This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Opening Up; Open Awareness. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Opening Up; Dharmette: Open Awareness - Dawn Neal

The following talk was given by Dawn Neal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 16, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Good morning and warm greetings, everyone in the Global IMC Sangha¹. My name is Dawn, and I'm back with you for a fifth day out of five. This is a sound check, and I hope everyone's doing well today. It's lovely to see all of your chats to each other. Good morning, everyone. I just love seeing how this community has gotten to know each other over the years of these streaming sits. A warm good morning to friends in the chat and to people who I know well by name, and thank you for the sound check. Great.

I'm so happy to be here with you. You may notice my background is different today; I am zooming in from Tucson, Arizona, where I'm going to be on a teaching team for a nature Dharma retreat in Cochise Stronghold later today. So, I am perched in a place right outside the airport and delighted to be with you. All right, with that, let's start the recording. Good morning, everyone.

Guided Meditation: Opening Up

The invitation is to settle into a meditation posture. This morning we're going to be working with flowing from directed awareness to open awareness, and back a little bit.

Perhaps first, just noticing any response in your heart, in your mind, to the chats, the warm greetings, the hearts, the moving text if you see it—the fact that it's there. And whatever those responses are, just feel in. Feel into your heart, feel into your body, and notice.

Notice, and then more generally, scan through your whole body and notice your posture, your level of energy, and any feelings of pleasant and unpleasant. Notice any responses to the way things are this morning, just as they are. Then, more globally, taking an internal temperature check, a weather check: how is this body, this heart, this mind? Notice the general mood today, in this moment, for you.

With that, perhaps take a couple of longer, slower, more intentional breaths. Allow your body, your heart, and your mind to settle here in meditation. Shifting the attention inward. Noticing if the breathing feels pleasant or otherwise.

The invitation is to settle in, either on the felt sensations of the whole body, or to zoom in just a little bit with selective attention on the body breathing. Allow the breathing to be natural. Give yourself over, dedicating the attention to these sensations of your aliveness. Perhaps noticing and encouraging a little bit more relaxation on the out-breath. Noticing the aliveness of the in-breath.

Attune to the details, the texture of each arising sensation of breathing or in the body. The beginning of the breath, the body of the inhale, the fullness of the full inhale, and the relaxation on the out-breath. Letting go. Dedicating the attention, directing the attention, for this little while.

Now, if the attention feels a bit settled, if the mindfulness feels a little bit more present, the invitation is to open up into a broader awareness. For example, include any senses of vibrancy or aliveness throughout the body. Perhaps an overall sense of the outline of the body where skin meets air, or where skin meets cloth. A sense of all the little pulsing and tingling, perhaps associated with the aliveness of being present within this body. Noticing weight, lightness, warmth, cool.

Opening still further to hearing. Whatever might be in your visual field—be your eyes downcast and soft, or closed—the darkness and light of the visual field. Perhaps little blips of thought or emotion. All of it included. Bringing the attention to the full scope, the wash of the moment as it flows by, as it flows through.

If a particular thing becomes obvious—hearing, for example—noticing that for as long as it's most predominant. And then, as that fades, allowing the attention to rest on the next obvious thing, whatever it is. No need to go looking; allow the moment to come to you.

Allowing sound to be sound. Sensation to be sensation. Emotion to be emotion. Thought to be thought. Noticing feeling tone: pleasant, unpleasant, neither.

Into the final moments of our meditation together, the invitation is to recollect these last moments of practice. Intentionally bring to mind any moments of mindfulness, patience, calm, goodness of any kind, and appreciate it. Appreciate these moments.

Then, more broadly, appreciate yourself and your fellow practitioners here for taking the time. It's a cultivated practice; it's a beautiful thing to do. From that place of appreciation, acknowledge anything that may have not been so easy in these moments with kindness, compassion, and appreciation for the effort of showing up.

With that openhearted attitude, allow in images or thoughts of the others in your life. The people, the other beings, anyone whose life touches yours directly or indirectly. And if it feels right, offering the wish that our practice here together may benefit them. May our practice here together be a cause and condition for greater freedom, peace, joy, and awakening in the world.

For greater freedom, peace, joy, and awakening in the world. For greater freedom. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for the sincerity of your practice.

Dharmette: Open Awareness

Good morning. A special welcome to those of you who arrived a bit late into the YouTube sit together; I'm delighted to be with you. My name is Dawn Neal, if we haven't met yet. This is the fifth of five days on the essential elements of mindfulness practice, designed to complement what Gil Fronsdal² has been doing for the last number of weeks introducing mindfulness. Today we've reached the last of these talks, and it is on open awareness. It is sometimes otherwise known as choiceless awareness, though that's a little bit of a misnomer because the mind is always choosing to pay attention to something—we're just not going out and intentionally directing our attention.

I'm going to start this morning, as I did yesterday, with a little exercise. The exercise is to notice your hand, and notice your hand from the inside out. Allow awareness to fill your hand, to soak into it the way water soaks into a field. Feel it as if it were sponge-like soil absorbing water. And then expand. Expand your attention to your arms, your shoulders, neck, core, whole body. Allow awareness to fill your body the way water fills a sponge, with a fullness of embodiment.

Now, allow the capacity of seeing and hearing, emotion, mood, thought, whatever space you're in—all of that—to be included in present-moment awareness, without choosing anything in particular. This includes the screen that you're looking at, or the hearing through which you're taking in this talk, but without privileging anything. General presence in this moment of now. That is the process of opening to open awareness.

I gave the analogy yesterday of directed awareness being like looking for and finding a friend in a crowded place, maybe at a distance in a plaza. You hone in on that friend as you're walking towards them so that you don't lose them in the crowd before you get to them. Of course, everything else is there, but the attention is primarily on this person as you're navigating through. That's directed attention.

Open attention is being open to the wash of the whole crowd without looking for anyone. It's as if you're seeing a big stadium full of people and you're just taking in the fullness of the crowd—the music, the activity, the light, all of it. It's noticing the forest, not necessarily the individual trees; noticing the whole ecology. It's a receptive kind of awareness. To continue with this tree and forest metaphor, if a bird flies by, the attention can take that in, but it's not like you're looking for the bird. It's a natural capacity.

In open awareness, attention is relaxed. You let things come to you, and this allows the attention to settle on, or notice, whatever is most predominant and most obvious for a little time. I'll use one more example here. Those of you who practice Tai Chi or Qigong may be already aware of this. Right now many of you are looking at a screen, so the invitation is to notice your peripheral vision around the screen or whatever you're looking at. This can be done by looking at your hands, perhaps in anjali³ or gassho⁴, and then slowly bringing them apart. Move your hands further and further off to your sides, and notice where the peripheral vision loses the capacity to see the hands while staying in that broad wash of seeing. There's no one particular thing in focus until something moves.

As someone mentioned in the chat, open awareness can naturally arise with a lot of practice in directed awareness. For some people, it doesn't feel natural at first. For other people, it's how they start; it's the easiest way to begin. The point here isn't necessarily to encourage you to do it instead of directed awareness, but to highlight what meditation often includes anyway, or what can develop and what teachers teach about. I'll talk a little bit about why it might be useful and why it might be interesting to experiment with now and then.

The practice of open awareness develops a capacity to stay present in a wide range of situations. Meditation is the process of cultivating our minds, and the cultivation of open awareness begins to develop a broader capacity to take in everything around us in all kinds of situations—walking down the street, washing dishes, talking to a friend, whatever it is. That's useful.

It's also a way in formal sits of including the full range of the different kinds of objects of attention that Gil has brought in over the last weeks. Mindfulness of breath, of sensation in the body, of emotions, and of thoughts includes vedanā⁵ (feeling tone)—the pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral—and all kinds of reactions, impulses, and attitudes that emerge from that and that act back onto it. Attending to this full spectrum, this full range of what's arising now, reveals more about how our inner ecology and our inner life works in the moment.

So there is this sense of using your Dharma intelligence, using your natural capacity to notice cause and effect, and increasing wisdom. You are noticing in the moment what's easeful and helpful, and what's not so easeful or helpful. One way of staying aware is to notice if there's tension or stress, or if there's ease and relaxation. Get interested in what's easeful and what's not. Then, notice and allow everything to unfold for the purpose of letting things come and go, discovering what things are helpful to cultivate and what things are helpful to let go of. "Maybe I can let go of that analysis, of thinking about that thing, and relax more into my body."

How does open awareness show up? It's like softening your eyes in the exercise we did a few minutes ago. Softening the gaze can actually help to soften the focus of the mind, too. There's a gentle effort, a light persistence in noticing—a gentle presence noticing now. For most people, it's really not possible to be aware without any kind of guidance or object, but you can start by noticing the body and noticing the senses: seeing, hearing, sensing, and then allowing.

This comes easier for some people than others. For some, it's totally natural. Other people find it much more natural to start with directed attention on the breath and the body and stay there for a while, as we did this morning, until the attention opens up. Then it's easier to feel the flow of different objects of attention coming through and to allow them to come without looking for them.

If you've only ever done one of these, you might play around with accessing a more open kind of awareness—maybe listen to this recording again or watch it again. It's like a cross-training; it can build a capacity for more ways of cultivating the goodness of awareness and mindfulness.

I hope that this 45 minutes was helpful to you this week in considering the difference between directed awareness and open awareness, and the way open awareness can open us to the full range of human experience in the moment.

Thank you so much. It's been a delight to be with all of you this week. Since there's not time for Q&A, as I promised yesterday, I'm going to put a link in the chat. My blog is down right now—I'm having website dukkha⁶—but my other website allows a contact form, and you're welcome to send questions directly to me. I'll send a link out to a blog for answers sometime around the end of this month or the beginning of next month. That link is now in the chat.

Thank you again, Sangha, for a wonderful week. Thank you most of all for the sincerity of your practice. It's a beautiful thing you're doing. May all beings benefit from our practice here together.