Guided Meditation: Awareness is reverential about all phenomena; Dharmette: Very brief overview of Shinzen Young’s approach

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Meditation: Awareness is Reverential about Phenomena; Talk: Brief Sketch of Shinzen Young's approach. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 16, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Awareness is reverential about all phenomena

Take your time to settle in, adjust, and find your center.

Practice is about feeling good and the willingness to feel bad consciously. We do what we can to feel good, to arrive and relax, to soothe ourselves. But feeling bad is no problem whatsoever. Feeling good and feeling bad are just forever in conversation in a human life, in our Dharma practice.

We have so many fantasies about pleasure. Here in our practice, we just relax the line that divides pleasant and unpleasant. We just assume if it's here, it belongs. If it's here, it's not an accident. If it's here, it's here of some necessity. This allows us just to relax all the anxiety and strain that goes into sorting our experience into piles. And just breathe.

Awareness has a kind of reverence for all experience. The affective qualities, the valence, the hedonic tone—pleasant, unpleasant, neutral. Our preferences have no respect for any of this. Fair enough. But awareness is very respectful of phenomena.

The stability of attention is inversely proportionate to the effort we might make. Even effort feels like noise. But so often effort is beautiful, necessary. Just meeting your mind as it is now. It is a kind of improvisational wisdom practice.

If you were guiding a group of people in meditation, what would you say now? Maybe say it to yourself. Listen to your wisdom.

Dharmette: Very brief overview of Shinzen Young’s approach

It's good to sit with you. Even though I've had to find my own voice in practice, even when I'm not talking like him, I find myself thinking often of Shinzen Young^[1], a teacher that I sat with for more than a decade. I teach quite differently from how he does, much less systematically. He's highly systematic. I teach differently, but I feel infused by his wisdom and care over the years. I thought to just provide a very brief sketch of his approach to mindfulness. There's a lot in there, and you can unfold it over time, but for what it's worth, here is the rundown.

First, just to say that the definition of what mindfulness is, what mindful awareness is, is contested, and that's a good thing. No one gets to give a final definition of mindfulness. We can look in the Suttas^[2], the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta^[3], and glean as much as possible to understand what the Buddha might have meant about mindfulness. But it's actually an open question, and it's good that there is an interdisciplinary dialogue about what mindfulness is.

Shinzen offered a kind of unusual and, I think, potent definition of mindfulness, saying that it's a threefold skill set working together: concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity. Those three skills work together in order to generate mindfulness.

Often we distinguish mindfulness from concentration. People say, "Oh, I like concentration practice. I'm a Jhāna^[4] teacher. I teach meditative absorption." Or, "I like mindfulness practice. I'm a mindfulness teacher." But in the Suttas, and here in Shinzen's definition, these aren't really orthogonal constructs, entirely separate. Mindfulness, in other words, entails some measure of attentional stability, otherwise we don't sink into phenomena. That sense of being pinged around by phenomena is often a sign that the tranquility, the Samādhi^[5] side, is not adequately developed.

In Shinzen's system, concentration is defined as the ability to focus on what you want, when you want. It's that simple. It's a way of selectively highlighting particular phenomena, say our breathing, and then the stickiness of the rest of the phenomenal world falls away when there's a high level of concentration. Generally speaking, concentration makes all experience richer. When our attention is gathered, the data stream is fuller. There's more data. We're not just glancing off the surface of phenomena.

Sensory clarity is the ability to untangle the elements of sensory events. Normally we experience our life as a kind of amalgamation. It's all glued together, and we don't realize that we're experiencing many different streams of data simultaneously. Mindfulness actually helps us slow down and untangle these different threads of experience. Sensory clarity is also alluding to the ability to detect subtler and subtler experience—experience that was previously subconscious. Thoughts, feelings, urges, and moods that might have flown under the radar of awareness now become clarified and more noticeable.

Subtle is significant. As Shinzen would say, when we practice this, we recognize subtle is significant. It may be subtle in one sense and have huge cascading effects across the heart and mind. Sometimes even what we call unconscious motivations have a conscious or subconscious fingerprint. We have to get subtle.

Then, equanimity is the third skill. The ability to let sensory experience come and go without push or pull. Sometimes Shinzen would call it a radical permission to feel. He would say that while we were all in pain during a long ninety-minute or two-hour sit: radical permission to feel. Feeling, in the end, is the ultimate arbiter^[6] of the manifestation of clinging and letting go. So that's what we're cultivating when we're cultivating mindfulness: concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity.

But the first question is really: why develop mindfulness? As he said, it is threefold: to appreciate self and world, to transcend self and world, and to improve self and world.

To appreciate is to experience the senses with radical fullness and gratitude. Not the thin gruel^[7] of me in my gratitude journal, but when it's deep—the richness of experience, the richness of goodness. How fully can we experience goodness? Ordinary mind doesn't just glance off of pain; it glances off of goodness, too. With mindfulness, the richness, the satisfaction, and the poignancy of our life runs deep.

The language he uses, "transcend self and world," points to knowing what lies outside of self-referential awareness, or knowing what awareness is like when it doesn't taste like self. He's pointing to the deep end of the pool. In the penumbra of cessation^[8] called emptiness, you no longer feel this world in exactly the same way.

These experiences of appreciation and transcendence help us refine our personhood and be of deeper service, to be a more potent cause and condition for happiness in others.

Where is mindfulness cultivated? The traditional answers are the foundations^[9] or maybe with the aggregates, the heaps^[10]. Maybe this is blasphemous, but Shinzen found some of that confusing, so he cut up the sensory pie differently: into visual experience, auditory experience, and somatic experience.

There's visual experience. If we're sighted, there is physical sight and mental images—I can picture the screen and my body right now. And then visual rest: some kind of blank mental screen I can attune to, just giving visual attention to that soothing, restful space.

Then auditory experience. There are physical sounds, like the sound of snapping. There's mental talk, what we normally call thinking, the auditory function of thinking. If you say your name silently, you'll hear it. And then auditory rest: external silence or the internal silence of the mind.

Then somatic experience. Physical body sensations, emotional body sensations, and somatic rest—the body in deep rest or tranquility. That's not exhaustive and leaves out some experiences, but it covers almost everything. There's seeing, hearing, and feeling—external, internal, and restful.

Lastly, how is mindfulness cultivated? Staying with this theme of three, his system outlines three basic approaches to meditation.

The first is noting: tracking sensory events with or without mental labels. You're directing attention in a very particular way. For example, my breathing: there's the physicality of the breath coming in at the top of the inhalation, the exhale, and the bottom of the exhale. Maybe I'm noting, which is mental labeling, or maybe it's noticing wordlessly. But it's a deliberate tracking of sensory events.

The second option for cultivating mindfulness is doing nothing: dropping the intention to control attention. It's wild how much we attempt to control our attention. We just drop that intention. If we can drop it, we drop it. If we can't drop it, it's not our intention. That is a second mode of practice.

The third way of cultivating mindful awareness is nurturing the positive. Intentionally creating positive mental images, positive mental talk, and pleasant emotional body sensations. Loving-kindness would fall into that realm.

So, three, three, three, three. Three attentional skills: concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity. Three jobs: appreciating, transcending, and improving self and world. Three sensory modalities: visual, auditory, and somatic. And three basic approaches to meditation: noting, doing nothing, and nurturing the positive.

That's the rundown. For what it's worth, please explore as you see fit and leave whatever feels irrelevant behind. Thank you all for your attention.

Announcements

Thanks, folks. I'll be away next week, so I will see you on the 29th. I'm jumping into the chat here. Take good care.