Awareness Through the Open Window

There’s a big window beside my bathtub. In the colder months, most nights you’ll find me in the hot water with the window open. The mix of heat and cool air has always felt amazing. The contrast of my body warm and relaxed, as fresh air rushes in, it's so satisfying.

Lately, this ritual feels entirely different. The room is peaceful, the lights dim, the air warm. Outside the wind throws around the big tree, it's night time and the air feels and smells distinct. As I sit in the bath, I’m aware of both worlds at once. The calm warmth and contained inside, and the cool, restless expansive world outside.

What’s changed is how it’s all being experienced. It’s no longer me inside the bath, noticing the contrast between hot and cold. Instead, everything, the warmth, the chill, the sounds, the sensations, the lights, it's all being noticed equally, as one shared space of awareness. There is no centre having the experience. It's simply everything in the field of awareness is being experienced within the field of awareness.

When I think back, I remember what it used to be like. I’d open the window, feel the cool air on my skin, and enjoy the physical sensations. It was all happening through the body. Me, in the bath, having an experience.

Now, it feels different. The boundaries between “me” and “everything else” have softened. The wildness outside the window, the stillness inside the room, the sensations in the body all of it is part of the same unfolding moment. There’s no single center it’s happening to. It’s as if life itself is experiencing, through and as everything, all at once.

It's in this moment I become fully aware of the shift in perception, the shift in experience. It's in this moment I really stop to realize what's changed. And who the heck is I? If there's no centre, no witness, no one who's experiecing?