Your Goal: Sustained awareness free from aniticipation & fear.
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“They train themself: ‘I will breathe in experiencing to piti.’ They train themself: ‘I will breathe out experiencing to piti.’ They train themself: ‘I will breathe in experiencing sukha.’ They train themself: ‘I will breathe out experiencing sukha.’” MN118 The Buddha
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Back: Meditation Skill 10: Whole-Body Breathing.
Next: Meditation Skill 12: Access Concentration.
With ever increasing intimacy of your awareness with the pleasurable experience of your whole-body as it breathes, your sense doors, including your body sense will fade, replaced with an overall awareness of growing blissful pleasure of born of letting go in the body and mind.
Your meditation is the same as Meditation Skill 10, except you now bring to the foreground of awareness the growing pleasurable feeling of piti in your body and the joyful happiness of sukha in your mind.
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Meditation Instructions:
Your meditation remains the same, Steps 2-3 are two new additions to your meditation.
Your meditation is the same as Meditation Skill 10, except you now bring to the foreground of awareness the growing pleasurable feeling of piti in your body and the joyful happiness of sukha in your mind.
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.
Step 1: Meditation Skills 01-10.
Your meditation remains the same as in Meditation Skills 01-10, 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.
Marker 04: Content Happiness.
Marker 05: Natural Breathing.
Marker 06: Length of Each Breath.
Marker 07: Breath Sensations.
Marker 08: One Point of Breath Sensation.
Marker 09: Sustained Attention.
Marker 10: Whole Body Breathing.
Additions for developing mindfulness of whole body breathing in Skill 11:
Step 4: Intimacy with Piti.
Step 5: Sustained Awareness.
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 eleventh step in meditation is to develop Marker 11: Sustained Awareness (right column) to calm Hindrance 11: Anticipation of Pleasure (left column).
Progression Map for Mindfulness of Breathing
Meditative Hindrances. Meditation Markers.
01: Body Relaxation.
02: Mind Relaxation.
03: Mindful Presence.
04: Content Happiness.
05: Natural Breathing.
06: Length of Each Breath.
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.
13: Unstable Samadhi. 13: First Pleasure Jhana.
Other Hindrances: It is important to note that although your focus is on settling the Hindrance of Anticipation of Pleasure 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.
As you increase intimacy with the pleasantness 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.
Progression: Once you understand how to withdraw awareness from the sense fields so that it only rests within the pleasantness 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 & 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.
13. Unstable Samadhi.
Meditative Hindrance:
Anticipation of Pleasure (11).
Desire for pleasurable states.
Anticipation of Pleasure refers to the subtle excitement that arises within the mind as it starts to glimpse and 'look forward to' the possibility of blissful pleasant feeling.
Antidote:
Anticipation calms with repeated exposure to the blissful pleasant feeling that arises at access concentration until the mind is no longer excited by it. Anticipation is weakened by refining contentment in all aspects of your life and developing a heart connection (saddha) with the meditation path and practice.
You are ready to progress to Meditation Skill 12: Access Concentration when:
You begin to develop your skill in using your meditative samadhi as the grounding point for your GOSS Formula in daily life.
Mindfulness in daily life is based on samadhi-gata sati.
New GOSS Formula:
Applying in Daily Life:
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.
Questions can be submitted at: MIDL Community Reddit Forums.
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