Meditationprovides investors with many benefits. Below are meditation tips from the newly releasedMeditation Guide for Investment Professionals, the full version of which isavailable online for CFA Institute members.

The initial installment of this series offeredgeneral tips to help with almost any meditation practice.

The focus in this edition is open-monitoring meditation. Why? Because the world has gone mindfulness crazy in the last several years, and mindfulness is a common termfor open-monitoring meditation.

Open monitoring has a long secular history and has been the most widely and statistically researched form of meditation.

The descriptor open-monitoring comes from the scientific literature that seeks to classify meditation styles. Many similar meditation practices go by different names. In addition to mindfulness, open-monitoring meditation may also be called insight meditation, Shamatha, or Vipassana.

One thing to remember: Open-monitoring meditation is basic to its individual meditation style. There are more comprehensive techniques scaled to the experience of the meditator. After all, meditation has thousands of years of documented history, and the depth of individual practices can be enormous. A parallel: Beginning research analysts dont start off learning trinomial options pricing models. Rather they receive an overview of financial theory, including arbitrage. Then they may proceed on to probability theory, Black-Scholes, binomial trees, and so on.

So it is with basic open-monitoring meditation. Think of it as one of the initial and critical steps to developing a robust meditation practice.

The scholarship provided below and in each of the forthcoming articles on meditation types isderived from the combined research efforts of neuroscientists, psychologists, and practitioners.

Open-Monitoring Meditation

What It Is:Open-monitoring meditation seeks to cultivate metacognition,a state of consciousness innate to every person. What is metacognition? The awareness of awareness itself. Those who achieve it describe it as the development of a purely objective witness consciousness that has the ability to watch all of the rest of their mental processes with non-attachment.

Non-attachment is a Western attempt to translate a specific meditation term for which there is no exact corollary. Non-attachment is nonjudgmental awareness that borders on pure objectivity. Put another way, non-attachment minimizes subjectivity. It is different from detachment, which is active disengagement from something. Non-attachment is similar to readiness. Hopefully, as investment professionals, we understand the benefit of minimizing subjectivity as we each strive to see the world for what it is, rather than what we prefer it to be.

Metacognition is cultivated, enhanced, and improved through meditation. Open monitoring asks that practitioners focus their awareness on the present moment rather than on mental distractions. Practitioners should accept their stray thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations without judgment. Eventually, with practice, their consciousness achievestotal awareness of their thoughts rather than just being lost in in those thoughts.

Mindfulness has been transformed into many formal training programs that you may have heard of, including the well-known Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).

Benefits

Among the many reported benefits of open-monitoring meditation are stress relief, better thinking, increased emotional intelligence, and the ability to overcome mental biases.

Steps

Below are steps for a generalized open-monitoring meditation.It may be useful to read these instructions into your smartphones Voice Notes function so that you can create your own guided meditation with your preferred pacing and duration.

In the next installment, the topic will be focused awareness meditation, which in technique is nearly opposite to open monitoring.

If you engage in this practice, feel free to share your experience in the comments section.

If you are a CFA Institute member and would like more information or support about meditation, then join our LinkedIn CFA Institute Members Meditation Group.

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All posts are the opinion of the author. As such, they should not be construed as investment advice, nor do the opinions expressed necessarily reflect the views of CFA Institute or the authors employer.

Image credit: Getty Images/Kaligraf

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Meditation Tips for Investment Professionals: Open-Monitoring Meditation - CFA Institute Enterprising Investor (blog)