Meditation Skill 04

Your meditation is the same as Meditation Skill 03, except you now enjoy the pleasant feeling of contentment with the Mindful Presence of your body, to uplift your mind with the experience of contentment and happiness.

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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.
• Benefits: This Meditation Skill will teach you how to find enjoyment in contentment and enjoy simple things in life.
• Attention & Awareness: Allow your attention to rest in the foreground on the touch of your thumbs as your hands rest in your lap, while keeping the uplifting feeling of happiness of heart and contentment with your background mindful presence.
• Progression: When you are confident in your ability to develop the spiritual feeling of Content Happiness when smiling with your eyes. And, as the feeling of Content Happiness grows, the length of time that you habitually forget during meditation will shorten and only last for a short time before mindfulness returns.

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Meditation Instructions:

• You Tube: Video Instructions.

In Step 01 your meditation remains the same, Steps 2-3 are two new additions to your meditation.

1. Meditation Skills 01-03: Develop mindful presence as you did in Skills 01-03 with one addition, hands resting in your lap with one thumb on top of the other to ground attention. Once you feel very present in your body add Steps 2-3 to develop content happiness.
2. Enjoy Contentment: Enjoy the pleasant experience of being mindfully present in your body. Calm any interest in past or future to develop contentment with the presence.
3. Smile With Your Eyes: Smile with your eyes into the pleasant feeling of contentment and allow the pleasantness and enjoyment of it to enter your mind. Bring the smile to the experience of presence in your body and allow happiness with that contentment to grow in you mind to rise to a feeling of being content and happy.
4. GOSS Formula: Use the GOSS Formula any time you observe that you have been distracted to return to mindfulness. Enjoy coming back to the pleasant experience of contentment with the presence of your body, to weaken habitual mind wandering and forgetting.

• You Tube: Video Instructions.

Your meditation is the same as Meditation Skill 03, except you now enjoy the pleasant feeling of contentment with the Mindful Presence of your body, to uplift your mind with the experience of contentment and happiness.

Step 1: Meditation Skills 01-03.

Your meditation remains the same as in Meditation Skills 01-03, except you now add Steps 2-3 as new additions to your meditation.

Your Meditation So Far:

Sit in meditation (thumbs touching).

Reflect gratefully.

Listen to sounds.

Clothing on your body.

Marker 01: Body Relaxation.

Marker 02: Mind Relaxation.

Marker 03: Mindful Presence.

Additions for developing Content Happiness in Skill 04: 

Step 2: Enjoy Contentment.

• Enjoy the subtle pleasantness, comfort, and ease of your body's presence as you sit mindfully in meditation. 
• Develop contentment with this experience by softening your mind's tendency to look forward to a future result or to look back at what happened. Your aim is to develop intimacy with the feeling of contentment with your body's Mindful Presence.

Step 3: Smile With Your Eyes.

• To connect your mind to the feeling of contentment, relax the muscles around your eyes and gently smile with caring and kindness to arouse a feeling of happiness. The trick is to relax the muscles at the base of your eyes and slightly lean your awareness into the smile, allowing it to come from your heart outwards with kindness and gentleness.
• Once you feel the happiness of the smile, bring it to the experience of contentment in your heart with your body's presence and enjoy it to allow it to grow. As it grows, it will develop in your mind as enjoyment of mind and a Content Happiness of heart. 
• Tip: What you are doing here is creating a positive feedback loop in your mind on the pleasantness of happiness and contentment. Experiencing the pleasant feeling of happiness and contentment, allows your mind to absorb this feeling of pleasantness into itself. Enjoying it, your mind will produce more pleasantness, creating a feedback loop in which spiritual pleasantness, happiness and contentment grow.

Step 4: GOSS Formula.

• Now that you have developed a feeling of Content Happiness with your Mindful Presence, you can use it as a foundation for insight into the anatta (autonomous) nature of your mind's habitual patterns. This is simply done by developing Mindful Presence in your body, and enjoying it. This very act will immerse awareness within your body and create a reference point from which you can observe your attention habitually wander during meditation and in daily life.
• MIDL has a simple formula that makes the development of insight from this foundation easy. It is called GOSS: Ground > Observe > Soften > Smile > repeat if needed. It is this formula that you have been learning in Meditation Skills 01-04 and this offers you the ability to meditate in daily life and weaken habitual patterns that bind you. 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 = Be mindful of the touch of your thumbs.

Observe = Be happy when you notice you have been lost in mind stories.

Soften = Return awareness to your body by softening/relaxing your body and mind. 

Smile = Smile with your eyes into the subtle pleasantness of letting go to reward your mind.

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 their associated Meditative Hindrance and changing the conditions that support them.

Your fourth step in meditation is to develop Marker 04: Content Happiness (right column) to weaken Hindrance 04: Habitual Forgetting (left column).

Progression Map for Mindfulness of Breathing

Meditative Hindrances.                      Meditation Markers.

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

                                                               00: Diaphragm Breathing.

                                                               01: Body Relaxation.

                                                               02: Mind Relaxation.

                                                               03: Mindful Presence.

04: Habitual Forgetting.          →      04: Content Happiness.

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: Sensory Stimulation.                  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 weakening the Hindrance of Habitual Forgetting 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 weaken the habit of habitually forgetting your meditation object and experience a content-enjoyment of the presence in your body as you meditate, with the experience of breathing throughout your body becoming more apparent, you are ready to develop Marker 05: Natural Breathing.

At this stage of meditation it can be difficult to find enjoyment and pleasure because our mind becomes discontent and preoccupied with the desire and aversion based in the past or future thereby limiting access to kusala: wholesome states of mind. If you are experiencing difficulty at this stage of meditation accessing the pleasure of letting go, intentionally cultivating wholesome  qualities will help to sweeten and uplift the joy within your mind and heart.

Antidote 1: Forgiveness & Gratitude Forgiveness & Gratitude Instructions

Antidote 2: Metta Loving Kindness Metta: Loving Kindness Meditation

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

00: Stress Breathing.

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: Sensory Stimulation.

11: Anticipation of Pleasure.

12: Fear of Letting Go.

Meditative Hindrance: 

Habitual Forgetting (04).

You completely forget your meditation object and that you are meditating.

Habitual Forgetting refers to when your mindfulness grows weak, and your mind forgets your meditation object and even that you are meditating. This lapse into forgetting during meditation is a survival mechanism of your mind designed to save energy by following repeated patterns, like a screen saver on a computer. You may first notice that your mind has forgotten your meditation object after you realise that you have been off thinking or fantasising about something for some time.

Sleepiness & Drifting, Habitual Forgetting and Mind Wandering are connected.

The process of the mind is this: 

1. Your mind becomes sleepy and drifts around causing you to lose clarity of the sensations in your body. 
2. You then habitually forget your mindful presence in your body. 
3. Your mind wanders and becomes habitually lost within thoughts, fantasies, memories, etc., for a while (like entering a daydream). 

The important part in working with this is to first remove Hindrance 03: Sleepiness & Drifting, by increasing your mindfulness and the clarity of your mind's comprehension of the experience of your meditation. This will gradually shorten the length of time that your mind habitually forgets your meditation and make it easier to weaken Mind Wandering. As Habitual Forgetting weakens the thoughts and fantasies associated with Mind Wandering will become background, random thoughts that no longer disturb your meditation.

Antidote: If you do not weaken habitual forgetting, your mind will slip back into Hindrance 03: Sleepiness & Drifting. You aim to shorten the length-of-time that your mind forgets your mindful presence and gets lost in thoughts, memories and fantasies. This is done by taking an interest in noticing when you have become lost within thoughts, memories or fantasies and rewarding your mind by softening & smiling (GOSS) to return mindfulness to your body. The effect of this can be increased by enjoying it to reward your mind for returning to mindfulness.

How to weaken the mental habit of habitually forgetting.

1. Once you have created a foundation Content Happiness in Step 4, 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. Relax your attention and allow your attention to wander if it wants to.
3. Smile and be happy whenever you notice that you got lost in mind stories to reward your mind for returning to mindfulness.
4. Once you have acknowledged that you are mindful again, apply the last two steps in the GOSS Formula: soften > smile to bring mindfulness back to the presence of your body. Smile with your eyes and enjoy the presence of your body to re-arouse a feeling of Content Happiness and reward your mind for letting go.

Support Meditation: Technique for weakening Habitual Forgetting.

You are ready to progress to Meditation Skill 05: Natural Breathing when:

• When you are confident in your ability to arouse joyful-happiness (sukha) when smiling with your eyes into the experience of mindful presence, and the period of time you habitually forget during meditation only lasts for a short time before mindfulness returns. It is important to note that you will still experience mind wandering to thoughts, fantasies and memories but will still have your meditation object, the pleasantness of your bodies relaxation, within your peripheral awareness for most of your meditation.
• Another sign that you are ready to progress is when you become naturally aware of the flow of breathing throughout your body. If the breathing experience is unclear, it is a sign that you need to spend more time developing a feeling of Content Happiness and are not yet ready to take the breath as a meditation object.

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

From the foundation of the feeling of Content Happiness you learned in Meditation Skill 04, you can observe how your body experiences change throughout your day. One of the insights you will begin to develop is the understanding that much of how your body feels during the day is directly related to your present state of mind. 

For example, if you feel mentally happy, you will also feel happiness in your body as a feeling of lightness, comfort and calm energy. If you feel mentally averse and angry, you will also feel anger in your body as a feeling of hotness, tightness, tension, and upward-moving energy. By mindfully observing the relationship between these changes in your mind and body, you will understand that your body, directly and truthfully, reflects your state of mind in the same way a lake reflects, without judgment, the mountain, clouds and sky. 

What is meant by 'direct reflection of your mind' is that your current state of mind can be observed by your body's reaction to it in terms of its elemental qualities: warmth, coolness, heaviness, lightness, hardness, softness, etc., and the feeling of pleasantness or unpleasantness that surrounds it. Checking in and observing these helpful reflections in your body during your day will help you to clearly-see how you are relating to what is happening in your life at this time, allowing you to soften, relax and let it go if it is based on desire or resistance.

Tip 1: Use simple reminders.

Use a simple reminder, like walking through a doorway, washing your hands, or having a cup of tea, to check-in on how you feel.

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Tip 2: If you feel stressed.

If you are resisting something, you will notice experiences within your body such as tension and tightness in your throat, chest, or belly. This will also have a feeling of unpleasantness or unease in the background. Taking slow, softening breaths in your belly to relax, as you learned in Meditation Skills 01 & 02, will lower your experience of this stressed feeling. 

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Tip 3: If you feel anxious.

When you feel anxious, ground your awareness by feeling your feet touching the ground. You can also ground by gently squeezing one hand in the other to make you more present. Next, place your palms below your belly button and use slow, softening breaths in your lower abdomen, like in the previous meditation, to re-engage your diaphragm. Re-engaging your diaphragm with slow belly breaths will lower the anxious feeling.

From your foundation of mindfulness of your body, developed in Meditation Skills 01-04, you can begin to train your mind to let go of habits and be more mindfully-present in your body, in your daily life. 

Meditation Skill 04 in Daily Life:

1. Ground: Gently soften and relax your body and mind to bring awareness into your body until you feel grounded and mindfully present (as in Meditation Skill 03). 
2. To carry this presence throughout your day, allow your body's mindful presence to shift into your background (peripheral awareness) like you would allow quiet, gentle music to rest in the background of your awareness while you move about your home.
3. Observe: Check in during the day and notice if you have lost that background awareness of your body. If you have, you will find that your mind has become caught up in some thought, fantasy, reaction, etc.
4. Soften: Take a few softening breaths to relax your body. Be mindful of your awareness returning to your body when you relax, and notice how nice it feels to re-establish a background mindful presence.
5. Smile: Gently smile with your eyes and bring them to the pleasant feeling of your background, mindful presence. For a few moments, smile and encourage the enjoyment of it to grow, rewarding your mind for letting go. Let go of this presence and go about your day, checking in now and then. Softening and smiling to re-establish it if your mind has forgotten your body.

Practised in this way, following the GOSS Formula, your mind will gradually develop a positive habit of being mindful of your body during the day. At first, the periods of background mindful presence of your body will be short, but gradually, the periods of mindful presence will increase, and habitual patterns of desire and aversion will weaken.

Question: When I soften my attention to a distraction, the attention to the distraction does relax, but my awareness doesn't naturally return to my body. Instead, it feels like my awareness becomes more open to everything, but not necessarily grounded in my body. The original distraction becomes less focused, and I'm more generally aware of everything. I often have to intentionally move my awareness back to my body. Am I doing something wrong in my softening process? Should I simply move my awareness intentionally back to my body after softening, or is this "open awareness" ok? Thank you.

Stephen: I see this as an opportunity for both skill and insight.

All of us come to meditation with a unique combination strengths and weaknesses related to balances in both energy and structure of attention. The balances and imbalances are often deeply habituated within our body and mind before we sit for the first time in meditation.

While general structure and instruction are offered in MIDL, this framework will not always align with what has been habituated in each meditator. The instructions therefore offer a reference point of possibility regarding what the perfect energy levels and attention structure look like.

Since no meditator begins at the same point, the structure of MIDL when followed will reveal imbalances in energy and the structure of attention allowing us as insight meditators, to not only recognise these imbalances that lead to hindrances but also an opportunity to recondition our mind and body to function in a different way.

Question: When I soften my attention to a distraction, the attention to the distraction does relax, but my awareness doesn't naturally return to my body. Instead, it feels like my awareness becomes more open to everything, but not necessarily grounded in my body. The original distraction becomes less focused, and I'm more generally aware of everything. I often have to intentionally move my awareness back to my body.

Stephen: This is perfect, we can see that the soften part of GOSS is doing its job, it has released the grip of your attention on the distraction in a skillful, and enjoyable way. What we can also notice as you have highlighted, that while your mind drops back into the peripheral, background awareness, it increases clarity of all your senses and remains/loses clarity of the experience of your body within this awareness. your mind is looking outward and highlighting that, rather than looking inward and taking refuge in your body.

This tendency like everything else, is a habit of awareness. It is neither good nor bad, it just is as it is. this habit may have been developed by doing a no-object open awareness practice for a period, or because of a difficult emotional event within your life that made your mind adverse toward experiencing emotions within your body.

There are many benefits to developing mindfulness of our body until it becomes the natural dwelling place of our awareness that make it worthwhile changing the way that your awareness is behaving at this time. From experience with myself and other meditators I am confident that this habit of awareness can be changed to a certain degree through gentle, repeated daily practice and by feeling your way through it.

Question: Am I doing something wrong in my softening process? Should I simply move my awareness intentionally back to my body after softening, or is this "open awareness" ok? Thank you.

Stephen: In the beginning after you soften you will need to guide your awareness into the experience of your body. By experience I mean the elemental qualities of warmth, coolness, pressure, heaviness etc. and the general pleasant feeling of your body as it relaxes. Think of this of gently encouraging, with love and kindness, a wayward sheep dog puppy that has wandered from the flock.

They key to changing the way your awareness works is to develop a reward system for your mind bringing awareness to your body experience. This reward is the 'smile' part of the GOSS Formula and like giving the puppy a pat and making it fun each time it comes back to you. When you gently bring your awareness to your body experience, after softening, relax your eyes and smile into how nice to feels to be awareness and present within your body, and to let go the interest in being stimulated by the world around you.

Question: Once I get that 'smile' or 'joy' how do I maintain it rather than see it fade after 20 seconds? 

Stephen: Think of smile and joy as smiling and enjoying yourself. It is about having a good time resting in meditation. You are enjoying having a break from life, nothing to do, nowhere to go, enjoying it. The feeling lasting 20 seconds is good, this is a sign that you mind is able to access this feeling. It is also a sign that it does not come natural to your mind, and it wants to return to not enjoying the meditation. 

This is a simple matter of seeing this as a habit that you can develop. You are weakening one habit, not enjoying yourself, and creating another habit, enjoying yourself. Returning again and again to enjoying yourself without looking for anything else. Being content with just this experience now, will gradually increase your minds ability to the pleasant feeling of enjoyment. It is important to also notice in daily life how often your mind is not enjoying what's happening now to and to intentionally engage with and enjoy what you are doing. Being grateful in simple things in your life is definitely a doorway.

Question: I've also been noticing that as I move up from MIDL 03, my body starts to naturally become aware of the breath interfering with any attempts of achieving Marker 04. 

Stephen: How can breathing interfere with anything? Your body is breathing 24hours a day already so what is going on here? Your minds preoccupation with the breath is a sign you are not relaxed enough yet. Picture yourself in a hypnotist's chair and being led into deep relaxation. When you are deeply relaxed you won't be interested in anything and won't react to anything. 

Take your time developing Marker 01: Body Relaxation and Marker 02: Mind Relaxation. They are so enjoyable just in themselves. When you are physically and mentally relaxed you will feel so comfortable that you don't want to move. So relaxed and content just to sit in meditation. You do not have to try to get to Marker 03: Mindful Presence and Marker 04: Joyful Presence because they will just naturally occur by enjoying the growing comfort and ease of your body and mind as you relax.

Question: Do you also have anything you'd recommend generally to work with MIDL 04? I don't see any progress despite consistent effort.

Stephen: I admire your consistent effort, but goal orientated effort does not develop the meditative state. The meditative state develops by allowing your body and mind to relax, letting them be as they are. the settling process happens by itself. Instead of consistent effort you are better off applying consistent curiosity and interest in what it means to relax so deeply in your body that you feel so comfortable that you no longer want to get up. This will take you in the right direction. 

Question: I ’m not sure if I’m doing the observing of part anatta right, could you please explain how to observe it?

Stephen:  

To observe anatta simply notice how something happens by itself. If I have a reference (grounding point) to my present experience such as mindfulness of my body, then when my mind wanders, or I find myself thinking about something, I can clearly notice that the mind wandering or thinking happened by itself.

Is it enough to just notice being distracted , grounding, returning to being present, softening and smiling? 

A short reflection when your mindfulness returns, and you notice that you were distracted is helpful. This reflection can be as simple as noticing that there was a period of time in which you have no idea what was going on: "well that is interesting". You can use a simple word called a label to clarify this: "distracted" or quickly reflect on what it felt like to be distracted, and what it feels like to be present in your body again (soften, smile).

While to type this takes a while, noticing anatta is very quick to do. Think making a cake and at some stage you quickly reflect back to recall what you have done so far. When you reflect back you can see the steps quickly, and then you continue to focus on what you are doing now in the baking process. In the same way, it doesn't take a lot of 'thinking about things' during meditation to clearly see that your attention wandered from your meditation object to a distraction, by itself. 

It just takes clear seeing and a deevloped intimacy with the experience of your meditation object, in this case how nice it feels to be mindfully present in your body. This familiarity with mindfulness of your body will allow you to more easily notice when you become distracted from it.

This looking clearly again and again or clear seeing, will gradually make your mind more sensitive to the 'by itself nature' of experiences that occur during meditation and in daily life. Thought it does take a clear intention and curiosity to try to notice that things happen 'by themselves'. Once you start to notice this it is endlessly interesting.

Or should I tell myself something like ‘hey that distraction was autonomous’, add a label or something else.

You can do that. Some meditators say anatta, or hey that was interesting. I find being curious about catching the points of change between attention, inattention, and returning of attention enough. If I watch a cat walk across a room by itself a number of times, any feeling that I am the cat fades away. The cat does cat things by itself; therefore, I am not the cat and allow the cat to just be a cat.

If I watch experiences of my mind and body, I will clearly see that they are doing things by themselves. If I am aware of these experiences again and again, like the cat, and notice that they are occurring by themselves, without my help, the feeling I am my body, I am my mind, will naturally also start to fade. It is all in the clear looking with curiosity about noticing things happening by themself, that is the key.