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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Is it just me, or time is very relative when your doing this exercise? I put an alarm on my cell phone for several minutes and they passed in a matter of seconds. I am very interested on your opinion about this matter. Thank you!
Well, as they say, time flies when you're enjoying yourself. When meditation's a struggle, time can seem to crawl by, so it's a good sign that you felt that time was passing quickly.
Hello Bodhipaksa,
After a period of time of doing stages 1 and 2, I've now progressed in the last few days, to stage 3. It has typically taken a fair bit of discipline to meditate for even 30 minutes up to this point...due to body discomfort, restlessness etc. Today I had what felt like a breakthrough experience. I stuck with the counting stages for at least 10 minutes each...and even went back to them after starting stage 3, when I found that I wasn't anchored firmly enough...then finally achieved enough calmness to feel ready for Stage 3. Fairly soon after beginning stage 3, I began to notice that my hands felt very large, accompanied by a deepening, drifty feeling, but also quite focused...there was a sense of a choice to just let go and let this happen, and that if I did, I would go deeper. I just keep focusing on my breath...this focus felt more and more pleasant and effortless. I had a physical sensation of almost travelling deeper inside myself and becoming very 'small' within my physical body which felt more and more like just a 'field' of some kind, kind of like a bubble around me. I almost felt like my awareness (basically 'I') was like a nucleus in a large spacious cell, and that my body was like the cell membrane with just sort of a fuzzy sensation. It wasn't that I didn't have thoughts arising, but I had no difficulty letting them go...the focusing and breathing was much more appealing to me. When my physical sensations and mental processes began to pull me out of this state, I opened my eyes and 50 minutes had passed without so much as a change in position (beyond correcting my posture a bit)...unheard of for me prior to this point. It felt so rewarding! As I'm doing more reading and exploration, I'm hearing terms like 'access concentration' and 'jhanas'...I know very little about these at this point, but am wondering if the experiences I'm describing might possibly fall into either of these categories. Your thoughts would be appreciated. Thank you :)
Sounds like first jhana to me. Good!
Wow! That feels good :) I had been feeling somewhat discouraged for the past week...just seemed like my meditations weren't feeling very satisfying...felt a fair bit of resistance...so I was questioning myself a fair bit, as has been my lifelong tendency. So this was a good wake-up call to stick with things, and just accept what comes without judgment...without labeling things as 'good' or 'bad'. Acceptance seems to be the general theme these days...it seems to be the antidote to struggling. :) Thank you so much for your reply!
Ah, yes. It's very important to accept the ups and downs of practice. That applies to the "ups" as well. It's important not to get elated when we think things are going well.
Thank you...I'll definitely keep that in mind. :)
I am practicing meditation for few years (watching thoughts and feelings). Earlier I was so anxious I need to be "inside" the thoughts. Even if I am physically in a meeting and I am seeing the people who are talking, but I won't hear theam. Now I moved out of that mode. I am able to focus on. Sometime my body shakes during meditation. Even my body bend forward during meditation. I am getting thess symptoms for some time. But I am not sure whehter I am progressing well. Please let me know or suggest for my progress.
Hi, Radhakrishnan.
It's very hard to know what's happening without talking to you more extensively. From what you say you're able to be less caught up in your anxious thoughts, and more able to be present. That all sounds good. I wouldn't be concerned about the shaking -- things like this are quite common and are often the sign that the meditation practice is working. It sounds like it may be a form of prīti (pīti in Pāli).
Hi
Can one meditate lying down on one's back? Is it less fruitful than the other method?
Thanks
Hi, Mukta.
This article might answer your questions about lying down to meditate.
All the best,
Bodhipaksa
Hello Bodhipaksa,
Many thanks for the wonderful work you're doing, the site is very helpful and clear.
I've been practising zazen for a year now, and within the last two months have had a recurrent experience during meditation. These involve being completely absorbed by an intense yellow vibrating light, qualitatively ecstatic or electric. The light swirls, and as the experience progresses, so does the intensity of the swirling. The most powerful of these I had today, in which the vibrating light was roaring. Time and physicality were gone. It was indescribable and quite shocking.
The experience is both unpleasant and pleasant. Very intense. Once I return to my body I find that my heart rate is soaring. The reason I write is that in a way the experience, despite being extraordinary, is worrisome. I haven't any formal guidance nor have I sought a teacher. Now that my practise has reached this point I feel it necessary. I think I may start a course on here. What would you advise at this point?
Thank you
Hi, Pho.
Thanks for your kind comments about the site and about the work we're doing.
I'm familiar with the kind of experience you describe. It's not a helpful state, but nothing to be worried about. If it's what I think it is, it's a particular kind of samapatti that arises when the mind is becoming calmer and more concentrated, but where the meditator hasn't yet become fully grounded in their present-moment experience of the body and mind. I see it as the result of mild sensory deprivation. The mind, lacking its normal input and lacking its normal level of internal activity, starts generating these mildly hallucinatory effects. Often they are swirling lights, although sometimes they involve distorted perceptions of the body.
I'd have thought this kind of thing was more common in focused meditation compared to zazen, which is much more of an open-focused state where there is a broad range of perceptions, giving the mind much more to pay attention to. So I'm going to guess that in your zazen you're tending to focus quite narrowly on the breath, or some other sensation. If I'm wrong, please forgive me and put me straight...
What I'd advise you do is to pay much more attention to the details of your physical experience, including sensations from all over the body, and sensations arising from the outside world, and not just the breathing. Even when you're paying attention to the breathing, do it in a very full-on way, noticing a wide range of sensations from the front of the body, the sides, the back, the surface, the depths, the belly, the chest, the throat and head...
And if the swirling lights re-appear, just note that that's happening, but redirect your attention to your actual physical experience.
People who are prone to this kind of samapatti are also prone -- and this is good news! -- to having clear and vivid nimittas arising in meditation. A nimitta is a "sign" -- often arising as an image -- which is very clear and stable. They emerge as they mind is settling down, and if paid attention to in a non-grasping way, they'll lead you into a much deeper level of calmness and concentration. In this case, the mind is finding you a subtler object to focus upon. So watch out for the arising of a similar experience to your swirling lights, but one that is lucidly clear and (probably) very still and stable.
As for courses, I'm currently doing most of my teaching on Skype, and some of those courses are at a time suitable for people in the UK (I'm assuming that's where you are, based on your IP address). But I'm probably not starting any new courses until the fall, although in just over a month, when my current courses end, I'll probably keep meeting with people on Skype in a more informal way, where we sit together and then discuss what's going on in our practice. You'd be welcome to join in with one of those. Alternatively, Sunada is running our web-based courses, and if you like I could pass your email address on to her and she will make contact.
All the best,
Bodhipaksa
Hello Bodhipaksa,
Thanks for the prompt, detailed and informative response. Greatly appreciated.
Haha ahh you've described my practice perfectly. I used the term Zazen carelessly and may have misunderstood its true meaning. I started meditation in this style; A choice less awareness in which I'd pay attention to the breathing, though not exclusively to it, allowing my attention to wander from feeling to thought for instance, then back to the breathing as an anchor. From what I've understood this more resembles the open awareness of Zazen you've described. I practised in this manner for what may have been the first two months.
Since then I've adapted a method on this site. I currently spend 5 minutes counting after the exhalation. Five minutes counting before the inhalation. Then I drop the counting and spend five minutes in general awareness of the breath; The rising and falling of the stomach and other associated sensations. Then 10 minutes following solely the sensations of the breath around the nostrils! Then 5 minutes of loving kindness. As you predicted, my meditation is mostly on a single object!
How could I structure my session on this basis? I'd like to balance open awareness with focused awareness for their associated benefits. Especially after reading an article on here about open awareness having an improvement on creative, divergent thinking! Maybe replace 10 minutes of my session with the open awareness I described (to ensure that I've understood)?
Another query relating to this is how to use meditation in relation to tasks that necessitate thinking. I'm a university student and should currently be doing an essay. How would one use what they've learnt in meditation to think more effectively? Apologies for the vague question, I'm finding it difficult to verbalise the issue.
Ah I'm glad the opportunity may arise with the nimita for a deepening of concentration and calmness!
If you could pass my email on to Sunada that would be great, I think a web based approach would be better suited for me at the moment.
Thanks a lot!
I think what you're doing is fine, on the whole. In other words the way you're structuring your meditation is perfectly appropriate.
I suspect (again this is just my best guess) that the problem is just that you're allowing yourself to be seduced by the swirling lights, and the more you pay attention to them, the more intense that experience becomes. So as you're practicing within the structure you're using, just don't pay any significant attention to the lights. Acknowledge that it's happening, but see it as a distraction just as you would with passing thoughts, and keep bringing your focus back onto the breathing or lovingkindness. Becoming absorbed in the lights will stop you going deeper into your meditation practice. It's probably a question of fine-tuning your attention.
But also try to have as full an awareness of the breathing as you can. As I like to say, "Mara makes work for idle minds." In other words, if you don't give your mind plenty to do in terms of paying attention to the breathing, it'll find plenty to do, whether that's excessive thinking or the kind of experience you've been having.
It wouldn't surprise me if you had nimittas starting to arise before long, and if you ended up in jhana soon thereafter. But do let me know how you get on.
I'll certainly pass your email address on to Sunada.
All the best,
Bodhipaksa