselves.
We can practice meeting what is here with kindness. We can allow awareness to be more than a tool for monitoring our flaws. We can bring love to what we see, including the difficult things.
And when we forget, as we inevitably will, we can begin again.
I am loving awareness.
Thank you for reading,
Christiane Wolf
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