Opening Awareness

Opening awareness is a path of meditation that leads to better ways of being in the world: passionate, accurate, and spontaneous.

As your mind settles and your senses open, you discover new freedom and purpose in everyday activities. Skillful perception, creative choice, and confident action are hallmarks of practice. Opening awareness transforms your relationship with your emotions, and so your relationships with others—and this makes all the difference, for family, work, and society.

Life becomes a dance of creative engagement as vividness in spacious clarity pervades experience.

Preview the first two chapters below
or purchase the book here.

Chapter One Why practice opening awareness

Opening awareness is a meditation path that leads to spacious clarity: experiences of continuous, vivid appreciation of what is happening.

As you begin to have more space around thought in your meditation, moments of quiet presence arise elsewhere in life. At times, you may experience a brilliant clarity, unobscured by compulsive rumination. This spacious awareness makes previously inhibited choices available. You may find new ways to respond, as you see emotional and relational patterns more clearly.

Opening awareness embraces ordinary life.

Some meditation methods train detachment from emotions and dissolution of the self. Opening awareness, by contrast, welcomes the texture of emotional experience, and fosters versatility in self-perception.

Once you have established familiarity with opening awareness you may find:

• Courage to stay present and spaciously engaged in any circumstance, however unexpected or challenging

• Moments of effortless, quiet awareness while you are involved in ordinary activities

• Vividness: heightened awareness of sounds, sights, sensations—your world becomes colorful, vibrant, and clear

• Intimate familiarity with previously-unnoticed “textures” and physical sensations associated with your emotions

• Confidence in meaning and purpose

• New spontaneity and responsible autonomy in relationships: family, work, projects, and society

• General contentedness punctuated by moments of irrationally exuberant joy

These are common effects, though none are guaranteed: opening awareness varies in its reach and impact among individuals. You may experience such effects soon after starting to practice regularly.

“Opening awareness creates a space of no judgment and total freedom to experience anything that arises. I enjoy that each sit will be uniquely different. I love surprises.”

—Kristie, Evolving Ground apprentice

This book is a detailed, practical manual for opening awareness meditation. If you apply the suggestions here consistently and regularly, you can establish an ongoing daily practice. That will bring noticeable changes to the quality and availability of awareness in your sitting practice within a few months, or perhaps even only weeks.

In the same way that practicing a physical activity will grow your strength and agility even before you are comfortable with the new movement, practicing opening awareness can bring benefits to your day-to-day life even before you feel you’ve mastered the instructions.

Chapter Two What makes opening awareness different

Meditation is not “all one thing.” There are many systems of meditation, which differ in techniques—and also in goals and results. Different systems produce different alterations in conscious experience, and different transformations in your self and the way you feel and act in the world.

The technical methods of a meditation system propel you on a path that heads in a particular direction. The many meditation techniques available are not just different means for achieving a single, shared purpose.

Different paths have different end points. Do you want to go where this one can lead you?

A good initial reason for meditating is often curiosity: a desire to explore unusual, extreme forms of consciousness. What experiences will a particular meditation method give rise to?

Some different outcomes various systems promise include:

• Non-self, or True Self, or Cosmic Oneness

• Unchanging content-free consciousness without sensory awareness—or vivid perceptual awareness in dynamically evolving situations

• Immunity to suffering—or compassion for the inevitable suffering of all sentient beings, including oneself

• Concentrated, focused attention control—or panoramic, open awareness

These words describe contrasting experiences. Which seem most attractive to you now? Why?

In the longer run, many meditators find themselves motivated more by the changes meditation brings to their way of life. Meditation methods transform your psychology, your perceptions in everyday life, and your approach to action. Different methods aim for quite different, often quite radical changes in living. Some, pursued seriously, point to permanent withdrawal into a monastery or solitary meditation hut. Others lead to richer, more effective involvement in family, projects, and society. Do you want the lifestyle a particular system encourages?

How does a meditation method work? How does it produce the results it promises? Is that believable? Is it desirable?

These are valuable questions to explore before choosing how to meditate. This chapter introduces some ways to understand opening awareness in contrast to other meditation paths that you might encounter. Understanding differences may help you decide which fits best with your preferences and circumstances.

Life-affirming view

A meditation system’s view profoundly shapes its goals, and so its path, and so then its methods. “View” is a term for an overarching collection of assumptions about how the world is and what meditation is for.

Contemporary society has inherited many different, sometimes incompatible views from multiple eras and cultures. Ancient views may remain implicit in a meditation system, informing its attitudes and goals. Making views explicit draws attention to potential internal contradictions. It may reveal unexpected ways a path is incompatible with your own views and purposes.

In Evolving Ground we draw attention to two broad categories: renunciative views and life-affirming views.

Many religious systems are renunciative: they see everyday life as inherently impure, and so to be abandoned. Most meditation methods originally evolved for renunciative purposes in renunciative settings. They were designed to help you sever human relationships, in combination with a life of celibacy and abstinence in a monastery. Meditation was meant to enable a metaphysical escape from a cycle of suffering and rebirth by withdrawing from all connection with the defiled and defiling world. The aim was enlightenment: a state of eternal perfection, free from the emotional turbulence of ordinary life.

Opening awareness is not designed for cloistered, monastic life. It is accompanied by a life-affirming view, and is designed to help you experience aliveness and connection in relationships.

A life-affirming view regards emotions and self, suffering and enjoyment, relationship and involvement in practical affairs as natural and pervasive aspects of human experience. Opening awareness practice prepares you for spacious involvement with all life’s circumstances—work, family, and society. This spacious involvement is the basis for enjoyable, useful activity in the world.

The renunciative view accompanying a meditation method may sometimes go unnoticed. How do you know when a worldview is implicitly renunciative? If emotions, self, and suffering are seen as inherently problematic obstacles, and it aims to overcome them with meditation, that’s a sign of a renunciative view.

Most widely-available meditation methods, ancient religious ones and modern secular ones, were devised to subdue emotions by detaching from them altogether. “Non-attachment” and “letting go” commonly describe such renunciative methods. The purpose may be to “calm the mind.”

“It wasn’t until I realized how lonely and frustrating it was for my wife being married to the equanimous, distant version of Jared that I started to wonder if there was a different way to approach my meditation practice.”

—Jared, Evolving Ground cofounder

By contrast with renunciative methods, opening awareness clarifies the mind so that the full range of physical and emotional experience is available without conceptual elaboration. With a life-affirming attitude, any experience you encounter is welcome.

Spacious clarity includes everything that arises in experience, without ignoring, rejecting, or cutting it off. No sound is distracting, no thought is bad, no experience is wrong. Emotions and sensations come and go in awareness. Disturbing thought-stories and images gradually dissipate when they have space to do their own thing.

As your mind clears while maintaining awareness of everything you perceive, you feel more connected with the world, not less. In this experience of vivid connection, everything seems immediate and fresh.

Developing this friendly attitude towards everything that arises in your sitting practice will have positive repercussions in your relationships. Although opening awareness is most often a solitary practice, its aim is relational transformation, and beyond that social transformation.

This is a path of celebration, of down-to-earth realism, of uplifting courage, of gentle precision, and of open hearts.

An experience of spacious-self—not no-self

Many meditation paths emphasize a changing experience of the self. No-self, egolessness, selflessness, and empty self describe states of disintegration, deconstruction, or transformation in self perception.

The experience of the self in opening awareness is not emphasized over any other experience. Awareness does increase experiential understanding of the transitory, nebulous nature of all phenomena, including your self. Opening awareness emphasizes increasingly vivid, appreciative experiences of relationship—with your environment, sensations, emotions, perceptions, and other people and living beings.

Things, including selves, don’t come with labels. We add those in order to navigate our world. That often makes experiences, including our selves and relationships, seem more fixed than they are. Opening awareness practice makes this labeling, “referencing” process increasingly obvious without denigrating it. There is nothing wrong with labeling, identification, and referencing that would mean we should want less of it in our day-to-day experience. Instead, opening awareness brings spacious clarity to self-perception, so you can become more adaptable, flexible, fluid, responsive, and free.

As your experience with opening awareness deepens you will come to recognize your personal patterns of reaction and response. These patterns normally dictate how you are in the world, and how others perceive you. Seeing your patterns clearly in meditation loosens their grip and increases choice in the moment. Spacious clarity, the result of opening awareness, is free from compulsive response.

When spacious clarity arises naturally in everyday circumstances, new ways of being present themselves. Your self does not disappear, as though it were a separate entity erased from experience. How you are, and how you relate, emerges in fresh responses to evolving contexts.

Discovery without stages

Opening awareness is more like exploring a wide, varied terrain than following a fixed path.

Many meditation systems offer a straight, narrow, well-paved path. They provide way stations you are supposed to reach, in the correct order, to be given the next set of technical instructions. This sort of rigorous, progressive, staged approach can be helpfully reassuring.

By contrast, although opening awareness has some typical intermediate results, there is no prescribed series of stages. Personal journeys through meditation to spacious clarity are diverse. Everyone starts with a unique pattern of awareness and unawareness from which to expand experience. For example, some people have odd proprioceptive side effects early on. Others never experience this. Some do experience unexpected, sudden shifts in bodily awareness, but only after years of practice.

The challenge is that the breadth and openness of the practice can seem overwhelming.

Until you have some familiarity with spacious clarity, opening awareness may seem confusing, imprecise, or vague. In progressive systems, the method is reassuring but the result can be disorienting. This is opposite to opening awareness! Opening awareness can seem elusive at first, but the result is reliable. Spacious clarity is consistent and predictable, more so than anything else in life. Many practitioners have said that their meditation became immensely reassuring after their first experience.

Another challenge in opening awareness is that, even though you can learn from others, nobody can tell you exactly what to do. This is the nature of discovery. The more you meditate, the more you will hone your personal understanding of how to find and maintain awareness. In the long term your meditation is the sum of your personal confidence and trust in this process. Talk to peers, mentors, and experienced practitioners while you establish familiarity.

“I see everyone as being in a vast spiritual territory, each with unique perspectives and experiences of the regions they’ve explored. In Evolving Ground, through opening awareness, practitioners find their way to a basecamp in this territory, which equips them for their life-affirming path. Since everyone finds themselves at a different starting point, each journey to basecamp is different. When practitioners connect on their journeys, they find that appreciating each others’ views and skills makes personal discovery possible.”

—Jared, Evolving Ground cofounder