Most people who sit down to meditate close their eyes, and there is good reason for it: the eyes are where the world keeps pouring in. In a five-minute video titled "Eyes Open Meditation," Dina Proctor, creator of 3x3 meditation and author of Madly Chasing Peace, argues that closing them is not the only door. Her technique is to walk, drive, or simply look around while keeping your attention on what you see, without attaching the running commentary the mind usually layers on top: the label ("stop sign"), the judgment ("that driver is cutting me off"), the private wish that something were different. What is left, she suggests, is colors, shapes, and a quiet presence underneath them, and in that space you can find a gap between thoughts that is hard to reach any other way. It is a practice aimed less at stillness than at a way of being that can travel with you through an ordinary day.
Picture a familiar route. You turn a corner and there is a stop sign. Before you have really registered it, the mind has already moved: that's a stop sign, cars are supposed to stop, why isn't that one stopping, that neighbor has a nice mailbox, I wonder when the trees will start losing their leaves. Proctor describes exactly this reflex. "We have this whole entire commentary about what we think we see going on in the world," she says, and the mind "just labels it so we can understand it file it away" (about 1:00).
Her point is not that the labeling is a flaw. She describes it as part of how we function: "there's this process that goes on tens of thousands of thoughts every single day," and labeling is part of how we understand our world. The trouble is that the labels arrive so quickly that they replace the thing they describe. The stop sign stops being an object in front of you and becomes a rule, a judgment about other drivers, a reminder of something you need to do later.
The eyes-open practice asks you to slow that process down. In her words, "the technique is to be present with whatever you're seeing and allowing whatever you're seeing to do or be whatever it is without having a mental label or judgment about what's going on" (about 0:34). You are not trying to stop seeing. You are trying to see without adding the story.
The most useful image in the video is one she offers to make the shift concrete. "Think of it like you were just born into the world," she says, "you're a few months old and you don't know what a stop sign is" (about 1:54). An infant does not know what the red octagon means. What it registers is the color, the edge, the shape, the fact that something is there. The child does not yet have the language to name the color, and that absence is precisely what she wants you to borrow for a few minutes.
This is a subtle discipline. Proctor is careful to separate noticing from analysis. You can notice that "there is something there made up of colors and shapes" without moving into "what I wonder what that color is," which she calls "a whole nother level of commentary." The aim is presence at the level of perception, not a new kind of thinking about perception. She extends the same invitation to the rest of the scene: a tree, a flower, a dog walking by. Each becomes a set of shapes and colors instead of a category.
Proctor says she uses the technique in the car, and she chooses a moment most drivers will recognize. "If I'm feeling frustrated traffic isn't moving enough and the cars in front of me aren't moving and we're all stopped and how come nobody's moving," she says, the mind starts producing its questions about what is causing the delay and whether she will be late. Instead, she shifts to "just noticing like I'm in this place kind of surrounded with these colors and shapes" (about 3:01).
A caution from this editor, not from the video: the noticing she describes is a light background awareness, and it should never pull attention away from the road. The useful part is the mental move, the letting go of the commentary that turns a traffic jam into a personal grievance, not any change in how closely you watch the cars around you.
The most distinctive instruction in the video is about what not to do. You are not trying to fix anything. "It's not about trying to change something or make something better or improve something," she says (about 3:45). Traffic is traffic. The stop sign is the stop sign. "We can't change any of these things anyway," she notes, which is part of the relief. Once the commentary about what is wrong falls away, what remains is "just a presence underneath it."
This is where the practice connects to a broader idea she returns to throughout: meditation as non-resistance. A driver who darts around you becomes, in the terms she offers, "just a shape kind of going around us." The rest, the assessment of the driver's character and the story about being cut off, is what she calls "all the story and all the mental comment." Seeing the shape alone is not a pretense that nothing annoying happened. It is a refusal to let the story set the terms of the next minute.
Proctor is clear that the practice has a specific payoff. It can be "a really great technique to get you into a place where you find the space between your thoughts," she says, which means "finding that quiet between the comments that are constantly going in the mind" (about 4:30). Most of us assume that quiet has to be manufactured by sitting still and shutting out the world. Her approach suggests the opposite: the quiet is often easiest to find in the busiest part of the day, because the busy scene gives the mind more commentary to step back from.
The gap is not a blank. It is simply the moment between one comment and the next, when the mind pauses long enough for you to notice that the commentary is a separate activity from the seeing itself.
Proctor frames the whole practice as a definition of meditation itself. "Meditation for me isn't something I'm doing to check out the to-do list," she says. "It's a state of being, and we can be in a state of meditation while we are active or while we are still" (about 4:40). The meaning she gives is simple: "being fully present and non resistant and at ease and in flow with whatever is going on."
That definition is the reason eyes-open meditation makes sense as a practice. If meditation is a state rather than a posture, then a walk, a commute, or a moment in a crowded room can be as valid a place to practice as a cushion. It also explains the two situations she names at the start of the video: spending time in nature, where you want to deepen the experience, and feeling restless, where sitting still is hard. The technique meets both needs without asking you to become someone who sits well.
Proctor does not give a timed protocol in this video, and it would be inventing to suggest one. The sequence her description supports is simple:
- Choose an ordinary setting: a walk, a drive, a park, or a room where you are waiting.
- Let your eyes rest on whatever is in front of you, without searching for anything special.
- Notice colors and shapes. Let a tree, a dog, or a sign be only what it looks like.
- When a label arrives (stop sign, nice mailbox, why is that car slow), notice it as commentary and return to what you see.
- Pay attention to the small gaps between comments, and to how it feels to be present without fixing anything.
She closes with a line that works as a summary of her whole approach to practice: "it's something that's been really powerful for me and so it works for me maybe it'll work for somebody else so as always take what resonates and gently leave the rest" (about 5:04). That generosity is part of the teaching. The video offers a technique, not a rule, and invites you to test it against your own days.
If the idea of seeing without commentary appeals to you, start small. Take one walk this week and try the stop-sign exercise: when a label rises, let it pass and return to colors and shapes. Notice what changes when you stop asking the world to explain itself. Proctor's video is short enough to revisit before a walk or a drive, and her description of the technique is clear enough to practice from memory. For further reading from the same teacher, the video's description and her own references point to her work with 3x3 meditation and to Madly Chasing Peace, the book she names as her author credit. Use what resonates, and leave the rest.
