Meditation Skill 01

Intentional relaxation of effort and tuning into how nice it feels to relax will train your mind to let go of the world around you and rest deeply within your body. Gentle diaphragmatic (belly) breathing is a natural doorway to developing deep physical and mental relaxation that will lower your experience of stress and increase your body awareness throughout the day.

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• Set a countdown timer on your phone (set to DND) and place it behind you. 
• Meditation Length: meditate for 20 min, gradually increasing to 30 min.
• Attention & Awareness: Allow your attention to focus in the foreground on the subtle pleasure of relaxing your body while keeping a background, peripheral awareness of the growing feeling of comfort and increased awareness as your body relaxes.
• Progression: You feel comfortable & at ease in your body during your meditation and no longer experience physical restlessness or the desire to move around during your session.

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Simple Instructions:

When joined, these five steps create the complete meditation for Skill 01: Body Relaxation. Learn each step individually and then, when comfortable, combine them all together. For insight, be curious about how to calm restlessness and enjoy how nice it feels to relax your body.

1. Prepare: Sit for meditation, palms below your belly button, and reflect gratefully >
2. Belly Breathe: Enjoy taking ten slow in & out-breaths in your belly >
3. Full Breaths: Enjoy taking ten slow in & out-breaths from your belly to your chest >
4. Enjoy Relaxing: Allow your breath to flow naturally for the rest of the meditation. Rest in, smile, and enjoy any relaxation or comfort you feel in your body. 
5. Insight: Develop insight into restlessness by noticing any feelings of restlessness or the desire to move around. Playfully, learn how to settle these feelings of restlessness using slow belly breaths, developing comfort in your body.

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Detailed Explanation:

Step 1: Prepare your body and mind for meditation. 

• To begin meditation, find a comfortable place to sit on a chair or the floor. Place your palms beneath your belly button and gently close your eyelids.
• Always begin your meditation by sweetening your mind by reflecting on simple things in your life for which you can be grateful, including this opportunity to meditate.
• To arouse mindfulness, spend a few minutes listening to the flow of sounds around you, feeling the touch of your clothing on your body, and the heaviness of your body as it rests on the chair or the floor.

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Step 2: Enjoy relaxing your body with 10 slow belly breaths.

When you begin meditation after a busy day, you may feel uncomfortable and restless sitting still in meditation. You can now begin to relax restlessness with gentle belly breaths to develop comfort and ease in your body.

Try this now: Place your palms below your belly button.

• Slowly extend the lower part of your belly away from your body and notice how the breath comes in through your nose.
• Slowly lower your belly and notice how the breath goes back through your nose. 
• Play around with this belly-breathing movement, being careful not to overextend your belly or to try too hard. This is simply a way of reminding your body to relax.
• Once comfortable, slightly slow down each out-breath to develop relaxation and calm. Counting to 2-3 on each in-breath and 4-5 on each out-breath can help this. 

Observe the effect: After taking ten breath cycles, remove your palms and allow your breathing to happen naturally. Notice any changes in your body, such as your breathing happening more deeply and your body feeling more relaxed.

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Step 3: Enjoy taking 10 slow, full-body breaths to relax even more.

Once comfortable with belly breathing, learn to breathe into your whole body.

• Beginning each breath in your belly, take ten slow, gentle breaths from your belly up into your chest, filling it like a balloon. 
• As your body deflates with each out, any effort held in your body to relax. Like melting with the out-breath. The secret is to allow your body and rib cage to rest on your lungs as they inflate and deflate. This allows your body muscles to relax fully.
• Practice this by taking 10 full-body breaths: inhale from your belly to your chest (avoiding strain) and slowly release that breath to relax your whole body.

Observe the effect: Allow your body to rest on the inflation of each in-breath, and then completely let go as your body slowly deflates with each out-breath. Knowing how nice these relaxing effects in your body feel as each breath goes out is important. Allow your attention to focus in the foreground on the subtle pleasure of relaxing your body while keeping a background, peripheral awareness of the growing feeling of comfort.

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Step 4: Continue to relax with natural breathing.

Learn to continue to relax your body with uncontrolled breathing.

• Once you have completed the first three steps, let go of any intentional control of your breathing and allow it to occur naturally for the rest of the meditation. Focus on the gentle stretch and relaxation of each in-breath and out-breath. 
• Take a moment to release extra effort in your shoulders, chest, and upper back by slowly letting them drop with each exhale. Allow the feeling of relaxation to flow through your arms, hands, legs, and feet.
• If you feel any restlessness building in your body as the desire to move around, take a few more slow belly breaths and relax.

Observe the effect: Notice how relaxation of your body increases awareness of your body.

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Step 5: Use the process of relaxing your body to develop insight.

• Restlessness: Develop insight into restlessness by noticing any feelings of restlessness or the desire to move around. Playfully, learn how to settle these feelings of restlessness using slow belly breaths, developing comfort in your body. Understanding restlessness and how to calm it will teach you how to truly relax and let go, in all aspects of your life. 
• Other Hindrances: At this stage of meditation, your mind may wander to thoughts, become sleepy, or even forget that you are meditating. These are normal parts of learning to relax and let go and should not be taken personally. You are retraining your mind in different behaviour, and as your skill improves, all these things will settle down. All you need to focus on at this time is calming physical restlessness and developing relaxation in your body.

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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 retraining your breathing patterns by following these instructions: 

Meditation for Anxiety.  

Progression in mindfulness of breathing can be accurately tracked by observing your ability to access the 12 Meditation Markers. This can be done by developing insight into and calming the conditions supporting the associated Meditative Hindrance.

Your first step in meditation is to develop Marker 01: Body Relaxation (right column) to calm Hindrance 01: Physical Restlessness (left column). 

Progression Map for Mindfulness of Breathing

Meditative Hindrances.                       Meditation Markers.

01: Physical Restlessness.      →    01: Body Relaxation.

02: Mental Restlessness.                  02: Mind Relaxation.

03: Sleepiness & Drifting.                  03: Mindful Presence.

04: Habitual Forgetting.                     04: Joyful Presence.

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: Subtle Distraction.                      10: Whole-Body Breathing.

11: Anticipation of Pleasure.           11: Sustained Awareness.

12: Fear of Letting Go.                      12: Access Concentration.

Physical Restlessness: Being physically restless will hinder your ability to relax and calm down during meditation. During this stage of meditation, you can develop insight by being curious about what it means to find enjoyment in relaxing and letting go of effort in your body until all feelings of physical restlessness disappear. 

Other Hindrances: It is important to note that although your focus is on settling the Hindrance of Physical Restlessness at this stage of meditation, all the other Hindrances listed above may also be present. It is essential to settle each Hindrance in the order presented in the above Map for Mindfulness of Breathing, as each Marker is the antidote for its associated Hindrance.

Progression: Once you can calm physical restlessness and feel comfortable sitting in meditation without the need to move around, you are ready to settle Hindrance 02: Mental Restlessness by developing Marker 02: Mind Relaxation.

There will be times during meditation when you find it difficult to feel comfortable and relaxed in your body. These difficulties, known as the 12 Meditative Hindrances, are viewed in MIDL as opportunities to develop understanding and insight into your mind and body. 

Below, we can see that in Meditation Skill 01, the first Meditative Hindrance that you develop insight into is feelings of physical restlessness in your body.

Meditative Hindrances.

01: Physical Restlessness.

02: Mental Restlessness.

03: Sleepiness & Drifting.

04: Habitual Forgetting.

05: Habitual Control.

06: Mind Wandering.

07: Gross Dullness.

08: Subtle Dullness.

09: Subtle Wandering.

10: Subtle Distraction.

11: Anticipation of Pleasure.

12: Fear of Letting Go.

Meditative Hindrance: 

Physical Restlessness (01).

Unable to experience physical comfort.

Physical Restlessness refers to when you feel unsettled in your body and need to move around and fidget to get comfortable during meditation. It occurs during meditation due to energy build-up from stress/aversion or overstimulation in our daily lives. Simplifying your life and relaxing with slow, softening breaths will lower your experience of stress and anxiety and weaken your desire to distract yourself with sensory stimulation.

Antidote: Be curious about what it means to find pleasure in relaxing your body and learn to enjoy physically relaxing with slow-gentle breaths. Retraining your breathing patterns with diaphragmatic breathing will aid in lowering your experience of stress and anxiety. It is also helpful to bring gratitude to your mind by reflecting on the small things you are grateful for. Include in this how fortunate you are to have this time to meditate and spend time with yourself.

Other Hindrances: When developing Marker 01: Body Relaxation, it is normal to experience mind wandering, becoming sleepy, or even forgetting that you are meditating. At this stage of the development of skill in relaxation and calm, your only concern is bringing relaxation to your body. When you notice that your mind has wandered or that you have forgotten that you are meditating, smile with your eyes to reward your mind and take a few belly breaths to bring mindful awareness back to your body.

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.

You are ready to progress to Meditation Skill 02: Mind Relaxation when:

• You feel comfortable & at ease in your body during your meditation and no longer experience physical restlessness or the desire to move around during your session.

Added Note: Your mind will wander, and you may feel sleepy during this stage of meditation. This is perfectly ok and a sign of successful relaxation. These are both signs of imbalances in your mind's energy and will be addressed as your meditation practice deepens. For now, take an interest in how your mind wandering and sleepiness happen by themself (anatta). 

Observing in this way will increase your mindfulness and begin to teach your mind to let these imbalances go. The most important part of this stage of meditation is that when you notice that your mind has wandered, you come back to being curious about how deeply you can relax your body.

• SoundCloud: Guided Meditation.
• Insight Timer: Guided Meditation.
• You Tube: Video Instructions.

Your first step in bringing insight meditation into your daily life is to create a foundation / reference point from which to develop insight. The foundation/reference point the Buddha recommended is kaya-gata sati: mindfulness immersed within your body.

The first step in immersing mindfulness in your body is to learn to relax your body, with clear comprehension of what it feels like to relax. The purpose of Meditation Skill 01 is to develop your skill of immersing awareness within your body through relaxing and letting go.

Meditative Hindrance.                        Meditation Marker.

01: Physical Restlessness.      →    01: Body Relaxation.

In Meditation Skill 01, you will learn four things that you can bring into your daily life:

1. To recognise physical restlessness.
2. To relax physical restlessness.
3. To appreciate how nice it feels to relax your body.
4. To notice that whenever you relax your body, with clear comprehension of it, that awareness of your body increases.

Once you are familiar with Meditation Skill 01, you can integrate it into your daily life. The key is to check in on how you feel throughout the day, starting with when you hop out of bed in the morning.

• How am I feeling now? 
• Am I holding more effort in my body than I need to?

If yes, take a few softening breaths to relax effort in your body, notice how nice it feels to relax, and then immerse yourself back into life. This simple act of taking a few softening breaths will withdraw your awareness from your intellectual mind and bring awareness into your body, therefore developing mindfulness of your body (grounding).

How to do it.

The key to being mindful of your body in daily life is not to try to be mindful of your body in daily life. 'Trying' will take you in the opposite direction, as your mind will see mindfulness as something else it has to do, with another problem to solve. 

It is important to make being mindful during the day something enjoyable for your mind to do rather than another job to complete. 

This is done by:

1. Enjoying noticing when you have forgotten to be mindful.
2. Taking a few breaths to relax your body when you notice.
3. Finding enjoyment in the relaxing breaths.
4. Clearly comprehending awareness returning to your body as you do.
5. Being satisfied with creating small gaps in mind wandering.

It's all about the gaps.

Being mindful in daily life is not about striving and straining to be mindful; it is about making being mindful a fun and enjoyable thing for your mind to do. By checking in every now and then throughout the day and softening/relaxing your body, you will create small gaps in the habitual patterns of your mind and body. With repetition, these gaps in 'mindlessness' will gradually increase, as will the appreciation and pleasure of mindfulness. Mindfulness of your body will begin to become a natural resting place, a place of safety from the stresses of daily life.

Stress throughout the day.

You can use the skills you have learnt in Meditation Skill 01 to gradually weaken your experience of stress throughout your day by re-engaging your diaphragm muscle in respiration whenever you notice you are feeling stressed. More information can be found in this section of the MIDL Insight Meditation website: Meditation for Anxiety: Reengage Your Diaphragm.

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.

1. It is the pleasure of noticing how heavy something feels and putting it down.
2. It is the pleasure of not having to do anything anymore.
3. It is the pleasure of relief, contentment, of ease.

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.

1. Tense & Release: I am going to start with the simplest one. Lay down on the floor and let yourself settle. Tense your right forearm, hold it for a short time, then release the effort to tense your arm. Let it rest on the floor and notice how different it feels. Follow the same procedure again for that arm: tense, release, feel. Gradually move through major muscle groups in this way. Nothing special needs to happen, you are simply teaching your mind to feel the relaxation that comes after the tensing is released, training your mind to perceive it.
2. Breathing Pattern Retraining: If you experience stress and anxiety, then the meditation for retraining your breathing patterns can be very helpful. There are many meditators in this community that have found this helpful and can guide you in this. This method is not suitable if you experience OCD.
3. Stillness Meditation: This is a method of intentionally allowing relaxation to come to your body part by part and meditators who have aversion to breathing find this helpful. Stillness meditation has four steps of depth, begin with developing body stillness.

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.