Meditation Skill 10

Preliminary Meditation:

• Length: 20 min.
• Summary: This is preliminary training to develop your skill in transitioning in a foreground /background shift, between the focus of your attention on one point of breath sensation and background peripheral awareness of your body. To train this, it is helpful to use the touch of our thumbs to replace the focus of attention on the breath.

Simple Instructions:

Clarify the difference between attention & peripheral awareness.

1. Sit in meditation, thumbs lightly touching.
2. Rest your attention on the touch of your thumbs.
3. Acknowledge the awareness of your body resting in the background.
4. Bring the awareness of your body to the foreground and allow the touch of your thumbs to rest in the background.
5. Learn to cycle these two experiences between background and foreground awareness.

Guided Meditation: Transitioning from Doing to Knowing

Your meditation is the same as Meditation Skill 09, except you now bring the peripheral awareness of your whole body as it breathes to the foreground and allow your attention sustained on one point of breath sensation to rest in the background. Your next step is to develop intimacy with the experience of your whole body 'as breath' by increasing your sensitivity to breath experience throughout your body. As intimacy increases, awareness of your five senses will fade, and the pleasurable experience of body breath sensation will fill your awareness.

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• Meditation Length: 60 min. To give your mind time to mature samadhi (unification).
• Attention and Awareness: Allow your awareness to rest in the foreground on the pleasure of your whole-body breathing while keeping a background, peripheral awareness of your attention on one point of breath sensation.
• Progression: When you become intimately aware of the experience of your whole-body breathing as pleasurable and your awareness of your five senses begins to fade. 

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Summary:

1. Prepare: Sit for meditation, one thumb resting on the other, reflect gratefully.
2. Sustain Attention: Allow your attention to sustain in the foreground on one point of sensation while keeping a background, peripheral awareness of your whole-body breathing as in Markers 01-09>
3. Body Breathing: Allow your awareness to rest in the foreground on the pleasure of your whole-body breathing while keeping a background, peripheral awareness of your attention on one point of sensation >
4. Whole-Body Breathing: Increase your breathing experience throughout your whole body until your intimacy with it increases and fills your awareness.

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Detailed Instructions:

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 sustained attention on one point of breath sensation as in Skills 01-09.

• Allow your attention to sustain in the foreground on one point of sensation while keeping a background, peripheral awareness of your whole-body breathing 

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Meditation Skill 10 Additions:

Step 3: Bring awareness of your whole-body breathing to the foreground.

• Once the focus of your attention has been sustained on one point of breath sensation, slowly open your peripheral awareness to the subtle experience of your whole body as it naturally breathes.
• Bring your awareness of the experience of your whole-body breathing to the foreground and allow your focus on the breath sensation to rest in the background.
• Allow your awareness to rest in the foreground on the pleasure of your whole-body breathing while keeping a background, peripheral awareness of your attention on one point of breath sensation.

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Step 4: Increase the experience of your breathing throughout your whole body.

•  Gradually increase your experience of your whole body as it breathes until you experience breathing throughout your entire body. This increased intimacy will withdraw your awareness from the stimulation of your senses. As your five physical senses fade, you transition from a physical meditation object to a mind-created one in Meditation Skill 11 of piti-sukha.

Summary

Experiencing Your Whole-Body Breathing:

1. Shoulders.
2. Shoulders + chest.
3. Shoulders + chest + upper back.
4. Shoulders + chest + upper back + side of ribs.
5. Shoulders + chest + upper back + side of ribs + belly.
6. Shoulders + chest + upper back + side of ribs + belly + arms.
7. Shoulders + chest + upper back + side of ribs + belly + arms + legs.
8. Shoulders + chest + upper back + side of ribs + belly + arms + legs + head.
9. All as one intimate body breath.

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Explanation:

1. After your attention is sustained on one point of breath sensation, increase your sensitivity to the background, peripheral awareness of your body and bring it to the foreground.

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2. To increase your sensitivity to your whole body as it breathes, begin to be aware of any 'breathing movement' in your shoulders—the gentle lift and the gentle drop. Stay with this until it becomes clear to you.

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3. The next step is to include the experience of the 'breathing movement' of your upper chest and upper back with your shoulders. This feeling is an opening of your upper chest as it gently stretches and relaxes with each breath. Noticing how your chest, upper back, and shoulders expand and deflate in opposite directions is helpful. 

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4. Once step 3 is clear, add the experience of your ribs 'breathing movement' as they open sideways. This feeling is your whole rib cage opening and closing with each breath. I find it helpful to experience this from inside your chest. Everything expands outwards, and everything relaxes inwards. 

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5. Gradually, include your belly and lower back so that this becomes one big inflation and deflation.

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6. As samadhi develops on your body breathing, you will become sensitive to the pressure of the expansion and deflation of each breath within your arms and hands, legs and feet, and even inside your head.

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7. Intentionally increase your sensitivity until your whole body becomes one continuous breath experience. This will mature as the perception of the borders of your body fades away, as will physical sensations as your body as a sense organ shuts down. In Meditation Skill 11, what is left is the experience of a large, body-less ball of fine, pleasant feeling (piti) as your mind moves to the more refined mind-created experience based on joyful happiness from the growing seclusion of 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 and calming the conditions supporting the associated Meditative Hindrance.

Your tenth step in meditation is to develop Marker 10: Whole-Body Breathing (right column) to calm Hindrance 10: Subtle Distraction (left column).

Progression Map for Mindfulness of Breathing

Meditative Hindrances.                       Meditation Markers.

                                                               01: Body Relaxation.

                                                               02: Mind Relaxation.

                                                               03: Mindful Presence.

                                                               04: Joyful Presence.

                                                               05: Natural Breathing.

                                                               06: Length of Each Breath.

                                                               07: Breath Sensations.

                                                               08: One Point of Sensation.

                                                               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.

As your attention is sustained on one point of breath sensation, you access your first experience of true seclusion from sensory experience. This occurs because once attention is sustained, it no longer habitually leaves your meditation object to absorb into distraction. 

While attention is sustained in the foreground, your background peripheral awareness still contains experiences created by the physical world and those created by your mind. Your next step is to bring the background peripheral awareness to the foreground, allowing your attention to rest in the background, and to develop intimacy with your body breath experience to completely withdraw awareness from the six sense fields to develop complete seclusion for the mind in preparation for jhana.

Progression: Once you understand how to withdraw awareness from the sense fields and the pleasure of your body-breath moves to the foreground, you are ready to develop Marker 11: Sustained Awareness.

Meditative Hindrances are signs of an imbalance in either your effort or the structure of your attention and are seen as an opportunity for insight into your mind.

 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: 

Subtle Distraction (10): 

Background distraction within peripheral awareness. 

Subtle Distraction refers to the experience of the subtle habitual grasping of the mind onto sensory experience within our background, peripheral awareness during meditation. This subtle habitual sensory grasping disturbs the unification of the mind because of the dispersal of mind energy and, therefore, hinders the development of upacara samadhi (access concentration).

Antidote:

You may experience shaking in your attention as you transfer from sustained attention to peripheral awareness of your whole body as it breathes. This may occur due to a weakness in your ability to open your awareness while taking many experiences as one within one field of that awareness. This is like looking over a valley and taking in the whole view rather than focusing on one thing within that view.

The antidote to subtle distraction is to become aware of breathing within your body part by part, as described in the above meditation instructions. Once you are aware of breathing throughout your body, you create a strong intention to be intimately aware of this experience. With this intimacy, you will begin to experience a fading of your sensory fields, including the body sense, with bodily pleasure replacing sensations within your body. When your mind develops intimacy with this bodily pleasure, this instability will come to an end.

You are ready to progress to Meditation Skill 11: Sustained Awareness when:

• You become intimately aware of the experience of your whole-body breathing as a pleasurable breath experience, and your awareness of your five physical senses begins to fade.

• SoundCloud: Guided Meditation.
• Insight Timer: Guided Meditation.

Question: Since English is not my native language, I think I may be missing some subtleties of 'peripheral awareness' in translation. 

Stephen: Think of peripheral awareness as the background awareness of all experiences that are occurring outside of the range of the focus of your attention.

• Example 1: you are having a conversation with a friend at a party. Your attention is focused on your friend and the conversation, while all the activity at the parts falls into the background peripheral awareness. You are aware of other people, sounds etc, but you do not focus your attention on them.

• Example 2: your attention rests on the screen in front of you, yet in your sight you have peripheral awareness of the room around this screen, yet the focus of your attention does not move to it.

Question: How do you know you have peripheral awareness of the body when the attention is on something other than the body? 

Stephen: Because you will be aware of different experiences within your body such as warmth, coolness, touch etc. even though the focal point of your awareness, attention, rests on something else. 

Question: Is it simply about 'know' that the body is present without forgetting it while you focus on X or Y? 

Stephen: It can be but more than that. It is knowing the experience of the body rather than the idea body. The remembering and forgetting part relate to mindfulness and is not a definition of peripheral awareness.

Question: Is it something akin to proprioception? 

Stephen: The position and posture of my body is known in my background (peripheral) awareness regardless of the task that I am performing...............

• Perception, as in what something is, may or may not be present when we are peripherally aware of a background experience. We can be aware of an experience in the background but not necessarily have any idea of how it is placed in space or time.

• Peripheral awareness occurs before perception, it is simply occurring autonomously in the background all the time.

We become so absorbed in attention that we do not notice it unless there is a distraction, and our attention is drawn towards one of the objects occurring in this background awareness.

Question: Could you provide an example from your daily life or explain it differently so I can ensure I've grasped your meaning?

Stephen: You know that the music is playing in the background while you're cleaning the house, but your attention is focused on the cleaning not the music.