Eyes-Open Mindfulness

Eyes-open meditation can sound like the worst idea if you’re used to practice as a private escape. Then Susan Piver walks us through why keeping the eyes open may be the most direct path to mindfulness in real life, because you don’t have to “come back” when the sit is over. We talk about the simple mechanics of resting the gaze, why distraction and tired eyes are normal at first, and how the nervous system settles when we stop trying to force focus. 

From there, the conversation turns to what meditation is really for. We’re not training to be impressive meditators. We’re training to be more awake, more patient, and less ruled by triggers when life gets loud. Susan shares a teacher’s perspective on why the benefits often don’t appear during practice, how expanded heart shows up on its own, and why “attention is the most basic form of love” is more than a nice quote, it’s a map for how mindfulness practice changes relationships. 

We also zoom out to the stress of the present moment on planet Earth, using Tibetan Buddhist “six realms” imagery to describe conflict, power grabs, and the exhausted feeling of fighting battles with the wrong tools. The takeaway is grounding and practical: strengthen the human realm by teaching people to work with projection, story, and reactivity, and keep your classes clean, inclusive, simple, and honest. If this helped you, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs steadiness, and leave a review with the biggest takeaway you’re practising this week.

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ABOUT THE SHOW

Mindfulness Exercises with Sean Fargo is a practical, grounded mindfulness podcast for people who want meditation to actually help in real life.

Hosted by Sean Fargo — a former Buddhist monk, mindfulness teacher, and founder of MindfulnessExercises.com — the show explores how mindfulness can support mental health, emotional regulation, trauma sensitivity, chronic pain, leadership, creativity, and meaningful work.

Each episode offers a mix o...

Transcript

Welcome And Practice Setup

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Susan Piver is with us, and we are super grateful to have her with us today here at Mindfulness Exercises. And I'm basically gonna give it over to Susan to just lead us in practice and teaching today. So welcome, Susan.

SPEAKER_02 0:15

Thank you. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_04 0:17

Hi.

Why Meditate With Eyes Open

SPEAKER_04 0:18

Can you say more about eyes open practice?

SPEAKER_02 0:22

Love to. Yeah. Did you try it or did you think, ugh, that sounds awful?

SPEAKER_04 0:27

Or I noticed first I needed to move my view away from the screen. Yeah. And then I noticed I'm looking like, do you really want to know? Yes, I do. I'm looking at, you know, the dust underneath my dresser, and then the dresser legs, and then the wall behind it. And and what you had said about the sun rays, like the vision being like sun rays, it just combined with what I'm seeing. That was really lovely. Because I'm seeing so much, right? Like even as I'm focusing, not focusing, there's so much to see.

SPEAKER_02 1:05

Yeah, it's distracting.

SPEAKER_04 1:07

Yeah. And I notice after a bit, my eyes getting tired, reminding myself to blink, reminding myself to let go of focus and like let my eyes rest and not be looking or seeing.

SPEAKER_02 1:25

Thank you. Very clear. I understand what you're saying. So as you know, there's eyes closed practices and eyes open. Most are eyes closed. I have an argument. I mean, I've only ever practiced this technique that I just taught you, period, for 33 years. So with an eyes closed practice, there's a sense of withdrawing. Sometimes that's really important, really necessary. But then when your meditation practice is over and you open your eyes, you have to come back. And there can be a sense when you go into your life that you're leaving your meditative equipoise, as they call it, I'm not sure where that word came from, on your cushion. And when you want to get it back, you have to go back there, sit down and close your eyes. Not always, this is a little bit black and white, but when you have an eyes open practice, it's a more seamless way of bringing mindfulness back into your life. Because you don't have to come back as you never went anywhere. So the eyes open practice emphasizes the quality of wakefulness awake here at present. And eyes closed emphasizes other things, but not awake. I have a wonderful friend Michael Carroll, great meditation teacher, wrote many wonderful books about mindfulness at work. So if you're interested in that, he's the guy, I think. He says in meditation, we're not trying to get anywhere. We're trying to be somewhere. And it's easier to be somewhere when your eyes are open. You know where you are. So then when you go outside, you bring that with you. Now it is completely understandable to think, well, it's easier to meditate with your eyes closed. Because it is. It's a lot easier. As mentioned, the idea of meditating is not to be good at meditating, doesn't matter. But if the object was to be good at meditating, this may be an overly long answer, we'd all be sitting here with our eyes closed. But we want to be good at being ourselves in our world. And that's why we practice. Don't practice to be good at meditating. Doesn't matter, as I mentioned. And then it's very natural and understandable for basically one of three things to happen in an eyes open practice in the beginning. First is your eyes get dry and you're like, what the I'm blinking enough or I'm blinking too much. Second is you start to become hyperaware of your breath. Because I had a good breath, I don't know, or maybe I should be breathing in a different way. Third, you fall asleep when your eyes are closed. So it's much less likely you'll fall asleep when your eyes are open. But with these first two, hyper-awareness of eyes, hyper-awareness of breath, you'll find that in your students anyway, whether their eyes are open or closed. And my theory about that is let's say your attention span is this wide. In the course of a normal day, it's jam-packed. You can't put anything else in there. It's just jammed with inputs and ideas and problems and responses and smells and all the things. And then in meditation, you say everybody out. But this space remains. And it's almost a reflexive anxiety to try to fill it with something. But all we have to fill it with is our breathing and our eyeballs. If you're sitting with your eyes open. So at first, you can be uh it's like anxiety. I'm not saying you have anxiety, Diana, but it's an anxiety response. It's like you left home and 20 minutes later you realize you didn't bring your phone. What am I gonna do? It's that kind of anxiety, and that absolutely dissipates on its own with time. So you don't have to do anything to fix that. That may be overanswering your question. But what do you think, Diana?

SPEAKER_04 4:49

That's great. I love your attention span. And I love hearing you just say, everybody out.

unknown 4:56

Everybody out. Later.

SPEAKER_04 4:58

Yes. And you know, I've been taking notes, you know, as you're talking and just love it, eyes open, is a seamless way of bringing mindfulness into life. And that wakefulness would really resonates as well, is when you said we want to be good at being ourselves in our world. I think that is so beautiful. Yes. And don't you think that's why we're doing this? Yes. And I can see myself incorporating it, just trying eyes open. I think I like to retreat with my eyes closed. That's my way of saying everybody out. And so everybody out with my eyes open is to shift. It's different. I do have a technical question here. When eyes are

Let The Gaze Rest Naturally

SPEAKER_04 5:40

open, can I move my eyes around?

SPEAKER_02 5:42

You should like let your gaze rest. Okay. If you look around, you know, it can increase the sense of agitation. But when you let your eyes rest and focus instead of laser pointing with your eyeballs, like receiving. Right now you can try this. You're looking. See if you can direct your gaze into the middle distance between where you are and where I am. Like look in the middle distance. That's the looking that we're doing. It's a melding whip.

SPEAKER_03 6:10

I have a

Meditation That Expands The Heart

SPEAKER_03 6:11

question. If you could please say more on meditation, not as something we do alone for ourselves. You said something about X percentage of the magic is gone when we think of it as something we do for alone. And so I'm thinking, well, as a teacher, individuals are coming to me, but maybe what are some ways that I can encourage this expansion? And maybe it's just as simple as like dedicating the practice when we're done with the practice or a focus on integrating the practice. What can I do as a teacher? Like people are coming to me because they want the self-help. What can I do to encourage them to broaden the practice, so to speak? Into what? To see the practice not as something that is them by themselves alone, but maybe has a benefit that extends beyond them as individuals. I'm not trying to be a smart ass here, but why do you want them to do that? I personally want them to do that because in my experience, it's that effort in broadening out that helps me feel better. So I would like to introduce that experience to others.

SPEAKER_02 7:33

Got it. That's lovely. And I can feel your good-heartedness in that query. And even maybe sorrow. You can't. The key phrase was in my experience, and we don't know what their experience is. However, we can know, I do anyway, that 2,500 years in the Buddhist world, practitioners have said it happens anyway. It happens. And our job, I feel, as teachers and friends, is to be alert to such things and not encourage or discourage, but just appreciate people's expanded heart. That will communicate much more than what I or you might do to encourage, because we don't have to. It will happen. For some people, it looks like they just are crying all the time. They don't know why, or they get angry at you. Mostly that doesn't happen, very rare, but they'll say things like, I just noticed, I'm not sure how this is happening, but I notice that I'm not as triggered by things that normally trigger me. Can you explain that, Sarah Bay? And then you have to say no. But that's awesome. So that's what we're looking for. And further to that point, I think, people will want to know if they're doing this correctly, and when will the benefits come in? What I say to people is they're not going to happen while you're meditating. While you're meditating, you're going to be going, what's for lunch? When is this over? I don't like this. I hate myself. I love myself. That's what we're all doing. But when you go into your life, you start to see you're more patient. You're less triggered. You have better ideas. That's where the tell is. And so this expansion of awareness of others, because I think what you're longing for, I know I am, it will happen. One reason why I think what you're doing and what all of you are doing is so important. Because this is not a way to perfect anything. It is a way to love. The great Zen teacher, John Tarrant Roshi, also a poet, said long ago, I know because I read it in Oprah, like 25 years ago, I never forgot it. Attention is the most basic form of love. Through it, we bless and are blessed. That's what we're teaching. That's what we're practicing, working with attention. So you can say, I am working with teaching people how to love. Because without the ability to pay attention to someone else or yourself, you're telling a lot of stories. As long as you're teaching people to work with attention, you are teaching them this expanded awareness, I believe. Thank you. You're welcome. I know, and this may be a little long-winded, but I'll keep it short, and I won't keep you past your own interest as far as I can discern it. There's a lot of understandable wish in meditation world and other worlds to work with the extreme anxiety of the present moment on planet Earth. If you're not feeling that, I'm happy for you. And it's not just in America. The quote about attention and love, yes, attention is the most basic form of love. Through it we bless and are blessed. And I'll tell you the author, John Tarrant Roshi, I believe

Attention As A Form Of Love

SPEAKER_02 10:40

he's Australian, Zen teacher. Probably kind of old right now, but so what? In Tibetan Buddhist iconography, I will make this short, I promise. There are six realms of existence. See, there's like six pieces of a pie there. This dude with fangs holding it. These are called the six realms, or the wheel of life. Some people say these are real places. I don't know. Some people say psychological states, some people say both. There's three so-called higher realms and three so-called lower realms. We don't have to talk about the lower realms right now, but they're hungry ghosts, maybe you've heard that phrase, just can never get enough. These are beings, I know I said I wouldn't mention it, but they're tiny little mouths and skinny little throats and huge bellies. They can never get enough. So we've all been there. We all know what it's like to be a hungry ghost, but in this Buddhist view, that's an actual place. And the animal realm, love animals, but they don't have a lot of wherewithal to become enlightened. They just get to eat and sleep and protect themselves. And then hell realm, this is the third of the lower realms, and there's multiple hell realms in Tibetan Buddhism, like cold hells, hot hells, and so on. Anyway, the three higher realms are called the God realm, which is, oh, everything's great for those people. They live a really long time, they're beautiful, they can fly, they're psychic, they want something, it's there. There are people like that on planet Earth who have that. They're beautiful, they're rich, they have everything, they want something, it appears. But the bad news in the God realm is it is said they die a very long and painful death. And then they have to come back because they didn't get enlightened, because why would you study the Dharma if you're in the God realm? There's no impetus whatsoever, there's no suffering. I see tech support entered the waiting room. I don't know if you know what that is, Saramei, but I'll just leave it to you. Then there's the jealous god realm. This is gonna come back to our topic in a moment. The jealous god realm, asuras, as they're called in Sanskrit, they're not gods and they're really pissed off about it. And they're warring, constantly warring with each other, and there's no moment where the battle is won. Even if they win, oh, there's another battle to fight. I want what you have, and I'm gonna do everything I can to take it. And I don't care about you. We see that every day. People who are just want more power, more whatever it is they want, jealous gods. They're not gonna get enlightened either because they're too busy fighting. Then there's the human realm. That's us. That's the best one. Because we have suffering and we have ease. They alternate. Some people don't have any ease, so they're in a hell realm. But most of us here, we have enough wherewithals that we can study the dharma. And we're motivated to because we have had suffering. If we didn't have suffering, we wouldn't be motivated. But we have uh something over our roof and over our heads and food to eat, so that's the good realm. Now, getting to my point here. We're witnessing a jealous god battle. That's how I would say it. And we can't fight it because we're not jealous gods. Our weapons, weapons of the human realm, logic, legislation, verbal skills, psychological insights, they don't give a shit. When we go into a jealous god realm with our weapons, we just dissolve. And that's better than trying to pick up their weapons. So my point here is, and highly so welcome. I cannot defeat

Strengthening The Human Realm

SPEAKER_02 13:45

my enemies right now, the jealous gods. I don't have the weapons, but I can strengthen my friends. I can strengthen the human realm, people who enjoy the things that I mentioned, logic and legislation, academia, and psychological skills and verbal skills, and loving kindness and compassion, that those things don't mean anything in those other realms, but they mean something in our realm. And one thing that we can do as meditation teachers is strengthen the MF human realm by teaching this practice. And that's not just a nice thing to do, because someday we will defeat our enemies, so-called. Yeah, I'm not talking about politics. I'm just talking about power grabs, and it's on both sides. We'll be strong when it's our time. But if we spend all our time trying to fight jealous gods, or however you would phrase it, with no weapons, when the time comes to speak up and speak out, we will have no energy. So my suggestion to myself and to my own students is please focus on strengthening the human realm. You can actually do that. You can do it today. You can do it in ways big and small. And as meditation teachers, it's big because you're teaching people to work with their projections. It's very important. I'm happy to conclude there as you wish. If you want to stay in touch, go to the Open Heart Project, sign up for my newsletter. It's free. It goes out every Monday. And I've done this for 10 years. I send a video. It's free. And there's a little talk on something like the jealous gods or keeping your eyes open, whatever it might be. It's usually less than 10 minutes, and then a 10-minute guided sit, just like what we just did. And you are welcome to be there. Thank you, Dorothy.

SPEAKER_03 15:19

I'm stuck on thinking about what you just said about the realms and whether or not it's a myth of mindfulness meditation can change the world.

SPEAKER_02 15:29

Oh, yes, it can. As a spiritual practice. And it

How Mindfulness Changes The World

SPEAKER_02 15:33

happens through the relationship of teacher and student, meditation, teacher and student. Doesn't happen by you being an expert or being great meditator yourself, because none of us are. It happens by teaching people to work with their minds with an open heart. What else can work? What else could we do? I know there are people who say, Well, you're just sitting there doing navel gazing, maybe you should go out and do something else. But okay, do something else, but do this too. Because the change is gonna have to come heart by heart, person by person, because it's beyond legislation, it's beyond war, it's beyond peace, because we're on this treadmill of war and peace. And I believe, knowing nothing, that as person by person

How To Structure A Meditation Class

SPEAKER_02 16:12

has to lay down the weapon.

SPEAKER_01 16:13

Can you talk a little bit about how to approach structuring a class or a series of classes? You know, a light chair, I was the keep it simple, but for all of us kind of starting up in the realm of teaching, meditation, and mindfulness, just anything you could share would be really valuable.

SPEAKER_02 16:31

So you're talking about you, we're gonna give a class on how to meditate.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

Not just a one-off, because one-offs are easier, right? But if you were to create a session, my question could be should it be four, should it be six, you know, like kind of thing? It really depends.

SPEAKER_02 16:45

You know, if you're teaching 12-year-olds, should probably be one. If you're teaching 112-year-olds, probably also should just be one. If you're teaching people at work, if you're teaching people who are healthcare providers, you have to make the call. But the shorter the better. One's probably not enough. Ten's too many, three, four, something like that. May not sound like it's to your point, but to me it is. First pay attention to how you arrange the room. It should be clean, it should be orderly, it should be elegant, it should be inviting, not because we're persnickety, but because we want people to feel confident. I was taught that when you're offering a spiritual teaching like meditation, your first job is to establish confidence in the mind of the student. And how do you do that? By offering something real. And what is real is what you know. It also helps if the room is not a mess. Because you see things like that, you're like, someone's not paying attention here. So establish an environment that communicates someone is paying attention. And there are places for people to sit with bigger bodies, and there are a place for people to sit on the floor, and there's chairs, and there's room, and there's sensitivity to being inclusive. I think it's always good to tell a little bit about who you are so people know who's talking to them. And then you use your judgment. It's good to say a few things up front, like this is what I was trained to do, this is what I teach, this is why I think it's useful. I like to start myself with the misconceptions. And I think that puts people's minds at ease and also raises and lowers the expectations at the same time. I like to say that what I teach comes from the Buddhist tradition because I'm not trying to hide anything. And then practice. And then use your intuition as Sarah and I were talking about, like, should this be five minutes, should be twenty minutes, probably ten minutes is good. And it's important to leave silence because we're not babysitting anyone. Our job is not to take care of anyone, cannot take care of anyone, but you can care about everyone. And that's an important distinction. And I think sometimes, especially women, feel like, well, I feel the people's anxiety, and because they are anxious, because you just like so sit there and don't do anything. That drives a person crazy. But you don't want to fill the space with things because you have to go into that. You don't want to aggressively push them or or try to m mitigate it, but leave the space and then ask for questions. That's where it always comes to life. How was that? What do you think? And then you could give a little homework for the next until we meet again, let's say it's a week, try to meditate five days a week for five minutes, Monday through Friday. And if that doesn't seem doable, then look at your own schedule and go, well, I could probably do Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And decide that and don't do Tuesday. And want to avoid aggression. So just live up to what you think you can do. And then in the second class, it depends on who you're teaching and what your subjects are exactly. But if it's at the library or something and it's just your community, not just, but that's great, then you have to use your intuition to see what's going on. But you can trust that people will tell you what to talk about. Sarah,

Thoughts Are Still Thoughts

SPEAKER_02 19:45

hi.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

I wanted to shine back a little bit of confirmation about the meditation before we jump off. What I experienced during the meditation at some point when we were just allowing that space to be created and practicing that like stillness focus, relying on the breath, the mind and the body, I think were the three. Space was being created. And then there were inevitable gaps to be filled with the increase of space. And what I noticed within myself in my experience of the meditation was an increase in the breath of victorious breath coming through, or you can hear victorious breath sounds like ocean breath, that was filling some of the created space within the meditation. What I initially thought during the moment was a sense of gratitude for what came to fill the gap was in a healthy aspect and amplification of the breath, one of the points we were supposed to be using within the meditation, instead of more of a distractive quality coming through in whatever way that would have shown in the environment. I think that speaks to the potential we have for mindfulness and meditation, strengthening the human realm, fortifying for what we're able to do, fortifying and protecting ourselves in a way of holding our focus and bringing it through with reinforcements instead of weakening out of vulnerability. And then the other point I wanted to tie in was at the very beginning when you made the point of these meditations are practiced, ancient lineage, and how you stated the term interstate a few times within the session. I really like that thought, viewing it. I don't know if you meant interstate, but we went with interstate in my mind of driving. I mean the highway, but in the thought of meaning highway. Almost as if the path has been found, the roads have been paved, the lines have been painted. And to that extent, the turns have been acknowledged, the signs have been seen. And so when a facilitator is able to follow these. Ancient lineages of meditation, you're setting us on a route in some sort of way of thinking where those inevitable turns and signs will pop up. How the victorious breath came through in my case of experience, that was a noted right hand turn that is along this path of practice meditation by all those that we follow. I just wanted to shine back my experience and say thank you.

SPEAKER_02 22:29

Thank you for shining that back. I appreciate it. May I shine back to your shine back? In meditation, everything you're saying may be completely true. Probably is. But while you're meditating, those are thoughts. Even noticing the breath, the ocean breath, even the ocean breath is a thought. Anything that is not breathing is considered thinking. So those are very important insights and very worth investigating. But they not on the cushion, and the meaning is yet to be determined. Always. So when you decide it means this, then the door closes. But when you see, oh that's interesting, that happened. That door opens wider. To what? We will never friggin' know. In Tibetan Buddhist thought, there are three primary obstacles to meditation. I'll just tell you one of them, although I'm happy to talk about all of them. The first one is called laxity slash elation, like two sides of the same coin. Laxity is uh that's never gonna work. Oh yeah, okay. I said I told some Buddhist lady I'd do this for five minutes, so I'm gonna do it, and I'm kind of phony at it. Elation on the other side of the coin is it's working. And it is. But while you're meditating, both of those are considered thinking. You not go, you let go, and you keep letting go. And even if the Buddha walked into your house and sat in front of you and said, Sarah, you are the future Buddha, you would call that thinking. Let go and come back. Breath, breath, breath. The letting go is the essential gesture.

SPEAKER_00 24:00

Oh, I appreciate the nuances of identifying thoughts and letting go. I super appreciate the responses. And I think those are some of the magic qualities we speak of. The different thoughts and interpretations that we experience and how it seems to show up sometimes in a group, multiple points. So I think for my particular share, I think it's a practice of allowing communication and not telling ourselves, shut up, or like keep it in, because we don't know what is medicine for another or for ourselves. And so I'm not necessarily resisting the idea of thinking, I'm inviting the thinking. But I appreciate the space to go through the battle of will I want I internally and get to the moment of I will and then be received in a way that feels constructive. So I just appreciate the proc practice, and I'm not sure I can bring together a thought to boil it back into a closing point.

SPEAKER_02 25:08

No problem. I appreciate getting to know you a little bit and how your mind works and your obvious warmth and enthusiasm and excitement. That's gonna make wonderful teaching.

SPEAKER_04 25:18

I'd like to shine in on the shining.

Love Self-Love And No Problem

SPEAKER_04 25:22

So beautiful. I'm like following you. I come from the Christian tradition, and there's scripture that says, look for the ancient path. When you find it, walk on it. And what you shared just really resonated with me. And thank you. Um, because there are times in my practice where I feeling it's like an entryway, these are thoughts, right? But it's an entryway to walking on that ancient road. And I just love it. I love look for it, call out for it and walk on it. So thank you for sharing that, Sarah. And also coming from the Christian traditions, the teaching that without love, no matter how wise or brilliant we are, without love, we sound like a clanking gong. Yeah. I know. Susan, thank you for it. These reminders, I just love it. Like opening the heart, opening the heart, lowering the walls, opening the heart. And it's not like my effort that lowers those walls. It's just the willingness to participate in this beautiful gift.

SPEAKER_02 26:24

I appreciate what you're saying and the emphasis on the importance of love, which always begins with self-love. And then who can do that? Most of us can't. But that doesn't mean that self-love goes away because you have love for yourself as someone who cannot love themselves right now. So there's no problem.

unknown 26:45

Right.

SPEAKER_04 26:46

Yeah, I was reading a Diana Winston's book. She says, What would this moment be like if there was no problem? I love that. I love that too. That's great.

SPEAKER_02 26:56

We're lucky that we found this. Very, very, very lucky.