Meditation: Observing Your Experience with Open Awareness
Welcome to the Mindful FIRE Podcast, where we explore living mindfully on the path to financial independence and beyond. In this 20 minute guided meditation, Adam Coelho leads us through the practice of Open Awareness. This practice is a bit different than what we’ve practiced in past weeks but I think you’ll really enjoy it. As you may know, meditation is not something mystical or magical, it’s simply mental training. It’s literally exercise for your brain, specifically the mental muscles of attention and meta-attention. Attention, everyone understands, as simply directing your focus to a particular object, for example the breath. Meta-attention however is “the attention of attention” or the ability to know your attention has wandered. Both the mindfulness practice I posted a few weeks ago and this practice train the mental muscles of attention and meta-attention, but do so in different ways, much like different exercises at the gym can strengthen certain muscles in your body. This practice begins with focusing our mind on the breath. From there we expand out until we’re resting in an open, choiceless awareness. In this open awareness, we’re practicing simply observing our experience as it comes, stays for a moment and then moves along. We notice the breath, sounds, sensations in the body, and thoughts in the mind as they come and go. I find this practice very helpful, especially when I want to be creative or would like to open my mind to new possibilities. That’s not exactly the point of the practice but I find it to be a nice side effect. The point is, as with most mindfulness practices, to develop awareness of what’s happening right now with an attitude of openness, curiosity and kindness. I hope you enjoy this practice and would love to hear what you think on Facebook or LinkedIn (#mindfulFIRE) Please share this with your friends and write us a 5 Star review on Apple Podcasts! See the full show notes at Text Adam w/ comments or questionsPS: I am considering hosting my Life Envisioning Workshop publicly for the first time but I'm only going to do it if enough people are interested. Join Waitlist The Life Envisioning Workshop is all about Creating space to think REALLY BIG about what you truly want and what's possible for you Leaving with your own BIG vision for the next chapter of your life Learning envisioning practices that put your brain to work to make your vision a reality Meeting new friends who are also dreaming BIG and pursuing FIRE If this sounds cool, JOIN THE WAITLIST to let me know you're interested.