Meditation Skill 03

You now introduce your ability to relax and soften, learned in Meditation Skills 01-02, to find enjoyment in the growing mindful presence within your body, with less mind wandering and free from restlessness. The key is to take your time being mindfully aware of each of these stages.

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• Set a countdown timer on your phone (set to DND) and place it behind you.
• Meditation Length:  Meditate for 30 min to develop calm & insight.
• Attention & Awareness: Allow your attention to focus in the foreground on your contentment with mindful presence while keeping a background, peripheral awareness of the presence of your body.
• Progression: When you feel confident with your ability to remove sleepiness & mind drifting and feel content with resting in a clear, mindful presence in your body.

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Simple Instructions:

Develop the foundation of Meditation Skills 01-02 in Steps 1 & 2:

1. Prepare: Sit for meditation, one thumb resting on the other, reflect gratefully >
2. Softening Breaths: Enjoy relaxing with a few slow softening breaths >
3. Sounds: Be aware of the flow of sounds > then soften interest in them > 
4. Body: Be aware of your whole body sitting > then soften interest in it > 
5. Warmth: Be aware of any warmth in your body > then soften interest in it > 
6. Touch: Be aware of the touch of your body > then soften interest in it > 
7. Everything: Be aware of everything together > then soften interest in it >
8. Insight: Develop insight into sleepiness and mind drifting by noticing that they develop due to not clearly comprehending the process of relaxing your body and mind. If you do not notice and bring balance to sleepiness and mind drifting you will slip back to Hindrance 02: Mental Restlessness. Playfully, learn how to energise your mind by being curious about what it feels like to relax your body and mind and how nice it feels to relax and let go.

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Detailed Explanation:

Step 1: Prepare your body & mind for meditation.

• Sit for meditation, gently close your eyes, and place one hand in the other, resting in your lap, one thumb resting on the other as a grounding point for attention.
• 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.

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Step 2:  Develop Meditation Skills 01 & 02 to relax body & mind.

• Take slow, softening breaths to initially calm your body and mind and bring mindful awareness to your body.

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Meditation Skill 03 Additions:

Step 3: Be aware of the flow of sounds.

• Start to be aware of any sounds around you, allowing them to come and go. 
• 5 min: Gently keep the flow of change within the sound gently within your mind, then let it go with a few softening breaths.

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Step 4: Be aware of your whole body as it sits.

• Become more aware of the experience of your body sitting in the chair or on the floor.
• 5 min: Gently keep the experience of your body sitting in meditation gently within your mind, then let it go with a few softening breaths.

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Step 5: Be aware of any feeling of warmth in your body.

• Next, become more aware of the experience of warmth or coolness in your body. Not focussed on it, but in a general and relaxed way.
• 5 min: Gently keep the experience of warmth or coolness gently within your mind, then let it go with a few softening breaths.

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Step 6: Be aware of the touch of your hands & body.

• Next, become more aware of your hands resting in your lap and the pressure of your body contacting the chair or floor. 
• 5 min: Gently keep the experience of the feeling of touch & pressure gently within your mind, then let it go with a few softening breaths.

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Step 7: Be aware of everything together as one experience.

• Next, allow your awareness to open to all the above experiences as one field of awareness and attention. 
• 10 min:  Keep the whole experience of sitting in the room gently within your mind, then let it go with a few softening breaths. Allow your attention to focus in the foreground on your contentment with mindful presence while keeping a background, peripheral awareness of the presence of your body.

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Step 8: Develop insight using Mindful Presence and the GOSS Formula.

• Now that you have developed some mindful presence in your body, you can use it as a foundation for insight into the anatta (autonomous) nature of your mind's habitual patterns and teach your mind to let them go. By using this simple GOSS Formula any time you observe that you have been distracted, you will weaken habits your mind may have to forget during meditation or wander to thoughts, memories or fantasies during meditation.

GOSS Formula: How to Let Go.

1. Ground.
2. Observe.
3. Soften.
4. Smile.
5. Repeat if needed.

Ground = Mindful Presence.

Observe = noticing whenever you become distracted.

Soften = Relaxing your body and mind with gentle breaths to let go of the distraction.

Smile = Smiling to enjoy the pleasure of relaxing & letting go to reward your mind.

GOSS is a circular formula that develops insight and offers a pleasure-reward for your mind, for returning to mindfulness. When skillfully used, it will gradually decondition defensive, unwholesome, and unskillful patterns within your mind (akusala).  As you soften, smile and enjoy how nice it feels, begin to notice how your awareness naturally returns to and grounds in your body. 

Further explanation of the GOSS Formula is found in the section below.

GOSS Formula: How to Let Go.

1. Ground.
2. Observe.
3. Soften.
4. Smile.
5. Repeat if needed.

Ground = Mindful Presence.

Observe = noticing whenever you become distracted.

Soften = Relaxing your body and mind with gentle breaths to let go of the distraction.

Smile = Smiling to enjoy the pleasure of relaxing & letting go to reward your mind.

GOSS is a circular formula that develops insight and offers a pleasure-reward for your mind, for returning to mindfulness. When skillfully used, it will gradually decondition defensive, unwholesome, and unskillful patterns within your mind (akusala).  As you soften, smile and enjoy how nice it feels, begin to notice how your awareness naturally returns to and grounds in your body. 

Anatta (It happened by itself!): When following the GOSS Formula, you will begin to notice that some things happened by themselves such as mind wandering and thinking. 

"What happened during your meditation?"

"I was being mindful of my body, feeling grounded and present (Ground), and then I noticed that my mind had wandered, and I was thinking about something that happened earlier today (Observe)."

"It is wonderful that you could notice. How did you notice that your mind had wandered?"

"I noticed I was caught up in thinking and was no longer mindfully aware of my body.""

'This sounds like a good meditation. You were 'grounded' in your body. You 'observed' that your mind wandered and that you were thinking. You also observed that you had forgotten your 'grounding' point. This is a sign that your mindfulness is growing stronger; you should celebrate this."

"Why would I celebrate that my mind wandered?"

"You are not celebrating that your mind wandered, although it wandering by itself is very interesting. You are celebrating that your mind remembered itself; that it returned to mindfulness. Making a fun game out of this. Enjoying it. It is like making a fun game out of every time your dog brings the stick back. If you are upset with the dog, why would it bother bringing the stick back? Make it a fun game, and the dog will bring the stick back faster. It is the same way with your mind noticing its own wandering and returning to mindful presence in your body."

"How do I make it into a fun game?"

"By using the relaxation skills you learnt in Meditation Skills 01 & 02: Softening and Relaxing your mind and body. When you gently soften and relax, your awareness will return to your body like the dog bringing to stick back to you (Soften). If you smile with your eyes when your awareness returns to your body, really enjoying it, you will reward your mind for letting go (Smile). Reward your mind for returning to mindful presence. Habit throws the stick, but it is up to you to train it to bring it back. This is what GOSS is for."

Tip: Take interest whenever your mind wanders toward sounds, thoughts, memories, etc. The key to insight is to notice how these wanderings of your attention toward distractions are habits within your mind that happen by themselves (anatta). When you notice that your attention has wandered, smile and take a few slow belly breaths to soften your awareness back into your body. Observing distractions in this way will teach your mind not to hang on to things and let them go during meditation and in your daily life.

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 third step in meditation is to develop Marker 03: Mindful Presence (right column) to balance Hindrance 03: Sleepiness & Drifting (left column). 

Progression Map for Mindfulness of Breathing

Meditative Hindrances.                       Meditation Markers.

                                                               01: Body Relaxation.

                                                               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.

Other Hindrances: It is important to note that although your focus is on settling the Hindrance of Sleepiness & Drifting 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 increase your mindfulness to remove any sleepy, drifting feeling from your mind and experience an effortless presence in your body as you meditate, you are ready to develop Marker 04: Joyful Presence.

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.

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.

Sleepiness & Drifting (03).

Loss of clarity of body sensations & a sleepy, drifting feeling in mind.

Sleepiness & Drifting refers to becoming so relaxed during meditation that you feel sleepy and your mind drifts & floats around, causing you to lose clarity of the elemental qualities of your body as you sit in meditation. This happens because your skill in relaxing your body & mind is becoming really good; however, your skill in mindfully and clearly comprehending your present experience is still weak and needs to be increased to bring balance back to your mind.

Antidote.

As you become more skilled at physically and mentally relaxing, you may over-relax your mind and slip into a sleepy, drifty state. This, strangely enough, is a sign of progression in meditation and means that you are becoming skilled in relaxation. However, this sleepy, drifty state will cause you to weaken in mindfulness because you will lose clarity of elemental qualities (different sensations) in your body. Developing intimacy with the first two Meditation Markers: Body & Mind Relaxation, will increase your mindfulness and stop your mind from falling into a sleepy, drifting state. Bringing more detail into your meditation, such as being aware of the elemental qualities of your body like warmth, heaviness and touch, plus how nice it feels to relax, will increase your mindfulness and clarity of comprehension.

Meditation to weaken the Sleepiness & Drifting when you relax.

1. Once you have created a foundation of mindfulness of body in Step 7: Place your hands in your lap with one thumb touching the other to help create a defined grounding point for your attention. Maintain a background, peripheral awareness of presence in your body, and a foreground focus of attention on the touch of your thumbs.
2. From this grounding point, start to notice the various Elemental Qualities of sensations within your body. Do this slowly and deliberately, one at a time, spending time on each one to mentally 'feel' it.
3. Earth Element: Be aware of the touch of your hands. The pressure of your body on the chair or floor. Mentally feel the hardness or softness of that touch, taking your time. You can energise your mind by mentally saying: "hard, hard", or "soft, soft" to direct your attention while rubbing your awareness on it to experience it.
4. Fire Element: Be aware of any warmth or coolness in your body. You can energise your mind by mentally saying: "warm, warm", or '"cool, cool" to direct your attention while rubbing your awareness on it to experience it.
5. Smile & Enjoy: As you become more clearly aware of your body, smile with your eyes and be happy with how nice it feels to just sit here in meditation, resting in your body. Enjoying the relaxation of your body, and how nice it feels to have a holiday from the world, enjoying the presence of your body, will energise your mind and remove the last remnants of sleepiness & mind drifting.

Doubt is not on the list of hindrances in MIDL because doubt can occur anytime during your meditation until you complete the first insight path at Sotapanna: Stream Entry. Until Sotapanna doubts your ability to meditate, in what you are doing, the meditation method and the teacher will visit you whenever your meditation becomes tough. 

It is important to understand that until the First Path Insight, Sotapanna (which uproots doubt), the purpose of your meditation practice is to reveal, understand, and significantly weaken doubt within your mind. This means intentionally being aware of the background negative commentary within your mind as it constantly judges and offers words of wisdom, seeing these doubts in your mind as defensive mechanisms trying to protect you (and your habits). 

It also means seeing that the background doubtful commentator uses unpleasant feelings (vedana) and convincing arguments to encourage you to fall back into old habits and ways of doing things. Insight is developed into doubt by seeing the feedback loop of doubt within your mind, and that it never leads anywhere good. See if you can notice how doubt both creates its own problems and then tries to solve them. 

When you gently soften your interest in doubt, you may notice that when doubt is not present in your mind, there never was a problem in the first place, and everything is just as it is meant to be. When you start to see doubt in this way, that it just leads to complication and never leads anywhere good, you disenchanted with the mental habit of doubt. As disenchantment grows, and your mind turns away from it, doubt not being practised or fed, will begin to weaken and fade, and saddha, as verified faith, trust and confidence, based on your own experience, will grow and create the conditions for Stream Entry, and the uprooting of doubt.

Congratulations, you have finished Cultivation 01.

You are ready to progress to Meditation Skill 04: Joyful Presence in Cultivation 02 when:

• You feel contentment sitting in meditation while mindful of your body, and you have developed the skill of balancing energy while relaxing your body and mind to remove sleepiness and mind drifting. This will be accompanied by an increased enjoyment of being mindful of your body, reflecting as an increased feeling of contentment.

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

Meditation Skills 01-04 are designed to develop the MIDL GOSS Formula. Once you understand GOSS it will transform your insight meditation in both seated meditation and daily life.

GOSS: Ground > Observe > Soften > Smile.

Meditation always begins by developing a grounding or reference point from which you can develop both calm & insight.

Below is a simple instruction of how the GOSS Formula does this. 

GOSS Formula: How to Let Go.

1. Ground.
2. Observe.
3. Soften.
4. Smile.
5. Repeat if needed.

Ground = develop mindfulness of your body to create a reference point to the present.

Observe = notice whenever you become distracted from this reference point.

Soften = relax effort in your body and mind to let go of the distraction.

Smile = enjoy the pleasure of this relaxing/letting go of effort to reward your mind.

How this works in daily life.

Ground: 

• In daily life, you simply check in on yourself a few times per day and notice if you have lost being mindful of your body. By simply relaxing your body & mind while enjoying it, as in Meditation Skills 01-02, your awareness will withdraw from your mind and become grounded within your body.

Observe: 

• Once awareness rests in your body you can go about your day. Check in every so often and relax your body and mind whenever mindfulness of your body fades. At some point during the day, you will notice that you have become lost within your mind and forgotten mindfulness of your body. This forgetting is perfectly normal and an opportunity for insight into anatta: the autonomous nature of your mind.

Soften: 

• Once you notice you have lost mindfulness of your body, you take some softening breaths to soften, relax, and let go within your body and mind, allowing awareness to ground naturally within your body again. 

Smile: 

• The mind responds better to reward than criticism. If you smile into your eyes and bring this smile to how nice it feels to soften, relax, & let go, then the pleasant feeling that arises will reward your mind for letting go and gradually develop mindfulness of your body as the natural dwelling place of your awareness.

GOSS is a circular process of insight & pleasure reward that gradually deconditions defensive unwholesome & unskillful patterns of mind & heart.

The first Meditation Skills you will learn in the MIDL Insight Meditation Course will teach you how to let go using the GOSS Formula while seated in meditation and daily life.

In Meditation Skill 01 & 02: 

• You will learn how to let go physically and mentally. This relates to the Soften part of the GOSS Formula: Ground --> Observe --> Soften --> Smile.

In Meditation Skill 03: 

• You will learn how to be mindful of your body so that your awareness becomes grounded within it. This relates to the Ground part of the GOSS Formula: Ground --> Observe --> Soften --> Smile.

In Meditation Skill 04:

• You will learn how to reward your mind by finding pleasure in being mindful of your body and in letting go of distractions. This relates to the Smile part of the GOSS Formula: Ground --> Observe --> Soften --> Smile.

You will then have all the tools you need to train your attention and weaken hindrances such as thinking and habitual wandering.

How to begin GOSS in daily life.

The GOSS Formula is circular and always begins with establishing mindfulness of your body by relaxing effort in your body and mind with clear comprehension of it.

Understanding this, we can see that GOSS initially begins with:

To reset the GOSS Formula, begin with:

1. Soften
2. Smile

When you soften and relax effort in your body and mind, smiling as you enjoy that relaxation, your awareness will withdraw from your intellectual mind and Ground within your body.

1. Ground.
2. Observe.
3. Soften.
4. Smile.
5. Repeat if needed.

At this stage of meditation, bring an investigation into your daily life as to the circular nature of GOSS. When you begin Meditation Skill 04 to develop Joyful Presence, will learn how to fully enjoy and smile into the subtle pleasure of relaxing and letting go in all aspects of your life.

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

• Sit in meditation >
• Take some slow softening breaths to relax >

Be mindfully aware of:

1. sounds around you > 5 min > 
2. border of your body as it sits > 5 min > 
3. warmth in your body > 5 min >
4. touch/pressure of your body > 5 min >
5. everything together > 10 min >
6. Develop a content, mindful presence within your body >

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:

1. By putting gentle effort towards what you are experiencing now.
2. By celebrating and enjoying the game of observing when your mind habitually forgets.

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:

1. Sit in meditation >
2. slow softening breaths to relax >

*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.

1. Sit in meditation > 
2. Be aware of sounds > be mindful of it > 
3. Be aware of your whole body > be mindful of it > 
4. Be aware of warmth/coolness > be mindful of it > 
5. Be aware of pressure, touch > be mindful of it > 
6. Be aware of everything together > be mindful of it >
7. Bring your awareness back when your attention wanders.

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 do I notice the gap between thoughts? I know direct experience is the answer but some pointings would be lovely.

Stephen:  To notice the gaps between thoughts, you need a reference point. Without a reference point, it is easy to become lost in the mind's habitual patterns.  A reference point is an experience that is always available, here and now as part of your present experience. 

Once you have decided on a reference point, you need to become very familiar with it so that when your mind habitually wanders from that reference point, you will notice. This is the point of seated meditation, to develop familiarity with a reference point: body, touch, breath, image or whatever the meditation object is, and become so familiar with it that it is obvious when your mind forgets it.  

In MIDL, the reference point is awareness of the experience of our whole body as we sit in meditation. Our body knows nothing of the past or future and is always here, now present, making an excellent reference/grounding point for awareness. 

Even better, our body has available in it the subtle pleasure or comfort and ease that comes from relaxation. this subtle pleasure within the body, which comes from relaxing effort in our body and mind, makes body awareness attractive to the mind. As we train our mind to perceive the pleasure of relaxing and letting go, the subtle pleasure of our body increases in clarity and generates joy, making it enchanting to the mind.  

Once you have your reference point, you can now observe your mind. This is done by relaxing your effort and allowing your mind to wander wherever it wants. Take an interest in the gaps between meditative attention, inattention, and the return of mindfulness. 

Once you have noticed this wandering, particularly that it happened by itself (anatta) gently relax your awareness back into your chosen reference point to start again. It is by observing these gaps that you will begin to see the gaps between thoughts.   

As samadhi (unification of attention) develops, your mind will try to habitually pull away from your reference point but will only partially do so. Because of this, you will notice the stillness, a thought arising, its pull on your attention, and then see it cease without losing awareness of your reference point.

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.

1. In MIDL the background awareness of your body and sensory experience is referred to as peripheral awareness.
2. In MIDL the focal point within this awareness that moves around between different objects is referred to as attention.
3. In MIDL both peripheral awareness and attention can expand and narrow their focus and also share the same energy pool, thus strengthening one, withdraws energy from the other.

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.

1. Vinnana: awareness is the quality of knowing of an experience. This quality of knowing experiences occurs autonomously in the background by itself, whether we are mindfully present or lost in habitual mind patterns.
2. Sati: mindfulness refers the function of short term, working memory. It is experienced as keeping awareness of an experience continuously within that short-term working memory over a period of time. For mindfulness to be present it requires the ability to be aware of being aware of this (.....).

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 background awareness of your senses can be very wide or focus on like a camera and be very narrow.
• Your attention can also be very narrow on one experience, such as touch, or it can be opened wide to take in a range of experiences in one field.
• You stand on a mountain looking over a valley and see the valley as one view, you can then focus in on a grove of trees, or even more narrow on a bird sitting on a branch, this range of focus is attention. 
• You can observe this as being separate from awareness because while you are changing this focus you are still aware of the sounds of all the other tourists talking in the background, and of that your body is feeling cold at this time. 
• Your focal point, attention however is scanning the valley and focusing in on things your find really interesting. 

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.