The Gift of Reverential Alertness

Reverend Bernard Beckwith, spiritual leader and founder of the Agape International Spiritual Center, describes his program of Life Visioning as a pathway to live up to our fullest potential and as a process that can reveal the answers we seek in our eight life structures: ego, beliefs, relationships, livelihood, finance, health, spirituality, and community. He uses a term that caught my attention and struck a resonant chord—“reverential alertness.” Beckwith says that it means “to listen as if someone was whispering the secret of the universe in your ear.”

How intently would we listen if we thought that we would come away with a gift of ineffable proportion?

To be reverential is to be full of respect and admiration; alertness means ready to see, understand, and act as needed. As a deeply introspective practice, Beckwith says that such a practice can be a force for self-empowerment. “Its potency resides in the depth of your ability to enter a receptive state of consciousness, activate the intuitive faculty, receive its guidance, and put what is revealed into action.” It allows intuition to blossom. Greg and I participated in Reverend Beckwith’s Life Visioning program a few years ago and found it an illuminating experience.

Adopting reverential alertness means that we value the information, the purveyor of the information, and the possibilities it can generate. What Rev. Beckwith describes is attentiveness that becomes a way of being, perceived through all our senses with intent and deliberateness.

If you pay enough attention, you will know the tune of creation, and you will naturally find your own rhythm.

—Sadhguru

Speaking of tunes and rhythm, our JLP practice of Big Ears is a manifestation of reverential alertness—the deep listening that is a musician’s superpower of collaboration and co-creation. Big Ears frames levels of listening, from the active listening of being fully present to a soulful listening of co-generating a future. As each musician improvises, his/her bandmates don’t know exactly where they will take their solo, but they’re willing to flow with that band member’s unfolding creative vision.

Yogi, mystic and author Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev says that if you can accept that you don’t know, then paying attention comes easy. If we welcome and are listening for the unknown through our attentiveness, we can extricate pearls of wisdom as they are revealed.

We listen to learn.

Our learning can be self-transformative, yet if we consider reverential alertness as a place from which we authentically connect and communicate with others, therein lies the gift of attention. The level of our focused intensity speaks to our recognition of what is trying to emerge.

Attention is like sunlight. When it is on, it reveals everything.

–Sadhguru

Whether around the dinner table, in social gatherings, or in business meetings, we can find opportunities to put this level of respect, admiration, and readiness—reverential alertness—into action and inspire a deeper level of understanding in our communication and relationships. It is a gift we can empathetically offer and another way we can tap into relational grace.