Open awareness is a non-referential meditation, meaning you don’t use any reference point such as the breath or the body to keep your mind focused. Those focal points are useful as first, but as you progress, they can hold you back. In open awareness, your attention rests with everything that’s happening. To this end, you meditate with your eyes gently open. Normally our eyes are trained to focus on a single object. Here, you softly take in everything in your field of vision simultaneously, particularly the periphery, the way you might gaze at a wide expanse of ocean. 

In this way, you go beyond sitting in mindfulness to expand your meditation to embrace your daily life. The practice of openness can feel challenging at first because our minds are so habituated to contracting—around our problems, our storylines, our ideas—but the more you practice, the more you realize that openness is actually your natural state, and contraction is the source of suffering. Openness is the key to your freedom.

This meditation is partly inspired by one offered in the book REVERSE MEDITATIONS by Andrew Holecek. Relax and enjoy!

Music & audio engineering by the fabulous Eric Fischer.

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Host: Tess Callahan
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Music (unless otherwise noted above): Christopher Lloyd Clark
Audio Editing: Eric Fischer

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