Never mind the mindfulness

5 key differences between awareness meditation and mindfulness meditation

I remember my first experience of awareness meditation like I remember the feeling of riding a bike without training wheels.

Meditation master, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, used a Tibetan singing bowl for two very short guided meditations. In the first, the instruction was simple and clear: “Listen to sound.” In the second, the instruction was simple, but I had to think about it a little. “Now, meditate on sound.”

He didn’t offer any definition of what he meant by meditate. So, I did what I thought I should do, pay more attention to the sound. When he finished, he offered the “secret to meditation:” that the first meditation is the best one.

The point of this instruction on “non-meditation” was to remind us that we already know how to be aware. The moment we layer in our concepts about “meditation,” we risk muddying the waters with unnecessary effort. We don’t need to strive anymore than we need a flashlight to find a lit candle. We just need to relax into this awareness and be with it. All that we need and hope for from meditation, more clarity, better concentration, the ability to sustain insight, flows as we increase our willingness to simply be.

Before I discovered Mingyur Rinpoche, I’d been meditating for many years, but I’d never considered how the concepts I was bringing into my practice might be blocking my progress.

The path forward from that day hasn’t necessarily been simple, anymore than learning to ride a bike means being ready to bike a mountain. But in shifting my style of meditation from mindfulness to awareness, I shifted into a significantly different gear, one that has made meditation easier, more interesting and more effective.

In the ten years since I changed my style, I’ve navigated leadership, life challenges and levels of stress that in the past might have broken me. Above all, I’ve developed a confidence in my mind that isn’t dependent on how many hours I spend on the cushion. I can meditate anytime, anywhere. I now find myself effortlessly meditating during all kinds of situations, from mundane tasks to excruciating meetings. There’s even an awareness technique for sleep meant to amplify the rewards of rest.

Whether you’re new to meditation, or your attempts at mindfulness meditation haven’t quite taken, or even if you’re a long time meditator looking to shift gears, here are five key differences for the curious.

Awareness meditation is “subject oriented,” rather than “object oriented” 

Object orientation is a key component of mindfulness meditation. What this means is that this style uses “objects of meditation,” like sounds, the breath, even thoughts and emotions as the focus of the meditation. While awareness meditation uses these same objects as support for meditation, the primary object of awareness meditation is always awareness itself, making the practice more about the meditator’s sense of presence than focussing on any particular object. Mindfulness meditation is calming because these focuses slow down our thinking, but in a fast paced world, awareness meditation means being able to tap into that sense of being grounded, even while you’re on the move.

Awareness meditation leans more towards freedom than concentration

A big idea in awareness meditation is “self-liberation.” Being aware of painful emotions, thoughts, and beliefs, without judgement, is enough to trigger the process of releasing them. We don’t need to add effort to this process any more than we need to help a snake uncoil itself. Mindfulness meditation leans a little more towards the objective of building attentional muscle as a way of achieving clarity or becoming “better” at being present. As Jon Kabat Zinn describes mindfulness it is “paying attention, in a particular way, on purpose.” Both have results, but if you’re prone to anxiety, mindfulness might make the mind even tighter. Awareness meditation is more about finding that goldilocks level of ease.

Awareness meditation incorporates extrospection into the mix, while mindfulness meditation tends more towards introspection

While both types of meditation rely on and develop introspection, the process of looking inward at the mind, awareness meditation employs and cultivates more techniques for extrospection, the process of becoming familiar with how the mind shapes our experience of the external world. This is why meditators in the Kagyu tradition, Mingyur Rinpoche’s lineage, tend to meditate with their eyes open instead of closed. A bonus feature of this tendency is that you don’t need to create the perfect meditation environment. Anything you hear, see, smell or feel can be incorporated into your meditation. 

Awareness meditation is not about building, it’s about leveraging

The mindset of awareness meditation is that we don’t need to “become” more present, or get better at clearing the mind of thoughts. We need to become better at recognizing and remembering the myriad of ways that we already are present in the tasks that we do, in the decisions we make to listen to others, and even in the moment we decide to meditate. We’re already present. No need to keep hammering this point into our minds. Once we relax into this truth, our sense of presence expands naturally.

Awareness meditation is about self discovery, not self improvement

Mingyur Rinpoche often talks about the ways our true nature is like a diamond covered in mud. All the wealth we need is there, we just don’t see it because it’s obscured by the confusion of our beliefs, and habits, the worst being our endless quest for perfection.

Does this mean that we need to give up on the desire for excellence, or even the idea of perfection? No, quite the opposite. The better able we are to see how pure and perfect our innate awareness already is, the easier it is to access the clarity and freedom that awareness meditation frees up, and the easier it becomes to achieve the excellence we’re striving for. 

For the curious: