Your Goal: Develop mindfulness on different experiences.
As you relax deeply into your body, you will naturally develop mindfulness. In Meditation 03, you will strengthen mindfulness by being aware of different experiences: sounds, warmth, coolness, touch, etc. to develop mindful presence in your body.
Your third step as an insight meditator is to develop a mindful presence by finding pleasure in relaxing until awareness rests within your body. As presence naturally establishes mindfulness and creates a reference point from which to observe the habitual wanderings of your mind.
What is Mindful Presence?
Mindful presence refers to developing mindfulness of your body to the extent that your awareness naturally abides within your body experience, by itself.
Mindful presence will naturally occur within your body by relaxation effort in your body and mind, as in Meditations 01--2.
To understand how to develop this mindful presence, it is helpful to understand the meaning of mindfulness in terms of meditation.
The Pali word from which mindfulness is translated is sati.
Sati literally means: ‘memory’ or ‘to remember’. Not remembering the past but remembering the present: remembering your experience of ‘now.
Mindfulness refers to the function of short-term, working memory.
The effort of mindfulness is to keep within your short-term memory an awareness of what you are experiencing now, over a period of time without forgetting it.
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Try this now to understand mindfulness:
To understand mindfulness and access short-term memory, remember this number: 34.
Keep it gently in your mind.
Now continue to read the rest of this text while noticing the gentle effort it takes to keep that number within your short-term memory while also reading this.
It is that effort of keeping an experience in your mind and remembering it that is the function of mindfulness.
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Mindfulness during meditation.
When meditating you will not be asked to keep a number in mind, but rather a certain aspect of your sensory experience.
This may be as simple as acknowledging sounds around you, what it feels like to sit in a chair as you meditate, or the natural flow of breathing in your body.
In Meditation 03 you will be asked to be mindful of:
Each of these is a way of training your mindfulness muscle and giving you an opportunity to develop a mindful presence that will protect you in daily life.
Regardless of what experience you are asked to be mindful of, it is the gentle effort towards remembering your present experience and noticing when you get lost in thinking, planning, remembering, etc. that will strengthen your mindfulness muscle.
As your skill in mindfulness develops, you will live more fully in the physical world of the senses, rather than within the disconnected mind-created world of thoughts and fantasies.
What is Distraction?
Distraction is something that you will become familiar with as an insight meditator.
At some time during meditation, you will become distracted. Being distracted is not a problem but rather an opportunity to understand mindfulness.
What will make you skilled in insight meditation is how you view distraction.
As a MIDL insight meditator, whenever anything distracts your attention from your meditation object, then that distraction becomes your object of meditation.
Instead of struggling against distraction, you become fully aware of the distraction itself and use it to develop your mindfulness.
For example:
A sound outside of your room may disturb you during meditation.
Instead of complaining about the sound, if you notice how it flows, comes & goes, it will not interrupt your meditation.
By acknowledging sound, you use it to hold your attention and develop mindfulness. Make distraction an object of your attention, and it's no longer a distraction.
Thinking during meditation is a common way that meditators become distracted.
It will be natural for your mind to relate relaxation with thinking or falling asleep. As an insight meditator, you will train your mind to relate relaxation with tranquility and clarity of awareness.
A skilled insight meditator doesn't get upset about getting lost in thinking.
They see it as a natural functioning of their mind and use it to develop insight into its autonomous nature to train their mind to let go.
Making a game out of noticing when you are distracted or even forget your meditation has many benefits to both mindfulness & insight.
You now introduce your ability to relax and soften, learned in Meditations 01-02 to become more aware of the experience of your body as you sit in meditation with less distraction. The key is to take your time being mindfully aware of each of these stages.
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Meditation Structure:
Create a foundation using Meditations 01 & 02:
Meditation 03 additions.
Be mindfully aware of ...:
Be mindfully aware of .... = to put gentle effort towards remembering to keep that particular experience (above) in your short-term memory over a period of time and noticing when you forget it. It's the gentle effort to remember each experience while relaxing effort that develops a mindful presence. The above times are flexible, this is about strengthening your short-term memory by remembering different objects.
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Meditation Instructions:
Step 1: Sit in meditation.
5 min: Take slow breaths to soften/relax as in Meditations 01-02.
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Meditation 03 Additions:
Take your time with each of these stages as this will develop both mindfulness and calm.
Step 2: Be aware of sounds.
3 min: Keep the flow of change within the sound gently within your mind, remembering it to develop mindfulness.
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Step 3: Be aware of the border of your body.
3 min: Keep the experience of the borders of your body gently within your mind, remembering this experience to develop mindfulness.
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Step 4: Be aware of warmth.
3 min: Keep the experience of warmth gently within your mind, remembering it to develop mindfulness.
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Step 5: Be aware of touch/pressure.
3 min: Keep the experience of the feeling of touch & pressure gently within your mind, remembering it to develop mindfulness.
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Step 6: Be aware of everything together.
For the rest of your meditation: Keep the whole experience of your body as it sits in meditation gently within your mind, noticing when you wander to develop a mindful presence. Gently relax effort in your body and mind, enjoying it (soften --> smile) whenever you become habitually distracted.
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The third marker of mindfulness of breathing, establishing a feeling of mindful presence within your body, naturally occurs due to the increased pleasure of relaxation in your body & mind.
Experiential Markers:
Support Article: 12 Experiential Markers
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:
Habitual Forgetting (04), Gross Wandering (05).
Antidote: Curiosity + the GOSS formula by using mindfulness of sitting in meditation learnt in this Meditation Skill as your grounding point.
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Developing the GOSS Formula
In Meditation 03 you develop your skill in the Ground > Observe part of the GOSS Formula: Ground > Observe > Soften > Smile. You can now start applying the first three steps of the GOSS formula to distraction.
The last part Smile, the reward system for your mind, will be learnt in Meditation 04.
Support Article: 16 Meditative Hindrances.
Congratulations, you have finished Cultivation 01.
You are ready to progress to Cultivation 02: Curiosity & Balanced Effort when:
In this simple map you can observe that when practicing Meditation 03 (blue line) the main hindrances to your meditation will be Habitual Forgetting and Gross Wandering.
The Experiential Marker: Mindful Presence, developed by Meditation 03 is the method you should use to calm/weaken the present hindrance.
Questions can be submitted at: MIDL Community Reddit Forums.
Question: When the instructions "be aware of your whole body" and "be aware of everything together", what is the meditation object in each of these cases? Is it the sensory experience of the whole body, and everything together, respectively?
Stephen: Meditation Structure: https://midlmeditation.com/meditation-skill-03
Be mindfully aware of:
This is a gradual process of bringing awareness from external experience to within your body, until your mind is aware of all parts of your body.
Be aware of your whole body = being aware of the borders of your body such as the touch of your clothing, air on your skin, body sitting on the chair/floor, in an overall general experience.
Be aware of everything together = being aware of the four progressive experiences that I have bolded above in one overall general awareness of your body.
Aware of everything but focusing in on nothing. This is a much more present and heightened awareness and clarity the first instruction: Be aware of your whole body.
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Question: What is the difference between "be mindful of everything together" and "develop a mindful presence within your body" (steps 7 and 8 on the Meditation 3 instruction)? How does one make this move?
Stephen:
Be mindful of everything together = as described above, has an observing mindfulness of our body experience, as if from distance.
develop a mindful presence within your body = as relaxing and letting go in your body and mind develops, awareness will naturally sink into your body experience with a mindful presence establishing within it.
Mindful presence refers to kaya-gata-sati, mindfulness immersing throughout the body and being mindful of all other experiences from it.
The important point here is that this cannot be brought about by effort, but rather but the relaxing of effort while tuning into the pleasure of it.
In MIDL this is also referred to as a background peripheral awareness within the body when separating this observing awareness from the focal point of attention in later trainings.
Question: I usually meditate with no audio guidance. I am enjoying the recorded guided meditations,
Stephen: Even though they are called guided meditations, in MIDL there are no guided meditations but rather recorded instructions for meditators that learn the structure of the meditation through active guidance rather than by reading.
The guided meditations are unnecessary for the development of MIDL and are best seen as optional learning aids.
Use the guided meditation a few to get a feel of the structure and purpose of the particular training you are focusing on. Consider them like training wheels on a bicycle.
Once comfortable follow the structure and purpose the meditation, without guidance. There are also written instructions so that there is no need to use the guided meditation, if you find these helpful.
It is important to note that mindfulness will not develop in guided meditations, particularly ones where there is no silence as the music or instructor is providing the mindfulness for you by distracting your mind from distraction.
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Question: When I try to follow the sequence on my own, I get caught up in remembering the steps and how much time to allow for each. And this has had the impact of making me prefer the guidance and be far more distractable without silence.
Stephen: This sounds like good practice, you are meant to get distracted, and it is perfectly ok. You have taken the training wheels off the bike, and of course you will wobble and fall off sometimes, this is part of learning balance.
Your aim now is to develop your mindfulness muscle. Your daily seated meditation is the gymnasium in which you perform repetitions of certain exercises to strengthen that muscle
Mindfulness is strengthened in two ways:
Remembering > forgetting > remembering > forgetting, this is the game. It is important to not put effort into trying to not forget, but rather in relaxing.
It is even more important to be happy about noticing when you notice that your mind has wandered and rewarding it by tuning into how nice it feels that mindfulness of your body has returned again. As you are training above in Meditation 03.
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Question: ....and be far more distractable without silence. Has anyone navigated that
Stephen: Yes, this is a perfectly normal part of the path, and part of the development of insight into how habitual and autonomous our mind actually is.
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Question: Seems like the easiest answer is listen to the guidance every sit but I am a little weary about that as I enjoy being able to have total silence also.
Stephen: Let's revisit this table again:
*Notice that this part here is what you do during the meditation. Be curious about how to relax physically and mentally.
3) sounds
4) whole body
5) warmth/coolness
6) pressure, touch
7) everything together
8) mindful presence
*Notice that this part here is sequential, moving awareness from outside the world to inside your body.
These steps above will happen naturally as you relax physical and mental effort throughout your body while enjoying that relaxation. This is the same sequence our awareness goes through when we fall asleep, from the outside world gradually closing inwards.
The difference here is that we relax deeply but with clear comprehension of the process of relaxing. Simply, relax effort in your mind and body, and be aware of the process of relaxation.
9) Apply GOSS to bring awareness back when attention wanders.
*This means that once you are deeply relaxed in your body and mind, to notice whenever your mind wanders, particularly to thinking, and relax your body and mind again to develop presence.
If you forget the instruction, just go back to softening, relaxing, letting go and enjoying it.
Question: When does observing the flow of sounds turn into mind wandering?
Stephen: If you are reading a book and are aware of the sounds of other people within you home talking in the background your mind has not wandered. If your attention goes out towards them and you are listening to what they are saying instead of reading the book, your mind has wandered.
Question: Does it happen when you start thinking about the sound that is already not present?
Stephen: Awareness of a sound that is present requires no thinking or verbal commentary about it. We simply know that it is present to us. If you are thinking about a sound that is no longer present, this is no longer a sound but becoming distracted from mindfulness of your body, within thinking.
This is the time to notice the effort it takes to think about a past sound, and apply GOSS stages 3 & 4 by softening, relaxing back into being aware of your body, while gently smiling with your eyes to reward your mind for letting the thinking go.
Question: Or when you start having images and other thoughts associated with the sound.
Stephen: Some people think with images or a movie, others with a voice in their head or a combination of these. It is natural for the mind to offer a commentary about what it is experiencing at this time, like a narrator in a movie.
If your mind produces images or commentary and you are not lost within the 'mind world' this is an opportunity for you to develop insight into the autonomous nature of thinking, how it happens all by itself.
As you observe these verbal thoughts and images in this way, gradually your mind will naturally let these thoughts go and losing interest int hem, they will gradually settle down by themself.
Question: Are itches considered mind wandering? I'm asking because itches happen in the present moment. What makes them to be considered as mind wandering?
Stephen: An itch is considered as mind wandering in the same way as the book analogy above.
An itch within itself is just a present sensation that moves or changes.
When we use the word itch in common everyday language, we also infer that it is unpleasant and that there is a need to scratch it to make it go away. To a mediator an itch may be a sensation + unpleasant + aversion + desire to scratch = movement to scratch.
At deeper meditation and levels of insight an itch is just an impermanent, autonomous sensation, without anything else added or anything needing to be done.
Question: Is it because they're unpleasant? And unpleasant sensations can produce all kinds of thinking?
Stephen: An itch within itself is not unpleasant, it is simply a sensation. Our mind however, possibly over thousands of years, has learnt to associate the experience of an itch as something that needs to be relieved.
It therefore encourages us to scratch it by producing an unpleasant feeling around it to develop the aversion necessary so that we consume energy by scratching the itch.
The mind is a problem solver, and thinking is part of the problem-solving process. Thinking is all part of the attraction or aversion process within the mind as it tries to categorise and justify any given experience and the response appropriate to it.
As insight meditators we learn to just be with an itch, a thought, unpleasantness etc. and just let them all be, understanding that they we all just take care of themselves and that there is nothing that we need to do about this.
Question: Regarding the sounds. So, by saying observe the flow of sounds do you mean observe them with peripheral awareness, and not with attention?
Stephen: Yes, we acknowledge with both peripheral awareness and since attention does not yet have a meditation object, attention, on the characteristic of flow and change within any sound around us.
Question: Then later the sounds can just be present in the background awareness? Is my understanding correct?
Stephen: Yes. This is based on when we sit down for meditation, we acknowledge any potential distractions, use them to develop mindfulness, then gradually narrow the field of attention into the body and then the breathing, while the sounds etc. move into the background peripheral awareness.
Question: As I understand the object of attention is our bodily sensations (coolness, heaviness, warmth, touch etc). Itches are also a part of bodily sensations.
Stephen: Yes, I agree, they are.
Question: So why is it that putting attention on the sensations of warmth is not mind wandering, and putting attention on itches is?
Stephen: Placing attention on an itch is also not mind wandering, it is just an object of attention. Mind wandering does not refer to whether something is a sensation or an itch, but rather to the autonomous movement of attention from our object of meditation towards another experience. it is this habitual movement or shift of the focus of attention that is referred to as wandering.
Question: That's my question. I'm asking this because I need some clarity on which sensations I should, and which shouldn't observe during the meditation.
The word sensation just refers to any experience within your body. You can use any sensation/experience within your body as your grounding/reference point to now. this includes warmth, coolness, touch, pressure and itches.
The instructions are just a general suggestion of different experiences that you can use to ground your awareness in, you are the only one that can know what experiences are present within your body.
Whatever is the dominant experience of your body as it sits in meditation, at this time, that is what you should use to ground your awareness within your body. What ones you use does not really matter, as long as it is countering the tendency of the mind to dwell in the past or future.
The structure:
If we look at the basic structure for Meditation Skill 03 is a bringing awareness from dwelling in the world to dwelling within our body.
Question: In meditation 03 the instruction is to be AWARE of X and notice when ATTENTION wanders away from it. That’s two different things, no? What I mean is you can be AWARE for example of pressure/touch but ATTENTION is going to a sound.
Stephen: Yes this is right, as an experience you can be aware of both peripheral awareness and attention at the same time.
Your attention can be resting on a conversation with a friend at a party, while you are aware of your body standing there, and the other activity, sounds of the party going on in the background.
If you are distracted, it means that your attention shifts from your friend's conversation to something else that is happening at the party, such as someone mentioning your name, and you are no longer aware of what your friend just said.
Peripheral awareness remained, but the focal point of attention changed.
Question: So what does the instruction mean?
Stephen: The purpose of Meditation 03 is to develop an experience of Mindful Presence within your body as a foundation for mindfulness of breathing.
Mindful presence is concerned with keeping a continuous peripheral awareness of your body.
Question: Does it mean „be AWARE of X and restrict the movement of ATTENTION within X
Stephen: In MIDL attention is never restricted to anything.
Attention is trained to rest on an experience not through force but rather through finding the pleasure within the experience itself.
Whenever we relax/let go of anything there is pleasure available - always. Intentional, slow relaxation in our body feels good. Intentional slow relaxation of our mind feels good. The feeling of ease and contentment that comes from developing mindful presence of our body feels good.
Attention in MIDL rests within an experience not because it has to, but rather because our mind enjoys and inclines towards pleasure. It is the pleasure of letting go that we use to train the mind in MIDL.
Question: and notice when ATTENTION goes out of the defined scope of AWARENESS“?
Stephen: Yes.
Question: How important is peripheral awareness (introspective and extrospective) in MIDL?
Stephen: Peripheral awareness is really important in MIDL and is trained in Meditation 03 as mindfulness of your body which is referred to by the Experiential Marker 03: Mindful Presence.
This background mindful presence of our body is maintained through the whole of mindfulness of breathing up to access concentration where awareness of our body fades.
During mindfulness of breathing peripheral awareness of our body is established through relaxation in Meditations 01-03. This is the meaning of Ground in the GOSS Formula.
We then develop our attention on the breath during of different stages of mindfulness of breathing, while always maintaining some peripheral awareness of our body in the background.
This in turn habituates peripheral awareness of our body in daily life, allowing meditation to transfer from the cushion, and for us to apply the GOSS Formula: ground > observe > soften > smile, throughout the day.
Question: Is Mindfulness the same as Awareness? If not, how are these two defined in MIDL?
Stephen: In MIDL they are defined as two separate experiences.
In this way awareness is the autonomous knowing of an experience, mindfulness is the presence awareness of that awareness and its objects.
This can be observed quite clearly in a daydream. When you fall into a daydream you become unaware of the world around you and the daydream becomes your reality.
When you come out of the daydream you realise that you were unaware of your surrounding because mindfulness was absent, however you can recall the contents of the daydream, because awareness continued within it.
Question: So the peripheral awareness isn’t just developed on the body but on all six senses, no?
Stephen: Peripheral awareness is a field of awareness that contains all sensory experience from the six senses within it.
We can choose however to be more interested in a particular experience in that field than other experiences: sensations in our body.
To initially do this we use both peripheral awareness and attention together, by paying attention to different experiences within our body, while maintaining an overall general awareness of all other background experiences.
This means that attention can take interest in other things, such as aspects of the breath, while a background peripheral awareness of our body, as primary, remains.
Question: Because when you would be aware of only the body sounds and thoughts for example would be excluded, no?
Stephen: What you are describing here is the development of samadhi (unification) that has not yet occurred.
Think of each Meditation as being a gradual development of samadhi based on letting go.
In the beginning your mind has sensitivity to all experience within the six sense fields: sight, sound, smells, taste, touch sensation, mind experiences.
In the earlier Meditations that scope is wide containing all sensory experience.
But as samadhi develops due to growing intimacy with body and breathing, other sensory experience gradually drops away.
As samadhi develops during mindfulness of breathing, the scope of both peripheral awareness and attention narrows as you progress through the 12 Meditation stages of mindfulness of breathing up to access concentration where body sensations also fade.
This gradual fading of sensitivity to sensory experience is a natural progression of samadhi.
Question: Ah! Now it's becoming clear, thank you! So, at the beginning it's okay to watch the flow of sounds with attention, but then once the attention is on the body sensations, the sounds just go to the background awareness, right?
Stephen: Yes, this is correct. We are gradually bringing awareness from the outside world, to within our body, by acknowledging different ranges of experience and relaxing our interest in them so that awareness rests within our body.
As we do so the field that we were previously aware of goes to the background by itself, and our new object of mindfulness comes to the foreground.
Question: When you say to be aware of everything as one. What does attention do at this time? Does it just surf through different sensations? For example, this moment the attention is on the warmth in my hands, then the next moment it shifts to the touch of my legs with the meditation cushion, then it goes to the feeling of heaviness and so on. Is it something like this?
Stephen: Both awareness and the focal point within awareness (attention), have a range of focus just like a camera.
Your attention scanning from one experience to another is a mental habit, in your training in MIDL you will learn to open and narrow the focus of your attention separate from your background awareness.
I recommend playing with this when you are walking down your street, viewing the whole street as one rather than focusing in on specific things, just as if you were a tourist who was visiting your street for the first time.
Question: When I try to hold several objects in my attentions, I just notice that my attention is quickly alternating between these several objects.
Stephen: And this is normal for many of us, it is just a habit of attention, the same can be said for many other meditators that can keep multiple objects within their attention but have difficulty keeping their attention on one object exclusively over a period of time.
You can see this in the different skillsets in daily life in the way that different people are able to use attention.
With practice we can learn to use all ranges of attention and awareness, in MIDL this is called flexible attention, and this is something that you will naturally develop as you practice the different MIDL skills.
A complete fluidity of attention and awareness that is comfortable everywhere and gets stuck nowhere.
Question: So, if I'm viewing the whole street as one, will I still see the details of specific things (like a person walking across the road, the color of the building etc.) or will it be more of a fuzzy image with all the objects in it?
Stephen: Yes, you will clearly see a person walking across the road, but your attention will not focus in on what you like or dislike about them., it will just see a person walking across the road.
This is how it usually is; we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, know something in a general way and then our mind focusses in on one aspect of what is being experienced, and fades into the background all other aspects about it.
This is usually because we find that particular aspect of what we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, know, pleasant or unpleasant. It is with the focusing in on one aspect of what is being sensed, with attraction or aversion, that judgment is overlayed.
The easiest way to experience the swapping between this focus of attention is noticing that to read this, your attention is focused in on the screen. Now relax your sight and notice that you can see the text on the screen, the screen, and other objects in the room around the screen, in one field of vision.
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