Tag: insight

Beholding Awareness

In becoming aware of the sense of self, it greatly helps to have a practice that enables shifting out of habitual modes into a more open and spacious awareness. One key to this is noticing the awareness, rather than objects of awareness, which creates a shift towards allowing. The self is known by this awareness (as well as body sensations, thoughts, and emotions). This beholding awareness can know the self as it arises and passes, as the sense of solidity increases and decreases. This also helps us tap into the sense of completeness of being awareness — where there is nothing missing and no self-deficiency.

This practice begins with belly breathing while counting the length of inhales and exhales, moving from equal duration, to longer exhales. This is a powerful practice for quickly calming and grounding.

In-Person Events

Upcoming events in Sydney!

Day of Practice

Sunday 5 October 2025, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Buddhist Library, Camperdown, Sydney

The opportunity to go on retreat is special. To have the time and space to focus on practice is an amazing opportunity. Unfortunately, many of us don’t get this opportunity very often, so we try to carve out bits of time that allow us to do this in the midst of a busy life. The Day of Practice is an opportunity to practise deeply in the city, without leaving our lives.

You can look at this as a detox from communications and electronics, or a nervous system reset. It can be a deep exhale and shift towards relaxation. It also fosters time to go deeper in practice and explore what is meaningful to you about meditation and the path. The day becomes a container to hold your practice and assist cultivating different states of mind.

Learn more here and register with the Buddhist Library.

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Śamatha – Practices for Deep Nervous System Resourcing

Tuesday 14 October 2025, 7:00 – 8:30 pm
Buddhist Library, Camperdown, Sydney

Śamatha (calm abiding) is a meditation practice that leads to degrees of samādhi (collectedness and unification of mind and body). This calming is a powerful resource for regulating and balancing the nervous system. Beyond simply relaxing, these practices open up the possibility of deep states of effortlessness and equanimity – which can be directly linked to states of deep nervous system regulation.

Attuning to the state of the body and mind in the present moment provides clues as to how to navigate both meditation and daily life in a way that leads to more grounding, settling, and the state of energised calm that is both a resource in itself and sets the stage for freeing insight to arise.

This session will include lecture, guided meditation, and discussion to provide a first hand experience of these practices. All levels of experience are welcome. If you are interested in a deeper exploration.

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Vipassanā – Attuning to the Felt Sense of Freedom

Tuesday 21 October 2025, 7:00 – 8:30 pm
Buddhist Library, Camperdown, Sydney

Vipassanā (insight) is the practice of Buddhist meditation that allows for seeing through obscurations to recognise our deepest nature. But how do you know that your insight practice is moving forwards?

As insight practice deepens, there is a felt reduction of clinging and suffering in the moment. You can track this with an awareness of the body and by tuning in to the sense of lightness and openness that is revealed when habitual tendencies relax. We will explore ways of tracking this felt sense of lightness and noticing the fading of perception that reveals deep insights about the fabrication of experience.

This session will include lecture, guided meditation, and discussion to provide a first hand experience of these practices. All levels of experience are welcome, however previous meditation experience is recommended to get benefit from these teachings.

If you are interested in a deeper exploration, Kynan is leading a 10-day retreat starting October 24.

Everything Within Awareness (Guided Meditation)

Awareness is knowing, spacious, and welcoming. Awareness allows everything; rejects nothing. Awareness effortlessly holds all experiences within its tender embrace. Here I offer a practice of somatically grounding through movement and breathing, relaxing and stabilising whole body awareness, and then pointing out this awareness that is already here, already knowing. Allow the instructions to be poured in. Notice any shifts that occur in response. Rest as awareness.

Transforming Emotions (Guided Meditation)

NOTE: In this practice you will intentionally invite an emotion to come forward. It’s best to bring up something that isn’t the most intense or strongest. Choose something that feels of medium intensity and manageable for your current state. The practice begins with 10 minutes of grounding and settling. If at any point you feel either overwhelmed, or disconnected and spaced out, return back to a grounding practice, or stop the meditation.

Emotions are a dimension of experience that occupies a space between physical and mental. These are felt experiences that are tangibly real, yet ephemeral and elusive. It is emotional experiences that make being a human both worth rich and wondrous, as well as difficult and oppressive. Yet we often don’t fully open to the emotional dimension. When we feel into emotions fully and allow them to be there, they will shift on their own. Emotions cease being static or stuck and instead become liquid, flowing, changing experiences that unfold the richness of being alive. Through exploring the emptiness of the emotional experience, it will often transform into an essential quality: sadness becomes love and compassion; anger reveals strength; frustration turns into clarity.

Let be (Guided Meditation)

The one spiritual truth is to “let be”. However, most people need some technique, practice, and system to figure out how to do this. In this practice, you will bring an intention of affectionate curiosity to the whole body space. Working with the body is particularly helpful here, as the body is so tied up in our sense of self and our habitual patterns, plus it also helps us get out of our heads. Occasionally asking “can I be with this?”, you’ll notice when there is resistance or trying to change the experience, allowing you to soften and relax into the unfolding present moment experience. Finally you will notice that who you are at a deeper level is not these sensations, but the awareness that is knowing, clear, lucid, and still.

Pointing Out Awareness (Guided Meditation)

You experience many sensations and contents of awareness: sounds, images, body sensations, feelings, emotions, thoughts. You can observe these and be with them. But these sensations are not you. You can have an emotion, but you aren’t an emotion. An emotion can’t fully define you. Your sense of experiencing goes way beyond this. Thoughts might reference a sense of self, but there is awareness that knows the thoughts and knows the spaces between thoughts. When the mind settles, you can notice the awareness that knows these contents. You are this awareness that is like a wide open sky. Just as the sky is more than the clouds, awareness is more than its contents. This awareness is continuous and spacious. It is a bright, clear, lucid knowing. Rest as this awareness that is completely whole and unbroken.

Practice: 15 minutes samadhi, 15 minutes pointing out instructions on awareness that is aware of itself.

Interconnectedness and Non-Separation (Guided Meditation)

So much of being a human is dominated by a sense of separation. There’s an underlying sense of being an individual entity that is somehow outside of the environment. Yet when looked at closely, your being is intimately interwoven with all of existence. You are made of the same minerals as the Earth, a home to bacteria and micro-organisms, your body is sustained by the air and sunlight. Each person you know has affected your existence, and you have affected them, in ways that can be pointed to directly. By resting into a sense of non-separation, you can find a prior sense of relatedness; a sense of the field of relation that comes before separation.

Can I be with this? (Guided Meditation)

Can I be with this? (Guided Meditation)

Duration: 30:07

Letting be is a core principle of Buddhist meditation (and perhaps a key tenet of all spiritual practices). To let be means to be with what is experienced, exactly as it is, with no need to change it. In this meditation, you will be guided to bring a curious, welcoming awareness to whatever is arising, gradually including sounds, sights, body sensations, thoughts, and emotions. The key here is welcoming any resistance. To aid this you can visualise resistance by seeing it as a Part of your mind and letting it take a form, or imagining placing it beside you. You can also use the trick of taking whatever is causing difficulty as unchanging — the one permanent thing in the universe — as a way to release the urge to change. Finally you will explore the felt sense of your whole body in this moment as the unfolding experience that is more than words and somehow in excess of what is present. Ask yourself: can I be with this, exactly as it is, with no need to change it?

Download link.

The Body is Space

YouTube | alternate | audio only (31:33)​

The body itself is made of atoms, which are mostly empty space. You can find a sense of freedom and refuge in the body through tuning in to spaciousness that arises within the body. This practice explores ways of opening to a wide-open, vast, spacious awareness. First you will allow the body to settle by connecting with the breath and then expanding to include the whole body in awareness. From here you can tune into the shifting, changing, flowing, impermanent sense of the body sensations, noticing how the body is open, empty, transparent, and light. Tuning in to the sense of space in the body, you can open to this sense of lightness and openness, and then opening to the sense of a vast, spacious awareness that holds the whole body, and all of experience, bringing tremendous relief.

Thoughts and the Thinking Process

This 26 minute guided meditation that explores one way of seeing thoughts and the thinking process. This is an insight practice that is intended to increase clarity of this specific part of experience. Here we look at how thoughts often appear as either mental images or mental talk, finding where they are located in space and the felt sense of experiencing these different kinds of thoughts. We are unconcerned with their content, seeing them as a process of the mind that doesn’t need to be stopped or controlled but instead can just be allowed to happen without pushing away or holding on.

Version 1 – 26 minutes. this meditation doesn’t include any śamatha/samadhi/concentration practice, so you may want to add this yourself at the beginning.

Version 2 – 40 minutes. This is a longer version of the Thinking Process meditation that includes śamatha practice at the beginning.