Skill in Focusing

Focusing is the meditative skill of moving between wide, middle and narrow focus of awareness that when developed balances attention that may hinder the development of samatha (calm, tranquility) or vipassana (insight) based samadhi (unification).

Focusing is related to the meditative skill of flexible attention. The ability to change the focus of your awareness from wide, to middle, to narrow, and back again, in the same way you might on a camera.

These transitions in focus can be training intentionally during your daily meditation and are also part of the natural development of training your attention in mindfulness of breathing, called the Experiential Markers.

This ability to change focus will allow you to swap between the cultivating of calm, developing of insight and the pleasure of letting go. This is a corner stone ability and part of the Observe part of the GOSS formula for transferring mindfulness into your daily life.

Awareness is like sight.
Imagine if you moved around through the world and your sight would only zoom in on individual things; you had no peripheral vision, no ability to see the bigger picture. 

If this was the case you would not be able to move through the world without banging into things, you would crash if you were driving a car, or your mind would endlessly be agitated as it rapidly moved from one individual object to another.

We all have strengths and weaknesses in this area, this is part of the problem. We are learning the skill of smooth focus of awareness, not becoming habitual or stuck within this range from narrow to wide.

• Meditation Object: The change between wide, middle and narrow focus of awareness. 
• Developing Insight: Observe any weakness with your ability to keep a narrow focus, wide focus and middle focuses of your awareness. 

• Hindrance Weakened: Balances weaknesses induced by habitual attention.
• Length: 30 min. 

Step 1:  With hands in your lap, thumbs lightly touching, begin your meditation with mindfulness of your body in Meditation 01.

Step 2: Use slow, softening breaths to relax as in Meditation 02-03.

Your meditation is the same except that once you are physically and mentally relaxed, you begin to cycle between your awareness of touch, whole room and your body as it sits. 

Meditation 04 Additions:

Step 3:  Bring awareness to the experience of your thumbs touching each other.

• Remember it for 1 min.

Step 4: Open your awareness to the room around you, sounds, air on your skin.

• Remember it for 1 min.

Step 5: Bring awareness into the feeling of your body as you sit in meditation.

• Remember it for 1 min.

*Begin again at Step 03.

Step 6: Apply the GOSS formula when your attention wanders.

You are ready to progress when:

• You can comfortably change the focus of your awareness from narrow (thumbs), to wide (room), to middle (body) and back again.

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

From your foundation of GOSS, you can begin to train attention skills learnt in seated meditation, into your daily life. 

This Meditation in Daily Life:

1. Gently open your awareness wide to your five senses as one landscape of experience.
2. Moving around during the day, check-in and notice when your attention narrows in on a particular experience.
3. Soften interest in the experience and widen your awareness to your senses again.

Both peripheral awareness and attention, which is the focal point within awareness, both have a range of focus from wide to narrow. 

Many of us have habituated patterns of focus within both peripheral awareness and attention. Imbalances in these ranges of focuses directly reflects our defensive personality traits, and how we interact with our senses, other people and in our ability to learn information in schools etc. 

These habituated patterns of focus are brought into our meditation practice, some meditators have attention that will only focus in on one object and cling to it and find it very difficult to take multiple objects in one field of attention/awareness. 

Other meditators find it easy to hold multiple objects in the focus of their awareness/attention but find it difficult to keep one exclusive object within their mind, and their attention tends to slide off and wander everywhere. 

MIDL meditators intentionally exercise this range of focus to remove these habitual tendencies to develop what is known as Flexible Attention, which allows for development of calm/tranquility and insight in daily life.

When you have trained the deficiencies out of your focus, you can both develop calm and tranquility and in samatha, and observe habitual patterns of attention in daily life by keeping your awareness wide and noticing when your mind focusses attention in on experiences within the six sense fields.