For most of us, meditation is about focusing. But there's another approach – one that asks you to let go of focus altogether and simply rest in awareness itself.
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When most of us picture meditation, we imagine sitting still and concentrating hard on the breath, gently reeling our attention back in every time it wanders off. That's called focused attention, and it's the bedrock of most mindfulness practices, including those here at Whole Health Co. But there's another way of meditating that flips the whole approach on its head, and it's just as old, just as evidence-based, and – once you get the hang of it – potentially more restful.
It's called open awareness, sometimes known as natural awareness or choiceless awareness. Instead of narrowing your attention onto one thing, you widen it to include everything: sounds, sensations, thoughts, emotions, the sense of simply being aware at all. Nothing gets pushed away and nothing gets chased. You're not trying to change your experience, you're just letting it happen while you notice it happening.
Two ways of paying attention
Researchers studying meditation tend to split it into two broad categories. Focused attention meditation trains you to hold your attention on a single anchor – the breath, an image, a sensation – and gently return to it whenever the mind drifts. Open monitoring, the academic term for open awareness, does something different. You maintain what one meditation resource nicely describes as a "non-judgemental, moment-to-moment awareness of whatever arises" – hearing, seeing, feeling or thinking, without getting hooked by any of it.
Neither approach is better than the other, they're just different tools. Focused attention is perfect for calming a busy or anxious mind and building concentration. Open awareness tends to be associated with something a bit different, a sense of spaciousness, creativity and what researchers call "meta-cognitive awareness" which is the ability to notice your thoughts without getting swept up in the storyline.
A well-known study by Dutch researcher Lorenza Colzato and colleagues in 2012 even found that open monitoring meditation specifically boosted divergent thinking, the kind of flexible, generate-lots-of-ideas thinking that underpins creativity, in a way that focused attention practice didn't.
There's also some fascinating brain research behind it. Studies using functional MRI, including work from Kyoto University, have found that open monitoring meditation reduces activity in brain regions linked to the default mode network, the part of the brain associated with mind-wandering and rumination, and dials down memory-related processing in a different way to focused breath meditation.
Ancient roots, modern practice
None of this is new, of course. Open awareness has deep roots in two closely related Tibetan Buddhist traditions: Dzogchen, from the Nyingma school, and Mahamudra, from the Kagyu school. Both point directly at the nature of awareness itself rather than working step-by-step to develop awareness. These traditions eventually made their way west largely through the 'Insight Meditation' movement, which draws on Theravada Buddhist vipassana practice.
More recently, natural awareness has found a wonderfully accessible modern voice in Diana Winston, director of 'Mindfulness Education' at UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center, whose book 'The Little Book of Being' we reviewed here back in August. Diana, who trained as a Buddhist nun in Burma and studied under teacher Jack Kornfield, argues there's no hierarchy between focused and open practice.
Natural awareness, she says, isn't some advanced state reserved for seasoned meditators. It's always available, she describes it as "not something we create, it's already here", and her book is built around short "glimpse practices" designed to help you recognise it in everyday moments rather than only on the cushion.
It's worth saying that open awareness isn't about "zoning out" or letting the mind drift aimlessly. There's still a quality of alert, gentle attentiveness running through it, it's just not pinned to one object. Diana Winston describes it as being like a "wide-angle lens" compared with the "zoom lens" of focused attention, both are useful, they just show you different things.
What a session actually looks like
If you fancy trying it, here's a simple way in. Start as you would with any sitting practice, comfortable posture, a few settling breaths, eyes closed or softly open. Rather than fixing your attention on the breath, though, simply let your awareness rest open, like the wide open sky with clouds passing through it. Sounds, bodily sensations, thoughts and feelings will all arise. Let each one come and go without grabbing hold or pushing it away.
If you notice you've got caught up in a thought, that's fine, it happens to everyone. Just gently return to that open, spacious quality of awareness rather than to a particular object.
Many teachers suggest starting with just five or ten minutes, as sustaining open awareness without an anchor can leave us feeling more ungrounded than focused practice. It's less about doing something and more about relaxing into something that's already there.
Getting started
If you're new to natural awareness, Diana Winston's The Little Book of Being is a wonderful place to start, and UCLA Mindful also offers a completely free app packed with guided meditations, some specifically on open and natural awareness, alongside more traditional focused practices.
For those wanting to explore the practice within its original Buddhist context, Gaia House in Devon runs in-person and online retreats rooted in the 'Insight Meditation' tradition. And, of course, it's a practice we regularly visit in our guided group meditation sessions here at Whole Health Co.
As ever, there's no need to pick a side between focused and open awareness. Most experienced meditators move fluidly between the two, depending on what the moment calls for or the stage of development.