Eugene
Pustoshkin,
Tatyana
Parfenova
(Russia)
Title of contribution:
Spacious Awareness in Holoscendence Meditation
Where & when:
Spacious Awareness in Holoscendence Meditation
Spacious Awareness vs. Narrow Attention in Integral Awareness Meditation. Often contemplative practice, meditation, and mindfulness practices are associated with focused, concentrated attention. Concentration (e.g., on breathing) tends to be conceived as a gateway even to mindfulness. (Mindfulness is usually defined as non-judgmental awareness of everything that is arising moment to moment.) There are, however, contemplative practices that stress not concentration as narrowing down of attention towards exclusive staying with a single figure/object but deconcentration and a sort of decentering as gradual or rapid widening of attention in order to gain access to spacious awareness (openness to the entire field which evenly encompasses both foreground and background). In Integral Awareness Meditation (IAM) concentration is always practiced in conjunction with—and on the basis of—deconcentration, with the latter being a primary mode of bringing forth open wide-awake consciousness state that allows accessing different layers of awareness even in novice practitioners. Altered states of meditative consciousness can be easily enacted and developed this way, and energy field resonances manifest as operands at more advanced state-stages of IAM.
Names of co-contributor: Tatyana Parfenova
Certified mindfulness instructor & Holoscendence (Integral Psychology) practitioner/facilitator, Tatyana graduated from an Integral Theory course in Moscow. She is an Integral therapist, a facilitator and explorer of constructive states of consciousness beneficial to raising the quality of life. Tatyana has been organizing workshops and programs in Integral psychology for several years in Russia. She teaches workshops on Integral Theory & Practice and Vertical Adult Development.
About Pustoshkin Eugene:
A clinical psychologist & Integral therapist, Eugene is a deeply-experienced workshop facilitator, teacher-practitioner of Holoscendence, Integral Meditation, and AQAL Approach.
He’s been translating K. Wilber’s and other authors’ works on AQAL Integral Metatheory, Transpersonal Psychology, & Mindfulness for more than a decade (he translated/edited more than 10 books).
Chief Editor at eroskosmos.org—the Russian Integral online journal. Bureau Chief for Russia at INTEGRAL LEADERSHIP REVIEW.