Guided Meditation Videos on Nondual Awareness by Michael Taft
Here is a series of twenty one meditations on what I call nondual awareness, or what I here call vast, spacious awareness. If you want to learn the basics of nondual meditation, just do these twenty three guided meditations in order, and listen to the talks afterwards.
Most of the meditations are an hour long.
If you want to learn more about nonduality, you can start here.
These nondual meditations were streamed live from my class at the San Francisco Dharma Collective. The sound is sometimes quiet or has glitches because of the live streaming. As the weeks go by, we slowly solve some of the issues, so the volume gets louder and the glitches fewer.
About Nonduality
What does it mean for a meditation to be “nondual”? In the simplest way of describing it, it means that we are dropping the sense of being an observer. In other words, instead of me over here, observing that thing over there—which is a spatial relationship constructed in the mind—we allow space to collapse and let go of any sense of being an observer.
What happens is pretty amazing. When the observer vanishes, so does the sense of the object-ness of the thing being observed. To put it another way, when the self is not a thing, no thing else is a thing either.
So instead of instead of me over here, observing that thing over there, there is just “observing” happening. It’s a very distinct and unusual type of experience at first. As we learn to let go of dualistic meditation, and drop deeper and deeper into nonduality, we realize that—rather than being something strange and rare—it is actually the fundamental ground of consciousness.
Watch these videos and do all the meditation to get a sense of this.
Befriending Your Mind
Let Go of Grasping
Discovering Sky-like Mind
The World Is Inside You
Awareness Has No Center
Directly Investigating Awareness
Allowing Vast, Open Awareness to Do Vipassana
Three Vehicle Investigation
Dissolving into Vast Spacious Awareness
Awareness Aware of Awareness
Mahamudra Vipashyana on the Moving Mind
Nondual Metta Practice
The World as Dream
The Fox Wedding
Vanishings into the Void
The Lion’s Roar
Turning the World Inside Out
Dropping Out of the Machinery of the Mind
Meditating Down the Stack
Awareness Seeing the Sense of Self
The Inconceivable
Emptiness, Emptiness
Emptiness of Thought and Feeling
Contacting Nonduality
Having done all of these meditations diligently, you will have a much better sense of what is meant by nondual awareness, and how to begin to contact it.
Even if you are deeply involved in vipassana practice, I recommend doing some of these nondual awareness meditation practices every once in a while to open things up, loosen your mind a bit, shake out the dust and cobwebs, and freshen things up.
What do I mean by “vast, spacious awareness”? Nothing other than nondual awareness, buddha nature, tathagatagarbha, rigpa.
photo of cranes by Michael Taft