I’ve just added two more resources to the website: the Choiceless-Awareness Meditation Warmup and the Choiceless-Awareness Meditation.

We could categorize meditation in different ways, but today I’ll make the distinction between concentration/focused-attention practices and open-monitoring/choiceless-awareness/vipassana/insight practices.

As the name implies, concentration practices have you place and repeatedly return your wandering attention to an object of meditation. This may involve looking at an object, visualizing an image in your mind, or focusing on a sensation. The Short Sitting Meditation and Long Sitting Meditation (also known as Shamatha, or “calm abiding” Meditation) on this website are concentration practices focused on breathing in the body. While we are placing our attention on an object of attention that is dynamic vs. static, this approach helps us get grounded, focused, and calm.

I think it is important to build a foundation in concentration practice, and you can always return to a strict concentration practice for a particular sitting period or a longer stretch of time when you need to get more calm and focused. This approach, however, doesn’t deepen mindfulness, and help you meet and digest more of your world and your experience. Consequently, I encourage people to eventually learn Choiceless-Awareness or Vipassana Meditation. (See the Choiceless-Awareness Warmup and Choiceless-Awareness Meditation here). In this approach, we open up our awareness to allow whatever comes to our attention to be an object of meditation—sensations, emotions, sounds, thoughts. This type of meditation allows for more insight, energy, inquiry, and engagement with the outside world.