In meditation, we’re often told to “observe”, “watch” or “look at” our feelings and thoughts. I think this invites a kind of vision-adjacent looking that isn’t always optimal. Vision recruits a lot more concept-making than other senses. It’s a very top-down way of sensing, with up to 80% of the input to primary visual cortex being feedback not sense data. So, being prompted to “look at” our feelings / thoughts may prompt a more concept-laden way of experiencing them. It also invites a sense of a “me” over here, observing a feeling / thought over there. For these reasons, I think prompts that use analogies to different senses can work better. Being invited to “listen in” to your thoughts and feelings, for example, can allow for a more receptive mode of experience. It can be even better to simply “feel into” your thoughts / feelings / emotions / perceptions / the space of your mind. Listening, whilst encouraging more receptivity, can still conjure a sense of a “me” over here listening to a feeling / thought over there. Whereas “feeling into” our experience both invites a non-conceptual sensing and less me-making. The intimacy of the sense of touch means that when we feel something it is always to some degree merged with us. In the case of our proprioception, we can feel things “from the inside.” Feeling a thought / feeling / perception “from the inside” gets much closer to the right meditative stance imo. Even better than “feeling into” can be “be sensitive to.” Most people hear that phrase in a way that invites a feeling-adjascent sense. But a particular type that is especially receptive rather than an active touching. This captures the receptivity of listening and the reduced me-making of feeling. The “be sensitive to” instruction can be especially effective for vipassana / insight meditation. Instead of looking for, manufacturing or actively seeking qualities like impermanence, non-self and suffering, we receptively remain sensitive to them when they arise. We might also say we “tune into them.” We have an openness to that frequency of experience. Likewise, I think this can be a powerful prompt for Do Nothing / Open Awareness styles of meditation. Observing our experience invites a subtle doing that runs counter to the theme of this meditation style. I find that simply remaining sensitive to or tuning in leads us to a deeper level of non-doing. Ultimately, people can experiment with these different prompts and see what works best for them. Different people experience senses in different ways, so some prompts may work better for some than others. But it’s good to be aware of the subtle differences that different sense-analogies induce. And to play around with them to find the meditative stance that orients us towards the deepest insight.