Spaciousness in daily life
The practice doesn't follow you off the cushion. The results do — if you let them.
Not a method for every second
If you've spent time with other meditation traditions, you may have absorbed the idea that the practice should run continuously — that you should be doing it on the bus, in line, in the middle of conversations. Opening Awareness isn't like that.
It's an on-the-cushion practice. Sitting with it makes it more available to relax into spaciousness in everyday life — but trying to do Opening Awareness in everyday life usually backfires. Most people find that constant practice in ordinary circumstances actually inhibits the very results they're hoping for.
There's also no need to get rid of conceptuality. Thoughts, images, plans, and stories are useful. The point of relaxing the addiction isn't to throw the tool away — it's to get freer to use it well, in the situations where it actually helps.
What becomes more available
As spaciousness becomes more familiar, certain qualities tend to show up on their own. Not as things you have to cultivate. Just as ways of being that find more room.
Wonderment — letting go of fixed ideas about what's going on.
Curiosity — there may be more here than you know.
Humor — there can be fresh ways to see things.
Playfulness — some other relationship could happen than the one that's been happening.
Enjoyment — pleasurable appreciation of what's actually here.
Creativity — something else could happen than what has happened.
These arrive spontaneously. You don't have to deliberately practice outside the session for them to show up. In fact, the deliberate effort tends to crowd them out.
If you want to practice between sessions
The instructions are simple, and they fit on a sticky note:
Sit down somewhere comfortable. Set a timer. Remain uninvolved with whatever occurs.
What fits is individual. An hour. Five minutes a day. None at all. As you get more used to Opening Awareness, you may find it becomes a genuinely enjoyable part of your day — not because you're trying to make it that, but because it's what happens when you stop trying to make it anything in particular.
Closing
Thank you for spending this time with the practice. Watch the short video below. Then please go outside, look around, listen to the full soundscape of where you are, and feel what your body is feeling.
Where this is going
The next arc shifts focus to appreciation — the vividness and vastness of this world that becomes more available once spaciousness is part of the picture.