Five Lessons Learned about Bare Awareness Meditation: An Exploration Inspired by a Friend’s Comments on my Last Essay on Substack

A close friend of mine offered a thought-provoking response to my last Substack article, about the evolution of meditation in my yoga practice. He observed that I "...had been on an interesting and valuable journey," but that he "remained unclear" as to what I meant by meditation. I seemed to be referring to a range of practices, including guided visualization and somatic savoring, under the umbrella of meditation. But in his experience of meditation, in the Buddhist tradition he followed, meditation wasn't about visualizing something uplifting or about relishing sensations of the breath or body. It was about "bare awareness," in which you opened the mind to a panoramic awareness of whatever was happening without a specific focus or direction. 

My friend noted that he meditated with his eyes open, so as to be aware of external stimuli, like dogs barking and cars passing on the street. But he did not direct his attention to a particular place, object, or experience. He simply noticed what was going on around him and let what he noticed pass through his awareness. 

Two things struck me when I read my friend’s comments. One was that I could see his point about the absence of a definition for meditation in my piece. Had I thought about the issue, I probably would have said that meditation is a settling into the body and breath, an opening of the heart, and a quieting of the mind to listen deeply to one’s truest inner voice. 

Generating that definition brought into focus the second thing that struck me. My definition, and my practice, included several different elements, like tending to the heart and seeking the soul, compared to the more minimalist view that bare awareness suggested. From what I had gleaned about Buddhism over the years, I wasn’t sure that Buddhists even thought in terms of a person’s “truest inner voice,” in the manner that my definition had pointed to. 

Yet I was curious about bare awareness. I had great respect for my friend and knew that he wouldn’t have embraced a practice that wasn’t beneficial. So, I decided to read a bit about the practice (I found especially helpful a book by Adyashanti entitled True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness). In light of what I learned, I tried out the practice for a couple of weeks.

In this essay, I describe the try-out method I used and present five findings from my experience. 

I hope that readers will share in the comments section their own experience of meditation, regardless of how similar to or different from mine it might be. 

Method

Paradoxically, the method of bare awareness is to have no method. Unlike the primary meditation approach I had learned, which was to turn inward to the breath as a home base and an abiding point of reference, in bare awareness you let go of any set focus (even if you start by bringing awareness to the breath) and allow your awareness to receive whatever signals come its way, from either the outer or inner world. Rather than a method, which may require the mind to concentrate attention on the breath—or, for example, on a mantra, a scene in nature, or the chakra energy hubs—bare awareness does not close in on an object of attention. It accepts rather than directs the flow of experience. 

For about 15 minutes each day (or at least most days) during my bare awareness experiment, I sat and meditated in a relaxed but alert manner in chairs in various places I visited in my daily pursuits, like my local coffee shop and the waiting room of a doctor’s office. While sitting, I lengthened my spine from base to crown and sensed energy flowing through its natural curves. I kept my eyes open but held a soft gaze that allowed me to take in what was in my peripheral vision as well as directly ahead. My head made small movements, and my eyes gently shifted if something caught their attention. I noticed, too, sensations from within my body, like messages that I was tired, calm, or agitated, and messages from my external senses, especially sight and hearing, like the loud-colored posters on the walls of the coffee house or an elderly woman in a wheelchair speaking with concern in her voice to a desk-bound staff member in the doctor’s waiting room. 

I tried to notice what was happening without making assumptions or judgments and without trying to hold onto what pleased me and push away what didn’t. I let in what was there as best I could. When a judgment or emotional response arose, I felt its presence momentarily. But I did not linger or dwell on any emerging content; I invited it all to move along. 

Findings

1. It was easier to write about bare awareness than to practice it. 

Practicing was challenging. It was hard for my mind not to have an attentional home base, like the rhythm, pace, and texture of my breath or the poetic, guided visualization offered by a meditation teacher. I couldn’t easily get the hang of the free-floating awareness and diffuse-attention aspects of this practice. My mind wanted to land on something and sink its teeth into it. It wanted to go where it would feel pleased and productive. It wanted more structure. To simply rest in pure awareness felt unnatural. The main reason I practiced for only about 15 minutes each day was that I didn’t take to the practice all that well. 

2. I wanted my meditation to get me somewhere.

Through this experiment, I realized that, implicitly if not explicitly, I typically meditated to cultivate a desirable mental or emotional state. For example, I might have meditated to feel more peaceful, to feel more compassion toward myself and others, to find inspiration and inner guidance, or to feel part of a greater whole. My practice generally had a direction; it was a path to a better place. 

But with bare awareness, the point of meditation, I gathered, was simply to meditate, to experience being present for the sake of being present. I might end up feeling better in some way, but that was a natural accompaniment of the practice, not a planned-for change. Bare awareness meditation was about present-moment awareness as an end in itself. 

3. I felt a more vital connection with my surroundings.

One thing I did appreciate about open-eyed, bare awareness meditation was a heightening of my connection with the sensory world around me. The world became a livelier place when I greeted it with unfiltered openness.

For example, while meditating with an outer-gaze awareness in my neighborhood coffee house, I heard soft jazz playing in the background. I’m sure music was regularly playing in this comfortable setting, but I usually was so engrossed in reading on my iPhone or iPad that it rarely entered my consciousness that music was present. On this occasion, I let the music caress my awareness. This caressing might have been a more amplified emotional experience than bare awareness in its pure form entailed. But I wasn’t trying to be a purist and allowed myself a bit of pleasure. 

As another example of seeing an ordinary environment with fresh eyes, I discovered in the doctor’s waiting room a vibrant painting of a flourishing meadow. I recall that the trees were depicted in an Impressionist style and were radiant with abundant, warmly colored leaves. I hadn’t paid attention to the picture before, despite having been in the same waiting room a half a dozen times. Invigorated by my bare awareness meditation, I widened my awareness beyond my usual focus on my phone or on my day’s agenda of tasks. 

Awakening with bare awareness to the outer landscape contrasted with my usual meditation approach, which was to awaken to my inner landscape. In my everyday practice, I would close my eyes and look inward, following my breath as it swelled my low belly and widened my pelvic floor on the inhalation, and receded and drew in on the exhalation. Further, I might take a moment to enjoy the cool breeze of air tickling my inner nostrils on the inhalation and savor the pause at the end of the exhalation before it dissolved into my inbreath. After a while, I often would enter a flow state with the breath. Time would stop, effort would ease, and I’d feel like the breath was bathing me in its mellow rhythm. No longer did I relate to separate aspects of the breath. Rather, I experienced the breath holistically, as a unifying presence. This was an awakening of my inner experience, not one that brought me closer to the external world. 

Both kinds of awakening, the inner and the outer, nurtured a sense of wonder. What stretched me beyond my normal pattern was to consciously engage the outer.

4. I gained a better understanding of the Buddhist notion of the relative self.

A cornerstone premise of Buddhism, as I understand it, is the notion of a relative or contingent self. This is the idea that what we think of as a fixed, permanent part of the self, which we might regard as our deepest, most essential self, or soul, does not exist. What we call self is relative to and contingent upon what is happening in our body and mind and in the outside world at any given time, and what is happening is always changing. We have a self, but it’s not the solid source of continuity in our lives that we typically deem it to be.

The reason this is relevant to bare awareness meditation is that if we think of meditation as a way of connecting with a soul, we will seek not a bare awareness but a soulful awareness. We will look and listen inside for a solidly enduring source of guidance, inspiration, or love that in Buddhist terms doesn’t exist. This doesn’t mean that there is no love, inspiration, or wisdom to be experienced but only that it can’t be located as a set constituent of our being. 

From what I could tell, the practice of bare awareness is an experience of the contingent nature of self. By staying open to the flux of life, the swirl of change, we see with progressively greater acuity that there is nothing absolute to hold onto. There is not even what we might like to think of as our essential identity. This recognition can be frightening, causing us to feel unmoored and adrift. But it also can be liberating, the liberation of not having to bind ourselves to fixed notions of who we are, who others are, or how life is supposed to be.

Bare awareness meditation may not have a direction or a method. But I think it has a purpose: to see ourselves as we are and the world as it is, free of our preferences, prejudices, and fears. 

5. The Seventh Limb of Yoga and Bare Awareness Meditation Share Something Important in Common.

In classical yoga, there are eight limbs of practice. The seventh limb is meditation, Dhyana. This builds on the sixth limb, concentration, Dharana. The seventh limb, in my experience, is a deeper, more sustained, and more easeful form of concentration than the preceding limb rather than a qualitatively different form. 

I’m not entirely sure I’ve experienced meditation according to classical yoga’s conception. But I think I’ve come close when I’ve felt absorbed by my breath, like in the flow state I described earlier. This experience of flow is a near egoless and effortless state. What falls away is the division between self and breath. The breath is in me and I’m in the breath. My personal experience of my breath and the universal process of breathing join together. Distinctions between the personal and the universal fade. Perhaps this is what is meant by feeling a oneness with the universe. 

The flow state at the core of the seventh limb may be like the experience of the relative self in bare awareness meditation. In both cases, the ego-centered self recedes. As the ego loosens its grip, space opens. Both the inner and outer worlds seem alive with fresh possibilities. Perhaps this cultivation of spacious possibility is what unites bare awareness meditation with the more concentration-based meditation found in yoga.

I’m grateful to my friend for his thoughtful comments on my previous essay on meditation. His comments led me on a meditation adventure that furthered my understanding of bare awareness meditation and also enhanced my understanding of my more familiar practice. I sense that each form of meditation, an awareness-based and a concentration-based version, offers distinct benefits that perhaps coalesce into a larger unity during mature stages of practice. 

I plan on continuing to explore these different approaches to meditation. It is rewarding to bring curiosity to each. 

Acknowledgment: I want to thank Kasey Stewart, my friend and fellow member of the HeartSong Yoga Sanctuary, for her keen editorial suggestions.