Meditation

Amazon link. This book introduces the nondual way of meditation, which is quite different from the popular mindfulness meditation method. With mindfulness meditation, it takes years of daily practices to be awakening. The promise of effortless meditation is that through some powerful glimpses, the practitioner can experience awake awareness right away. These practices are usually quite short (most are just several minutes) but the effects are often immediate. There are over 40 glimpses in this whole book, some are quite similar to others. One problem that I experienced while going through these glimpses is that many of them are question-based. Rather than guiding the practitioner with concrete instructions, the author tends to ask a lot of questions in these glimpses. And often the answers are not obvious, especially as a new practitioner. As a result, by the end of a glimpse, I'm not sure if I "got it". Another problem is that the author likes to use a lot of adjectives to describe awareness, which sometimes can be annoying. I've never seen this style of teaching instructions in other kinds of meditations. Loch Kelly's teaching style was also complained about by other practitioners such as those on the Waking Up app. Indeed, if you are totally new to effortless meditation and listen to his meditation lessons directly, you may not understand what he's talking about. It gets better after reading his book. ...

Deliberate mindfulness has two main styles of practice: shamatha, translated as "calm abiding" and vipassana, translated as "insight meditation". It is now accepted in the field of mindfulness research to refer to calm abiding as focused attention (FA) and the insight meditation practice as open monitoring (OM). Recently, a third type of mindfulness, nondual awareness (NDA), has been included in mindfulness research studies. Here are three descriptions that might be helpful to understand the difference in these three stages of 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. ...