Should You Meditate with Your Eyes Open or Closed?
By Tergar Meditation Community • 5 min read
By Tergar Meditation Community • 5 min read
As a beginner, if keeping your eyes open during meditation is too distracting, it’s fine to close them. And, as your practice progresses, you may encounter particular types of meditation that involve visualization, in which case, having your eyes closed can be helpful. Generally, though, in Mingyur Rinpoche’s tradition, you are encouraged to meditate with open eyes. If you’re unable to do so at the outset, it’s recommended that you practice it a little at a time until you find it comfortable.
It might help to know that “eyes open” doesn’t mean staring or bugging out your eyeballs, trying not to blink. It can actually feel very relaxed. If having them open irritates you, check in with how they’re open. You can even touch your face to see if the muscles around your eyebrows are tense, and if they are, release them. Continue to tune in like this until meditating with eyes open eventually feels natural and comfortable.
Through the practice of meditation, we can come to experience the quality of authentic inner joy anytime, anyplace, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This may sound like an impossibly lofty goal, but it’s achievable. How? By bringing awareness to everything we do. “Everything we do” includes the nitty-gritty of dealing with the people, places, and things that make up our world: staying late at work, driving our kids to school and our pets to the vet, taking the bus, and shopping for groceries. We need our eyes open for all this stuff, so it goes without saying that meditating on the cushion with our eyes open will make it all the more natural to do so off the cushion.
There are other reasons to keep your eyes open. Meditating with your eyes closed can give rise to experiences specific to having one’s eyes closed in general . . . a certain dreamy quality that might seduce you into thinking, “Okay, now I’m meditating.” Quite unconsciously, you might then start dividing your experience between being on the cushion with these lovely, dreamy experiences, and being off the cushion — also known as everything else. It’s “meditation” life versus “everything else” life . . . and then, bam! You have unwittingly turned meditation into an instrument for further splitting your view into what you do and don’t like, positive and negative, hope and fear, good and bad — when actually, what we’re meant to discover in meditation is that awareness can handle and hold everything equally, which is the key to inner joy.
In the vast space of awareness, hope and fear are just two galaxies among countless trillions. Within awareness, you can touch into a deep, grounded, stable sense of well-being, of sanity. In order to be able to experience this calm sanity throughout the day, you need to be able to bring awareness to your life in real time. It’s not something you need to create by closing your eyes and digging deep inside; you can connect with it at any moment. To deal with what life dishes out, you need to be fully available to reality. After all, should you get pulled over by a police officer, it’s not as though you can say, “Excuse me, officer, I need to close my eyes for a few minutes and meditate.” The idea is to be present and bring awareness to every situation.
“Wherever you are and whatever you are doing, pause from time to time and relax your mind. You don’t have to change anything about your experience. You can let thoughts and feelings come and go freely, and leave your senses wide open. Make friends with your experience and see if you can notice the spacious awareness that is with you all the time. Everything you ever wanted is right here in this present moment of awareness.”
– Mingyur Rinpoche –
Try to apply this walking guided meditation by Tergar Instructor Myoshin Kelley in your everyday life with your eyes open.
Do you want to try meditation, but don’t know how to start? This free course is specially designed for beginners, and takes only a week to complete.
Tergar Meditation Community supports individuals, practice groups, and meditation communities around the world in learning to live with awareness, compassion, and wisdom. Grounded in the Tibetan Buddhist lineage of our guiding teacher, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, our online and in-person programs are accessible to people of all cultures and faiths, and support a lifelong path toward the application of these principles in everyday life.
Everybody knows what it feels like to experience anxiety: the shortness of breath, racing pulse, rushing thoughts, and so on. Indeed, you may be more familiar with these sensations than you’d like to be! And by now, you have probably noticed that those with anxiety are often told to try meditation. But how does meditation work for anxiety?
“Your awareness is bigger than your negative thoughts. So when you can hold sensations in your awareness, that is kindness. If you feel like you can’t let go of your aversion to some of them, that’s okay too. Just be with your aversion. When you allow yourself to have an aversion, that is love. That is compassion. That is forgiveness. So anything is okay: panic is okay, depression is okay. Guilt, destructive thoughts, whatever — it’s okay. All of these feelings are just like clouds in the sky, coming and going.”
If you’re reading this, you’ve certainly received at least a few teachings that inspired you to meditate. But for some of us, there’s just one catch: we somehow can’t get around to actually doing it. “Oh my, the day went by so fast! Well, tomorrow, I’ll definitely make time to meditate.” Tomorrow comes and goes, and meditation gets put off until the next day . . . and the next.
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