Open awareness

Open awareness practice, also known as choiceless awareness, or formless meditation, is any kind of meditation practice that uses a kind of awareness that includes many different experiences, rather than a focused attention which singles out one particular meditation object.

Most people's first tastes of meditation are with some kind of technique that uses focused attention - you are asked to keep bringing attention back to one particular object of experience (for example the breath). This stabilises attention and reduces distraction by training the ability to keep attention in one place.

However, this is not the only way to meditate. Open awareness practices provide a way to be present without narrowing attention down. This is not better or worse, but a very different style of meditation that affects the mind/body/heart in a different way.

Using an open awareness, meditation can feel less effortful, and can become a process of relaxing ever more deeply into a sense of space and freedom.