The Way of Effortless Mindfulness

Highlights

The Ultimate Medicine of No-self Self

Self is you, but not the “you” that you often think you are. Self is the “I am” without I am “this” or I am “that.” Self is not the thinker. Self is not your personality, not your ego or observing ego, not a hypnotic or altered state, not an image or your imagination, not an archetype or a separate soul, not a guide or inner voice, not solely an energy, not an entity or the human person that you are today. Self is neither meditator nor detached mindful witness. Self is aware of all these experiences, states, and parts; Self is inherent within them and includes them.

The Ultimate Medicine of No-self Self

Losing a sense of Self is often the feeling of being contracted into a point of view, blended with a part that sits in the seat of “I,” so the part believes it is “me.”

The Ultimate Medicine of No-self Self

effortless mindfulness as a foundation can change what would have been a “dark night of the soul” into more of a detox or thawing-out process, with more growing pains than unconscious suffering

Three Hypotheses

The Self (with a capital S) is not a bigger version of the small self, and the small self cannot grow into Self. The small self does not need to be fought, defeated, or erased but needs to retire from its role as the center of identity. In fact, we can thank the small self and give it retirement benefits for working so hard. As we’ll see in chapter 7, what we call small self is a group of parts of us, subpersonalities. We can then look at this constellation of small-self system as a way of bringing greater acceptance to our personality.

Three Hypotheses

When I ask people, “Where is your sense of self located?” many tell me it’s in their body or upper body, but most say that their normal sense of “me” feels located in their head behind their eyes, looking out at the world and feeling down to their body. They feel enclosed in their head and separate from what they see.

Three Hypotheses

With effortless mindfulness, we address the location and formation of consciousness that limits awareness, mind, and Self. We do this not by creating, imagining, or cultivating positive states but by untying knots to reveal the natural condition of our heart-mind and Self. As a student of mine once said, “Everything feels empty and full. I am here and everywhere as if there is no separate self but also things are alive, and I feel like, ‘I’m just me.’”

Three Hypotheses

Emptiness does not mean that you are totally absent of a small self on the relative level. Emptiness means that everything is empty of a separate, independent existence. For example, a flower is not a flower without its connection to water, to air, to sun, and to earth

Three Hypotheses

Realizing emptiness helps relieve the suffering caused by the mental habit of a small, separate sense of self. This limited mental pattern of small self is attempting to relieve suffering by trying to be both independent and connected. Instead, the pointer of emptiness is actually saying that we are already interdependent or interconnected

Three Hypotheses

The movement of viewing from a mindful witness to awake awareness-energy is the “collapse” or unity of subject and object. The view from awareness-energy feels interconnected with what we are aware of, without being identified with anything. Awake awareness-energy experiences directly from all around and within on a felt-sense level, without viewing from a witnessing awareness, without merging back into subtle energy, and without reidentifying with the small self.

How to Remain Awake

The most fundamental aspect of awakening is the shift in our understanding of who we are. Our culture, upbringing, and mind have all created a sense of “me” that is based on a thinking self: “I think, therefore I am.”

How to Remain Awake

The first hint about why it is hard to remain in Self-leadership is that the “you” that wants to remain awake is not you! The entire abiding experience will feel paradoxical to the thinking manager “you,” which will likely think that nothing on this path of awakening makes any sense! Indeed, the reason many people haven’t yet awakened is because the small self is being run by their survival operating system and the expectations of our culture.

How to Remain Awake

Here is where a transitionally helpful spiritual ego, meditator, manager, or Self-like part can be a trap if not recognized.

How to Remain Awake

We must avoid being pulled into the mind by the old egoic structure and its defenses, which, for their own survival, are wanting to convince you that Self is just a “meditation state” so that they can remain in the driver’s seat—a Self-like part playing the role of Self.

How to Remain Awake

The key in this effortless mindfulness approach is to shift immediately into the new operating system of awake awareness rather than just deconstructing the small self. Awakening and stabilizing our awakening is as much a process of unlearning as learning

How to Remain Awake

It is going to take effortless mindfulness to change the old habit of remaining in our small self and to learn to let go into open-hearted awareness, which sustains itself naturally.

How to Remain Awake

This transition into “don’t know mind” can feel like the moment we released our parent’s hand when we were a kid on the first day of kindergarten. But here, as we move toward the unknown, toward the greater Self, we are letting go of the ego identity’s hand

Glimpsing All the Way Home

You can set an alert in the calendar on your smartphone to remind you to do mindful glimpses throughout the day. You can record the mindful glimpses in your own voice or listen to one of my recordings. It is particularly helpful to learn to do the mindful glimpses with eyes open, such as while looking out the window, walking, or looking over your computer screen, and you can then return to your daily activities from effortless heart-mindfulness.

Here is a simple guide to use as a reference to learn how to do small glimpses anytime during the day:

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

SPACED OUT

Once you unhook local awareness from thought and open to space, you will feel some relief and freedom from the chattering mind. This is a crucial step, but space is not the final frontier. We do not want to remain as a detached mindful witness or in disembodied pure awareness. While the first step is to discover that space is free of mental obsession, the next step is to discover that space is not absence, but space itself is aware. We can then also discover that spacious awareness is inherently within our body.

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

you will experience your subtle body as a return to your senses. This can be a pleasant state and is often experienced through practices like calm abiding, chanting, mantra, dancing, music, massage, exercise, or drugs. If you get stuck here, however, you can become a “bliss ninny” or be only “hippy-happy.” While this experience of the subtle body, or inner body presence, is free of the mind, it is still bound by our skin and subtle energy body.

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

The solution begins when we know from nonconceptual awake awareness.

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

if you’re too far back into awake awareness or conceptual mind, then people experience you as “porridge too cold.” If you are too much in subtle body awareness or emotionally enmeshed with your own parts or with other people’s feelings, then people experience you as “porridge too hot.” If you are relating and creating from effortless heart-mindfulness and Self-leadership, people will exclaim, “Porridge just right!”

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

The term nondual does not mean oneness. The Sanskrit word for nonduality, advaita, was used for a reason: it means “not two.” The ancient mystics had other words for oneness that could have been used, but they chose advaita. Nondual means both/and, inseparable, all-at-once, and simultaneous: not one, not two, not several, not empty, but all of these.

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

The goal of meditation is not to stop thoughts or just be very relaxed. This can be an important first step to soothe the animal of our mind and body, but awakening is alert, interconnected, creative, and compassionate.

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

The small mind naturally fears the unknown. It spends time and energy projecting negative beliefs onto the emptiness of no thought and no action and defending against the void and egolessness

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

In Toward a Psychology of Awakening, John Welwood points out this potential trap: “There is often a tendency to use spiritual practice to try to rise above our emotional and personal issues—all those messy, unresolved matters that weigh us down. I call this tendency to avoid or prematurely transcend basic human needs, feelings, and developmental tasks spiritual bypassing.”3

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

Not-knowing is the transition between conceptual knowing and awake awareness. If you stop in “don’t-know mind,” which is the beginning stage of true knowing, then you are free of the old information processor in your head, but you have not yet rewired your system to hook up with awake awareness that is the new nonconceptual operating system.

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

we can get stuck in a meditative gap of not-knowing, which can lead to a couch potato phase. Instead, we need to keep moving, first from mental knowing into not-knowing, then into nonconceptual awake awareness, then to a not-knowing that knows, and finally to open-hearted awareness.

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

SPIRITUAL ROBOT

The feeling of being not only disidentified but detached from all emotions and preferences can lead to the point where, when you are asked, “What type of tea would you like?” you respond, “All tea is the same.” The goal is not to transcend emotions, desires, and preferences but to shift out of the suffering caused by ego-identification and into living from an interconnected, joyful, compassionate, and awake human life.

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

Some students might idealize teachers and remain in a dependent role, doubting that they themselves can ever awaken. Other students are continually spirituality shopping and going to different teachers as a way of entertainment and avoidance of facing the meeting of repressed parts as necessary for spiritual growth.

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

Nihilism is the view that because everything is empty, everything is meaningless. Eternalism is the view that there is a thing called “me” that will exist as it is forever. Being empty of a separate self means that we are interconnected to life. Remember, emptiness means interconnection.

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

the ego is not an entity that exists; it is a mental and emotional pattern. Fighting against the pattern reinforces its strength! Once we discover awake awareness as the foundation of who we are, ego functions can relax and semi-retire from trying to do a second job of ego identity.

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

Awakening does not mean that all of your human developmental areas will go to an elevated level immediately. For example, discovering the wisdom of open-hearted awareness does not mean you will immediately be able to win all Trivial Pursuit games, play concert piano, or have excellent communication skills with loved ones or people at work. In Zen, there is a saying: “Enlightenment is acceptance of imperfection.” We need to continue to both wake up and grow up.

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

WEARING ROSE-COLORED GLASSES

When we do this, we are acting as if the relative world is “rosy,” or we are allowing ourselves to be blind to human suffering. This distancing comes from false beliefs that awakening means that we will never have any problems and that we will be able to escape from the human condition. Instead, we are able to experience both pleasant and unpleasant feelings and respond more courageously to inner and outer pain.

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

SPIRITUAL SUPEREGO

This is a harsh inner critic, an aspect of the ego-self that remains dominant and subtly drives you to renunciation, self-denial, or judgment of yourself or others around “spiritual” beliefs, ideas, or right and wrong actions. This is a protective part that is trying to help, and it is best met with listening and love rather than judging the judger.

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

The inertia of our habits of mind has a power that draws us back to the magnetic ego-center. While our awakening path unfolds, as long as the unconditioned spacious awareness remains the only alternative to ego-identity, then we will have to come back to the ego in order to function. Since we can’t live as a human being while remaining in pure awake awareness only, we’ll experience “losing it” and having to return to ego identity in order to function, until form and formlessness are discovered to not be separate.

Glimpsing All the Way Home

awakenings may come from glimpses, surrendering, marinating, or spontaneous moments that we can’t foresee. The premise of mindful glimpses is that the peace and love we seek is already here, and it can be intentionally and immediately discovered. We do not have to wait for luck or grace because grace is already here, even though it may feel hidden. The paradoxical truth is that there is always awakeness and always unfolding. There is nothing to do to be the awake awareness that you already are, but there is the unfolding relationship and intimate dance of the formless and form.

Glimpsing All the Way Home

We start out with the normal way we’ve all mostly been walking around: as the small self, with the small thinking mind doing its best to care for itself, using attention to witness its pain, to embrace its circumstances, but also getting overwhelmed and still perceiving itself as small and separate.

We’ve now learned pointers that can lead us into immediate awakenings, that open us out of what the thinker “thought” reality was and into a new view and new you. These “aha!” moments (that are sometimes “ha-ha!” moments) may last a few seconds or may move us from a meditation state to a new stage of life. The unfolding of our awakening often includes difficulties as we stumble our way toward living from open-hearted awareness. Awakening does not add or change anything ultimately. It is a shift of the background already-stable awake awareness to become the ground of our seeing and being.

Glimpsing All the Way Home

Awakening shifts us out of our limited view that does not see awakeness and into a loving, interconnected, joyful flow of life.

When we have seen through the constructs of who we thought we were, the most constant experience that remains is love, in its multiple forms: gratitude, patience, acceptance, compassion, joy, beauty, and bliss. We are experiencing all of life from open-hearted awareness. We find ourselves so effortlessly loving, and we know ourselves as fully lovable. And more: we know ourselves as love itself.

Glimpsing All the Way Home

As we live life, it doesn’t mean it will always be easy. Pain, loss, and difficulties are a natural part of everyone’s life, yet we can discover the support of effortless mindfulness to open us to interconnection with all of life. We are all on the same journey and part of the same human family. I admire and join you in continuing to wake up and grow up for the sake of all beings. I have found that the shift from head to heart leads to compassionate activity and commitment to social justice. We can develop a sense of courage and community and find the well-being and love that are within us and unite us all as we honor and thank the beautiful mystery.

Appendix: Traps, Detours, and Rerouting Instructions

The everyday mind has been our primary way of orienting ourselves for identity and safety. The small self that is created within the everyday mind operates like a computer that has been programmed to follow certain rules. Thought-free awake awareness is not included on the list of the everyday mind’s approved programs. The everyday mind’s safety programs instead have rules like “Orient by thought” and “Avoid the void,” which may send the alerting program of the ego defenses into a panic. So when we shift out of everyday mind, the ego defense program reacts as if it were protecting us from death, but it is protecting a limited thought pattern! The confusion happens because the small self sends adrenaline into the body and creates a feeling of fear and danger as if there were a physical threat to the system. There is no real danger if you can shift into awake awareness as the new operating system. There still may be a car alarm going off, but there is no thief to be found. The feeling of fear is real, but the reason for it is not.

If you get scared back to the mind, you can begin to glimpse again. As you do, you’ll learn to feel the fear and embrace the fear from awake awareness. There will be a period of adjustment and growth that includes some disorientation before reorientation.

The Ultimate Medicine of No-self Self

I’ve asked clients to become aware of an anxious part and then a less anxious part of themselves. When asked who is aware of those two parts, they often respond, “Me.” I have then asked, “Where are you aware from?” They have responded, “All around,” or “Within my heart,” or “From everywhere.”

The Ultimate Medicine of No-self Self

I was amazed at how even people who had diagnosed mental illnesses and complex trauma benefitted from directly accessing Self. I started to adapt and refine this process of realizing Self and brought the two disciplines of meditation and psychology together in my psychotherapy practice and teaching

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

Glimpses are the initial effortless effort of opening, surrendering, resting, or turning awareness around to find our open mind and open heart. They are “micro-meditations” or “rest stops” where we can refresh or reboot our whole body-mind system. A glimpse is not an insight from our conceptual mind; it is the direct experience of the essential peace, love, and wisdom that’s always been here. It is a paradigm shift, an identity shift, a shift of consciousness to a new view and a new you that feels true.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

A mindful glimpse is similar to a Zen koan, a simple inquiry that can’t be solved through logic and that takes you out of your conceptual mind and small self. Unlike a koan, a glimpse does not start with thinking. It starts with awareness unhooking from thought. The effortless mindfulness glimpses I offer in this book can be done with eyes closed or open anytime during your day. They initially take from ten seconds to ten minutes to do, but they shift you into a new operating system that allows you to enjoy their continuous benefits. The primary way of practicing effortless mindfulness is small glimpses, many times.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

Several of my students have told me that dropping into one small glimpse has been as life changing as going on a long meditation retreat. I have found that different glimpses work well for different people depending on their learning styles. So if one glimpse in this book doesn’t click for you, no worries. Just keep reading and try the next one.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

Without knowing it, most of us do our favorite leisure activities to experience effortless mindfulness and its natural qualities of freedom and joy. We do what we love to experience effortless mindfulness. However, effortless mindfulness and its qualities are not dependent on what we do or where we are. So even at work or in the New York City subway, we can discover the inner freedom, love, and clarity that are who we truly are.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

When I describe effortless mindfulness, some people tell me they’ve had this feeling walking in nature, playing music, gardening, making love, driving a car, or during a special moment in their past that they long to return to. Many of us have been intuitively practicing some form of effortless mindfulness throughout our lives—while being creative, with loved ones, or while playing sports. And some of us have experienced it when we suddenly became calm and clear during a crisis.

For example, we may have shifted into effortless mindfulness while hiking with friends. While hiking, we may notice that as soon as we reach the summit of the hill, our goal seeking stops for that moment. Our identity as a seeker relaxes as we look at the sky and feel our awareness and mind open into it. We might look at our friends and feel a sense of connection and open-heartedness. We feel fully present, with no problems to solve and nothing to push away. We look at the trees and feel connected and part of nature. Our separate sense of self relaxes to reveal a wordless experience that rests in a place of “all is well.” At times like these, we feel freedom, clarity of mind, joy, connection to nature and other people, and a sense of well-being. However, we often associate these enjoyable qualities with an activity or place without realizing that the source is already available within us.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

The opposite of mindfulness is mindlessness: being distracted, spaced-out, or impulsive

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

In his book Rainbow Painting, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche writes that “there are two types of mindfulness: deliberate and effortless.”1 He described effortless mindfulness as a simple yet advanced form of mindfulness. He taught that effortless mindfulness is the path to realizing and living from our nature of mind (awake awareness).

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

In Tibetan Buddhism, rigpa is the word for “nature of mind,” or awake awareness.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

The cause of suffering is failure to recognize awake awareness, and the solution to suffering is in realizing and living from awake awareness. The shift into awake awareness is what makes effortless mindfulness possible.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

Because effortless mindfulness is a less familiar approach for most Westerners, it may be easier to understand it in contrast with the more familiar deliberate mindfulness, which is now so widespread that it is what most people call “mindfulness.” Most of the mindfulness books, centers, and teachers in the West have come from the Theravada and some Zen traditions.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

The immediate goal of effortless mindfulness is to transition into the new, upgraded operating system, which is embodied and open-hearted and has greater capacity to be with our full human experience. One student of mine reported, “I am feeling a deep sense that all is well, that who I am is okay. It’s not that there are not difficulties and pain, but now I feel a loving support within that gives me new motivation.”

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

In deliberate mindfulness, we intentionally cultivate a loving attitude, calm our small thinking mind, and then observe our thoughts and feelings. In effortless mindfulness, we shift out of our small thinking mind into the source of mind, which is already calm, focused, interconnected, and compassionate

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

The radical discovery is that the freedom, clarity, and natural love we seek are always right here. This natural awareness does not have to be created but simply uncovered.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

To look more closely at the difference between these two kinds of mindfulness, consider a widely accepted definition of deliberate mindfulness from Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the important teachers to help bring mindfulness into contemporary culture:

Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.3

Here is my definition of effortless mindfulness:

Effortless mindfulness is letting go of thoughts, present moments, and attention—opening to a naturally compassionate, nonconceptual awake awareness that is interconnected here and Now.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

in the Now, we can be aware of the coming and going of present moments while we make plans for the future or recall the past.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

The origin of the word mindfulness comes from a word in the Pali language, sati, which is translated literally as “remembering.” In deliberate mindfulness, it means remembering to return our attention to the object of meditation, like breath, when attention wanders. Attention is defined by Merriam-Webster as “the act or state of applying the mind to something.”4 You can apply your small mind to your breath or a task, but eventually the small mind will wander, and you will become distracted. Maintaining continuous attention is difficult, not just because the attention does not remain stable but because the small mind is not a stable entity. American psychologist William James agreed: “There is no such thing as voluntary attention sustained for more than a few seconds at a time. What is called sustained voluntary attention is a repetition of successive efforts which bring back the topic to the mind

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

Deliberate mindfulness is being attentive from our small mind or a mindful witness; it requires us to continuously return to the task—re-remembering and refocusing. The reason we lose focus when we try to be mindful is not lack of willpower. We lose focus because the small mind we’re looking from is always moving and changing. In deliberate mindfulness, we must continuously reapply ourselves to the task at hand by actively remembering not only to focus but to recreate a “focuser” identity in our mind.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

Effortless mindfulness is a remembering of our true nature—who we have always been. In effortless mindfulness, we don’t have to pay attention from our small mind because we are aware from awake awareness, or source of mind, which is not made of moving thoughts. We can feel in a flow with a wider context but also a feeling of being grounded and not overwhelmed by the things that are happening. A client told me, “I feel grounded, but it’s interesting because the supportive ground is made of awareness. From here, I feel interconnected and effortlessly focused. And that gives me a sense of deep safety and well-being.”

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

Rather than cleaning up and calming the stormy clouds of our mind first, effortless mindfulness starts with recognizing awake awareness, which is already naturally calm and clear. Then we can return to our stormy problems or challenges with a new perspective and sense of well-being.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

can be mindful of depends on what level of mind you’re mindful from. In effortless mindfulness, it is not as important to focus on what thoughts and emotions are arising but rather to ask, “Who or what level of mind are they arising to?” In effortless mindfulness, we shift from focusing on what we are aware of into focusing on awareness itself—moving from a detached observer and into a view from interconnected awake awareness.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

With deliberate mindfulness, we discover who we are not. With effortless mindfulness, we discover who we essentially are.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

In deliberate mindfulness, after an initial stage of calming our chattering mind, we establish a mindful witness to observe thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Insight meditation can lead to an important insight that “I am not my thoughts, beliefs, stories, or a thought-based identity.” This is what I call the mindful move. The mindful move helps us get a healthy distance from being identified with emotions and thoughts.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

For example, we may feel misunderstood by a family member and respond with defensive anger only to realize that we misunderstood what they said. The mindful move can allow just enough space to ask a question that can bring clarity to you and the relationship. We see that there is not a solid mind and not a solid separate self, made of thoughts, by observing thoughts like, “I am thinking this thought.” This helps us take thoughts less personally.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

Establishing this mindful witness brings relief from being overidentified, which is an important step. However, the danger of stopping at this level of a detached witness is that we may end up isolated, as if in a “witness protection program.” One student said, “I was good at being mindful of activities from my birds-eye-view, but I began to feel I lost my flow and became more aloof, mental, and robotic, like Spock from Star Trek.”

Here, there’s still a subtle dualism of “observer” and “observed” that gives us a feeling of freedom from attachment while maintaining a feeling of looking down from a distant tower at our body, mind, and the world.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

The unique thing about effortless mindfulness is that the first shift is to look back through the meditator to even further disidentification as we open to vast, timeless, nonconceptual awake awareness. The unfolding of effortless mindfulness continues to become aware simultaneously from outside and within, so we feel a natural interconnection and intimacy with everything without being reidentified.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

The term nondual is one of the best ways to describe effortless mindfulness.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

The Sanskrit word for nonduality is advaita, which means “not two.” It is pointing to the view that the dualistic way of perceiving—inside versus outside, subject versus object, and other versus self—is not the only level of reality. In Buddhism, nondual is defined as “two truths,” meaning that ultimate reality as formless awake awareness and everyday relative reality are experienced simultaneously

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

sees this as the foundation of our everyday dimension of reality. So when we shift into nondual awareness, we experience objects both as interconnected and as a unique expression simultaneously. Nondual awareness is another way of describing the view from effortless mindfulness.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

Focused attention (FA) is like looking down from a tower to the river of your breath. Open monitoring (OM) is like looking from an open sky to thoughts, feelings, and sensations as separate objects, like clouds and birds, coming and going. Nondual awareness (NDA) is like being the entire ocean of awareness that is also arising as the unique wave of your body while feeling an interconnected flow with everything. For this reason, I often call effortless mindfulness nondual mindfulness.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

In one research study, conducted in 2012 at New York University by Zoran Josipovic, PhD, and his research team, experienced practitioners of effortless mindfulness were asked to shift into nondual awareness while receiving a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan.6 I am familiar with these important results because I was one of the subjects in this study. We were asked to do focused attention practices, open monitoring practices, and then nondual awareness practices. The results showed dramatic differences in the brain between the different practices, as I will explain below. The NDA practices I did while in the fMRI machine were the effortless mindfulness practices that I present in this book.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

Josipovic writes that “NDA meditation is different from FA and OM meditations in that it enables an atypical state of mind in which extrinsic and intrinsic experiences are increasingly synergistic rather than competing.” Effortless mindfulness balances the activity of the default-mode network and task-positive network so that we are equally aware of what we’re doing and our internal state. Awake awareness is aware of what happens both inside and outside.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

frequency. The slowest wave is delta, which oscillates between one and four cycles per second and occurs primarily during deep sleep. The next slowest, theta, occurs during a drowsy state before sleep. Alpha waves indicate relaxation and occur when there is little thinking. Beta waves are the next fastest and accompany thinking or concentration. Gamma waves are the fastest brain wave and occur during moments in which separate brain regions are firing in harmony, such as moments of insight, creativity, or “aha!” experiences.

The most significant outcome was that the frequency was in the high gamma range in all twenty-nine subjects doing forms of effortless mindfulness.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

The study is also striking because “in contrast to using number of hours or years of practice … the primary eligibility requirement was that each subject had the ability to shift from everyday mind to awake awareness.”9 This is important in showing that awakening training is possible in the midst of daily life rather than only for full-time yogis or those in monasteries.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

Most people master the task they are good at to enter the flow state. But in effortless mindfulness, we first shift into an integrated flow state, and then we can do any task from heart knowing.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

GLIMPSE From Your Heart

1. Pause … notice your next out-breath … then, with the next in-breath, let your awareness move from your head down to your heart.

2. What is it like to know from your heart?

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

• Awake awareness is our primary level of knowing, which is prior to thinking, includes thinking, and is also beyond thinking.

• Awake awareness is not an altered, transcendent, or even a meditative state. It is not attention, and it’s not mindful awareness; neither is it mindlessness or zoning out.

• There are many types of consciousness (patterns of experience) such as emotional consciousness, hearing consciousness, and thinking consciousness. Awake awareness is what makes consciousness conscious. Thoughts, feelings, and sensations are dancing patterns made of awake awareness.

• Awake awareness is clear and open, resting as peace of mind

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

Rather than looking to our thoughts, memories, personality, or roles to identify ourselves, through effortless mindfulness we come to know awake awareness as the primary dimension of who we are. Once we experience awake awareness as the foundation of our identity, we experience our conditioned thoughts, emotions, and sensations as waves within the ocean of our life.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

• Awake awareness cannot be harmed by any strong emotional state. In other words, awake awareness is the source from which all emotional states arise and are experienced. We don’t have to leave or change our feelings to find essential well-being.

• Awake awareness is nonconceptual, invisible, formless, boundless, and timeless, yet it is our optimal level of knowing and the foundation of our identity. It is experienced in those times when we peek beyond the veil of our conventional experience and notice the silence that is the fabric of our everyday reality.

• Awake awareness unfolds into open-hearted awareness, and then the natural qualities of well-being, compassion, and intuitive intelligence are revealed.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

Awake awareness is the most important discovery we can make on our path of effortless mindfulness. However, in this approach, awake awareness is not the end goal, and we do not seek to remain in a detached witness state or a state of pure awareness. Instead, awake awareness will unfold into awake awareness-energy embodied and into open-hearted awareness. Similarly, as we will explore later in this book, effortless mindfulness could be called “effortless mindfulness embodied” or “effortless heart mindfulness” as we learn to live an awakened life.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

GLIMPSE Background Awareness

1. Take one slow, deep breath.

2. Let out a sigh.

3. Now, let your awareness open to discover the background awareness that is already effortlessly awake and aware without your help.

4. Notice that you can effortlessly focus from this background awareness

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

One of my students described the experience like this: “I’m not aware of an open mind and an open heart. I’m aware from an open mind and heart that is connected to everything.” When we tap into this feeling of viewing from our wordless awake awareness, it opens us to a relief from suffering, natural joy, and compassionate connection with people and the world around us.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

We have been taught that our intelligence, identity, and safety are based on developing and being centered in thought-based knowing, or what I will call our small mind. When we shift from our small mind to awake awareness as the source of mind, we discover that we are already effortlessly mindful. Effortless mindfulness is the way of knowing, creating, and relating from awake awareness. Although effortless mindfulness begins by letting go of everything, we ultimately become embodied, energetic, loving, and fully human.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

GLIMPSE Eyes of Awareness

1. With a soft gaze, simply see what is here in front of you.

2. Notice the awareness that is looking through your eyes.

3. Now close your eyes and notice the same awareness that was looking out is still here.

4. Simply rest as this wordless awareness, which is now aware of itself.

5. Without creating a thinker, be the awareness that welcomes and includes everything.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

might be asking: If awake awareness as the source of effortless mindfulness is already here, why haven’t I discovered it yet? This is a good question. One reason we don’t discover it is that we don’t have awake awareness on most of our Western psychological maps. Many people who have longed and strived to be free of suffering have missed awake awareness, not because they lacked desire or commitment but because they didn’t know what to look for or where to look.

The Shangpa Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism gives four insightful reasons we don’t naturally discover awake awareness, which I find quite helpful:

1. Awake awareness is so close that you can’t see it.

2. Awake awareness is so subtle that you can’t understand it.

3. Awake awareness is so simple that you can’t believe it.

4. Awake awareness is so good that you can’t accept it.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

GLIMPSE The Peace Within

What is here now if the peace you are seeking is already here?

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

Effortless mindfulness begins as a meditation practice but becomes a holistic way of sustaining our most optimal way of living—the shift that has traditionally been called awakening. It’s a term shared by many religions, used by spiritual teachers, and studied by historians. In the introduction, I defined awakening as “a shift and upgrade of awareness, mind, and self.” A fuller definition of awakening is moving from our current, limited mind and small self to a new, upgraded operating system of optimal mind and expansive, interconnected Self.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

The term awakening is an apt one because people who’ve had the experience report that it resembles waking from a dream. We spend much of our lives sleepwalking while hoping the project of improving and developing our separate sense of self will help us feel happy and connected. When we wake up from this daydream, we may be surprised to realize that our limited perspective is only a small part of a vaster reality.

Awakening may seem like a distant, unattainable goal or a lofty challenge, but it’s no more unreachable than any other stage of learning and growth that you’ve already lived through. Awakening is not limited to those who join a monastery, live in a cave, or are Olympic athletes of meditation. After working with thousands of meditation students and psychotherapy clients as well as colleagues who teach meditation, neuroscience, and developmental psychology, what I’ve learned is this: awakening is the next, natural stage of human development.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

Effortless mindfulness is a practice that leads to and supports awakening.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

I believe that awakening is a natural stage of human development and that we need to humbly and honestly share stories with each other about our own growth in this regard so that we can open the conversation and normalize this concept in our culture.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

For me, initial awakening was a radical shift to uncover an essential dimension of well-being, a feeling that everything is ultimately okay, that who I essentially am is okay. This realization is nothing like imagination, belief, or a temporary meditation state. Although awake awareness is invisible, the knowing that “all is well” is as real and intimate as the feeling of my body breathing

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

When we get caught in thought, we can “learn to return” and “train to remain” as our awakened nature. After a series of small glimpses, many times, effortless mindfulness becomes “second nature.”

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

GLIMPSE How to Do Not-Doing

Can you let go into the awake awareness that is resting deeper than sleep, yet wide awake?

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

As in any learning process, there are obstacles, traps, or points of difficulty that everyone encounters. One of them is our doubt, thinking something like, “Other people are getting it, but I’m not.” However, the interesting thing about effortless mindfulness is that your doubting part, your sincere effort–making part, and your thinking mind will never get it. If you think, “I will never get this,” in some ways you are correct because the “I” that is trying to “get it” can’t.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

If you had never ridden a bicycle, I could describe how to ride: put your left leg on the left pedal, then swing your right leg over the bike, push off, and begin to move before you put your foot on the right pedal, and then pedal as you try to balance and keep your hands steady on the handle grips. It can make some sense, but it’s only when you get on the bicycle, start riding, and get a feel for it yourself that you will know balance and effortless riding.

Ultimately, you don’t need to intellectually understand how to do effortless mindfulness any more than you need to understand the physics behind how your body balances when you ride a bicycle. You need only to shift into awake awareness as the place of knowing. From there, the knowing will teach itself.

The Next Stage of Mindfulness

from fresh beginner’s mind, inquire: What’s here now when there’s no problem to solve?

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

It’s doing things without thinking about them, not being clear about our words or actions. Mindfulness is a basic human capacity and has become part of contemporary Western culture as we have joined millions of people around the world who have been practicing mindfulness for millennia.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

Mindfulness is one of the most important things we can discover for our health and happiness, and over the past twenty years, empirical research has repeatedly shown that it reduces stress-related symptoms, anxiety, depression, and chronic pain as well as improving cognitive function, boosting immunity, and lowering blood pressure. Mindfulness is now taught in schools, community centers, hospitals, gyms, prisons, and businesses. Gradually, mindfulness meditation as a basic tool of healthy living is becoming as routine as eating well, exercising, and getting enough sleep.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

The pervasive feeling of anxiety, self-centeredness, and fear, which had always felt like a normal part of who I was, dissolved. What was here instead was a profound sense of well-being, unity, joy, and gratitude. This full expression lasted through the day and had faded a bit when I awoke the next morning, but it remained in the background

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

When we shift into effortless mindfulness, rather than trying to create a “nonjudgmental” attitude, we discover that awake awareness is not just neutrally nonjudgmental but is a naturally compassionate dimension of who we are.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

When we compare these two types of mindfulness, we see that there are several significant distinctions between deliberate mindfulness and effortless mindfulness:

• In effortless mindfulness, rather than “paying” attention, we are letting go of attention to receive another kind of awareness, namely awake awareness.

• In effortless mindfulness, rather than paying attention “on purpose,” we are relaxing the goal-oriented mindful meditator to discover a nonconceptual awake awareness that is aware and focused without our help.

• In effortless mindfulness, rather than starting by concentrating or narrowing focus “in a particular way” on an object like our breath, we are opening to awareness as the object and the subject, to discover a spacious, contentless awareness from which we are mindful. Rather than taming the horses of our mind in a small enclosure, we are opening the gate to the field of spacious awake awareness.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

Deliberate mindfulness practice actively cultivates the attitude of lovingkindness, whereas in effortless mindfulness, we discover a natural lovingkindness that is already here. This discovery of natural lovingkindness is the foundation of a new motivation for compassionate activity that is not based on external rules but comes from the direct experience of interconnection with all of life.

Awakening Glimpse by Glimpse

GLIMPSE Embodiment Scan

Those who have taken a yoga class or a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) course will likely have done a body scan meditation. This embodiment scan practice is similar, but you are not scanning your body from your everyday mind using attention. This is a “nondual body scan.” In this glimpse, we’re going to have local awareness unhook from thinking and then drop to know and experience your entire body directly from within and then open to discover the safety of being boundlessly embodied. This is a good practice for helping you wake up from the limitations of your small mind. You may also find that this is a good practice to help you fall asleep at night.

1. Begin by finding a comfortable way of sitting or lying down. Notice the feeling of your breath in your body.

2. Now, shift your awareness to notice the location of where you are focusing from.

3. Next, let local awareness unhook from this focusing location and begin to move down, feeling its way down through your face to feel and know your jaw directly from within.

4. Be aware of not looking down from your head to your body. Notice what it is like when local awareness begins to know and feel your body directly from within.

5. Feel local awareness move down to sense your neck from within. Then feel local awareness begin to expand to include feeling your shoulders, arms, and hands and then further expand to be aware directly from within your chest, upper back, belly, and lower back.

6. Allow local awareness to remain aware from within your upper body and continue moving downward to include your hips, pelvis, thighs, legs, and feet, knowing them directly from within.

7. Allow local awareness to be aware of your entire body from head to toe from within.

8. As your awareness moves down the length of your body, notice the releasing of holding and a deep relaxation. Be aware of the space, awareness, contact, and effervescent aliveness of the experience of knowing your body directly from within.

9. Feel your body from the awake awareness within as a field of effervescent energy. Notice the awareness and energy are mingled as both your soft body and a boundless quality that begins to open outward. Feel how energy and movement are happening equally outside and within and that awake awareness is aware simultaneously from outside and within.

10. Feel your breath happening by itself like waves in the ocean. Feel that awake awareness is also happening by itself.

11. Notice that awareness extends beyond your body to notice the space in the room and the awareness-energy as an interconnected dynamic field subtly connected to everything and everybody while feeling embodied here and now.

12. Enjoy the feeling of the natural, boundless freedom and awareness-energy embodied.

13. Rest in the fullness of interconnected embodiment.

Once you’ve gotten a feel for effortless mindfulness—unhooking and glimpsing—you can begin to apply the skills in your everyday life, such as working with different kinds of suffering. In the next chapter, we will explore how to relate to physical pain using effortless mindfulness.

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

While being able to step back and observe the pain from the outside was a great teaching of deliberate mindfulness, it was, unfortunately, not enough to relieve my chronic pain. I learned to accept the pain as it continued and thought that that was good enough, seeing that pain is a part of human life, with no way around it. But then I became curious: could effortless mindfulness treat physical pain the same way that it treated mental and emotional pain?

That’s when I began experimenting, and I had a remarkable discovery: the healing power of awake awareness can be applied to pain in the body as well as to the mind. I have found local awareness has an intelligence that can move directly within the signal of pain, to its source, to see what is true. Then, the pain signal goes to the background intelligence of awake awareness.

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

What Is Pain?

Pain is a normal part of human life. And pain hurts. Although pain feels like a threat, pain is not attacking us. Pain is designed to help us survive. Pain and pleasure are signals. Pain is a signal that something is out of balance in your emotional, mental, spiritual, or physical life and that something needs attention. It is meant to be unpleasant, for a good reason: to bring our attention to a potentially dangerous situation until the issue is treated. The sharp, unpleasant signal is designed that way to make sure we drop everything else and attend to the situation immediately. When pain continues unabated after our best healthy efforts to tend to it in a physical way, we look for ways of stopping it, reducing it, or escaping it in any way we can.

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

For example, if you’re walking barefoot, thoroughly engaged in a conversation with a friend, and you step on a piece of wood and get a splinter, the strong unpleasant pain signal is meant to get you to immediately stop all other interests and attend to the wound. If you had a sharp piece of wood in your foot and it didn’t cause pain, you might not bother to take it out, resulting in infection or worse. Once you take care of the immediate problem, or source, the nature of pain is to eventually go away. Pain by itself is not an entity or an enemy that has any motivation of hurting you. It is an important survival mechanism of our body—a communication tool.

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

By way of our senses, we have contact with experience in and outside of our body that tends to feel either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. We tend to like pleasant sensations, which leads to craving what we like and trying to get more pleasure, and we tend to dislike unpleasant sensations, which leads to rejecting what we don’t like. When that strong craving or rejection happens, there is a contraction of our greater sense of self into a specific identity of “craver” or “rejecter”: we configure our consciousness into a “me” that is a “thinker” or “manager” that has a strategy to get its goals and desires met and believes that that strategy is real and right. Craving and rejection are a normal part of our physical survival, like craving food when we’re hungry, but they also become our primary source of suffering when they become our identity.

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

Effortless mindfulness is a wonderful approach that does not in any way attempt to replace or deny diagnosing the cause of pain and working to cure it through any and all means. I am simply sharing this practice as a suggestion of what can be done in conjunction with any medical treatment.

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

With effortless mindfulness, we can learn to become present with the unpleasant—an important skill that we often avoid learning until we experience inescapable pain

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

When the pain signals recede to the background or significantly lessen, we no longer have to suffer silently or try to escape the pain through behaviors of shutting down, numbing, addiction, or acting out. By changing how we relate to pain, we can find a doorway to a freedom that allows us to respond to pain from courage and intimacy. We can learn to be present with the unpleasant, remain sensitive without being defensive, and be responsive but not reactive.

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

When the intelligence of awake awareness knows directly that there is no immediate danger, the pain signal can go into the background. In my own experience with back pain, the pain no longer needed to send a message from my back to my brain to signify “Danger!” or “Check this out!” When I allowed awake awareness to experience itself as awareness-energy and embrace and eventually recognize that my pain was not separate from my intelligent awareness, it put an end to any resistance and secondary suffering. When this happened, the pain energy became effervescent; it gave me a strangely warm and blissful feeling. Because I could work with the pain through my awareness in this way, I came to understand that the sciatic pain signal was not because of a ripped muscle or cut tissue or knife in my back (even though it felt like that at times). It was simply a signal to get me to notice the situation, which was not related to a real threat.

Within a week of starting to experiment using effortless mindfulness, the pain abated, and by the end of the second week, it was at worst an occasional dull ache, like a sore muscle. It has not returned as a chronic condition to this day! I may get a twinge in my back occasionally if I twist suddenly, but even that does not stay long. The other unique change is that pain does not shoot up to my head; I feel it only in my lower back area. This method has not only relieved my own chronic pain, but has worked for many of my clients and students as well. Once local awareness meets and acknowledges the pain directly, most people report reduction in their experience of pain from around an 8 (on a pain scale of 1 to 10) to a dull 2.

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

Though many of us are not taught this, being sensitive and vulnerable is one of the most beautiful dimensions of human life. However, if we are sensitive, we are exposed to pleasure and pain on the physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional levels. If our best option of treating pain is to defend ourselves by becoming less sensitive, we will feel less pain but also less pleasure and less fullness of life. The interesting process of effortless mindfulness is to become more vulnerable and more sensitive by opening to a subtler, vaster, more embodied dimension of consciousness that also has more courage and support.

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

the natural intelligence and intuition that are available to us as we shift into open-hearted awareness will give us good clues as to how to meet our particular type of pain in the way that matches our unique system.

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

“small glimpses, many times,”

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

The key to being able to do this effortless mindfulness pain-relief method is to distinguish local awareness from attention. Let’s review the difference with these experiential glimpses so that we get a feel of local awareness.

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

GLIMPSE Experiencing Attention

1. Look at one of your hands. Now move that hand out of your vision and bring your attention to that hand. Try to continue applying your attention there for a short while.

2. What was your experience of attention like?

Initially, when you use attention to focus, you may feel that your head (where your brain and eyes are located) is your central place of perceiving. When you bring your attention to your hand, does it feel like “you” are in your head, looking down at your hand? Or does it seem as if “you” are shining a flashlight from your head to your hand? Or do you feel connected, as if a telephone cable is running from your head to your hand and sending signals back and forth? Do you feel how attention can wander? Are you able to feel that maintaining attention is a continuous process of remembering and forgetting?

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

Now that we’ve experienced attention, let’s see how local awareness differs. In order to experience local awareness, you need to unhook local awareness from thought and know your hand directly from within. Try this for yourself now:

1. Unhook local awareness from thought and let local awareness begin to move down through your neck and know your shoulder from within.

2. Slowly move local awareness like a knowing, invisible bubble down your arm into your elbow. Feel the awareness of space and sensation directly from within.

3. Continue to let local awareness move down your forearm until it feels your hand from within.

4. Experience this new type of knowing that is happening directly, from within your hand.

5. Notice that when awareness knows your hand from within, it does not refer to a mental image of your hand. It feels the space and aliveness of the sensations, so there is not a clear boundary of inside and out.

Notice the way in which local awareness knows your body directly from within. Once local awareness has unhooked, thought is no longer the primary mode of knowing, yet thought is available as needed

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

If you do not reference a memory or image of your hand, your experience of your hand shifts into direct knowing. Direct knowing is spacious, alive, and much more fluid in feeling than attention.

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

You’ve just experienced how local awareness moves from thinking in your head to being able to directly know from within your hand. Now you can begin to get a sense of the feeling of local awareness unhooking and moving to any area where you are experiencing a pain signal. The important thing here is feeling how local awareness moves and knows directly from within.

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

GLIMPSE Effortless Mindfulness Pain-Relief

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

the key is simply this: instead of trying to move away from the pain or finding that you’ve automatically done so, learn to shift your local awareness to discover the awake awareness that’s already with and within the pain

Effortless Mindfulness Pain Relief

Through practicing this exercise, see what you can discover and what might change in your relationship with your pain.

1. Begin by becoming aware of your body, and then notice the area where you feel pain. Notice the qualities of the specific area and its borders—where the pain begins and ends.

2. Notice the area just outside the borders of the pain. Now, notice the space between this area of pain and the location in your head where you’re focusing from. Notice the feeling of the pain signal sent from the painful area to your head.

3. Bring your awareness to your head, and instead of looking at the pain from above, as a mindful observer, unhook local awareness from your thinking.

4. Feel local awareness begin to travel internally down to feel your jaw directly from within your jaw.

5. Feel local awareness move to be aware of your throat, knowing your throat directly from within. Now feel local awareness, like a bubble of intelligence, as it continues to move within your body toward the area of your pain.

6. As you do this, feel that you are knowing directly from the local awake awareness that is sensing from within your body. As local awareness moves into the area of pain, allow local awareness to feel gently within the area of pain without referring to thought.

7. Local awake awareness can sense the aliveness, space, and awareness within the atoms of the place of painful signals.

8. Local awareness has traveled to the source of the signal, so there is no distance between the origin of the pain signal and the place where the call is received. Local awareness enters the pain and the space; it gets subtler and subtler. Local awareness joins with the area that’s sending the pain signal, and it assesses: Is there really a threat here now?

9. Local awareness sees that pain is made of awareness and knows directly that there is no dangerous threat that needs to be constantly monitored. No action, response, or ongoing pain signal is needed to be sent to the brain, as the situation is now clearly seen by the intelligence of awake awareness.

10. Local awareness reaches the pain, meets it, and becomes intimate with it, recognizing that it is not other. Let the pain sensations be rerouted to the spacious awake awareness all around your body. Continually responding to the pain signal is no longer necessary. Local awareness has already responded and is currently within the area of pain. The pain signal can now go into the background, to the field of the intelligence of awake awareness, rather than the small self or small mind. There is a connection to the source of intelligence, a larger field of open-hearted awareness that is embodied and compassionately comforting.

Three Hypotheses

I believe the primary role of a teacher is to introduce students to their inner teacher, to encourage curiosity, an open mind, and an open heart.

Three Hypotheses

we can find which aspect of consciousness we’re experiencing through and untangle the knots of confusion. We can do this by incorporating mindful glimpses into our lives to navigate a new and more profound way of seeing, knowing, and being.

Three Hypotheses

Even though I use terms like awareness, mind, and Self to describe consciousness, what I am pointing to is beyond words and descriptions. We can understand our consciousness not by talking about it or thinking about it or even labeling it but by wholly seeing, knowing, and being it ourselves.

Three Hypotheses

The Buddhist word for suffering in Sanskrit is dukkha, sometimes translated as “perpetual dissatisfaction.”

Three Hypotheses

When dukkha is addressed by relaxing out of a small mind and small self, we discover the sense of effortless mindfulness, the sense of Ground of Being, the sense of true nature and natural interconnectedness.

Three Hypotheses

Although freedom and well-being are ever present in and as us, we still experience suffering because we are viewing from a limited perspective. This suffering is neither punishment nor caused by something we have done wrong, but instead, it is a current human habit to identify with the limited patterns of consciousness. We are unable to access our natural capacity because we don’t even know it’s possible or how to awaken.

Three Hypotheses

It’s important to remember that the freedom and well-being we seek are already within us. It does not need to be created or developed but simply realized

Three Hypotheses

We can’t use limited awareness, small mind, or small self to solve the problems that they are creating. We can’t train our small mind to be capable of awakening. Our limited awareness can’t know awake awareness. And the small self is not the one who awakens!

Three Hypotheses

it is important to understand what the conceptual small mind is. Buddhist mind science recognizes the familiar five senses—smell, taste, touch, hearing, and sight—and adds to that a sixth sense: thinking. If thinking is a sense, it is as illogical to say, “I think, therefore I am” as to say, “I hear, therefore I am” or “I taste, therefore I am.”

Three Hypotheses

If thought is information like sound or taste, and thinking is a sense, then who or what are thoughts appearing to? When thinking appears to itself, thought to thought, it creates a “thinker,” which is a self-referencing loop. In Tibetan Buddhism, this looping, or “selfing,” is called the “afflictive consciousness” because it creates a limited thought-based sense of self

Three Hypotheses

Both ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience agree that there is no location of a separate self in our brain. The brain is a symphony, but no conductor can be found. Living as if there were a small, separate self inside your head is living from a mistaken identity, which is the root of suffering.

Three Hypotheses

From the small self, we are living in too tight a place, not knowing that there is more space available. Too small a mind creates anxiety or depression, too-narrow awareness keeps us seeing with blinders on, and too small a sense of self creates a feeling of separation, loneliness, fear, and isolation. A full, intimate emotional life is too much for this small self because it is a thought-based creation. When operating from a small self, our energy goes down into depression, up into anxiety, or is acted out in emotional outbursts or addiction. We create suffering by trying to solve our problems with only the resources of a small, separate self. The way out of suffering is not to create a smarter small mind, trying to figure it out, or even meditate to calm the small self.

Three Hypotheses

From heart-mind, we move from simply “not knowing” to a “not knowing that knows” things directly, without reflective thought, which is like a continuous intuition

Three Hypotheses

we can feel an embodied awareness-energy interconnected with the world from our naturally awake heart-mind.

Three Hypotheses

the root word for empty—svi in Sanskrit—is often described through a metaphor as the invisible life essence within a seed that allows it to grow into a tree

Three Hypotheses

I realized that the simplest and best definition of emptiness is “interconnectedness.”

Three Hypotheses

True well-being, the relief of suffering, is not just based on belief or positive thinking but comes from the core realization of interconnected Self, in which we directly experience the reality that we and others are not separate. No matter what difficulties we experience and what beliefs we may have, our true no-self Self is always here to help us come back into perspective, compassion, and wholeness.

Three Hypotheses

The first four types of awareness related to small mind, small self, and deliberate mindfulness are:

1. Attention

2. Self-awareness

3. Subtle energy awareness

4. Mindful awareness

Three Hypotheses

These are followed by four types of awareness that are related to awareness-based mind, Self, and effortless mindfulness:

5. Awake awareness

6. Local awake awareness

7. Awake awareness-energy

8. Open-hearted awareness

Three Hypotheses

GLIMPSE Looking from Awareness

When you look at awareness now, does it have a limited shape, size, location, or color? When you look from awareness, is there a center from which you are looking, or is everything interconnected?

Three Hypotheses

Self-awareness, which is one of humanity’s greatest strengths, leads to the creation of a small self when we split our thinking into two parts. Self-awareness becomes the center of the separate small self that feels like “me.” Self-awareness is aware from a manager part (which we’ll explore in chapter 7), sometimes called “ego identity.”

Three Hypotheses

Self-awareness is a psychological term referring to self-reflection and the ability to split off thought to create an observer of one’s thoughts, individuality, and behaviors.

Three Hypotheses

Mindful awareness is a witnessing awareness that is sourced in the subtle mind. Subtle mind is what we attempt to access in deliberate mindfulness in order to observe the contents of the mind. It is the ability to step back like a detached observer of thoughts, sensations, and feelings. Mindful awareness is aware of the everyday mind and the commenting, planning, judging functions of self-awareness. It is nonjudgmental and neutral—not attached to thought. Mindful awareness is located as a meditative point of view, which some people call “the observing ego.” Whereas self-awareness is a layer of the personality that has an agenda, mindful awareness is the subtlest layer of the small self.

Three Hypotheses

Neither attention, self-awareness, subtle energy awareness, nor mindful awareness can know awake awareness. The next four types of awareness are where effortless mindfulness begins.

Three Hypotheses

We can only know awake awareness when it has recognized itself.

Three Hypotheses

Awake awareness is natural awareness that is present already, available to all of us without having to be developed or created.

Three Hypotheses

Effortless mindfulness begins by looking back through the mindful witness to this spacious, already-awake awareness

Three Hypotheses

The magic we discover is that there is seeing but without a seer or source of seeing.

Three Hypotheses

Local awareness is the dimension of awake awareness that can move from identification with our body, small mind, and small self to awake awareness

Three Hypotheses

Local awareness is like another sense that is designed to know awake awareness. It allows us to be both spacious and present,

Three Hypotheses

Here, the wave of awareness emerges from the ocean of awareness while still being of it.

Three Hypotheses

We begin to notice infinite boundless love as the ground and then notice our true Self as the open-hearted awareness loving presence.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

Understanding that spacious awareness is already awake without our help means that we do not have to create it or develop it. All we need to do is to discover how we can know it and then simply surrender, mingle, or plug into that source. The trick to recognizing spacious awareness is to be clear that we have unhooked from the mind and then the body, without spacing out and without referencing some state of energy or imagination either. Through glimpses, we can learn to distinguish being aware of the space in the room from spacious awareness.

We begin awareness of awareness by having local awareness unhook from thinking and identification with other parts of us. Then local awareness can move to other senses and then to space as transitions to awareness of awareness. Try these five mindful glimpses to see which work best for you.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

Now let’s have local awareness unhook from thought, notice one of our senses, and discover local awareness aware of spacious awareness.

1. Unhook local awareness from thought and have awareness move to hearing the sounds coming to one of your ears.

2. Don’t focus on who is hearing or what is heard, just the sensation of hearing.

3. Notice how local awareness is able to focus on the vibration of sound at one ear.

4. Just as local awareness can focus on a small area, notice how local awareness can now unhook and open into the space in which sound is coming and going.

5. Rather than focusing on the movement of sounds through space, let local awareness rest in the open space.

6. Local awareness opens to space until it discovers that open space is aware.

7. Feel that local awareness is like an air bubble that opens and blends into the air, mingling with the field of spacious awareness that is already aware.

8. Let awareness palpably know and feel itself as spacious awareness, without looking to thought or sensation.

9. Stay with this contentless, timeless, boundless awareness itself. Remain undistracted without effort. Take as long as you need to get a feel for spacious awareness being aware of itself without any physical or mental references. It can be like tuning in to a radio station of silent pure awareness. Only the knowing from awake awareness can know when you’re there.

10. Relax into abiding as this field aware of itself without subject or object for a minute or two.

11. Notice the moving thoughts and then notice stillness. Now rest as awareness of stillness and movement that is silent, thought-free, timeless, boundless, contentless, yet fully alert and aware.

12. Once awake awareness is primary, notice that awake awareness is spontaneously aware of itself, by itself, as itself without any effort.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

GLIMPSE Awareness of Awareness

In this glimpse, local awareness moves outward into space and then discovers spacious awareness. Here, we will let awareness mingle with space and then become aware of itself. Because our senses tend to be oriented to the front of our bodies, it might be easier to discover spacious awareness when focusing on the space at the sides of your body or the space behind your body.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

THE FIRST YOU-TURN

Through the next, and final, glimpse in the first foundation of effortless mindfulness, we’ll explore how awareness is normally hidden in the background, identified with thought, or misunderstood to be a way of perceiving the things around us. In many meditation systems, awareness, attention, and consciousness are treated as if they’re the same. In Western psychology, and even in our common speech, we often use the words aware and conscious as if they mean the same thing. For example, “I am aware of what I am reading” and “I am conscious of what I am reading.” We also use awareness and attention interchangeably, such as when we say, “Bring your attention to what you’re hearing” or “Bring your awareness to what you’re hearing.” When we conflate these terms, we are regarding awareness as a limited type of consciousness that is “between” self, as the subject, and an object, as in “I am aware of that cup.” In this case, awareness is the link between you—the one who is looking—and the cup, which is the object being seen.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

Awake awareness is different from attention or consciousness. Awake awareness is not the intermediary between you and an object; it is the foundation of who you are and how you know.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

Our current sense of “I” is constructed around self-reflective thinking, so when we think we are something smaller than awareness itself, awareness can get caught in the middle and reduced to a function or tool of the mind and identity.

Currently, awareness does not feel like the foundation of who I am but instead feels like it’s in the middle: “I am aware of seeing the cup.” Here, we are acting as if awareness were a functional tool of “I,” as something that connects me and objects around me (that are perceived as outside of me): “I am → aware of → seeing the cup.” Let’s look more closely at this process:

• “I” is a pattern of thought—small mind—that takes itself to be the subject.

• “Am” is currently connected to the “I” of small self instead of awake awareness.

• Awake awareness is reduced to being seen simply as “attention,” a tool for focusing. It’s considered to be an intermediary process rather than the foundation of who I am.

• “Seeing” is the particular sense that is being used in this example.

• “The cup” is the object of focus—the seen.

When local awareness does a “you-turn” and looks back, it sees through the small sense of self and discovers that awake awareness is now where “I am” is located.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

The you-turn reverses the process of perception: Awake awareness can move from being a mode of perception between you and something you observe to instead turning around and looking back through the mental pattern of “I” to find itself. Awake awareness becomes the primary location of observing. The “am” is no longer located within thinking but is now directly experienced as awake awareness aware of itself, your body, and the cup.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

As local awareness becomes aware of spacious awareness, it begins to recognize itself. Local awareness and spacious awareness then unite, realizing they have always been united, like an air bubble bursting into air. From this perspective, there is no longer a subject knowing an object; there is just awake awareness knowing itself. Awake awareness knows itself by being itself.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

Awake awareness is infinite, invisible, inherent, and most importantly, intelligent. However, what it knows has no conceptual information. There is a new kind of direct knowing that starts with not-knowing, which becomes a not-knowing that knows.

This awareness of awareness is what gives us the opportunity to experience essential freedom, the first glimpse of who we essentially are: boundless ground that needs nothing and can’t be hurt by anything. It can feel like such a relief from difficulties in life that one of my students who had this experience asked, “Is this legal?”

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

One way to check if we are in the second foundation of effortless mindfulness is to inquire: “Am I aware of spacious awareness, or is spacious awareness aware of itself?” Be with this inquiry and experiment with it until you can start feeling a shift in your perspective so that awareness is now resting as itself.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

You are not the one experiencing awake awareness; you are that. It is important to have this shift of subject-object, this shift in realizing who is “you.” This is a shift out of self-center and identity. If you can abide as awareness of itself—contentless, timeless, boundless, knowing—for even three seconds to three minutes, that experience can shift you into realization. To be free of our thought-based operating system, we just need to realize ourselves as spacious awareness until it becomes our new boundless ground.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

GLIMPSE Mind, the Gap

This glimpse is about finding awake awareness in the gap between thoughts. You may be familiar with a meditation practice in which you repeat a word or a sacred phrase, known as a mantra. Instead, in this glimpse you focus not on the word or its meaning but on the space—and awareness—between the words. Give your thinking mind the simple task of repeating a word to occupy it while you become aware of the gaps between your thoughts. As you explore the presence of awareness in this space, you may begin to notice that awake awareness is already aware.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

While doing this practice, you may notice that there are two types of space. One is physical, such as the space in the room you are in—the absence of objects and content. In art, this is called “negative space”—the space between things. The other type of space is presence, which is aware and awake. It is not just empty—it is a positive space. Awake awareness is alive and conscious.

Whether there are thoughts or no thoughts on the screen of your mind, there is a background knowing that can move to the foreground. This silent, spacious awake awareness doesn’t use thought to look to other thoughts to confirm that you know what you know.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

1. Begin by silently and slowly repeating in your mind, “Blah,” with some space in between. “Blah … blah … blah.” Allow the word blah to float through the space of your mind like a feather. Don’t create any other thoughts or be interested in any thoughts that arise. Let blah occupy all the interest and activity of thinking.

2. Begin to be aware of the thought-free space between the words: “Blah” … space … “blah” … space … “blah” … space.

3. Next, become more interested in the quality of the space between the words. See if you notice that the space is not just a gap but that the space itself is aware. “Blah” … aware space … “blah” … aware space … “blah” … aware space.

4. Feel the spacious awareness in between the words and all around them as a field of awake awareness in which the word blah and other thoughts now appear. Feel your mind not as a solid thing but as clear, open, and aware.

5. Stop saying “blah” to yourself and just feel into the space you have been noticing. Feel and be this awareness that is awake and alert. Notice that you don’t need to go to thought to be aware. Notice the ease and natural welcoming of all experiences that arise.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

GLIMPSE Awareness Yoga

In yoga training, one is taught how to move the body to feel renewed, refreshed, balanced, and unified. Here, we will learn to move awareness for the same purposes. Use these four pointers one at a time to shift your view, pausing in between to experience what they point to. Instead of trying to understand the meaning of each pointer, just be curious. Let your awareness look. Repeat each one as many times as you like. You can say these phrases with your eyes open or closed, as you prefer. The important thing is to shift awareness to look and to feel where you’re looking from after you shift.

1. Look from awareness and say to yourself: I am curious what the next thought will be.

2. Now look from awareness to experience the space through which thoughts and sounds are moving.

3. Now look from awareness to see: What is aware of space and moving thoughts?

4. Now look from awareness and rest as the awake awareness that is aware of itself, by itself, as itself.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

GLIMPSE Infinite No-Self

In this practice, we shift away from the mindful witness and any tendency to contract into a point of view. The feeling of being a self is the feeling of being an observer with a particular location. No-self is the realization that we are everywhere, nowhere, and here. We can let go of the tendency to construct a subject-versus-object view or holding on to positive qualities that arise—like bliss, clarity, and non-thought. We no longer look from a particular location of the ego, the meditator, or sky-like spacious awareness. When we shift away from the self-location, we can let everything be as it is, and paradoxically, we will feel ordinary in an open-hearted way.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

Here, we will check for any remnant of the location of an ego, meditator, or “small self” viewpoint so awake awareness can become aware of itself.

1. As you take the next breath, focus on the feeling of breath moving in your body. Unhook local awareness from the focusing and have it search your entire body-mind from head to toe to see if a self as an object or subject can be found. Allow the awareness to scan quickly and thoroughly until nothing is found.

2. Upon not finding a “self” located in any one place or looking from any one place, notice how awake awareness and aliveness are free and unconfined and seamlessly permeating.

3. Notice that the field of open and empty awareness is aware of itself, by itself, as itself. The awake field is infinitely aware from everywhere, interconnected to everything. The ocean of awareness knows all waves from inside the wave.

4. Feel that there is no boundary, no center, and yet observing is occurring with no observer.

5. Notice the arising of your human body out of formless awake awareness, moment to moment.

6. Notice the quality of the Now, where everything is here all at once.

7. Let everything be as it is, ordinary and free.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

the realization is that energy is made of awake awareness. The feeling is like the ocean of awareness is arising as this wave of my body and mind, which are not separate from the awake field of awareness-energy.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

Certainly, on the visual and physical, conventional level, we experience things as separate objects. However, we are talking about a simultaneous perception of interconnectedness on the most essential level, which has been called “emptiness-appearance.”

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

We can remain effortlessly focused in awake-energy because its foundation is awareness-energy rather than a changing mind or a detached mindful witness. From here, we can practice effortless mindfulness embodied, as we observe thoughts, sensations, feelings, and mind objects. We see that thoughts are not who we are, but we also have the insight that they are made of awareness, and there is no need to get rid of them.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

We learn to trust that knowing is happening from the intelligence of awareness-energy, and we no longer need to return to conceptual thinking for a second opinion or to create a “thinker.” Once this important foundation is established, we can move to the new, daily operating system of open-hearted awareness in the world.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

This is important because many people I meet have a “waking up” experience but lapse back into a mindful witness, detached observer, or big-sky mind. Our interest is not waking up from our sense of self into separation from daily life but instead waking into a fully alive human life. The stage of awake-energy is an integration in which we discover that energy is made of awareness, so we can feel embodied and alive without getting stuck in a detached witness or becoming reidentified.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

Awareness-energy is often called “simultaneous mind” or the stage of “one taste” in the Mahamudra tradition because all unique appearances have the same essential flavor of awake awareness.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

from the intelligence of awareness-energy, we feel connected with everyone and everything. There is a sense of being simultaneously everywhere, nowhere, and very much here. A sense of being interconnected is a unity feeling that begins to be embodied and grounded in a new sense of safety.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

There is a Tibetan Buddhist practice called “sky-gazing.” You physically go to a place with a wide-open vista, and you become interested in looking at the open space. The exercise moves from being vision based to being awareness based. First you notice the open space in front of you, then within you, and then behind you. This gives you an experience of awareness of awareness.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

Inquire: Am I aware of spacious awareness, or is spacious awareness aware of itself, by itself?

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

The Ground of Being is experienced not only inside your body but also all around. The new feeling is not that “awareness is in my body” but that your body is arising from awareness. There is a deep restfulness as well as a new motivation to engage in life from a natural flow state.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

People who learn this foundation of awake awareness-energy embodied are astounded that they can immediately shift into this Ground of Being level of awareness-energy while doing everyday activities in a stress-free flow—with their eyes open. The Ground of Being is the ultimate well-being that is here no matter what difficulties occur in our daily lives, though it can sometimes be in the background.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

what about the energy? Many people begin to feel a subtle sense of bliss arising both within their body and as if the world is alive and sparkling. This is the movement, feminine, dancing aliveness that is called “shakti” in India and “emptiness-bliss” in Tibetan Buddhism. This is a real and natural quality of this foundation’s unfolding that is different from blissful pleasure that comes and goes.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

In this fourth foundation, we become aware that we are both infinite and finite. It feels like the ocean of awareness-energy is arising as the wave of a new sense of “me.”

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

note another paradox about awareness-energy: in the fourth foundation there is simultaneously a sense of energy and flow (movement) and of stability (stillness).

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

It is in this fourth foundation of awareness-energy embodied that you feel both the ground and the flow state, or that feeling of “being in the zone.” This is the other paradox of the fourth foundation: a new kind of stillness and flow. In this flow state, you’re effortlessly moving around, doing activities in which time slows down; your concept of self is interconnected with everything around you; and you’re embodied and operating from a nonconceptual intelligence that knows just what to do.

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

When we transition back from boundless, timeless awake awareness to awake awareness-energy embodied, we begin to feel that the Now is both timeless and able to function with conventional clock time. If we want to learn to be in the Now, we can ask, “When am I?”

Practicing the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness

GLIMPSE Emotions as Awareness-Energy

When you start this exercise, bring your awareness within your body and find any emotion that is there now. You can do this exercise with any emotion, pleasant or unpleasant, but when you do this for the first time, please try it with an unpleasant emotion. If you don’t have an unpleasant emotion available, choose the unpleasant emotion that you encounter most often in your life. If necessary, you can go to a memory or a recent situation in your life to bring up an unpleasant emotion. By practicing this, you will learn that you can feel sad without being sad, anger without being angry, and more.

1. Find an emotion—fear, anger, or jealousy, for instance—and begin by feeling it fully. (I’ll use sadness as an example in the following steps; you can substitute whatever emotion you choose.)

2. Silently say to yourself, “I am sad.”

3. Fully experience what it is like to say and feel “I am sad.” Stay with this experience until you feel it completely.

4. Now, instead of saying, “I am sad,” take a breath and say, “I feel sadness.”

5. Notice the shift from “I am” to “I feel.” Experience this shift and the new feeling of being. From here, feel your relationship to the sadness as a feeling.

6. Shift again by saying, “I am aware of feeling sadness.”

7. Experience awareness of feeling sadness fully. Shift into an observing awareness. Notice the different emotional quality that comes from this.

8. Shift again, and silently say “Sadness is welcome.”

9. Starting from awareness, experience what welcoming the feeling is like.

10. Feel the awareness-energy embody and embrace the feeling. Notice the different emotional quality that comes from welcoming. Sense the support that welcoming brings.

11. Finally, say, “Awareness and sadness are not separate.”

Pause to feel awake awareness around and within you, permeating the emotion fully, but without identifying with the emotion or rejecting it. Feel awareness-energy with emotion fully from within. Feel the awareness, the energetic aliveness, the deep stillness of presence. Notice the feeling of looking out at others and the world from this embodied, connected, open-hearted awareness.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

Nonduality begins with a recognition of a transcendent dimension of reality—awake awareness

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

nonduality means that the dualistic relative reality we experience, of separate energies and things, is made of awake awareness. So awake awareness and appearances are not essentially two different things.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

The study looked at our brain’s two primary networks: the externally focused task-positive mode and the internally focused default mode. During goal-oriented activity, the default mode network is deactivated, and the task-positive network is activated. When we are daydreaming, creatively imagining, or thinking about a situation, our internal network is activated, and our external network is deactivated

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

Our brain continuously and rhythmically alternates between these two networks, which leads to a feeling of distraction. We can notice this when, for instance, we are standing in line and realize our attention goes outward to what’s going on in the room and then shifts to become aware of something we’re thinking about. We are not intentionally doing this; our brain is alternating, and our attention follows.

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

One insight from Josipovic’s study was that one-pointed focused attention (FA) tends toward “suppression of the activity of the default network.”7 FA and OM each suppress one of the two brain modes. While suppressing one mode gives us relief, we cannot function for long from just one mode. If we are only focused on monitoring our inner world (OM), we cannot complete daily tasks; if we are only mindful of outer tasks (FA), we can become unaware of our inner life and lose the creativity that comes from free association and creative thinking

Discovering Effortless Mindfulness

For me as a subject, NDA (or effortless mindfulness) is the experience of being undistracted without effort, aware of what’s going on inside and outside as a continuous, interconnected, seamless flow.

Awakening Glimpse by Glimpse

For example, if I was feeling upset, I would acknowledge my feelings and shift awareness out of the cloud of stormy emotions and then, from this open mind and open heart, return to the emotions with a new view. This brought such relief and joy! It was like emerging from a dark tunnel to a beautiful view, except I was not only seeing the view. It was as if I were viewing from an open, quiet, loving intelligence that was connected to everything. How could this freedom be so close and yet so hidden from most people’s day-to-day experience? How was it that despite all the progress humanity has made in other areas—like medicine, communication, and technology—that shifting into awake awareness was not something that was recognized and taught to everyone?

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The Way of Effortless Mindfulness - Loch Kelly

The Way of Effortless Mindfulness

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