Coming up with the right kind of language to talk about this approach to meditation has been very difficult. What seems to have happened is that I've made a slight breakthrough in the last few months. It helped putting out Unlearning Meditation and making it more available to the public. But Unlearning Meditation, which is something that I've been giving talks on for a couple of years now, is really about how to break the habits of mind in meditation. But that's not what I teach necessarily. That's one aspect of it. But what I feel I'm teaching is something of a broader nature and a particular way or style of meditating. And I've decided to call it "Recollective Awareness Meditation. " And the reason for that is the kind of awareness that is involved comes about through recollection, through recalling things in your sittings, through an act of calling back to mind or looking back upon your experiences. And the recollection in itself is a form of awareness, is a form of becoming conscious of what happens when you meditate.
The initial instructions seem to be very loose and relaxed and you just let things happen, go with what you're experiencing. Showing preference for the body as a form of structure, as having a base. But you're not really trying to change or manipulate or direct or guide or do anything with your experience. You're letting the flow of the meditative process develop naturally. But if that was the only thing that you would be doing in meditation, you would find that you're really not getting that much more aware. You may be getting a little more tranquil. You may be getting in touch with deeper feelings, with certain states of mind you might not normally get in touch with. But it doesn't necessarily increase your awareness of the meditative experience. It doesn't produce the kind of awareness that Buddha recommends for one who wants to develop on the path to wisdom.
What I have seen is that people who've tried to use moment-to-moment awareness, which is how awareness is most commonly taught, tend to try to force themselves to be in the present moment and try to just maintain a certain stance on their experience where they are either noting it, giving it a label as "feeling feeling" or "thinking thinking" or "hearing hearing," or they're just trying to be in the "now" and that's the only part of the experience they tend to value. Whenever they're in the present moment or at a moment-to-moment awareness of experience, that's when they think they're meditating. Everything else,when the mind wanders, when something else happens, they think, "That's not meditation, that's 'mind wandering,' that's 'chattering,' that's getting away from the subject of meditation or the object of meditation."
Recollective awareness can occur very close to the event. I wouldn't suggest using noting, but I would say that noting can be a form of that. That is, you're recalling something that just happened. You're becoming conscious of something that just happened. With the practice of noting, if you try to keep on top of your experience in that way, there's not going to be any flow to it. Instead, it's going to be very choppy and you're always going to be noting what you're experiencing. That's what you'd be doing. You'd be developing a kind of commentator, a second voice that would become your meditator. And that's what often happens with noting practices or trying to be in the present moment. They actually generate something else.
With recollective awareness you're not developing a commentator or another voice. You're letting your experience go on, and every so often in the sitting you may find that you become conscious of where you were. You're caught in a scenario about what you're going to say to somebody when you see that person tomorrow and you may be far along in the scenario and have said quite a bit when you finally realize, "Oh, I've been talking to this person in my mind for the last minute or two." And, at that point you would know what you were experiencing. It's a form of recollection. You might reflect back a little with a little bit of effort and recall what you were talking about, the themes, or if you saw the person's face that you were talking to, or you might recall something about the experience you just had and then drop it and then continue. And what that will do is it will not artificially disrupt the flow of your experience. Not like noting will, not like trying to be in the present moment will. Instead you find that you will naturally kind of come out of a scenario or something your mind is involved in and you look back, maybe for a few seconds, and then you may find that you go on.
And that's for thoughts and feelings and for what people consider to be mind wanderings. For of other types of experiences, such as when you're aware of your breath, you're aware of just sounds or just your body, or you're sitting in a very calm state with not too many thoughts, you may find that there's no need to recall. You're in a way naturally with your experience. You're knowing it in some way. You may not be able to put it into words. You may not be able to lodge it directly in your memory, but you are with it in a way. And you can just allow yourself to continue, to kind of just stay with what's going on and trust that, even if you're not in a fully conscious or not ideally in a wakeful state, you're still with your experience. You're still connected with what is going on.
And then after the sitting comes the most important aspect or most important act of recollection. And I would say that after your sitting when it comes to reporting or journal writing, what is going on is that you have stepped outside of the meditative process. You're no longer meditating. So any thoughts or reflections don't necessarily bring you back into a meditative state or meditative process. Instead those reflections make you more conscious of what happened when you meditated. It is very similar to recalling dreams, of keeping a dream journal. When you write down your dreams in the morning, you don't necessarily go back into dreaming. And you may find that some of the states of mind or some of the impressions and feelings you had while you were dreaming are very tenuous. They're fleeting, they're hard to get at. And you may find the exact same thing with meditation. That you don't quite have the language for it or you don't quite, you're not quite able to hold what that experience was. But it's enough that you know it. That you've reflected back and you know that you went through something that tenuous, that vague, that hard to grasp. That increases your awareness.
Now, if you were just going on, if you decided not to recollect, what's generally going to happen in your meditation practice is you're going to move from sitting to sitting and move from sitting and going out and taking care of your business and talking to people and getting involved in things, and you're not going to really have a sense of knowing some of the things that went on in the sitting. A few highlights will stick in your mind or a general mood or a general feeling may stay with you. But as far as really getting a sense of what goes on in your meditation sitting, that part will be lost. And the thing that seems to happen - it's like dreams - if you don't write down a dream sometimes, if you don't mull it over, after 2 or 3 days, it doesn't really exist anymore. You've completely forgotten it. What will happen then with the recollecting is you find that the sittings that you've remembered and recalled, when you have similar sittings, you're usually more awake, you're more attuned to what is happening. There's a certain familiarity. A sense of "I've been here before. I've been through this before." You may not have put it into words, but there is a strong sense that you know what this state of mind is. You know some of the patterns. You know kind of where it goes. You may not be able to predict it or anything like that, but you can get a sense of being more conscious of it than you would be otherwise.