Uncover Your Natural Awareness

HAVING TAUGHT MINDFULNESS for twenty years, I’ve observed that a specific type of meditation practice has dominated the field for decades—classical mindfulness. Pay attention to your breathing, and when your attention wanders, bring it back to your breath. It’s great to practice this narrow, object-focused, and effort-based mindfulness, but there is also a mindfulness that is wide-open, objectless, and effortless. I call it natural awareness.

Natural awareness is a way of practicing in which your focus is on awareness itself, rather than on the things you are aware of. It is generally relaxed, effortless, and spacious, and it can elicit a profound sense of well-being. The term natural awareness invites you to notice or rediscover the awareness that already exists and is available to you at any moment.

Because natural awareness is hard to define, it is primarily recognized experientially. Let me give you some markers for it. Experiencing natural awareness can