Meditation Skill 01

Creating the conditions for your body to relax, while tuning into how nice it feels to relax, creates the conditions for stress based physical restlessness to settle down. Slow, gentle belly breathing (diaphragmatic) is a natural doorway to settling restlessness accessing relaxation.  With practice of Skill 01, your experience of stress will lower, and awareness of your body throughout the day will naturally increase.

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• Set a countdown timer on your phone, set it to do not disturb, and place it behind you. 
• Meditation Length: Initially meditate for 20 minutes, gradually increasing to 30 minutes.
• Benefits: This Meditation Skill will teach you how to lower your experience of stress & restlessness and help you to feel more relaxed in your body throughout the day. 
• Purpose: To develop the foundation of mindfulness of your body in preparation for mindfulness of breathing in Skill 05 and to bring insight into your daily life. 

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Meditation 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.

• YouTube: Video Instructions.
• SoundCloud: Guided Meditation.

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Step 1:  Preparation for meditation.

In this meditation, you move from laying on the floor in Skill 00 to sitting upright for meditation. You can sit on a comfortable chair, use a kneeling stool or sit with legs crossed. Whichever is most comfortable for your body.

• Sit in meditation: Find a comfortable place to sit on a chair or the floor for meditation that is secluded from disturbance for this short time. This may be a quiet room, garden or sitting in your car. Then allow your eyelids gently close, relaxed.
• Reflect gratefully: Begin your meditation by sweetening your mind with reflections on simple things in your life for which you can be grateful. 

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Step 2: Develop mindfulness. 

Begin your meditation by taking your time be mindful of these two things one after the other.

• Listen to the flow of sound: To develop mindfulness, spend a short time listening to the flow of sounds around you. This will help you feel present and aid in your mind settling down and help you relax.
• Feel your clothing on your body: As you relax, become aware of the touch of your clothing resting on your body. Notice how present the experience is.

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Step 3: Slow belly breaths.

Once you feel mindful of sitting in meditation, you can further relax with slow belly breaths.

•  Relax with slow belly breaths: To further relax your body, take five slow breaths in your belly. This is done by slowly moving your belly away from your body, and slowly lowering it back to relax, as you did in Skill 00. 

Tip: Find the nice feeling in each slow belly breath to deepen your sense of relaxation.

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Step 4: Slow body breaths.

Your next step is to learn to bring each in-breath up into your chest, then to relax your whole body with each out-breath. At first these breaths may feel big but gradually they will become subtler as you practice. 

• Relax with slow body breaths: Now take five more slow in-breaths, starting from your belly and bringing into your chest to fill it like a balloon. Then slowly allow your shoulders, chest and upper back relax.

Tip: If you feel like your breathing will not go up into your chest when you breathe in, it is either because you are slumping or because you are over-inflating your belly. Try a smaller breath in your belly before inflating your lungs and each breath will feel more comfortable.

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Step 5: Enjoy relaxing.

Your next step is to learn to enjoy the relaxed feeling of your body to allow it to grow.

•  Relaxing your body with softening breaths can only take meditation so far. For relaxation to deepen you need to actively enjoy how pleasant it feels to relax. 
• Once you have completed the previous 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 and most importantly: enjoy the feeling of relaxation. 

Tip: Restlessness: If you feel any restlessness building in your body as the desire to move around, take a few more slow belly breaths and allow your body to relax.

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Progression in mindfulness of breathing can be accurately tracked by observing your ability to access the Meditation Markers. This can be done by developing insight into their associated Meditative Hindrances and then changing the conditions that support them. 

Insight: Insight is developed at this stage of mindfulness of breathing by being curious about creating the conditions that support Marker 01: Body Relaxation thereby weakening the conditions that support Hindrance 01: Physical Restlessness.

Progression Map for Mindfulness of Breathing

Meditative Hindrances.                      Meditation Markers.

(Hindrances to calm).                          (Signs of deepening calm).

                                                               00: Diaphragm Breathing.

01: Physical Restlessness.      →    01: Body Relaxation.

02: Mental Restlessness.                  02: Mind Relaxation.

03: Sleepiness & Dullness.                03: Mindful Presence.

04: Habitual Forgetting.                     04: Content Presence.

05: Habitual Control.                          05: Natural Breathing.

06: Mind Wandering.                          06: Whole 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.

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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 enjoyment in relaxing your body with slow-gentle belly breaths. Retraining your breathing patterns during Skill 00 will lower your experience of stress and the reactivity of your mind. Bringing gratitude to your mind by reflecting on the small things you are grateful for will sweeten your mind and change how your mind relates to your meditation. I recommend reflecting on how fortunate you are to have this time to meditate and spend time with yourself at the beginning of each meditation.

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Other Hindrances.

Restlessness: Develop insight into restlessness by noticing any feelings of restlessness or the desire to move around, particularly when you begin your meditation or near the end. Playfully learn how to settle these feelings of restlessness using slow belly breaths as in Step 3. Understanding restlessness and how to calm it will teach you how to truly relax and let go, in all aspects of your life. 

Tension: As your body relaxes, you may experience feelings of tightness and tension within your body. These tensions may be held in your body due to stress, lack of flexibility in your body, or because of past physical injury. Relaxation and tensions in your body are two separate things. I have found that with regular periods of relaxation and simply allowing these tensions to be there, they will go away of their own. If tension is due to physical injury, then using lying down as a meditation posture would be kinder to your body.

Mind Wandering:  At this stage of meditation, thinking about the past and future and mind wandering are normal, should not be seen as a problem. Your main goal in Skill 01 is to settle any feelings of restlessness in your body that come from stress or anxiety developed throughout the day. To develop insight, take an interest in any feelings of restlessness or the desire to move your body. Playfully, learn how to settle these feelings of restlessness by using slow belly breaths, as learnt above, to develop comfort and ease in your body. When repeated in this way, physical restlessness will come up less in your meditation, and more relaxation will begin to appear in your daily life.

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Your first step in bringing insight meditation into your daily life is to create a foundation and 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 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 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 the awareness of your body increases 

Once you are familiar with Skill 01 in seated meditation, 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. 

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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 of habitual 'mindlessness' will gradually decrease, and your enjoyment of increased mindfulness will increase. Through enjoyment of how nice it feels to return to mindfulness; mindful awareness will begin to naturally rest in your body creating a place of safety for your mind 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 website: Meditation Skill 00: Diaphragm Breathing.

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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.

Tip: When practicing Meditation Skill 01: Body Relaxation, it is normal for our mind to wander to thoughts because of restless energy or to feel sleepy because of the busyness of the day. There is no need for you to do anything with these hindrances at this stage of meditation, but rather to learn to relax your body and find enjoyment in it. 

As you relax your body and enjoy that relaxation, the restless mental energy of your mind will start to settle down. Enjoyment of the experience of will also begin to uplift your mind and completely remove sleepiness in Skill 03: Mindful Presence.

While practicing Skill 01, it is also helpful to learn to observe the by-itself nature (anatta) of mind wandering and sleepiness. Taking interest in how your mind wanders to thoughts and sleepiness comes by themself, will increase your mindfulness and teach your mind to let them go.

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