What Is Open Monitoring Meditation?
When practicing open monitoring, practitioners are asked to concentrate their attention on the here and now rather of letting their minds wander to other topics. It is important for practitioners to accept their random thoughts, feelings, and physiological experiences without passing judgment on them.
What is open awareness meditation?
Open Awareness Meditation is a form of meditation that is the polar opposite of Focused Attention Meditation. This style of meditation is also known as open monitoring or non-directive meditation. Your attention is not focused on anything in particular; rather, it is open and stays aware of everything that is going on around it.
- Thoughts
- Feelings
- Memories
- Sounds
- Smells
- Sensations felt in the body
The practitioner is advised, rather of becoming caught up in an idea or sensation, to just witness everything and be present to whatever is happening. This is in contrast to being caught up in a thought or feeling. One of the best things about meditation is that it can be practiced by people of any age.
How do you meditate with open monitoring?
Meditation with focused attention as opposed to open monitoring – A focus, such as one’s breathing, serves as the focal center of the meditative experience in many different kinds of meditation. When practicing these specific kinds of meditation, the focus acts as an anchor.
They can be used by the meditator to induce concentration and to return to if they discover that their attention has wandered during meditation. In open monitoring meditation, one of the steps is letting the mind to wander from thought to thought. It’s possible that the mind may become aware of breathing, but rather of concentrating on it, it will only observe it and allow the idea to meander.
Thoughts come into the mind and pass out of it without any interaction or evaluation taking place. It does not matter if the thoughts are about the prosaic tasks of daily life, such as paying bills, or about flights of imagination, such as legendary creatures, or about some mix of the two, such as a unicorn-Pegasus hybrid that eats bills, they are all treated equally.
Does meditation improve concentration and creativity?
In most cases, improvements in convergent thinking occur after practicing focused attention meditation, whereas improvements in divergent thinking occur after practicing open monitoring meditation. However, one research in particular looked at the effect of meditating with one’s attention concentrated in one place while still keeping one’s awareness open on creative tasks that required both convergent and divergent thinking.
How does meditation allow the mind to drift?
Meditation with focused attention as opposed to open monitoring – A focus, such as one’s breathing, serves as the focal center of the meditative experience in many different kinds of meditation. When practicing these specific kinds of meditation, the focus acts as an anchor.
- They can be used by the meditator to induce concentration and to return to if they discover that their attention has wandered during meditation.
- In open monitoring meditation, one of the steps is letting the mind to wander from thought to thought.
- It’s possible that the mind may become aware of breathing, but rather of concentrating on it, it will only observe it and allow the idea to meander.
Thoughts come into the mind and pass out of it without any interaction or evaluation taking place. It does not matter if the thoughts are about the prosaic tasks of daily life, such as paying bills, or about flights of imagination, such as legendary creatures, or about some mix of the two, such as a unicorn-Pegasus hybrid that eats bills, they are all treated equally.