Lexicon
Open awareness
Attention without a chosen object, resting on whatever arrives.
- Published
- 17 Sep 2026
Open awareness is what is left when the anchor is put down: sounds, sensations, thoughts and moods are all allowed to come and go without any of them being promoted to the object of the session. It is not daydreaming, because something is still watching.
It is usually taught after concentration practice rather than before it, and for a practical reason: without a trained capacity to return, open awareness collapses into ordinary thinking within a minute or two and is not noticed.
→Practices that use this term
- Metta on the move 8 minutes
- Practice in a noisy room 15 minutes
- Anchor at the sink 4 minutes
- Bells and their decay 12 minutes
- Ten-step walking 10 minutes
- Hand on the belly: a diaphragm check 6 minutes
- Metta for a neutral person 15 minutes
- One breath before the inbox 2 minutes
- Ambient sound as anchor 10 minutes
↔See also
- Anchor — The one thing attention is asked to return to when it wanders.
- Equanimity — Steadiness that does not depend on things going well.
- Dullness — The foggy, sinking state that is not sleep but is not attention either.
- Noting — Giving what has distracted you a one-word label, then returning.