Telling someone to “open your awareness” or “let go of narrow attention” doesn’t work for everyone. Sometimes we need to take more oblique, step-by-step approaches.
Beyond the Checklist is one such approach I’ve been working on. It will help you to broaden your awareness to include more of your lived experience; but more importantly, it will help you find this “letting go” reflex. It will help you notice how it feels to stop narrowing your attention, and let you cultivate that feeling in more and more ways.
Here’s how we’ll do it: I have a few toggle lists down the page. (It’s best if you only look at the next one after finishing the previous one.) In each toggle, there’s a checklist. These are checklists of experiences you can open up to in meditation.
You aren’t trying to cycle between the different items on the checklist, but to allow all of them to be open at once.
Each time you notice you’ve closed yourself off to one, gently open back up to it. If you lose another, gently re-open to that.
When you’re consistently open to all the items on the list, such that they really don’t even feel like separate items, but a single field of experience, then you’re ready to move on to the next list.
And remember: the aim is to move beyond the checklist—to master the meta-move of opening up your experience, dropping the constant game of narrowed attention that we play. Done well, this exercise will eventually lead you to a place where checklists seem silly; where you can hold yourself open to everything in your experience, even things you never would have thought to look for or put on a list. Unexpected, strangeful things that approach sideways and change your life.
But first: we master the bunny slope.