Openness in Silent Meditation

Hello, my name is Michelle. And welcome to episode four of the Nature of Meditation podcast.

In this episode, I'm exploring the experience of openness in silent meditation practice.

So as usual, let's start with our three-minute silent meditation to help us arrive in our present moment experience.

Help us arrive in our field of awareness in the present moment.

So, I will be silent now for three minutes, and try my best to become more present and aware. And you're invited to take your seat, make yourself comfortable, and gradually, or maybe even instantly, coming into your present moment experience.

Back in the present moment. Hopefully, you're feeling more aware now than you were three minutes ago. More present and aware.

So, for this podcast, I mean, in previous podcasts, so far, so far I've been consciously and intentionally turning our attention inwards and resting our attention on our anchor. And that anchor may be are the sensations of our breathing, our chest and abdomen naturally rising and falling in each moment.

So, in meditation proper, there's no judgment and no discrimination, and no duality. So now, instead of intentionally focusing inwards, we're going to turn our attention outwards, towards openness.

And we're going to explore the actual space of our field of awareness.

The vast, unbounded field of awareness that our sensations, emotions, perceptions, and all of our experience is occurring within and moving through.

So, so far in the podcast, in the first three episodes, we have been turning our attention inwards. And now in this episode four, we're going to be non-dualistic and hopefully more balanced and whole. And turn our attention outwards towards openness.

So in practising open awareness, instead of focusing and concentrating on one specific reference point, the anchor point of our meditation, such as our breathing or our hands, or a mantra.

Instead of focusing our attention on our anchor, our attention is open and unattached to anything. So we're not using an anchor when practicing open meditation.

Now, I know the practice of mindfulness is extremely popular these days, which is the reason why I'm focusing on meditation. But I would like to explain openness in such a way to help mindfulness practitioners approach, understand and practice openness.

So in mindfulness practice, we can think of it as, or we can understand it, as creating openness by using our anchor, our reference point.