General Protocols

The GoDeeper brainwave protocols for each of these General Protocols are based on composites of research findings related to multiple techniques that fall under each general meditation category. Thus, the descriptions of the goal and technique in each general category are also amalgams and do not attempt to describe all techniques and levels in that category. More specifically, these descriptions are intended for Level 1 & 2 meditators in each category. If one of these General Protocols feels like a great fit, we encourage you to review the Resources section to find a teacher from a meditation lineage in that category. Finding a good teacher is essential for going deeper.

Table of contents:

  1. Allowing Absorption
  2. Focused Awareness
  3. Open Monitoring (Mindfulness)
  4. Cultivating Positivity
  5. Nonduality

Allowing Absorption

Allowing Absorption is one of the most popular meditation families worldwide. This is largely thanks to the popularizing efforts of such movements as Transcendental Meditation (TM) and Ziva Meditation as well as the relative ease of mastering their technique.  

Goals

Stating goals for Allowing Absorption is paradoxical since the overarching goal is to not act from a goal-oriented place.  That said, the goals are:

  1. Let go of the monkey mind chatter of thoughts and emotions.
  2. Be absorbed into a blissful, thoughtless state of merging with ultimate reality.  TM practitioners, for instance, believe that such transcendent experience is the most restful state of being.
  3. The ultimate “goal” is to let go of all goals because goal seeking separates us from unity consciousness. Thus, to speak of Allowing Absorption as a goal is problematic. Striving will not get you there. Only surrender gets you there. 

Technique 

  1. Let the mind and body relax as much as you can while maintaining a posture that fosters relaxation. You can be sitting, standing, or lying down as long as the spine is comfortably straight. 
  2. The essence of all Allowing Absorption techniques is to surrender effort. Some traditional techniques like Shikantaza do this directly, but that can be challenging for beginners.  That’s why techniques like TM have you repeat a mantra to keep the mind occupied until it lets go.  It is important to listen for the mantra mentally, not to say it under one’s breath. That would be effort, not surrender. Allow the mantra to get quieter and quieter and eventually disappear.  
  3. Maintain a sense of surrender, effortlessness, and letting go throughout the meditation. 

You will notice that there is no Level 4 option. Level 4 is always nondual, which is a completely different brain state.  

Deep & Shallow

Tap once after you’ve emerged from depth; tap twice when you notice you’ve been shallow.

Deep in Allowing Absorption meditations may look like:

  • Concentration, clarity, and equanimity develop on their own
  • Paradoxically, you experience more presence as a result of letting go
  • You notice a sense of ease, calm, peace, or happiness

Shallow in Allowing Absorption meditations may look like:

  • A lot of effort and intention makes it hard to let go
  • When you let go, your experience becomes foggy, dull, or agitated
  • Thoughts, feelings, or experiences take you away from the practice

Benefits

The NeuroMeditation Institute claims Allowing Absorption (AKA Quiet Mind) is good for negative self-talk, perfectionism, chronic pain, addictive behaviors, identity concerns and not a first choice for people who struggle with dissociation and depression, grief, or difficult life transitions. They have a quick survey to find out which type of meditation is best for you based on your needs and goals. 

In a review of spirituality-integrated psychotherapies for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), TM showed an effect size and efficacy comparable to existing evidence-based treatments for PTSD (Field et al. 2024).

Tips & Confusions

Allowing Absorption can be confused with Focused Awareness because both categories contain techniques in which you focus on a word, phrase, or mantra, and when you get distracted, you start again with no judgment. However, the goals and target brainwave states of Focused Awareness and Allowing Absorption are different. In Focused Awareness, the goal is to stay with your object of focus with a clear and discerning awareness. In Allowing Absorption, the goal is to to pass into absorption; thoughts and emotions fade away, and the distinction between subject and object can disappear.

Unlike Focused Awareness meditations, Allowing Absorption meditations do not consider thoughts as distractions unless you’re either actively resisting or chasing them. Even though thoughts are not a problem in this technique, it is not appropriate to “work on a problem” in these practices. That would be considered a distraction from the practice itself.  Just let yourself be absorbed into, for instance, the word, phrase, or mantra itself, and then into the inner silence that emerges when the mantra disappears.

Focused Awareness aims to develop an attentional skill. Many of its techniques emphasize increasing your ability to suppress mind wandering, which is associated with the brain’s Default Mode Network. Allowing Absorption meditations are more about surrender. Directing the mind as in Focused Awareness runs counter to the goal of complete surrender. Beginning meditators should try meditations from each meditation category to see which ones feel most natural and best suited to their needs. That said, it is generally better to go deep with one or two types of meditation than to keep “playing the field.” 

In contrast to techniques that aim to develop specific skills, some Allowing Absorption practices can be “mastered” quickly. In TM, for example, there may be little difference in the results of 10 vs 100 hours of practice (Travis & Arenander 2007). Skill-based meditations are harder to master, but moments of transcendence can last longer. Because some Allowing Absorption techniques come from an ancient Vedic tradition and are the oldest known form of meditation, preceding all Yogic, Buddhist, and Christian forms of meditation, perhaps skill-based meditations were developed as an attempt to prolong the unity state associated with Allowing Absorption practices.

Finally, in Vedic Meditation, Ziva, and TM, mantras are given to practitioners for their sound, not their meaning. In those techniques, the practitioner does not choose a mantra that has aspirational meaning as, for example, Peace, OM, or Love. You don’t want to tempt the mind by exploring a meaningful word; you want the mind to fall in love with the unadorned sound of the mantra in your mind.

Resources

Focused Awareness

Goal

Focused Awareness develops your capacity to pay attention with a minimum of distracting thoughts. The goal is to maintain a narrow focus of awareness on the object of your choice. 

Technique

The instructions for Focused Awareness meditations are simple to say—and hard to do! These instructions apply to breath focus, Anapana, Samatha, and Shamatha.

  1. Select an object of focus. Examples include a body sensation such as breathing, a candle flame, the sounds in your environment, a specific mental image, thoughts or emotions, or anything you can see before you.  Teachers and practitioners often use the breath as a focus object because it is always there, embodied, and straddles voluntary and autonomous control. Freely available, focusing on it helps induce depth. 
  2. Let the mind and body relax as much as you can while maintaining a sitting, standing, or lying posture that fosters alertness. 
  3. Gently place your attention on your chosen focus object. 
  4. When you notice that the mind has wandered, guide your attention back to the object of focus with kindness and without self-criticism. 
  5. Repetition trains the brain.

You will notice that there is no Level 4 option. Level 4 is always nondual, which is a completely different brain state. 

Deep & Shallow

Tap once after you’ve emerged from depth; tap twice when you notice you’ve been shallow.

Deep in Focused Awareness meditations may look like:

  • Stable focus on the chosen object
  • The chosen object remains vividly clear and detailed
  • Free from dullness and agitation
  • Distractions don’t derail you from your focus on the chosen object

Shallow in Focused Awareness meditations may look like:

  • Attention moves to any object other than the chosen one
  • Leaving the present moment to replay the past or plan for the future
  • Becoming absorbed in a train of thoughts
  • Feeling dull, sleepy, or agitated

Benefits

Focused Awareness improves reaction time, memory, and a variety of cognitive skills. Its meditations benefit people who have ADHD, ruminative depression, or memory problems.  It is not recommended for people with OCD tendencies.

Focused Awareness develops stability of attention and teaches the mind to stay put. It activates the frontal lobes of your brain, which are involved in executive functions such as decision making, emotion regulation, and stopping yourself from doing things you shouldn’t do.  When you engage in Focused Awareness meditation, you strengthen such functioning. 

Journey to Depth

Focused Awareness is a skill that initially requires top-down control but eventually becomes a bottom-up habit, taking less work than it did in the beginning. Focused Awareness is considered the foundation for most other meditative practices, but that doesn’t mean you have to switch to another technique to go deeper into meditation. It is not just for beginners. 

Focused Awareness meditations are also used as warm-up exercises by more advanced meditators, the same way musicians use scales and athletes use stretching to limber up for more advanced movements.  Some of the most advanced meditations, such as Jhanas practice, begin with single-pointed focus.

Resources

Open Monitoring (Mindfulness)

Mindfulness as taught in the West covers three different techniques: Focused Awareness, Open Monitoring, and Cultivating Positivity.  We use the scientific name and definition of Open Monitoring to more specifically match the protocol to the brain state you wish to achieve.   

Goal

Open Monitoring has surged in popularity because it provides a straightforward solution to the stresses of modern life. Mindfulness/Stress Reduction teaches that stress comes from chasing pleasure and anxiously avoiding pain. Open Monitoring-type mindfulness meditation creates a brain state where one watches thoughts and feelings go by without getting lost in or identifying with them, reducing emotional reactivity and the negative emotions associated with mind wandering. 

Technique

  1. Find and maintain a posture that fosters alertness.
  2. Relax the mind and body as much as you can. If you can’t let go of at least some bodily tension, try yoga or progressive relaxation before starting. 
  3. Warm-up with a short Focused Awareness practice to calm the mind. This is comparable to musicians tuning their instruments before a performance. 
  4. Shift to an observer role. Open up to any and all sensations, thoughts, and emotions. Accept these as they are without attachment, neither holding onto them nor pushing them away.
  5. Let sensations, thoughts, and emotions pass through awareness without assessing what they are or getting involved with how you feel about them. The less evaluation you do, the more bandwidth the brain has to take in the present moment. 

Level 4 is always nondual, which is a completely different brain state. Open monitoring is often the stepping stone to nondual awareness because, to enter a nondual state, you need the open monitoring habit of taking in the world without evaluation. 

Deep & Shallow

Tap once after you’ve emerged from depth; tap twice when you notice you’ve been shallow.

Deep in Open Monitoring meditations may look like:

  • Vivid awareness of whatever pulls your attention
  • Thoughts, feelings, and sensations lose a sense of solidity
  • Aware of awareness itself (meta-awareness)
  • Insight into how the mind works

Shallow in Open Monitoring meditations may look like:

  • Losing awareness by getting caught up in thoughts, sounds, or other experiences
  • Identifying with thoughts and emotions instead of observing them
  • Getting lost in memory, fantasy, or planning
  • Being pulled into dullness, sleepiness, or agitation (it’s not a distraction if you are aware of being dull)

Benefits

This style of meditation is great for reducing anxiety, cravings, chronic stress, and obsessive thinking. It is not recommended for people who have a tendency to dissociate.

Open Monitoring is the opposite of the stress/anxiety response. Worry often involves ruminating on the same thoughts and feelings about the future or the past. With Open Monitoring, you focus on what is going on in the present moment. You let sensations come and go without abstraction (“That is a chair”) or judgment (“I hate that chair”), which trains you to be more okay with whatever you experience. 

Journey to Depth

At the beginning, it can be hard to let sensations in without putting labels about what they are and whether we like them or not.  Sensations regularly trigger thoughts and memories.  With practice, you can train your brain to do less and less evaluating. It gets easier and takes less will power as the evaluating parts of the brain establish the habit of not kicking in during meditation.   

The extra bandwidth you get from less evaluating may give you a crystal clear heightened awareness that makes the environment seem more vivid—colors might appear brighter, sounds more distinct, and textures more palpable. This clarity can also manifest internally: as thoughts become more focused, the mind feels less cluttered, and intuition is more available.

As Open Monitoring becomes more automatic, with more bottom-up instead of top-down brain processing, the peace, equanimity, and clarity of awareness itself become more apparent. What arises does so vividly, without obscuring the field of awareness itself. As this progresses, it can lead to nondual states in which no self is found that “has” the experience.

Tips & Confusions

In many ways, Open Monitoring and Focused Awareness are opposites, or at least opposite ends of a continuum.  In Focused Awareness, one tries to narrow one’s focus to just one thing. In Open Monitoring, one widens one focus to let in as much raw experience as possible without getting lost in concepts and trains of abstract thinking. The connecting thread is that both techniques are designed to loosen your identification with the planning, judging, conceptual mind. Ironically, the most evolutionarily advanced parts of the brain are the prime targets to disengage to enter meditation’s highest states.  

Resources

  • “Mindfulness NeuroMeditation” (explained by Jeff Tarrant, PhD, founder of the NeuroMeditation Institute, 2-minute YouTube video)
    https://youtu.be/pB8cX3CH_yg 
  • Try the NeuroMeditation Styles Inventory to find out which of four NMI meditation styles is best for you based on what ails you. This survey matches your mental and emotional struggles to the meditations that most directly address these problems. (N.B. Their Quiet Mind = our Allowing Absorption.) Alternatively, our survey helps determine which meditation style fits you best and thus would likely be easier to learn.
  • “MBSR: 25 Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Exercises and Courses” (article containing exercises, practices, and resources)
    https://positivepsychology.com/mindfulness-based-stress-reduction-mbsr/
  • “Getting Started with Mindfulness” (short article with basics, practices, and links to guided meditations)
    https://www.mindful.org/meditation/mindfulness-getting-started/
  • Palouse Mindfulness website (free, on-line, self-paced, full course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR))
    https://palousemindfulness.com/
  • Training suggestions: If Open Monitoring (Mindfulness) meditation is a good fit for you, consider training in one of these tradition-based techniques: Zazen (Shikantaza “Just Sitting”), Vajrayana or Mahamudra Open Awareness, or Vipassana (Goenka Body Scanning or Thought Watching).
  • “The Brainwaves of Open Monitoring Meditations” (our in-depth white paper, ideal for downloading)
    https://imbr.org/white-papers/

Cultivating Positivity

Goal

The goal of Cultivating Positivity meditation is to increase your capacity to experience and express love, kindness, compassion, and other positive states. This is achieved not just by thinking benevolent thoughts but also by feeling benevolence clearly and intensely.  

Technique

  1. Let the mind and body relax as much as you can while maintaining a posture that fosters alertness. 
  2. Cultivating Positivity meditation involves extending goodwill in wider and wider circles. Typically, it starts with well-wishing phrases toward yourself such as, “May I/you be happy. May I/you be well. May I/you be safe. May I/you be peaceful and at ease. May I/you be free from suffering.”  Many varieties of this type of meditation also include visualizations, for example, imagining breathing positive energy out from your heart, sending it to yourself or your loved ones.
  3. Extend the same wishes to beings that are further and further away from your immediate life. This typically includes sending warm wishes to people you don’t know well or at all.
  4. In more advanced practices, you send such wishes to people you find difficult or challenging, and finally to all beings (not just humans). 

You will notice that there is no Level 4 option. Level 4 is always nondual, which is a completely different brain state. 

Deep & Shallow

Tap once after you’ve emerged from depth; tap twice when you notice you’ve been shallow.

Deep in Cultivating Positivity meditations may look like: 

  • Genuine engagement with the positive state you’re cultivating
  • Positive states become clearer, more vivid, or more intense
  • You’re able to stay concentrated on what you’re focusing on

Shallow in Cultivating Positivity meditations may look like:

  • Pulled into experiences other than the positive state you’re cultivating
  • Even if you’re focused, the positivity seems forced, superficial, or unclear
  • Trying to cultivate positivity results in resistance or negative reactions

Benefits

Loving kindness and compassion practices help us engage with ourselves and others in a warmer, wiser, more understanding way. Cultivating Positivity meditations are good for depression, grief, and lack of empathy. It’s helpful to remember that the intention to generate compassion during the meditation is enough—you don’t need to feel it for the meditation to have benefit.

Tips & Confusions

If you are depressed or consumed with ruminating and can’t generate the warmth of open-hearted feelings, teachers often recommend starting with Focused Awareness and trying Cultivating Positivity again later. 

Instead of using phrases, you can focus on the feeling of loving kindness or compassion. Or you can visualize well-being surrounding the person or animal who is the focus of your meditation—that visualization could, for instance, take the form of a warm glow or the feeling of a loving hug. To get in touch with self-compassion, placing your hand on your heart can sometimes help.

Neuroscientists often separate empathy from loving kindness and compassion. As they define it, empathy is simply the ability to feel what another person is feeling. Empathy can be positive, negative, or neutral. Spending too much time feeling what others are feeling can be distressing (especially for professional caregivers). On the other hand, neuroscientists define compassion as the wish to alleviate your own or another’s suffering and loving kindness as the wish to promote your own or another’s happiness. It thus has an active component that empathy doesn’t have. Empathy is valuable in that it can open the door to loving kindness and compassion—but you don’t need to stay in empathy to experience and activate compassion.

Resources

Nonduality

Nondual meditations are central to many Eastern traditions, including Advaita Vedanta in the Hindu tradition, Zen in the Mahayana tradition, and Dzogchen and Mahamudra in the Vajrayana tradition. In the West, Christian mysticism (contemplation) and Sufism (muraqaba) have nonduality at their core. All of these traditions emphasize connecting with nondual awareness, the implicit background awareness that belies conceptual description.  It is commonly referred to as timeless, contentless, unconditioned, intrinsically pure, luminous, self-aware, and the sky in which all of our experiences play out. 

Goal

The aim of nondual meditation is to transcend the ordinary perception of reality that distinguishes between self/other and subject/object. We describe escaping these binary oppositions as achieving a state of nondual awareness. The goals are to directly experience insight into the nature of the mind and ultimate reality and to stabilize this state in a lasting way, which are often referred to as awakening, self-realization, enlightenment, or union with the divine.

Technique

Open monitoring is often the stepping stone to nondual awareness because it builds the habit of taking in the world without evaluation. This is foundational for a lasting nondual state. While similar to Open Monitoring, nondual meditation does not distinguish between an observer and experience. When nondual awareness arises, sense perceptions appear, but no self is there to receive them.

Many different traditional approaches to nondual meditation exist, but here’s a general approach:

  1. Begin by settling in and relaxing, taking a few deep breaths and tuning into the present moment.
  2. Notice whatever is happening in awareness without trying to change it. This includes thoughts, sensations, sounds, emotions, and anything else that enters your awareness. Let your attention be totally open and expansive.
  3. When a thought or sensation arises, simply notice it. Acknowledge it without judgment or conceptual elaboration. 
  4. Let go of the need to identify with any particular thought or feeling. See them as clouds passing in the sky of your awareness.
  5. Rest your mind simply as it is, naturally, in open awareness without adding or subtracting anything. Simply rest effortlessly without controlling anything.
  6. If you unmerge with the spectrum of experience and slip back into a sense of self and other, start again.
  7. See what happens.

It’s best to practice nondual meditation under the guidance of a qualified teacher. If you experience agitation, dissociation, or derealization (nothing seems real to you), stop the practice, open your eyes, ground yourself in the reality and safety of your surroundings, and get advice from your teacher about next steps.

Deep & Shallow

Tap once after you’ve emerged from depth; tap twice when you notice you’ve been shallow.

Deep at the Nonduality level of any technique may look like: 

  • A loss of subject-object distinction, a sense of unity or transcendence of space and time
  • Rapture, joy, bliss, reverence, or something similar
  • A feeling that it would be difficult to communicate your experience to those who have not had similar experiences

Shallow at the Nonduality level of any technique may look like:

  • A clear sense of a distinct self 
  • Distraction,haziness, resistance, ambivalence
  • You’re fully implementing your technique, but it’s not clicking

Benefits

Nondual meditation gradually dismantles the notion and experience of a separate self. In this family of techniques, belief in a separate self is considered the prime source of all suffering, and so dissolving it is considered the path to lasting well-being, inner freedom, and more profound positive, prosocial states such as oneness, equanimity, love, and compassion. 

Tips & Confusions

Talking about nondual experience tends to pretzel the mind. Our language is founded on the principle that both an observing subject and the things it observes exist.  

Nonduality is generally regarded as the ultimate goal across meditation families.  There are many paths up the mountain, but they all terminate at this one summit.  

Resources

Protocols