Understanding Mindfulness & Meditation

Meditation is a way of training attention. At its core, it’s simply noticing your thoughts as they arise and pass, giving yourself space to observe them without getting pulled into judgment or provoked to reaction.

While most people start with basic mindfulness (noticing thoughts, emotions, and sensations as they come and go), there’s also a deeper form of practice: nondual mindfulness. Waking Up points to this in much of its content.

We tend to feel like we’re observing our own experience unfold. Nondual practice is about seeing that your sense of being an observer is itself a part of your experience—one that you can observe. There’s just experience, and it’s appearing, evolving, and disappearing.

Mindfulness reveals what it actually feels like to be you. That may sound bizarre or nonsensical, but most of us move through the day without recognizing the character of our own experience. We’re absorbed in passing thoughts, unaware of sounds around us, oblivious to sensations in our body and even to subtle emotions that define our mood. Mindfulness interrupts this autopilot and brings you back to what's happening now.

Meditation is the deliberate practice of mindfulness. However you do it—sitting, standing, or walking—it allows you to notice your thoughts clearly. In doing so, to see that you’re not them, but the awareness in which they appear. This recognition changes how you relate to stress by creating a buffer between what happens and how you react to it—a buffer that expands with continued practice.

While basic mindfulness trains you to observe thoughts, emotions, and sensations with clarity and without judgment, the nondual mindfulness emphasized by many Waking Up teachers is different. Here, you turn attention from thought and feeling to a more fundamental part of your experience—that of being aware. With nondual practice, you learn to recognize that your awareness is not separate from the things appearing in it. There is just experience.

Many people think meditation is primarily about relieving stress and feeling more calm. But mindfulness meditation is a way of doing something more profound: understanding your mind.

Through nondual mindfulness meditation, you begin to see that thoughts are temporary, impersonal appearances in awareness—and that, more than any passing idea about yourself, this space of awareness is what you are.

This shift creates space between events in your life and your reactions to them. What’s more, it transforms your moment-to-moment experience of being yourself—of being a self at all. This may seem abstract, but it informs the way you show up for everything you do. At Waking Up, we don't draw an artificial boundary between formal meditation and the rest of life.

Through Waking Up, you learn how to pay closer attention to your conscious experience, observing the character of thought, emotion, and sensation. This brings a profound recognition of how suffering arises: not from events, but from your interpretations of them. Once you understand what’s happening in your mind, you’re able to relate to yourself and others with more clarity, equanimity, and compassion.