Are you living in your life — or in your idea of it?

By Simone Claridge · True Better You

This post began with a question from someone in our community.

She had caught a Thursday practice she had missed — a recording — and one sentence stopped her mid-listening.

"You are not living in your life."

She wrote to ask me to expand on it. And her question has stayed with me, because it points at something I notice in myself all the time too.

What I meant is this.

We think we are responding to what is happening. But very often, we are responding to everything we have already experienced. Our memories. Our expectations. What we think should happen. What we absolutely don't want to happen. What we fear. What we are trying to hold onto.

We are not meeting life as it is. We are meeting life as we already know it.

Grandmaster Pang Ming spent decades developing a precise map of human consciousness. At the center of that map is something he called Yiyuanti — a term worth pausing on, because it doesn't translate neatly. It means the pure awareness at the core of every human being. Not the mind as we usually think of it. Not the thoughts, not the emotions, not the personality. The clear, aware presence that is here before any of that arises.

From the moment we are born, this pure awareness begins receiving information from the world. Every experience, every feeling, every word spoken by the people around us gets impressed into it and stored. Over time, this accumulated information forms a structured inner system — what Dr. Pang calls the reference framework. It becomes the background against which everything new is measured, judged, and responded to.

Think of it as an inner operating system. Built from everything you have ever lived through. Running quietly in the background of everything you do.

The reference framework was meant to serve Yiyuanti — to help pure awareness navigate the world. But Dr. Pang points at something important: over time, the servant becomes the master. We no longer respond from pure awareness directly. We respond from the accumulated program.

Western cognitive science arrived at the same recognition through a different route. The psychologist Jean Piaget called these inner structures schemas — organized mental frameworks built from experience that guide how we perceive everything afterward. Once formed, schemas tend to protect themselves: they direct attention toward information that confirms them, and away from anything that doesn't fit. The old pattern maintains itself — not maliciously, but automatically. Different tradition, different language. The same recognition.

Close enough to touch:

Imagine you grew up in a house where love was loud. Not because anyone was angry — that was just how warmth moved in that family. Big voice, strong presence, a lot of energy.

Now you are older. Someone speaks to you quietly and calmly, and something in you reads it as distance. Not because it is distant. Because your inner system — built from everything you lived — measures quiet as absence. The reference framework is running. And you don't even notice it happening.

That is how most of us move through most of our days. We think we are responding to what is here. We are actually responding to what our accumulated information tells us this probably is.

And here is the part that matters: what we resist, we hold. What we fear, we fix our attention on. What we absolutely don't want to happen — we are already building in the mind, rehearsing it, bracing against it. That bracing, that fixing of awareness on the unwanted — keeps it alive. Not because life is punishing us. Because a gripped awareness cannot meet what is actually here. It is meeting the old program, over and over, confirming itself.

We are, quite literally, creating the life we know — including the parts we don't want — by the very act of holding them in the awareness.

On awakening — and what it actually is:

Most of us carry a concept of what awakening looks like. Something dramatic. A shift. A moment of arrival that changes everything and doesn't wear off.

But what actually happens — when something real does happen — is much quieter than that.

We become aware of what is watching.

That is all. Not a new state imported from somewhere else. Just — the observer becomes visible to itself. The awareness that has always been here, underneath every response, underneath every fixed pattern, underneath the reference framework itself — notices itself. And in that noticing, there is a gap. Just a moment. Between what the old program says and what is actually here.

Most of us have had those moments. More than we realize. A sudden stillness in the middle of a busy day. A pause before the usual reaction. A strange clarity that arrives and then dissolves back into the noise.

We tend to make those moments precious and rare — as if the recognition is the difficult part, and once it arrives, the rest follows naturally.

But the teaching says something different.

The first recognition of the observer is actually not the difficult part. Almost everyone has touched it. What requires real, sustained practice is what comes after. Teacher Wei is direct: if the pure awareness — the observer, Mingjue — is not stable, it will be caught again and again by the old information. A word from someone triggers the reference framework, and the pure awareness loses itself in the reaction before it even notices what happened.

Stabilization is the work. Not one gap. A continuum.

The practice — through Mingjue, through N-Tone, through returning again and again — trains the observer to stay with itself. Not to have a beautiful experience once and remember it. But to build a new ground. A new baseline. Where the gap is not the exception but the place you live from.

Teacher Wei describes it as learning to navigate the ocean of information without losing the center. The information still comes. Triggers still arise. The reference framework still has its patterns. But gradually — with practice, with return, with the N — the observer becomes more stable than the noise it watches.

Awakening is not the hard part. Stabilizing it so it becomes the ground you stand on — that is the practice of a lifetime.

What Karin showed me:

The woman who wrote to me had just come through two months of jury duty. Two trials. Both ended as mistrials. Weeks of uncertainty — not knowing until the last minute whether she needed to report. A triple murder case that lasted six days. A molestation trial that ended abruptly after lunch, with no explanation given.

She couldn't control any of it. Not the outcome of the trials. Not whether she would be called. Not what she would be asked to sit with.

And she wrote: "I enjoyed practicing around all that while in court and just the waiting time. Brand new experience around what's shifting in me."

Reading that, I felt something settle in me.

She wasn't waiting for life to become peaceful before she came back to herself. The courtroom, the uncertainty, the waiting — it all became part of her path. She wasn't trying to make the reference framework stop running. She was simply returning, again and again, to the one who was watching it.

That is what stabilization looks like in an ordinary life. Not a dramatic shift. Not a retreat experience that changes everything. Just — returning. One morning at a time. One N at a time.

The gap becoming a continuum.

And I want to say something to everyone who has been practicing for years and still wonders if something is wrong, because the moments of clarity don't last, because the reference framework keeps running, because life keeps arriving in the forms you most wanted to avoid — nothing is wrong. You are exactly in the practice. The recognizing was never the destination. The returning is.

So the question is not: how do I improve my life?

The question underneath that is:

am I meeting my life at all — or am I meeting my accumulated idea of what it should be?

And if I am gripping — bracing — holding the unwanted thing so tightly in my awareness that I can't see past it — what would happen if, just for a moment, I let the observer simply watch?

Not fix. Not resolve. Just watch.

That is where life actually is.

If you'd like to explore what it feels like to step out of the old pattern, the introduction to N-Tone chanting is one of the most direct ways I know.

→ Explore: Introduction to N-Tone Chanting  

Every morning a group gathers to chant N together — daily, 8–9am EST. No teaching, no performance. We come as we are. We come for what we truly are. And we stay conscious in it.

→ Join the Daily N-Tone Session  

With gratitude to Grandmaster Pang Ming, Teacher Wei, and Teacher Xu, whose teaching this rests on. And with warm thanks to Karin, for a question that helped me put into words something I have been living much more than explaining.