If you’ve ever tried to meditate by staring at your breath and felt like you were fighting your own mind, there’s another approach worth knowing about: open monitoring meditation. Instead of anchoring your attention to one thing, you let awareness stay wide open and simply notice whatever shows up — a sound, an itch, a stray thought — without chasing it or pushing it away.
Table of Contents
This guide explains what open monitoring meditation actually is, how it differs from the more familiar focused-attention style (like breath counting), and gives you a concrete way to try it for the first time, plus the mistakes that trip up most beginners.
Quick Answer
Open monitoring meditation is a practice of maintaining broad, non-judgmental awareness of whatever arises in your experience — thoughts, sounds, sensations, emotions — without fixing your attention on any single object. Beginners typically do best starting with a few minutes of breath-focused (focused attention) meditation to settle the mind, then gradually widening awareness into open monitoring for 5-10 minutes at a time.
Open Monitoring vs. Focused Attention: What’s the Difference
Meditation researchers Antoine Lutz, Heleen Slagter, and colleagues popularized a simple two-category framework for describing most seated meditation styles: focused attention and open monitoring. Focused attention means picking one object — the breath, a mantra, a candle flame — and gently returning to it every time the mind wanders. Open monitoring drops the single object altogether. Instead, you rest in a broad, receptive awareness and observe whatever enters your mind or senses moment to moment, without labeling it good or bad or trying to change it.
In Buddhist contemplative traditions, this style of practice goes by several names, including ‘choiceless awareness’ (a term associated with the teacher Krishnamurti), ‘bare attention,’ and elements of Vipassana (insight) meditation and Zen ‘shikantaza’ or ‘just sitting.’ Modern secular teachers often just call it open awareness or open monitoring.
The two styles tend to train different things. Focused attention is generally considered better for building raw concentration and settling a busy mind, since it gives you something concrete to keep coming back to. Open monitoring is more about strengthening meta-awareness — the ability to notice you’re having a thought while you’re having it — and cultivating a non-reactive relationship to whatever passes through your mind, which is a core skill behind emotional regulation.
How to Start Open Monitoring Meditation as a Beginner
Most teachers recommend against jumping straight into open monitoring with zero meditation experience, because having no anchor at all can feel disorienting rather than calming. A better on-ramp: spend your first days or weeks doing short focused-attention sessions on the breath, then use the steps below to transition into open monitoring.
1. Sit somewhere quiet where you won’t be interrupted for 5-10 minutes. Keep your spine reasonably upright, whether in a chair or cross-legged on a cushion.
2. Close your eyes and take three slow, deliberate breaths to settle in. Notice the weight of your body on the seat and the feeling of your feet or hands.
3. Spend the first minute or two on your breath alone, the way you would in a standard focused-attention practice. This gives the mind something to stabilize around before you let go of it.
4. Gradually widen your attention. Instead of narrowing in on the breath, let your awareness open up to include sounds, physical sensations, emotions, and thoughts as they arise — like widening a camera lens from a tight zoom to a wide shot.
5. When something arises — a car horn, an itch, a worry about tomorrow — simply notice it without following the story or pushing it away. Let it pass through awareness like a cloud crossing the sky.
6. When you catch yourself getting pulled into a thought (this will happen constantly at first), don’t treat it as failure. Noticing you got lost IS the practice — that moment of catching yourself is meta-awareness in action. Gently return to open, spacious attention.
7. End the session gradually: let your awareness narrow back to the breath and body for a few breaths, then open your eyes.
Tips and Common Mistakes
Don’t start here if you’re brand new to meditation. Beginners who skip focused attention practice and go straight to ‘just observe everything’ often end up scattered or drowsy rather than calm. A short breath-focused warm-up first makes open monitoring far more workable.
Don’t try to suppress thoughts. The instinct when a thought pops up is to shove it away, but open monitoring is about non-reactive noticing, not blank-mindedness. Let thoughts arise and pass on their own.
Don’t confuse ‘open’ with ‘checked out.’ Open monitoring is still an active practice — you’re maintaining alert, present awareness, just without a narrow focal point. If you notice you’ve drifted into daydreaming for several minutes, that’s mind-wandering, not open monitoring.
Keep early sessions short. Five to ten minutes is plenty when you’re starting out; the quality of non-reactive attention matters more than the length of the sit.
Try guided open awareness or choiceless awareness recordings from established meditation teachers or apps if sitting in total silence feels too unstructured at first — a guide’s occasional prompts can help you stay oriented without giving you a fixed object to grip.
Explore more: Explore more mindfulness guides.
Open Monitoring Meditation FAQs
Is open monitoring meditation the same as mindfulness meditation?
They overlap heavily. ‘Mindfulness meditation’ is a broad umbrella term, and open monitoring is one of the two main techniques researchers use to categorize it (the other being focused attention). Many popular mindfulness practices blend both styles in a single session.
How long should beginners practice open monitoring meditation?
Start with 5-10 minute sessions, using the first minute or two to settle with the breath before widening into open awareness. You can gradually extend the length as staying non-reactively aware starts to feel more natural.
Why does open monitoring feel harder than breath-focused meditation?
Without a single anchor to return to, there’s less structure to hold onto, so the mind can feel more scattered at first. That’s normal — most teachers recommend building some concentration through focused attention practice before spending significant time in open monitoring.
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Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash.
