Week 1 (6/1/26)
Open Awareness Week 1 (6/1/26) Home Practices
Formal Practice —
Set a clear plan & intention for your daily practice between each weekly class. Know when and where you’ll do formal practice and for how long. It’s also incredibly useful to have a plan for when and where your back up meditation time will be if something unexpected keeps you from your regular daily practice.
Spend the first half of your formal meditation time with more narrowly focused directed awareness, and the second half with the instructions to include more mindful recognition of secondary objects in a more broad/more flexible approach to directed awareness (we’ll begin to explore open awareness next week).
In both approaches, the most important element is a skillful approach to refining the subtle art of beginning again. The moment when you notice the mind has been absorbed in something which has created a felt sense of disconnection to present moment experience we want to gently hone our capacity to be ever-more forgiving, ever-more easygoing, ever-more simple and swift in returning to mindful awareness. Remember, you don’t control the moment mindfulness leaves, nor the moment it returns, you can only train a more peaceful, simple, warm, and wise response to the moment you’ve become aware. And no amount of meditation experience should make us complacent in our genuine interest in subtly refining our skillfulness in these moments.
Instructions for the first half of practice:
- Choose a homebase (‘Primary Object’) to rest and cultivate receptive mindful attention. Some options:
- the feeling of breathing in and out
- the experience of hearing sounds arise, change and pass
- feeling an area in the body where somatic sensation is clear enough for attention to have something obvious to recognize from moment to moment, yet where most of the sensations (most of the time) are neither compellingly pleasant, nor compellingly unpleasant.
- Feel the direct changing experience moment to moment, settled back, not ‘leaning forward’ to get the experience, but receiving each moment as it presents itself.
- Because we are building toward an open awareness practice, which benefits enormously from clarity & discernment. It is recommended to practice with using a whisper-quiet, gentle rhythm of mentally labeling or noting what is being experience.
- When awareness of the primary object is in the foreground, or most-obvious, label is simply with one word (e.g. ‘breath’, or ‘sound’, or ‘feeling’). Any other experience (‘Secondary Object’) becomes predominant, use the label ‘not _____’ (e.g. ‘breath’ & ‘not breath’, or ‘sound’ & ‘not sound’).
- There is tremendous flexibility in how you use these nearly-silent mental notes. Find a rhythm/pace/speed of notice that is balanced between supporting a feeling of genuine engagement and relaxation in attitude. They can be quite spread out, or very close together. You can also adjust the words, the tone, the ‘volume’. Be exploratory. The goal is to recruit the verbalizing mind to support the meditation practice rather than be left to its own devices, to boost a sense of clarity, and to balance the energy.
- If you’ve explored widely different modes and approaches, and have a continued sense of difficulty employing the mental label. Let it drop for a period of time. When you find that either a) you could use a little more clarity and sense of engagement, or b) the verbalizing mind is ‘kicking up lots of dust’ while being left unemployed, gentle invite the rhythm back in and continue exploring.
- Bring a true learners attitude. Don’t expect anything to feel perfect, or to fit just right. Simply play, take interest, and learn. All engagement with meditation is doing something beautiful for yourself, and all those who might be affected by the state of your inner world, don’t lose sight of that beauty and start nitpicking the details!
Instructions for the second half of practice:
- Continue in the way described above but adjust the mental label for the secondary objects (“Not ____”), to a single word that describes simply & directly what is experienced. Examples might include things like: Thinking, Feeling, Hearing, Confusion, Joy, Throbbing, Tingling, Remembering, Criticizing, Fantasizing, Planning, Analyzing. Etc.
- Rest attention with the primary object, and as secondary objects pop into the foreground label them once, clearly recognizing what has come to the forefront of attention, then gently return your receptive mindful attention to the primary object.
Extra Credit —
You can try this for very short periods of time mid-day, after waking, or before bed for 4-8min at a time. First starting with the more narrow directed awareness, then shifting to the broader directed awareness. Doing this can help the whole practice feel much more natural, and encourage a very valuable economy of effort during longer periods of formal practice.