Noting
Noting is the practice of continually labelling the actions of the mind and body, either silently or out loud, as they happen. It helps us stay as the observer of our experience and trains our ability to be present with whatever we're doing.
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This practice works on a few levels at once. The first is developing the ability to stay as the observer of experience. By giving your mind a stream of actions to pay attention to, you’re able to watch things unfold rather than be caught up in them.
The second is presence. This practice helps you slow down and deconstruct experience into progressively smaller moments, which brings you deeper into the present moment.
The third is that it can develop insight into impermanence. When you’re labelling things quickly and precisely, you start to see directly how quickly each sensation appears and disappears on its own. What felt like a continuous, flowing experience is seen clearly to be a stream of individual moments arising and passing away.
Developing your concentration helps a lot here. When your attention is steady, you can notice and move between sensations quickly, without getting pulled off into mental chatter or imagery. When the mind is scattered, experience becomes vague and muddy, and it’s a lot harder to see what’s actually happening in each moment.
Similar to walking meditation, noting is a great way to bring qualities like awareness and concentration off the cushion and into daily life. Because it works with whatever you’re doing, you can play with it throughout the day whether you’re walking, eating, or washing the dishes.
Noting practices
Noting in daily life
Take something simple like brushing your teeth. Normally you’d call the whole thing “brushing teeth” and move through it while thinking about something else. If you turned it into a noting practice, the labels might look something like this:
The labels you use aren’t important, what’s important is the recognition and labelling any time you notice a new sensation.
Noting as a seated practice
Shinzen Young has a simple framework for this practice. Everything you can experience falls into one of three categories.
Sitting quietly, you simply note whichever category is most present in each moment. It could look like this:
For any noting practice, do it at whatever speed feels right for you. Over time as your concentration and awareness improve you’ll naturally be able to speed up as you recognize progressively more subtle sensations, and learn to shift quickly between them. Eventually the act of labelling may get in the way and slow you down. If that’s happening, you can switch to simply noticing each sensation.
A guided practice
An overview and 20 minute guided noting practice.
Noting resources
Here’s another example of noting in daily life. This is an excerpt from the book “Practical Insight Meditation” by Mahasi Sayadaw where he shows how to note while eating food.
When you look at the food, looking, seeing.
When you arrange the food, arranging.
When you bring the food to the mouth bringing.
When you bend the neck forward, bending.
When the food touches the mouth, touching.
When placing the food in the mouth, placing.
When the mouth closes, sclosing.
When withdrawing the hand, withdrawing.
Should the hand touch the plate, touching.
When straightening the neck, straightening.
When in the act of chewing, chewing.
When you are aware of the taste, knowing.
When swallowing the food, swallowing.
