“Basic awareness meditation is really nothing more or less than giving open, nonjudgmental attention to present-moment, non-conceptual experiencing. You don’t have to be in the lotus position. This can happen on the city bus.”
Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
at the beginning of a mindfulness meditation
to wind one down
throughout an entire practice session
riding the bus
I want people to know they have more options for exploring mindfulness than they assume. Despite how it’s typically advertised, it goes way beyond breath awareness for relaxation. It includes a variety of exercises, habits, and strategies that develop empowering attention skills.
The various practice options fall into three main categories:
focused attention
trait cultivation
open awareness
Strengthening your ability to focus involves deciding what to pay attention to and what you’ll do about inevitable distractions.
Sensations related to breathing are discussed the most, leading to the assumption that mindfulness is synonymous with breath awareness. However, any category of sensation or perception can be used as a focus-building anchor. This includes sights, sounds, physical sensations unrelated to inhaling or exhaling, thoughts, and emotional feelings. You can even explore several of them during a focus practice session.
When our attention wanders away from what we’ve decided to notice, we practice gently steering it back. Attending to the chosen perceptions builds focus. So does redirecting it back.
Another category of exercises involves cultivating traits you admire, such as compassion, gratitude, and ethical conduct—character traits that atrophy unless we actively strengthen them.
Incorporating such exercises into our mindfulness practice allows us to align our daily lives with our core values and beliefs. It’s not just about sitting quietly in meditation; it’s about weaving mindfulness into our everyday decisions and behaviors.
For example, if compassion is one of our values, we can cultivate it through simple acts of kindness and empathy, such as listening attentively to others, supporting those in need, and trying to ease up on ourselves during challenging circumstances. To develop gratitude, we might set aside time each day to reflect on what we’re thankful for.
Integrating such habits into our daily lives reinforces our mindfulness practice and fosters congruence.1 It empowers us to live more authentically and nurtures a deeper connection with ourselves and others.
The third practice category involves suspending control of one's attention. This option functions as the primary approach in many contemplative traditions.
It goes by many different names,2 including:
open awareness
choiceless awareness
just sitting
passive contemplation
non-dual awareness
This category of practice develops intimacy with awareness itself.
Meditation teacher Adyashanti refers to open awareness practice as Allowing Everything To Be As It Is. He describes it as moving from the driver's seat of awareness into the passenger seat, which I find a helpful analogy. When I get the urge to grab the steering wheel, speed up, or hit the breaks, I try to go along for the ride instead.
There are many ways to practice mindfulness. Explore the methods that interest you, and combine them to increase their overall value.
Working with different sensations can enhance your ability to focus. You can also learn exercises that help you cultivate kindness, delight, and awe. Sometimes, you might even set these aims aside to develop a more intimate familiarity with awareness itself.
The attention exercise below (and the guided recording in this post) provide an interesting way to give open awareness a spin.
Exercise
This is an approach to open awareness practice based on Shinzen Young’s “Do Nothing” technique.
