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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I like// I needed the article. I actually need a Buddha buddy. I an new and struggling, but I am hanging in.
Thank You much.
I have started meditation few days back with the OM sound and i am observing an increased number of dreams. what does it signifies? Does it signify we are on right track and we should continue?
I don't know exactly what it signifies, but it's certainly common to have more vivid and memorable dreams after starting meditation or when we're doing more meditation than usual. I take it to be a sign that something beneficial is happening. Keep on going!
How do i know if i have the "gaining idea" mentality.
well i know i need realizations and clarity so i meditate a lot although i really try not to have any expectations when i meditate but even trying not to expect something is an expectation in itself...right? or is that too philosophical..
I am currently on winter break from college and i really want to learn how to meditate as fast as i can because i want to go to college fresh, calm and focused. Therefore, i actually meditate as much as i can per sitting and then sit down again when i feel like sitting again which is quite often.... usually my meditations last 20 minutes or so?
Do you suggest that its too much meditation and should be balanced with other activities?
During meditation i had this thought which i disregarded then that just like how to much medication is not good, too much meditation cannot be good..the saying too much of anything is never good..does that apply here?
You may recognize you have a "gaining idea" in meditation when you find you're disappointed in your progress, or experience doubts about your abilities as a meditator, or when you find yourself being irritable when you can't do what you want to do, or when you find yourself to be physically tense, or there's a lack of pleasure and happiness in your experience when you meditate -- to give a few examples.
"Trying" not to expect something is probably not a good way to think about what we're aiming to do. Expecting something is a kind of grasping, akin to grasping something in your hand. Letting go of expectations is a form of, well, letting go, akin to relaxing your hand and thus releasing your grip. You don't "try" to relax your hand. You just stop grasping.
The saying "too much of anything is never good" is rather tautological! Can we ever say that too much of something is good? The question is, how much meditation can you usefully do? At what point does your meditation practice start to have diminishing returns (which it always does, at some point)? And at what point does forcing yourself to meditate actually become counter-productive if you're forcing yourself to do something that's no longer benefiting you? Then again, on intensive retreats the crisis brought on by sitting to the point where meditation has become counterproductive (for example the mind is screaming at us to stop meditating) can actually push us to go deeper, by letting go of expectations that we never even knew existed.
bodhipaksa,
so basically you mean just sit and meditate and the more effort you apply to meditation the deeper one can go.
right?
Hi, Vrajesh.
That's not at all what I said, and it's not something I think is at all true. I think you may be seeing in my words what you want to see there, which suggests again that you have a "gaining idea."
All the best,
Bodhipaksa
Hi Bodhipaska,
I just started meditation, and today while I was meditating, I felt like I was being pulled to the left, and felt like I was stuck leaning significantly that way, even though when I opened my eyes I was sitting perfectly straight. Do you have any thoughts on what that might be about?
Cheers,
Cheneil
These kinds of sensations are not uncommon when people are starting to learn meditation, and sometimes when they're doing more meditation than usual. In the form of Buddhism I practice they're called samapattis, and the advice is that they're distracting but otherwise harmless, and we should just ignore them and continue with the practice. They disappear in time. It may be that your body was fractionally out of alignment, and the sensation was being exaggerated in your perceptions.
I'm happy that I'm seeing/feeling these signs (and in a very positive way). I'm not that reactive anymore, before I was so moody and get angry in an instant. I'm more calm and friendly.
And the dreams -- yes, the dreams. They're more vivid and I remember them even to the slightest detail. Maybe that's because I'm practicing lucid dreaming or something. But maybe meditation really had to do with it.
Salamat.
During meditation sometimes it feels like energy is flooding throughout my body. I'll be in full rem, my eustation tubes are opening and closing and my lips are quivering uncontrollably. Sometimes in my limbs its like little valves are opening and closing. Its not what I would call a relaxed state, but when I hold on to that for awhile and release back to a relaxed state, it's deeper. Are those symptoms normal? Thank you.
Hello,
I'm relatively new to meditation and have no teacher besides reading books and internet articles, which are not necessarly following the technical aspect of meditation. I use breathing as an anchor to control my mind and progressively, during the past few weeks, I have started to feel changes. Occasionaly I see light patterns, but more often is the feeling of being in a crystal like sourounding, very clear but no forms around. Then energy starts flowing through my body which feels like shiwers up and down my spine. But in my last sesion I left like I was entering a 'realm' I was forbiden to and the shiwers were cold, I was sweting and to be onest, I was scarred, although I kept on meditating and concentrating on compassion at that time. During my meditation sessions I pay more attention to the feeling than to an immage. Is it possible that without a formal guidance, one can access forbiden areas and my feeling scared was just a warning, or this is normal and one's mind plays tricks ?Feeling scared is what concerns me.
Is this normal ? Am I on the right path ? Can you please help.
Cheers!
Hi, Radu.
It sounds like you're experiencing a number of things connected with an experience of jhana, or meditative absorption. These are all quite normal. The light patterns sound like what we call a samāpatti, which is a slightly hallucinatory experience, which I see as resulting from the mild sense deprivation that can arise when the mind is becoming still but you haven't yet got used to that stillness. This occurs on the way to jhāna, but isn't actually very helpful.
The crystal shell sounds more like a nimitta, which is a more constructive experience. Nimittas emerge when the mind is becoming more still and when we are able to enjoy that stillness. Nimittas often seem to be slightly synesthetic. They're a very good sign that jhāna is beginning to happen
The energy flowing in your body is called pīti or prīti, and is a very familiar experience to meditators. It's one of the experiences that characterizes jhāna, although it often arises before jhāna begins.
I wouldn't worry about the fear. It's probably just that you don't have guidance and so there's some fear about whether what you're experiencing is normal and healthy (which it is). There may also be fear of change, which is something that can be stirred up by deeper meditation experiences. I'd suggest that you just keep going. When the fear arises, meet it with lovingkindness. And if you don't do lovingkindness practice, then I'd suggest you start :)
The links I've put in here should give you more of a sense of what you're experiencing. You might also want to join Wildmind's Google+ Community, where you can get support and encouragement from other meditators.
And if you appreciate the fact that a meditation teacher is spending several hours of his day corresponding with people about their practice (I've literally spent six hours responding to comments and emails today), then please feel free to make a donation to our Sit : Love : Give project. Monthly donations are ideal, even small ones, but a one-time donation would also be welcome.
Hello,
I've been meditating for two weeks now. And by then, I feel relaxed, not getting affected by my thoughts that much.
But for the past couple of days, my mind is racing again. I can't seem to concentrate. I feel like I'm getting impatient. Is this normal?
Your thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Salamat.