15 Guided Meditation – Tuning into the Self-sense

Lenses of Insight
Lenses of Insight
15 Guided Meditation – Tuning into the Self-sense
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Releasing the self-sense: through sensation, feeling, thought, and the self-sense, choosing a lens at each level. Chapter 5.

Thirty to forty-five minutes. Posture, the clearing breaths, and the presence anchor are as in chapter 2. Releasing clinging is the default lens here. You can also do the same exploration of layers with impermanence instead, or as well, if it is useful.

  1. Settle, find your presence anchor, and open to the whole body and its felt sense. Set the intention: to bring awareness to more and more of your experience. Read the overall tone, contracted or open, without needing it to be different.
  2. Sensation. Notice what you are seeing, eyes open or closed; then what you are hearing; then the sensations of the body. Allow all sensations to be exactly as they are. Come back to the felt sense and notice what that has done.
  3. Feeling. Notice the feeling tone – pleasant, unpleasant, neutral – or simply the felt energy in the body. There might also be emotion or some kind of complex feeling. Relax the body: open, soften, allow. Let it be, and let it shift.
  4. Thought. Bring attention to where thoughts seem to happen – in the head, in front of or behind the eyes, between the ears. Notice what is there, inner speech or images or a bubbling stream, and release any clinging around it. If there is very little mental activity, enjoy the relative stillness. If a thought is hard to catch as it happens, look back at the last one, even the one that distracted you, and check whether it was heard or seen.
  5. As thought frees up, watching it can become like watching a brook: seeing and hearing the trickle of the stream, without being pulled into any of it. Let all experience come and go, curious but unconcerned.
  6. Then the self-sense. Notice what it is like right now, read in the body. Notice how contraction appears in the body when experience is glued together. If you like, put a number on it, zero to ten.
  7. Look at how it is made. Notice how sensation, feeling, and thought get glued into something that feels solid, something you are identified with. Watch the gluing without trying to undo it. You may see it forming, and then falling apart.
  8. Let it be like a rainbow: vividly appearing, yet insubstantial. Whatever self-sense is there, relax around it, and notice that it changes on its own.
  9. At any point, if you meet a wall – resistance, difficulty, something you seem to be butting up against – bring that in too. Welcome it in, seen clearly, without adding more to it.
  10. Rest in whatever has loosened. When the self-sense thins, notice that something still knows. Rest as that knowing.
  11. As you come out, notice whether the self-sense starts coming back in, and things begin to get glued together again. Watch it reform, with the lens still on.

From the audio companion to Lenses of Insight: A field guide to insight practice, by Kynan Tan. Recorded at a Day of Practice at the Buddhist Library in Sydney on 26 July 2026, and at an online workshop on 6 September 2026.

The field guide has every practice written out, and the understanding that goes with it. Get it free: Lenses of Insight field guide.