06/01 – 6/22 Open Awareness

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.

Open Awareness Week 2 (6/8/26) Home Practices

Formal Practice — 

To continue building deeper facility and familiarity with the dynamics of open awareness practice this week, take the instructions for the second half of your practice time from last week, and shift them to the first half. If it’s helpful to begin with a short period of steadying attention with more single pointed awareness please go ahead. Over the course of the first half of your formal practice each day, slowly extend the amount of time you spend attending to any secondary objects. Then, at the half way point, settle back into open awareness practice by leting attention move freely. 

i.e. When a new experience becomes predominant, notice attention moving to this place and allow attention to settle there. There will still likely be lots of less predominant momentary experiences that flicker in and out of awareness at that time (sometimes they may feel more like they are in the background concurrently, other times they may feel like attention temporarily “flits” over to them for a very short duration). Practice including and allowing these while attention continues to “rest”, “orbit”, “settle”, “refer back to” the most recent predominant experience. Then as a new, clear predominant experience arises, allow/encourage mindful attention to “rest”, “orbit”, “settle”, “refer back to” this new experience. 

You are witnessing/feeling/knowing a truly organic process. Much like quietly observing a wild animal in nature. Rather than expecting a wild animal should be any certain way, offer your genuine interest and curiosity to see how it actually is, how it actually behaves.

It should not be understated how subtly challenging it can be during this style of meditation to have strong clarity discerning when attention is moving freely from place to place with mindful presence, as opposed to when the mind is slipping into a more habitual mode of discursiveness. Particularly so when practicing open awareness for a short part of our day in daily life—when many of our waking hours are spent in more habitually discursive modes. The practice of mental noting is a tried and true support for this. Explore and employ it as much as you need. Don’t feel bound to it. But think of it as a meditative ally worth cultivating your own unique relationship and facility with.

Investigation: This week after each practice session, make note of which secondary objects tend to be easier to maintain a clear continuity of mindfulness with, and which tend to be more likely to nudge the mind into unintentional habit patterns. This self-knowledge is invaluable for meditators.

For newer and intermediate students: take kind and very intentional care of your balance of energy. Choose a meditative posture that supports balancing the current energy in the body. Recognize the level of energy in the mind and encourage a gentle softening/relaxing, or a gentle engagement/attentive interest depending on what is needed. Set the intention to learn from patterns of over-efforting or casual disengagement as you witness them over the week, and over the course of the class.

For more advanced students: As ever, we take the cue from the buddha’s teaching that the karmic impact of any action, including each momentary meditative action in formal practice, is rooted in the intention motivating that action. “Karmic impact” here means potency for the sake of freeing the heart/mind from the causes of suffering). So, as you meditate incline toward a life long, continued refinement of rooting your moment-to-moment meditative actions in any of the three wise intentions (goodwill/non-ill-will, compassion/non-cruelty, simplicity/contentment/renunciation). e.g. “Can I begin again out of a palpable motivation of compassion, goodwill, or renunciation, rather that just beginning again because that’s what my teachers have told me?”, “Can I gently incline toward clarity out of a similar motivation?”, “if I need to adjust the body during meditation…(same as above)…?” etc. etc.

Last of all but not least of all:

Have fun! And take healthy pride in your practice. You are returning your attention home. Offering a healing depth of intimacy to your one precious life. These practices can’t help but cultivate patience, courage, humility, joy, wisdom, tenderness, empathy, receptivity, and confidence. And with moments of instant gratification waiting in your pocket at all times, but few and far between in endeavors of this depth, to consistently make time for your meditation practice is something worthy of admiration. Sadly, you’re more likely to get praise for a new haircut, or your Wordle streak than you are for keeping up with your meditation practice. So be liberal with your own acknowledgement of living according to your values. You deserve it! Celebrate it. Wishing you an insightful and week.

Open Awareness Week 3 (6/15/26) Home Practices

Formal Practice — 

This week please feel encouraged to drop into an open awareness practice as early in your formal practice period as feels right to you. Early in the period, offer most of your attentive engagement to fine tuning your approach to be responsive to the conditions that are present at that time. That means:

• feeling out an appropriate strength and frequency of mental noting/labeling to support a sense of clarity at this time
• recognizing whether an orientation to settle back and relax, or to engage and encourage interest is most helpful for balancing the energy at this time
• Noticing what momentum is present in the mind/heart which is most likely to cause forgetting of where we are and what we’re doing (anxious planning, wistful reminiscing, fantasizing, wallowing, judging etc), and then setting a strong intention to include recognizing this as yet another object to bring mindful awareness to during the meditation.
• etc.

Once we’ve settled in and heartfully calibrated our approach to meeting the unfolding present moments, add an intention to explicitly bring wisdom into the mix. This can look many different ways. In class we talked about approaches like: perceiving change/impermanence, perceiving our lack of control over experiences, perceiving the experience’s lack of capacity to provide durable satisfaction, and seeing all experiences as nature playing itself out. 

There is no need to try to do all this at once. We can simply begin our meditation practice by gently applying our instructions and subtly fine-tuning our approach to meet the current moment on its own terms, and from there, recalling our intention to not simply be aware, but to be aware with wisdom.

If these instructions feel like they may be missing a certain heartfulness, consider that the only wise response to any stress, struggle, or suffering we perceive—no matter how subtly—is to respond with compassion. And the most durable motivation to train in and cultivate wisdom & awareness is the motivation that cultivates “for one’s own benefit, for the benefit of others, and for the benefit of both oneself and others”. Said another way: when there is wise view, all wisdom & awareness practices have the palpable motivation of genuine care and connection.

Extra Credit

For all of us, but especially if you have the benefit of a routine that allows for formal practice in the first half of the day. It can be particularly beneficial to pepper the latter half of the day with 2-3 minute periods of formal practice standing at the sink after drying the hands but before leaving the rest room, or after replying to one email before reading the next, or each time you put your phone in your pocket. You may find that a noticeably wise and refreshing way of experiencing life is much more immediately accessible throughout your day than you might have assumed.