Meditation Skill 03

Your meditation remains the same as Meditation Skill 02, except you now find enjoyment and contentment with the growing presence within your body as it rests in meditation. As any restlessness in your body and mind relax, your awareness will naturally fill your body in mindful presence and remove any feeling of sleepiness from your mind.

YouTube: Video Instructions.

SoundCloud: Guided Meditation.

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• Set a countdown timer on your phone, set it to do not disturb, and place it behind you.
• Meditation Length: Meditate for 30 minutes to develop relaxation & insight.
• Benefits: This skill will develop an aware presence in your body throughout the day and make you more aware of mental habits, allowing you to change them.
• Purpose: Develop a natural mindfulness and clear comprehension of your body in preparation for mindfulness of breathing and insight during your daily activities.

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Summary:

1. Enjoy relaxing your body and mind as you did in Skill 01 and Skill 02.
2. Develop mindful presence by enjoying relaxing your mind & body. 
3. Develop contentment by deepening enjoyment of your body's mindful presence.
4. Introduce the GOSS Formula to develop insight into hindrances to relaxation. 

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Instructions:

Step 1: Sit for meditation and develop Skills 01 and 02 as you have in previous meditations, except you now add the below Steps 2-4 below as new additions to your meditation.

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Additions for Skill 03: 

Your aim for Skill 03 is to enjoy softening effort within your body & mind so that awareness rests deeply within your body and a feeling of contentment grows within your heart.

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Step 2: Develop mindful presence by enjoying relaxing your mind & body. 

• As you enjoy the growing relaxation of your body and mind in Skills 01 & 02, a feeling of mindful presence will grow in your body. 

Tip: Mindful presence naturally occurs whenever we relax both body and mind while clearly comprehending what it feels like to relax in our body and mind, enjoying that feeling.

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Step 3: Develop contentment by deepening enjoyment of your body's mindful presence.

• As the feeling of mindful presence grows in your body, notice and gently soften any tendency of your mind to look forward to a future result or to dwell on what just happened. Looking forward and back can develop discontent and hinder your mind from finding enjoyment in meditation. 

Tip: It is helpful at this stage of meditation to be curious about finding enjoyment and contentment with the simplicity of resting in your body at this time. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to be. How nice is this? Is there a need to add something else to this experience?

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Step 4: Introduce the GOSS Formula to develop insight into hindrances & distractions. 

Use the mindful presence of your body as a foundation for insight into hindrances & distraction.

1. Ground awareness in your body by relaxing your body & mind.
2. Observe when your attention wanders from your body toward distraction.
3. Soften and relax to let go of the distraction and return awareness to your body.
4. Smile and enjoy how nice it is to relax and let go to reward your mind for letting go.
5. Repeat if needed.

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As you practice for Skill 03, you may experience the hindrance of Sleepiness & Dullness. Insight is developed at this stage of mindfulness of breathing by being curious about creating conditions that support mindful presence in your body, thereby weakening the conditions that support the hindrance to relaxation which is sleepiness and dullness.

Meditative Hindrance.

Sleepiness & Dullness (03).

Loss of clarity of body sensations and a sleepy, dull feeling in your mind.

Sleepiness and Dullness refer to a state of relaxation during meditation where you feel sleepy, and your mind drifts and floats, 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 and mind is improving; however, your skill in mindfully and clearly comprehending your present experience is still weak and needs to be strengthened to bring balance back to your mind.

Antidote.

Sleepiness and Dullness occur at this stage of meditation as you become more skilled at physically and mentally relaxing and you over-relax your mind and slip into a sleepy, drifty state.

• To lower sleepiness, learn to mentally feel the experience of relaxation such as warmth, heaviness and pressure, plus how nice it feels to relax.
• Increasing your awareness of the experience of your body as it relaxes will increase your mindfulness of your body and clear sleepiness.

Tip: If you feel sleepy because of lack of sleep or a busy day, it is ok to allow yourself to fall asleep during meditation. The important part is strengthening your resolve by practicing your meditation regardless of how you feel. Once your mind and body have had the rest they need, you will wake up and can continue the meditation again.

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Other Hindrances that may be present.

When developing mindful presence in Skill 03, it is normal to experience other hindrances. 

• Habitual Forgetting: Forgetting you are meditating.
• Habitual Control: Desire to micro-manage your meditation
• Mind Wandering: Become lost in thoughts and memories.

Tip: If any of these hindrances are present, there is nothing you need to do with them at this time. Allow your mind to follow these habitual patterns for now. These hindrances will be calmed down as you develop Skills 04-06.

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The first three Meditation Skills have now created a foundation of mindfulness of your body that allows you to bring the GOSS Formula into your daily life.

GOSS Formula: How to Let Go.

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

How this works in daily life.

Ground: 

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

Observe: 

• Once awareness is grounded 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 likely notice that you have become lost within your mind and forgotten to be mindful 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. Suppose you smile with your eyes, acknowledging the pleasant feeling that arises from softening, relaxing, and letting go. In that case, the reward that your mind receives for letting go will gradually develop mindfulness of your body as the natural dwelling place of your awareness.

The GOSS formula is a circular process of insight and pleasure reward that gradually deconditions defensive, unwholesome, and unskillful patterns of mind and heart.

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You are ready to progress to Meditation Skill 04: Content Presence when:

• You feel content with the mindfulness of your body as you sit in meditation and understand how to remove sleepiness and dullness when they arise.

To notice the gaps between attention and habitual inattention, you need to create 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 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 such as your body, touch, breath, image or whatever the meditation object is—becoming so familiar with it that it is obvious when your mind forgets it.  

In MIDL, the reference point is the awareness of our whole body's mindful presence, whether we are sitting in meditation or daily life. Our body is the perfect reference point because it knows nothing of the past or future. Have you considered that your body is always present, making it an excellent reference point for insight? Even better, your body can sense pleasant feelings every time you relax and let go of your interest in being stimulated by the world or your mind. This subtle pleasantness within the body, which comes from relaxing effort, makes awareness of your body attractive to your mind. As we train our minds to perceive the subtle pleasantness of relaxing and letting go, the subtle pleasantness of our bodies increases in clarity. It generates joy, making it enchanting to the mind.  

Once you have your reference point, you can now observe your mind. For this next step, so that you can observe the anatta (autonomous) nature of your attention, you have to let go of control of it. This means learning to rest in the peripheral awareness of your body presence, and allow your attention to rest on the touch of your thumbs in the foreground without controlling it. This has the feeling of relaxing back on a bicycle seat and letting go of the handlebars, allowing the bicycle to steer itself.

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Once you rest in the presence of your body, you can have fun by allowing your mind to wander freely. At first, it may not play the game. If it doesn't, then relax your interest in the meditation more, and it will come out to play like a playful dog. Your attention is like a dog,. When it is distracted, it will hop up from your lap, bark through the fence, chew on its favourite toy, and fall asleep under a chair. Wherever your attention (dog) wanders, observe its anatta nature and call it back by softening using the GOSS Formula. Feeling your body fill with presence as you soften and relax. Smile with your eyes to bring up the pleasant feeling of letting go, enjoying it, to reward your mind for returning to presence. 

To add curiosity, 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 mind/collectedness) develops, your mind will try to pull away from your reference point habitually 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.

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Doubt is not on the list of hindrances in MIDL because doubt can occur anytime during your meditation. Until Stream Entry-Insight, it is normal for doubts about your ability to meditate, the meditation method, or your meditation teacher to arise within your mind. The purpose of your meditation practice is to reveal, understand, and significantly weaken doubt within your mind. 

The trick is to transform doubt which paralyses your mind and to transform it into curiosity: "I don't know but I would love to understand".

This means being intentionally aware of the negative background commentary within your mind, as it constantly judges and offers words of wisdom. Learning to see any doubt in your mind simply as a defensive mechanism trying to protect you from the danger of not getting it right. 

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 into doubt is developed by seeing the feedback loop of doubt within your mind and realising that it never leads anywhere good. 

See if you can notice how doubt creates its problems and then try 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 will become disenchanted with the mental habit of doubt. As disenchantment grows, and your mind turns away from it, doubt not being practiced or fed, will begin to weaken and fade, and trust and confidence based on your own experience will grow overcoming all doubts.