Open Awareness: A Sitting Practice
A meditation for those who have outgrown breath-counting and want to just be present, without an object.
Most beginning meditation has a focus: the breath, a mantra, a body scan. Focus is useful for the first months and years. It gives the mind something to come back to.
There is another mode, often taught later, called open awareness or choiceless awareness. There is no object. You are not focusing on anything in particular. You are simply present, with whatever happens to arise.
This sounds either trivial or impossible, depending on which day you read it. It is, in fact, neither. It is a real practice. Here is how to do it.
The practice
Sit comfortably. Three slow breaths.
Begin with the breath, just for a few rounds, to settle.
Now: let go of the breath as the focus. Let your attention be wide. Not on anything specifically. Notice whatever arises in the field of awareness — a sound, a sensation in the body, a thought, a feeling — and let it pass through.
The instruction is the same for everything: notice it, don't follow it, don't push it away. Watch it the way you would watch the weather.
A car passes outside. Sound, noticed. It moves on. A small ache in the lower back. Sensation, noticed. You don't try to fix it. A thought about lunch. Thought, noticed. You don't follow it into a meal plan. The breath itself, going in and out. Noticed. You don't grab it.
Twenty minutes of this is a deep sit.
What this is for
This practice teaches you, slowly, that you are not your thoughts, your feelings, or your sensations. You are the awareness in which all of these arise.
This is not a metaphysical claim. It is an experiential observation. After a while of doing this practice, you will start to notice that even strong feelings — anxiety, anger, grief — pass through awareness just as a sound or a sensation does. You stop being so identified with them. They become weather, not identity.
This is one of the great gifts of long practice. You do not stop having difficult feelings. You stop being so completely had by them.
When to begin
Don't start here. Start with breath-focused sitting, as in How to Begin. After three to six months of daily sitting, try this practice once a week. After a year, you may find this becomes your main practice.
There is no rush. The practice is patient. So can you be.