June marks the final month of the Paramita Project! This month, I’ll be practicing and pondering jnana, which can be translated as awakened awareness. What a beautiful note on which to end this symphony of spiritual practices, yes?!

Lama Surya Das says, “Jnana paramita is simply authenticity in being.” After all these months of practice and effort, jnana carries the quality of pure presence. So, rather than spending June practicing awakened awareness, our goal will be to embody and/or notice awakened awareness within us. I say “within us” on purpose, because we already carry jnana. Unlike prajna wisdom, which must be cultivated, jnana is more like a return to our essence. It has a child-like quality. Awakened awareness already belongs to us. It merely awaits our perception.

Awakened awareness does not reside in the realm of ideas. (So blogging my thoughts on it and discerning how to “practice” it will be somewhat ironic.) It’s the knowing we have before ideas, before conceptual knowledge ever enters the picture. Again, there is some innocence at play in jnana, but it comes from seeing all. Some people translate jnana as knowledge. But in the West this word is very unhelpful because we mistake it to mean head knowledge, or book smarts. It is more knowing than knowledge.

When we live with awakened awareness, the goal isn’t to change our life but to awaken to the life we already have. We connect fully with it. Lama Surya Das says, “We often feel like something is missing. It is–we are.” So often, our lives happen, but we cannot fully say we live our lives. When we embody jnana, we embody life fully.

This month, how can you choose to embody your life fully?

This post is part of the Paramita Project, where I’m practicing one paramita each month for ten months. Read all my posts on the tenth and final paramita, jnana, here.