Here is an interesting and different meditation. It's a variation of awareness meditation, that form of meditation which focuses our attention on what we are aware of right now -- in short, Step 10 meditation.

This meditation can be done anywhere, but it works best -- at least initially -- if we are in an unfamiliar place.

Close your eyes and place your attention on whatever your mind is presently aware of -- a memory, a sound, a feeling. Lift your head in such a way that you know that -- if you open your eyes -- you will not be entirely sure what you'll be looking at. Now, very, very, very rapidly, open and close your eyes once. Your eyes should be open for the merest fraction of a second -- the less time, the better.

If you open and close your eyes with rapidity, you will notice after you've closed them that all you have done is to see patterns of light and color. Your eyes were not open long enough for you to see and recognize or understand what you saw. Now that your eyes are closed, you have time to reflect and determine what it was that you were looking at. But -- and here's the important thing -- at the time you opened and closed them, you "saw" but yet you did not "see." This meditation teaches us that "seeing" usually consists of two components: the seeing of the patterns of light and color, and the process of making sense of those patterns.

Awareness meditation consists precisely in being able to discriminate between sensations (seeing, thinking, hearing) and our interpretation of those sensations. It helps us to see that our egos take our perceptions and "make sense" out of them -- attempt, in fact, to make a secure, safe, and recognizable world out of them. But we have learned that our egos are an illusion. Our experience, it seems, is merely streams of visual, auditory and other perceptions which contain no sense of "I." We impose that "I" upon them; "I" turns our perceptions into likes and dislikes, wants and aversions -- in short, into suffering.