Open Awareness Meditation

About This Meditation

While most mindfulness practices begin by narrowing attention to a single focus—the breath, body sensations, or a mantra—the open awareness meditation takes the opposite approach, expanding attention outward to encompass everything simultaneously without fixating on anything. This practice, called choiceless awareness in the Vipassana tradition and shikantaza (just sitting) in Zen, is considered one of the most advanced and subtle forms of meditation, though it is also profoundly simple. You sit with your awareness fully open—receiving sounds, sensations, thoughts, and emotions equally, without preference or resistance—like a mirror that reflects everything placed before it without changing anything. The practice develops what meditation researcher Dr. Antoine Lutz has termed open monitoring, which neuroscience research has shown activates distinctly different brain networks than focused attention meditation. Open monitoring practices increase activity in the brain's salience network, enhancing your ability to detect important signals in a noisy environment, and in the default mode network's creative and integrative functions. Practitioners often report that open awareness meditation produces a quality of consciousness that is simultaneously relaxed and extremely alert—a panoramic awareness that misses nothing but grasps at nothing. This twenty-minute practice guides you from focused attention into progressively wider awareness, providing a practical bridge that makes open awareness accessible even if you have primarily practiced focused attention techniques.

More Mindfulness Meditations