Reverse Meditation: How to Use Your Pain and Most Difficult Emotions as the Doorway to Inner Freedom by Andrew Holecek

Author:Andrew Holecek [Holecek, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: OCC010000 BODY, MIND & SPIRIT / Mindfulness & Meditation, REL042000 RELIGION / Meditations, SEL019000 SELF-HELP / Meditations, REL007020 RELIGION / Buddhism / Rituals & Practice
Publisher: Sounds True

Chapter 8

Nonreferential Meditation

An Introduction to Open Awareness

Let your mind come forth without fixating it anywhere.

—The Diamond Sutra

If you go toward the suffering and allow yourself to go through it, you discover suffering is joy. It’s a little itch on the edge of bliss.

—Robert Thurman

Progressing from the practice of referential meditation into the sphere of nonreferential practice represents a subtle but major step forward in the journey of meditation. The hitching post of a referential practice is an aid for tethering and taming the mind, but at a certain point the post holds you back. In the next two chapters, you’ll be learning about nonreferential meditations that go beyond sitting in mindfulness, and expand your meditation to embrace the entirety of your life, including everything that hurts.

Buddhists sometimes refer to nonreferential meditations as objectless shamatha or shamatha without a sign. Other meditators call it nonreferential mindfulness, awareness of awareness, or formless meditation. Scientists use the term “open monitoring.” I prefer open awareness, because that framing is resonant with the definition of meditation as “habituation to openness.” Instead of constantly closing down and habituating to contraction, open awareness allows us to reverse that habit and default into opening up.1

Open awareness is a multivalent practice with many applications and levels. I’ve been doing it for decades, and the more I do it, the more I discover. Depending on your interests, you can keep the practice at entry levels and derive great benefit, or you can go to the deep end of the pool and plunge into the nature of mind and reality. For our purposes, entry-level benefits are enough. But I will point out some of the deeper aspects of open awareness so you can appreciate the profundity of this practice. As the material progresses into these depths, don’t worry if it doesn’t speak to you. Skim or skip as you like.

Whether you know it or not, you’re familiar with closed and contracted states of mind, because you “meditate” on them all the time. Every time you grasp, or get distracted, you’re practicing contraction. A practice of openness can therefore feel unfamiliar at first, or even intimidating. But because openness is actually the natural state, it becomes easier as you repeatedly return to your nature.

If contraction is the source of your suffering, openness is the key to your liberation. And as with contraction, openness is something you can feel. It’s expansive, receptive, and refreshing. Importantly, this somatic component allows you to use your felt sense of contraction as a new prompt to open. Once you sensitize yourself to your contractions, every time you feel them, you can reverse that tendency by opening. Obstacle transforms into opportunity.

Claiming that contraction is something you can feel implies that you can feel all our contractions. This is a partial truth. If the contraction is very subtle, or constant, you lose touch with it. It’s like an air conditioning system that’s always been on and suddenly turns off. Until it stopped, you had no idea it was even on.

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