The Felt Sense of Am-ness
I quite often encounter those that have found themselves quite by accident in an unspoken trap on the spiritual path, particularly in the realm of self-inquiry, non-dual and awareness teachings. It’s the tendency to move up and out of the body, out of the heart, and out of life itself.
For instance, engaging in the practice of “I am” meditation is a powerful one, one I often recommend. It can bring clarity, quiet, and space. It can point to the vastness of Being, the formless presence beyond all form. But it can also quite easily tip into a kind of subtle disassociation, a no-thing-ness that disconnects us from the living, breathing felt sense of our own existence.
In deep meditation or awakening work, many encounter this moment of expansive recognition, a dissolving, a quieting, a spaciousness so complete it seems to transcend the personal altogether. And while that can be beautiful, even liberating, it can also become a kind of spiritual bypass. A subtle escape hatch from the rich aliveness of being.
Because what often gets overlooked is the invitation not just to witness or dissolve,
but to land.
To arrive fully here.
When I speak about sitting with the “I am,” I’m not pointing toward an idea, a concept, or even a mantra. I’m also not pointing to a void, a nothingness.
I’m pointing toward a felt experience.
The warmth of your own presence.
The living pulse of being.
The subtle, luminous intimacy of existence itself.
Unadorned, prior to any story of worthy or unworthy, good or bad.
This “am-ness” is not neutral in the dry, distant sense. It is not numb or removed.
It is alive.
Soft.
Clear.
Unconditional.
It does not need your justification or apology. It doesn’t ask for anything, and yet it quietly gives everything.
This isn’t a state to be achieved. It’s not a place to arrive. It’s a sitting with, sitting AS. An unconditional, unarguable resting in the fact of being.
I exist.
I am here.
I am alive.
Before identity. Beyond self-concept. Even beyond the observer.
Not “I am this” or “I am that.” Not even “I am nothing.”
But simply:
I am.
And yet even this sacred sense of being can become abstracted. It can become familiar, conceptual, distant. We begin to watch the “I am” as if from the outside, crawling underneath the concept and sliding into a kind of objectless awareness. An aimlessness or the bypass into emptiness.
But that’s not quite the same as being here, in the alive knowingness of your own am-ness, your own inherent existence.
What I’m pointing to is not the concept of existence, but the felt sense of existence.
A presence that is known not through abstraction, but through the body.
Through love.
Through the raw, unfiltered immediacy of this moment.
So often, we carry a deep belief hidden under layers of survival and conditioning, that we are somehow a mistake. That our existence burdens the world. That we have to earn our place by being better, doing more, causing less harm.
And in that struggle, we miss the very thing we’re longing for.
There is a ground of being within you that has never judged your existence.
That is the felt sense I speak of.
This can be tender. It can be stormy. And yet it is profoundly grounding.
It does not seek to escape the human, nor dissolve into the void.
It embraces the whole, right here, right now.
There is grace in returning to the simplicity of presence,
to the warmth of breath,
the ache in the chest,
the quiet joy of simply being.
It’s not flashy. It doesn’t always feel “spiritual” in the grand sense. But it’s real. And in its reality is an intimacy that no transcendence can replace.
So perhaps the invitation isn’t to bypass into no-thing-ness, but to fall gently into the beingness of this moment.
Alive, awake, here.
When you feel into that simple am-ness, you start to remember:
You are not a mistake.
You are not a disruption.
You are not broken and need to be fixed.
You are not too much, or not enough.
You are.
And that is holy.
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Thank you for walking alongside me ~ Imogen