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Today, I bring you an exercise that I learned from Gil Fronsdal, a meditation teacher at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. You can access Gil’s teaching and guided meditations at www.audiodharma.org.

In this exercise you’ll explore the relationship between your awareness and your experience. In other words, you’ll turn your attention toward noticing the qualities of your own awareness, the ways in which you are aware.

The way you are aware can change moment by moment. It can also be affected by the events, thoughts, feelings, etc. on which you’re focusing your attention.

This week's peaceful moment: Dirt road near Brooks, Alberta on a hot summer's day

 

Noticing the nature of your awareness and how it can change moment to moment, experience to experience, can teach you a lot about how you relate to your experiences. It can also show you how to relate in a way that’s healthier and more helpful to you.

I know this explanation is not particularly satisfying. I think that’s because attending to awareness is an experiential exercise that is difficult to describe. Let me try, though, to give you just one example before we practice the exercise together.

In doing this exercise, Clara notices that when she experiences discomfort, say a mild ache in her legs while sitting on her meditation cushion, she naturally broadens her awareness. Instead of focusing on the discomfort, she allows her awareness to take in her breathing, sounds in the room, and other things, and this expansion of awareness allows the discomfort to be less prominent, so it doesn’t bother her. On the other hand, she notices that, when pain arises, she contracts her awareness, and focuses narrowly on her breathing. She notices that this is a distraction technique that doesn’t necessarily reduce her suffering.

Of course, what you discover will be entirely personal, and you may discover new or different things each time you practice this exercise.

So, let's get to it

For a 12-minute guided exercise on awareness of awareness, forward to 2:04 in the audio or video file, above.

Up Next Week

I hope you enjoyed this meditation. Next week I’m going to share a beautiful practice learned from a Buddhist teacher. It’s called stepping back. I hope you’ll join me.

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