Disidentification

Meditation can easily become myopic. In fact, it necessarily starts out this way. While concentration is low, attention needs to be held on very small, specific objects of focus. But in the long term, the name of the game is disidentification, which means widening attention to include the parts of ourselves that we are identified with (emotional sensations, thoughts/beliefs, etc.).

As concentration and clarity improve, a practitioner can include more and more of the periphery in awareness, both in practice and in life. As awareness becomes wider and more subtly sensitive, the practitioner is less and less likely to identify with one bit of sense experience while examining another. In the long term, he/she can experience all of life (and all of self) as a process–a flow.

Posted in Impermanence, Technique.