Unlearning Default Awayness
How to recognize and relax unseen Awayness.
I've been meditating for almost ten years. I've dabbled in many methods and frameworks: Seeing that Frees, Aro gTér, Sam Harris, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, The Mind Illuminated. Time and again, the spacious, open, inclusive, “non-doing” practices resonated most deeply. I finally took the hint and adopted Opening Awareness as my base practice.
The basic instruction is deceptively simple: “Remain uninvolved in whatever arises.” Involvement manifests as three “muscular contractions” of the mind: emphasizing, de-emphasizing, and setting aside. In their compulsive forms, these map to clinging (attachment), pushing away (aversion), and ignoring (ignorance). Discovering what the instruction means in the midst of specific sensations and concrete situations becomes integral to the practice, ultimately revealing what it means to rest in the totality of experience.
While various scaffolding practices can help re-establish uninvolvement, the practice itself remains simple: remain uninvolved.
The two misunderstandings that confused my practice for years centered around the relationship between orientation1, strategy, and these three involvements. To unpack them, we need a simple model of how intentions translate into actions through three distinct levels:
Level 1: Orientation
The level of intention with the felt sense of agency pointing in a direction. My fundamental aim in any given moment.
Level 2: Strategy
The level of tactics I employ to enact my orientation, including both habitual, patterned reactions and fresh, spontaneous responses.
Level 3: Involvement
The level of mental actions that are the “muscular contractions” of consciousness mentioned above:
Emphasizing sensations, which can escalate to compulsively clinging.
De-emphasizing sensations, which can escalate to compulsively pushing away.
Setting aside sensations, which can escalate to compulsively ignoring.
Towardness and Awayness Orientation
To unlearn my first misunderstanding, I had to feel the difference between two types of orientation:
Towardness as coherent approach. I’m moving toward something specific I can name, feel, or envision.
Awayness as scattered flight. I’m moving away from something I don't want without a clear destination.
Misunderstanding 1
I confused orientation with involvement. I didn't see that an underlying Awayness orientation (Level 1) could be motivating my entire practice, causing me to constantly try to get away from the three involvements themselves (Level 3).
For example, when approached with Towardness, “Remain uninvolved with whatever arises” is a clear aim. You can intend to remain uninvolved without clinging to remaining uninvolved. But when Awayness co-opts the instruction, it becomes, “Get away from all involvement,” creating a paradox that generates endless struggle.
Misunderstanding 2
I saw my defensive patterns as broken, stuck strategies (Level 2) from the past; outdated, malfunctioning, and in desperate need of fixing. This created an Awayness orientation toward seeing my own patterns.
The Brilliance of Patterns
What started to unwind Misunderstanding 2 was adopting a view that saw my defensive patterns as brilliant at what they're motivated to do: move me away from threatening experiences. They may have originated in the past, but they persist because they're still effective right now.
Through this view, I developed a Towardness orientation with respect to seeing these patterns, resting in the full experience of them. They have become fascinating, each with its own intricate logic, intelligence, and resourcefulness.
Towardness and Awayness Asymmetries
Returning to Misunderstanding 1, I've started to unlearn it by recognizing two interesting asymmetries between Towardness and Awayness.
Directional Clarity:
Towardness implies a single destination. Like swimming toward a visible shore, I have an attractor: kindness, nobility, connection, searchlessness. I'm familiar with what calls me—or at least the direction it lives in—and orient toward it.
Awayness has no such directional clarity. I can go in any direction, as long as it's away from what I don't want. Like fleeing a swarm of bees, I have a repulsor: pain, rejection, embarrassment, failure, Samsara. There's no specific target, simply “Not this. Away!”
Relationship to Involvement:
This directional asymmetry creates another: how eager Towardness and Awayness are to get involved, how much they churn involvement.
A clearly seen and deeply felt Towardness motive uses involvement only to course-correct. When I've arrived, I can simply rest.
Awayness incentivizes clinging, pushing, and ignoring in any direction that moves me away from—or keeps me away from—the unwanted condition. This creates hyper-vigilance. I must guard in all directions to ensure the threat isn't approaching. Rest becomes dangerous because it means letting my guard down.2
How This Works in Context
Consider my walking into a social event where I don't know anyone.
With a Towardness orientation (moving toward genuine connection):
Level 1 (Orientation): Move toward genuine connection
Level 2 (Strategy): Coherent engagement
Level 3 (Involvements):
Emphasizing moments of real resonance when they arise: making real eye contact, asking genuine questions, and sharing something authentic.
De-emphasizing filling silence with empty chatter.
Setting-aside the urge to look at my phone.
Notice how Towardness uses involvement purposefully. Each involvement serves the coherent aim rather than scattering in all directions.
With an Awayness orientation (moving away from embarrassment):
Level 1 (Orientation): Get away from potential embarrassment
Level 2 (Strategy): Scattered disengagement
Level 3 (Involvements):
Clinging to phone screen for safe escape.
Pushing away eye contact because it's too vulnerable.
Ignoring interesting conversations nearby because it's too threatening.
Moving away from embarrassment uses any involvement to scatter chaotically. Yet this isn't brokenness! It's successfully implementing a defensive strategy that's working perfectly at what I'm (unknowingly) intending to do.3
The “Problem” with Awayness
To be clear, I'm not saying Towardness = good, Awayness = bad. Indeed, it's not always bad to be motivated by Awayness. Running the hell away from a swarm of killer bees—in any direction—is perfectly legitimate!
Awayness might become problematic only if I'm not seeing that it is motivating action. There's not even anything inherently wrong with keeping motives—and the patterns that serve them—unseen. There are no existential problems or ultimate solutions. Awayness only becomes a “problem” in a relative sense when I want to move in a specific direction (Towardness), but the unseeing of Awayness makes that difficult or impossible.
Aspects of Working With Unseen Awayness
1. Valuing the Aim More Than Avoiding Discomfort
I had to want the result more than I feared what I’d encounter on the path. Many genuine methods led directly toward experiences I wanted to get further from. If presence means feeling everything—including pain—while I'm unknowingly motivated by pain-Awayness, my hidden strategies will sabotage every move toward presence.
Moreover, many (all?) beautiful experiences contain their shadows as inseparable aspects. Deep appreciation holds the seed of loss. Genuine intimacy requires vulnerability. Vivid aliveness includes encountering uncertainty and the uncontrollable.
So when I lacked this clarity of values, I defaulted to Awayness, trying to get the “good” by moving away from the “bad.” But since they're experientially inseparable, the consequences of my strategies' success at getting me away from difficult experiences was to move me away from some of life's most beautiful.4
2. Experiential Knowledge of the Aim
I needed to know what I was moving toward through direct experience, not just concepts. At a minimum, I needed to feel what it was like to move in the right direction. “Remain uninvolved with whatever arises” remained empty words until I tasted that quality of uninvolvement. Without this experiential knowledge, I navigated by rumors and negations, trying to eliminate everything that seemed like "involvement."
To clarify: the method “Remain uninvolved with whatever arises” involves specific steps like recognizing involvement when it arises, gently relaxing the grip, returning to uninvolvement. The result is the felt quality of uninvolvement itself, a particular flavor of noninterference.
But without having experienced genuine uninvolvement, I only had concepts. So instead of following the method, I tried to manufacture the result through negation, eliminating everything that seemed like “clinging,” “pushing,” “ignoring,” “thought,” “crampedness,”… on into infinity. I was defining my target by what it wasn't rather than knowing what it was. This was Awayness mimicking Towardness.5
3. Felt Recognition of the Difference
I needed to know what the energetic quality of both types of orientation felt like. Towardness feels like opening, flowing, extending, motivating, energizing. Awayness feels like contracting, backing up, scattering, folding, depressing. Without this felt discrimination, my overwhelming default was Awayness.
The critical failure here was not noticing when Towardness flipped to Awayness. What began as genuine intention—“Remain uninvolved with whatever arises”—would subtly transform:
I'd make instrumental adjustments: “Relax this clinging by noticing what other sensations in awareness are present.”
The adjustments became the focus: “Monitor for any sign of involvement to relax.”
The means became the end: “Actively scan for and eliminate all forms of clinging, pushing, or ignoring.”
I was now in Awayness, desperately using involvement while claiming to practice uninvolvement.
The result was exhausting vigilance and hollow victories, achieving the “uninvolvement” of successful avoidance rather than genuine arrival.
Some of My Most Brilliant Patterns
To illustrate how unseen Awayness operates, here are a few of my most persistent patterns, ordered roughly by how difficult they've been to see:
People-Pleasing
Pattern: Default to agreement, smoothing, and self-erasure. Often slip into dishonesty about my wants, needs, and abilities (see Meta-Awayness of Towardness below).
Brilliant Logic: If I control how others feel, I can avoid rupture, rejection, shame, and the pain of empathy.
Joy Dampening
Pattern: Brace against the experience of joy.
Brilliant Logic: If highs stay moderate, lows hurt less. Intensity control = intensity avoidance.
Appreciation Blindness
Pattern: Block felt appreciation for anything.
Brilliant Logic: If nothing is appreciated, nothing can devastate me when lost.
Awayness From All Arisings
Pattern: Maintain constant vigilance against all arising sensations/experiences.
Brilliant Logic: Any painful or unwanted arising could ambush me at any time. Never relaxed = never getting caught off-guard.
Meta-Awayness of Towardness
Pattern: Block recognition of any Towardness orientation.
Brilliant Logic: I can't choose wrong if I never choose. I can't waste time on the wrong aim if I never pick one. I can't feel bad for having harmful or immoral desires if I never recognize any desires at all.
Practical Suggestions
If any of this resonates and you find yourself struggling with a practice, it may be worth exploring a few questions somatically:
“Do I truly want the results of this practice?”
“Do my assumptions about what the results of this practice will be like involve experiences I have reasons to avoid?”
“Does actually moving toward the results of this practice cause me to confront experiences I’m strongly motivated to stay away from?”
No amount of rephrasing practice instructions will help if following them leads somewhere you unknowingly don't want to go.
I’ve often found that a method was actually working, but it was resulting in experiences I had unseen, legitimate reasons to avoid. I could only make progress once those Awayness incentives were seen and relaxed.
Specific Practices That Helped Me
Somatic-based emotional work like Focusing or Internal Family Systems: A prerequisite of feeling Towardness and Awayness is the ability to feel in the first place. This is particularly tricky if you have Awayness incentives to not feel the intensity of embodied experience. If I could tell my past self one thing, it would be, “Learn how to inquire somatically before trying anything else!”
Existential Kink: An Awayness orientation toward my patterns incentivized keeping them unseen. EK gave me a playful framework and a set of practices to start establishing a Towardness orientation with respect to those unseen patterns.
Shadow Appreciation: I formulated this practice after noticing I was completely blocking the experience of appreciation. Whenever I asked what I truly appreciated, I only felt hazy numbness. So I flipped the block and went straight for the heart: “What would devastate me most to lose?” Immediately, answers poured in. I chose one and refined it: “What, specifically, would devastate me most about losing my girlfriend?” A cascade of beautiful details I deeply value about her flowed effortlessly into awareness.
This can be repeated with anything that arises. Here are the steps:
Rest in Receptive Presence: Start with an amount of Opening Awareness you find appropriate.
Drop in the Question: Silently drop the question, “What would devastate me the most to lose?” into awareness, without effort.
Notice What Arises: Allow memories, images, or sensations to surface; feel their bodily resonance.
Savor & Amplify: Deepen appreciation by naming what matters, then increase intensity and specificity by asking, “What, specifically, would devastate me the most about losing X?”
Meet Resistance: If numbness or resistance arises, greet them kindly and rest in spaciousness as needed.
Iterate: Cycle 2 through 5 however many time feels appropriate.
Rest Again: Conclude by resting again with Opening Awareness, allowing whatever arose to settle naturally.
Worst Case Scenario Simulation: This practice treats every avoidance or resistance that arises as a locally optimal strategy (a Chris Lakin’s phrase), a successful way to move away from an unwanted experience. The practice helps you feel what Towardness might be like right in the middle of the worst expression of the unwanted experience:
Rest in Receptive Presence: Start with an amount of Opening Awareness you find appropriate.
Recall a Triggering Situation: Bring to mind a moment where resistance or fear arose (social anxieties work especially well for me).
Enter the Catastrophe: Vividly imagine the absolute worst outcome, tracking the real-time bodily sensations the outcome provokes.
Repeat until the scenario feels maximally vivid and fully “as bad as feared.”
Feel Towardness: At peak distress, envision and enact how you'd like to respond with clarity, boundaries, kindness, strength, nobility, etc.
The aim is to experience what Towardness would be like in the midst of the worst-case outcome.
Rest in Towardness: Linger in the felt sense of that orientation.
Re-run or Rest: Replay the scenario until it becomes neutral or boring, then savor the spaciousness that remains.
Rest Again: Conclude by resting again with Opening Awareness, allowing whatever arose to settle naturally.
Influences, Resources, and Thanks
Struggling with Ari Nielsen’s Another “Simplest” Exercise of Searchlessness and being completely dumbfounded by why it was so damn hard to follow the instructions was a major catalyst that started a process culminating in much of what I’ve written here.
The influence of Malcolm Ocean’s Towardness & Awayness Motivation are fundamentally asymmetric, along with that of Chris Lakin and Max Shen's conversation in Aim at what you want, not what you don’t, on all of what I wrote can be seen clearly.
Exploring Bruce M. Di Marscio’s The Option Method also planted many seeds:
Andrew Shade Blevins’s How to Be Happy and follow-up Sample Problem
The entirety of Chris Lakin’s blog Locally Optimal is worth reading, but here are some choice selections:
If you're interested in spacious, inclusive, life-affirming meditation, I'd highly recommend Charlie Awbery excellent introduction Opening Awareness. I'm deeply grateful for their direct guidance on the path.
Many thanks to those who have had a direct or indirect influence on this material, particularly David Chapman, Jared Janes, Ari Nielsen, Bill Klein, Max Soweski, Andrew Shade Blevins, Ye’tsal Kandro, and everyone else over at Evolving Ground. Your practice is inspiring.
Finally, a very special thanks to Ari Nielsen for encouraging me to turn this material into a post and offering advice on how to publish!
Throughout this post I’ll use the terms orientation, intention, motivation, aim, etc. interchangeably to refer to the same felt sense of being motivated or intentioned.
Notice how this incentivizes an Awayness orientation with respect to rest…
There's a third asymmetry I've started to notice: Awayness-motivated involvements tend to escalate more readily into their compulsive forms. When I'm oriented by Awayness, “emphasizing” quickly becomes desperate clinging, “de-emphasizing” hardens into forceful pushing away, and “setting aside” collapses into willful ignorance. This often results in a difference in tone or texture of each. Towardness-motivated involvements feel lighter and more spacious. What might be “clinging” under Awayness becomes “appreciating” under Towardness; “pushing away” becomes “releasing”; and “ignoring” becomes “letting be.”
Before I valued genuine connection more than I valued avoiding the discomfort of separation, I couldn't even see that they were inseparable. And before I could even see that I valued genuine connection, I needed to relax the Awayness motivation to not see what I deeply valued (see my discussion of my Meta-Awayness of Towardness pattern). This shit cuts deep!
I find community/sangha to be incredibly valuable in this regard. Without having experiential knowledge of the results of a practice, I can be inspired by others who seem to embody the results so beautifully.
Thanks for writing this. Sending some joy your way. Catch!
Thanks for the writing! All the insights, techniques and resources are really helpful. A spring board to the practice. I can see myself coming back to this text time and time again to remember and rediscover ways of looking, so thanks again.