Resting In Our Own Natural Awareness

In this post, I want to explore a profound teaching from one of my teachers, Mingyur Rinpoche. He's the brother of my main teacher, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, and is truly a wonderful meditation teacher—very clear and profound. In my opinion, he has the ability to guide someone from the beginning of their meditation practice all the way to enlightenment. His teachings on meditation are usually quite pithy, helpful, and to the point. I'd like to unpack one of his quotes that I find particularly illuminating for both beginners and experienced meditators alike.

Let's begin by examining the quote, and then I'll offer some commentary on how I relate to it and how it might be helpful in your own practice. The quote is:

"If we try too hard, meditation becomes difficult. But it is so easy. Meditation is resting in our own natural awareness."

For some, this might come as a welcome relief. Mingyur Rinpoche is saying that meditation is easy! For others, it might be frustrating—you might be thinking, "What do you mean meditation is easy? I don't find it easy at all!"  Let's break this open a little bit, especially when he refers to "natural awareness." This is a term that comes more from the Mahamudra traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, but it can apply to any meditation practice, regardless of whether you're in another Buddhist lineage or have a more secular approach.

Let's start at the beginning of the quote, where he says, "If we try too hard, meditation becomes difficult." I have found this to be 100% true. I am one of those people who has tried way too hard to meditate over the years. In fact, I spent about three to four years in retreat as a Buddhist monastic, trying far too hard to meditate. I came out with more meditation experience, but also with what we call "subtle body problems" related to lung, or wind energy. This actually made my anxiety worse.

One surefire way to exacerbate anxiety, if you already have it, is to push yourself even harder and create more tension in your meditation and life in general. I can personally vouch for that. Once I realized this, I had to backpedal and fundamentally rework how I approach meditation. Mingyur Rinpoche's brother, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, has really helped me with that, so I also recommend his teachings if you struggle with too much tension and forcing in your meditation practice.

For those of you who also struggle with this, one of the initial steps I implemented—which might help you—is learning how to relax in meditation. This involves relaxing the body and also checking my motivation or intention. Why am I sitting there at that moment? What's my approach? Do I have a more long-term motivation for why I'm meditating, or am I secretly wanting to get some special experience, to feel better, or to get rid of a certain mood or emotion?

I mention this because I found that if I have a hidden motivation behind what I think is my primary motivation—in my case, I was a monk, so I thought it was a purely Buddhist motivation—what I really wanted were short-term outcomes and results. This is one way we can get into trouble because often, when we're dedicating ourselves to a long-term meditation practice, we can build up a lot of expectation and tension desiring quick results.

Obviously, meditation for me is mostly pretty hard work. It's not necessarily pleasant all the time. But over the mid and long term, it becomes pleasant because you can start to see the long-term shifts in how you relate to life. You can relate with more ease, more openness, and more compassion. That's the real benefit. But when we're looking for short-term outcomes, we're going to get tense. We're going to try too hard in meditation because we're trying to force something or get something out of it too quickly.

Besides learning to relax the body and let go into the moment as much as we can with meditation, I would also recommend examining your motivation and intentions. Try to release motivations around short-term results. Even the word "relaxation" can be deceptive because we could be seeking the short-term results of relaxation rather than just learning to let be in the moment with the body and whatever is arising. I definitely recommend the latter—find some teachings, find some guided meditations, work with a teacher on how to allow things to just be. This is really important for meditation.

For those of us into serious Buddhist meditation, this quality of awareness is quite key. Until we have a discernment of what that quality of mind is, it's going to be tough to know what we're aiming for in meditation. In Buddhism, there are usually two categories that different meditation practices fall into: shamatha (meditative awareness) and vipassana (insight meditation). These are actually plural—shamatha meditations and vipassana meditations—because they are baskets of different kinds of practices, not single practices.

These baskets serve as context and points of reference for what we're using them for. In shamatha, we're trying to strengthen meditative awareness. As Mingyur Rinpoche said in the quote, "Meditation is resting in our own natural awareness." Awareness is natural; it's an inherent part of mind, and we're trying to strengthen that through meditation so that it can then be used in vipassana practice to understand our underlying confusion and start to unwind it. These are the deeper motivations of Buddhist meditation.

But as Mingyur Rinpoche says, if we're trying too hard, that's not going to work. If we're trying to squeeze awareness or squeeze ourselves to get it, that's going to stress us out. Instead, we need to cultivate mindful presence and start to discern what this quality of awareness is.

One exercise I really like, which I've been introducing to my mentees and students, is to simply focus on something quite intently with as much single-pointedness as you can bring. A visual object is usually helpful for this. Just stare at something and be with that as much as you can. Now, notice the mind that's being with that. Notice that you can know you're being with that—that's awareness. That quality of mind that can bear witness, that can be watchful, that basically knows we're knowing—we have to become familiar with that in meditation.

What we do then is basically rest with that awareness. "Rest" is an interesting word here. You find it a bit more in the Mahamudra traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, and I've found it really helpful as a term. It's not rest like checking out from everything; it has more of a connotation of being with. We rest or be with awareness.

As Mingyur Rinpoche is pointing out in the quote, awareness is natural. We don't have to put so much pressure on ourselves to get it or to attain some spiritual or religious principle we're putting on a pedestal. "Natural" means it's not even religious, actually. The religion is the system that forms around the Buddhist teachings to help us strengthen awareness, which is fine. But our awareness isn't Buddhist, it's not Christian, it's not religious at all—it's just part of our mind. We're all born with it, but most of us don't strengthen or cultivate it because we don't have a system or practice to do so. That's what meditation serves as in this first basket I call shamatha or meditative awareness practices. We're trying to connect with that innate or natural awareness and strengthen it. Then we're using that natural awareness to almost look at itself and examine the nature of reality to cut through the underlying confusion that causes dissatisfaction and stress in our lives.

I think it's extremely good news that this awareness is natural. For me personally, when I was in periods of retreat as a monk, this really helped me relax into the practice. Even if I could connect with that natural awareness for just a few seconds—5 or 10 seconds—that was excellent. At some point, I realized I needed to stop pushing to make that connection longer and longer, and instead just connect with it for as long as it would last and then connect with it again.

That's my next piece of advice based on this quote: you don't need to try to hold your natural awareness in meditation for a long period of time. If you can do that, great. We can have a kind of mid-term goal of strengthening awareness to be able to do that. But at the same time, I think sometimes it's actually more useful to be satisfied with the short time we can connect with it and then do it again. If you're doing a 20-30 minute meditation practice, you might connect with natural awareness and rest in it, I don't know, 50 times. There's no set number or rule here—it's about you and working with your experience.

At the end of the day, we're trying not only to strengthen our connection with that awareness but also to allow that awareness to almost sustain itself. Of course, in shamatha meditation, we need to put in effort, but as Mingyur Rinpoche is pointing out in this quote, rest needs to be a component of meditation—resting with awareness. Sometimes in Mahamudra, we say "resting on awareness." However you want to think about it, that's the way it's often expressed, and I've found it to be very, very helpful.

The outcome of not pushing too hard, using the right amount of effort—I would say using our effort towards consistently looking back or connecting with that aware quality of mind rather than trying to force it—is that over time, meditation can become easy, as Mingyur Rinpoche is saying.

To repeat the full quote: "If we try too hard, meditation becomes difficult. But it is so easy. Meditation is resting in our own natural awareness."

Out of all of this, just remembering and memorizing that last part of the quote—"Meditation is resting in our own natural awareness"—can be immensely helpful. If you're a beginner in meditation practice, you're probably going to have the question, "What is that?" I've tried to point to it through a few different ways here, including an exercise on how to recognize it. Nonetheless, it can take some time to feel confident and say, "Oh, there's my natural awareness." It's actually with us all the time, including when we sleep. We just are not recognizing it or connecting with it.

If you're more of a beginner in your meditation practice—and by beginner, I mean you're not sure about natural awareness, not how long you've been practicing—you can work with that as a mid-term goal. Aim to have a little more confidence that you can connect with natural awareness, this natural awareness of your mind. It doesn't have to be about sustaining that for 30, 45, or 60 minutes. Make it about connecting with that awareness, and then make it about whether you can rest with that natural awareness—can you just be with it?

For those who have some ability with that, then we might be looking at the traditional shamatha teachings of going through the nine stages of resting, or just developing more single-pointedness—more single-pointedness with that awareness. But either way, if we're able to rest with awareness, as Mingyur Rinpoche says, the practice becomes a lot easier.

For me personally, I don't know if I would say it's "so easy." I believe in Mingyur Rinpoche, but in my practice, it often feels like work. I don't want to say "hard work" because that can sound negative, and I don't think work is bad. Work is something valuable in our life. Work doesn't have to mean something heavy; it just means it takes effort. So for me, meditation takes some effort, but it's interesting how this quote makes me rethink what effort means. Maybe effort just means resting with awareness. It doesn't mean any other kind of striving or pushing.