How To Practice Meditative Awareness

Introduction

Within Tibetan Buddhism we practice meditation by cultivating awareness and familiarizing the mind with beneficial qualities like loving kindness, compassion, meditative awareness, and eventually insight into the nature of reality.

Today I'm going to guide a short practice of meditative awareness using the breath. Though the breath is probably the most common anchor for meditation, there are also alternative anchors you can work with. These can include working with a visualized image, a sound, an external object, or just awareness itself without a particular object.

Whether you're sitting in a chair or sitting on the floor the main thing is to keep the back upright. If you're sitting in a chair you can scoot forward and place a cushion under you to prop your hips forward so you don't have to lean against the chair for support.

When you first arrive on your seat for meditation take a moment to just relax the body a little. You may want to roll the shoulders back and forth and perform some gentle stretches as you relax more into the body. Feel your body upright yet relaxed. You can close the eyes or allow them to be half or fully open. Place your hands/palms on your knees or in your lap with the right hand in the left palm and thumbs touching.

The Practice

Let’s start the practice by deepening the breath in and out of the nose. If you’re new to breathing consciously in and out of the nose just allow the breath to arise and fall naturally.

As you continue to familiarize with the feeling of the breath arising and falling, bring your attention to either the sensation of the breath at the tip of the nose, or the sensation of the chest and abdomen expanding and contracting. If you are completely new to meditation you can also silently label “in” on the inhalation, and  “out” on the exhalation.

Continue this for a few minutes while allowing your attention and awareness to rest more and more in the freshness of the present moment.

Next we're going to see if we can become familiar with the aware aspect of mind that is bearing witness or being watchful of the breath.

Try to notice the quality of your mind that can be both attentive to the breath and simultaneously watchful of the experience of being attentive. This is awareness. Some people also call this “the witness” or “observer.” See if you can sustain that aspect of your mind or experience for a little while.

The other main factor of the practice of meditative awareness is training in what’s called non-distraction. Here we are remedying the habit of mind that unintentionally gets carried away within thought rumination. This type of distraction is when one thought comes, then another, and another, and suddenly we’ve totally lost awareness. Instead we are lost in a story, or thinking about something we have to do later, or reflecting on something that happened yesterday.

So the key thing is to notice when that happens and bring your attention back to the breathing body, and back to this quality of awareness. Here we do not need to get rid of thoughts, we just need to notice when we've lost track of awareness and re-recognize it. So continue the practice of awareness of the breath for a few more minutes with this in mind. Focus more and more on being present and aware of the breathing body, noticing when you're distracted and bringing the attention and awareness back to the breath in a gentle way.

Dedicating the Practice

When you’re ready to close the practice please dedicate the positive energy you’ve cultivated towards the benefit of all beings, that as you grow your own inner light, that inner light can shine more and more in the world around you and have a beneficial impact.

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