Awareness Meditation
Awareness is the substrate of all experience. If you want to change something, you must first become aware of it. You cannot change something that you are not aware of. However, things that you are not aware of can and do change you, and that can be a problem.
Awareness is value neutral. Simply by becoming aware of something you can increase it or decrease it. By becoming aware of your weight you can increase or decrease it. By becoming aware of your anger you can increase it or decrease it. The rule of thumb is that enhanced awareness changes a behavior in the direction of your intent. If you intend to decrease a behavior, it will tend to decrease with increased awareness. If you intend to increase a behavior, it will tend to increase with increased awareness.
What does this have to do with meditation? Many people have difficulty meditating for a variety of reasons. Most of them boil down to going to war with themselves. They put themselves into conflict with their thoughts, feelings, bodies, or environment, with the result being that they fight instead of meditate or capitulate and do something else: sleep, problem solve, or daydream. Consequently, avoiding such warfare is critical to successful meditation. But how?
Awareness meditation simply notes what is coming up in your awareness at this moment. At first this is done with language, spoken or unspoken: “I am aware of the flowers on the table.” “I am aware that I am uncomfortable.” “I am aware that I am bored.” “I am aware of my breath.” I am aware of an itch in my left foot…” Whatever comes up is named. If you start thinking about what you’ve named, you name that: “I am aware that I am angry.” You start thinking about why you got angry – what that co-worker said to you earlier today. Then you say or think, “I am aware that I am thinking about why I got angry.”
Most people will do this for three or four things and then drift into long periods of thought and feeling before realizing they have fallen asleep and stopped naming things. Then they will try again, only to soon fall asleep into their reflections. This is why naming things out loud can be helpful at first.
How does this exercise help meditation? You aren’t saying anything is good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, smart or stupid, or brings happiness or sadness. You aren’t saying you have to sit in a certain position, keep your eyes closed, not think, not imagine, or not forget what you’re doing. You are not saying that you shouldn’t do it in the car or while dancing or while at work. All you are doing is noting whatever comes up, which you can do any time, wherever you are. What this tends to do is create spaces between those thoughts, feelings, and sensations that come up. Those that do become less seductive; it becomes easier to simply note them as you gain practice.
This exercise quickly leads to periods of relative tranquility and clarity that are qualitatively different from normal waking experience. In other worlds, this process quickly leads into periods of genuine meditative awareness.
Deepening this process becomes a matter of noting more subtly whatever comes up. As the mind calms you will find that you start naming thoughts, feelings, and sensations as they start to come up and then even before they come up. This naming is more properly called “noting,” because the process is much more subtle than language and grammar at this point. However, it is basically the same process, simply refined.
Naming is effective for a variety of reasons. It engages the mind in an activity that is productive and useful rather than fighting it. It enhances awareness of what is present rather than focusing on the past or future. It makes no value judgments. It is simple. It can be done as effectively by beginning as by advanced meditators. It provides the experience of a genuine shift in consciousness, a payoff promised by meditation, quickly. It continues to provide that experience over time; you do not stop having such shifts just because you have mastered the technique, as can happen with other approaches to meditation. You are doing something that you normally do anyway: observe and think about your experience.
It is also extremely effective at cultivating the witness, increasing acceptance, reducing reactivity, and decreasing personalization. This is because it does not waste time or energy judging experiences as good or bad. It does not deal with preferences. Instead of endlessly fighting over preferences it simply says, “Preferences are beside the point right now. For now I am going to simply focus on awareness itself.”