Your Goal: Body relaxation, free from physical restlessness.
“A meditator, ......... sits down, folds their legs crosswise, holds their body erect and establishes mindfulness to the front.” The Buddha MN 10.
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Next: Meditation Skill 02: Mind Relaxation.
You begin your journey into insight meditation by learning how to let go by relaxing your body with gentle breaths. As you do, you will experience the pleasure of this relaxation throughout your whole body, becoming so comfortable that you don't even feel like moving.
Your first meditation in this insight meditation course is focused on accessing the subtle pleasure available in relaxing effort in your body with slow-gentle breathing.
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Meditation Instructions:
Note on Anxiety: If you are currently experiencing anxiety, the pleasure of relaxing/letting go of effort in your body using breathing may not be easy for your mind to access. In this case I recommend beginning with retraining your breathing patterns following these instructions: Meditation for Anxiety.
Your first step in the path of insight is to relax effort held within your body and to access how nice it feels. Intentional relaxation of effort + tuning into how nice it feels, will withdraw awareness from your senses & mind, allowing it to immerse within your body.
As your awareness withdraws from the sensory world, you will find that awareness of the experience of your body naturally increases. The Buddha referred to the immersion of awareness within our body as kaya-gata-sati.
A natural doorway to immersing awareness within your body is gentle diaphragmatic (belly) breathing. Diaphragmatic breathing will lower your experience of stress and naturally make you more aware of your body.
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Step 1: Sit in meditation.
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Step 2: Take 10 slow belly breaths.
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Step 3: Observe the effect.
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Step 4: Take 10 slow body breaths.
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Step 5: Observe the effect.
Note: Picture inflating and deflating your body as being like blowing air into a balloon to inflate it. This requires some gentle, continuous effort. Picture number 6 as being like letting the air out of the balloon slowly, this requires a letting go of and releasing of effort.
As your body naturally deflates in number 6, this is where you will access the feeling of relaxation, letting go. Once you are able to access it you can then stop controlling your breathing yet still access the natural deflation/relaxation that occurs in your body with each out-breath.
Your Map of Mindfulness of Breathing
Progression in mindfulness of breathing can be accurately tracked, by observing your ability to access the below Experiential Markers through relaxing/letting go.
Experiential Markers:
The first marker of mindfulness of breathing that you will be developing is an increased feeling of physical relaxation throughout your body.
When you can experience complete relaxation throughout your body, you have reached the first Experiential Marker: Body Relaxation. When followed sequentially, these Markers create a progression map for mindfulness of breathing when based on letting go.
Support Article: 12 Experiential Markers
While practicing meditation, there will be times when you find it difficult to access the experience of relaxation and calm.
These difficulties in developing relaxation and calm are known as the 16 Meditation Hindrances.
Meditative Hindrances are signs of an imbalance in either your effort or the structure of your attention. It is skillful to view them as an opportunity for insight into your mind rather than something to overcome.
Meditative Hindrances
Meditative Hindrance:
Stress Reactions (01), Physical Restlessness (02).
Antidote: Curiosity towards what it means to find pleasure in relaxing your body + learning to physically relax with slow-gentle breaths.
If anxiety is present, I recommend retraining your breathing patterns following these instructions: Meditation for Anxiety. This technique lowers the experience of stress & anxiety, as well as making it easier to develop calm during meditation and feel it in daily life.
Support Article: 16 Meditative Hindrances.
You are ready to progress to Meditation Skill 02: Mind Relaxation when:
Important Note:
Your mind will wander at this stage of meditation, and this is perfectly ok. Focus is not on stopping wandering but rather on learning how to calm your mind's restless energy by relaxing effort in your body.
In this simple map you can observe that when practicing Meditation 01 (blue line) the main hindrances to your meditation will be Stress Reactions and Physical Restlessness.
The Experiential Marker: Body Relaxation, developed by Meditation 01 is the method you should use to calm/weaken the present hindrance.
Questions can be submitted at: MIDL Community Reddit Forums.
Question: I'm starting meditation 1 and I see that there's loads of them on the website. My question is, as I go through the different meditations, is there a practice that I use consistently or do I just change it up based on what skill I'm trying to cultivate?
Stephen: This is a wonderful question, thank you for asking and also welcome to MIDL.
One Meditation Practice
There is only one meditation practice in MIDL that follows a simple formula:
The purpose of this is to:
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Making Sense of all the Different Meditations
While there is a set of meditation (skills) that are developed in MIDL, there is just the one meditation practice as laid out above.
Each Meditation is simply a way of systematically developing very specific calm & insight skills in seated meditation, that will train your mind towards a momentum of letting go in seated meditation and daily life.
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Tennis Metaphor
It can be helpful to think of this like learning a sport: Tennis.
Instruction: Hit the ball over the net with your racket and hit it back when it returns to you.
While we could be happy with the simple instruction: Hit the ball over the net with your racket and hit it back when it returns to you.
However, MIDL provides the opportunity to move beyond social tennis (meditation) and to develop your skills to the highest level in a systematic and precise way.
Maybe even winning a tennis match at Wimbulton someday.
Tennis metaphor for MIDL training:
To play at this elite level requires curiosity and repeated training of foundation skills again and again until these skills become second nature.
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One Meditation Practice Summary
The Buddha introduced the basic game of insight meditation:
The MIDL Insight Meditation course is a methodical and precise way of training the skills needed for the Noble Eightfold Path to be fulfilled that can be applied during a retreat or within daily life.
Step 1: Come to my weekly meditation classes and develop a relationship with the community, be that through your presence, or participation. Feeling part of a community keeps your meditation practice honest and regular.
Step 2: Your meditation should not be focused on developing your attention but rather relaxing, letting go - and the pleasure available within them.
This is where your mindfulness and curiosity will be focused during each meditation session - what does it mean to feel, to access, to abide in the pleasure of relaxing effort both my body and mind.
The mind loves reward, it is our task now to give your mind a positive reward that is not found within the world.
It is helpful to lay down on the floor when meditating in this way. Again, it is not about developing your attention, it is about developing your skill in relaxation and accessing its pleasure.
Step 3: We will pretend that you have never meditated in your life, by hitting the reset button now. At this stage you should meditate for success.
This means meditating for a length of time that makes you feel good about the meditation, adjusting your time around your family/life commitments and capabilities at this time. Start your first day's meditation for 5 minutes, put your phone on DND and set a countdown timer with a pleasing beep instead of a ring tone.
Practice for 5 minutes for 1 week, so that you feel a sense of achievement, then commit to 10 minutes per day for the next week.
A simple meditation structure can be found on my website: For New Meditators, above.
***The title says for new meditators, remember we are only pretending. Your aim is not to learn to meditate again, this is not going backwards it is going forward, your aim is to train a tendency within your mind to want to meditate but giving it a feeling of success and pleasure rewards.
All this rests on your building trust with yourself.
With addictions: drinking, gaming, nicotine, your trust in yourself will be significantly weakened. All relationships rest on a bed of trust, including our relationship with ourselves.
To rebuild trust, you need to make a promise to yourself - and keep it.
Again, this is not about fighting your mind, but in building its trust in itself, with achievable goals, and a pleasure reward that it cannot find addiction: the pleasure of letting go and gradually the pleasure of meditative joy which will satisfy its cravings and make the pleasure of the addictions feel unattractive.
Buy yourself a nice diary just for meditation and when you finish this one and write down on day one what you observed in your mind and body - without judgement comments.
Keep in touch.
Question: I can do all the things except for the pleasure-related parts. I cannot find any pleasure in breathing.
Stephen: And this is perfectly ok and normal. I also could not find pleasure in meditation and my idea of pleasure in life was brief and overstimulated.
My mind was unable to find pleasure in subtle things, and because of anxiety and depression, pleasant experience in all aspects of my life was difficult to access because I literally couldn't see it.
Unpleasantness however was very easy to see in everything I experienced and with the anxiety, breathing was unpleasant to be aware of.
Note that I said "was" because this tendency of the mind can be changed with clear, precise training and also understanding of what is meant by pleasure in a meditative sense.
Question: Also, this is not just "currently". I have had this mild anhedonia as long as I can remember.
Stephen: (Anhedonia: Loss of interest in activities or a reduced ability to find pleasure in normally enjoyable experiences.)
I am sorry what you are experiencing, this however answers this: "The instructions merely say "find the pleasure" as if that is an easy task. I cannot find it..........."
It is not that the doorways to pleasure are not there or not available, it is that your mind does not understand that it should produce pleasure in specific situations.
In this case when relaxing effort in your body and mind, this currently will appear as a foreign language to your mind.
Defining meditative pleasure:
When I am talking of pleasure I am not talking of excited pleasure, what is being talked of is very simple and subtle.
It is the pleasure of working hard all year and stepping out the door at the end of the day for a two-week holiday.
This type of pleasure can only be accessed in a specific way: by letting go.
Normal worldly pleasure is short lived, and accessed through getting, experiencing, having. Meditative pleasure is only produced by our when it lets go. Let's go of the effort to get, to experience, to have.
As long as there is letting go of effort in our body, mind, heart, then this pleasure is always available.
It is important to understand here that it is your mind that produces pleasure, not the meditation technique or experience in life. It chooses what it defines is pleasant or unpleasant in life.
Fortunately, how your mind perceives experiences can be changed if approached in the right way.
The role of perception:
To understand perception, we can understand its use in language. When someone talks, you do not hear words, you actually hear sounds. The meaning of the words is a trained perception.
If someone speaks a language you do not understand, you will hear sounds, not words. If your mind is trained to perceive that language you will seem to hear words, not sounds.
Your mind is doing the same thing with pleasure.
If your mind has been trained (often due to trauma or aversion) to perceive the unpleasantness is things/experiences, rather than the pleasantness with them, then your mind will not understand the language of pleasure.
It is like your mind is being turned towards a pleasure potential, but it does not understand what is being said.
How to work with this:
If you decide you would like to do this, we can continue this thread here or you attend a weekly online class and ask for guidance there.
We will have to feel our way through this to find out what works for you.
Stephen: One of your first lessons in meditation is that it is not easy to stop wandering off and becoming lost within thinking during the meditation session - and that this is perfectly ok.
It is the 'being perfectly ok' with what is happening during your meditation (and daily life) that you are training during meditation. One of the key points to understand is that your mind wandering is not a problem - this is what it does. Your heart beats, your lungs breathe, and your mind thinks.
Thinking is simply your mind trying to solve a problem to protect you, wandering and forgetting what you are doing is simply a habit of mind that will change as your mindfulness (remembering) becomes stronger.
Your task during meditation is not to stop your mind from wandering but rather to develop the skill of being able to observe when it does wander.
By taking interest in the points of change between being fully aware that you are sitting in meditation and forgetting that awareness, the clarity of your mindfulness will increase and the periods in which you become lost within thinking will naturally become shorter.
The important thing is to learn to take happiness in the game of remembering what you are doing, and to enjoy that happiness every time mindfulness returns, every time you notice that you have wandered.
The enjoyment of the game and the pleasure of it is the key here. if you punish your mind for wandering it will become averse towards wandering, thinking and forgetting. this just creates a painful mind loop that doesn't lead anywhere good.
If you want your mind to change its behaviour you need to reward it, focus on the fun and pleasure of remembering, this is its reward for good behaviour.
"Hey wandering, hey thinking, I see you", big smile.
Practice this way the habitual wandering of your mind towards thinking will settle by itself and your mind will naturally become calm and tranquil.
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