悲壮 Bei Zhuang – A Direct Glimpse into Awakened Compassion

Ever since that moment i tasted awakened awareness, i was able to put myself back to peaceful sleep when waking up at 4am bcs my finite, relative self was grieving again: The passage of time. The fading of youth. The unfinished tasks. The deep anxiety of not having done enough.I no longer push it away. I let it move through me.Fully feeling and nonreactive.

That moment happened during the last morning on the cushion with my nondual awakened awareness retreat with Dustin and Rigdzin community, during the meditation, I heard the words in my ears: “Everything arising in awareness is awareness seeing itself, expressing itself, in front of itself.”

A strong current of energy flooded through my body. Something not of thought, but of knowing arose in me, just like “a snowflake falling into a vast, warm ocean.”

Suddenly, light flooded through my being. My heart pounded. My body trembled. A word surfaced—not from thought, but from the depth of the Field in front of me… the field i was meditating on.. The open field facing Monterey Bay, with redwoods and rolling hill. It’s a Chinese word keeps whispering to my ears.

悲壮 Bei Zhuang, a sadness so vast it becomes magnificent.

Isn’t it interesting that we can learn so much from an ancient language? This Chinese word captures and holds dichotomy, and is close to the sensations of nondual experiences.

It was not sorrow. Not despair. But the aching beauty of awareness witnessing all the striving, all the longing, all the brokenness and brilliance of human expression.