Coaching practices for Resting Awareness Meditation

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Resting Awareness Meditation, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• Every time I sit quietly and let my body relax I just drift off and fall asleep
• In a still moment I sometimes catch a glimpse of just being the space everything is happening in, not the things happening
• I calm down for a minute with my eyes closed, but the second I open them and step back into the room I snap right back into the same tight, tunnel-visioned reactivity
• I’ll surface from a meditation realizing I drifted off ten minutes ago and was completely gone the whole time
• When I finally work through a hard feeling I rush straight back into doing and it all snaps shut again

Practices that may help

1. Settling into restful alertness
   Allow the body to reach deep rest while the mind stays quietly awake.
   Transcendental Meditation (TM)
2. Rest as the witness rather than in objects
   Allow the inquiry to culminate in resting as the awareness that perceives, rather than in any object perceived.
   Self-Inquiry: Ramana Maharshi’s Path of Direct Investigation
3. Expand: widen awareness back to body and situation
   After the breath anchor, expand attention outward to include the whole body and the surrounding moment.
   The Three-Minute Breathing Space
4. Develop introspective metacognition
   Train the ability to notice, in real time, when attention has wandered — before you’ve been distracted for a long time.
   Shamatha: The Buddhist Practice of Calm Abiding
5. After RAIN: resting in natural, open awareness
   After the four steps, rest in the open awareness that remains — not returning immediately to doing.
   RAIN Meditation: Tara Brach’s Four-Step Practice
6. Glimpse practice: a 10-second recognition of aware space
   Pause, drop the question "What am I aware of?" and simply notice that awareness is already on.
   Non-Dual Awareness, Made Practical
7. Releasing the object: sitting without a focal point
   Let go of fixing attention on the breath, a mantra, or any other anchor — simply be present.
   Shikantaza: Just Sitting
8. Use the breath as the primary anchor
   Rest attention gently on the sensations of breathing — not on the idea of breathing.
   Shamatha: The Buddhist Practice of Calm Abiding
9. Open Monitoring Meditation, Made Practical
   Open monitoring meditation (also called choiceless awareness or open presence) is the practice of resting in an expansive, receptive awareness without directing attention at any single object — observing whatever arises in experience without preferring or pursuing any of it. It complements focused-attention practices and is associated with different neural signatures in contemplative neuroscience. Direct outcome evidence is limited compared to focused-attention methods.
10. Choiceless awareness — resting without an object
    Sit with attention open and receptive, letting whatever arises in experience be the meditation object — without choosing, pursuing, or rejecting any of it.
    Open Monitoring Meditation, Made Practical

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