Choiceless Awareness
Advanced
Skill Level:
“While you are practicing just sitting, be clear about everything going on in your mind. Whatever you feel, be aware of it, but never abandon the awareness of your whole body sitting there. Shikantaza is not sitting with nothing to do; it is a very demanding practice, requiring diligence as well as alertness. If your practice goes well, you will experience the 'dropping off' of sensations and thoughts. You need to stay with it and begin to take the whole environment as your body. Whatever enters the door of your senses becomes one totality, extending from your body to the whole environment. This is silent illumination.” Master Shengyen
This technique is part of the Expanding phase of SERA, in which the OD practitioner must help participants shift their consciousness into a non-conceptual domain. With expanding the goal is to open conscious awareness further and deeper into a non-conceptual, sensate, and intuitive quality of awareness. In this way, the practitioner helps the client establish a more spacious orientation of awareness, in which sensing is amplified and thoughts are recognized like objects with various levels emotional intensity and attachment rather than truths.
As you think of unique ways to apply this technique to a new OD solution, remember that the aim of the Expanding phase is to stretch consciousness further into non-conceptual, sensate, and meta-egoic forms of awareness.
Watt, T. (2017). Spacious awareness in Mahāyāna Buddhism and its role in the modern mindfulness movement. Contemporary Buddhism, 18(2), 455-480.
Leighton, T. D. (2004). The art of just sitting: essential writings on the Zen practice of Shikantaza. Simon and Schuster.
