Meditation Markers
Meditation Markers are a way of tracking your progression in calm during mindfulness of breathing.
CULTIVATION 02: CURIOSITY & BALANCED EFFORT
Article: Meditation Markers.
Understanding Meditation Markers.
Meditation Markers (signs of deepening calm) are sequential experiences that naturally develop during mindfulness of breathing and reflect the depth of the meditator's relaxation, calm, and momentum of letting go. These markers accurately track the development of samatha-calm and vipassana-insight.
Mindfulness of breathing is a meditation practice used to develop samatha-calm & vipassana-insight by tracking the changing experiences associated with respiration within your body during seated meditation. The experience of breathing within our body has many advantages over other meditation objects for vipassana-insight.
The experience of breathing:
- is always available & present.
- changes over time (observe anicca).
- tightens and changes when desire or resistance is present (observe dukkha).
- can be controlled or happen by itself (observe anatta).
- it passively reflects the state of mind of the meditator observing it (observe specific conditionality).
These five things make being mindful of your breathing the perfect meditation object for both samatha-calm and vipassana-insight. During Meditation Skills 01-12, you will develop the conditions for mindfulness of breathing and use these above characteristics of your breathing as your meditation object to develop samatha-calm and vipassana-insight tandem.
How samatha-calm & vipassana-insight develop together.
The formula for developing samatha-calm and vipassana-insight together is quite simple. Whenever you sit down for meditation, you should always do so with the intention of developing samatha-calm. You can even do this if your mind is really disturbed or if your body is in physical pain. What is important here is that you are creating a baseline for insight by creating a very clear and repeatable intention. This is what I intend to: "Relax and develop calm". Therefore, the inability to do this opens up opportunities for vipassana-insight into anicca, dukkha & anatta and insight into how to transform imbalances into samatha-calm (as listed below).
Samatha-calm develops in this way.
This means during meditation you always intend to develop, with clear comprehension:
- relaxation that leads to calm.
- calm that leads to tranquility.
- tranquility that leads to unification.
- unification that leads to jhana.
- jhana that leads to Nibannic insight.
Vipassana-insight develops in this way.
While following your intention to develop samatha-calm, different habitual imbalances within the structure of your attention or your effort will hinder your ability to develop samatha in the way listed above. Anything that hinders samatha is known as a Meditative Hindrance. While these hindrances or imbalances are hindrances to samatha-calm, they are not hindrances to vipassana-insight; they are its content. Understanding it in this way, you will join both samatha & vipassana together as one practice, and see hindrances as not being personal, but rather as opportunities to develop insight that leads to deeper letting go, and therefore to a natural deepening of samatha-calm in all aspects of your life.
An example of this.
You sit down for meditation and are feeling stressed from a busy day and have difficultly settling in your meditation. Relaxation feels a long way away. You notice that your breathing is short and shallow and related to feeling stressed. Looking at this section of the map for mindfulness of breathing we can see that your intention is to breathe in a relaxed way with your diaphragm (in your belly) but you are breathing in a stressed way (in your chest). Since the conditions for this stress is stress breathing, you take some slow breaths in your belly, to re-engage your diaphragm, and gradually the feeling of stress fades away.
Progression Map for Mindfulness of Breathing
Meditative Hindrances. Meditation Markers.
(Hindrances to calm). (Signs of deepening calm).
00: Stress Breathing → 00: Diaphragmatic Breathing.
01: Physical Restlessness → 01: Body Relaxation.
02: Mental Restlessness → 02: Mind Relaxation.
03: Sleepiness & Drifting. → 03: Mindful Presence.
You have now developed your first samatha Marker: diaphragmatic breathing, and developed insight into the first hidrance to samatha-calm, stress breathing. Your next step in mindfulness of breathing will be to calm any feeling of physical restlessness present, to develop a feeling of relaxation in your body. Once you are familiar with how this works, and what order to approach hindrnaces in it becomes this simple. A complete map for mindfulness of breathing will be offered in the next section: How Meditation Markers work.
Meditation Markers (markers of calm) are experiences that can be observed during mindfulness of breathing, to track the development of relaxation and calm accurately in a way that establishes the Seven Awakening Factors: mindfulness, curiosity, balanced effort, joy, tranquility, unification & equanimity.
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Following the instructions in Meditation Skills 00-12, you will sequentially develop the following Meditation Markers. Can you notice that each description of these Markers creates a progressive experiential map of how calm is developed during mindfulness of breathing?
Meditation Markers:
(Signs of deepening calm during mindfulness of breathing).
00: Diaphragmatic Breathing.
01: Body Relaxation.
02: Mind Relaxation.
03: Mindful Presence.
04: Content Happiness.
05: Natural Breathing.
06: Length of Each Breath.
07: Breath Sensations.
08: One Point of Sensation.
09: Sustained Attention.
10: Whole-Body Breathing.
11: Sustained Awareness.
12: Access Concentration.
13: First Jhana.
14: Second Jhana.
15: Third Jhana.
16: Fourth Jhana.
Meditative Hindrances & Meditation Markers.
To develop both vipassana-insight and samatha-calm during your meditation, each Meditation Marker has one Meditative Hindrance aligned with it. During your daily meditation, you will develop insight by learning to recognise each Meditative Hindrance as it arises and calming it to develop the Meditation Marker related to it.
Progression Map for Mindfulness of Breathing
Meditative Hindrances. Meditation Markers.
(Hindrances to calm). (Signs of deepening calm).
00: Stress Breathing → 00: Diaphragmatic Breathing.
01: Physical Restlessness → 01: Body Relaxation.
02: Mental Restlessness → 02: Mind Relaxation.
03: Sleepiness & Drifting. → 03: Mindful Presence.
04: Habitual Forgetting. → 04: Content Happiness.
05: Habitual Control. → 05: Natural Breathing.
06: Mind Wandering. → 06: Length of Each Breath.
07: Gross Dullness. → 07: Breath Sensations.
08: Subtle Dullness. → 08: One Point of Sensation.
09: Subtle Wandering. → 09: Sustained Attention.
10: Sensory Stimulation. → 10: Whole-Body Breathing.
11: Anticipation of Pleasure. → 11: Sustained Awareness.
12: Fear of Letting Go. → 12: Access Concentration.
→ 13. First Jhana.
→ 14: Second Jhana.
→ 15: Third Jhana.
→ 16: Fourth Jhana.
How this Progression Map of Hindrances & Markers Works.
We will use an example from daily life to understand how this map works.
Meditating after a busy day may make you feel stressed and therefore physically & mentally restless. As you can see in the map above, your first step is to calm Meditative Hindrance 00: Stress Breathing by taking slow diaphragmatic breathing to develop Meditation Marker 00: Diaphragmatic Breathing. Once your body is breathing in a relaxed way, then your next step is to calm Meditative Hindrance 01: Physical Restlessness by developing Marker 01: Body Relaxation and so on.
Progression Map for Mindfulness of Breathing
Meditative Hindrances. Meditation Markers.
(Hindrances to calm). (Signs of deepening calm).
00: Diaphragmatic Breathing.
01: Body Relaxation.
02: Mental Restlessness → 02: Mind Relaxation.
03: Sleepiness & Drifting. → 03: Mindful Presence.
04: Habitual Forgetting. → 04: Content Happiness.
05: Habitual Control. → 05: Natural Breathing.
06: Mind Wandering. → 06: Length of Each Breath.
07: Gross Dullness. → 07: Breath Sensations.
08: Subtle Dullness. → 08: One Point of Sensation.
09: Subtle Wandering. → 09: Sustained Attention.
10: Sensory Stimulation. → 10: Whole-Body Breathing.
11: Anticipation of Pleasure. → 11: Sustained Awareness.
12: Fear of Letting Go. → 12: Access Concentration.
→ 13. First Jhana.
→ 14: Second Jhana.
→ 15: Third Jhana.
→ 16: Fourth Jhana.
In the map above, the first two hindrances missing in the Meditative Hindrances list represent that you have successfully calmed the Meditative Hindrances of Stress breathing & Physical Restlessness by developing diaphragmatic breathing, then relaxation of your body.
As you become more skilled in meditation and insight into hindrances in this way, the Meditative Hindrances will become weaker. Once a particular hindrance is weak, you no longer need to calm it and can freely develop just the Meditation Markers to establish access concentration and move onto jhana (absorption). If, however, your samadhi (unification of mind) is disturbed during meditation or in your daily life, the earlier hindrances that you have calmed may get stirred up and arise in your mind again.
For example, if you meditate this morning and your mind is calm, you can reach Marker 07: Breath Sensations fast because there are hardly any hindrances in your mind. If you then have a stressful day and decide to sit in meditation to relax, you find that the earlier Hindrances, physical and mental restlessness, are pretty strong and need to be settled. This disturbance in your ability to develop samadhi during mindfulness of breathing offers you insight into the anicca (impermanent, therefore unreliable) and anatta (autonomous) nature of your mind.
The unskillful thing would be to try to get to the same place you were this morning. The skillful thing to do would be to develop insight into the relationship between a stressful day and feeling physically & mentally restless. Learning to calm these stress reactions by being kind to your mind and body by developing relaxation in your body and mind following Markers 01 & 02. In this way, you practice vipassana-insight into the hindrances to develop samatha-calm.
You may have noticed that Markers 00-03 are present within Cultivation 01.
MARKER 00: Diaphragmatic Breathing.
- Natural, calming breaths happening within your belly by themself.
Marker 00 is concerned with calming the stress response by engaging in rest/digest belly breathing, associated with the parasympathetic nervous system, rather than stress breathing, associated with the sympathetic nervous system. This change alone significantly settles the hindrances of desire and aversion. It offers you the ability to relax your body, breathe, and calm your mind in preparation for mindfulness of breathing and daily life. This simple act of retraining your breathing patterns during meditation, once understood, will significantly lower your experience of stress and anxiety in your daily life. This alone makes the meditation practice worthwhile and worth investing your time in.
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MARKER 01: Body Relaxation.
- Awareness of comfort and ease within your whole body.
Marker 01 is concerned with developing a feeling of comfort and ease within your body, creating the conditions to calm Hindrance 01: Physical Restlessness. Body relaxation has a bonus for calm and insight in that as your body relaxes, awareness will naturally begin to immerse itself within it. The subtle pleasantness of relaxing and letting go will naturally deepen awareness of your body.
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MARKER 02: Mind Relaxation.
- Awareness of comfort and ease within your mind.
Marker 02 is concerned with cultivating a feeling of comfort and ease within your body, creating the conditions to calm Hindrance 02: Mental Restlessness and its associated mind wandering. Awareness of comfort and ease within your body in Marker 01, combined with the softening of effort within your mind, will bring about the mental comfort of Marker 02. Mind relaxation has a bonus for calm and insight in that mindfulness will naturally grow within your body's awareness as your mind relaxes. The Buddha called this kaya-gata sati (mindfulness immersed within your body).
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MARKER 03: Mindful Presence.
- An aware, stable, mindful peripheral awareness is present throughout your body.
Marker 03 is concerned with establishing a posture of mindful presence (sati-parimukham) by bringing mindfulness to the forefront of the mind and immersing it within your body. Mindful Presence is established when the enjoyment of physical and mental comfort and ease matures. It's experienced as a feeling of contentment with an abiding presence throughout your body, free from any interest in the past or future. As Marker 03 establishes, your mind will develop contentment with how nice it feels to rest within the awareness of your body and calm the conditions that support Hindrance 03: Sleepiness & Dullness.
Markers 04-06 are found within Cultivation 02.
MARKER 04: Content Happiness.
- The uplifting happiness that comes from enjoying growing contentment with the pleasant feeling of Mindful Presence within your body.
Marker 04 is concerned with cultivating happiness, enjoyment and contentment within your heart and mind to balance effort and energy. Happiness and enjoyment are developed by enjoying the growing mindful presence and increasing contentment with your body. This is experienced as an increased clarity of peripheral awareness surrounded by a warm, comforting blanket of safety. As the feeling of happiness, enjoyment and contentment grows, your mind will lose interest in the past and future, creating the conditions to calm Hindrance 04: of Habitual Forgetting.
It is important to note that the happiness that comes from contentment is sensitive to attraction & aversion and can only be present when your mind is inclined toward letting go. If there is grasping, trying, struggling, or achieving present, your mind will become dry, and the happiness of contentment will be absent and inaccessible.
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MARKER 05: Natural Breathing.
- Awareness of natural breathing flowing within your body free from control.
Marker 05 is concerned with mindfulness of the subtle pleasantness of breathing as it naturally flows throughout your body, free from intentional or habitual control. Natural breathing will become clearer as you develop relaxation and clear comprehension. To find enjoyment in your breathing, apply the feeling of Content Happiness to it and smile into the simple flow of breathing within your body—the natural stretch of your body as the breath comes in, the natural relaxation of your body as the breath goes out—tuning into how nice it feels. By learning to tune into how nice this gentle stretch and relaxation feel, the subtle pleasantness of your body breathing will become clear. When you access the subtle pleasant feeling within your breathing, aligned with the joy and happiness of letting go, you will become very aware of each in and out-breath, and Marker 05 will establish. Once established, Marker 05 will create the conditions to calm Hindrance 05: Habitual Control.
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MARKER 06: Length of Each Breath.
- Awareness of the whole of each in & out breath, from its beginning, middle, and end.
Marker 06 is concerned with continuously being intimately aware of the whole length of each breath to increase the application of your attention. It is important to note that awareness of the whole length of each breath will become clearer to you as a further development of relaxation with clear comprehension, not through an effort to look. Once awareness of each breathing is developed, free from effort and strain, awareness will establish within the flow of the breath throughout your body as a Breathing Presence. Once established, Marker 06 will create the conditions to calm Hindrance 06: Distracted Mind.
Markers 07-09 are found within Cultivation 03.
MARKER 07: Breath Sensations.
- Awareness of sensations within each breath at the tip of your nose.
Marker 07 is concerned with cultivating exclusive attention to a more refined meditation object: the changing sensation at the tip of the nose as the breath draws in and out. It is important to note that awareness of breath sensations at the tip of the nose occurs naturally as a progression of relaxation with clear comprehension, not through the effort to look.
As effort within your body and breathing are relaxed and effort in your mind calmed, awareness will naturally gravitate towards the tip of your nose, and sensations within each breath will naturally appear. Tuning into these sensations, plus generating enjoyment of the growing experience of calm and tranquility, will develop exclusive, intimate attention. Once established, Marker 07, accompanied by growing meditative joy and tranquility plus insight into their nature, will create the conditions to calm Hindrance 07: Gross Dullness.
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MARKER 08: One Point of Sensation:
- Awareness of one point of breath sensation with the fading perception of in & out breaths.
Marker 08 is concerned with cultivating stable attention on one point of breath sensation at the tip of the nose by accessing the subtle pleasant feeling of growing tranquillity. It is important to note that awareness of one point of sensation does not come about by effort but rather by calming the perception of time and tuning into the pleasant feeling of growing tranquility that comes from the absence of the desire 'to do'. Once established, Marker 08, accompanied by maturing tranquility, will create the conditions to calm Hindrance 08: Subtle Dullness.
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MARKER 09: Sustained Attention:
- Awareness of stable, unified attention that no longer wanders or moves.
Marker 09 is concerned with sustaining attention on one point of breath sensation at the tip of the nose while enjoying the joy & tranquility of the seclusion from the intellectual mind. When your attention sustains itself, it will become effortless and stable, with little wandering, and joy and tranquility will develop to maturity. Sustained attention develops through cultivating the enjoyment of letting go in your body and mind, not through holding your attention to one point.
While it is possible to sustain attention through effort and sheer willpower, you will habituate this tendency within your mind.
The tendency towards effort & control will, therefore, become natural in daily life. This should be avoided. It is more skillful to develop stable attention by inclining your mind towards the subtle pleasant feeling of letting go. You will habituate a tendency within your mind to let go in daily life. The momentum of letting go in calm, insight, and morality is the energy that turns the Wheel of Dhamma in the meditator's mind. Once established, Marker 09, accompanied by stable, unified attention, will create the conditions to calm Hindrance 09: Subtle Wandering.
Markers 10-12 are found within Cultivation 04.
MARKER 10: Whole-Body Breathing:
- Peripheral awareness of the experience of your whole body as it breathes.
Marker 10 is concerned with developing intimacy with the background peripheral experience of your whole body as it breathes. Developed intimacy withdraws peripheral awareness from impinging sensory objects as a gradual closing down of the five sense doors. Even though attention is sustained, peripheral awareness still contains sensory input and has opportunities for habitual distraction. By opening peripheral awareness to the subtle movement of your whole body as it breathes, intimacy develops, and the sense fields calm. With maturity, your body will become one ball of breath-sensation-awareness, with attention sustained in the middle. Once established, Marker 10, accompanied by developed intimacy, will create the conditions to calm Hindrance 10: Sensory Distraction.
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Marker 11: Sustained Awareness:
- Calming of sensory awareness with intimate, stable, unmoving awareness of the subtle pleasant feeling of your whole-body breathing (sensations and body border have ceased).
Marker 11 is concerned with developing exclusive, intimate awareness of the experience of the pleasantness of your whole-body breathing. During this stage, your awareness will completely withdraw from your senses as intimacy matures (sound may still be present as very distant). Marker 11 only arises once attention and peripheral awareness are both sustained. As your awareness sustains, sensations within your body will become very subtle due to the calming of sensory awareness.
Since your body is also a sense organ, your ability to experience bodily sensations from the world will calm, and breath sensation will fade. As awareness is sustained, sensations are replaced by subtle pleasurable feelings (vedana) as the early stages of piti start to arise. With this pleasurable feeling in your body, peripheral awareness will sustain as a solid, stable, unmoving awareness, with strong sukha (joy/happiness) within the mind and piti (pleasurable sensation filling the body). Once established, Marker 11, accompanied by subtle piti in your body and sukha in your mind, creates the conditions to calm Hindrance 11: Anticipation of Pleasure.
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Marker 12: Access Concentration:
- Awareness of unified, stable, unmoving attention & awareness, free from hindrances, with pleasurable body sensation, joy, and happiness of mind.
Marker 12 is concerned with establishing access concentration as a platform to cultivate and enter jhana (absorption). Access concentration only arises once attention and awareness have been sustained and unified. It requires an absence of Anticipation of Pleasure and fear of giving up control. When one completely surrenders control, this natural process shifts into a flow-like state of piti (as blissful pleasant feeling)-sukha (as joyful happiness).
At this stage, you have established the conditions for access concentration: unified, stable attention, free from the 12 Meditative Hindrances, accompanied by piti and sukha that arise from this intimate seclusion. Once established, Marker 12 creates the conditions to calm Hindrance 12: Fear of Letting Go.
Giving up control during daily seated meditations is necessary to experience momentum in letting go within your mind. Giving up control does not mean giving up the structure of your meditation but rather giving up your desire to control your experience and experiencing. Giving up control over what happens and what you experience in meditation brings an understanding of the saying: "There is no such thing as a bad meditation, just opportunities to learn and grow."
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How to Structure Your Meditation:
As a MIDL meditator, your intention when you meditate is always to develop samatha (calm and tranquility) through mindfulness of breathing. Anything that interrupts the development of calm and tranquility is seen not as a hindrance but as an opportunity for insight into your mind's autonomous (anatta) nature. Understanding your mind's autonomous nature means letting it choose whether your meditation period focuses on cultivating calm, insight, or letting go, not you.
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When to meditate for calm:
Samatha phase.
When you sit in meditation and your mind naturally inclines towards calm, you take advantage of this and practice mindfulness of breathing for calm and tranquility. Your mind will naturally enter a samatha-calm phase when sila: morality has refined in your daily life. Because of this, your mind is inclined towards letting go of control. During a samatha phase, you aim to develop access concentration and jhana to increase the clarity of your awareness and incline your mind towards letting go. You can encourage this process by adapting your GOSS Formula towards accessing the pleasantness of relaxation & letting go.
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When to meditate for insight:
Vipassana phase.
When you sit in meditation and find that your mind inclines towards disturbance, you take advantage of this by grounding awareness in your body. From this foundation, you develop insight into the impermanent (anicca) and autonomous (anatta) nature of your mind & body.
Your mind will naturally enter a vipassana-insight phase due to a stressful situation in your daily life or increased clarity of anicca (impermanence) and anatta (autonomy) during samatha. During a vipassana phase, spiritual pleasant feeling and contentment will be inaccessible. You aim to allow your mind to experience the out-of-controll-ness of the 'mind-mess' to develop disenchantment towards its autonomous nature. You can encourage this process by adapting your GOSS Formula towards accessing the subtle pleasant feeling of letting go of any aversion within your mind.
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When to meditate for letting go:
Sila phase.
When you sit in meditation and your mind inclines towards letting go of all objects, you take advantage of this tendency by practicing nirvikalpa samadhi (objectless unification) and refining morality in your daily life. Your mind will naturally enter a sila-letting go phase due to the maturity of disenchantment during the vipassana phase. During a sila phase, you may not feel like sitting as much and become sensitive to everything you think, say, and do. Take advantage of this tendency to let go by allowing your mind to follow habitual patterns and doing so with a clear comprehension of the process. When the pattern has ended notice how you feel within yourself for following that pattern, the feeling of unpleasantness, unsatisfaction, and lowered trust within yourself. Also, take advantage of this and decondition this pattern, by softening into how you feel while experiencing the subtle pleasant feeling of letting go, to train your mind to let go.