Meditation: Observing Your Experience with Open Awareness

Welcome to the Mindful FIRE Podcast, where we explore living mindfully on the path to financial independence and beyond. 

In this 20 minute guided meditation, Adam Coelho leads us through the practice of Open Awareness. This practice is a bit different than what we’ve practiced in past weeks but I think you’ll really enjoy it. 

As you may know, meditation is not something mystical or magical, it’s simply mental training. It’s literally exercise for your brain, specifically the mental muscles of attention and meta-attention. 

Attention, everyone understands, as simply directing your focus to a particular object, for example the breath. Meta-attention however is “the attention of attention” or the ability to know your attention has wandered. 

Both the mindfulness practice I posted a few weeks ago and this practice train the mental muscles of attention and meta-attention, but do so in different ways, much like different exercises at the gym can strengthen certain muscles in your body. 

This practice begins with focusing our mind on the breath. From there we expand out until we’re resting in an open, choiceless awareness. In this open awareness, we’re practicing simply observing our experience as it comes, stays for a moment and then moves along. We notice the breath, sounds, sensations in the body, and thoughts in the mind as they come and go. 

I find this practice very helpful, especially when I want to be creative or would like to open my mind to new possibilities. That’s not exactly the point of the practice but I find it to be a nice side effect. The point is, as with most mindfulness practices, to develop awareness of what’s happening right now with an attitude of openness, curiosity and kindness. 

I hope you enjoy this practice and would love to hear what you think on Facebook or LinkedIn (#mindfulFIRE)

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See the full show notes at mindfulfire.org