In the third stage of this meditation practice we let go of the counting and simply follow the breath as it flows in and out. This is the Mindfulness of Breathing proper, and if I were forced to introduce the Mindfulness of Breathing practice in two minutes then this is what I’d teach — simply paying attention to the sensations of the breath.
However, by saying that I don’t want to devalue the earlier two stages, which are important aids in helping us to practice effectively in this stage of the practice and important practices in their own right.
Here’s an outline of the practice so far:
Set up your posture, as described in the posture guidelines, developing awareness of the body and relaxing as best you can.
Then, becoming aware of the breath as the central experience within the body, begin counting after each out-breath, counting in cycles of ten breaths. When you notice the mind wandering, gently bringing it back to the breath. Notice the gently relaxing quality of the out-breath.
Moving into the second stage of the practice, begin counting just before each in-breath, again counting ten breaths before starting over again at one. Notice the gently stimulating quality of the in-breath.
When you feel ready, move onto the third stage.
In the third stage of the practice, drop the counting, and just follow the breathing coming in and out. Pay particular attention to the transitions from an in-breath to an out-breath, since those are the places where you’re most likely to become distracted.
See if you can notice the breathing as a continuous process — not as a series of in-breaths and out-breaths, but as a never-ending stream of sensation connected with the movements of the body, and the sensations of the air flowing into and out of the body.
You can listen to an MP3 guided meditation that will lead you through the first three stages of the practice by clicking on the player below:
If you’ve been working methodically through this practice you know the score by now. Try doing all three stages for a few days. Practice them every day, if possible, and get to know them well.
Watch out for any tendency to want to skip over one stage (maybe because you don’t like it as much as the others). Each stage has its own special function, so remember to do them in the correct order.
You might want to make your meditation a little longer now, perhaps five minutes per stage, making fifteen minutes.
Shunryu Suzuki, the famous Zen teacher who founded the San Francisco Zen Center and who was a major influence on Western Buddhism, talked about “the gaining idea.” This rather awkward but incredibly useful phrase points to the problem that arises in our practice when we’re hungering for results. We want be enlightened right here and right now. Or we simply want to rush on to learn the whole practice so that we can check that off our list of things to do. The gaining idea is a major hindrance to developing skill in meditation.
As Suzuki Roshi said, “When a gaining idea arises in our practice, it is a sign that our practice is in trouble.” The reason for this is that we’ve actually incorporated our restless, grasping mind into our meditation practice. Our practice has been taken over by the mind that craves, yearns, and tries to appropriate results without following the path that leads to those results.
These attitudes of grasping, craving, and greedy hunger are the very things that cause us suffering in the first place. Because we suffer we want to meditate, because meditation is the antidote to craving and suffering. And then what happens? Our craving takes control of the meditation! It’s as if the antidote to the poison itself accidentally becomes contaminated with poison!
It’s useful if you learn to recognize this gaining idea, this notion that somehow your best interests will be served if you rush through the practice. That notion is false. Meditation is about letting go of grasping so that we can experience freedom. So start doing that now by deciding that you’ll pause where you are right now, and that you’ll explore the stages of the meditation practice and really get to know them before you move on to the next stage.
As part of that exploration come back to this section and read a bit more about the issues that can arise in this stage of the practice.
Perhaps this is a good time to remind you of your body. I’ve emphasized that it’s important to set up your posture at the start of a period of practice. Doing this provides you with better conditions for meditating.
It’s like making sure, when you’re building a fire, that your kindling is stacked just right and that your matches are dry, so that you’ll end up with a good blaze instead of a pile of smoldering wood and a bad temper.
But when you take your attention away from your posture in order to be more aware of your breath, you’ll often find that your posture starts to drift. You might find that some parts of your body start to sag, while others become tense. And these changes lead to mental and emotional changes.
The tension in your shoulders might be related to some anger you’ve started to experience. The sagging in your spine might be related to a feeling of despair that’s crept in. If you relax your shoulders, the anger will start to disappear again. If you straighten your spine, you’ll start to feel more confident again.
As you become more proficient at meditation, you’ll learn that you can periodically take your attention away from your breath for a split second in order to check your posture and make minor corrections. You’ll get so good at doing this that you’ll be able to effectively keep a continuous awareness of your breath.
Remember learning to drive? You probably found that at first you’d take your attention off the road to change gears and when you took your attention back to the road (several long seconds later) you’d find that you’d drifted off towards one side or that a red traffic light had mysteriously appeared from nowhere. Later, you’ll have found that you were able to change gears without significantly taking your awareness from what was going on around you.
The same thing happens in meditation – we learn to deal with the seeming complexity of managing our posture and what we’re doing with the focus of our attention – elegantly and even effortlessly. A good way to start practicing this skill of monitoring your posture without disrupting your practice is to check and correct your posture in between stages.
You might want to do this every time you move from one stage to another. Later, you’ll find that you can integrate monitoring your posture into your practice in the way that I’ve described.
While stage one of this meditation practice helps to develop more calm (by emphasizing the qualities of the out breath), and stage two helps to develop more energy and awareness (by emphasizing the qualities of the in breath), the third stage emphasizes both the in breath and the out breath equally. This helps us to blend the calm relaxation of the first stage with the energized awareness of the second stage.
In our meditation practice we are ideally developing a sense of energetic calm awareness, or a calmly energized awareness. While doing stage three you can be aware of the constant oscillation between the calming out breath and the energizing in breath, and allow the qualities of the out breath and of the in breath to permeate each other.
Modifying an analogy the Buddha himself used, you can think about making dough. When you’re making dough, what you’re doing is taking two contrasting substances – a wet one and a dry one – and combining them together in a perfectly balanced blend.
If you have too much water, then you’ll have a sticky mess, while if you have too much flour, you’ll have a dry, cracked ball.
Get the proportions just right, and you’ll have dough that is perfectly pliable and workable. (The Buddha’s analogy involved a “bathman or bathman’s apprentice) blending soap powder and water — presumably the Buddha was more familiar from his earlier life with bathing in luxury spas than he was with baking).
Just as the right balance of flour and water (or soap-powder and water) produces a pliable mixture that can be used appropriately, this stage of the mindfulness of breathing meditation practice helps us to develop pliability of mind; to get our minds into a calm and energetic state where we can work to develop a much greater degree of concentration.
If the first two stages have gone really well, letting go of the numbers can allow us to develop a deeper and more balanced concentration. However, if we haven’t managed to develop enough calmness in the first two stages, then it’s easy to get lost in the third stage.
This often happens because the counting has been acting as an anchor for our awareness: it stops us from drifting too far away from the breath. So if we let go of the counting we can often float off into distraction.
One way to retain an anchor while letting go of the numbers is to use a physical sensation in the body as an anchor. I sometimes use the physical sensations in my hands in the same way as I use the numbers.
Sometimes at the end of every out-breath I take my awareness to my hands in order to keep me grounded. I use the sensations in my hands much as I’d use the numbers.
The physical anchor is a more refined anchor than the counting because it’s non-verbal — it cuts down on the amount of thinking, so that your mind can develop a deeper level of stillness.
Other times I maintain awareness of my hands throughout the cycle of each in-breath and out-breath. When I breathe in there’s a sensation of rising in the body and so I have a general sense of the gap between the hands and the breath widening. In each out-breath there’s a feeling that the body is sinking, and so I get a sense of the connection between the hands and the breath narrowing. So I notice the connection between the hands and the breath, and this helps keep the mind from wandering off.
Partly I think this works because it makes the practice more interesting. But partly I think it’s something to do with introducing a “stretch” into the practice. What I mean is that I’ve noticed that when my mind stretches to accommodate two separate sensations it seems to calm down very quickly. I can’t explain this, but I offer it as a tool that might be useful.
Other “stretches” involve being aware of the space outside my body while focusing on some inner sensation (like the breath), and being aware of sounds outside of myself while following some inner sensation.
You might want to play around with this idea of creating a stretch in your awareness and see what happens. Just notice two very different and geographically separate sensations, and pay attention to both simultaneously. And notice what the result is.
We talk about “trains of thought.” You can think of these as being like real locomotive trains that pull into a busy station and then go rattling off. Most of them don’t go anywhere that we particularly want to go (most of them are to do with worrying, getting angry, running ourselves down, etc). But our mind is like a little kid that’s very restless and curious, and keeps going through the open doors into the carriages.
Before we know it we’re miles away from where we wanted to be (in dangerous territory, often!), and it takes us forever to get home.
By learning meditation you can learn just to watch the trains pulling up and pulling away, being aware of them and choosing not to get into them.
Are there any trains we want to get into? Yes. Some thoughts can be useful, if they are thoughts that guide us toward our immediate experience. For example, we can say to ourselves things like “Staying in the moment … there’s just this moment.” Thoughts like that take us deeper into our meditation.
One difference between useful thought trains and those that take us into distractions, is that when we’re reflecting (as opposed to being distracted), we know what we’re thinking and why, and what effect those thoughts are having). By contrast distracted thoughts are like dreams — we don’t know we’re in them until we “wake up.”
But it can take a while to recognize which thoughts are useful and at first it’s not a bad idea simply to treat all thoughts as distractions and to let them all depart from the station of the mind while you “just sit” on the platform.
There’s another way that the third stage of the mindfulness of breathing meditation, in which we drop the counting of the first two stages and simply follow the breath flowing in and out, is a progression from those two stages.
The progression consists in sensing the continuity of the breathing process, through having an unbroken awareness of the breathing rather than in having an awareness of individual breaths.
When we’re counting out-breaths (as in the first stage of the meditation practice) or counting in-breaths (as in the second stage) there’s an inevitable tendency to experience the process of the breathing as being chopped into bits. There’s an in-breath. Then an out-breath. Then another in-breath. Then another out-breath. We may acknowledge pauses between the in and out phases, so that we mentally chop the breathing into four parts: in / pause / out / pause.
Now actually the breathing process isn’t quite like that. It’s not really divided into discrete parts. When you watch the breathing closely in meditation you’ll see that the in-breath shades into a feeling of fullness, which then shades into the release of the out-breath. Then the increasing sense of emptiness at the end of the exhalation shades into the beginning of the next in-breath. There are no distinct beginnings or ends. There’s just one continuous process that changes its character over time. It’s much like looking at a rainbow. There are different colors, but when you look at where one color shades into another you’ll see there are no distinct transitions.
We’re practicing mindfulness of breathing, not mindfulness of breaths.
When we experience the breath as chopped up then there’s a tendency for our awareness itself to become discontinuous. We actively experience the in-breath, then the mind goes a bit floppy for a moment, then we pay attention to the out-breath, then the mind goes a bit squidgy again. Somewhere during the times when the mind is taking a little vacation from vividly noticing the breath it decides instead to get absorbed in some thought or fantasy, and we don’t have the mental sharpness to stop it from going on a little (or perhaps a long) wander.
When we get to the end of the second stage and stop counting we have the opportunity to experience the wholeness of the breathing rather than the chopped-up-ness of in-out-in-out. And so our awareness itself becomes more continuous. We’re less likely to get distracted. The mind becomes more attuned to the subtler sensations where the breath is changing from an inhalation to an exhalation, and vice versa. And we develop a very pleasant sense that we have a continuous thread of awareness running through our experience.
So practically, what this means is that we follow the sensations of the breath as it flows in, noticing the sensations of movement becoming subtler as the sensations of fullness are becoming stronger, noticing the “cresting” of the inhaling as it releases from fullness into the emptying of exhaling, noticing the sensations of exhaling becoming stronger as the body moves faster and as the exhaling happens more slowly, bottoming out into an increasing sense of emptiness, until the emptiness gives way to a sense of filling. And so on, and so on. It’s actually hard to put this in writing because for the sake of clarity in writing I have to use commas and periods, which suggests a succession of discrete experiences rather than an ever-evolving transition within one single experience, which is the process of breathing.
Another approach would be, next time you’re following the breathing (and maybe that’s right now) seeing if you can notice any absolute boundaries and discontinuities within the process of the breathing. I think you’ll find there are none, and that as your sense of the breathing becomes more continuous, so too does your sense of the continuity of your mindfulness.
The great hypnotherapist, Milton Erickson, told a story about how one day, when he was a boy, a riderless horse wandered into the farmyard outside his home. Milton had never seen this horse before, and had no idea where it lived, but very soon he had the horse back where it belonged. How did he do this?
Well, he sat on the horse’s back, got it to start walking, and then every time they came to a turn in the road, he paid attention to the almost imperceptible movements of the horse’s body that told him where it wanted to go. And once young Milton had sensed in which direction the horse wanted to head in, he encouraged it to do so. It turned out that the horse knew its own way home, and all Milton had to do was give it a little gentle guidance — or encouragement to trust its own instincts.
It’s similar with our breathing. I’ve said that in the mindfulness of breathing practice we’re not controlling our breath. On the other hand I’ve also suggested that you can use deep breathing, or breathing into the belly, or breathing into the upper chest, etc., as ways of altering your state of mind. This might sound contradictory, but it’s not really. When we change the pattern of our breathing, we don’t have to exert any control. We can gently guide the breath without controlling it, as Milton did.
Had Milton tried to tell the horse where to go, he’d never have got it home. Horses, after all, are trained to follow orders. Instead he used a more subtle technique of being aware of where the horse wanted to go, and then reinforced that desire with some gentle guidance. The horse soon got the idea.
We all are riders of horses, in a way. Our breathing is generally under the control of subconscious processes, and it has to be said that our subconscious, by and large, does a pretty good job of keeping breathing. The subconscious rarely fails to carry out its tasks, which is more than can be said for our conscious minds (how often do we go upstairs to get something and then forget by the time we get there what it was we wanted?). So let your subconscious do what it’s good at.
When you want to change your breathing, say by breathing into your belly more deeply, then all you really have to do is to take your awareness into your belly to give your subconscious a gentle hint, and then let it do the work. In this way, we gently guide our breath rather than control it.
The fourth stage of this meditation practice helps us to have greater focused attention. You can learn about that here.
You can also learn more about this meditation practice in my book, Wildmind: A Step-by-Step Guide to Meditation.
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Thank you very much for your clear and kind answer. I really appreciate it.
Yes, Im Science student, Your new paths is called as Neuro Plasticity. It means new paths developing and change structure to good side.
Im having terrible mental problems since more than 5 years, such as major depression (I am native Buddhist, killing ourselves is next hell,im afraid of hell) , Anxiety, negative thoughts, Phobias such as afraid to blonde hair,white race skin, and many. live in future (sometimes next reincarnation)
I did mantra meditation for a week..and I was extremely happy (compare with before), and i wanted to cure mind cure depression, so I turned to Mindfulness.To yesterday it is 75+ hours and I feel better, specially not live in future like before and happy. and looks memory also improving.
Im really glad wonderful website like this and kind intelligent people like you helping people.
Best wishes.
Good day! I have been meditating for about a year now... I practice several different methods, from Tonglin, to contemplation, to breath awareness... however, recently I have focused most on Tonglin. Now, in doing any of my meditations, I always invite the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas to sit with me. I invite them to breath in unison with me, and to exchange energy with me... and "visually" they appear. They always come. I have noticed that I get quite hot, develop damp skin, and recently have felt a pressure in the top of my head, as though something is trying to burst out. It is not painful, just unusual, and not a serious distraction. I have read in prior comments about third eyes, etc. I know little about this aspect. I have been through the seeing of colors (brilliant golds were the most recent) and quite enjoyed watching the color morph into Buddhas, skulls, faces, etc. and used whatever images appeared to contemplate their meaning, and learn from them... but that seems to have passed. I attend a VietNamese Mahayana Temple, but clearly am drawn to Tibetan Buddhism. I am not concerned as much about the pressure in my head, nor the body emanating so much heat, as much as understanding if there is any spiritual significance to this at all? I thank you for your time... and send you much merit and gratitude for the work you are doing here. Be happy, peaceful and well....
Hi, Pamela.
There's no enormous spiritual significance in these experiences. The shape-changing colors and patterns are fairly common when people are first learning meditation, and sometimes when people are doing more meditation than usual. It's not helpful to pay attention to these, and they should be noted and ignored in favor of the object of the meditation practice.
The heat in the body is arising because you're relaxing and experiencing arousal of the parasympathetic nervous system, which allows more blood to flow to the skin. It might be that you need to have some mild sympathetic nervous system arousal, which comes about when we have a more vivid focus in our meditation practice or are otherwise alert.
The pressure in the head is something I'm not familiar with personally, although it seems to be quite common, particularly between the eyebrows. Again it's a sign your becoming more calm and relaxed. Just keep on accepting the sensations, neither getting anxious about them or getting excited about them.
Everything that's going on is a sign you're moving in the right direction. Just keep on going!
Hi,
im not sure you've answered this as i haven't read all the comments (there's a lot of them :) , but i have been meditating for 9 months now and have come to state of silence or peace that has had magical illuminations in my practise and life. I am curious as of late, during my meditation, i have been experiencing what i think is scene's or snippets of other people's lives, i can hear talking - and i am not familiar with the voices sometimes these are from completely different worlds to mine i.e. a man talking about the council and his right to land (i'm an mid 20s female artist living on the beach). Other times i feel i vaguely even watch scene's. I remember when i first started meditating at vipassana introductory course i had sort of flashback replays of past memories but these are definitely not my own. I'd like to know more about this- if other's share this experience. I'm not worried if it is a progress or not. Happy to just go with it and thought i'd share.
Hi, Melanie.
Our minds are full of scenes and snippets of other people's lives -- things we've heard, seen, read.
And our minds are capable of running "simulations" of other people -- including people we don't know. You can imagine having conversations with them and hear them talking back to you. And every night when you dream, you lose any awareness that this is something you're imagining, and you believe that the images and voices are real people.
So this is what's happening in your meditation. You'll tapping into the part of your brain that creates dream-like imagery. So this isn't of any real significance, although it is a sign that you're getting relaxed. Maybe you need a bit more alertness to balance up the relaxation. It's just a guess.
All the best,
Bodhipaksa
I have recently started trying doing meta & only trying meta for self. I have been very conscious of not hurting someone whom I have had a really major fallout with. But I still get sucked into thoughts & arguments which just cause me immense pain. Sometimes I feel like a fraud as I try hard to avoid really saying the harsh things I really want to say to that person but deep inside I know they are boiling & am fearful I may fall to that temptation/ urge one day . I really don't want to hurt anyone as I know the pain of hurting & am just feeling completely lost of how to deal with this. How long will I have to do meta to myself as I am not strong enough to send meta to that person as the mere thought causes traumatic stress. Or my entire approach is wrong. I have tried to reconcile with that person without any success & it is a person whom I can't avoid contact for various reasons & the friction doesn't seem to end. So just caught in a real catch 22.
Mainly it takes time, so just keep doing the practice. Thoughts and arguments are always going to come up, so we just keep letting go of them and returning to the practice. Every time you notice that you're caught up in an inner argument and let go of it, the practice is working.
I can't really comment specifically on your situation, but not wanting to hurt someone is generally a good thing. You say you "fear" hurting someone and I'm not sure how seriously to take the word fear, but fear's not a great motivation. It's better to want not to hurt someone out of compassion, rather than fear. Because sometimes we need to say things to people that will hurt them, even when they're true and said kindly. And fearing hurting someone in those situations can lead to us doing the wrong thing.
So if you're troubled by keeping things bottled up inside you, it would be best to find a way to express them that's true and compassionate.
Hi,
since I am meditating daily for 2 years I am feeling calmer and settled with a smooth mind; awareness and gratitude for the given now arises more and more ....BUT I am also missing the thrilling feelings, the joy of buying something beautiful, the heartbeats when planning for the future or just when I see a beautiful woman... ... and could it be that my memory about past is going worse as I am living in the very moment? also time goes faster than ever...
The thrilling involvement in a lively world of joy and sorrow is missing.
Whats going wrong, are these common side effects of right or wrong meditation or am I just getting old? Thank you for your help!
Hi, Georg.
Well, I've been meditating for 30 years, and I still feel joy when I buy something beautiful, feel excited about the future, and experience pleasure when I see a beautiful woman. I don't know what you're doing in your meditation practice, but you may be cutting yourself off from parts of your experience. There's really very little else I can say, I'm afraid, since I don't know anything about your meditation practice or about your life.
All the best,
Bodhipaksa
hello Bodhipaksa
really nice to wander to this website where i can so easily submit a question!
i have been meditating for about 11 years . mostly it was zenlike, with an open consciousness, but i got to a point where I am needing focused meditation (mantra in this case) to keep enough focusing capability to be able to keep connect with 'objects' within my awareness (words on a paper, people that i talk to... etc)
i came to this helpfull effect of focused meditation by accident, just by experimenting, and now i alter between zazen and mantra, in order to keep some balance
I actually 'do' zazen during all waking hours, i am not capable anymore to be not in zazen, it became my natural way of being
My question: is where i am still healthy? and where am i going?
the zazen is not a practice anymore, it is natural, but i can do, and i do, mantra as a practice
am i going good or am i in some kind of a deviating state?
your answer is extremely appreciated as i do not regularely walk into people that can answer me on this one!
greets!
ananda
Hi, Ananda.
Without knowing you I can't really comment on whether what you're doing is healthy or not. I think the practices you're doing are fine, but how that's manifesting in your life and impacting those around you I, just can't say.
I would recommend taking up lovingkindness practice. It's a necessary complement to both open awareness and focused attention.
All the best,
Bodhipaksa
I started meditating a few weeks ago, using guided meditation on the internet as I could not find a local group. One meditation asked me to open a door and whatever was beyond that door was my happy place. Yesterday I decided to try meditation without any guidance, just silence. After a short time I found I was no longer noticing my breath. I saw my face looking back at me, lots of light and aqua around my face and I was holding a turquoise stone. I'm not sure if this means the meditation worked though I felt wonderful afterwards. I actually felt truly happy and I haven't felt like that for a long time. Not sure what to make of the colours or the stone?
I really need to create a post or page for this, since I get asked this question over and over again. And in fact there are several comments above that describe similar experiences. So I'd suggest reading through the previous comments and then getting back to me if you still have any questions.
I have been trying to meditate for quite some time now. When I feel Im getting deep I can see bright purple colors swirling about. Ive tried for a long time to find out if there is a meaning to this. Do you know?
Also, ive tried many times to either astral travel or see some other things. Once when i felt I was getting close I felt a dark evil "face" right up next to my face just waiting for me to get out of myself so that he/it would be right there terrorizing me. Right at that point I felt or sensed my grandmother (deceased) slam closed my meditation and then I couldnt meditate any more that night. Should I be worried?
I'd suggest reading the comments above, Jennifer. This kind of question has been asked and answered many times on this site...
I'm afraid I don't have any insight into why you would feel head pain, or whether it would relate to whatever it was you were doing on Hulu.
I have just started meditating. Yesterday session was scary I blacked out, soon as I came back around I stopped at once.
But ever since then I felt dizzy and faint. I google this stuff and was advised that I needed to be grounded. So I walked in the garden hugged a tree and did some grounding exercises from you tube. I woke up this morning and feel completely disconnected. I just sit down and keep forgetting things. I can not focus on anything. And am quite concerned. Can anyone help
Well, who knows? You don't say what you were doing when you were "meditating." Maybe you were hyperventilating or holding your breath. Maybe you need to talk to the person who taught you meditation, or if you tried to teach yourself then perhaps you need to get yourself to a class. Or maybe you need to see a doctor.