Meditation Skill 11

Your eleventh step as an insight meditator is to introduce the meditative skill of offering exclusive awareness to an experience, such as your whole-body as it breathes, in a gentle and caring way, to withdraw that awareness from sensory input within the six sense fields. This skill develops the conditions for both attention and awareness to completely sustain in preparation for establishing access concentration (unified, stable attention free from the meditative hindrances).

As you become more aware of the experience of breathing throughout your whole body, you will find that your awareness begins to develop an intimacy with it. Intimacy of awareness refers to the exclusivity of attention you give to someone you care about to let them know how much you care, free from any external distraction. As the intimacy of your awareness of your whole-body breathing increases, the borders of your body and sensations within your body will fade. This is not a sign of dullness as your mind at this stage is beyond this, but rather an observation of the gradual shutting down of the body sense door because your mind no longer is giving importance to it. 

This same process is happening to your other senses, but because of your exclusive awareness of your body, it will not be as obvious. Most importantly, your mind sense is also going through a calming process because it is no longer being stimulated, and as this happens, it will gradually enter the pleasure of seclusion. This pleasure cannot be understood in terms of worldly pleasure which seeks and wants more, but rather the pleasure of letting go, putting down, releasing. As your mind enters the pleasure of seclusion your mind will feel the joy of relief and the sensations within your body will be replaced by pleasurable feeling reflecting this letting go.

Your meditation is the same as Meditation Skill 10, except you now focus on accessing the pleasure of the experience of your whole body as it breathes until peripheral awareness begins to sustain on it.

.............................................

• Length: 60 min.
• Developing Insight: Notice the separation between the focus of attention and the background peripheral awareness.

.............................................

Meditation Structure:

1. Sit in meditation > 
2. Establish joyful presence as in Meditation 04.
3. Establish sustained attention as in Meditation 09 >
4. Experience whole-body breathing as in Meditation 10 >
5. Sustain awareness on body breathing experience.

.............................................

Meditation Instructions:

Step 1: Sit down for meditation on a chair or the floor and gently close your eyes. Develop mindfulness of your body & joyful presence as in Meditations 03 & 04.

Step 2:  Develop peripheral awareness of the experience of your whole-body breathing as you did in Meditations 05-10.

Meditation 11 Additions:

Step 2: As samadhi develops on your breathing, the pressure of this expansion and deflation will also be able to be felt within your arms and hands, legs and feet, and even inside your head.

Step 3: Gradually open your awareness to these sensations until you can experience them throughout your body. This will mature as the perception of the borders of your body fade away as a large, body-less, ball of pleasant feeling sensation. one ball of pleasant breath sensation.  

•  It is important to make the intention to only attend to the ball of breath sensation, completely abandoning any interest in experiencing anything else. Becoming so intimate, so present with this body-breath sensation that awareness of the other sensory fields begins to fade.  

Step 4: As the sense fields fade, so too will this ball of breath sensation. As intimacy increases, the pleasure of this subtle sensation will replace its sensate quality (piti**). This occurs as the body as a sense field closes down due to the seclusion of samadhi and is replaced by a mind created perception of breathing: a ball of pleasurable sensation. 

**Piti - as sukha-vedana: pleasant feeling.

Step 5: Once this occurs, continue to increase your intimacy with this pleasurable sensation, allowing awareness to experience it from within. Do this until awareness enters into an autonomous flow with the feeling of pleasantness. This is experienced as the transition between effort and effortlessness. 

• It is at this stage that awareness has sustained with the pleasurable sensation (piti). Remain with this pleasurable feeling and offer it your complete undivided attention. As you do it will increase in strength and clarity. 
• It is at this stage that you bring the one point of breath sensation back to the foreground of your attention. Passively know as many details of the sensations as you can, while maintaining within your peripheral awareness the pleasurable sensation (piti). 

Step 6: As you do this the pure, clean feeling of joy and happiness (sukha) will grow within your mind as it is purified from the meditative hindrances. 

Note: It is important to note that since this is born from letting go, if the hindrances of anticipation of pleasure or fear of giving up control arise, that this whole process will reset to Marker 10, whole body breathing.

Progression Map for Mindfulness of Breathing.

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.

Meditative Hindrances.                      Meditation Markers.

                                                              01: Body Relaxation.

                                                              02: Mind Relaxation.

                                                              03: Mindful Presence.

                                                              04: Joyful Presence.

                                                              05: Natural Breathing.

                                                              06: Breathing Presence.

                                                              07: Breath Sensations.

                                                              08: One Point of Sensation.

                                                              09: Sustained Attention.

                                                              10: Whole-Body Breathing.

11: Anticipation of Pleasure.   →   11: Sustained Awareness.

12: Fear of Letting Go.                       12: Access Concentration.

Your eleventh step in meditation is to develop Marker 11: Sustained Awareness (right column) to calm Hindrance 11: Anticipation of Pleasure (left column). As you increase intimacy with the pleasure of your body-breath experience, your awareness will begin to withdraw from the six sense fields. As your body is one of the five physical senses, as its sensitivity fades, the borders of your body, and sensations within your body will also fade away. 

As sensation sensitivity fades all that will be left is a refined pleasurable feeling of piti replacing the body-breath with the joyful happiness of sukha in the background. This piti-sukha is now your meditation object to develop the final step before jhana, access concentration.

Once you understand how to withdraw awareness from the sense fields so that it only rests within the pleasure of your body as it breathes, you are ready to develop Marker 12: Access Concentration.

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 & Dullness.

04: Habitual Forgetting.

05: Habitual Control.

06: Distracted Mind.

07: Gross Dullness.

08: Subtle Dullness.

09: Subtle Wandering.

10: Sensory Distraction.

11: Anticipation of Pleasure.

12: Fear of Letting Go.

Meditative Hindrance

Anticipation of Pleasure (11).

The desire for pleasurable states. 

Anticipation refers to the subtle excitement that arises within the mind as it starts to glimpse and 'look forward to' the possibility of blissful pleasure. 

Antidote

1. Developing intimacy with the pleasure of the growing seclusion and fading of hindrances.

You are ready to progress to Meditation Skill 12: Access Concentration when:

• When you become aware of an increased feeling of steadiness of awareness accompanied by fading of the sense fields and the sensations in your body fades, leaving an increasingly subtle pleasurable feeling (piti) that fills the experience of your awareness.

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

Mindfulness in daily life is based on samadhi-gata sati.

New GOSS Formula:

1. Ground awareness within your meditative attention (samadhi).
2. Observe the Enlightenment Factors that are present, weak, absent.
3. Soften into those weak or absent to make them stronger.
4. Smile with your eyes into them to establish them in your samadhi.

Applying in Daily Life:

1. Structure your meditative samadhi by arousing mindfulness, curiosity, effort & softening, joy, tranquility.
2. Gently soften this samadhi into your body until it feels grounded, present, now.
3. Experience subtle movement of your whole body as it breathes.
4. Tune into the arising pleasure of this return to unification & letting go.
5. Use awareness of this samadhi to observe your citta (heart/mind) during the day.
6. When you notice a change, soften into your body-breathing to unify the samadhi again.

Meditative samadhi when not yet mature is highly sensitive to defensive habitual patterns and absence of sila (morality). This can be used to your advantage to develop insight by using changes in the structure of your samadhi as a viewing platform.