Awareness Meditation

Initiate meditation by calling to mind and heart the request of Right View and Right Intention, which is that awareness simply experiences what’s happening. The intention is to enact awareness as fully as possible without judgement of what arises.

The Arc of the Eight Steps

The arc of the sequence of the eight steps is to establish and initiate the request of practice, i.e. to call forth the discipline that supports that intention in the context of behavior and interactions, and then cultivate the capacity to engage practice and be deeply informed and transformed by that engagement.

Each step offers a particular expression of experiential learning. 

The steps Right Speech, Right Action and Right Way of Life all primarily attend to interacting with the context of our relationships and circumstances of our life.

The steps Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration cultivate the capacity for engagement.

As all the steps are experientially learned, they become part of the person, part of how the person acts, interacts and establishes a self.

Then the steps are all facets of the expression of practice, each one calling forth all the others. Each experience, whether interactive or intra-active, is an opportunity for Appropriate Response. Practising with the Eight Steps begins again with a deeper involvement.

Concentration 

Concentration can be thought of as having two ways of being expressed: focused attention on an object and attention on the continually changing flow of experiencing. In both forms of engagement it is the fullness of experiencing that enables concentration.

In One-pointed Concentration, as consciousness settles into fuller engagement with its object, particular characteristics arise: initiation, engagement, rapture, joy and sustained contact. As the engagement becomes increasingly sustained and immersion in the experience of focused attention develops, the rapture (positive appeal of what’s happening) falls away; then, with further settling, the pleasant, physical and mental joy fall away and there is complete immersion in the sensations being experienced.

Even though intentional complete immersion requires substantial dedicated effort that’s not possible in ‘usual’ lifestyles, it’s possible to open up to intense moments in our lives that help us to connect deeply to what’s being experienced in a way that goes beyond our usual ways of constructing reality and how these experiences register in the body. Either of these altered experiences can offer insights into practice, the mental sense of self, or the psychosomatic sense of self. 

In Continuous Contact Concentration the receptive attention directly experiences the impermanence of momentary being. This can loosen up how we cling to our conceptualized version of reality and initiate a ‘seeing and seeing through’ the thoughts and emotions that arise. As the sustaining of attention becomes more persistent and the perception of impermanence increases, a profound non-grasping reveals an unconstructed interbeing. In our ordinary life this ‘flow’ can appear in moments of non-grasping activity or interaction that call forth a sense of ease, joy or trust in the agency of what’s happening.

Both of these forms of concentration, even with an ‘everyday’ mind, can encourage and guide our practice. Often our meditation includes them both. Often they balance each other as we engage our activities with awareness. Gratefulness, compassion and generosity arise as Appropriate Response.