Nonduality and Mindfulness — Two Great Traditions that Go Great Together
 

In 2011 I decided to take meditation seriously and began practicing the Vipassana technique of calm abiding. Five or so years ago I came across a YouTube video titeld "Becoming Conscious: The Science of Mindfulness" where Jon Kabat-Zinn spoke of resting in awareness where there's no object of attending or technique. One just notices anything and everything that comes into the field of awareness and without engaging or judging. I started mixing that in when during calm abiding I got to a point where breathe was barely noticeable and the mind was all but still.

I always felt resting in awareness was a great compliment but I never understood why and I just found an article that sheds some light on that feeling and want to pass it along.

https://deconstructingyourself.com/n...ndfulness.html

"There are several ways to take this step. The standard nondual method is to simply sit with no agenda. Notice that this is not “not meditating,” it’s meditating with no technique. (The difference is crucial.)"

Hi, I didn't read the link...but why rest in awareness?
My take: Because therein lies peace - I have peace so that is not longer my objective after decades
of looooong sessions of meditation...but what lies in that peace and stillness!!
Revelations, Divine Knowledge and Insights galore, love, ecstatic connection with
the Divine, the Self, Reality---answers, profound understanding of what others call mysteries. :hug3:

It's like a two-step process. Calm Abiding, like any mindfulness technique, concentrates or focuses the mind, stilling it. Resting in awareness (choiceless awareness, open awareness) is extremely difficult without a focused/stilled mind. When I first started mixing it in, and this was after I was fairly established in calm abiding, it was difficult, only being able to maintain it for seconds, maybe half a minute at best.

Traditional mindfulness where there's an object being observed creates the so-called 'Observer Trap', where the observer is more or less a more subtle and benevolent subset of ego.

Having no object of focus as in resting in awareness deconstructs that. It's literally resting in pure awareness with no specific agenda, hence no observer. It's being aware in the purest sense of anything and everything that comes into the field of awareness.

That article led me to this article and I'm thinking at some point I'll give it a try.

https://deconstructingyourself.com/n...awareness.html

Paraphrasing from the article:

Sit in a comfortable relaxed position. Breathe normally and spend a few moments simply relaxing.

Now gently gaze at some object. It can be a chair, plant, anything. Allow your gaze to take in the object. Notice if you can it's awake. Not that it’s an object but that it is shining with awareness. It is as much aware of you as you are of it.

Repeat with another object, so on and so forth. After going through all objects in your field of vision do the same with your entire field of vision all at once.

Finally found it! This article calls it Do Nothing meditation, but it is resting in awareness, choicelsss awareness, open awareness.

https://deconstructingyourself.com/d...editation.html

Doing Nothing — How Does that Work?

Here is a meditation technique that does just that. I call it the “Do Nothing” technique (which is the name given to it by meditation teacher Shinzen Young), but the same method (or something quite similar) is called shikantaza (“just sitting”) in Zen Buddhism, dzogchen in Tibetan Buddhism, and is practiced in Advaita Vedanta (nondual Hinduism) as well. The famous teacher Krishnamurti called it “choiceless awareness.”

I'm new to meditating and just getting the gist of it but when my mind has gone to just the awareness stage,something eventually comes in and grows.(Hope that makes sense).

Try this way of thinking about it. It's not your mind going to that stage of awareness, but the blinder (mind) being removed and your true nature (awareness) being revealed. :biggrin:

I find the variations of technique to be vast when it comes to meditation, however I also believe that each person will have their own unique way of implementing them.
For example, if ten people started off with the same technique and then over time after reading what else was out there they would subconsciously slightly alter the way they meditated to better suit them individually, they would all end up being different, like fingerprints.
What might work for one, may not work for another.
Personally, I used to be able to meditate into a hypnagogic state and hold there for some time, recently that has become a struggle and I am looking at introducing different elements of other techniques into my own to get back to that point.

I also rest myself into the pure awareness that appears when the chattering of the mind stops.

I noticed that nowadays I only meditate for around 20-30 minutes because I have this strange sensation that I am actually meditating for hours and hours, do you experience this?

It varies? Calm abiding seems to feel longer but mainly because when the timer goes off it feels like I just started. Choiceless awareness sometimes seems to go by as quickly within the sitting as when the timer goes off.

I think the difference is in one I'm attending breathe and the other I'm not attending anything.