Maintaining awareness

During meditation we want to have both attention and awareness. Judging the quality of our attention is relatively easy, but how do I know if I have enough awareness?

Awareness has this tricky problem, that when you check up on it—you immediately replace it with attention. Am I aware of sounds? I move my attention to my awareness of sounds, and here I am, having my attention on sounds. It seems impossible to check.

Using the four-step transition

One important use of the four-step transition is that it helps you calm down the monkey mind. We only transition when the monkey has calmed down a little. This allows us to get our attention focused on really subtle sensations, but we can also use it to preserve awareness.

At the first step of the four-step transition we're following our attention around without any restrictions—our mind feels really spacious. Spacious might sound a little vague, but it is the best word I can find for it. It feels spacious in the sense that it is inclusive and broad in scope. You experience the world around you through all the senses.

Often when we start restricting the space of our attention in the next steps—we automatically also restrict the space of our awareness. You experience this by the mind feeling less spacious. Eventually losing contact with the world around you almost completely. In these moments it feels like only the breath exists and maybe some distractions.

Congratulations! You have lost most of your awareness.

Now, this might not seem like a bad thing—I'm really focused, right? But the amount of mindfulness appears to be directly proportional to the amount of awareness.

$$\text{mindfulness} \propto \text{awareness}$$

Some traditions go one step further and claim that mindfulness is awareness.

Keeping it spacious

The loss of awareness can be solved by using the four-step transition in another way. Before we would transition when the monkey mind has calmed down a bit, now we add another requirement. We only transition when our mind feels just as spacious as in the step before.

So, during the four-step transition, we check how spacious the mind feels. If it feels less spacious than in the step before, we try to regain that spaciousness. Doing this will probably make it more difficult to maintain attention within the restricted area, but that is fine, that is part of balancing attention and awareness. Take your time going through the steps—developing attention AND awareness—the breath is not the end goal.

How to get the mind more spacious?

It would be like explaining how to move your arm. You have to figure it out for yourself, but now you have an important tool in doing that. If you can recognize the experience of spaciousness at the first step and the lack of it at the last step, then you know what needs to improve. You can recognize when you're doing it correctly and when you aren't.

I would start by trying to reduce the effort you're putting on your attention and see if that helps—but play around, transition from one step to the next and try to keep that sense of spaciousness, while also maintaining attention.