Next stages: open monitoring and non-dual awareness
If you have been practicing meditation for a while, something interesting starts to happen. At first, the practice feels like training a muscle: you focus, you get distracted, you come back, and over time your attention becomes steadier. But eventually many people notice a deeper shift. The mind grows quieter, the constant inner narration softens, and the sense of “me doing the meditation” begins to feel less solid.
This is where meditation moves beyond basic attention training and into what many traditions call working with the ego.
What Do We Mean by “Ego” in Meditation?
In everyday language, ego often means arrogance or self-importance. In meditation, it means something much more subtle: the ongoing sense of being a separate self who is thinking, choosing, judging, and controlling experience.
This “narrative self” is the voice in your head that says: “I am doing well.” “I am failing.” “I should be more calm.” “This is boring.”
It is not wrong or bad. It is simply a mental process that constructs a story about who you are and what is happening. Meditation does not try to destroy this process – it helps you see it clearly, so you are no longer automatically pulled along by it.
Focused Attention Is the First Step
Practices like CEVAM and other focused attention methods are the foundation for everything that follows. When you train your attention on something specific such as the visual field behind your closed eyes—you begin to notice when the mind wanders into thought, planning, memory, or self-talk.
Each time you detect that drift and gently return, you strengthen executive control: the capacity to stabilize attention, inhibit compulsive reactions, and recover quickly from distraction.
Over time, that same skill makes the ego easier to work with. The narrative self still appears, but it is less sticky. You are learning to relate to thoughts as events, not commands.
Open Monitoring: Awareness Without a Center
Once attention is reasonably stable, many traditions introduce a second mode of practice called open monitoring. Instead of selecting one object, you allow everything to be included: sounds, body sensations, emotions, mental images, and thoughts.
The training is simple but profound: notice what arises, allow it to be there, and let it pass without grasping or resisting. When a self-referential thought appears “I’m doing it wrong,” “This is not working” it is treated like any other experience: a momentary pattern appearing in awareness.
This gradually weakens the ego’s grip because the ego is largely a stream of self-referential interpretation. When interpretation is seen rather than believed, it loses its authority.
Non-Dual Awareness: When the Observer Softens
For some practitioners, open monitoring naturally deepens into what is often called non-dual awareness. In this mode, the usual split between “me here” and “experience out there” becomes less pronounced.
There is still seeing, hearing, and thinking—but the sense of a separate observer who is managing it all may soften, or temporarily disappear. Experience feels more immediate and less personal.
This is not something you force. It tends to emerge when attention is stable, the nervous system is calm, and the mind is no longer compulsively narrating what is happening.
How Attune Supports the Next Stages
Attune is not designed to replace these deeper practices. It is designed to make the foundation extremely strong. By giving you real-time feedback on alpha activity in the visual cortex, Attune helps you train the exact skill that makes everything else possible: stable, clear attention without unnecessary strain.
When attention is stable, mind-wandering decreases, self-talk quiets down, and emotional reactivity softens. Those are the conditions in which open monitoring and non-dual practices become more accessible whether you practice them inside Attune sessions or in your own meditation routine.
The Takeaway
Meditation does not end with focus. Focus is the beginning.
As attention stabilizes, the narrative self loosens. As the narrative self loosens, awareness becomes more open. And in that openness, a different way of being less reactive, less self-centered, and more present can unfold naturally.
Ready to deepen your practice?
