How to Do Mindfulness-Awareness Practice
Discover your natural human capacity for steady presence and open awareness through traditional mindfulness-awareness meditation, learning to reclaim your innate power of attention in a culture of endless distraction while cultivating qualities that enrich your everyday life, relationships, and work.
Introduction: Mindfulness and Awareness as Human Capacities
Meet Gaylon Ferguson, teacher of Buddhism and mindfulness meditation, as he introduces the two aspects of practice — mindfulness offering stability and steadiness of mind, and awareness cultivating openness and spaciousness — both thoroughly natural human capacities available to everyone.
04:48
Introduction: Mindfulness and Awareness as Human Capacities
Meet Gaylon Ferguson, teacher of Buddhism and mindfulness meditation, as he introduces the two aspects of practice — mindfulness offering stability and steadiness of mind, and awareness cultivating openness and spaciousness — both thoroughly natural human capacities available to everyone.
04:48
Overview: Placing Attention and Befriending Yourself
Explore the specifics of mindfulness practice — placing bare attention in the body and returning when the mind wanders — while understanding this approach as "making friends with yourself," welcoming all thoughts, emotions, and sensations rather than suppressing them, and preparing these qualities for everyday life engagements.
15:30
Guided Practice: Experiencing Body and Breath
Experience sitting meditation directly through guided practice, learning the loving-kindness posture (sitting upright in a chair or on a cushion), feeling the body breathing naturally, and practicing the essential rhythm of stay-notice-return while befriending your ordinary mind just as it is.
13:27
Conclusion: Establishing Your Practice
Receive guidance for developing a sustainable personal practice — finding what's regular and consistent in your own schedule (even a few minutes is meaningful), connecting with meditation communities and resources, and understanding your practice as joining a stream of practitioners cultivating wakefulness and compassion for a mindful society.
04:56Related Readings
Let the “Nine Breaths of Purification” Clear Your Mind and Open Your Heart
Daniel Ahearn, LMFT, shares an article and accompanying video on the how and why of a practice he says offers "a gentle revolution, a way to clear what weighs us down, to reconnect with the body, and to remember that every breath offers a chance to begin again."
Buddhist Meditation is Relaxing with the Truth
It is only when we begin to relax with ourselves as we are that meditation becomes a transformative process.